Issue 21

D-L Alvarez

i. Tom sat alone at the bar

This was a Mexican restaurant in Oakland. Milo was in the back area, taking the corner stage to sing karaoke. It was 1998 and Milo was celebrating his birthday, but then the plug was pulled, mid-“Never Let Me Down Again.”

“Awwwww! …”

They thought it was a burnt fuse, but quickly learned that the whole neighborhood was out of power. Tom had a flashlight in his bag that he held like a microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, we can’t just call it a night. This man—what’s your name sir?”

“Milo.”

“Milo here is turning the big Five-Oh.”

Applause.

Milo shook his head in the dark. He didn’t know Tom, Tom knew none of the birthday party, and Milo was only twenty-nine. All that was irrelevant. No night-out lost steam on Tom’s dime. By candlelight he got the patrons to join in a cappella rounds of one song after another. Sometimes even a small mishap allows people to drop their guards and unite under the banner of a moment.

Tom visited tables, trawling secret talents for a makeshift show. The bartender lent out a stronger flashlight that was operated like a spot. “Ladies and gentlemen, I believe it is customary for the birthday boy to show off his birthday suit, is it not?”

Cheers and woots!

Milo gave Tom a grinning side-eye, but eventually caved to popular demand with a clumsy striptease down to a hairless chest and tighty-whities.

“And remember, ladies and gentlemen, the fine people working under these unique challenges … have pets at home that need to be spayed, neutered. None of that comes cheap, so please tip generously.”

At 11:30, complimentary rounds of melting ice cream: strawberry, Mexican chocolate, vanilla, and cardamom. Tom and Milo shared a bowl. “So who the fuck are you,” asked Milo, “the Birthday Fairy?” They did not go home together that night, but started dating shortly after.

It got serious, quick. In under a year they invested in a property in Humboldt County, a summer cabin with a makeshift shower in a barebones kitchen full of spiders. Rusted barbecue supplies were piled under a plastic tarp. They worked to make a home for all seasons, turning the screened-in patio into an insulated bedroom.

The two enjoyed all shades of wine under a tin chandelier that was a gift from Milo’s mother. Because they romanced the idea of rising early, it felt like they always slept late, but that was its own pleasure. Some mornings they donned boots and hiked along deer paths. Afternoons, Tom went to his workshop, a toolshed behind the cabin, digging fingers into wet clay.

Fridays they drove into town so Tom could drop off any new pottery with Dana, who ran a small chain of boutiques. There were five up and down the coast, specializing in handcrafted items. Tom made gnomish creatures riddled with holes and floppy pockets. Their spilling guts, deep pits, crooked drooling grins, and bent backs came alive with greenery if kept in damp shady corners, like mutant knee-high chia pets.

Initially all the residents of Bolinas had to have one, then Eureka and Half Moon Bay, spreading throughout the affluent pothead set. His first press was not from a crafts publication but in High Times. That was Dana’s connection. She talked Tom’s ears off with her own ideas, molding the air in front of her in a contact creative high.

For Milo, Friday meant spa day. The spa was a gym with a lap pool and sauna. The owner gave Milo a discount to compensate for the fact that he could only make it in once a week. Of course, every gym has members who prepay a year then barely attend, but those suckers lacked Milo’s charm and bargaining skills.

After an EP’s worth of Dana, Tom excused himself to stock up on groceries and sundries, and at least once a month the boys met up at Lucky’s afterwards, where they fed its old jukebox with quarters and themselves with greasy bar-food. Lucky was a caricature lost in time, missing a front tooth, red cheeks, small smiling eyes, large puppet hands, and a string of awful jokes. Some old some new, none that you dare retell in mixed company. Not just dirty, but packed with isms and inspiring more groans than laughs. Still, by the third or fourth round Milo and Tom repeated punch lines back to the bartender and they all giggled. Then the boys drunk-drove home. High beams brought to life a church of trees arched over the empty mountain road that twisted back to their place.

They celebrated Milo’s thirty-third and their four-year anniversary at Lucky’s in March of 2002. Dana and her partner joined them. The next morning Milo had a cough, which he chalked up to aging. “My body doesn’t want me staying up past midnight anymore,” he said. But the cough continued for days and then weeks after.

