An Elegy

I found out that Jon Cook was dying from Facebook, the way you do, now. For a second my mind just refused to accept it. I convinced myself it had to be someone else. Our mutual friend, a musician originally from Louisville, has over 4000 Facebook friends. He could easily have two with the same name, I reasoned. I clicked through to Jon's page, which noted that he graduated from J. Graham Brown and attended Antioch. The About Me section was a tightly woven, incomprehensible(at least to me) screed about his music: "People say I was the first drummer for Rodan." It was like a rubber band to the face.

I'm going to admit at the outset that since Balthazar died, every death hits me harder. The grief receptor in my brain has been kindled and each loss is amplified by that great, precipitating one. I am surprised and a bit embarrassed by how much Jon's death has wrecked me. It implies a closer connection to him than I can claim and makes me feel like a big drama queen. After he died I sat down and wrote a really sentimental blog post about how much I loved him. But even as I was writing it I knew it was bullshit. Jon Cook deserves as truthful an elegy as I can offer from my admittedly distant vantage. To write it I had to go back more than twenty years.

My journals from 1986-89 are in my closet in a pile with all of the other journals I've filled since I was nine years old. The one in which I found Jon is covered in peach-colored calico with the image of a quilt on the front. In addition to reminding me that I once had terrible taste, it is useful for rooting out the revisionist lies I tell myself.

He didn't appear until a couple of years after I met him, after we'd both left Atherton for different schools, after he'd briefly dated one of my friends. He wasn't a local music icon yet, just a fucking adorable kid in a hardcore band. I think his band Cerebellum had recently formed. I say kid because I was more than a year older and because there was something about him that invited caretaking, even then. I ran into him at a field hockey game, of all places. His blue eyes, they killed me.

I've been watching Half-Cocked, the 1994 indie film he appeared in, and he's magnetic in it. His sly smile when the idea occurs to him to hijack the stage during a show, the bounce in his step as he and his friends approach the Chattanooga record store, the beautiful irony in his voice when he tells his friend “I've got it under control,” he makes me smile, and he makes me remember why his Facebook page is covered with fond reminiscences from girls who went out with him.

At that time of my life what usually happened, elucidated in nauseating detail in that journal, was that a boy would flirt with me at a party and then call me fat by my locker and then give me a ride home from school and then ignore me at a soccer game. Instead, Jon asked for my number, and then he called. He wanted me to come see him play.

I don't know whether he sensed something in me, something dark and damaged that was analogous to himself. There was no obvious tell: I wasn't Goth, I wasn't punk. I wore Benetton sweaters. I listened to a lot of CSN. I didn't even write poetry.

Maybe he picked me because he knew it could never work out. Maybe he just thought I was cute. He was fifteen.

My teenage journal, it pains me to say, is like a Louisville phone book of males born between 1967 and 1973: everyone got a listing. I was on a quest for that mythical creature: a boy who would make me look OK to everyone in the town and thus make me feel OK to myself. Sometimes when I was at home alone I conjured this sparkly unicorn. I think he was a soccer player name Blake. Of course in order to do that I had to remake myself, too. I became a girl with long blonde hair who went to Collegiate and played the piano. Is it any wonder that nothing ever happened, sexually or emotionally, with anyone? I can see now, with sadness, how terrified I was of being known, and how incapable I was of knowing anyone else.

When Jon asked me out, despite the fact that he was very far from being a soccer- playing paper doll, I said yes. Because he was brilliant and weird and full of energy. Because he had those eyes. We went on a date to Hawley-Cooke Booksellers. It was then that I got the idea that I would ask anyone who wanted to go out with me to take me to the bookstore. If they didn't want to, they weren't for me. You see how I was already planning for some theoretical date with some theoretical guy with a resume.

We went to the Corn Island Storytelling Festival. He invited me to see Love is A Dog From Hell, the film adaptation of Charles Bukowski's book. These are things I would do, now, with my husband. Which is not to say that Jon was a grownup; not at all. He was like a Newfoundland puppy on a skateboard. But the things we did and the things we talked about were real things. It was not chugging grain alcohol in the McDonald's parking lot. It was not some keg party on Old Covered Bridge Road, or a high school football game. And it scared the shit out of me.

I never saw the other side of him, the belligerence that provoked ass-kickings. He only showed me the bits of himself he thought a girl like me would like.

I quickly decided to end it, whatever it was. He hung around, waiting for me, for a little while. He told me he was falling hard, and wrote me a beautiful illustrated letter, which I still have, and I don't save things.

The journal informs me that I went to one of his shows and left before he played. I hate myself for that. I got what I wanted; nothing happened. And I lost...what? I'll never know.

We talked on the phone during college. He'd dropped out of Antioch and his mom was furious. I talked about swimming. I'm not really interested in sports, he said, and I heard the anger in his voice. Was he still hoping I'd snap out of the Preppy Handbook hell I was living in and be who I really was? Or was talking to a clueless uncool girl just a way to pass the time when no one else picked up the phone?

The last time I saw Jon I was twenty-one or twenty-two and was back in town for a visit. I went to eat lunch at the Irish Rover. He was waiting tables there. I was so happy to see him, but I could tell the feeling wasn't mutual. I watched his face and saw him imagining some country club life I was very far from living, and hating me for it. Maybe he finally gave up on me then, decided I was that girl, after all.

When I went to his Facebook page there was a rant about women always leaving him for better and richer men, and I wondered if in our brief moment he had thought that about me. Jon, it wasn't like that! I wanted to say. You had it all wrong!

We all had it all wrong because we were young and fucked up and doing the best we could.

I moved back to Louisville after college. I worked at the bookstore where we had our first date. He never came in. It would have been easy enough to track him down, but I didn't. Maybe I was afraid of his contempt. Then I had a nervous breakdown and everything changed. I moved to New York and reconstituted myself.

I hadn't thought about him much lately. I got married, moved to Portland, published a couple of books. I had a son, then I had another one, who died. You know, life. I didn't know about his recent travails with mental illness and addiction. To say that I'm sorry for the way our abbreviated episode played out is as beside the point as handing a stuffed animal to the mother of a stillborn child. Be sorry that he was bipolar. Be sorry that he didn't take his meds or that he never found meds he could tolerate. Be sorry that he was an addict or that he endured way too many unimaginable losses.

But in my small, selfish way I am also sorry that the last memory I have of Jon is of him glowering at me with what felt like disgust.

I had always believed that people whose lives have glanced off of mine, the ones that mattered, would return to me in some way. It's the only way I've been able to stand all the leaving. I never thought too hard about how such a mechanism would work. But that was our only chance, existing in that place in that time, together.

I think I finally understand what In Search of Lost Time actually means, and why it's a better title than Remembrance of Things Past. This is an elegy for my wasted youth. This is a lament for lost possibility: his, mine, ours.

I married a man from LA who was a punk teenager hanging around Hollywood Boulevard in the '80's. He's not a musician, though; he's a writer, like me. My favorite picture of him is from when he was fifteen and wearing eyeliner and a beret before going to a show. He introduced me to the music of X. He tolerates the fact that I have been known, on occasion, to listen to Hall and Oates.

I like to think I would have fallen in love with my husband in 1988, and he with me, but the truth is, I would have run.

I don't have the right to say I loved Jon. I wasn't in the scene; I don't know the difference between math rock and post-hardcore. I didn't see him through the hard years. All I can say is that he meant something to me, something vital and important that I'm heartbroken to have lost. But of course I lost it years ago, when I wasn't paying attention.