A Memoir
What We Lost
in the Ire
I was fifty when it broke. The stage was finally empty — the men all gone, in their different terrible ways — and I was alone with the quiet and a song I’d heard a thousand times, when the truth came in from the wrong direction all at once.
For thirty years the story had run the other way, and I’d believed it all the way down. I was the angel. I bickered with every man I was ever with — sometimes mean, sometimes explosive — and afterward I always told myself the same thing: that I let it go fast, that I wasn’t the one with the problem, that these guys had real evil streaks in them and I was the patient one weathering the storm. I held that line for three decades.
I had it backwards. I’d had it backwards on purpose. The annoyance, the fights, the cold exits were never a reaction to anybody’s evil. They were a system I’d built to keep everyone exactly far enough away, and I’d run it so long I’d mistaken it for my personality.
This is the story of the four years that built that system and the twenty-five that ran on it, and one man I kept on the other side of the door the whole time while telling myself I was the one being wronged. Most of it happened in the nineties, in hotel rooms across four cities, with a lot of drugs and a little money and one person I could never quite leave or keep.
His name was Shannon.
A year before I met him, I drew him.
I was on the phone with a friend back in Dallas, doodling on a piece of paper, not paying attention, and I sketched out a good-looking guy. I’m not an artist. I can’t draw. But that one came out, and it came out well enough that I didn’t throw it away — I tucked it into a book. Three or four years later Shannon found it and said, “Who drew this of me? It’s so good.” I’d drawn his face before I knew his face existed. I still don’t know what to do with that.
The other omen came in my first weeks in Kansas City, when I lived up north and didn’t know a soul. There was a guy I worked with named Eddie, gay, about to go to jail for a year. His dad had kicked him out, and he needed somewhere to crash the night before he turned himself in, so I let him stay at my place. We were up late talking and out of nowhere he asked, “Do you know Eric and Shannon?” I told him I’d been in town about a week and didn’t know anybody. He looked at me and said, “You would really get along with them.” A year later every word of it came true.
By then I was living in a house with five straight guys, and we partied without stopping. When the Hurricane closed for the night we’d haul the after-party back to our place. Eric, Shannon, and I were the token gays of that whole crowd — the fast, fun, mostly straight crowd that ran the late nights. That’s how it’s always been for me, and how it was for them, which is part of how we recognized each other.
I met Eric first — Shannon’s best friend, the most fabulous person in the city, and the two of them looked enough alike that people mixed them up. One time I walked up to Eric and said, “Aren’t you Shannon?” and he did not love it. I’d bummed a cigarette off the real Shannon at a rave one night. I was wearing a white suit, bleach-blond hair, rolling on ecstasy, and he told me how good I looked. He was a striking man from across a room. He looked like the drawing.
He had a way of being two famous people at once. Thinner than you’d think but not skinny, in tight leopard print or red vinyl pants, big jet-black hair, a leather bomber jacket nobody could touch. There was something in the cheekbones and the swagger that made strangers reach for a name to pin him to, and they never landed on the same one. Kids at the mall would stop dead and call him Prince. Kids at Six Flags were sure he was Michael Jackson. He never corrected anybody. He’d just give a little nod, like, yes, fine, whichever one you need me to be — and somehow be more himself for it. He could stand still in the middle of a food court and bend the whole room toward him without saying a word.
We didn’t really meet until the salon. FEVA, the hippest place in the hippest part of town, where you couldn’t just call for an appointment — somebody had to do you a favor to get you in. Shannon and his boyfriend Troy owned it together, and they’d just broken up. The day I was there, Troy was doing my boyfriend’s hair and Shannon was across the room working on somebody else.
Then Xanadu came on.
It’s my favorite song, and the first few beats do something to me I can’t help — I light up, every time, before I’ve decided to. I lit up there in the chair, and Shannon noticed. He looked over with this little look, like, hey, I know you, and told me he had the whole soundtrack. I told him I had four copies of it, and went off on my whole diatribe about what a fan I am. Then he asked, “You know who I think was inspired by her?” I said Cocteau Twins before I’d thought about it. That was the handshake.
