DIED 1991
IN MY YOUTH I was often told, usually by men, that I talked too much, so it was a relief to finally meet a guy who talked more. He was the son of a Chicano boxer from Texas retired to Pinebrook, New Jersey, the hometown of my future brother-in-law, The Carpenter. Growing up, they called him Bean—because he was Mexican, I reminded my sister the other day. Oh, boys will be boys: first tree houses and mischief, then girls and cigarettes, next roofing jobs and heroin. When we lived in the fifth-floor walkup on West Sixteenth Street, he’d show up at the door with his terrible complexion and boundless enthusiasm, sometimes with dope, sometimes sick, sometimes with his huge, silent friend Chris, sometimes with a matchbook on which he had written a phone number to buy a car, or drawn a diagram of how to grow opium poppies on the windowsill.
Remember how we all loved him despite his being somewhat unlovable? my sister said. I do. Having met him at what was probably the low point of my life, the infamous 1982, I was eager for nonjudgmental companionship, and was particularly transfixed by the way he concentrated on retracting the syringe when helping me shoot up. Together we watched my blood unfurl like fireworks in the clear liquid. I followed him around for a month or so, until he shrugged me off by shacking up with an old high school girlfriend. I was living far away by the time they all started dying. My sister remembers that on the way to his funeral she and her husband stopped at the SPCA. They adopted a blond Lab and named it Bean. This was how we were back then, she sighs, meaning drugs flattened everything. On the other hand, when my son was sixteen he named the puppy I gave him for Christmas after his dead father, so maybe they were just young.