January 13, 2024 Read Time:
General
The memorial service was held at the Zilker Club House, whose balcony had a view of the entire sweep of Austin’s enormous glittering skyline. No memory of the old skyline remained, but it was certainly darker and flatter. But then I’d never attended an event at the clubhouse before. Or couldn’t remember. Maybe you were here for the release of Scott’s novel in 2014? someone suggested. That’s the last time I was here. I didn’t think so—I was living somewhere else. Scott had moved away himself, along with his family, first Chicago and then Roanoke. The prosperity bomb of the last two decades had left the old vibes in tatters. There might be a Formula One track and a Tesla factory but no one remembers the old cafe poets or can pronounce "Zilker." (It's "zo-ker.") Scott died last fall n a sort of exile from all this, well-regarded and safe and until recently employed as a creative writing teacher, but far from Texas, where his extended family and his neurologist were. I am really feeling the arc of the thing, he wrote me once. He meant life, but I think the changes to this city charged that feeling too.
What am I going to do without my best writer friend? He generously read everything I sent him, without a discouraging word or dispiriting line-edit. He got contracts, I got contracts, he didn’t get called back, I had rejections: we shared each other’s news and shared the emotional burdens of it, without malice or even a speck of envy, but also without empty bucking up. The struggle was hard, it was real, there was nothing you could do except keep writing and hope things would turn around. Believing in someone else was his way of believing in himself. His prose had this remarkable quality of being able to capture the negative spaces between the sentences that someone else would have written. His ideas outlined the gaps between things, which were intricate as fjords, yet he made them seem so simple. But before he got sick, his emails stated the plain thing. Why wouldn’t the agent get back to him. He seemed puzzled and sad. And yet he kept writing and teaching, until his voice gave out. Even then, someone at the memorial told me, he'd gesture in the conversation, to try to communicate that they were having the same experience, but he couldn't find the words. The disease had progressed too quickly to get him trained on a communication device. He still texted, but you'd have to check in with his wife, Tommi, to find out what he was trying to say. The arc of the thing was slippery.
In Austin, especially during the 1990s and early 2000s, which was about when I met Scott and Tommi, one’s social network was a personal work of art. Building and maintaining it was raised to a high aesthetic. If you wanted to know where the parties were, or how to get tickets to some show or exclusive event, you had to know someone. Nothing got done without parties, so we threw them. Dinner parties, drinks, big hangouts not for any particular occasion, just because the nights were cooler. When George W. Bush was elected president, I threw an inauguration party and constructed a W-shaped piñata filled with gold coins and sour balls. Social media probably saved our livers in the long run. But then you'd have missed out on the exquisite pleasure of sitting at a dinner party next to someone you didn’t know, only to find they work with or live next to your good friends. The far ends of your social network you were always trying to fold together. The serendipitous connection of the social origami. The generosity toward people who had just moved to town, because everyone had just moved to town at some point or another. There's always an extra spot at a backyard barbecue, just bring a six-pack of Shiner Bock. We were like creatures in a natural pool, constantly refreshed by flows of water. This seems like it would be the wrong metaphor for Texas, which is indeed hot and arid, but in fact Austin’s jewel is a spring-fed, natural bottom swimming pool, Barton Springs, whose demise — unregulated drawing from the local aquifers have endangered numerous local springs —would simply punctuate the end of the place. A water metaphor is a remembrance.
Scott would have loved the reconnecting that his memorial sparked. At the last moment, I recognized an old acquaintance, Tim, a playwright turned executive director, whose foundation had sponsored Scott’s book launch. He handed me a business card, which hasn’t happened in years. Society is healing, I thought. Then a stout executive-looking man in a sports jacket approached me, and I could peer through the gray hair and wrinkles and see who it was. Michael. A lawyer. New York City. We’d been in the same graduate program thirty years earlier, but what was amazing was that he was childhood friends with Scott’s widow, Tommi, which I may or may not have known. Sometimes the same creatures get washed into the tidal pool together. I live now in the Netherlands, the story of which I told so many times that night. People were interested, though some had a stricken look at their faces: what does he know that I don’t? Should I move to the Netherlands too? It’s a good thing you left Austin when you did, someone told me. It’s not the same thing at all.
I learned one thing about Scott: a huge Texas Rangers fan, he'd watched their last playoff game against the Houston Astros. He died a few days later. Later in the month, his mother was able to get tickets to the second game of the World Series, which would be in Arlington, Scott’s hometown. Can you get me some ashes? she wrote to Tommi, who overnighted them. Now there’s a part of Scott, unmoveable, in right field.
Recently by Michael Erard