Tyler

*I wrote the following to a pen pal about two years ago. I’m posting it here to honor the anniversary of our friend’s death.*

A couple weeks ago, a drink or two into a deeply pleasing night of domesticity (Arielle cooking, me rearranging and alphabetizing our novels, Mets game on) Arielle was phoned by her ex-boyfriend—one of the important ones. This was wildly out of the ordinary. Daniel had done an unimpeachable job making himself scarce since they agreed to go their separate ways in college. Last we heard he was teaching English and dating a 2L at Yale. (Me: “Daniel better put a ring on that!” When I first met him, in 2005 probably, as a lumpy and largely friendless dude come over to smoke, drink and flirt with his girlfriend on her porch, he introduced himself—a physically beautiful little guy with big curly hair and a Christlike air—by saying “I understand you’re poor,” and handing me a bowl of soup. I experienced the kind of total defeat the drunk driver does, who can’t stop expressing his gratitude to the cop who pulled him over and cuffed him. This child of the Chicago suburbs had made a point of being or at least appearing money-indifferent his whole life, and had advanced from working for the Asheville homeless to teaching middle-school New Havenites, so Yale law would, I cynically thought, have a certain irresistible erotic appeal to him.) But A. didn’t want to take the call; she let it ring; he called back; she picked up. 

I saw her face change. She said, “Oh no…” and walked out the front door to our porch. 

After processing this for a minute I typed a text to her I’d never send, one she could answer with a single gesture, then went outside and showed it to her. Is it Tyler? 

She’d eschewed any of our copious chairs for the more grounding discomfort of the wooden planks themselves. She looked at the text, looked at me, nodded. 

I’d always assumed that Tyler was Daniel’s sidekick, but at some point during the memorial service I got to wondering if I’d had it backwards.

Daniel and Tyler met in high school in Wheaton. Arielle and Daniel met in college at UNC-Asheville. The three spent a summer working together at a farm in Virginia—a by almost all accounts grinding ellipsis of manual labor separating much more normal terms of middle-class American collegiate life that was then dutifully hallowed in verse and song and photo album and whisky-tinged recollection ever after. I say “almost” because Tyler probably really did enjoy it. 

He was lean and strong, fair and tan, a powerful feeler of emotions who wore round-rimmed glasses back then, listened to you with his whole body, was a sufi in the kitchen at night with the volume turned up, a person I think almost constitutionally unable to complain, blue-eyed, without a plan in his head beyond the next visit/trip/WOOFing. In fact he never seemed to think more than two months ahead at any given time—an aspect of his personality that seemed marvelously beatnik at the time and that only now am I realizing was rooted in the sinister inclination that would see him hanging from an I-beam in the animal room of his house in 2022.  

We chimed at once. Like Daniel, Tyler struggled with the Christianity he’d been reared in. Unlike Daniel, he wore his struggle—not with ostentation but visibly under the skin. 

My family was something of a joke: dad Catholic, mom Baptist, sister Jewish, me Atheist. One of my folks’ bigger regrets was enrolling my sister and me in a private school of an apocalyptic fundamentalist Baptist bent. They’d done it for the academic reputation and hadn’t reckoned on the experience souring their kids on religion for decades, but that’s what happened. By the time I met Tyler I’d set aside the mantle of deism-agnosticism I’d worn since high school (a superior being may exist but it won’t necessarily be anything like us, according to my definition) for the full Dawkins. You remember: college was no time for half measures.   

Me he liked because we could talk poets and the bible too. He liked that I’d squirreled my way into this orbit of lovelorn dudes circling Arielle. 

Once or twice when the three of us were hanging out he’d lose control of his laughter and Arielle would very deliberately try and level him. She thought he was bipolar. 

A small sampling of Tyler stories I heard at the ceremony and wake: 

Our friend Derrick, who’d met Tyler when, during a sudden downpour, the latter had insisted that they strip off their shirts and run fill tilt through a residential neighborhood (“How could he tell that I was the kind of person who needed that?” Derrick asked) was hiking with Tyler somewhere in Washington state when they came upon a sound that had a distant little craggy islet in it. Derrick said, “I’ll bet no one’s ever swam out to that rock,” and Tyler was down to his skivvies and had dove in in two shakes. Derrick said it took an hour at least for Tyler to swim all the way out there, where he lingered a while before returning totally exhausted. Asked how it was, Tyler said it was terrible—everything completely covered in bird shit—but that he’d had to stay a minute just to catch his breath. 

Daniel told the story of a time Tyler was supposed to visit but had to cancel last minute because he couldn’t afford the trip. He’d seen a commercial about children in need featuring a south Asian girl with a cleft palate and had called them up right away and given them all his money.  

Lots of people mentioned Ralphie, a seriously troubled and troublesome dog Tyler’d taken in, who at one point literally smashed through a wall of Tyler’s house. And his dog Dirk, a colossal and sedate animal of a breed that escapes me, was something of a celebrity at the ceremony. Everyone knew him because Tyler wrote to everyone and seldom let a letter pass without relaying news of Dirk. When Arielle and I visited his house (a tiny old cottage his parents had bought for him in Defiance, Ohio, so that he could live in the same town as his sister and her family) Dirk was outside, lashed to a tree like a grounded dirigible, refusing to enter. It would come out that he hadn’t been inside the house since Tyler’s death but that he wasn’t keen on leaving the yard either. When he looked at you, you couldn’t help seeing his confusion. 

