A few phone calls today. I left a message with Sherry Babb, one of those accounts that translate your voicemail message into text (not a bad idea, but I wouldn’t trust it; I’d text to begin with), and she phoned me up on 0209 landline an hour or two later. Apologized for not having got back sooner; she’s at work in some conference in Texas. With that out of the way, she asked how Michael was. I said, “Michael is dead.” We then had a tear-fest and she asked the usual questions. How did he die? Where was he when he died? She was appalled to learn I woke up to find his corpse beside me three days ago. (But Sherry never married; it probably never occurred to her this is how these things happen.)
And then: Have I made any plans for a funeral, etc. No, not at all, I can’t handle it, and he’d want as little as possible, didn’t wish to leave footprints, a simple cremation and then be best forgotten.
Sherry was one of Michael’s oldest friends, at least among those I knew. I first met her in January 1986. She’d just returned to Manhattan after some time in rehab and resting at her brother’s in Florida. Short blond hair, wore a bright red turtleneck. A year earlier, the city marshall had come by to evict her. She’d made a good living, but spent most of her money on a fierce cocaine habit. For some years I believe she worked for Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records. I have a vague memory of her telling us she was on the floor, sniffing lines off her coffee table, upon which a big candle burned in her otherwise darkened apartment…but maybe I am mixing up her story with the setting in which she told it: there was rather dim lighting in Michael’s apartment since he had his track-lighting dimmers turned down. After that I next saw her in early 1998, when I returned from California. Now her hair was longer, she lived in distant Yorkville, and she would soon adopt a Chinese baby. It was a fad in her circle of middle-aged unmarried women.
1999. M took the flash shot. S and I look pained.
When Sherry rang I was on the phone (Moki’s) to Mimi Collich, whose maiden name was Mary Alice Burns. We’d crossed paths before, at her father Dan Burns’s funeral in Winchester, but I don’t remember her from that; I remember being messaged on Ancestry-dot-com 2-1/2 years ago when she found a photo of Dan’s father in my family tree. I suppose I am an aunt by marriage. Mimi was then trying to get over a deeply debilitating case of Covid-19. Damaged her all over and she still finds it hard to get about. She tried to phone me several times yesterday, again today. Seems Jamie gave the word to his mother A.T., and A.T. called Mimi, and they both cried together on the phone. She lives way out in Bucks County someplace…weirdly she remembers me telling her that I used to take the bus down to New Hope, PA. I must have told her that I’d go there to have my hair done when Dana stopped coming to NYC for her dwindling client base. (Actually I took the bus to Lambertville, and crossed the bridge to the town of New Hope, and then found my way to the salon. Dana may have worked out of two different ones. One may have been AKA, which looks familiar from its pictures, and another one with a Cat in its name. I always had a long wait for the bus back from Lambertville. The stop was at a gas station just over the bridge. They had a Live Bait vending machine there. I once bought a container of mealworms to bring back to my turtle.)
After Mimi and Sherry it was time to phone A.T., full of tearful condolences. She went on about how she’d loved Michael very dearly but they didn’t get along much of the time. Michael was spoilt. Too dependent on his mother. I told her Moki had always told me the same thing.
Now I’m remembering how five or six days ago I was reading a long memoir by David Foster Wallace’s onetime fiancée, Gale Walden, in the LRB. I couldn’t finish it. The guy died, killed himself, and Gale took forever to get over that. Meantime Moki was next to me in the bed here, rapidly expiring. I put the thing down right there on the bed, and finished it early yesterday morning, once the body was gone and I’d dealt with the cops and the medical examiners.
I finally got some sleep last night and slept through to ten a.m. with the help of some vodka and a full Trazodone.
Today I went to St Paul the Apostle’s on a cold, blustery afternoon. Said a rosary on the way, last decade of it in the church. Last Friday was the day I discovered Moki’s mother’s rosaries in the little basket, and slipped one into his hand, which completely eluded him as he himself was slipping out permanently. I then put it in my quilted Barbour jacket’s inside pocket, and cried on the way to St. Patrick’s. And there the rosary sits still. I also began a new novena today, in a welter of tears and self-pity.
I’m going to have hard going for a long time.
