14 years ago

 I’d never seen anyone like him before.

Ryan Fox.
That name alone doesn’t feel real.
My life divided into 3 sections.
Before, during and after Ryan Fox.
During was only 3 years. How could one person cause such a disruption?

His hair was wild, his sideburns too.
He had a way about him, a style rarely seen these days, in men or women.
From a different time and place, and yet, when I met him he was sharing a basement apartment with a guy named Bob (about as ordinary as it comes).
In later years I found myself struggling to get him to participate in society in a normal way, something he very much resisted. I’m Ryan Fox, he would say. As though he knew something I didn’t.
He had a little ginger in his hair, which he put special pomade in from an orange tin with a black man on it. His couch was a work of art. It came apart in pieces, like it was designed for a film set or a play. It was so uncomfortable, but it was cool. Beside his bed there was a vintage record player suitcase, and 45s in every colour, each marked with a little RF in the corner. Sometimes there was also a TB. Tara, the ex we don’t speak of. On his dresser a small stack of paper, receipts, coasters, 10 or 15 of them and on the top, a phone number. I couldn’t help myself, I peaked under, it said Melissa, and another number, then another, and another.
He caught me.
“You can throw those out.” he said.
“I don’t need them anymore”.
It was the first day we’d met.

The day after I met him his cat, Richy, died.
Richy was very old, and a good friend to him.
“Richy must have known it was okay to go because you’re here now”
He was mine, right away.
I never doubted that.
Maybe that’s what keeps me going back, the certainty of it all.

He would tell me about his Mother, he adored his Mother.
You and her, he would say, you two are it, my two favourite people. 
We would walk a lot. Him, a few steps behind with a coffee and a cigarette.
We didn’t have a car in those days, barely able to feed ourselves and pay rent.
That red coat. Those shoes. The wallet and the chain.
We’d walk to 7/11 for big Gulps, coffee and cigarettes.
We didn’t know what to do with his ashes because he was from the city, not much of an outdoorsy guy. His sister in law suggested we see what 7/11’s policy is for scattering ashes in their parking lot.
I don’t remember full ash trays, but they must have been, he was usually smoking.
He had secrets too. A heartbreak before me, a darkness in glimpses.
He’d play guitar, late into the night, like my Dad.
Then in the morning he’d walk to the pawn shop and get his amp back. A constant rotation of items lived there, his wallet full of pawn shop slips.
Money was such an elusive thing, something that floated in and out of his life.
He found $20 on a walk once. He sang David Bowie songs the whole way home, full of joy.
When he played music, people stopped what they were doing.
It wasn’t just the lit cigarette in the head of the guitar, burning the paint off. It was the wild devotion, a person taking the song as far as it can go. A born performer.
“I’ve never seen someone break four strings and keep playing before” I heard one guy tell him.
Often the audience was pulling their friends in “You gotta come see this guy”
Are you going to play guitar for a living one day?
Yes.
Are you going to love me forever?
Yes.
Ok.

There’s always a bookend when I talk about him, the death always weaving its way into the story.
The death day itself, the weather, his Mother, the accident, the memorial at the movie theatre – with popcorn and everything. But today I’ll leave it at that.