The Last Laugh of an Enlightened Pirate (Memoir)

The screens were showing different scenes. Planes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers five hours before, and the buildings were gone. TV commentators spoke feverishly, and even though you could not move, you were laughing maniacally. Out of the side of your mouth, like a pirate.

Your mother was sitting next to your bed, and she had been waiting for me. We’d made an appointment a week before so that she could be there when I arrived. She wanted to see how you’d react to an old friend.

When she saw me, she brightened, then darkened, and said, “Matthew loves the chaos today.”

Her voice had the same tone and cadence I knew from when we were teenagers. Filled with the music of a Jewish New Yorker.

That’s when you looked at me. You turned with your bulging eyes. Like you’d become a subaquatic creature. And there, underwater, you grinned at me.

Even though you couldn’t say so, I knew you were happy to see me. And I was glad to see you, too.

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It had been seven years since we last spoke. I lived in San Francisco then, and you were in Granite City. It was after you got busted for selling heroin.

“By the feds, Gench,” you said. “They arrested me in Washington and Minnesota at the same time!” You laughed, and so did I. You were high on pills of some kind.

We talked on the phone for an hour, and before we got off the phone, I jokingly said, “Remember, man…life’s too long not to sleep.”

Now, in that bed, in that nursing home, in that Granite City suburb, on September 11th, you were wide awake and cackling like a swashbuckler, unable to move.

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The last time I saw you in person, walking and talking, you came over to my apartment in Seattle. The one in the Regrade near Lake Union. Before they started calling it Belltown, below Queen Anne and the Space Needle.

You brought Mystic Jeff with you, and my apartment was filled with Minnesotans that rainy afternoon. Even though I loved you both, it wasn’t cool for the two of you to go into my bathroom and shoot up. That was a rule of mine: I didn’t let junkies in my house. But you did it anyway, and I was angry.

I forgave you because I was no saint. That’s one of the reasons we got along so well.

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You were always better at doing and dealing drugs than I was. When we met, you’d just returned from living in France with your father. Europe had taught you all about the latest intoxicants, New Wave and post-punk music, and skater fashion.

I was just an innocent fourteen-year-old punk, and you were a year older. So, I wasn’t sure why you sat down next to me on the school bus and put your Walkman headphones on my ears. I heard U2’s The Joshua Tree for the first time that day, and we were instant friends.

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That winter, you made me deliver newspapers with you on your paper route at five o’clock in the morning. It was a brittle cold day in February, and you got me deliriously high.

Thirty degrees below zero and completely dark outside, we shivered in an alley behind a dumpster. By the banks of the Mississippi, frozen and white. You stuffed your metal pipe full of weed and lit it for me.

After we snuck back into your house, I was so relieved because I was so cold. We prepared bowls of cereal, careful not to wake your mother, and we ate them upstairs in your bedroom while we listened to Black Flag on low volume. My fingers were so frostbitten that I could barely bring the spoon to my mouth.

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When summer came, we rode the roller coasters at Valley Fair for our birthdays, just one day apart. Then, they threw you in lockdown drug treatment, and I had kidney surgery. I wanted to see you when I got out of the hospital, but they kept you locked up for six months.

While you were self-tattooing yourself in rehab, I lost everything in a fire, broke my leg, and started singing with my first band, The Eviction Committee. You didn’t seem to care about my leg or the fire after they let you out, but you were jealous of my garage band. So, you became a lead singer, too.

We were ridiculous, you and me. You, shaking your long, black, Jewish mane of hair and doing your Robert Plant impression with your band, The Horsemen of Orpheus. And me, acting like Jim Morrison, cigarette and microphone in one hand, while I sang and screamed with my round Charlie Brown face.

Few people knew we were both classically-trained musicians. I didn’t make a show out of being a pianist, and you kept your violin skills hidden. Instead of sharing stages with our adolescent rock bands, we could have played Mozart duets.

But that wouldn’t have been as cool. Or as dangerous. Or what young women wanted. We had priorities, you and me.

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Our teachers said we were smart, but you were obscenely intelligent. When we took our college entrance exams, neither of us studied. I was sober and nervous, and I did pretty well. But you were cavalier and on LSD, and you scored higher than anyone.

