Spirit Run for Joe

On guiding my dead friend home.

I’ve been close friends with only one true artist, a grown man who gave himself to his calling to write. As a journalist in Chicago, his newsroom was Pulitzer material. His standards for the craft were impeccable, but he admired the average in every person.

Joe thought of the artist as someone beholden to his subjects. He was heart-centric, polite, and well-mannered. A gentleman. He loved the guitar, even wrote a book on the history of the instrument, and bringing people together to make music was his raison d'être during the years I knew him. His curiosity extended to everything: the mob, ancient history, physics. It’s hard to believe we were friends. Joe read all eleven volumes of the journal of Samual Pepys. Eleven volumes.

For fun. 

He was high-minded while also gregarious, and he lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the windswept town of Livingston, Montana surrounded by rare books, his record player, and the photographed portraits of friends and lovers he developed. Photography was another of his passions. Films, too. Livingston is unique in that many raw talents find their way there. Famous actors, writers, and musicians. Joe fit right in, a city slicker in a rural cow town with a big, cold river running through it. 

In my own quarters, a pair of dirty underwear on the floor is commonplace. Joe was fastidious. Everything in his space was intentional. Neatness for him was an act of respect toward himself, a demonstration of proper conduct. He took pride in his few possessions, caring for them with a sense of what the Japanese call aizō ("愛蔵")—loving-storage of items whose condition and longevity transcend the brief life of an individual and carry generational significance.

When I visited him and we listened to music together and talked about writing, I thought privately to myself that this life of his—devoted to craft, to learning, to joy, to class— was the epitome of success. When I shared this sentiment with him, he tilted his head to the side, averted his eyes the way he did when thinking, and drew his thin lips back. He had doubts about his choices—not remarrying, not having children, not owning his own home. It’s hard to do a fraction of things, let alone do all things.

Joe could have cared less what the Joneses pursue. He elevated modesty the way my grandfather did when he dressed for Sunday Mass. He carried himself with dignity. He was an artist that way. I admired the courage it took to stay true to himself in a world gone mad on the accumulation of possessions, the accumulation of garbage. 

After he moved to Montana, journalism behind him, Joe wrote for a television network that allowed him to dive deep into topical stuff mostly related to history, work that paid him enough to eke out a living while not sacrificing his long standing artistic ambitions. He went above and beyond the basic requirements of the job. Dilettantism was anathema to Joe. To write a thousand word article, he would read a half dozen books. Who could fail to respect this level of attention to life? Every two weeks, he would take my ear and tell me about something or other that he was researching for an article. Could be German U-boats. Could be crawfish.

I loved him for his gracious and hungry brain. As educated and autodidactic as he was, he was also warm, kind, and humorous. A deep man who enjoyed life. A rare brother, at least in my experience, who followed his curiosity despite what it cost him, which, I imagine, was a lot.  

He was more brilliant than I fully understood. If you have an extensive vocabulary, there is this phenomenon you’ve perhaps noticed. Depending on who you are talking with, your brain will select words according to that person’s level of diction. It happens subconsciously. When Joe talked to me, he used words I had not ever heard in conversation, but that I knew very well from reading. It was delightful to experience such a robust grasp of language. Outside of polished circles, this kind of talk is unknown, and I’m not—anymore than was Joe—big on polished circles. 

Before I knew it was the final year of his life, I took him to breakfast on January the first, his sixty-ninth birthday. As always, he was sharp, an intellect with a mountain of literature buried in his brain that he was able to recall and recite from at will. He had a sweet tooth, so I bought him dessert—a Torta di Pistacchi, or a pistachio tart. I’m not big on sugar, but that tart was excellent.

We ate it with our coffees. If Joe could be highfalutin or smug, it was over all things Italian, for that was his ancestry. The restaurant I took him to is still there, and they do Italian food justice. That tart blew him away. It was lightly flavored with rosemary, and it punched its weight enough that to this day I think of making it for my girlfriend. She and Joe would have gotten along well. She loves books, too, and tarts. Joe was like a boy eating it.

We lingered after our food was gone, the way it must be done when with a true friend. In retrospect, I’m glad that my schedule was open, and that I did not have to rush off. That day, we talked a lot about his life back home in western New York, where he’d grown up in an intergenerational Italian household. He made himself laugh recalling those bygone years. 

