THE GHOSTS OF 2020 (AND OTHER YEARS)
More reflections on a trilogy of death from the cursed COVID-19 era
CROSBY STREET, SOHO, NEW YORK, APRIL 23, 2020
"1: to show that something exists or is true —+ His success bears witness to the value of hard work. ... 2 formal: to make a statement saying that one saw or knows something asked to bear witness to the facts She was accused of bearing false witness at the trial."
My father’s death wasn’t the only personal tragedy of 2020 or in that period of my life. Elmer’s death was one of a series of fatalities of men who, in various ways, shaped by ideas of manhood and life -- all in ways Elmer hadn’t. He died on April 25. On May 7, my longtime friend, the record executive Andre Harrell, was found dead in his West Hollywood apartment at age 59. On May 11, Robert ‘Rocky’ Ford, my former roommate and mentor, died in New York after a long illness at 70. That’s three deaths in eighteen days.
So, on top of all the horrors happening out in the world, I was quarantined while experiencing the deepest period grief in my life. However, that summer of 2020 was neither the beginning nor the end of my mourning. On January 15, 2018 record exe Gary Harris, another long time friend from my days covering music, was found dead in his New Jersey apartment. On February 8, Lovebug Starski aka Kevin Smith, one of the first rapping deejays I ever saw, suffered a heart attack in Las Vegas. The next day Reginald Cathey, who I’d worked with on multiple film and theater projects, passed from brain cancer.
In 2021/22 there was another trilogy of death: director, singer, and author Melvin Van Peebles died on September 21, 2021, my Village Voice colleague writer and musician Greg Tate passed on December 7, 2021, and songwriter, activist and radio personality Mtume on January 9, 2022. Also impacting me was the death author and critic Stanley Crouch on September 16, 2020, though I didn’t know about his death until much later.
Very different men, connected by race, talent, and their roles as public figures, who played large and small roles in my evolution. Their exits from this world have affected me in a legion of ways, some quantifiable, others I’m unable to truly articulate. We weren’t always close. We were sometimes at odds. But I owe them all a debt, for impacting my thoughts of the possibilities of life, career, and manhood. They are all my ghosts — all inescapable as the night chill in January.
To me, ghosts are memories in places they don’t belong. They are projections of people from our past popping up unexpected and unwanted, diverting our attention from the now to drag us back into a book already written and tales too often told. I try hard not to see ghosts, but I can always feel them. They tug at my shirt sleeve for attention, claiming time from future planning, demanding I live in my memories. I remain respectful of their desires, acknowledging that they are inescapable, and that one day, I too, will be someone’s phantom. At least I hope so. Nothing could be worst but to be a ghost and haunt no one’s sleep.
Once you get past fifty the calendar becomes less your friend, and more a device to measure the time you have left. You wonder which of your friends will outlive you and why you outlived others. Not all deaths end in funerals. Some deaths are of a culturally rich era that the world absorbs before moving on.
People are multi-faceted, and I’m smart enough now to never ever believe you know and understand everything about anybody. Each of us makes millions of decisions daily, decisions that define our character and guide your journey. I’ve never been a fan of the cardboard cutout, sanitized memories of the departed. Because a person has died it doesn’t turn them into a saint or a devil. Most people live within a wide spectrum of behavior. It’s too easy to sanctify and demonize when most people are ice burgs. What truly drives them is largely hidden below the surface, even in the most public of lives.
The absence of their souls on this plane of existence of palpable. They become our ghost as we are haunted by what they did and spoke. I remember my father, my friends, my acquaintances, my rivals, and those who connected with me for a season. Remembering them is recalling myself.