Harris: and hopefully the guy in the night vision bedroom scene
Me: was she foine?
Harris: she was
they were doing their job thing
which was walking around with candy trays and trying to get tips and wearing these vests
for a group called the “meow meows”
and i said i’m in the ruff ruffs
and she giggled
and then she literally ripped my shirt off and put on her vest
and gave me the tray
Me: shut up!
Harris: and i started selling her candy
and getting a lot of tips
Me: That is fucking wild.
Were there sparks?
Harris: mad sparks
but i was wasted and on my A+ game
i was like whats yer name
and she was like kimberly
and i was like your last names burly?
she loved it
I need the digital record because my memories are unreliable. I worry that I won’t be able to keep you alive in my mind over time. I can see the outline of memories in flashing images like a slide show. I have an idea about the theme of an interaction, but I couldn’t write the scene. I couldn’t take a lie detector test. I worry that my fragmented outline of memories will become even more barren with time.
What sticks out most vividly are your facial expressions:
Like the one where you squint your eyes and crinkle your nose and scrunch your shoulders up like you’re hiding in your own face.
Or the one where you purse your lips tight into a pucker and raise your eyebrows.
Or the one where you have this totally blank, flat expression but there’s so much going on behind the eyes.
I can picture you sitting in front of the TV at two in the morning, wearing flannel pajama pants, a Phish T-shirt, and a hoodie, watching The Real World or something equally inane and eating leftovers out of a Styrofoam to-go container with your fingers. You never used silverware.
I can see you sitting on the couch, one knee bent, finger-pecking furiously away on your laptop. You never learned to type properly but were lightning-fast on a keyboard. You could have won a competition.
These are the images I saw on repeat for thirty years. They’re seared into my memory. Conversations are harder to conjure because they happened only once. I want to remember all of the things you said, but I can’t. I can listen to podcasts or stand-up DVDs or Mom’s home movies, but I can’t remember all the things you said to me on the phone at two in the morning while freaking out about a girl, and I want to remember those moments so badly because they’re all I have. We can’t create any more memories.
For some reason, I can remember lots of times as teenagers when we got fucked-up together:
Like the time you picked mushrooms in a field after it rained, and we dehydrated them upstairs in the middle of the night in the food dehydrator Dad bought to make beef jerky. The whole upstairs smelled like cow shit for days. Mom and Dad didn’t seem to notice. How?
Or the time we took acid in high school and hung out by the pool in my friend Nellie’s backyard until six in the morning. You accidentally took a sip out of the Coke can that was full of cigarette ash and gagged for several minutes. We laughed about it until we cried for weeks, months, years. I still laugh when I think about it.
Or the time you came to visit me when I was a freshman at NYU. You were only a high school sophomore, a little boy, but we somehow got you into a bar down the street called the Fat Black Pussycat. A dark place coated with red velvet. You drank too much and threw up all night. But it was funny.
Or the time in middle school when you and your friends rolled fake joints out of oregano and brown paper lunch sacks and Mom found it the next day, woke us all up at seven in the morning, and dragged us out into the backyard to bust us for smoking pot. I told her it was oregano and that you were stupid and went back to bed.
Why do I remember this stuff?
Because you died of a drug overdose?
Because I have to somehow make myself responsible?
I remember other stuff, too.
Like how you loved to make Hungry Man frozen dinners at three o’clock in the morning in our old house on Dumfries.
Or when you played the title role in the musical Oliver in middle school and said, “Please sir, can I have some more” in your little British accent so perfectly.
Or when you were the spotlight operator for The Boys Next Door in high school, and I was stage managing, and you were thirty minutes late for your call and didn’t give a shit, and we got into an enormous fight over the headset.
Or the time you made me go see the String Cheese Incident at Radio City Music Hall, and I threw my back out on the way to the concert walking down the stairs of my apartment building on Third Avenue and Twenty-Eighth Street but went to the concert anyway because I knew how much it meant to you. Our seats were in the balcony and every time people jumped around, which happened excessively, the balcony would shake and I was certain we would die in a balcony-collapse freak accident.
Or the time we saw Phish at Coney Island and it was outdoors and rained the entire night, and I was wearing a white dress that was soaked all the way through and shivering on the train the whole two-hour ride back to Queens.
I remember that you used to suck your third and fourth fingers relentlessly so that they had these permanent indentations on them and you would drag your little, white blanket behind you everywhere you went, like Linus. The only time it wasn’t in your possession is when you had it in the freezer. You liked it best when it was really cold.
I remember the day you got the