Because running into a Cocteau Twins fan out in the wild is, to this day, a monumental thing. It means you belong to the same small world without having to explain any of it. That’s what happened across the salon floor, and it was settled from there. The part I’m only now learning to sit with is that the thread I’ve spent twenty-five years thinking of as mine — that you could hear Olivia underneath the Cocteau Twins — started as his question, not my answer. He handed it to me in the first ten minutes, and I kept it, and I’ve written whole essays since on a thought I didn’t have first. I don’t know how much of what I think is me started out as him.
That was the first file. I didn’t know it yet, but he was going to become the place I kept everything — that the music would be the filing system between us, and the archivist would be him.
Shannon was the one on his way out. He and Troy had been together for years and owned the house and the salon both, and now Shannon was selling Troy his half of everything and planning a move to New York, which was the actual reason they’d split. I had a boyfriend too, a cute kid I’d been seeing a month or two and was never really in. I didn’t even break up with him. I just stopped. He came up to me at a club one night and said, “What the hell is going on?” and I looked right through him and said nothing. I feel bad about that. Not bad enough, apparently — not then, and not now.
I overheard Shannon on the phone with his friend Heather, saying he was going to take Michael on a date that week. I was just confused. Who’s Michael? I said it out loud — who are you taking on a date, who is that — and it took me an embarrassing beat to understand that Michael was me. I hadn’t known I was the one being taken anywhere. As far as I was concerned we’d get high and make out sometimes and that was the arrangement. But he started taking me to nice places and spending money, and when he told me he was moving to New York, I said, “I’ll go with you,” before I’d thought about it for a second. We moved in together inside a month.
The night it actually turned, we were at dinner at a place called Otto’s and got to talking to the waitress, a girl named Brooke, and her roommate down at the bar, a hippie girl. The roommate’s the one who asked if we wanted to do some acid. We ended up on the lawn at the Nelson-Atkins, tripping out of our minds. We climbed up inside the giant shuttlecocks out on the grass and stood there in the dark, and the wind came across that open lawn so hard it felt like the two of us were flying, like the whole sculpture might lift off the ground and take us with it. That’s the night Shannon told me he loved me.
What I said back was, “Don’t you have a bunch of boyfriends?” And to myself, clear as a bell: no, this isn’t going to happen. And then I caved anyway, that night or close to it.
Our first fight came not long after. I had his Jeep and didn’t come back when I said I would. I don’t even remember where I was, but it was disrespectful, and he was pissed, rightfully so. I remember exactly what went through my head while he was going off. Not this will happen forever. What I thought was: if we could just never have this first fight, it would be perfect. Like the fight was the thing wrecking it, and not me.
I believed that for about thirty years.
We moved to New York. Then Atlanta, for the ’96 Olympics. Then Dallas. Then back to Kansas City, where we’d started. Four cities in four years, a slow loop that ended exactly where it began, which should have told me something and didn’t.
Most of the time we lived in small hotel rooms. We never had money. We got fucked up. Two extremely social people with nothing but each other and a city full of strangers we’d turn into friends inside a week. The stories from those years could fill their own book, except I can’t run most of them start to finish anymore — Shannon kept the files for those years, and I only kept the receipts. But the thing that matters most about that stretch isn’t any single night. It’s the CDs. We had hundreds of them. Music was the entire language between us, from Xanadu forward, and over four years our two collections stopped being two collections. They became one pile, and you couldn’t have said whose was whose. Same with everything else — the clothes, the books, the junk you accumulate living on top of another person in rooms barely big enough to stand up in.
That pile is the reason we didn’t break up sooner. I knew we should. I’d known a long time. But every time I got close to it, I’d picture actually separating all of it, sorting hundreds of discs back into his and mine, untangling four cities’ worth of one life back into two, and the exhaustion of it made staying the easier thing. We’d just fight about who got what, and I knew it. So we stayed. People like to think love is what keeps you somewhere. Sometimes it’s only logistics.
Across those four years we only really broke up twice.
