Halfway Twice is Not Yet Once
Halfway Twice is Not Yet Once
"Director's Cut." This version is one I edited and changed up substantially after the earlier version was published in SLAB! literary magazine. More sociology, more philosophy, and more rage.
When we were 13-years old, my best friend, Matt, introduced me to punk rock. The year was 1987 and until then my limited music collection consisted of vinyl records of Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys, bootleg cassette copies of Doug E. Fresh and the Fresh Prince, plus cassette tapes I’d purchased of Kool Moe Dee’s “How Ya Like Me Now” and “Crushin’” by the Fat Boys.
Hanging out one day in his bedroom, Matt rifled through his milk crate full of records—I glimpsed Huey Lewis and Sinéad O’Connor go by—and pulled one out. Its cover art was loud pink and black with an incongruous yellow. I could make out the words, “Never Mind the Bollocks,” which I didn’t understand. Matt put the B-side of the record up and moved the needle to the third track, licking his rollercoaster lips, immersed in concentration. Seriousness decorated his face; his black hair was gelled up in desultory spikes. “Check out the break midway through,” he said and started playing the song “Bodies.”
I didn’t know what it was about. But when the instruments go silent in the middle of the song, and Johnny Rotten screams, “Fuck this and fuck that / Fuck it all and fuck the fucking brat,” my eyes went wide and my mouth dropped open, then lifted into a smile. Matt was smiling too. This was new information! Could you really say stuff like that? Could we be as rebellious? Could we be as free?
We began to attune ourselves to the possibilities of radical gesture. Later that day, out of the corner of my eye I saw Matt make one such radical gesture. He threw one of his LPs out his second story bedroom window. He did it without warning; he hadn’t even said, “Watch this,” as kids do when they are about to do something significant. He just frisbeed it out the open window. I scurried over and saw the vinyl record laying smashed to pieces on the sidewalk below. Looking back at him, he was still holding the sleeve and record cover. It wasn’t Tiffany, or INXS; it wasn’t Huey Lewis, or Bruce Hornsby. What smashed to bits on the street below was his record of the Sex Pistols.
I thought of the Sex Pistols defenestration a year and three months later when I was at after-school soccer practice and I saw my parents’ car unexpectedly coming down the hill to the fields. We had moved to the suburbs in the interim and so I didn’t live near Matt anymore. And I had started at a new school. Flo Jo had won gold at the Summer Olympics in Seoul, her hands festooned with 3-inch long, news-making fingernails. In Germany, three jets collided at an airshow, killing seventy-five spectators on the ground. The Shroud of Turin had been carbon-dated to be only as old as the Middle Ages. Michael Dukakis had been videoed in a tank, looking like a dork in a comically large helmet barely serving to envelope his comically large head. That morning, October 27th, President Reagan decided to demolish the U.S. Embassy in Moscow after Soviet listening devices had been discovered.
Let it be Bryan Oswald, I thought to myself. If not Bryan Oswald, then let it be Craig Evergreen. But I already knew who it was. I knew why my parents had come.
It wasn’t anything supernatural. I just knew.
One involuntarily perseverates in such moments, pausing to look as if from a vantage point in future time, knowing in retrospect that everything is about to change.
The setting sun inflamed the tree crests. Mount Hood was a pink pyramid, immobile at the horizon. I disassociated and, at the same time, experienced the world via an immediate apperception, the newness of which startled. Every tree, every winging bird impressed upon me the fullness of its being. If it’s not Craig Evergreen, then I hope it’s Jamal Jackson. As my coach surveyed the soccer field, his mirrored sunglasses coruscated, catching the fire of the sun. The perspiring boys’ shoulders glistened with tiny colorless starbursts. If it’s not Jamal Jackson, then I hope it’s Brad Reeves. In the parking lot, two joggers were standing together. One, flirting, did knee lifts and then stretched out to a lunge. The other stood contrapposto, impatient, and adjusted her headband. If it’s not Brad Reeves, let be it Jonathan Anderson.
