Dear Jason Noyes,
(An elegy/ode to you, or to Alcoholism, and to couples that drink in the dawn of each day)
Hi buddy, hi love… Jay Jase. How’s it going for you in heaven? Skateboarding with the homies, bourbon on ice, and swimming with sharks every day? Did Young Money join you yet? (your Frenchie, he loved you). Young Money was a good boy. I couldn’t believe you left him.
I COULD believe that you left me. I never expected anyone TO stay with me. Or did I leave you first? I did. fuck. I’m sorry. I had to, though.
My bottom line was homelessness.
I can’t be homeless, man. But I could answer when you call me on the cell phone (the free one they gave you), flirting, drinking out of a paper bag in the cold (it’s not allowed in the shelter), and asking me to come back to Brooklyn. (Hell no).
I enjoyed arguing with you about life, and being a little scared of you. I liked making you a little scared of me. Because I deserved to feel these things after All the psychic molotov cocktails I hurled at the chain of receding threats, threatening me with love.
I wasn’t the chic who was sexiest or the most cool or fun, but I was your last commitment. The gay one. The dyke. The mean one. Remember me? We were friends more than anything. Not good friends, more like frenemies. Like Paris Hilton and Nichole Richie. No, like Gaga’s, “Bad Romance.”
No, like “Bar Flies,” starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway. Watching it together, laughing. Girl, don’t eat the green corn.
I still start every day grinding beans for coffee, adding cream, and sugar, honey, or syrup.
Then, after I write for awhile, some hours, (unless I have to go to work), I mix Cutty Shark or similar blend of scotch with seltzer water and orange juice, just a small one. Then I’ll write a bit more, or walk my dog, and then I might nap.
Around 2pm, I wake up and make this drink again, this time with green, Indonesian kratom powder- real caffeine.
Yeah, I still smoke good herbs, too. It’s still sad how we don’t stop.
Can sad be funny?—like your choosing the bottom shelf, plastic, Gallon of Evan Williams. Clinking ice in the glass, 10 AM, had the both of us feeling optimistic. We’d be cracking jokes, me trying to hug you. When I let you hit the joint just once, you became convinced that I’m a dude because you were crazy. You said, You can just tell me, I promise I won’t be mad.
[My mom keeps saying that I’m an alcoholic. I think that she’s just as bad as me, and should worry about herself while I worry about me.]
I love my favorite drink, and so did you. And anyone who loves a drinker
can tell you: second place is the place you take to the drink.
I liked second place. I didn’t want first place. I wouldn’t win first place. I wasn’t going for that. This was something unspeakable that needed to be. So in the beginning, I brought a Irish coffee to you at your job. We stood sipping them behind the moving truck.
I don’t love Irish Coffee, but it was my lie to you saying: you can drink with me. Which changed, naturally. If you die, we can’t drink together!?
I don’t know what I was going for. I didn’t care, I guess. It was stupid of me to marry you, and everyone knew it. You knew it. You did it for me, anyway. Tiny black diamond ring. Or was it for you? Afterwards, we clung to it, but marriage is a technicality afterall. And so is getting divorced.
4 or 5 years later (I try not to remember the year), To this morning, if I could, I would text you in the city Saying, WYD, HYD? With a decent picture of me going *cheers Title it, I still love you, babe.
There’s another Jason Noyes out there, a commercial photographer You were an artist, but a bastard and a drunk. That guy (who’s still alive) shoots things like stock footage for sale. Your photography was radically humiliating. It was porn (can porn be art?)
Of me and everyone else. And I hope all the film was destroyed when your family’s basement flooded. But if someone finds it, the better for the legacy you’d want. Your photography was sex, that’s what you made, that’s what you wanted to sell.
But I saw your childhood pictures in Baltimore. And that’s the kid I recognized in your smile. That’s who I believed in, not you per say. And not me, either. Being losers together was companionable, and I’ll always miss you, Jase.
Not your temper or your ignorance and ego, but your silliness, and humility, where we were both kids, trying to figure this sex thing out, or not Until basically I told you, Go Watch Porn or Something, Leave me alone and you did, thank you. Or you didn’t, thank you, for that, too. I don’t think I was any more gay than you. Maybe I am. Who cares, anyway?
And do you see Mitch Hedberg on the regular up there? Now amongst bad angels you play.