Observing death
Michael A. Fitzgerald and Robert Becerra
Greetings from West Virginia.
I’m visiting my father at his house on a mountain overlooking Harper’s Ferry. From the deck I can see miles of trees and glints of the Shenandoah River below. Lots of history flowing down there.
I’ve asked him many times what the name of this mountain is and he gets annoyed every time. To him it’s just “the mountain.” It turns out it’s Blue Ridge Mountain. I was supposed to go see The Lemonheads at the 9:30 Club last night but yesterday he went to urgent care to follow-up on a visit last week for something very minor and was admitted to the emergency room. It wasn’t life-threatening and he’s fine but he’s 82 so it was a long and stressful day.
As many of you know, Robert Becerra, cofounder of The Stains passed away earlier this month. I didn’t want to write about Robert just like I didn’t want to write about SPOT because one can only take so much death. It feels like between SPOT’s death in March and Robert’s death in September a hundred punks have died. Old punks, young punks, kids in the scene, and those who’d fallen out of it a long time ago. Killed by drugs and diseases and Amazon delivery trucks. Just an awful summer.
On the Monday after Robert died I learned that Michael A. FitzGerald passed away from colon cancer. Michael was one of the founders of Submittable but before that he was a novelist and a member of the Legion of Vermin. He wrote a very sharp and savage novel about an American abroad called Radiant Days. It’s about a type of person who thinks they are good when in fact they cause a great deal of harm in the world. Because they can’t handle the radical revision it would take to square these facts with their conception of themselves, they change the narrative.
It seems like there are a lot of these types of characters afoot these days but back in 2007 I hadn’t read a novel about someone like that even though I was very much someone like that. Every addict or alcoholic fits the bill. We’re all experts at changing the narrative to suit our disease. Radiant Days shook me to my core. I never told Michael that and now I never will.
About six weeks ago I got a very short email from Michael. He told me I’d done a great job on Corporate Rock Sucks and closed with “thank you.” I get messages from readers all the time thanking me for writing about SST, but they’re usually strangers. I wrote back to Michael—What’s new? How are things?—but didn’t hear back from him and I didn’t think twice about it. Everyone’s busy, etc. Now I know why. He knew. That “thank you” was his elegant little way of showing his appreciation for our friendship without the formality of saying goodbye. He didn’t want to say too much because to say another word would have triggered an avalanche from me, from him, to others, from others. He didn’t want that and I respect it but goddam he was only 53.
The Los Angeles Times asked me write about Robert Becerra and I said yes. I don’t know if other freelancers feel this way but it’s not my nature to pitch a story when someone dies but if I’m asked to do it I embrace the opportunity to be of service. These pieces are so much harder to write because you’re talking to people who are grieving the loss of a friend or loved one. They may be grateful that someone is memorializing that person, but it’s not a story to them. It’s the legacy of someone they care very deeply about.
For the story I talked to Jack Rivera who joined The Stains when he was still in high school and played on the band’s self-titled album. I talked to Jimmy Alvarado, my colleague at Razorcake and a punk rock historian. He’s the one responsible for the two-part oral history of The Stains in issues 67 and 68 of Razorcake back in 2012, which you can read online as a PDF, and if it weren’t for him the LA Times wouldn’t be publishing a story about Robert Becerra and I wouldn’t have had nearly as much to say about the band in Corporate Rock Sucks. I talked to Mike Vallejo cofounder of Circle One. I talked to Dez Cadena of Black Flag, DC3, and, most recently, Dondo. I talked to Robert’s widow, Jenny Cohl, who helped me fill in many gaps when I was researching Corporate Rock Sucks and was extremely generous with her time and memories. I reached out to photographers Edward Colver and Wild Don Lewis who will never get the recognition they deserve for making LA the most vividly realized of all the early punk rock scenes. I mean look at this:
I encourage you to check out the article, share it on social media, and send it to your friends or even people you hate so that the story reaches more than the handful of people who are already passionate about The Stains. If you need a nudge, consider this: Dez told me something I’ve never heard before. He considered joining The Stains as a vocalist before someone talked him out of it. Who was that? Read the article. Instead of joining The Stains, he recruited the band’s rhythm section for DC3 and the rest, as they say, is history.
After I talked to all those people last week I wrote the first part of the story at the airport in San Diego on Wednesday. I wrote the second part in the sky, between time zones and snatches of sleep. I finished the draft at my cousin’s house in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn on Thursday. On Friday my editor asked for a rewrite, which required more phone calls, more texts during my travels from Brooklyn to Harper’s Ferry via Washington, DC, and Haymarket, Virginia. After a few more follow-up questions on Monday the story was published on early Tuesday.
On Monday night I sat out on the deck with my dad and we observed sunset, which he told me is one of his favorite things to do. “Different every night,” he said, which is how I feel about the beach. In the Navy, there are rituals that are carried out at sunrise and sunset and they are marked on the Plan of the Day as “Observe Sunrise” or “Observe Sunset.” We observed the sun slinking below the tree line. We observed the clouds changing color. We observed the darkening of the sky.
Inevitably, we told Navy stories.
He reminisced about his retirement ceremony, which was also my swearing in ceremony, at the Naval Observatory, back in 1986. He’s been looking for the VHS tape that was recorded of that day. At one point he mentioned the band that played at the ceremony.
“There was a band?” I asked.
“Oh yeah.”
“I guess I was too traumatized to remember.”
I meant it as a joke so I was surprised when he replied, “You probably were.”
I was 17 years old and signing my life away, so to speak. So, yeah, I probably was.
He told stories about liberty in Barcelona and Taiwan. He told me about witnessing part of the chief’s initiation ceremony called The Dance of the Flaming Assholes. (Hint: not a metaphor.) I told him about some the hazing I witnessed and was subjected to during my Crossing the Line ceremony at the equator. He told me about his ship getting hammered by Katabatic winds off the coast of Panama and I told him about my ship getting hammered by a monsoon in the South China Sea.
“I don’t think most people have any idea of what any of that means,” he said, “unless you went through it.”
It’s true for sailors.
It’s true for punks.
It’s true for all the people who cross paths on their journey across this ball of confusion and I’m grateful to be crossing paths with all of you.
Special shout out to anyone struggling to stay on the right side of the dirt and the sunny side of the street. You can do this.
So much heart and truth here.
Your column shook me today. I passingly knew Michael at the University of Montana during grad school Ran into him at a bookshop in Boise during the brief time he lived in Idaho. He was so kind and gracious. We were not friends, but I always admired him, and remember him telling me about the publishing startup he was working on. I was so impressed with his dedication to getting people's writing out there. He certainly honored the craft. Going to reread his book as a way of honoring him. Thanks for sharing.