January 13, 2005

Seasons don't fear the Reaper

Jeff always wanted me to play that song at his funeral. "I need someone to do two things for me at my funeral," he told me once. "I want to be buried in my Army jacket, and I want someone to play 'Don't Fear The Reaper' for me."

Jeff's 'Army jacket' was this WWI type officer's greatcoat he'd found at an Army-Navy thrift store one time in downtown Syracuse when he and I were poking around there. We used to love to go to that place every once in a while, it was right down the street from an adult book store Jeff liked. Neither of them are there any more... or they weren't, last time I was in Syracuse, back in 1997. The adult bookstore probably isn't much of a loss (although I'm not sure our culture has gotten any better for the sudden diminishment of freedom of speech their modern day lack represents; it's not that people don't like porn anymore, they just don't want members of the Decency Brigade to spot them going in or out), but the surplus store was a caravan of tawdry wonders to folks such as Jeff and I, and I still miss it. It smelled like rubber and old boot leather and shoe polish and oiled metal. Jeff also bought a denatured hand grenade there... one of the old WWII ones that looks kind of like a pineapple... and he kept it around his various apartments on the coffee table as a conversation piece for the rest of his life... but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Jeff had always told me that, if he got to the age of 30 and he still hadn't accomplished certain goals, he was planning to just quietly off himself that night. That's why, on his 30th birthday, I made sure I got him on the phone. He knew what I was doing, and he humored me... I guess the gesture meant something to him. We talked until 5 a.m., and then he said he was going to get some sleep. I asked him if he was okay, and he understood what I was asking. He thanked me, and said yeah, he'd be fine.

The next year and a half were rough on Jeff. He called me twice more, once because he was having suicidal thoughts, and once because he'd actually cut his wrist, and was surprised it wasn't bleeding much. I talked him down both times. His life wasn't going well. He'd barely escaped what would have been a disastrous marriage of convenience (hers, not his) to a Brazilian go go dancer. She wanted a green card, Jeff wanted to at least be able to talk to people about his wife (and, 18 months later, his ex wife, it was understood), and, in the end, she found a sucker who wasn't quite as unprepossessing as Jeff... that was hard for him. And the soulless yuppies Jeff worked with at Prudential were stressing him out, too; having decided they just didn't like Jeff (that happens a lot to people like Jeff and I) they had set about a systematic campaign to catch him doing things he shouldn't, and he'd been written up twice... once more and he was out.

He'd also lost his driver's license, but continued to drive anyway without it, as you couldn't get around in New Jersey, where he lived, without wheels. He finally got pulled over doing it and was actually arrested and spent the night in a jail cell before someone posted bond for him. And he was going to have to go to a hearing where he would most likely be sentenced to at least another 90 days, and have his license revoked for life.

And then, at work, he got caught leaving his computer unsecured for a third time (an offense everyone does, and nobody cares about, unless everyone else on your team is out to get you, of course).

I found out about all this later, because Jeff's phone had also been turned off a few weeks prior to all this happening...

So, I was out of the loop.

These were the days before a lot of things, and one of those things was cell phones, and another was prepaid calling cards. I had no long distance on my phone, but Jeff usually called me if he was feeling down, or, if I knew he was going through something bad, as I generally did because we also exchanged infrequent letters and I was in touch with his older sister Donna as well, I'd find a way to call him... use someone else's phone, call from work... something like that.

Anyway. January 14, 1993, my phone rang in my apartment. I can't remember what I was doing, or what day it was... although a quick look at my calendar feature tells me it was Wednesday. I was probably unemployed at the time.

Jeff's closest friend in New Jersey, Patsy (Pasquale, but everyone called him Patsy) Fiola was on the other end. He was worried. He'd gotten a big box of stuff from Jeff in the mail, and Jeff only lived 12 miles away from him. The note in the box had sounded like a suicide note to him. He didn't know what to do, as Jeff's phone was out, and Jeff could be touchy about people being too solicitous of his welfare...

I advised him he should head over there and see what was up. I think he knew... I certainly knew at that point... and he just didn't want to do it, and I don't blame him.

He called back a few hours later, and told me... well, it couldn't have been pleasant for him. Nobody answered the door. He peeked in windows, and finally saw Jeff in the bathtub. I guess it was obvious even through the window Jeff must have been dead.

I was amazed how ungrief stricken I was. I must have expected it, or something. I mean, you know, it sucked, but I was okay. Stoic. Functional. And I’d thought about what I’d do if this happened. So I set about tracking down everyone from our college clique, to let them know.

That’s the thing about death. I occasionally worry about it. If something happens to someone I love, who is going to let me know? How would I find out? I figured the people who had shared their lives and sometimes houses or apartments with Jeff for years in college would want to know. So I borrowed a neighbor’s phone and made a lot of directory assistance calls, and calls to parents of old buddies I hadn’t heard from in a while (we didn’t have Google back then, either) and assembled a list of phone numbers.

Nobody cared. Jeff was long in the past for these people. One woman was more concerned for me than for Jeff, asking me if I had someone to be with. I didn’t, but I felt fine.

