I learned about Henry’s death while scrolling on my phone. I was sitting at my desk, about to leave for work. I stopped on his self-portrait in an ornate brass mirror. He held his camera in both hands, up to his right eye. His eyebrow was cocked, rippling the row of wrinkles on his forehead. Behind him, framing his body, was a window. Light pouring in.
It’s with great sadness we share that Henry …
I read the caption several times.
News of death should be delivered by mouth, or on stationary alongside poetry. Henry’s death was placed in the same category as vacations, babies, and expensive meals. I instinctually put my phone in my pocket and got up to brush my teeth, reorienting to the rhythms of my work day.
But driving to work, I listened to a song he made, a song I’d loved for over a decade. Every night, walk the streets somewhere/ Between heaven and hell. Where was Henry now? I breathed wet ugly breaths. I turned my car around.
*
The video is dark and blurry, the scene bisected by black lines from poor tape quality and age. But it’s clear the focal point is Henry, the shirtless young man onstage, his torso pale and thin, his black jeans too big, barely hanging onto his waist. His hair is parted in the middle and flopping off either side of his head, that classic late ‘80s haircut, and despite the poor video quality it’s clear his hair is stringy, soaked with sweat. He holds a microphone in two hands, crouches over, and sways as his band plays droning music. The mood is anticipatory, the crowd of mostly young men already hopping up and down, slamming into each other. Suddenly the stage lights flash and Henry stands straight, throws his head back, and screams IF YOU’RE GOING TO DO IT, DO IT! He hops from the stage into the crowd as the band launches into the opening bars of their song. His voice is clear and strong, pure feeling. He twirls around, leaps onstage, turns his back to the audience, and waggles his butt. He never stops moving.
*
Copernicus, by suggesting Earth circulated the sun—just as the stars did—revalorized Earth as a heavenly body. Christian theologians hated him because they’d been preaching Earth was the static center of the universe.
If divinity exists right here, on Earth, then so, perhaps, does hell.
*
When I was 21 I worked as a cashier and shelf-stocker at a health food store and café. I loved refilling the spices because they were next to the kitchen, where I could hear Henry singing. I poured garlic and sage and smoked paprika from bulk bags into mason jars, breathing in their savoury clouds as Henry belted lines from songs he loved and ones he invented on the spot, often macabre. I don’t want to live in this world anymore!
I kept a small notebook at the check-out counter, where I’d jot down pressing thoughts and overheard conversations. I was a new graduate, and I wanted to be a writer. I hoped that someday these notes, and my life, would mean something.
Blavatsky—female theologian of theosophy and anthroposophy make pesto and seitan sausages tattoo, look up flowers CVS: infection cream, lube, detergent, vitamin D
My first Henry note:
Henry crouched on the ground trying to put lemon slivers into Shawn’s socks
*
After graduating I’d stayed in the upstate New York college town I’d longed to run away from. I had no idea where else to go. I had a job, at least, one I’d pined for my whole senior year as I visited the café and gorged on their vegan blueberry pies, their spicy tempeh stews. I was raised on pizza and pasta in South Jersey, but at the café I ate my first turnips and artichokes, my first nori rolls and peanut noodles. I wanted to live in the store’s warm spiced atmosphere, a welcome contrast to the fluorescent-lit English Literature classrooms I’d inhabited throughout college.
My boyfriend Francis and some friends were staying in the small town, too. And I loved my rented room, attached to a sagging house at the edge of town—a converted shed just wide enough to fit my single bed, surrounded by trees.
After work I opened my windows, stripped to my underwear, and worked on my zine, Sticking Around. In issue #1 I hand-wrote: I want to write my stories, journal entries, letters, songs. I want to practice the guitar and maybe sing in front of a small group of people someday. I pasted in photos and doodles and quotes from Audre Lorde and Cindy Crabb’s Doris zine that I typed on a typewriter. I copied, cut, folded, and stapled pages. I could have slowed down, fixed the typing mistakes, and learned InDesign, but I was in such a rush to make art that was entirely mine, not just a homework assignment.
I mailed my zines to anarchist bookstores across the country and occasionally received a $5 bill in the mail as commission.
