Dear Lovers,<\/p>\n
This is not a Eulogy.\u00a0 There are no mourners but myself.\u00a0 And I\u2019m all alone now that Rocksteady\u2019s gone. Forgotten.\u00a0 His footnote in time reading only: Bad Guy.<\/p>\n
He was a witness that had to be protected from the The Foot Clan after turning state\u2019s evidence against The Shredder.\u00a0 Society\u2014in turn\u2014had to be protected from him.\u00a0 From us.\u00a0 Two brutal faggots who terrorized the city and testified only to save our own hides.<\/p>\n
So the story goes.<\/p>\n
Now I\u2019m left out here\u2014alone in the desert\u2014passing my solitary days in the shade of the shipping container that\u2019s been our home for these two decades past.\u00a0 Writing comic books where we figure as heroes instead of villains, storyboards without pictures, since Steady was the artist.\u00a0 His scorched bones lie scattered in the succulent garden where I spend the cold nights staring up at the stars.\u00a0 Trying to make myself believe that he\u2019s up there staring back.<\/p>\n
And though this isn\u2019t meant to be a tirade against the Almighty, I often find myself wondering what kind of God it would take to let lives unfold the way ours have unfolded.\u00a0 Both of us orphans, bounced from foster home to foster home, unwanted, abused, both big for our age and quickly becoming the bullies we were expected to be.\u00a0 We found each other as 12-year-olds under the roof of a group home in Harlem.\u00a0 Retreated into each other\u2019s arms in the nighttime to feel safe\u2014if only for a little while\u2014from the hostile world outside.\u00a0 Friendless but for each other, our foster father beat us and our foster mother did nothing to help.\u00a0 We escaped into the streets after they found us in bed together.\u00a0 After they told us to get out.\u00a0 Left us to fend for ourselves before we were even teenagers.<\/p>\n
Our world expanded to encompass the filthy island of Manhattan, and, for a little while at least, we were free. Free from the abuse we\u2019d always known and had accepted as a part of our lives.\u00a0 Free from the school system that despised us, and that we\u2014in turn\u2014despised.\u00a0 Free from the foster care system that had pimped us since birth.\u00a0 Now able to bed down wherever we wanted, to vaunt through the sunny days stealing candy bars and Coca-Colas, to picnic on abandoned rooftops, and skateboard through the streets.\u00a0 Free to make awkward love to each other beneath the shadows of skyscrapers within the jungle weeds of central park.\u00a0 To smoke cigarettes and marijuana and hang out with whomever we wanted.\u00a0 Carefree, the days filled with stripped-down music and angry young voices and sunshine.\u00a0 Days that stretched golden into the future for two young vagabond kings.\u00a0 In love before we knew what love was, wearing blue jeans and torn leather jackets.\u00a0 Black booted and ugly and aimless and happy, living lives that felt like dreams.\u00a0 It all runs together now.<\/p>\n
The happy times before we started shooting dope.\u00a0 When all that freedom was burnt up in a bent spoon.\u00a0 It all runs together again.<\/p>\n
How common is the story?\u00a0 The talk of downward spirals?\u00a0 The repeated claim that one would have done anything for a fix.\u00a0 I would have shot my own mother, says one junkie in the circle.\u00a0 I would have chopped off my genitals, says another.\u00a0 Then the lovers on the other side\u2014holding hands in their plastic chairs\u2014claim they stuck together through the thick and thin of it.\u00a0 Even at the end of our ropes, they say, we made sacrifices for each other.\u00a0 Even at the end of our ropes.\u00a0 How common is the story?\u00a0 I\u2019ll spare the details.<\/p>\n
Suffice to say we found our way to the underbelly of the city. And were as loyal as dogs to anyone who\u2019d give us what we\u2014by that point\u2014needed.\u00a0 Steady and I, always rock steady.\u00a0 Together from the beginning to the end.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
H was it, man.\u00a0 That\u2019s what he\u2019d say.\u00a0 When we talked about life before The Turn.\u00a0 The Turn.\u00a0 H was it, he\u2019d say, shaking his head.\u00a0 At least it should have been.<\/p>\n
