Humming Shadow

conversing with grief, while I can

Robert Burke Warren

May 21, 2023

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch

He said to me, “You must not ask for so much”

And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door

She cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”

– Leonard Cohen, “Bird on the Wire”

I recently played a gig in my old East Village neighborhood. I traveled solo, but I was not alone. A humming shadow accompanied me.

I’d not performed in the East Village in fifteen or so years. I lived, worked, and played there from 1985 to 2001, age 19 to 35.

To supersize the nostalgia, I drove down early from the Catskills. I ate at Cafe Mogador on St. Mark’s Place, one of two surviving restaurants from my time. (The other is Veselka.) The chicken couscous tasted exactly the same. Fabulous. The cappuccino was actually better, served with a heart etched into the foam. They didn’t do that in the 80s and 90s.

The gig went well. I sang Johnny Cash songs at Nublu Classic, a dim jazz bar on Avenue C, and talked about Cash’s life. I promoted a book about him I recently edited. Turnout was great. Folks sang along and engaged. The WGA Writers’ Strike had just begun, and several NYC writers were in attendance, silver-haired and pumped up. Not to be fucked with. The scent of beer-soaked floorboards threatened to pull me down a rutted memory lane, but performing Cash tunes for a crowd kept me squarely in the moment.

Once the adrenaline waned, however, my faithful humming shadow resurfaced, settling into the periphery of my thoughts. We headed back north.

About my traveling companion, this humming shadow: I’m 58, and, like most people my age and older, I am grieving more people, and I know more people who are grieving than at any other time in my life. A beloved friend is dying of a degenerative nerve disease. She cannot receive too many guests, so a few days ago, as a red-tailed hawk circled above, I sat on a chair in the sun, weeping as I wrote her a note of appreciation and farewell. That’s a first.

Another friend lost her brother during Covid Year One. Another lost his sister in Year Two. Two other friends lost their husbands – men I knew and deeply admired – last summer. Another just lost her sister to cancer.

That’s a shortlist.

I’ve known grief since my father died in a car crash when I was seven. And of course I’ve accrued more as I’ve grayed. Evidently, grief is one of many taxes on the gift of age. News flash. But for the longest time, the shadow in which my grief pulses was only intermittently noisy. Now, it hums constantly.

Like radio signals emerging from static, out of this hum I decipher messages that once were distant, distorted noise. In certain moods, I will entertain the notion these communiques are from ghosts. As my proximity to them increases, I discern language:

Do it now. Say it now. Ask for what you actually want. Don’t put up with that. It’s too late for a lot of things, but it’s not too late for everything.

En route to NuBlu, I passed my first New York address. The exterior of the pre-war building appeared unchanged. Although I lived there only a couple of months before they threw me out into the Manhattan thaw, I can still conjure the scent of the interior, like someone making soup on every floor 24/7.

On February 1st, 1985, I moved from Atlanta into a one-bedroom apartment therein. I brought my bass, an amp, a steamer trunk full of thrift store clothes, and about $500 from selling Christmas trees. I intended to join a band and somehow make a life in still-affordable New York City. It was one of the craziest things I’ve ever done.

Crazy in part because I’d accepted an invitation to be a roommate of a former teacher and his girlfriend, a peer of mine. We’ll call him Harry, and her Melody. I was nineteen. Melody was twenty. Harry was pushing thirty. He’d been one of Melody’s and my high school teachers, but he’d also been a “friend,” a mentor to me. For me in particular, he was one in a series of ill-chosen father figures. I cleaved to him to fulfill needs of which I was only dimly conscious. I am fully conscious of them now. He was conscious of them then.

Back in high school, Harry had assiduously drawn mostly fatherless latchkey kids into his orbit, a clique I’ll call Harry’s Favorites. He’d taken a couple of secret teenage lovers (of the age of consent), including Melody. Post-graduation, Melody, a gifted actress, had moved to Manhattan to attend Juilliard as a theater major. Harry quit his teaching gig and followed her, and they’d gotten that apartment together. I stayed in Atlanta for the time being, playing in Wee Wee Pole with RuPaul. All the while, I kept up correspondences with both Harry and Melody. Once I left Wee Wee Pole, I set my sights on NYC. In a letter, Harry offered me a place to alight.

