Sam Raffa

The new kid comes flailing out at me on the blacktop playground, blue eyes glinting a challenge, but not without some humor. He’s got all the Kwai Chang Caine moves down from the television show “Kung Fu,” hands up near his face and subtly forked, he leaps a telegraphed kick my way; I give him full out Bruce Lee five-fingers-of-death eyes and spin adroitly past him, ready for the next round.

A hundred screaming Catholic kids out here for recess and he’s singled me out; a brand new arrival to our sixth grade class, this strange kid with the blue eyes– Mike; I’m the first friend he makes here, and this is how it’s done. We take the brunt of some actual hits, no harm done, and then it’s on to kickball with the rest of the boys…

He’s one of these kids bedeviled with the need to pry open appliances just to see their inner workings– it pays off years later when he’s able to fix everything from radios to blow dryers, but for now he’s his mother’s only child and a terror to all things electronic.

He draws well, too; he and I are the kids most often enlisted for posters and signage at school; his signature is obnoxiously prominent and we tell him so– me and my tight group of friends. Of the bunch, only Danny and I consider Mike an actual friend of ours; the rest adopt a wait-and-see attitude that persists for the remainder of their acquaintance with him, but they benefit from Mike’s innovations: nunchucks– deadly little clubs he’s hand-crafted from bamboo and joined with his mom’s clothesline rope; school supply boxes with pencil launchers he’s designed and built into them, complete with false bottoms and hidden compartments for contraband firecrackers and cigarettes. All kinds of stuff like that, and to everyone’s benefit, but only Danny and I trust him like a friend; treat him like a friend…

Years later when we’re in high school, Mike’s the first of us to have moved out of his parent’s house; his interests are focused on music, and he’s a talented guitarist. He and I have a disagreement over a girl– a girl who’s completely in love with him, and a close friend of mine. It’s a serious disagreement, and we drift apart after that, surprised to see each other occasionally as the years go by; bumping into each other once at an electronics store downtown where he works for awhile.

He turns up again in 2003 when I’m working full-time and only home for a couple of hours a day. My feeling is that, when I’m not at work making money, I’m at home working on my art, and when there’s any time left, I’m trying to schedule it with the people who are currently in my life… I make it clear that I don’t even have time for a conversation with him right now; we shake hands and he walks away.

I get the news from my old friend Danny, whom I haven’t seen in more than twenty years. I’m out walking last Sunday, wearing a hat and sunglasses, and Danny recognizes me from half a block away by the way that I walk– because the friends we make before we lose our innocence know us for the rest of our lives in ways that will always be surprising.

We sit down to talk and it’s not long before he tells me about Mike; working as an electrician in a neighboring town, Mike and two co-workers were spending the night in a newly constructed restaurant which he’d somehow been locked out of; he’d attempted to get back in by climbing through a vent in the building; he’d gotten stuck where the shape of the vent had tapered and he’d asphyxiated; died while trying to regain entrance.

The first of us to die… It had happened six months ago. Danny had heard about it on the radio in his car and confirmed it with mutual acquaintances. The first of us to die– I’m surprised by an exhilaration that comes over me as Danny leaves– similar to when you’ve had a close call in traffic and you’re shot full of adrenaline and aware of the newness of each passing second; wide awake and emphatically alive. It settles into an even more unexpected sense of relief– as if the dread and anxiety I’ll sometimes feel building for months finally has a solid place to settle in for awhile.

It’s in the night that my imagination pays visits to the restaurant and that final innovative push of his, that impulse that had always whispered to him about an alternate route to be forged if he had the courage; the same instinct that had distinguished him as an individual, someone I’d known well, a long time ago.

When I talk to my friend Doc about it, when I try to articulate the catalogue of Mike’s extraordinariness for her, his giftedness, that’s when I finally do cry about all of this; I’m aware of my inability to convey it to her properly; what we’ve lost here; what we’ve allowed to slip away without even having said goodbye.

Feb 5, 2010

At Le Central (“the affordable French restaurant”), my sister and I are discussing the vagaries of love and friendship; I’ve fallen hard for a Vietnamese girl who is currently angry with me– she and I are in the middle of our first terrible disagreement; it’ll be two weeks before she can bring herself to speak to me again. My sister orders us a couple of glasses of Merlot, and then she asks me if I’ll give her away at her wedding.

Giving away the bride is usually reserved for the bride’s father to do at the beginning of the ceremony; he walks his daughter up the aisle as music plays, and hands her off to the groom. My sister is a year older than me; our father died when we were very young. Of my four siblings, she’s always been the one I’m closest to.

