I met Evan Jones in the fifth grade, and I didn't like him. He was one of those stocky, athletic crew cut characters who excelled in every sport he attempted. We called him a ball hog behind his back on the basketball court, and I did my best to ignore him as much as possible. Even during the young elementary school years, I had already learned to be judgmental. He invited me to his birthday party and told me exactly which robot action figure I should get. I went to the party, brought the proper gift, and played Nerf football and other games in the backyard with all of the other kids. When I left, I decided he wasn't as bad a kid as I thought.

In seventh grade, Evan made the first team in basketball while I didn't make either squad and ended up being a manager (basically the guy who carries the equipment and water bottles). While the team practiced on the main court, I took shots at the side baskets. Halfway through the season, Evan fractured his non-shooting hand and couldn't practice with the team. As a result, we played games of horse and talked while he healed. I learned that he liked to play D & D, play arcade games at the mall, and read fantasy novels and comic books just like me. We quietly became friends.

Although he was popular and well respected with his classmates, he had his problems. It was difficult for him to control his temper. He continuously got in fights with his sister and let the smallest set backs anger him for hours. Being a military brat, Evan was under the constant scrutiny of his father who thought the best way to motivate his son in football and basketball was to yell at him when he made a mistake. He always felt the need to please his father and pushed himself to an intense degree. Blessed with a natural and fluid ability to run, Evan became the starting running back on the football team, one of the leading scorers on the basketball team, and the only person to place in running events at the junior high track meets. The athlete I always wanted to be.

While everyone wanted to hang with Evan, a large chunk of people were not so fond of me. I wore rock concert T-Shirts to school and never understood the purpose of a hairstyle. Fitting in was not in the cards for me. On many occasions, other judgmental kids would ask him why he bothered with me. To which he always replied simply "He's my best friend."

Evan was as much a best friend to me as I was to him. I never thought this antithesis to myself would ever be anything but another face in the hallway, but during those dramatic early teen years, he was the first person I called whenever I had a free moment. We talked about everything we could think of‹girls, family, friends, how to win at a certain video game, what we would do if we were super heroes, what we were going to do when we grew up, jokes we didn't understand but sounded funny, and senseless babble that only makes sense in those early teenage years of life.

And then after our eighth grade year, he moved away. His father transferred to another air force base, and the family left New Mexico for Virginia. We kept in touch over the years, visiting each other every three or four years or writing brief letters saying nothing important except that we were still friends.

I never had a definitive best friend after Evan. My buddies came in the form of a group, gang or machine. Always a definitive yet interchangeable cog of many soap opera-laced think tanks.

Yesterday, Evan Jones married Paula Coker. I was one of nine groomsmen. Part of the machine.

But the night before, Evan and I stumbled to the edge of a dock in the Hampton Virginia Bay after boozing and bustling at bars with the wedding party. The two of us talked about his marriage, our aspirations to be significant writers and poets, him getting over the father who divorced out of the family, his Division III football war stories, and senseless babble that only makes sense to drunken fools sitting at the end of a dock in the middle of the night.

Not bad for a couple of 14-year-old best friends.

Good luck, Paula and Evan.

Chris Jungle was a fine drunk at the wedding reception.