Like a smoker’s hack, it was mostly in the morning and sometimes produced phlegm. Otherwise he felt fine. A month and a half into it, he woke with a fever and thought, “Finally, this flu will blossom.” He figured once the fever broke, it would be over. Instead, it worsened. He stayed in bed longer and had less and less appetite. Even trips to the bathroom exhausted him.

So, Tom walked Milo to the car and drove to the nearest medical center, which was a renovated Dairy Queen. The doctor asked about insurance. His tone assumed they hadn’t any. Tom produced a plastic card with provider information. An ambulance was called to take Milo two more towns down the road.

The results of Milo’s tests told them his condition was advanced, something that had been developing since long before that first cough. In fact, calling it a condition oversimplified it. Milo had a list of internal traumas, two of them advanced beyond repair. The focus then was to make his last days as comfortable as possible. They dripped morphine into his veins while draining fluid from his lungs, but his breathing stayed raspy. He wasn’t there a full week before they pronounced him dead.

Tom stayed in his car that night in the hospital parking lot, unable to make himself leave the vicinity of the body, which had been moved to the basement. His joints, neck, and head ached the next day, and he felt lost. He took aspirin from a plastic bottle that lived in the glove compartment, washed the chalky pills down with a Sprite he bought at a drive-through, and drove away from the sun.

He parked next to an apple orchard, listening without thought to the song of crickets and the white noise of traffic from a nearby highway. He turned the car around in a numb dream state. Some hours in he was headed down that familiar winding mountain road, but left the high beams off this time, even though the road was empty as ever. He slept once again in his car, this time in front of his own house.

The cause of death was AIDS-related. This shocked both Tom and Milo. They’d tested negative when they started dating, and were together every day since. Four years? It felt like less than four months, thought Tom, a blink. At the same time, the day they met was a lifetime ago.

In the following months Tom spent lots of time on the front porch, staring. Autumn settled into the fields and groves, and he wrapped himself in a blanket. The days got shorter, but he stayed in the dark until he nodded out a few times. Only then would he forge into the cold house, stumbling blindly past dusty mementos. They were cloaked in shadows, but he could feel their dull, dead eyes watch him on his path to the bedroom, the windows of which he sealed with cardboard.

 

ii. Who’s Milo?

First I heard of him was when Tom and he moved north. Chester, Tom’s Oakland bar-buddy, told me. Chester and I both used to go to the EndUp in the early nineties. We knew each other by sight long before he and Tom joined forces, but ran in different circles. He found me at the Hole in the Wall, where I’d gone after hearing one of my history students speak at a gallery down the block.

“Vince! You’re gonna shit. You know Tom’s been seeing this guy, right? No? Christ, he’s head over heels! You must have heard. Anyway, he and his guy, Milo-something, they’re moving. Moving! To some shack in Bum-fuck, Idaho. They’re going to raise exotic chickens and adopt green-eyed children to gather the eggs … Shit in a pink outhouse.” After each sentence he studied me with a raised brow. “Tom’s ceramics are flying off the shelf, since that write-up,” he said, rubbing his thumb against the other four fingers to imply a fan of cash. “That man was a catch! Girl, you let a good one get away.”

Tom and I were boyfriends in the early nineties, but this story was breaking in 1999. Chester wagged a finger, then signaled to the bartender that his glass was empty. Once he got a refill, I patted his knee and raised my glass, “To the lovebirds?” Chester wanted to get a rise out of me so he wouldn’t feel lousy alone. He was the one losing someone. Tom and I never saw each other. There was no animosity, but his life re-centered in Oakland and I seldom made it across the Bay.

Four years later … Chester was again the messenger, again at Hole in the Wall. As before, it wasn’t enough to share the news, he poked at me with it. “Who the fuck doesn’t know their status?”

Tom was kind with me, before and after the breakup, so where did this meanness come from? Maybe Tom said nasty things behind my back? Chester didn’t know me enough to have a grudge … unless it was simply that I had been Tom’s boyfriend once. It’s not hard to imagine Chester wishing for more than a friendship from Tom. It would explain why he didn’t have anything nice to say about Milo either, even at a time like this.

Milo and I were the kind of men who would leave Tom, while Chester was loyal. If only he could find someone to reward that. Even Tom, who Chester lauded and defended, even Tom abandoned him.

“Dead of fucking AIDS. In 2002!” Chester was fuming. “I hope to God Tom’s clean.”