Over the past twenty years I’d managed to avoid nearly every major family reunion that’s involved our many aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, and this wedding promises to be chromosome-a-palooza, exactly the kind of thing I’ve found ways to skip out of, but I do love my sister and there’s no way I’m going to refuse her.

The ceremony is going to take place in the mountains, in a beautiful chapel near my sister’s new home. At the wedding rehearsal, the wedding planner takes us through the formal steps of what we’ll do once the music starts, beginning with our entrance at the back of the chapel, our slow advance up the aisle towards the altar, and finally at the front of the big stone room, where the wedding planner tells me I can either kiss my sister on the cheek or grasp her hand before leaving her at the altar to join my immediate family in the front row pew. Later, in private, I tell my sister that a choreographed kiss on the cheek sounds awkward at best, and I’ll be opting for the grasped hand instead…

Just as I’m falling asleep that same night, my Vietnamese friend calls late, as she tends to do– it’s the first time in two weeks that I’ve heard her voice, and the sweet forgiveness of it grants me ample peace of mind to drift off once the phone has been cradled.

My sister’s wedding day is a clear and bright thirteenth of September; she’s mythically beautiful in her white gown; I’m sporting a rented polyester tuxedo and black plastic shoes. We wait just outside the chapel behind closed doors for the music to begin, our arms gently linked together. The organ’s song bursts forth all at once, the doors open up, and every relative I’ve managed to avoid for the past twenty years stands up as one entity and turns to face us; a horde of cousins, aunts, and uncles twisting mechanically towards us like an hallucination of a music box in a bad fever dream. The organ music is deafening, and as we step forward, my body douses itself with fight or flight amounts of adrenaline; I have some idea of the expression on my face as I grimly stalk forward– all I lack is a machete to cut the jungle grass I’m trying to navigate my sister through; my eyes lock on one or two aunts, uncles, or cousins with a joyless confrontation that says, just try and stop us…

It seems a long time before my sister and I finally stand next to the man she’ll marry, facing the minister who asks in sepulchral tones, “Who gives this woman to be this man’s bride?”
“I do, and my family,” I answer, in darker tones than I had at the rehearsal.

And then it’s quiet as snow in the big cathedral as I unlock my arm from my sister’s arm– this girl who used to be mistaken for my twin when we were younger and looked so much alike– and suddenly it’s no longer metaphor but literal truth, this business of giving away the bride; I’m actually handing her over to begin her life as this man’s partner…

Without thinking about it, I lean over and kiss her on the cheek; the sound of it bounces off the peculiar acoustics of the big stone room like a tiny slap, the loudest kiss of all time; we smile at each other and I walk away from her to sit down next to my mother in the front row pew.

The light is clean and all encompassing from the big windows behind the minister as the ceremony commences; I become aware of a tremor in my body which emanates from deep inside of my bones. It’s getting worse; a violent shaking like I’ve never felt before, strong enough to travel into the wood of the bench we’re sitting on; strong enough to be visibly evident to anyone who would look my way…

Good golly, I can’t stop it no matter how I try– try to relax, try to hold still, the tremor just gets worse– will I actually explode? Will I burst into flames? Will the minister stop the ceremony long enough to inquire as to whether I could please settle down over here…?

I close my eyes, and there’s my Vietnamese friend, unbidden and dressed in a gown of white, her raven-black hair laced with baby’s breath flowers, beaming the way she does with that inner light, and my body becalms itself at once, and the shaking stops, and I continue to gaze at the image of my friend until I know I’m alright. I’ll paint and draw this face of hers many times in the coming years, but I’ll never even try to elucidate this particular vision of her, because my private need for it is somehow too terrible and too urgent for me to limit it within paint…

I open my eyes and watch as my sister marries this good man in this beautiful chapel in the mountains where her family and friends have gathered to witness this moment of enormity in the course of her life.

In the years that follow, my sister’s marriage remains strong; I’ve attended my Vietnamese friend’s wedding to another good man– she wears a red gown as per her family’s own bridal tradition. The tremor that had overtaken me is something I haven’t experienced again, but it’s the memory of its cessation– the gigantic power of my love for my friend– that I remember most clearly, and the sheer relief of having kept the promise to my sister that I would help see her through anything that the day might require…

Nov 2, 2009

The ninth and final time they fire me from my job at the Fox Theater, my friend Danny turns up in the lobby to ask if I want to go with him to visit his brother Dave’s family in the mountains, spend a couple of weeks up there. I’m nineteen, out of a job, and out of ideas– lighting out for the mountains sounds like a great thing to do.

