Bridge to the Chorus
One of the standouts on TV this year has been a show called The Last of Us. Big hit based on a video game about the end of the world caused by an evil fungus. One episode stands out, although all of them offer a wildly precise fusion of arthouse and house of horrors. This episode focused on a gay survivalist who stumbles across the love of his life after ambushing him in his post-apocalyptic front-yard pit/trap. From that connect through twenty years of being together, the two men come across as understanding the situaiton they are in, but also honed in on the secret world they've made together. "Secret" not because they are gay but because the world is ending and they have to find shelter from it. Terror in the streets, fascism and chaos roiling toward international suicide. They drink wine, eat gourmet venison dinners, play Linda Ronstadt on the piano, fend off mushroom-zombies, sleep together, live together, and eventually die together. It so perfectly fits the current zeitgeist it almost felt like a dream everyone with any common sense and kindness was collectively undergoing.
I'm turning 58 in April. Bill and I have been together a lifetime, and spent most of it living in an anonymous condo in Forest Park, working jobs trying to help people, writing and making art on the side but also as a way to harbor and maintain whatever tenderness, weirdness, and creativity we could engineer. Shitty politics and the pandemic moved all of us into a new era, of course, but Bill and I, like a lot of people, including the two guys in The Last of Us, have found a way out of appocalupse and into the now.
Right now, though, "now" feels like an alien planet. All the death I'm dealing with, all the lame-assed sorrow. My friend, the one who killed himself, was almost 59 and lived a sort of beautiful vagabond life filled with artmaking and friends and family. He painted, made movies, wrote books, dedicated his whole existence to never giving up on his vision (a stubborness I don't really have access to), and yet in the end he gave up. The artmaking and everything else didn't build a bridge for him. He never had a lot of success, just a lot of work and trying and the satisfaction of the aforementioned stubborness that didn't seem to matter in the end. I met him in 1983 in art school and fell in love with him and we moved in together in 1985. He didn't feel the same way I did, although he was truly considerate about rejecting me for the most part. We remained friends even after we stopped living together in 1987. My unrequited love for him evolved into a strange sullen respect, a sort of curiosity of who he might become and who I might become, once we got past what I felt about him and myself.
Eventually Bill and I moved in together, started our lives.
I never really had a good conversation with this guy I used to love, even though we stayed in touch after those heady serious embarrassing days. I wish I could have told him how much I respected how he always maintained his connection to what he wanted to do and what he wanted to be. Not that it would have stopped him from killing himself by any means, but because of my own selfish reasons: I never really got around to saying what I felt because of what I felt.
I did have that chance with my mom last year, when she was in her final stages of cancer and dimentia. There was an epiphany with her that I wrote about here. It wasn't that magical of an epiphany or anything, but it felt exactly right because we could be in the world together (even if it was a nursing home in Johnson City, Tennessee) and not worry about what we did to each other, just look at who we were and are and be OK with it.
I've known my friend who has just been diagnosed with cancer for over 25 years. She is an incredible human being and it hurts to even write a little bit about what's happening to her, but I was able yesterday to text with her a little, and I was reminded yet again of what you're supposed to do when you don't know what to do: speak. Don't speak too much, don't get fucking chatty, but tell people what you feel about them, let them know what they mean to you when they mean something to you. Allow yourself that experience beyond the initial discomfort of showing your cards. What she texted back will live with me forever.
The Linda Ronstadt song they used on The Last of Us is "Long, Long Time," one of her first hits from 1970. Perfectly nostalgic, full of the sort of country-rock longing that doesn't really exist in pop music anymore. Plaintive, humble, almost confused. Here's the bridge to the chorus: And time washes clean/Love's wounds unseen/That's what someone told me/But I don't know what it means.
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