Thu, 19 May 2005

Above
I hadn’t seen Ryan since high school, when we were in an afterschool drama class together. We didn’t spend much time together then, though we got along well; I remember he and I having a long conversation on the bus ride home from Carrol Iowa, where we had a drama competition, and seeing him at parties, where he would come by, say hi, say something funny and forgettable, and then go off to repeat this with others. I hadn’t thought about him since my first year of college, when I was thinking constantly about high school, in which every connection I had with anyone seemed profound and heartening in comparison to the veil of tears my college career was becoming. It took me a while to place his voice as I heard him call out my name in HEB a couple weeks ago, only recognizing him as he called me buddy and reached out for my hand, which reached for his without my thinking about it. We started talking, what he’s doing in Texas, what I’m doing in Texas, and he told me about this cross-media thing he was working on, which I was initially skeptical about but became more and more interested, realizing that Ryan had seriously pursued acting and playwriting while I went into ten years of uncontrolled drift. I’ve been here in Austin for about nine months, yet I still didn’t know where a bar was that wasn’t on Sixth Street, or in a bowling alley, so I asked Ryan if there was somewhere nearby we could discuss this further, and we walked a couple blocks toward the highway and into a small building, on the edge of a neighborhood, where low fuzzy funk music pulsed out in waves from speakers in the ceiling. We had more drinks than was probably good for us, by which time Ryan’s projects were sounding like the perfection of all my worldly desires, and we’re walking back to the HEB parking lot and he’s asking me what I’m doing for Thanksgiving, and suggests we get together that night and he’ll show me the studio. You already know how I spent Thanksgiving day. That night I followed Ryan’s directions across I-35 to this brick building out by the library with the big mural of Martin and Malcolm on the side, and after banging on the metal door a few times Ryan answered, and brought me in, introducing me to a couple friends of his, Matty and Christina, who are setting up this strange while backdrop stage with a grid marked off in black tape. Ryan explains they’ve been working on updating a kind of low-tech 3d rendering engine a friend of Matty had abandoned when he quit his job and went to Bali. My understanding of this sort of thing is slight at best, but I had been reading a lot about Bunraku puppetry, which the three of them had only recently learned about, and suddenly I actually had an audience which was interested in the stupid arcane crap I pick up like lint. They ordered really good Chinese food from a place I forgot the name of, which is lame as I’ve been trying to find a good Chinese place in Austin since I got here, and Christina puts on a CD of this band she knows and it’s really good, and we end up drinking this weird potato vodka and the whole night is going really well, and Ryan asks me about my other friends here, and in a joking kind of way asks me if I would set him up with someone. Laughing, I tell him sure, I got the hook-up, it’s no problem, and he asks me what they’re like, and I’m playing like don’t worry, you’re set up, and he’s asking if I know any girls with long brown hair, and I keep waving my hands like an old shopkeeper, whatever you need, I’ve got it taken care of, and he asks me if I know any girls who have cancer. I give him a look, and he’s laughing, and Matty is laughing, and Christina is smirking and rolling her eyes, and anybody who knows me knows I make jokes in poorer taste before breakfast, so I laugh, cancer, syphilis, tuberculosis, whatever you need, and he says no, no really. I’m really looking for a girl with cancer.

