"Those who can, do. Those who can’t, bitch about it on the Internet." -Simon, from The Book of Simon
Some bios list credentials, such as: Education BFA in Illustration, Massachusetts College of Art Occupation Former Production Slave, Ballantine Books Comics Credits Columnist, Writer, Artist, Editor Etc…
And some bios tell a story, such as: I can remember sitting in front of my television one morning, watching the old Batman show, when Julie Newmar appeared in that skintight black leather outfit as Catwoman. It was my first boy/girl thing. >A year later I was in kindergarten telling Katherine Burke that I loved her. It’s pretty much been a string of stupid mistakes ever since…
Still other bios state an intent, such as: This is a series of essays illustrating the life of one particular struggling artist as he plods through the world and occasionally bumps into some interesting shit.
But most bios just sit to the right of the column and are never looked at. So ignore this space and just read the damn column already…
Tuesday afternoon my sister called me from Massachusetts. She was at work and couldn’t talk. All she had time to say was, "Uncle John died yesterday." I had plenty of time on my hands, but my entire response was, "Oh well." Over the next couple days I thought more about this, not my uncle’s death but my blasé reaction to it. What really bothered me was that I didn’t care. Granted, I was about as far removed from my uncle as two relatives can be, but my reaction has me looking over how my attitude toward death and parting of ways has changed over the years.
Ginny and Boogles The first time I remember anyone dying was my ‘Aunt’ Ginny. I was maybe seven when she died and I didn’t have that close of a relationship with her. She lived in a nursing home, back when they were called that, and I only really saw her on holidays and when we’d visit. The last year or so of her life something happened to her and she started speaking only in French Canadian, which was strange because she never knew how to speak the language before. The mind does odd things. When she died I think I was too young to realize what was happening. Because I rarely saw her, I didn’t catch on to the impact of death. They took me to the funeral and I remember being sent up to kneel before the coffin. What I was supposed to do there I had no clue, so I just put my head down and counted to ten before getting up. People were crying and I couldn’t figure out why. Looking back, maybe it was a good thing that the first death I had to deal with didn’t really mean that much to me.
The second death I remember I wasn’t actually told about until years after the fact. When I was little we had an enormous sheepdog named Boogles. The kids in the neighborhood called him Bulldozer. The best part about him was that he used to break his chains, escape from the backyard, and always go right for the one-armed kid who lived around the corner. Don’t feel any pity, that one-armed kid was the bastard of the neighborhood and he deserved what he got. Anyway, Boogles died when I was about eight. My parents told me they were taking him to the vet because he was sick. To my young mind he was at the vet for a long time. Every so often I would ask when Boogles was coming home and they would say he was still sick. Eventually I stopped asking, subconsciously realizing the truth. Soon after he was ‘taken to the vet’ there was a pit in our backyard that I used to play G.I.Joes. Little did I realize I was actually playing just a few feet from the rotting corpse of my dog. Years later, when I was nineteen, I was working at my parents’ store one day when they made a joke about my dad stupidly putting lime on the grass instead of the dog. It was the first time anyone had said aloud anything to suggest he was dead. I remember my mother suddenly getting some kind of psychic alert and looking over at me, aghast at what I’d just heard. Even though I had known, deep down, for years that he was gone, I had never had a real chance to acknowledge his passing. It was a big shock at how much that acknowledgement affected me.
I.L.M. Ginny died and it didn’t really matter. Boogles was gone but I didn’t get to deal with it until years later. The one death that has easily had the most profound effect on me was when my grandfather died. It’s been seventeen years and I know there are ways that I’m still recovering from it. My grandfather was more integral in raising me those first nine years than my actual father was. So much of who I am now is a direct result of his influence. When he died I remember it being devastating.