My whole body cringed, the retraction readable from across the bar. I hoped that all Chester saw was a sympathetic gesture towards my former lover. That was a part of it. First and foremost though, I cringed at that unfortunate euphemism. You see it on gay hook-up profiles: I M clean, U B 2.

Men who use that word as a stand-in for HIV-negative are the same ones who use the word dirty for shit. He was dirty is code for he failed to douche all evidence of humanity from his colon. Once your asshole was washed, only clean cocks allowed. The flip side of each euphemism is implied; HIV-positive people are shit, and a clean asshole is a visual and tactile metaphor for disease free—another catch phrase of the same demographic. How could an STD live in an ass rinsed so thoroughly even the faintest taste of salty perspiration was absent?

“I really do, Vince.” Chester was going to repeat it, and I couldn’t stop him, not without giving him another barb to use against me in the future. “I hope he’s clean. Do you know if he is—clean? He says he’s clean, but I don’t think he’s had the good sense to get tested since it happened. He’s just moping in the middle of nowhere, doesn’t answer his phone. I’d check in on him if I could get away. I don’t know why they had to move so far. There’s countryside closer than that.”

“I’ll contact him,” I said. Chester had me worried as well, though vanity kept me from admitting I didn’t have Tom’s number and no idea if his old email was in use.

“Thanks, Vince. And hey, I know this whole thing must be especially upsetting to you.” Chester handed me his own number, written on bar stationary. Did he have them already written out in his pocket, like makeshift business cards? “You can call if you need to talk it out.”

Only as I stepped outside did the impact of Chester’s earlier comment sink in. He knew I hadn’t been in contact with Tom for years, so why ask me about Tom’s status? Was Chester asking if Tom was positive as far back as when the two of us were a couple? Was the extended logic that Tom recklessly infected Milo? Who knows what was going on behind those glassy eyes. Maybe he wanted to shame all of us for whatever sexual practices he imagined us having … without him.

Tom and I always used condoms. We were negative, but in those years I went to funerals more than the Laundromat. Besides, condoms helped in other ways. Without them, I came too quickly. But why was I explaining this inside my own head? Whatever the implication, Chester’s words did their trick. Do you know if he is? … This whole thing must be especially upsetting to you. It was subtle enough that he might have meant nothing by it, but his scrunched face accused. Chester held me in contempt, and I felt dirty.

 

iii. Dear Tom

Chester told me about your terrible loss. You must be devastated. I’ve only heard glowing things about Milo, and know he meant the world to you. I’m still in San Francisco if you want to visit. I’m around the corner from our old storefront space. My roommate and I have an office that doubles as a guest room. More accurately we have a guest room that has in it a desk-sized container for stamps and post-its. I’m sure you have many friends offering similar, but count me as one more.

Vince

 

I hit send without expectation. The last time we were in contact was nearly a decade before. However, four days later there was a response.

 

Vince, you old fart,

Great to hear from you, man. It has been a few. Sorry I never answered those emails of yore. You were in my thoughts, but I suck at follow-through. And once Milo was in the picture, ho boy. I guess you could say the picture got stuck in a frame and the frame got stuck on a shelf.

The cabin is a serial killer dream-shack: Plain Jane on the outside, but brimming with creepy personality. A magpie nest full of the shiny objects we’ve collected. We’re such packrats. Whoops. I’m mixing metaphors—and species! That’s fitting. It’s cluttered to the rafters with kitschy natural science.

 

From there Tom took me on a written tour of the knickknacks. Things like a taxidermy rabbit standing upright on its haunches, dressed in a vest, and sun hat, and a bank where a monkey with long fingers grabs your coin and drops it into his pocket. He listed a catalog of things minus visuals, in a situation that ached for visuals. He wrote in the present tense, describing objects as his eyes fell upon them. Then, after many anecdotes in which he often referred to Milo—also in the present tense—he ended abruptly.

I wish you could’ve seen it.

No name at the bottom. Not unusual for an email, but for one this long it stood out.

I wrote back.

 

Hi Tom.

