Spokane

From my journal, 03/10/01

I hadn’t even taken a seat at the counter, and they were already talking to me. It was a ratty, smokey little diner, across the street from a storage and shipping joint in what could’ve been just about any town in America.

“How tall are you, son?” he asked me. He had salt ‘n’ pepper hair and a salt ‘n’ pepper beard and sparkling old eyes and a goofy grin.

“Uh, six feet four,” I answered.

“Six feet four,” he exclaimed, “Now, that’s the perfect height for a center. Do you play basketball son?”

“No.”

“Why not? You’d be a great center.”

“I might be if I could shoot the ball. I’m tall, but I can’t shoot.”

He didn’t seem to hear me. He just kept going. “Oh, you’d be a great center. Six feet four is perfect height for a center. I got that from the old basketball players. Now they got those real big boys, but six feet four is the perfect height for a center. You try again son. See, you let ‘em get under you, before. You try again, you’ll be great. You’ll see. Six feet four is the perfect height for a center."

He didn't care what I said, so I couldn’t really argue. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll try.”

I glanced around the place just as the waitress came up. Everyone in the joint was over fifty, and she was no exception. Her hair was dyed a tacky auburn and she looked tired and sounded worn out, and she had a bright pink tee shirt under her black sweatshirt. There were big, sloppy, neon pink letters running diagonally up the sweat. “RENO.”

“Didja need a menu?” she asked.

“Yeah, and a cup of coffee, please.”

“Okay, just a minute.”

“No hurry.”

I looked around the place again, and Salt ‘n’ Pepper was still smiling at me from his seat on the other side of the register. “How ya doin’ today?” I asked him.

“Oh, I’m wonderful son. I enjoy this as much as you enjoy basketball.”

I think he meant that he enjoys life as much as he wishes I enjoyed basketball. Truth be known, I couldn’t care less about basketball, but he certainly seemed to be getting a kick out of life.

“How much to settle up for the coffee?” he asked as the waitress came by.

“Ninety seven cents,” she answered.

“That’ll work out perfect,” he warbled, “I’m gonna give that three cents to this young man here.”

He came around the register holding his dollar. Then he caught sight of my backpack. “That’s a mighty fine backpack. But there’s one thing wrong with this backpack, you know what it is?” He looked up at me from behind his thick, rectangular glasses.

“No, what’s that?”

He grabbed hold of a black and grass green nylon zipper pull. “This right here. That’s the only thing wrong with your backpack. But I’ll take care of it for you.” He stuck his thumb through the loop and pulled, trying to snap it, but the braided nylon wouldn’t budge.

“Huh. Tough fucker,” He grunted, “And I don’t have my knife.”

The waitress had come back with my coffee in the standard issue chipped brown mug, and she brought the standard plastic eight ounce glass of water too. I watched her set down the napkin and silverware, and when I turned back, Salt ‘n’ Pepper had the nylon in his teeth, tearing at it and grunting. I was about to tell him I’d take care of it later, but his teeth slipped and he pulled away, apparently thinking he had won the fight.

“There you go son,” he grinned. “Now there ain’t nothing wrong with your backpack. You can just leave that corpse right there.” He was smiling a big, toothy smile, obviously pleased with himself. “You just leave that corpse hanging there,” he repeated, grinning.

The waitress came by and took his dollar and gave him his three cents change.

“That’ll work just right,” he said. He took up my right hand and pushed the penny hard into the center of my palm. He looked me square in the face, eyes gleaming behind his spectacles. “That’s for you.”

I smiled at him and he grinned back, then said, “Give me your other hand, son.” I held it out, and he pressed another penny into that palm, hard and flat and right in the center. “That’s for your wife.” He grinned wide, then said, “Now put them together, son,” so I closed my palms with my thumbs toward the green styrofoam ceiling. He slid the third penny under my thumbs and into the crack between my palms.

“That’s for your son,” he stated brightly, and he shuffled through the door, past the red and white Miller Highlife sign and into the lounge.

There was a woman with thinning hair and a pile of pull tabs in the booth behind me, and a man with no hair, a wrinkled scalp, eight or ten teeth and a pile of scratch tickets in the next booth over.

“Do you know what you’re having?” the waitress asked me. Her hair was done up in puffy pigtails, and the line of yellow light bulbs made a funny haze around her head in the loose auburn hair.

“Yeah, could I have a short stack of cakes and the combo with scrambled eggs please. And I won’t need any toast with that.”

“Short stack of cakes and eggs and hashbrowns then,” she echoed.

“Yeah, and can you tell me where the restrooms are?”

“If you go back over there, there’s a red sign that shows the way.”

“Thanks,” I said. I followed the sign past a couple of doors and around a few corners. The toilet seats were cracked and stained; there wasn’t a door on either stall, but when you gotta go you can’t be too picky. My shit was just this side of liquid. Probably because my last meal has consisted of Triscuits and cream cheese and a Butterfinger bar in the back of a Greyhound. Oh, and a pint of Kokanee and one of some local IPA in an Irish pub at 1:55 in the morning.

Sometime halfway into my flaky instant hashbrowns, an old woman in pink and blue pajama pants came up next to me, leaning on a copper cane. “Morning Laura,” she called to the waitress. Laura responded, but I didn’t quite catch the other woman’s name. Edith or Edna or something, I think.

“Is Michael working today?” she questioned.

The waitress got a strange look and said, “No, he walked out of here.”

“He did?”

‘Yeah. He was just standing around, talking about his cat, and I asked him to cook an order and he walked out of here. Broke all kinds of things on the way, plates and mugs. He slammed the microwave door and we had to replace that.”

“No! The microwave?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s not right, I mean, he had no business doing that. And he was just standing around, talking about his cat?”

“Yeah, and when I told him he needed to cook an order he started yelling and walked out.”

“Well that’s not right. Work is no place to be standing around and talking about your pet.”

“Not when there are customers anyway.”

“And then he just stormed out.”

“Yes.”

“That must’ve been awfully embarrassing.”

“Well, I was just embarrassed for our customers.”

“And he just stormed out?”

“Yeah.”

“He must’ve been drunk.”

“I think he was.”

“Well he must’ve been, to do something like that.”

