The Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts

real quick: I’m still answering advice questions and other stuff, but this one is a hard one. proceed accordingly.

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The hardest ride I have ever done was ten years ago this winter. Nothing harder since, I swear. Not a single thing since. 

It feels stupid and unfair because the best parts of being friends with Brandon coalesced on bikes, in the summer. All my memories are short sleeved and bare calved. I said goodbye and never thought it was a real goodbye. Then seasons changed and I didn’t get another choice. By then it was so, so cold. 

*

It was Dr. King Day and it was too cold to ride a bike. Los had been in town for winter visits, left me a message and said Call Me Back. I called back on the 60 bus and all he said was, You need to come over to Yut’s right now. It was so cold and I emptied of all the heat in me and I willed the bus to go faster, then I willed the doors to stay shut, and then I got off and walked down 18th anyway.

I climbed up the stairs and when the door closed we were all in the kitchen and Yut was flat back against the corner wall and something was unbelievably wrong and I know what Los looked like when he’d been crying and somehow he opened his mouth to tell me what had happened slowly and calmly and then I too fell hard and and I too refused refused refused to believe it. 

*

Because he was there when I moved back to Chicago and began adult life in the Oughts, the memories I hold onto like the world’s mopiest Peter Pan have Brandon stamped everywhere. 

From 2009 to 2012 I practiced young adulthood as I floated amongst a lot of other sweet and smart and silly hipsters. It meant I had a job I took because I could not find another one, bolstered with that start-up cash and Gen-X C-Suite culture. I worked from 2 to 10 PM and spent a lot of time on GChat. I spent a lot of this time with Brandon, who at the time I knew to be vaguely involved in one of these computer jobs. 

This also meant I knew someone who could be counted on to want to make plans. And so this is how I came to love lake beers. 

*

We Gchatted before he died. I’ve looked it up in the years since then, queasy.

Happy New Year!!!

Everything in this age we leave behind, unreal, is somehow determined to remain. Unnerving, ever present. This, and the last Christmas present I gave him, a book, back in my position, with my inscription to him, and a letter he got from me when he moved to California. It was on his desk. I hid it amongst treasures when it came back to me, shaking.

*

Brandon invented lake beers. Self-explanatory. Leave work. Buy beers. Meet up at Lake. Line up bikes in sightlines. Drink beers. Listen to the lake. Listen to each other. Take off, eventually. 

When he died, no matter that it would be the first day of February, no matter what, it would have to be lake beers. 

*

When you are twenty-five and someone you love who is also twenty five dies, the part you play is a strange one because you are perhaps not yet used to grief, if you are very lucky. I was mostly very lucky. I had seen someone too young to die, prior to this, and I knew people who had been in the military who explained things like, Things Come In Threes and to watch out for how death worked like that. . 

You have to watch your friends crying and you are crying and then you realize you have to start telling people and you get on the phone and you start calling and your voice comes out like the most gentle thing you can make because you are not keeping it together and one by one you are calling boys you know and they are On Their Way Over and then it does not matter that it is Monday and zero degrees and as you keep drinking beer to feel something other than what you feel you realize: we have to tell the girls. 

Then there is no other choice because what else do you think to do but start to call, at the hour of the night where there will never, ever be anything good across the wires, and as quietly as you can, say the words, he died. 

*

What else we did was plan the hardest ride I have ever done in my life, a week later. We went on the internet, we told people on Facebook. We went through our computers and profiles and sent picture after picture to each other and his family. 

Brandon still holds the mantle as king of sharing music. We had always been a group of dumb indie rock loving, concert going friends. Bands came through Chicago and Champaign endlessly and you could spend hours remembering shows and reminiscing. Because of this we made a playlist for Brandon, of Brandon Music. I still listen to it. All the time. 

That week it was harder to listen to some of it than others. I listened to Wolf Parade’s Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts over and over again: 

Now they say it’s in God’s hands

But God doesn’t always have the best goddamn plans does he?

*

One of the bands I have seen the most times in my life is the post-rock duo El Ten Eleven because they played many free shows in Chicago, and we went to most of them because Brandon loved them. It made me a fan. The last time we saw them together was a sticky July day, drinking 7-Eleven booze under the Blue Line to thrash around to the looping and vamping. 