Your place sounds amazing. I’d love to see it. Next month my roommate is doing a performance thing in Oregon. We’re driving up because the car is her main prop. Maybe I can visit? You’re welcome to join us on the rest of the drive. She’s good. I’m including her website.

oxo

—Vince

 

(15 minutes later)

 

Vinnie,

Thanks, but I’m in no mood for humans. Of us two, Milo was the host. You know me. You’re sweet, but I wouldn’t know what to do with you here, other than recommend hikes you could take. I’m in the workshop a lot catching up on back orders. Once they’re done, I might travel. For now I need down time.

I didn’t open the link. No offense, but I loathe performance art and didn’t want to get vomit on my keyboard.

 

You know me, he said. We were a couple for four years, one of which we lived together in a storefront. He pinched vertical landscapes out of clay at a table down near the door, while I typed rough drafts on an actual typewriter “upstairs” at a desk next to our loft bed. I wrote about places where queers gathered in the Cold War decades. Depending on the publication, editors sent rejections citing too much or not enough sex.

I cooked. He did the dishes, using the same sink where he washed art supplies of varied toxicity. I knew him. For example, it made me laugh that, having offered to pay him a visit, he told me to take a hike. That was Tom’s humor: jokes that could slip by anyone not expecting them. The vomit joke wasn’t subtle, but there to remind me with whom I was chatting.

That in mind, I had no idea what I should read into the parts where he described himself as a withdrawn homebody. Tom was gregariously social when we were together. His collection served as evidence; many were gifts from people who loved his company. A flea market with Tom was a garden party. He learned names quickly. Every object had a history he could recite, and he kept in contact with some of the sellers.

Granted, this was a Tom of long ago. People change. But if he wasn’t being sarcastic, when had the change taken place and why would he think I knew about it? Was it gradual, or a matter of relativity? Maybe Milo was such a butterfly he made Tom look like a shrinking violet in comparison? Those options would be fine. I worried though that the antisocial Tom only existed following Milo’s death, and that his note saying stay away was a plea for me to come as soon as possible. I returned to the line from his previous message: I wish you could’ve seen it.

 

Dear Tom,

Let me know if I’m being invasive, but I would love to spend a day hiking around that area. The city is feeling claustrophobic. I’ll be the opposite of overbearing. I could even ignore you completely to give physical presence to your self-imposed reclusion, so that you don’t relax and mistakenly think you are simply enjoying the quiet solitude.

—You know me. 😉

Your friend,

Vince

A week passed without response. I ran into Chester, this time in the Castro, which was not his common stomping grounds, a point he worked into his hello: “Well, well, so this is where I have to come to find you!” I was sitting on the steps of the Country Club, a place for people in recovery. “Lord, you’re not a teetotaler now, are you? Have you ever even finished a single pint in one sitting? Oh I get it, you’re faking it to meet men!” Chester spoke in a stage voice, winking to the others hanging out.

“My friend Ken is inside,” I said with a forced smile. “What brings you to these parts?” Why did I let this guy under my skin? Normally we crossed paths three times a year at most, but he always came at me with digs. Probably he meant nothing by it. It’s that gay thing some affect, intended to come off as witty. They borrow it from television shows about catty women, shows that imitate mid-century films, also about a type of woman who delivered biting cocktail humor through perfectly painted lips. The versions on television are sloppier, shelf liquor without a mixer. The gay fans take it down a notch further, till the “jokes” sting of rubbing alcohol with a raised eyebrow or a puckered lip for punctuation.

In other words, this affectation was common enough that it should have landed like water on a duck’s back, but when Chester did it my feathers ruffled. I think because coming from him it was even more unnatural. When he was himself Chester was a no-frills pot-bellied guy whose wardrobe was determined by whatever his sister gifted him. His neck was often sunburned because he always went to his nephew’s softball games. Where most gay men relax into themselves in the safety of a gay bar, Chester was the opposite. His stilted bitchiness screamed, desperate to be liked! It fueled a vicious circle: jokes begging laughs but falling flat turned him bitter, making the jokes meaner, jokes that would do anything to have you to sidle up to them, while pushing you further and further away.

“I’m meeting a friend next door,” said Chester. It was understood that next door meant Uncle Bert’s, the bar five doors down. “Did you ever write Tom?”

“We exchanged messages. He’s depressed, naturally, but has his signature humor. He’ll pull through. I offered to visit.”

“What did he say?”

“He wants to be alone, but at the same time he encouraged me to talk him into it. Rather than admit he wants company, he’ll push the issue, so that once he gives in he’s doing me a favor. You know how he rolls.”

