In the middle of the night, I'm thinking about being a boy and at Sara's house. And her teenage brother who was very cool and had thick spectacles was sitting in the backyard in shorts with his legs crossed, playing with his leg hairs. And I said, your brother is counting his leg hairs!
And then I'm thinking of another cool teenager, and he played Peter in the play of The Diary of Anne Frank. And the Frank sisters both loved him and so you felt he was the type to fall in love with. He was stoic and I remember he wore a necktie as a belt, the length of it dangling at the side of his thigh, and he wore smart sweaters and was handsome and was reading a paperback of The Clan of the Cave Bear, which was popular at the time. That was in the moment that I passed him in the lobby of the theater, and I swear he smiled at me. I wouldn't even have thought that someone like that knew I existed!
He wound up shooting himself in the head. I was maybe 12 years old and none of us could fathom that. Especially when someone said, just think, his poor parents, when you do that, someone has to clean up the mess, because your head splatters on the walls. I guess his dad had a gun? I had friends who were crying and hugging each other but I didn't know him so I wasn't meant to cry and hug, so I just thought about it. And someone else said on his wall he had a Smiths poster, "Shoplifters of the World Unite," I think.
I've written this down before, I'm thinking, but it keeps coming back into my head. The waste, and that he must have been a beautiful person. And that my memory of him ends the same time as everyone else's. Never even went to college, let alone go bald or do something adventurous, or make a thousand more mistakes.
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