Electric Green Hummingbird
for Luis, in gratitude for help given, death be damned
The green hummingbird sipping from the purple late summer hosta blossoms reminds me of those strange days following your August 9th, 2006 death at age 39.
You were wearing a substandard helmet – a “brain bucket” – while riding your beloved BMW motorcycle around our rural Catskills neighborhood. A neighbor – four houses away – witnessed you vault over the handlebars when the BMW engine seized up. You landed headfirst on the pavement, knocked beyond unconsciousness. The neighbor called 911.
That spot is shouting distance from where this hummingbird now perambulates, eighteen years later. In order to get anywhere – the store, my job, the state highway – I must revisit the spot where your body was irreparably broken.
All these years I’ve wrestled with my culpability around this event. I’m sure I always will. Thanks to you, however, the guilt doesn’t lacerate as it once did. It has taken time and distance to recognize the ways in which you’ve helped me move forward.
And by “you,” I’m undecided if I’m talking about your ghost, or my memories of you, or your love for me, abiding undiminished. Gazing in the ever-expanding vista in my rearview mirror, especially when I replay the days immediately following your death, I experience you as some combo of ghost/memory/love.
I’d been keeping the BMW under a tarp in our Phoenicia, NY barn for three years while you restored a house and adventured in Merida, Mexico.
Nine years prior, in the wee small hours of a summer night, at the Dynasty Diner on East 14th St., NYC, I’d asked you to help raise my son Jack, to be his padrino (a term superior to “godfather”). Bursting with joy at the prospect of my impending fatherhood, you were uneasy about being a padrino. Nevertheless, you accepted.
A shortlist of reasons for my request:
In 1992, you and I were paid sidemen in Polygram recording artist John Moore’s band. (You on guitar, me on bass.) John could be an insufferable dick. We put up with it largely because this was a working gig. At a fateful rehearsal in a dank pit on Mott Street, he insulted you one too many times. You said, “Fuck you, asshole, I don’t need this,” packed up your Telecaster, and out you righteously stormed, back to food service jobs. I ran into the piss-smelling hallway and begged you to reconsider, as hanging out with you was one of the perks. You said, “I love you, Robert, but I just can’t do this shit anymore,” and strode away. I wish I’d followed you. Within a few months, I quit less dramatically. Years later, John would apologize via Facebook message for being “a right tit!”
In the mid 90s, when I briefly had money to burn, I paid some passion-free musicians to back me at a gig. After the tepid show, you accosted me on the Avenue B sidewalk, furious that I’d entrusted my work to careless mercenaries. “They don’t give a shit!” you yelled. “You deserve better than that!” My work, my fitfully crafted early songs, my life, mattered to you, deeply.
In the late 90s, when digital tech was all the rage, you opened a windowless basement analog recording studio on the Lower East Side. It featured an early 70s Ampex tape machine, a relic, a beast. I helped you lower all 500 pounds of it down a concrete stairway using a rope secured to a parking meter. The “cognoscenti” said you were crazy to invest in quirky, ancient machinery. You laughed. And lo, the music we recorded on that machine – my debut solo album …to this day – sounds better than anything I’ve since done. It garnered much praise from on high. The vintage Ampex is now coveted by sound engineers and musicians.
In the early days of my stay-at-home dad-hood, you taught yourself filmmaking, and directed and shot Rockets Redglare!, a documentary that got into Sundance 2003. Your friend Rockets Redglare was a bon vivant addict and surprisingly accomplished character actor, a kind of punk rock Zelig whom you defiantly adored. He died from addiction complications during filmmaking, and you finished editing while grieving. This was a kind of love I’d never seen before, and have not seen since. The film is as much about your devotion as it is about Rockets.
