At times in my life I look back and see signs I missed. Glaring messages later written in the nightmares of mothers, memories of survivors, they were there whispering to me or screaming, I can’t know. I missed them all the same. In brief unwelcome moments, I can see a face looking at me differently than I saw at the time, silently begging me to turn back or wishing they could explode upon me the wealth of pain they knew better than themselves, the same which would soon barrel down upon my back. These faces, I think, saw warnings of their own and missed them the same, or saw them too late to disown the path. They left clues in their wake, tokens of the demons they couldn’t shed, littering my own path.
Larry was my friend. Larry had a face and occasionally the thought of it paralyzes me. When he died, junkies raided his knapsack and left him to rot on a couch. That isn’t what hurts me, though. People die and I’ve become accustomed to the occurrence. Larry had a face and sometimes I’m sure no one saw it but me. Now, I wish I could go back and explore his eyes for everything he never said. Where did it all go so wrong?
I woke up to find a package of syringes on my kitchen table. I was an addict but not a storied one — yet, and I didn’t ask the right questions. I didn’t know the questions. No one claimed it and I dismissed the entire event. I don’t remember Larry’s face that day, but if I did, I suspect I would see something tragic. Something dead.
We met in a hole in the wall country bar and despite years of flooding my brain with damaging substances, I will never shed this memory. My girlfriend lifted up her skirt to show him all of her fancy girl parts under the table. Obviously, he came home with us that night. How could he have known that she was a raging Xanax junkie with deep rooted insecurities and tendencies towards manic outbursts of violence and destruction? We locked her out of the bedroom and spent the night talking. Larry had a face. When we woke, she had slung thousands of sewing needles across my apartment and left with my car keys. The needles were embedded in the carpet and we played hopscotch to get to the door. After her mother returned my keys, I let him drive me and my Volkswagon Cabrio convertible at 100mph over 30 miles down country roads and highways so he could make it to his nephew’s high school graduation. This was our friendship, 12 hours in.
He was shorter than me, nearly as wide as he was tall, his muscles well defined if not imposing. His dusty blonde hair and cherub face belied his recent release from Prison. Sometimes I imagined how difficult that must have been for him with his stature, fending off perverts and psychopaths with his thumbs or a bed post. I never asked. He had the obligatory tattoos, I might recall a swastika, and that deep, thick Carolina drawl that made me feel safe from God and man. I’m not painting a pretty picture, but this is reality, not a fucking Hallmark card. Generations of poverty and drug addiction had shaped him into a stereotype, but he had a face with eyes that saw and had seen and testified, which is more than I could say for most.
Larry and I never had sex, although this would become a topic of dispute after his death. We spent time spending each others time, in movies or talking about life or just lying in the bed listening to each others breathing. He would hold me while I slept, his own sleep elusive. At the time, I quietly questioned myself as to why our relationship was so severely platonic, yet surprisingly intimate. It would be years before I fully understood his sexless, needy state. Larry had a face and somehow I missed it, the sadness, the hole in his sky. I missed his addiction, I missed that he was nearly dead as he lay beside me. I missed that he was grieving his own departure and gripping me as a last farewell. I only knew we needed each other.
That year, Larry died. They brought him back and he suffered for it. He spent weeks in the ICU, his lungs filled with blood clots. He couldn’t blink without the threat of death. Bound up by tubes and wires of all sadistic medical variety, they kept him alive. Every life saving measure lengthened his sentence, chained to the black hole that was devouring him from the inside. I looked down at his face and desperately wanted to save him, too. I didn’t know I was looking at a man who wished to cease, at a portent of my future self. He was frail and gentle and broken in the ways a man only breaks beneath the weight of his own ghost. When I saw him next, he was ancient. All life had left him and he carried a bag of grapes and looked at the floor. I hid under my steps and cried. Larry and his face and his spirit, they were leaving me.
That day, under the steps, I saw something I didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know. I learned what death felt like when it stood at the door and there was nothing I could do to stop it from walking inside. I watched him ascend the stairs and exit my life.
It wasn’t long before I walked up those stairs myself for the last time and walked away from that part of my life. A few weeks after I learned I was pregnant with my first child, Larry died. They didn’t bring him back to his black hole this time and I didn’t go to see them put him in the ground. He died alone, like he had lived. His mother called and asked if my child was his. I wanted desperately to be able to tell her it was, to give her a piece of him to hold on to, but it wasn’t his child. That week, Larry’s demon jumped from his corpse and on to my back. I took up where he left off, addicted to heroin, desperate, destitute and on a collision course with my own death. In my memories, I like to tell myself that he tried to tell me not to follow him. If I’m being honest, I don’t think he did. I don’t think he ever tried to say a thing, but it feels better to remember it wrong, to remember him like I saw he wanted to be.
I don’t want to romanticize him. He was a fucked up mess of a person who had, at times, done some pretty terrible things to other fucked up people. Once, I watched from the car as Larry called a meth junkie and convinced him there were people surrounding the house. We were the people. The guy ran out into the woods and hid in a tree. While tree guy was doing tree guy stuff, Larry walked in the guy’s house and stole his meth. After the guy came down from the tree and his high, Larry sold him his own dope back (minus a little). Oddly, that is the only night I recall doing drugs with him. Maybe I’ve revised that history as well, but I like it better this way.
What makes him compelling? What makes me think of him over someone more deserving? He is, was, an over-exaggerated version of all of us. His life and death were the product of so many external inputs, his fucked up parents, poverty, the shitty little town he came from, people who sought to teach him and others how to be as sick as they were. He was born for prison, born for death, born to be written into my blog and my memory and as a phantom in the mind of some young boy out there who will never know his father. Larry has a son, he isn’t mine and he isn’t Larry’s because Larry and his face are dead. What makes him compelling? That his condition was greater than me, that I couldn’t save him, that is the draw. That I can see and yet remain impotent. That these matters rest with God and the Larrys of the world, hashed out without my consult. And when I sat beneath the steps and grieved the man and his grapes, God didn’t rally for me. I’m not angry, I just wanted a vote.
I just wanted to be a good friend
I just wanted to save Larry
I just want to write him into existence, even if only for a moment.
Larry had one album he listened to habitually. One song, specifically, and I would watch him as he listened, investigating his eyes for answers to his condition. It doesn’t fit the tone of what I have written, but I can’t refuse it, as it is permanently imbedded with the image I have of him. When I hear this song I am overcome by tears as the moments all flood back. It’s not beautiful, it’s just everything. Larry’s face had a song and I want to scream it.
The Reprobate's Guide to Pancakes 