The first was in Atlanta, the summer of the Olympics. There was a guy named Chris who sang at Six Flags, had his own show out there. He was into me, he asked me out, and I wanted to go, so I broke up. The date happened. Shannon came along on it. That was the end of that.
When it was time to move from Atlanta to Dallas, Shannon and Eric went ahead a few days early on the bus. I stayed behind, and while I was back there I had sex with Chris. Then my dad drove me down to Texas. By the time I got to Dallas, Shannon and Eric already had an apartment and a whole life going with people I’d never met. We weren’t really trying to work it out — I’d have told you we were, but that’s not what was happening. We just drifted back to normal, slowly, the way we always did, until one day we were sleeping in the same bed again and nobody had decided anything. Eric was there for all of it. He got mad when he caught us in bed together — you two are doing this again? — and he wasn’t wrong to be. He had a front-row seat to every fight we ever had.
But before any of that drifting-back, there was the morning Shannon was supposed to meet my mother for the first time. He didn’t show until hours late, wrecked, still in his clothes from the night before. The first time he’s meeting my mom, and that’s what he does. I was furious. It was humiliating. Years later he told me that night was the one and only time he ever cheated on me. He’d been with a guy.
It wasn’t until I was fifty, going back over all of it, that the math did itself. A week before that morning, back in Atlanta, I’d slept with Chris. And I never told him. I don’t think he ever asked, because I wasn’t a cheater, that wasn’t my reputation, so it never made it onto my own ledger at all. I’d completely buried the fact that I’d done the same thing to him a week earlier and simply decided it didn’t count. We were both burning the house down. We just lit it from opposite ends.
The second breakup was in Dallas, when we were dealing drugs. I’m not proud of it. It’s what we were doing.
A friend of mine met Shannon — someone who didn’t know him at all — spent a little time around him, and came back and told me, you need to leave him. I’d half decided he was cheating anyway. He’d do mean things, act like he was messing around, and even though he swore later that he never did and I believed him, at the time it played like proof. So we broke up. I moved into a strange house in a bad part of East Dallas, where my room was the living room.
There was a homeless old man who came through one day. My roommate let him use the place to get cleaned up, and I’d come home once before to find him just sitting in my living room, in my space. We’d talked a little. He was profound in a way I couldn’t account for, said a couple of things that landed too hard for a stranger, and then he was gone, and I’d thought it was strange and not much else. Hold onto him. He comes back.
Shannon, meanwhile, had fallen in with a crew run by a guy named Beef. The whole group gave off evil-cult energy, and Beef gave me bad vibes specifically. One night they all drove a couple hours south to a rave, and everybody I knew was there. I sat in that house bored with the last of the sugar cubes of acid we had, and finally I took one, and it came on hard.
I put on Four-Calendar Cafe, and when “Pur” came on it cracked me open. I had a vision: pyramids, and every cat in the world purring at the same instant, all of it one sound, the whole planet humming on one note. I’d never felt anything like it. It seemed like the most important thing I would ever know.
Then I went walking around Dallas alone, out of my mind, headed to my friend Lizzie’s. I was tripping too hard to walk up and talk to a person, so I sat at a bus stop across Ross Avenue with an ice cream, trying to come down enough to function. And a black cat — bigger than a small dog, a genuinely huge animal — came tearing across four lanes of traffic straight at me. I was sure it would attack. It jumped into my lap, and we sat there petting each other, having a completely real, connected moment, four lanes of cars going by. Every cat in the world purring at once stopped being a thing I’d seen on acid an hour before. It was happening. It was in my lap.
The day before, I’d called Lizzie from the payphone across the street and asked what she was up to, and she’d said, “I’m giving Death a bath.” I thought it was hilarious. I’d never met her cat. So I sat on that bus stop and decided that if this giant cat didn’t run off in five minutes, I’d carry it over to her, because she was a cat person. I picked it up, walked it to her door, and the second she opened it the cat shot inside. I started apologizing for hauling a strange animal into her house, and she just said, “Oh, Death.” It was her cat. I’d spent half an hour holding Death in my arms and didn’t know it.
