Eric Overlock

Eric Overlock was the toughest kid in Belfast, Maine. He was also the coolest. We grew up skateboarding. He was talented and sponsored in the ’90s when that was a big deal. His nickname was Big Poppa, like The Notorious BIG. He could fight, smoked cigarettes, and was dropping acid at 15. He’d talk about finger-banging girls and all the younger kids would listen and try to copy everything he did. He taught us how to steal beer out the back door of Belfast Variety, tucking our JNCO jeans into our sneakers and dropping 40oz down our pant legs. We’d waddle out of the store trying not to clink the bottles and making eye contact with the clerks so they never looked at our feet 

He taught us how to kick-flip, shove it, the impossible, and the benihana that none of us ever got down. We spent many summers smoking joints under the ramps or skating well into the dark. The skate park was a collection of homemade ramps overlooking Penobscot Bay. Between us  and the bay was the sewage plant churning and mixing frothy shit with chemicals. To us it was paradise, lacking nothing. The Garden of Eden.

Eric had a hard face, which I now recognize comes from growing up too fast. He was cool to us, impenetrable, although I’m sure he was getting his ass beat at home. Looking back, he never seemed like a kid. I know now that comes from figuring out the world early. He had a slight overbite, like a Pike, wide-legs jeans, and always had a chain wallet. When he’d get pissed and couldn’t land a trick often he’d smash his board in a fit of rage.

I learned a lot from Eric, but it was from him I first learned that anyone, and eventually everyone, can and does die. Hemingway wrote, “The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those it can not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of those things you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

“To Thai For” was the name of the sandwich wrap. Peanut sauce, rice, and some sprouts in a flour tortilla. Baywrap (the store in Belfast) still sells it to this day. One of the girls bought him the wrap. Eric took a bite and spit it out immediately. He skated home, presumably to get his epi-pen, or maybe his dad, neither of which were at home. He must have started to skate back into town. He passed Belfast Variety where we stole so much beer and collapsed on Route 1, less than 100 yards from a phone. My brother, Chris, found him on the side of the road and gave him mouth-to-mouth and CPR while they waited for the ambulance. The paramedics thought he was having a drug overdose and took him to the hospital. He died right before Halloween, on October 29th. Eric was 17 and now I’ve lived more than twice that long.

Peanuts aren’t nuts at all. They’re legumes and they grow in grape-like clusters below the ground. They’re native to the Andes and South America. I had to look this up. Fate or chance, the sequence of events, the slightest deviation likely would have saved his life. Had my brother found him five minutes earlier. If Chad had let Nathaniel smoke in the car. If Nate had skated home with Eric, or Eric had stumbled into B.V. 

Yet how many have been spared by this same randomness?

Between then and now I’ve lost many friends, all of them young. Mostly to drugs. One of my best friends, Alden, was hit by a semi when he was crossing the road, drunk. But by this time, nearly age 40, I’m inured to it. That Alden left behind a 5-year-old son that he loved and will never know is tragic, and devastating, but then again, so is the world. I know this now, which I didn’t know then. That makes it somehow easier.

I used to visit Eric’s grave a lot for the five or so years after he died. It was marked by a tombstone with an etching of Eric’s face. My friends and I would head to the cemetery and smoke joints and pour out Colt 45 and Bull Ice. We’d tell stories about him and stare at the ground. Sometimes I’d go alone, to feel anything at all. 

They say you die twice. Once when you stop breathing, and again when people stop saying your name. In my sadness and way of grieving, I think I wanted to bring Eric back from oblivion as if the pain and the memories were enough to will him into something else; something not dead, something meaningful. I’d look at his face etched into the stone, the overbite and backward hat and I’d try to cry. I’d drive out of the cemetery along the cracked and faded asphalt, lined with pines, maples and towering oaks that had long since shed their leaves. I always remember the beech trees, their leaves pale and dead clinging to the branches against the naked forest.

When I was a kid, I had some ideas about how my life was supposed to turn out. Ideas about fairness and justice and how the world should be, at least the shape of it. When I went to prison in my 20s, one of the guards always said, “fair is a place you take your pig.” He wasn’t wrong. When we were young we never wanted to grow up. We used to skate and talk about selling out, this ultimate betrayal of self. Cowing to the system, and the world, a 9 to 5 responsibility. I think we clung to the last corner of innocence in defiance and denial. 

I realize the world is unchanged in this way. But I had to learn this: We can be spared tragedy for a time, but eventually. We all learn this, one way or another.

In my head I often find myself skipping from moment to moment, a deck of cards, somewhat in order, rearranging them from time to time. Sometimes they’re upside down, others burnt at the edges, faded, and some lost forever. The thing they represented gone, or changed beyond recognition. I tried for many years to keep Eric’s card exactly the same, but I couldn’t. When I was young this was one of the great injustices of the world, some piece out of place that could never be made right. Now his loss is woven into the years that followed. It’s like one of the cards shuffled into the deck that’s faded, still there, but some of its weight is gone. I grew up and watched the world churn through the very brave, and very gentle. Eric always will be the cool kid to me, but instead of this tragedy, he’s somehow untarnished by life and the years that ground most of us down. One by one we either died or sold out. That’s the way of it. And then there’s Eric, ripping kickflips and smoking cigs. Smashing his board against the world.