When you get somebody going about their life, it is a beautiful thing to listen to them with every ounce of your being. To listen as if they may at any second fade like a mirage. To listen to a human singular and irreplaceable, to really listen with a sense of gratitude that of all people, they have chosen you to trust with their words in the moment, with their small yet consequential histories, with pieces of their hearts. 

Friendship has the power to allow us to exist in the fullness of our truths the way absolutely nothing else on earth is able to do. To be seen is to be blessed, because much of the time the people who we consort with do not know us well, they only think they do, which is to say they know their preconceptions of us, not us as a dynamic, mutable act of creation looking for assurance that in this confusing world, we are cherished, we are interesting, we are lovable. 

Seven months later Joe was dead of a glioblastoma, a nasty brain tumor. Before he was diagnosed, something strange happened. He told me he’d been experiencing moderate night sweats. I’d had those as a cancer patient myself. But then he improved for a short period. Only one day when I bumped into him, he said he was considering getting a second opinion, and he asked me what I thought. Given my own history, I encouraged him to pursue answers, not to brush things under the rug. As I was telling him this, I heard a voice in my head speak as I was speaking to Joe. It said: Joe has cancer. I had this feeling like I’d grown a few inches shorter. I don’t know what any of this means, but I do know that I knew without a shadow of a doubt. I wish like hell that I was off the mark by miles.

For the few years that I knew him, we shared our love of literature and music, much in the way I had shared these things with my college buddies years earlier. Only Joe was the real deal. He went the whole way with that love and made it a life. He made himself into a writer, a photographer, and a musician—a craftsman. The brother had taste. When I played the good tunes he lit up like a jack-o-lantern, and he wrote down the names of the bands he did not recognize that I exposed him to. Ever curious, ever learning.

He took the artist’s oath and kept his promise. He even had his garret, like the stereotypical writer of fantasy, three stories above the streets of Livingston, Montana. He could have been a wealthy, high-powered attorney. He had thought about it, but that path would have been an act of cosmic betrayal. A lie. He was a writer by edict of god, and he would see that mandate through. 

Until I read his obituary, I had no idea he studied fiction writing at Yale. All we talked about was books and writing. Not once did he mention this prestige. That was Joe’s way. He wasn’t in it for accolades. He loved the work. The work is what mattered. You’ve got to read A.J. Liebling! Greatest book on boxing. Period. Always, Joe was after me to read. Oddly, maybe fortuitously, in the months before he was diagnosed, he returned to Tolstoy, said he was finding more in the old man than he remembered. The day he told me this, he gave me a copy of A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exely. I’d read it as a young man. Read it again, Joe said.

The last time I saw him alive, he cranked James Brown on his stereo while ceremoniously giving me a first edition of Hunter S. Thompson. By then, he was locked up in assisted living. This was his last hooray. He packed up his camera and some things important to him in a small suitcase, as if he was going on vacation. I watched him closely the way hawks watch meadows. I wanted to imprint everything in my memory so that one day I could write of him and honor him and his friendship. I’d never watched a friend die like this. It tore me up something fierce.

The warm hardwood floors of his apartment creaked as he fumbled his way from room to room. There were his records, his books, his curated life. He knew he would not be returning. Not ever. It was painful for him to admit. We didn’t admit to it. Why would we? What was the point of admitting to a colossal sorrow that none of us can avoid? When you love life, when you love ideas, when you love learning the way Joe did, saying goodbye to all that is like dying a million times. It’s not only your own life that you will miss, but the lives lived by all the other artists you admire, the lives of your friends who brim like you with bottomless longings to experience existence at its ripest. 

There was a day some months before our final time together in his apartment, a day when he had called me from the oncology center in Billings, Montana where he was hospitalized.

When I answered, I shouted his name, “Joe!” 

His voice cracked when he tried to respond. 

“Josh, my friend!” he said after collecting himself. “What’s up?”

I was out for a jog in a local park, running in circles to celebrate my own remission from cancer. I was running to prove to myself that I was still alive, that I was healthy and strong. That I was a beast with no quit in him despite a year from hell itself.  