While I was there, some friends brought Shannon by — they knew I was at Lizzie’s, and there he was. He was fucked up and kept calling for me, and once everybody left we went back to my place in East Dallas.
And the old man was there again.
We put on “Pur” — the song from the vision, the one that was still ringing in me — and I’m nearly sure he was hearing the Cocteau Twins for the first time, that we were the ones who put them in front of him. He sat down with us, and for about thirty minutes he said the most profound, beautiful things anyone has ever said about us — about what the two of us were to each other, what we were doing in each other’s lives, what it meant. He talked about us like he’d known us forever and could see the whole shape of it from above. He used the word holy and I believed him. Then he stood up and walked out, and we never saw him again. A few hours before, I was mildly freaked out that a homeless man was in my room. By morning we were both dead certain he’d been an angel sent to tell us the truth. There was no other explanation we wanted.
That was the whole pattern. A cat named Death would cross four lanes to find me. A stranger would appear in a bad neighborhood to bless us and vanish. And we’d take it as the universe casting a vote. We broke up twice, and the second time the world threw all of that at us inside a single night, and how do you argue with that. What I never noticed was that the signs only ever turned up to glue back together a thing the two of us kept breaking on purpose.
We’d known of Luke for about a year before we ever met him. He was Lizzie’s best friend, an animator in New York on a kids’ show everybody’s kid has seen, and Lizzie kept telling all three of us we’d be obsessed with each other the second we were in a room together. She was right. He’d come through town and we’d party, we drove down to Austin once, and the three of us just fit. Shannon and I fought like it was a part-time job, but never when Luke was around. Something about him kept the peace — Shannon wouldn’t do it in front of him. Luke and I flirted, but it was innocent. It was easy, and nothing in my life back then was easy.
He was handsome like an actor. Designer everything, Louis Vuitton duffels, that New York gloss you could spot across a parking lot. Cops in the city had tackled him over a joint when it was still a real charge, wrecked his back, and he’d come out of it with a fifty-thousand-dollar settlement and a standing prescription for Dilaudid. So he moved home to his grandparents in Dallas, which is how we started seeing him every time we were at Lizzie’s, and then for a few days he just moved in with Shannon and me at my mom’s place in South Dallas.
We were all so in love with each other we talked about a threesome and then decided it would be too weird. My mom adored him. My little brother adored him. For a few days the house was as good as it got.
The Matrix had just opened and we’d all gone to see it the night before. The whole next day we kept talking about it and how awesome it was. Luke kept saying he was going to change the Matrix. Not the movie — the Matrix. He moved around the house saying it, glowing, and it was wonderful, the kind of thing only Luke could say and have you believe him. He’d been off the Dilaudid about a week, which I think was part of why he’d come to stay with us, but that afternoon he went to his grandparents’ and brought the rest of the bottle back, because we had a party to go to that night.
We were getting ready and he came out of the bathroom and he was just gone. Couldn’t work his hands. He sat down and had me tie his shoes for him, and I remember thinking, what is his deal, what’s wrong with him. I was naive about that whole category of drug. I’d done plenty of uppers, ecstasy, liquor, weed, but I had no idea what a downer did to a body. None.
We took Luke’s convertible. Top down. Shannon drove, because Luke was too far gone to, and Luke sat in the middle. Somewhere on the way the drug hit him in a big warm wave and he had an erection, and he took my hand and put it on it, not as a come-on, just so I’d feel how good he felt, like he wanted to give me some of it. Shannon noticed, and he didn’t like it. It didn’t turn into anything — I told him it was no big deal and he let it go — but he said something. That’s the part that’s sad now. He was bothered, and I waved him off, and he understood, because that was where we lived.
The party was at Clay’s, a secret Freemason. It was a fancy place in a nice neighborhood on a busy street. Very boho before boho was boho. Maybe ten people, more a dinner thing than a party. Luke stopped me at the front door and said, “Don’t let me go to sleep.” I didn’t get it. We’re at a party, why would you go to sleep. Inside of a few minutes he was out cold. Clay and I carried him into a back living room and laid him on a sofa to sleep it off in peace while the rest of us stayed up all night.
