Do or Die (a short story...)

autobiographical fiction by Michael Mohr

My friend Matthew died of bone cancer at the age of 24, in 2008. I was living in San Francisco where my girlfriend at the time, Janine, and I had just moved. Janine and I had met a year prior, in San Diego, where I’d lived for a couple years, in Pacific Beach. When we met I’d been 24, Janine 20. We met through work, a tourist surf-related shop in the San Diego harbor. We both worked behind the register.

I’d been born in Ventura, 90 miles north of Los Angeles along the coast, and raised in Ojai, a small mountain town surrounded by the Topa Topa ranges and orange groves 12 miles east of Ventura off Highway 33. Highway 101 ran parallel to the Pacific. We moved to Ojai in 1991, when I was eight. My father was a computer engineer—formerly a math and chemistry teacher at the community college in Ventura—and my mom had been a nurse and now taught a master’s nursing class at a university south near LA.

Ojai had a population of about 8,000. There was very little to do there when you were an antsy, energetic, attracted-to-trouble pre-teen. The town was covered with expensive private schools; there was one public school with about 2,000 kids. I went to a Catholic, college-prep institution. I hated it but I fell in love with literature through one beloved English teacher, and I met a couple older punk-rock guys who brought me into that world.

There was also Luke. He was my best friend. We’d met in Little League when we were ten. We practiced at Nordhoff, the public high school. I was terrible: Left Outfield. I often screwed up. My teammates clearly did not like me. Even then I felt like an outsider. Just as I did in my own little family, which was just my parents and me.

Luke and I became instant friends, despite our obvious differences. He went to Nordhoff; I went to Villanova. He had a younger sister and brother; I was an only child. His family was strongly religious and went to church every Sunday; my parents were atheists. (Yet they sent me to parochial school because, they claimed, those were the schools which provided the “best education.”) He was relatively good at sports; I was not. He appeared set-up to be fairly well-adjusted; I, most certainly, did not. (While his parents screamed a lot, they provided emotional stability. My family had an unstable, family history of alcoholism and clinical-depression.)

Luke was my link to meeting Matthew. This would have been in the mid-nineties. I lived on a street called The Moon in Spanish—La Luna—an uphill, somewhat steep, busy street which my mother didn’t want me near. Luke’s house was about a mile away, on the flat, safe Rice Road. It just so happened that Luke’s next door neighbor was Matthew. We were all about 12, 13. Luke and I had gone through various young male phases—BMX, surfing, skateboarding, punk rock—and were currently into skateboarding. (“Skating” as we called it.) One day, while Luke and I were rolling around on his parents’ slightly-inclined salmon-pink driveway, the sounds of hard plastic wheels rolling and scuffing along the asphalt, his neighbor came over from next door, out of the blue, skateboard in hand, smile on his face.

Matthew was tall. He looked sort of like a mix between a beach-bum, a surfer, a skater, and a rock musician. His hair was big and puffy and dirty-blond, with lighter-blond highlights. He wore beige Dickies. He jerked his chin, seeing us, hurling his board onto the salmon-pink driveway, rolling over to us slowly. Luke made the introductions. Matthew’s voice was distinctive, as was the way his lower lip slightly hung down. He wore a black T-shirt that said, Dead Kennedys and had the DK symbol, red, white and black. I can’t quite describe his voice other than to say it sounded sort of like concrete being mixed with marbles, yet simultaneously clear and intelligent. A perpetual half-grin was plastered eternally on his lips. He confused and intrigued and intimidated me. It seemed as if he were from another planet, another dimension, another reality. He was cool, that was obvious.

By the time Luke and I reached time for high school—1999—we had stopped being friends. This was ineluctable. As if written in Athenian stone millennia before. Luke and I were different, as I have said. Despite the fact that we’d done Little League together; had learned to surf together; I’d become baptized at his church (to my parents’ certain horror); we’d become obsessed with MtV together; we’d skateboarded together; we’d gone on countless trips with his family to their cabin up in Lake Nacimiento, in Monterrey County; We’d gone with my family to several Baja trips, as well as whitewater rafting trips; etc. None of that mattered at 14, 15 years of age. He was going to public school, I was going to private. We knew the seams of our friendship would tear. And they did.

