Life Harvester 28: RIP Dan Klein, A Character Sketch From A Novel I'm Writing
Life Harvester is written by Colin Hagendorf. This is the email version of a print publication available for low-cost individual subscription via Paypal or on Patreon. Life Harvester subscriptions are free to prisoners. If you know an incarcerated person who would like to receive a newsletter every month, get in touch with me directly and I’ll take care of it.
FOOL ME ONCE
What’s good, it’s April. Spring is in the air. Go out and find someone to kiss. I’m exhausted and sad and enamored with feeling a breeze on my face or walking in the woods with my dog, so I didn't write much this month. Instead here’s another old MRR column about a dead friend who's birthday just passed, and a character sketch from a novel in progress that I really like but I know it won't make the final draft. If Life Harv isn't a place where I can air out the musty attic of my writing practice, then what even is it? Happy birthday to George Costanza, Bahamadia, and John Waters.
LIFE HARVESTER RADIO
This month on the podcast I talked to artist, activist, scholar, illustrious zine maker, and my very old friend Mimi Thi Nguyen about coming to the US as a refugee as a child; getting into punk through Maximum Rocknroll; falling out of love with punk because of a bunch of shitty men involved with MRR; falling back in love with punk through Evolution of a Race Riot, a zine project she made in response; connecting the dots between her refugee experience and the legacies of US imperialism informing her work as a scholar; the statement she wrote about the massacre in Atlanta. Plus I talk a bunch of shit about pop punk and threaten to break a 50 year old's glasses. We didn't talk about the Legend of Billie Jean, and that's my fault, but you should read Mimi's old Punk Planet column about it. LISTEN HERE.
RIP DAN KLEIN זכרונו לברכה
This piece originally ran in Maximum RocknRoll in my column Eat, Pray, Shlub, during the editorial tenure of Grace Ambrose. It’s about my friend Dan Klein, who passed away on June 9, 2016. His birthday was last month, so he’s been on my mind. He was a true mensch and I miss all the time. Honor his memory by blasting Alton Ellis, giving yourself a tattoo, or telling a zionist to eat shit.
I been thinking a lot about this old friend of mine lately. He isn’t someone I saw with much frequency when I lived in New York. In fact in the past few years we really only saw one another twice a year, at Passover and Hanukkah. Other than that it was incidental meetings. Occasionally we would make a plan to drink coffee on a bench in Tompkins Square Park, something we had one often in our early-20s. But those rendezvous occurred less often as we got older and our lives took shape in more substantial ways.
But there’s an intimacy in our friendship and the way we communicate that feels profound. During our afternoons on the park bench, we would often joke about our future as old men. It started because of an experience I’d had on the bus. There had been an elderly gentleman sitting in a single seat, with an empty seat behind him, clutching a paper bag tightly in both hands. I sat on the bench opposite his and watched him intently. He seemed to have such a sense of purpose, clutching his bag like that.
A stop or two later, another elderly man got on the bus and sat in the empty seat behind the first man. While he lowered himself into his spot, he placed a hand on the first man’s shoulder and squeezed—a small gesture, but significant. The first man opened his paper bag and removed two identical sandwiches. Tuna salad, by the smell of it, on untoasted white bread. He handed one to his companion, folded the paper bag and put it in his pocket, and then they silently began to eat. They finished their sandwiches right as the bus reached the park, where they slowly disembarked together. It was a brisk autumn day and I wondered if they’d be cold. The ritualistic nature of their interaction fascinated me and for a time I thought about them incessantly. How close were they? How long had they known each other? Did they ever speak?
Later that week I was in the city at the coffee shop across from Tompkins and I ran into my friend. We took our coffee into the park and sat smoking on a bench. I told him about the two men, and we joked that one day we’d be the old Jewish guys on the bus, moving slow, eating stinky food. “I can’t wait.” I told him. “I can’t wait till we have to make the kid at the bodega heat our coffee extra in the microwave because we’ve been smoking so long we can’t feel anything in our mouths anymore.” he countered. “I can’t wait until we don’t understand young people,” I replied as a group of teens walked by.
I never really thought I’d live far into my 30s, so most of my friendships don’t include an expectation that we’ll be old together. My relationship with this particular friend is unique in that regard. And that’s part of why it was so jarring when he called me to tell me he was sick. “I’ve got ALS. I’m picking out my wheelchair today,” he said. He’d been diagnosed right before Thanksgiving but wanted to wait until after the holidays to let people know.
When I flew home in December I went straight from JFK to see him. Sitting on the Airtrain, I started thinking about the decade that we’d known each other. I thought about the first time I’d gone to his parents’ apartment, before he’d even moved out. I thought about the first time he’d come over to my place on Lorimer Street when we were just beginning to become friends. I thought about all the times we’d hung out. But I also thought about the spaces in between, the times I hadn’t seen him. One thing I’ve long admired about him is the fact that he never pulled punches. He was blunt and direct, in a way that wasn’t insensitive, but wasn’t sensitive either. One of his complaints throughout the years was that he felt taken for granted, or worse, excluded. I never felt like he was leveling that accusation at me, but I always felt like he could have if he wanted to.
