Stand by Me (2nd Reading journal for The Body)

For some reason I have always considered girlfriends’ friendship as to be higher in intimidation, thus a better and a closer one. Although I cannot be one hundred percent sure for now, I guess I was wrong in that sense. I have never been a boy. But, if their friendship is like the one in “The Body”, I would pay great amount of respects towards them. As much as that, “friends” I found in “The Body” had something more than that can be expressed in a word “friendship”. If I had to name it, I would say it is a “friendship for real”.

In my point of view, real friends have to be just friends, meaning they should not have any barrier between themselves for any kind of reason. I specially want to mention the “barrier by background” for now. When people are young, most of them tend to make friends regardless of each others’ background. Rather than that, they think more of how well they fit into each other in person to person. But then when they grow up, being adults, they tend to calculate how much beneficial their friends would be to them. It is just a natural consequence, well a bad consequence, while growing up as adults. This might be part of the reason why Stephen King portrayed children, not grown-ups, to be his models of “friends”.

In “The Body”, all four friends in the gang have unhappy family background; Gordie, the main character, is an invisible son after his brother Denny’s death; Chris is poor; Vern has imprisoned brothers; Teddy has deformed ears because he was child-abused by his father. They get along with each other not because they are childhood buddies, but because they understand each other. Whenever Gordie’s father tells him not to hang out with those “thieves” and “poors”, he never listens. I believe this is what childhood friendship’s innocence is, and at the same time what the real friendship is. I felt shamefully embarrassed of myself sometimes being picky when choosing friends. And now I learned that I can’t really “choose” friends, but it just forms naturally.

 “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve.  Jesus, does anyone?”

Another value of having real friendship is standing by each other all the time. Especially when they feel lonely or depressed, friends are the ones who can give them power just by being next to them. Even if they don’t do anything special, “standing by one another” would be enough. In this sense, I would specially like to portray Gordie and Chris. Although all four of them are good friends, I found those two most stand-by-me-ish. They form a "mutual support bond" between themselves. Chris supports Gordie's writing, and believes in his ability when other kids make fun of it. He tells Gordie, "Kids lose everything unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks are too fucked up to do it then maybe i ought to," which means he would always be next to Gordie whenever he needs support and someone to lean on. Later on in life, Gordie encourages and helps Chris to keep up studying and get into university.

“That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”

Chris also shows Gordie his heart and how much he was disappointed at the teacher about the milk incident. Gordie understands Chris sincerely. To look at this in the viewpoint of ordinary teenager, it might seem to be just a normal conversation that would go on between friends. But then if we think of it from their perspective, this kind of conversation would not have been an easy one. They had to pull out all their family background and some other private issues. Chris had to tell that he was from a poor background, and Gordie knew it. Chris trusted Gordie enough to tell his innermost worry, and Gordie trusted Chris enough to give him sincere comments. It valued much more than just some middle classed teenagers whining and responding. Without exaggeration, it was their whole life in a longer view.

Taking out memories with friends, to be frank, I did not have any friends like Gordie or Chris when I was their age. I was not mature -in mind- enough to listen to my friends’ worry and be truly concerned about them. But I don’t regret my past for not building friendship like the “gang” in this book. It is just I was a bit slower than them. I am now happy to have bunch of friends that I can show deep inside my heart. Because of this book, I could think of what my friends mean to me and what I mean to them.

Overall, I prefer the title “Stand by Me” rather than “The Body”. The journey was important for them not because they wanted to find a dead body, but because they could get together and grow more tightened “real” friendship. At least I believe their goal in the first place was not to leave home; they just wanted to be “standing” by each other for a long time. And how FANTASTIC is that.

"Me? I'm a writer now.  Like I said."

There you go. This is the power of true friendship.