I met David at a party in the
basement apartment of a friend of a friend.
He was hitting on me, but I was
too innocent to realize it.
I taught him to recite a Rilke
poem in German —
Doch ist einer welcher dieses fallen
Unendlich sanft in seinen händen hält.
Later he tried
to take me home, but I unwittingly put him off by making some heterosexual
remark.
I remember his
stoical, disappointed look.
I walked home by
myself and wrote a poem about the two marvelous pools that were available for
me to bathe in.
____
A few weeks
later I met him somewhere.
He had run out
of money, had nowhere to live, and asked if he could stay with me in my
apartment for a while.
I had one room
and the use of a bathroom and a kitchen. It was the Spring semester of my
freshman year.
He slept in a
sleeping bag across the room from my bed.
We listened to
music together on my little portable record player. He was able to listen to music intently, and was a great Bruckner
enthusiast.
Actually, Brucker
was part of his Deutschland
identification. He had been brutally tormented in high school for his
homosexuality, and had indulged in revenge fantasies spiced with Third-Reich
imagery.
I started
sharing his improvident habits. We ate dinner at the student union nearly every
evening, sitting with a gay Latin TA who distrusted me because I was a Scorpio.
I don’t remember
his name, but he and David were both Capricorns.
David had
started as a Latin major, but not being able to concentrate on his studies he had
suddenly taken off for Boston
with some acquaintances, returning with hardly a cent.
Most of his
energy went into having lunch or dinner or trying to find sexual partners.
I went with him
nearly every night to a bar called The Sink, an old Boulder establishment, with raunchy early-Mad-magazine-style
cartoons scrawled on the walls.
We drank Coors
drafts, though at that time alcohol didn’t appeal to me much. But we spent
money on grilled cheeseburgers with mounds of grated cheddar cheese.
David never
hooked up with anyone, and we’d return to my room and go to sleep in our
separate beds.
____
Needless to say,
my semester was a washout. I think I finally told David that he would have to
leave.
At any rate, at
the end of the Spring term, I went back home to Denver and worked at a gas
station for the summer, using the money to buy a 1917 Mason and Hamlin grand
piano, which I still have. My father helped me buy it. For a long time it stood
in the dining room of my parents’ Denver
house.
I’m not sure
what David did the next year. I think he went to Los Angeles for a while. But in the Spring of
’72 he was living in my old rooming house, while I was living with Eldon, north
of campus.
When I had it David would borrow marijuana from me,which in his Germanophile way he called Rauschgift. He’d smoke it listening to
Bruckner records.
I’m not sure
what he was doing that semester, but I’m sure his studies didn’t prosper.
____
After my own Boulder career collapsed and I returned to Denver to read St. Thomas à Kempis and practice the piano, and
finally return to my literature studies, David would visit me.
He was living
with his parents and working at the May D&F department store downtown.
I was very cold
to him at first, but he persisted, and finally we were regular friends again.
One day, I don’t
know why, we drove to Boulder
together. We smoked some Rauschgift
and drove out south of town.
We got out of
the car and hiked around. We had to jump over a stream. I jumped, and then he
jumped. He was not an athletic person, and his vision was bad.
He got tangled
up in some rusty barbed wire that cut him in the chest.
It was a
frightening shock.
He screamed out.
We drove to a
7-11 store and bought cotton swabs, alcohol, and antibiotic cream. I applied
the alcohol and cream to his cuts in the 7-11 men’s room. It hurt him, but he
bore it stoically.
He went to the
doctor for a tetanus shot, but a few weeks later, after working out in the
basement of his parents’ house in Aurora,
he died of sudden cardiac arrest.
I don’t think
his death had anything to do with the barbed wire incident.
I didn’t go to
the funeral, but I did visit his grave site beforehand and saw the cement vault
they were going to bury him in.
To this day, his
embalmed corpse lies in that water-proof box, perhaps not much physically altered
from the day he was deposited there.
The thought
makes me want to be buried in muck so that the worms and bacteria can eat me up
quick.
____
A year or so
later, my father and I visited the grave, and by coincidence met David’s
parents there.
They were devastated
by the loss of their only son. “He literally died in my arms,” his father said.
They clearly
loved David very much; yet I thought, perhaps unfairly, that their ultimatums—Get
a job or move out—had probably added to stress that may ultimately have killed him.
They were
consoled to find that David had a friend who took the trouble to visit his
grave.
My father had
his notions about my relationship with David.
Just before he
died, David left his hat at my house.
My friend
liked to wear
this goofy black beret. He
left it at my folks’.
Before he managed
to come back for it, he died.
So my dad wore it.