Around ten the next morning the sun was up and it was one of those beautiful sunny spring mornings in Dallas. Luke’s car was out of gas. I went into the back room where he was sleeping and took some money from his wallet, and I remember he was snoring kind of funny, and I didn’t think a thing of it. I walked down to the gas station with a plastic milk jug. I remember that walk specifically, which is strange, because nothing happened on it. Just the light and the air and me feeling fine, easy-high, taking my time. I filled the jug and carried it back in the morning sun and poured it into his car.
Then I walked back into the house.
Everyone was standing in a circle in the back room. Lizzie was down on her knees over the sofa, holding a mirror under Luke’s nose. He’d stopped breathing. We got him to the hospital as fast as a car can move — his head in my lap in the backseat, top still down.
He was brain dead before anyone would say the word. His eyes stayed open the whole time, just open, pointed at nothing. For about ten minutes it was me and Shannon over him, begging him to come back, telling him we’d take care of him, we’d take care of everything, just come back. He didn’t.
After that there was nothing to do but wait for his family. That’s when I left. I told them I was going to smoke, or get something to eat, maybe. The errand I handed myself was to drive to the house for the rest of his pills and bring them to the doctors, like it mattered, like it would change a single thing. The truer reason was that I hated those pills. They were the thing that had done it, and I couldn’t stand them sitting in that house another minute, so I went and got them out. And under all of that, the rest of the truth was that I needed to be gone. I needed to be by myself. So I left Shannon standing in the worst room of his life, and I drove off.
I don’t remember what I did after that. When I got to the house my mom was home. I got the pills. By the time I made it back to the hospital, she and my grandmother were there too. Shannon looked at me and told me he couldn’t believe I’d left him. He’d been sad too.
We kept Luke’s convertible a few weeks after he died; the police were done with it and his grandparents told us to hang onto it. The funeral was theirs, a Christian thing, awful in the specific way those can be. His cousin sang a terrible Christian song, and my mom and Shannon and I could not stop laughing about it, the way you do when the other option is worse. The tombstone said Jamie Daniels — his birth name. He’d had it legally changed to Luke Warm, but they buried him as Jamie Daniels, the version of him his family knew, never the one we did. Lizzie got up and read something from Blake, dark as hell, and that part was right. His grandparents were so sweet through all of it.
We had all his things. His computer, which we were really trying to get into — the password hint was “devildog,” which we eventually worked out was a game, though I don’t think we ever cracked it. And the check was there too, the settlement, in Shannon’s name, sitting at my mom’s house. We could have cashed it. For a minute we were headed that way. His grandparents made a point of telling us not to open that check, and it took us a while to understand why: because we could have, because nobody was going to stop us. Luke’s whole plan had been the three of us moving to New York on that money. With him gone, his grandparents offered to take us on the trip anyway, like he’d wanted, and we just looked at each other — what’s the point. We gave the car back. We gave the check back. We gave all of it back — two wrecked kids passing a test nobody set us. Then my mom and my grandmother rented a U-Haul and drove us the other way, back to Kansas City.
Dallas was done. I don’t know how to say it better than that. It was just done, and it was sad. The romance ended the way I end most things, which is to say I withdrew until there was nothing left to stay for.
I stopped sleeping with him. I wasn’t attracted to him the same way as he got older, and instead of handling it like a person, I just shut it down. He said, if you won’t have sex with me, I’ll find someone else. I said fine, do that. Eventually he did. The new boyfriend was named Chad, though I called him C-Had. A blob with no personality, a guy Shannon could mold into whatever he wanted, and when I said so, Shannon agreed and we laughed about it together. We came apart over it — except we still lived together, then moved again together, and finally I got my own apartment, which is the only thing that ever really separates two people who can’t stop orbiting each other. I was jealous at first. I couldn’t believe he had someone else, as if I hadn’t handed him the idea myself. But it passed fast, and then it was just funny: the two of us sitting around laughing about the man who was supposed to be his actual relationship now. That was the tell I couldn’t read. Everyone told me I seemed happier once the romance was over, and I was. The day-to-day administration was over. The bond didn’t go anywhere.