It kept going. So did the people. Coming and going. Everybody knew everybody else. Ruthie and Russ and Rob and Dan and a stream of tepid coffee and eggs over easy and more coffee and plaid shirts and worn out jeans and dirty baseball caps and coffee and ruddy faces and baggy eyes and pull tabs and coffee and a fella in a wheelchair with a foot missing and a black beret with a silver cross on it and hawaiian print tee shirts and coffee and people giving the waitress five bucks on four ninety and saying “keep the change” and pull tabs and the woman with the cane saying “he’ll kill somebody when he’s drunk one of these days, Michael will,” and coffee and cowboy hats and a girl with a cane who couldn’t have been more that twenty five but looked well past forty and twelve cent tips on six dollar tabs and coffee and coffee and coffee in a steady, brown, tepid stream and cream out of innumerable little plastic cups and body odor and baggy eyes and a guy in a plaid shirt and a baseball cap with a scraggly beard and dirty hands with long, uncut nails and fingers that shook and clenched his fork and a yellow bag of rolling tobacco, and when he saw me spin my pen in my fingers he stopped and turned towards me as Laura topped off my coffee.

“Wow, that’s cool,” he stated. “I had an uncle who did that with a quarter, or…or was it a fifty cent piece?”

“Right on. That’s tough. I could never do it with a quarter.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he stammered, “I did it one time. It had to, to uh, go under,” and he held out his shaky hand to try to show me, but his fingers wouldn’t do what he wanted. “Oh damn,” he half mumbled, half chuckled, “I did it once. I had an uncle once who could bend a fifty cent piece like that. An Uncle Joe, Uncle Joe.”

“Takes some strong fingers to do that,” I said.

He smiled, “Yeah, I had an uncle who could do that once.”

And they just kept coming. Old men with buttons and patches on their hats, saying things like, “Say, where’s the waitress,” and, “I’ll just let John blow in your face, he’s got the cold on him,” and throwing trash at the can in the corner and saying, “Damn, I missed that bucket,” and I had just noticed that the one guy had a tan leather coat when his friend said, “I don’t want no damn gravy on my chicken fried steak, what’s the soup?”

“Chowder,” Laura answered.

“I don’t want no damn chowder, what else you got?”

“Soukatash.”

“What the hell is Soukatash? Aw hell, just give me a salad.”

“You want bleu cheese on that?”

“Hell no.”

“Well, what do you want?”

“Ranch, damnit. Isn’t this a cow town?”

I’d probably had eight cups of what we had all tacitly agreed to call coffee. The sign over the pink lemonade dispenser read

BOOTH SERVICE

$1.00 PER PERSON MINIMUM

4 PERSON PER BOOTH MAXIMUM

COFFEE DRINKERS

3 REFILLS

all in block capitals.

There was a machine dispensing Chicklets and one with Hot Tamales next to a newspaper box in front of the door.

The bus ride took almost six hours. It was raining when we started and I was eating Triscuits out of a box and using them to scoop Philly cream cheese out of the foil wrapper. I turned off my overhead light; I thought I had seen lightning. I started counting the cars somewhere outside of Issaquah. I was stuck on one eight seven for well over a minute. Getting through from two oh one to three hundred took longer than any other count of one hundred. The moon tried to poke through the clouds at two four seven. I saw snow on the ground at three one one. The fog came up thick at three twenty four. Three four eight came along and we hit the top of the pass and I noticed that it was snowing. At four seventeen the bus started braking and groaning and I figured I was gonna die just east of Snoqualmie. Four ninety three and it was still snowing. The driver stopped the bus and got out to adjust his left headlight. An Alaskan fisherman was coughing. At five seventeen the moon came through. I lost count somewhere around six hundred.

The sky cleared up. Somewhere around Moses lake a fog rolled in. It was heavy and thick and it fuzzed up everything. Fog creates all the visual effects of good acid, without that nasty feeling in the pit of your stomach. I hadn’t taken acid in years, but I had that nasty feeling just the same.

There was a rest stop with a burned out sign. One side read “Restau” and the other side “aurant.” Funny thing. It was missing “rest” and “rant.” The two things I had come to do. There were three radio towers with bright, flashing, white lights that looked like lightning.

I fell asleep on the open plains somewhere just east of Ritzville. I woke up as we pulled into Spokane.

“Everybody needs to get off the bus,” said the driver. “You can put your stuff on the seat if you don’t want to take it with you.

The streets smelled like middle America and there was dirty snow and piss in the alleys and the first motel I came to was closed.

I found an open one three blocks away. The room was forty five dollars for the night, and checkout was 11 am.

“If you need a little more time, just call down and let us know,” the attendant informed me.

“Is there an open bar around here?”

“Well, I guess the best place is Thudpuckers. That’s…oh, do you have a car?”

“No, but I saw it. I just came from there.”

“Oh. I guess there’s next door.”

‘Right on.”

He looked hesitant. “It’s a gay bar,” he choked out.

I just wanted a beer. I went upstairs and stashed my bank card and three hundred twenty six dollars cash in the microwave and went to find a bar. The bar next door had black cellophane over its windows and a silver and black awning. It didn’t look too inviting, so I went the other way. Four blocks up I heard shouting and saw a Ford Bronco pull away from the curb.

“I don’t wanna fight you,” the kid in the black coat said. Then the yellow hat started throwing punches. Yellow Hat got Black Coat on the ground and smashed his face into the pavement. He pulled him up by the hair and punched him again.

“Don’t you ever fuckin’ talk to me that way,” and he slammed Black Coat’s face into the sidewalk while a guy and a blonde girl in a black leather coat and miniskirt stood there watching.

I went into a shitty Irish bar and had a couple pints of beer. A minute later, Yellow Hat came in, blood on his fists, staggering and crowing. Half a beer later, the cops came and gave Yellow Hat a new set of matching silver bracelets and a ride somewhere. I went back to my motel.

I took a bath when I got back to my room. I tried to jerk off, but my dick just wouldn’t get hard. The towels were thin and rough, and my hair never really dried.

I must’ve woken up six or seven times, and every time I went back to sleep, I asked why I was running.

