Some Kind Of Life

In Which I Think About Life and Death via Strangers and Dear Friends

I am fifty-one years old. Like many people my age, it wouldn’t take long listening to hear us lament that we are old, and if you’re older than me you probably think the same thing I think when I hear someone griping about turning thirty: You have no idea buddy.

The reality is that every time I think of myself as old, I try to remind myself that there is a decent chance I’ll get another thirty years, although family medical history does make that a little bit of a toss-up, and worrying about getting old is a waste of damn time.

I am very fortunate to have nearly all my close friends still alive at my age. Lots of fifty-year-olds aren’t so lucky, and I did use the word nearly.

A comics maker, Elijah Brubaker, that I only knew parasocially and through his work, died this year on his fiftieth birthday. He created two novels that I love unreservedly. The more recent, released in 2017, is a retelling of a bible story, and I can’t think of a single other example of that genre that’s held my attention. I don’t think I read more than five pages of Crumb’s Genesis, and I’ve owned it since it came out.

The earlier one is a novel only ever sold in twelve individual issues released by Sparkplug and Alternative Comics over the course of a decade. It is a biography of Wilhelm Reich, a psychologist who released books, among others, called The Function of the Orgasm and one that I’m going to partly redact because I don’t want the web searches it might bring: The Mass Psychology of F@scism.

When I was young, I often made friends who, unknown to me consciously, shared an understanding of trauma via experience. Not that our traumas were similar, but that our responses to them stood side-by-side. We were each applying our mechanisms for survival, but appreciated and empathized with the methods of the other.

When my friends’ mechanisms would drift toward something that made things more difficult for me, I inevitably distanced myself, but never lost the love I felt for them and their struggles.

Now that I’m older, I have more empathy and understanding of how I can maintain both friendships and boundaries. I can connect with people, and when I do, those underlying issues often still exist, but I don’t have to take ownership over anyone’s trauma but my own. I can love them with little judgment, even if I occasionally need distance to maintain my own tenuous hold on sanity.

When I was twenty, my closest friend was Chris Hammonds. We bonded over some common interests—punk rock and hip hop, comic books, arcade games, skateboard videos^[1]—and some unspoken commonalities. Our parents were divorced and we were raised by our moms without much attention from dads who started new families. We were both self-destructive, expressed through a total lack of regard for our physical and mental health: junk food, zero exercise, no awareness of planning for our future, no self-reflection, and no awareness of diagnostic or therapeutic methods to combat our individual traumas.

Our lives became quite intertwined. Our personal and business lives overlapped and we spent a lot of time together, especially during times when neither of us had a girlfriend to spend time with.

We did have differences, and those differences became more apparent as time went on. He did have a commitment to running a business that I had never learned, mine failed to achieve any growth, but he could manage his reasonably well. Neither of us were interested in infidelity, but he had a commitment and dedication to getting laid casually that I never had.

For a couple years (though time is flexible and my memory is unreliable) Chris and I were pretty inseparable. We were in a casual business partnership, shared rental space at a collectibles show, and spent much of our time together. He would stay at my house one day a week, I would stay at his one day a week, and he would often hang out at my comic shop^[2] if he didn’t have anything else to do. We would travel for comic shows together (Arizona, NorCal, San Diego) and hang out in our free time, seeing movies, shows, eating trashy diner food, and being dickheads to random friends and enemies^[3].

It sounds like the end of Elijah Brubaker’s life was like many of its years, full of strife with the world around him, and with a struggle to care for himself properly.

I did manage to tell him how much I appreciated his work. I subscribed to his Patreon and followed him on social media, and sent him a little money for artwork a couple years ago. I never got any artwork, which is fine, I’m sure it helped him more than I missed it. (I would still love to own an original if anyone has a line on where they went. Hopefully they will be sold to benefit people who need it or his archives donated to one of the several great comics museums.)

Reading the The Comics Journal’s collection of remembrances (and thank goddamn for The Comics Journal), I was stung by the loss of a great artist and a friend to the many people who wrote about him, as well as the understanding that this was only a fraction of the people feeling the acute pain of loss. I also realized that I was thinking about my friend Chris.

Chris and I became less connected as time went on and life became busier. I got a retail job in addition to the comics business, then a couple years later I dropped the comics entrepreneurship entirely as the market went through one of its many contractions. He bought a retail store (clothing, not comics) and then we were both very busy with separate endeavors. He would cycle through women, eventually finding a wife who was patient and kind enough to handle him. I dated his stepsister and later a bridesmaid at his wedding, but neither of those lasted long.

