Pieces.

When something breaks we gather the pieces.

We listened to different music usually, and he didn't dance. He said he didn't dance. With me he didn't but once, sort of, that I can remember.  We were both a little drunk after dinner. There was music. "Dance with me!" "No." I was not getting him off that couch. He just wanted to eat his pie in peace. So I danced around him and tugged on his hand. He let me, but that was it. He could be an immovable object when he wanted, a rock. I tugged. He scowled. The song ended. "There," he said, "we danced," and then he laughed, "done."

I opened the cupboard to take out a plate. When I did, an old fashioned glass juicer -- the kind with a bowl with a lip and peaked twist in the middle -- fell out and broke. Had that thing forever. Still used it. I picked up a big piece and held it in my hand.  Not a metaphor yet, just a shock. It was heavy, surprisingly so. I looked at the broken piece and I cried. That was a few days ago, just after my friend died. I cried a long time. And then I picked up all the bigger pieces and swept up the shards from the counter and floor and threw them away.

We'd make breakfast on my days off. He'd make his coffee and we'd kibitz while I cooked bacon and eggs. It was a pleasure to watch the way he read a newspaper; just as they were meant to be read, as people used to read the paper; front to back, section by section, even the funny papers. He loved the funny papers. He loved his LA Times, but he would read any newspaper, subscription or free, and from anywhere. And he knew what he was reading because he read them every day, every day, as long as I'd known him. I'd ask him questions about what he'd read and he would explain it to me. More often than not he knew more about the place I lived than I did. He knew whereof he spoke.

Live long enough, things break. People we love may leave us. Little tragedies and large. They happen again and again, and yet it's a shock every time. Never gets to be easier, never routine, just happens and we go on. We lose a grandparent and that is hard, but no one expects it to be otherwise. We lose a parent and that is harder still. We lose a lover, husband, a wife, a partner, a child. Some loses are too hard to think about until they are our own. Unimaginable. All we can do when they aren't ours, is our part.

We went to bookstores together in at least three states. We took road-trips to go to bookstores. As soon as we got to the bookstore, we would go our separate ways. Each of us had his own list. We would check in with each other when we passed in an aisle. He always had a stack, so did I. "Finding anything?" "Not really. You?' Then we would laugh. Sooner or later we would stop shopping long enough to eat.

We try to say and do the things required of us. We try to do the right thing, as best we can. We know what that is or we ask. Find a way. People do these things differently sometimes; not the way we were raised, or not the way we would do now. Doesn't matter. There is always a way. We do what we can. We extend our sympathies. It's a good verb, expansive. So we reach out to those who's loss may be greater than our own. We comfort who we can. We help as best we can. If we can get there, we go. Family by all definitions gathers in and mourns, they laugh and tell stories, those that do, drink, eat if that's right, prayer if that is the custom.

We ducked out of a memorial service once. The service was held at the bookstore where he sometimes volunteered. I had a cigarette in the alley, he came with. A writer I admired and who he knew slightly had died. He said, "Had to get away from 'posterity' for a minute."

The death of a friend is different in kind. It falls in a place less familiar, not familial, where custom can't help in the usual way. The death of a friend makes a space the size of the friendship we lose, and that isn't always so easy to define. And in the absence of definition, how do we ever see the other side? What do we put where our friend was? What can we do from where we are if where we are is not near?

Once, we got stuck in a construction delay on our way to the theater. A man in one of those huge pick-up trucks just ahead of us lost his mind. We watched him gesticulate wildly, honk, and silently curse. (It was winter, our windows were up.) He was a caveman. We giggled like schoolgirls. We forgot our own frustration in our delight with watching his. "Jomo" was born that night. We met him many times thereafter. We called the frustrated driver in his big truck, "Jomo," as in "Jomo want to go NOW!" and "Jomo need to turn here!" Stupid construction delay. "Jomo mad." "Jomo smash stupid cars." "Jomo need woman."

It takes awhile to even frame such a death as a loss for ourselves in addition to the irreparable loss that has happened to a friend's mother, or partner. What is our loss to theirs? One doesn't want to claim too much, intrude, to talk out of turn.

