The first and only time I’ve ever been put in the backseat of a police car, I was with Chris Hunnicutt.

Chris was one of my only friends in high school who had nearly full-time access to a car — a burgundy two-door Mercury or Buick or Oldsmobile or something like that from the late ’80s or very early ’90s that I’m guessing had been passed from Mr. and Mrs. Hunnicutt to their oldest daughter and on down the line until Chris, the youngest of four, inherited it after he got his license in 2001. Its front bumper sagged just enough in the middle to make his car very easily identifiable among the dozens of others in our school’s parking lot.

We called it The Car That Smiled Back.

Green Bay Southwest High School had open-campus lunch, so a lot of days Chris and I would make our way to the parking lot and go somewhere like Fazoli’s or Hansen’s for the 45 minutes we had until our next classes, and I know we spent more than a few hours in that car cruising around after choir concerts and just killing time bullshitting with each other.

Anyway, one day in the late spring or early summer of 2002, I was over at Chris’s house to work on a silly music project. I didn’t have a car of my own, so Chris had generously agreed to give me a ride across the bridge and back to Allouez in time to start my shift at Austin’s. Before we left his house I put on my white button-up shirt and tie, because at the time that was the dress-code at my neighborhood grocery store, and we headed east.

Chris and I soon made our way to Hwy. 172 and to the stop light right next to the jail. Suddenly, Chris’s car started making some very unsettling noises, and then it just shut off.

“Aw man – did you run out of gas?” I asked, knowing that we were in high school and sometimes teenagers forget to do important things.

“No way, dude,” he responded, pointing to his not-empty fuel gauge. He tried restarting his engine, but when he turned the key nothing happened. No revving. No sputtering. Just a click.

So there we were, blocking traffic at one of Green Bay’s more heavily traveled intersections, unable to start Chris’s car and a little unsure what to do next. Wanting to move his car as far to the side of the road as we could, I hopped out and tried with not very much success to push the car while Chris put it in neutral and steered. We did this for about 30 seconds when an police cruiser pulled up behind us.

The confused Allouez officer asked what was going on, and we explained. Because neither of us were intoxicated or otherwise unruly — and because we were two white teenagers in Green Bay and I was wearing a white button-up shirt and a tie — the officer let his guard down pretty quickly and radioed dispatch to send a tow truck. (This was before every high schooler had a mobile phone.)

At this point, Chris and his car were set up with a lift back to the west side where he would later learn that the alternator had failed. I, however, still needed to work and now had no way to get there. Again, I couldn’t just call my parents and have them pick me up since I wasn’t carrying a phone, and while I could have walked the 1.5 miles to the store, I would have been very late to work without the ability to let my bosses know ahead of time. So I figured I’d see how far the “To Serve” part of this officer’s oath would go.

“Hey, uh, do you think you might be able to give me a quick ride down to Austin’s?” I sheepishly asked. “I was on my way to work and I don’t want to be late.”

From the officer’s immediate nonverbal reaction, I was able to discern two things: that he really didn’t want to chauffeur this kid to work but also that he couldn’t think of a good reason not to.

“All right,” he sighed.

I wished Chris luck and then hopped in the back of the squad car. I’m sure it feels a lot smaller back there when you’re under arrest, and I’m glad my lone police escort was only for a few minutes to somewhere other than jail, but I still got a few sideways looks from my co-workers as I was dropped off in the parking lot.

This has always been my go-to story involving my friendship with Chris, mostly because its one of the only stories that can be told as an extended narrative. The two of us had plenty of adventures, growing up in a smallish city during a time when you actually had to get together in person to hang out with your friends, but as I reflect on the years we were in each other’s company, I mostly go back to the fact that Chris and I spent at least a small portion of five days a week together for the better part of six years. For this reason, many of my memories about our friendship are more about those day-to-day interactions than about big, exciting events.

We sat at the same lunch table in middle school, where Chris and my buddy Sam would sing this song at each other. Once we got to high school, we would regularly go to El Azteca for their $5 lunch special (served with chips and salsa!), which was a midday paradise for broke 17-year-olds.

We were in gym class together in 8th grade. One of the last units of that year was softball, since it doesn’t get nice outside in Wisconsin until May. Chris was always a bit of a mischief-maker, so when he stepped to the plate and our teacher “accidentally” beaned him with a harmless, lazy pitch, he responded by very purposely throwing the bat in the teacher’s direction. I’m sure he got in trouble.

Perhaps the thing that bound us together most closely was the fact that we spent three years singing the same voice part in our high school choir. There weren’t too many guys at my school who could successfully hit the notes required for Tenor 1, but both of us could, and I like to think we leaned on each other to ensure our small subsection sounded as good as possible.

Chris was one of my only friends with whom I had a specific handshake. It was one of those things that evolved over time until it became needlessly complex, but also something that both of us could still reflexively perform even after a whole bunch of years. We also had specific nicknames for each other. I was “Er-Mac.” He was “Hunnicups of Love.”

There was a small period of time right at the end of high school where Chris got a bunch of us into the Spin Doctors. Keep in mind, this was more than a decade after the band’s one significant record was released, but there we were jamming to “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues” and “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong.” I still love that album, and will always, always think of Chris when I listen to it.

I could continue with these little anecdotes, but I’ll sum up who Chris was to me with one more longer story:

My only prolonged experience playing music with other people was in 8th and 9th grade when I was in a teenage punk band. We mostly played covers, but we were among the first in our immediate age cohort to organize ourselves into an actual band, so it was pretty sweet.

