Some stars shine differently than others. There’s just something about them. When you look up at night and see the plethora of tiny specks dotting a blanket of pitch black, it’s easy to get lost in the randomness and the repetition of it all. As beautiful as it is to look at, the monotony of it all can dull the awe that follows the visage. But then there are the stars that stand out. The ones that are off color or shine a little more brightly. They are slightly askew and seem to have wandered away from the other clusters making themselves known in their own version of absurdity. Their lingering light seems to scoff in the face of the uniform blanket of stars that they are reluctantly a part of.
When I was a young man, I was listlessly bobbing upon the waters of life. I had an anchor in my hand but I didn’t know where to put it to firmly make my stand and to solidify my place. Like all young people who are trying to make a name for themselves, and grasp on to some sort of identity, I was belligerently stubborn in my insistence on being myself. The world begged conformity, but I had no interest in the mundane. I was attracted to the abstract and the odd. Everyone around me begged for me to see things their way with promises of an ease to the burdens that I carried and I wanted none of it. The cost was too high. I couldn’t bear the thought of giving up who I was in order to pacify and quell my anxieties.
Wearing all black, with hair upon his shoulders and a twinkle in his eye there was a beacon in my young life. The man may as well have invented sarcasm and you wouldn’t have been able to convince me that it wasn’t his own creation and his alone. Someone in my life had already discovered how to break the mold and exist outside of it and I wanted in. I didn’t even have to ask. It’s like he saw the same things in my eyes that he had already learned and experienced by paving the way ahead of me, and a hand was outstretched as if saying “here, let me show you how to do it.”
The events are innumerable. There were dusty books and tomes that he evacuated from his downstairs library. Volumes of knowledge he owned and passed to me without much explanation. Within these pages I discovered Hobbits and monsters. I discovered theoretical conundrums that would bend the way that I thought through the stories that he shared with me through the smell of a well worn paperback. The words were always important, and the ones that he knew would have the most impact on me were the ones that he shared with that same twinkle in his eye that I came to recognize as him already knowing deep down how much that particular book was going to impact my life. He was my tailor made library and it changed who I am.
Behind a poster clad door down a hallway by the bathroom, there were many times that you could hear emanating from the bowels of his bedroom sounds that contorted the boundaries of my mind. I learned later that he had the sounds of the divine locked away inside of his mental catalog of music and he was all too willing to share it with me. From Siouxsie and the Banshees to the thoughts and horrors of Reznor with NIN. To the somber longing of Mazzy Star and Kendra Smith with Opal. The borrowed cassettes that were copied, to later iterations of burned CDs that were perused from the likes of Napster, the years went by and he expanded my mind with the sounds that he had archived as important. I was enthralled and blown away time after time. We turned each other on to new things that expanded our horizons in the end, and it became a lifelong adventure of mutual discovery in the hands of the music that helped us to understand who we were. He gave me the gift of music and my love of it, and he changed who I am.
This love of music evolved into shared beers in dark venues where we watched the musicians that we had previously pirated and consumed move in real time on stage. His friends worked for the radio stations, so concert tickets were abundant. Walking backstage and meeting Rob Zombie, and shared laughs about how he was shorter than we had imagined. Dodging Faygo cannons at an ICP concert and recognizing the absurdity of their entire act. The stench of 5 Points Music Hall were a welcome home sign on the doors of our lives. Years later I would play on the stage of those same venues and remember the shows I had seen with him there in the past when life was at the same time more simple and more complex all at once. We always philosophized whether the music we had just witnessed had lived up to our expectations on long walks back to the car in some random parking deck or darkened lot. The memories of those shows remained a part of our conversation for years to come. He taught me how to have fun in the gloom of modern life and made me feel something when I was having a hard time seeing the point of it all. That underlying glimmer in his eye was doing its work and he knew that I was going to be okay even before I did.