All we can do is tell our part.

This is mine.

My friend died. His name was Charles Barragan.

We met thirty-three years ago working in a video store in Colma, California. The store was called Captain Video and we did rentals. I believe Chuck did the books. I don't remember when we became friends, but then I can't remember now when we weren't. He was a serious, sardonic little man with a chest like operatic baritone and SO much glorious black mullet then. In those days he wore suspenders with jeans, muscle-shirts, and aviator sunglasses. It was the eighties. He was cool. I never was, but, I amused him. We stayed friends even after he left the video store. He was the one who told me to apply for the bookstore job I would have for a dozen years after.

We went to matinees at the discount movie houses. Saw a lot of animated movies together. Often we were the only adults unaccompanied by a child. We faced it out. When there was more than one animated movie out at a time, we sometimes did marathons, moving from one cartoon to the next. Once we saw three in one day. By the time we came out of our third, we noticed the concessions crew and the ticket-taker were eyeing us more suspiciously than usual. "Pretty sure we just got put on a list." "But we don't even like children." "True."

I met his Tede. He met my Allen. We were two interracial male couples in San Francisco in the eighties. We were all kinds of hot. We all became friends, though I don't think Tede ever entirely approved of us. We were Chuck's friends. Tede was a radical, a drag legend, an activist, a figure of historical significance, and a substantial personality. We were a bit bourgeois. We ate pork and used salted butter and voted a straight Democratic ticket. Chuck loved that about us I think.

Allen made fried pies. Basically these are pie crust with applesauce in the middle, sealed like a calzone and fried in butter. Served them with vanilla ice-cream. Allen made him try one. It was good. He ate half of it. "I can't believe you can make something too heavy for a Mexican to eat," he said.

I loved that Chuck was curious, omnivorous, sexy, sly, engaged. He did things. He met people. He was a traveler, an explorer. He was a huge consumer of news, of books, of information. He followed politics. He studied history, and the law, and spirituality. He knew people. He was engaged with the world. Tede taught him, gave him some of that, I assume, but it had to have been in him. He was, and would always be braver than me. He made me braver -- at least a little bit.

At a party once when Tede was still alive he and I stood and watched while Chuck flirted with an elderly lesbian couple; Birkenstocks, a knee-brace, dress-vests, severe looking women, Tede's friends. "See that?" Tede said, "Works on everybody."

It did.

Thanksgiving started as a pot-lock back then, though Allen did nearly all of the cooking from the beginning. Once, there were a dozen men, orphans from other family, friends. Thirty years? That's probably right. Year before last, our only other regular, Roger, died. This past year it was just Chuck and us. (When it came to turkey, he was a leg man, which was unlike him.) 

When Tede died, Allen and I were out of town. It was before cellphones and Chuck couldn't reach us when he needed us. Took a long time for him to quite forgive our absence. Understandable. Unimaginable. Chuck had a dream after in which Tede came to him and they were reunited. In the dream, I showed up with something like a washing machine in tow. In the dream I told him that this was a reality meter and that Tede was dead. When I said this, Tede disappeared. I wasn't always a good friend.

Once when Tede was in Nicaragua with the Sandinistas, the FBI came to the door of their apartment in San Francisco. The FBI. In Suits. In the Mission. They told Charles he needed to talk to them. "No," he said, "I don't." and he closed the door.

Chuck loved Allen's homemade rolls and made everything into a sandwich. Didn't like gravy. Would eat greens eventually, though grudgingly. Loved the macaroni and cheese. Sweet potato pie -- he was a convert on that as well.

He worked most of his life for non-profits, and for awhile, in the university system. He was good at his work. Human resources. He told me, "A non-profit is where your Christmas bonus is opera tickets someone gave your boss -- for Wagner."

Every year he stayed with us for a couple of weeks at Thanksgiving. Wherever we were, wherever me moved, he came. We went to movies and plays and bookstores. We went to expensive restaurants and to taquerias. He was never tight about food and wine and art. Allen would take him to the least likely action films and he would go. He ate popcorn like a wood-chipper. He bought tickets for early music Christmas concerts and I went and we enjoyed it. He would try anything, except dancing. He didn't dance. Not with me.