And so sitting on the train I wondered how he felt about me coming over to see him. I probably wouldn’t have been going straight to his house from the airport if he wasn’t sick. It occurred to me that this same thought had most likely crossed his mind as well.
When I got to the apartment, his mother wheeled him out from his room, and we drank seltzer like good Jewish boys. We hadn’t seen each other since Passover, probably, so there was a lot of catching up to do. His band had just recorded a full length for Daptone. It was during the recording process that he realized something was wrong. He was getting tired and feeling so weak all the time. Doctors eventually figured out it was ALS, a neurodegenerative disease that slowly kills off the nerve cells in the body. Pretty soon he was using a walker and he’d just moved on to the wheelchair. “I’ve got two to five from the onset of the disease and I probably had it for a year before I was diagnosed,” he told me matter-of-factly. He’s got the same frankness about his own mortality as he does about everything else.
As he listed everyone else who had visited, we got to the point in the conversation I’d been afraid of. “You know, these people keep coming over, people that I haven’t seen in forever, and it’s so great that everyone gives a shit about me. And I started thinking about how mad I used to be all the time at all these people that I thought weren’t calling me enough,” he paused to catch his breath and I waited for the indictment. “And then I realized I wasn’t calling them either. I just think it isn’t worth it to be so mad all the time. At the end of the day I got a lot done, I had a ton of great friends, and the stuff I felt so mad about is inconsequential.”
Other people filtered in. Soon there was a whole crew hanging out. I ordered some pizzas, people told stories. I left my friend in high spirits, feeling sad but heartened. It’s weird to say, but he wears his illness well, or at least as well as one can.
A few days later at my parents’ house I broke down. I’d been running around the city trying to catch up with everyone and it wasn’t until I was stationary that it hit me. I felt so sad and so angry all at the same time. And listen: I know this isn’t about me. I’m not the one that’s sick, I’m not doing the day-to-day caretaking. I know I’m not the one most affected here and my perspective isn’t the most important. That feels important to say.
I saw my friend again before I left town, at the tattoo shop our pal Sue works at. He wants to get covered before he dies, and Sue called a shop meeting where everyone that works there agreed to tattoo him for free. It’s so good to see people getting together to mitigate the awfulness of all this, but it’s still so stupid that he’s sick in the first place.
You know that Jack Palance Band song “How Can I” on the JPB / ADD/C / Queerwülf three-way split? I thought it was some sad sack “my girlfriend left me” pop punk, but it’s actually about a friend of their’s dying. I think I’ll leave you with a few lines from it:
How can I live when I know things are coming I just can’t take? / How can I live when I know that my heart’s gonna have to break again? / It’s just like my buddy Mike Pack said. / He said “always tell your friends you love ‘em, because you never know when goodbye’s gonna be goodbye.”
A CHARACTER SKETCH
Bullitt, “like the Steve McQueen movie, cause I’m fast,” is a bike messenger in Manhattan who one of the novel’s two protagonists, a recently out teen dyke in Richmond Hill, Queens, meets on the Chainsaw Records message board.
The mysterious and mononymous Bullitt of the Lower East Side, NY, née Abigail Elizabeth Lanier, only daughter of Chip & Linda Lanier, of Darien, Connecticut, was not always the streetwise bike messenger she appears to be today. And despite her best efforts to obfuscate her tony suburban roots, she isn’t that far off from the coddled girl she once was.
She was a quiet child. Oddly quiet. Uncomfortably quiet. She didn’t speak until she was 4 years old and when she did it was a full sentence. “That toy is mine,” told to the child of one of the house keepers who had come into work with his mother due to some family emergency or another. Her parents had deposited him in Abigail’s room, among the cornucopia of stuffed animals and toy dolls in which she silently lived. Abigail had been playing when the young man arrived. She regarded him briefly and returned to the child-size kitchenette in which she was preparing a meal in simulation. Trepidatiously, he crept across the expanse of her pink-carpeted room and sat down beside her. She didn’t so much as glance at him. He cautiously reached out and selected a wooden tomato from the pile of discarded fruits and vegetables on the ground. It consisted of two perfect semi-spheres, attached at their center by Velcro, the better to simulate slicing. He had never seen such a toy, his playthings were largely made of plastic. He stared at the toy tomato in his hand, sticking and unsticking the Velcro. Just then, Abigail’s mother cracked open the door to check on the children. The creak of the hinges disrupted the young man’s reverie. Abigail looked up at her mother, looked at the boy, and snatched the tomato from his hand, uttering her first words.
Around her 10th birthday, at a pool party at the Birchwood Country Club, an ache had developed inside her and didn’t let up. She began to fear that she had been switched at birth in the hospital, sent home with the wrong family. The cold, well-mannered man and woman she shared a home with could not possibly be her real parents, who she imagined were out there somewhere, with the wrong daughter, feeling the same ache. She knew deep-down that the life she lived was not rightfully hers, and she feared every day that it would be stripped from her. She had glimpsed the world outside the extravagance of her family’s wealth through television shows, movies, and out the window of the family car when their Irish driver had taken her and her mother into Manhattan to see Annie on Broadway.
