2000 to 2003, Ithaca, New York

By Silvi Alcivar

Karl Brown, a misplaced Midwesterner with a penchant for growing facial hair, damaging televisions during presidential addresses, and conducting general misanthropic jackassery, kissed me four times.

Actually, I kissed him, like a fourth grader pursing her lips on a dare to catch a boy unsuspecting, in the fall of 2000, when we were freshman in a play at Cornell University. He played a failing writer who wouldn’t love me back.

One night, we watched Almost Famous under the questionable pretenses of a date. As Karl walked me home, excitedly stuttering, shyly eyeing me, I thought he could have been that boy from the film — a groupie writing about groupies and lying to Rolling Stone about his age.

In the right mood, Karl admitted that he wanted a writer’s fame in a Beat Generation, Neal Cassady kind of way. “Yeah,” he’d say, “I’m working on the great American novel and shit.”

In any mood, he walked around singing Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, CCR, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the more obscure of the era only a fan could name. But at heart, Karl was punk rock — The Misfits, Dead Kennedys, Dropkick Murphys, and the more obscure of the genre only a fan could name. One Halloween, he dressed up in a self-made Mötley Crüe T-shirt — permanent marker on cotton — and a greasy mullet wig.

Karl hailed from Fredericktown, Ohio, a manufacturing, farming, and mining town, but he didn’t like to play the small-town farm boy. He’d smoke a cigarette or a pipe or a clove with anyone willing and talk Nietzsche, Kant, Aristotle, Kerouac, Vonnegut. But try as he might to play the beatnik, the punk rocker, he couldn’t hide his state pride, which manifested in trivial facts: state rock song (”Hang on Sloopy”); state tree (buckeye); state bird (cardinal); state motto (”With God, all things possible”).

I didn’t know states had rock songs. And Karl was an atheist.

That night, after the movie, Karl and I stood at the Thurston Avenue bridge — a small stretch of road and sidewalk with a beautiful, harrowing view of Ithaca ’s deep gorges whose waters turn turbulent in the spring thaw and whose fame lies not in their beauty but in their suicides, a fact I learned alongside my acceptance.

“Congratulations. Have you heard about the bridges?” I hadn’t. But my first day on campus, I saw a body being hauled out of the Thurston Avenue gorge, the very place Karl and I stood, peering over the edge, admiring the water reflecting the night. Before too long, we said a brief “good night” and hugged.

Soon after I returned to my dorm, Karl knocked on my door. He dodged my eyes, ran a hand through his peppery black hair. “C-c-can,” his eyes met mine, “c-c-can we talk?” He never stuttered when he was in a good mood or when the things he said didn’t matter.

“Sure, what’s up?” I asked, cutting the silence of his hands combing over themselves.

“So,” the words spilled out, “I-I haven’t really been able to find my niche, people you really get along with. I have Tony and Travis and Ted, b-b-but what I’m trying to say is….” He bit his lip, paused, looked at me, sighed. “You are the most incredible girl I’ve met here, smart, fun, beautiful, and I’m not just saying that. I-I-I just can’t get you out of my head.”

I put my face in my hands. I smiled, sighed, “Anything that comes out of my mouth right now is going to sound shitty.” I laughed nervously, “That sounds pretty shitty, huh? I mean,” I fumbled, “I think you’re great, and I don’t want to make our friendship weird. That’s not to say there’s no possibility…I’m sorry. I’m rambling.” I sighed.

I don’t remember how we left it, and now there are days I just can’t get Karl out of my head.

Karl was an awkward build — his arms seemed as long as his legs, and he looked slightly hunched when he walked — but not unattractive. After we went to see Waking Life, “a live-action animation philosophical mindfuck,” according to Karl, we talked dreaming and euphoria, and we spent 10 minutes in silence looking into the Ithaca night sky.

That night, when Karl hugged me, I remember feeling the awkwardness of standing three inches taller as his arms grasped one another behind my back and lifted me off my feet. I remember feeling his small hands, with their short rugged fingers, pressed into my shoulders, and how, as he let go of the embrace, he looked at me smiling, letting out his classically Karl chuckle that accompanied the momentary shutting of his startlingly blue eyes.

