Architects obsessed with penises? Who knew!
Saturday, April 15, 1995 (maybe I should have been dating these all along...).
I only got one hour of sleep the night before the funeral. I doubt many people who attended got much more than that. I piled up the NYC crew into my 1985 Thunderbird and headed to a church in New Jersey. I have a vague recollection of being a pallbearer. I don't remember if we carried or rolled the coffin in. His bass was on a stand in front of the pulpit. The very bass I said I had hoped to get if he was dead. Well, there it is, Stupid. Go ahead, take it. See what happens.
I had been asked to say a few words at the funeral, but I said no, which was very uncharacteristic of me. I really am a ham, but I didn't think I could add any more or less to the event. Or maybe I didn't want to feel so exposed up there. Or maybe I was just plain afraid. I don't remember a damn thing anybody else said up there. My most vivid memory (besides me and my friend holding hands in a death grip) was a single teardrop on the floor in front of me, which fell from his girlfriend's face. A perfect circle, it was. I stared at it for the rest of the funeral. I needed something to focus on.
I've had trouble with this post, thinking about what details from that day I could talk about, yet none of them really have any "value." Or maybe what I thought was interesting beforehand just doesn't really seem worth mentioning. And of course, if you haven't noticed, I haven't used any of this space over the past five days to actually say anything about my friend, just about me and my experiences surrounding his death, so it's definitely not a tribute. I don't know what it is. It's just me reflecting (a self-indulgent exercise if ever there was one).
Or maybe I'm just petering out at the end of a long day, offering up this anticlimax to these past events I've been unfolding.
Or perhaps I should have let the dead lie sleeping altogether.
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