Once, when we’d been 13, Matthew had come along with us to the cabin. It had been Luke’s parents, Luke’s sister and brother, and me, Luke, and Matthew. I remember the small room the three of us boys shared. I remember sitting out on the deck, seeing the huge trees and a tip of the shimmering blue lake. I remember endless, 100-degree days out on the water, fat sloppy smiles on our faces, nothing on but swim trunks, Luke’s dad guiding the speedboat, one of us being pulled on water skis or on the tube, all of us slathered absurdly with sunscreen. (I’ll never forget that chemical stink, Copper Tone, SPF 50.)

I remember the meals we ate, the TV we lazily watched in the evening, the vulgar jokes we told when the three of us were alone and in the dark in our room. I remember Luke’s cousin, Ashley, arriving for a few days on that trip, with her father (Luke’s uncle), and thinking she was hot, and Matthew, his serious blue eyes grinning, pulling me aside one morning and saying, “Dude: Go for it, brother.” I remember he used that specific word: brother. And I remember making out with Ashley, on the couch in the living room, in near total darkness, from midnight until 4am one magical night, silent except for the smacking of our innocent, teenage lips, horny and alive, hearts pounding, in secret.

We were at different schools now, with different friends. We were stuck in the slow-moving amber of teenage coolness. Our egos throbbed like fists smashing a punching bag. With the severing of my bond with Luke, I lost contact with Matthew. He’d always been a peripheral friend, known solely through Luke.

The sifting of the sediment of time, however, worked on its own nature. After high school, when I was about 20, by then seriously into punk rock—not just buying the punk CDs but actively living the lifestyle, dressing the part—I had made some friends who knew Matthew. This was the surfer/skater/punker circle. I’d discovered alcohol and drugs in high school and had barely graduated. I was going to community college, half-assing it. I lived with an old buddy and his girlfriend on Ventura Avenue, near Main Street in Ventura.

This was how Matthew and I reconnected. Luke and I, despite the fact that our mothers were still close, had not talked in years. Matthew still lived next door to him, on Rice Road. One day, a buddy of mine who played guitar and wanted to start a band—and knew I was good at the drums—said we were going over to Matthew’s house. He still lived with his parents. I think he might have still barely been 19. I hadn’t seen him in years. He played the bass. I remember being in my buddy’s car as we drove east on Highway 33 from Ventura. I was nervous and excited and uncertain.

When we got there it all looked the same. We knocked and Matthew answered the front door. He looked exactly the same as when we were 13, 14, except he was now well over 6’0 tall, his head had grown larger, his hair was wilder, and his lowe lip hung down a tad lower. He wore a clean, blank white T-shirt, and somewhat tight stone-washed blue jeans. He looked 80% punk, 20% philosopher. He jerked his chin at me, grinning like back in the day, and snatched my palm with his, shaking it vigorously. His palm was much bigger than mine, sweaty and warm. He still intimidated me. I wanted to impress him. I wanted him to think I was cool. But I’d never been cool. I’d always just been me.

We walked through the house and out the back door into a huge, unkempt yard. Weeds rose two feet into the air, mildly swaying in the breeze, as if praying to God. There was a little shed. Matthew led us inside, opening and then closing the steel door. It was tiny inside. Barely room for four or five people, tops. It felt instantly crowded with the three of us. It reeked, too, of body odor and sweat and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. There was a red Pearl Roadshow drum-set sitting in the center. Matthew looked down at me, seeming slightly doubtful, and, as he lifted his bass over his shoulder by the wide black strap, and plugged himself in, he said, “So, I hear you can play this thing?”