My dead friend was there, the one who slit his throat and knelt over the drain in a bathtub in Vermont so that he wouldn’t make a mess while he bled to death. Everything was wrong, he said, and he was gonna get the KKK to fix it. It’s this place, I screamed, can’t you see what it’s doing to us? It’s driving us all crazy. But he wouldn’t listen and he went off to slit his throat and die behind the bushes. Lets’ burn it all, I screamed. Alex came to help me. He busted all the gas lines behind the stove while I scrambled to get my shit from my bedroom. Computers and comic books, and I thought I had it all, but when I turned there was a bookshelf stretching away for miles in front of me. I had to take them all. Alex was screaming at me from the bottom of the stairs. Get the fuck outa here, we gotta light it, we gotta go. I started to leave, then went back for my bowling ball. I couldn’t carry any of it, so I dropped it all. When we got outside our friend was there. He had come back from slitting his throat and he had brought the KKK and the police, and there was a river of blood oozing from two nicks in his jugular and running into a puddle on the ground, and we ran off through the back yard. We were screaming. The house never burned.

I woke up ten minutes before checkout. For the first time, I knew why I was running.

I checked out at 10:59. “Is there a diner worth eating at around here?”

I barely heard what the girl said, but I thanked her and set out walking. I had no idea where I was or where I was going, but after a few blocks I saw the run down diner and went inside.

I hadn’t even taken a seat at the counter, and they were already talking to me. It was a ratty, smokey little diner, across the street from a storage and shipping joint in what could’ve been just about any town in America.

A guy with a bushy beard and a camo hat and wild eyes stumbled in just as I finished my last cold sip of coffee. “Who’s took my money?” he growled, and took a seat at a booth in the corner.

The shift had changed, and the waitress was putting on a new pot of coffee.

Tunnel Vision

From my journal, 1/30/01

"I can't think of what else to say. It's not like that hole people talk about. It's not shock or grief. It's just a nagging feeling that I'm missing a clue or something. But where do I start?"

I was taking a class on modernism. My professor, whose name I forget, was something of a legend already at UW. Five foot nothing, young, and very strange. Always wore black, almost always dresses. Long, beaded necklaces with huge beads. And the one teacher I ever had who would cut you off if you repeated someone else's point. "Yes, Mr. Jackson already made that point quite astutely. Do you have something new to say, sir?" And we were reading something, right then, with a suicide in it. Ford Maddox Ford, maybe? I'd left class halfway through the day after Peter. Left at the break, and felt I had to explain why. When I got back to class the next meeting, she asked me to stay after. "You may not want to read the last two chapters," she said, looking me up and down, with softness I'd never suspected. "Forgive me for saying, but there's a suicide. I know that might be hard. If you don't read it, it won't count against your grade." I don't remember what I said.

From my journal, 2/15/01, the beginning of what I'm really trying to say

"...And the furnace shut down, too. I can only hear the scratching of my pen and the sounds made by the tiptoeing thieves who aren't really there."

And later in the same entry, releasing to rhyme which never lets me lie...

"I wanna run to New Orleans and Bangladesh. Turkey and Kazahkstan and Tibet and Liberia and Siberia and Moscow and Hawai'i and New Mexico. I wanna see Caracas and Tijuana and Tenochtitlan and Mazatlan and Argentina and Norway and I wanna run with the bulls and dive with sharks and get the fuck out from behind the books and screens and see the whole fucking world from Beijing to Boston and back again old friend no end to the bends in the trail the pail is a bucket with a hole in the bottom and we shot 'em with a 12 gauge sawed off till they looked like stew you do what you gotta do but leave a shoe for us to hold and say we remember the night in December 1993 me and the guys surprised you and you killed us in return burn down the bridges to Babylon rabbit's gone and Cheetah to what to do when the screw is all the way in spin the wheels and deal with it feel the shit hit the fans cheer for the XFL hell can't be as bad as all this piss on Mephistopheles unite and fight like Perikles Herakles buried those dreams in a drive through window in White River Junction function if you can and if you can't just fake it take it to the Maker's Mark whiskey frisk me I've been feeling whispy she kissed me missed me but she hit me with her next shot and got what she wanted dead or alive survive the ride and the tide'll get you sweat suits that don't keep me warm at night are a big fat fucking waste and I sometimes wish my friends would've kept on living..."

And now we're getting somewhere. Two weeks after that, the girl who tore my heart out to watch it beat got married, with me and my friends all there. Three days later, my first real love, Sonia, found the entry that said,

"I don't know how to tell her I don't want to be with her anymore. Hell, I don't know how to tell myself."

I asked for a week to decide. She granted it. And two nights later, on my way home from work, I stopped at the Greyhound.
I called my boss. "Em, I can't come in to work tomorrow night. I need to get my head straight."
"OK. Whatever you need. I'll get your shift covered. Just keep me in the loop, K?"

I didn't have a cell phone, yet. So I must have called from the payphone at the station. I don't remember what I told Sonia when I called her. I stopped at the

little corner store at 9th and Stewart while I waited for the bus. What's the first bus out of here? Spokane? OK, One way to Spokane, please. That's how I want to remember it, anyway. But the first bus was going to Olympia, and that wasn't far enough. So I waited for the second, the Spokane one. It left at 6:15pm. In my memory, it was already the dead of night. I suppose in Seattle at that time of year, it's dark by 4:30.

I had one change of clothes in my backpack from work. I bought a box of Triscuits, a tin of cream cheese, and some candy.

I sat on the left side of the bus. Halfway back, or so. No one next to me. I counted cars, and tried to figure out if the flashes over Bellevue were lightning or searchlights. I was on the road, without a plan. But the world was as narrow as my seat, at that point. Narrow and closing. I had a one way ticket on the first bus that was really leaving, and now I was on it. No idea where I was really going.

I've been hearing from people, for the last few days. Small comments and long emails. With images I never saw, and pictures I'd forgotten. Emails that start with

"it strikes me that the canyons where we were left in isolation were perhaps similar to the ones where the friends lost to suicide had lived,"

or

"I just started typing. It's long, and personal, and random."

With the kind of memories that stick, like,

"I began to drink too much. I lost my driver's license in a pair of pants after bowling one night, having forgotten it was there."

Where have you run to, when the world closed in around you? What happened in your mind that took you from fight to flight? What weird detail clings to your mind, so that when you turn just so it still comes to you in a flash, unbidden?

Twisting the Kaleidoscope

Full disclosure: I'm stealing the title of this post from a writer/friend who uses it as the title of her blog.

