Thoreau's Rooster

          On the ride back to Columbus after Tyler’s funeral, Mark and I don’t talk about Tyler. Instead, we talk vaguely about politics, about movies, about music we listened to before but not anymore. We wonder if hating the government makes you a liberal or a conservative. We talk about how it’s funny that NoFx’s peak album was called “The Decline.” We do not, though, talk about our friend, Tyler, or the last night the three of us were together, or how he checked himself into the OSU psychiatric hospital the very next morning.
          Mark pulls out stuffing from the leather seats of my Villager minivan. “Car’s falling apart, buddy,” he says.
          “Yeah,” I say, “she’s getting a little older now.”
          “Shit, I remember riding to grade school in this thing,” Mark says, scratching at his overgrown beard. I picture the bald-faced versions of me and Mark riding in the backseat, my mom at the wheel, listening to a Michael Bolton tape. We complain that the music sucks, though we are yet to define exactly what kind of music we think is good—something that will keep us bound for many years.
          “Yeah, this baby’s been with the Courtney family for a long time, now,” I say. I pat the side of my carseat twice, as if to say “good girl.”
          “Hard evidence,” Mark says, and flips his thumb through the library of dead air-freshener trees that dangle from my rearview mirror. We laugh. Mark puts his hand back at his side, and the trees hanging from the mirror swing back and forth slowly. I am reminded of an image, one that is in Mark’s head, too, I’m sure, but push it away.
          “For every action, an equal and opposite reaction,” I say, citing science rather than emotion, the latter begging me to ask how long Tyler swung that way.
          I keep driving down highway, highway, highway, watching the road and the orange sunset sky. I feel like we’re characters at the end of a movie, the cameraman peeking just over my right shoulder, and I deliver what I believe to be a good final line: “Goodbye Perrysburg,” I say with enthusiasm, looking in my mirror, though we are already miles and miles out of town.
          Mark laughs. “Yeah, it gets more and more depressing every time we go back, doesn’t it?”
          “Well, this time for sure,” I say.
          “I don’t know, man,” he says. “What is it about that town?” Without his saying so, I know he’s talking about the suicides. There was Jay Roelling, his older brother’s best friend who hung himself in his bedroom closet with barbed wire, Chris Norson, who climbed the watertower to see how it felt to jump off, and now Tyler, our boy, who ripped his hospital gown to thin pieces, made a rope, and a noose.
          We speak in metaphors, trying to figure out what part of our little suburb town could be causing this, talking about baby birds and safety nets and loaded guns and we realize that no language, figurative or literal, is going to pinpoint this thing, this smalltown sadness that plagues our kind.
          I pose a question: “Is it the town?” I say, my index finger raised for emphasis, “or is it us?”
          We keep quiet for a while, since neither of us have a real answer. When the silence becomes awkward, I get out my CD booklet and put in the saddest sounding instrumental music I can find. We ride this way all the way back to Columbus, feeling vulnerable, suddenly unable to blame any of this on Perrysburg.
          “I’m never going back,” Mark says.
          I laugh. “You wish.”

Theory #1:
          When I think about Tyler, I am forced to think about Mark, who killed himself, too, just a month later, just a month after that car ride, thus fulfilling his prophecy of never going home again. A year later, it still is a hard thing to understand, to wrap my head around.
          What was the cause of all of it? Was it the town? It couldn’t be. That explanation would be too simple, too predictable. There was nothing unique about Perrysburg in comparison to any other suburban town. It was completely forgettable. Could it be the town’s lack of personality that made my friends feel so insignificant, so bored with life? I got nowhere. I was thinking too vaguely, circling back on myself.
          So I got to the specifics, and started to come up with these theories, some simpler ideas to explain the what and the why.
Theory number one puts the blame on me, and my own inaction. Did I know that Mark was depressed? Of course I did. In our efforts to be songwriters together, he would leave sets lyrics at my house for me to read once he was gone—probably his way of telling me these sad things without the awkward confrontation. I read the lyrics “stainless steel/ so good to feel/ edge serrated/ my vital veins invaded.” I knew. He told me he would never go back to our hometown. Still, nothing.
          My second day back in Columbus after that first sad trip to Perrysburg, I went to dinner in the Short North with Sarah, Mark’s girlfriend. We were good friends, but it was not a social visit; it was a dinner with a goal. We were very efficient and business-like once we sat down, getting right to the point: What would we do about Mark? He was suicidal. Up to this point, we had gotten a handful of empty threats from him. In fact, he cried wolf once on the Lane Avenue bridge, once on the Iuka, and seemingly countless times in his bedroom, usually after a breakup with a girl. Eventually, we became used to it. We were tired of being woken up in the middle of the night, just to worry in vain. A call for attention, we called it. But once Tyler was gone, we were shaken, no longer willing to call anyone’s bluff. So Sarah and I devised a plan. We would get him some help. A confrontation, even an intervention, was necessary. Once the plan was ready, though, I wavered. Sarah asked me, “So when do you want to go and talk to him?”
          I hesitated. I asked, “Can’t you just take care of it?”

