What's Happened Since

Tonight, nine years ago, was the night JP died.



I think about his mom, a lot. His family, at that time in my life, treated me better than my own family. I still have the winter coat his mom and grandma gave me that fall; I wore it every winter til last year, when I reluctantly accepted the necessity of a new one. After he died I tried to keep in touch with his family, but in time it just got to be too painful for me. Selfish, I know--what was painful for me must have been unimaginable for them. Parents shouldn't outlive their children, and his mom was just the nicest lady. I miss her a lot, actually.



When I walk home from the Green Line, I walk past the spot where we bought the heroin that killed him. It took til earlier this year before that memory clicked into place--I remembered a school, and a big vacant lot with a wrought-iron fence near the alley where JP made the buy, and I remembered the street itself; it was only when I walked past one afternoon that the view struck me and I thought I remember--this is the place. It looks like every other fenced-in vacant lot with an alley behind it; no one but me would know there was anything different about it. I am the only one who knows; I was the only other one who was there.



There are too many memories like that one--memories of which I am the sole living custodian. Our life together was insular, an entirely closed system, at least at the moments of which I have the strongest memories. I suppose most couples could say the same; the moments you remember best are the ones where the only witnesses are you and the one you love. And in my case, I'm the only one left to remember them.



There was a night I remember in June, when we were living in Wicker Park in our little storefront apartment, the place in which I did heroin for the first time. This night was months later, when we were pretty-well hooked but still controlling it. It was hot, really hot, a presage of the week in July when 800 people would die in this city in a heat wave--and we had moved our mattress into the den because it had better airflow.



There was a radio station back then, in the summer of 1995--WCBR, "the Bear", a low-power station out of some northern suburb. And one night in June, we stayed up all night--just me and JP, our closed ecosystem. We did heroin, of course, but that's not the part I remember. I remember listening to this low-power radio station, calling the DJ every 20 minutes or so, requesting songs we remembered from the last few years, songs that Q101 didn't play anymore. We requested Catherine Wheel's "Show Me Mary", but they couldn't find the disk and they played "Heal" from _Happy Days_, the first time I'd ever heard the song. And they played "Work For Food" by Dramarama, and "Tomboy" by Bettie Serveert....We went for a walk around 2 AM, over to Arandas, a 24-hour Mexican place over on Division and Milwaukee; we bought tacos and then walked down by Chicago Avenue, over the expressway bridge. A homeless guy stopped us, and he was obviously drunk and not entirely coherent; I remember JP being miffed at me because I was so obviously scared. JP was always open to every new experience, and sometimes he had to drag me along behind because I was so well-conditioned. I think I've progressed, in that at least--at least a little.



We went home and stretched out on our mattress in the den, and we slept like we had all the time in the world to be together.



Four more months is not--never was, never will be--all the time in the world. And in the months after he died I remember thinking this most of all: I wasn't finished yet. There was still more he could have taught me. That, above all else, remains my biggest statement of the unfairness of it all.



I wonder sometimes what would have happened if it had been me instead--how well would he have taken it? Would he have gone on? Would he have had as hard a time getting over me as I've had getting over him? Would he do what I've done, and chase away perfectly good partners for the unpardonable sin of not being the one he lost?



Would he have kept going with his dream, and had the band? And what would have happened, had he lived, when the music world stopped believing the same things we believed? What would have happened to his unbounded optimism, his unshakeable will? Would he have given up and become bitter--and if the music failed him, what would he have done instead?



I think of all the things that have happened in the intervening nine years--not to me, but to the world. The last newsworthy event in his life was the OJ Simpson verdict; we rode around Lincoln Park that night in my little red Dodge, and he hung out the window and yelled at the yuppies: "Shame about OJ, ain't it??" We were such jackasses, laughing and taunting the wealthy, never knowing that we only had a few more weeks.



I think of all the things he'll never know. The Internet. George W. Bush. September 11th. The war in Iraq. The 2000 election. Monica Lewinsky. Boy bands. Britney Spears. Laci Peterson. Chandra Levy. Elizabeth Smart. Rap-rock. Limp Bizkit. Eminem. The Bartman ball. The Bulls' last two winning seasons. The breakup of the Smashing Pumpkins. The death of Princess Di, of Layne Staley, of William Burroughs, of Brad Nowell, of Ronald Reagan. Weapons of mass destruction. Osama bin Laden. Duct tape. Anthrax. Courtney Love's fall from grace. Michael Jackson's repeat offense. The R Kelly tapes. Strom Thurmond. Bad _Star Wars_ movies. Y2K. John Ashcroft. Homeland Security. The Patriot Act.



I think of all the things I've learned, all the things I've done, in the nine years since his death. He will never know that I bought a house, that I got a job in computers, that I lived in North Carolina. He will never know that I had to have our cat put to sleep, or that I learned how to crochet. He will never see the pottery I painted or the quilts I've made, never see the bookshelf I've built or the cats I love, never hear any of the CD's I've bought because we talked about getting them, one day, when we quit the heroin once and for all. He will never hear the music I learned about in the effort to collect every single thing that reminded me of the time we were together. He will never see how far I've come.



I've had to learn to be proud of myself, now that he's no longer here to be proud of me. I think that was the thing that always amazed me the most about JP--that he was consistently amazed by me. He was the first person in my life who accepted me the way I was--flaws and all--and who could even see good in those flaws. He was like that with everyone.



After the funeral, we went back to his mom's apartment--all of his friends. This was the same apartment where we'd had all those amazing parties back in '91, and it was strange to be there without him. But we sat in the spare room--none of us wanted to be in his room, to think about what had happened there, least of all me--and we talked about our memories of JP. And we laughed, a lot, because that was what we'd always done when he was around.



I think of his friends a lot, too--all those people who used to be part of my life, who lost the same guy I lost. I've fallen out of touch with all of them, and I know there are a couple who still blame me for what happened. We all knew JP was a dreamer; I was the one who was supposed to have better sense than that. I was the one who should have kept our feet a little more firmly on the ground--who should have called a halt.



I know that's not a fair assessment, and I'm years past trying to assign or accept blame for what happened. It just happened, and it was stupid, small enough that we should have been given a second chance--but we weren't. Even my usual "everything happens for a reason" doesn't cut any ice in this set of circumstances: No matter WHAT the lesson might have been or who might have been the one who needed it, whether it was me, whether it was someone else--I refuse to believe that the universe would sacrifice one life--particularly not a life like JP's--to teach that lesson.



And so I'm left with this: It happened. Nine years ago tonight, it happened. And my life--and a lot of other lives--have been left poorer for it. No reason; no answers, not in this lifetime anyway. If there's something after this life, maybe I'll understand it then.



In the meantime: I think about JP.



A lot.