Darkness Over Europe

There are four bottles of Jack Daniels on the kitchen counter. They are empty. At this point there is more Tennessee in me than New England. When I piss the scent is so fragrant it smells like someone baked a cake.

I miss Ebony so desperately. I have resisted all human contact but I have craved it so intensely. The touch of a lover. Ebony’s touch. In my grief, no less than seven women have offered themselves to me, in the kindest ways possible. They will forever remain anonymous. They are all beautiful, too. One is married, two are black – which, yeah, I guess that’s my thing now (“Once you go…”) -- and one, I am uncertain of what the current politically correct vernacular is, so, let’s say in a Jerry Lewis way, “a lady-type person of the lesbian persuasion.” She told me, “I want to take your pain away.” I don’t know if that’s ever, ever going to be possible. I am truly, deeply flattered and humbled. Somewhat baffled, but definitely humbled. Geographically it doesn’t even make sense – most of them are not on the East Coast or in the United States and none of them knew Ebony. (Hello!) But it’s kinda weird. I didn’t know that was a thing, but apparently when you lose someone, people want to sleep with you. I’m not judging – and I’m certainly not against it – but I don’t think it’s time for that. If it ever will be, I don’t know: but definitely not right now. Also, I have stuff to do.

So I have not taken any of them up on their magnificent offers. Instead, I wander around from the bedroom to the living room, watch The Kennedys documentary on CNN and SNL reruns On Demand and try not to stare too intensely at all of the things that remind me of Ebony before I black out. There is a picture of her that I had blown up and it sits across from the couch. It is of her posing against a jet turbine in her FA outfit and she’s smiling. It makes me smile and it makes me cry. My heart races and my face gets hot and my head is banging from the Jack and the tears run hot down my cheeks and I sit there and stare at it. This apartment is a shrine to six and a half years of our ten years together. I have to leave but I kinda don’t want to. It was our home. I’m supposed to be packing, but I am overwhelmed.

For six and a half months, I took care of Ebony here, in the apartment, because I would not put her in a home or fucking facility. Her mother, a saint, came up at the end of September and stayed with us on the couch – fully thinking this was temporary – and was here until March. Our story, Ebony’s story, is one about love. And now I wake up and realize that there is no one who loves me.

I remember a time in college, my freshman year, when a bunch of us pretentious English majors were sitting around trying to outshine each other with our knowledge of “important” writers. A lot of these guys were quoting philosophers and a couple of them talked about Nietzsche. You know those guys: they have the forward-flip preppie haircut, buzzed in the back and wearing LL Bean snowflake sweaters. Those guys, quoting Nietzsche. The only thing I ever got from that guy, that I ever related to, was this quote that, I don’t even remember where it came from, but he said, and I think I am paraphrasing, “Become who you are.”

I am now 50 years old. I am, and have always tried to be, happy-go-lucky. But I am miserable. I look like a washed-up 80s rock star and I am fine with that mostly because that is what I looked like when I met Ebony. She liked that. But I look in the mirror and try to see what she saw and I cannot. I am a phantom, a specter, a shadow of myself. I am not who I am or should be.

When I first met Ebony I was in a dark place. I listened to The Sisters of Mercy and Ministry a lot. Ebony saw me and reached through the veils of darkness, pulled me out and showed me the stars. And she said, “I love you.” I. Love. You. This crazy, beautiful, amazing person, this amazing soul. Loved. Me. This giant, magnificent obsidian beauty who smelled like the beach, picked ME. Me –of all people -- a total fucking Irish moron. And now here I am, alone, in a dark place again.

I listen to Bobby Darin and Motorhead, and Dinah Washington and Judas Priest; Filter and Nine Inch Nails; Ministry, The Cult, Type O and The Sisters and The 69 Eyes and I think about Ebony and just hug my pillow. The neighborhood is filled with noises and the guy downstairs keeps weird hours and I can hear the muffled conversation he has with his friends or maybe playing video games and I wonder if he can hear me playing music and crying.

I taste the Jack and remember the first time Ebony and I kissed. That is a special thing, between lovers, when you first connect. It is unforgettable. Ebony and I were sitting in her car, a maroon Ford Taurus hand-me-down from her Mom’s boyfriend. We were parked outside my old apartment in Washington Heights, on Riverside Drive at the bottom of West 157th. It was that time when everything is awkward and you’ve been out and now you’re getting ready to say goodnight and you’re both so attracted to each other that you don’t even know what to do with yourselves. I was fidgeting, nervous, sitting in the passenger seat trying to look cool, but Ebony was totally focused. She was a big girl – tall – and had what I later referred to as “an enormous wingspan.” She reached over and brushed the hair away from my face, then moved her hand behind my head – her hand covered the back of my head – and she pulled me towards her. As we got closer she whispered, “I want to taste the whiskey on your breath.” And then she kissed me.