2. Invincible
          I am on the stage of the Great Masonic Ballroom in Toledo, waving my goofy baseball cap at a crowd of a thousand, at least. After two hard years of working at my music, I am finally getting my big break, opening up for a band that would draw a crowd like this one. They hold their hands high above their heads, shouting with enthusiasm. On my left is Tyler, on my right I have Mark, and behind me our drummer Joe, and we are all smiling big, fighting the urge to just drop our guitars, throw our arms in the air and shout Yes!
          I strum the chords to the last song of our set, a ska song, and I pop the strings with such force on my upstrokes that they lift off the bridge. Mark is singing along with me: “You better hurry up, cuz’ the bandwagon’s leaving, don’t wanna be left behind/ Don’t wait up for me, I won’t be there, I like being one of a kind.”
          The crowd loves us. They push to get closer, and they move as one in waves—at once everyone topples to the left, and then, with a push from the people on the outskirts of the crowd, they move back to the right. I am only fifteen years old; Mark, Tyler, and Joe all sixteen, but the crowd does not write us off because of our youth. Instead, they embrace the energy we bring, and our message of nonconformity appeals to them.
          We hit the final chord, and then again, and again, all of us swinging our extended arms in circles, hitting the guitar on the way down, Pete Townshend style. Tyler shouts to me, “Stagedive!” I laugh, in a way that suggests a sarcastic yeah right, but Tyler is relentless.
          “Come on, man,” he shouts. “It’ll be awesome.”
          “They are gonna drop you,” I say.
          Mark pokes his head into the conversation, which takes place while the crowd gives us plenty of applause, and says “Let’s do it.”
          “Dude, they’re gonna drop you,” I say to Tyler, this time looking him straight into the eyes, playing the parent.
          “No they won’t: I’m fucking invincible,” he says, and he is airborne. Soon Mark has jumped too, and aside from the drummer I am alone onstage. Afraid of being seen as the coward, I finally jump, though it is a slower process of submersion, like I’m easing myself into a cold swimming pool.
          Floating on top of the crowd, I, too, feel invincible, somehow more than human. I wonder how long it will be before the current carries me to the edge of the crowd, or if, maybe, I will get caught in the undertow.