*
In my notebook by the cash register I sneakily wrote: the speakers crackled overhead & Henry looked up, paused, and said, “I thought the world was ending. I was hopeful there for a second.”
He’d drop these lines then rush away, back to the kitchen. He was small, wiry, and quick, like an athlete—a BMX biker, maybe. He wore black band tee shirts and skinny jeans beneath his aprons. He had gauges in his ears and a greying buzzcut. On his half hour lunch break he and the assistant manager downed sake shots at the sushi bar next door. He left work on a longboard.
*
John Milton was in his early 50s when he began writing Paradise Lost, the same age Henry was when I met him. In the epic poem, Milton famously wrote, “The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” It’s hard not to read this line as memoir, knowing Milton’s misfortunes—his first two wives who died in childbirth, his imprisonment for opposing the monarchy, and his blindness, which required him to dictate the poem’s 10,000 plus lines to scribes.
Milton was a Christian, a believer in a monotheistic God. But his religious beliefs didn’t keep him from meeting with Galileo, who reified Copernicus’s belief in a heliocentric universe, in a solar system beyond God’s purview. Milton’s poetry leaves space for religious language and imagery to expand into greater mystery rather than certainty, than doctrine. In Paradise Lost, heaven and hell continuously ferment within each of us.
*
The first time Henry and I talked, we talked about music. It was early Sunday morning at the café and I was crouched down, shoving Amy’s lentil soup cans onto a bottom shelf. In my periphery I saw Henry whip by, point to the back of my shirt, and say HA!
I spun around. You like the Thompson Twins?
Like them? I was at that tour in the ‘80s, before you were born! Before I could say anything, he bustled back to the kitchen.
It was summer, 2013. My music taste was mostly out of sync with the times. I listened to decades-old albums by The Cars, The Smiths, The Cure. I’d had a radio show a few months earlier in college where I played only ‘90s riot grrrl. But I was also getting into seeing live shows, so I agreed to trek with friends to the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago.
After the festival, I told Henry about seeing Pissed Jeans—he occasionally wore their band tee. I told him how the lead singer stomped around the stage and snarled into the microphone, bratty, petulant. At one point during his set he ripped off his tank top to reveal another underneath, which he ripped off to reveal yet another. The tanktop was emblazoned with the name of a vodka company. Henry loved this.
*
On a slow Friday night Shawn left his post in the kitchen to hang out with me at my register. Like Henry he also wore square-rimmed glasses, band tees, and skinny jeans. They were close friends.
He wiped his hands on his apron, leaned over the counter, and asked if I knew Henry had been in a famous band in Virginia in the ‘80s. They’d played at CBGB and opened for The Pixies, the Minutemen, and R.E.M. They were featured in a regional hardcore documentary.
He took out his phone and pulled up blurry YouTube clips of Henry’s band playing in dark bars. Their songs were chaotic and rock-adjacent, with meandering guitar solos and too-loud bass, anchored by Henry’s soaring, almost operatic voice. I preferred softer, melodic music, but these songs were special, they contained that vibrant, impish something Federico Garcia Lorca termed “duende.” In an old profile I’d read later of his band, Henry was quoted as saying, “we’re after spirit more than anything else.”
I admired Henry’s energy as he bounced across the stage. Shawn and I snort-laughed as Henry told the audience his band was the pop group Milli Vanilli, as he asked them if they’d seen “that girl who called me an asshole.” He was 25 years old.
Shawn also told me, briefly, that after Henry’s band broke up and he left the south, he moved to New York City, met a man, and fell in love. They dated for years, and their breakup was one of the great tragedies of Henry’s life. It was the only reason he was living in our upstate town.
Shawn said not to bring any of this up with Henry, that he didn’t like to talk about it. I wasn’t sure if he meant his heartbreak or his queerness.
*
At 20 I sold the flute my parents bought me when I was ten to buy a classic black and white Mexican stratocaster guitar from a guy on Craigslist. I taught myself to play the guitar my senior year of college in my shed-room, sitting on the floor against my bed and box spring. I spent whole hours transitioning between two chords while listening to a metronome, willing my fingers to move quicker, more gracefully. For months my fingertips were purple and indented with the shape of guitar strings.