Now I’m wondering if maybe he’s just messing with me, or if maybe he has cancer, or if maybe he really is into girls with cancer, and I’m not sure how to proceed, so in a feat of tact and diplomacy I managed to switch the conversation over to, I don’t know, wounded soldiers in the second world war being sodomized by wolves or something. This went on a bit longer, and then Matty left, and after another half hour Christina left, and I was getting ready to go, and Ryan told me he didn’t mean to make me uncomfortable earlier, it’s just a thing he has and he didn’t realize it would be weird. I looked at him, and he laughed, and said okay, sure, it’s a little weird, but he had a girlfriend in college who developed a tumor in her brain, and it was benign though the surgery was worrisome, and in the weeks beforehand the two of them had a relationship more immediate and more intense than any either of them had before, or since, at least in his case, as she’d broken up with him a couple months after the surgery to move to Seattle. After he graduated he moved to Austin to follow a job offer at garden.com (which he fled from with a sweet severance package as one of the first of the firings, which is package-wise definitely the best way to go) and had tried to meet other women, but there was something missing. Besides, he said, slurring a little, what’s so different about being attracted to someone with a certain hair color, or a certain build, or a certain disease? And weren’t women with cancer often seen as unattractive both by those who once loved them and by the world at large? I told him I agreed, on all counts, and didn’t mean to make him feel awkward, and we apologized to each other, and laughed, and after a little more small talk I told him I had a thanksgiving party I had to go to, which was true, but I didn’t go. I drove around for a few hours, thinking, and finally went home to sleep. What made this encounter so odd for me was that I did have a friend with cancer, an ex-girlfriend named Heather who lived in Iowa City I’d not heard from since I moved and had been thinking a lot about lately. Heather’s the only person I can think of who actually really qualifies as an ex-girlfriend: everyone else I’ve ever had any sort of relationship with was either a fluke or a fling or a friendship that failed. Like most other women in my life, Heather would occasionally call me to tell me how fed up she was with her current boyfriend, but it had a different tone, as this subject wasn’t just an abstraction between us, we had a history along these lines, and because of that the whole thing always felt more comfortable, more adult. I went away from my conversations with her feeling like I had a history, that I wasn’t just mindlessly falling through my life. And I thought to myself, driving up North Loop on the way back to the house, that maybe Heather and Ryan might not make a bad couple. And then I felt wrong, in a way I couldn’t place, and tried to think of how I should be writing more and how I needed to prepare for New Year’s, how I was going to be back in Iowa over the holidays.

Yesterday morning I got up early, then everything was still quiet, and I called Heather, who I knew would just be getting in from jogging (how strange that I went out with a woman who jogged, who I, and this shows how much I was into her, I even jogged with once, down by the river, when I think I threw up in front of the Art Building), and we talked for hours, how I had to get in and see her while I was back, how she had been thinking about me, and I told her I’d be in town for week, and she said perfect, absolutely, she had no classes and she wasn’t going home, we could talk and talk, it’d be perfect.

That night I went to Ryan’s studio, and Christina was there talking to Ryan about something very emotional, and I told them I’d take off, but Christina said no, stay, I know I don’t know you very well but maybe you could be like an un-judgment-like ear about this thing, and Ryan told me either way, whatever I wanted, and when I was younger I tried really hard to keep out of things like this but my life had emptied out to the point where this sort of thing had a secondhand charge which was invigorating, and besides I wanted to get to know these people and why not jump in, so I stayed, and Christina explained to me the history of her and Matty, and how they used to be so close and everything was going great but now he’d been closing himself off and there was something cold in him and while they still had this whole life in common with the studio and all their shared friends and everything the whole relationship was just impossible and she didn’t know what to do. Having done this a few times in the past, I told her some sort of, not nonsense, but something about needing space and open communication and things which, while true, were so open and general that they could apply to anyone, but I have this way of doing this in a very direct eye-staring way, and she totally knew what I was talking about, it was totally the situation, and she was gonna go call him, which she did from Ryan’s bedroom, and while her and Matty talked and tried to patch things up, and Ryan just looked at me and laughed, and just like that I told him he should go home for the holidays as I knew this girl I thought he should meet.

Ryan’s folks live in Cedar Falls, so after I drove down from Minnesota with my sister I gave him a call and he laughed about how after spending the weekend with his comatose parents I best come through on my end, and we drove down to Iowa City to do some book shopping and hook up with Heather, who met us in the ped mall, and I made introductions, and she was surprised to see someone with me (I used to be a hermit) but we got coffee at the Hamburg and I got the scoop on how being a TA was going, and over an hour she started addressing Ryan as much as me, and even more than me, and I smiled, and we drifted to that bar across from Dirty John’s, and they started talking directly to each other, staring and looking away and smiling and doing a lot of gesturing with their hands and leaning toward each other, and I told them how sorry I was but I had to meet my friend Chris in Cedar Rapids and I had to go, I’d be back tomorrow, and Ryan said it was okay, he’d find a place to stay, and they both blushed a little and looked at the table, and Heater walked out with me to my car, all and she had that surprised delighted tone I only heard from her a couple times, and she still needed to talk to me like *really* talk to me before I left the state and I promised her I would, and as she walked back into the bar she turned around and looked at me, and smiled, and went in.

And God, who had been waiting for me to fix and foster and nurture the relationships of all my friends, looked down on me and cured me of my idiocy, and for the first time ever I understood, it all made sense, and there, in the middle of Market Street, in the middle of my epiphany, I was hit by a Cambus and killed.
(12:05.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #