Last night I googled you .“Not a Pretty Girl” had come through my playlist, and the memory of you introducing me to that song came flooding over me.
Over the last decade or so, I’ve intermittently extended feelers out toward you. You, responding less and less frequently, until just silence. Your phone number no longer working. Every email sent into the void to no avail. Until I just stopped sending signals out. Now, every once in awhile, when you pop into my head, I get an itch to see if the internet will present an avenue to me back to you.
Your internet footprint, unsurprisingly, has been low to
nonexistent for some time, but yesterday as I scrolled through, I noticed some
activity on your Facebook page I hadn’t seen before. I scrolled through
pictures of young you posted by a slew of unfamiliar faces, each post with a
fairly inscrutable but ominous caption. And then I saw it, posted 2 years ago, a photo of an announcement:
“Dear friends and family,
We invite you to gather with us to honor Greg Conger, in
memory of his life…”
My heart stopped. Yours stopped, it appears, more than 3
years ago. Before I lost my mom even, before you turned 36. There’s no
description anywhere of how you went, but the memorial fund to an organization providing
homeless health services makes me think that your passing was not unrelated to
your later life circumstances.
I have no one to share this grief with, this heartbreak. Our
love, our friendship, existed mostly in a bubble all its own, outside of our
normal lives, slowly fading to nonexistence. So, I have found myself pouring
over our correspondence, a desperate attempt to hear your voice again, to
remind me of who we were. Your words transportive and lyrical, even if at times
the content was sardonic and scathing. My words are blunt, awkward, at times
too saccharine, and at other times, dismissive.
I find myself drawn to collect these fragments, write things
down now to keep you close and to try to stop you from further slipping away. You
were an incredible writer. I just want
to keep you alive.
---
We were quick friends. Visibly outsiders in high school. You
in your top hot and chains, suits on Fridays (Formal Fridays), me in my 70s
polyester shirts and thrifted circle skirts, often complemented by my German
army shirt. Both in clunky boots.
Even from those early days, you had this aloof demeanor of
cool, a sense of hardness and nonchalance that you projected. The hipness could
not be denied, with your inexplicable knowledge of hidden art spaces, maxims
derived from diverse 20th century thinkers, and grasp of obscure
cinema. Yet below your precociousness and pretentiousness was your kindness,
your presence, your patience. The softness you shared privately beneath the
edge.
I, in those days, was a scattershot of anxiety, insecurity,
and self-inflicted pain, rejecting what I considered “mainstream” without
knowing what or why. Just that I didn’t see myself in any of it. Screaming to
be seen while unable to look at myself in the mirror.
But you were also lightness. Possibility.
We used to send each other letters that were little pieces
of sacred art pushed through the mail like magic.
I still have one, stuffed inside a childlike, messy envelope,
a kaleidoscopic scrawl of color. Reading it now, I find your words surprising.
In our later correspondence, your writing was harsher, more performative,
measured. You shared many writings that you had labored over through the years.
But this early missive could be from any alt-teen with baggage.
Awkward and trite, you shared the happiness I brought you, you, a person not
used to joy. How seen you felt. “I’ve never shared these things with anyone,”
you said. Obvious perhaps, but believable.
Still, looking back, I’m glad to know that for a brief time I
provided you some solace.
In those early days, you saw me so precisely and, shockingly
to me, did not turn away from what you saw. That scared me so profoundly that I
cringed and pulled back. You wanted to be with me, you told me so, but I
couldn’t hold that. “I’m so sorry,” I said. I didn’t have the words to express
my fear of such exposure.
I know I shattered you then. You were already holding so
much hurt.
---
Over the next year, we bounced back. The summer before I
left for college we fucked.
That summer, I was working a soul-sucking job where daily I
faced a long commute in stop-and-go traffic followed by abuses hurdled at me by
my equally young and insecure work partner, venom about my body, my lack of femininity,
my weirdness. Enfeebled and seeking escape, I used my newfound freedom by means
of a drivers license to make up for my miserable days with long, adventurous
nights.
That often led me to you. Exploring the winding roads of the
hills on our way to be high or drunk or whatever suited the moment. Many blurred
memories shrouded in darkness and fog.
I remember your birthday party at the start of that summer.