I started humming melodies as I strummed those two chords and I recorded these experiments into a tiny silver 4-track cassette recorder my friend lent me. I mostly sang about the agonizing process of starting to date my boyfriend Francis, my obsession with him, my vulnerability and desire for control, the limits of human speech.
this is so weird, i feel so nervous last night i dreamt about asparagus, i was eating it with you ‘cause you’re absurd, too you’re absurd, too
I eagerly re-listened to my song experiments after work, amazed and thrilled I’d been able to imprint my voice and words onto a physical object. This is what I wanted to do with my life, not necessarily make songs but experience this feeling of mucking around in mystery in order to produce something new. When a former professor of mine walked into the café and asked, So, what’s your life plan?, her question slid right off me. I was living, right now.
I put my recordings on Bandcamp under a joke name and called them “shitty beginnings.” I shared the link on my Tumblr page, where one of my followers, a guy whose indie band would later achieve a cult following, offered to dub them onto cassette tapes.
*
My favorite line from Paradise Lost is “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.” I see it as a line about the artist’s life, choosing to exist beyond social niceties and the rote machinations of living and dying. I see it as choosing potential instability and loneliness, but having that risk be worth the reward of self-sovereignty.
The older I get, the harder it is for me to find those who have doggedly committed to a life of art, even among creative circles. Too many forces pull us in other directions—toward financial solvency, home ownership, dissolving into parenthood. It’s not that aging artists don’t sometimes participate in capital, in social custom. But they also have a steeliness to them, in how they protect their creative time and structure their lives around their understanding of beauty. They always look ageless to me, bright in the eyes and on the cusp of regeneration.
*
At work, I walked into the kitchen to slice off a piece of fresh focaccia before it was placed on the lunch buffet. Standing, shoveling the warm bread into my mouth—crispy on the outside and doughy on the inside, the tomatoes sweet from the oven’s heat—was often the highlight of my day. The flavor of the bread was enhanced by the kitchen’s activity, by all its forces working toward creation: the head chef stirring vats of roiling lentils, Shawn transferring trays of roasted herbed vegetables into serving basins, the baker stirring blueberry muffin mix, the pots swinging from hooks on the ceiling, the steel counters glistening in the mid-morning light.
That morning the light was orange as it came through the cracked windows. And the song playing from the stereo was orange, too, mellow and warm. It was bop-y like a pop song, but fuzzy, low-quality, and the instrumentation and vocal delivery were delicate, insular, delicious. The lyrics were about flowers but dead ones, and being suspended between heaven and hell.
I walked up to Shawn, breathless, What is this. He looked up from cutting carrots and said, proudly, It’s Henry, in the ‘90s. The song was called “Dead Flowers.”
*
In the ‘90s Henry recorded sparse songs in his New York City apartment. He used a keyboard he found in the trash. Many of the songs feature ecclesiastical language (jesus, angel, soul, and god) contrasted with uglier words (disturbed, die, pistol, whore).
In “Dead Flowers,” my favorite song of his—one of my favorite songs of all time—the singer repeats, Every night, walk the streets somewhere/ between heaven and hell. What was Henry’s heaven, his hell? Did he, like me, grow up in church, kneeling to pray to a man in a white robe, a man who was watchful and vengeful, who would smite him for sneaking candy from the pantry? What of rock music? What of homosexuality?
I imagine New York was a place Henry could finally be himself, having left the south, left the machismo of being the lead singer of a rock band. I imagine he’d felt pressured to play straight, to fracture and contort himself.
“Dead Flowers” stays with me because it’s a song of extreme isolation, of torment. The singer stands alone on a riverbank, crying, watching dead flowers float downriver, “forced to disappear.” I know what it’s like to grow up strange in a conservative town. To be unseen as an artist, to pine for a man, to feel stuck. To have to hold all that in your head all day as customers and bosses bark at you, and your only pair of good jeans gets a rip in the crotch, and you can’t make rent.
But “Dead Flowers” is also a song of rebirth and eternity. When the singer walks the city streets at night, he does so freely, undisturbed. I imagine there’s pleasure in this anonymity, in getting to be one of night’s creatures, finally inhabiting any shape you want. In the last lines of the song, Henry sings that the dead flowers are Born again, free of fear/ Crawling to the shore/ Coming back for more.
