RIP in Peace, Skate Muppet

When it happens, it’s usually to someone else’s friends.

This time, it was my friend: an old friend, a friend I hadn’t seen or spoken to in years, a friend I kind of knew was lost and messy and too much. Meaning too much to care and worry about, because worrying about someone who you know isn’t going to change is draining: Like a bath without a plug, no matter how you try to fill that tub, that worry is going to drain you, no matter all the bath bombs you throw in. Those dissolve, might change the color of the water, might smell better, but it all spirals down the drain and leaves and you’re left with an empty old tub, eventually. Some things you can’t turn off even when you want to.

I met Andy in San Francisco in 2007. He was new to SF, like I was, and we were outside the Knockout on Mission Street, I think. Andy was adorable—good looking, tousled hair, lanky limbs, earnest eyes. I remember being bummed that he smoked cigarettes, because I’ve always hated that smell. Stale, matted cigarette smoke hair is a smell Andy would carry with him through life. Andy and I were the same age, and both had the distinction of being the quirky Jewish friend, when most of the people we knew weren’t Jewish—we weren’t religious, but we could make jokes about money and get away with it.

In those early SF days, we were in our mid-twenties, and it felt like everyone was. And most likely, everyone was. We all rode bikes and skateboards and no one paid for the bus (well, I did, obviously). There were house parties, art gallery parties, store opening parties, dollar beer at the bar parties, nighttime at Dolores Park parties. It was the right age and the right time to be in San Francisco—before Twitter, before Facebook overtook MySpace, before tech became a capital T. It was before phones captured anything but phone numbers, and those changed often, as people like us lost our phones or had them turned off or went off of family plans, finally.

Andy was someone who I didn’t need a phone number for, because I’d always see him out. He was from Kentucky, and the Kentucky dudes were some of my favorite dudes on the planet. Some nights I would go out and meet them and the party would go back to a living room somewhere, and often that was my little living room, and Andy would sleep on the futon couch. Andy dressed really well, in the 90’s skateboarder thrift store chic style that is honestly still what turns my head (that and the sound of skateboard wheels hitting pavement). I was going through an oversized t-shirt phase, and I had a truly insane assortment of thrifted t shirts. Andy looked better in most of them, so I gave him t shirts some mornings, when he would wake up bleary-eyed with his muppet voice, “Allie! I need coffee!” His voice would always lilt up, like everything he said was half-joking. There was one t shirt I gave him that he wore a lot, and everytime I saw him in it, I was happy. Andy was cool, and everyone liked him.

Everyone partied and drank to get drunk, so it really didn’t seem like an issue when I knew him. He wasn’t even especially drunk most of the time. It was innocent, and normal, and novel, then. It was social and it felt relevant, going out and being together and drinking enough to let yourself slip sometimes, to drink until you couldn’t really take care of yourself, and someone else would. It’s indulgent, to drink like that; a way of asking for care without having to say anything—fuck, most of the times we can’t say anthing, just mumble-jumble slurry blurry incantations of the liberty in letting go. There is warmth in leaning on someone, of having someone help you stand up, like ethereal body warmth that permeates those sloppy nights of brown-outs and mornings of bleary eyes. Sinking into that surrender can be embarassing for most of us, and we might make choices to not be that person, but sometimes all we want is to not have to be the one making choices. When you take yourself out of the equation, how do you figure yourself back in?

I saw Andy less when I moved into my thirties. He moved to New York, and I would see him sometimes when I would visit. One time he came to Cori’s house, when I was staying with her in Brooklyn. I remember that he didn’t smell good, and he was extra Muppet, and because I hadn’t seen him in so long I thought it was funny. In retrospect, I think there was a lot going on that he was avoiding, and the beginning of the cycle of him not having a place to live, and finding girls to take him in, and drifting. He didn’t have the same anchors in New York that he had had in San Francisco, and everyone was getting tired of the character development and waiting for the plot. Come on Andy, show me an arc.

After that I never saw Andy in person. Last weekend, someone I rarely ever talk to texted me a picture of me and Andy, and wrote: “RIP Andy, thought you might want this.” I hadn’t heard yet, and the shock overwhelmed me. I burst out crying, loud crying, panicked crying, and I called one of my best friends, who was Andy’s best friend, and he picked up. His voice was quiet, and calm, and sounded like it was carrying the weight of too much he couldn’t put down yet. My frantic fear that Andy was actually dead was confirmed, and I veered back from hysterics, slowed down, and realized in my head I hadn’t known how bad it was, but his close friends did. And it made sense. It is tragic, on so many, if not all, levels. It is fucking tragic. Sometimes you hope someone hits rock bottom so they’ll stop, change, climb out of that well,but you can’t do it for them. You can’t care it for them, you can’t plan it for them, you can’t love them for them. They have to do that work themselves; or, they don’t.

Rest In Peace Andy.