You sent invites by mail. I received a full-page note, barely scrutable in Hep
Cat slang, suggesting a beatific midcentury fit was required. Clare and I
donned our flared dresses and cat-eyes only to be greeted at the door by
pirates and toga-laden Grecians. Instantly embarrassed and confused, the joke slowly
came to us. You sent different invites to different friend groups so that each
person would face that same doubt and confusion. Brilliant.
Soon after, I was over at yours for a quieter night. Your
house in the Berkeley hills was one of those achingly beautiful Craftsman
homes, that provided, unfortunately, no boundary or relief from the nightly
fog. You and I were curled together on the couch, a comforter over us as we
watched Casablanca (who else did I have to watch classic films with?). Soon our
physical proximity gave way and our bodies shifted gears.
We moved upstairs. My body, often tightly controlled and hidden, unraveled, exhaled in that soft, livid light. Femmes of my generation were trained to assume that sex would be an annoying acquiescence at best, painful at worst. But between us it was silly and sweet, awkward and clumsy as it should have been. Afterward, we talked for hours, holding each other.
We continued to play throughout that summer. We fell asleep
fooling around your mother’s basement, in a friend’s guest room during a party
(“no that blood was not us…” we defended), in the botanic gardens where I
worked, breaking in under starlight (a rare moment of timidity on your part on
display through this transgression). Youthful dalliances before the world got
heavy.
We played in other ways too. Walking the streets during bulk
trash day, we carefully collected items to mold into ephemeral sculptures that
lived, for a night, on a random soccer field. We wrote bad poetry in sidewalk
chalk. Hung in coffee shops sharing writing prompts. Snarking on the avenue.
---
As all young lovers of our ilk do, we exchanged books as a means to say crudely and expectantly, “Here is my heart, my truth. See me.”
The most notable exchange of ours, for it was our goodbye before I left for the east coast, comprised of:
-From you to me, Generation of Swine, Hunter S. Thompson’s collection of articles that he wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle from 85-88
-From me to you, Beautiful Losers, Leonard’s Cohen three-part novel of longing, lust, grief, and regret.
It’s almost too poetic from this vantage point now. You, always carving your own path until your fingers blood, sucking the marrow out of life, while wielding a critical edge through the bullshit and occasionally blowing shit up for the hell of it. Me, governed by fear, rejecting the beckoning hand that calls out, “Come, explore, be present in the unknown and the possible,” and instead shirking back to the safety of the known, only to long carry the heft of “what if…”
“Here is my heart, my truth. See me.”
For years, when we would meet up, I would unsuccessfully demand
my book back. That beat-up little paperback I pulled from my parent’s shelf. It
was dense and compact, with an abstract eroticism on its cover and the perfect
aroma of hydrogen peroxide and vanilla. I was irked to be separated from it.
Close to a decade later, in your bedroom that was little
more than a sagging futon on the floor and books piled high in every direction,
after hours of libidinous entwinement and in the backdrop of candlelight, I
spotted it wedged on an overstuffed shelf by the window. I didn’t want it
anywhere else. A little piece of me next to you.
During that tryst, fifteen years ago, you held me up for
the last time. My enduring inner gloom had overtaken me. I was sad and lost and
happened to be in California. I got in a huge fight with my parents and called
you around ten saying, “Can I come to you?” The answer from you then was always
yes.
I traveled 2 hours on foot and by BART. It was after
midnight by the time I got to you. You met me with arms full of groceries and
walked me to your home. I hadn’t eaten in 2 days, and I was so empty. You
cooked me pasta with pancetta, salty and greasy and nourishing. We drank gin
and tonics as you listened patiently to my incoherent ramblings and you shared
elaborate tales of your latest escapades to distract me from my singular pain.
Then in the last slivers of darkness, under your covers, we
stripped off all we were carrying and embraced.
We spent three days together that way, locked in your room.
Naked and present and connected. Moving seamlessly between fucking and talking
and reading to each other. Needing no further sustenance than what was
contained in that little room. Until, inevitably, I had a plane to catch and a
life outside that room to return to. And it was over.
---
After high school, we never really lived in the same place,
geographically or situationally. I moved to the east coast for many years. You
stayed, began working, continued partying, writing. In your emails, you would
boast of your latest project – a screenplay co-written with a friend, some
parody band, essays on the bourgeoise Californian malaise through the lens of
the cater-waiter. There are copies of some of your earnest songs in my email
that I can, sadly, no longer access.
