Most of you know I’m not the guy for giving speeches, but here goes. Apologies in advance if I can’t get through this.

I used to tell this story about waking up in a strange house, on a floor, and the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a leather boot about two inches from my face. At that angle it looked enormous.

Then there was a brilliant light which I mistook for the morning, and a long period of darkness at the end of which I awoke in a hospital recovery room, and my face was swollen and swathed in gauze. In the bed next to me was a man with broken ribs and arms. “Wuff goig odd?” I said.

(Pause for laughter)

The moral of this story was supposed to be that you can forgive anything if the situation, ultimately, strikes you as being more comic than tragic.

Over time, lying there listening to the doctors talk to the man, I learned that he had sustained several simple fractures, oblique and transverse, from falling down a flight of stairs. My skull, also, had been cracked in, and several of my teeth would need to be replaced with a porcelain bridge. This was didn’t concern me at the time, because of the medication.

At this point in the story, I would usually open my mouth and pull back my upper lip (using my finger like a fish hook) and reveal the extent of my dental work, and the quality of it.

Then, I would gesture at Mike as if to yield the floor to him, saying, “and Mike, how did those arms of yours heal?”
If Mike wasn’t there, I couldn’t tell the story.

Mike would say, “Oh, the arms healed fine, but I never could get those boots clean!”

That’s right. There was so much blood that when he tried to flee the scene, he had slipped and fallen down the stairs. You know, maybe it was the pethadine hydrochloride, but I had to laugh. I mean, what a way to start a friendship that lasted 34 years!

But, ladies and gentlemen, that was 1971, and today (pause)... well, today is the last time I’m ever going to tell that story.

It’s not the same without you, Mike. Goodbye, buddy.