Wyoming
I'd like to write about my friend Eric, although I'm a bit hesitant. But wtf, this is my journal, right?
Eric was my best friend for four years. Long years too. These days, years seem much less significant, easier spent, quicker to expire. We were loners, but I was a phoney-loner, finding myself getting antsy for broader social stimulation often without much regard for the quality of my company. But we would always reconnect and wrap ourselves up again in our co-isolation. We moved to Chicago together three months after my high school graduation in 1998. For several months, it worked to some extent. Eric was employed at Barnes and Noble full-time, having transferred from Grand Rapids, and I attempted to go to film school at Columbia College. We were a couple.
Less than a year later, I had established a group of friends, while Eric withdrew even more, expressing complete disinterest in those friends and even a disinterest in taking advantage of the city with me. I would invite him out, but he nearly always declined. I remember once he agreed to take the train downtown with me. We had been there for months in this great neighborhood near the train, and not once had he taken the train! It was odd because he rarely drove either, favoring not a car, but a bike. He rode his bike to work a couple miles across town nearly everyday. I wish I remember what we did that particular night, but I only remember being on the train platform, waiting.
Not long after, everything disintegrated. I rarely saw him. I was aloof and spent nights out with my "band," a half-hatched punk band, sometimes not coming home until dawn. It was for the most part innocent insomnia.
I don't remember the conversation we had about moving out, breaking up. I only remember one of the last days when I was driving him to work. A very sunny late morning, we were both completely burdened by our recent decision, unable to communicate... which seems strange to me. I suppose I was looking forward to my burgeoning independence. But such a stark sadness too, in that sunlight reflecting off of all the concrete behind the Webster Barnes and Noble. I had put Billy Bragg's Worker's Playtime on my car stereo, a recent purchase. It no doubt grated on Eric's ears.
Eric moved back to Grand Rapids and eventually found a job in a textile/fabric factory. I can't imagine him there. I have copies of writing and little cartoons he did while working there. A little story about saving a cricket at the warehouse and thinking of making a joke about Francis of Assisi but having no one to relay it to... It was almost like a rudimentary illuminated manuscript, and all under the cryptic title "The Geneticist at the Wheel or the Clean Lines of a Contact Waiver, by Bobby April, illustrated by Roma K. Weatherfield, editorial guidance by Eric James Kruse."
That year, 1999, I was very involved in my own life. No longer going to school, I worked as a delivery driver over the summer and early fall for a popular downtown sandwich/smoothie shop, making really good money under the table, and eventually settled in as a full-time dogwalker, which I would do for just over two years. I visited Eric a few times in Grand Rapids, but I was too wrapped up in my world and he his. He was living at his mom and stepdad's house. Although I adored all of them, everytime I visited I couldn't stay long, didn't know what to say or do.
In the summer of 2000, my self-absorption settling-out steadily due in part to the constant presence of my ridiculously self-centered friend, Chris, Eric decided to move out to Portland, Oregon. We had been maintaining a better phone relationship and he sounded happy about his decision. His biological dad, someone he had never had a great relationship with, offered to make the trek out to Oregon with him by car, probably feeling guilty, amongst other things, about their history. He had asked Eric at 14, an only child, to help him move out of the family home on the sly and wait by himself for his mother to get home, an explanatory note in hand.
The story goes that when Eric and his dad were travelling out to Oregon, the car broke down in Wyoming and they had to stay there for a week to get the right part replaced. Strangely, a year later, moving out west myself, Joe and I broke down in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and we sat in a hotel room for a week, broke, calling the repair shop everyday, desperate to get moving again. I never found out in what town Eric and his dad were stuck.
A few days elapsed after Eric finally arrived and settled temporarily into a house belonging to a friend of his father's, who was out of town. One Monday, July 17th, I remember trying the number Eric had given me to see how he was and to ask him to be a reference for me on a job application. I'm not sure where I had intended on applying. No one answered the phone and I didn't try back.
I will cut this short and say that Eric killed himself in that house. He was very methodical. He used his newly-repaired car parked in his father's friend's garage, attaching a tube from the exhaust to the interior of the car, duct-taping the windows, leaving the ignition on accessories so that he could listen to what his father described as the "red Belle and Sebastian album." I never bothered to find out which red album it was. The ambiguousness still holds something for me.
Eric left me all of his money, $4,500 dollars, 1,000 of which were "in Traveller's Cheques (in a copy of Sentimental Education)" according to the note he left behind. It was awkward because for several days his father was strange about allowing me to see the note Eric had left, not telling me what it said or why he was hesitant. It was only at the memorial service in Michigan that his mother pulled me aside and told me about the money. I guess Eric's dad was worried that I would actually want it and take it to court, trying to argue that his note acted as his will. Of course, I didn't want the damn money. I just wanted to see what Eric had said, and the anticipation was excruciating. Expressing this and being heard, I was given a photocopy. Now that I think of it, it's a really shitty photocopy. It's entirely legible, but the edges of words disappear at the edge of the page.
Eric had left me my own note as well. A few days before his mother called my mother and my mother called me, I received an envelope in the mail from him postmarked July 17th, the same day I had attempted to contact him. Inside was a polaroid of myself taken by him inside a Wyoming motel while on our first cross-country trip to visit my parents in San Francisco, the same summer we moved to Chicago. I was miserable for most of that trip out there. It was hot, and I was menstruating, experiencing severe back pain. In retrospect, I wonder why I didn't just shut the fuck up and take some Advil. In the picture, I'm in shorts and a Kraftwerk t-shirt, a pair of light green sunglasses resting on my head. I'm sitting on a bed, legs crossed with a subdued smile, holding up the motel's postcard "The Prairie Inn," my arm resting on my crossed leg. It was my 18th birthday.
In the envelope, too, was a postcard from Wyoming:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/typographitext/142471693/