Lord Fear (3 page)

Mostly he was alone if I wasn't with him, so I was with him a lot.

These were moments when I saw Josh, when I thought his name. His absence was heavy as my father and I watched large men dressed as boys play in the dirt. We sat close, spoke in grunts, cheered for the kind of heroes who always listened to lessons from hard fathers as they succeeded in a game marked by clean, white lines.

On weekend nights, I walked past him on my way out and
stopped to look in. I remember it—many nights distilled into just one. A room lit only by a television, his outline half in shadow, half glowing, a reflected image of Derek Jeter's face shimmering on his cheek.

I paused. My plans were to meet friends on a dark street to smoke a poorly rolled joint and talk about being stoned. And then there would be a party. And maybe there I would kiss somebody, and she would rub me over denim, though probably not. And then I would walk home late, chewing gum, looking up at streetlights like buoys in black water. My father saw me and made a sound. I saw his hands and the things that they did without him noticing. His palms turned up in a silent question as he leaned toward me.

“You going?” he asked. “It's tied still, no score.”

The TV light was a wave breaking. I went to sit next to him. I put my legs up on his knees. He put his hand on my ankle. Everything was quiet and safe and still and heavy. Those were the words that I felt most, that best described growing up after Josh overdosed, after his heart slowed and then broke, after it exploded with the blood it could no longer move.

“I wasn't going to leave for a while,” I said.

My father smiled and turned the volume up on the TV.

He wasn't thinking about me. I knew that. But I was there. I wondered if Josh ever sat still and silent like this. I wondered what stillness felt like for him. If it felt like effort. Years later, I would read a poem he wrote with blue pen on yellow paper, and I would picture him on our father's couch, momentarily still, his fists clenched. But I hadn't read it then, and his absence, like always, settled into the quiet.

[NOTEBOOK, MAY 1994, “MOTHER'S DAY DINNER”]:

It is strange when the pain is gone. Or maybe I'm just acclimated. The heavy fires have dissipated and smoke remains. Smoke—still
terrible—but not the same magnitude of the former. On this day, a heavy ache. A sadness pulls down my psyche. A willingness to live here, but a yearning for another reality. Or is it? A drink and a nap hid it again. Deep down to dwell in the bowels, only to be synthesized by the love of strength and of power
.

—

Time passes, nearly a decade since the death.

Our lives develop, an aging montage.

Dave marries. There is a reception at a restaurant near City Hall. Then he gets a separation and gives up custody of the cats. Beth decides to tattoo her eyelids to save time applying makeup in the morning. She never regrets the decision. My father ages gracefully. He sits in the dark less. He speed walks for exercise and counts his calories. He meditates in his desk chair every evening with all the phones silenced, and claims to be a far less angry person. I grow up. I am tall and thick, and I sport a patchy beard that's mostly on my neck. I am as old as Josh was in my early memories of him. When I'm told that I look a little like him now, I know it's a lie but I try to believe it. I've taken some of his old jackets—the grungy flannel, the studded punk leather. Sometimes I wear them in front of the mirror and attempt a sneer. My girlfriend, Sofia, watches me when I do this and she laughs. She calls me a poseur, but she says it gently. She knows when I'm trying too hard to be what I'm not. We are in love.

I'm a writer now, self-identified. Really, I intern and sometimes freelance for bad pay. I make a point of walking around with a reporter's notepad in my back pocket, and I like to hit Play at random moments on the digital recorders I fill up, just to get the rush of hearing my voice asking a question, another's answering me. Mine is a simpleminded, mission-driven, bleeding-heart
kind of reporting. I interview people I deem sad or underserved. I valorize a local graffiti artist, triumph any and all historic preservation, generally mourn development. I stay up all night trying to talk to transgender prostitutes who work along the Hudson River, making vague promises to destigmatize them. I report on one, named Sweet Chocolate, with the cloying assertion that “standing in the solitary glow of a streetlamp, she could have passed for a schoolteacher.”

