A death has occurred or is near:
Then there was Mike. I made Mike’s acquaintance in October 1995, the week I arrived in LA. I had only been here a couple of days. I’m pretty certain he was the first person I got to know, the first friend I made. Though I use that term lightly. I’m not what you would call a great friend. I still spell the word incorrectly, putting the e before the i.
So we met at Highways, this theater in an old warehouse in an industrial part of Santa Monica, just off Olympic.
I was taking a workshop of Tim’s, a movement workshop. I wouldn’t be caught dead doing that now, but dance or something approximating dance was a practice I dabbled in back then.
When Tim and I got to the theater, it would have been around five. Mike was sitting on a sofa in the lobby, reading a paper. I don’t think Tim knew him either, and we all chatted a little. I don’t recall too much about that first meeting. Although it was fall, I had managed to get sunburnt. I felt self-conscious, about the sunburn, about everything. Tim told Mike I had just come to LA from London, which is where I had been living for a year or two.
“Ah, welcome, welcome,” Mike said.
He must have been around fifty, but he was like a gawky, gray-haired teenager, tall and rangy with a nervous laugh. He had a weird mangled accent, similar to how mine sounds now. Mike told us he was from England but had been living in the States for many years, and had spent good chunks of time in Australia. He felt very . . . familiar. Kind of like you. You remind me of someone, whose name is, as the saying goes, on the tip of my tongue.
I was closely observing myself but I do remember being struck by Mike’s last name. Hazelwood, like a forest of hazelnut trees. One of those old English names that is derived from the locale, the place of birth. Way back in Mike’s genealogy, the first Hazelwood must have lived near a forest. Even though he had died and the family had moved away, the name remained the same. Centuries had passed and here was Mike Hazelwood living far from England, far from that forest, in California, by the sea.
That fall I saw Mike every week.
He always came to the workshops early, and I would come down to say hi. I was staying at Highways, temporarily, in this attic that was Tim’s office. I wasn’t meant to be there so I had to keep a low profile and avoid the landlord, a pale woman with red hair, but I could see who was in the lobby through a hole in the wall.
“Hey man,” Mike would say, “how’s it going?” On cooler days he wore this big black coat. I would sit down next to him on that shabby sofa and we’d talk, but apart from his greeting, I couldn’t tell you the content of our conversations. I’ve never been a good listener; I’m too wrapped up in the conversation in my own head, which is far more compelling.
Yet I can still hear, faintly, his way of talking, slowly and hesitantly, as if he didn’t trust the words that were forming in his mouth, as if he was apprehensive of everything he was saying.
You got this sense from Mike that he was extremely uncomfortable, not just speaking, but in his own body. He shared with me once that he was taking the workshop to overcome this discomfort.
It was quite painful to watch him participate in the movement exercises. Mike’s lumbering gestures were reminiscent of Lurch, the manservant from The Addams Family, though Mike was not quite so graceful. As Mike shifted his limbs, his skeleton and skin appeared to be at odds with one another. Still wearing his black coat, his jerky motions and grim expression of concentration made him look like a man dancing at his own funeral.
I’m not one to talk; when one of my workshop partners would try to manipulate my body, I would tense up, like a corpse attempting to resist the advances of a mortician. But Mike took each step so seriously, as if eventually this would pay off and from within his clumsy pirouetting his spirit or soul would show through.
He was goofy too, with the spacey, scattered air of someone who took far too much acid in the ’60s, crucial brain cells dissolved from one hit too many; every now and then, as he moved, he would break into laughter.
I lived at Highways for about six or eight months, rent-free. That period of life is indistinct to me now, but then I’m not sure what period of life isn’t.
I was dazed, still wondering how I had ended up in LA, which had never been on my radar and struck me as an endless, bleached-out sequence of condos and spindly palm trees.
I would hang out by myself in the attic, which was cozy in a musty sort of way. There was a fridge and a futon and a big old desk. There wasn’t a microwave but there was a kettle, so I could make cups of soup. Tim bought me these purple curtains with a moon pattern and a string of lights in the shape of little chilies to brighten up the place.
Things between Tim and I were . . . volatile. Our passion would send us into a kind of . . . hole. There were intervals when he needed time out.
When I got antsy I would go wandering. The neighborhood was deserted, just factories and warehouses with an odd house here and there. There was a park a couple of blocks away, frequented by hookers and dealers. I would sit in the kids’ spaceship in the park and watch the deals, the exchanges. I felt . . . invincible, like you do when you’re twenty-three.
Once in a while, as I walked back to the theater, cars would slow down and I would receive invitations from strangers.
What I recall most of that time is a feeling of being unsure of myself and somewhat . . . uncontrollable. This feeling never left me. In that attic and on those vacant streets, I discovered a number of things about who I was, they were incredibly profound, but unfortunately I’ve forgotten what those attributes were.
