V

I’M THINKING ABOUT all those signs we put on our walls when we were teenagers and knew that we would live forever, in order to show how tough and cynical and worldly-wise we were: NOBODY GETS OUT OF HERE ALIVE was one of them. THE PERSON WHO DIES WITH THE MOST TOYS WINS was another. There was one of two vultures sitting on a branch that said PATIENCE MY ASS, I’M GONNA KILL SOMETHING.

And it’s easy to be cynical about death when you’re young. When you are young, death is an anomaly. It’s not real. It only affects other people. It’s a bullet you’ll dodge easily. It’s why young people can go into battle: they really will live forever. They know.

As you stick around, as you go around the Earth, you realize that life is an ever-narrowing conveyor belt. Slowly, inexorably, it takes us all along with it, and one by one we tumble off the sides of the conveyor belt into darkness.

A few days after Amanda decided that she was going to stop touring and be with Anthony, we heard that our friend Becca Rosenthal had died. She was twenty-seven. She was young and beautiful and filled with life and potential. She wanted to be a librarian.

Just before Christmas, our friend Jeremy Geidt went into hospital for a relatively minor operation. Jeremy was a crusty, foul-mouthed, gloriously funny actor and teacher who had come to the US in the early sixties with Peter Cook’s Establishment Club. He had lived a remarkable life, which he would tell us about in booze-tinged anecdotes and perfectly deployed expletives. Jeremy spent most of the next six months in the hospital, recovering from the first operation, and dealing with a tumor in his throat. He died in August, suddenly and unexpectedly. He was old, but he relished life, chewed it like a dog with a rawhide bone.

They fall off the conveyor belt into the darkness, our friends, and we cannot talk to them anymore.

In November, Anthony’s friends divided up the tasks of taking him to chemo, staying with him, bringing him home again (he could not drive himself back, after all). I offered to help, but Amanda said no.

VI

I MET AMANDA Palmer because she wanted help in playing dead. She had been pretending to be dead in photographs for the previous fourteen years, and now she was making a whole record about it. Who Killed Amanda Palmer, it was called. We met and interacted because she wanted someone to write stories of her deaths.

I found the idea intriguing.

I wrote stories. I killed her over and over again in every story and poem. I even killed her on the back of the record. I wrote a dozen different Amanda Palmers before I ever knew her, each of them dying in a dozen or more inventive ways.

The deaths were inevitable. Of course, sometimes describing and thinking about death is our way of celebrating life, of feeling more alive, of grasping life tightly, licking it, tasting it, plunging our teeth into it and knowing that we are part of it. It’s like sex, the tumbling into the tug and pull of the continuous stream of life. And life and sex are always tied in to death: the erection on the gallows, the final urge to procreate and live before the darkness.