Keith: Metallica and Mound Visits

(Editor’s note: Welcome to Living Eulogies. All recollections are accurate in the author’s mind only. Apologies in advance to everyone who has different recollection of the same events. Send all complaints to Al Roker. Stop, drop and roll.)

My drive to work today was highlighted by my first listen of Metallica’s new album, 72 Seasons. The car windows were down on this 66-degree morning, and the stereo volume was cranked up and thumping as loud as my Shitty Little Nissan Versa would allow, which is to say, weakly.

I was thinking about Keith Lucian.

Keith and I started to become friends in the wake of The Great Unfriending that happened to me in sixth grade, when my Ridger friends decided en masse I wasn’t someone they wanted to hang out with anymore. Over the course of that year, I started to make new friends, and by seventh or eighth grade, Keith was probably my best friend at the time.

We bonded over a love of sports — he a Mets baseball, Giants football and Syracuse college basketball fan, me a Yankees baseball, Jets football and St. John’s college basketball fan. Our differences allowed us endless opportunities for smack talk, most of which favored his teams back then.

I was thinking of Keith this morning, however, because of something that had nothing to do with sports. Keith introduced me to Metallica one night when I slept over at his house. We were hunkered down in his bedroom. CD’s were relatively new, and we both were developing a deep appreciate for the full, rich sound they brought compared to cassette tapes. Keith was the first person I knew who had a sound stack … a boss CD player, tape deck and amplifier, all separate units, along with booming box speakers. This was the height of cool.

On that night, Keith asked me if I’d heard Metallica’s new album yet. And Justice For All had just come out. It was the album that would help Metallica cross over from the fringe world of metal to mainstream success via the driving power of One, made more notable by its award-winning video on MTV set to the 1971 film Johnny Got His Gun.

But the truth was, I’d never heard any Metallica at that point. Keep in mind, I was growing up in the 1980s in Suburbia, New York. Metallica — and metal, in general — was something to fear amidst the Satanic Panic. It wasn’t too many years before that my father had quizzed me during a day of fishing about my recent involvment with a Dungeons & Dragons group, wanting to ensure I wasn’t planning on taking an ax to the family any time soon.

Keith popped And Justice for All into the CD player and pushed the “forward” button until he reached Track 7. So much easier than fast-forwarding a tape! The first booming notes of The Frayed Ends of Sanity blared through his speakers, complete with the Wizard-of-Oz-esque palace guards chanting.

I was hooked. The music was so raw, so aggressive, so filled with anger. I loved it.

By the time I returned to Suburbia the next day, I was a Metallica fan. When the Black album came out a few years later, I devoured it. Every album since then has been something I’ve highly anticipated, and 72 Seasons was no exception. I even handled Load, Re-Load and St. Anger without losing my shit.

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My friendship with Keith was forged over many common interests — aggressive music and sports being just two. Another key one was girls. Keith and I talked endlessly about the latest interest in our lives. I also somehow became Keith’s wingman on what were two of history’s all-time worst dates. Keith, for whatever reason, ended up dating two different girls over the years whose parents wouldn’t initially allow one-on-one dates. I ended up being Keith’s chaperone, of sorts, after he fixed me up with someone so the date would be double.

The first was with someone whom I had a great interest in as a friend but, sadly, nothing more. That didn’t end well at all, but it was the better of the two. The second one was so bad that by the time we ended up at the movie we were seeing together, my date sat next to her friend and I sat next to Keith.

Good times, folks. Good times.

We were both huge supporters of each other’s love lives. Keith lived in Mt. Kisco, which afforded him much more freedom of movement than I had on the Ridge. Keith could walk places of actual interest. Mt. Kisco had sidewalks to traverse. So we traversed them. We called in the Nike Express, and it wasn’t rare for us to walk the several miles from his apartment to the Electric Playhouse, the local arcade, where we deposited quarter after quarter after quarter into the hottest games of the day.

He and I once took the Nike Express several miles to Pizza & Brew so he could ask out a girl he thought was into him. I waited outside in anticipation of his successful mission. Sadly, he had misread the signals, and the walk home was much more somber.

Keith and I played on the same baseball team during my singular best — and ultimately final — season. I had become a pretty dang good pitcher, and Keith was my catcher. We had another catcher on the team, but I always preferred throwing to Keith, so much so that I would ask the coach for Keith to catch on the days I pitched.

The games themselves were fun. The mound visits were epic. Keith always knew when to come to the mound for a chat to settle things down. Rarely did we talk about baseball. I never knew exactly what Keith was going to say when he visited the mound. Often it was about whatever hot girls were in the stands.

I remember one game in which the bases were loaded with two outs in the last inning and us clinging to a one-run lead. Keith came out to the mound, and I expected him to talk about what pitches we were going to throw.

No.

“What do you want on your pizza?”

“What?”

“Your pizza. What do you want on it?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You and me. I need to know what you want on the pizza we’re going to get as soon as you strike this fucking guy out.”

And I did.

It was pepperoni and sausage, by the way.

Keith and I drifted apart as high school went on. We ended up hanging out with different people, and by the time graduation came, we were merely two faces in the hall to each other. I have so many stories with people that end just like that, and today? This particular day? It makes me so fucking sad.

Keith and I shared a whole helluva lot, and then, suddenly, we were strangers. We’ve caught up a little bit on Facebook over the years, but our politics are very different and our lives have gone in different directions. That said, I miss those days of walking around Mt. Kisco or listening to really loud music in his apartment. I miss playing one-on-one basketball at the Boys Club and talking about girls. I miss the mound visits and the simplicity of what we thought were our complicated teenage lives.

Hell, I even miss being his wingman on those horrible dates.

So let’s hear it for Keith, the kid who introduced me to Metallica and the best damn catcher a pitcher could ever ask for. Hear Hear!

Who should be the next Living Eulogy? Email me at johnagliata@gmail.com.

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