date: 03.13.2003
entitled: "Tribute to Max"

Max was one of the class clowns in elementary school. He lived about 3 blocks away from me, in a house that backed onto the woods � a very cozy looking lot, I always thought. His mom had obviously been a flower child, and seemed to have some lenient and liberal ideas for Max�s up-bringing. She looked like your typical Midwestern mom, only she had long, straight hair down to her butt, and drove a relatively fancy looking, bright red sports car (what kind you may ask? Do you really think I paid attention to makes and models of cars growing up?).

In sixth grade, for the annual Halloween parade through the school, Max showed up wearing the most creative costume I have seen to this day: he was a big bag of garbage. His mom had cut holes in the garbage bag for his arms and legs, and had stuffed it to the brim with �garbage�; paper cups and plates, old toys, newspaper, and other rubbish looked as if it were spilling out the top, near his neck. The best component of them all, though, was a baby�s diaper, onto which they had smeared chunky, brown paint to resemble poop, glued little plastic flies, and attached in an open position near his shoulder in an awesome display of bodily functions! YES! And do you know what the teachers and principal of the school made him do? That�s right. The conservative lame-oids who were running the school at the time made him cover the poo with a piece of newspaper. All the kids still thought it was an amazingly clever costume, and that�s all that mattered.

Max was also a kid who happened to ask me to �go with him� while attending one of the many roller skate parties of late elementary school. I think this was in fifth grade. I have always felt terrible at my response to his query, as I really had no romantic interest in the boy. I don�t remember exactly what I said to him, but I remember catching some flack from a few of his friends, and even one or two of their older siblings. Hey, I was like 11 years old, what�s a kid to do? And anyway, I happened to have a severe crush on some other boy at the time. It�s not that I didn�t think highly of Max, in fact I thought he was hilarious, but that didn�t mean I wanted to hold his hand or go over to his house to play Atari or anything.

It�s strange that I happened to recall all these tidbits last week, considering that�s right about the time he died. I am not lying. I was chatting with my friend Dave today, and he informed me of Max�s death, and that he attended his wake this past weekend, while home in Michigan (Dave is a recent Midwest ex-patriot now residing in New York City as well). It seems Max drowned to death recently in a friend�s pool. I immediately questioned if this friend�s pool was located in Michigan, since it is the middle of winter, and it doesn�t really sound like a pleasant idea to jump into a pool of ice (and don�t people normally empty their pools when summer is over?). It turns out that it is located in Michigan, and Max happened to be on some kind of drug or another when the accident happened. What a way to go. But hopefully whatever drug he was on didn�t let him become too distressed or suffer much.

Joe and I have had discussions before about the �kid from school who died� phenomenon; this is where everybody and his brother has something good to say about the person they barely knew, and scrapes their brain to recall encounters with the person, just to bring themselves closer to the tragedy � to be able to say, �yeah, this kid I went to school with died the other day�. I may even have a diary entry about this phenomenon. And even though my recollections of Max are similar to these happenings, I must defend myself by saying that I am truly sad to hear of his death. He was a neighborhood kid whose laugh I can still hear, whose face I can still see, whose walk I can still imagine, and whose house I will still pass by, while visiting my parents, and think of his mother. That is all.

song stuck in my head:

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