Pals in Heaven

For Stephanie

My friend Stephanie died this week. I met her twenty-six years ago.

You know how some people you’re just supposed to know? It just had to happen? These are the people who make you who you are.

When I first met Stephanie, she was my teacher in junior high. She did the thing that great teachers do, which is show you the best stuff in the world. Stephanie gave me so much—Barry Hannah, Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner, Willa Cather, Franny and Zooey, The Smiths, Jack Kerouac, Emily Dickinson, Kurt Vonnegut, T.S. Eliot, John Prine.

I’ll never forget the first time Stephanie shoved a Barry Hannah book in my hands. “If you tell anybody I’m giving you this, I’ll lose my job,” she said. And she was right. They would have fired her ass for that.

The book was High Lonesome, I read it, and it completely changed my life. That was a true before and after moment. I was genuinely not the same person after I read that book.

Stephanie gave me Geronimo Rex, Airships, Ray. “This guy grew up twenty minutes from us,” she would tell me. “These beautiful maniacs are everywhere.”

I would finish books and she would talk about the books with me. Argue with me. No one had ever done that before. It meant the world. She was maybe the first person to ever take me seriously. I remember once talking to her about that Kerouac line about how “the only people for me are the mad ones,” how much I loved that.

“He’s right,” she said. “But you got to remember, chasing the mad ones will bite you on the ass every time.”

Stephanie would make me mixtapes. I had never heard Morrissey, I didn’t know Lucinda Williams. But I did know the Pixies and Flipper and we bonded over that. She’d listen to stuff I brought her, in those days Sparklehorse and Pedro the Lion and my friend Betsy, who would one day write a song for Dolly Parton. We had a great back and forth mix series going for sixteen years. When I brought her something, Stephanie paid attention to it, even if it was just home recorded demos from a girl I had a crush on.

When I got older Stephanie would invite me and some other former students over and show us movies, and they never made sense, they were just her weird taste. Mosquito Coast was one, which sent me screaming “ICE IS CIVILIZATION!” through the halls. Once it was Bringing Out the Dead, which is an insane movie to show me, but it was perfect, I couldn’t believe it. That’s when I understood you could have your own taste, your own favorites. They didn’t have to be the best thing, they just had to be your thing.

I desperately needed somebody to show me this stuff. Do you know that Jean Valentine poem, “Door in the Mountain”?

Never ran this hard through the valley
never ate so many stars

I was carrying a dead deer
tied on to my neck and shoulders

deer legs hanging in front of me
heavy on my chest

People are not wanting
to let me in

Door in the mountain
let me in

Sometimes I think that poem is my whole life.

Me and Stephanie stayed friends after high school. She edited the first short story I ever published. I loved sending her stories because her ideas were always deranged and correct. Sometimes she would send me poems and they were so sad they broke my heart. She came to every Mississippi reading I ever did. I thanked her in my first book.

In the last few years we didn’t talk as much as we should have. That’s my fault. I just didn’t know there wouldn’t be more time. The last we spoke she was stoked on her new teaching job, and she’d assigned a student one of my books to read. I wish I’d said more than just my gratitude. I had a lot more to say. I never thought there wouldn’t be more time. I can’t even find a picture of us.

Here’s the thing I keep circling around: I was so desperate for the world, and she was the first person to say, “Ok, here’s the world.”

You have to have people like that. People who are brave enough to be like that. It’s the only way out, or rather, the only way in. It’s the only way to find something that’s yours.

So thanks to Stephanie, who was kind enough to take a curious kid seriously. Who funneled me contraband books because they were beautiful. Who knew the good stuff and never held any of it back. Who understood that sometimes you meet your people in strange circumstances, but they’re still your people, and you have to hold your people close, because they are the ones who will form your universe.

I said thanks in life, but I wish I had said it a million more times. Wish we could have gotten a beer again. Wish I had finished that last mix quicker. Wish I was better at responding to emails. You could have called me. Jesus, I just always thought there would be more time.

I’m going to leave you with this, a favorite song of hers, one she put on every mixtape she ever made me. The Judybats, with the sublime “Being Simple”:

And I want to be good but good is being simple
Simple is forgetting
I simply can’t forget
I want to be great but greatness is giving
Giving leaves me empty
Oh great emptiness