The bear necessities of friendship
By Qraig R. de Groot ’93

hen my best friend Tony Welz got married, he asked me to make a speech at his wedding. As I pondered what to say, I became stressed. How would I put the essence of an entire friendship into a short, captivating speech?

In the weeks before the wedding, I found myself reliving my 10-year friendship with Tony. I remembered instances before meeting his fiancée… before I moved into his California apartment… before our adventurous excursions into New York… before graduation, late night mixers and Theta Chi pledging. I thought all the way back to Fall 1989 and our first meeting.

I cringed when I saw Tony. He was standing in the middle of our tiny Mimosa room in ripped jeans and a black T-shirt covered in images of fiendish rock stars. He wore a beard, moustache and long, stringy hair that went way down his back. ‘Oh, no!’ I thought. ‘It’s the Heavy Metal Roommate from Hell!’ But the worst was yet to come.

Behind Tony, hanging in the window from a noose, was a beige teddy bear shrouded in leather and studs. It frightened me that this was the first thing Tony decided to display in our new room. Seeing Tony and that bear, I assumed my demise was imminent. And I would make sure my mother was to blame since she convinced me to go away to
college.

To my amazement, the first few days passed without incident. Actually, Tony and I hardly uttered a word to one another.

I sat at my desk writing letters to anyone who might save me from my room—which quickly became ‘Tony’s Demonic Den.’ Tony covered the walls with posters of Alice Cooper, Metallica and Megadeth, eerily complementing that poor hanging bear. Day after day, he would lay on his bed reading and listening to his Walkman at deafening volumes while I tried to build up enough courage to ask the one question that plagued me.

“What’s with the bear?” I nervously blurted one day. Instantly I felt the need to run for fear that Tony would lash out at my stupidity and hang me next to the bear. Instead, he laughed and told me the whole story from the bear’s incarnation as a childhood toy to its transformation into a Halloween prop and finally a bizarre window ornament.

The innocence of it all quelled my fears and led to more questions. Soon a full-fledged conversation ensued and we realized we had a lot in common. It surprised both of us.
As the months went on, Tony and I started hanging out and experiencing college life together. Eventually we took down some of Tony’s posters to make room for mine. Yet the bear stayed, not as an object of repulsion and fear but a symbol of a forming friendship.

Tony and I spent the next three years as roommates. We pledged the same fraternity, took some of the same classes, went to the same bars and always shared lots of laughs. As things changed around us, two features remained: our strong, unexpected friendship and that bear, which continued to hang proudly in the window of each new living quarters. It was the last thing Tony took down on graduation day.

In the end, I shared these memories of Tony with the wedding guests, just to remind everyone what Tony was like before he became a clean-cut public relations powerhouse. I think they understood that I owe one of my most cherished friendships to a curiously demented, leather-clad bear dangling in a window. You know, I miss that bear.

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Qraig de Groot ’93 is a music coordinator at Five Mile Radius Entertainment in West Hollywood. He lives in Los Angeles while his college roommate, Tony Welz ’93, resides in Foster City, California.