I suppose that is part of why I have been boozing so hard. I want to have whiskey-breath and remember that day. Of all of our days, that was the most special, because it’s the day that I fell in love. I should have married her the day I met her. Shame on me.

We had so many awesome, crazy experiences and I was privileged to be with her. She was freaking gorgeous – beautiful face, dynamite eyes, amazing smile, tall, legs for days, a huge ass and she loved metal – really extreme stuff, too – but she loved rock and New Wave and “Kick” by INXS was one of her favorite albums. I never made a lot of money but one thing that I was able to do was take her to shows. And we both loved music and going to shows was our thing. Two times, I was able to get Ebony a photo pass to see Iron Maiden at Madison Square Garden. When you get a photo pass to shoot a show, you get to stand right in front of the stage – even closer than front row – and she shot Maiden -- twice. There are so many of those kinda stories thanks to the amazing people that I have had the pleasure to know and work with. One day I will share the story about the time we hung out with Ian Astbury at SxSW on St. Patrick’s Day in 2012. Astbury actually said to me, “Wow, she is gorgeous.” I will never forget that.

Ebony was so totally amazing all I can do is think of her and then try to distract myself any way possible so I don’t dwell on it and want to kill myself. I just loved her and wanted to spend all my time with her. Even if we were just sitting on the couch, each of us at one end looking at our phones. I just wanted to be around her.

There is a low-rent drug dealer in our building. He comes to visit his grandmother every other week and stays for a weekend. He saw Ebony and I together and one day I was outside and he chatted me up.

“You like that black shit, huh?”

I said something like, “I don’t know man. She’s hot. I just love her.”

And he was like, “Okay, okay. Cool. Cool. I feel you.”

He would always say hello and I remember once he helped Ebony carry in her bags when she was back from a flight.

That was it. No big deal. Later on, I was at the deli and he was buying beer and his card wasn’t working – and you would think this guy had cash, but whatever -- so I just said, “I’ll take care of it.” It was a six-pack. Like, so what? What’s a six of Bud? You’d think I’d pulled a thorn out of his paw.

From then on, he would always come up and fist-bump me and used the N-word to say hello – I don’t use the N-word -- and wanted to give me drugs. Marijuana, mostly, but he would offer me other stuff if I wanted it. I never did. But it was nice to know I could if I wanted to. He saw me with Ebony when she was in a wheelchair and a couple of times in the ambulance and knew that her mother was staying with us. He was always respectful and kind.

I ran into him the other day and he was with a couple of his pals – I don’t want to say “thugs” but, um, thugs– and he grabbed me and hugged me. He introduced me to his pals and told them a 30-second version of what Ebony and I had and went through and I started crying. That makes people uncomfortable and they were clearly uncomfortable but each one of them started sharing a story about personal loss – to cancer.

After, he asked me, “How you getting’ on? You doing okay?”

I’m not. But I said something like, “Hanging in there.” Then I came upstairs and watched “Sportscenter” and passed out.

Cancer touches everyone and no matter what the situation, everyone grieves in his or her own way. It’s something inescapable. Right now I cannot escape and that’s all I want to do.

I go to the window in the bedroom and throw it open to smoke. I am afraid I might fall out but I brace myself and stare up at the sky while I inhale American Spirit tobacco. It is vast and beautiful and lonely. And I think to myself…

“Out of my mind’s eye, out of my memory… black world, out of my mind.”

That’s where I’m at. Black Planet, black world…

(Official) Letter of Resignation

On Friday, April 6, I submitted my official letter of resignation to ABC. I loved working there, but I have a lot of work ahead of me and need more time to grieve than would be allowed for a leave of absence.  It was difficult to write but needed to be done for my sake, and theirs. Below is a copy of that letter.

I have spent the better part of the day trying to craft this letter. I am bereft of the proper language to express my gratitude and haplessly keep returning to an online thesaurus, which has proved to be of no help.

It was with great pride that I took the position at ABC. The hours were odd, but as David Muir would leave, I would enter and after some time, learned about “the Diane Sawyer break room” and would start my nights, as I liked to put, “drinking David Muir’s coffee.”

Two years is not a very long time but it was a sensational time as, after years of freelancing for Esquire, The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone, et al., I finally had a desk job my mother could brag about.

In that time, Ebony and I were living with her cancer diagnosis. She had an anaplastic astrocytoma, a brain tumor that has no cure and even after surgery to resect the mass, it was guaranteed to recur. An astrocytoma is a mass that has splinters; you resect the mass and the splinters go off and become their own tumor. It’s like a goddamn alien weed.