We had long conversations about self-sufficiency and survival and how hard he had worked to make his life his own, something he could be proud of, often without support or the approval of family. He didn't expect to find anything like what he'd had with Tede ever again. Wasn't sure he needed that kind of love, that loss, pain.

Then he fell in love again, hard.

He read book reviews and then bought and read the books. Who does that? He read books I never heard of, from authors I never heard of and he read them straight through. I finally read graphic novels because he did. He read novels and philosophy and politics. He was content to sit and read in our living room so long as there was a fire in the fireplace and a glass of wine. He was the perfect houseguest; fun but undemanding. He could feed himself. Go out for the evening on his own when I was tired after work. Allen adored him and he adored Allen. 

He was a good liberal democrat all his life. His childhood hero was Robert Kennedy. He was a feminist and did not like camp. Despite, or perhaps because of his liberality and the catholic nature of his tastes, he hated stereotypes and crude language. We would torture him by talking filth, Allen in particular. Charles would howl and leave the room. I would call him, "the Empress Carlotta " and mock his delicacy and chase him into the guest room, supposedly hot with passion for his exquisite purity. He would smack me away like an insect shouting, "Close the door after you! Out!"

He loved Star Trek. He was kind of a nerd about it. When I asked him why, he told me. Imagine a future where decency and cooperation are the standard for the whole universe. That meant something to him when he was a kid. He still believed in that future when he died. He was a good man.

"She's the most amazing person I've ever met," he told me. 

When he started to describe Maureen to me, he was at a loss for words, for once. He was smitten, though the stubborn ass would not admit this for some time, at least to me. I knew he was in love. He was. They were a couple for twenty two years.

When we finally met the woman, we knew she was a vegetarian. Hard, in our house. When they came to see us, I bought and stuffed huge Portobello mushrooms. "She doesn't like mushrooms," he told me after I'd started preparing them. "Didn't I say?" "No, you did not." Men. Damn.

They traveled together all over the world. They ate amazing meals in amazing places and they drank great wine at great vineyards. She made him a better person; more demonstrative, easier in himself, less angry. He loved her family and they loved him. His mother loved Maureen. 

They were so good together, Charles and Maureen, so good to each other. He was always Charles, she was often Mo. Not sure how many of us still called him "Chuck." She brought him out into the world. She's beautiful, and funny, and a grown woman. I don't know that he ever respected anyone more. I know he never loved anyone so much, or was so loved in return. He was taken care of. Best thing that ever happened to him, our Maureen.

We love her.

Last Thanksgiving, which we could not know would be our last Thanksgiving together, he didn't feel well. We all assumed this was over-indulgence. He was our health-conscious friend. He went to the gym. He didn't normally eat the way we eat at Thanksgiving. Who does? We went to Funko Headquarters. We went to a bookstore we had trouble finding. He was still abashed about trying to kill us all the year before by not opening the flue on the fireplace and then reading on the couch while the whole house filled with smoke. We had a good time.

He was a rock. He was the executor of our wills. When Allen and I could finally get married, he stood up for us. He was our witness.  

Let me be his.

Months after he got home to San Francisco and Maureen he was finally diagnosed with Systematic Light Chain Amyloidosis. We'd never heard of it either. He went into treatment. There was a plan. We were planning a trip down to SF to see him. And then he stopped breathing. Days later, he died. Maureen was there throughout. She was his rock. Twenty-five days from his diagnosis he went.

What is the space left when a friend dies? What was it to have such a friend?

He was my friend for thirty three-years.  He was my friend, our Chuck, Charles. He was our brother.

He was a good man. He was a good friend. 

He hated gush. Didn't much cuddle as a rule. He was good at sitting with us, reading next to me. He was my rock.

Oh, my friend.

Kisses, Carlotta. Don't be mad at me. 

I will always love you.

He was my friend.