OK, with that out of the way:
For the last week or so I’ve been in a really bad headspace. I had a birthday in early December. To date myself, I am closing in rapidly on 50. When you get to this age, a couple of years seems like a couple of months, so even though I’m not quite there yet, I feel like I may as well be. I have actually forgotten my exact age a few times so it makes things easier as well to just remember 50. I have been feeling ancient and irrelevant.
The day I turned twenty five, I woke up incredibly hungover to the phone ringing. An old girlfriend was calling to tell me that my best friend had committed suicide. It had actually happened a few days earlier and she had not been able to get through; at that time, fast internet was expensive, and I had a single land line which shared duties both as a home phone and as an internet connection. I had left the modem on for the last week, not expecting any calls, probably downloading some files that at the time were considered huge. I had only turned off the connection because I thought my mom and dad might worry if they couldn’t get in touch with me on my birthday.
That day was a total clusterfuck from beginning to end, but that was the worst of it right there. And I want to / need to talk about it. About him. About them.
I think we were fourteen maybe when we first met. We played music together. He sang and played bass. I played guitar. Music is the True Language of the Ineffable, and through it we came to understand things about each other that could never be said, could never even be articulated. He didn’t start off this way but as he aged he began to possess an indefinable quality that people call “it.” The thing a young Marlon Brando had. The thing young Elvis and Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop and Kurt Cobain and Mick Jagger all had, like a natural 18 CHA. He wasn’t a great speechmaker or anything like that. But by the time he was seventeen he had come into his own entirely and on stage he was in his full glory, a young god. In one of the Discworld books, Nanny Ogg’s cat Greebo is transformed into a human. When I read that bit it immediately made me think of my friend. The way the eyes and the smile are described is just dead on.
Here's a passage from the discworld wiki:
Despite the scars and the bad eye, the human Greebo's other eye glitters like the sins of angels, and his lazy smile is the downfall of saints. Female saints, anyway. He appears as a dastardly buccaneer ready to unbuckle any amount of swash; a six-foot, well-muscled, grinning bully who radiates a greasy aura of raw sexual energy that can be felt several rooms away. Despite everything they see, women are still attracted to him.
I’m a straight male and even I picked up on that “greasy aura of raw sexual energy." Women threw themselves at this guy.
Jesus, I just looked up pictures of Greebo as a human and the general artistic consensus even LOOKS like him a little:
Had things gone differently, I think it’s quite possible he would have become a household name like the others mentioned above.
At one point we traveled to Indiana to play a show, and we were in some small town, and they didn’t like us, and he made some ill-considered remarks that implied the best things going there were incestuous sexual relationships. The mood got ugly. When we were breaking down and packing up, he went outside to smoke or something, I’m not sure what, and suddenly I realized he was gone and I got a Bad Feeling and grabbed our drummer and went to go find him.
He was in the back of the parking lot surrounded by like ten good old boys – I say ten, but the actual number was probably somewhere between eight and twelve. They were about to kick the ever-living fuck out of him. As I came up on this Situation, this is what I heard him say to this group of men:
“You guys are a bunch of cumswilling fatherfucking faggots and the only reason you came tonight is because your little sisters wouldn’t let you touch them.”
In hindsight, there is a lot wrong with this statement, but this was the 1990’s and challenging another young man’s sexuality if you were not friendly with him was the one of the main du jour ways to show him your displeasure.
It was also a really good way to get into a fight. It probably still is, but I haven't used those terms or gotten into a fight in such a long time I'm not really sure.
His utter lack of fear is one of the things I will never, ever forget as long as I am of sound mind. He was not a fighter, in spite of oozing danger. The drummer and I were the band badasses. I had been working in construction labor for a couple of years. I had done a decent amount of training in boxing and martial arts and had been on the wrestling team, though I didn’t like my teammates and quit after the first year. And when I wasn’t doing those things I was hauling musical gear around. I was in shape. But I also had enough rough and tumble experience to know that ten vs. one or even two or three only has one result in the real world. I am certain that without any intervention, these guys would have at the very least put him in the fucking hospital. And that’s assuming that none of those guys were packing and willing to bring a gun into the mix. Even without that I think it is quite possible that they might have killed him. I had visions of him being chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged through the streets.
