pigeon

She was reading Garfield and laughing out loud. Laughing out loud!

Some cutesy homily about mundanity presents itself but doesn’t seem right. I hate Mondays, lasagne, etc. This isn’t a graduation speech, ffs. I’m not gonna ironically lionize Garfield.

Is “I was walking through a cemetery and I saw a tombstone with your name on it” a creepy thing to say to someone? If it’s literally true?

What if the person you said it to was already dead?

Bo, my best friend, had a flair for the mundane.

But he also dabbled in the dark arts.

The year after he died, I used to leave the computer on in case he wanted to send me a message through it.

He used to have a rule: if he was meeting someone at a bar and they were late, he would have one beer by himself, and if they hadn’t shown up by the second beer — maybe it was the end of the second beer — then he would assume they weren’t coming, and go on home. Or wherever. Probably home if he was drinking by himself, because it’s faster and easier and cheaper to get drunk at home.

After he died, I used to have a lot more than two beers, waiting for him to show up. But he never did.

He’s only ever come back from the dead a few times that I can remember. At least one of his appearances was nice and reassuring, but the first time was horrific. I don’t even want to tell you about it. Just imagine a cottonmouth and a corpse and thinking someone was back but they really weren’t, tinged with the sulfurous taste of guilt, and you’ll start to get the idea, maybe.

Was I dreaming? I didn’t think so. Am I dreaming now? Don’t think so. But there have been times when I didn’t think so (almost thought so but then decided nah) and then it turned out that I really was, so who knows. I guess maybe that never stops happening. Keep waking up, keep discovering you weren’t really awake.

I wonder if he even would have wanted to send me a message. I like to think that now he would. That such a volume of water as would be required has flowed under the bridge in the intervening years. I like to think that if he were a stray cat, he would appear from out of the alley one night, walk up to my back door and just hang around.

I would open the door. The golden light would spill out of my kitchen into the warm summer night, and he would hesitate, then walk on in, and in this manner we would be reunited, at least for the moment.

He was able to read the same words I was reading but understand them as a whole different language. When we were tripping at Y-NOT II, accompanied by my then future now ex wife, the pinball machine said “FOR AMUSEMENT ONLY” and I said, “What if you’re not amused?” Bo said, “Then you’re not doing it right.”

Later, back at his apartment — the apartment I still walk past every now and then and think was that his apartment? and I stare at it until I’m sure again that, yes, that was the place, right there on Pleasant on the lower east — when we were lolling around on the floor as the acid was slowly wearing off, he said, “I’m kinda disappointed I didn’t see any new colors tonight. It still feels like Pee-wee’s playhouse in here, though.” Pause. “Is that normal?”

We were leaning against the lower part of the couch. His legs and my legs and my then future now ex wife’s legs were intertwined like mangrove roots.

Bo said you learn in school how to be invisible, until one day you either disappear altogether, or else figure out how to start to come back, to be visible again.

I said it’s all gonna fade. Enjoy it now.

Half crumpled in my pocket was a bar napkin on which I’d written this:

this is it.
this is all you get.
listen & see love
in
their
eyes

This is it. This is all you get. That’s what the acid trip had to say to me that night. There was a bunch of other stuff, but that was the main thing. This is it. I’d been looking up at a colorful row of bottles above the bar at Y-NOT, and that’s when I knew. The colorful bottles were just colorful bottles. There was no secret, no mystical hidden meaning, no afterlife that was gonna make all this tedious ordinary life somehow worth it. No fantasy world on the other side of an invisible veil, juxtaposed with this mundane one. No special caste of Jedi people privy to an extra sparkly universe. We’re all Muggles.

What if that’s not good enough? Then you’re not doing it right. What does all this have to do with Garfield?

Bo told me one time about being on a bus, or a train, or a plane, coming back from somewhere, I don’t even remember where, maybe nowhere in particular, maybe New Orleans, and he was sitting next to this young woman from somewhere — Austria? — English wasn’t her first language. I guess they had managed to talk a little bit, nevertheless? But it doesn’t matter — the part I remember is the look on his face as he recalled that she was reading a collection of Garfield comics, raptly, and laughing out loud. Laughing out loud. You don’t usually think of Garfield as something that’s uproariously funny. Good for a chuckle or an eye roll, maybe. But no, she was just cracking up, laughing out loud at Garfield, of all things.

What he looked like as he was describing that little moment: amusement, mixed with amazement. That was the thing, with him. He could be working a shift at Subway and have something interesting to say about six different totally boring things people did. They way they asked for hot peppers. How they pronounced “Mountain Dew,” with too much emphasis on the t. We could be walking down by the lake, doing nothing more exciting than stopping at a vending machine to get a coke, and he could imagine that being a fascinating story from the perspective of some alien species that’s obsessed with humans.

We were sitting at some bar on Brady Street one time, one of the dives that’ve almost all been crowded out by the bland airbnb rentier vibe they got going on over there now, and he was saying how no matter how thoroughly you write, how excruciatingly you go into detail, how much you rack your brains for the deepest truth, you’re always going to miss something. There’s always going to be something you’ve left out.

He was right, but these days I tend to think that’s a feature of language, not a bug. It’s how language survives. It’s a little bit “It provokes / the desire, but it takes away the performance” but even more “she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies.”

Later on, at that same bar, a band was playing, it was hopping, there were a lot of young folks being young and fresh and vigorous. This old guy appeared from out of nowhere and we watched as he shuffled, slowly, carefully, slightly bent over, through the crowd back toward the bathroom, and a little later we watched as he came back out of the bathroom and retraced his steps, moving slowly back to the other end of the bar, by the door. Picking his way, deliberately, paying attention to the placement of every step.

Bo looked up at the ceiling for a moment and then said, I feel like I’m at Callahan’s right now.

It’s not like he saw magic that other people didn’t see, so much, I don’t think; it’s more like he saw normal stuff that other people didn’t see, and that made him, in a way that might have been easy to overlook, magical.

Hang on, I think I’m getting a message through the computer after all. It’s not loud. I can’t quite make it out exactly. I’m sure there’s some part of it I’m missing. And I’m gonna have to type it in myself, instead of waiting for the computer to spit it out for me. But I’m a do the best I can. It’s — I’m not sure, but I think it’s something along the lines of this:

Exist! Exist! Appreciate, commemorate, share and exist!

Or, as Garfield would say (I guess), “So much time and so little l need to do.”

Lol.