Fare Thee Well

For HJS

When I first moved to New York, I stayed with him in an apartment in Alphabet City, a third-story railroad that he shared with another guy, R. I slept on the couch and, in the mornings, put on my one suit, a brown one that my father had bought me the last time I was in Maine and went to work for Wall Street Services, a temp agency that staffed up JP Morgan Chase with new arrivals to the city. I was waiting to hear back about when my publishing job would start and my New York life could really begin. Until that happened, I was on 2nd and B, on Jeremy’s couch, and between his bedroom and my corner of the apartment was another bedroom R. slept in with his girlfriend who screamed Fuck me like that and Yeah, I want you to cum on my back on the regular as if there were walls or even doors that separated their fucking from the rest of the apartment.

I lay there and thought about why I was on the couch. At some point a few weeks later, I slept with Jeremy again when his roommate was out, and afterward, he said, It’s been a while. Ten years since we had first had sex, my first, in the basement of my house in Bangor. That day in New York he told me I had been his first, too. How strange to find that out so much later. He was my first love, my first sex, my first everything. Even after all this time, for me, no one has really come close. But I never knew who I was to him until he died.

On one of those early days in the city, I called a friend in Athens, Georgia, and after my hello he said, Wait. Wait. I asked, What? just as the sound of a siren started to vault through the street. There it is, he said. No New York call is complete without a siren.

At an Alphabet City bar, one that may still be there now among all the other bars that have popped up since, I sat across from Jeremy and F., the wild-haired, hard-drinking, hard-fucking girlfriend of R., and watched the two of them laugh and flirt. I’d find out later, when Jeremy was dying, how much she loved him too, what good friends they’d been for years. On the night he died, we stood in his kitchen in Astoria while he lay in the living room, barely there, and we leaned on each other, weeping as if he were already gone.

My first night on Avenue B, I felt so earnest. So uncool. I learned that Jeremy was doing heroin, thought it was amazing. I can’t even describe it, he said. Jeremy, brilliant and articulate Jeremy, had no words. I felt the distance between us widen, could hear the creak and the echo of it. My cousin Richie had died of a cocaine overdose when I was 11, turning me in the moment I found out into a straight-edge girl who only looked like a party.

I hated how much I still loved him — I wore it like neon. I thought I didn’t matter enough to him to tell him not to use, not to choose that particular way to die. I didn’t want to watch him die, so I left. Once I found myself a 15x15 square foot apartment in Fort Greene and moved off his couch, I stopped calling. I stopped showing up. I stepped away. And, for whatever reason, he let me go.

By October 2012, it had been over a decade since I last saw him. He was living in Astoria then and I discovered out our whole NYC life had been one half turn away from overlapping. He told me to meet him in Socrates Sculpture Park, which was hosting a pre-Halloween kiddiefest, and to bring my boy who he wanted to meet. My mom was visiting from the Adirondacks and we made our way there — no small feat, with a seventy-seven-year-old woman who hates the city and jumps at every honk and three year old who wanted all of my attention. We saw everything there was to see in the park, playing between that year’s crop of outdoor sculptures for a while and doing Halloweeny things like picking up an apple with your chin and passing along to another person, no hands. We had Sam’s face painted up like a tiger’s, ate lunch, and waited and waited for Jeremy who did not answer his phone, who did not show. Just as we got on the Q60 to head back to Jackson Heights, he called and said, Where are you? I’m here. Sam was asleep on my lap and we went home.

When Jeremy and I finally did meet up again, it was at the Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg on New Year’s Eve. We agreed to meet to see a screening of Inside Llewyn Davis, which I hadn’t yet seen but which Jeremy, who had studied cinema at McGill and ate films in his spare time, had already seen twice. I bought my ticket and waited in the lobby as the start time crept closer.

As I stood there, I remembered the last New Year’s I’d spent with him, in Portland, Maine, twenty years earlier. It was two years after we had broken up, after he’d gone to McGill and I’d finished my senior year of high school in Bangor. I had said that we should break up because he was going away and that everything would be different and he said, No, I’ll never meet anyone like you. But of course, he met someone not like me but someone other than me and sent me a letter to let me know. He and I stayed in touch. I didn’t want to be in touch; I wanted to be in touch. When we were both in Maine over Christmas break, he said we should meet in Portland for New Year’s, and I said yes.

On Amigo’s on Exchange Street, where all of Portland did and likely still does their underage drinking, and Jeremy was playing pool and he was flirting with someone and I thought fuck this. I left the bar before midnight to find my best friend, Heather, who worked at Carbur’s Restaurant. She came out into the Maine winter and hugged me while I cried behind the back door of the kitchen, crushed cigarette butts littering the snowbank we stood next to, as all the fireworks went off in the sky over the Old Port and fell down around us. He was always hurting me, casually, by not knowing how much I cared about him. And I was always putting myself there, wanting to be there and not wanting to me. I didn’t know then that I needed someone to be careful with me.

That night in 2012, when he finally showed up, he was sweating and he pulled me into his hug saying, Kace. It felt the way it always did. I wanted to stay inside that embrace; it seemed to answer all my questions. He said he’d run there — he’d been with his aunt and his cousin at his cousin’s place nearby — I’d meet them later and he was sorry and we were almost late — sorry — and we should go inside.

The Nitehawk is one of those rare movie houses that conspires to empty your wallet by bringing you food and drink while you watch the big screen, so we ordered whiskies and I ordered meatballs which Jeremy didn’t want — he was vegan, he whispered — What? I said. Vegan?! Why would you do such a thing? as I stuck a meatball in my face and we looked at each other and laughed. Fifteen-year-old me was so happy to be watching a Cohen Brothers movie with Jeremy, drinking whiskey, and sitting close as if years hadn’t blacked out between us.

How was he? The same, which is to say his handsome and lean face still turned out the same half-frown, half-smile and there were still three freckles that stippled his left cheek and his eyes were the same intelligent hazel green. He was lanky and cool and we had everything to talk about. It wasn’t until the end of the movie, after Llewyn sings “Fare Thee Well” and we re-see the opening when I thought, When will I not be in love with this motherfucker? Because I had finally tired of having my heart broken.

Hours before 2012 turned into 2013, we walked an empty Kent Street and went to his cousin’s party, up 25 flights to a panoramic view of the city that stunned me quiet when we first stepped inside. We had been having a disagreement about American Hustle, which I thought was nothing more than an excuse to see some side boob from Amy Adams, and which he thought was a near-perfect movie. The party was full of bright, young things and I felt old for a moment and then realized I didn’t care; I was so glad to be around him again. I was introduced around and ended up sitting next to his aunt and across from his cousin, a bartender at Soho House who was mixing up a drink so tall and green it looked like a smoothie in a cocktail dress. Jeremy sat next to me and we talked with his aunt and cousin. When he wasn’t listening, his aunt leaned over to me and said, You’re good for him, you know. I said that we hadn’t seen each other for years, this was the first time in ages. No, no — you’re good for him, she said again, as if I’d missed the point.

There was a dog at the party, a chocolate lab belonged to his cousin, that seemed fine with all the people coming and going. It sat down on top of my feet and Jeremy’s, looking for all the world like he was ours. At some point, the door opened, and in swanned a beautiful, young woman with waist-length brown hair and a smile that cracked the room open. She was a lean French Canadian who was somehow connected to Cirque du Soleil. I thought, Great, this again, which of course was not her fault, my jealousy, the fact that I felt not enough always when I was around him, the fact it always seemed a stranger could just show up and displace me. I loved him first, as if that mattered. I never knew how much of what I felt was me, how much of that was his doing, how much a wicked combination of the two. The three of us talked for a while and then she asked, How long have you two been together? And Jeremy and I looked at each other and laughed the same kind of laugh — a short breath out through the nose — and I decided to see what he would say. We’re just good friends, he said, Old friends, friends from forever. At the time, it felt like an insult. Was he flirting with her? I said nothing and looked at the city which did not look back at me. When midnight came, we hugged. We walked to the train and stood shivering with the fireworks still shooting up and over the Hudson.

During those early days in New York, I met a man — a boy, really, now that I think about it, now that I’m older — through a work friend. He was tall, with a thicket of dark curls that rounded him out at 6’2’. A smart, Jewish boy from the Upper West Side. I had a weakness for smart, Jewish boys. They always wanted to talk until they didn’t and they weren’t afraid of women with opinions. He had sharp eyes and was keen to know me but I was hesitant to spend too much time with him. He seemed possibly gay. Or maybe he was too enthusiastic about me in a way that made me not trust him. Why would someone be so interested? One night after dinner in the East Village, he kissed me suddenly and it shocked me. I had decided, without letting him know, that we were going to be friends. When we spoke on the phone the next day, I told him so and he was angry. Sometimes you have to accept what people are giving you, I said, salting the wound without meaning to. No, he said. You’re wrong, and hung up. A few years later, I saw him standing in line next to another man who, except for his coloring, could have been his twin. They were holding hands. He saw me and I smiled, waved, kept walking.

Awhile after New Year’s, Jeremy said we should go see the Art Spiegelman Retrospective at Jewish Museum, which showed the Maus drawings about his parents' survival of the Holocaust and In the Shadow of No Towers, scenes Spiegelman had drawn of what he saw on 9/11. The exhibition included images of Spiegelman’s contemporaries, including R. Crumb. When I was 15, Jeremy had shown me a book of R. Crumb’s and I remember flipping through it, hating it, they way he drew his blocky women and their hard nipples that poked at the fronts of their t-shirts, their stocky thighs and dank hair, as anything Spiegelman drew in Maus. I wondered then what it meant that Jeremy liked R. Crumb and his renderings of girls and women. I should have asked him about that as I stood in the exhibit in front of one of those girls.

After we walked wandered through all the camps and the death and Spiegelman’s father’s kitchen and his nerves, we ate at a diner and caught up. Since I’d last seen him, I’d left publishing, stopped talking to my father, left the city for Michigan, moved back after getting my MFA, moved in with my on-again, off-again boyfriend, gotten married, gotten pregnant, had the baby, gotten divorced. He told me he’d spent years with his girlfriend Sasha and they’d bought a place in Washington Heights and had a dog named Hazel who had moved out with him and to Astoria when he and Sasha broke up. Hazel had died. He also told me that a friend of his had died of a heroin overdose in front of him and he’d stopped using. That’ll do it, I said. Seeing someone you love die. When I had first learned about Sasha, a gorgeous, altogether cool painter, I thought, well, that’s done. She seemed perfect for him. He couldn’t quite explain to me why it hadn’t worked out between them. Maybe he didn’t know. I let that sit on the table between us when we asked for the check. He was dating, was always in pictures on Facebook with a gorgeous woman named Rita, who had a beaming smile that she turned to Jeremy in all their shots together, but he hadn’t mentioned her at all.

Since I’d left my husband, I’d gone on dates upon dates upon dates. It was my unpaid, wholly unfulfilling part-time job, sifting through heaps of men on OkCupid, Bumble, Tinder, just trying to find someone to sleep with. I was pretty sure that anyone who wanted to get close to me I might punch in the face. Jeremy showed up on all three platforms. What does this mean? he asked me the third time it happened, on Tinder. New York is a small town, I texted back. Then, We should go see a show.

This new and improved Jeremy, this 3.0, was running the New York marathon. He had a field of wheatgrass in his kitchen and was eating like a vegan monk. I teased him about this at every opportunity; it was so at odds with the hard-partying, why-the-fuck-not-do-some-heroin-it’s-amazing Jeremy I had known and chosen not to know a decade-and-a-half earlier. He was in charge of other marathons, too, movie parties — hours and hours of movies arranged around a theme — held in his apartment from morning till night, with a free flow of people who came and went throughout the day. He would ask what my schedule was with my son was and would pick a day that I could come. Can’t have one of these without you, Kace, he’d say. It’s not the same! I was sure it was something he said to his other friends too. Most of the friends I’d met in the Alphabet City days were still in the picture — R. and F., though they weren’t together, Sinead, the girlfriend he’d had in Montreal after we broke up, and a few more — and he had accreted other friends and assembled a fuller group. He stayed friends with his ex-girlfriends: Sasha, Sinead, me. People loved him. They showed up. We’d sit, our backs to the view of the Triborough Bridge which was still named the Triborough then — and watch Wake in Fright, that 70s Aussie kangaroo death fest, or Repo Man. It was after one of these marathons, when I was the last one to leave, that he said, Kace. I have to tell you something.

What it was was that he had cancer. That he had had colon cancer. He was 42 when he told me this. The year before, he said, he’d had colon cancer and a large part of his colon had been taken out. But he was better now. I felt like such a jerk for teasing him, for not connecting the dots, and also not understanding better why there seemed, in the people around him, to be an extra level of care. They had almost lost him and yet here he was. Once again, it wasn’t just me who felt that way. Now I understood the quixotic trips he’d been taking all over the country to visit every last one of America’s baseball stadiums, his sudden sentimentality. While we were on his couch, he let out a small fart. He apologized, embarrassed. Don’t worry, I said, It’s just punctuation. A semi-colon! and we laughed. When we said goodbye at the door, he kissed me on the cheek and stayed there.

He had cancer and he was dating. It was both brave and stupid, hopeful and hopelessly unfair. One day at MoMA, he told me about a woman he’d gone on a date with and how now he had to tell her he might still have cancer. I wondered what this meant about the other men who were on those sites. What were they living through that they could not say in their introductory texts? This was around the time that I started thinking, Thank God; I love him but I’m not in love with him anymore. Then I said it to a few friends, to test out how the words sounded coming out of my mouth. I sounded like I meant it, but of course, it was a lie. And he was dying again, this time really, not just in my imagination.

He had told me in the spring that he was scheduled to have a test to see if the cancer was gone and I hadn’t heard from him about it. I thought it must be fine and though I understood why he’d want to move on and enjoy life with that shadow lifted, I was annoyed with him for not letting everyone know that he was in the clear. Then he sent an email with the subject line “Update.” It read, “You know me and I value my friendships above all things. You are what makes my world go and I see a utopian vision in another realm where we can all commune happily far from trouble and illness with cool beverages, a wonderful soundtrack, and great repertory film houses everywhere. Maybe Tangier?” It detailed his illness and ended with a call for everyone to come and visit and to say goodbye. The cancer was back and would be taking him this time.

He met Sam on a bright square of a day in Gantry Plaza Park, which runs along the East River, and faces the city. Honored to meet you, young sir, he said to Sam, extending his hand to shake Sam’s in an elaborate move that made my otherwise shy kid return his serve with an equal flourish. I have a picture of the two of them from that day: they’re both bent down over a piece of paper and Jeremy looks as healthy as he did when I first met him when he was 15. Sam is watching him, his mouth open in a small o as if in shock. We flew paper kites until the neon of the Pepsi sign was brighter than the sun. We had one perfect day.

Two weeks before he died, Sasha arranged for his friends in New York to gather at a beach cabin in the Rockaways, near a place where the two of them used to spend their summers. I rented a car and offered to drive Jeremy but had to drop off Sam with his dad before we could head out. At the car rental place, my four-year-old spotted a white Camaro — A real racecar, Mommy! — and the rental agent bumped us up and rented us that car instead of the tidy little Honda I’d ordered online. So Sam and I drove over to Astoria in a white Camaro to pick up Jeremy to take him to say goodbye to his friends. Get strong, Sasha texted me as I was driving. The jaundice has set in. I warned Sam not to say anything about how Jeremy looked. When we picked him up, he was brittle and terribly skinny except for his feet, which were swollen. He was yellow. He sat in the back with Sam and put his feet up between the seats. Do you remember where Jeremy’s from, Sammy? I asked. Sam looked at Jeremy and said, China? Which was so terrible and sad and made Jeremy shake with laughter. Maine, I said, Maine, baby.

On August 1, 2015, nine days before he died, he posted a picture of the two of us at MoMA. Under the “Friends on Facebook for Two Years” banner is a picture of me pretending that my hand is a brain sucker while Jeremy stands there allowing me to suck out his brain in front of Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse. He wrote, “Lookie here. 2 years on Facebook and 26 in real life.” With some people, the time is always wrong. With some people, you have to accept what they are giving you. Sometimes these are the same people.

The wake — the memorial party, as Jeremy’s friend called it on Facebook — was held in the basement of a bar and was wall-to-wall with people, some who’d come from was a slide show and everyone in it was also in the room. Julian and I stood in the back as the slides ran along. One came up of a chalkboard sign from outside the bar. The sign read: Don’t worry, ladies, Jeremy is back! I took that, Julian said. Perfect, I said. All night, I kept meeting people, some of whom I’d heard about — Big Mike, Farooq, Karen — and they would say, Oh, you’re KC, and then hug me hard as if I mattered. I got very drunk on whiskey and threw up my guts when I got home.

For a while after Jeremy died, Sam confused Jeremy with my friend Robert. He’d met both of them around the same time. Telling Sam about my day, I’d say, I talked to Robert, and Sam would say, He’s dead. No, I’d say. That’s Jeremy. Jeremy’s dead.

I knew him in the early New York I had first flown into, taking a shuttle bus from JFK to Alphabet City and walking the three flights up to find him on his couch, surrounded by people, one of them a delicate blonde in a cowboy hat — and I knew him in my second New York — the New York I keep living in because of the custody agreement I have with my son’s father, my adult New York where I take care of what needs taking care of, where I try to take care of myself. I don’t know what this New York will be now that he’s not in it.

We bought him a seat at The Film Forum but I’ve yet to visit it. Maybe I would go for a screening of Inside Llewyn Davis.

I got friends together for my birthday this year; one of them was Sasha. She ended up talking with my friend Nicki. Later that night, Nicki told me about their conversation. When asked how we met, Sasha had told her that we had an ex-boyfriend in common. And Nicki said, Because if you have to choose, you choose KC, of course. Sasha had to tell her that our friend Jeremy had died which was why he wasn’t there too. He bequeathed her to me, Sasha said.

This is, of course, was what surprised me most, that the boy I first loved and who I couldn’t stop loving should be this above all else — an old friend, from forever.