Divorce Chronicle #16: Living BACK in Time

Ode to my Best Friend, Ric Reaper

Jan 29, 2026

Back in October 2024, I posted a piece called “He Was a Friend of Mine”. It was about losing my good friend, Jack Slater, who died in Seattle after losing his battle with a liver transplant at much too early an age. Jack was an iconoclast and a bon vivant; he loved the Dodgers, and he was loved by a countless number of his admiring friends. The post included the song, He Was a Friend of Mine, sung by the crusty King of Greenwich Village folk music, Dave Van Ronk, and it made me think about how few people might be at my own memorial in the not-too-distant future.

And in my last Divorce Chronicle #15, I wrote about “living out of time”, about how I was hardly connected to any living and breathing human beings over the course of the last 11 months. About how my “best friends” were now canine in nature, meaning that they were, specifically, the comforting and friendly dogs I’ve been sitting in my solo travels around this lonely planet.

Be that as it may, and as is my instinctive and unconscious wont, I now contradict myself entirely - by arriving in Manila, to stay at the high-rise home of my best friend from childhood, Ric Reaper, whose name has peppered these Santa Fe Substacks over the last four years.

I’ve known “The Reaper” for over 70 years! Ever since the first grade at red brick Bowling Green Elementary School in Westbury, New York, where we both took the yellow school bus to Miss Lippert’s classroom before the new beige brick Salisbury Elementary School was built closer to our “Birchwood” neighborhood. It was the early 1950s (“the 50s”), back in the straight-laced suburbs of Long Island.

Not only was “The Reaper” in every other elementary school class with me before we both reached ten years old, but he was in all my classes from the 8th grade until we graduated Clarke High School in 1965. After that, he joined me at SUNY Buffalo (called “UB” back in the day) for four years of college, where we were, of course, college roommates. In between, he followed me to summer sleepaway camp, Camp Lindenmere in the Pennsylvania Poconos, where my parents unwillingly enrolled me in my early teens, and where Ric kept going for about three more years without me, making some of his other devoted and lifelong friends.

When and where did Ric get his name, “The Reaper”? Well, it was sort of a combo deal that just settled upon him in the middle of our college years. Firstly, more or less hitting the metaphoric nail on its ironic head, the fact that my dear friend has always been such a private and dark-souled Scorpio, self-effacing and droll to a flaw, he simply was modest, mordant, and humorous enough to accept the moniker of the haunted “Grim Reaper” - on his own.

Secondly, I believe it was in our junior year at UB, in a philosophy class that was well known throughout the university as being the “easiest class on campus”, in which, naturally, we both enrolled, and where… we sat in the very last row of a large lecture hall… completely ignoring the lectures of the tepid professor… while instead… we exchanged torn paper notes, testing our memories of every song on every Beatle album released to that date, 1968. Trust me, we were gooood.

Meanwhile, the infamous philosophy professor’s name was “Dr. Riepe” (pronounced “Reepy”), a very pale-skinned, asthenic, and harmless ghost of a man, who gave the entire class the generous and unearned letter grade of “A”, which we thought was both memorable and worthy enough to give his name to - Ric.

And so… thereafter, my friend became known as “Riepe”, or as… “The Reaper”.

Here’s a photo from just a couple of days ago, of Ric and his lovely Filipina wife, Gloria, taken at the Pinto Art Museum just a few miles north of Manila in the wild and woolly town of Antipolo.

Afterall, that’s what The Reaper is doing in the Philippines these days - living with Gloria and her very large Filipino family. After two previous marriages, he’s now been married to Gloria for almost two decades, and not having had children in his two previous unions, he now finds himself, surprisingly, and happily, surrounded by a harem of Gloria’s sisters, a bevy of brothers-in-law, a gaggle of stepchildren, and a still-growing Filipino gang of grandchildren.

Here, his name is “Lolo” Ric, “lolo” meaning “grandfather”, very similar to how I was called “Pak” Trules by my ex’s Indonesian family, and still now… by my son. Personally, I would call him “Godfather" Ric, as that is more or less his role here in Manila, sitting around gracefully on his “Grandpa/Godfather chair”, not lifting a finger, doling out his kindness and generosity to his adopted Filipino family.

I would be remiss not to mention that The Reaper is an intercontinental city dweller, living here seven months a year on the 16th floor of a comfortable high-rise in Makati City, while still keeping his 33rd-floor one-bedroom rental on 95th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues in Manhattan for the other five months. Lucky man.

And lucky friend, yours Trulesly, who seems to have an open-ended invitation to add one more New Yorker to The Reaper’s Filipino mishbucha (Yiddish for “big family”). Sorry, Ric, I know how much you hate my using Yiddish in these Substack posts!

The best thing about our lifelong friendship is that it’s a perfect fit. A match made in suburban New York Heaven. Whereas Ric worked his entire professional life for the Legal Aid Society at 100 Center Street in downtown Manhattan, defending the dregs of NYC’s criminal court system, while I took “the road less traveled”, we have never lost touch, except for maybe a year of two in my early 20s when I cut myself off from everyone I knew to discover myself as an “artiste”.

But it’s “easy”. Our friendship. He’s the only friend I know who has been able to make me laugh for more than 70 years. Every time we talk, text, Facetime, or see each other in person. The Reaper just - makes me laugh - whether it’s with another “Godfather” joke about Luca Brasi, Clemenza, Frankie Pantangeli or Salvatore (Sal) Tessio. Or… more frequently with… detrimental but painfully true jokes about… myself. Even about - my recent divorce. (After all, he’s still one divorce up on me.)

The Reaper also seems to have this empathetic gift for - accepting everything about me - without judgment. He knows me better than anyone else in the world (even my ex), and still… accepts me the way I am. Miraculous. Of course, he is simultaneously my existential “consigliere” (referring again to “The Godfather”, in this case, to “Tom Hagan”, the character played by Robert Duvall) - always giving me prudent, sound, and “reasonable” advice under every, and all, circumstances. “Reasonable” being The Reaper’s favorite word.

When I say to him,

Another fine mess I’ve gotten myself into,

The Reaper, inevitably, helps me find a way out.

So please know, that at least for these hot and humid days in the vertically-densest city in the world, Manila, I am in good hands… gratefully being fed three traditional and delicious Filipino meals a day (all on a previously-unfathomable, regular breakfast, lunch, and dinner timetable), while I pile on the pounds and play pickleball four days a week.

I’m no longer “living out of time”, but rather, I’m living “back in time”, with a large human family and a trusted godfather - on the 16th floor of Salcedo Place in Makati City, the tony part of high-rise Manila, on Luzon Island in the steamy Philippines.

So let’s raise our glasses!

Tagay! (“Cheeeers”in Tagalog)

Here’s to - “The Reaper”!

And here’s too - to friendship.

My black pearls from Bali. Silver Brazilian “Figa” pendant, given to me by Ric Reaper when I had cancer in 1989.

Trules

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