My college-era friend Michael Barrish died a few weeks ago. I’m still processing it. He was in his early 60s, and he died of dementia, after four years of his friends knowing that he had it. I never made it to the nursing home to visit — haven't been to New York in years. Tried to get there a couple of years ago and plans fell through. And now I’ve made plans to get to his memorial, to celebrate his life with people he loved — now that he's gone. Feels wrong. We should have had this party years ago.
A great writer who never sought remuneration. Excellent songwriter who seldom played out and hadn't played out in decades — only did it with friends, when we were young.
“Great” writer? Thought-provoking, funny, insightful, sharp, surprising at every turn. Short stories and meditations. Poems. He wrote two drafts of a travel book — I read at least one of them and loved it — and he scrapped it as — not right for him, I guess.
Excellent songwriter. More terrific songs than I know. He visited me once in Seattle in the late ‘90s, after he’d stopped performing (not living near friends who wanted to perform with him). We played songs for each other in my tiny apartment. I asked him to write down the lyrics to one, so I could learn it. When he went to the nursing home for dementia I recorded it, just . . . for him. Now that he’s gone the title haunts me. “All She Wrote.” The old American idiom for finality, “she” indicating “Fate,” I suppose. Whatever the root — that’s all he wrote. There isn’t any more. There won’t be any more.
You can hear my recording of "All She Wrote" here, if you want.
Since he died, friends have been sending around recordings of his other songs. I’m learning more of them. He has a bunch of good ones — really good.
Deeply immersed in poetry. When he was in the nursing home I sent him a link to the album that included his song. One of the songs (“Space Moves Around You”), I lifted the central image from a poem by a once-more-prominent Canadian poet named Mark Strand, a poem called “Keeping Things Whole.” He busted me. “That one song reminds me of a poem by Mark Strand.” I'd forgotten that I'd lifted it. Spot on. Loved being busted. Especially by someone in a nursing home for dementia, especially by my fading, poetry-drenched friend.
He dressed to fade into any background, and yet if you knew him, his mind and approach to life were unlike anybody's I’ve ever known, not much like anybody I’ve heard of. Deeply immersed in poetry, when I knew him he owned no books and never more than two pairs of pants, two shirts – one to wash, one to wear. He got stuff from the library and kept it in his memory. At one point he owned two plates, two bowls, two cups, two forks, knives, spoons -- in case somebody dropped by. The only reason anybody would need more than one of each.
And sweet! He loved his friends, and he had the sweetest laugh, easily delighted by the mishaps of life. Thinking of that giggle, dang, it breaks me up. He loved beauty, took joy in the beautiful things his friends and his idols made, devoted his energy to writing that he might or might not describe as beautiful, but in which he aspired to the standards of his favorite writers. Did he reach them? Judgment is impossible and irrelevant. I love reading his stuff; that's all I can know.
He self-published a whole bunch of stuff, online, on his own site, Oblivio. Short fiction and meditations. Another friend is gathering it into a book to share with his friends; I heard it’s running to 300 pages. I tried to keep up as he was posting his stuff, and I know I didn’t. I look forward to seeing the collection.
“College-era friend”? He never attended. He was a high school dropout from Philadelphia who met a University of Michigan student in New York, came to Ann Arbor to visit, fell in with my crowd, and never left our lives.
We were involved in some college hijinks, some political-intervention public-action theater -- he was a ringleader, I an eager collaborator. Events that in retrospect feel like dreams, feel implausible. Here’s a photo from one of them, one he told me he was proud of.
He's the central figure in the photo, the young white clean-shaven man in a white lab coat and wearing dark sunglasses, speaking to a group, the officiant of a parodistic religious ceremony, with a group of white college students crowded behind him. The caption states: “In protest against the PSN (Progressive Student Network) protesters, a group of students vowed to continue research in Prof. Senior’s lab, writing in their manifesto, ‘At this moment, 15 members of the Nuclear Saints of America have entered the laboratory of the Prophet Professor Thomas B.A. Senior to do military research, and they will not leave until they get some done.’”
The week before, friends of ours had staged a sit-in in the same lab, protesting the nuclear research taking place. The Ann Arbor News had spoken dismissively of the protesters' throwback hippie appearance. We thought — that's really weak and condescending reporting -- and my deceased friend and two other friends — Andrew and Ken – hatched the counter-protest scheme. We put posters up inviting people to an exorcism at the lab, and we wrote a ceremony to exorcise the spirit of the hippies, in support of the Professor's work. Implausibly, the professor took us at our word and opened the doors to everybody who saw the posters and showed up — hence the implausible, movie-still quality of the photo, which I never saw until I went looking for documentation of the event a few years ago and found the photo and caption in the University of Michigan’s Engineering Department's official online history. Still hard for me to believe that it all happened.
The friend who’s compiling Michael’s Oblivio posts shared his posted instructions, written 10 or 15 years ago, regarding his death. He put it wittily and elegantly, qualities I don’t feel up for aspiring to as I write this, but one of his instructions was that whoever eulogized him had to include something we hated about him. He claimed to be insisting upon this stipulation.
And for a long time, I couldn’t think of anything. Still can’t, really. Sure, he could be annoying —— who can’t? His stipulation captures an annoying quality: his high standards, his hatred of sentimentality (though he himself was outrageously sentimental — in person, not so much in his writing), his pickiness, his (though one seldom saw it) — snobbery.
Standards! As far as I knew, he seldom deviated. Very healthy guy. Worked out religiously, ate modestly, never ate junk, drank seldom and lightly, kept a vegan diet. He indulged everybody’s weaknesses, but his purism has put me in a bind, with this directive. I wouldn’t say I hate it about him; it feels like a productive and stimulating annoyance, a prod to question the routines, to dig deeper. And . . . well, I can’t say that I hate it. I don’t. It’s annoying, this directive, and that’s fine – it’s his eulogy – and ultimately, I think, at least for me (though perhaps not for you, dear reader), it’s worthwhile.
Dig deeper. He said one of the most profound things to me once, when we were in our early or mid 20s. (He was a couple years older than me; some memories are fuzzy.) He had been hanging out with a bunch of the gang (all guys? I think so but not sure), and — but I should back up.
If you’ve met me, or seen a picture of me smiling, you’ll probably have noticed that I have a significant scar on my face, and that my smile is lopsided. Long story, don’t feel like telling it now — I’m fine, and happy to be alive. I mention it because, this one time, when we were in our 20s, Michael, after hanging out with the guys, told me that they’d been talking about my scar, and concluded, “Everybody has scars. Only yours is on your face.”
Truth.
And he certainly had his. Ran away from home at 17, didn’t speak to his family for years, never reconciled with his father, changed his last name after his maternal grandfather. And still. He made his way, lived with little waste and few footprints, dated, got married, got divorced, did terrific work as a writer and songwriter in as close to an ego-less devotion to his arts as anybody I’ve known, and had a big impact on a small group of people to whom he was devoted.
Grateful to have known him.
I hate that he’s gone.
Ty john