Back in high school, Harry’s Favorites had hung out in his bachelor pad, attended repertory cinemas with him, grabbed coffee, talked about rock n’ roll and David Mamet. We were insufferable sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen-year-olds. We knew of his clandestine transgressions with students, and he knew we knew, but we never, ever talked about it. We tacitly protected him from disclosure. In return, he’d made us feel special and powerful. My hunger for those feelings was intense, and, I’m sure, obvious.

Perhaps my loyalty was one of the reasons he offered me the futon in the living/dining area/kitchen of the coveted NYC apartment. That offer also comprised his performative revelation that he and Melody were, in fact, a couple, and had been since she and I were high school juniors. We played out the scene with conviction. Oh really? I said. Whaddaya know.

The largesse of Harry and Melody did not last. Come April, they kicked me out. It occurs to me now Harry didn’t require me to cover for him anymore. Whatever. It really was for the best. We were all miserable. Shocker. I was depressed, working temp jobs for minimum wage, sporting an ill-advised crewcut. I almost returned to Atlanta, but through the kindness of strangers, I found a good place to live, a couple money gigs, and a band. Once away from the toxic Harry-and-Melody situation, I thrived. They lasted about another year. Both would soon leave New York, each bound for different locales.

Partly due to the intense forward motion of my life, I didn’t look back on those years with much focus until I became a parent, and especially a teacher. For years now, I’ve worked with kids who remind me so much of who I was, and who my peers were. How insecure yet exuberant we were, such easy marks for a certain type of vampiric opportunist. On the way to elder-hood, I have kept my eyes wide open for those types of people. In that expanded, uncomfortable vision, I see Harry for what he was: a predator.

As I’ve learned about cults, and met some folks who were in them, I see now my junior and senior years of high school were as close as I’ve ever come to being in one. All of Harry’s Favorites I’ve connected with agree. We share a dark amazement at how much we knew, how little we shared, and how few questions our elders asked.

During my time in that apartment with Harry and Melody, I received news that my buddy Adam Cahoon’s cancer had come back. We’d been friends since sixth grade, Boy Scouts in Troop 165. He was kind and funny and wickedly smart. He’d been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma when we were sixteen. After chemo and radiation, which rendered him skeletal and sterile, the cancer had gone into remission. He’d rebounded. He’d gotten buff. When I got that call, my heart rose into my throat, and I immediately booked a flight back to Atlanta.

We met in the playground of the Catholic school we’d attended. It was dusk, a Saturday. Brisk. He looked fine, even handsome, and seemed upbeat. But there was a new, dark color in his voice. He breathlessly asked me to tell him all about New York. Everything. I fessed up about my crazy living arrangements, and he smiled at the drama of it. He advised me to be careful, but Adam didn’t really seem worried about me.

We sat on the swings, reminisced, and laughed into the night. Adam smoked a few cigarettes. When we embraced and farewelled, he told me to keep in touch. I said I would and headed back to my dysfunctional situation with more perspective, I daresay, than most nineteen-year-olds. Adam, meanwhile, would enter into more health-destroying chemo, a bone marrow transplant, and horror I cannot now imagine.

That playground visit was the last time I would see my childhood friend. Within two years, a few days after leaving me a hoarse message on my answering machine, he would be gone at twenty-two. My first peer to die, the first person I knew to die young.

Keep in touch, he’d said. At the time, I agreed, but once he passed, I didn’t know how. I do now. Thanks to the humming shadow, I keep in touch with Adam’s and all my departed loved ones’ unmet desires for more time. Time in which to take risks, to ask for more, to speak up, to acknowledge, to bear witness, to call out injustices, both present-day and long ago. They cannot do it, so I will.