*
In his collected poems, Lorca often writes of heaven, “heavenly light” and “heavenly fields.” But only once does he write of hell. In his poem “In New York,” written during his year-long stay in the city, he writes, “This is not hell, but the street.” His New York streets are full of cement, piss, and “counterfeit dawn.” His city river is full of “tender blood,” like Henry’s river full of dead flowers. Lorca wanted his poems to be read as songs.
Lorca was assassinated at age 38 by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, because of his socialist views and, in no small part, his homosexuality. But his poems sustain. Like religion, they pulse beyond rationality, into the sacred.
*
I’d casually mentioned to Henry that I’d recorded some sloppy bullshit music. He begged me to share it.
When I received my cassettes in the mail from my Tumblr friend, I was afraid to touch them, as if they were a wild animal. I kept the box in the corner of my room for weeks.
Eventually I used a box cutter from work to slice through the packaging and unearth the tapes, tiny sea green rectangles in cheap plastic casing. For their covers I drew and photocopied a picture of my room: my bed pressed against three walls, posters tacked up haphazardly, my guitar and 4-track strewn across the floor.
One afternoon, I foisted one of my cassettes toward Henry, my head turned. He bounced on his toes, eyes beaming. That evening, after the customers left, as I mopped the dining room next to the kitchen, I heard a familiar voice over the stereo, crackling through cassette fuzz. I rushed toward Henry and demanded he turn it off.
He wiped his hands on his apron, slowly clicked off the stereo, and turned his whole body toward me. Gone was his slightly manic energy, his sarcastic affect. He looked me dead in the eye and said, These songs are damn good.
*
It mattered that Henry was an older man. He was the first adult man in my life who didn’t try to hit on me or talk over me or punish me. It helped that he was queer—I felt I could trust him.
There was the man who kept coming into the café with a hard-on through his gym shorts, staring at me. The man who said, You look natural, except for that thing (pointing to my nose piercing). The man who slapped my stomach and shouted, Eat something! We need to fatten you up for winter.
*
I got a band together and we played our first show in my basement. I hung up heart-shaped Christmas lights and brought down a big thrifted lamp. My bandmates and I put our coats and instrument cases on the washer and dryer in the corner. Our friends funneled down the narrow staircase, already drunk. Because the basement ceilings were only six feet tall some guys walked around with cuts on their foreheads without realizing it. It was October and I’d just turned 22.
I don’t have any photos of the performance but I do have one of the aftermath. The photo focuses on our drummer. He’s smiling and standing up from his drum seat, triumphant. (He quit after that show.) I’m in a dark corner, crouched over, putting something away, my back to the camera. Black jeans, grey hoodie. Tiny.
It’s likely I told my friends not to take pictures. I’d invited them, but it was unbearable to have them watch me. During our set they smiled encouragingly, but I couldn’t help but feel a bit patronized. I was a beginner. I was bad, a mess, for sure. And on some level I believed that being a “bad” artist was a moral failure. That it rendered me unloveable, even unworthy of living. Between songs I gulped whiskey, trying to evaporate. I could feel my heartbeat in my bowels. I could feel my fingers slip onto the wrong guitar strings.
As I sweat in the dark, singing with my eyes closed, trying to reach the right notes, I thought of my earlier conversation with Henry. I’d told him I was nervous to perform and he’d said, You know what, after a certain point, you’re like, “I’m gonna show these fuckers something.” I couldn’t muster his bravado that evening, but for brief moments, I showed myself something, something other than my fear and shame: what it felt like to lose any sense of time or awareness of my body, to slip into a portal of complete concentration. A purity of being.
*
Seven AM on a Sunday at the café. I sliced open boxes, stood on a step stool, and restocked jars of sauerkraut on the highest shelf. From up there the music from the speakers was loudest. I often claimed dominion over our sound system, playing sparse emotive songs, Mazzy Star and Liz Phair’s demos. The music stuffed itself into my head—throbbing from sleeplessness—like gauze.
Those mornings my body still beat to the night before, all my trips to New York City. At first I just drove the four hours there and back to see bands, sometimes alone. I was a shadow in the corner of other peoples’ night out. I drove home itchy and eager to someday participate. Then, a few months after my band played our first show, we started getting asked to play at those same venues I’d haunted. I can’t say exactly how it happened, other than I threw myself in their direction. When asked to play, I never said no.
