The Awful Grace
A man died. When he was still more or less a boy he bullied me and my friends, all of whom were several years younger than him, into the worst kind of submission: the kind suffused in jealousy. He was bigger but also way smarter and when he came for us it was rarely physical. He spoke and you were instantly in a Queensberry stance, mentally. But we were jealous because he was out of reach, protected from up on high by the Prince of Darkness, and everything he did to us fashioned a brutal charisma out of thin air.
You can grow up and move away and take a different lifestyle out for a permanent spin but certain people stay with you no matter how many boxes you unpack. At least on Facebook you can banish the scourge of not knowing what old banes of your old existence are up to. It helps if you have leftover IRL mutuals who are right there on the ground, keeping more or less tabs. You get a text about divorce papers being filed and you mouth “see you at the cleaners, motherfucker”, secure in no knowledge at all, really. Except you were at their wedding and saw the way he didn’t look at her. He married your sister’s best friend, see.
We whitewash the dead. Saints are made saints posthumously, and this applies as easily to the irreligious. I perused the eulogies that lichened their way across the internet and agreed with my mother on the phone, as tersely as though the line were tapped, that these reports of his being a reformed humanitarian and swell guy had to be a lot of bunk.
Mourning bends toward the selfish anyway; everybody wants to be luxuriously remembered and if that means rigging the obituary of anyone who precedes you in passing, it’s worth it if you get the same treatment. The perfect funeral is one where everybody lies.
He was a terrible person for so long. I’m not insisting the people who loved him and others who pronounced profound change upon his character got it wrong, or that the voluminous privilege and formidable gifts of his youth were ill-dispensed because he was such an ass about them, or even that he had it coming.
But if his reign of terror can’t even be acknowledged, if the ones who escaped it cannot reference it as our most formative experience with him, it’s as though we have no memory of him at all. It’s like I’m forced to weigh telling the truth about a person against how much I’d like a packed house at my own funeral. And I don’t even care who RSVPs to that event, as long as someone reads from “Car Crash While Hitchhiking”.
R.I.P. G.H. 1974-2010
