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Some friendships are forged in pick-up games of basketball, neighborhood games of stickball or friendly games of tag.
Mine were cemented in crime scene photos.
I was about 13 and active in Boy Scouts. I was a mere Webelo at the time and we had to do some kind of photo essay for a photography skill award.
Or maybe I’m ascribing all of what I’m about to describe to the Scouts and I was just a goofy, demented kid with too much time on his hands.
Anyway, the idea was that each photo would depict some scene and all the frames in sequence would collectively tell a story.
So, naturally, I chose something that would involve guns, drugs and suicide. See previous comment about being a demented kid.
At the time, I was fascinated by all things cops on TV (“Adam-12”, “The Rookies”, “S.W.A.T.”), so I thought it would be cool to re-enact some kind of crime scene and photograph it.
Over time, my friends and I ended up doing three different kinds of photo essays (one of which involved ketchup for blood after the perp gets “shot”).
Another called for my friend John and me to portray drug dealers who flee the cops and then get arrested as they draw down on us.
In these dramatic photos, John and I complete a drug exchange while Pedro and Jimmy keep us under surveillance and then bravely rid the streets of filth like us.
Cue dramatic music. Roll credits.
But my true Cecil B. DeMille moment came weeks later when I decided we would stage a drug-addled, suicidal John standing just inside a bedroom window of my family’s third-floor apartment.
We took the window screen off for dramatic effect. And, oh yeah, the window was open.
Wide open.
But we needed a cop, someone who projected authority and sympathy and who could be seen as realistically trying to talk John out of jumping.
So we befriended the new guy at school.
Enter Pedro.
I don’t think he could have been at school more than a week when we broached him with this half-baked idea.
And, in a display of the kind of white-hot intellect that only 13-year-old boys are capable of, Pedro said: Sure!
Somewhere I have photos of Pedro wearing a cop-like windbreaker, hands outstretched, pleading with John to come back from the ledge.
And there’s John, looking back – eyes glassy and his hair disheveled, looking strung out from drugs. (We used my acne medication as a prop in one of the photos.)
Sadly, Detective Pedro fails and John “jumps” from the third-story window. I shot a photo from out the window of John sprawled on the sidewalk below – SPLAT! – with a squirt of ketchup near his head.
Translated from Spanish, Pedro would later tell his mom that day: “I guess that’s just how white kids play, mom.”
Fast-forward nearly 40 years.
The photos have faded but the bonds of friendship – and the over-the-top sense of adventure – have endured and remain as bright as ever.
