My Life, Deleted by Scott Bolzan

Author:Scott Bolzan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins US

Among the voicemail messages that Joan had saved was one from a guy who said he hadn’t heard from me in a while and wanted to have lunch.

“Did I know a guy named Mark Hyman?” I asked.

Joan reminded me that we’d been friends since we had offices next door to each other in 1993. She called him to explain what happened, and he and I had a short, awkward conversation. He said he’d wondered what happened to me because we’d planned to have a holiday lunch the day after my accident but I’d never called to confirm. He invited me to lunch again, but I wasn’t ready yet to try having a conversation in public with someone outside my immediate family.

Joan had been encouraging me to rebuild my friendship with Mark and my old friend Jerry Pinto, saying it would be good for me to have someone other than her to vent to, someone who could give me a different perspective on the old Scott and could fill me in on private man things we used to talk about. “You don’t tell your wives everything,” she said.

Besides that, she said, who better to teach me how to be a man than another man?

These seemed like good reasons, and, frankly, I was intrigued to see whether my friends were anything like me. I knew that Jerry and Mark were both a decade older than me, and even on the phone they sounded far more boisterous and self-assured than I felt inside, which was meek and reserved, even though I didn’t know what those words meant at the time. I didn’t really know how to be myself with either one of them because I didn’t know who that was, so all I could do was react to whatever they said or did.

Back in February Jerry had flown in for a brief trip to help Joan and me resolve our health insurance problems, but we didn’t have more than an hour’s conversation over dinner before he flew home with my signature. I’d been hoping to rebuild our friendship, but in spite of his promises to be available anytime to talk to me—“If you’re upset, call me. If you can’t sleep, call me”—I’d left multiple messages on both his cell and business numbers and he’d only called once since his trip.

“Sorry I haven’t called back. I’ve just been busy. I’ll give you a call tomorrow,” Jerry said. But the call never came.

Initially I thought maybe he was just busy, as he said, but when the trend continued, I wondered what I’d said or done wrong, so I kept leaving messages. We finally did connect a few times later in the year, but they were brief conversations, with dozens of messages from me in between.

Mark, on the other hand, had been checking in with me every couple of weeks, and when I was ready, we made plans to meet for lunch at Chompie’s, a Jewish deli in Scottsdale.

When Joan dropped me off, I saw a man fitting her description standing outside the restaurant and pointing at me.

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