Over the last week, since I posted my first bit about Jason, I've been talking to friends, and engaged in conversations we never had. And what strikes me most is this effect, the kaleidoscope. One note in particular got me thinking, a little tweetback from an old friend:

There are other comments, and emails, too. Corrections on failed memory - Seamus collected the lumber for Peter's boat himself, carless, and brought it on the bus to the Summerhouse. Addition of forgotten pieces - the "PJS" we carved in the prow of Peter's boat. Holes filled in - Jason's journey cross-country with Lael after leaving Seattle. And confessions made in response to my own writing that I can't repeat here. And what continues to strike me are the ways that the cells change, as you twist it, and the strange places where the image crosses, intersects, and forms a new picture for everyone.

And what strikes me now, looking back on the five friends who took their own lives through suicide or overdose, is the isolation. Death is a lonely time, regardless. But not all death is the same. In murder, I felt community, as we rallied around our friend. In disease and old age, sorrow muted by family and acceptance of an immutable cycle. But I look at the strange chasm that opened and widened in my own life through those self inflicted deaths, and wonder how I didn't even realize at the time that I had stumbled into it alone.

My experience, looking now, was one of sudden isolation. At one moment, walking with friends through life. And then, without warning, suddenly wandering a series of deep canyons with sheer walls, the kind that close in above you and block out all but a sliver of the sky. The only comfort also a cold knowledge - my friends, recently walking beside me, were wandering in similar canyons. Their voices sometimes breaking through in whispers bending around curves. Occasionally finding one another around one turn - Seamus and I building a boat in our basement, or working with Diana, Michael and Brie to pack and sort Ro's things - only to be separated as suddenly at another corner. And the words, or voices, whispering "sorry," or "that's horrible," or "tell me if there's anything I can do," echoing from the canyon walls high above, disembodied and empty. Anyone who was not in a canyon like mine, anyone still standing on a place with a view of the horizon, was hopelessly lost to me. And everyone in another tunnel too close for comfort, too far for safety. And no way to describe the canyon walls.

Oddly, the one comment that ever made it through was the cruelest. Not meant as cruel, mind you, but the one that took any pity or sympathy and turned it into self interest masked in humor. It was fifteen months after Peter, still some four years before Ro. After nearly a year without death, Morgan was murdered and Judy succombed to cancer and hospital mismanagement in a two month stretch.

Sitting in the Irish Immigrant at trivia night, at one of the round cocktail tables, Brie was doodling on a page. "I dunno, I might have to stop hanging out with you," she said, sort of nervously glancing up from her sketch. "Being your friend is awfully dangerous." She chuckled in that way that means you're not sure whether what you said was ok or not. The whole table kind of stopped. I remember Darin was there, but not who else. And it was the only time a voice made it in. In many ways, it's the moment that drew me to her.

Because, after Peter, that was how it felt. That there was no safe ground, anymore. Jason was not a surprise, and in many ways a relief. I could see his pain, and his struggle, and relief mixed with guilt. That didn't change the isolation, but at least the canyon made some sense. For me, and for many of us, Peter was like stepping on stone only to find air. And when Morgan and Judy went, it started feeling like it would just be like that forever. Like no one was a safe bet, and the vanishing point was just waiting around the corner.

And somehow, to hear someone give credence to that little whisper I was holding in the back of my mind, that made it something real. It meant that it wasn't just some cold voice in the back of my head. It meant that it was something other people wondered, too. And somehow, that meant I didn't have to worry about it anymore.

It's strange, what's remembered and what's forgotten. I've been combing through old journals, reading little snippets of what I wrote in the aftermath. There's oddly little, especially at a time when I was otherwise writing prodigiously. One piece on Jason, nearly identical to a section of the post I wrote last week. I read it and wondered how it could have echoed back so clearly, like my hands remembered the pattern of the words and wrote them again in muscle memory. Of Peter, precious little. A few small snippets. An entry from the hours when we were still trying to convince ourselves that it was a stupid, drug induced accident, not a calculated execution. And then beyond, the slow slide into the mania that gripped me for months after.

I'll write a bit more about that time later. About the busses, and the train. About running so hard after a dream, and then running away once I found it. And I hope, as I sort through the lenses, that I'll keep hearing from my friends. Keep seeing the kaleidoscope twist in front of me. Keep finding the angled light that casts a completely different shadow, be shown the tunnels and crevasses that others saw. If only so that I can walk more in history than memory. And maybe, just maybe, really find my way out of that tunnel I've been running through for so long.

Princess and the Boat, or, Two Days Later

Prologue:

The boat was probably twenty feet from shore, and another twenty down the beach, by then. Seamus was somewhere between tears and screaming. I had a sinking feeling, the kind you get when a plan starts taking on water. Like in the movies when one guy gets trapped behind a door in the flooding engine room, and his friend has to watch through the tiny glass window while the room fills up. We were frozen in place, standing on the cold rocks and sparse sand. And our little boat was bobbing away, Cthulhu's tentacled head and small plastic body drifting into the sound.

"I'll get it."

I honestly don't remember if there was any discussion. But Princess was in her skivvies, and wading into the water. I could see her shoulders shake with the cold as she half slid, half swam out to the boat. I could see her face contorting with the cold as she swam back, towing our boat behind her.

May I introduce Peter? (from my journal, 2/2/2001):

There was nothing left on TV. (Note: In those days we had a pretty basic cable package. I'm pretty sure it was late, but one way or another it was just the two of us sitting on the couch.)
"Let's write a story," Peter said.
"Alright."
"What's it gonna be about?"
I looked, and the first thing I saw was a six-pack of fishtail. "It's about a fish."
"Okay, what kind of fish?"
"A flying fish."
"Anything special about him?"
"Yeah, um, he's got a huge tail and he flies really fast."
"Cool. So, uh, what's he do?"
"Waddaya mean?"
"Like, why do we want to write a story about this guy?"
"Um, he's a spy. In the south seas."
"What year?"
"1942."
"Who's he a spy for?"
"The Australians."
"Why?"
"They want the Nazis to win."
"Okay, why?"
"Cause they want to be free of their western ties."
"Alright, what's his name?"
"Tommy Tonqua."
And that's how it got started. We pumped each other for info. It probably lasted an hour. We ended with a page and a half of a story.