He made a space his own wherever he was. He was vibrant and quirky, interesting and angsty and it reflected well within each place that you found him. Sitting in a chair in his room in front of a television or a pair of Bose speakers that were laden with paperbacks and candles, you could smell the incense leaking out of the pores of every surface that it had been soaking into for years and decades. The walls were always dark, and the room was lit from an electronic screen of some sort. In the background you could find pirated music from obscure concerts downloading away while some music video from a band you had never heard of was streamed over YouTube and had obviously been recorded with a camcorder. I learned there to slay demons in a pile of gore and violence via Doom, but before that I feigned being cool, when you turned a corner after solving a puzzle in Shadowgate only to find a newer, more grotesque puzzle to solve. The 8-bit soundtrack sent chills down my spine and I loved it. Stacks of VHS tapes that explored the realms of horror from the absurd to the truly terrifying lined the walls. He could recite every one. He could philosophically analyze these pillars of cheese and sleaze. He understood horror, and horror understood him back. He showed me the beauty in the macabre, and he changed the course of my life with that knowledge by taking away the fear of the dark.
Evenings spent as a child spending the night with him in the basement as we played video games at hours that I wouldn’t have been allowed to at home were foundational in my life. Behind the click of an SNES controller on a rented game, we challenged ourselves to beat the game before the rental was due back and we succeeded. I’d play some levels as he typed away on a monochrome screened computer in the corner. Occasionally he would share a line that he had written in one of his many mysterious novels-to-be that he was particularly proud of, and that somehow correlated to the complication of a dark cave within the wooden-framed CRT TV that was presenting the newest level of an ever-increasing complex game. The pool table and the exercise bike went unused. There was art to make and there was pop culture filth to consume over lukewarm Coca-Cola and increasingly stale pizza that had been out of the oven for hours. The important things. He was nocturnal and he showed me the beauty of the dark in the bowels of that wood paneled basement. The sun didn’t matter. He changed who I was by sharing the dark with me.
He would pick me up from grade school in his Mazda MX-6. Dark sunglasses and long hair with cracked windows as a distorted guitar emanated from within the vehicle, when he came to a stop and I got inside at the car rider line, I knew that I was going to be okay, because he owned who he was and he was okay. Cruising the streets at speeds faster than they should’ve been, I had decided that he had this life thing figured out, and if he could figure it out, I could too. He empowered me in the way that he owned his abstractions and he changed my life.
When I was born, I think that Barry gave a piece of himself to me. Maybe carrying that burden for himself was too much and he needed someone else to help him carry that genetic weight. Maybe he knew that I was being born into the proverbial Matrix and he knew I needed the red pill. I needed the red pill. It has been a burden that I have carried my entire life, but knowing that he had walked that path already let me know that I could always count on him to share the load. He always carried his part of it as well to ease the weight. The hair may have thinned, and turned a little more gray, but still many nights after midnight we would sit up and talk about the plight of our lives and how we should proceed forward. We recognized the mutual glimmer from the shattered glass of who we were at our own feet, and we both offered to be the glue to try and piece it all back together. There was a bond there that I’ll never share with another soul, and I am forever thankful for that. Without Barry there is no me. Without Barry, life would have been infinitely less interesting.
Some stars shine differently than others. I learned over my past 40-some-odd years how important it is to ponder why those stars have set themselves outside of the realm of the others they share an ink black sky with. A lack of light promotes the light and the abstract stars own who they are to such a degree that they can’t burn the same way that the world would propose was proper. But these stars burn brightly and quickly and sometimes they turn into the night sky itself when the light goes out. The sky will never be the same, and it will always be less interesting without their presence.
Barry was my northern star. He led me to follow him into parts unknown. I followed and I learned and I was changed. He raised the abstraction within me and he was a good pseudo parent in that regard. But even that’s not an adequate description. I took a piece of his burden and made it mine, and to this day I carry it with pride because it is born of genetics and sweat and grief and beauty. We shared blood and we shared a mind. Without his mind and heart, I wouldn’t have the one that I do as an adult.
Friend is such a weightless word to describe Barry. Barry was my friend, but he was my star. His star burned so bright that it has now become the black that he always adored. I think it was always his plan, and I respect him for that. He knew where he wanted to end up. I will forever be indebted to the light that he provided to guide me to who I am, and I’ll miss how he lit up my night sky for my entire life. The memory of that empty spot in space and life will linger within me forever, and I’ll forever be grateful for knowing him. I love you and I’ll miss you Barry, you changed my life.