Accidental Brotherhood

How a bad relationship, a global pandemic, and a seating chart I had no control over gave me the friends I didn't know I was looking for

The best friendships are accidental. Not accidental like you bumped into someone and exchanged numbers out of social obligation, but accidental like you sat next to a stranger at brunch fourteen years ago because the seating arrangement was random and the woman you were dating at the time turned out to be a catastrophe and the one genuinely good thing to emerge from that particular romantic wreckage was this one guy named Jim. That’s how it actually happens. Nobody plans the friendships that matter.

I spent last weekend in Nashville, which the Drive-By Truckers have christened as the place where you go to see if what is said is so. It does. Nashville is exactly what Nashville says it is, which is rarer than it sounds. Most cities undersell themselves or lie outright.

But the Nashville trip is actually the third chapter of a story that starts, improbably, during a global pandemic, which I think most people would prefer to forget but which I can’t entirely write off because of what it accidentally gave me. The pandemic clarified a lot of things simultaneously — that the people keeping civilization operational are systematically underpaid, that we could have been polluting less this whole time, and that Skype had a twenty-year runway and somehow still managed to lose to a software program that nobody had heard of eighteen months earlier. Skype is the Buffalo Bills of tech companies. What Zoom actually did, at least for me, was conjure a group of people I would describe as hair-brained film nuts, comic weirdos, and genuinely committed bon vivants. They call themselves Video Village, and they spent their pandemic downtime doing Zoom table reads of significant scripts from film history.

Jim is a ringleader. I met him on August 12th, 2012 — I know the exact date the way you know the exact date of anything that turns out to matter — at a brunch I was invited to by someone who knew the woman I was romantically catastrophizing with at the time. The seating was arbitrary. We ended up next to each other and discovered we had, in the technical sense, a metric fuck ton in common. We stayed in touch with the low-frequency consistency of two people who understand that good friendships don’t require constant maintenance. When the pandemic arrived and Jim invited me to read with his crew, I said yes immediately, because making new friends during a period of collective psychological collapse is a survival strategy, not a luxury. I was immediately and without reservation accepted by these freaks, which is the highest compliment I know how to give.

Jim has a brother named Dennis. Dennis co-hosts a film podcast called Back By Popular Demand that I’ve appeared on multiple times now, which means we hit it off with a velocity that can really only be described as stylish. The catch, and there’s always a catch with the friendships that accumulate over distance and digital connection, is that Dennis couldn’t make the first in-person meetup, which was in Las Vegas, because of course it was. Vegas is where this kind of group inevitably lands first, drawn by some gravitational force that operates independently of anyone’s better judgment. We did a table read of Reservoir Dogs on that trip. I was Mr. White. Harvey Keitel’s part. I want to be clear that I’m telling you this not to brag but because it’s simply a fact that deserves to exist in the record.

What I remember most about that Vegas trip is that some of these guys have known each other since elementary school, others were fraternity brothers, and I was at a decade younger than them, an outsider by every demographic measure, and not once did anyone make me feel like I was auditioning. That’s actually unusual. Most established friend groups, even good ones, have a subtle gravitational field that pushes newcomers to the perimeter. This one didn’t. I don’t entirely know what that says about the group, but I think it says something important.

Nashville was this year’s installment. Steakhouses. Bourbon, obviously — this is not a negotiable element of any trip to Tennessee that takes itself seriously, and my bodyweight in fried chicken and barbecue. Live music. The Gulch. The Grand Ole Opry. The Country Music Hall of Fame, where I may have cried a little, and I’m not going to explain or defend that except to say that if you walk through that building and don’t feel something shifting around in your chest, you might want to get that checked out. And this time, Dennis was there.

The table read was Ghostbusters. Hotel patio, beers on the table, and an audience of bystanders who arrived confused and stayed anyway. I played Winston Zeddemore and also Walter Peck, the EPA guy everyone hates, which is a range I was prepared to commit to fully. We found a speakeasy. We found holes in walls. We ate well and drank better and stayed up too late making the kinds of arguments about movies that serve no purpose except to remind you why you love movies.

The thing about the Drive-By Truckers lyric is that it’s really about verification — you go somewhere to find out if what you’ve heard is true. What I keep finding out, trip after trip with these people, is that the thing I suspected back at that random brunch in 2012 was accurate. Some of the best things that will ever happen to you are going to arrive through a door you didn’t know was there.

And, for grins, I’ve provided a 71-song playlist that tops out at four hours filled with the songs that made me love country music. Happy trails.