You were trying to find your voice a writer. You shared this
letter exchange between you and John Dolan, a local writer you had become
obsessed with.
You wrote him, nervous, doubting:
Dear Dr. Dolan,
My name is Gregory Conger, I am 26 years old and I live
in Berkeley where I was raised. I am terrified of you reading this
letter. I’ve been trying to write it for the last year and I’ve stopped
even trying to count how many times I’ve started, stopped and tried again.
When I first started reading your writing it was
anesthetic. I was heartbroken, confused and was slowly realizing the more
intricate consequences of learning a trade rather than going to college.
I was nerdy, isolated and miserable. I’ve taken solace in books for as long as
I’ve known to read, and your writing both as Gary Brecher and under your own
name gave me some comfort navigating the consequences of my own stupidity.
Your writing though, also provided guidance. I had never
read anything that moved me so completely until I found the Exile. There were
other writers from other times (Celine, Dostoevsky, Hammet) but no one writing
now who said funny dark true things. Reading your work (along with Mark Ames,
Eileen Jones, Eduard Limonov and others) taught me to be a better
stylist. I stopped trying to show off and started writing what I meant.
It also made me a better person. Your work helped me to
read discerningly, to trust myself when I knew I was being lied to, and to be
braver when I looked at myself. I’ve learned to embrace my pain, and not
moralize my own feelings. I wanted to thank you for the solace and guidance
your writing provided me with.
I first decided to write to you after I had finished
Pleasant Hell. It remains the most touching, brave, hilarious and powerful book
I’ve ever read. I wanted to say thank you.
I’m writing for a more purely selfish reason. I’m at an
interesting period in my life. I’ve finally accepted that writing is what has
always mattered to me. I am trying to improve myself as a writer and I wonder
if you have any advice for a young person who likes doing things the hard way,
and learns slowly with a lot of humiliation and suffering.
I’m sorry for the lack of humor and the tone of sincerity
in this letter. I’m sure it isn’t all that much fun to read. I’m embarrassed by
it. I tried doing it differently and I never found a way that I was proud of.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
He replied, graciously, honestly:
Dear Gregory,
I'm very humbled to get this letter. The question you ask
is a very important one, and very hard to answer. People usually dismiss it
with some blather about how the hard way is the really glorious way. That's by
people who haven't done it themselves. They're not thinking of what
"hard" means, just as people who glorify suffering in other ways
aren't thinking of dental abcesses and clinical depression.
To be honest, I wish I hadn't done things the hard way.
Or I think I wish that. It's incredibly hard to say.
Bernadette Devlin titled her memoir "The Price of My
Soul" and explained that her mother used that expression, not to mean
"what they paid me to sell out" but the price one paid to acquire a
soul. There's some comfort in that.
But basically, if you're stuck with doing things the hard
way as I am and you are, you should do what you can to make the hard way more
bearable. For me, antidepressants were a miracle. I mean the moment Imipramine
kicked in was literally miraculous. I have pathetic fantasies sometimes of
going back in time and tattooing the word "Imipramine" on my hand at
age 16 so I'll have to find out what it is and get it.
Don't be sorry for the lack of humor at all. This is a
serious matter. I know that. And your letter was beautiful. It's a lot more
praise than I deserve, I'll tell you that. I'm an idiot and a failure in all
kinds of ways. But I slog on, and believe me, I take all the help I can get,
from antidepressants to humming some tune for hours at a time. I guess that's
all I can really tell you: Us hard-wayers are goddamn well entitled to all the
help we can get, and we don't need to apologize or explain or thank anybody for
it.
If you want to talk more about it, please write me again. I'm honored by your letter.
I believe you and he kept up contact. I know at that time he
mattered to you so much.
---
When I would return to California, I would most often visit
you at whatever bar or restaurant you were working at at the time. Things would
start cordial, a bit cold. But throughout the night we would find our way back
to each other.
Or sometimes we would go out.
One time, we met up in the city. I was in the height of my
vintage phase in a 50s knit suit and bold red lips (armor against mistakes).