Friends from college invited my band to play in their basements. Shawn booked us shows in town. Five months after my band’s first show, I’d played in a half-dozen states, released two cassettes through a popular underground label, and was planning my band’s first tour. I was tireless, ravenous for experience. I wanted to make up for the cloistered hours I spent as a lonely teen in a conservative town. I wanted to sublimate my hurt into purpose.
After one of our sets I overheard a guy tell his friend, Dude. This band just played, and they weren’t good, but they were fuckin’ great.
*
In my notebook by the cashier I wrote:
ask Fran to bring over stuff to record songs with buy new guitar strap email Kaler about philly show pack for NYC show
*
One afternoon, after I finished ringing up a customer, Henry walked up to me at the register and slapped down a pile of R.E.M. cassettes. A gift. He’d heard me stream them earlier on the store’s overhead speakers.
He told me R.E.M.’s guitarist wanted to start a side project with him in the ‘80s. I got drunk and blew him off. I was an idiot. He shrugged. I wondered if it was too painful for him to listen to them.
I’d learned more about what happened to Henry and his band through Shawn and internet searches. They lost out on a record deal to Guns N’ Roses. According to one article, they “sputtered out—mainly due to lack of direction and industry indifference.” The producer of their first demo said, “I thought they were going to do something, I really did.” Their guitarist robbed a bank on his 50th birthday.
After Henry and his partner broke up in New York City, he needed to move in with his aging parents upstate. I couldn’t help but pity Henry for what I perceived as his downfall, going from being a rock star to making ten dollars an hour, hanging out with people half his age, playing shows in people’s basements. I couldn’t help but view him as sort of pathetic, as much as I also admired him. At 22, I promised myself I’d never become him.
*
Three years after my band played our first show I found myself in a small music venue in Athens, Georgia with Michael Stipe from R.E.M.
He’d walked in just as my band finished playing our set. He stood out, an older man with a long beard in a sea of 25 year-olds. His expression a bit dour, sleepy. I watched him walk to the bar and sit down, indifferent to us packing up onstage.
I cursed the younger band we let play after us. We’d brought them along on our tour but they insisted on “headlining” as much as possible. I didn’t care, I didn’t believe in their aggressive careerism, in their jockeying for the optics of being “the best.” Or, at least, I hadn’t. Now Michael Stipe would never see us play. Not that he would have scooped us up and carried us to stardom or financial solvency, the chances of that were one in a billion, but now I’d never know. Art careers get made from many small moments of connection and luck. How many opportunities had I missed, how many more would I?
I spent the rest of the evening seething in the corner of the venue, one eye on the young band and their embarrassing theatrics, another on Michael Stipe, his back to the stage, face in his drink.
*
The video is dark and blurry. Henry stands center stage with a spotlight aimed at his face, flattening his features, turning him lunar. His head shines where his hairline has receded. He wears all black and plays a white Telecaster guitar. He introduces his song by saying, This is a horrible song but I’m playing it anyway. He slams his fingers across his guitar.
I pop on headphones, close my eyes, and listen to the song several times. The guitar is too loud for the vocals, the audio quality is poor, and the audience’s muffled chatter is distracting, but I can make out most of the lyrics. The narrator of the song goes to work, to a party, to Tompkins Square, and he encounters people who are dirty, hopeless, miserable, and empty. He then repeats the adjective in the next line, “I love [dirty] people, that’s why I love you.”
Henry’s voice is textured with age but it still radiates clarity and purpose. He’s used to singing in loud, strange bands, and there are dozens of videos on the internet to prove it. But now, as he sings the chorus, “I love you,” he holds out the last “uuu,” and I can finally hear the subtle intonations of his voice, its dexterity and singularity as it bounces between high notes. I can hear the lyrics, and I understand he’s singing a real love song, where love isn’t just kisses and platitudes but is interwoven with dailiness and grit, humor even. I sing the lyrics to myself for months.
*
At 22 I left that upstate New York town. Francis and I moved to Philadelphia, where we played shows with our band every weekend, booked scrappy country-wide tours, and made album after album. After years of this, we didn’t make much money, but we acquired a modest fan base, toured Europe, and were featured in Rolling Stone.