But I did intervene, and I managed to talk these guys down, apologizing profusely while our drummer pulled him away and I explained he didn’t mean any of it, it was all just part of the stage show (absolute bullshit, he meant every word, but it worked). However, the fact that he was ready to fight, that he wouldn’t back down, that he had said this thing and was not only sticking by it, he was doubling down on it in spite of the circumstances: I respected that so much. I’m not justifying his behavior or what he said, please understand – it was a dumb fucking thing to say, and it was ungracious and ugly to come into this little town and insult them, never mind that they didn’t care for our music. And by today’s standards it’s hateful as well, which I do not endorse in any way. But having said it, he was NOT backing down, and that was beautiful to me. He had no fear whatsoever. Instead, I backed down for him, like some kind of fucked-up Subotai to his Conan.
I think what I am trying to say here is that I loved him. Yes, in a platonic way, as a friend, but in hindsight there was a romantic component to it as well that is incredibly rare in relationships between straight men. Not a sexual component, no, but a romantic one. We instinctively understood how the other was feeling. We were absolutely united by the pursuit of genius and the desire to experience the sublime through excess. We shared everything from books and music to girls. And we also shared an addiction to opiates.
About a week, maybe two after I got that phone call, I gathered everything I had ever written to that point, every scrap of paper, every disk, every journal, I even got copies back from people who I had given them too, and I took it all out into the backyard and burned it. I was in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa at the time. I dropped out the next semester and never finished. I didn’t write anything creatively again until 2021 – a space of a little more than twenty years.
Before I left for school, lives had begun to become undone by addiction. For whatever reason, at the time, I could see what was coming down the pipe at us and that it was Not Fucking Good. Maybe I made a WIS save they failed, I don’t know. But I began to try to fight my way through to some kind of sobriety, or at least non dependence. When I did that, the girlfriend I mentioned above started dating my friend instead of me. For reference, this was the first girl I ever actually fell head-over-heels in real-deal Capital-L Love with. She was ferociously intelligent, and wild, and physically beautiful, a punk rock princess with dazzling, vibrant purple hair. And her eyes, oh my god. She had the slightest touch of heterochromia, and they were this deep, glazed blue-green with tiny golden brown sunbursts around her pupils. And in spite of being drop-dead gorgeous, she was NICE to me. This was very, very unusual for me, to have such a pretty girl be nice to me and that I felt at ease around. I had managed to punch way, way above my weight class, something that has happened to me consistently with women; I don’t know why that should be but some things you just shut up and be grateful for.
Anyway, when I decided to bow out, just like that situation with the ten good old boys, instead of backing down, my friend, seeing the same thing I was I have no doubt, doubled down. He accelerated into addiction, and he took my former girlfriend with him. And unlike some of the other girls we'd both seen, I cared about this one, so as much as I loved my friend, I also hated him for that, hated them both a little I think. But it also made sense in its own weird fucking way. They were both gorgeous, and fey, and kind of otherworldly to me. That didn't stop it from hurting me, though.
I'm off-track here. The point is that I managed to step away. They did not, and eventually wound up on the run from police for strongarm robbery and when they were arrested I was actually glad because I knew it meant they would have to kick, and maybe things would go back to How They Used to Be. I was pretty naïve.
My friend did three years in prison, and it changed him, but not in the way you might expect. He didn’t come out of it a hardass or a gangbanger, or anything like that. He came out with a timidity that had never ever been in him before. The first week or so he was out, we were crossing a semi-busy street, going to a record store I think. There was plenty of time to cross, but he saw a car coming and gasped and grabbed my hand, and pulled me back up on the sidewalk. It took probably 30 seconds for the car to reach us, and we would have been able to cross in seven. He looked kind of sheepish afterwards, but it actually really touched me that he had pulled me back like that. He had become totally acclimated to the pace of prison, which is incredibly slow. I have never been to prison, but I have spent a few nights in county lockups, and there is an awful timelessness about it, especially if you are in withdrawal. He never really got used to the speed with which things moved outside of prison ever again, I don’t think.
While he was doing time, I finally cleaned up some (not really truly all the way, but enough to not have to devote myself mind body heart spirit wallet and everything else to the fucking needle) and went back to school.