Preludes:

"That looks so good. I want a hamburger." He reached for the phone.
"Uh, Pete, what're you doing?"
"I'm hungry. I want a hamburger." He started dialing off the screen.
"Um, okay, but who are you calling?"
"I'm gonna order that thing."
"Why?"
"Because I want a hamburger."
"Um, Pete, you realize that thing won't get here for like eight weeks, right?"
"Whatever, I want a hamburger. I'm hungry."
"Dude, I'll drive down to Kid Valley if you wanna get a fucking burger. Don't order that stupid..."
"Hi, yeah, I'd like to place an order for the grill thing?"
"Dude, seriously, why are you ordering that thing? I'll drive you to get a burger!"
(Waving me off) "Yeah, how long will that take to be delivered? Okay. Uh huh. Peter Stansfield. 6814 30th Ave NW..."
In hindsight, this episode says a lot. One day I came home and found eight identical boxes from Ubid.com on our stoop. When Pete got home, he was fired up. "Yes, my printers are here."
"Dude, why did you order eight printers?"
"Great deal man. Great deal. Seriously. You want one? I figured I'd have one, give you one, maybe give one to Scotty, and then sell the others."
I took one. I don't actually know what happened to the rest of them.

Nicknames

When you have a guy like Peter bartending in a glorified video arcade, you're in for trouble. That's where I met him, at Gameworks, 1998. It was probably my third week when he hacked the computer system and gave everyone new nicknames. I don't remember most of them. The only one that stuck was Seamus. That's still what we call him. "Sean" sounds funny coming off my tongue. He gave the managers names that were, well, unflattering. And no one could figure out how he did it, or really that it was him. Well, everyone knew it was him, but no one could ever prove it, which is all that really matters.

Pete talked. He talked almost all the time, and if he wasn't talking, he was dead silent. That should have been a sign, too.

But my family isn't prone to mental health issues, at least not anyone close to me. And at 19, 20, even 21, I didn't know the signs. One day, Peter was in a good mood and telling me about the story he was working on about a peasant boy who accidentally releases a wasp demon one night while taking shelter in a cave during a storm. Or he was ordering a George Foreman grill because he was hungry and wanted a hamburger. Or he was holed up in the basement for a week straight, speaking to nobody, coming and going when no one was looking. But mostly manic. Almost always manic, as I remember. And he was brilliant. And this isn't true. It's just my memory, which is now ten years old, tonight. And those are the newest. Some of these memories are from 13 years ago, and I can't really be held liable. It might not all be the exact truth, but it's all the truth for me.

The Main Event

We were all at the house already. It was early evening, but it was long since dark. Seattle in January. It gets dark by 4:00 PM that time of year. Anyway, there we were. Lucas, Malloy, Seamus, Disco, Sonyer, Princess, Laura, John, I'm sure a few others. I remember people were going in and out, even though it was cold and damp outside. Smoking on the stoop. Talking quietly. At least I think we were all there and it was night. But maybe it was the afternoon and it was just me and Lucas.

One way or another, the phone rang. And Lucas answered. And he went outside, and sounded agitated, and when he came back in his face was white and he screamed, "FUCK" and spiked the phone on the love seat. It bounced, high, and clattered down on the floor.
"Dude, what the fuck?"
He was red, now. Lucas is pretty hard to read, most of the time. Red isn't good. "Peter killed himself."
"What?"
"Peter killed himself. Last night. At a hotel."
"What?"
"He filled a bag with nitrous and put it over his head. The maid found him this morning."
If everyone wasn't already at our house, they got there soon enough. It was two days since we heard about Jason. I'm pretty sure everyone was there already because of that. But I could be wrong. It might have just been me and Lucas. But everyone else was there soon enough, in that case. Peter had moved out of our basement the day before. He got a pimp job at Microsoft, rented a sweet apartment in a high rise downtown at 9th and Pike. And then he rented a hotel room. He ate an expensive meal in a restaurant overlooking downtown. He drank a bottle of wine. And he pulled a bag over his head, filled it with nitrous oxide from a whipped cream bottle filled by those little silver cannisters, and laid back on the bed.

Nocturnes

It was only the second time I'd ever been to a christian service of any kind, and the first time I'd been to a funeral. I didn't fly home for Jason's service, but this one was just over the hill. It was in that funeral home at the top of Dexter, where it hits Westlake and crosses the bridge. It seemed like everyone I knew was there. And somehow, for some reason, I didn't sit next to Sonyer. I wanted to sit with Malloy and Fresh, or something like that. I remember looking across the aisle and down a row to where she was sitting in the middle of the service. "God" this and "Jesus" that, "way and the light" and "he who believeth in me shall live forever." But Peter didn't believe. He was an athiest. And Sonyer was sitting across the aisle, and crying, and looking at me. And I wasn't crying, and I didn't feel anything at all. Just anger that they were talking about God at my friend's service. I thought about the boat in the trunk of the car, and that was the only thing that kept me from walking out. But she was crying, and I knew there would be hell to pay.

"I thought he was gonna do it when he told me he was moving in here," Sierra told us. "He's tried three times before. Pills once. And I think cutting himself or something. But this was the way he talked about. He used to tell me he would give away all his things, and move somewhere quiet, and put a bag over his head. He knew what he was doing. I thought he was going to do it when he moved into the basement, but then he seemed so happy here. I've never seen him happy for so long."
It wasn't clear at first. Not totally. Peter loved nitrous. More than anyone I've ever met. I'm not sure why. All I know is that, for me, it slows the world almost to stopping. Peter's mind was truly brilliant, and always going. Maybe it let him slow down enough, for just that minute. In any case, it could have been a stupid accident. That's what we wanted to believe, when everyone was there in the living room. I remember Princess and Laura were sitting on the couch, the one facing the big windows that looked down into Ravenna. But Sierra knew. She knew. And even though we wanted to think it was a mistake, a stupid way to get high that went horribly wrong, Sierra knew. And we did too. But it was just two days since we got the first call, the one about Jase, and it didn't seem possible. I remember Laura's face. It was kinda twisted. The way they say someone's "twisted with grief." I don't remember feeling anything.

Seamus was twisted up, too. I think the idea came to him the next day. "He told me he wanted a Viking funeral," he said. "We have to give it for him."
Things from those days aren't so clear, anymore. Here's what I remember, clearly. The pictures I have in my head.