I felt the red creeping into pale cheeks. Well. Here it was. Do or die. Now or nothing. Somehow this moment felt profoundly crucial, as if everything else in my existence depended solely on it. My heart thudded in my chest. A loud ringing noise burst against my ears. I felt my blood pulsing through my veins. I looked behind me at my buddy, who had his green Stratocaster slung over his stomach already. He and Matthew had plugged in. The buzzing noise of their instruments seemed like violence.

Matthew jerked his chin. He said, “Let’s play Dead Boys, Sonic Reducer.” This was an infamous 70s punk band. Everyone knew this song. It was, like most punk tunes, very simple.

I sat down at the drum kit, on the little leather swivel stool. I gazed one last time at Matthew. I swallowed. I looked at my buddy. I said, “On three,” and my voice cracked.

Matthew did the countdown and then we launched into it. I hit the mark. Everyone did. We played the entire song through. Matthew sang the lyrics into a microphone on a stand near him, yelling into the silver bulb with miniscule holes.

After playing for an hour, nonstop, Matthew looked down at me, his hair sweaty and plastered to his head, chest expanding and contracting, and said, “Holy shit, brother. You can play.”

Between that experience and when I moved to San Francisco, at 25, Matthew and I saw each other maybe half a dozen times. A party here and there. A local Ojai punk show at The Women’s Center. At 22 I’d moved with a friend to San Diego. But I’d be in town, in Ojai, during Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc. Sometimes we just acknowledged each other without speaking, other times we chatted for a few minutes, catching each other up on life.

One night I remember well. I must have been 23. I was hanging out with some punk buddies at their house on Lyon Street in Ojai. We were drinking forties, listening to The Lower Class Brats on vinyl. Someone brought acid and soon several of us were frying. We heard voices our age next door. High, we walked to the wooden fence between the houses and looked through little holes. We smiled, laughing, seeing kids our age. One or two looked vaguely familiar. And then, just like that, from inside the house out into the backyard came Matthew. We ended up walking over there, knocking on the door. We came in. Matthew and I hugged. He grinned, that ape-like lower-lip thing he did, which I’d always admired and respected.

Beers in hand, The Chronic album playing loudly, I followed Matthew outside, into the backyard, where five minutes prior my buddies and I’d been peering like weirdos. For about fifteen minutes it was just me and Matthew back there; everyone else had gone inside suddenly. We sat down at a rectangular glass table, facing each other. He jerked his chin at me, his blue eyes greedy and sparkling, his lips twisted up, and he said, “Dude. Brother. You’re on something. That I know for sure.”

I laughed, outrageously. “Acid.”

He laughed, too. We popped our brews and drank. We chatted for a while about Ojai and the “punk scene,” and about being in our early twenties. He was 22, about to move to San Francisco for college. He wanted to get into sound engineering. He seemed excited about the future. “I love Ojai,” he said, glugging his Pabst Blue Ribbon, burping, then shrugging. “But there’s more out there.”

And then the next thing I recall is him rolling his big hand in waves, making me watch it, knowing I was high. I followed his hand rhythmically. He laughed. “Are you seeing shit?”

“Yeah,” I said, and I knew my mouth was wide open in a dumb smile. “Your hand looks like fire.”

“Fire?” he said, surprised.

I shrugged and drank. “Something like that.” There was silence a moment and then I said, “Hey: Can I ask you something?”

“Sure, brother.”

I felt a sudden bash of shame and fear and insecurity. I knew this was the LSD talking. But it seemed to represent something real and buried deep inside me.

“Remember a couple years ago, when we played music in the shed?”

“Sure,” he said, stifling another burp.

I waited a moment, wrestling with myself as to whether to speak or not. Maybe I could just remain silent. “Well,” I said, embarrassed. “Did you really think I was good at the drums?”

He guffawed, throwing his head back. His large scruffy chin faced me for a moment. When he faced me he looked serious. His eyes blazed into mine. It seemed like he was communicating something deep, something true, something authentic, even sacred; holy. For a moment I thought he might just leave it at that, not speak. But then he said, “Fuck yeah, man. You were incredible.”