I felt endlessly grateful he loved them and the music moved through that week, because there were no words there, and because I didn’t have any either. What we were thinking adding “Slow Show” or “Midnight City” or “Someone Great”, I don’t know. Somehow especially Explosions in the Sky, even with no words at all. I couldn’t bear it. I still, sometimes, can’t. 

*

The week of the ride, the nice bike I owned was stolen on campus. I don’t know how, and sometimes I wonder if I just didn’t lock it, brainless with grief as I was. But when I walked out of lab, half functioning, I bent to unlock it and found nothing. I didn’t bother to cry. It didn’t really matter. 

It did mean I’d have the bike I’d always had to go on the ride - single speed 70’s conversion. He’d helped me tension the chain on it, once, patiently, riding back from the lake. Never held it over my head, never condescended, never made any suggestion I didn’t need to hear. Because he liked riding bikes. He liked the riding through the world. I have realized this is what I love, too. We met and I began biking in earnest and finding joy therein, and so he is knitted up with that, too. 

This ruined me, probably. I had a friend like Brandon who was kind and funny and ran a little jealous and liked bikes and I must’ve assumed there were many men in the world of bikes who were like him. The joke sets itself up: white guy, shmancy touring interest, indie rock, beer, OK Cupid maven, computer job, group ride organizer. The punchline was that he was actually a really good fucking guy. He was the best of us. 

I get that it’s fucked up, but for a long time I felt like I’d trade any of the other dudes in his vein for him to still be here. I don’t get to do that math, luckily. 

*

It was so cold and we did not know who would make it. I knew I had to. We met at Ceres, where we used to meet for a can of Coke and a tumbler of whiskey. A Friday night, packed, but we crammed into booths: friends, family, coworkers, bike people. Then it was time. I had three pairs of socks and my knee high boots, my sets of gloves, my messenger bag loaded with his favorite beers for the road. Internet friends saluted us, rode us out to the Lakefront Path in his honor, a kindness in seventeen degree darkness. 

We leaned the bikes against the wall all about the Planetarium, listened to family gratitude and memory  carried to us in stillness. After the first ashes left across the lake, I passed the beers, looked out to Hyde Park, South Shore, Indiana. His parents hugged us and made their way off, and we returned to our circle. If I cried then, let it out, I’d never make it farther, so we stowed jars and fifths and faced the Lakefront Path, knuckles frozen. We took off.

*

Brandon had a pink Schwinn Prelude and a Cakipants Long Haul Trucker and at some point a Kilo TT, from Bikes Direct, probably. He had gone touring in Florida and Iceland and New Zealand and California and rode to his parents lakehouse, or took us riding there, unfailingly. He somehow rode to his grandmother’s house all the way across to the Southwest Suburbs. He went on brewery ride after brewery ride. He held Bike Prom and got dragged to Halloween Critical Mass. He would ride up and down from Wicker to Pilsen unfailingly: rain, snow, sleet, hail, and meet us on our 3 flat steps, with beer, stories about girls, and a slow but very well-timed sense of humor. When we complained about conditions (internal or external), he rejoined: Not with that attitude, you won’t.

I remember the bikes because these bikes remained even when he did not, one making its way through the snow in his memory, for him.

*

We had to go to Richard’s. We had to. On Grand the snow began. On my Varsity I flanked the rear, legs cold, and pissed that I had to take a leak. The crowd inside was full of young professionals drunk on Friday and the typical old Chicago crowd, Sinatra and Styx on the Jukebox. We smiled, forgot, stopped at the warmth, the regularity of it all, anachronistic but at one time ours. 

Later I found a picture I took of the neon Men and Women signs. The first time I sat in Richard’s was because Brandon told me to come to the riding club’s Bike Prom. Where he had a suit on, where I should have appreciated his invitation to a good ride with some good guys, a chance to wear a dress on my platform pedals. But I showed up in my thrift store dress and Chuck Taylors with someone who he never trusted and he was fucking right and for good reason. Before I could go in the bathroom, I typed into the photo, Where are you? Where the fuck are you? 

*

He was not in any of the places. Except he was. Because when his brother arrived at my apartment to head to the bar, we needed something for the ashes. In my life I will remember this: the mason jars from my cabinets, the ashes that silently moved into them, then with us. 

*

Our group winnowed. The snow did not stop. There was the house on Wabansia, so we went from Grand to Wicker Park. This was the first nice place I knew how to ride back to my shithole three-flat. The snow stood at two inches on the sidewalk. Yut spoke. Ashes scattered. Los and I took the rear as we continued on, after nine already, and left the steps we started to become more than teenagers on. 

