Death made direct contact with me for the first time ever last week.
Until I got the call, I'd been...not oblivious exactly, but insulated. My parents, still alive, were significantly older than normal when they had me, and while I was self-conscious of this growing up, aware of their mortality to a greater depth than, say, children whose parents were barely through their twenties, it also meant I never knew their
parents, thus, had no grandpas and grandmas to have to say goodbye to. Three of them were gone before I was born; the last, my mom's mother, I have only sketchy memories of: an old lady, sitting in a chair like a portrait of an old lady hanging on the wall, watching and listening, but never (rarely) speaking.
Until recently, death kept its distance. It was no match for me or my family, and it knew it. My parents enjoyed good health, as did my brother and me...nothing chronic, nothing ongoing. No hospital visits or surgeries or medication regimens for any of us, no reason,
much less inclination, to become one of those people who can tear down even the most auspicious gathering by talking endlessly about what ails them. But early last year, my dad, at the age of 80, suddenly found himself being rushed through winter snows to a hospital an hour away for a heart condition that came out of nowhere. Late last year, unexpectedly, his best friend lost a battle with cancer that he was hardly given a chance to try fighting. This hit my dad hard, particularly on the heels of his own 'cardiac event'. and to top it off, my parents have - in general - really started to look, and feel and act their age in a way they never used to. They were always just Mom and Dad...now it's clear in no uncertain terms that they've joined the ranks of the elderly.
They've lived a good long life, and no one - including them - is feeling robbed of anything, necessarily. It seems a certain resignation burgeons the longer the twilight lasts. But being resigned to death in old age doesn't make it any less unnerving or heart-breaking to deal with, this slow and steady - and now more apparent than ever - march into that good night. Lately, it seems, death is getting cocky, closing in, looking for a opportunity, smelling something on each of us that's whetting its appetite.
Nothing could have prepared me, however, for the news I received last week, that a friend I'd known for two decades had taken his life at the age of 37. In recent years, he and I had lost touch, but there was a time when we were close, when I shared a bond with him I've never shared with anyone else and probably will not again. I had just seen him a month before, for the first time in quite a while; he didn't seem well (that's not 20/20 hindsight talking...), and it was shortly afterward, but before his death, that I found out he was suffering from severe mental illness.
It's amazing how reliable the 5 stages of grief are. I was given the news while I was at work and got down to the business of 'denial' right away, keeping myself busy, avoiding what I had just been told as though believing if I ignored it, it would tire and go away. After that, I went through an 'anger' phase...anger at him for what he did, anger at myself for not being there, for letting us drift apart, for all the times I thought about giving him a call and didn't (though I know there would have been nothing I could have done to help him). And of course, there came short but powerful moments of 'depression' that took my breath away in an instant. The only stage I escaped was 'bargaining'...maybe because at the end he and I weren't as close as we'd once been, maybe because the last time I saw him I knew right away he was not the guy I'd once known, or maybe simply because I knew there was no point.
His funeral was only the second I'd ever been to, the first for someone I actually knew well. I delivered his eulogy, and this prompted other people to come up and say a few words, and there was definitely a consensus about this guy, a consistency to what people remembered of him. No doubt, he will be missed.
And now, all that's left is that hollow, orphaned feeling that comes in the aftermath, that settles in my gut like water flooding a basement. This, accompanied by thoughts of my own mortality, and an impulse to cling to those I've shared my life with more than ever. No question, depression is hanging on.
Here, as I wait for 'acceptance' to finally make an appearance, I present his eulogy, both as an ode to a friend, and a cautionary tale:
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"I first met Adam 20 years ago, spring of 1994. I was the manager of a restaurant in town, and there were two things I noticed almost immediately about the guy who came in for food every single Friday night:
1) His metal-studded leather jacket and long pony-tailed hair; a look that - even before I knew him - didn't seem to match his glasses and quiet demeanor.