We were the closest thing either of us had to family after that, closer than I’ve been to anybody, for what turned into a quarter of a century. It was pure magic. He’d have told you the same.
He was also the one who held it all. Shannon told our stories better than I could — the same nights I’m clawing to reconstruct now, he could run start to finish with every name and beat in place, and he’d do it at a party and own the room. So I let him. For twenty-five years I didn’t keep the archive, because he was the archive. I outsourced my own life to him. That’s the real reason so much of this is a blur and so much of it is missing — I didn’t lose the memories, I lent them to him, and when he died I didn’t get them back. Every song that drags a whole day up out of me now is just an index card pointing at a file I gave to somebody else.
One especially lovely autumn morning — late 2002, because Scarlet’s Walk had just come out and that record dates everything I can’t otherwise date — a few days after Eric’s birthday, there was a knock on my apartment door. Shannon had a car that day because he’d dropped Chad at the ER for a ruptured hemorrhoid. We put the album in and listened to “A Sorta Fairytale” on repeat for an hour, cruising around Liberty Memorial.
I don’t have a good memory in general, but this day plays like a movie, slow-motion and high definition, and it takes my gut straight back to the specific feeling the magic in the air put there. The song set the mood and we were ready for one of those adventures. We bar-hopped and park-hopped. We blatantly stole a witch Barbie from CVS and then ran and bought each other T-shirts off a twink prostitute trying to better himself by selling shirts on a corner in midtown, midday. I don’t specifically recall, but I can guarantee the jokes were constant and the laughs were everywhere. We picked up and discarded a whole cast of friends as the light went down, huffing some ether we’d come into along the way.
Then he crashed Chad’s car — Chad had taken the bus home from the ER — into the roundabout by the park off 39th Street, sirens already starting up, and one of the night’s random characters bled from a gash on her forehead. I went into hero mode and ripped off my brand-new homemade T-shirt to bandage the wound, and then me, with my fat hairy stomach flopping in the night breeze, hauled ass on foot through the park to the back entrance of my apartment, which held as refuge for a while — until the late night’s crackhead in the literal closet turned into a different story altogether.
A demo of “A Sorta Fairytale” came up in my playlist just now, and here we are.
I love and miss him.
I moved to Hawaii in 2004. By then the love of my life was a man named Ryan, who was married to my best friend — its own long story, and not this one — and out on the island the whole thing was coming apart, and I was coming apart with it.
So I called Shannon. He was the one person who could get my head back on straight, and he knew it, and he came. A few years after I’d landed there, he packed up his life and moved across the Pacific because I needed him. That’s the thing about us I keep having to say out loud now: when it actually counted, he showed up. I called, and he crossed an ocean.
Eric and Chad came out a few months after he did, and for a while the whole old Kansas City constellation was transplanted onto an island — Shannon, Eric, Chad, our best friends, me. Some of the best years there were.
There was one shadow over it I didn’t understand until much later. Before Eric and Chad came out to join us — while Shannon was in Hawaii with me and the two of them were still back in Kansas City — Chad slept with Eric. Eric was HIV positive. He’d die of it eventually, years after all of this, long after Hawaii. Chad got it from him then, though none of us knew for years. It didn’t surface until later, back on the mainland, when Shannon and Ken had gotten together and Chad called Shannon out of nowhere to say he was positive, and where it had come from. For Shannon it was a scare — he’d been with Chad — but he was okay. Chad stayed in Hawaii after the rest of us scattered. As far as I know he’s still there.
Before he left, I’d been staying with a friend I called the Ranger — one of only two park rangers in the whole state. Then Shannon broke up with Chad and fell in love with him. The three of us were packed into the Ranger’s tiny one-bedroom, and watching Shannon be in love up close — how sweet he was about it, how soft — bothered me in a way I told myself was only about square footage. There wasn’t room. So I left.