“All I know is he’s direct with me, but that’s how I am with everyone. Tom’s one of these mirror personalities, you know? He reflects what people give him. That’s why everyone likes him. He appeals to our narcissistic tendencies. That’s your friend in the tank top?” Chester pointed to the top of the steps where Ken was chatting with a woman. “Girl, I guess we know your type.”

I realized what Chester was talking about. Though the two would never be confused in a lineup, there were shared characteristics. Ken was a pale, freckled, redhead with a cowboy smile, while Tom was perpetually tanned, a dirty blond whose happiest face looked like a sneer, but both had a wide gait verging on bowlegged, and cartoonish energy. Both had broad shoulders in spite of zero interest in sports. Both enjoyed playing the mule-headed cynic, even though they were kittens underneath, and both were about six years younger than I. Tom and Ken were of a type, though certainly not my only type.

Before Tom I’d had three boyfriends. The first two were versions of the kind of men I grew up around in Gilroy: brown, skinny, short … humorless, methodical, and full of small-town generosity. The third was an aspiring actor.

Post-Tom there was only Carl, and that lasted only a summer. Carl was more an experience than a relationship. We met on a Paris-bound plane: my getaway, his home. I saw him every day for three months. He was charcoal black, twice my age, and something of an Einstein. Being with him was a drug, in that all my functions and habits were altered. My brain raced constantly, I slept less but deeper, and my character relaxed into someone more trusting and spontaneous. Even my body odor adopted an unfamiliar metallic quality. How much was Carl and how much France, I cannot say. The affair ended when I boarded the return flight. That was the deal from day one: “I don’t do long-distance relationships,” he warned. Our time together had an expiration date, though he was so romantic, I got fooled into thinking that he would at least invite a second adventure. Maybe it’s best that never happened. You can’t repeat the novelty of holiday passion, and Carl had no interest in whatever is the natural follow-up.

At any rate, the times with Carl are anti-narrative, more mood than story. Chester didn’t know anyone I dated, save Tom, so from his perspective Tom was my type. And Chester was right to see Ken as Tom-like, even if I hadn’t noticed till Chester pointed it out. Kudos Chester on an excellent character read.

I thought about Chester’s comment on how Tom simply mirrored the behavior he was handed. It might have been a dig, or maybe Chester was simply being straightforward, and maybe the reason Tom made me read between the lines was because I was equally obtuse and equally too stubborn to own how obtuse I am. If so, another good read on Chester’s part. That’s probably what bugs me: he sees through me. Or that’s how it felt that day on the steps. For a second I wanted to apologize, but for what? I suppose I felt ashamed for making an effort to be nice, instead of just being nice.

Sorry I judged you, Chester, is what I thought to myself.

Chester said, “I better not keep my date waiting. And you should grab yours before someone steals him. You keep letting them get away.” He winked and walked up the sidewalk, and I returned to finding him incredibly annoying, as if those few seconds of seeing him in a new light were merely a sun flare.

Yet another week passed, and then:

 

Darling.

So concerned! I forgot that about you, Vince. I don’t like manners. People have them not to be good, but to look down their noses at those who lack manners. But you, sir, are sincere.

In that spirit, I guess I’m a sadist, because I sincerely enjoy watching you tiptoe round words like ‘depression,’ ‘suicidal,’ and the pop-psych that goes with that vocabulary. I know it’s on people’s minds. Chester sent an email, too. Not much meat on it, but he sent right away, and he hates to write. That in mind, don’t be upset if I give him the Friend Contest trophy. He won’t get even honorable mention in the Subtlety Contest though. He’s as subtle as a diner waitress at closing. He sent the Cliff’s Notes version of ‘How Isolation = Suicidal = a Classic Call for Help.’

Can we unpack that bullshit? Beyond the fact that I was isolated by choice long before Milo passed, and perfectly happy, this cliché that a person considering taking their own life would obviously prefer to live … ugh! Intelligent people can choose isolation, even death, without hidden agendas.

I know you get it. I saw you lose friends, and family too. Sometimes people have to make hard decisions. What is worse: to die in a way of your choosing, or to suffer a few months, maybe longer, only to die at the height of suffering? Suicide can be a call for help, but it’s a case-by-case basis. Fuck one-size-fits-all platitudes. I won’t have my grief redacted by a Hallmark-card analysis.

