Navigating the Swirl

Let Death Do its Thing

I don’t usually use this space to tell stories. But there’s one I want to share with you. Something of an homage to my best friend from college, Steven Ratushewitz, who died 40 years ago this month. It’s also an inquiry into how we experience and metabolize grief, together, in the time we do have here. It’s a difficult place for me to go, but I feel pretty sure there’s some value and joy once we get to the other side. So here goes.

I went to Princeton University for all the wrong reasons. A Jewish public school kid who got in on grades at a time when the bulk of students were still members of a legacy I didn’t even know existed until after I got there. People with the same names as retail stores, corporations, even a colonized country or two. I went for dream of inclusion in the preppy elite, thinking that’s where the smart successful people were. But I quickly found out it was teeming with a lot of prep school trust fund kids and Young Republicans and southern rock fans who hung confederate flags out their dorm room windows. Not everyone, of course, but that’s the keg culture that dominated.

Princeton had this strange tradition where on the first night before class, everyone surrounded the original campus building, and someone tried to steal the clapper from the bell in the bell tower. Like, they either climb up the building from the outside, or find a way in. And whoever steals it is remembered somehow, I guess. Whatever.

So all these students, almost all guys (Princeton had a worse than 2 to 1 ratio of men to women at that time), they’re all milling around this building. And I lock eyes with a guy in ripped jeans wearing red bandana over messy black hair. Not a preppy. And there I was, practically in preppy drag, wanting to prove to him that I wasn’t one of these dudes. I was a fellow public school artsy outsider to this insular sea of privilege. I guess I wasn’t pulling off the preppy thing, because he just came up to me as if he recognized me as an ally and said “yo - I have an idea.”

We found a big stick shaped like what we imagined a clapper must look like, and made it look like we had emerged from the building with it. We ran into the woods screaming that we had the thing, and were pursued by a couple of upper classmen we couldn’t outrun. When they got to us, they said they represented some alumni and would give us $1000 for the clapper. Wha? What kind of sick world had we signed up for?

Steven and I talked most of the night, and vowed that whichever one us of was alive in 50 years would come back and prank these people in some awful way. We figured we would be too old to get prosecuted for a prank. But it was a real pact.

We were partners in crime after that. Maybe not so much partners in crime as partners in justice. Like, one day we offered our resident advisor’s pet gerbil its freedom. We explained in four languages that we would open its door for one minute to give it the opportunity to escape. But we informed it that with freedom came great risk, like being able to find food and avoid predators. The gerbil chose to remain domesticated. We also did graffiti protests when the school closed the library to the public, screened bootleg movies, and did other stuff that risked our status there. Steven more than me.

We’d go to punk clubs in New York, hang out with the Dead Boys at Max’s Kansas City, do drugs, make art, and live in ways we felt defied the elitist wealth networks of the Forbes and Rhodes who graced our classes. In those days, just having an earring or a bit of red dye in one’s hair was a statement of protest. We made music bouncing tracks back and forth on cassette recorders; I directed a play Steven wrote about an exchange student who was actually a bowl of jello; we took an impromptu trip to Montreal where we met a band of Haitian drummers, and then got them across the border to the US — apparently holding a lot of mushrooms because they gifted us a big bag when we dropped them off in Maine. I’m not sure how much of that I would have done without Steve and his confidence.

Steven was always a notch or two more adventurous and righteous than I was. I’d attend an illegal protest, but he’d cut the chain link fence barricade. I was aware of racism, he ate at the college’s Third World Center, where people of color gathered and forged solidarity. He was like a cross between Lou Reid cool and Naomi Klein leftism. And increasingly intolerant of anything contaminated by establishment approval. I wanted to be as confident in my convictions as he was, but it appeared to come at a cost. No compromise. Lots of conflict.

Things got a little strained between us after I came back from a semester at a theater school. I got almost too into theater for him. One time I didn’t take a hit of a joint because I had a play rehearsal coming up, and he said something like “What happened to you? I barely recognize you.”

We stayed friends, but I had chosen the “establishment” route of pursuing theater and an MFA program in California, while he went total indie: working temp jobs and living off lentils while playing bass and doing graffiti. And some hard drugs.

But we wrote letters, and I told him about all the stuff I was doing at CalArts, the insanely wonderful school that launched PeeWee Herman and Tim Burton and Don Cheadle and me! We had digital music, devised theater, and gamelan.

