ryan

Simultaneous to when Leah and I were walking over to the abandoned parking lot to take yesterday's 500th Blip, several hundred miles to the south my old friend Ryan Noriega lost his battle with spinal cancer.

When I lived in Austin, I played fretless bass in the band Heaven for Betsy with Ryan, the love of his life Grace, and my other friends Chris and Jen.

When I first moved to Austin in 2007, it was during one of the darkest times in my life. I was amidst a divorce, the buying and subsequent quick selling of a house, and living in a city and state I really knew nothing about. I took a job at a research lab where I met the love of my own life, Leah, and our beautiful future was set in motion. But also working there was Grace and we hit it off (probably with our shared obsession of The Simpsons though there was so much more than that). She'd told me that her and her boyfriend Ryan had been putting together some musical numbers and were looking for a full ensemble to start to play shows around Austin. The rest, as you could say, is history.

I had just found out, just a handful of weeks ago really, about Ryan's stage four spinal cancer. And now he is off, away, my friend the Blue Boy.

Indeed, Ryan was an artist like no other I've ever known. Extremely talented in writing and performing music, but also an incredible visual artist and cartoonist. The above picture, inked into my flesh, features the logo for the band that Ryan created, Betsy, the dead pink bunny. Yes, I loved Ryan's art so much that I needed this tattooed on my arm. This was my compliment to him, to my experiences. And I guess now it all seems even more surreal.

I knew when I played music with Ryan and Grace and Chris and Jen that I was in the middle of living during the beginning of the best times of my life.

PS: Check out my favorite cartoon strip of his Holy Mole, about a parish of forest creatures--the priest is a mole. So fucking brilliant.

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Finally, as you can imagine, my mind has been flooded with all sorts of distinct and scattered memories of it all. Here, if you will indulge me, is my working out of it from the last few days. I know most of it may not make sense. And that's okay:

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I just watched the clock change over from 10:44 to 10:45. I watched it happen. It meant something.

He walked with a hunch, a bowed back as if carrying something massive upon it. A guitar amplifier, say, or an upright bass. Or a vintage suitcase packed with intangible non sequiturs. He walked like Mr. Burns or Professor Farnsworth (and I think he would have valued these comparisons).

He chewed at the corners of his mouth a lot. For the longest time I thought this was from a self-conscious nervousness. Only later, much too later, did I realize these gestures were physical manifestations of thought. Deep thought[1]. Not uncertainty. In actuality (he might have hated that phrase), he was one of the most secure people I've known. He handled judgments upon him as if they were the most inconsequential thing in his whole life, as if they were...now I know why he'd lumbered about with that heavy, heavy spine. Because of what grew there.

I tumbled over the curb on San Jacinto, just missing that concrete ladle where sidewalk embraces crosswalk. Like old friends. I remember the back seat of his robin's egg blue putting Mitisubishi. CDs and papers and a P. Terry's straw wrapper maybe. Grace and I had hoisted a dozen pints after work and he'd appeared to retrieve us. I cried in the backseat, with the windows down. I might have held something, my father's old Canon or a waterbottle or a coffee shop receipt or my own hand. They knew what it was about. In the rearview mirror (I've recalled it askew) his freckles were rising like dark stars over the darker horizon of his thick-framed glasses. Buddy Holly, he got that a lot, I imagine, but didn't care. They were lashed with white athletic tape, or once-white, across the bridge[2]. And in all seriousness, Grace turned, grabbed my hand. She sat in the seat ninety degrees sideways towards me. I could see his mouth corners, in that mirror again, recede away into themselves.

That night on a blue couch that smelled of Rufus, they took off my shoes[3]. They took off my shoes and I slept. The morning brought my expected brand of embarrassment, of mild shame.

He'd closed the French doors, the recording room, to let me sleep. I saw a frog on the computer screen, a frog brandishing a claymore.

"This looks like World of Warcraft. But with frogs." I still tasted canned Guinness.

He responded about, yes, its similarity but that this game was free. And with animals[4].

That morning, he drove me back to my car, still festering in the parking lot at work. I don't think we talked[5]. I hate myself for not remembering if we talked. Like improvised, impoverished notes and melodies, this memory fled. But fled in a way that goosefleshes neck and arm follicles in its flight.

And I have a button. And I have a tattoo. Many times over.

---notes---

[1]For an example of this, take the following critique that I received when we once exchanged creative projects. Mine was a novella (with fictional renditions of Brian and Leah) that I have long sequestered, but still not firmly killed; his a far superior graphic novel. How can one compare words to words and pictures? But taste his words, they still live:

Brian - I feel selfish for saying this, but I say it in all hope that it might help you work on it. I don't particularly like the bits where the narrator tries to put order into it ("Now to back up further, as I claimed I would do earlier..."), and also you had mentioned in your earlier draft about not knowing what the narrator wants - I don't think either of that is necessary, or I should say that I don't want it to be necessary. I see your story as a timeless love story (not "timeless" in the sense that it's an instant classic, but timeless in that the chronological order is a little blurred). The reader can sort of navigate the events based on their relation to the major events in the narrator's life - his mother's death, Leah's family moving, Leah's death; and I feel like the real story is about how these two are supposed to be together, and like anything that is destined to happen, it's destined to end in tragedy. But the real hook of it is that this story hasn't ended, because it sort of exists all at once. It's a faux-steam of consciousness about his relationship where one detail leads to the next, and possibly in the end begins where it starts, with Leah's death somewhere in the middle.

One of the things I mentioned before that I really like about your writing, this in particular, is how you can expand milliseconds of time into paragraphs and pages. In essence, this entire novel is really just a collection of seconds pieced together, a total runtime of about three minutes. Here's some of the scenes that I think are missing:

The narrator's father coping with his wife's death.
The narrator's life when he is separated from Leah, possibly a relationship he was in that he knew was not important.
The narrator and Leah meeting each other again.
A wedding or some sort of consummation of their renewed relationship.
The narrator after Leah's death.

It may seem cheesy, but I sort of envision this moment where the narrator picks up on Leah's ability to communicate with animals sometime after her death, reconnecting her to him.

There's also that segment towards the end that I believe is incomplete, where Brian mentions his father's inability to get satisfaction from his art... that should go somewhere. A thought or theme that I had that might be a little overly dramatic for you... you mention also how he runs out of supplies... I think it might be interesting if, after his wife's death, the father is constantly creating and recreating the same artwork, finishing it and being dissatisfied, then destroying or selling it and trying again. It might be sort of a beautiful, poignant moment if, in his desperation to find materials to work with, dismantles the air hockey table and creates something with it. Or it might just be too contrived and overblown to fit into your style...

Those are my thoughts at the moment. If you don't like them, I'll try to get some new ones.

[2] It was still there the very last time I saw him in person, in Austin, in the hospital room that overlooked the Interstate. His neck emaciated, his non-working legs akimbo beneath the knit blanket. His shoulder felt so thin when I gripped it in leaving. I didn't know how else to make it all tangible.

[3] They were the authentically creative. Occasions: a Nightmare Before Christmas in July party. An Up watching party projected on the ceiling as guests laid on sleeping blankets surrounded by balloons. A bouncy castle. All of the Vaudevillian backstories. We loathed sports together.

[4] This made sense in light of his graphic novel, I think now. Or maybe it didn't correlate at all. I can never know.

[5] What about the Whip-In? The Music Lab? We shared things, and not just sweatingred Tecates. But I cannot articulate these (other) things.