The Man Who Was No Longer There

It should be noted that Hank Oak is back in town. He walked into Miss Kitty's kitchen this eve, as I was makin' up some victuals, and I said that I was glad to see him, and: "Where the hell you been? Last time I checked, you were goin' to Tequila!"
"For four days," he responded. Tequila actually is the name of a village in Mejico, turns out, and although he'd planned to stay there a month, we hadn't heard from him for six. He had, in fact, only been there four days, and some explanation was certainly in order. I received it, by fits and by starts, over the course of the bi-weekly Tuesday night dinner thing.
Turns out that he has turned his back on his old career in tech support, and is now making pseudo-Indo food at this Tea/food joint up on Belmont favored by hippies and yuppies. Thing is; the guy knows more about food than I've even forgot, and he has never even worked in a kitchen, like me. Tha' don't matter. What matters is that we are making plans for a dinner party competition, and perhaps putting together a food magazine for actual people, and he wanted to know where to find me, so we could go downtown and make fun of the awful people on First Thursday. "Well, I live over the Troika," I says.
"Where?"
"Over the coffee shop? Across the street from where you used to live?"
"Ohhhh!" he said. "Hey, do you live in the apartment where the guy who died lived?"
"I live in his room," I said.
"AAAAHHHH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!"
"Yeah, I know, 'take care'!"
It's true, though. That's where Quicksilver died. He had a congential heart defect, and it was gonna get him some day, and on one particular morning of his twenty-fifth (?) year, it happened. I remember, because I was walking into the Troika, where I worked, at the time.
I was greeted by this little poodle dude who was dating one of the upstairs ladies. He was in tears, and when I inquired why, he told me, and I immediately was no longer in the mood to work.
Quicksilver was the nicest one of the activists, by any stretch. "He reserved his anger for The Man," was how his girlfriend put it. She put it to me on the occasion of his being dead one month. She was also the one who had been jarred awake by the convulsions of his body, trying to live, even though the heart was dead, the brain soon to follow.
They called out the ambulance, and unfortunately, News Channel Eight just happened to be driving by (or some loser local affiliate; it scarcely matters which one), saw the commotion, and couldn't get anything clear out of everyone, as every person involved was either grieving or a emergency services professional. They determined that since the near-deceased was tatooed and twenty-something, that clearly drugs had been involved. Thanks, as always, to you fucking coke freaks who make too much money, and are qualified to eat lunch at best, who nonetheless report the news.
A week before, he had been on the news, when the Nice Mister Bush had been in town. A lot of people (including infants, I needn't remind you) showed up on the news that day, being pepper sprayed, but Quicksilver made the front page of the paper, and I believe CNN. I had stood in the middle of all of it, wearing a suit and shades, photographing it all, as people on either side were being beaten and gassed...
I'm straying from the point. Our friend was dead. The nice one. I spent the rest of that day at work having to break the news to people who had not yet heard, and playing mournful songs. But far worse than this was that I also wasn't going to lie to strangers, and that led to awful exchanges:
(The chick with bilateral myopia from across the street says) "Well you know; Death Is A Celebration!"
(To which I respond) "I understand your point. Your comment is ill-timed."
And later, I go back to Gringa Alta Prima's joint, and I finally get to have the good solid cry I'd been needing to have all day. All day long, I'd been inadvertantly playing these songs that I'd just brought with me, but seemed like farewells for the Quicksilver. "Hold To the Unchanging Hand of God" by Ry Cooder, "Uncloudy Day" by the Staple Singers, and that song by Takako Minekawa where she just keeps saying, "In the skyyy....In the skyyy..."
Then I make the mistake of goin' down to My Fuckin' Pal, where I encounter a drunk bunch of people I parenthetically know. One is this silly girl with whom I had once shot pool. I told her the story. She decides that the best way to deal with this information is to say-"Well, in Mex-ican cul-ture, death is a celebration!"
To which I could only respond, "I ain't Mexican!", when of course what I really meant was, ' you silly white fuck, could 'ya just shut up for half a second, and not turn everything into your anthro seminar?'
I went outside for half a minute, to gather my thoughts, and was pursued by her table-mate and acquaintance of mine, Zephry. He chooses to respond to my distress by drunkenly gripping my hand and saying, "But we're still alive. We're still alive!"
I agreed, thanked him, and went back inside.
I encountered another group of people with whom I was parenthetically acquainted. For some reason, I still couldn't keep how I was feeling inside sufficiently, and told them exactly what was on my mind at the moment. One of them said, "Well, you know what they say; Grief is for The Living."
"I've never heard it expressed otherwise. You know, maybe I shouldn't have brought it up."
The rest of them rushed to make up, but by that time, I was over this whole being in public thing. Wherever I went, people had the awful judgement of either trying to make this actual death of someone I liked and could no longer talk to into either some awful Grieving seminar that they'd learned in Counseling, or some Life Affirming bullshit, of which it was neither. I've been well acquainted with Death my entire life, and don't consider it to be something out of the ordinary. At the same time, I also feel that it's entirely okay to be bummed about it. The fact that the rest of these people couldn't see that is a monument to more than just their crap communication skills.
Pathetic as it may be, I chose to deal with this by making a mix tape. Probably this is the one I should have analyzed, in lieu of the last entry, but it's not. It was called 'The Man Who Was No Longer There'. Side A is titled 'Grief Is For The Living', and has a somber aspect to it, and side B is titled, 'But We're Still Alive', which has just the opposite aspect.
Even that has a story. The next day, a friend was driving me up to ( a cemetary, of all places, to look at the view), and I was telling him the story of the last couple days, including the mix tape part. He chose this as being an appropriate time to tell me about the inherent superiority of MP3 technology, as opposed to those silly old magnetic tape things. I chose to not throttle him, on that occasion.
I missed the ash-scattering ceremony out at the coast, as I was not invited, and had to work in any case. It turns out that Quicksilver's mom had the zinger that day. She thanked those assembled for coming, and pointed out that they all clearly had 'big hearts'..."Hopefully not as big as his was, but..."
And the wake was the following weekend. It was too damn full of silly Wobblies who showed up ostensibly to say farewell to a brother union member, but it quickly regressed into a stupid party, with too many damn strangers. It was disappointing, and still too damn sad.
The aforementioned girlfriend dragged The Reverend and I into the apartment where I curently live, and poured three shots of whiskey. We held them aloft, waiting for the words to come. They didn't.
"You know," I said.
"You know," the other two said, and we drank it down.