Originally published March 7, 2005
When the word came, it wasn't unexpected. Stan had been dying for a long, miserably long, time. This tempers the sting of loss not at all. A world that can ill afford to be less good is decidedly less good today.
I've thought for hours about how to eulogize my friend. I'm reticent to make it about me—I find that self-serving and distasteful—yet I do not know how to extricate myself. I likewise hesitate to dwell on Stan's orientation, yet I do not know how to remove our differences from my Stan the Flake stories. We celebrated, even clung to those differences. All my best stories are about our Odd Couple dynamic. So I'm not going to put any artificial limitations on this. I'll just type, and if it gets unbearable, stop reading.
When we met in September '94, I was a freshly hollowed out human being. We needn't spend time rehashing that period, but to recap: I abruptly had no relationship, no friends, no income, and massive debt in a new and chilly town, and my new hobby was going to bed at 5pm. There was no reason in the world for anyone to want to be my friend. That's not modesty; it's an ugly fact. I had nothing to offer another human being. And at the time in my life when I had the least to offer another person, one person figured it out and took it upon himself to reach out to me and be my friend, anyway. There is no repaying a debt like that.
Lord knows why he reached out. Stan the Flake: worldly, buff, health-obsessed, vegetarian, alternative medicine-promoting, alternative-everything promoting, flamingly gay man from whitest small-town eastern Washington. Me: provincial, beef-fed, dousingly straight Midwesterner from a black neighborhood, a fellow who'd never knowingly met a gay man in his life, let alone heard of the putrid herbs and teas littering the Chinese pharmacy that was Stan's kitchen. Much as there was no reason for him to be my friend, there was no reason in the world to think he could be. Yet...yet...
In my will, I instruct my executor to forego any kind of service and instead invite my friends to participate in a John roast. One of my regrets about that decision has been that I, myself, would never get to hear Stan tell stories similar to the below, only with himself installed as the hero. Alas, now no one will hear those stories. Here are mine.
"How many hours have you put in this week, John?"
"75. But it's only Saturday."
"You and your death wish. Here. Take this. And don't take it with fucking Diet Coke. Get some water."
"I already have a mother. Get that muck out of my face."
"Now look. You're incredibly stressed, and you're susceptible to all ki—"
"Say 'susceptible' again."
"Thutheptible. Oh goddamit, I do not either lithp."
"Only when you're agitated. And you don't normally stand with your hips cocked, either."
"That ith not a gay thtereotype."
"Oh yeah it is. With hands on hips. Yeah, just like that."
"Fine. You justh go ahead and work yourthelf into a coma. My fault for caring, ya fwuckin' cornpone bible banger."
And he would pirouette and leave. And I would swallow whatever pond seepage he left in a Dixie cup. This, you see, is how men say they care about one another.
Briefly convinced that a woman was the cure-all for all my problems, Stan emailed me a spreadsheet put out by the Microsoft gay and lesbian group.
"Stan? Why did you send me a spreadsheet identifying all the gays at Microsoft?"
"Yeah!" Stan replied with way too much earnest exuberance. " I figured it might help you if you could weed out the lesbians!"
[about 10 seconds of silence]
"You. Sent me. Me. Me, Stan. Think about what you've done, here. Me. Malicious me. A list of all the gays at Microsoft."
"Well not all of us," he chirped. "Just the known ones!"
More recently, a group of us were downtown, and Stan and I were in the back seat bickering. A collision sent our car spinning some 500 degrees in the middle of a busy street. Everyone was okay, but we were startled speechless. I finally broke the silence. "You know," I growled disapprovingly at Stan, "I always figured when it came my time, it'd be a beautiful woman by my side."
"JETHUTH CHRITHST, HOW THE FWUCK DO YOU THINK I FEEL, JOHN?!"
• • •
In trying to boost my self-worth, Stan once gave me one of the greatest compliments I've ever received. I didn't deserve it, but it was still impossibly great. There's a sweet strangeness, or perhaps a strange sweetness, in a gay man trying to buck up his straight friend by telling him what his attractive qualities are. And nonsense or not, the unusual sentiment behind it was wondrously caring. That was Stan. His grace transcended differences that for others would have comprised an insurmountable chasm.
Huh. How about that. Stan is the hero of my stories, too.
For obvious reasons, names and chronologies have been scrambled a bit. -jh