I told him not to worry, and deleted the message he sent after without opening it. The delete was an accident, but I’m happy for it. I won’t entertain arguments on how to properly grieve with a man whose practiced method is avoidance.

 

So there they were: ground rules. If I didn’t want to be cut off like Chester, I couldn’t say, Yes Tom, not every suicide is a plea, but if you’re considering it (talk about tiptoeing around the S-word, he wags it in my face while conveniently omitting if he sees it as a real option), if you are thinking about it at thirty-five, over the loss of a lover, you qualify as someone screaming from the rooftops, “HELP! HELP!!”

I resented how he aligned himself with the sick and dying. Tom would heal given time, but if he decided to check out, he’d do it as easily as a fourteen-year-old flips the bird when you take his photo. The same thing that made him the life of the party could be his undoing: a bullheaded conviction that he’s always right.

Our breakup manifested around a contrived plan to curb poor choices. “We should be monogamous,” he said, with the excitement of suggesting a trip to the beach. This was three years in, and we were moving in together, so I agreed. It was no sacrifice on my part. I seldom took advantage of our open arrangement. Tom, on the other hand, was not able to stop cheating, which only became cheating with the new rule.

The first time he did it, I shrugged, “I don’t mind, but if we’re going to …”

“No,” he said. “It was a slip. I just …”

Near the end of summer, I found condoms and lube in a book bag.

“I’ve been sneaking around the past month,” he confessed. I hadn’t asked. When we had an open relationship, I only hooked up during guest lecture tours, those trips where he couldn’t be with me. As a tourist I like how sex takes you beyond museums and exteriors. Tom never got jealous, so I don’t think he was trying to operate a double standard.

In his request for monogamy was a goal to discipline himself. His liaisons extended from behavior he was ashamed of. He met these guys between three and five AM, when parties slid beyond alcohol. He couldn’t imagine himself not going to the bars and clubs, so tried to change the after-hours outcome without altering the habits leading to it. Like making a resolution to give up junk food but still shopping in the same aisles.

Another possibility is he liked the thrill of getting caught, because he was sloppy with clues. I didn’t have to look for those condoms. He left the bag on the sofa while he took a shower after getting back from his trick. Did I mention it was my bag? I thought I’d left it there, and when I picked it up there was the evidence.

The next time round, it was a note near the phone. We had a spiral notebook for messages. I wouldn’t have given a thought to the name and address had he not also included, as was his habit, fragments of their conversation: 7”, poppers.

When I saw him next, I asked in all sincerity, “Are we back in an open relationship?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve been good lately. This one really was just a slip.”

After the next slip, I changed the question to, “Do you want to move out, or …?”

“How long would you give me to find a new place?”

His quick resignation gives us a third possibility: the monogamous thing was Tom’s way of passively ending the relationship, perhaps subconsciously. He set up rules that he could break and get in trouble for. I get it. It’s easier than admitting you’ve fallen out of love, maybe even less cruel? But by forming these hypotheses, I become another of the amateur psychiatrists trying to decode Tom. I hadn’t played that game for years, and didn’t want to fall back into it.

I decided I wouldn’t tiptoe around his rules. No masking my concern to make it palatable. If he was thinking of killing himself, he could tell me and stop planting the idea between politics and gallows humor.

 

Dear Tom,

It’s true. While I never had to sit in on an assisted suicide, I knew people who chose that route when their infirmity became insufferable. The only dignity left was arranging when and how they would bow out.

I’ve given that authorship thought as well. Not so much the method as the circumstance. Things like: what if I fell ill one day and was so sick only machines could keep me going? I don’t have much saved and wouldn’t want to put my brother or friends through financial strain. On the other hand, how bad off would I need to be before taking a loan was out of the question? If I’m in a coma, go ahead and pull the plug. But for a broken leg, I’m not too proud to ask for a handout.

But what if health wasn’t the issue? What if money just ran out, I lost my home and became a beggar? In a pinch like that I’d be the squeaky wheel, see what welfare I qualified for, get creative with meal prep. But how long could I go like that? Where’s the breaking point? If I was so down and out that no one wanted to help anymore (help less), would I become strong in different ways? How do people make such monumental decisions? As long as you’re alive, there’s a choice. Choose death, it’s done.

