Maybe It Doesn't Care - A Work In Progress Part 1

Mike,

I wish I knew why this happened.  I’m making a mess out of this.  I can’t find the words to explain how I feel.  Only you would find this funny.  That I can’t find the words.  I’m thinking of crowded summer parties, with me racing to try and finish all of the little odds and ends, and you stopping me by the fire light, introducing me to friends of yours and wanting me to tell some story about the two of us, or even a story that was just about you, that I hadn’t been there for.  You would say to just tell it; because you loved the way I told it.  You were bragging again.  Always about your friends, never yourself.  Yet here I am, without the words to tell the story.  Now that it really counts.  When there is so much riding on the story.  And I’m sorry, buddy.  Because I don’t know if I actually can.  It’s too big.  It’s too steep.  I don’t know if I have the words for this one.  I can’t hide behind the easy clichés.  There is no tidy way to wrap this up.  Or even start it. 

Who would have thought, all those years ago at that house on Jackson street, when we first met, where you told me about the white waters of Alaska and gave me your tattered copy of Walden, that fifteen years later this would be the state of things.  You in the ground, and I’m here, staring at the painted, striated landscapes that you would find beauty in, in some way that I am trying to, but I don’t know if I can.  I know it’s important.  I know that I need to.  It will matter later. 

So I came to the desert to talk to you.  Or maybe write to you.  A you that doesn’t have a name anymore.  Or at least a name you would use.  It still seems inappropriate that we would say your name and it seems like a hymn, or an incantation.  As if another story will never be told about you without heads being bowed in revelry, in respect.  I can’t just tell some silly story about you trying to get laid, or falling into the fire pit without it ending with some parable about cherishing life, or the futility of it all.  It sounds childish, but that is not fair.  It is not fair that you got to take that with you.  I loved you, and I feel I have ownership to those stories, too.  To the silly, scruffy, blurry eyed you that I knew since we were just kids.

But since your death, there are others of you now.  Some shattering that took place.  There is now a you that has gone beyond, to see something that I don’t even know if I believe in.  There is a you who is now a monster, something without a name, or a face, like some wolf at the door of mortality.  There is a you that is a tragedy, a last minute mistake of addiction, or a halfhearted gesture of self-destruction.  Which only serves as the world’s saddest equation.  One side of the scales is accident, and the other is suicide.  So many friends have ticked away the long hours of the night counting and twisting and adding up the evidence to one end or the other, as if one answer would drag you up and out of the box we watched them put you in to say “Sorry, sorry everyone.  This was just a simple mistake.  Didn’t want to worry anyone.  Everything is fine.  You can all go home now.”

You would have loved it last night.  We huddled around a campfire under the desert sky.  From the hillside, I could see only the electric lights of two other houses, burning low and pale.  There was guitar and banjo, beers and laughter.  It was a night full of song and story.  Just like you always pictured we would have.  I know that was always the way you pictured everyone.  Better than we ever really were.  You bragged about your friends the way that others talked about movie stars or musicians.  The hard part about this was none of us ever lived up to that.  How could someone?  I would always get frustrated with you about that.  You would knock yourself down to make everyone else seem taller.  You would build makeshift pedestals out of undeserved praise.  When all anyone wanted was to have you around.  To have you stay.  But after your words of kindness, you were always halfway out the door. Did you know that we all loved you anyhow?

I’m dancing around it now, and I know it.

We were going to celebrate your birthday after we had band practice.  That was September 11^th.  The joke had always been that it was perfect, because you were an EMT, and your birthday was 9-11.  Then the towers were hit in New York.  We practiced anyhow.  At the end of that dead end street, we opened the doors to the garage and played.  We wrote a sad song for a strange day, a song about growing up.  It was overcast, and raining.  Remember?

We weren’t going to really do all of the things we sang about in those basement band practices when we were kids, filling my poor mothers house with loud bad music.  Punk songs about rebellion, driving off into the sunset and a love more pure and real than the world had ever seen.  But you, you never stopped believing them.  You wanted nothing less than honesty, a love of fire, bursting at the seams, a life of magic, unfettered and true. 

You dreamt of red sand and plateaus, the Mars like alien landscape of southern Utah.  You traveled there, not telling anyone of your plans.  Gone one day, your room empty, a bed with no sheet.  Just a dusty land-cruiser and your dog for a co-pilot.  Following a faint red line on a faded yellow map.  A vein through the wind carved stone and sagebrush.  You slept under Joshua trees, with a blanket of stars spread out overhead.  You were happy.  I thought you would never leave.  I wish you hadn’t.