A bad summer batch of heroin leads to a spike in overdoses, and I get sent to write an article about the junkies dying in Tompkins Square Park. I breathe through my mouth and remind myself that I'm heroic, and I go to the patch of asphalt where the crusties camp, asking timid questions. They invite me to sit with them. I get a little obsessed. After the article runs, I keep showing up in the park collecting quotes. There's a freelance photographer at the local weekly, a plainclothes Quaker do-gooder who has noticed my grim sincerity and has taken a liking to me. Together we go to the park, bring offerings of pizza, and gently push the victims for their stories. The leader of the group, a guy named Jewels, is as old as Josh would be, has shot up for twenty years, and carries himself, deservedly, like a veteran of a never-ending war. I like him. I ask him a lot of questions. He gives me his email address and so I send him even more questions, feel a visceral rush every time I open my in-box to his chest-puffed, all-caps answers.

I AIN'T GONNA APOLOGIZE FOR ANY MOTHER-FUCKING THING THAT I DO
.

When my subjects ask me why I care, I tell them about Josh and watch their faces soften. They are kind to me for loving someone like them, is what I think, which is awfully paternalistic and probably not true, but feels great. I say his name and ask if they remember him, ask if he ever hung around the park and if
they ever shared. Jewels is the only one old enough to remember that far back, but he doesn't remember much.

—

On a July Saturday, I leave whatever story I'm chasing and stand with my family on the patch of grass next to Josh's grave. We have the usual conversation. We talk about societal lack of compassion, the pains of the Giuliani era, and all those second-time offenders who got turned away from public methadone clinics. Et cetera, et cetera. We blame until it's time to get quiet and mourn.

We are Roth's grievers again, the way we are every year on his birthday. We are stiff with responsibility. Nobody wants to be the first to ask when we can leave or why, in the grander sense, we keep coming.

The registering once more of the fact of death that overwhelms everything
, is how Roth put it. Yes, that's right.

There are six of us. Sofia is part of the group for the first time, which feels significant in a way that I'm embarrassed to think about, this reveal being the greatest intimacy I can offer. Dave's ex-wife went through the same process at the beginning. We stand in a sticky semicircle, and Beth passes around a tissue packet so that everyone is prepared for crying time. My father looks down at his son's headstone pressed flush against his mother's, does not comment on the bad arithmetic of the image.

I turn and admire the scope of this place, a cemetery so large that it has named streets within it, maps delineating neighborhoods by the front gate. I try to quantify, the way I always do, how many headstones I can count before my eyes cross on themselves, and I imagine the same image, a mouth of shark's teeth that have punctured flesh. This is just the Jewish cemetery in a town that is mostly cemeteries. The Catholic cemetery that we mock each year, with its plastic roses and giant marble crucifix headstones, is across the road, its ostentation looming on our horizon.

We stand for ten minutes, maybe. It's hot.

Then my father says, “He did not deserve this.”

We all concur. No he didn't, nope, not at all, each of us tripping over one another to say it, even Sofia, who never met him, who has no idea what he did or didn't deserve, agreeing with perfect confidence. Then there's a pause.

I think this is where the story begins again for me. What I mean is that this is the moment when I decide to dig. Something infinitesimal changes in the way I grieve. Grief becomes, just for an instant, not enough. I hear myself saying that he didn't deserve to die, and I realize that this is all I know for sure about him, or all that I think I know. I have a nasty suspicion that my sadness is born from only this fact, and the vagueness of the platitude is heightened by the shark's-teeth headstones, rows and rows of deaths that should all be mourned that way, and are by somebody, by everybody. Nobody deserved it. It goes unsaid for the thousands of graves around us. But we're not grieving so much as defending him, I think, until defending him becomes the only act of remembering. We work to separate a good life, a good man, from a bad death. Once, he was young and sober and beautiful. He was pure then, and innocent, and just a regular guy, or maybe something better, and he definitely didn't deserve what came next.

“I'm losing his voice,” my father says. “I can't hear him.”

We all listen to the wind for a while, hissing through trees, making no noise at all as it slices between the headstones. I want thunder, but it's a clear day, a day of parched, silent sun. There is sweat running down the backs of my knees, and I reach down to scratch. Dave tries to impersonate his brother. That's not it, my father tells him, and Dave gets defensive, says it's pretty fucking close. Josh always sounded like he was going to cry on the phone; we all agree about that. You always had to ask,
Are you okay?
Then he'd get annoyed and say,
Yeah, what the hell are you talking
about?
We laugh at that until the laugh dies out. “He sounded like Andre Agassi,” my father says, and Beth says, “Who's that?” “A tennis player,” he tells her, and she shrugs.