Misery is gone, but gone too is the capacity to feel miserable. That knowledge of what misery is in comparison to what is tolerable and what is amazing, gone. You go to sleep and don’t even dream: a numb slide into a foul sinkhole.

Unless you are Christian, in which case you get to go to hell, ha ha.

Anyway, I mentally went down that road a few times, and it always led to the same place: I couldn’t do it. If I was suffering, I could ask someone to give me a shove … or maybe I could mix some narcotics into a pesto or a smoothie myself? I don’t know. Probably, as long as I had that capacity—the ability to run a blender—I’d also have blind hope.

Remember guys who were skin and bones, covered with sores? They needed help with everything, but as long as they comprehended the idea of recovery, they deluded themselves into thinking there was a chance.

That would be me. I’m more afraid of the permanence of death than the agony of illness. Agony can diminish. With one foot so deep in the grave it’s gray, stinking of piss even as I can’t swallow water, I’d still lie in that bed hoping for a miracle.

Some of those guys got that miracle. They lived to see the cocktail. Some went to death’s door with lovers and friends, and then came back alone. They manage. They go on bucket-list trips and have songs they refer to as their jam. They rent films for movie night with friends. It never stops being hard, of course. I still cry over the loss of Rick. All I can do is experience life in his absence, for both of us. For now, I look out the window and watch the wind blow the leaves. I have a conversation with you in my head, and I transcribe those thoughts here.

I’m able to remember us, something I can’t do once I’m dead. My beliefs tell me to enjoy, or even just experience without pleasure, this short life. I want to taste things, cry, forget to breathe then remember to breathe, touch grass … hear things at a distance getting closer or farther away. Even when I’m ready to go, I won’t be ready. Does that make sense? I don’t know if this is good. Do I hold to life out of fear, or appreciation, and does it matter?

Yuck, I’m dipping into philosophical territory, which is outside my wheelhouse. I’ll stop. I do want to see you when I go north, but that’s up to you.

Love,

Vince

iv. Not a word

When it came time, my roommate and I drove to Oregon. I didn’t have Tom’s address, but wouldn’t visit without an invitation anyway. If he didn’t want company, he wouldn’t take company. I had to be happy believing his ambitions would keep him going.

His rant came out of the pain of being suddenly alone. He and Chester were tight, and Tom felt guilty when he moved away with Milo. He knew Chester felt cast aside at first, but they got together whenever Tom visited San Francisco—which, as it turns out, was every three to five months. Tom stayed at Chester’s and they’d have themselves a weekend. After the death, however, Tom stopped visiting, stopped responding at all.

I learned all this, sadly, at the reception following Chester’s funeral. I went there wondering if anyone had heard how Tom was doing. It’d been eleven months since our exchange. When I arrived, Tom was there with a woman who turned out to be Chester’s sister, Laura.

It wasn’t just the email about a cry for help that rubbed Tom the wrong way, even before Milo’s death Tom and Chester had a falling out. Tom omitted this part of Chester’s message when complaining to me about it before, but Chester had asked for forgiveness.

“Forgiveness?” Laura balked. “That hardly sounds like Chester. He once helped himself to a slice of the birthday cake I made for my husband. Chester had keys to our place and the cake was cooling on the counter. I didn’t get so much as an oops from him. He played it like it was my fault for leaving it out—in my own house mind you. You never complained when I took a banana or some cookies,” her Chester-impression was spot on. “The counter is a permission-granted zone.” She cackled.

Tom and I laughed too, then he continued, “Yeah no, he didn’t use the word, forgiveness. He said something like: We’re good right? I know you got your panties in a knot last time we hung out because I wanted to change the game plan. But bottom line, I’m here for you if you need me.”

Laura laughed more, “YOU got YOUR panties in a knot. Now that sounds like Chester.” She laughed again, then gestured that her glass was empty exactly as I’d seen Chester do at the bar, but we were in a house now, and I wasn’t sure who she thought would refill it. She said, “So what was the thing? The big change in plans?”

“Something stupid,” said Tom. “It wasn’t a big deal. It’s just that our traditional spot is a cute dive in downtown Oakland. It’s a short drive from there to his place. I could do it blindfolded. Plus I know people there, including the bartender. Why pass up friends and free drinks? He wanted to take a fucking BART into SF for some …” Tom looked like he lost the thread mid-sentence.

