David Berman has left the stage, made his exit, delivered his final observations on the state of existence.
I feel like it’s dumb to be tearing up at the thought of a Berman-less world, so I guess I’m dumb, and I guess I don’t really mind.
I can't claim I knew him very well, but I thought of him as a friend. You know, the sort of friendships that form when you're both part of an amorphous social circle of weirdos in a small town at a certain point in time? Like that. Actually, exactly that. Everyone ends up at the same places, and it’s all a sea of get-togethers where everyone ends up in the kitchen, and a tiny club and a sushi bar and a Thai restaurant and a coffee shop and a bunch of patios in the summertime. You see different combinations of the same people, and there’s always beer and whiskey, and every wall is decked out with Steve Keene paintings, no matter which house or shop or café you’re sitting in. Now, a couple decades removed, defining specifics is onerous, and also pointless: if that conversation didn’t happen at that party, then it must have been the next night at the bar, or maybe Sunday afternoon on the couch at the record store. And David Berman (sometimes colloquially referred to as just “Berman”, as there were approximately 5000 Davids around in that era), was definitively part of those extended groups.
And as a result, I didn't keep a clear record of him. I remember interactions, but as a continuum, with only the most recent one clearly defined, and everything before simply part of how we all knew each other. And what stands out is how he always treated me the same, since whenever we first actually met. I was almost always the youngest person in the room, often by a decade or more, so with most people, I started out as “___’s little brother” or “____’s best friend” or “the young smartass” or “the lighting guy” or “the wanna-be DJ” or “the kid at the coffee shop” or whatever, and eventually grew into an actual identity. Which was fine; I relished those roles, wore them proudly, and often defined myself by them. It was simply a contrast when someone approached me as just another person, right off the bat. He was one of those few, and that stands out now, more than any actual details of whens and hows and whether it was at Spencer’s 206 or Tokyo Rose or wherever.
I guess it was just the casualness, the consideration that he brought to the table every time we met or spoke that left the biggest impact. He would take a moment and turn it into a conversation, and because he was both interesting and interested, you might not even notice until a couple minutes had gone by. The next thing you'd know, you might find a common passion, or find that some long-held perception was being challenged – but in a way that you never felt threatened, because he always came from a place of appreciation. It was the joy, or the humanity, or just the FEELING of a thing that he could somehow latch onto and use as a hook, making even the smallest sentences into moments of sharing something. He cared about ideas, but even more about people.
I almost didn't write anything, feeling it wasn't my place... Feeling like I didn't have a right to be so gutted when I heard the news, compared to so many others. It seems like half my friends were close to him, the other know him only as an artist they revere, whose work changed their lives. I'm not at either extreme, so I thought maybe I didn’t have anything to offer, and would just be seeking attention by trying to insert myself into this group of well-wishers and mourners and people dealing with it. But that’s me defaulting to being the kid, and not a person who cared and liked him and is trying to deal with his leaving. So fuck it, here’s some words to remember him by, to go with a beer or a cup of coffee or to mix with your memories. It’s what I bring to share with this extended group of friends.
It's weird, as I've gotten further from those days, that loose-knit community of weirdos has scattered and grown older and farther apart, and memories have gotten as fuzzy and looping as one of his melodies. I remember him some places that I know he was, and a bunch of others that he probably wasn't. And that's okay. That's probably how he'd want it.
I don't even know if he'd remember me now, but then, that's what I thought every time I ever ran into him, and somehow he always did, standard metrics of friendship be damned. So yeah. I'm one of the many people he affected, and I’ve cried a lot less for people I've known much better. I count myself lucky to have known him, however it happened.
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