Danny’s brother Dave is a policeman, and Dave’s wife is someone I can talk with all night long. I was fifteen the first time I’d gone with Danny to stay for a month with them, and we’d returned for several more summer visits. Now, as we make the long drive up, Danny tells me that we’ll be staying in a camper parked in Dave’s spacious back yard. He tells me that he’s decided to become a policeman, like his brother Dave. When we were twelve, we’d all wanted to be cops, Danny and me and all of our friends– blame it on Robert Blake as “Baretta.” But now we’re nineteen, and Danny is completely serious.

When we finally arrive, it’s late at night and Dave is annoyed: he’d arranged for Danny to go out with him on patrol, and they pretty much have to leave right away. Danny shows me the small camper we’ll be staying in– I’ll sleep in the bed on the floor; the back wall has a curtained off area that hides a raised cavity where Danny will sleep.

It’s been a long day; I get into the tiny bed and eventually fall asleep. When I wake up, the entire camper is shaking– I open my eyes in the dark and hear the sounds of a terrible struggle; harsh exhalations of breath, the impact and friction of total mayhem– I get up and face the curtained wall from where the noise is coming, a battle to the death in there, and I can’t think of what to do; “Okay, stop it,” I shout, “I’ve got a gun!” but the pummeling continues, and I reach my hands past the curtain into the dark and catch hold of thrashing limbs, gathering as much bulk as possible before pulling straight forward, bringing my friend Danny crashing to the floor, his blanket wrapped around his neck, his hands gripping both ends of the blanket.

“Jesus, Danny,” I say. There’s the reek of whiskey pouring off of him, and as my fingers find the overhead light, I see that he’s pale as chalk, harsh red around his eyes. “Jesus,” I further intone, helping him undo the knot of blankets at his neck. Much lighting of cigarettes and preliminary stammerings follow before Danny fills me in on the night he’s just had, a night which had culminated in Dave taking a call from the dispatcher about a man who’d killed himself in his home, alone; when he and Danny had arrived at the scene, Dave had decided that Danny should fingerprint the corpse. And then they’d gone out drinking. And then they’d come home. And then Danny had met up with the fingerprinted man at the bottom of a horrible dream.

There’s a moment of complete disconnection here, at this point. I’ve known Danny since we were both nine years old; neither of us has ever been nearer to a dead person than at a church funeral; I’m suddenly aware of the great distance my friend has traveled while I’ve laid fitfully sleeping, but I lack the ability to catch up to where he is now. Except to say that I’m right here, and he can tell me whatever he needs to, and we can go from there…

Danny wants to go back to bed now, and he does; I ask him to keep the curtain open, but he slides it back in place as if he hasn’t heard me. My mind is full of lurid visuals from his story, fueled by the seething afterburn of bad adrenaline. I turn on the nightlight next to my bed and find the Richard Bach paperback, Illusions, I’d purchased at the grocery store some hours previous along with our other provisions. Illusions: The Adventures Of A Reluctant Messiah. I read every word of it that night, finding in it what I need most: a sense of spiritual well-being; of sane, calm, human balance and equilibrium. It’s a book I’ll purchase for many of my friends in the years that follow for their own darkest nights…

I finish the book and turn off the light, wondering how long until dawn, thinking the word “home” over and over again, noticing for the first time its similarity to the meditative word “Om”… How am I going to break it to Danny that I’m ready to go home after just one night? Sleep comes eventually, and when I wake up late in the morning, Danny tells me we’ll be going home now; I tell him I think it’s a capital notion. I’ve barely gotten to speak to Dave’s wife and Dave is already back at work; Danny and I eat some hastily scrambled eggs and drink many cups of coffee, and then we’re off; we’re out of there for what turns out to be the final time.

On the road, Danny expresses shame for his own reaction to the events of the night; I excoriate Dave’s shitty judgement in having Danny jump into the deepest end of the pool so soon in his apprenticeship– I can’t tell if it makes Danny feel better to hear it, or if it only makes him feel more isolated with his newly acquired burden; he’s decided not to become a policeman after all… was that how Dave wanted this to turn out?

