I feel the pain

I have always disliked Dinosaur Jr. Some bands I can tolerate, a few I love but most do nothing for me, which is truly an insult. The lead singer seems sloppy and lazy, the music isn’t very focused, I don’t like the album art, honestly, J. Mascis just irritates me and just the fact that I am writing about him is more press than he deserves. It’s just low-effort, all of it. Spotify’s bio makes it sounds like the band “were largely responsible for returning lead guitar to indie rock,” and then mentions the Pixies. No, the Pixies were responsible for everything good which, by definition means you cannot credit this to Dinosaur Jr.

Spotify has not gotten the memo about my distaste for Dinosaur Jr. and threw on their only hit, “I Feel the Pain.” It’s not a terrible song but it’s not a great song and if that’s the best they can do, well, so sorry about the hand you were dealt. Don’t @me with your defenses of the man or his music, idgaf. I was listening to the song and it goes, “I feel the pain of everyone, then I feel nothing,” over and over. I had heard it before, thought it was trite and dismissed it as amateurish writing. You can’t feel the pain of EVERYONE and then feel nothing. Unless you are some kind of sociopath, which is an accusation I will not make.

I started crying, a little unsteady at first and then full blown ugly crying, wrapped in a towel in my bathroom. The crying had been coming and going every couple of hours for more than a day now. Last night my friend Chris called me to tell me that our friend Jay had died. I had written about him in my zine many times, including the story, “Dead to Me.” Someone discovered his body in his house and they called it natural causes. He was eight months older than me and we did a lot of the same drugs together. I gave up everything but legal stuff many years go, though he never quit. The last time I had spoken to him was over text and he told me that he was the singer for band called Daylight Mourner, they made a video and sent me the YouTube link. He looked great, like I remember him. Before that, it might have been three years since I had heard from him. And a few years before that was the last time I ever saw him person.

From the time I met Jay in 1988 until the mid-2000s, I saw him, talked to him or hung out with him all the time. I was the first person in my friend group to get married and he was the perpetual bachelor. He used to say he couldn’t take care of a plant, it would commit suicide rather than be in his care.

When Chris told me about Jay we were both in shock. It wasn’t just that someone we knew personally was gone, but someone who we had all known really well. He was supposed to be the best man at my wedding but said that he couldn’t afford to fly to Las Vegas. I offered to pick up his airfare and hotel even though I was making $18 an hour as a design monkey at the New York Press. I didn’t want him to miss it and he did. After he missed my wedding, things were just never the same. I was not mad and I do not hold grudges but he felt what I would call profound shame. Others might characterize as a surfeit of pride that made him feel embarrassed about the fact that he had let people down. Whenever I saw him he was apologetic and regretful, implying that he was just spending all of his money on drugs and he wished he had just accepted my offer. He was sad about it. It was like he was punishing himself for just being himself. That’s what we all loved about Jay. There was no one like him. He would say the crazy thing, he would punch out a lightbulb, he would tear a button off his coat and use it to pay a toll on the highway. He was like Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up and could never die.

I think about all of the wasted potential, all of the things he never got to do. The thing is, he did get to. He was famous for fifteen minutes that landed him a page on IMDb. He did drugs with Depeche Mode, he made friends wherever he went, he slept with so many beautiful girls and he always seemed to be having the most fun. He was truly free in a way that I will never be. I don’t feel constrained by my relationships so it doesn’t feel like a prison. I would have thought the song that would get to me was Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again,” because there were many nights when I was taking a ride with my best friend and I knew he would let me down again. Maybe he just wouldn’t show up to something we had planned. Maybe he bailed early when we were hanging out to meet a sketchy dealer somewhere. For the last few years, he stopped responding to everyone in his life. Even his family and bandmates could not reach him. One of them told me they went to his house to do an intervention and get him the help he needed. He told them in no uncertain terms that he was not interested and they should fuck off and never contact him again. He never said that to me, but it was implied by the years of radio silence.

I went to bed after getting the news and could not stop thinking about how he died alone. I never changed my number and I’ve had the same e-mail address for decades but is it his fault for not trying to get help? I don’t fucking know. I just know I can’t stop crying. Writing this has calmed me down so if it never sees the light of day, I wrote it down. Writing is the closest I get to therapy these days.

Jay had a younger brother and he loved to tell the family story. His parents were a small Jewish couple in Brooklyn who could not get pregnant, so they adopted Jay. A few years later, they did get pregnant and had his brother Edward. Edward looks just like his parents and Jay is tall, Nordic and slim. A friend of a friend reached out to Jay’s brother and Edward remembered all of us. He said over the past few years Jay had fallen into a spiral of depression. He was into conspiracies and when his father died from Covid, Jay just got worse. I can’t even talk about without crying now, fuck, how am I supposed to do this? He was afraid of microchips and the CIA. He moved to a small house in a nearby state and had only minimal contact with his family, usually to ask for money. In the last few months of his life he stopped paying his bills and his brother said that he thinks he froze to death in the house because they turned off the utilities for non-payment. My friend Jay froze to death in his own house. Or maybe it was really an OD and it’s easier to blame something else. Who do you blame for that? How do you explain that? I have no idea. I am writing it down so I can say that it’s a story that happened and that it’s the worst fucking thing ever and I am heartbroken and can’t stop crying about it. I’ll never see that guy ever again. I have moments where I feel the pain of everyone and then I feel nothing. That asshole from Dinosaur, Jr. was right and I was wrong.