In that moment, I imagined him old — a balding man who’d actually grown shorter with age. It wasn’t hard to imagine Karl bald. For the play, he’d actually taken a razor to his head to look the part.

That night, Karl beamed, “That was the best.”

“Yeah,” I told him, “it was.”

But Karl and I stopped going to the movies, for no reason other than the fact that circles of friends from freshman year of college widen, shrink, and overlap, then time passes, and there are some people you don’t ever see again.

In my sophomore year, I heard from Ted that Karl wasn’t doing so well. Ted didn’t look so well. He’d put on weight, and the unevenness of his beard, which hadn’t been shaved in weeks, made him — a cheery guy who sings strange Boy Scouts songs when he’s in the mood — look old and sad.

Ted told me they were taking time off from classes and working at RPU, a campus dining hall. They washed dishes, and they filled cups with silverware and large platters with food. The hours were terrible. The job sucked. They spent their time off drinking beer and smoking pot.

Some time later, I ran into Karl. His hair was closely shaven, dyed blue. He wore a goatee, smoked a cigarette, slouched. Although genuinely excited to see one another, we could only make polite gestures of conversation: “How ya been? How’s school?”

Karl would often say things were “the best” or “the worst.” Those were his only descriptors. But he didn’t talk about worsts then. He introduced me to his blue-haired girlfriend. Her family, like my family, was from Ecuador. We thought that coincidentally funny, but no one laughed. I asked him to do lunch sometime. He said, “Yeah,” but we both knew making lunch plans was as good as breaking them.

“It was so great to run into you,” I said.

“Yeah, unexpected,” he said, “the best.”

Later that year, I worked as student manager of my dorm’s dining hall. On a grossly understaffed day, my boss decided to call RPU to see if they’d send some of their guys over. Half an hour later, Karl and Ted stood in my kitchen. I felt less like their friend, more like their boss - not because I had to but because that’s what I felt.

The night was awkward. Karl and I didn’t exchange a word.

That spring, I saw Travis — Karl’s partner in Calvin and Hobbes trivia games. At 6-foot-4, Travis had reddish hair and freckles, and wrinkly cheeks when he smiled. He skipped hello, asking if I’d read the paper.

His cheeks wrinkled. “Do you want some bad news on such a gorgeous day? Have you heard about Karl?” Then his face dropped. “Sorry, I should have gotten in touch with you,” he told me, plainly. “Karl killed himself.”

My hand covered my mouth, “What!”

“I’m sorry,” Travis repeated, “I should have told you.”

“No, I….” I stuttered, “W-w-when did it happen?”

“Thursday afternoon, one of the first beautiful days in April, the kind of day you’re sorry you wore your coat because you’ve got to lug it around.”

The Cornell Daily Sun reported that Karl Brown, ‘04, fell to his death from the Stewart Avenue bridge Thursday, April 10, 2003, at 5:16 p.m., with 10 onlookers present. University Health Services encouraged them to seek counseling.

The Daily Sun didn’t report Karl had been going to group counseling twice a week for depressives, the types who felt they might be destructive; or the half-eaten box of Chinese food sitting in the middle of Karl’s floor; or the eyewitnesses who saw Karl strolling, pacing, back and forth, until he took a light jog and, very athletically, hurdled himself off the side of the bridge.

That Thursday, The New York Times counted the deaths of American and British soldiers in Iraq. The world reported cases of SARS. George W. Bush was president. Later that week, Cornell students fought for the Kyoto Protocol and mourned the lives of two other suicide victims.

I stood next to Travis, asking if he was OK, but I didn’t listen to his response, because I began remembering a manifesto — “An Angry Young Man Reflects on the State of the Union Address” — posted on my door, written by a young revolutionary who finally extricated himself from this world’s grief.

Silvi Alcivar recently received a master of fine arts degree in creative nonfiction writing from Pennsylvania State University. She enjoys teaching poetry in nursing homes and running half marathons, and she plans on doing both when she moves to San Francisco this fall. This is her first published piece.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 | Email This Post

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