“So, I mean, where the fuck to start?”
That’s how Tony began our interview in 2021, with a question that threw me then and continues to throw me now. Am I supposed to conjure up a clever little intro to the strangest and most complicated relationship of my life with the most distinctive person I have ever chanced to know? The only thing to do is to start at the beginning, telling it as it was, maybe capturing a glimmer of his special tragic wonder, the likes of which I’m certain there will never be again.
I can’t tell you how it happened; there will be no announcement, no death certificate, no closure. But what’s closure? Our lives, our loves go on and on. The other night I searched our emails: the voice memos I made for him to use as DJ drops, the plane tickets to Vancouver, where we moved for no reason at all. Messages from South Korea, Mexico, Arizona, with subjects like, “I’m sure you won’t read this,” “Hello I’m alive” “Hey man , ok things are better now can I explain!” “Call me i miss you I’ll tell you what happened i hope to hear from you by Monday, Tuesday I’ll be gone. Hmm that sounded a bit ominous. I mean I’m not gonna die or some shit. Well, 80/20 says i don’t and if it goes wrong , now you have a movie lol please call me.” And so on.
From him I learned forgiveness, among 1,000 other things. His last message I can’t read — I know exactly what it said — and I hope that he’ll forgive me, too, wherever he is now.
“I’m listening to your album on hella muscle relaxers & let me just say, THANK YOU lol,” I tweeted to my most mysterious reply guy on Christmas Eve 2015. For months he’d frequented my mentions and the things he said were strange; the face in his photo was shrouded in smoke, a black hoodie pulled tight over his shaved head. I’d come to like him. He amused me. That afternoon my dad had gifted me some Valium for reasons I can’t recall, so I sank into his sofa while the TV played on mute, listening to the album the guy had put out some months back. The bottom dropped out of the room. The music was haunted, terribly lonely, cyberpunk without being lame; it had a different gravity, heavy and light all at once. “Drums are for people in their 20s,” he’d later scoff and I’d agree, though I was 28.
“Call me,” read the message that appeared a moment later. “I can’t type good, I’ve got fat thumbs. And I’m on molly.” The number that I dialed had a Tucson area code. “I think that we should start a podcast,” went the voice on the other end. “Hmm,” said I, wondering what’s this guy’s problem? which is how it always goes when I’m about to fall in love. “I feel like there’s enough of those.” “Okay, I mean, that’s fair.” For another hour or two I held the phone against my cheek, thoroughly enraptured by his stream-of-conscious rambles, which crescendoed to a yelp when he got excited (often). He was living in L.A. but moving soon to Joshua Tree, where he had plans to buy a Vespa with a basket for his cat, as well as several firearms he admired “from an engineering standpoint.” “You can visit me,” he offered. I said, “Well, I don’t know...”
Two months later my employer, a music television network past its prime, sent me to L.A. to interview a B-list R&B singer whose team suddenly stopped returning my calls. In any case, the hotel was booked for five days. I typed a message, sat a while, and finally pressed send. “Come over,” he demanded. He was packing for the desert. He was leaving the next day. “I’ve got mushrooms and a bottle of soju.” And also, he said, a surprise.
He came down to the lobby in track pants and a white tee; he lived around the corner from the mural on the cover of Elliott Smith’s Figure 8. I remember how he looked then: 6’0” with bad posture, a nose that had been obviously broken more than once, and tattoos spread across his knuckles that read SCUM, two letters per hand. He had warned me about his teeth, why he never smiled in pictures. Frankly the situation was worse than I’d imagined but as quickly as I noticed, I had already forgot, such was the eclipsing force of his charisma. “Surprise time,” he exclaimed, his hazel eyes dazzled with mischief as he led me round the back to the apartment complex pool. There in its turquoise glow the building’s chainsmokers assembled, a fascinating crew of which he was the clear ringleader: a young Army vet and known Jeopardy savant; a middle-aged woman who gasped when she spoke, leashed as she was to an oxygen tank; a heavyset man who looked roughly my age, absorbed in some kind of esoteric sleight of hand...
No, he was twisting the final touches of an elaborate balloon animal! “Do you get it!?” Tony yelped, levitating with delight. The creature looked at first like it could be a jazz musician, until I saw that in its hand wasn’t a saxophone but a styrofoam cup filled with purple balloon lean. I laughed so hard I nearly fell into the pool: “Is it Future?!” “I knew you’d like it,” Tony said. I promised to keep it forever, privately wondering about the logistics re: balloon animals on planes.
His studio was empty: no furniture, no bed, just some cardboard boxes and a Bass Station keyboard. His Siamese cat, Breakfast, chased him around the room as he poured soju in teacups, pulled mushrooms from a freezer bag. I waited on the floor. He put on his own music, an edit he had made in homage to David Bowie, who had died the month before: “Five years, my brain hurts a lot, five years, that’s all we’ve got...” I don’t remember a lightning-strike moment, a flash of falling in love. We already were. He texted me so the following night: “I love you” from Joshua Tree. He drove back to L.A., though I couldn’t say how; he surely did not own a car. The five-day hotel reservation ran out so we booked two more nights at the Standard in cash, where we snorted cocaine and drank by the pool, scheming up “work” I could plausibly do to justify my staying. (“Just wanted to make sure you made it back okay from LA,” read an email from Viacom’s production coordinator. “We got the notification you didn’t make the car pickup. Assuming you took a cab from the airport?” I didn’t respond.)
My debit card stopped working. We ran out of cash. I used my dad’s Southwest miles to book a flight home the next day. Returning for one last night in Tony’s empty apartment, we spent the rest of his checking account on delivery sandwiches, the only food I can recall eating that week. From his laptop on the floor, we watched a movie I’d never heard of where a mutt is abandoned, sold to a dog-fighting ring and trained to kill. Tony sobbed through the whole thing. We fell asleep on the carpet with the cat nestled between us. I had lost my state ID card at some point along the way, but when I got to LAX they just let me walk right through.
PART ONE OF ??????????
MORE TO COME THIS WEEK.