There was this kid in my creative writing class in high school. He was a stoner. Completely. He’d used more drugs by the age of 16 than a young Keith Richards. He was barely functional as a person and seemed by looks and demeanor to be about 60 years old.

He was also by far the best writer of any of us.

I’ve since lost it during my many moves, but he wrote my favorite poem of all time. I only remember fragments of it now. One part of it was the line, “The trees fell down/And the bugs arose.”

I’m not sure what made the poem so great. It was like an LSD-infused blend of Annie Dillard, William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot. It was unlike anything I’d ever read, and was completely original – it sang and soared and false-stumbled to mislead you, then lifted you to greatness on the next line.

I have no idea what happened to Paul. One of the last conversations I had with him went like this:

Paul: So I counted how many times the dryer went around when it dried my clothes.

Me: Wow…hmm. How many was it?

Paul: I forgot now.

Me: Paul, so you spent 45 minutes counting this and you forgot? OK then….

But that was Paul. Lost in his own world of drugs and who knows what else. Like many of my childhood friends, he is probably now in jail or dead. But he probably could’ve been the next David Foster Wallace if he’d grown up in different circumstances.