I sleep-walked past my teammates who were drilling traps, paired off, juggling the ball between them. My field of vision was busy with twenty-four legs marionetting out at odd angles to trap or flick the ball. Everything moving in rhythm with the physics of soccer balls; each boy’s body a puppet on a string. I heard nothing except my heartbeat in my ears. If it’s not Jonathan Anderson, then I hope it’s Billy January. A woman sat glassy-eyed in a gazebo, unread paperback draped over one knee. My teammates bodies danced with the exuberance of youth. Their creaseless faces were still slightly plumped with baby fat—everywhere else taught skin stretched over lean muscles. The guys’ adult features were growing in, but each at a separate rate, so their faces looked cartoonish, all out of proportion. Some already had their adult noses, eagle beaked, but still had tiny child ears. Delicate features graced the countenances of some; kitten noses and thin lips. Others were rougher. And there’s always that one guy who was goofy faced, perpetually rosy cheeks and duck bill lips. If it’s not Billy January, then I hope it’s Ben Mattis.
At midfield, I see my mom’s Volvo has stopped behind the goalie net, still fifty yards away. If it’s not Ben Mattis, then I hope it’s Chris Hammer. My mom and step-dad get out of the car, leaving the doors open. They refrain from raising their arms to hurry me over. They do not call out. They are motionless as a pair of dead trees. Petrified.
They would not look as stunned as they do if it were merely Bryan Oswald or Craig Evergreen or Jamal Jackson or Brad Reeves or Jonathan Anderson or Billy January or Ben Mattis or Chris Hammer. Please do not let it be Matt Taylor. Let it be Jimmy Sosa. Let it be Dave Bishop. Let it be anybody but Matt. Not Matt.
As I got closer to my parents, I could read the news on their faces. Right then and there, I threw up.
The year 1988 was a high-water mark—in Portland, as well as nationally—for automobile-related pedestrian deaths.
According to the US Department of Transportation, in 1988 there were 6870 pedestrian traffic deaths nationwide. That’s over 18 people dying every day, or 2.8 per 100,000 over the year. Since 1988, the rate per 100,000 has declined a little every year until it hit 1.4 in 2011, after which it has ticked up again each year. Between 2015 and 2019 the rate was steady at nearly 1.9 pedestrian deaths per 100,000 each year.
Chances of being killed by a car while walking have never again been as high as they were in 1988, when it was twice as likely as in 2011. It was just very bad luck for me and everyone who loved Matt Taylor.
The old neighborhood was swarmed with cars. Matt’s parents’ house was full of people, but it was quiet and dark. The curtains were drawn with only a few lamps switched on. The light of each lamp did not seem to illuminate beyond the volume of its lampshade, merely making a cone of light going down to the floor, like a dunce cap, like a spotlight on an empty stage, as empty as my mind, blanked out by grief.
No food was being served. No drinks. The grieving kids mixed among the grieving adults. I mean, there had not been established some kind of area for kids set off from an adult area.
Through the wretched shadows of the living room, I was brought over to hug the driver. He locked me in, his chin on top of my head. My arms went around him at his ribs, but I was passive. My face was in his chest, which convulsed like a winded cheetah’s after a kill on some National Geographic TV show. When he pulled back, his curly blond hair fell over his face, which was ruddy, stricken, inconsolable. I remember him looking like Reginald Denny, although this was before Rodney King. The bloody association seems appropriate.
I went upstairs to Matt’s bedroom and was startled by the sight of his Trapper Keeper, which, evidently, had been recovered from the scene of the accident and returned to his room. Its three binder rings were crushed and there was a black tire track on the back cover. At least that’s how I remember it.
Like an object from another universe, it seemed to sit apart from the rest of his things. It seemed to have an outline around it, marking it as an object of a different kind. The mangled binder was an object from the universe in which Matt was dead. The rest of the bedroom was from the universe in which he was still alive, in which he was still my best friend.
