DIED 1981
THE DEATH OF A lover haunts you differently than any other. The first time I learned this, it was from a boy who hanged himself just a couple of months after our ill-fated coupling in the driveway of the home he shared with his girlfriend and their baby daughter. She was one of my closest friends, ten years older than me, an artist and a playwright, a freethinker and a bit of a pothead. He was winsome and slender, a mime and a clown, his irony and his poker face concealing a hard edge of anger and despair. Their half-assed attempt at an open relationship was partially fueled and deeply complicated by her unquenchable attachment to another guy, a mythologically obese, unhappily married local musician, who would screw up her life thoroughly by the time his basso profundo was silenced by an overdose of pain pills in Oaxaca, where he spent the 1990s hiding from the DEA.
It seems almost ludicrous when I think of it, like a movie with too much foreshadowing: the whiteface, the skits about death, the late-night readings of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. But at the time it was pure shock. Who would hang himself in the very room where his girlfriend and daughter were sleeping? He and I both turned twenty-three the month he died. Half the time it was clear it all had nothing to do with me, half the time I was flattened by loss and guilt, and using it as an excuse to get really drunk. Then I tried not to think about it for twenty years or so, after which I spent about five years thinking and writing about it all the time.
Perhaps the real memory, the memory I’m still looking for, is not accessible this way. Perhaps it is heat, pressure, cells. The purple blooms on the morning glory vine outside my window, lit neon by the sun. Already closed the second time I look.