“BART? Public transportation? Also not Chester’s style.”

“So we didn’t have to worry about a DUI coming home across the bridge. The cops monitor that. There was this guy Chester liked …”

“A crush?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Anyway the guy was going to be at this birthday party and … Chester thought it would be fun.”

“Kamal’s birthday?” I asked. “It was fun.”

“Yeah, Kamal. So you know, the whole Hole in the Wall gang. … I guess I was stubborn and selfish. Those guys are more Chester’s buddies. I didn’t want to feel … besides, you know how Chester is with guys.”

“All I know,” said Laura, “is whenever I asked him if he was seeing anyone, he said, men make better friends than lovers.”

“Yeah, well, even the friends, the new ones … he scares them off.” Tom looked at me and shrugged. I could read in his hooded eyes that he was sliding into the blur-part of the evening: the section that might be erased tomorrow. “I should have … I act like I’m protecting him, but Chester didn’t … I should’ve been there for him like he was for me. What if this is my fault?” He said, “Everyone was trying to make sure I was okay, ‘specially Chester, and then it’s Chester who …”

“Honey, it was an accident, okay?” This came from Laura. “Chester was drunk. He was drunk at the beach and the idiot decided to go for a swim. After all, there was no note. If Chester was going to do something dramatic, he would have milked it.” She laughed, and gave Tom a hug.

I was gobsmacked: both at Tom’s chutzpah to try and fish sympathy from the sibling of the departed by straight-up confessing to being the most likely cause of her brother’s death, and at Laura’s forgiving nature and her giving that sympathy in full doses.

I thought about this flimsy proof that the death was accidental: no note. For whatever reason, I was struck for the first time by the oddness of that expression. Why is it always called a suicide note? Wouldn’t a final farewell more likely take the form of a letter, a long one? Then again, once you are so bereft of hope, what good is a last explanation? The action itself speaks volumes.

“I’m going to get some of those Swedish meatballs I keep hearing about,” said Tom. “Do you want anything?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but walked in the direction of the banquet table, then made a French exit.

A month after the funeral there was a less formal memorial at Hole in the Wall. I stumbled on it by chance, going into the bar after yet another student reading. That seemed fitting. Run-ins with Chester were always unplanned. An unexpected sadness washed over me when I saw his drinking pals, most of whom were not at the funeral. They looked torn up. In this context Tom was glaringly absent.

Chester’s sister was there, passing around drunken hugs. Seeing Laura again made me think about her remark regarding the absence of any final note. I was tipsy—the beers flowing freely by the pitcher—and shared my observation with the bartender, Kamal. I worked it like a joke: “We need toilet paper. Now that’s a note!”

Kamal shook his head and then rushed to the other side of the bar to pour another pitcher. He’d been smiling before, but now looked worried. I hoped I hadn’t upset him. Most likely the party simply crossed the threshold of fun for him and was back to being work again. People were getting sloppy and loud, and Kamal would have to cut off the wasted ones.

I got ready to head out at what I thought was nearing midnight, but then Kamal announced last call. He leaned over to me. “One more, Vince?”

“I’m good,” I said. “You have a good night, Kamal.”

He waved me closer and gave an awkward hug bent over the bar. “Here,” he said, unpinning a folded piece of paper from some corkboard behind the bar. “I haven’t seen you in a while.” It had my name on it. “I read it,” said Kamal, “but only after Chester died. Sorry. It’s the thing you were talking about.” It was written on bar stationary, the same paper Chester used to give me his number. Kamal added, “His sister can never see this.”

 

Hey Bud,

Sorry we can’t do this face to face. You’re the only person

I can talk about this shit with. But you’re also the only one

who’d try to talk me out of it. All the crap I love makes

me sad . Clockin out while there are still clocks.

Thanks for being an ear and a pal,

love,

Chester

 

Kamal was pouring last rounds. I folded the paper and stuck it in my shirt pocket. Home was only a twenty-minute walk, and I needed some fresh air. Along Division Street you could hear the elevated freeway traffic above: the two AM rush hour, the rush that Chester learned to avoid. He’d been pulled over driving home once at 2:30. He told me the story, most of which I forget. There was some joke he made about the cop’s name, thinking that his capacity to read a name badge would be taken as proof of his sobriety. He laughed. We both did.