Later that night at home, on my own, I put on a recently purchased Songs Of Leonard Cohen album and play it repeatedly while I draw Cohen’s portrait from the photo on the cover. I disappear, disappear, disappear into the music and into my drawing. In the months that follow, I’ll receive literature in the mail advertising the Colorado Institute of Art and never know how I got on their mailing list, but I’ll end up enrolling there, and my future will largely be connected to that; Danny will marry his high school sweetheart and go to work for the city we were born in, for a while driving around as a “water cop”– keeping an eye out for violators of water restrictions during the long, dry summers that see us drift further and further from each other and into the new chapters of our lives.

But there’s a darkness to that final night in the mountains that seems bereft of any light save the one we were able to give each other, and a bottomless despair that neither of us will forget, that marks the point where our teenage years came to a sudden end and our lives as young men began; mine was met at the gate by the words of  Richard Bach and Leonard Cohen; I can only hope my friend Danny met up with equivalent counsel at some point…

Jul 10, 2009

Last Tuesday I was working on a complicated graphic in Adobe Illustrator when a co-worker, who is a friend of mine, came into the office. I acknowledged him distantly, not wanting to divide my attention from the work I was doing, but I could tell that he was troubled. “You okay?” I asked; my friend is often troubled.

“Yeah,” he said. “Listen, give it five minutes, and then read this,” he said, indicating a folded page that he put on my desk.

“Sure, okay,” I said, assuming it was a copy of something he’d written to a girl he’s deeply in love with. Occasionally he’ll do this– ask me to go over one of these private messages with an eye for grammar and an opinion as to whether or not it makes any sense.

“You outta here?” I asked, nudging my layers and layers of vector art around.
“Yeah, I’m not feeling so good,” he said, and turned to leave. “See ya later.”
“Alright, man,” I said, and he closed the door behind him.

Half an hour later I went out for a smoke and took my friend’s note with me. I opened it and found that it was a message he’d written directly to me; cryptic stuff about opened doors that can’t be shut, Satan, stress, worry, and needing to hear some more cowbell…

I pulled out my cel phone and gave him a call; it went straight to voicemail. We’ve both been bitching about our day jobs for many months now; we’ve both been complaining about various things in our lives for ages.

“Listen,” I said, “if you’re talking about making some changes, I’m right with you, man; there’s, like, a million things we can try… there’s just millions of choices here. You should’ve talked to me– we should’ve talked. Give me a call, man; I’m picking up some glasses at the mall tonight; give me a call, brother…”

When I was thirteen, a close friend of mine committed suicide. I hadn’t seen it coming at all, and even in retrospect, his darker moments never seemed to add up to that kind of finality, to me. What I found was that, if you have a friendship with somebody who makes that choice, it’s like you’ve swam out with them to the deepest part of the coldest, darkest river in the world, only to find that they’ve disappeared completely, leaving you to either sink down with them or  start swimming back to shore on your own; it’s a long way back, and by the time you’ve made it, you’ve pretty much decided you don’t want to swim that distance again any time soon…

The Sheriff’s Department called me an hour later last Tuesday, telling me that my friend had phoned his wife at her day job and had said many of the same things he’d written in his note to me; where I’d assumed my friend was talking about quitting his job and making some changes in his home life, his wife had made more astute assumptions and had called the police. Sheriff’s deputies had arrived at his house to find that he’d swallowed half a bottle of whiskey and three Percocets; he’d been uncooperative with the police and so they’d tasered him; he was now in the hospital under a 72 hour “mental hold.” This is someone I’ve talked, laughed, and argued with for years; it’s as if the deputy on the phone is making all of this shit up on the spot…

In the days that followed, I’ve had lots of conversations with my friend in the form of text messages on our cel phones; conversations with his brother, his wife, and the girl with whom he’s in love.

Here’s the one thing I have learned about people, and the friendships you have with them:
The decisions you make about them when you’re by yourself are important, and valid, and deserve all the attention you give to them. But it’s the decisions you make about them when they’re in the same room with you that matter the most; they’re the decisions that actually define the friendship.

Whether my friend’s actions last Tuesday amount to a sincere attempt at ending his own life, or a dramatic performance calculated to emphasize his current despair for the edification of his family and friends– either way– in the coldest and most exhausted part of me, he just became a very bad risk; a lousy swimming companion out here where the water’s deep and treacherous.

