WE CALLED IT sword fighting, but in truth we just beat each other with Wiffle Ball bats while saying things like “Taste this cold steel” and “You like that? Huh?”

When my mother saw the welts at dinner, she asked, “Were you playing with Jimmy today?” She tried to discourage our friendship.

In preschool, I hit him in the face with a toy fire truck, held it by the white ladder and swung it like a hammer. It took a divot out of his forehead that now looks like a chicken-pox scar.

When we were seven, he hit me in the back of the head with his father’s three-wood. I can't cut my hair short, because it doesn’t grow where the club struck. In tenth grade, I drove over his legs with a go-kart while he was sunbathing with Lisa Genardi.

On our class trip senior year, he pushed me off a trestle bridge into a river. After that, I developed an inner-ear problem.

At our class of ’92 basketball game, I took his legs out when he went in for a layup. I drove him to the hospital and waited with him for the doctor to put his shoulder back in its socket. When his wife arrived, he said, “Tell this underhanded fuck he can go home now.” But she wasn't speaking to me, either.

Last Thursday, he called and asked me to help him split a cord of wood. I got there around eleven-thirty. He was already working.