Something about that tempted him. I think he had his fill of the harder drugs, as well. We had too many friends who went over the edge and weren’t coming back. He also had a younger brother who had gone into a business in a bottom-up entrepreneurial way. He was working on a business plan for a movie theater that was also a cafe and a motel. An honest business serving culture…and dating. And it felt to Steven like a cool place to try to do something.

So he offered to come out, see what CalArts was all about, and then drive cross-country with me back to New York for the summer. We’d use the trip to reconnect and write a screenplay together, that I could then direct and his brother could screen at his theater.

And we had a great couple of days. He loved CalArts — everyone does. It’s one giant building of insane art and play. The motto is “no technique before need.” So it’s a supported free-for-all, a best-of-both-worlds celebration of weird. Steve could see the appeal, as well as the kind of discipline I was developing as an artist. Committing to craft is not selling out. 

This is where the bad part happens. Steven wanted to see the Grand Canyon on the way back to New York. His grandmother said to watch sunrise from the south rim. But this meant getting to there from LA by sunrise. We were having a great drive from LA through Death Valley, reconnecting on every level from psychedelics to Buddhism to Wittgenstein. We didn’t even have any drugs or weed or anything with us. Just pure joy. Love, true love.

It was really late. Like 2am. We pulled into a rest stop for gas and food, but all they had was a candy machine so we got this big brownie. It was maybe two in the morning, and I was just too tired to drive. But we were close enough to make it by sunrise, so Steven took the wheel, using the brownie for an extra boost. Well, I guess you know how that went. Trigger warning.

I felt us going off the road as Steven shouted “oh shit.” He tried to navigate for a moment or so then plowed into a large juniper. It wasn’t as soft as it looked. It was a loud hard BAM. Blood, glass, everywhere. Everything hurt but nothing hurt. I looked over and Steve was unconscious, pinned in there with metal and branches. I managed to get out of the car. It was accordioned, squished. Glass in my hands and face, a fucked up leg. I made it around to his side, and pulled back a piece of metal that was pressed against his neck cutting off his windpipe. But instead of coming to, he just slumped over and blood came out of his nose and ears. I sat him up again, but I knew what was happening. He wasn’t in there anymore.

I went out into the highway. It was like four in the morning and there was no one to wave over. I just stood there in the road, under the sky, and screamed. There was nothing to do. Eventually the truckers came. Sat me down against something. Then the ambulance. The paramedics kept working on me, assuming I was thrown from the car because it was too squished for anyone to survive. And I kept sending them back to Steve. They said not to worry about him. A special crew would extract him.

It was in the ambulance that I got weird. I imagined there were drugs in the car and that the cops were going to find them. Should I take responsibility? Say they were Steve’s? He couldn’t get in trouble anymore. I guess I gave my mind a fake problem to work on. (Weeks later, I remember: there were no drugs. Steven had gone clean.)

The siren was on. The EMT was asking questions about how many fingers he was holding up or what I had for breakfast, and I asked him if people ever get over stuff like this. He was barely my age at the time—maybe 20—and looked at me like the question was beyond his pay grade. Then he said something like “people go on with their lives. They live on.”

And it was at that moment I decided I would live on—not just for me, but for Steven as well. I’d live for the both of us. Incorporate his life mission, his soul, into me.

It was a tough summer, but when I went back to school I leaned into Brecht and more political theater. Marx, Artaud, and Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed. Everything indie. Proletariat. I merged my own love of the arts and spirit with Steven’s commitment to absolute integrity and never surrendering to the compromised values of the status quo.

It’s made for a tough path all these years. I eventually quit theater because so much of it catered to the elites who paid for it. It was at best apologist, or a substitute for on-the-ground activism. I could hear Steven’s voice condemning the fancy productions. I turned to interactive art. After all, back then the net offered an indie, bottom-up alternative to that high-brow arts scene, but—as you all know—it ended up being anything but an anti-corporate safe haven for anarchist art and culture.

I spent 20 years trying to live and write at the intersection of culture and social justice. Holding the double agenda—never leaning totally into art or culture or reverie as long as there was one person suffering somewhere else. It wasn’t even always conscious. It’s just, after a couple of decades living like this, it’s who I became. Smart, but always conflicted. You can even hear it on some early Team Human shows, like the conversation with Omaha Nebraska artist Brigitte McQueen. I’m asking her if it’s okay to make art and have such fun like that while there are still people suffering and starving. She said it’s even more of an obligation to joyfully make art, but I didn’t quite understand what she meant. Not in my body, anyway.

