The List I Lost
I have slowly accumulated a list of people who have vanished and I believe have probably died. This is not one of the things you think of when you are young and wonder what it’s like when you are old.
I have a trick memory that pops out bits of my history to me almost at random, so I'm always contacting someone from my past to say hello. But sometimes I don't get an answer, and I can't find any trace of them.
My roommate Colin Park was a unique and insightful person, though not neurotypical. He wrote long letters to his friends to which we gave lame replies and he eventually stopped but I learned a great deal from his lists and analysis. I was able to bring him to the United States with a job, but he left New York and moved to... Cincinnati? Cleveland? it was some thirty years ago. Unfortunately, Park is the most common Korean surname so he is unsearchable. Of all this list, Colin is most likely to be still alive, and I hope so!
A later roommate, Caz Sykes, injured her head when we were living together. She was bad about keeping in touch, and always had a new email address. When one of her best friends in New York City died, I tried to find her, but no luck. I discovered that people with her injury often die young. But her name is too common. She was full of life and energy, and I hope things worked out better than I fear.
Jac, whose real name was Jonathan A. Chandross, is a recent addition to the list. When I knew him, Jac was a cynical but cheerful man, extremely knowledgeable and rational — really a pleasure to be around. He used to come to my Open Loop shows in the East Village, but we’d see each other once or twice a year for long after that.
His name is searchable but the trail goes cold late in 2019, with nothing conclusive. My last email from him, around that time, was chilling and prophetic. He talked about how Western Civ. was inadequately prepared for a new pandemic, how his lungs had been damaged by a seasonal flu, and how China was an incubator for new diseases — this from about three months before COVID.
I have three or four email addresses for him — all but one bounces, the gmail address, which remains silent. I fear the worst.
I have lost track of two people who were probably homeless when COVID started. Patrick Thomas Bucklew aka the Mangina or Mangie had lost his foot in an accident when young and had been increasingly self-medicating. My last record of him is from April 2019 when he was arrested again because of this. I have heard nothing since.
Mielan Zebrowski, also called Michael McDonald (I think), was a long time ago a waiter at a failing restaurant I used to go to. We kept in touch, I helped him get an apartment, but his mental health was failing, and he was diagnosed with various things like bipolarity and ADD. I got odd emails from him out of the blue once in a while on his good days, but it felt like he was deteriorating. The last email asked for money, but when I wrote back and asked how to send it to him, he never replied.
John Gille used to help out with our band Verge. He was also a unique individual, an opportunity seeker, but again mental health intervened and he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He managed to come to a tolerable place with it due to his cleverness, but I wouldn’t say he was really very happy.
A friend ran into John in the street ten years ago (and didn’t bring him to me! He was coming to see me, they were two blocks away!) He was on Facebook up until some years ago but very inactive, and now he’s not there.
I have too many stories about John to even start but one day I will.
I would love to hear from any of the people mentioned above, or really, almost anyone from my past. (And you would know if you were one of the few in the “almost”).
Life is partings and greetings. You never know when you’re meeting a dear friend for the first time, or taking your leave for the last.
Not twice this day
Inch time, foot gem
(Credited to Takuan)