I think I felt closer to you back then than I ever did at the house on Gunnell.  I think maybe you were further away from me then, moving faster down another path, and that may have something to do with it, but also the fact that we were older.  Maybe it is just harder to get close to someone like the way that we could when we were kids.  Maybe it all changes.  Maybe it will never be like that again, and that is why it is so hard to forgive you.  Or why I feel like you have abandoned me.  The truth is that you didn’t abandon anyone.  You died.  That is all that happened.  There are no promises to keep when you have actually stood at the edge of the cliff like that and stared down, decided to jump, go to a place that none of us can follow you to.  There is no such thing as abandoning.  There is no such thing as a broken promise anymore.  There is just living and not living.  There is no deserves.  I should feel embarrassed to even mention it. 

***

I came to the desert, to where you called home.  Where you wanted to make a home, finally, away from the neon and fast foods, the traffic lights and distractions, to find peace.  I came to the desert to try and look into your heart.  To try and understand any of this.  I would have to write such a fiction, to do that.  Even if you were here now, no one could say what was in there, which is both funny and tragic, for someone who seemed to wear his intentions so loudly.

You would have hated to be remembered as someone selfish.  But who we say we are and what we do is so seldom the same thing.

You wanted your life to be a song, or a movie.  Something heartbreaking and haunting that you could quote to others, with hands clasped at your breast, falling into one another, saying “Isn’t that tragic?”

But listen-

We only feel that way because the horror is manufactured, the heartbreak is make-believe, and we are still safe.  I honestly don’t think you understood that.  You were so frustrated with the idea of having to have a job, mind-numbing responsibilities, unglamorous obligations, and the idea of settling down, that it would send you into drunken rages, tearing down the walls of your bedroom, painting words of philosophers onto the doors of your house, shouting “THIS!  This is what we need to be doing.  This is the way we should be living!”

I would look back at you, trying to understand, and you would shake your head, disappointed, and walk out the door, stumbling into a rainy night and down the dark, wet streets, leaving me watching from the doorway, frightened.

You said you wanted to walk into this strange red landscape and disappear.   Like vanishing from the pages of the book has some heroism to it.  Maybe that’s true.  Maybe it does.  You wanted to be Ambrose Bierce.  But instead you ended up more like Hemingway.  For all of the lion hunts and Mexican sunsets, all of the women and whisky, he still ended up with a gun in his mouth in Ketchum, Idaho.  You were that way, too.  Why do we paint over someone’s whole life with the brush that they died holding?  It’s unfair, but almost uncontrollable. 

You told me a story once, over beers and laughter, about huddling against the wall of a bus station in Alaska, nineteen years stupid, no money, no ride, no jacket at two a.m., with both arms inside your t-shirt, flicking a cigarette lighter just to keep warm and feeling more alive than you ever had.

Where does this story go now?  Does it still matter when the thought of a nightstand crowded with empty pill bottles knocked to the ground by a frantic family trying to wake up you, their dead son comes rushing at it’s heels?  It should matter, but I don’t know.

***

I guess believing doesn’t mean being right.  I was hurt and devastated for so long, and in the end, it didn’t mean anything.  No answers.  No moral.

I often play pretend mathematician, or maybe soothsayer.  I rattle my bones and throw them onto the ground, hoping to explain something that just happened, or is going to happen.  The idea being that I will find some golden ratio, some statistic that will keep myself and everyone I care about safe.  Every time that my car slides out on a patch of ice down the canyon, or have a cough that persists for longer than a week, I try to use Karma to weigh out the odds that I will be alright.  Did I give money to charity, did I hold the door open for someone.  These factors will determine my survival.  Now, I know that is all horseshit.   We leave everyday up to chance.  Even over the course of long stretches of time, it is still random chance that determines our outcome.  If you had slipped off of the ledge of a cliff, would I be ringing my hands over the loss?  Sure, but not for the same reasons.  What if I saw that you had the chance to hold onto something right when you stumbled?  I would wonder why you didn’t try to grab a hold.  But if I follow my metaphor far enough, it falls apart, because what I get is this:  If the fall wasn’t sudden, if it took three years for you to clear the ledge before you fell away, why couldn’t I reach you in time? Was it a painfully slow time lapse, where the intentions of the actions cannot be predicted until it has become far too late?  It would be reassuring to think so, but in truth, I fear I may have just stopped watching when it was most important.