The house on Bosworth was the last place Brandon lived when he lived here, a large top floor with a window to a treacherous roof. 

*

The spring before he held the last party we had as the wanted company we all kept in Chicago. He took a time lapse which is basically kids with jobs and a keg and board games and bike stands, his favorite bands, one of the warmest days we’d had yet that year. The lease was up and so we intermittently ran up and down the carpeted stairs to smoke, even though in the summer Brandon would let me sit in the window and exhale whatever fury I nursed out the window, knees folded. 

I have a photo from that night, a portrait of the family I wanted to stitch together, something I had in those first Chicago years: boys I lived with, boys I’d fought with, who told me their loves, who saw the choices I stumbled into and away from. Brandon grinning in the middle, our faces open and squinting, flushed. My hair is long and my mouth is open, my shoulders leaning into anyone who will have me. 

The day after Los and I stopped to say another farewell on our way to the suburbs. We drove out on the Kennedy that morning after we said a perfunctory goodbye. “Kettles” by the Arcade Fire played. 

This is probably the last time we’ll all be together like that again, he said. Probably for a while, I nodded.

Well, maybe someone will get married, we agreed. We were right. We weren’t. I thought of that morning, at night, on my bike, on the bus that goes by that house, to this day. I thought of it so painfully the next day: all of us from that time lapse at a memorial service. How it wasn’t a wedding. How he was right. 

*

If we’d been prudent or prepared more, we would’ve gone West to East. We couldn’t and we didn’t and so we cut West and North to the split-level in Palmer Square, near Tastee Freeze, Vas Foremost Liquors.

Because we both had May birthdays and both loved parties, Brandon let me live through his bigger and better dwellings and speaker system. The house was set back from the street, with an unlocked gate and a yard full of six inches of snow. I’d ride there after my night shifts to sit in the yard in the heat amidst tall grass, circle of people, beer. At this point we were frozen and the end, the Harbor, was miles away.  We opened the gate.

His brother gave me the Mason jar. We stood in a circle I’ve been in a thousand times before--when he moved in and painted a garish green racing stripe on his bedroom wall, New Years when we somehow didn’t need coats to smoke and tell secrets in the yard as temperatures hit sixty at midnight, birthdays where I made sure to make everyone dance to the Notorious B.I.G.

Brandon used to reflect how we both loved crowds and loved being alone, how we drank whiskey on our own timetables, and we never told each other it was wrong to do otherwise. I loved having short hair. Once he told me he thought girls with short hair were great. I didn’t get it.

The ash fell into the center, where he would’ve set us all up, where we would have showed up. 

*

The hardest ride I have ever done I almost could not do. I could not finish, I didn’t want to finish, I didn’t want to leave, I didn’t want to stop. I didn’t want to come to the point where it would be tomorrow morning and we’d bundle into cars to the funeral.

I don’t know what to do with the fact that I think about Brandon every year, more than that, on bike tour, with friends. Or that by now he has been gone longer than I had known him. That I have become a shitty friend to his memory, bad at keeping in touch and making things happen.

This is what happens when someone dies so young, though. A decade on and we have moved in and out of Chicago, gotten married, gotten divorced, kids, jobs, life. When someone you love  dies at twenty-five, there’s no way to say what would’ve happened. But parts of Brandon always somehow ripple through my life - someone I’ll meet knew him then, a volunteer shop in his name continues its good work, I became someone who went on bike tours, too. Who helped other people do that. Like he helped me. Unobtrusively and earnestly. 

I miss him. I wonder at all the people he stitched together. I see us all standing along the wall, swollen in the room because there are so many of us. It is one of the last times I listen to “Your Hand In Mind” for years. I would have held on to him fiercely. He was one of the first adult friends I made. He was someone who helped me come out of my shell, be someone who could do things, make things happen. 

*

We had to finish. We got to the L and L as a handful, followed by honks and hollers from amazed taxi passengers and bar patrons. Our shoulders numb, and almost one AM. The bar gone quiet. We have to finish what we started, we said. We have to.

Quiet waves. None of us said anything, laid our bikes down. By the time we made it to Diversey, I do not remember what my body felt like. 

I do remember what a body looks like. I learned this on the hardest ride. A body, the last of it we carried when we stopped and cast out into the lake– a body looks like snow.

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for branflakes