At some point after he had been out for a while, he started drinking very, very heavily. I think maybe he was trying to recapture that old swagger that he had lost and when he was drunk he felt invincible. This was never anything he told me. He wound up with a DUI. After the first one, the cops in his neighborhood started looking for him and pulled him over every time they saw his car, and he, like an idiot, refused to stop driving, and so the charges for both DUIs and Driving Without a License just piled up and it got so he was looking at additional prison time. And when I saw him or talked to him I did my best not to be furious with him because I could see the despair in his eyes. It was 1999, and still JUST possible to kind of start fresh if you moved far enough away geographically. I moved to Iowa City for school. He ran off to San Diego without saying goodbye to anyone to escape doing more prison time, and I never spoke to him or saw him again.
A few months later I got that call on my birthday. His parents were very religious and insisted it had been just a mistake, that he screwed up and took too much, but I knew that it had been On Purpose, and I knew why: it was because he could never go back, never recapture the intensity. I wish so, so much I could have pulled him back from that street the way he did for me.
I feel responsible for his death. That’s probably dumb. But you see, I was the one who introduced him to the thing that wound up killing him. I knew a guy in the city who was selling Mexican tar. My friend was a type one diabetic with easy access to needles and no phobia of them, which meant we started off right away by mainlining the drug, rather than something slightly tamer (if such a thing can be said to exist with regards to heroin). Rationally, I know that it would have wound up the same way, no matter what I did. He was actively seeking this thing out, consumed with dreams of being like Mick Jagger or Uncle Al Jourgensen or something, just like me except I was maybe thinking more like I’d be Billy Boroughs. Idiotic in hindsight, but we were only seventeen, an age when most young men are idiotic. And there were so, so many vectors it could have come from, if it had not been me, it would have been someone else. But I can’t seem to internalize that it’s not my fault, and instead what I have is a hollow, painful place that opens in my chest like a black hole in the pre-dawn darkness when I am by myself, before my wife wakes up.
I want to talk a little about my wife as well. She grew up in Japan and never had to deal with any of this stupid shit before she came here. She is a Good Person untainted by this kind of corruption. I am incredibly lucky to have her, and have once again punched way, way above my weight class. I feel quite certain that without knowing and staying close to her, I would be dead or in prison myself. When we started dating, I never told her about this shit because I knew that as a rational, reasonable human being, she would look the situation over and decide she wanted no part of it. There was one night she came back to the US from Japan and crashed out in my bed all jet lagged and I and a bunch of my friends stayed up all night shooting dope, smoking crack, and even doing the occasional speedball, and she never knew.
I finally had to come clean with her one day when we walked in to my place coming back from dinner or something and found the friend I am talking about and my roommate at the time (a guy I have stayed close to, basically the only other "survivor" as it were) literally on the floor with the needles still in their fucking arms. She thought they were both dead and they looked like they might be. Having been through OD situations a few times, I checked and could see they were breathing, but for her sake I woke them up – dragging them one by one to the bathroom, running the tub cold, and splashing it all over them – they were too heavy for me to actually get them into the tub without hurting them. They were pissed at me for having done this. I did not care. Even though, or perhaps because she is a good person, my wife has something in her like steel. Or maybe because she has something in her like steel she is a good person. Either way, I can count the number of times I have seen her cry since 1998 on one hand: when her grandpa died, when her grandma died, when our pet fish died, when our cat Biscotti died, and when we walked in on those two assholes passed out. Because they are so infrequent, when the tears do come, they are amazingly effective. Should it be within my power, there is nothing I would not do to halt them.
I try to keep her front and center in my thoughts, but sometimes I forget how lucky I am. I think entitlement is probably the natural state of human beings unless we very consciously remind ourselves of just how much more fucked-up things could be. Or at least that’s how it seems to be for me. The thing I need to remember, to keep ever first and foremost in my mind, is that by any measurement, my life is really, really good. In spite of a rocky start to the marriage (neither of us were really ready to live together or be married, but her visa expired and we were even less ready to never see each other again), we were both willing to put in the work and it evened out. I have been moderately successful financially, and our needs are simple and we do not lack. My parents are both still alive, and I have a remarkably good relationship with them these days. I have a generally very good relationship with my wife. I do not have children or many close friends left, and this last is I think the biggest thing that brings me down sometimes. I miss very much the easy authenticity I had with my friends, especially those two, and the lack of any need to explain things to each other, especially difficult-to-explain things. They knew and understood. I think I probably have a touch of seasonal depression anyway, but it’s particularly bad at this time of year because I cannot help but think back to that phone call and it sets up a spiral that can be difficult to get out of.