Two years later I was living in San Francisco. Janine and I had moved there in January of 2008. I was 25. She was 21. We lived in Ocean Beach. I was taking classes at CCSF, trying to still finish my general ed credits to transfer to San Francisco State. Janine worked at a seafood restaurant with her older sister in Tiburon and took three classes at SF State, having transferred from SD State. She was studying English literature. We shared a small room in a 7-room house on the second floor. We read and argued and fucked and drank and worked and went to school: That was our life. We could walk out our big square window and jump onto the roof of the building. Sometimes we did this at sunset, watching the sun fall below the red Golden Gate Bridge, below the sea.

In the time between 23 to 25 Matthew had found out I was also moving to the Bay Area, somehow, and somebody had given him my cell number and he’d called one day and we talked on the phone. I had been thrilled. We hadn’t rehashed the past; instead we’d talked erratically and madly about the future, hanging out together in San Fran. Finally, I remember thinking after we got off the phone, we’ll be legitimate friends. Even though we’d known each other for twelve, thirteen years, we’d never exactly been “friends” in the strict sense. Yet more than acquaintances, too. Some strange middle-place between these two arbitrary labels. Some part of me had always yearned for his friendship and respect. I’d felt that from the first moment we met, around 1996, holding his skateboard and standing on Luke’s salmon-pink asphalt driveway on Rice Road.

It was 2007, maybe six months before Janine and I moved to SF, that I heard through the Ojai grapevine about Matthew. I can’t even remember anymore who told me. Was it by phone call? Email? Text? That memory is gone. The important information was this: Matthew had stage four bone cancer. He was in Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto. The diagnosis had come shortly after his move to SF.

I felt floored.

Janine and I were slowly drifting apart, like the continents of Pangea billions of years ago. We could not stay together. I was working at a laundry-delivery company on Stanyan Street, driving a company van all over the greater Bay Area, picking up and delivering medical clothes and supplies from hospitals. It was a nasty, thankless job. My drinking was increasing. Janine worked more and more, and stayed with her sister oftener and oftener. We hardly saw each other and when we did, we fought. By May it was clear we were going to breakup. By June we pulled the trigger. We left the room in the apartment. She lived with her sister; I found a small room in a three-room apartment on 26th and Judah in the Sunset.

Luke and I had reconnected, loosely. Turned out he’d moved to San Francisco, too. He was going to UCSF, doing research at Stanford. His mom had told him I was in the city as well. He called me up one day, out of the blue. It was implicit that he didn’t want to restart a friendship, and that was fine by me because neither did I. Matthew’s name came up briefly a couple times, rehashing the past, and about his cancer. Luke had seen him several times at Stanford, since he was already there. A part of me wanted to see Matthew; a part of me didn’t. I still felt that strange, insecure sensation around what we were—friends? Strong acquaintances? Soul brothers? I didn’t know. Probably it didn’t matter. Luke assured me Matthew would be fine. Which was what everyone seemed to say.

Two days before Christmas, 2007, I was in Ojai for the holidays. I usually drove up from San Diego and stayed with my parents for a week or so. This was about two weeks before Janine and I moved to San Francisco. I often felt nervous about being back in town. I still had a few friends there but it was always a harsh reminder to me, seeing the herdlike groups of close buddies in the bars, and at punk shows, that I was still an outsider, that in a sense I’d never been “one of them.” (And never would.)

I don’t remember who told me about the punk show that night, in Ventura, two days before Christmas. All I know is that I went. My buddy Darren came with me. I drove us, from Ojai. I’d never been to the venue before; it was small, with low, pulsing red light, a two-foot-high stage, floor-to-ceiling windows behind us, showcasing Telephone Road. Cars rushed north and south along the road. I walked into the place and immediately recognized several people. Kids I’d known most of my life, peripherally. It had the normal punk stench of leather and body odor and old pot and beer. Some band I didn’t know played hardcore stuff, and people were jam-packed up against that knee-high black-painted stage. Voices intermingled loudly between songs.