The worst part about it was that I was a prick. He was in the hospital and everyone, except me, knew that he wasn’t coming out alive. The last time I saw him I was pissed off because I had been hanging out with a friend and was dragged away by my mother to pay my grandfather a visit. I was such a spoiled brat at the time that I refused to talk to him, since, in my mind, he was the reason I wasn’t still having fun with my friend. If I had known that would be my last chance to talk to him there’s no doubt I would have acted differently. But that’s the shitty thing about regret, isn’t it?
Not too long after I was brought to the hospital late at night. The whole family was there and I remember being told that things weren’t looking good. I don’t think it fully hit me then, or maybe it did and I just blocked it out. All I remember is that they wouldn’t let me see him, I was taken home, and my aunt who I never liked told me he probably wasn’t going to make it through the night. And he didn’t. After that I remember not crying at the wake, crying at the funeral, and people gathering at my grandmother’s house for deli sandwiches.
MeMe The death of my grandfather really set a chain of events slowly in motion. It was like a fuse had been lit. What set everything off was the death of my grandmother a dozen years later. The family had been slowly falling apart without the patriarch to keep things in order. But when my grandmother died things went flying off in every direction and the real damage got done.
I was twenty-one and living in Boston. The call came early one morning that she wasn’t long for this world. The last five or so years she’d been drifting away thanks to a fun mix of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. She was living in a nursing home and mostly vanished into the far recesses of her mind. When I got there the family was gathered around her bed, my sister sitting next to her, holding her hand. Everyone was hugging and comforting each other. Even under the circumstances I had trouble setting aside the hypocrisy of their actions. These were people who had backstabbed, frontstabbed, and fought with each other for years. Even at my grandmother’s deathbed they couldn’t resist getting in a jab here and there. Yet, still they pretended to care about each other.
This was the first death I had to deal with since my grandfather and I was surprised by how little it affected me. My grandmother and I hadn’t been close since his death, and trouble with my uncle had pushed us even further apart. When she started to get sick, any connection we had seemed to disappear. Although, even in her delusions where she insisted my mother buy catfood for cats we didn’t have, something in her remembered that I loved Cheez-Its, and she always had a box for me. But even that sentimental note didn’t spark enough emotion in me to shed a tear when she died. They had to pull my sister away from the fresh corpse. I easily played the figure of strength.
At the funeral, I was the last to leave the graveside. I wasn’t feeling particularly sad that she was gone, I just wanted a chance to talk to my grandfather, who had the adjoining plot. I’m sure some of the more bitter members of the family resented my gesture, making comments about how I hadn’t been there in her final years and I had mostly detached myself from the whole family. What right did I have at that point? But the thing is, I saw what the family did to her, how they accelerated her demise. Witnessing something like that was the reason I had put distance between them and myself. When I talked to my grandfather that day I asked him to go easy on my grandmother, she’d been through enough already.
Lou Lou was the guy my mother left my dad for. He died a month later because he was a broke-ass Libertarian who refused government-funded healthcare. When he came down with pneumoccocal meningitis he opted to die rather than compromise his principles. I never met the guy. I went to his funeral. For obvious reasons I wasn’t shaken up a bit.
Fred B. Decker Fred was the greatest dog in the world. I know a lot of people say that about their pets, but they’re wrong. Fred was an oversized Shetland Sheepdog that we got when I was thirteen. He trained quickly and never pissed or shat on anything indoors after that. He rarely got sick, never ran away, didn’t bite or harass anyone, ate lying down at his bowl, and was generally just a nice animal. Everybody loved him.
He died soon after I moved to New York. My sister called and told me they put him to sleep. The last month of his life had been pretty rough. He’d come down with something that made his breathing hard and his legs useless. After a couple of days of him lying on the floor, barely alive, they finally did what was best. When I heard he was gone my response would barely register on any meter. Sure, he was a great dog. But he was just a dog. It was then that I started to realize that I have trouble forming emotional attachments to animals. Maybe the whole Boogles debacle scarred me more than I thought.
