J's Story

 “We make our selves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.”

• V.S. Naipaul

  
  

“He said 'we are what we lack' ... this guy...”

— Gord Downie

“And then you wonder why I have no identity?”

- Zac de la Rocha

You're finding a bit here unequal to the task of tribute, but then again he wasn't exactly worthy of one, no offense. It's said we all become stories in the end, it's that or oblivion. So who was my main man of mirth made melancholy? What can we say? People liked him, can't say that about just anyone. Big guy, didn't fit in his unwashed clothes. That fat fuzzy play-dough face like a third-tier muppet. Unique. But that does not a story make. Thing is, I wasn't there. I only remember the kid he was, I was witness to the first act of the story, twelve years. I never knew the man he was for the last twenty. Man-child, should probably say. So what justification do I have to mention any of it? Because he was my friend, and I want to know why he blossomed into a poison thorn instead of a fruitful flower.

The thing is I didn't see it happen. I was there when it started, yes, but even then his life could have gone in any direction. I didn't see the crucial element. It's been suggested that this passing feels sadder than it might otherwise because of that thwarted potential. So maybe I saw all that there was to see. Playing on the swings in kindergarten. Oh to be the playground pigeon watching us pass in the park. Later, when he introduced me to Donkey Kong, he and his flabby hands and goofy laugh, it's that laugh and smile that I'll choose to remember, a happy goofy little boy. We rode bikes, took turns as cops and robbers in those empty apartments full of other people's things gathering dust, we stayed up late telling tales by flashlight of the ghost of the girl upstairs.

He wasn't a big fan of barriers. I guess that was probably his undoing. Hatred, I mean, not hatred of barriers. Although hatred of barriers is still hatred, after all, still a tainted emotion. And I can speculate that he was drawn to the easy fix of vitriol, just as he was drawn to the short thrill of childish pranks.. He was big into bating losing arguments. Why did he do this? He was being a dick to see if you were in on it. Most of us weren't in on it, or if we were at first, we weren't by the thirtieth time, and what this led to was lots of practice cussing people out. It was his kind of social experiment, but it was also him being a dick. He didn't like barriers. So once you'd tell him to stop, he wouldn't ever want to.

Like a bird each day began with music. Crackling bass with fuzzy guitar, loud and proud, a big breathless electric inevitable. I wonder, listening to my staid funereal Weekend Edition in the car while pondering Scott Simon's perennial love for the Cubbies, if this was the difference, where our paths diverged, balanced on teeter-totter of preferred accompaniment. I doubt it. He liked to sing, and we thought it lazy when sadness swelled screaming in every song, in a style he'd parroted from shlocky acts, all spleen and screed... He had a tendency to wallow. He was a big baby, but he was dedicated to that at least. Giving voice to his own constellated poetry of sadness.

Was it this that led to the drugs that scoured him, thwarted musical ambition, an artist's yen for the intoxicated outlet? One is curious how the dark annunciation commenced for him, as it does for anyone, how it all starts rolling downhill. Was it swiping his older brother's cigarettes, or did it stream from the trickle of pain meds they gave him following the attack? A prescription issue passed unto pathology? I think about it now, putting on my black tie, to try to figure out if there was something there that I missed.

He struggled through the middle grades because he didn't take anything seriously, and in this there's nothing exceptional, but he was one a kind, and as the speakers my age today who knew him then will attest, he was one of a kind After all, not just anyone can progressively get someone so incensed, so angry, over weeks and weeks and months, that they will attack you in broad daylight, with a baseball bat to the head, for multiple blows.

J was in the hospital, I remember knowing that. I saw them wheel him away. I saw the blood, and later the scars on his shaved head. There was a lot about this that was weird. The way he just took the blows, didn't flinch or cover out. Didn't pass out although he was bleeding. It was weird to see his assailant so fired up, he was usually such an up-tight guy, but strange to see him bulging with rage, teeth bared, taking full swings. He was trying to kill him. It didn't seem real. Time froze, we froze. Another weird thing is that when I remember this incident, I was standing right there when it happened after all, hundreds of us were, I remember their roles reversed. It seems to me, even though I know that the memory is flawed, that my friend J was the one swinging the bat. That it was all his fault, and the rumors were that it was his fault, that's not misremembered, they say that he'd been baiting the guy with slurs under his breath for month. How did none of us hear it, I don't know. Like a lot of preventable sleights, it went unseen until it exploded.

