We all more or less know how this story ends so it’s probably a decent enough place to start. I want to warn people now that I’m not necessarily going to hold anything out at arm’s length or avoid putting fucked up mental images into words. In my own life the only effective remedy I have ever known for soul crushing darkness is to dive deeper in but I realize that isn’t true for everybody. If anyone wants to spare themselves the experience of wallowing in familiar pain from a novel perspective I’ll be putting a line of asterisks for when it gets to the part that everybody can feel good and smile about.
I was working at a private tutoring company in Ladera Heights which is often called the “Black Beverly Hills”. My career in public education had been taken from me in Oakland for being a messy genderqueer goth but the representatives of this particular evil corporation seemed to get me and understand the importance of the teaching profession as a “calling”. I knew a lot of people around the scene who worked or spent time in the field but Joey was the only other person I knew that seemed to be built for it.
We needed to be open and honest in front of children in the same way that we needed to perform live music in front of our peers at social gatherings. When you respect children too much to ever lie to them they sense it instinctually and give you something back that I don’t exactly know what to call. Words like “youth” and “optimism” scrape against this thing but don’t really describe it at all. Whatever it is it made us better people.
On this particular day the grownups in the room were talking about something in the news called the Ghost Ship Fire. I had felt the aftershocks of the Great White disaster in Providence from a distance. In many ways it was the “other shoe to drop” to the destruction of Fort Thunder. There was a political purge against artist’s living spaces and performance venues in wooden warehouses. I had come to Fort Thunder because the phone number and street address sat on the home page of it’s website but after Great White even borderline illegible screen printed posters only said “ask a punk” at the bottom.
I had never heard the name Ghost Ship or, to the best of my knowledge, set foot inside the actual space but something was telling me this new disaster would be hitting closer to home. I sat down with my three students and grabbed one of the iPads we used for lessons. The name 100% Silk was familiar and my stomach sunk a little. I saw Obsidian Blade and it sunk even further. The article got to a list of names and I had never been in a situation with Joey that required learning his government name but when I read the word Matlock I just knew and it broke me.
I had three students in front of me of various ages, I think it was two third graders and a high schooler. We were in relationships by which I mean we shared things with each other. We all were there to do a job but if something was wrong, if something had happened at school or at home or in the unprofessional corners of my own life we validated each other and in some small way we helped. We would talk about whatever it was for a quick minute or address it silently through psychic or empathic communication but we always did something.
Three sets of eyes were on my face and the moment things were wrong all three of them knew it. The children gasped and the high school aged girl gently called out “oh no…” in a small and personal voice. They didn’t know anybody who had been at Ghost Ship but they knew me and they knew that I represented a kind of hope that growing up could mean building tiny versions of the world you wanted with the people you cared about instead of spending all of your time and energy being drained by the world and the people you didn’t. They knew that I represented a promise that there were worlds full of people like me and something horrible had just happened in one of those worlds and they shared my loss and pain, not in the empty platitudes of professional adult colleagues but in honesty, curiosity and emotion: the languages of children.
I can’t imagine the guilt and torture of having made it outside, stepped outside to smoke, left early or even decided not to go for any of a thousand reasons. I also had the mercy of reading the news after the dust had settled and the losses had been tallied rather than frantically running through crowds and around blocks searching for the faces of the people I loved or watching fire trucks arrive and clinging to the hope that they would miraculously pull the living bodies of those people out of the inferno even as a tiny voice was telling you that it had simply had burned too big and for too long and then the agony of having to let go of the hope and reluctantly close your hand around the tiny voice because some horrible prank of time and fate had decided that the second one of these things was going to be the truth.
I do imagine that for most of the people living in the Bay Area the horrors of proximity were at least to some degree tempered by the salve of community. In Los Angeles the only community I had access to was a single minute in the psychic company of children. I’ve tried to do my best to explain what this means and while I’m sure anybody can grasp what I’m getting at the only person I would expect to truly understand is Joey and of course Joey’s dead.
There were some pieces left I had to grapple with alone so I rushed into the teacher’s lounge. I thought about the overwhelming heat and the feeling of being suddenly blinded and suffocated by smoke. I thought about feeling trapped or seeing a clear path to an exit and having to choose between taking it and running back into hell to try to save the people you loved. How little time there really was for that kind of decision. How so many people must have chose the second one and just never made it out.
I thought about the last time I had talked to Donna when her younger brother had just died from having an unusually strong reaction to attempting an experimental overdose of over-the-counter drugs and how now her parents would be burying another child after another accident that must have made them feel like the entire universe was a chaotic sadistic parable at their expense.