Bruce Not long after Fred gave up the ghost, one of my piece of shit uncles followed along. Pretty much all but one of my uncles is a piece of shit, so it can be hard to tell them apart. Watts enjoys the way I refer to them by descriptive titles rather than names. There’s the half-uncle in Washington state (not a piece of shit, but annoying as hell), the slumlord, the criminal, and the one who fried his brain on drugs. Bruce was the criminal and the single biggest cause of pain and misery in my family. So, to say I enjoyed the way he went is an understatement.
Bruce was always a fuck up. He was a drug addict and scam artist, having never worked a single job until he was over forty. That’s not exaggeration. While my grandfather was alive, Bruce would get his money from him. My grandfather even went so far as to buy a marina so Bruce would have a job. Bruce never went to work, but he’d stop by to empty out the safe occasionally. Once my grandfather died, Bruce started taking my grandmother to the bank and having her cash checks for him. While she was living with us she would have horrible delusions in the middle of the night which turned out to be flashbacks. She would wake up screaming about people trying to break into the house. The truth was that she was remembering drug dealers coming by her house, looking for Bruce, trying to break the door down to find him. When my grandfather died, he left my grandmother a millionaire. Twelve years later, there was less than half that left, all thanks to Bruce’s lifestyle.
Again, my sister was the bearer of the news. When she told me that Bruce had been crushed by a tree I laughed my ass off. I was at work and people in the nearby cubicles came over to see what was so funny. All I could tell them was, "Karma’s a motherfucker."
John And that brings us to John. John was my father’s brother. He wasn’t around the first few years of my life because he and my father had had a falling out. I assume it had something to do with my uncle being a space case thanks to all the acid he did when he was younger. All I know is that they must have put things behind them, because suddenly he was there, though still in a limited capacity. I would see my uncle once or twice a year and came to dread every encounter. We learned later that the bottle of water he carried around was actually straight gin. Considering it was near impossible to hold a conversation with him when he was sober, sixteen ounces of gin really didn’t make him the person I wanted to sit down and have a chat with.
The only standout memory I have of him is the night his wife backed over our mailbox trying to get out our driveway. Beyond that, he really was a non-entity in my life, someone I did my best to avoid because he was just a waste of flesh. When I found out Tuesday that he died, it didn’t faze me in the least. To me he was just life filler, a body that took up space but didn’t contribute positively or negatively to my existence. I can’t mourn that he’s gone because, to me, he was hardly even there to begin with.
But his death has made me look back at my reactions over the years. Not just to death, but loss in general. I remember when I broke up with my first girlfriend. I was devastated, bordering on suicidal. When I broke up with my last girlfriend I didn’t shed a tear or even take a moment to acknowledge the loss. It’s become the same thing with friendships. When I kicked out my roommate almost two years ago he took with him a friend I had known for ten years. I easily dismissed the whole thing, telling myself that if my friend wanted to choose a manipulative, slimy, hunk of human garbage over me, when I hadn’t asked him to make a choice in the first place, then that was his mistake and fuck him. Ten years and I swept it under the rug like so much dust. Is this what it’s like to grow old? As the years pass, is my reaction to loss going to become even more casual? All these deaths the last five years or so, I can excuse my reaction because of the detachment of the circumstances. But what happens when someone I really care about goes away? Or, more disturbingly, am I still capable of really caring about someone? What really bothers me is that I don’t even care about that question all that much. Even writing this column I’m feeling detached. Everything I’ve just written about and thought about is more just curiosity to me, not anything I’m genuinely worried about. That’s either a good thing, or a bad thing. Maybe someday I’ll care enough to figure out which.
From The Monkey House a/k/a Simon Hermit in a cave
The Random: Some of the television networks have announced their new fall lineups. NBC is doing an American version of the British show Coupling. They’re scheduling it after Friends. Thing is, Coupling is really just a British version of Friends. So am I the only one who sees this as something of a programming circle jerk?