Unfortunately, after the high of Sundance, your distributor reneged on his promise to get the film into theaters and onto DVD. (Your friend and co-producer, Steve Buscemi, would help successfully sue that distributor in 2007.) With Rockets Redgalre! in limbo, you decided a change of scenery was in order, some palate-cleansing in the land of your father’s people. Not long after my little family moved from the East Village to the Catskills, you were residing Mexico, working with your hands, planning your next move.
At the same time you were getting burned by your would-be distributor, I experienced some significant heartbreak of my own. Via email and phone, we helped each other through our troubles, becoming closer. You wrote amazing emails in the dead of night – riotously funny, poetic, raw. You repeatedly invited me to Merida to “just sit on the roof” and process some pain. It was working for you. I stupidly found excuses not to do that.
In 2006 you sold the home you’d restored. To my delight, you ventured back north in a RV to visit us in Phoenicia, to retrieve your bike and other stuff I’d stored for you, and to get to know your godson a bit before heading to Costa Rica to start over yet again. Your money belt was crammed with cash. You planned to open a B & B.
During those three years of storage in the barn, a family of mice had made a nest on the BMW seat. You thought that was hilarious. You rolled the machine onto the flagstones and tinkered with the engine, confident you could get it running again.
You spent much of your last full day in this realm with Jack. Y’all explored Phoenicia on foot, conversed at length for the first and last time. You’d previously known him as a rising kindergartner, and were of course astonished at what a difference three years had made. When you were in Mexico, he’d written on a piece of paper that his desire for his future was “to be in the big movies.” At eight, so much of who he would become was already formed, his spirit leading him into a life that would mirror yours in some intriguing ways.
Did you guide him from the other side? After your death, I would invoke your name many times, asking, “What would you do, Luis?” Did you answer in ways I am only now understanding?
I consider this: You were an edgy, provocative filmmaker. He is an edgy, provocative filmmaker. You were stubborn with your creative work, saying fuck you to the odds. He is stubborn with his creative work, saying fuck you to the odds. At this writing, he is an award-winning moviemaker, with much excellent cinematic storytelling under his belt and in-progress. He recently produced a film festival in nearby Kingston to showcase other filmmakers’ work, and his.
A sizable chunk of the money you left behind to start that Costa Rica B & B helped pay for your godson’s film school tuition.
More than once, when Jack has asked me for advice, I’ve told him about something remarkable you did – some royal fuck you given to some unsuspecting tyrant, some clarifying, inconvenient honesty hurled at me. Something you did that I did not have the courage to do.
I’ve repeatedly found opportunities to remind my son why I chose you.
I recall us talking that last night about the afternoon you’d spent with Jack. The wonder in your dark eyes as you spoke of my eight-year-old kid.
“He’s so goddamn smart. But more important than that, he’s kind.”
I shared with you my pain over losses, betrayals, and disappointments I’d incurred since our move from NYC. You were ready and willing to hear it all. You were not a bullshitter. Your childhood home, your supposed protectors, had brought you much pain. You assured me that, in spite of the difficulties, regarding the home Holly and I were creating for our son, “there’s a lot of love here.”
It was approaching dinnertime the next day when you crashed. Holly, Jack, and I had stayed late at a party in Woodstock, a little past the time we were supposed to collect you to go get Mexican food at the Gypsy Wolf. You were off, motoring the blacktop when we arrived home. I’m guessing you got tired of waiting for us, and figured you’d take a quick spin through the neighborhood, enjoy the beautiful day. Take advantage of our lateness.
After hearing the town-wide first-responder alert horn that also warns of floods, then the approaching sirens, I somehow knew you’d crashed. I ran down the street into another world. I found a team struggling to keep your body alive, stabilizing you for an airlift to Albany. The trauma shifted me into numb efficiency, horror kept in abeyance, but hovering near.
I caught the attention of a beautiful, dark-eyed EMT who could’ve been your sister..
“What can you tell me?” I asked.
“He’s critical.”
