image stolen from nowandgwen.com
We both know I won’t make 30, I told her. What will you put on my grave. “Kiss Joy as it Flies,” she said.
She died at 4AM Wednesday morning. 36. Heart attack. Drug related. Funeral is tomorrow. I think about putting a snow pea flower in her coffin. I think about her in the coffin and I have to cry.
She’s the other voice in my internal dialogue now. I have to write about you, I tell her. I don’t know what to call it. Maybe “Goodbye Baby” but I never called you baby. Yes, that’s stupid, she says. Obviously shit like “RIP” is out; “She’s Gone,” “She Died,” what the fuck. I can’t use your name. I’m afraid your mom will read it. She’ll think I’m spreading shit that you did drugs. Well you did– you did a ton of fucking drugs. Order an eight ball at 10PM and cook it all up and then another eight ball at 3 in the morning. I had work the next day. Woken up by your douchey fucking dealer from San Diego with the spiky hair. He wanted to fuck you but who didn’t. At least he was respectful about it. Just get a quarter ounce at the start of the night, I’d say. Trying to sound cool. Like I was top secret drugs guy too. Really I was scared.
Well what about “Kiss Joy as it Flies.” It’s too corny, I tell her. But it’s true, she says. Yeah but I can’t be titling shit after William Blake on my blog about fucking whores and taking shits. Stop being afraid to be corny, she says. Just share how you feel. Well then how about “Shit Piss Cunt Fuck,” I say, and she says perfect.
Why did you have to die, you bonehead. How did you go. Were you on pills like they said or did you slip on a banana peel. How will your mom react if she sees me at the funeral. What is this flower on this tree. Why are you not here to tell me. You always knew. Why did you have to die and now I can’t see you anymore. You’re in a fridge at the morgue. I don’t want you to be cold. I want to give you a warm blanket. There has to be a way to make it not true. Wake up. Reset everything. I want to just hear your voice one more time. Your laugh.
I was gonna do a ninth step with you but my sponsor told me not to. Stay away from the girls, he said. But you weren’t a girl that way. What if I’d done a good job. What if you came to AA and lived. What if a unicorn came out of my ass, we could hitch a ride on it, it would suck me off after.
I’ll see you in your coffin clothes and think what you might say about the outfit. I can’t let you go into the ground. Darkness and silence. I don’t want you to be scared.
There was a loose pit bull on the street this morning. Looked like yours. What if it was, I thought. You lived 15 miles from me but I chased him anyway. Because what if you warged into him like Jon Snow. Came and found me. The neighbor’s pit chased him away. What if you got hit by a car. I’m a sane adult and I’m scared your spirit is inhabiting a dog. It knows enough to get to my apartment but not enough to stay off Sunset Boulevard. Year of Magical Thinking shit. I wanted to reread that book before making this post, but I lent it to you I think. Little awkward getting it back.
When my cat is out at night I go call him. Coyotes coming; he’ll get shaken to death by his neck. Too long and every shadow starts to look like him running toward me. Same with you now. Every breeze is your spirit. Every animal possessed by you to look me in the eye, and tell me: what? What is the message from the dead? Would you really inhabit a squirrel in my trash can. Look up from worrying a Jack in the Box bag with one french fry in it. Wordlessly tell me the meaning of life. Knowing you: maybe. I saw a green finch and I stared and stared until I heard your voice. You said: retard, you’ve seen this same finch fifteen thousand fucking times. It lives here.
What can I say about her. She was smart. She was funny. She was pretty. I loved her as much as I’ve loved anybody. She loved me like that too. I’m glad I got to feel that. Now I’m glad I remember.
She took care of me. I took care of her. When she took too many pills I’d turn her over. One day I couldn’t. It hurts. I wish I’d said something. Told her life gets better when you stop this shit. The world goes deeper than what you know. What you’re running from isn’t so bad. But I can’t tell her now, so I’m gonna tell you:
Stay here.
Stay with me.
delicioustacos 
What this pussy bullshit
LOL!
This made me laugh.
Jon Snow isn’t going to warg into his Cuba Gooding Snow Dog.
Everyone else is a philosophical zombie anyway.
Go back to the sex stuff man
It’s funny how people are hating on this post. Stop living vicariously through DT and have your own sex adventures.
Great post man. Very powerful shit. These internet dorks can’t relate to it because they never had a friend overdosed.
Fag.
Bon moulded the character and flavour of AC/DC. He was one of the dirtiest fuckers I know. When I first met him he couldn’t even speak English – it was all ‘fuck’, ‘cunt’, ‘piss’, ‘shit’. – Angus Young on Bon Scott.
Nice piece of writing BTW.
Sorry you lost her, man.
And sorry for her that she lost so many years she should have lived.
very good shit man. don’t listen to internet loosers on what to do.
Sorry for your loss.
Your writing makes me want to be a better person.
I read this after my friend also died of a heart attack. What are the odds, right? I mean, “friend” is, like, being generous, the person I knew I only hung out with once, at SxSW like a million years ago. But I kept in touch, dropped her emails when things were shitty or when she posted bikini pics on Facebook or something, why not? She was funny, not an idiot like me. Witty, quick, sharp, not slow and dimwitted and muddy like the glob of molasses I call my brain. I always thought I might go visit her someday, just up and go, visit her and fall in love – Real Love – the same way I ended up in this city up north 15 years ago. She was my little escape fantasy, and every time I emailed or texted with her and floated the idea of tossing it all and heading south, she deftly flirted back, let my little fantasy blossom. She was something. She was LA to me.