2) The fact that he always ordered the same thing, every time. His exact special order escapes me, but his methodical manner doesn't. Like clockwork, he would call it in ahead of time, and pick it up ten minutes later, like clock work.
Several Friday nights' worth of this came and went, until eventually I was nodding and smiling when he came in, and he back at me, knowing that I knew that he was 'that guy' with 'that order.'
Eventually, he turned in an application, and I hired him, and it did not take long for a close friendship to grow out of our working relationship. Adam and I just clicked, effortlessly; we shared the same way of thinking about things, had the same sense of humor, same way of expressing it. We were both creative people, and it was through this kindred spirit that we ended up creating a cartoon character of all things, called Pickle Boy. Pickle Boy was a 7-foot-tall dill pickle who just happened to be the
real defender of the American way of life, and went out of his way to make sure everyone knew it.
Early in our friendship, we spent a lot of nights sitting at a local diner smoking cigarettes. Well, I smoked, and more or less blew it in his face, but he tolerated it, and together we sat late night after late night, penning those single panel cartoons. Sometimes he wrote up the idea and I would illustrate it; sometime I wrote up the idea and he would illustrate it. But we were so much alike, neither of us strayed from our original vision, and Pickle Boy became, like all great ideas in the minds of their creators, larger than life, an extension of ourselves, a third person in the act. The cartoons were dry, they were witty, they were at times a scathing review of the very American priorities and values Pickle Boy was sworn to defend. And they would only deepen the bond between Adam and me.
Over time, we drew up about a hundred of these cartoons, and in the earliest days of the Internet, like '97 or '98, he built an elaborate website from which to promote our cartoon and sell Pickle Boy tee shirts. Website building was a big deal then; there was no dragging and dropping with ease, like today. No Facebook, no MySpace...it was done pretty much by hand, one HTML brick at a time, but Adam taught himself how to do it, even created a bunch of animated GIFS of Pickle Boy in action, which blew my mind. He was like Bill Melendez to Charles Schultz back in the day - animating our cartoon character, yet managing to preserve the look and feel. It was amazing.
The website was as much a money-making scheme as a creative endeavor, I guess, but we didn't care. Pickle Boy was real in our minds, and we were confident he was going to be the next Dilbert, the next South Park, the next something...
We sold just one shirt - to a girl in Georgia - a few more if you count the friends we guilted into buying one...we got some fan mail here and there, from people who discovered the website. We even got some hate mail from somebody in Australia, who actually called us, 'talentless American wankers.' And we shared those moments - of excitement, triumph and embarrassment - in a way only creative collaborators can.
I miss those days with Adam. Moreover, I miss the days when my dreams were driven largely by an energy fueled by fearlessness fueled by a certain naiveté that's found only in youth. I could collaborate with someone right now and go on to fame and fortune, and it would
never feel like it did at age 24, at the very moment the Pickle Boy website went live, or when we received our first order on-line, or when we proudly posted our hate letter on the website, folding it into the Pickle Boy narrative, as though the
character had received it.
Adam was quiet; he tended to lurk on the periphery of any social situation, watching and listening. This was too bad, I think, because it prevented people from knowing not only that he was uproariously funny, but a hell of an improviser, and not afraid to play the spazz. We drove to New York City once, to visit my brother, 1500 miles there and 1500 miles back, and on the way out we road dogged it, went 17 hours before stopping. By the 14th hour, somewhere in Ohio, we were spent physically and psychologically. I was at the wheel, slapping myself to stay awake, or maybe just for something to do, Adam was slouched down in shotgun staring out at the road as it whizzed by, and I don't know if it was exhaustion making him loopy or what, but out of nowhere he started doing a voice, a woman's voice, a woman with a severe speech impediment; at least that's what it sounded like to me. I had no choice but to respond in kind, with my own verbally challenged character, and so on and so forth, and pretty soon we were acting these two women out, lending them lives and stories to tell in a style and at a pace that would have blown the doors off any improv class, and I was laughing so fucking hard at what he was coming up with, I couldn't breathe.
