1. for one night only, a pair of stoops

on brief encounters made possible by ghosts, birthdays, dead phones, dead friends and the curse of finding poetry in motherfucking everything

I am splitting the following essay into two newsletters because of length and also because it felt apropos. I will send part 2 out later this week but for now, this is part one: Everything That Happened Before Midnight.

***

“Hold on, I have to say hi to a dog,” I say, cigarette hanging out the side of my mouth. My roommate from 24 years ago sits fullscreen in the glow of my phone as I duck out of view for a moment to pet fur.

The dude holding the dog’s leash doesn’t look at me, probably thinks I’m crazy which is what I say into the phone as he walks off.

“But I don’t care. Crying in public makes me feel motherfucking alive.”

I am FaceTiming from the stoop of a house that hasn’t been mine for more than twenty-years. I am bloodshot and mascara smeared in the clothes I wore to my twins’ back-to-school night. It is 8:30something and for the next two hours people will walk their dogs past me as I hold a phone in front of my face — gazing at and crying with and becoming the kind of annoying person who FaceTimes in public without headphones on.

I am on the phone with a man who is reminiscing just as loud as I am from the dark of his own backyard in PDX. He is grayer now but still talks the same and smokes cigs the way he used to smoke them when we lived together right here in this very spot in front of this very house with our old friend who died today and “REMEMBER WHEN…” and “I CAN’T BELIEVE IT” and “I KNOW. ME TOO, MAN. FUCK.”

We haven’t seen each other in the flesh in almost two decades and I wonder if my face feels as estranged to him as it is reminiscent of home. Because that’s what his feels like to me.

Grief is always strange, the way the memories suddenly traipse in and sit on your chest, trip you down both familiar and unfamiliar sidewalks, confront you with the passages of time.

I feel as nostalgic as I do for those days as I feel embarrassed for the woman I learned to become in a world of boys. Want to show my past how far I’ve come. How strong I am. How different…. but instead, in the shadow of my old house, I cannot and will not and won’t. The memory of then has become too thick a fog for me to see myself as I am now. Uncanny valley.

He calls me Becca and every time I hear my name leave his mouth the way it used to sound, it breaks my heart the way old movies do or a song that reminds you of a feeling you know you’ll never get back. A CD you purchased from a store when that was a thing, then listened to all the way home.

“WHENEVER I HEAR ANY SONG FROM KID A I STILL THINK OF YOU.”

Light another candle and releaaaaaaase me. (Releeeeeaaaase me.)

Grief has a tendency to recede the sand and dirt and whatever else has accumulated over the years revealing an abandoned ship. Broken in places you had forgotten about. Unscathed in areas that remind you of the magic of the time you used to sail.

What the wind felt like on the water.

How you looked in a captain’s hat.

The version of your name that was written on the wood.

For me that name is Becca. A name I haven’t gone by since.

***

We can’t believe it’s been twenty-four years since we lived here, we both keep saying, both of us parents now, him divorced.

His kids are younger than mine are and when I tell him I have a son now who is the same age that I was when we lived together, he tells me that he remembers how one day I just disappeared.

I do that sometimes: ghost. And when people do it back I am often relieved. Offended, too, but mostly understanding. Sometimes an Irish Exit is the only way to leave. But that’s not the way I remember it. That is not the story I have told myself after all these years.

Sometimes I want to know why someone disappears and sometimes I’d rather not. Sometimes I can’t remember which person pulled away first and appreciate the ambiguity. Sometimes disappearing is the only way for me to leave.

Otherwise I’ll just say goodbye forever. Keep coming back.

***

I reorient the screen so that my old roommate can’t see me, only the house we used to share — the place we lived, laughed, loved twenty-four years ago. From January, 2000 - March, 2001: 516 Genessee Ave, across the street from the baseball fields at Fairfax High.

It used to be sky blue with dark blue trim and now its beige and has the ugliest fence you’ve ever seen. Beige is my least favorite color and I can’t sit on the stoop because of the fence but we look at the house long and hard together, drag our eyes over the parts of it that look the same. We retrace our steps up through the front door, down the hallway and into our bedrooms — the wall that separated us different but the same.

He’s been drinking and I have not been but I light up a smoke immediately and hold it up to the phone and he does, too and when he sees PARLIAMENTS on the packaging he gets excited because he never stopped smoking them either. Holds up his pack like look at us we’re still the same dirtbag kids.

And then we imagine Chris, feet up on the couch, making us laugh over stir-fry, which was the only thing I knew how to cook in those days, the three of us sitting around a table I only recently got rid of. We draw him onto what used to be the front lawn with the pen of our memory; the night it snowed for thirty seconds and then stopped.

“This is where we were bad enough to get into trouble but good enough to survive,” I think, giving him the tour of the exterior with the camera of my phone.

And we did survive.

Not all of us, but some of us.

Some of us survived.