LA. Where you are, DT. And then I realized of course we know the same girl, because how many 36 year old broads in LA died of heart attacks the same week, and furthermore, of course it’s the same fucking girl, my muddy molasses brain worked out, because I found your stupid fucking shitpiss blog in the first place when she linked it from her Facebook like 4 fucking years ago. I am obviously an idiot. But I already established that.
I did not know C like you did, DT. But I knew her for a carefully constructed but carefree moment, and she let me hold on to that moment for years and years, and now I can’t stop thinking about her. And if only one moment is making me this sad about her, I can’t imagine how her real friends and lovers are feeling now, having had many many many of those moments.
But what do I know? I’m a fucking idiot, and also, BTW, I fucking hate you. Oh, I dunno, lots of reasons. But I still read your blog, so it doesn’t matter none, does it.
Sorry, feeling feisty yet morose thinking about C. You know, ready to throw hands, East Coast way of dealing with sadness, fight it out. So, sorry. Fight it out. I dunno, if I ever get down to LA, let’s hang. Or fight.
Oh wait, you don’t drink, so you don’t fight. You’re also jacked like Vin Diesel. I’m an idiot.
I really liked her. Makes you wonder how many people are on the most distant peripheries but still actually kind of love you and are going to be far away and actually didn’t know you that well and are not really entitled to sadness but are really sad anyway when you die, like, really sad. Like me for her.
Let’s fight. I texted that to her once, “wanna fight?” Of course she said yes, let’s fight.
Thank you for this.
Ah, fuck you DT, I’ll punch you in your fucking neck. Shut you up with a fucking neck punch, see how charming you are when you’re clutching your throat, croaking like you gagged on a supersized dildo.
Sorry, sorry. Not sorry. People keep posting pictures of her and they keep catching me off guard on my Facedink feed, and so then I felt like punching you in the neck. Just trying to be alpha male, in case C’s looking.
Oh stop being a baby, I haven’t actually done it, right? Big baby.
What an amazing post. You are an awesome muthafucking writer.
Reread this. Reminds me of the final scene of Betty Blue.
I come back to this post often. Had to again tonight to make sure it wasn’t one of the posts you were scrambling to hide-away in the wake of your doxxing (good luck, moron – you ever hear of the Wayback machine?). 2 years now C’s been gone, I occasionally see Facedink posts by people who actually, actually knew her, not my stupid manufactured remembrance of her, cobbled together from 1 night in Austin and a smattering of gmail and text exchanges. Those posts make me sad, both because she’s gone and because I didn’t even really know her. Not really.
About 5 months after C died, I learned that my first kiss died of diabetes. I hadn’t thought of her in years and years, hadn’t seen her since graduation or something. I fell long out of touch with her before email was even popular, let alone AIM or Friendster or MySpace or Facedink. We’re talking, like, mid-90’s, Netscape era-timeline here. So, like, if she was challenged to name everyone she knew, I would probably be pretty low on that list. And vice-versa – ask me “Quick, name everyone you knew in high school!” – her name wouldn’t have popped up, unless I specifically remembered “Oh, right, this girl who was my first kiss!”
Oh right, this girl who was my first kiss. But that’s a fairly substantial position to hold in someone’s life. As little as I ever thought of her, I’d never forget her name, not ever. I’d never forget her face. I can picture her instantly, her name brings me instantly back. Like, in the parthenon of romances you recall and/or honor, the Firsts are always give particular deference. Right? Right? They tell your story, they’re one of the ways we all measure our milestones, every GirlsDoPorn interview starts off with what the First Fuck was like. Firsts are obviously important. So I hear about how this girl died, and I immediately try searching for her, and her internet life is non-existant. Only through an online obit a couple of pages into Google do I find she actually died 4 years earlier (6 years, now), and I had no idea. I guess living on the other side of the continent facilitates that. But I find the obit has an adult picture of her, young, blond, pretty in that wall-eyed, Eastern European way because of her Polish roots, lots of Polskis in New England, barely into her 30’s, and I remember kissing her behind the high school PA building. And I also remember her pumping insulin into herself, because she was diabetic, had been since birth, and big dumb me, I didn’t know what diabetes was but she explained it was dangerous and she could die. And now I think about her all the time, this girl, this lovely, bright, girl who let me kiss her, and diabetes eventually got her. I assume that’s what it was; the obituary doesn’t say. And that obituary is all I’ve been able to learn about her, her life, what she grew up into or who she loved and married or anything. No online presence, no social media, everything has been from this one, solitary, tiny obit. I wish there was something else out there about her, some Facedink profile or a memorial page or something, SOMETHING, because I need more, she mattered to me. I was so far on the periphery of the life she was living, as she was to me, but she mattered, and her death struck me, and still does, and maybe she’d be surprised to here that ‘Oh, Monty even remembered me? Monty is, like, actually, measurably upset about my passing? Like, still, 2 years after finding out?!’ But. Yes. Absolutely yes.
And I feel that way about C. I wanted to visit LA and C was LA to me. So I come back to this post, because I can read a real account of her, flesh out my gmail convos and build a bit more personality into the texts and emails. The “Miss you” and “Can’t believe you’re gone” blurbs, the 2 line outpourings, don’t help with that. This post does.
So I’m glad – no, relieved – you haven’t hidden this post yet. If you have to take down this whole stupid blog, if you finally throw in the towel and take your ball and go home like a big baby because somebody posted your name on Jezebel (“My Year Reading Delicious Tacos”), I hope you keep the domain and keep this one dumb post up there.
If you don’t, my previous neck-punch threat still stands. You can’t fight, I can. Who knows, maybe someone out there that you’ve forgotten about would be sad you got punched in the neck? Let’s find out.