Whatever the perspective is on the truth – and it is perspective, where a few small steps to the left or the right can make the landscape drastically change, and it is truth, like some great stone monolith, weather worn, granite, a millennia old, truth with a capitol T truth – There are some undeniable facts.  You did call me up out of the blue to tell me that you had tried to kill yourself.  A drug overdose.   That is truth.  There is no perspective.  What was I supposed to do with that information?  I told you that I thought that you needed to get help.  You told me that you were going to get some.  I can’t honestly say now whether or not I believed you.  I know that I wanted to believe you, but I was also scared of you, and so sad.  There may have been a part of me that felt like I was off the hook.  “There, see?  I did the good thing.  The thing that a friend would do.  I told him to get help.” As if it was that easy.  You just tell someone to go get help and PRESTO!  Everything is all better. 

How did you get there?  It interests me, because I know that there was a low point for me in my life, and I thought that maybe I was at the bottom of something, with nowhere left to go.  That I was standing on a precipice that overlooked some massive void.  I never want to feel that way again.  It was dehumanizing. 

My stepfather killed himself when I was 19.  He drove off into a white snowy canyon one December afternoon and was never seen alive again.  My family had settled into a slow and deliberate dance with his depression for so long, it’s almost all I can remember of him.  A quiet, fragile loneliness barely holding on in a house full of screaming, laughing kids. It was easier to deal with the idea of someone giving up when you are at that young.  The whole world seems tragic and star-crossed and worth dying for.  As sick as it sounds, I treated his death like some parable.  Some lesson I could learn.  I don’t want to make that mistake here.  I want to really feel this.  But I don’t know if that is possible.

I’m not sure if I can actually forgive you.  I don’t even know if that’s important.  I think I was mourning you long before you died.  You had changed so much in such a short amount of time.  I felt that you were heading down a path that no one could follow you down.  I was waiting for you to turn around, see how far you had come from everyone who loved and cared about you.  I wanted you to realize all of your stupid mistakes, to ask forgiveness, to take it all back (and you could still have taken it all back).  But then you died, and dying made the change final.  No turning around.  No coming back home.  Wherever you went to, you went alone.

Not being able to go back.  We used to joke about that.  When you were still working on the ambulance, you told me that story that should have been harrowing, but because of the way you told it, it was actually hilarious.  A story about the drug dealer who, in a fit of paranoia, stuffed all of his product up his ass, only to try and retrieve it later by fishing around up there with an unbent hanger.  After puncturing everything inside himself including the bags of drugs, he had ended up strapped to the gurney in the back of your ambulance, higher than a tight-rope walker and covered in his own ass blood.  You said “when that happens, you have officially gone too far to bake your grandma cookies for her birthday.”  You lose touch with something.  You have crossed a line.  It’s called propriety.  Or dignity.  But I watched it happen to you too.

I may have come here to stalk your ghost.  It might be all I have left.  Along with a box full of photos, your ex-wife’s rosary, and your tattered copy of Walden.  I remember how you gave that to me the year we met, back when we were both wide-eyed kids.  You always idolized Thoreau’s belief about material things.  You said that was why you had to give the book away.  I get it; it’s a really romantic concept to have no worldly possessions.  But what about the rest of us now?  When any of us would fawn over a grocery list you once wrote, or a photo from a slightly different angle than all of the ones that I have memorized.

And the hardest part of any of this is that for all of my writing, all of what I am here trying to say to you, there will be no response.  It is just being emptied into the ether.  I am standing on some lonely, dirty fog drenched shore just throwing bottle after bottle out into the cold indifferent sea, and none of them will ever reach you.  That isn’t happening.  There is not a happy ending in the next chapter, and you validate any of this.  The bottles will just litter the ocean floor.  A clunking clinking sun-glinting mass of should haves, would haves, halfhearted regrets and pleads.

You had a Scottish wedding in New York, unspoiled by the rainy afternoon, with bagpipes playing and the bride’s bouquet thrown into the Hudson.  You seemed like you had reached a moment so important.  One of those adult places where this would be a moment that defined you.  But I watched your marriage disintegrate so fast and your bright eyes sink deep into your skull and you grew so thin.  Not just skinny but frail, like a boat sail hung too long in the salty wind, threadbare and broken.

Believing doesn’t make someone right, and after hearing your planning of stepping off the edge of the world so many times, how were any of us even surprised?  We shouldn’t have been.  But I always believed you were meant for more.  Of course I did.  We all did.  I thought that you were so melodramatic for bringing those ideas up.  After a few drinks and here he goes again, about how he won’t be around forever, and we had better all get used to the idea of that.  It annoyed me.  I thought you were so full of it.  And here is the strange part.  You were right.  Absolutely you were.  But I still don’t believe you.  And this is something that I do not understand for any reason.  How can I not believe you?  You are dead.  You were telling the truth.  This is not denial.  I just still cannot bring myself to look at the world that way, I guess.