I’m a sentimental fool, still marking your birthday while certain that you’ve forgotten mine. Still playing your music to conjure up your ghost. Still re-reading your books, checking out the quotes you highlighted, keeping the memories alive. Sometimes I’ve thought about giving our stories to the world, but what sense would they make? Two libertine pig children, grunting and snarling on the kitchen floor. Psychogeographers exploring docks, mud and estuarine tunnels. Exhalation and sleight of hand. Madness and society.
Do you remember Nadia? She told me that all humans are animals in a parallel universe. Dragging heavily on an unfiltered cigarette, she fixed me with a no-nonsense stare and pronounced conclusively in husky Russian tones, “Your frriend, he is fox. But you… you arre dauck.” “I don’t want to be a duck,” I protested. “Ducks are ridiculous. I want to be a cat, or a snake, or a scorpion.” She waved her cigarette dismissively. “Want is nothink. You arre dauck.” It was clear that further discussion would be fruitless.
She was right, of course. I was a shy, secretive water sign, always diving to the depths. You were vulpine fire, a crepuscular trickster, the rust-red underdog revealing the hidden via the infernal, corrosive method. You didn’t so much open the doors of perception as kick them down and ransack the palace. Flat on your back in the Electric, with the lunatic who was not yet my friend striding over your chest. Flat on your back in Maryon Park at midnight, connected with the universe, conversing with the infinite.
Our friendship too fell flat and with the carelessness of youth we let it lie. Which dark star are you orbiting tonight, I wonder? Or, after forty years of daily revolution, have you torn loose from your axis: a spiralling, crazy diamond with a carbonite heart no longer constrained by logic or reason? I stand on the too, too solid earth, weighed down by the leaden pull of gravity, looking to the sky for a sign that you’re out there, limitless and free, a shooting star burning brightly along a heavenly path of eternal delight.
Happy birthday, Johnny.
Funny that we’re both looking to the heavens today. I like your way better, though.
P.S. Ducks have many qualities and none of the baggage of those other, well-played animal metaphors.
I suppose they’re second only to the ostrich in terms of their capacity for avoidance. They even lent their name to the idea.