Theory #2:
          In high school, Mark, Tyler, and I were celebrities. Everyone knew who we were, and wanted to be part of what we were doing: making music that was fun, and fresh. We performed in front of huge crowds like that night at the Masonic a few times. By the end of high school, though, we had stopped making music together. Yes, there were some personal differences, but the main reason that we stopped playing, I believe, was because we came to have a much darker, more teenage outlook on life, and the happy-go-lucky music we used to make seemed silly and false. Music about pain and lost love seemed better to us, somehow more appealing. As we found the darker artists, we wanted to imitate them, and we knew that songs like this just couldn’t be played in a happy major key with a happy fast beat.
          So what happens when a pseudo-celebrity is stripped of his celebrity status? Theory number two says that it scars him, so that nothing in life ever seems as good, like the peak, the climax, has already come and gone, and there is nothing left but a lifetime of falling action.
          After high school, we moved to Columbus, and left our nostalgic fans behind. At one of the first parties we all attended in our new city, Mark got his hands on an acoustic guitar. While everyone else stood in lines to fill up their beers, the three of us traded off playing cover songs, singing together, even getting a group from the party to sing along at points.
          “You know what you should play?” Tyler said between songs. He looked at me, then looked at Mark, smiling with anticipation.
          Mark lit up. He strummed the first few chords to an old song of ours and said, “This one?”
          Tyler said yeah, and laughed. Mark played through the introduction and Tyler danced a little until the words came in, and they waited for me to sing.
I choked. I was embarrassed. “None of these guys know that song,” I said, looking out at those in the crowd that were listening to us play.
          Tyler and Mark didn’t talk much more about it. I had struck a chord, I believe. I had pointed out a truth they hadn’t realized yet. We were forgotten. Mark put the guitar down.
          Theory number two puts Tyler and Mark on the level of Bonaduce. They were child celebrities, who would later have to become normal, boring people, and this fact would cause them to fall apart. The only thing that I can hope is that we squeezed enough into the time we were on top, and gave enough energy, enough hope to the world while we had them listening.

3. On With the Show
          Just a few days before Tyler kills himself, I am sitting in a booth at Bernie’s, an OSU campus basement bar, ignoring all of my friends who have come to support my new band, Made To Break, because it’s a school night and I have a lot of reading to get finished. I keep my nose in the book, but in my peripheral vision I see Tyler and Mark talking to each other in a booth, leaning inward toward each other, suggesting that somebody is telling secrets. Almost three years after the breakup of our band, there is still a little bitterness, even a little longing, but Tyler and Mark are good friends, and come to support my new band nonetheless.
          I should talk to them, but I don’t. I watch them drink, and drink, and smoke for probably an hour, all the while engrossed in what seems like an intense conversation.
It is probably midnight by the time my band goes onstage. I set up my bass rig, tall as I am, while Mark and Tyler show off their drunkenness in front of the stage. Made To Break, they shout, over and over again, testing out how many ways it can be said, how many different syllables can be emphasized. An anonymous sound tech is walking from the stage to the sound booth, back and forth, setting up microphones and direct inputs, and his shoulder bumps into Tyler’s. Neither party apologizes, only warns.
“Don’t do that again,” one of them says.
I am plugging cables into outlets, unwinding cords. The sound tech heads back to the stage, and Tyler rocks him hard with a shoulder. “Sorry, dude,” he says. “An accident.”
A scuffle begins. Both men are drunk, one from alcohol, the other from power—comfortable, probably, knowing that this is where he works, and if it came down to it, he could just have the kid thrown out.
          Mark, always sticking up for his friends, helps Tyler get separated from the sound tech, and encourages them both to settle down. Ticked off, adrenaline pumping, the sound guy gets back to work. As he hooks up my direct box, he asks, “Do you know these guys?”
          I have two options. Deny my affiliation with Mark and Tyler, or establish myself as one of the bad guys, an enemy of the man whose stage and microphones I am about to use, the man who will pay us later. I stare at my shoelaces, because it makes it easier not to look at my friends when I say, “I have no idea who they are.”
          On a final trip across the room to the sound booth, the sound guy gives Tyler a shove, and they start throwing punches. The bartender is shouting, telling them to get the fuck out, and Mark listens. He gets hold of Tyler, and they walk out of the bar together, side by side, embracing each other, as I think on with the show, and start strumming.

