Admission

Part One, In Which Our Man Gets His Club Card

It was late Thursday last when my phone rang. One a.m., big hand on the twelve. Name on the Call ID was Jason, one of the people in life I refer to as the Old Guard (aka The Usual Gang of Idiots, though I never told them that). I met them in high school and gamed with them through college; Rifts, Risk, D&D, Twisted Metal 2: World Tour, StarCraft, GoldenEye, Halo, DOA 3, F-Zero X. If it used a D20 or offered four person multiplayer, we were together for it. We waited in line for the midnight showings of The Matrix and X-Men and LOTR and the dreaded prequels. We passed around the fantasy novels and the non-mainstream comic books. We ate delivery Chinese food with chopsticks, and if IHOP was a school we’d all have a degree.

Kevin was always at the center of that circle. He was the one who introduced half of us to the other half. If we tried anything new, it was probably his idea. If there was a get together or an outing, he was the most decisive among us to organize it; the center around whom we all gelled. When Kevin moved to Cincinnati I started to drift away from the group, and after I moved to Chicago I never kept up with them anymore save for Kevin, who would make a few trips to see me over the years.

My first thought was that the late night phone call must have been a mistake. I didn’t even know Jason had my number after I got a Chicago area code, so . . . maybe a pocket dial? Maybe drunk? I was almost asleep for the night, and decided whatever it was could wait until morning. Some distant part of me dimly reminded me that good news never comes in the middle of the night. I told that part to be quiet.

One urgent voice mail, one returned call, and fifteen minutes later I was gently calling my wife’s name to wake her up and tell her the news. I was not yet ready to handle this alone.

My Lady Love has dealt with death on both personal and professional levels. I’ve heard and seen her coach others through grief many times; she tells them it’s like suddenly one day someone hands you a membership card to a club you never wanted to join. Sooner or later we all lose someone. They may be important, they may be close, or they may simply have been around for a while. However and whenever it happens, it links us together in a way that poets and parents and clergy and counselors have been trying to explain ever since our species first learned to grunt.

But you never really know what it’s like until you get there. You can hear the description of a room to every detail, be prepared for every nuance and every surprise, but the room always looks different to each person who walks in, filtered through our own senses and experiences and emotional states and our connections to those who walk in with us, and links us who walked in before us, and impresses itself upon us as much as we are malleable enough to allow. The only assurance I can give you is that the room is big enough for everyone to have a space within it, and when you walk in, everyone turns to look.

“Kevin died,” Jason said.

Hi. My name is Mark. I’m new here.

The next few hours were . . . well. It was difficult to concentrate. In calmer moments I tried to lock down logistics. I emailed everyone to whom I had responsibilities over the next week and told them I was probably going out of town for a few days. I decided I should pack a bag and wondered if I had any clothing that was black and wouldn’t be mistaken for a fashion statement. I made a list of all the people who wouldn’t know unless I was the one who told them, and tried to figure out the best time and method to tell them. I decided I didn’t want to make people wait, but I didn’t feel the need to tell them in the middle of the night. The news would be just as bad in the morning.

I called an old friend first, and I tried to reach my little sister. I told my parents. One person was harder to tell than others, but that was because we hadn’t spoken in fifteen years - but that story belongs to itself.