Shannon left a few years before I did. I nearly made the full ten years out there. And when he threw his going-away party, I didn’t go. I was mad that he was leaving — that was the whole reason, he was leaving and I couldn’t take it — and I stayed home. He and our best friends took turns calling me every ten minutes the whole night, passing the phone around, trying to get me to come say goodbye. I let it ring. Every ten minutes, all night, the people who loved me most trying to put me in a room with the man who’d moved across an ocean because I asked him to, and I sat there and let it ring.
He crossed a Pacific for me. I wouldn’t cross town to say goodbye. He was leaving, so I left first.
I moved back to Kansas City because Shannon was there, and because being near him felt like being near family, even though he wasn’t, technically — my actual family was down in Texas. The plan was to move in with him. That didn’t work out, which by then was the most predictable sentence. He used his pull to get me a place in an old firehouse in the Captains Quarters, and it was awesome — they threw raves there on the weekends, art shows sometimes, and my rent was working the door here and there.
By then Shannon was dating a trust-fund kid named Ken, a dead doctor’s son, a genuinely nice guy. When he started seeing Ken, Shannon quit working. This was a man who’d been a phenomenal hairdresser, who’d cut hair all over, including New York, on things I can’t get into here, who’d always had a clientele that would follow him anywhere. And he just stopped. He’d wake up, get a six-pack of Colt 45 and a handful of Fireballs, and drink the day down on Ken’s money. It wasn’t a lot of money. It was enough.
He started turning up at my work, already wrecked, angling for free food and drinks, and it annoyed me. There was a stretch, four or five months, where I didn’t see him at all. He was going through his own thing — they’d moved north of the river, there was always some drama — and my own life was finally quiet, so I kept my distance. That’s the move I keep making.
He showed up one day with Ken and said, “Hey Michael, tell Ken it’s okay if this guy I met online comes and sees me while Ken’s away on his family vacation.” I said, no, that is absolutely not okay, what are you even talking about. There was some man he’d met in a chat room, a horror site, something like that, who he’d been talking to. Shannon always went on the family vacation with Ken’s people, but this time he wasn’t invited, because they’d had it with him refusing to work, and the trust money was running thin.
A little after that, he called me at two in the morning and said he was coming over. He came over and we hung out and did tarot cards, and my dog trotted up and dropped a dried-out dead rat in his lap, something that had been mummifying in the attic. Just our normal good time. And somewhere in the night he told me I needed to start preparing myself for him to die. I told him to knock it off, that’s so negative, that’s crazy. He said his legs hurt. I said, then go to the doctor if you really think something’s wrong, but quit thinking like that, you’re going to be fine.
That was the last time I saw him.
The next day he took the little bit of money I’d given him that night, and the guy from the horror site drove up from Alabama and got him, and they left. Just like that. People kept coming up to me — Shannon moved to Alabama? What? — and I barely knew more than they did. We talked a couple of times. He told me he was about to open an apothecary, and I told him he’d watched Practical Magic too many times. The last message I got from him said he’d quit drinking and was going to stop smoking soon.
About a week later I was walking to work and a feeling of dread came over me so heavy I was certain somebody had died. I thought it was my mom. It didn’t once cross my mind it could be Shannon — that was so far outside what was possible my brain didn’t reach for it. That night Ken called. Shannon was in the hospital. The whole story came thirdhand, from the Alabama guy to Ken to me: that he’d been sick a couple of days, that he went to the bathroom and was bleeding, and then there was blood coming out of his eyes, and he had a heart attack in the ambulance and died later.
He knew everyone I knew. Within an hour of the news going public, I had more than forty messages on my phone. I counted them. That was the size of the hole he left, measured in the only unit I had that morning.
I don’t know what really happened in that hospital, or in that house. The man he left with was strange in a way I never trusted — part of me has always half believed the two of them were into something dark that finally turned back on them, like a bad episode of Charmed. I never liked him. At the funeral, people treated him like a kind of pathetic widow, and he tried hard to talk to me, and I never let him. But I understood exactly what he was, standing there. He was what we’d been, with Luke — the ones who happened to be in the room at the end. Except this time the one in the room was a stranger, and I was a week away with a bad feeling, telling Shannon to quit being so negative.
And then they were all gone, every one of them, the stage was finally empty, and I was fifty years old and listening to “Pur.”