The other day I was in the Loop for work. Right by the river. It was one of those bleak, cold Chicago days where everything is the same grey color, the buildings, the asphalt, the oppressive sky that feels like its clouds are no more than ten feet over your head. The wind was bitter enough to bring tears to my eyes and then freeze them to my cheeks. I went up to the railing at the river and I looked down into it.
And I had this sudden and eidetic memory of a summer night he drove us over to K town to cop and afterwards we were sitting in the car parked and my girlfriend straddled me, facing me in the passenger seat and all of us were turned on in every way possible, she was careful and gentle, she was almost never so gentle and she found a vein on me when I couldn’t and I remember just before she pushed the plunger down she bumped her forehead against mine, on purpose, and a lock of her hair, beautiful, deep, and violet, brushed against my cheek and tickled it, and her smile was full of promise and she smelled so good, like clean rain, and she looked me full in the eyes and she kissed me deeply and the faint flush at her throat, and my friend was laughing at us, with us, in the seat next to me, a joyful, clear, contagious laugh like bells, and the plumes of blood, and the overwhelming, unbearable pleasure of all of it. The intensity of it. And I know that I can never, ever go back, those times are done and that intensity is gone forever, and that if I were to try to get it back it would kill me and before that it would destroy me and those I love, and in spite of that I miss it in a way that I feel I cannot begin to make other people understand no matter how hard I try.
The river was grey-green like a dead thing, sluggish and turgid, swollen with flat chunks of ice. It looked so cold and dark and suddenly I had this almost unstoppable urge to just… jump in. How long would it take? Looking down at the frigid, grey water, I don’t think it would take that long. I don’t think it would even hurt that much. Not the way going on hurts, anyway.
And then I thought about my wife, and I did my best to snap out of it. She needs me. She depends on me. But.
They haunt me. I think this is maybe what ghosts actually are. In my mind and soul, they are unquiet spirits that come back over and over again in the dark mornings to stir that hollow place and make my face and throat feel hot and tight and like my heart is a bird trapped in my ribcage and the blood is pulsing behind my eyes, a mild headache. Sometimes they don’t or won’t wait until I am alone and I come close to breaking down in public. I’ll catch a little whiff of vinegar, or I’ll just picture the plume of blood comingling with the junk in the barrel of the needle and the ghosts visit and I start to salivate and my fingers shake and I want to weep. Sometimes it’s so close to the surface that someone will notice something and ask me:
 |
| He even had a vest like that. |
Had things gone differently, I think it’s quite possible he would have become a household name like the others mentioned above.
At one point we traveled to Indiana to play a show, and we were in some small town, and they didn’t like us, and he made some ill-considered remarks that implied the best things going there were incestuous sexual relationships. The mood got ugly. When we were breaking down and packing up, he went outside to smoke or something, I’m not sure what, and suddenly I realized he was gone and I got a Bad Feeling and grabbed our drummer and went to go find him.
He was in the back of the parking lot surrounded by like ten good old boys – I say ten, but the actual number was probably somewhere between eight and twelve. They were about to kick the ever-living fuck out of him. As I came up on this Situation, this is what I heard him say to this group of men:
“You guys are a bunch of cumswilling fatherfucking faggots and the only reason you came tonight is because your little sisters wouldn’t let you touch them.”
In hindsight, there is a lot wrong with this statement, but this was the 1990’s and challenging another young man’s sexuality if you were not friendly with him was the one of the main du jour ways to show him your displeasure.
It was also a really good way to get into a fight. It probably still is, but I haven't used those terms or gotten into a fight in such a long time I'm not really sure.
His utter lack of fear is one of the things I will never, ever forget as long as I am of sound mind. He was not a fighter, in spite of oozing danger. The drummer and I were the band badasses. I had been working in construction labor for a couple of years. I had done a decent amount of training in boxing and martial arts and had been on the wrestling team, though I didn’t like my teammates and quit after the first year. And when I wasn’t doing those things I was hauling musical gear around. I was in shape. But I also had enough rough and tumble experience to know that ten vs. one or even two or three only has one result in the real world. I am certain that without any intervention, these guys would have at the very least put him in the fucking hospital. And that’s assuming that none of those guys were packing and willing to bring a gun into the mix. Even without that I think it is quite possible that they might have killed him. I had visions of him being chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged through the streets.