Darren and I stood back from everybody, to the side of the stage, watching the people and the band. A mosh-pit started at one point. At this point in my life—almost 25—I was very slowing coming to the realization that “being punk rock” wasn’t my sole aim in life, and in fact had very little to do with who I actually was as a human being. Like surfing before it, it had become an identity; I’d made the classic mistake of thinking punk rock was “who I was.” But of course it was simply a front; a mask; a costume; a way to fit in as a weird, uncomfortable, awkward young man in a superficial, capitalistic society which had never made sense to me. I’d rejected my parents’ money (yet clearly benefited from it). I’d chosen alcohol and partying and punk shows and anarchy and fun over career and conventional adulthood. But now that was all slowly changing, morphing.

Suddenly I was jarred out of my reverie when I saw a guy who seemed familiar, yet I couldn’t quite place him. He was in the middle of the mosh-pit, dancing feverishly. He was tall, very thin, wore a beat-up black leather motorcycle jacket, the collar popped up behind him. His head was a sort of narrow oval. His eyes were sunken; his cheeks pulled in. His face took on a sallow, hollow look, sickly and half-morbid; his face looked nearly green. The guy’s eyes were blue. He danced round and round and round in the circle-pit. Suddenly it hit me like a hard punch to the gut from Mohammed Ali. It was Matthew. Holy shit, I thought. No way. I studied him more closely. He couldn’t have weighed more than 120 pounds. Stick-thin; skeletal. His face had that awful green glow. His lips were thin and weak-looking, almost blue. The lower-lip still had that slight curl but it was almost indecipherable. In short, he looked horrible.

I stood and waited and watched the band finish their set. After it ended, and the DJ put on David Bowie on the record player as we all waited for the next band to set-up, I watched Matthew as he started slowly zigzagging through sweaty bodies away from the circle. I felt anxious. When he made it out of the circle of flesh, I smiled and walked up to him. There was a bright hanging light which caught his face and for a moment he looked bright pure white and holy.

“Matthew?” I said, not intending to ask it as a question.

“Dude, Michael, how are you, brother?”

Without warning he stepped into me and hugged me. I felt his frail frame smash into mine. I could feel his ribs against my chest. He felt fragile. He held the hug for a few long seconds and then detached. He held an unlit Marlboro 100 in his left hand. I’d forgotten he was left-handed.

“I’m alright,” I said. “How’re you?”

He shrugged, smiling a little, gesturing with his hand as if not to worry. “I’m fine, dude. It looks a lot worse than it is.”

“I heard about it a while back. I’m sorry, man. I thought about visiting you in Stanford but…I just….”

“Don’t worry about it, bro,” Matthew interjected.

Then a few of his buddies rolled up and their hands were on his shoulders, everyone grinning wildly. It seemed like a caricature. We all rolled outside. Matthew smoked, talking to a few of his close friends. I stood aside, just observing. I wanted to smoke but I didn’t have one and I didn’t want to ask and risk rejection. After having finished only half his cigarette, Matthew went back inside. Just before he reached the entrance door, he glanced over and caught my gaze. It seemed to go into slow motion for one moment. His blue eyes blazed like they always had, fierce and exuberant, alive with energy. He smiled again. He jerked his chin at me and that one little gesture took me all the way back to 1996 again. There he was, the same guy as way back when.

I stayed a moment outside and overheard a few of his buddies talking about Matthew. They all agreed that the cancer was improving, that he was getting better, that he’d be back to his normal self in a matter of mere months. I remember standing there, leaning against the wall, thinking, You’re all delusional. He looks half in the grave already. Look at his face!

That turned out to be the last time I ever saw Matthew.

