DIED 1982
NINETEEN SEVENTY-SEVEN, THE DAYS of Eden in the city of Austin, Texas. I was living there the summer before my senior year of college in New England, and though I was double-majoring in history and semiotics, I had figured out my true purpose in life, which was to own a frozen yogurt store. Frozen yogurt was new; I was an early and passionate convert. One day, while window-shopping for a location in the university area, I took a flight of stairs behind the Varsity Theater and found him in his tiny jewelry shop, safety glasses strapped to his head, making comets of amethyst and silver.
He was about twenty-five, which was old to me, and looked like a Bavarian elf—pink cheeks, smooth skin, goatee, and thin ponytail. I explained about my frozen yogurt store. Have you ever had vanilla ice cream with fresh mangoes? he asked. He made it for me after an Indian dinner in his apartment: the first time I had a popadam, the first time I visited someone whose canvases were stacked against their unfinished walls. A burning draft card, purple comets in oil-crayon galaxies. Oh! I said, I love these, and he gave me three or four. How much he liked me made me nervous.
We didn’t stay in touch, and he died before I moved back to Austin in 1983. He went through a crazy time, I heard, cocaine and strippers at the Yellow Rose, and just when people had almost given up on him, he met a wonderful girl. She spoke six languages. Her whole family loved him. Their wedding was practically an affair of state, with limousines full of flowers and diplomats strung down the road. Lady Bird Johnson, even. A month later he slipped out of their bed for a few hours to visit his old friends; when his new wife woke up in the morning he was dead beside her. The wedding gifts were still in their boxes and the bluebonnets in bloom when all the fancy people had to come back for the funeral.
Today frozen yogurt is everywhere but I have lost my taste for it, and I also long ago lost one of the Colombian emerald earrings he made for my twenty-first birthday; my mother bought the stones and he set them in little cylinders of gold. The other one I’m wearing right now.