As we walk back to the car, Dave tells me that he has a tape of Josh's voice. It's a fake talk show that Josh used to record as a teenager, with himself as a Johnny Carson figure, Philip Goodman, the future funeral emcee, as his guest. Josh would write these long scripts, lists of questions. When Philip came over, Josh would put the tape recorder on before he even got his coat off. The tape has been sitting in Dave's desk, nestled into piles of pennies and bent index cards.

“You don't want it?” I ask.

“No,” Dave says. “And don't get your hopes up. It's sort of pointless. I just figured you'd want it because you weren't there. And it seems you like to listen.”

—

I take the tape home and put it in an old Walkman. I stare at it for a few days, and finally, alone, I sit down and hit Play. His voice sounds like I remember it, but that sound is disappointing, just a voice. I remember the sound, but I remember no thought or feeling to attach to it. I pause, wait, then start again. This time I go through the only motions I know how to go through. Somebody is real, true, verifiable, if they speak into a machine and then you write their words. I've been taught this rule. He was real. He spoke, it was audible, and I want to prove that to myself, even though I shouldn't have to.

Dutifully, mechanically, I transcribe him.

[CASSETTE TAPE, UNDATED, “THE JOSH SHOW, VOL. 1”]:

[Static. A click.]

Okay, it's back on
.

[Sigh]

Great
.

Welcome to The Josh Show. Are you happy to be here?

[Pause]

Okay, hey, Phil, I have a question. Do you like rubbing clitori?

[Giggling, from Dave in the background; no answer]

Phil, Phil, Phil, can I ask you a serious question now?

[Sigh]

I dunno, Josh, can you?

Do you like doody pie?

Come on, Josh, what kinda questions are you asking me?

[More giggling]

Okay, okay, okay, Phil, serious question. What do you think of Toco Lewis?

What do I think of Toco Lewis? Who's Toco Lewis?

Oh, he goes to my school. So, do you ever eat titty?

[Unintelligible, frustrated exclamation]

How often do you wank? What does your dick cheese smell like? Do you eat dick cheese? How many pubes do you have, Phil?

3,000, Josh
.

3,000? You counted? How many are you gonna have by the time you die?

3,001
.

Okay, okay, okay, okay, Phil, can I ask you a serious question now?

No, Josh, clearly you—

Do you like to eat titty?

All right, interview's over. Dave, turn the thing off
.

Dave, if you touch it, I'll fucking kill you. Phil, Phil, Phil, come on, your readers want to know. Phil, please. A serious question. Do you like pussy juice?

[Sound of chairs moving]

Phil, Phil, wait, hey, Phil. When was the last time you rubbed clit?

The last time you asked me, so like a year ago
.

Wow, so that's a long time. What did it smell like?

Like cod, Josh
.

Or haddock, what about haddock? That's a nice fish. Did the clit smell like haddock?

Josh, when was the last time you rubbed clit?

I never rubbed clit
.

So instead of talking to me, why don't you go rub some?

[Pause, breathing]

Phil, Phil, Phil. Did the clit smell like haddock?

[Click]

It's tough to find nobility in the raw data, but I'm willing to try.

There is more on the tape, a few sessions' worth. I keep listening. I transcribe it all. Every page looks the same.

I try to remember something, a moment like from the tape—Josh's voice and laughter, me present this time. But memory is a hard thing to force, and, as usual, the memory I find of him centers on his absence, on the imagined. Instead of his voice, I remember
The Lord of the Rings
because the first time my father tried to explain Josh to me, he did so with a fantasy. I read the books when I was ten, eleven maybe, right when I started seeing Josh less. I was an easily frightened kid, and I couldn't sleep when I got to the Gollum passages. I imagined him hissing to me,
Precious
, a cold, gray hand snaking out from under my bed. I fled my room and found my father in the kitchen eating a banana. I told him I was scared of monsters that wanted one thing so intensely, monsters with sallow skin and no personality beyond the want, skulking around my closet. He paused, put a hand on my head, told me he had something important to say. The connection was an easy one for him to make—when a hobbit ceases to be a hobbit and becomes a creature that nobody can
really know, when an addict ceases to be the person that you loved or maybe is still that person somewhere, but on the outside, the part you have to interact with, nothing remains.