When I moved into the freshman Honors dormitory at William and Mary in 1967, a skinny kid from Connecticut was moving into the adjacent room. His name was Kenneth Albert King, Jr., but he was called “Kenny.” We were all amused at his saddle shoes, a Fifty-ish item that he continued to wear for a few years until that kind of clothing was supplanted by jeans, paisley shirts, and love beads.

Kenny and I soon became fast friends—inseparable, really. Although he was an English major, and I wanted to be a biologist, we shared many traits—particularly a penchant for the bizarre and grotesque aspects of life, the desire to cram as much experience as we could into our short span, and a desire to go out “on the road” (our heroes were Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy).

And we did all that, traveling extensively over the next ten years. The highlight was a marathon hitchhiking trip from Fort Worth Texas (site of a friend’s wedding), up through South Dakota, and east to Boston. That trip included a ride with four stoned G.I.s returning from Vietnam carrying several “keys” of marijuana, and driving a car with no license plates—not a wise move. It also included a ride down the freeway at 100 mph in a car containing four drunken teenagers, with “Paint it Black” cranked up full volume on the radio, and a girl in a bikini sitting in the driver’s lap. (That’s the only time I’ve ever asked to be let out of a car.) And we were busted on the Dan Ryan freeway here in Chicago for hitchhiking: a state trooper had been killed that night, and they frisked and questioned us for an hour by the interstate before letting us off. That trip was the first thing I remembered when I heard the news about Kenny yesterday.

Here’s a photo from 1972, sent to me this morning by my friend Will, another of our classmates, and one whose parents lived in Fort Wayne Indiana. (Will was in fact the guy who got married in Texas.) Halfway through our Big Hitchhiking Trip, Kenny and I sought food, a bed, and solace from Will’s parents, showing up unannounced on their doorstep. They took this picture of us. Note my Mountain Master backpack.

That was just one of many great times we had—often the kind of times that Tolkien described as difficult in the experiencing but wonderful in the retelling.

We read the same books (Vonnegut, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway and Fitzgerald were favorites), dated the same women, and shared many mind-altering substances—this was, after all, the late Sixties. It was with Kenny that I had the LSD experience in which I received a profound revelation, duly scrawled on a piece of paper to be read the next day. As I’ve recounted, the revelation turned out, in the morning light, to be “The walls are fucking brown.” We went to many of the antiwar demonstrations in Washington together, and I visited his home in Enfield, Connecticut, meeting his siblings and his parents, the famous “Lefty” (an ironworker) and “Phil” (for “Phyllis”).

After college, I moved to Boston for graduate school, and Kenny took a job in Washington, D.C.. Although he aspired to be a world-class writer (and I still maintain that the raw materials were there—I have his letters to prove it), he took more mundane jobs that always left him stressed and unsatisfied.  But we got together as often as we could.

Here’s a picture of Kenny and me taken in 1977 by a friend and former classmate—Clark Quin, who was (and is) a professional photographer—at his studio in Somerville, Massachusetts. Needless to say, both of us were drunk and stoned at the time. Kenny is holding a bottle of his favorite brew, Rolling Rock. (We drank so much of this beer that we memorized the motto on the bottle, something I can still recite today: “From the glass lined tanks of Old Latrobe, we tender this premium beer for your enjoyment as a tribute to your good taste. It comes from the mountain springs to you. ’33′”.) Clark wrote the lovely sentence below the photo.

I loved Kenny; for years he was my best friend and I’ll probably never be closer to any man.

In Washington, Kenny met a wonderful British woman, married her, and moved to England, taking up a job at Whitbread Breweries as an IT expert and buying a house in the village of Kingsclere. We still kept in touch, and I visited him and Jane about once a year.  They had two kids, a boy and a girl, and moved to the even smaller village of Denton, where they bought a lovely renovated barn that used to belong to the vicarage.  It was a peaceful place—a place to walk, have scrumptious vegetarian meals (Jane was a vegetarian and and a great cook), and, most of all, to drink wine and chat.

Among the legacies that Kenny left is my love of wine. He was an oenophile, a collector far more serious than I, and introduced me to good wine. On my many visits to Denton, he’d break out some great bottles and we’d do blind, comparative tastings: say, four bottles of Hermitage with dinner. Needless to say, we’d polish them off and fall insensate into bed. The next day we’d walk it off through the neighboring fields.

The photo below is the way I’ll remember Kenny in the last years—proffering a great bottle. He was full of warmth and friendship—the kind of guy who would dig through his collection to offer me his special rarities. We bought cases and bottles together—I still have a few bottles of Maury from 1939 sitting in Denton.

Once every couple of months, a big manila envelope would arrive in Chicago from Denton. It contained newspaper clippings that Kenny had collected for me. Many of them were Jancis Robinson’s columns on wine, but others were about rock and roll (we shared the same passions there, too: Steely Dan; Crosby, Stills and Nash; Laura Nyro; Joni Mitchell, and the Beatles), literature, and all of our joint enthusiasms. I got one of these packets about three weeks ago, and haven’t yet finished going through it.

Yesterday, when I woke up at 4:30, I had an email from Kenny’s wife with the header, “Very sad news.” My heart sank: what could have happened? It couldn’t be! And then I opened the email, which began:

I am very sorry to send you bad news by email. Kenny died very suddenly on Sunday while we were staying with friends in Kingsclere.

All I could absorb was “Kenny died.” It went on, but the details are irrelevant. I stumbled to work, and what filled my mind was that big hitchhiking trip we took in 1972, and how the person who went with me no longer existed. Yes, those are the trite but human thoughts that strike us when this happens: the person is gone for good. Where did he go? As an atheist, I know he’s gone for good. We were planning a big wine-tasting trip together next year: an epic journey by car from England through France and down to Jerez in Spain. The person I would have gone with is no more. The only mercy is that he had an end that was sudden, rather than withering slowly and painfully into decrepitude. But it was way too soon: he was allotted another two decades!

We will all lose loved ones, and experience the horrible pain when that happens, and such is the curse of Homo sapiens.  But who is to say that a lioness doesn’t experience the same grief when they lose a cub? The difference is that we know it will happen; we are the only species aware of our own mortality. We pretend that we’re immortal but know we’re not, and we know too that if we live long enough we’ll experience these losses over and over. One day there is a happy, wine-drinking human, and then he is no more. At such moments every word and phrase seems trite: he had a good life, the grief will abate over time, he did not suffer, and so on.  There is no consolation for his wife and children save their mutual support; our love and sympathy are not anodyne, though we hope otherwise.

There is nothing to add except that I loved him, that my heart goes out to his family, and that we had many good times together on this planet. Without Kenny my life would have been immensely poorer. He will be buried Tuesday in Kingsclere, but I will not be there, for I have unbreakable commitments in California.

Kenny leaves behind his wife Jane, two children, Adam and Charlotte, and a recently born grandchild, Thomas, as well as his sister Pam and brother Peter (you may know Peter King from reading Sports Illustrated or watching football on television, where he’s a commentator).

I lifted a glass to my late friend last night, and it was a good one: a Rioja Alta Viña Ardanza Riserva from 2004. He would have liked it. It was full and rich—like his life.