Seamus and I, walking through a Home Depot with random lumber. Some 1x4's, and glue, and nails.

Seamus and I, sitting on the floor of the basement. In the southwest corner of the basement, where there was a big, open space and a light hanging from a chain and the cobwebs are considerate enough to stay in the corner. Everyone else had given up, by then. We're not exactly shipwrights. I don't remember what tools I had at that point, but at best a few power tools, a hammer and some screwdrivers. The light cast those ugly, deep shadows everywhere. But I remember Seamus's face. It was even longer than usual, and sunken a little, and his eyes were somewhere between frantic and pleading. And I knew that if we were going to come out of this, we had to finish the boat. I remember the sawdust on the floor, and the glue, and the nails. I remember the look on Seamus's face when we affixed our dowel-mast, and put the action figure body with Cthulhu's head in place beside the mast.

I remember the way the frozen grass sounded at Carkeek. The way it crunched underfoot, and thinking that if I was barefoot it would be stabbing into my feet. It was cold as fuck. Colder than Seattle usually gets. There were maybe ten of us. And I was helping Sean carry our makeshift boat, soaked in gasoline. Cthulhu was tipped over beside the mast. The mast didn't have a sail, as I remember. And the boat was nothing like a Viking ship. More like some child's idea of a rowboat with a mast, much too small, stuck in the middle. But it was our boat. And Seamus was carrying it with the kind of reverence that befits some ancient treasure. I remember the service was bouncing in my head. "Yea, tho I walk in the Valley of the Shadow," and all that. I remember the inside of the funeral home like it was burned into my eyes, white walls, flowers, folding chairs. Coulda been an al-anon meeting. I skipped the casket, I think. I remember flashing to that room, as we walked through the park. I think there was snow on the ground, although that might have been a year later, with his parents, when we went for a memorial. But the main thing I remember is nothing. I felt nothing. I wasn't angry. I wasn't hurting. I was only cold, I just knew that we had to put that boat into the water, we had to light it on fire, we had to send Cthulhu-Pete to his Viking funeral. For Seamus, if for no one else. There was something that told me that, the same thing that knew the only thing I could say to Seamus 5 years later, in much darker times still. But that's another story.

And when we got to the shore, and put the boat to sea, we loaded our Roman Candles, lit the fuses, and waited.

But the little balls of spark blew away down the wind. Or they broke up before they reached the boat, little green and yellow and red sparks overwhelmed by winter and wind and sea. And pretty soon the candles stopped hissing and popping, and we were just standing there, watching our little boat float away dark against the dark water of the Puget Sound.

"What're we going to do? We have to set it on fire," Seamus said. When they say that someone "sounded small" that's the voice I imagine. A desperation that's just not enough to beat the wind, not enough to carry to the waves, not enough for a sea god, or even a nymph, to hear and take pity. He sounded small, and I felt small. I looked at him, and I knew he was right, but I couldn't do anything, didn't feel anything.

The boat was probably twenty feet from shore, and another twenty down the beach, by then. Seamus was somewhere between tears and screaming. I had a sinking feeling, the kind you get when a plan starts taking on water. Like in the movies when one guy gets trapped behind a door in the flooding engine room, and his friend has to watch through the tiny glass window while the room fills up. We were frozen in place, standing on the cold rocks and sparse sand. And our little boat was bobbing away, Cthulhu's tentacled head and small plastic body drifting into the sound.

"I'll get it."

I honestly don't remember if there was much discussion. But Princess was in her skivvies, and wading into the water. I could see her shoulders shake with the cold as she half slid, half swam out to the boat. I could see her face contorting with the cold as she swam back, towing our boat behind her.

How it Ends

She pulled it onto the rocky beach, shivering. Maybe it's just how I want to remember things, but I'm pretty sure I gave her my overcoat. She pulled her clothes on over her wet panties and bra, and she stood shivering. "Well? Are you guys going to light it?" she asked. Diana. That was always what drew me to her, even though our moth and candle routine never lined up right for either of us to see what it would be like. When I was the moth, her flame was covered, and when she was the moth, another girl always had my flame. But that was what drew me, first, her attitude. She never waited for concensus, like the rest of the city. She just acted. She just did. She just said. Acted on what no one else would. Did what no one else thought of. Said what everyone was thinking. Like jumping into February water in the Puget Sound to drag a boat back to shore. Like saying, "Well? Are you guys going to light it?"

We didn't waste any time, then. But the gas had either been waterlogged or evaporated, and it was hard to light. Even if we'd scored a direct hit with every ball, I don't think the Roman Candles would have caught it on fire. But our lighters did, after a while. A kind of weak, low flame, barely standing up to the wind. But we pushed our little boat into the current, and watched the prow rise above the foam, then sink into the waves. We watched until we couldn't see the flames anymore, until the dark and the wind and the sound swallowed even the shadow. And Princess never complained of the cold, huddled under someone's jacket, maybe mine.

But the boat was too far out against the black soon enough. And we began walking back, feet crunching in the snow. And Diana's teeth chattering. We laughed about our little boat on the high seas. About a cruise ship passing it. About it washing ashore in China, or Kamchatka. About someone finding Cthulhu-Peter in this little charred boat, somewhere across the sea. The fire wasn't enough to engulf the boat, no true Viking funeral. But it was enough to melt a little plastic action figure into a puddle. It was enough to burn the Cthulhu head Peter had put on the figure, so I guess it was a kind of Viking funeral. I remember the way Diana's teeth chattered. I remember that Seamus looked present again. Like he had done what he needed to do for himself, for Pete. And I remember feeling nothing.

Epilogue

I started at Gameworks when I was nineteen. Within a month, all my friends were 21, except the girls. Diana was still seventeen, then, and so was Laura. But they were cute girls with fake ID's. After work, everyone went to Von's Martini-Manhattan Memorial. Or to Blowfish (it was still called Blowfish back then). Everyone except me.

Sometime in the fall of the next year, when I was twenty, I got off shift and Pete was getting off, too. He said, "C'mon, let's go to Von's." I didn't say anything, I just went, praying not to get carded. I didn't. And then we went to the 'Fish. And I didn't get carded. And after everyone else had joined us, and we were well toasted, Pete came back from the bathroom. "Hey, you never came out before. Let's see your ID. It must be good. I wouldn't serve you." Everyone laughed.
"I don't have one."
"What?"
"You've been with me all night, dude. I don't have one. No one's carded me."
Pete looked around the bar. He looked back at me and laughed.