But I did intervene, and I managed to talk these guys down, apologizing profusely while our drummer pulled him away and I explained he didn’t mean any of it, it was all just part of the stage show (absolute bullshit, he meant every word, but it worked). However, the fact that he was ready to fight, that he wouldn’t back down, that he had said this thing and was not only sticking by it, he was doubling down on it in spite of the circumstances: I respected that so much. I’m not justifying his behavior or what he said, please understand – it was a dumb fucking thing to say, and it was ungracious and ugly to come into this little town and insult them, never mind that they didn’t care for our music. And by today’s standards it’s hateful as well, which I do not endorse in any way. But having said it, he was NOT backing down, and that was beautiful to me. He had no fear whatsoever. Instead, I backed down for him, like some kind of fucked-up Subotai to his Conan.
I think what I am trying to say here is that I loved him. Yes, in a platonic way, as a friend, but in hindsight there was a romantic component to it as well that is incredibly rare in relationships between straight men. Not a sexual component, no, but a romantic one. We instinctively understood how the other was feeling. We were absolutely united by the pursuit of genius and the desire to experience the sublime through excess. We shared everything from books and music to girls. And we also shared an addiction to opiates.
About a week, maybe two after I got that phone call, I gathered everything I had ever written to that point, every scrap of paper, every disk, every journal, I even got copies back from people who I had given them too, and I took it all out into the backyard and burned it. I was in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa at the time. I dropped out the next semester and never finished. I didn’t write anything creatively again until 2021 – a space of a little more than twenty years.
Before I left for school, lives had begun to become undone by addiction. For whatever reason, at the time, I could see what was coming down the pipe at us and that it was Not Fucking Good. Maybe I made a WIS save they failed, I don’t know. But I began to try to fight my way through to some kind of sobriety, or at least non dependence. When I did that, the girlfriend I mentioned above started dating my friend instead of me. For reference, this was the first girl I ever actually fell head-over-heels in real-deal Capital-L Love with. She was ferociously intelligent, and wild, and physically beautiful, a punk rock princess with dazzling, vibrant purple hair. And her eyes, oh my god. She had the slightest touch of heterochromia, and they were this deep, glazed blue-green with tiny golden brown sunbursts around her pupils. And in spite of being drop-dead gorgeous, she was NICE to me. This was very, very unusual for me, to have such a pretty girl be nice to me and that I felt at ease around. I had managed to punch way, way above my weight class, something that has happened to me consistently with women; I don’t know why that should be but some things you just shut up and be grateful for.
Anyway, when I decided to bow out, just like that situation with the ten good old boys, instead of backing down, my friend, seeing the same thing I was I have no doubt, doubled down. He accelerated into addiction, and he took my former girlfriend with him. And unlike some of the other girls we'd both seen, I cared about this one, so as much as I loved my friend, I also hated him for that, hated them both a little I think. But it also made sense in its own weird fucking way. They were both gorgeous, and fey, and kind of otherworldly to me. That didn't stop it from hurting me, though.
I'm off-track here. The point is that I managed to step away. They did not, and eventually wound up on the run from police for strongarm robbery and when they were arrested I was actually glad because I knew it meant they would have to kick, and maybe things would go back to How They Used to Be. I was pretty naïve.
My friend did three years in prison, and it changed him, but not in the way you might expect. He didn’t come out of it a hardass or a gangbanger, or anything like that. He came out with a timidity that had never ever been in him before. The first week or so he was out, we were crossing a semi-busy street, going to a record store I think. There was plenty of time to cross, but he saw a car coming and gasped and grabbed my hand, and pulled me back up on the sidewalk. It took probably 30 seconds for the car to reach us, and we would have been able to cross in seven. He looked kind of sheepish afterwards, but it actually really touched me that he had pulled me back like that. He had become totally acclimated to the pace of prison, which is incredibly slow. I have never been to prison, but I have spent a few nights in county lockups, and there is an awful timelessness about it, especially if you are in withdrawal. He never really got used to the speed with which things moved outside of prison ever again, I don’t think.
While he was doing time, I finally cleaned up some (not really truly all the way, but enough to not have to devote myself mind body heart spirit wallet and everything else to the fucking needle) and went back to school.