I imagined his parents leaving the room just the way he had left it. I had heard that’s what grieving people do. I wanted it that way too. I saw the room staying exactly the same as time vibrated fast-forward like on a VCR. Dust accrued. At first lightly and then darkly, dust put a drab cloak over the disheveled homework on his desk; grey dust buried his milk crate of music; the windows grew dark and sfumato; cobwebs connected the headboard to the wall; cobwebs enveloped the Jenga-like pile of textbooks on the floor; cobwebs grew over the four corners in the ceiling, empty spaces filled with gossamer—like Miss Havisham’s in the Dickens we were reading at school—and the room turned as grey as my mind.
When I went back downstairs, Matt’s parents sat me down in their TV room. I sat on the couch facing the TV, which was turned off, and Matt’s parents, Howard and JoAnne, both took the large ottoman and sat leaning forward towards me.
“We would like you to be an altar boy for Matt’s funeral mass.”
The connotation was it would be an honor for me. “I have never been an altar boy before” was the best excuse I could come up with to not do it.
But JoAnn said, “You and Matt were very close and we want his close friends to be able to do something special for him.”
Even though I didn’t want to, I ended up being one of two altar boys for Matt’s funeral mass. When our priest, Father Campbell, liturgized at the mass that the angel Gabriel came to get Matt because God wanted Matt at His side, I found myself hating the angel Gabriel.
At another moment during the funeral mass, I was crouching down with Dave Bishop, holding the big Bible aloft for Father Campbell. “Am I doing it right?” I wondered. I was afraid of doing something inappropriate. I looked out over the crowded church, the hundreds of people mourning Matt. I have remained up there, at a distance, looking in, ever since.
Elevated on the transept, I could see everyone’s faces in the crowded church. It was strange to be looking directly at people’s faces instead of just the backs of their heads. Looking out, I saw the faces of so many crying girls. It made me think of a story I’d heard. One day, Matt was staying home sick from school and Jessica Martinez and Jessica Hochman—both of whom I had a crush on—actually went up to his bedroom on their way to school and woke him up in his bed. Imagine! I couldn’t get over that one.
In the pews, everyone wore bright colors as had been suggested by the Catholic school authorities. I felt we ought to have worn black to the funeral. There was no point pretending the death of a child is an opportunity for celebration. To the cemetery, I wore a pastel, paisley sweater: shapes resembling amoeba and paramecia in peach pink, canary yellow, and periwinkle blue. The stupid, saccharine outfit made me feel angry and helpless. It is such an obvious lie. Colors? Celebration? Jesus fucking Christ.
If this is religious consolation, the whole thing is a sham.
At home, I punch the freezer in the garage over and over, making little dents with my bare knuckles, which bruise up a blue brown like wine dregs and dark liver. There. That’s it. Those colors are more like it.
There was a side yard by our house into which no neighbors could see. The neighborhood echoed mysteriously as I hit the trees with my aluminum baseball bat. I discovered that the skinnier trees could be felled with patience. Thwack, thwack, thwack. I slowed down to allow just enough of a pause between swings to coil up with the deliberate swagger of a home run hitter. And then: thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. The bark exploded off the trunk. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. The softer bole took on dents. I started to sweat. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. My hands started to hurt, vibrating with each strike. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Finally, the dents made it halfway through and the whole thing bent and fell. I jumped back. Then strutted to the next tree. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
Finally, in a somewhat more classic manner, I punched a hole in my bedroom wall. At that point, my mom and stepdad intervened: I went to a child psychologist. Anger is the emotional reaction to thwarted desire, the psychologist said. Anger is the emotional reaction caused by not getting what you want, he added, or the reaction to having something you cherish taken from you. It would be a long time—years or even decades—before I was more sad than angry. For a long time, they were the same thing.
I asked “Why?” so intensely that it colored my being and shaped my personality without my noticing, for years and years. There was something I felt needed setting right. There was an as-yet-unknown answer to a not-yet-imagined question which would make sense of a world that suddenly had stopped making sense. Existence itself seemed to me to stand in need of being set right. I asked “Why Matt? Why did it happen? Why anything and everything?” I turned to the biggest big picture I could conceive of to see where my experience fit in it, to see what sense there could be made of this fucked up, upside-down existence. Cosmology and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series grew became a source of redemption for me; Sagan called it “Sacred Awe.” I thought I was interested in physics. But I realized in my 20s that I was really interested in systematic philosophy. I asked “Why” so insistently that, Matt’s death—I now think—turned me into a philosopher.
