I may be crazy, but my 50^th high school reunion is calling me back. Mostly I  just want to see Woody again. He should be in rare form, given that for a long time he never expected to reach this milestone, with his diagnosis and all. Even before that, we shared enough dumbass stunts to preclude any notions of ever toasting such escapades in our old age.

Like the time on spring break when we tried to walk from Daytona Beach to Ft.Lauderdale, wearing only flip-flops, t-shirts, and our bathing trunks. No hats, no sun block, no underwear, and certainly no cell phones.

If we had consulted a map—free at any gas station back then—we might have realized there is no contiguous beach from Daytona to Ft. Lauderdale. We might have also learned we were biting off a two hundred mile walk.

After less than ten miles the beach simply ended. Backtracking would have been sensible, but instead we chose to battle westward through fields of saw grass and mangrove swamps until we came to a road and stuck out our thumbs. By then the heels of our flip-flops had completely worn away, forcing us to walk ballerina-style on the balls of our feet, which may have explained the difficulty we had in getting rides. So we accepted any ride, regardless of the length or the direction, taking a long, rambling inland loop through alligator swamps and dry landscapes crawling with armadillos.

“Race riots,” was all one driver said when he dropped us off in a section of Jacksonville up in flames. To be fair, we had told him he could drop us anywhere, so it may have been his idea of a joke. Forty-eight sleepless hours later we landed right back in Daytona Beach where we started.

Boredom drove us to Newton’s Auction House, with Woody brazenly bidding up items of jewelry at three and four thousand dollars a clip. Neither of us had the slightest idea of how auctions worked.

“Hey,” I whispered to Woody. “What happens if you win one of these bids?”

“Relax. I’m just playing these guys,” Woody assured me.

“Them?” I asked, inclining my head toward the Mafioso-looking guards in the back of the room in their black muscle shirts.

There were two auctioneers. One rallied up the bids while the other quietly showed upcoming items to the high bidders in the audience. The guy working the crowd introduced himself to us as George and said he had an “exquisite” man’s gold ring coming up, with diamond and tear-drop ruby insets. Woody tried it on and said he had to have it.

They started the bidding for Woody’s ring at one hundred dollars. The lead auctioneer called out in nasally, machine gun bursts, “Bid’s at a hunert, do I hear a hunert ‘n ten, a hunert ‘n ten, who’ll bid a hunert ‘n ten?” At this point George leaned over to Woody and whispered, “Say one-hundred-ten and leave the rest to me.”

Woody raised his hand and called out, “One hundred and ten.” His bid felt completely safe—given that this ring, like the ones before it, would surely sell for thousands more.

The auctioneer at the front of the room was just revving up his sermon about the value of the ring and how it had been owned by Dean Martin…or at the very least Dean Martin owned the matching “twin” to this ring.

Just when the head auctioneer was reaching the climax of his pitch, George interrupted him and said, “Tony, the gentleman back here has tried on this ring. He really admires the design. I say we let him have it for a hundred and ten bucks.”

Tony argued that the ring was worth fifty times that amount, but eventually relented — too quickly, in my opinion — and slammed down the gavel, shouting, “Sold to the young man in the back of the room, for a hunert ‘n ten dollars!”

The auction house required a twenty percent deposit on winning bids, but they called it square at eighteen dollars and a handful of change when that was all Woody and I could scrape together. Woody carefully tucked the receipt in his wallet.

Later that night Woody stepped under a light next to the door of a seaside condo to pull a cactus spine from his finger. He was lucky it was only his finger. After we had downed several beers, Woody had stepped into an abandoned lot filled with cactus to take a leak.

If we hadn’t been such cactus virgins, I might have known better than to break off a pad and toss it toward my friend to check out, and Woody definitely would not have tried to catch it.

As he leaned against the door of the condo trying to get in the best light to examine his wound, the door suddenly opened, pitching Woody into the arms of a stunning blonde. Our luck seemed to be turning when she and her two girlfriends invited us in for dinner. Woody poured gin and tonics, and attempted to charm the pants off the shortest, dark-haired girl.

“So Rosie, are you a riveter?” he asked her.

I had no idea what that meant, and I don’t think Rosie did either. But like a lot of Woody’s banter, it felt flirtatiously suggestive and seemed to be working.

“What would you like me to rivet?” she asked him.

I took the helpful, serious approach, stirring the risotto, while Shelly leaned lightly against me, streaming sauvignon blanc into the rice and mushroom mixture.

But the evening’s promise was shattered when Audra — the blonde — revealed that her boyfriend George would be arriving as soon as he got off work at the local auction house. That news threw Woody into a theatrical frenzy, claiming he had a score to settle with that “bastard,” which promptly cost us our dinner invitation.

That was the last time Woody and I traveled together for many years. Shortly after our return from Florida, everything changed. Woody’s girlfriend announced she was pregnant, he married her, dropped out of college, and went to work shaving skins for the next seven years, snorting leather dust by day and blowing dark, stringy mucous into his handkerchief at night.

I moved out of the area and Woody and I saw each other less and less. But whenever we did get together, Woody always produced the dog-eared receipt for his ring from his wallet. He spoke with regret of his failure to claim the ring — as though the ring was a talisman and by forswearing it he had somehow altered the trajectory of his life.

I finally lost contact with Woody altogether, hearing rumors that he had moved to Florida. When he reconnected with me ten years later with news of his diagnosis, he joked that he had caught the disease — an aggressive form of leukemia — while vacationing in Mexico.

He shrugged off my suggestion that his illness may have had more to do with the skins he had once shaved.

“Don’t even go there,” he said, waving me off. “The doctors say I have a defective Philadelphia chromosome.”

“Right, I said, “but those skins were soaked in benzene and benzene is known to cause DNA strand breaks like those detected in your form of leukemia.

Woody just shook his head, rejecting my theory.

“As Yogi Berra said, ‘you can look it up,’” I added.

In fact, I had looked it up. Benzene was first reported to induce cancer in humans as far back as the 1920’s. But the chemical, leather, and rubber industries denied any link to cancer until 1979. By then, Woody had already fled the leather mills before they got the best of him (or so he thought). Maybe his brain somehow detected the chromosomal breaks in his body and silently whispered to him, “I can’t tell you why, but you must leave this place…leave your wife… leave your five year old daughter…leave now before it’s too late.”

Luckily Woody had enough time left for me to shanghai him for one final trip — to England to find our old childhood mate, Malcolm. It was a raucous, happy, and at times tearful farewell tour.

More than fifteen years have now passed since that epic “last” trip. Since then — after abandoning all medications out of sheer stubbornness due to the extortion of the pharmaceutical companies, and to the total puzzlement of his doctors — Woody’s leukemia simply disappeared.

So, I look forward to toasting memories with Woody at our 50^th high school reunion — a milestone neither of us expected him to reach. I am certain he still carries the receipt for his ring. I hope to touch it, caress its feathered edges, and absorb its good karma through my fingertips.