If I wasn’t in the mood to talk to Mike before the workshop, I would stay upstairs. Sometimes I would watch him through that hole in the office wall, reading his paper or checking out an exhibition in the gallery. But he was more drawn to the gallery’s concrete floor.
The floor was covered with an art project, outlines of bodies drawn in permanent marker, like the outlines they draw on the pavement when someone jumps from a skyscraper. These outlines were filled in with names, thousands of names, of people who had died of AIDS. Most patrons ignored the names, but Mike would get down on his hands and knees and inspect the names, really read them.
I would watch him until I got bored.
As soon as Tim turned up, I’d head down to the workshop. To start things off, we would all form a circle, which I believe is meant to serve a protective, magical function.
I was the only person living in the theater, which in a previous life had been a munitions factory and after that a factory where they manufactured spoons—not regular spoons but the musical kind. This guy Lawrence Welk owned the plant; he had this corny variety TV show, where his band played and guests yodeled and tap danced, but I hear the spoons are how he made his fortune.
During the day it was fine, but at night, it got to me, especially if I came back late from work or wandering, or woke up and had to go take a leak. The bathroom was at the other end of the space. To get to it, I had to walk through the gallery and bring a flashlight to guide me.
I felt superstitious about treading on the names, so I would try and tiptoe around them, like avoiding cracks in the sidewalk, but it was impossible. There were so many names, inside the bodies, spilling over their outlines. Whenever I stepped on someone’s name I would say sorry, sorry. I would start to imagine all those names were whispering to me, repeating their own name over and over, above the low whir of assembly lines run by the ghosts of munitions workers and the feeble clacking of musical spoons.
By the time I got to the auditorium, lit only by a ghost light, the exposed light in a small wire cage that is kept on when a theater is empty, the light whose purpose is both practical and supernatural, I had pretty much psyched myself out.
One night, I accepted an invitation from one of those strangers in their cars. He was curious about the place, and I grabbed my flashlight and showed him around. He had spiky blond hair with dark roots showing. He was wearing black jeans, a studded belt, that Dalí skull T-shirt, the one where the skull is a bunch of naked women in careful formation. I shone my light on the gallery floor.
“Spooky,” he said.
He took off his shirt, and in the weak glow of my torch I admired the tattoo of Santa Muerte on his chest, the tip of her scythe grazing his left nipple. As we stood on those names, we kissed. Overcoming my superstitions, I pushed him facedown onto the concrete floor.
The next day I apologized to the names and my knees were bruised.
Look, I know I keep returning to myself and avoiding my subject, which is meant to be Mike, because I didn’t make the effort to get to know him. He wasn’t fascinating or beautiful enough to hold my attention. I’m sure I’ll have to pay for this down the line. Isn’t there a circle in The Inferno where the superficial ones go?
After the workshop ended, we saw Mike from time to time.
Tim and I even went over to Mike’s once, a fancy ocean front apartment in Malibu. It took us ages to find parking.
Mike made us dinner and played us some songs on the piano. I had learned he was a songwriter; Tim probably told me. Mike had penned a couple of famous tunes, including the song “It Never Rains in Southern California.” That’s how he made his fortune, music royalties.
I spent my childhood glued to the radio; in our house the easy listening station was always on, but I didn’t know that song. The title, yes, but not the words or the melody. I don’t remember those tunes Mike played for us either; my mind was . . . elsewhere, though I do recollect his voice was flat.
Afterward, he walked us to our car. I think we all commented on the sea air. Mike was so tall he had to stoop over to give me a hug. Like all his other gestures, his embrace was ungainly. Yet full of so much feeling, as if you might be crushed by a combination of his physical strength and his . . . emotions, which were threatening to overflow, and there was that nervous laugh again, like he was flustered by his own intensity.
Mike died of a heart attack, on the sixth of May 2001. At the time of his death he wasn’t in LA; he was in Italy, Florence. I heard from a mutual friend that Mike died in a hotel bed in the middle of the night.
What an odd way to die—not the heart attack, not the bed or the night, but while you’re on vacation. As if Mike went to Florence specifically for that purpose, traveled thousands of miles to meet his death, which required a beautiful location.
But when he woke up with a start and . . . realized what was going on, he must have felt scared to be dying so far from home, in a foreign land. Dying is already like going to a foreign land, the most foreign of lands, where you know no one, even though everyone is there.
A month or so after Mike’s death, a postcard came in the mail. Postmarked Florence, April 29. The picture was a painting by Caravaggio, one of his voluptuous street urchins transformed through art into something holy: a pale young man with black curly hair, his curls entangling with the dark background, his face shining out of the darkness.
Mike had written on the back about having seen this painting, how magnificent it was. I couldn’t read the rest of his scrawl, though there was an x and an o at the end. And a wish you were here.
For a while Tim and I entertained the idea of how weird this was, like the postcard had been sent from the afterlife. But we knew it had just gotten lost; Italy’s mail service is notoriously slow.