It struck me at once on first entering Tyler’s house the way he’d oriented his writing table: a flimsy card table with a Smith Corona typewriter on it, facing the front door. He sat and wrote letters while facing his front door from only four or five feet, the rest of his house behind him. Letters was how he faced the world. I am certain that he was a known quantity to every postal worker in Defiance. 

At the informal outdoor banquet (ribs and myriad gluten-free sides—Tyler’s favorites—him one of the serious sufferers of celiac disease) we greeted his sister Chelsea, whom we’d last seen about fourteen years prior at our wedding when she’d come as Tyler’s plus-one. I conveyed to her the bit Zadie Smith conveyed from a correspondent of Julian Barnes’s: “It hurts just as much as it’s worth.” She implored us not to leave before we’d gone through several boxes of Tyler’s personal effects they’d hauled out of his house. We were joined in a generous parlor of their church-owned house (Chelsea’s husband a minister) by Daniel and his fiancée and our friend Derrick and another lifelong friend of Tyler’s we’d never even heard of. Others filtered through. Someone delivered a bottle of wine and that’s how the wake got started. 

Chelsea told us no, not bipolar disorder: her big brother had been diagnosed early with paranoid schizophrenia. Long heavy silences punctuated and freighted the conversation over the next seven or eight hours. Many of us confessed that we hadn’t read all the letters he’d sent. I confessed that I hadn’t read the book of poetry he’d self-published and sent us. That day I learned he’d self-published three others. Some of it was kind of wonderful, but most of it was dreck. He’d become frozen in a posture of Bukowski impersonation and thought highly of his own work—I think it was the only vanity he had. He didn’t rewrite. 

Apparently the average lifespan of an American male with paranoid schizophrenia is around 62. Tyler didn’t see 40. He smoked weed and drank whiskey and cheap cider and rolled his own discount tobacco. In the last five years of his life he put on pounds in reams. He had harrowing experiences of remote psychiatry during COVID. There were drugs that shouldn’t have been diagnosed and a change in medication near the end that maybe precipitated it. He didn’t have wifi in his house because he believed they were listening. Left by Daniel for a rehabilitative hour or so to milk a cow in a purely pastoral setting miles and miles from modernity, he was found pale and sweating and mumbling that the FBI was going to get him on child pornography charges. Come to Asheville one last time to help Derrick patch his roof, he swigged from a bottle of whisky on the roof and asked Derrick if he could hear those people over there, miles away, talking about getting him for the child-touching thing. Chelsea’s minister husband, who’d emceed the memorial service, asked the room if it knew of any instances of abuse in Tyler’s past. The room didn’t. The last time we’d seen him he’d shown up unannounced at our house in October of 2020. High COVID. We were a little spooked. Suddenly manifest was the gulf between us. We kept it to the porch and Arielle didn’t stay long. I agreed to accept one of the ciders he had in his car. (He also had Dirk in there, overfilling the backseat of a Toyota Tercel, if memory serves, but Dirk couldn’t climb the steps to our porch, and there were cats to consider.) He and I spent a pleasant if lightweight half an hour or so, the substance of which has completely fled me, and then he left. 

The next time we were that close to him was when we tromped across a cemetery in Ohio. Daniel had texted the location: in the northwest corner under a big tulip tree. It was a lovely cemetery, huge and flat and intentionally landscaped with big bursting trees and sculptural prophets, flowers everywhere and flags. This was on the banks of the Maumee River, and the only flaw, I thought, was the tacky-ass segments-of-hymns broadcast in tinny electronic periodically from a central hub. We are naive, because lucky, and hadn’t considered that the site would be raw, so that was a shock. A coffin-shaped rectangle of slightly mounded straw amid a ragged fringe of grass. Chunks taken out of the earth where the backhoe’s weight had sat. Far out on the periphery of the sprawling estate. 

We poured whisky on him and drank from the bottle. It was 10 or 11 AM, I think. Arielle read her last letter to him, Polaroids were snapped, ambling walks undertaken, sticks made to adorn the gravesite in ways not too crown-of-thorny. I said goodbye. 

From there we went to his house and met Dirk. Every room was packed with sagging bookshelves and Daniel said please take some. The only one I opened was Infinite Jest, thinking to myself: Is it time? Imagine my surprise when a sheaf of pictures fell out. People I didn’t know and a couple I did, including a friend of Arielle’s he had a deathless crush on and a snap of himself at his most glorious, sitting in a lawn chair on a sunny day looking like nothing more than a US Navy sailor from the 60s: almost naked, tanned and blonde and smoking and happy. 

The next day it was the memorial service and banquet and impromptu wake. 

The day after that we sped home to North Carolina and, trying to nap in the passenger’s seat, I experienced the lowering of the shields. The strange numbing membrane that encloses me on hearing bad news had, at length, peeled off, and I couldn’t stop thinking about my friend’s last minutes.

I think about them still.