***

I got a text that Chris was in a coma hours before I got the text that he was dead, while I was trying to decide whether or not to come early and help out at back-to-school night.

“My friend just died I’ll call you back.”

The text came from my old friend, J. Ex-boyfriend really, but it was so long ago it feels weird to say that. Like I’m not over it or something. What is the statute of limitations for saying ex-boyfriend? Either way, there was a time when I loved J most of all and I’m grateful that our friendship survived.

“I have bad news,” the text said. And then, he told me.

***

Chris and I were roommates just after Y2K after meeting and becoming close friends through J who Chris lived with before moving in with me in January of ‘00.

with J in St Louis. Not pictured, Chris wearing a giant “Y2K clock” around his neck

I had just moved to LA at eighteen years old and spent the first months of my adult life with the two of them. It was the late 90s/early 00s and my entire world was skateboarders, alcohol, drugs, sex, writing stories for Chicken Soup for the Soul and hanging out with people who liked to light things on fire.

There is so much to say about that time — a time I have written about peripherally all along but never in depth. Maybe there’s a part of me that feels ashamed of who I was in those days but it’s more than that, I think. Like, there’s this part of me that doesn’t trust my own memory.

It is the only time in my life where there is no real paper trail. Like I didn’t want my future self to remember it or something.

Because I didn’t go to college and the bulk of my male friends were much older, they became my entire social life during my formative young adult years. When you’re the only girl in a house that is teeming with men you learn to take on certain roles. As someone who derived power from caretaking and sex, it was like having easy access to drugs.

It was never like that with Chris though. He was only ever like a brother to me, which is why we were able to share a room for half a year without making each other feel uncomfortable.

Chris, J + AVE, Kibitz Room, ‘99

He didn’t have a car or a bank account but didn’t seem to need one. Everyone was so in love with him, he managed to live relatively jobless for years; his razor sharp wit the only currency he needed. And when he did start working, he would blow every paycheck on his friends. Shower us all with gifts, insist on picking the bill up at dinner.

Some people are easy to take care of because they take care of you back.

He was like that.

And from what I’ve read and heard from those who knew him more recently, that never changed.

***

The last time we touched base was on Halloween, two years ago. It was a group text c/o J who had found an old drawing he did of Chris on the stoop of our house at the Halloween party we had in 2000. Chris was dressed in a monkey suit in the drawing and I don’t remember my costume that year but I do remember that my friend was visiting me from college that night and had to stick her finger down my throat to make me throw up because I was so wasted I couldn’t stand up and I remember thinking what a good friend she was to me for doing that. And she was a good friend. Still is to this day but now she lives in Denmark.

***

As soon as I got the text that Chris had died I looked for everything I could find from that era of my life and found very little. A few pictures but that was it.

It always happens when someone I used to know has died — a sort of overwhelming need to reach out to everyone I knew during the days we were close followed by the questioning of whether its even appropriate.

Which is why when my old roommate reached out to me first, I felt relieved. Like I was given permission to mourn or something. Like, yes, this did happen. We were best friends once. We were a family. Loved each other so much we couldn’t imagine one day becoming estranged.

I texted him back immediately. Made a plan to meet him at our old house later that night. Then went on to reach out to others — DMd an old friend who I follow on Instagram although we also haven’t spoken in years.

She dated Chris and lived with him after I did. Asked for my number so she could call me back. First time we’d talked since she became a mother, too.

She was the first person I ever did drugs with and when I think of her I think of cocaine in the bathroom at The Three of Clubs and The Burgundy Room, The Beauty Bar and The Room and The Kibitz Room on Tuesday nights and and and. She got clean around the same time I got pregnant with my son and never looked back and I can tell by the sound of her voice that she isn’t about to now which I respect. She has blocked out that time in her life even more than I have.

Some of us want to press our face against the glass of our past lives and some of us don’t want to be reminded of them at all and some of us toggle our want to remember and then forget and I understand all of it. Have spent the last six years shepherding four different people through very different versions of grief.

“Can we please talk about…”

“Yes.”

“… no I don’t want to talk about.”

"That’s fine.”

***

Which brings me back to where I am standing, in front of our old spot, shifting my weight in platform sandals, face lit by lamplight, two hours after our conversation began.

It is almost 11:00 on a school night and we are in the process of saying goodbye, when the screen goes black and my phone suddenly dies.

We had just agreed to getting matching tattoos for Chris next time he’s in LA — which I have a feeling we’ll never get even though we swear to fucking god we’re gonna do it.

He’s been drinking throughout our call and I have spent my entire adult life making promises with people who may or may not remember them in the morning.

Either way I call him back from the car, once my phone is charged enough to use it, and say goodbye…

To him and also to Chris, to me, to us.

To the story we wrote together — the one we abandoned in different ways for different lives and the one we returned to tonight.

Right here. Where it all began.

This, but bluer.

This, but younger.

This but without the fence…