The last time I saw Kevin Flanagan (his friends called him “Flan”) was at a bar about a decade ago.
We had been in touch after years without contact and were trying to reconnect. That night, his wry sense of humor was as sharp as I remembered from our days growing up in Revere’s Point of Pines. The evening was the result of our talking on the phone after 20 years. He reached out to me, and I remember the voicemail he left clearly:
“Mr. Brenner, I just want to say sorry for being such a punk when we were kids and for taking so long to call you.”
We had a lot of laughs that night. I went home, and I haven’t seen him since.
Tuesday, I was informed of his passing.
Mood Music:
After the initial shock, the sadness settled in. My mind rewound to memories of days spent smoking on Revere Beach, bantering on the bus to and from the Voke, where we were briefly in the same shop, and the summer we hid behind boxes in my father’s warehouse, avoiding work and smoking, as always.
He was always in my orbit growing up, straight back to elementary school. He grew up a few streets from mine. He was among the friends who tried to offer me sympathy when my brother died in 1984.
We fought a lot as kids, mostly because we were both awkward and would sometimes pick on someone else to make ourselves feel better. At one point when we were around 16, I boasted to my under-the-bridge friends that I could take him in a fight.
They held me to it. They brought the two of us down onto the beach, carved a boxing ring into the mud and we went at it for a good hour. We didn’t really fight, mind you. We just circled each other, waiting for someone to throw the first punch.
We worked out those kinks as we got older. We settled into a pattern of smoking cigarettes on the boulders behind the sea wall at Carey Circle, occasionally drinking. He was a regular in my basement, which sometimes resembled a neighborhood bar for minors.
Then he went his way and I went mine.
Turns out he’d been living in Atkinson, N.H. — the next town over from me — for years.
I’m glad he came back in my life, if only for a little while. You can never have too many good friends, and he certainly was one.
Until next time, Flan, rest easy.
