Like Dizzy Gillespie's Cheeks

Three

Although death is universal, we all react to it differently. And I suppose with each death I've encountered, none have hit emotionally the same way. Not that I'm an expert or anything, but like most, I've had my share of deaths. Beginning with my first (the uncle I didn't know), the one thing I learned is that you cry when someone dies. At least that's what my mom taught me. And then I learned you go to this cold, creepy place where the trees have no leaves, the sun never shines, and everyone cries some more.

I concluded the best part of a funeral day was at the end, when the food was served. There always seemed to be more food than there were people to eat the food, so I'd usually end up getting sick from eating too much. The only problem with a family member dying was that these food extravaganzas were always accompanied by old ladies with hairy moles trying to squeeze my cheeks ... I found it difficult to eat with sore cheeks.

By my third or fourth death, I finally understood why everyone was crying. Johnny Hutton, a friend of mine in high school, was decapitated when the snowmobile he was riding on the back of went through a path that had a low-hanging wire. His sister, who was driving, survived.

"People in high school don't die," I'd thought. But I found out that wasn't true. He died all right, because I saw his dead body at this thing I was introduced to at the time called a wake. The first thing I thought was, "How ironic to call it a 'wake,' when the person couldn't be more dead." I walked through the wake talking to no one, feeling things I wasn't sure why I was feeling them, smelling things I wasn't sure what I was smelling. From then on, I just associated it all with death.

I sat for a while in a chair in a corner and soaked up the sadness. With plastic plants, bad paintings, and teenage angst, this sadness thing felt like a familiar place all of a sudden. Johnny's big sister, Sally, the one who drove Johnny to his death, walked by with Johnny's mom, Nora. Neither of them was crying. I wondered what goes through a person's mind when they're that close to death.

I left the wake, hopped on my bike, and raced as far as I could as fast as I could, until the tears blurred my vision so much I had to stop. I finally understood what all the mourning was about. It was all about loss. The loss of someone who understood, the loss of love and friendship, and even as a teenager, I understood what mortality was without understanding what it meant.

It was at this time that I not only started having anxiety attacks but was moved enough to write my first song on the piano. It was called "One Note at a Time," which was a metaphoric insight into living one day at a time and attempting to appreciate it. Heavy for a kid in high school, but that's the way I was. Always living on the edge of existential quandaries.

Well, the funk was back like never before, and as I made my way to the gig that night, I started to freak out. It seemed like what used to be insignificant and meaningless suddenly became important. A flower bud for instance, sprouting on a tree in the middle of Michigan Avenue, became a miracle. The kitten in the window of Hansa's Dry Cleaning that Ben despised as an ugly, lazy, scraggly piece of shit was now a living, breathing thing. And Crazy Joe, the dancing homeless guy who lived on lower Wacker Drive was no longer Crazy Joe; he became somebody's son, somebody's brother, somebody's father.

At the same time, things that were once important now seemed worthless: the music I played, the love I felt, the ambition I had ... all vanished. There's something liberating about not caring. It gave me a perverse sense of strength ... a feeling like there was nothing to lose anymore, nothing at stake. I could be an asshole without consequence because nothing mattered, especially to the people in the bar.

They couldn't tell how I was feeling. Didn't care. Wouldn't understand. They're here to lose their own realities. Or discover new ones. Create a sense that everything is, if not all right in their lives, at least not as bad as it seemed. I'm simply background music. The tips in the fishbowl at the end of the night reflect as much.