It was late fall, 2008. November, a week or two before Thanksgiving; I know this because I recall that Obama had been the first black man elected to the presidency in the history of America earlier that month. The leaves’ colors had changed and they’d fallen in droves onto the sidewalks; red and brown, the sound of the edges of those leaves skittling along the road by the warm Santa Ana winds. By now I was living in North Oakland, commuting to CCSF three times a week. My phone rang and it was Luke. I didn’t feel like talking to him. Usually in this situation I wouldn’t have answered the call. But something this time compelled me to, and on the sixth ring I did.

“Hey Luke, what’s up?”

“Matthew died.”

I didn’t speak for a minute. Some students were walking their bikes past me, their helmets dangling from their handlebars. A breeze blew through CCSF campus. On Ocean Avenue. I saw a row of class buildings, and the green expansive yard, and some concrete stairs. A professor strode quickly, two massive tomes under his arm, wearing a suit not far off. Sunlight gleamed against hundreds of parked car’s windshield’s in the lot across the street. Cars swished by twenty feet away. I first felt deep grief, not for Matthew directly but for the loss of Janine. I wanted to weep. I wanted to scream. I wanted her back. I knew I didn’t deserve her. Then that transmogrified into images of Matthew: Skateboarding on Luke’s driveway; the cabin; talking with him on acid (his big waving hand); his phone call to me and our excited chat about the future.

“You there?” Luke said.

“Fuck.”

Luke sighed. “Yeah. I know. It’s heavy.”

Turned out Matthew’s memorial was going to be down on the beach in Ventura, right off Highway 101, below the haggard boulders, on the sand. A bonfire. Friends. Family. Speakers. And then a single-engine Cessna would fly over the water for everyone to see, and drop off his ashes into the Pacific.

“You wanna drive down together?” Luke said. “I’m driving.”

And so, a week later, we did. It was a six hour drive. Luke picked me up. It was the first time we’d been around each other as adults. We were awkward and nervous. But as the hours passed we relaxed. Highway 101 stretched out before us like the Promised Land, the highway of our golden, wayward youth. This highway had always been there, and always would be there, we assumed. We talked about old memories of Matthew and us and the lake and Luke’s cousin and skateboarding and surfing and BMX. We laughed about our friendship ending because of high school and Being Cool. We were silent a long while. And then we cried.

The memorial was profound. There must have been 150 people. Cars were lined up along the boulders above the beach for over a mile. We found a spot and parked, then walked the mile back to the spot. There was live music being played down on the sand; Matthew’s old punk band had brought down a generator. Everyone was smiling and drinking beer from cans. Luke and I climbed slowly down the boulders to the beach. Luke stuck out like a sore thumb in this crowd, with his surfer shorts and surfer wavy hair with perfect part down the middle, and his button-up long-sleeve Quicksilver collared shirt. He looked preppy. We’d reversed roles: I was the preppy rich kid, yet I was inked and looked punky and dirty; Luke, on the contrary could have been fresh off the pages of The Gap.

We wandered around for a while and then separated. I found some people I knew from Ojai. Someone gave me a beer. The sun was big and red and pulsing and it was about an hour before dusk. It was cool and sunny out, maybe 60 degrees. Southern California in November.

At one point I spotted Matthew’s older sister. She was hugging a friend. Then I saw Matthew’s mom. She looked awful; feral; primal. Broken would be the word. She wandered around crying, her face a mask of urgent pain. Her mouth hung perennially ajar. Strangely, it seemed as if no one noticed her. She half-tripped and wandered around the people, her shoes kicking up tufts of sand. At times her crying exploded into loud weeping wails. It felt almost fake, as if some made-for-TV movie were being filmed. My heart broke for her. Her only son. Twenty-four. Twenty-four. Poof; gone, just like that. No San Francisco future; no bachelor’s degree in sound engineering. No adulthood. No marriage. No future. Nothing.