At some point after he had been out for a while, he started drinking very, very heavily. I think maybe he was trying to recapture that old swagger that he had lost and when he was drunk he felt invincible. This was never anything he told me. He wound up with a DUI. After the first one, the cops in his neighborhood started looking for him and pulled him over every time they saw his car, and he, like an idiot, refused to stop driving, and so the charges for both DUIs and Driving Without a License just piled up and it got so he was looking at additional prison time. And when I saw him or talked to him I did my best not to be furious with him because I could see the despair in his eyes. It was 1999, and still JUST possible to kind of start fresh if you moved far enough away geographically. I moved to Iowa City for school. He ran off to San Diego without saying goodbye to anyone to escape doing more prison time, and I never spoke to him or saw him again.
A few months later I got that call on my birthday. His parents were very religious and insisted it had been just a mistake, that he screwed up and took too much, but I knew that it had been On Purpose, and I knew why: it was because he could never go back, never recapture the intensity. I wish so, so much I could have pulled him back from that street the way he did for me.
I feel responsible for his death. That’s probably dumb. But you see, I was the one who introduced him to the thing that wound up killing him. I knew a guy in the city who was selling Mexican tar. My friend was a type one diabetic with easy access to needles and no phobia of them, which meant we started off right away by mainlining the drug, rather than something slightly tamer (if such a thing can be said to exist with regards to heroin). Rationally, I know that it would have wound up the same way, no matter what I did. He was actively seeking this thing out, consumed with dreams of being like Mick Jagger or Uncle Al Jourgensen or something, just like me except I was maybe thinking more like I’d be Billy Boroughs. Idiotic in hindsight, but we were only seventeen, an age when most young men are idiotic. And there were so, so many vectors it could have come from, if it had not been me, it would have been someone else. But I can’t seem to internalize that it’s not my fault, and instead what I have is a hollow, painful place that opens in my chest like a black hole in the pre-dawn darkness when I am by myself, before my wife wakes up.
I want to talk a little about my wife as well. She grew up in Japan and never had to deal with any of this stupid shit before she came here. She is a Good Person untainted by this kind of corruption. I am incredibly lucky to have her, and have once again punched way, way above my weight class. I feel quite certain that without knowing and staying close to her, I would be dead or in prison myself. When we started dating, I never told her about this shit because I knew that as a rational, reasonable human being, she would look the situation over and decide she wanted no part of it. There was one night she came back to the US from Japan and crashed out in my bed all jet lagged and I and a bunch of my friends stayed up all night shooting dope, smoking crack, and even doing the occasional speedball, and she never knew.
I finally had to come clean with her one day when we walked in to my place coming back from dinner or something and found the friend I am talking about and my roommate at the time (a guy I have stayed close to, basically the only other "survivor" as it were) literally on the floor with the needles still in their fucking arms. She thought they were both dead and they looked like they might be. Having been through OD situations a few times, I checked and could see they were breathing, but for her sake I woke them up – dragging them one by one to the bathroom, running the tub cold, and splashing it all over them – they were too heavy for me to actually get them into the tub without hurting them. They were pissed at me for having done this. I did not care. Even though, or perhaps because she is a good person, my wife has something in her like steel. Or maybe because she has something in her like steel she is a good person. Either way, I can count the number of times I have seen her cry since 1998 on one hand: when her grandpa died, when her grandma died, when our pet fish died, when our cat Biscotti died, and when we walked in on those two assholes passed out. Because they are so infrequent, when the tears do come, they are amazingly effective. Should it be within my power, there is nothing I would not do to halt them.
I try to keep her front and center in my thoughts, but sometimes I forget how lucky I am. I think entitlement is probably the natural state of human beings unless we very consciously remind ourselves of just how much more fucked-up things could be. Or at least that’s how it seems to be for me. The thing I need to remember, to keep ever first and foremost in my mind, is that by any measurement, my life is really, really good. In spite of a rocky start to the marriage (neither of us were really ready to live together or be married, but her visa expired and we were even less ready to never see each other again), we were both willing to put in the work and it evened out. I have been moderately successful financially, and our needs are simple and we do not lack. My parents are both still alive, and I have a remarkably good relationship with them these days. I have a generally very good relationship with my wife. I do not have children or many close friends left, and this last is I think the biggest thing that brings me down sometimes. I miss very much the easy authenticity I had with my friends, especially those two, and the lack of any need to explain things to each other, especially difficult-to-explain things. They knew and understood. I think I probably have a touch of seasonal depression anyway, but it’s particularly bad at this time of year because I cannot help but think back to that phone call and it sets up a spiral that can be difficult to get out of.
