An old friend of mine died day after Saint Patrick’s Day. He was not a good friend of mine, though I probably could’ve told him anything and I’m starting to realize that it’s those people I really should try to keep in my life and as close to me as possible. We were not in touch, so hearing the news on facebook was particularly harsh.
His name was Warren. He was an independent film maker, which makes him sound really cool. But on a daily basis, he was a down-on-his-luck chain smoker who was about my height and weighed half what I do soaking wet. I was an extra in his first film. He had a great, genuine smile. He was a self-effacing guy with a great sense of humor. He had an unforgettably pleasant voice.
I met him when I was still a teenager, working at a local coffeehouse…the kind that were around before Starbucks invaded neighborhoods like the plague. I like Starbucks…but I don’t like it in exchange for local coffeehouses, no matter how much better the coffee is. Warren used to come in all the time, complaining about how we couldn’t smoke in there after 7 p.m. and then after a while, there was no smoking at all. I was happy about that…I hate smoking. This means of course that I’ve known him most of my adult life.
I didn’t know how he died at first. I thought perhaps it was a suicide. He’d been heartbroken over the same girl for something like 7 years. But that seemed to be his thing…to be heartbroken. People don’t kill themselves over the thing that defines them, motivates them. He wrote all three of his movies about her. But what else? A secret illness? A car accident? No one said anything.
My mom and sister went to the funeral for me. They both knew him, my mom just ran into him a few weeks ago at the goth club she and him both frequented. They saw pictures of him young and happy, and of me young and happy. That’s about the time they found out that while tying one on during the Saint Patrick’s festivities, he’d fallen and bumped his head. Thinking nothing of it, he went home to sleep it off, and when his mom went in presumably to yell at him for not being up yet in the morning, he wasn’t breathing. He literally went to bed and just didn’t wake up again.
It sounds like a Quentin Tarantino movie. Not the end of a person’s life.
“Warren the independent film maker went to bed one night and never woke up again…” the movie begins. But that is how young people die. To die tragically, in a horribly visible way, would mean we could mourn. But when something like this happens, we scratch our heads and go, really? Death is that close to us after all, that we could just slip and fall, and stop existing? No mourning. Just confusion.
I was saddened all weekend after hearing it. I only got a little closure knowing that my blood was there to see him off at the funeral. But it made me sad because I would totally call him up and try to see him if he wasn’t already gone. I hadn’t thought to do it…it seemed Warren would always be hanging around, I would eventually run into him and catch up. He was a fixture in the East suburbs. An immortal piece of the background, a part of my life story. I liked him. I will miss him.
I hope to see him again.
No comments:
Post a Comment