Just before the sun dipped completely below the blue horizon, we were all quiet. A couple hundred people, silent, sitting on the wet sand. We heard the sound of the plane and then saw it like some insect against the sky, coming from the south. Before long the sound grew louder, and the plane grew bigger, and then it was there, in front of us, maybe a football field away, above the ocean, and, to the sound of silence and some light crying, a hatch opened beneath the plane and black ash fell from it, blown by the breeze and the air, falling, falling, falling until it reached the blue sea. Then the plane was gone.

Before Luke and I left I felt compelled—I’d had seven beers by now—to see Matthew’s mother. We’d never met though she’d seen me several times in the past. She was short, chubby, and had very thick, blond hair, which fell down around her shoulders. Her blue eyes were Matthew’s eyes, and her lips were the same, that lower lip thing. I saw her from afar, down the beach. It was dark now. People had flashlights and headlamps. Many had already left, climbing the boulders to their cars. I felt afraid but like I said, something compelled me.

I told Luke I’d be back in a few minutes. I walked the woman’s direction. I had no clue what to do once I got there. What I’d say. Maybe nothing.

At last I caught up to her. She faced the other way, watching the sea, the small crashing waves. I listened to the sound of the surf for a moment, a calming, meditative, rhythmic sound I’d known all my life. I swallowed, feeling my punching heart. I breathed long and slow and deep, and then said, “Excuse me?”

The woman didn’t budge, didn’t look behind her. It was as if she hadn’t heard me. So I said it again, louder. “Excuse me.”

She turned, slowly. She wore a headlamp which shined down and exposed her wrinkled, lined face. That mask of pain. Her eyes burrowed into mine. She was old and experienced and wise, I thought, and I was young and foolish and scared.

“Yes?” she said, her voice edgy and quivering.

“Um…” I started, then hesitated. “I don’t know if you remember me.” I paused, as if she would respond. She didn’t. “And, well, I knew your son.”

Her eyes seemed to slightly soften, but the pain in them was still so obvious, so powerful, that I again felt like weeping. A mother shouldn’t have to suffer such grief.

“From San Francisco?” she said.

“No. From Ojai. I was good friends with Luke Smith. Luke and I used to skateboard with Matthew on Luke’s driveway. On Rice Road.”

A hint of recognition passed across her eyes. She tried to smile. “I think I remember, now, actually. You played drums. Surfer. Went to Villanova.”

My blood pulsated inside me; I felt a chill down my spine. I was surprised she knew this information.

“Matthew talked about you sometimes.”

“Really?”

She nodded.

A beat of silence, minus the crashing foamy surf. And then I said, “Look. I just wanted to say. Matthew? He was such a great guy. And…Well…I loved your son.”

Her face shimmered. Her eyes wrinkled. Her lips quivered. She was trying to hold it together. But then her face just completely crumpled. She wept loudly, with abandon, and suddenly she lunged and was hugging me close, tight, her arms around my neck and back, her fingers clutching my shoulder blades, her face crying deeply into my throat.

The next day Luke and I headed back up north. We’d stayed at his parents’ house. They’d moved and didn’t live on Rice anymore. The drive was long and slow and quiet. We hardly spoke. What was there to say? We listened to music. We rolled our windows down and took the air in. We were sincere and serious.

I kept thinking about Matthew’s non-future. About his life which had been extinguished so prematurely. About the fact that death chooses you when it chooses you. I recalled all the same old memories. I regretted that we hadn’t hung out in San Francisco. I thought about his mother, her weeping, our dialogue, her fierce hug. How much pain, I wondered, could one person take?

And I thought about my own life. My own future. Being single. Losing Janine. Being here in the Bay Area. My drinking. Dead-end jobs. Slowly chipping away at college credits. My own relationship with my parents, my family, my friends.

If Matthew were still alive, I thought, what would he say?

Live life to the fullest, brother. Chase your dreams.

I smiled then, seeing Matthew’s face. The smile became a giggle and then the giggle became a roaring laugh. I kept laughing for what seemed like forever.

To this day I have never stopped laughing.