But I have no doubt that once we’re in the same room with the opportunity to talk about all of this face to face, I’m going to be looking at a close friend of mine again, when maybe I should be keeping my eye on that disappearing shoreline way back there…

God grant that the life jackets we’ve cobbled together from art supplies and good intentions retain their warmth and buoyancy; God grant our friends those same attributes. And happy new year, anyway…

– Jan 20, 2008

Rapid brush strokes, sharp and precise, describing the shapes and shadows of a scull-faced man with a powerful gaze; shards of blue paint coruscating from his head and shoulders like the atmospheric disturbance his presence sparked from the oxygen around him…

We’d all seen his work in the school’s first-floor gallery, the most striking of which was this self portrait he’d painted a couple of years earlier. We were in our first quarter of art school; he was among the teachers who taught the advanced classes in the final quarters there. We had a long time to wait for this remarkably talented artist to be our teacher.

The man from the painting stood before us many months later: gangly, intense, and energetic, as fine an artist as I’ve ever met. Unable to communicate the first thing he knew about painting; given to shrill temper tantrums at a moment’s notice; deriding one student’s difficulties with the English language and then staring at us in shocked outrage when we objected to that; storming out of the room and slamming the door behind him.

“U.B.I.,” he’d say, looking at our work. “Unity, Balance, and Integrity. That’s why this doesn’t work.” Unable to specify which aspects of it might fail to unify, balance, or integrate. At first I thought it was just me; the single deadbeat failing to learn anything from his class, but I soon heard of a petition that had been circulating with the intent of getting him fired from his position at the school. I didn’t sign it; I loved his work and still hoped to glean something from his class. Instead I managed to endure it, graduated from the school and then walked away.

Twelve years later I was waiting for a bus on Broadway when a homeless man approached me. His clothes and beard were filthy, one of his eyes was red, glazed, and immobile. He wanted to know my opinion of the billboard looming over our heads.

“Pretty bad,” I nodded. He went into a detailed analysis of it, and the name of the painter Renoir came up– he pronounced it REN-wah, with the accent placed on the first syllable, as my old teacher had done. He went on about the billboard, and then about the mishaps of his life; his broken marriage and lost jobs, and somewhere in the middle of it, I realized that this was, in fact, my old and terrible teacher from long ago, finally able to articulate what his one functioning eye could still perceive so clearly.

“You were my teacher,” I said to him. He stared at me, considering. We were standing two blocks away from our old school. “That could be,” he said. I’d never liked this guy, not even for a moment, but his talent made it impossible not to revere him.

My bus pulled up and I shook his hand impulsively; I boarded without saying anything more to him as he watched us pull away.

My delusion is that talent alone can rescue people from their own worst impulses. I was shocked by how vulnerable he’d been to the decay that’s available to anyone who seeks it, but I believe his talent remains, waiting to spread its wings and extract its host from the consequences that had piled up while he was too far away from his easel and brushes. There’s something pure and redemptive about talent, even when it’s hosted by frail and damaged people.

– Nov 13, 2005

My father died when I was four years old because of a mistake his physician had made. My two oldest sisters were teenagers; my sister Rosie was five; my brother Gene was one year old.

My mom asked a priest how she should go about telling her youngest children that their father was dead, or if she should tell us at all. The priest told her that, somehow, we would know; that there’d be no way she could explain it to us, anyway.

I had waking nightmares when I was a kid; full-blown hallucinations. Most often, these involved the woman who lived in the house next door to us. In the hallucinations, her skin was green, but transparent, not unlike the bottles that contained Coca-Cola in those days. She had no internal organs; it would’ve been possible to look right past her in the dark, except for the way the moonlight would catch her grinning, rictus face; her sharp, hooked teeth…

I’d bounce off the furniture in the living room, pointing her out to anyone who could help; my mom sat and prayed for me out loud, saying that she couldn’t see her because she wasn’t there; she’d wait for me to calm down, calm down…

At some point, the hallucinations stopped coming around, replaced by normal, sleeping nightmares that I was being kidnapped by hillbillies. I stayed in bed for those, eyes shut tight. I’d learned about hillbillies from the Clampetts on TV, The Beverly Hillbillies. But ghosts I’d invented for myself, and they were real enough.

Most of the people that I come to love these days, especially artists and writers, have something like this in their past; something incomprehensible, often in their childhood, that they had to come to terms with, ultimately, on their own. Weaving blankets of light in rooms full of darkness is how many of us begin as artists.

Something about having to find the light again, once everything’s turned as dark as it can be, empowers certain people, informs their personalities. You can hear it in their laughter; they laugh harder than other people do. And they mean it, down to their toes, when they say, “I love you.”

You can see it by the light in their eyes.

– Jul 15, 2005