For two millennia, philosophers have asked, “What is the meaning or purpose of life? What is the nature of value? What is the capital-G Good?” To each of these interrelated questions, the answer according to many is care.
In a deterministic and meaningless universe—where nothing is inherently either good or bad—human care is what creates value. Care is what creates good and bad. Care paints purposes onto the world, which otherwise lacks them.
Unlike now, for people living in the Middle Ages, the universe had an inherent purpose—philosophers then did not understand purpose as a projection, which is how people tend to conceive of it now. In the Middle Ages, each thing had an intrinsic purpose, which reason could ascertain the truth of: the stars, the planets, rocks, peasants, and kings each had what Medieval philosophers called a telos, an essential goal or function, following the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. A rock’s purpose was to move toward the center of the Earth. Throw a rock and its telos is what brings it back down. Aristotle’s students filled shelves and shelves of scrolls about what the telos of a human being is. The Medieval thinkers ate it up.
They added a hierarchy of nested purposes. It was called the scala naturae or “nature’s ladder.” From bottom to top, it went: minerals, animals, humans, angles, and, finally, God. Within minerals there was also a hierarchy, and within animals there was a hierarchy, and so on.
Every being in all creation had a proper place in the hierarchy synonymous with its proper function, the role it plays in the whole system. It was like an antediluvian Marie Kondo: a place for everything and everything in its place. Going from bottom to top, the beings in the chain increase in value as we go up. Going the other way, from top to bottom, the higher beings have a kind of authority, a kind of power over, and a kind of divine sanction to make use of, the beings below. For example, the plants were superior to the minerals and were understood to possess divine sanction to pull their sustenance from the minerals in the ground below.
Ranking among humans was simple in the Middle Ages. There were only three classes—peasants, clergy, lords—and the King at the top. Like plants’ divine sanction to exert power over and to treat minerals as a means to an end, and like humanity’s divine sanction to use as we saw fit all minerals, all plants, and all animals, the King had power over the lords, clergy, and peasants. King James I said, “Kings are God’s lieutenants on earth.” The English word “lieutenant” derives from the French words lieu or “place” and tener “to hold.” The King was a placeholder for God on Earth.
Any threats to the hierarchy—any insubordination, any attempted usurpation of the King, and even any peasant’s mere quotidian laziness—were thus a blasphemy against God and His divine sanction of the scala naturae, which the scholar Author Lovejoy dubbed, “The Great Chain of Being.”
It may sound stultifying to our modern ears; its immobility and unfreedom offends our sensibilities. But the interconnectedness and the teleological nature of the hierarchy delivered to each and every level exactly what we now lack. We may blanch that a King was justified when he forced the peasants to work the lords’ fields. But it also went the other way: a peasant extracted considerable meaning in life knowing that his labor and his place in the hierarchy served the stability of the whole—the whole, which was, after all, God’s plan.
With the Scientific Revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries, humanity gained a great deal of knowledge and freedom, but it also lost access to a ready-to-hand meaning in life.
In today’s scientific paradigm, the world is purposeless and without transcendental meaning. Science describes the way the world is; it does not tell us the way the world ought to be, or what would be proper to happen or best to do. Today, when we value something or call it good, we are saying, essentially, that there ought to be more of it in the world. That’s where oughts can come from, if not from science. When we say you ought to do this or that, we are saying the world in which you do this or that is a better world, a world with more good in it, a more valuable world than the world in which you do not do this or that. But why this or that is more valuable than another thing cannot be deduced from science.