You took me to a strange little bar in the Tenderloin. As we approached the
door, you said, “This is where I take dates when I want them to end,” less as
an implication of our circumstance and more as a show-and-tell. As we walked
inside, there were four aging queers at the bar and a toothless sometimes-drag
queen bartender. They all turned to look at us. Sheepishly, we ordered drinks
at the bar and moved to a side booth. A few minutes in, I noticed a jukebox in
the corner and put on the Supremes. Ears pricked up at the bar and opinions and
comments began to spill forth: which were the best Motown groups, anecdotes
about Diana Ross’ difficult upbringing. You and I never returned to our
sequestered booth, and soon we were all friends. Shots were flowing. We were
invited to the drag night on Saturday, when things really would be hopping, we
were promised. You politely dodged offers to have your dick sucked in the
bathroom, while I engaged in what I recall as a hours-long conversation with an
older gentleman about race and queer politics in the 1970s, getting murkier as
the shots kept coming.
Eventually, we fell out the doors and into a burrito shop
until you tugged my arm noting the need to make final transbay BART train. Under
the bay, you beckoned me to go with you deeper into the night. I felt the pull
in my chest, but said no, hugged you goodbye, exited at my transfer station and
went off to bed.
---
For years I couldn’t track where you were.
Estonia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Britain, Sicily, a train from
New York to California. You were editing an exiled poet’s memoir or building up
skills so you could apply for a work visa to Australia or just barely surviving
somewhere through barter and kind gestures. Running to or from, it was
sometimes hard to tell.
But it was always bold. In your words:
“One thing I have had to accept about myself is that I am a hugely impractical, unrealistic person with a lot of stupid, untenable plans.”
I read of your travels from my quaint life in the
mid-Atlantic, dizzied. Feeling timid, boring. Not sure what I could share back
that would be of any interest, anywhere near as engaging. Often your exploits
sounded thrilling, life-giving. Other times, terrifying, anxiety-inducing. Now,
upon closer examination, the air of loneliness and desperation is more present.
One time we Skyped while you were in Vietnam. In conversation, the veneer of intrepidness and charm of adventure, prominent in your writing, was absent. Miserable and exhausted. You said it had been relentlessly raining for days. There was nowhere to go, and it was beginning to get mind numbing. Limited funds in your pocket, the humidity unbearable. Then the internet gave out.
This was also the era where, in your missives, references to
your drug use, while straightforward enough, became more frequent more central
to the stories – losing your passport while high on MDMA with a clever Estonian
girl, landing in London to find the heroin as cheap and abundant as promised,
etc. Back at home in the Bay, you confided that your constant amphetamine
consumption was making you too paranoid.
And increasingly there were reports of your sexual ventures, dully presented, free of eroticism - sex acts diligently reported, increasingly obscene, absurd,
and/or exploitative. I didn’t mind the stories but didn’t invite them either.
Was this a performance for me? An attempt to show me how cool you were in your bohemian
struggle? I’ll never know. The softness in our contact began to fade. You were
becoming more impenetrable, less relatable, and meanwhile, I was beginning to accept
my movement toward a more normative life.
Coexisting with your freedom and world-building, you were also mired by your choices. In the exhaustion of just trying to make a living. The unfortunate consequence of forging your own hedonistic path. In a tongue-in-check essays about wine culture, you admitted:
“During the time that most people from bourgeois
backgrounds went to college and experimented with intellectual postures and
hallucinogenics in service to exciting varied sexual experiences, I foolishly
gave up my middle class birthright. Instead I worked sixty hours a week
in kitchens to pursue hard marxist theory and hard drugs.
It was stupid. There is now no doubt in my mind
about that. Don’t get me wrong the drugs were awesome, but they are much better
appreciated in the bubble of academia, surrounded by other posturing horny
young people.
There are many other reasons that I am ill-prepared to live in the polite world, of credits, resumes and handshakes but I am going to blame my own stupidity.”
There was no professional safety net to fall back on. Constant financial precarity. Working construction during the day, restaurant jobs at night to keep your head above water.
The divergence in our paths here was clear. I did the things. Went to college, got a white collar job. Went to more school, got a
better paying job. Chose a cushy path.
---
Even still, I hate that you became a stranger, that choices
and circumstance divided us.
Over time, we just fit less and less into each other lives.
We existed only in the overlap of our emails, the occasional Skype call. We
shared about our lives dutifully in letters and calls, but increasingly they served
more as reports from outposts on different planets than as points of connection.
When I first moved back to California, you were the first
person I reached out to, excited at the prospect of being real characters in
each others’ lives again, even though, I admit, I wasn’t sure how it would work
at that stage.
