Bring Out Yer Dead

   Preston. Yes,  He was handsome, in the New Wave way. Preston loved music and he also loved to dance and party. But he was gay. I didn't know until later of course. Poor guy had the skin thing where your pigment shows white in places. I think it messed him up. He committed suicide some time ago. When I found out I was gutted. Preston turned me on to 'The Flying Lizards" song:  MONEY. And I will always remember him when I hear it.

   Graves: OD'd a couple of decades ago. Graves was a tall, mohawked punk that patronized the bar I worked at in Richmond. As a bouncer at a very loosely run punk bar it was up to me to decide who got in and who stayed out. No one with a tie wider than one inch allowed in... no frat boys etc. Graves was always at every show and always paid until one time he asked if I'd buy his jacket.. his girlfriend needed an abortion. He was panicked, he was ashen. Since no one ever held any oversight on the funds coming in at the door, I just peeled off some bills from the wad and gave it to him, and to this day I regret taking the jacket from him. But I wanted to be cool, and he was the coolest, so I wore his jacket. And gained a false notoriety from it.  People thought I must be cool if I had Grave's jacket. But I wasn't cool, I was just a messed up punk drinking too much free beer and smoking and harming myself and raising fucking hell. I should have given it back to him. Now I can't.

    John Glenn. Your death is going to haunt me until my own. Many a night I sat there listening to you sing that song. Until it became a part of me. One of the most beautiful memories of my youth.  A musical: "A Little Night Music". The character: HENRY. The song:  LATER.  "It's not gloomy, it's PROFOUND". And now, whenever I hear it, I think of John. John who had the job I wanted so bad at the theater! Who had the lovingingest of husbands. Who had family. Who had the love and adoration of the entire theater community in Richmond.  As I had wished I could have one day. John, the gay man whom I loved and looked up to and admired and wanted to be like: goes in for a simple operation last year and does not come back out alive. An entire community was bereft. I was bereft, all the way down here in Alabama, having not even spoken to John for over a decade. When last I spoke to John, I was trying to get  a video tape of him playing the Cello and singing that song. 

   TO BE CONTINUED...