A good friend died a slow, punishing death a little over a year ago. He was only fifty-eight. And though I’ve thought of him a lot in the time since, it hasn’t been nearly what he deserves. But isn’t that the way it always goes? Our intentions are so good right after our hearts are scalded so, but then work and family and life return to our door, knocking relentlessly. If I were better, and smarter—or if I would just spend more time and care—I could maybe write something worthy of him, but this is the best I can do under the circumstances, which will never again be as good as they once were. And others I love have died since. The pile of bodies never stops rising. He had dark, curly hair and he wrote beautifully and he was much too good to be so humble. And he was kind. Goddamn, he was kind. So much kinder than I’ve ever been. I’m so glad now that I always hugged him whenever I saw him, which was not often because of the thousand-plus miles between us, and therefore not nearly enough. Hugs between guys say what they never can say. At a Halloween party long before my future wife and I would introduce him to his future wife, he went as a voodoo skeleton—white skull on a blackened face—though his costume didn’t extend beyond this. He wasn’t really the type to dress up or to call attention to himself in any way, but he was also too good a sport ever to not play along. This was the year I went as a flapper in a red sequined dress and a black wig and got so drunk that walking became an impossibility, even after taking off my girlfriend’s borrowed heels. I tore my pantyhose and then my knees to shreds crawling up a gravel driveway. I passed out smeared with blood and lipstick. I wish I could remind him of this just to hear his quiet laugh one last time. I have a photograph of him from that night: he’s standing in a hideous lime-green kitchen next to a couple dressed as Mickey and Mallory, the psychotic lovebirds from Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, which means this was probably the Halloween of 1994. I was twenty-five and he was twenty-nine. Beer in hand, he’s smiling through time at me from behind a death’s-head mask, and I can’t forgive the world for this cruelty.
