Twisters

Saturday July 20, 2024. I learned that my dear friend, Jon O’Connor, born June 27, 1964, had passed at 60 years of age after an infection hospitalized him. He had struggled first with pancreas problems, then liver, but mostly with hard living and alchoholism. There was nothing that guy wouldn’t try in an effort to get fucked up and out of this world. And I loved him. But I also kept my wary distance from the worst of it. My home was where he crashed when a few hours of orange juice and brown rice was a helpful remedy for a hot moment. Maybe a lavish meal, always with stuffed mushrooms, and two or three bottles of wine. “Let’s compare these three bottles I got for $7, $17, and $100.” The medium-priced one was always my favorite, or did he switch prices to see if I always trended towards the medium? I’ll never know. So quickly, he was off again.

What a joy he was. He had seven siblings and thousands of friends, and everyone has something to say about his physical skill at juggling arts and his skills at listening to people and help them express themselves. One of the best comments was “he taught me that it’s ok to pause the conversation for 15 seconds to compose what I need to say.” He could be very critical in the pursuit of excellence during the huge theatrical experiment we were immersed in most weekends. He sometimes criticized my renaissance faire garb as “something you could wear to the mall.”

The word “magician” is used often, and it retrospect, it fits. He and I got phucked up on pharmaceuticals twice, once on “horse tranquilizer sold as mescaline” at Christmas one year. We went to Eastwoods park in Austin and watched the trees breathe. About 15 years later a weekend of Ecstasy left me sitting quietly working crossword puzzles and drinking orange juice waiting for my brain to come back online. Jon was a constant drug-and-thrill seeker. He touched brilliance and brought it to others along the way.

I was in Walla Walla Washington, literally returning from the cemetary, when my friend called to let me know that Facebook had the story of his final days of infection, hospitalization, catheters, heart failure, intubation, death. (To all that is holy, please hear me, I want to die peacefully, at home, in my sleep.)

It had been a hard hard ten-plus years. Devastation, all that he loved stripped away when his first wife died of pneumonia.
(oh, there is a version of dying at home…and your husband trips over your dead body when he wakes up for work…fuck that was hard)
(I want to die peacefully, at home, in my sleep, in my bed where no one will trip over me)
and then his mom died during a routine medical procedure
(teeth? foot? something that wasn’t supposed to be life-threatening)

Those years can be tracked by the go-fund-mes. One to help with bills for pancreatis and to pay the heating bill when he lived with his first wife in cold, distant, Minneapolis. One to help rebuild his teeth so he could smile again when he started performing again. And one to pay the devastating load of bills when the liver disease progressed to where he could get on the transplant list, if he could just get sober long enough.

After hearing of Jon’s death, that Saturday in Walla Walla, I talked to friends on the phone, packed my stuff, prepared to leave the next morning. And then I drove to the Milton-Freewater drive-in for a double bill of “Twisters” and “The Bikeriders.” I sat there in the big sky, with smoke from wildfires mingling with the dust kicked up by the wheat harvest, and waited for it to get dark enough for the features to begin on the big screen.

Summertime sunsets are amazingly late way up north. The full moon rose red. Dust from the wheat and smoke from the fires made the evening murky and spooky.

“Twisters” began. Good soundtrack, insipid female lead, bad science. And multiple times people in dangerous situations, scenes they should have avoided altogether, get wrenched from their loved ones arms by the furious storm swirling powerfully above them. And that, that is exactly what it feels like to love and lose an alcoholic friend.

“The Bikeriders: was just odd. Based on a book with photos, a loving recreation of 1960s hooliganism and gun violence in an early motorcycle gang. The park mostly emptied out, and I turned the rental car around and sat in the front seat to stay warm in the cooling desert night.