I never got to test it, however. You didn’t take the bait.
Your phone number didn’t work and my emails went unread.
At the time I worried you were no longer interested in my friendship, in me. But more likely, you were just too far gone, had too much going on. In one of your last emails to me, you wrote:
“I’ve been dodging bullets more than I ever thought possible and have been a bit reticent with communication as a result…Sorry for disappearing, there was a lot of death and malice around me and I kind of cut off to make it less exciting to me.”
In our emails, we’d often share the circumstances under which we thought of each other. In that exchange, I had said I was listening to Leonard Cohen. You responded: “Leonard Cohen bums me out these days.”
I still don’t know what darkness was surrounding you. I
pleaded at the time: “You’re making me worry. Can I see you sometime? Or at
least can we talk on the phone? I just want to hear your story and hug you.”
I wish I could have at the very least witnessed for you. But you never responded.
In the 5 years I lived in the Bay, I got one more message
from you, 3 years in. You said “Being homeless sucks”
I didn’t know what to say or do. This came out of nowhere,
or so I felt at the time. I was also,
validly or not, affronted at all the unread messages I had sent.
“WTF?” I said. And, “Jesus, I thought you were
dead.”
You said you hoped you could find some horny couple to take
you in.
Your message came out of the blue, and I was stressed
because I had a work flight in the morning and my relationship with my partner
was tenuous. I didn’t know what to do. I feared what running to you would do to
what had become my life. So I let it sit, followed up later. Of course, it was
too late. No response. The moment had passed.
Now I wonder if I could have, should have done more in that
brief opening. Done anything, really. Asked “Where are you right now?”
when I got your message and run to you, held you as you had done for me. Heard
your story, offered what support I could. Likely it would have changed nothing,
but I should have tried.
I’m sorry.
Once, years earlier, I had sent some bullshit sprawling apology text about all the things, spurred on by a night of drinking. You replied:
“You never have to apologize. My forgiveness for you is very big, as it should be for friends.”
I hope you forgive me now.
---
I sent messages here and there for the next couple years.
But I have no idea if you ever got them.
I held on to hope that one day we would reconnect, be close
again, be friends again. But in my gut I felt it; I knew that, really, I would
keep searching the internet for signs of you, and one day, I would find only
your obituary. From what I can tell, you don't even have an obituary.
7 years passed since your last message. I didn’t know I had
missed you. That you had been gone for so long. That I hadn’t even searched for
you in over 3 years.
I’m here now, made it to my 40s, where you will never venture. I take vitamins and get my cholesterol checked annually. I tend to my garden in my suburban home in Maryland where I live preciously and unremarkably with my partner (now spouse) and my cats. My small but sweet life.
In a travelogues, you once wrote:
“After I am dead, and it turns out the Calvinists were
right about everything; when we know definitively that the poor deserve to be
exploited as much as they can tolerate; when the last drug user admits that he
never ever had fun on drugs, that it was only the shackles of addiction that
caused him to use; when it is objectively proven that wage labor is nothing at
all like rent-by-the-hour-slavery; when all of this happens and both God and
the Easter Bunny are high fiving at their quarterly meeting; I will be in hell.
I now know exactly what I will do in hell.
I know I’ve said this before, lightly, maybe too many
times. But I mean it this time. In hell I will have just spent 36
hours in airports or on airplanes, entirely without sleep. I will be
grilled by the customs agents at Heathrow airport, who will go out of their way
to humiliate me because I am unemployed, and when that doesn’t work, because I
am a “leech” on their society, or rather potentially the Republic of Ireland’s
society; ironically a nation that they’ve tried to starve to death every chance
available. When I say "they” I’m not talking generally here. I
mean the 19th century forced starvation of Ireland was directly perpetrated by
these same hateful bureaucratic scum. So I will rebook. I will do it so they
have no argument and I will stupidly lose a lot of money as a result.
Goodbye Dublin! Hello London. Then I will pay 30 pounds sterling and take a 15
minute train to Paddington station. It is impossible to not get lost in
that writhing gordian knot of sleazy commerce and it will spit me out, hungry
and weak in a the kind of downpour I dread riding my bike in.”
I hope that where you are there is stillness, softness. That
you are held. That you are seen in the best way, my dear old friend.