That summer, we met those two biker women in their early 20s. In the parking lot after The Cult and Metallica concert. They invited us to their apartment in Minneapolis, and we had a bacchanal.

It was the same night when Nathan parked his car on the railroad tracks and waited for the Burlington Northern train to come. He had begged us to take him with us.

His funeral was a week later, and you were at the service, but I missed it. So, I drove to the cemetery, went to the open grave where he was going to be buried, and I apologized for leaving him behind.

When you arrived to see his body lowered in the coffin, you lit a cigarette, and asked, “What are we doin’ tonight, Gench?”

There was a darkness to your mischief then, and I was drawn to it. But our acts of debauchery caught up with us.

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A month later, we parked behind the bakery in your Mazda RX7 in East Granite City. You’d been dealing coke out of your car while you delivered pizzas. That starless night, we were there to cut up the 8-ball you’d just bought and snort a few lines.

You’d already hoovered up a significant amount of blow, because when the headlights from a half dozen police cars rained down on us, you leaped out of the car as if you were a giant frog.

We went to jail, and I don’t remember how I talked my way out of it. I know you were furious that I walked. I know you thought I rolled over on you. But you must have made a deal because you only spent three weeks in a halfway house.

I’m glad you were released. I needed you. Driving through the country backroads blasting Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever with you made me feel better after I’d had more run-ins with the law.

So, when you smashed into the side of the freeway coming off the on-ramp in a thunderstorm, I was sad to see your RX7 be put to rest. But I was relieved you survived, uninjured.

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We may have been criminals and delinquents hunted by the boys in blue and the redneck bullies in that northern factory town, but we made it out. There were warrants out for both of us as we sped west, electrified on Rocket Fuel.

I apologize for not telling you that the Fuel was a mix of herbs and numerous hits of blotter acid. It was Mystic Jeff who gave it to me. But let’s call it even. You should have told me your four-foot-long iguana could get out of its cage into the station wagon while I was driving.

In the end, you avoided hitting roadkill on your Japanese crotch rocket, I pulled your lizard off my bare chest and out from under the dashboard, and we didn’t die when that blue Volkswagen van exploded in the painted mountains. We got to the Northwest and made it our home, for a while.

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To celebrate our birthdays that first year, I drove up from Track Town, Oregon, to visit you in Olympia. After getting high on your Washingtonian buds, we decided to go out to Denny’s, because they let customers get free breakfast on their birthdays.

I ordered mine at 11:55 pm, and you ordered yours at midnight. Grand Slam breakfasts. And we requested that everything be replaced with hash browns. Even the garnish. Our waitress hated us, and we giggled like devilish children during the entire meal.

After that, I didn’t see you much. I moved to Seattle and got deep into the early 90’s music scene, while you became a Deadhead and got deep into heroin.

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Before I visited you and your mother at the nursing home in Granite City that dark day in September 2001, I spoke to your father on the phone, and I learned what happened to you. It wasn’t drugs.

“We were getting Matthew’s health insurance arranged,” your dad said. His voice was academic and intimidating as it had always been.

“And he had a stroke. Right there in the office. Before the papers were signed. I rushed him to the hospital, and he was okay at first. But they found a brain aneurysm, and no doctor would operate. It was too much of a risk, they said. Three weeks later, he had a second stroke. Now, he is in the state he is in.”

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Just weeks before, I’d been chasing my father’s wartime ghosts traveling in Vietnam, and I’d broken my brain in Southeast Asia. Now, I was listening to your mother talk small talk there with you.

She took us both out into the courtyard, away from the TVs and the missing towers. You, in a wheelchair, and me, walking wounded beside you.

You’d always had the quickest wit. The sharpest tongue. Ready to do battle with only your mouth and your intellect, and now we were both silent and broken in our own ways.

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I left the nursing home that day, and I cried like a newborn. I had no idea how long you would be alive. And I wasn’t sure about myself either.

