Literary interlude

You know what? I don’t care that he’s dead. That’s what I wrote in a let­ter to his sister-in-law after fin­ish­ing the above, and then I went out and mailed it to her, but walk­ing down Sixth Avenue some­thing in the sun­light struck me, a glint in the leaves made me dizzy, the sounds and the feel of breath and being lif­ted me above myself right into the middle of the street, and I don’t know if Peter was look­ing down on me then but the sky was cry­ing warm blood, and it may have been only that pound­ing in my veins at the ecstasy of being alive. See, because when all is said and done I don’t care that he is dead, though I feel a cer­tain com­pli­city, because oth­er than that there would only be anger left, anger at life and anger at our blood that spills out of our weak­ness into troughs of uncar­ing. If I let myself get star­ted I will only begin to rant and threaten those who glam­or­ize death, but there is a death in the bal­ance and you bet­ter look long and hard at it you stu­pid fuck­heads, you who treat life as a camp joke, you who have lost your sense of won­der about the state of being alive itself, I AM OUT FOR YOU, I know who you are and I’ll shoot you down with the weapons at my com­mand and I don’t mean guns.

And ulti­mately this lance of blame must turn back upon myself, whom I have noth­ing to say in defense of, any more than I can hon­estly say I will nev­er take drugs again because of Peter Laughner, which would only be a ter­rible insult to his memory. Realizing life is pre­cious the nat­ur­al tend­ency is to trample on it, like laugh­ing at a funer­al. But there are vol­un­tary reac­tions. I volun­teer not to feel any­thing about him from this day out, but I will not for­get that this kid killed him­self for some­thing torn T‑shirts rep­res­en­ted in the battle fires of his ripped emo­tions, and that does not make your T‑shirts pro­found, on the con­trary, it makes you a bunch of asshole if you espouse what he latched onto in sup­ports of his long death agony, and if I have run out of feel­ing for the dead I can also truly say that from here on out I am only inter­ested in true feel­ing, and the pur­suit of some ulti­mate escape from that was what killed Peter, which is all I truly know of his life, except that the hard­est thing in this liv­ing world is to con­front your own pain and go through it, but some­how life is not a paltry thing after all next to this child’s inher­it­ance of etern­al black. So don’t any­body try to wave good-bye.

—Lester Bangs, “Peter Laughner,” New York Rocker, September-October 1977, reprin­ted in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, edited by Greil Marcus