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emancipation

Collisions Of Mirror Matter

by Derrick Harrison Hurd

November 2010

This is a suicide note. Actually it is a journal of my last fifteen days at the end of which I will have lost everything I have, including friends and a beloved pet and I will be facing in cold stark reality my first and most primal fear: homelessness.

I realized that I needed to chronicle this pivotal experience this afternoon when a friend of mine suggested that my only hope of salvation was to get early retirement by demonstrating dementia…which he was pretty sure I could easily do with the full and unreserved support of anyone that knew me.

I threw up on him, partially due to sunstroke probably, but also because that’s how easily things come crashing down…with one innocent slip of the anvil of truth.

I had stretched long-term friendships to the absolute breaking point. I had always been the strong one, the reliable one, someone who held up their end of the social contract despite the breeches and betrayals that tested it; now I found myself forcing people to face truths about themselves that I had to face again this time as the test itself.

One life, a life of no one special…and it’s outlandish hubris to think that you should care about the inane last acts of one of life’s really big losers lurching about in the early stages of dementia literally counting the days, but I do think though that there must be something valuable in any human experience and I want to share what I have left of life because I know a lot of stuff and most of all because I take notes compulsively…

The first time I tried alcohol as a teenager I took notes (I threw up on them, but I bet there was some meaningful data there)…I cry through the faithful documentation of every disaster I have ever experienced, and I scribble in those rare moments of reflection during periods of ecstasy… I take notes.

I think that the end of a life deserves some notes.

I conspicuously lack the kind of guts it takes to hurt myself intentionally, I am in excellent health, and I have not found life at the least unpleasant; in fact, quite the opposite. It’s just that I seem to have lost track of a lot of things and these things have taken some really dark turns and the course that  I seem to be on can only end in rather an unattractive way and very soon; fifteen days, as a matter of fact. Fifteen from this very day, bear that in mind as you read along.

Every day is one day closer to fifteen. It feels very good, I can tell you right now, to be here at day O, when a leisurely saunter through denial and anger, bargaining, depression and finally accepting the unalterable course of surrender to the one thing you finally could not out run.

But I tell you frankly and in complete candor that I am happily and gratefully very much alive and happy today that these truths are still so far away, and that I can hold my cat in my arms tonight without fear of safety or warmth or comfort…or the love we have become addicted to, as animals and some humans do.

Today that is how I feel, and I don’t know how much better I could feel, then to know that I have hardly even embarked in this panoramic journey which suggests nothing of the doom that tomorrow’s sun on my cherished terrace wakes my soul-mate Katchi brings one day closer to a numbered day. I really, really wish…against all I know I will learn in so compressed a time…to  remember better the day before I knew the number of the days.

Last night I saw Gabriel for the last time.  I have had lots of love affairs (real and imagined) and lots of last nights for these…all unendurable then and largely forgotten now. I think I learned from this that passion is magnificent but meaningless.  This last one, though, the best by far, was significant for the absence of sex as much as for the absence of reason; but most significant of all for its absence of flaw.

Of course you don’t usually realize it at the time, the day when the last of anything happens, although I can remember the last time I waterskied. I was a veteran of family vacations that focused on watersports and I was an expert skier by the time I was ten. Bowling became the family obsession when we moved to Point Loma from Ocean Beach and sold the boat.

So it was definitely that last family waterskiing vacation - my 13th birthday in fact - when I waterskied for the last time. That was some forty years ago. I would never have believed it nor conceived it possible as I danced with the sea that day that it would never happen again. It is a kind of schadenfroid to know this kind of thing.

Being in love was not a priority of mine at this stage of my life. I intended to be an inspiration to people by now and a teacher. I am neither of those but I got to experience the madness and ecstasy of love at this late date and I am grateful for that.

And that it was Gabriel makes it all the more extraordinary and probably the best story of my life because this time I did know when the last one would be. I wish I had gone skiing at least one more time though.

So…Good-bye last great passion and tenderest love of my life…and hello eviction.

Upon arriving home Gabriel has left a note that says he has finished off my liquor, smoked my last cigarette, and eaten the last of my food. He would call me later.

Last time he came back into my life I was really happy about it, really happy. It was on a perfect Hollywood summer morning before everything got so out of hand… he broke into my house and woke me up to tell me that he had a car and someplace he wanted to take me.

Bursting with excitement and irrepressible energy he was like a force of nature. He had a joyful vision and it was working, and it included the car and the color of the day and a secret he had prepared for me and he couldn’t keep from smiling all the way into the winding roads of the Hollywood hills.

At twenty-three Gabriel was quite an accomplished artist; but, he is first and foremost, a tagger. He likes to leave his mark, he wants to be remembered…but he knows he cannot stay.

There was a time when you could follow his symbol, his moniker, his statement…EVOK… painted on every tree and pole and stop sign between his house and mine.

He didn’t know what the word meant when he chose it, or for that matter that it was a word (with the minor addition of an “e”) but he was delighted when I told him what it meant. “I just thought it looked fierce,” he said.

There is a lake underneath the HOLLYWOOD sign. If you are willing to climb several fences that denote the area as restricted, and tread some pretty perilous rocky cliffs you can get down to the dam and the reservoir and some pretty amazing scenery.

On such a perfect summer day with your best friend in a perfect place it is possible to remember any wonderful thing that ever happened in your life…including youth itself.

I read a book once called Whitewater and it had a big impact on me. It was about a man who returns to his hometown, doomed to flooding due to the damming of some river, to remember a certain summer when love was sparked to life and a friendship that ended in a death.

It was rich in pathos and introspective insights about the twists and turns of life, the irony of realizing that you now know your own life story…and the things that we remember so clearly that even the fact that are now underwater, or dead, does not diminish them or reduce their hold on us. In the book it is a water tower.

I made a ridiculous and outrageous wish as I read that book. I wished that one day somebody would love me so much that they would want to write my name on a water tower. I can’t explain why the book and the story and the water tower made that impression on me, but I had long since forgotten the wish.

But as I stood in some verdant glen of shady trees with the sound of lapping water overhead I looked up at a mural that the boy had painted onto the wall of the reservoir.

EVOK it said and then my name.

I had never told him about my wish, I had never told anyone. But here fully fulfilled and realized was the monument to love that I deemed absurd and self-deluding to want for myself even secretly.

This was not the first time he had somehow read my mind and then magically manifested whatever he saw there… he had a genius for dazzling.

I would not see him again for months and by then my unemployment had run out and I wasn’t getting any second interviews anywhere, even for the most menial of jobs, the kind where you have to wear a paper hat…I would have taken it, desperation changes you.

My friend Adam, who was once a male courtesan of local repute who had taken the porno world by storm and then snagged a rich older celebrity with whom he had shared a glamorous life in the dying glow of the era of the studio stars. He was on a first name basis with stars like Rock Hudson and even Michael Jackson and was once the handsomest man I had ever laid eyes on.