When I started writing this, I looked around for pictures of Pete. I only found the one. It's from a party we threw in October, 2000. About 4 months before Peter put a bag over his head. He's sitting on Lucas's bed, dressed as Rasputin.

Most of his costume is off by that point. We were throwing a "Dark Shadows" party for Halloween. He's holding a whipped cream cracker. From the look of his face, it's post-hit. Nitrous slow and laughing. I remember when we found that picture, a few months later. No one else wanted it. But I thought it was appropriate. Peter would have liked it.

Peter didn't go out without humor. Things kept coming to us, for months. First it was the Girl Scout. She showed up to deliver cookies for us. None of us had ordered cookies. "The receipt says it's a gift from Peter Stansfield."

And the magazine. A gay newsletter, addressed to Seamus. Peter went out with humor, left little traces for us to wonder over, or laugh at. I wonder if it was his way of saying sorry? Or maybe just his idea of a good joke to play, on his way out the door. Gay magazines and cookies from beyond the grave.

Pete, I wish I could remember the story you told me, beyond the wasp demon. We were walking to catch the 64 over on 35th. I don't remember where we were going, but it was late summer, or maybe early spring. It was warm, and you were walking fast, talking faster, and wearing your khaki shorts and black hiking boots. I wish I had that story, or something else you'd written. I wish I had the story we wrote together, about an Australian Nazi fish spy, but it's not in my journals anywhere. I wish I had more to go on than a memory of you and Scott fighting to see who could leave the biggest tip at the 'Fish. I wish I had been a little older when you went, so I could have understood better. You were probably the brightest man I ever knew. And, other than your choice to leave, one of the best friends. I didn't understand then. I understand a little more, now.

I've been listening to Pandora, something you would have loved, while I'm writing this. And of all the random things, it decided to play something from those days. Moby came on. I can't help but think this has some small synergy. So this one is for you, Pete. I hope your boat made it to warm water, somewhere. I hope Cthulhu-Peter survived the fire, lived to baffle some fisherman, on some distant shore.



Hey, Hey, Hey, Woman, it's alright.
Hey, Hey, Hey, Woman, it's alright.

In my dreams I'm dying all the time
When I wake its kaleidoscopic mind
I never meant to hurt you
I never meant to lie
So this is goodbye
This is goodbye

Hey, Hey, Hey, Woman, it's alright.
Hey, Hey, Hey, Woman, it's alright.

Tell the truth you never wanted me

Tell me...

In my dreams I'm jealous all the time
Then I wake I'm going out of my mind
Going out of my mind

Hey, Hey, Hey, Woman, it's alright

In The Beginning

The year I really grew up actually started two months before. I was 21 then, in November. I was sitting alone in my girlfriend's dank basement apartment. My dad called. He said, "son, your dog is dying."

But that's a prelude, and for another time. Tonight, my story is about Jason, and about the next year, the first year I really grew up. The year that started ten years ago tonight.

I don't really remember when I met Jase. But there are a lot of memories. I remember walking towards the main entrance, on the second floor of LHS, and Jason smiling and swinging his backpack. I don't remember where we were headed. I remember skipping 5th period (we all had 4th off and first lunch) so we could finish watching Billy Madison for the 18th time, or so we could keep playing Street Fighter Alpha in his basement.

I remember his patented line: "You're a deeee-iiick! Get outa my house!" I remember the night I was sitting on his bed, and he poured beer on my shoe. It ran off my shoe and onto his blanket. And somehow that was my fault, and I got the line. I remember laughing in his kitchen one night, laughing so hard I almost puked, and I remember the night we took turns downing double shots from a handle of Captain Morgan until I did puke. He ended up worshiping the toilet, and I spent several hours under a bush in the back yard. I remember teaching him the Mohawk words of greeting, the "words that come before all else." Years later, before I really understood the depths of his darkness, he still held those words close in a way that makes me feel a little less sad now.

And I remember his guitar. I don't remember the name of the instrumental he wrote. Blue something. I don't remember the notes or the tune. But I remember the tone, and the slow building as the melody unfolds, like going somewhere else, like the world of suburbia, and high school angst, and nights spent driving around listlessly looking for anything, and the girl who wouldn't look at me after I asked her out, like all of it was some dream and now I was waking up in the real world. Waking up in the world where I belonged. It was about four minutes, but it always felt a lot longer.

This blog has been dead for a while. It's been more than a year since I last wrote here. And I suppose it's fitting that I resurrect it now, and for this. For death. The year that I turned 22, and the five years that followed, those were death's years. But none more than 2001. 2001 was the year that began the Suicide Squeeze. A vice of confusion that squeezed adulthood into us and pressed down hard, fast and relentlessly. I lost four friends in 14 months, and more over the next five years. And I've never really talked about any of them. Now that it's been ten years since it started, it's probably time to say something. If only so I don't forget. So this will be a chronicle, of sorts, a decade-old memorial. It's probably about time I took the journey. And tonight is Jason's night.

Jason loved music. He loved a joke. And he loved hallucinogenic drugs. LSD, 'shrooms, E, Special K. I guess I'll never quite understand, although I dipped in all of them at times, what they did for him. They were his refuge from something, but became the place he couldn't escape. I remember the day Janine broke up with him. We were standing on the corner, and he was yelling. I think it was cold, but it might have only felt that way. He was swinging his bag, angry, and he followed it with a hit of paper. I think it might have come off the sheet I bought that fall that lasted into the winter. I don't remember that part clearly. I remember wondering why he would want to take acid at a time like that. And I remember not saying anything.

By the time we all drove to Seattle, he had begun to show the strain. Who knows what crevasses the drugs opened in his mind, but they were beginning to widen by then. Alex and I drove together first, then Jase and Dan followed a few weeks later. To hear Dan tell it, Jase drove with a kind of fanatic adherence to illogical principals, putting the car in neutral on any downslope, and riding the pedal to the floor on an incline. Seeing how he operated on arrival it's easy to believe.

