I am going to be self-indulgent this week and hope you will bear with me as I turn this column into a thinking emotionally theme.
Considering I just turned 52 this past weekend, I have been incredibly fortunate to have known very little grief in my life.
Of course, at my age it is not at all surprising that I have lost all of my grandparents. I did deeply mourn them all, especially my maternal grandfather whom I felt really close to for some reason, and perhaps partly because he was the first to go.
Age really is a mitigating factor for grief, though. As deep as the feeling was in those early days of the loss, it was softened by the fact they were all very old and had lived fulfilling lives.
That is, perhaps, a bit of a trick, but it works. When I now think of my grandparents, it is not with grief, but with fond memories.
I have also said goodbye to a handful of furry friends. That is never easy and I sometimes still feel a degree of sadness, particularly my favourite Siamese Opal, who died of disease (I think she was poisoned) at just five years old. As with old people, though, there is a mitigating factor, for me at least. They are not human and although the love I have for them is as real and the grief as deep when they go, it fades.
Not so for my buddy Louis Fagan, apparently. Last week, someone put up a post on Facebook asking the question: If you could bring back one dead musician, who would it be? The answers were predictable, Elvis, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Robert Johnson, Stevie Ray Vaughn, B.B. King, Jim Morrison etc.
For me it was Lou, who like many of these more famous examples, lived hard and died tragically and way too young of a heroin overdose.
I had not thought about Lou for some months, but as soon as I did, the grief came flooding back. It was not small and dim and overtaken by fond memories, but big and harsh, as it was on the day I found out.
Louis was a real talent, sometimes dark and brooding, other times joyously exuberant. Either way, he could be an imposing figure, mostly because he didn’t know the meaning of the word relativism. He was simultaneously the guy I wanted to be and the guy I didn’t want to be. I loved both of him.
Lou loved to love and he loved to scrap.
I was not overly surprised that he got into smack; he was just arrogant enough to think he could be the one person in the universe who could handle it.
The last time I saw him was in Ottawa just a few months before he died. Just a few weeks before that I had run into the poet Michael Dennis who told me Lou was beating heroin. I thought he was joking.
Lou and I met for a drink at one of our old watering holes, only he wasn’t drinking. I told him about Michael’s heroin joke. He told me Michael was not joking. He told me he couldn’t drink because he had hepatitis from a dirty needle. He told me he was waiting for the results of an HIV test. He told me he would rather be dead than live with HIV.
Instead of drinking, we hung around at his parents cabin and played tennis and music. He had become quite a decent guitar player.
He had always been a great front man. His band, the Born Again Pagans was one of the best live bands in the country in the early- to mid- nineties.
After the Facebook post I did a search on Louis. There is virtually no trace of him on the Internet. It’s easy to forget the Web, and particularly social media, really hasn’t been around very long.
It took some digging, but I finally found one Born Again Pagans video that was uploaded by the Public Energy Vault, a group that is preserving the Peterborough (ON) contemporary art and performance scene.
It is a grainy, Super 8 music video of their song Get it Right. Seeing Lou again singing that song brought a smile to my face and a lump to my throat.
That posting led me to a remembrance of Louis put up by a guy named Peter Rukavina called the “Louis Tape” about a music tape (remember cassettes?) that Lou had put together for Peter’s friend Joanna for a trip to the west coast.
Since the tribute was posted in 2004, many people have added comments to it. Lou was nothing if not divisive, partially by nature, but mostly by intent, and the comments range from romantically nostalgic to inflammatory. Lou would have liked that.
And that is the extent of my friend’s Web presence. I imagine if Louis had lived, he would be all over the Internet and he probably would have eschewed it.
Now this column will add one more reference to Louis Fagan’s Web profile.
Rest in peace, my friend.
