…this week’s Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3.
I’ve actually been a pretty good mood all week for no specific reason that I can identify—and hey, why look a gift horse, etc.—so I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to come up with this week’s RTBC. But then, after a restless night (I’ve been sleeping terribly lately), I woke up with a pounding headache…and I can turn that into an RTBC:
1. As I was getting ready for work this morning, the pounding headache made me think, as headaches often do, of my favorite line from “Pounding Pipes,” my favorite Blood Oranges song:* “My head’s all right, not so sure about my liver.” This in turn made me think of Simon Riley, an adorable Irishman who camped out at my apartment for a month or so one summer when I was in college, along with his friend Dave Mulvaney (a true black Irishman–not “black Irish,” as dark-eyed and dark-haired Irish people are sometimes called, but a black man who was also Irish—his Jamaican father had moved to Africa, and Dave was raised in Dublin by his Irish mother). One night, Martha (my best friend through much of college), who practically lived at my apartment that summer too, and the Irish boys and I came back from the bar, a little (okay, more than a little) tipsy, and Simon was complaining about how long his hair was getting, so Martha offered to cut it. She cut it a little shorter than he wanted, and he was a little upset, so then she got upset, and everything was a little more dramatic because we were drunk, and the night ended on a less happy-drunk note than it should have.
Martha and I slept in the next day, but Simon woke up early to head to Pittsburgh, where he was meeting up with some friends. He left us a note on a napkin, a note that I have to this day, tucked safely in my treasured copy (really my mom’s, from her college days) of T.S. Eliot’s Selected Poems. The note was very funny and had a little drawing—Simon was, is an artist and illustrator—and among other things, it said “The hair is fine, the head’s a little sore.” (Actually, I think it said “hed” and “soar,” but that’s beside the point.) And he promised to bring us back a stick of Pittsburgh Rock, a joke I had to explain to Martha. I don’t know how or why I’ve kept that note for all these years, except that it reminds me of a very distinct period in my life, when I was quite literally obsessed with a boy (and that’s really a story for another day) and when Martha and I had our Edie Sedgwick summer and were joined at the hip and when the Irish came into my life.
“The Irish” were a group of early twentysomethings, a year or two older than me, whom my friend and next-door neighbor Matthew met in Ireland and invited to come visit him. Three or four of them showed up out of the blue that summer (1982), and gradually they were followed by several more; most of them spent at least their first night in the States sleeping on my floor because they’d used up all their allotted time as guests in the Columbia dorms and I became one of their contact people. They were educated, middle-class kids, but they came over with no plans, not much money, and nowhere permanent to stay, and maybe inevitably, some of them got into trouble. A few got into heroin, horrifyingly; one of them, Derek, an incredibly sweet and shy guy whom I loved to bits even though he was endlessly trying to bum money from me, died in mysterious circumstances, either jumping or being pushed onto the subway tracks as a train was pulling in. Dave ended up getting caught with drugs and deported; he can never come back to the U.S. Others did a little better, finding off-the-books jobs and living in a big shared apartment, and most eventually went home. There was a period of a few months where every other time the phone rang, I’d pick it up and be greeted by someone’s familiar Irish accent saying, invariably, “Amy, can ye do me a favor?” I loved them all, or at least I loved the guys; I didn’t get along quite as well with the women, for various reasons. But eventually, I took to paraphrasing Jesus’s “The poor you have always with ye” as “The Irish you have always with ye.”
But Simon was different. He’d been a fat, shy, unattractive teenager, and when I met him, he was still adjusting to his recent major weight loss that had left him gorgeous and left women chasing after him everywhere he went. He took advantage of the situation sometimes (for which I can’t blame him), and had a few meaningless flings, though alas, never with me. He and I were instant friends, though, and his shyness as well as his creative talent kept him from making a mess of things the way his friends did. He got an off-the-books job in an Irish bar and never asked me for money. 
He applied to Cooper Union and was accepted with a full scholarship (Cooper Union is free for US citizens, but foreign students have to pay, and I gather it was fairly unusual for them to waive the fees, so they must have really liked Simon), and went back to Dublin to gather enough belongings to get him through the school year. As he was applying for his visa, they asked him if he’d been working while he was in the US, and being an honest and trusting sort, he said he had. It didn’t occur to him, I guess, that the fact that he’d been working illegally would have an adverse effect on his ability to get permission to return to the States. Needless to say, his visa was denied; they told him he could try again in a year, I think, but Cooper Union couldn’t guarantee that funding would still be available, so he gave up and went to Queens in Belfast instead.
So how is this an RTBC, you ask? Well, Simon Riley has always been an emblem for me of all the people from my past who I’m unlikely to ever see again, but whom I still think of fondly and will always wish well—and I imagine that if I ever cross his mind, Simon thinks the same way of me. Maybe he doesn’t; maybe he’s forgotten all about me. I know there are people in my past that I’ve forgotten; that sort of thing just happens sometimes. But I find it enormously comforting to think that there’s a sort of circle of people out there, people I never fell out with, just sort of moved on from because of time or geography or whatever reason, whom I wish well, and who wish me well. There are a lot of failed relationships (I don’t just mean romantic ones; I mean human relationships in general) in my past—more, I sometimes think, than most people have—and I sometimes tend to dwell on those. But when I think of people who will always have a little place in my heart, whom I will always wish good things for, and whom I’d love to see again if the opportunity arose, I feel happy and somehow peaceful. And this happens whenever Simon Riley pops into my head, as he does every few years or so.
