Art and the artist

Twenty something years ago, I went to a show to see a performer from a band I liked playing in his acoustic side project. I'd been introduced to the original band by a friend of mine. We bonded over the ominous music and the desolate lyrics. We could both relate. It resonated. A few years later, my friend made the decision to hang himself. I hadn't seen him for two or three years by then but learned after his death that we'd been living in the same town. He'd been battling mental illness. His father told me he'd sometimes see me on the street and hide because he didn't want me to see him like that. His father told me he'd looked up to me. I felt responsible for his death. Not for causing it, but for failing to prevent it. I remembered us listening to this band together. In retrospect, it was like getting together to drink arsenic laced tea regularly in small accumulating doses. Goddamn the sun, we'd say in solidarity. Goddamn the sun. I also blamed the performer, who is on the stage in front of me now. The music he's playing is lighter than what my friend and I ingested together, and he's got a sort of old-time Americana gestalt about him now. I'm listening critically and remembering his other band and how it was a bleak soundtrack to my friend and I getting together. The abject hopelessness in some of the lyrics. We both felt it. My friend felt it even more acutely. I don't think he had the mechanism that allows you to feel something but to hold it out and slightly away from you and to see it as art - a metaphor - and draw sustenance from it. For him, it was a direct assault resulting in injury. The injuries compounded until they murdered him. After the show, I bought one of his CDs. The performer made himself available to meet people and sign merchandise. I asked him if he would sign my CD. "For Jim," I said. I told him that Jim had loved one of his songs in particular. I also told him that he'd hung himself. My heart was beating harder. He was speaking calmly. His eyes were on the words he was writing with a black sharpie. He said he hoped his music had helped him. I told him I didn't think it had.