I was running with the rapture of being alive, at being me in this amazing world full of amazing people. I was running to demonstrate to god my gratitude. I was running to grow.

“Joe, I’m good. I’m running.”

“You’re running?”

As Joe knew, I ran everywhere. I had shown up to his birthday breakfast in my running gear, while he had arrived, as usual, dressed in the Italian fashion. That is, with elegance and professionalism. We were like that. I had never shaken my farmhouse roots, my history of physical labor. Joe wore scarves and a jean jacket and black fucking aviators like Tony Bourdain. Goddamned right, he did.

“I am, Joe.”

“Good for you,” he said. 

He did not mention where he was. He did not mention his brain tumor. I knew already through the grapevine. We knew lots of people together. I was aware that he would die, and soon. Nobody had told me that. I knew in my gut. We talked about writing. We talked about books. We talked about romance. I told him I was mad for a bird, not exactly a pleasant state of being or one with any durability.

“Who is this bird?”

“I made remission, Joe.”

“You did?” 

He was quiet for a long time after I told him this. Our cancers were taking us on disparate paths. His voice cracked, again. 

“That’s fucking terrific,” he said. “When?”

“I’m lucky, Joe.”

“Well, that is debatable.”

“Joe,” I said, “I’m sorry.” 

I held the phone to my ear for a long time and stood there with him in silence as it flooded out of him. The loneliness of it, the heartbreak, the terrible unchangeableness of it. There was nothing else I could do. I understood absolutely everything he was thinking, everything he was feeling. I had been there a long time, and I had thought endlessly about the hours as gifts. I had seen enough of their absence to comprehend the sheer terror of losing everything and everyone who I loved with every atom of my body.

To accept death is a staggering act of courage, of bravery. Joe was encountering full force the clash of hope and reality. People have written of death for millennia. All of literature is scaffolded around it. It is both trite and tragic, but not the less unique for being so widespread. Perhaps the final free act of man is to choose it, to accept it, to take it on the chin. My buddy Joe sounded far away already, like a season coming to life, only he was not coming to life. 

“Don’t give up,” I said.

“Hell no,” he said through his grief. 

Then he asked me something, a man my senior by decades. A once-upon-a-time pugilist with a Yale pedigree he had never mentioned. A man who had done a lot more living than me. 

“Josh, what am I supposed to do?”

I answered him truthfully. I had thought my way through this scenario, only it was me accepting a terminal diagnosis, not my friend Joe.

“Joe,” I said as gently, yet as firmly as I could, “you show the rest of us how to die.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” 

Before he was driven back to assisted living from his artist’s garret, from his studio, from his beloved books and records and from the oddball town of Livingston, Montana with its unique blend of famous and ordinary people, we hugged. I could smell death on him. He thanked me for visiting. It was the best day, he said. I believed him. I knew this was it. It had all happened so fast. 

That night, I broke with a sadness so deep it convulsed my body. I could not let him go. Through marriage, he had known me. Through divorce, he had known me. Through cancer, he had known me. He knew about the life I had, that I was grieving. He knew me as I struggled to recreate myself from the acid of my own failures and my own mistakes into a better man. 

The day he died, I ran for him. I ran eleven miles through high mountain meadows thick with wildflowers under the big skies of Montana. I ran among elk. I ran among bears. I ran among eagles. I ran as if my life depended on running. 

I ran eleven miles to see Joe’s spirit home.

Eleven because that number had begun to show up in my life when I was close to hopelessness, when I was close to throwing in the towel, when I was close to believing myself to be many things which I am not. Eleven miles because eleven was my number, tied somehow to the unfathomable mysteries of the universe. Eleven miles because I was convinced there was more I had to offer myself and others. Eleven miles because Joe deserved no less. 

When I was done running, I stood within the abundance all around me, covered in sweat and salt. It felt good to honor a spirit this way. All of creation moved. Even the stones beneath my feet were quivering. The wind circled over the earth and the creeks flowed into the rivers and the rivers became one with the seas. Before each of us arose out of the field of matter, we were there. A light over all things attained, and we were there.

Before I went home, I said to the vast Montana sky with its rafts of ephemeral cumulus clouds:

Thank you, Joe, for being my friend. 

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Running is an act of gratitude toward the Creator.