The Wounds of Friendship (2023). Oil on Wood. From my book Trouble is Trouble, available at Amazon Books. Artwork and text copyright Danny Grosso.

Excerpt: “Like him?” he would start, “Why I like him so much it hurts.” He meant it of course, all of it, the “like” part and the “hurts” part. He grew up in a place where you give up your friends dearly, only as a last resort. Lives depended on friendships, on discretion, on fealty, and for that reason these bonds were cultivated from an early age. The older guys would introduce their sons and nephews to the other guys’ kids, so that by adolescence, everyone was spun together in a web of relationships that perpetuated the status quo. That web would tense with outside pressures from money and wives and and really anything from outside of the group, and sometimes strands would break with violence, leaving suspicion as a remainder. Eventually, the web of friendships would become one of betrayal and deceit that seemed inescapable.

Still, most soldiered on, as most did not know any better, they had few relations outside of the group. With age came wizened faces, and to those who knew how to look, the battle scars of friendship. “In this life, it’s not easy to stay friends. Everybody has to watch out for his own.” He would say that even while he was sitting next to Corky or Slugs, whom he’d know since the second grade. As children, they’d inflicted little tragedies upon each other. As adults, dangerous betrayals. Yet for a lot of them, the ties remained, and were often cultivated anew, after the detritus of the past was swept into a lump under a rug – still obvious, but also, important evidence that effort was made, like a memorial to fallen soldiers.

It was hard for some not to see their wounds as grotesque, their stubborn friendships as masochistic and ridiculous. “I know we are so different, and we don’t see eye to eye anymore but there’s somethin’ I still like about him,” he would say. And even through a blackening, closed eye and bloodied lip he seemed genuine in his feelings.

–Danny Grosso