bluecastle | (no subject)

This is my friend Jymm (underneath all that Klingony exterior). He would have been 43 today.

I "lost" him 13 years ago to pancreatic cancer. Quickly. Diagnosed on Monday, Dead by Thursday. More a casualty of using ER's as primary care facilities, but that's a (lack of) health care debate for another day. He was one week away from his 30th birthday when he died.

He was an accidental baby who came along late in his parent's lives. I don't think they ever quite knew what to do with him. But he never really knew what to do with them either.

He was the dearest, sweetest, most AGGRAVATING person I have ever known!

We first met in middle school when he was playing bass clarinet and sat in front of the alto saxophone row.

Lord he was annoying. Brash. Loud. Guaranteed to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, all the time.

By the time we reached high school and he was being mercilessly teased for being a boy clarinet player with terrible acne... and DIFFERENT... and I was being teased for being, pick one -- shy, stuck up, fat, stupid or ... just plain WEIRD according to the "normal" crowd. (I like to think my only disability was having a brain and not being afraid to use it.)

We were the closest of frenemies. Most days I couldn't stand him. But I couldn't shake some sense of connection. I didn't have a name for it then, and oddly I knew that. Now I think it was that I could sense the pain underneath the brashness.

His home life was so ... Ally Sheedy in the Breakfast Club-ish ... that he joined as many after school activities as he could to avoid being at home as much as possible.

God I was so clueless in those days.

Anyway... we loved and hated each other through high school band, drama, French club. He was Franz to my Frau Schmidt in "The Sound of Music." I was the only one who could tie his bow tie correctly.

He had huge hair, and loud clothes, and twirled a flag and a rifle in indoor color guard. He wrote for the school newspaper and the yearbook. He drew sketches, designs, rude cartoons. Sang in the chorus. Went to All-Eastern Band on the contra-alto clarinet.

We used to write stupid stories on my first amber-screened computer, alternating sentences. We'd make cookies in my kitchen like we were our own cooking show (He would have loved the food network).

We went on a European concert tour just after we graduated high school. He got us lost in London looking for a streetmarket, bought a black thong in Harrods, was rude to Germans in Germany, got drunk at our Swiss fondue dinner and got his hair permed the next day, made silly comments about the statues in the Vatican, and was generally a hoot.

We went off to different colleges, but stayed in a touch somewhat through LETTERS. This was pre-internet here kids. (oh the porn he missed out on.)

And one day I got this LETTER that said "I understand if you never want to speak to me again, but there's something I have to tell you..."

That was probably 1986. I didn't know any gay people. Not really. (In retrospect, the reality here is that I didn't KNOW I knew any gay people.) I hardly even really understood the concept. See my above cluelessness.

I still have those letters...

But after I got over being all shocked (I really was. As I said, I was utterly clueless about so many things). But I decided that he was my friend, and I loved him, and he loved me right back. Hard. And that was all there was to it. He's maybe the only person in my whole life who has ever loved me totally, and absolutely unconditionally.

(Shit. I can't be crying about this. I almost never cry about it anymore.)

He found his community at college. A roommate like him. And then he had to give it all up. He got mono and had to drop out of college and come back home.

He took me to my first gay bar. Stood up on a chair and announced to the whole room (maybe 10 people at that point) that I was his friend, and straight, so not to hit on me. Lord a'mighty. Told me the only difference between the two bathrooms is that one had a bigger mirror. *grins fondly*

After flailing around for a while he decided to go to beauty school. (have I ticked all the stereotype boxes yet? still. all true.)

I was his first LIVE, non plastic head model. Said he'd give me a lifetime of free haircuts if I'd be his guinea pig. I still have a hard time letting other people cut my hair. Mostly I just do for myself. Once he figured out what he was doing, he used to come over and cut my, and my parents hair. They'd slip him a little cash. He dyed my hair red for the first time. Using the leftovers from two different bottles that he'd used on his own hair. I've never gone back to my original color.

He never really had a good job. Just crappy retail, hourly shit. Still he got to do some "visual merchandising" in his last job and that made him happy.

He should have gone away to some big city and done hair and makeup professionally. He was wiz with a bottle of latex. (hmmm... that could be mis-interpreted. *giggle*)

He was the only person who ever called me Honey.

He called himself Sybil Flame. I'm not sure, and I didn't know enough, then, to ask the right questions, but I suspect the drag for him was less about trying to look like a woman, and more about just being his own outrageous self.

Halloween was his happiest day of the year. Said it was the only day of year he could feel really comfortable being himself out on the streets.

Used to chase me up stairs, pinching my ass.

For Christmas one year he bought me two albino guinea pigs ... named Mame and Vera!

Occasionally he'd find a steady boyfriend and I wouldn't see him for a while. There were allusions to a lot of indiscriminate drugs and sex, but in some way he tried to protect me from all that, I think. The wildest WE got was drinking bottles of Boone's Apple Wine or Pink Squirrel in the parking lot behind the midddle school. Well... and the time I got a good noseful from a little bottle of something or other he had stashed in his glove department before he could warn me not to sniff it. Again. Clueless me!

We'd go out on random drives, or just get hot dogs at a little dive, chat up the ancient waitress and just have a hell of a time doing absolutely nothing.

His parents found out about him when his dad found some gay porn in his room one day. It was really unpleasant for him at home after that.

At the end, when I found out he was in the hospital I tried to call him, but they were moving him to the bigger, further away hospital, and I was in the middle of stage managing a show, and didn't have my evenings free. He called my house Monday or Tuesday night when I was at rehearsal. Told my Mom he was hanging in there. Next thing I knew, my Mom calls me at work Thursday morning to tell me his sister called her to say he was dead.

That was the closest I have every come to fainting. I was 28 and had just lost someone who was at that point in my life, essentially, my only friend. I never got to talk to him before he died. I never got to say goodbye.

I missed the first tech rehearsal of my show to go to his viewing. Had I not been so numb, his mother would have broken me when she clutched me outside the funeral home and said "He said you were just like his sister." He called me Sissy sometimes.

What did break me was that because been sick for a while, the dye in his hair had faded from it's usual obnoxious red, and his sideburns were grey.

His fucking family, who never fucking understood him, dressed him in his awful high school graduation blue polyester suit and a red satin tie. He'd have been mortified.

He wanted to be cremated. His family stuck him in the ground. I have never been to the cemetery.

Once in a while, I get people asking me (always with a bit of a whisper) "did he die of AIDS?" Seriously? Why? Because that's the only way you think people who are gay die? Humph. Anyway.

I was kinda lost for a couple years after all this happened -- round about 1993. Threw myself into theater non-stop so I didn't have to be at home and think. It was safer than some other addictions.

But while he may be dead, he is never gone. If I look I can see him whenever I want to. He's right behind me all the time, probably thinking about licking my ear! Crawls into bed with me sometimes when I am lonely. Curls up on the couch with me to watch a movie if I need company. Smacks me upside the head if I am moping... :0)

His Dad's dead now, but my Mom still sees his Mom pretty frequently on Thursday mornings at the grocery store. I should have kept in touch with her. I think about it. She was sweet, and he did love her. But I don't know if I could handle seeing her, even now.

But this shouldn't end on an unhappy note. This is a birthday party! I love him still, and like to think he still loves me, wherever he is. If there's a heaven somewhere he's on the dance floor twirling along with the disco ball.

So even though I am an only child, I have a sister. And he loves me still. Just as I love him. Happy Birthday Honey.

Here are a couple of other pictures I scanned, with apologies for my crappy scanner. One is the two of us in his basement doing odd things with plants. The other is him just being him (and also doing odd things with plants. I have no idea where this theme came from)