The other day I was in the Loop for work. Right by the river. It was one of those bleak, cold Chicago days where everything is the same grey color, the buildings, the asphalt, the oppressive sky that feels like its clouds are no more than ten feet over your head. The wind was bitter enough to bring tears to my eyes and then freeze them to my cheeks. I went up to the railing at the river and I looked down into it.
And I had this sudden and eidetic memory of a summer night he drove us over to K town to cop and afterwards we were sitting in the car parked and my girlfriend straddled me, facing me in the passenger seat and all of us were turned on in every way possible, she was careful and gentle, she was almost never so gentle and she found a vein on me when I couldn’t and I remember just before she pushed the plunger down she bumped her forehead against mine, on purpose, and a lock of her hair, beautiful, deep, and violet, brushed against my cheek and tickled it, and her smile was full of promise and she smelled so good, like clean rain, and she looked me full in the eyes and she kissed me deeply and the faint flush at her throat, and my friend was laughing at us, with us, in the seat next to me, a joyful, clear, contagious laugh like bells, and the plumes of blood, and the overwhelming, unbearable pleasure of all of it. The intensity of it. And I know that I can never, ever go back, those times are done and that intensity is gone forever, and that if I were to try to get it back it would kill me and before that it would destroy me and those I love, and in spite of that I miss it in a way that I feel I cannot begin to make other people understand no matter how hard I try.
The river was grey-green like a dead thing, sluggish and turgid, swollen with flat chunks of ice. It looked so cold and dark and suddenly I had this almost unstoppable urge to just… jump in. How long would it take? Looking down at the frigid, grey water, I don’t think it would take that long. I don’t think it would even hurt that much. Not the way going on hurts, anyway.
And then I thought about my wife, and I did my best to snap out of it. She needs me. She depends on me. But.
They haunt me. I think this is maybe what ghosts actually are. In my mind and soul, they are unquiet spirits that come back over and over again in the dark mornings to stir that hollow place and make my face and throat feel hot and tight and like my heart is a bird trapped in my ribcage and the blood is pulsing behind my eyes, a mild headache. Sometimes they don’t or won’t wait until I am alone and I come close to breaking down in public. I’ll catch a little whiff of vinegar, or I’ll just picture the plume of blood comingling with the junk in the barrel of the needle and the ghosts visit and I start to salivate and my fingers shake and I want to weep. Sometimes it’s so close to the surface that someone will notice something and ask me:
Are you ok?
This is not typically a question people ask me and sometimes it catches me off guard and I’ll find I’m rubbing my teeth together hard enough that other people can actually hear it and my shoulders have bunched up to my ears and my forehead is creased and I will very consciously release all the tension in my shoulders and jaw and head and smile a little and reply with a lie made glib and simple and above all believable through long practice:
Yes, of course. I am fine.
This is not typically a question people ask me and sometimes it catches me off guard and I’ll find I’m rubbing my teeth together hard enough that other people can actually hear it and my shoulders have bunched up to my ears and my forehead is creased and I will very consciously release all the tension in my shoulders and jaw and head and smile a little and reply with a lie made glib and simple and above all believable through long practice:
Yes, of course. I am fine.
I'm sorry for your losses and the way these experiences have continued to haunt you. This definitely contextualizes a lot of your previous writings and also previous conversations we've had. If nothing else, this is a beautiful and powerful piece of writing, and while I know that doesn't necessarily justify, validate, or counteract the negativity, I'm at least appreciative for that much of it, and I hope you are as well. I hope you'll be able to look back at the sum of your writing and life experiences some day and feel like it amounted to something, if you don't already feel that way or if you aren't always sure. Also, happy birthday.
ReplyDeleteThanks very much, Max. It might sound kind of fucked up but I wouldn't trade my life for anyone else's. It feels good to get it out. I have never talked to anyone about any of this stuff. I knew when I started writing again that I was going to have to do this, and it was hard to do, but I'm glad I did it. And I am very glad you found beauty in it - that means a lot to me.
DeleteIncredibly unspeakably powerful. Like Max, I’m so sorry for your losses.