I’d return to that small town every now and then, it was right next to where Francis’s parents lived. I’d go to the café, again as a customer, savoring their tempeh stews and specialty vegan cookies. I’d see Henry and we’d chat about our bands. He said he was jealous of me and my life in Philadelphia. He bought my records. He invited me to play shows in their town, offers I said I’d consider but always ultimately refused. He unfriended me on Facebook.
*
When I ended my band at 27, Francis and I moved back upstate for two years. We hated it there, but he’d wanted to be closer to his family and I felt I needed to step away from my music community to figure out how to finally be a writer. In my loneliness I reached out to Henry, to see if he wanted to get coffee.
I met him at the same café I’d frequent in college, with the big brown leather chairs and the textured orange walls. Back then I’d order quadruple-shot mochas, but this time I ordered herbal tea. As I stood in line to pay I spotted him toward the back, sipping his drink. His eyes darted around the room, he tapped both feet. And I wondered if this had been a mistake, if there was, in fact, something weird about us hanging out, me a 28 year-old woman, he almost 60.
I walked toward his table and his eyes bugged out a bit when he saw me, as if I’d startled him. I wanted to give him a hug, a common salutation among people my age, but I felt awkward, so I just sat down across from him. His stubble was gray, like my father’s.
He launched into questions about my old band. Why’d you leave when things were going so well? What’s next for you? I took long sips of tea. I was tiring of answering these kinds of questions. He probably had similar reasons for leaving the band he was in in his 20s, didn’t he get it? I told him I was getting older. I wanted to make new work. I asked him about his cat, his parents, but he said he heard I was working on a new music project, and could I tell him about that?
Only later, years later, did I realize why his questions annoyed me so much. I’d wanted something from him—wisdom about how to age as an artist. Assurance I would be ok.
About forty-five minutes into our conversation he asked if I’d ever want to be interviewed for the radio show he hosted with Shawn at the local college station. I said, Sure. He said, Well, you just were. I didn’t understand. He pulled his phone out of his cardigan pocket and said, This is how I get the best interviews. Otherwise people are too self-conscious. He smiled, proud. I felt hurt, and violated.
We didn’t get coffee again. I moved back to Philadelphia. Two years later he died.
*
Back in Philadelphia I became friends with a woman who dated the lead singer of Pissed Jeans. Ten years after I saw him onstage at the Pitchfork Music Festival, after I first connected with Henry over his music, he came to my birthday party—32—and I sat next to him on the rug in my living room. I meant to ask him to sign a record for me to send to Henry. I really meant to.
*
The morning I found out Henry died, I started driving to work. I listened to his song “Dead Flowers.” Halfway through my drive I couldn’t see the road, I was crying so hard. I pulled over and texted my boss to say I wouldn’t be going in that morning. I said, my friend died last night.
Was that right? Was Henry my friend? When I got home I lay in bed, put on headphones, and listened to his music on repeat. I gave in to the wretched, almost-lovesick feeling of my complicated grief. It felt indulgent, unearned. What did I really know of Henry? I didn’t know the names of his parents or lovers. I’d never seen him cry. I want to say his eyes were blue but I’m not sure.
I still got paid even though I didn’t go into work; I was granted a “grief day.”
I grieved the loss of an artist in the world, one I thought was often overlooked. I grieved the energy we created between us, and what he knew of me that I’d never know of myself. I grieved an image for my own future, the possibility of aging as an artist.
From bed, I scoured the internet, reading everything I could find about him. On a Facebook fan page for his band from the ‘80s, users posted multiple times a week, even though it was 2024. The day he died people posted whole essays about how much Henry’s music meant to them, had given them hope, saved their lives. They posted live recordings and videos, previously unseen photos of Henry across the years, sweaty and shirtless, clutching a microphone, mouth open. He was far louder than I knew.
*
I dreamt about him recently. He was directing a musical, a massive high-budget production. He was gliding around groups of people, gesticulating, everyone paying attention to him. He wasn’t in heaven, or hell—he was working.
*
Shortly after I moved back to Philly, Henry posted on social media about having cancer. According to our archived messages I said: oh Henry! thinking of you xx He replied with several thumbs up emojis and a blue butterfly.