Her traumas, ultimately, weren’t much more than the quotidian humiliations of an aristocratic upbringing, though that didn’t dampen their sting. Her father was always at work, drunk when at home. He had a temper but never took it too far—a raised voice, a broken dish. He never laid a hand on his family. Her mother was home managing the household, also drunk. They didn’t love each other, barely touched. Everything a matter of decorum, ordered according to manners and rules.
And of course that’s hard for a child. Of course an empty person will grow in a home empty of love. That’s never been a question. What stands out, to Bullitt—when she’s alone, really alone with herself; when she’s spun out on speed, staring at the wall; when she’s copping a bundle or cooking a shot—is how commonplace her wounds are. How many girls with pasts just like hers aren’t strung out. And that’s when she longs for an explanation. On wild full moon nights when she stays past closing at Sophie’s doing lines with the bartender, she claims that the pain of being born queer into a straight world is why she turned to the bottle at a young age, but she knows deep down that’s not it. She knows she would’ve turned out like this no matter what.
She knew she was gay early on, and never felt conflicted or ashamed. It was the one part of her that was unambiguous. She loves women and girls. She loves the sight of them, loves their company, loves their bodies. The only time she truly experiences the full ego-annihilation that she’s sought her whole life with drugs is wrist deep in another woman. The sense of duty she feels with her entire hand inside her partner briefly sooths the ache she’s felt since childhood, abates the fear that she fits nowhere.
In the summer after seventh grade she had her first fling with Tiffanie Guccione. Tiffanie with the half pony and overalls, who’s braces shined when she smiled. Tiffanie, the youngest of 5, who’s house was so chaotic you could get lost. At the Burke twins’ pool party in 6th grade, Bullitt had been mesmerized watching Tiffanie eat a piece of pizza. She held the paper plate at eye level, angled slightly downward, the tip of the slice dangling off just far enough that she had to crane her neck to take her first bite. Her whole body seemed to quiver with anticipation. A drop of grease dripped to her lip, then ran down her chin as she moved in. Once she took her first bite, she moved her head and the slice towards each other in a perfect, almost graceful synchronicity until all that was left were some crumbs on her swimsuit and a bit of marinara on her bottom lip, which her tongue darted out to collect. Bullitt had never seen a girl so guilelessly ravenous. She wanted to be devoured.
It was this adolescent fling that had set her down the path of iniquity and deceit. In her escalating attempts emulate the boys that the object of her ardor seemed to desire, Bullitt’s behavior grew from daring (stealing her dad’s Jaguar), to reckless (staining the white leather interior fingering Tiffanie in the passenger seat), to outright catastrophic (crashing the car into a phone pole while fingering Tiffanie in the passenger seat while driving).
The last incident lead her parents to consider that their daughter might have behavioral problems that were beyond the scope of two emotionally-hobbled drunks, and so from 8th grade on, Bullitt was sent away for schooling, although at 17, after a scandalous affair with a new teacher straight from Smith College had her “asked not to return” to her fourth girls academy in as many years, her parents cut their losses and invited her to finish out her senior year back at home, where they eked out an arrangement. She could come and go as she pleased and keep whatever company she chose, as long as she maintained a grade point average of 3.5 or above and didn’t get arrested.
There were a string of girls stretching the Atlantic coast from Bridgeport all the way down to Mamaroneck with a candle burning for Abbie, as she was known back then. She thought of them as a bowl of popcorn, a delicious snack and a fine diversion, but ultimately unfulfilling. By the time she left for college the next autumn, that stretch of the I-95 corridor was littered with broken hearts, a greasy bowl of unpopped kernels. Still, she could find no one to devour her.
The closest she came to feeling the annihilation she craved was with an older woman, Julia, who she met at an L7 show at the Tune Inn. Julia was an old-fashioned leather dyke and a bundle a day heroin addict, both of which intrigued Bullitt. And while the complicated ceremony of leatherplay proved of no interest to her, Julia’s other passion became Bullitt’s as well. She’d always been attracted to badness, felt a pull towards destruction. The first time she smoked heroin she got vertigo laying still on the couch. She came to with the taste of puke in her mouth, a cigarette burn on her shirt, and a serenity she’d never felt in her whole nervous life. Sensing a kinship, Julia taught her how to use a needle.
She got into NYU early admission, a relief as she didn’t plan to apply anywhere else. She found the other students’ wide-eyed awe at dorm life a distasteful contrast to her own indifference and yet another indication that she just wasn’t like other people. She began the lackluster pursuit of a women’s studies degree, but spent most of her time at a coffee shop across from Tompkins Square Park, where the sharps container in their bathroom made her feel explicitly welcome, and The Cubbyhole, a lesbian dive on Hudson St, a ten-minute walk from campus. At Thanksgiving of her Freshman year, a week after her 19th birthday, her paternal grandmother’s health took a precipitous decline. By Christmas grandma was gone, and Bullitt, the only daughter of the only son, was the recipient of a sizable endowment, though access to the money would be limited until she was 21. She’d be there before she knew it, she told herself.