Theory #3:
          I didn’t think much about Tyler and Mark’s conversation at that bar until after everything had happened, and they both were gone. Sometime after Tyler’s death, Mark had mentioned the conversation, though only briefly, telling me that he and Tyler talked a lot about their feelings, and how they shared some of the same ones. Another one of those clues that Mark gave me, which I ignored.
          Theory number three involves what exactly was said in that conversation, and was developed only after I made the realization that the day Mark hung himself in his bedroom on Blake, just blocks away from me, was exactly a month after Tyler’s death. The theory is that this was a plan.
          One sunny day in the sixth grade, Tyler was playing basketball in his driveway with his friend Matt, who would later tell me this story. Matt went inside Tyler’s house to get a drink of water, but stayed inside when he saw something he liked on the kitchen TV. Ten minutes later, he went back outside again, and saw the young, bare-faced Tyler swinging, his neck tangled in the nylon netting of the hoop, which was lowered just far enough so he could reach the rim if he jumped. His face was blue, Matt told me. Luckily, the ambulance came quickly, and Tyler would live, having only to hide the scrapes on his neck for the next few weeks with collared shirts and necklaces with big metal beads.
          Because of stories like this, evidence that Tyler and Mark had suicidal thoughts from such an early age, I am convinced that both of them possessed an instinct to die. The incident with the basketball hoop would be called an accident around the town, but I know now that it wasn’t; it was Tyler’s instinct to die taking over.
          So, with this instinct, what stops them from just getting on with it, and doing themselves in? I can’t be sure, but I can guess that it’s friendship, family, and, above all else, fear. So I wonder if that conversation Tyler and Mark had was less about feelings and more about actions—actions they could take that would help them both get over that hump, get past that fear, and get to where they always wanted to go: death. So they agreed on the days. This way, there is more at stake, something extra to encourage them. They might think about their family, and want to stay, but then they would think about each other, and their promise, and they could go.
          Theory number three is only further suggested in my mind by the fact that the very next morning after that conversation, that night at Bernie’s, Tyler checked himself into the OSU psych ward, citing suicidal urges as the reason. This suggests to me that there was something special about that night that made him wake up the next morning with that urge. Unfortunately, the nurses and doctors couldn’t keep a very good watch on him, perhaps they were even tricked by his attitude, which was almost always positive, and he took care of things right there, in his hospital room, with a noose he made from his ripped-up gown.

4. The Chain
I am the first guest to walk into the showing of Mark’s body, my mother close behind me, my dad, brother, and sister waiting for a while out in the car, since we’re too early. I am wearing a green shirt with a green tie pulled up closely to my neck, as far as it can go. I have had the whole morning, and the restless night before, to prepare, so I am clean-shaven, and even my hair looks good. Everything about me is neat. I bite my lip, ready for everything to fall apart, knowing that, from here, things only become unraveled.
          I walk slowly to the open casket, where I see a much paler version of my boy, my best and oldest friend. I sneak up and stand next to his mother and father, who are just staring. His dad sees me, and I watch his knees buckle as he begins to melt. He grabs onto my hand, so tightly that it hurts, but I squeeze back anyway. He’s still your buddy, he says to me, blubbering. He’s still your buddy, he repeats, over and over.
          My mom has my shoulders, and she’s rubbing them softly. She, too, has melted, Mark having grown up so close to me that, at her nicest moments, she called him her son, too. Mark’s mom joins in on the huddle, and soon Tyler’s dad, the funeral director, is there too. We lean on each other, and sway.
          “This is the end of it,” Mark’s mom says. “We’re not gonna lose any more of our boys.” The adults nod in agreement that, yes, this is the end of it. It takes a while—my head clouded with memories that are instantaneously shifting contexts, from happy ones to ironically sad ones—for me to realize that they are probably referring to me. This marks the beginning of a stage in my life where I will be looked at differently, with extra attention, because I am the next link in the chain. I assure my mom, my dad, some therapist, that I will never kill myself, and I think that they believe me, but they put me on pills, just to be sure.
          I go both days to the showings, and stay the whole time. I see old friends, teachers, priests, and parents, and they all look at me with such pity, and say things like you poor boy. The girls, even some of the boys, hug me hard, and I hang on for too long.
          To distract myself from the details, the sadness, of the showing room, I toy with a theory that maybe this is what Mark and Tyler wanted. That they actually wanted to die, and that, maybe, they are content now. Still, I don’t know. I don’t know what to think or what to feel. I talk to people so I will stop thinking. Those that know about Tyler, who went to a different school, talk to me about him, too, but a majority of them have no idea that Mark, really, is number two, and that I had been in that exact same funeral home, repeating all the same clichés, just a month before.
I choose not to tell them. I want the eyes off me.