As I drove with tears rolling down my cheeks, I saw a bar off the highway. I took the off-ramp and went there. After ordering a drink, I wrote a song called Bootleggers, and I put you in a lyric:

I wrote this song on the back of a bag that once held a bottle of gin

Now you gamble somewhere between heaven and hell, waiting to cash it all in

But you didn’t cash it all in. You didn’t die. And neither did I.

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When I said goodbye that day at the nursing home, it was the beginning of a new chapter for us. There were no cops or drugs anymore. Just you and me and the pieces of who we had become.

Slowly, our pieces grew back together, and we became different people who loved each other even more than before.

When I entered your room the next time, your mother wasn’t there. The blond nurse was in the room with you, and she excitedly said, “Oh, you’re here to see Matt again! Well, okay then. I’ll leave you two alone.”

Your boombox was playing Sugar Magnolia by The Grateful Dead, and you turned your big, bulging eyes at me and widely grinned.

“Hi, man,“ I said. “What are you listening to? You know I can’t stand The Dead.”

It was a joke. Between the man in a physical coma and the man in a spiritual one. Your sideways smile grew huge, and you laughed hard, shaking. Saliva ran down your lower lip onto your chest. I cleaned it with a tissue.

A new version of our friendship had begun.

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I visited you every time I was in Minnesota. Sometimes, I would find you in a new room, down some dull carpeted hallway near where bingo numbers were being called. In your room, The Simpsons would be blasting on your TV. And the moment you’d hear me say your name, you’d find my face and beam.

At first, I visited you for you, but quickly, I started to visit you for me. You listened to my words, not because you had to, but because you seemed to want to. There were times when you’d drift off into some otherworld, your eyes reaching for elsewhere, but you always returned.

I held nothing back when I talked. I told you about my breakups and chronic pain. Being broke and being broken. You liked my darkest, most chaotic stories best. I guess you never lost your desire for danger, even if it was being lived vicariously through me. So, I told you about everything.

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When I brought in a new record I’d written and produced, watching you listen to it was mystical. I got to see you enter the music like it was a physical space. You listened to what I created, and you left the body you were trapped in.

After that, I played you all of my latest songs or albums, and you were the greatest audience I ever had. I’d press play, you’d inhale and exhale a huge breath, and then settle in to listen. Sometimes, a tear would roll down your cheek. I hoped it was a tear of joy.

I’d ask, “Do you like my new record, man?”

You’d find my eyes with yours to say silently, Good work, Gench.

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After all those years of drugs and drink, music and women, handcuffs and nearly dying, there we were, you and me, just sitting together.

Years passed, and your salt and pepper beard became distinguished, your fish eyes glassy and tranquil, and you emanated more and more wisdom. As I grew up myself, I learned to swim with you in your undersea world.

Every time I entered your room, you looked directly at me and you smiled. And every time I left, you cried.

“Well, dude, I gotta go, Matt,” I’d say. “I’ll see you next time.” Your smile would drain as you turned your eyes away from me. Then, tears would roll down both cheeks.

Our visits became a place of confession for me. As you got older and grayer, and your belly grew, and your skin became more glossy, your smile and contentment also grew. Your sense of calm increased, and you became a peaceful oracle.

You had found a way to connect with the world while you were a prisoner to your body. Gradually, you gained a sense of tranquility in your forced solitude. I envied your calm when I was in chaos.

As we entered our forties, I once said, “You know, Matt, I think you figured something out, being here all these years. I think you know far more than most of us now.”

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By 2016, it had been almost thirty years since that day you sat next to me on the school bus. In the beginning, we were hoodlums and criminals, running through the streets, taunting authorities, and rattling stages with music.

Then, you were frozen in place, and it seemed like you’d been thrown in a horrible prison. But you were too strong for a cage to hold your mind. During those fifteen years in the nursing home, you found something transcendent, and I got to share a small part of it.

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I was in New Orleans when I received a message from your younger brother.

He said, “Matt’s only got a few days left. It’s his heart. He won’t last long.”

After I heard from him, I called the nursing home. Your father was there with you. He asked me, “Do you want to talk to Matthew?”

“Absolutely. Put him on,” I said.

Your father held the phone to your ear and let me talk to you one final time. As I spoke, I heard you laughing on the other end of the line.

You sounded like a pirate, and it was beautiful.