An old friend of mine died last week, a man I hadn’t seen in 25 years until we reconnected briefly two summers ago.
Our lives went in different directions after a tumultuous relationship in my early twenties, though I’ve thought of him many times through the years. I didn’t anticipate how deeply I’d feel this loss, as I knew he was ill, had known for weeks, in fact, that he was dying.
I was living in the city when I met him, sharing a tiny apartment above a travel agency with a sorority sister from college. Our place had four cramped rooms, little natural light and virtually no closet space. But at the corner of Clark Street and Belden Avenue, we were in the heart of Lincoln Park, and that’s what mattered when we were 23.
It didn’t take us long to discover Neo, the new wave, post-punk dance club just a block north on Clark, accessed through a graffiti-covered alley, a scarred metal door, and a bouncer with a couple of safety pins through his lip.
It fast became our go-to venue, close enough that we could run up the street during freezing Chicago winters without coats to worry about losing once we’d made it inside. The music thrummed, pulsing and frenetic, driving the dancers who pitched and surged across the sunken dance floor. The eight-foot aquarium behind the bar cast an undulating glow on the eclectic mix of habitués, patrons of the club “serving Chicago’s underground since 1979.” We were thrilled to be a part of it.
A fight erupted one Friday night on the sidewalk in front of the club, between a guy I’d been talking to and another man, both drunk and throwing ill-timed punches as I stood by uselessly, shrieking at them to stop.
Kimball appeared from the alley then, a Neo regular I recognized from the club but had never met or spoken to. A large man, massive, really, he moved with surprising, graceful fluidity, breaking up the flailing tussle without so much as raising his voice. He picked a leather jacket up from the ground where it had been thrown, and gently handed it to my acquaintance, who took off down the sidewalk in humiliated rage.
I took off with Kimball. We were together for two and a half years.
We couldn’t have been more different, he a self-described “fat Jewish kid from Skokie” with barely a high school education and no family of consequence, a Tai Chi master who wore the full-length robe of his discipline wherever he went. He worked, at times, as a bouncer, but was often unemployed. That didn’t matter, though: he was an artist, a painter who conjured mystical tableaus reminiscent of Salvador Dali or Hieronymous Bosch; a reader of Kafka and Ayn Rand and Mad magazine. He was a storyteller who captivated, a listener whose attention made you believe you were the only person alive who mattered.
Everywhere we went somebody knew him, or wanted to, or pretended to. He had a mystique, a charisma which attracted men and women alike. Everyone wanted a piece of Kimball, had a story to tell of his exploits, his outrageousness, his larger-than-life personhood.
And I was his girlfriend, a diminutive blond from the North Shore with an expensive liberal arts degree, a new white Mustang and a 9-to-5 job at a dental association. Insecure but hiding it, I was often called beautiful but never believed it, a girl of “privilege” desperate to claim my own place, to escape the repressive shadow of a stunning, accomplished mother who had and did it all.
Kimball offered that escape. I didn’t realize then or care that I was simply trading one shadow for another.
It was doomed, of course. The bond we’d fashioned from our incongruous lives was not destined to withstand the differences which drew us so compellingly to one another. I don’t think either of us ever truly considered relinquishing enough of ourselves to accommodate the other’s expectations, our unformed yet firmly ingrained perceptions of what our real lives would be. When it ended, undramatically, I felt more relief than sorrow. But I never forgot him. He was part of me, for a time, back then when I was young.
I recall one summer afternoon, near the end, when Kimball and I waited out a sudden, violent thunderstorm, huddled together inside my car as the rain pounded the roof and sluiced across the windshield, blurring the world beyond, sheltering us, for a few sacred moments, from all that waited on the other side. Elvis Costello was crooning mournfully on the radio, and I remember the sense of melancholy I felt then, the certainty of impending loss. Kimball held my hand and sang softly out of tune: Alison, I know this world is killing you. Oh, Alison, my aim is true.
He comes back to me now in snatches of memory, his broad face thrown back in laughter, his farcical antics with my roommate’s cat, his confidence, worn like armor, disguising his own scars, the detritus of a broken childhood.
And with him comes a yearning for those impetuous, unencumbered days when I was young, and still believed in limitless possibility, before I grew up and adulthood fully claimed me. Those days when my parents were still alive, the home base I could run to; before I understood the mercurial nature of happiness, when inconsolable loss was as yet unimaginable, when I was still insulated by the arrogant gullibility of youth.
We saw each other two years ago at a reunion of Neo’s old guard, a gathering of regulars from back in the day I surprised myself by attending on a hot summer night in July. We told each other we hadn’t changed, which in his case was true. He was still robust, despite the disease which was slowly, inexorably taking him.
He reminded me of our attendance one Sunday morning at the church of my childhood, which I recall as a sort of last-ditch effort to find some spiritual middle ground on which we could build a future. My mother was horrified, embarrassed by her daughter’s choice of boyfriends, and bringing him to church, no less. Although he’d left his Tai Chi robe at home, Kimball’s blue hair was probably too much for her to publicly bear.
But Kimball was intrigued by the service, following the liturgy so familiar to me but utterly foreign to him. He was touched by the unanticipated sincerity of those bourgeois suburbanites who welcomed him, and asked him to come back.
He told me that was the beginning, the spark that eventually brought him to God, and to a community which embraced him, and became his family. I smile at the irony, he donning the comforting veil of faith as I suffered the loss of it, when my prayers for my son went unanswered, when I doubted so bitterly the belief I’d never had reason, before, to question. I’m comforted now, knowing he had a doctrine meaningful to him, which, in a small way, I helped him find.
He was larger than life, larger than my life could hold. Yet my memories of him evoke a simpler, less complicated time, an unguarded time. We experienced that together, before the world crashed in, before I learned what I was capable of, what I could hold, when I needed to.
Farewell, dear friend.
Farewell.
