Question: How can I mourn the life of Joel?
I am in Joel’s hospital room at Alta Bates, where I visited him so many times I lost track. That brutal winter of 2018. His heart is failing. He always looks happy to see me. I bring him Carl’s Jr. even though the doctor says sodium could kill him. Joel knows better than to believe her. There are certain pleasures we hang onto, a savor to life, that medical science doesn’t know.
Green and blue lights, an aurora borealis locked up in a hospital room, dance around his face. I lose track of what is his face and what is the light. I see a procession of people walk in who are there on various matters related to Joel. A nurse, a social worker, a doctor, etc. Joel is screaming in agony. The way he screamed when he was in unbearable pain, when the mask slips, when the organism is exposed to the mysteries of injustice. The doctor talks to me. She won’t look at him. Why are you talking to me?, I think. Talk to him. But I don’t say that. He’s going to die, she says. Cardiological jargon I forget. Mr. C–, do you do drugs? Crack, meth? Joel was always so demure about his drug use, he placed a veil of chastity over it. He didn’t want to be thought of as a drug user. Just a little something to keep me warm, he’d say. To feel good out here in the cold. But he never used the word “drugs.” The doctor explains to him now that his heart function will never return and that it’s the fault of the drugs he won’t admit to using. Later Margot, who works with unsheltered folks in San Francisco, tells me that she’s seeing formerly healthy patients come in with sudden and irreversible heart failure. There’s something in the meth, it’s causing…what’s the word, necrosis? It would take forty years of alcohol abuse to get to that point, but even with alcohol, it’s reversible, in part. And we’ll never know for sure, of course, who introduced it, I think, just as we’ll never know who introduced fentanyl, though we do know, after all. The same as always. The vast and grotesque necropolitical cartel of the centuries…
All those nights he passed in the tomb of that hospital room. An antiseptic tomb. He’d watch TVsometimes, but mostly he just sat in silence. He didn’t complain too much. We watched an NFL game together there. That’s when he told me about his brother who was stationed in Germany and had lived there for decades, how he had a whole family there. I think of Fassbinder. Of the Black GI Maria Braun shacks up with. For some reason I picture his brother as married to Hannah Schygulla.
There was a real tenderness in his relation to me, I think. Of course, I helped him. But he wanted friendship more than anything else. Now I can see that. A being totally incapable of cynicism. His invitation to his family’s house in Pinole, his mother’s after-church Sunday potluck. His mother, nearly 90, vibrant and energetic. When Joel gets sick she communicates by text. She always signs her text with her name: Wilma…David, Joel’s in the hospital again. We are praying for him. Wilma. Half the church is there, it seems. I am the only white person. Joel is eating in the corner. He seems happy to be with his family, but there is a dynamic, filled with pain and violence and intimacies, I don’t understand. I have rarely seen him so lucid, though, as when he talks to his family, especially his brother. It’s as if the fog of his mental illness lifts entirely for an afternoon. I see him as he was, as he is. He asks questions, he tells jokes. There is still a lilting awkwardness, and a fear in his eyes, the fear that’s always there and that wouldn’t leave him alone (there are some fears, I think, that are necessary, fears of experience and not of ego, of delusion). I sit down with the kids. Teenagers, really. Later the most talkative one says he respects me for sitting down and talking to them, not putting up a front. You could have come in here as the only white guy in the room and acted in a certain way. We talk about the West County jail, where he’s been incarcerated and where at the time they’re still detaining immigrants I know. He tells me about a horrific car crash he survived and emerged from unscathed, about the angels who dragged him out of the car. They begin to talk about Kodak Black and how he’s being destroyed for being a Black Hebrew, for knowing the truth about who the original Jews were and who the diabolical imposters who call themselves Jewish are today. I don’t tell them I’m Jewish, obviously. Later his brother drives us back to Oakland. His brother used to play in the NFL, talks like he knows the streets or whatever. He’s a big guy, and tough. Now he’s a minister. Joel asks him if watches any games anymore and his brother says no, he doesn’t want to be around those bars. Nothing but trouble. You got to stay busy, stay right.
