Half Life

On September 25, 1991, Tom stepped out onto the tenth-floor balcony and looked at the moonlight on the Hollywood Hills. Then he climbed up onto the railing and let himself fall to his death.

It's been twelve years since that night, the night that has become my own dividing line between Before and After. And now he has been dead as long as were friends. Twelve years on either side.

In the twelve years we had together, we experienced so many amazing things, so many places and ideas and personal changes. In the twelve years since, he still seems so immediate to me sometimes. I still think of him everyday, just in the back of my mind sort of way that I carry around permanent parts of my life, like the blue wallpaper of my childhood bedroom or the opening notes of Saint Stephen, loaded in the top drawer of my general memory. Sometimes I think of him specifically, like when I listen to music that he loved, or when I see something I think he would have liked. Other times, he's just there in my head, part of my processing mechanism along with other friends and family who shaped my thoughts.

But now I realize that for a full half of our time together, he has been a ghost. He's still 33 years old. There are so many things now that I have experienced that he knows nothing about. I guess the biggest one is that he will never know what it's like to bury his dearest friend. To look at him in the mortuary, blanket pulled up over his broken body, hair combed wrong by the mortician's assistant. He'll never have to choose an urn, or discuss with his mother what to write on the memorial plaque. He'll never have to go through his meticulous address list and call and write to everyone there, and he won't have to plan a service and invite them all to come. He won't have to sit between his bewildered mother and his grim Aunt Mary while the people who came all the way from Boston sniffle through Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. I knew it was too long, and I knew it was his favorite. It was the first audio CD I ever purchased.

And that is the sort of thing that amazes when I look back. The obvious changes are technological. Tom never owned a CD or a CD player. Never had a cell phone or sent an email message. He died two years before Mosaic came out. He never saw the Internet.

And he would have loved all that stuff.

I guess he could have had a CD player, probably would have bought one before I finally did. They were around in 1991, but he was only a year out of law school, still cautiously creating a home after the years of student frugality.

He used computers at work a bit. I'd been interested in them for a long time, but he never showed much curiosity about how they worked. But he was a 90-wpm touch typist, and he loved the way he could spit out information and then pass it on to someone else to prettify. He liked to claim he was a luddite, but he was always seduced by elegant industrial design. While he would have smiled at the "Kawai" factor of my perky white iBook, I can see him with a wafer-thin Vaio, dark and James Bond-y.

I think the last big "invention" he embraced was his cordless telephone. He used to walk around his underfurnished apartment with it, or take it onto the balcony while he talked, describing the blazing LA sunset and the lights twinkling on as the city darkened. He would have loved the culture of cell phones, of instant connections and messages and last-minute plans. He would have loved another opportunity to own a small, sleek, elegantly shiny toy.

Another device Tom came to like more than I did was TV. As he got ill, he began to watch it a lot. I'd try to phone him in the hospital and he would put me off until after McNeil-Lehrer. I wasn't a TV watcher then, so I don't know what other shows he followed, but I can imagine the ones he missed that he would have loved. I'm sure he would have obsessed over 90210, and probably Dawson's Creek and all the other teenage dramas of the 1990s. Think of it, all those years, from Brenda and Brandon's arrival in BH to David and Donna's wedding, and he missed it all. And Must-See TV. Perhaps he watched Seinfeld when it first began, back when Jerry had a mullet and wore white sneakers. But he never heard of Friends or Frasier.

And he never could have dreamed of Will and Grace. A show about a gay man and a straight woman who mean everything to each other. A show about, well, us. I rather think he wouldn't have liked it -- too broad, too obvious. I often think that about it myself. But when I watched it tonight, I thought about all the changes that have happened in the world since Tom left it. The Internet Bubble, Dubya, September 11th, the second Gulf War.... But the thing that seems the most unlikely is to see people like us as the subject of a prime time network show.

I never knew what to call our relationship. I still don't. But I know it was real, and so important to both of us. Twelve years ago, I would never have envisioned myself in the place I'm at now. I'm afraid to even try to imagine where I will be twelve years in the future. But I've realized one thing. Tom's ghost will be coming along for the ride.
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