Anyway, sometime in the summer of 1999, we played a garage show at our friend Amber’s house. Chris was there, and he had very recently started playing the bass guitar. During our set break, Chris picked up the bass and started plunking out the rudimentary line to “Blitzkrieg Bop.” I’m sure we had some side-eye for him at the time, since we had been playing our instruments for a few years rather than a few days.

As time went on, Chris’s musical abilities improved at an exponential level. Not only did he become an extremely capable bass player throughout high school, but before I knew it his hard work and talent had turned him into the sort of person who makes you widen your eyes when you hear them play. He jumped aboard every musical project my school had to offer, from jazz ensembles to orchestra to Battle of the Bands to playing in the pit for our high school musical, and he quickly built a reputation as a very reliable bassist.

My high school’s music department was supposed to go to Toronto in the spring of 2003 as part of our biennial tour, but concerns about SARS forced the folks in charge to quickly alter the plans. Instead, we ended up going to the Twin Cities, and this change would be one of the defining moments in Chris’s life. (Remember how inconsequential SARS seemed at the time?)

When scrambling to find some last-minute seminars for a hundred or so high schoolers to attend, the leaders of the music department booked some time with the head of the orchestra at Minneapolis’s Augsburg University. As luck would have it, this professor was also a classically trained upright bassist, and after the seminar he and Chris got to talking. Long story short, Chris altered his college plans just a few months before the end of high school to attend Augsburg, which got him out of Green Bay and springboarded him toward a career as a money-earning musician.

And that’s the ultimate irony: the guy who stood alone in that garage in 1999, fumbling through a three-note bass part in between our sets of distortion-heavy punk songs was the only one of us who actually found sustained professional success playing music as his primary occupation. Was it the pie-in-the-sky dream of touring with a world-famous rock and roll band? Not quite, but Chris made a decent living in Minneapolis and later in Denver by being the sort of Swiss Army Musician that would gladly accept any challenge presented to him, like when he was asked to simultaneously perform complex bass and vocal parts to a Bruno Mars song for a corporate gig.

On a personal level, Chris was by far my favorite person to harmonize with. Before we went our separate ways for college, we got together for a few one-off projects with some other friends, and figuring out how we were going to sing together was always the easiest part. Don’t get it twisted, though: that’s where any similarity in our musical skills comes to an end. Where Chris transformed himself into an extraordinary multi-instrumentalist whose list of accomplishments is as long as my arm, I’m still approximately as good at playing the guitar as I was when I was in high school, and any rare on-stage performance now takes place on karaoke night at the bar.

Like a lot of people do, Chris and I lost touch after we stopped seeing each other every day. There was never any animosity, of course, but sometimes people just get so involved in their own present lives that everything outside of that gets lost in the shuffle. I was happy, therefore, when Chris and I got to hang out for the first time in more than a decade when I was home for Christmas in 2019.

I just wish it had been under different circumstances.

In December 2018, Chris was diagnosed with Stage III Pancreatic Cancer, and at first I didn’t want to believe it. Surely it couldn’t be that bad, I thought, because the vast majority of the people who receive this diagnosis are over the age of 55. Deep down, though, I know this denial was rooted in the tremendous fear that my childhood friend was now in a battle with a terminal illness in his mid-30s.

From a selfish, positive standpoint, Chris’s diagnosis motivated me to get off my ass and try to reforge the connection he and I once had. Turns out, that’s really easy to do if you just make a little effort. All it took was a Facebook message responding to a video of Chris playing his bass on his 34th birthday. From there, we were in regular contact online and later by text, where we played chess and kept in touch about our lives.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I arrived at Chris’s house that day, but that uncertainty was obliterated within about 30 seconds of seeing my friend. It’s more than a little cliche to say things like “it was like no time had passed at all,” but it’s true. Sure, we had a lot of details to catch up on, but it was clear that our established friendship was strong enough to overcome even a 15-year separation.

For several hours, we sat with each other and joked about old times while Christmas movies played in the background, and of course, we talked about the current state of his health. We compared notes about the digestive effects of painkiller use and I learned what a Whipple procedure was. Not exactly barroom banter, but we weren’t going to ignore the reality of what was going on.

Chris and I kept in touch via text as 2020 began. I’d send him periodic movie recommendations and would hope to get his feedback. More than anything I just wanted to keep the conversation going.

Our last exchange was on Chris’s 35th birthday. I knew he was in the hospital, so I tried to be careful in how I phrased the acknowledgement, and we ended up agreeing that the Dwight Schrute Method was probably most appropriate. I sent a couple more messages in the days after, but I understood that he probably wasn’t in a place to respond.

Chris passed a few weeks later, and while it certainly wasn’t a surprise, it was still very difficult to learn. I can only imagine the grief his family must still be feeling, and I wished very badly that I could be there to celebrate Chris’s life with them. (I was all set up to fly back to Wisconsin again specifically to attend any related events, but then COVID appeared and, well you know the rest.)

I’m not going to sit here and pretend Chris and I were best friends. We’d built entire separate lives for ourselves after we both left Green Bay, and there are way more people who were closer to Chris as an adult than I was. Still, I like to think that our ability to so quickly pick things up again, even under those awful circumstances, is a reflection of the strength of our bond. We might have grown apart as adults, but it was clear when we hung out that December day that we came from the same foundation.

I miss my friend, but I’m very grateful that we were able to reconnect before it was really too late. We shared a lot of laughs as teenagers, and that certainly didn’t stop in our last interactions, even considering everything else that was going on. I’ll always think of Chris whenever I hear Primus or Victor Wooten and every time I see someone with the same sort of semi-mischievous Cheshire Cat smile.

Chris Hunnicutt – 1985-2020