His memory was always better than mine, and though I never forgot the red faces of the grimacing men to whom we\u2019d sold ourselves, he\u2019d remember a pair of pink-laced shoes on a pretty girl in Washington Square.\u00a0 Or a white pigeon we caught before we left the foster home, or the warm sound of a saxophone beneath Bethesda Terrace.\u00a0 Once, when we were watching a spaghetti western a few years ago, he asked me if I remembered a little Hasidic boy who\u2019d given us cigarettes on the Brooklyn Bridge.\u00a0 It was drizzling, he said, and there were seagulls flying out of the fog.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When we found The Foot\u2014or when The Foot found us\u2014we escaped our life in the streets.\u00a0 Otherwise\u2014as Steady said\u2014H probably would have been it.\u00a0 Our intake was strictly monitored, classes required, treatment given.\u00a0 For the first time in our lives, we became a part of something bigger than ourselves.\u00a0 Soldiers in an army, we did what was asked\u2014what was required\u2014blind always to the fact that we were putty in their hands.\u00a0 Physically manipulated in weight rooms and dojos\u2014pumped full of steroids\u2014until we were the largest thugs in New York.\u00a0 Mentally manipulated by our superiors, and the mantra of groupthink mentality.\u00a0 We were both still hooked on smack, and they always knew they had us on the line.\u00a0 They reeled us right into the isolation chambers and flipped the switch to turn us.<\/p>\n
Neither one of us could describe the events leading up to it.\u00a0 Not after it happened.\u00a0 We tried.\u00a0 In police interrogation rooms, in neighboring jail cells, in the desert container that became our home, we couldn\u2019t remember.\u00a0 There\u2019d been some sort of contest that we\u2019d won, that\u2019s what we were told.\u00a0 They doped us at the end of a long day of hustling.\u00a0 Whisked us away, though they always told us afterward that we\u2019d volunteered.<\/p>\n
The passage of time became a meandering dreamland spread forever in front of us.\u00a0 Memories that were not ours floated through strange brains, and it all runs together, it runs.\u00a0 I rooted in rhododendron tunnels, rolled waist deep through milky bogs, fled from large-toothed beasts beneath the streaming trees.\u00a0 I woke up to the sound of my own screams, the bedding sweat-soaked and covered in hair.\u00a0 Later, Steady would tell me about the sprawling Serengeti and the feather touch of birds upon his back.\u00a0 We were posted\u2014side by side\u2014in hospital gurneys for several weeks\u2014or several months\u2014fed intravenously, drugged so that we were never more than half conscious, our new hands\u2014gnarled and enormous\u2014reaching toward one another in the night.<\/p>\n
Months of rehabilitation followed.\u00a0 Mental and physical, coming to terms with what we\u2019d become.\u00a0 Again we were conditioned.\u00a0 Lauded by our superiors, held up as paragons of duty to new initiates.\u00a0 They cheered us onto stages as if we were celebrities, made us feel as if we\u2019d done something great.\u00a0 When, in fact, we were puppets.\u00a0 Drugged night and day, kept forever in a semi-stupor.\u00a0 They put us under if we misbehaved, and we did what was asked almost always of our own volition because the power itself was intoxicating.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re the fastest man on earth you run because you can, if you\u2019ve got perfect pitch, then you sing.\u00a0 We could take a bullet like a punch, pinch a man in two fingers and toss him across the street.\u00a0 We could knock down a building with our fists.\u00a0 Our violence was expected.\u00a0 It was encouraged.\u00a0 We were told we were animals.\u00a0 Rewarded for our depravity until we became the right and left hand of The Shredder himself, and thereby gained access to the inner workings of The Clan.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Sometimes Steady would ask if I missed it, and the truth was that I did.\u00a0 Sometimes.\u00a0 He\u2019d laugh about strange memories while we walked through the desert\u2014doing exercise to get his weight under control\u2014and I\u2019d suddenly remember how strong he\u2019d been.\u00a0 Standing shirtless in the midst of a brawl, his smooth muscles stacked like armor, always laughing at how easy it was.\u00a0 Grotesque and beautiful\u2014raw\u2014he was the most powerful man that ever lived.\u00a0 I remember gunshots ringing out and his laughter and the dying screams of those around us.\u00a0 We were gladiators in the Coliseum of city streets.\u00a0 The actors in a drama of bright life and death.<\/p>\n
