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I met Brian on the set of the movie Airheads in 1993. It was a month-long shoot, six in the evening to six in the morning.
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I was doing extra work then, whatever show or movie needed bodies that month. Fourteen agencies had my headshot on file. It wasn't a career. It was a way to stay busy and stay out.
We were both a little odd and awkward, and we were both into the grunge scene. Every night there was a different show at a different bar or club, and we went to all of them together. He leveled me out when I got too wild.
He drove me to the hospital more than once. I didn't have a car. He'd give up his day off, sit in a waiting room for hours, drive me home afterward, and never once make me feel bad about it.
Looking back, I was hard to be friends with. Loud, chaotic, always one drink from a problem. He put up with a version of me a lot of people wouldn't have. He did it for nineteen years.
We drifted the way people drift, not because of one thing but because of everything we stopped doing together. We got older. Work took more of our time. He went through a bad breakup, and I wasn't around the way I should have been.
Around then I'd started going to Japan, and something about it had really gotten into me. Nobody around me seemed interested, so I stopped talking about it. I pulled back from the thing that mattered most to me because nobody was asking.
I met people in Japan through a search feature on MySpace, asking where to go and what to see. A year later I did it again and met a woman who was calmer than anyone I'd known in fifteen years of Hollywood. We talked over Skype for two years.
I flew out, she flew out, and eventually I went back to Japan and asked her to marry me. Three days later we signed papers at a government office. No ceremony, no guest list, no time to plan one even if I'd wanted to.
I was back in Los Angeles a few days later.
I called Brian and got his voicemail. I left a message saying I'd gotten married, that I was moving to Japan, and that I wanted him to know.
He never called back.
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After that, he stopped talking to me. I couldn't reach him for the next three or four years. I knew what he believed had happened, but I never got the chance to explain what had actually happened.
Four months later, we had a wedding party in Japan. I didn't invite him. By then, he had already stopped speaking to me. His mind was made up based on a version of events that never happened, and I never got the chance to explain the reality.
Years later, I found out one more detail. A mutual friend told me Brian had asked his parents for a loan so he could fly out for the wedding.
But the wedding he imagined wasn't the wedding that happened.
There was no ceremony. There was no guest list. There were no invitations. Three days after I arrived in Japan, we signed papers at a government office.
I had never told him he was invited. I had never told him he wasn't invited. We had never talked about it.
He built a version of events in his head that wasn't what actually happened, and he made decisions based on that version.
I never got the chance to explain the reality to him.
We spoke once, about four years after I got married. It was a short conversation. Even then, he kept his distance. It didn't feel like the time to go into everything, and nothing important was said.
That was the last time we ever spoke.
I figured there would be another chance. That eventually we'd get a beer and clear things up. I let time do the work I should have done myself.
Thirty-one years after I first met Brian on the set of Airheads, a mutual friend called.
Brian had died by suicide a few days before.
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I sat there holding the phone for a long time.
A voicemail instead of a conversation. Years of silence over a version of events that was never the reality.
By the time there was no chance left to explain, it was already too late.
I wrote this because I didn't fix what mattered while I still had the chance.
Thank you for reading.
Neon