ReplyDelete“I think this is maybe what ghosts actually are. In my mind and soul, they are unquiet spirits that come back over and over again in the dark mornings to stir that hollow place and make my face and throat feel hot and tight and like my heart is a bird trapped in my ribcage and the blood is pulsing behind my eyes, a mild headache. Sometimes they don’t or won’t wait until I am alone and I come close to breaking down in public. I’ll catch a little whiff of vinegar, or I’ll just picture the plume of blood comingling with the junk in the barrel of the needle and the ghosts visit and I start to salivate and my fingers shake and I want to weep.”
God. I know it can feel like a platitude or a cornball thing to say that the bonds people form over the course of their lives and the effects of their deeds survive when the breath leaves their lungs for the last time, but…there’s this concept in Haitian Vodou called the gros-bon-ange, where the lingering presence of these bonds and effects - what is functionally the shadow cast by man’s life onto the world - is treated as a person itself.
“We mourn not man, but a man; and we lament not for his lot, but for our own. His death is as the closing of a door upon that singular, particular self which, projected through his flesh, nourished the world of substance which we shared. We mourn this man because to us his spirit was not like any other. The moment of death is as a separation of a mold from the form to which it had transferred all the particularities of its configuration. As the integrity of the mold's form is destroyed by the act of separation, so the flesh perishes. But the form, the self which had been cast, is non-material, hence is immortal - an identity, invisible but real, acknowledged in common and known by a name. This self, this form, the Haitian calls the gros-bon-ange. It is born of the body, and may be imagined as the shadow of a man cast upon the invisible plane of a fourth dimension, or as his reflection in a dark mirror. The gros-bon-ange is the metaphysical double of the physical being, and, since it does not exist in the world of matter, it is the immortal twin who survives the mortal man. It is these immortal twins, these gros-bon-anges of the deceased, who are les Invisibles or les esprits.”
I’m not sure if you’re religious or anything and I don’t believe it even matters, but I think there’s something of the dead gros-bon-ange - the impression left in the universe where a person was - in your ghosts. It’s maybe the most meaningful way of thinking about loss and grieving I’ve ever come across, even without the mystic components, and to see it reflected in this essay did something to me. I honestly don’t know what to say, except that I’m really fucking glad you started writing again. Happy birthday, man.
Thank you, man. I've been watching a lot of true crime stuff lately and I've come to the conclusion that suicides, being a kind of self-directed homicide, have very similar effects on surviving friends and family members. It just rips people apart.
DeleteAlso, I've come to have a lot of respect for single-entendre ideas - as someone who grew up with irony being basically baked in to all forms of modern art, I don't think what you are saying is cornball in any way. Thank you for introducing the idea of gros-bon-ange to me - I think you re right, they are very similar to my ghosts. That quote is really touching, and quite comforting as well. I appreciate you sharing it so much.
I am glad I started writing again too; it makes me really happy that you found this meaningful.
Feels like this piece, what you've gotten across with it, is fulfilling teleologically at least one aspect of "what writing is for".
ReplyDeleteTook me a few days since reading & rereading it to even come up with that line - just couldn't find the right words.
Wow - If that is true (even for one person) then that would be great. It makes me happy to hear that you felt this warranted a re-read and that you spent some time thinking about it. I could not ask for more. Thank you so much.
DeleteThe main thing I have to say in public is that this moved me the same way it moved Max, Ènziramire and Semiurge. To comment solely on the reality that this represents seems like it wouldn't do justice to it as a work of literature, and to comment on it solely as a work of literature seems like it wouldn't do justice to the reality. Perhaps the power of both are intertwined, which is both a frightening thought and a call to life's dangerous, played-for-keeps adventure; just enough to come back from the brink, but just where the brink is may only be clear in hindsight. I know what it is to want to revisit some of the wildest things you've been involved in, but you know that eventually you'll roll snake eyes the way you've seen other people do. But you may come out of it with things hard-won, as this shows. A harsh paradigm, but harshness can bear up majesty.
ReplyDeleteLike the others, I'm glad you've come through.
Thanks you, man. It means a great deal to me to hear that that you found this moving and meaningful, and that you found a way to relate to it. I know I've said this to you before, but I have a great deal of respect for you and your work. That has been a very large factor in my decision to begin writing again.
DeleteAlso, I loathe it when I typo in a blogger comment, lol. It's there forever.
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