I still loved him on those walks in the desert, as he struggled along, waddling, wheezing.\u00a0 I never stopped loving him.\u00a0 Ever.\u00a0 Even when I was angry at him for sneaking Little Debbie\u2019s and cigarettes, for lying about it to my face.\u00a0 Even when I found Ziploc bags full of candy stuffed into cactuses, floating in the toilet tank, buried beneath corners of the container house.\u00a0 I told him I didn\u2019t\u2019 want to live out here alone, brandishing the tobacco and the sweet treats that I\u2019d found.\u00a0 I told him he couldn\u2019t leave me out here alone, and he\u2019d shake his head and mumble something about how everything would be all right.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When they caught us, we cleaned up.\u00a0 Were forced to clean up.\u00a0 To withdraw from the substances that had so long sustained us.\u00a0 It was like sliding from the comfort of a cloud into the painful brilliance of a blue sky.\u00a0 Too bright, too much to take, it was worse than the time after The Turn.\u00a0 We gave up the names and locations of everyone we knew.\u00a0 And since we knew more about The Foot Clan and The Shredder than the others, they bent the narrative to make it fit.\u00a0 We were the bad guys, The Turtles the good.\u00a0 And so the story goes.<\/p>\n
I was able to adjust, able to take it in stride, recognizing we\u2019d been given another chance.\u00a0 But Steady couldn\u2019t do it.<\/p>\n
He felt we\u2019d betrayed the people who saved us, and, in a way, I\u2019m not sure he was wrong.\u00a0 Like a soldier discharged, he let himself go\u2014got fatter than fat\u2014without his daily missions to complete. I tried to show him we were free again, that we\u2019d escaped just like we had when we were boys.\u00a0 But it was never quite enough.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t turn him back.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t want to start over again.<\/p>\n
In the beginning he tried.\u00a0 He read the same books that I read, went hunting in the cool desert nights.\u00a0 But time wore on him, and he became obsessed with having our story heard, though he knew that it couldn\u2019t be done. \u00a0Part of the bargain was that we\u2019d hold our tongues, and instead of getting angry, he got depressed.\u00a0 That was all it took.<\/p>\n
He gained weight quickly, wouldn\u2019t let me see him naked, would only make love in the dark.\u00a0 Then not at all.\u00a0 When all along it was love\u2014love\u2014that had kept us alive.\u00a0 The awkward love of boys doing what they knew was wrong, the abandon of teenagers set free.\u00a0 The love of grown men who pledged everything to each other, turned beast to find love spring anew.\u00a0 Shape shifters, it was love that allowed us to escape from the world outside the door.\u00a0 To escape from the world.\u00a0 To escape.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What kind of God would it take? I wonder, staring up at clouds of stars.\u00a0 Trying to remember our lives like he did.\u00a0 Trying to remember him remembering.\u00a0 What kind of God?<\/p>\n
At night, though I dream animal dreams, there is sometimes a white pigeon, or a Hasidic boy with cigarettes.\u00a0 During the day it all runs together.\u00a0 I read everything I can get my hands on, plant more succulents among his bones in the garden, write picture-less comic strips\u2014westerns\u2014where we figure as heroes instead of villains.\u00a0 He sails out in my mind\u2014beautiful\u2014buoyed by flocks of seagulls to save us all from the lies we tell ourselves.<\/p>\n
This is not a eulogy.\u00a0 It is a love letter to the only friend I ever had.\u00a0 An account he always wanted the world to hear.\u00a0 This is a short remembrance of my dear Rocksteady who I will never\u2014not ever\u2014forget.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u2014Bebop<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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