A Friend Remembered Tonight

After my friend Jimmy died, his mother told me that he came to her, one night, and stood at the foot of her bed. Jimmy's death was very hard. He was a small man, but a dancer, cute and a little vain. I met him when we were freshmen in college. He was funny, adorable. He had thick black curls, long black lashes, a long pointed chin. He always felt he had "too many teeth," so when he smiled, he always touched his chin to his chest and turned his head, emphasizing his dimples. He was injured, a few years before he became sick, and had to stop dancing, but he still took class, choreographed drag shows, stayed slim and still wore his clothes tight. He was still quite young when he died. Before he died, he went blind. His skin was disfigured. He weighed nothing. His voice went from reedy to just a wet and difficult rattle. His bowels, then his mind, went. I was across the country by then. A friend went and visited him and told me. I sent letters. His last lover was gone. His mother cared for him in his last illness, as she said to me once, "just like when my Jimmy was a baby."

Jimmy came to her, after he died, just as he had been, before the illness, before even the accident. He stood at the foot of her bed and smiled at her, tucking his chin to his chest, but never taking his eyes from hers.

"He didn't say nothing," she told me on the phone, "but I knew it was him and he was okay."

She was a little Italian woman, even smaller than her son, and older, at least by the standards of her generation, when she had him. "My last baby" she called him. Once, at the last birthday party Jimmy had before he became sick, in his mother's house, I watched his mother happily cooking for a room full of drag queens. Jimmy's mother enjoyed the fuss they made over her, over her food. "You girls need anything down there?" she asked every few minutes, from the top of the basement apartment stairs. No one made a joke of that, no matter how many times she said it. Me she liked because I had a moustache, made a joke of tugging on it at the party, "He don't have to shave so much, like you girls," before Jimmy shooed her away.

She told me how happy she was that Jimmy had come to see her, that they hadn't needed to talk. "It's enough I seen him. He looked good. He looked real good. Happy."

The next time I called her, I had waited too long. Jimmy's brother answered the phone. He told me she had died in her sleep, some months before. We didn't talk long, the brother and I. I'd never met him. I never met Jimmy's father, either, that I can recall. That's how it so often was then, at the end of things, just a mother and her son.

Jimmy never came to me after he died. He never stood at the foot of my bed, smiling. I wish he had. But Jimmy came to his mother, smiled again for her, and that was, as she said, enough.

"He looked real good." she told me, "Happy." It made her happy. I hope they both are now. I miss my friend. His mother was such a good woman. I wish them both rest.

LONGING

Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again!
For so the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.

Come, as thou cam'st a thousand times,
A messenger from radiant climes,
And smile on thy new world, and be
As kind to others as to me!

Or, as thou never cam'st in sooth,
Come now, and let me dream it truth,
And part my hair, and kiss my brow,
And say, My love why sufferest thou?

Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again!
For so the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.

- Matthew Arnold.