Random Story

This story takes place thirty years ago. The characters are my mother, her boyfriend Norman, our family friend "L," and myself. Around the same time Kurt Cobain killed himself, L lost a child to suicide. So...one night, L comes out to visit my mom and Norman and I happened to be there. They drank wine and somehow the subject of Kurt Cobain came up. Norman decided to be an oblivious blowhard and start talking shit about Cobain and making light of people who kill themselves. L is normally a talkative, kinda loud guy, but he got really quiet, he seemed uneasy but Norman wasn't reading the room, just blah blah blah. I kind of wanted to slap him but instead I explained to him what goes through the mind of someone who is thinking of killing themself. It's not some Hollywood cliche, someone weeping and wringing their hands, writing some over the top suicide note: "You'll be sorry now! Goodbye cruel world!" My experience has been things just get really quiet and you get extremely numb, you feel unmotivated to do anything but just sort of sit in one place and maybe listen to music. Sometimes it's not calculated, you just have a gun or razorblades or whatever is around it's a sort of "What the fuckever," sort of sigh thing. Kurt Cobain wrote out this long ass note so maybe it was an angry suicide, like he was angry with himself for being in that situation or something. If Elliott Smith killed himself, it was probably spur of the moment. But, ES's situation is years after our story. So, I take maybe ten minutes explaining all this to Norman. Later, when we were walking L out to his car, he gave me this big hug and started crying. You have to understand, L is this macho sort of guy, so him crying took me aback. I don't know if he was upset because he was worried about me or because it brought back what happened to his daughter or maybe he had just been bottling things up because he felt no one understood. I don't know, maybe it helped him or maybe it gave his pain another dimension, I'll never know. My friends and I lost an amazing guy on April 23, 2006---456, that's how I remember it. His name was Jason but we called him the Captain. He was the guy you're watching the door for. You know, you're at a party and there's one guy everyone is waiting for, watching the door for---that was the Captain. He was going through a hard time and he shot himself. The shit he was dealing with was too much and Jason felt compelled to make the pain stop. Sometimes it's like that, sometimes it's numbness, sometimes it goes back and forth. If you survive deep depression a few times, you come to understand it will eventually pass and all you can do is grit your teeth and ride it out so....

I wish Elliott Smith was still making music. I wish Kurt had a chance to raise his daughter. And obviously, I wish Jason had gotten through what he was dealing with, I still watch the door for him and I know I'm not alone in that. He would have been fifty in a couple of weeks; it's odd to think that.

So...this is why I want to fucking slap someone talking shit about a human being who commits suicide. It's like an animal with its leg caught in a trap and they chew it off. Instinctively, that animal understands it will probably bleed to death, but anything is better than that trap. We live in anxious times, I think we allow ourselves to be isolated too much, I think more and more people are a lonely and scared mess but we feel obligated to smile some huge, fake ass smile and pretend everything is great. Sometimes it isn't and sometimes people die from it. I wish they didn't, but I respect their situation, I would never make light of someone who commits suicide...and back in 1994 I tried to explain that to Norman. I don't think he heard me, not really, but L did, and maybe he didn't feel so alone about the death of his daughter. As isolated as people who commit suicide feel with whatever they're dealing with, I'm sure the survivors deal a lot of isolation as well.

So, that's my random story. It just one night of four people drinking a lot of wine in a house in the country, but it's stayed with me for thirty years...