My retail job was somewhat active, and I shed some pounds over the years. I went through a brief era of drinking at shows and parties a few times a year, but never drank casually or regularly. I eventually got a girlfriend and then a fiancé within a few years of him getting married, and moved my way up at work.

A few more years floated by and there was one thing that started separating us. When I spoke to him on the phone, he would be consistently and insistently negative. 90% of our conversation was him complaining about business, family, or relationships. It wore me down. Not because I wasn’t negative and depressed myself. Because I struggled with it myself I knew that complaining about it wouldn’t help me. I definitely complained, but I didn’t need help multiplying the negativity, and I could never find a silver lining he could see.

His business and marriage struggled, he continued to gain weight and expand out of his once straight-edge-ish lifestyle into drinking and, maybe, some pills. His business had expanded to two locations, then shrunk down to one smaller one. We rarely spoke, but every so often I would reach out. He met my wife and I heard about his new on-and-off girlfriend and their daughter. I called him on his birthday in March 2014 and left a voicemail, but never heard back from him. I had kids and was busier than ever with life and work expanding to consume much of my time.

I wish everyone a life filled with contentment, but I know that so many people never find it. I have found it occasionally and am grateful that I have managed to wrestle some of my most self-defeating behaviors into near submission.

I’ve taken the late, great Tom Spurgeon’s advice and reached out to a handful of artists the last decade or so, and I would argue that all the time I’ve spent writing about creators and their creations online is an expansion of that approach to the wider world. Even when I criticize, I try to make it about things that I love. I’m glad I reached out to Brubaker to tell him how great I thought his art was. I encourage you to do the same for someone whose work is important to you.

I’ve also managed to get better about expressing my love and admiration for the people I am close to and know well. I’m still mostly bad at it, but not only bad. To demonstrate how far I’ve come, I had a family member ask my sister if everything was okay because they’d received a postcard that just expressed my gratitude and appreciation for them. That was it, a short note to say “thank you” and “I admire and respect you," and they were worried that I was not in a healthy mental state. I genuinely laughed out loud that I was so bad at this.

Four months after I left a voicemail for Chris, kids and their mom made their way down to San Diego Comic-Con on Wednesday morning. I had to be in L.A. through Thursday for a work meeting and I got back to my quiet hotel room Wednesday night, three hours north of them. I got a call and she said she had to tell me something, but she wasn’t sure about it.

She said, “I just talked to Sergio and he asked how you were with Chris being dead. I don’t even know if it’s true, but I knew I needed to tell you. Do you have anyone you can call to find out?”

I got off the phone and got on my laptop. I opened up social media and found Chris’s business partner and long-time tattoo artist, Sean. I “friended” him and messaged him my cell number and asked him to call me. He called about twenty minutes later (thankfully he had been online) and we talked. He confirmed that Chris had been dead since the previous October. He had gone to sleep in a chair at his shop in Fullerton after closing up and was found dead in the morning. Sean explained that they had become a bit distant as well once they stopped working together, and he didn’t know for sure what had happened other than heart failure, but that Chris had gained weight, expanded his drinking, and sometimes added pills. It might have been natural causes, but he hadn’t helped himself over the years and had died, age 34. The funeral and ceremony had long since passed and Sean didn’t know that no one had called me at the time. I thanked him and got off the phone. I called my wife and told her it was true and got off the phone shortly so she could get the kids to bed. Soon I was sobbing in my airport hotel room, wishing I could hug my kids and wishing I had done more to keep in touch with Chris.

There is no such thing as common sense, even when it comes to things everyone agrees on. Don’t touch a hot stove, don’t piss into the wind, make sure to hug your kids and tell them you love them. You have to learn things, and like most things, we learn them the hard way. We learn them by burning ourselves, by soaking our pants, and by wishing our own parents would have hugged us more or by recognizing that your kids will eventually grow up and move out and all the thousands of hugs you availed yourself of were still not enough…you would like some more.

And when your childhood was framed with neglect, as mine and Chris’s was, you sometimes don’t learn to take care of yourself. I’ve now made it another fifteen years past Chris and am barely getting the hang of it.

I encourage you to take care of your loved ones as best you can, and most importantly, take care of yourself. You deserve it.