Week #13: RIP Mike D - Just A Thing I Need To Do

And another gone.

Back in the early days, you tried to tell me. You remember, right? 

I met you when were in our 20s, working the city below the mountains. We'd broken out into 3-man teams and were roaming, freelancing, kicking ass and taking names, pockets full of cash, our cover charges paid, OPM. 

Our team mixed in with the partying holiday crowds, you and me hulking leather and crusted levis next to our dangerous little JC, she of piano wire, muscle, bone and bad attitude wrapped in deceptive layers of raw sex and red hair. We slid without a ripple into the pool of tourists and sharks and then tore through them without mercy, joining and mixing with other teams, breaking away on our own, an amorphous, ever-changing force, crushing targets, taking product, drinking, and partying with fists and guns, adrenaline high and with bright lines to cross and the sense that everything made sense, that up was up and that right was right and it was a real thing.

Two long summer days and cool mountain nights we battled and then we won and the street dried up like midday desert. The third morning we were in the huge hot-tub installed in the deck below the emerald forests and the 7000-foot high, snow-aureoled, granite teats of the earth; sunglassed and hung over like a bitch, the double-shot bloody Marys with extra Tabasco not even making a dent on the damage we'd done.

But it was, for all that, a perfect morning, laying back in the bubbling heat, slow-cooking the poison out, as sunrise boomed over jagged peaks, watching lovely parts of fiery-haired JC float to the surface as she stretched bikini'd into the roiling water -- were y'all sleeping together? I never knew, and didn't care enough to ask, but nowadays I idly wonder -- and we laughed and relived the nights, the retellings already so extravagant as to be near-unrecognizable.

As the waiter brought another round into the middle of yet another fit of roaring laughter, you suddenly sat up and leaned over and kissed JC on the forehead and slapped my shoulder and said, "This is as good as it gets, bros. We'll never have it better. Remember..." and you gestured, wordless, including us, the town, the mountains, the time...I remember wondering what the fuck had gotten into you, but then you laughed, and the moment passed. 

That night at the ski lodge bar when we joined with some of the other teams taking the night off and you talked the non-English-speaking band into playing "Cocaine" so you and me and JC could wail out a terrible version of the song -- I almost got it. 

But time and life moved on. We did more business together, of course, here and there and now and again. JC joined us more than once. She was there that terrible broken night out north of Denver, remember? Yeah. Commerce City. That night. But we were, in more ways than we could explain to outsiders, night shadows. Working together, never mind trust, was not a natural state, and it was nothing short of a miracle that we'd clicked so naturally.

And years passed, and we saw each other less and less, moving up and out and around into places where it just didn't happen that often. JC one day exploded like a land-mine when some new-age administrator stepped in the wrong place, and she walked away from the wreckage, away from it all, and last I heard was a sitcom-style feisty grandmother(!) running a family gift shop, if you'd believe that. I guess that's what she's still doing.

Your belt -- what an odd thing to remember. That belt you had that was made from a Harley's primary chain. It didn't matter how grubby or leathered or road-covered you were, that belt was always polished like fine silver. What a stupid thing to remember, but there it is.

I hadn't seen you for years until Mark got shot and you turned up at the ICU when we all gathered to hold the line. We did what we needed to do there, then went and got supper and a few drinks. We swapped war stories, updated each other on people we knew. Then we walked out onto State Street, shook hands and hugged, clapping each other on the back. I haven't seen you since.

And suddenly the other day, there you were, your whole life boiled and skimmed down to a couple of pale, bloodless, neutral columns on the online obit page, sent to me by a friend in Idaho who's still in the game. 

You looked unbelievably respectable, at least to one who knew you back when, although you still had that goatee, neatly trimmed now. Your business-short hair, styled and perfect, had gone gray. You looked like a fucking stock-broker -- I'd have ragged you about it mercilessly if you'd actually been here. I wondered whether you still had that primary chain under your suit coat. Probably not, but I wouldn't be surprised, really. 

The paper said you died in Salt Lake City after a sudden illness. They listed your age. I laughed out loud, and said "Bullshit!" I knew you were only a year older than me. No way you were that old.

But you were.

I considered that. And as I looked at the respectable, polished stranger in the picture, your eyes caught me. And I suddenly flashed to that morning and the savage, tattooed biker and the hard-as-nails redhead and me laughing in the hot-tub, echoing up out of pre-history, back when we were all ten feet tall and bulletproof, and knew who we were and were doing God's work, and I remember what you said.

You were right.

Good journey, bro.