The other side

But not the memory, it means a lot to me

The other day I got an email from an old acquaintance telling me Skinny John had died. I’m at the stage in life where you expect to hear this sort of thing, and I occasionally do, usually about someone I hadn’t seen in years. That was the case with Skinny John too, but the twist is, he was a Reverb Motherfucker. The Reverb Motherfuckers were a band, and when you’re in a band, it’s like family. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been away.

So I got on an early bus and went up to New York for the memorial. At first I didn’t think much about John except that he was dead and how odd it was that I was still alive, and then how odd it was that we were ever alive, and that someday we would all be dead — maybe you know how it is if you’ve also reached that stage of life where death gets more real but no less mysterious, like the outlines of the id monster passing through the force field in Forbidden Planet.

My mind had been disgorging memories since I heard the news, though, and as I contemplated them there was one I halfway considered sharing at the memorial service, if such things were asked for, involving the usually pacific John suddenly becoming hard-assed when a local scamster split from a gig he’d hired us to do without paying us — a total of $50, as I recall. John was frugal — I sublet his very cheap Rivington Street apartment when he decided to rent an an even cheaper apartment just down the street — but he was also keenly sensitive to injustice, and I knew it wasn’t the money that spurred him, but rather the idea of a cheat getting away with something when he could do something to stop it. So he woke us all up early on Saturday morning — normally an unthinkable disruption of routine — and lead us to the promoter’s place in Brooklyn to gang up on him and get the bread. I thought it was a refreshingly counterintuitive story, more suitable to a memorial service than, say, that look he gave me once when he didn’t understand why I was playing what I was playing, or the time he got me a “40 Year Old Hippie” shirt for my birthday because it was our little joke, or the first time he wore a loincloth on stage, or any of dozens of similar fractals that swirled up to the surface.

The service was at Greenwood Cemetery, one of the many marvels of Brooklyn that I never took in during all my years of living there. It was not in the original Warren and Wetmore chapel, but a newer one right past the gate, actually one of a pair of chapels — the other one was also holding a service, which gave the event a bit of a hectic air, appropriate for city people. In our room before rows of mourners sat a pine box piled with flowers and set on a plinth, and at the foot of it sat John’s guitar case festooned with stickers going back to our own era — “Windows 95 = Macintosh 89,” “10% of U.S. owns 72% of the wealth,” etc.

I was joined by other old-timers, some of whom I hadn’t seen in many years and who hadn’t seen John in that long, either. We gave each other the pat-down and listened to the service and to the remembrances. But unlike me, John’s relatives and girlfriend and other people had been living a life with John right up until he passed, and they poured their hearts out, sometimes with tears in their eyes, about his many fine qualities (if you want to know about them, his old buddy Falling James can hook you up).

I felt less inclined then to talk about John and me and some other guys shaking down some hood a quarter of a century earlier, because it was obvious that the person they missed was not a figure from the distant past but someone who had been walking and talking with them just a few weeks earlier. They didn’t have to reconstitute him from old memories — not just yet. So I sat there in the freshness of their grief holding my stories like a clutch of faded flowers.

We all have to die, and when that bar is crossed the self we had, I’m pretty sure, is no more; what persists we’ll all find out soon enough. I do know that out there beyond the borders of our conscious selves, there are constellations of thoughts and feelings about us held by others that will survive us a little while, like the fading energy of a supernova. I don’t know what the significance of these penumbra may be; maybe in the grand scheme they’re no less significant than the lives we believe ourselves to be living. Maybe when they seem to finally disappear they actually go into a sort of cosmic general fund that either improves or degrades the human experience. Whether or not it does, maybe that’s the best way to think about it until the mysteries are all revealed.