I’m now 2 years sober. Yesterday the next door neighbors had a barbecue. They have a rare commodity in the Bay Area: a decent sized backyard that his three kids will frolic in. They laugh and goof around with their dog. Happy neighborhood noise. There’s fence that borders their yard and the parking lot I use. The fence is old and the wood has many of spaces. Once in awhile I get out of my car and little eyes will be peeking through. A sweet little voice will ask me “Is Noah home?”. Sometimes he is and they play. It’s pretty idyllic. From what I can tell the parents live in grandma’s house. Dad has a little outdoor patio set with roof in the backyard. It’s as far from the house as the property lines will allow. If the property is the East Coast, the house is Miami and Dad’s Paradise is Buffalo, New York. Every once in awhile plays rap music the 90’s and cards with his pals. We say “what’s up” out front sometimes. I know about his secret club house though. Living with your moms is a viable solution to homeownership in the Bay and building a Dad Lab in the yard is fantastic solution. We don’t really know each other but I know some things. He’s my best friend.
I’m 2 years sober and my friend Raph is dead. He was murdered a few months back. I’m flying back to Baltimore where he and I went to college. There’s a gallery show/memorial featuring his profoundly good drawings. He was the best draftsman I ever met and I have met a lot. Raph was a hard man. He identified early in life that he wanted to be a Renaissance style artist. What I mean by that is that he drew the figure incredibly slowly and preferably from life. The style lacked any narrative epic that era yielded. His work were slow meditations on the pretty ladies and fools passing through his life. If he could have just blocked out the world, not think too much and just keep working he would have ultimately been successful. Happy-ish.
Unfortunately he was a bit of a misery seeking missile (he and I had that in common).. Oh he found fun and grabbed it with two hands when he did. He was charming and hilariously hard-headed with his opinions. The last time we hung out in New York I was very very drunk leaving for a commuter train back to my wife and kid in New Jersey. When I left a beautiful woman was enraptured. Raph had sold out a gallery show and worked as a profoundly qualified figure drawing professor. I left thinking Raph had his problems but he won that night. He’d be ok. He won that night and there would be others.
Except the night didn’t there. There were more bars, more drinks and erratic behavior that lead to poor woman stuck with werewolf Raph fleeing out the back of a bar through the kitchen. Hearing the story through the grapevine, made me cringe. Often times it was too much with Raph. His opinions were not welcome at work. Drunk Raph was charming and someone you could walk away from if he got too much. At work, most likely hungover, it was too much and they had the power to make him walk. It was humiliating. He was 0-1,000,000 in bar fights. Someone hit him with a pipe once when they stole his bike late night in Brooklyn. He thought the head injury changed him. I don’t know if it was that. The drinking was a key factor but he clearly felt so many feelings. In AA, a cliche we use a lot is “I didn’t have a drinking problem. I had a drinking solution.”
He was moving back to Maryland. While he was fired from all of the teaching jobs at top tier New York art schools, he had a prestigious residency waiting. Raph was going to live with his parents for a minute to recharge, leverage the residency for another gallery show then return to New York. He told me this on the roof of the converted fire hazard warehouse he lived in. We were watching the sun set as trucks loaded used mattresses into part of the building. On the other side they would come out as brand new mattresses. He moved to Maryland shortly after where he’d get a DUI which lead to his residency getting pulled. He’d never live in New York again...