David, Joel passed on Wednesday night. Wilma. How many months had it been since I’d seen him, how many cold and amniotic aeons since I’d thought of him?
I see that long, almost Mediterranean staircase that led from our street in the first apartment R and I shared in Oakland together down to a little street that connected to Broadway on auto row. That’s where Joel lived, near the top of the stairs in a little alcove. At the bottom of the staircase I sometimes see a couple guys who look like predators. It’s hard to explain, but they make me worry for Joel. Now I’m seeing Joel the time he was the highest I ever saw him. He has something to tell me. He has a feverish look in his eyes. He has something very important to tell me because I’m a writer and there are certain stories, certain things about this world, that sound too evil to be true, and they’re spoken in the language of evil, in evil’s tongue, but they have to be made known in plain language. I’m the one who can tell the story, who can reveal what’s really going on. He talks a lot about the devil and about men on the streets of Oakland who only appear to be men, but who are in fact demons. Men who do unspeakable things. Who have sex with cats. Even when he was sober, Joel was preoccupied with evil. And he spoke about it almost in fables. Sometimes he seemed to have the upper hand. He was sure of his ability to survive, on the physical and spiritual planes. I see him smacking his lips, talking out of the side of his mouth. His eyes really did twinkle when he smiled.
I remember once he took Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice from my apartment. He wanted something to read. He’d been in prison for something like ten or twenty years, he told me. He’d done bad things and lost his daughter. But now he was rebuilding his relationship with her. He hadn’t always been homeless, I figured out. He used to have a room in a house on our street and he did carpentry and odd jobs for people in the neighborhood. This is what I piece together. Then there was a fire in the house where he lived. The fascists on Nextdoor said he had set the fire, that one shouldn’t trust him, that his kindness was all a ruse and he was a violent psychopath who needed to be taken off the streets. There were people who defended him, too. The Nextdoor fascists called them cucks or snowflakes or accused them of harboring white guilt.
I see Jay, whom I also met in the neighborhood. In my nomadism, my derives. You have to know how to be in Oakland to meet the people worth meeting, or to see what’s really going on. Jay who lived in the apartment on the other side of Fairmount his South Asian immigrant parents had bought him. Where they were drinking themself to death, questioning their gender identity, hanging out with their lumpen friends from East Oakland. They were a “Daoist egoist anarchist,” who always introduced me as their anarchist friend, to vouch for me, even though they knew I was some kind of non-sectarian leftist who at the very least had nothing against Marxism-Leninism. They were always trying to get me to read Stirner. They quoted Stirner like scripture. I was skeptical, obviously. I’d read The German Ideology, obviously. You can’t know anything about Stirner from reading Marx, they said. They had an anarchist girlfriend they met online, through anarchist Twitter, who lived in Wisconsin and came to live with them. One nightthey tried to fuck me. I was tempted but turned them down. I was attracted to her. When Jay got drunk they groped me. They pleaded to fuck me, or for me to fuck them. I wasn’t interested. In 2019, I think (this must have been before Covid and the 2020 insurrection), Jay and I and two or three of their Black friends are drinking and smoking in their apartment. We are getting ready for a protest. Jay goes into their room and comes back dressed in all black, looking like Rambo, with a long knife sheathed at their side. I can’t go out with you looking like that, one of their Black friends says. I’m on probation. I think that Jay is either an agent or a deeply sad and troubled person. The latter, almost certainly. Or both. Filled with a hysterical rage and a hysterical love. The most self-destructive person I’ve ever met. I have a vision of the time I went to use their bathroom and it was filled with shit. Like a septic tank. As if it hadn’t been flushed in weeks.
I think of the violence surrounding us in Oakland, that goes all the way up to the CIA. The times Maya was beaten up when she was living by Mosswood. How a guy once came up to me when I was with her, saying she owed them money and she was in debt to some really bad people. How they slashed my bike tires while we were in the Korean restaurant.
Joel didn’t deserve what happened to him, I think. I realize that I could never ask him about his so-called mental illness. Could never know if he was always “like that.”