In memory, she is conveying without words that you will not survive. She, her team, and the staff at Albany Med ICU will work to keep your robust body ticking so they can harvest your kidneys and, amazingly, your liver. You’d been in recovery from heroin for years, and you loved alcohol, but your liver somehow bore no traces of abuse.
Your organs would live on in three Tristate-area people whose lives you saved. I would fantasize these recipients awakening craving Mexican food and beer, and suddenly loving punk rock.
That miracle of science barely softens the hardest fact that will forever haunt me: If I’d not stayed at that Woodstock party, chatting on a slippery deck, you wouldn’t have had time to get bored. That last ride would not have taken place, and you would’ve helped me raise my son as planned. I.e., in both body and spirit, rather than just the latter.
I can feel you getting impatient. What about the 2024 green hummingbird triggering the memory flood?
OK. A day after they took you off life support to die, bereft Jack and I were on the porch. Our tabby cat, Sis, approached with a green hummingbird in her mouth, identical to the one caroming around the yard today. Electric green, vibrant. Horrified, I pried it from her jaws. The bird dropped into my palm, deathly still, stained with cat drool.
I said no, no, no, NO. Please not now, not after I’ve said goodbye to my best friend. Just as I was about to give up my petitions, the green hummingbird rose from my hand, hovered buzzing before my face for a few seconds, and zoomed away. For the moment, I was in the moment. Free.
What else happened? After you died, we threw together an impromptu memorial in a mutual friend’s backyard. Folks traveled from NYC to mourn, and try to celebrate you. Someone made a collage with images of you, and clippings of poems, all pasted elementary-school-style to a big sheet of black poster board. After the memorial, I propped that collage against a dining room chair. The day after we’d gathered, I walked in to find a large black starling perched on the poster board’s edge. It had shat on the poster board, streaking it with bluish white. How that starling got in the house I do not know. Astonished, and again, smack dab in the moment, I opened the French doors leading to the backyard and out it flew.
Also this: The smoke alarm outside the room in which you’d been sleeping – where we had that last conversation – went off three times in two days. Piercing, insistent beeps I could stop only by standing on a step stool and removing the battery. That had never happened before and hasn’t happened since. There was no fire or smoke in the house.
Unlike you, I have experienced what I hope is midlife. Perhaps my greatest lesson of this phase is: forgiveness is a nonlinear journey, not a destination.
I can feel you recoiling at the “woo woo” sound of that.
I wonder if you would have experienced this realization, too, had you the time. Like me, you bore much understandable anger toward people who had wronged you, betrayed you, disrespected you. We bonded on these things. We never tried to talk each other out of grievances. The balm was in the presence of a friend.
I’m not saying midlife realizations have enabled me to erase resentments. I still wish ill to a select few. There, I said it. Not all the time, but most of the time. I do not subscribe to the notion that “the vessel that carries the poison harms the vessel.” In my experience, this is not true. Lots of hale and hearty oldsters out there ginning up ire.
Nevertheless, I’m trying. I am lucky to be able to try.
In my experience, this is a truth: forgiveness is a practice with no endpoint. Like most humans, I’m wired to perceive life in a straight line, to remember and plan; ruminate and worry; compulsively tell stories of the past and future. My problem is fixating on a grievous point in time, real or imagined.
Dwelling in the nonlinear, in the moment – therein lies freedom, and forgiveness.
The hardest person to forgive, of course, has been myself. All of the above is mostly about trying to see myself as more than the character in the story who stayed late at that Woodstock party, dithering when I knew you were waiting for me.
I will keep trying, and you will keep helping. Like today, when your sustaining love pulls my focus from the timeline and fixes it on the gift of the present moment, and so much more.
Thanks for this beautiful remembrance of a deep friendship, Robert.
Sometimes we need help remembering... to dwell in the present, to comprehend the vagaries of forgiving (ourselves). This recollection is beautiful and I imagine your friend's essence being needed somewhere else in the universe. Anyway, thanks for the reminders -- believe it or not I kind of needed them today.