I had about three minutes to dive as deeply as I possibly could into pain, sorrow and some form of probing empathy for the dead then I washed my face and I pulled myself together.
I had to teach.
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After my two semesters at San Francisco State as a Physics major I had landed back in San Diego for the beginning of the Summer. Francois had started dating Becky of the Bonsalls. I had a little bit of a crush on Cassie, the other one, but she wasn’t having it and was dating the dancing lime. They lived in a cheap apartment in Golden Hills that overlooked a backyard I used to play in when I was very young with some kids in the extended commune network.
Steve Lawrence lived in the living room and was usually painting. I can’t remember if Badger was actually living there but he was always around, one morning he had left a note written on a corn tortilla and stabbed with a knife into the kitchen wall, I do remember that part. Nate and Lil Four were definitely around. Pretty much everyone that lived there was into heroin but me and Francois didn’t touch anything yet.
There must have been a car that Steve and Badger had access to because one night they were driving around Downtown San Diego and found Joey Casio trying to break into an abandoned building to sleep in and they brought him home. Steve liked to give everybody nicknames, I think it helped him create an aura of being socially intimidating when he was actually afraid of everybody. He tried to call me and Francois Jebediah and Jacques respectively but those didn’t stick. We have the kinds of names that are naturally immune to nicknames. He called Joey Grace and that one did.
I remember seeing a flyer a year or so later for a Halloween show he must have played and he was listed as Grace Slick Rick James Gang of Lil Four Skins.
Joey had come down from Olympia because he was dating Dena but she still lived with her strict parents. He hung around the apartment, mostly in the kitchen where he was always cooking dirt cheap vegan food. Me and him were both vegan at the time so we talked about that a lot. He played Mack Dog tapes and showed me a super cheesy twee pop song he had written for the white plastic Fisher Price guitar called Vegan Love.
Francois bought the white Volvo station wagon that we were going to move to Chicago in. One of the first times he was driving it Joey was in the car with us and nobody really knew each other yet. Francois accidentally drove away from a gas pump with the nozzle still attached and ripped the whole thing away from the rest of the machine. Joey had the best seat in the car to survey the extent of the damage:
“It’s totally fucked! Keep driving, let’s get the hell out of here!”
That was the moment when we realized we could absolutely accept Grace, the new kid, as one of us.
When I returned to the West Coast after 9/11 I started to hear a certain phrase and have the same basic exchange in cities across the entire United States:
“This kid Joey Casio was just in town and he said he knows you!”
“Damn I really wanna see that guy!”
“Yeah he says he really wants to see you!”
We are both very tall, extremely high energy and have distinctive easy to remember names so this happened a lot. I can’t count the number of times and places the exchange happened but it was definitely a lot. I even made it to Olympia in 2010 but he was somehow out of town.
Finally there was a Mojave Rave in 2011, I think it was the 11/11/11 one, and people were saying that he was actually there. I searched through the faces and there he was, same crazy cartoon moon smile, only twelve years later. I’m not sure if it was at that Mojave Rave or one of the later ones but we finally got to perform with Dain as an improvised rap duo; this was one of the many dreams and schemes we had talked about in the Golden Hills kitchen of 1999. We performed songs about hantavirus, San Pedro cactus and the intelligence and grudges of crows that felt like we had practiced and performed them a hundred times even though we were making them up as we went along.
We didn’t become best friends after that but we lived in the same community for a while and we were good friends. We talked about work a lot because not too many people did the same thing as us. Veiled came down to Los Angeles when they were still Uncanny Valley and we did an epic show at Dem Passwords together (Alice Cunt actually shot the whole thing on a VHS camcorder but sadly seems to have lost the tape). They performed with me a day or so later as an improvised version of Black Light Jim Morrison that was way more fun than the actual band with the same name.
When everybody went to Slab City for New Year’s and was tripping on acid I remember Joey cackling maniacally while lying underneath a giant trampoline because every human body on it’s surface was sending tiny bolts of static electricity to his fingertips that were visible in the utter darkness of the desert.
We live with the reality of our friends and the people we care about dying all the time and of course it’s devastating every single time that it happens. But there are certain people who are like Baldur from Norse Mythology: Golden, pure and entirely harmless. I don’t remember ever seeing Joey in a drunken rage or being an asshole to anybody. He punched me once when he was drunk but I was the one being an asshole.
That part in the myth where everything in the world cries to get Baldur back, I think the world would do that for Joey. Really we’re just going to be doing it anyway.
We’re not getting him back.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 