When we settled into our new home, Jase started to wander. Over the year, he was more and more prone to strange outbursts and changes of mind. I would come home to find him alone in the living room, moving like someone stuck in a vat of jello. If he acknowledged me, he would stop, and smile his lopsided smile. "Tai Chi," he would grin. But it wasn't. You could see he was just trying to make sense of space.

He invited random strangers to our house. One night, he brought home a couple of Ave Rats, the homeless kids who scam and busk and hustle on University Way. They were nice enough, but I had to ask them not to shoot up in my bathroom anymore. Jase loaned them his guitar the next day, and it never came back. He didn't believe that could happen, that they'd just take his guitar. I remember him on the living room floor, half squatting, other half in a lotus position, rocking and scratching his head and asking himself why. He wasn't angry at himself for the obvious mistake of loaning a strange, homeless junkie his guitar. He was asking why they had taken it and not come back.

By the time our year in that apartment ran out, Jase was gone. But we were all a little too young to really understand. I'm not sure what we would have done if we did, or if we could have done something. But the fact was, we didn't. Jason's erratic behavior and swings of mood were annoying, frustrating, but not frightening as they should have been. We were supposed to be out on the first of October, 1999, and everyone else had a plan of where to go. I was at school in Olympia, for a short lived stint at Evergreen. Alex and Dan found a place in Northgate up the street from a strip club. But Jason seemed lost. Well, no, he was lost. I came back on the second, and found him still in the apartment, none of his things packed. I was furious. But there he was, sitting on the living room floor, in a four-bedroom apartment empty of anything that wasn't his. And I couldn't stay angry, because he was clearly scared. He didn't seem to understand where he was, really. He told me he wanted to go home.

I don't really remember what happened over the next year, for him. Jason packed some few of his things and drove his old beater home. Home to Lexington. I remember that Shar was worried about him, and called us. But I didn't know what to say. Jase found his way into a halfway house. He would call, once or twice a month, to say hi. Then it dropped to six weeks, then eight.

And then, on January 29th, 2001, my mom called. I don't remember where she got it from. Dan called right after. Ma Dukes had called him, too. We gathered up in the Summerhouse. I remember two scenes from that night. In the first, we were sitting on the stoop in front, silent. In the second, we were on the couch, talking. I don't remember anything that was said.

Over the coming days, we got more of the story. He had been doing better, was the story. He was living in a halfway house in Vermont, and when I talked to him the last few times, he sounded clear. But the voices wouldn't stop talking to him. Eventually, he did the only thing he could do. He knelt in the bathtub, over the drain, and opened his throat. It sounded like he didn't want to leave a mess. He was always considerate, in the oddest ways sometimes. I don't know how he managed, but, when he had lost most of his blood, he found his way outside. That was fitting. Jase was always happiest in the woods. He let the last drops go in the air, in Vermont, in January. It was cold that night. There's no other kind of night at that time of year in Vermont. But I hope he could see the stars.

I remember two conversations with Jason, late in the game. I'm not sure when the first happened, but it was one of the last times I saw his face. He had the same look he had when the Ave Rats took his guitar. He was pained, didn't understand something. And he said to me, almost pleading, "Shonkwaia'tishon Wat'ganowalando. Prayerful greeting, Creator. You taught me that, Ev. I remember," (Mohawk friends, please forgive my egregious misspelling). The second, and the last time I spoke to him, he was doing well, he said. He wanted to send me money he owed me. I was driving his car when two tires went flat. He wanted to pay me back. Some now, some later.

It was ten years ago tonight that it happened. Ten years ago tomorrow that they found him outside the house, and ten years tomorrow night when word found us. I'm on my couch with my laptop, writing in candlelight. Our power just went out, again. It was out for two days from 4" of snow, a laughable situation if it wasn't so fucking cold. It came back this afternoon, then blinked out again. I've got enough battery to finish my post and an air card to post from, and I'm glad for that.

I remember you, Jason. You had the brightest smile, and the goofiest laugh. You were a monster if you landed Ryu, and I don't know if I ever won against you in that fight. You had the most delicate hands. All they needed was a string, and the world melted away. It was a frightening world, then, as it is for everyone at 17, but I think perhaps more frightening for you. I wonder where your music took you. I wish it could have taken you somewhere far enough that you didn't have to leave us forever, somewhere you could go on it and then come home.

I was so angry, when they told me. Angry, and scared, and guilty. Angry, and scared, and guilty, and no room, then, for real sorrow. But tonight is ten years. Almost exactly now, near midnight. And tonight I cry for you, Jason "Cheetah" Hester. For the first time, after all these years.

I wish I had known how to help you, or even that help was deeply needed. I wish I could have seen past the petty annoyances and understood your pain. I wish I could have told you what your guitar and your laugh meant, back when we still had them. I wish we could have saved you. And since I know that I can't change any of those things, I'll change the one thing I can. Tonight, my friend, I'll cry for you.

Rainer Maria Rilke, redux

Rilke is one of my favorites. Beautiful, haunting, concise... this is a great poem from him for the season:

Autumn Day

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free....... Read More

and the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then,
and pressthe final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander the boulevards, up and down,restlessly,
while the dry leaves are blowing.
****
and, since i'm an ass, i've paraphrased it below for the modern age:

it's about to get cold, chumps.
better get your fruit before the frost does.
cold? hungry? not gonna change.... Read More
alone? get used to it.
by the way, rake your fucking lawn.

i'm sure it means something, i just don't know what

i found a little, dessicated frog.
its legs, its body, leathered by the sun.
it wasn't dead, although it would be soon,
it lay on the short grass down at the park
i go to with the dog most afternoons.

just now, a memory flashed past my eyes.
i must have been 15, 16 at most,
and we were driving, late at night, along
a little country highway headed to
the cabin in New Hampshire where we spent
the month of August. both sides of the road
went down to marshes. as we came around
a bend, we drove into a heavy rain.
and suddenly the road had come alive
with frogs, in thousands, crossing back and forth.
the rain was crackling on the volvo's roof
and frogs were popping underneath the wheels.
my mom pulled over, shut the engine down,
but even after we had waited there
for half an hour, frogs covered the road,
and it was late, too late to sit and wait.

i only saw the frog because i heard
it croak, a raspy little sound, stiffled,
as if it had a frog stuck in it's throat.
and even though i knew that it would die
more slowly if i left it where it lay,
i couldn't bring myself to lift my boot
and bring it down and crush that little voice.