Until I did a ceremony a couple of years ago—yeah, a facilitated mushroom journey. I was lying there, experiencing the mycelia as if they were feeling around inside my body. The tendrils reaching up from my gut. And when they got to my heart, they just held there. It was really painful. A terrible, squeezing. Like the mycelia had wrapped around my heart and were clenching. I thought maybe they were hurting me, but then they said, in that silent way a plant can talk, “You have a broken heart.” Huh? I assumed they were talking about my marriage. But it was even older than that. “You are broken-hearted.”

The distinction mattered. I was back there at the accident. I saw Steven in the car, bleeding out, and realized what the pain was. Not just mourning. It’s that my heart was broken from trying to hold his heart along with mine. It was too much. I had taken responsibility for him. Not to him, but for him. Trying to fit two lives, two hearts, in the space of one. The mushrooms weren’t squeezing my heart like that; they were just showing me what I was doing to it all the time. It was pain I was carrying with me. I couldn’t hold his heart in mine anymore.

I gave consent to let him go, and the pain in my heart stopped. It was like I could feel him going. I had to let him go. It wasn’t good for him either.

I cried a bunch. It may have been the first time I cried about this since I was there in the middle of the highway. And as I wept, I started to feel like the tears were no longer my own. They were infinite. An ocean of tears beneath us all the time. This shared, almost infinite well of trauma and grief. It goes on forever.

All we can do is make like a mushroom and metabolize it. We’re all in this churn, this swirl, together. It’s painful, violent, pathetic. Unnecessarily cruel. It’s us, it’s the babies getting blown up in wars, the refugees being turned away, the people caught in the gears of the machine or its toxic clouds.

We’re all in the swirl. This insane, violent swirl. And as I considered that, I started to see some old friends. Ones who had passed on, and were now bobbing around in this swirling ocean. Not Steve, but Robert Anton Wilson—he had this Alfred E Neuman “what me worry” face on. As if to say, it’s not so tragic; it’s really just ridiculous. I saw the great satirist Paul Krassner in the swirl, too—with that gentle knowing smirk of his. Harvey Pekar shrugging that shrug. Terence McKenna, with his wry smile; and Genesis P-Orridge with mock demonic laughter. Each of my departed friends and mentors in the swirl, metabolizing the tears in their own, painful but joyful ways. Each one discovering how to do this processing, this metabolizing, not with anguish but in something like bliss. Accepting the cycle of death and life and death.

I released the stubborn, punk insistence and resistance of my 20-something best friend, and accepted the possibility that I really do have a different mission. I mean, what if art is our way of metabolizing all this grief, of joining this collective swirl as the bliss. Think Happy Buddha. After realizing that all existence is pain and suffering, he starts to smile? That’s his middle age wisdom? But that’s precisely it. True compassion allows you to metabolize this grief and sorrow, and transform it into something else. Death into life.

I’m not saying Steven was wrong. He was as true to a cause as a human could be. I’m just saying his path wasn’t my path, and trying to do both became an unnecessary source of conflict. And holding onto his heart and mission was a way of delaying the pain. Not letting him die. Steven died.

I think our resistance to death is a big part of our problem right now. All the tech bros and wealthy folks working on life extension or the end of death altogether? Like that’s gonna be fun? If your life expectancy was 10,000 years like some of these folks are suggesting, then the only way you could die is in a freak accident. So who’s gonna even go outside or go in a car? The price of eternal life is that everything becomes a risk. Your highest probability of dying 9000 years early. Better stay inside and not move.

The precious scarcity of this existence—the brevity of life—is part of what makes it so beautiful. Part of what gives us the opportunity to recognize how special each of us is. Something that the wealthiest sociopaths at the top of our civilization’s pyramid would do well to accept and celebrate. Because the swirl is coming for them, too. No matter how high up the pyramid you go, if you’re alive you’re still in the swirl. If you exist you’re in the swirl. Hell, if you used to exist, you’re in the swirl.

We’re all in it, and we’re all in it together. That’s the Team Human awareness I’ve been pitching all these years. That’s what no amount of machines or wealth can deny, not for very long. Whether we tear down the towers with protest, reveal their faulty foundations with art, or melt them with love, we’re all doing our part in our own ways. That’s why there’s so many of us.

Anyway, I love you Steve. I’ll see you in the swirl.