I discovered a couple of things about Mike, after the fact. I just wasn’t interested while he was alive. People get my attention far more easily when they’re gone.
So I looked him up online, one night when I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. Most humans use the Internet to interact with the living, but I prefer to use it to connect with the dead. I don’t mean like in a séance. I just read up on them, though if there were a space you could make contact with the dead, the Internet, ethereal and nowheresy as it is, like a high-tech Ouija board, might be a good place to start.
The Wikipedia entry on Mike had a fairly extensive biography, information about his music and composing, and a list of the songs he’s written. Most of the titles were unfamiliar to me, except for “The Air That I Breathe,” which I vaguely know. At the bottom of the page, after the references, Mike’s name was listed under these related categories: 20th century English songwriters, 1941 births, 2001 deaths, and deaths from myocardial infarction, which I guess is the technical term for heart attack.
Apart from that, there wasn’t much about him. A German music blog had a retrospective article on Mike’s career. I didn’t bother to translate it. The site seemed rather obscure, but I suppose we don’t get to be picky about where we’re memorialized. If we’re documented by even one amateur, archived in a little nook or dusty corner of cyberspace, we’re insanely lucky.
On Google Images there were a few scattered photos, mainly from the 1960s, when Mike was young and in this garage band the Breathers. In one shot, the band members were wearing ruffled paisley shirts, running through a field of flowers. It was all very groovy, a term Mike used, I’m sure of it, during our lost conversations.
In another, Mike was dressed like a Quaker, black suit and black broad-brimmed hat, white shirt with a pointy collar, looking as sharp as Death himself, wearing mirrored shades, so I couldn’t see his blue eyes: I didn’t mention that Mike often seemed to be squinting, like he could only take a small portion of the world in at any given time.
I listened to one of the band’s songs, “When Tomorrow Comes Tomorrow.” It was upbeat, the lyrics naïvely hopeful, but the sound of this utopian anthem was muffled and distorted, like it had been recorded in the bowels of the Underworld.
That was the extent of my discoveries.
I’m not definite on where Mike’s body ended up. Was he buried in Florence? Was his corpse flown back in cargo to California? Or was he shipped to his place of birth, so he could be buried beneath those hazelnut trees, which hopefully had not been cut down?
I think what I’ve been telling you is a kind of eulogy, though one that fails: it sheds no light on the man it’s dedicated to, it eclipses or negates him.
This could be a eulogy for anyone, for no one.
I don’t think much about Mike, except in passing. Occasionally, a memory returns to me: one afternoon, not long before the landlord with the red hair found my stuff and kicked me out, I observed Mike through the hole in the wall as he was inspecting the floor of the dead. With the swiftness of a magician, he pulled out a magic marker from a pocket of his black coat and, hunched over, began freshening up some of the names that were fading, tracing over each letter with real care.
Next to Mike’s name on his Wikipedia page there’s an [edit] icon. The word is italicized and placed in square brackets, like death italicizes and brackets us, like death edits us, emends us, or is edit just a nicer way of saying delete? I could go in and modify his page myself, though every addition requires a verifiable citation and none of my anecdotes can be substantiated. That popular reference site is stricter with this rule around living persons. It’s easier to alter and rewrite articles about the dead, as is often the case.
Mike’s . . . accessible as information, stored and transmitted in the form of electronic signals.
However, the things that genuinely interest me about him aren’t available. They’re in a . . . space where there are no categories, no signals, no data.
During my most recent search for Mike, I found myself looking up the afterlife instead and came to an empty Wikipedia page that said nothing but “After death,” “Life after death,” and “Hereafter” redirect here.
When I die, when it’s my turn to be categorized and filed away, perhaps the first person to greet me will be Mike. He’ll be sitting on a threadbare sofa in the afterlife’s crummy lobby, and he’ll receive me in his typically awkward manner. No, he’ll have gained more confidence, feel more at home, more himself amid Death’s dark psychedelia.
“Hey man, you finally made it!” he’ll say, patting the couch. “Come sit next to me.”
I’ll sit down and apologize for not listening to Mike sing those songs of his that night in Malibu, and he’ll go, “Look man, no worries. I can play them for you later.” He’ll tell me about the band he has formed, Mike Hazelwood and the Floor of the Dead. They only play one song, he’ll explain, the one about breathing air, which sounds unbelievably groovy in a realm where you can’t breathe. He won’t have lost his sense of humor or his sweet quality, despite Death’s bleakness.
I’ll apologize a second time for not really getting to know him when he was alive or dead, and he’ll say, “That’s okay. We’ve got plenty of time now. More time than we’ll know what to do with. Let me show you around.”
He’ll pull out a flashlight, necessary to illuminate Death’s darkness. He’ll suddenly look more somber. Mike will take me by the hand and whatever Death actually is will get underway.