Stand by Me: Thirty Years Later

Riley Elementary: Not what it looked like when we attended

They say the friends you make in middle school are the friends you have for life. When I was eleven years old and in sixth grade, way back in 1986, my best friends were Phil, Mitch, and Jon. The four of us hung out all the time, with lots of sleepovers, most often at Phil’s house where we had the run of either the basement or the lower level family room of their split-level house. We’d hang out, play basketball, the Pursue the Pennant baseball strategy game, do mad libs, and make stupid fart and burp jokes. We usually walked to school together. I lived the furthest, so I picked up Mitch as I walked past his house, then Jon, who lived down the street and closest to our school, and Phil would meet us coming from his house right before we got to the cream-bricked James Whitcomb Riley Elementary school. We were among the first kids to the school grounds which gave us as much time as possible to play basketball on the school’s unbreakable playground hoops where nothing but a perfect shot would go in.

About that time the movie “Stand By Me” made its theatrical debut. Starring Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman, River Phoenix and Jerry O’Connell, and based on the Stephen King novella “The Body,” the movie tells the story of four friends taking a journey to find the dead body of Ray Brower, a local kid who went missing. The movie immediately stuck a cord with me. First off, the four boys swore a lot, more than I ever did, and I learned many new words watching that movie. My God the movie was rated R, how the hell did I see it? Oh, yes, the joys of premium cable television. Thank you, HBO. Second, the main characters were four best friends, just like my quartet of friends, and right about the same age as us. Third, the lead character, Gordie Lachance, was dealing with the death of his older brother, similar to how I was still adjusting to my father’s death. Finally, I wanted to be a writer, just like Gordie does in the movie. In the end, after jumping out of the way of a train, running away from a vicious dog named Chopper, getting covered in leeches and fending off a group of high school thugs led by Ace and Spider, the boys find Ray Brower but instead of claiming it themselves, they place an anonymous call to the police with his location and head home.

Read it!

 After watching the movie I knew had to read “The Body.” And I truly intended to. A couple times I’d look for it at the bookstore or library, but mostly unsuccessfully. Then twenty-five years passed. The movie disappeared into the corners of my brain, and I never read the book. While flipping through TV channels a few months ago, I came across “Stand By Me” on basic cable. It was heavily edited for language, but it got me thinking about reading “The Body” again. I watched for fifteen minutes then turned it off and ordered the book on Amazon. It sat on my nightstand among the pile of other books I was either currently reading or about to start (I always have more than one book in progress at any time). The novella was much longer than I expected, about 180 pages. I read it in a few sittings over a week. Much of the book was exactly like the movie. Portion of the narrator’s part, , were word for word from the novella. Often when reading parts of dialogue in the book, I could hear the character’s saying the lines in my head while reading the words on the page. There were also a few things in the book that seemed different from what I remembered of the movie. Was I losing my mind? Had it just been too long since I’d seen watched the movie that I just didn’t remember it correctly?

So I headed to my library and borrowed Stand By Me - I was a little shocked they had it- and watched it again.

Instantly I was zapped back to sixth grade. I think we might have watched Stand By Me at my birthday party that year. The memories of that movie, that time in my life, what I felt when I watched it over thirty years ago, I felt it all over again, even more strongly in some parts. I could feel for Gordie and the loss of his brother. Gordie felt he had become the invisible boy around his house, his parents so overcome by grief at the death of Denny that they barely noticed Gordie was present. My father had died a few years earlier, and I was still struggling with it. I wasn’t the invisible boy around my house but now that my mother was working full time while on her own trying to raise three children, I had more time to myself than I had ever had. Little things would send me into hysterical crying fits. Nothing felt right, and people were always asking me how I was, bringing up memories of my father. Everywhere Gordie went people would bring up some memory of his brother.