Martha’s one of those people too, in a way, except that she and I have always stayed in at least sporadic touch and seen each other semi-regularly over the years. My friendship with her is like a lot of my friendships with people in my more recent past: not quite active, but not completely dormant either.
2. And thinking of Simon Riley made me think, through a series of mental jumps, of someone else from my past whom I almost never think of, even though in some ways I still think he and I were destined for each other: Kevin Cooney, the first boy I dated after I finally got over my obsession. (It’s not necessarily a positive, that destiny thing, and I’m pretty sure the way I felt about him wasn’t healthy, though I am sure it was love, love of the type the poets write about and some people never even experience. The fact that there seems to be an air of destiny about a relationship doesn’t mean that you actually should be together.)
Kevin was a massively troubled person (as I was, am too, of course) in myriad complex ways that I won’t even try to describe; that he was already showing alcoholic tendencies was practically the least of his problems. He was also beautiful, the nearest to the perfect embodiment of “my type” of any guy I’ve ever known. (He’d have had to be a little taller and have brown eyes to be the exact embodiment, but instead he had the most astonishing blue eyes I’ve ever seen, and I don’t usually like blue eyes on people, only on cats. You could have drowned in those eyes, though…) And he was arguably the smartest person I’ve ever met, or more accurately, the person who possessed the most of my type of intelligence (verbal/logical/linguistic rather than mathematical or technical or artistic). His brain was the thing that attracted me most (no, really). With my flair for melodrama, I envisioned us as Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, or some such college-girl vision of the perfect crazy-brilliant couple.
And then he abruptly broke off the relationship after a few months for no good reason except that I was too serious about it, and he was too scared to be that serious—not an unfamiliar setup for me in my younger years. The breakup was notable for me in that I consciously decided not to be traumatized by it and not to become obsessed with him, and I succeeded. I think I was afraid that if I thought too hard about what I was losing, I’d really go over the edge, so I just put it out of my mind. We actually stayed friends—somewhat uneasy friends, but friends nonetheless. A few months later, he decided to move to New Orleans, for no particular reason except that it seemed like a place where he could really ruin his life, since the bars are open all night, and I stopped thinking about him at all; as I remember, I didn’t even ask the mutual friend who’d introduced us about Kevin more than once or twice.
But I thought about Kevin this morning because thinking about Martha and that apartment reminded me of the morning that he called me at 7:30 a.m., after I hadn’t heard from him for months, and weirdly, exactly one year to the day after I’d met him (not that he’d have known that, but I did), and I suddenly found him back in town and back in my life. Martha and I had been to a show at Maxwell’s the night before and had been up till 5AM talking after the long trek home from Hoboken, and yet somehow she graciously decided to go home so that Kevin could come over. He came over, and he said things that sounded like I’d written the script for him: he hadn’t realized what a good thing he’d had with me, he hadn’t found anyone else like me and didn’t think he really would, and this time, he wasn’t going to get scared away—”and you can quote me on that.” When he inevitably did get scared away—inevitably and pretty foolishly, since I was two weeks away from moving to Austin for grad school—I did quote him on it, just to vent my frustration. I wasn’t heartbroken then, either; I was furious, furious at him for not being capable of being what he said he’d be, and even more furious at myself for falling for it.
But I moved on, literally in this case, and I stopped fussing about it pretty quickly as I got caught up in my new life in Austin. He called me there once or twice; I’ll never know why, exactly. And then I never heard from him again. Time passed, and I was able to think of him fondly and to wonder what became of him without any particular pain or passion. For years, I’d check the phone book every time I went home to see if there was a listing for him, but it’s not that uncommon a name, so there were usually several listings. I’ve even Googled him, with the same results. So I don’t know, and will probably never know, who he turned out to be, and I’ll always wonder just a tiny bit, every few years when he crosses my mind. Of my relatively small number of ex-boyfriends, he’s the only one that I’d be truly happy to see again—just to see, just to find out what he’s like and where he is and what he’s doing. But thinking of him, I remember only the good parts, and it makes me oddly happy.
3. A much shorter and more mundane RTBC: since next week is this semester’s on-campus session, I don’t have any homework this week, so I can use the time to catch up a little. I’ve already made good progress on catching up, but getting fully caught up will a) make my step a little lighter and b) give me time to maybe see a movie, or shop, or even clean the house a little bit, all of which would be fine things indeed.
4. (I’m whispering this one so the Fates won’t hear me.) There’s a potential, remote reason to be very cheerful possibly, maybe, just possibly lurking on the horizon…but that’s all I’m going to say about that for fear of jinxing it. (I’m not at all superstitious, except when I am.)
5. Basketball, as noted in my lengthy post about it from earlier in the week—and March Madness is just around the corner. I love, love, love March Madness. For the first four days, I watch basketball till my eyes glaze over; I watch teams from colleges I’ve never heard of; I put money in the office pool and agonize over my brackets; I become familiar with emerging great players I’ve never heard of and remember them in June when the draft comes along. It’s one of my favorite times of year, and it’s only a few short weeks away.
6. And finally, a late-breaking RTBC, courtesy of my friend Jim: he staged a Google fight of his own and found that love does, in fact, conquer awl. Best laugh of the week. I can’t resist a good bad pun.
*Incredible but true: I was listening to the LynxPod at work today to drown out some construction noise that was making my headache even worse, and “Pounding Pipes” came on—for the first time ever. No one will ever convince me that iPods don’t, in fact, have minds of their own.