What-ought-to-be, the Good, value, and purpose—these are the kinds of things for which Galileo and his compatriots could not give quantitative explanations. As Philip Goff explains in his recent book, Galileo’s Error, the Scientific Revolution drew a bright dividing line between phenomena that could be explained by the mathematical sciences such as physics and chemistry, on the one hand, and, on the other, phenomena that were essentially non-quantifiable and were, at best, amenable only to qualitative explanation. These non-quantitative phenomena were: consciousness, the force of moral impermissibility, value, the Good, aesthetics, psychology, history, and politics. And also care. Caring about what we care about does not involve description, it’s about prescription or what ought to be.
Matt was beautiful. I wanted more Matt in my world. There ought to have been more Matt in my life than there was. My time with Matt was meaningful. But also ineffable. I idolized Matt. He was completely himself. His mere presence was a source of joy, calm, and nourishment for me. Matt was one in 10 million. Eventually, he was unlucky enough to be one of three in 100,000.
In the coming months and years, I constantly asked myself how Matt’s death was going to affect me, but the answers never came, while over time the experience took its effects mostly unbeknownst to me. One might think that because of this childhood experience I’ve by now faced the inevitable fact of my own death more thoroughly than other people. However, when death comes close to young people, it does not always inspire them to make homemade T-shirts with text in glued-on glitter that says “carpe diem.” Far from inspiring me to use my time wisely and “gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” I developed a fear of death, which was paralyzing. It stunned and shut me down. My desperate feeling of loss mutated over time into stultifying grief. Preoccupation and distraction gathered into habits and ways of being that formed a precipitate of unfreedom. I had become distressingly unpunk, unradical, unfree.
For a non-believer, facing the reality of mortality can be scary, like crossing a rickety rope-and-wood bridge that spans a fathomless abyss. The cliché is “Don’t look down.” But looking down is unavoidable. The trick is to be able to look straight down, to stare the abyss in the face, without losing your balance.
To this day, I have still not faced the fact of death, even though, as a philosophy professor, I know that conducting a thorough-going examination of death is required by many philosophies I admire, such as existentialism and stoicism. The act of my remembering Matt is entangled with my philosophical-therapeutic attempt to face mortality. Without belaboring the compulsory reference to Montaigne, let me say this essay begins my attempt at recovery. I’d say I’m about halfway there.
Three years after Matt’s death I was enthralled with a girl named Rose Roberts. Rose was beautiful and mysterious; a brunette who only ever wore concert t-shirts and jeans—a little bit of a hippie girl, as far as one can be at 16-years old. She was like my favorite time of day, when the sun is low and gives light like a Vermeer. Her aura was crisp. One day at school, she told me that her favorite street was Germantown Road. I’d never heard of someone having a favorite street before. And I’d never heard of Germantown Road. That night she drove us there in her yellow Beetle. She loved to drive. She would tickle the roof of her car every time they—she and her car—saw another Beetle. We got to Germantown Road at dusk. But we could still see well enough. It is a winding road that goes from the industrial waterfront of north Portland up a steep incline with lots of switchbacks. Cutting through the heavily forested neighborhood, it can take you all the way into Forest Park. It became my favorite street.
We went up Germantown Road and then back down—and then up and down again. Then Rose drove us into the industrial waterfront to the base of an old railroad bridge she said she liked. Passing signs that said, “Danger,” “No Trespassing,” “Keep Off Bridge,” and “Impaired Side Clearance” we climbed onto the bridge. It was made from rusted steel beams layered with chipping-off, silver paint and of enormous old timbers black with soot, tar, and time. There were no lights. We stopped at the middle, the dead center of the bridge.
We looked around silently at the nothing, which was everywhere we looked. Rose kissed me. I kissed her back. The world whirled around me; around me whirled the world.
After a while, Rose said, “Do you want to keep going across?”
I looked down the length of the tracks. They disappeared into black before I could even see the end of the bridge.
“Let’s go back,” I said.
“Sure,” said Rose, without accusation. And when we got off the bridge, back where we had climbed on, Rose said, “David, you walked the full length of the bridge. But you didn’t make it to the other side.”
First published February 2022 in SLAB Literary Magazine, http://www.slablitmag.org/home/issue-16-table-of-contents/#frost