Now I am back at the beginning (time is formless and tragic, we never know when we are at the beginning, or the end for that matter). Rebecca comes home and tells me she met a really attractive and kind “young man” living on the stairs. Joel was uncannily good-looking, but he was also sixty, it turned out, though he looked twenty years younger before he got sick. Rebecca could never tell age, or time (a spatiotemporal autism). He ate Thanksgiving dinner with us our first Thanksgiving in Oakland. Just the three of us in that disgusting apartment, infested with German cockroaches we couldn’t get rid of and that ultimately got rid of us (as a couple). There was a cockroach on his plate. He didn’t say anything. Rebecca felt an immense guilt over it. I have a vision of a girl who came over one night, a girl I never saw again. A cockroach crawls around her pussy while I go down on her. The depths we let ourselves sink to. The cannibalistic depths of our cockroach humanity. I think of cockroaches and their connection to racism, to the poetics of scientific racism and genocide. I think of the evils of biologization.
He died because he was Black, I think. He died because he was poor. Many people die in this country for those reasons, I think.
The question of his sexuality. The paranoia of his (non-violent) homophobia. The shameful sweetness of his personality.
When he got sick again, or one of the times he got sick again, I went to the motel room on MacArthur I paid for to take him to the hospital. It was totally destroyed with shit, piss, vomit, old junk food. It was unclear when he realized he was dying. Sometimes he appeared to know, and other times to forget. That’s how it is, I think. But he wasn’t that different from me anyway. This isn’t about turpitude. I think of the time Maya and I trashed another motel room on MacArthur where we almost drank ourselves to death. What excuse did we have?
Once I’d helped me get Social Security and an SRO room, I stopped answering his calls as much. He didn’t want anything, he was just lonely. The last time I saw him before the pandemic we ate Indian food together and some cops fucked with him on the street. They wouldn’t believe he was who he said he was until I told them who he was. The fucked up parody of slavery that all was.
This world must not exist, I think. I think of the difference Badiou spells out between communists who posit “another world is possible” versus those who say “this world must not exist.” I know which one is true, for me.
I name…Mayor Libby Schaaf, guilty of murder. You can’t talk to someone like that, I think. These sociopathic agents of capital and the state.
The infernal machine of capital. The land I see from the Berkeley hills on the weekly hikes I take with Andrew. He’s returned to the land, I think. Returned to his land. His land was Alabama, originally. That’s where he was born. I remember how he drove himself all the way across the country and back when he was desperately sick to see his sister one last time. He was so weak he could barely walk. He told me he was so sick he could only drive an hour at a time. I don’t know how he made it. I think of the awful decay of his body, the cruelty of its atrophy.
He believed in God. He was depressed and sicker when it was cold. His health and his mood improved in the sun. The sun shines on us all, I think, but not on the souls of the ruling class, who will never see the sun. They’re dead stars, distant stars. One day capitalism itself will be a ghost, a dead star whose vast destruction shines on. I think of petroleum and what Benjamin said about “only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” The future will see our violence when we’re gone, our insanity. Our nightmares will be their ancestors. They will look on and know us as we never knew ourselves. Their verdict will be terrible. The problem of how to inhabit now the verdict of the future.
I hope his death was sweet, I think. I think of the strawberry milkshakes from Carl’s Jr. he always wanted me to bring him in the hospital. The sweetness of life, I think. A feast in heaven…a feast in hell…This world is the feast of hell. Satan’s feast. They chew us up. Yum yum.
I snap like an angry dog. This canine world again. This dog-eat-dog world. We snif each other, too.
Aw, I’ll be alright, he says.
Some things happen multiple times. I have a sense of deja vu.
We are not who we think we are. And: there’s another name for this world.
Our words escape us and say other things, like our souls.
There’s that aurora borealis again. I see Libby Schaaf in front of a firing squad. I see OPD in the streets at night, how their lights are always accompanying me in the delirium of my insomnia when they make their raids at the homeless encampment down the street. The long, dark night of the soul. The phantasmagoric police state of the soul.