When he came back to school it was with a unreformedly triumphant drunken swagger. His bald head was stitched together in such a way that seemed to lend a piccaso-esque wrongness to his face. His eyes were dark and narrow. If the whole world was unfair it was worthy of being blurred out, this much was clear. Not just anybody can look a haggard forty at their high school graduation.

One decides that primarily he was frightened, that he was hurt and scared. So the question is, why did he stay in that place so long, or allow those emotions it to fester into anger and despondency, recrimination, blame. Was it really too hard to rise above it? One wonders at his innermost wishes and dreams. I like to imagine him successfully living the double life of both anarchist dad and disciplined rock god. It's been commented upon that all he should have cared about was family, that they could have provided him with a center, but this seems to miss the point. He was insanely far from center. He was scuzzy. I was ashamed to admit that I, too fell into this thought trap and judged this book by it's cover alone, assuming that if he wanted help he'd help himself, but now it's too late. And I don't know what any of it amounted to. A hill of beans? I don't know what that means, do you? They say you only lose what you hold dear. What we lost was a man who long ago, as a boy, when the world still lied spread out like a bewildering and stupendous dream, became afraid that he was unequal to meet it and decided to go in the opposite direction, and stayed that course for far far too long. A choice that any of us could have made, and may yet make. We couldn't have changed his mind, once you'd suggest that he'd stop, he'd never do it. Guess he showed us.

Intendantalogue

People lose things all the time! Keys, wallet, phone, that word — what was it, jobs, health insurance, minds, youth, conventional attractiveness, civility, tact.

We arrive and awkwardly appraise the arrogant aesthetics. Arrangements imply the abhorrence of chaos.

Heavy doors with inlaid halberds guard their leatherbound analects. Each quarterly dividend a sermon.

The well-suited servant stirred pepitas and cranberries into the salad. A wall of grand accomplishment accompanied her assurity of self.

It was the best bath I've ever had. Outside a stand of solemn maples fidget like strangers in a bank queue.

But bureaucratic strivings belie the belief that lives like ours are beautiful. Despite liberal dispensation of ebullient encomiums, we remain straggly of soul.

A vibrantly indigent potluck of short fuses and arrested opinions. Whose streets were poorly lit, whose music fills us through the anxious hours.

Note the chip in the windshield. It whispers a want of surety, probably. Foreclosure is imminent.

People lose time all the time! Thanks Candy Crush. There it is, time, streaming, out the hulu in the wall! Code Blue, this fall on CBS.

Yet for all the firmness of your kind inducements I would not behave any different. Differently?

On behalf of the doctor the nurse pronounced it some kind of blood deficiency, insufficiency, everyone dies. We have to.

Act now for the Final Hours of Extra Savings. After all the cure for mourning is motion.

Despite a pensive and intricately nihilistic disregard for tenderness I woke up next to my friend on the sofa and did not remember having had sex. Next stop, a frenzied stall, to binge in the ripening warmth of memories, Christ they're on the cusp of re-manifestation. Time is in limited supply. She may have been the strong silent type, but she was just passing through.

People find themselves in all sorts of things; danger, trouble, a mess. But also families, clubs, conventions, church council, systems, the grip of social forces, a zeitgeist, hermeneutic loops, forearms deep in a sudsy quotidian epiphany.

A little while after the weather report the little girl asks “why is Fox so angry?” and sure enough, men sweatily bulging out of expensive ties spout their vague little daggars of schadenfreud and there is little in the way of palatable explanation to a six-year old.

There are those who revel in angry exhortations, like farts or masturbation. In my considered opinion there's only so far that splatterpaintedirritation will get you before you turn into whiteness, nothingness, no thoughts, no thing so much as a backwards facing testament to the real world lying ahead. Where does it come from? I don't know. Loss, fear, sadness. She thinks about this over snacktime grapes and cheezits. Chews and nods to her own private funky beat. It's so easy to go with the flow, why doncha? You might like it. Although you may just as well subvert expectations short term and survey the insurmountable benefits of cherishing change through non-conformity. Bask into the light and run yourself the risk of wonder.