in_the_garden raze mike hurt his hands working on the line, but you wouldn't have known it from his handshake. my dad represented him in his comp claim. he got him some money. mike was grateful. he knew there were other people like him. he wanted to help them the same way he'd been helped. he didn't have much education, but he cared a lot. he was smart. he was determined. he got a job at a nonprofit place. he became an agent of change. he did a lot of good. i spent the summer i turned sixteen working in that office. a grant from united way paid three students to make a short educational film about environmental cancers. we all collaborated on the script and shared the filming and voiceover work. i got to create the music on my own. the woman who was running the show bought this weird bare-bones computer program. it was sort of like a primitive version of adobe music maker. that was what i had to work with. i couldn't even choose the notes i wanted to play. there were pre-recorded samples. i could arrange and stack them on top of one another. that was it. dragging and dropping waveforms on a grid. working with canned sounds wasn't my thing, but after a day or two of messing around i started to get the hang of it. a lot of it was trial and error. sifting through fifty different bass lines. trying to find drum beats, guitar riffs, and keyboard parts that fit together. then doing it all over again for the next measure, and the next one, and the next one. it was slow going. most of the sounds weren't very inspiring. mike encouraged me to stick with it. i played him some of the things i was working on. he dug up a cd of sound effects for me to experiment with. i tried importing sounds into the program, but every external sample i flew in got sped up. it wasn't subtle. i hit on a synth string riff and started building a weird little dance song around it. i dropped in funky bass lines and sax harmonies. i bent some of the sounds out of shape with effects. i made the second half a little wilder, with dissonant sax stabs, backwards canned vocals, and a bit of backwards piano. i couldn't thread my own voice through the music, but i found a way to make something that sounded like me. "that's the one," mike said. "that's it." it became the theme song for our film. that job paid for my drums. but the best thing about the summer gig was getting to be around mike and jane every day. jane was a few years older than me. she was working at the office as an intern. she was skinny. she had the straightest brown hair. we liked the same music. she called me john boy. she put this little growl in her voice when she said it. most of the time i talked about music with mike. he told me he saw jimi hendrix live the year he died. he had two huge amplifiers set up at opposite ends of the stage. he used a foot switch to send the signal from his electric guitar ricocheting back and forth, creating a surround sound effect. mike told me about the history of blues music. he said it was an art form devoid of artifice. those people built themselves out of nothing and sang what they lived. he made me a tape of some songs he liked. i can't find it, but i know i have it somewhere. i can still see his handwriting. little letters full of slanted purpose. blue ballpoint pen. his black hair was curly. it was long in the back and short up front, but it wasn't a mullet. it was a crown. i gave him one of my albums to listen to. it was one of the first things i was able to put on a cd instead of a cassette tape. it was pretty rudimentary stuff. i didn't know what i was doing with a digital mixer yet. i wasn't sure what he would think. "i hear a bit of lou_reed and neil young in there," he said. "but i hear a whole lot of johnny_west." his smile told me all i needed to know. he wasn't just being nice. he liked it. my mother came to pick me up one friday when i was getting off work. she grabbed my suitcase and started carrying it to the van. mike offered to take it for her. "i can handle it myself," she snapped. "i see that you can," mike said. he just smiled at her. he's the reason we had a home for seven years. we needed a house. we found the perfect place, but we couldn't afford it. my dad asked mike if he could borrow the money for first and last month's rent. "if it was anyone else," mike said, "i wouldn't do it. but for you and your son, absolutely. what do you need?" he gave me the first paying gig i ever had that had anything to do with music that was really my own. he and jane paid me to write and record some instrumental music for the office to use in their videos. i kept the pieces short, thinking they would be making little teasers and promotional clips. i heard one of my songs in a video they showed at an awards banquet. the video was longer than the music, so they looped it. it was this meditative piano piece. i recorded it in stereo, but they mixed it in mono. it took on a ghostly quality. the reverb was deeper. flattening it out like that somehow made it more than what it was. mike found me and gave me a bear hug. he said one word. "haunting." this guy named ken started showing up at meetings. he was the worst kind of union blowhard. he wasn't in it to help anyone. he was only in it to hear himself talk. he thought he knew everything. the only thing he knew was how to bully people. he bullied his way into a position of power at an office full of people he didn't care about. ken wanted to fuck jane. that was one of the reasons he was there. she was half his age, and he was married, but he didn't care. he would come around just to look at her. she thought he was a joke. mike was the only one willing to take ken on and stand up for his coworkers. so ken pulled some strings and got him fired. my dad threw me a surprise birthday party when i turned eighteen. he invited mike, but mike said he couldn't come. he said he had agoraphobia and horrible anxiety attacks. we didn't know. nobody did. he took me out for lunch about a week later. he knew i was trying to make a long-distance internet relationship work. he bought me a headset microphone. "in case you ever want to talk to her with voices," he said. mike had another gift for me. "an old friend." it was the computer program i used to make the music for the educational film. we both cracked up laughing. i asked what was going on with him. "political bullshit," he said. "nothing worth mentioning. i'll be fine." a few months later, he swallowed some pills, sat down in his garden, and looked at all the beautiful things he helped grow until they went away. i saw jane at the visitation. her eyes darted around the room until they found mine. all she said was, "what the fuck?" she stepped into me and put her arms around me, and everything that was wrong about that man lying dead in a wooden box went into our bodies. we tried to kill it by shoving ourselves into each other as hard as we could. i couldn't get off work to go to the funeral. my dad went without me. the priest asked if anyone wanted to say anything. mike helped all these people. some of them had jobs because of him. some of them had lives because of him. and they had nothing to say. there was nothing inside of them. my dad stood up. he had something inside of him. he talked about who mike was. how he sang what he lived. he talked about our friendship. he looked at these people who called themselves his friends. he wanted to spit in their faces. they gave mike an award after he died. ken presented it to his wife. more political bullshit. twenty years now he's been gone. he has grandchildren he didn't live to see born. if i ever see him again, if i can still speak, i'll have three words for him. he knows what they are. 210919 what's it to you? who go blather from