It’s a Cocteau Twins song, and the thing about the Cocteau Twins — about Elizabeth Fraser especially — is that you can’t make out the words. She doesn’t sing in sentences. She sings in something underneath language, sounds that almost resolve into English and then dissolve before you can catch one. People have argued for decades about what she’s actually saying on any given song, and most of the time the honest answer is nothing you could ever write down. It’s pure sound shaped like feeling, and that’s the whole point of it.
Which means you can pour anything you want into it. There’s no lyric to argue with you, no line that turns around and tells you you’ve got it wrong. But this one always resolved, for me, into a single sentence. Out of all that dissolving sound — whatever the official words are, if there are official words — what I heard was always I am not afraid of your anger. For as long as I can remember, that made “Pur” a song from me to him. We’d get high and put it on and cry, both of us, and I filled in the rest with my own story: this is me holding space for him, me being patient with him, me telling him I wasn’t scared of whatever he was. We’re feeling the same thing, I always thought. Same frequency. The song never corrected me, because the song never said anything at all. I’d been hearing my own voice come back out of it for twenty-five years and calling it his.
It hit me like a brick. It was the other way around. It had always been the other way around. I am not afraid of your anger — that was never my line to sing to him. It was his to me. The song wasn’t my patience with his anger. It was his patience with mine. He was the one who was never afraid of me, who kept showing up, who held the space and waited for me to figure it out and never once stopped, twenty-five years, while I kept just enough distance to stay safe and called the distance a virtue. The truth came in all at once — about that song, and every fight, every cold exit, every time I waved him off. I’d had it exactly backwards, and I’d had it backwards on purpose, because the story where I was the angel and these men had the evil streaks was the story that let me push everyone away and feel righteous doing it. The bickering was never a reaction to anything. It was the alarm. It went off the second anyone got close to the door.
And underneath the alarm was the thing it guarded, which is plainer and colder than any of it. The feeling I like best — the one I’d take over almost anything — is coming home from a good night out, feeling great, and knowing there’s no one on the other side of the door. No one to answer to, no one waiting up, no one there at all. That isn’t a wound somebody gave me. It’s just what I am. So the switch, when it came, wasn’t remorse. It was recognition. I should never have pretended to be anyone’s boyfriend, not once, because I was never built for the other side of the door. And because being a boyfriend annoyed me down to the bone, I ran a permanent campaign of being an asshole and filed the whole thing under their evil, man after man, year after year, rather than say the simple true thing out loud: I wanted to come home to an empty room, and I never stopped wanting that. I was never the angel. They were never the monsters. I just wanted to be alone — not from him in particular, not from some love I was too scared to have. From everyone. He just got close enough that I had to keep the system running on him too, and he let me, for twenty-five years, and never made me feel it.
When the switch flipped, I wasn’t even thinking about Dallas. Not the vision, not the pyramids, not every cat in the world purring at once, not the night that song turned holy. The most sacred origin story I had, and it had fallen clean out of me — because Shannon kept it, like he kept the rest, and when he went he took the file and left me the index card.
There’s one more number I can’t put down. I’ve lost a lot of people, nearly everyone closest to me, one after another, and Shannon was in the room for every single one. Every death I had to stand inside, he stood in it next to me. He could do that. He could be on the other side of the door. The first Thanksgiving after he was gone, I sat down and worked out that he and I had spent nineteen of them together. Nineteen. More than I spent with my family, more than with anyone alive. The one person who was always there — at every grave, at nineteen Thanksgivings, across a Pacific the day I called.
There’s a photograph my friend Chelsea took, near the end of Dallas, before Luke died. Shannon and I are sitting on a bed. He’s in a white shirt, turned toward me, watching me. His face has a look I always read as bitchy, but the truth is he looks sad — small and sad in a way I never let myself see while he was alive. I’m drinking from a glass, my eyes cut to him. The look on my face isn’t sinister, exactly. It’s conniving. Tricky. A certain smirk.
For thirty years I remembered myself as the one who got hurt in those rooms. The camera remembered it the other way.
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