I was raised by an awful man who enjoyed calling his kid a "faggot" if he cried. Needless to say, my crying jags are pretty uncomfortable (thanks dad!). So it usually only happens when I am alone. The first time in recent history that I cried in front of someone was when I learned of a friend's suicide. So caught off guard, I began crying uncontrollably. I was screaming, hysterical, and curled up in a ball. It went on for some time. My girlfriend, god bless her, freaked out. It scared her to see me so out of control.
That said:
September 6. Twice in one day.
That morning, very early, I drove a freight truck from Brooklyn across the Manhattan Bridge into Tribeca. I was supposed to have a bunch of furniture to a studio by 8:30. I was early, so I got a nice bug cup of coffee and sat in the truck, watching the stuffed shirts rush to their office jobs, listening to NPR.
As soon as I turned on NPR, a StoryCorp broadcast came on; part of the ongoing collection of a person story for every person who died on Sept. 11. They played a recording of a woman talking about her ex-husband who died. He was in the tower that was hit first. He called his ex-wife to tell her he always loved her and asked the new husband if he would please be a father to his children, because he didn't think he was "going to make it."
I started to cry just as my co-worker walked up to the truck. He and I talked about how fucked up life can be.
When I got home from work, a friend in California sent me a message: "Brian would have been 32 today. I guess he is 32 today."
Our little circle of friends has lost 3 friends to suicide. Brian was the first. Brian's note read, "Don't tell my son what a pussy his father was."
Along with the message my friend sent, he also sent Brian's obituary:
I had never seen it. I moved out of town just before Brian hanged himself. Seeing
Food service worker made me so angry. Of all the things one could say of the dead, "food service worker" has to be about the laziest, most insincere, and fucked up. Brian was a lot of things; he struggled with drug addiction, gainful employment, love, family, depression, but surely there is something good to say about his life besides the fact that, at the bottom of his rope, with nothing left, he found himself working at a fast food chain.
Perhaps it was the heightened emotion surrounding 9/11 in New York, coupled with the idea of StoryCorp candidly documenting the lives of all the people who died. Whatever it was, I lost it. Shivering, stammering, snotty.
I miss my dead friends, and it's a shame they did some really fucked up things, but they were loved. We loved them. I wish I could have written the obituary.
Brian Lee Cooper
Listened to Quicksand really fucking loud in his gray Sentra. Took mushroom once and puked all over. Perhaps you saw his band, Liquid Tricycles, perform at Izzy's Pizza? Brought a dirty mag to school in fourth grade. Gave himself a mohawk, complete with egg whites styling, before the first Lallapalooza. Halfway through the show he started itching. Brian Cooper was allergic to eggs.