There were other similar moments after that, and from these other characters arose, always one for each of us to play off the other: Edith and Fran, Larry and Dennis, Ed and Barnabus.
These names, these 'characters', don't mean anything to anyone anymore, but to me, they are as alive, and animated, and memorable - as 'classic' - as anything that's ever appeared on
Saturday Night Live, anything Chris Farley ever came up with. They truly enriched my life.
As time went on, things beyond our control caused Adam and me to drift apart, but he was never not there. He was always around. We saw each other at parties, or out at the bars once in a while. He taught me how to ride a motorcycle one of those summers...actually trusted me with his little Honda (his Harley, hell no...), with only the slimmest assurance that I wouldn't lose control and rocket that thing down into a gully. He let me borrow an old helmet too. It was full of road rash, and bright white; he called it 'the egg.' I seem to recall him and his brother getting a good chuckle at the thought of me wearing it. But wear it, I did. I haven't ridden since, never ended up getting my motorcycle license, but I know how to ride. I
could get my license if I wanted to. And that's because of Adam.
He was an intelligent, multi-faceted guy. If you had a problem, you called Adam. He was a kind of jack of all trades. He just knew stuff, or if he didn't, he could almost always figure it out. Beyond being a cartoonist and a killer improviser, he was a musician, a handyman, a computer technician, a mechanic...definitely a mechanic.
He was the one who bought my gutless 1981 Camaro that I
wrote about on this page last year, with its factory 8 track player and rainbow striping, and turned it into something that chewed up pavement.
He also networked all the computers at my office once, seven of them in total, running between two floors, spinning CAT 5 cable like gold, getting them all communicating with each other, correctly, efficiently. It seemed he was always repairing or installing something for me or someone in our group of friends. This, in spite of the fact that we'd let Pickle Boy and other great ideas fade away over time, and had drifted apart. Adam was always around, always willing.
Several more years passed before I saw him again. He was painting by this time. Painting had become a kind of calling, a siren song, a natural evolution from cartooning, I'd say. I was writing newspaper articles by then, and this time, he got a hold of me. He asked if I would be willing to write up a story about an art exhibit he was having at a local coffeehouse. I said sure. Admittedly, I was hesitant at first. More than once in my life I've had friends and family read my writing and been told only how neat the typing was.
But I was impressed, legitimately impressed, by his work. And fairly amazed, not just by his technical ability, which all things considered was not too surprising, and not by what I still consider to be the ingenuity of his artistic vision, but by the sheer complexity. I was - and I am - amazed by the thought of the hours he must have spent creating those intricately woven images. They are testament to the complexity of his personality and his thoughts.
That was 2006. After that, we drifted apart again, this time more permanently. I moved out of the area where I'd grown up and lived most of my adult life in 2008, and haven't been back much. I've let more than a few friendships slide. I didn't see Adam again for six years - until just a month ago - when I had the opportunity to have dinner with him, and two other people, two buddies who were part of the crew back in the day and knew Adam as I knew him.
He and I said hello, shook hands. He looked older, a little tired. So did I. I said let's keep in touch, and he said, yeah, it's been too long.
And he was right. It's been too long.
There's nothing I won't miss about Adam, and there's a lot to look back on. I have an unlimited supply of memories in the form of photos and video and cartoons to smile and weep for, and I do. And I will. But I think what I will take with me from this point forward will not be just the memories of what he and I were once, or what we did together, but what we let ourselves become: deeply in-tune creative collaborators who over time dissolved into distant acquaintances. I want to go out of my way to make sure that doesn't happen with anyone else I've shared my life with, and I like to think that will be how he'll continue to enrich my life.
Goodbye Adam. Wherever you are now, wherever you got to, I have no doubt you've already made it a funnier, more intelligent, more interesting place."