I think the last person I called… well, it doesn’t matter who he was, but he obviously didn’t care, either, and in the middle of the call I suddenly found myself crying so hard I couldn’t say anything. So I just hung up.

The following day I got three huge boxes of stuff in the mail from Jeff… drawings, his notes on projects we’d worked on together, various other things. A reasonably pleasant, upbeat goodbye note. (This was later offset by the copy of the actual suicide note they’d found in Jeff’s apartment, which the detective assigned to his case sent me a copy of. Jeff wrote it to set down what he was going through as he went through the act of cutting his wrists. It’s a horrible document; his handwriting steadily gets more and more illegible and finally, in a manner that is nearly ghoulishly classic, simply trails off at the end.)

Much of the artwork in that box I have posted, at various times, in various places on the Internet, so other people will have a chance to see how brilliant Jeff was, and how badly the world misses him, even if it doesn’t seem to know it. The best of these is The Fantasy Worlds of Jeff Webb , and you really should check it out.

I used to miss Jeff every day. I’d be walking down the street and see something… a sign, something someone was wearing, a holiday decoration, a poster… and think I should mention that to him next time we talked. I’d be watching something on TV at home and see an ad for a new movie, or an upcoming TV series, and think “I wonder what Jeff would think of that”. I hate that Jeff missed out on BUFFY, and ANGEL, and SMALLVILLE, and Magic: the Gathering, and HeroClix. And email. And weblogs. And prepaid phone cards. And so many other things.

And life. More of it.

I don’t miss him every day any more. Now it’s down to, maybe, three or four times a week.

But I miss him.

He was hard to get along with, he really was. He was insecure and abrasive, ravingly opinionated, a self pitying drunk, and, well, he self medicated himself with beer far too much. He did stuff that drove me crazy. I sent him a short story of mine once to comment on. Without asking, he rewrote it from top to bottom and sent it back, and we got in a horrible fight for it, because you couldn’t tell Jeff things like “I really don’t want to collaborate with you on this” without him being dreadfully hurt. (But if you collaborated with him, you couldn’t tell him if you thought some suggestion of his wouldn’t work. Then it became a complete rejection of him and everything about him. Oh, he was a pain, sometimes.)

I lived with him for two years, one in the dorm, one in a five bedroom house we shared with three other guys, and I wouldn’t, and couldn’t, do it again. He often invited me to move down to New Jersey, saying he could get me a job at Prudential. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t live with him again, it would have been too hard.

But I miss him.

I didn't make it to Jeff's funeral. He was cremated, so he didn't get buried in his Army jacket. And I doubt anyone played "Don't Fear The Reaper" for him. But funerals are more for the living than the dead, and I don't like funerals... I prefer to grieve in quiet, I don't like making my pain into an attention getting display. And, besides, I'd spent a Spring Break visiting Jeff at his parents' house in Edwards, New York once, and it's an appalling place, honestly. Taking a Greyhound all the way up there just to mourn Jeff in public in front of many of the people who had failed him even worse than I did... I couldn't do that.

But I play "Don't Fear The Reaper" for Jeff every January 13th. I'm playing it right now.

I miss him.

He was a brilliant man. I’ve said that before, and said it often, in many places, but he was. He could talk lucidly about anything, from occult philosophy to quantum physics. His original comics projects were amazing; you have no idea how something like his BROTHERS OF THE ATOM or NEW TOMORROW could have reshaped the industry if it had ever been published. And he was a loyal friend, where, you know, every other one of his and my friends for life from college just… moved on, as people do.

Most people.

But, you know, I guess, in the end, Jeff moved on, too.

He was hard to get along with. I couldn’t live with him. In the end, I guess he couldn’t live with himself, either. He had an enormous amount of talent nobody wanted or appreciated, and an enormous amount of love inside him that nobody much seemed to want or appreciate, either. I could never teach him the one thing he most needed to learn: that for people like him, and people like me, it is necessary to learn to disregard the opinions of the unworthy.

He just could never get that down.

It’s hard to do, of course, and you can’t take it too far, or you end up a sociopath in a shack making letter bombs. But if you’re someone like Jeff (or someone like me) it’s something you have to learn to do to some extent. You simply can’t let yourself care too much what those worker bees at the office think of you… or feel about you, since none of them actually think. You have to learn to disregard it, to a great extent. Or you won’t survive.

Jeff didn’t survive.

You play the 'then, maybe' game. If I hadn’t pissed off Steve Jackson and he hadn’t rejected the project Jeff and I collaborated on, then, maybe…

If I’d moved to New Jersey and hung out with Jeff more, then, maybe…

If I’d found him a job in Syracuse, then, maybe…

If his phone hadn’t been shut off… then... maybe...

I wish I could call him. I wish I could email him. I wish he could drive all the way down to visit me for a long holiday weekend in his beat to shit blue truck with the white shell on the back, without his license, in his ratty old World War I greatcoat, with a duffle bag full of cheap videotapes he wants to show me.

I miss my friend, Jeff Webb.

I wish I could tell him that.

I hope he’s at peace.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.