I don’t mean to set myself up as any kind of eulogist, but I wanted to write about something beautiful that happened recently in the wake of something awful.
A friend died recently, under very strange (and tragic) circumstances. His name was Chris Thompson (In the Photo Above), but a lot of his friends knew him as “Little Man”. Upon meeting him, the name made sense. He was on the short side, built like a truck, hair constantly pulled back…I always picture him in a leather jacket, smoking cigarettes and listening intently whenever you’d speak. The nickname was never meant as a dig to his size…in fact, only his friends called him that, and no one ever did it with any trace of malice.
He was one of the first people to not be shitty to me on my first day in high school. He hung out in “The Cubby”, a weird little alcove in a hallway near the library where the metalhead kids would hang out. Chris and I were never close, but he was always extremely nice to me, and I appreciated that. The closest we got was one summer we talked for hours on the phone (because without a car, what the hell else were we supposed to do?) about how to beat Tomb Raider (because that game was EVIL)…and he talked me through a few rough patches.
As time went on, our crew in The Cubby grew to include the skater kids, the ravers, the hip hop heads, the hippies, the drunks, the auto body freaks…basically anyone who found themselves on the fringes of the backwards-ass high school culture. And it was great…we never wanted for someone to talk to or hang out with.
Anyway, we all kind of drifted after high school, apart and all over the world, which I’m coming to learn is basically required for adulthood. It gets harder and harder to remember where you came from and the distractions pile up until something happens to yank you out of your routine, making you stop and realize not just how far you’ve come, but how great everything was where you started.
In this case, it was the untimely and weird death of our friend Chris. Now, I don’t want to go ahead and act like we were best friends. There are people out there who knew him infinitely better than I did, and no doubt felt the sting more than me. I don’t want to downplay their loss, I just want to point out something that I think we can all appreciate.
After his passing I started seeing people change. Most of this took place on facebook (making this the ONLY profound thing I’ve ever seen on facebook) where the people who knew Chris kind of gathered to commiserate over their loss. After the initial shock faded, pictures started popping up. Everyone who knew Chris started posting these amazing, scanned-in pictures (usually photos with Chris or connected to him somehow) of all of us as 8th grade, 9th grade, 10th grade kids, decked out in insane clothing, covered in our favorite bands, communal over Slayer, Megadeth, and shit…Marilyn Manson. Dark clothes, weird jeans, shitty homemade bongs, even shittier weed, skateboards, great music, cigarettes, and more cigarettes…our only concerns being where we could hang out after school and whether or not the “cool guy” who didn’t card for smokes was working at Oasis Market. Seeing these pictures reminded me, and I hope a few other people of how awesome we all were back then (despite some of the fashion choices), and it made me conscious of the kid I was, wondering what that kid would think of me now.
Which is infinitely valuable. As things get more complicated and you get older, the best move (which I now realize thanks to all of this madness) is to just start doing/listening/thinking about/talking about whatever it is you loved when you were 15.
So before I ramble more, here are the photos. I think they are perfect (especially that one of Joe’s wall with MEGADETH written in duct tape). A lot of them were taken by Joe, some by Shawn, and some by Bill. If anyone objects to these being up, just let me know and I will remove them.
Thats Chris in the bottom two photos as well.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is that this is great. I know we would all prefer to have Chris still around, with these photos safely buried somewhere, but given the situation, we’re lucky that at least something special grew from something so awful.
Rest in peace sir. Play a Sepultura record up there.