Ebony had brain surgery and aggressive radiation and chemotherapy in 2015 and in 2016, they – “they,” the doctors – said there was “no recurrence.” With this cancer, they don’t say, “you’re in remission,” because they know the tumor will come back, so they say “there’s no recurrence.” Until there is.

And like Ernest Hemingway wrote in “The Sun Also Rises,” when the guy talks about how he lost his money, we were blithely living with her cancer and she went from being fine to not being fine, “gradually, then suddenly.”

The last six and a half months were beautiful and terrible. I would go to work, take the train home – the MTA is the worst, by the way – and I would get home between 3 and 5 depending (we live out in Jamaica)  and then I would get up at 8:30 and make coffee. Ebony’s mother came to live with us in our one-bedroom apartment, so she and I would sit and have coffee and then we would get Ebony up (she was usually up to the smell of the coffee) and clean her, change her, bathe her and feed her breakfast. I swore that I would never put her in a fucking facility and I worked hard to give her a life and not an existence. But I had to work and after breakfast her mother would take over and I would go back to bed for three or four hours. Then I would get up and deal with all the shit: bills, Medicaid application, her insurance, Visiting Nurse Services (who are terrible) and pay bills and order a bunch of stuff from Amazon (diapers, Shea Butter wipes, mattress liners, etc.) and then around 4 I’d start dinner and then after we fed her, would change her and put her to bed.

Every other day I played her favorite music and whenever we could, would take her out in her wheelchair to the park over by Archbishop Malloy. On her birthday, I moved Heaven and Earth and took her to Nobu and fed her sushi and sashimi. I ordered a ridiculously expensive glass of red wine and let her sip some. She loved red wine and the movie “Sideways” and I was not going to let her miss out.

My entire existence was for her and like the first thirty minutes of “Saving Private Ryan.”

When she passed, I was holding her hand. I could not bear the sound of the monitors and all the beeping and the noises in the hospital, so I put on “Legend” by Bob Marley & The Wailers, and put my phone on her shoulder. She was still warm when people were coming in the room. I wouldn’t leave her. Finally, they told us we had to leave and I wouldn’t go until Winnie, this nurse from the Grenadines, came in and sat with her because I didn’t want my last memory of Ebony to be leaving her in a room alone. She looked so peaceful, like she was sleeping.

To say that I have been grief-stricken and inconsolable is an abuse of vocabulary. Ebony was my rock. She was my salvation and she was a total badass and she was hotter than Hell. She was glorious and while it comforts her family to say “she is with God now,” I can assure you that Ebony is, in fact, drinking with Motorhead.

It has been a little over two weeks since she went to see Motorhead and I have singlehandedly bumped the second quarter earnings of whoever manufactures Kleenex. I still have to go through all of Ebony’s things, return medical equipment, donate all the “stuff” and then leave the apartment. Right now I have a lot on my plate. To add to my American melodrama, my mother – I am her only living relative – blacked out one night at the end of February and hit her head on the vanity in the bathroom. She has been recovering from a concussion and needs my help.

Oh, and by the way: I turned 50 on March 30. Me, and my arch nemesis, Celine Dion (we share the same birthday/month/year) are both candidates for AARP.

I am overwhelmed.

There is nothing I would prefer better than to set the clock back and return to bitching about Arie Luyendyk Jr., but I know that I cannot. I want to drink David Muir’s coffee and I want to find Kickers and I want to listen to Nick Legasse yell about sports…. But I cannot. I want Ebony back. I want to hold her again, I want to text her and tell her stories… but I cannot.

As such, I find that I cannot return. I am going to move home, take care of my mother and keen like an Irish widow. (It’s in my blood, I kinda have to.)

I will truly miss working for ABC because it is and will always be a highlight of my life. The courtesy and kindness that you have shown me during my struggle, you showed to Ebony as well and I will never forget that. If I get my shit together and you want me to come back, I’ll come back. If you ever need someone murdered, I’ll do that, too. Of course, I’ll have to invoice you, but whatever you need: I’m in.

I don’t know how to write a letter of resignation and I hope that this is sufficient. I really don’t know what else to say or write, but you made my life better and I hope someday I can return the favor.

In the meantime, I am going to be going to some dark places, I think, before I find the light. I guess you can find me on Facebook or Twitter and I hope that you do.

I just want to say thank you. I loved the job but more, I was supremely grateful to be a part of something so special, made all the more so by the special people that you are.

Thank you.

With the highest regards,

Mark Andrew “Mick Stingley” Mullaney