We had our own Stand By Me moment when we were younger. There was a tiny creek that wandered through our town, a creek so small it disappears for blocks at a time under street and doesn’t show up on most maps. It might have been called Mill Creek, or at least that’s what the subdivision it ran through seemed to be called. One day we decided to follow it to see where it went. We knew it ran behind our friend Raquel’s house (and part of us probably want to see Raquel in her bathing suit by her pool). We weren’t going to find a dead body, but it was about as adventurous as you could get in the suburbs in the 80s.

 Our story didn’t end well. We ran into our Ace Merrill, the bad kid played by Kiefer Sutherland in the movie (to this day I am still scared of Kiefer Sutherland because of how well he played Ace Merrill). Some kid and his sidekick toadie, some 80s bully, fou

I bought my orignal NES here.

nd us as we were following the creek. He followed us on his bike, threatening to beat us up. We outnumbered him, but he was bigger than us and let’s face it, the four of us were more Teddy and Vince, who ran away from Ace in the movie, than Chris Chambers and Gordie Lachance, who stood up to Ace at the climax of the move. Plus, none of us snagged our dad’s revolver while he was deep into his whiskey.

Eventually Ace followed us away from the creek and into the Venture (think Target, but black and white stripes instead of a red bullseye) parking lot. We went inside, while the bully paced outside the store, waiting for us to come back out. We used the pay phone to call Jon’s mom to come get us. It was a sad mix of fear and shame, plus trying to explain why were even at Venture in the first place was difficult. “You remember the movie ‘Stand by me,’ Mom?”

           

 At the end of the real movie, Teddy and Verne disappear into the hallways in junior high and high school and Gordie and Chris see little of them. Gordie and Chris remain friends through high school but lose track of each other after that. We find what triggers adult Gordie to think back on his friends is that Chris Chambers, now a successful attorney, dies breaking up a fight at a restaurant. 

Mitch, Jon, Phil and I thought that would never happen to us, we’d never not be friends. We were too close at the time. But thirty years later, where are my friends? Where are Mitch, Jon and Phil?

The good news is all of them are alive. I haven’t seen or talked to Mitch since high school graduation. We didn’t have any classes together in high school, we stopped playing the same sports together and they became just two people I saw passing in the halls at school, just what we thought wouldn’t happen. With social media, it’s easy to track people down, at least the ones who want to be found. Mitch works for a big computer company, and Jon is a high school teacher. They both live near where we grew up. I never had a falling out with either of them, we just slowly faded away from each other’s lives. I wonder if they feel the same way. I wonder if Mitch still has my G.I. Joe action figures and vehicles that I left at his house in seventh grade when we had an epic battle in his backyard with  our stuff combined.

Cubs Win! Cubs Win!

 Phil and I still talk and see each other regularly. We go to Cubs games regularly and last year we went to Washington, D.C. to see the Cubs in the playoffs and finally saw them win a playoff game together. Phil and I have never gone too long without talking to each other. In high school We had a few classes together and still hung out together, not as much as grade school or junior high. Our birthdays are two days apart, for a few days every year we were easily reminded of our friendship. Maybe that triggered us to stay in touch. I don’t know. The world is kind of weird that way.

 When I started writing this I reached out to Phil to see what he remembers about the four of us and Stand By Me”. He said he and Mitch hung out together in High School, and he hung out with Jon right after college, but it had been a long time since he had talked to either of them.

 Maybe Phil and I were closer friends with each other than we were with Mitch and Jon. Maybe we were the pair, the Chris Chambers and Gordie Lachance. Who knows, but he is still one of my best friends. Life gets complicated as you get older. More responsibilities, college, girlfriends, moving away, wives, jobs, careers, children. It’s hard to find time, or to make time, for people you were close to thirty years ago.

 When I checked in with Phil I said I was glad we were still friends and that we still hung out and that he took honors biology with me freshman year. We studied a lot together for that class. I also told him I was glad he didn’t get stabbed in the neck trying to break up a fight at a fast food restaurant.

His answer, “Ha, yes, we will hang out for fifty more years. Don’t go breaking up any fights.”

Thanks for reading.