Bisbee New Years

Always fabulous. Going to Birmingham AFTER the event… So nice.

Brett’s senior prom. I was wearing his skirt. (Just as friends goddamnit! He was my BROTHER! Gross!😂)

I met Brett when I started working at the Rickshaw Stop in I guess, 2015? Once we worked together a few shifts, much alcohol consumed, it turned out we had our own secret language of laughter. Like literally didn't even have to talk to each other and both start giggling til we fell down. As we got to know each other better, the deeper not so fun stuff stuff came out, for both of us, and we both struggled a lot with family issues and substance abuse issues, we'd constantly say to each other "Dude, I think it's time to stop drinking, for real this time"....Then I'd have to go pick him up to go to work and he'd already have put a couple bottles of wine away by 11 am. But I didn't judge, he still got his job done and then took a very long nap before finding his way home again. For a while, when I was struggling to make ends meet, he hired me to clean his place at the Vulcan. One day, I stupidly wiped the side of the microwave the wrong direction straight into a VERY sharp knife that was on a magnet just opposite the microwave and sliced the fuck out of my pinky, I'm talking a big ol' separated flesh could almost see my bone at the base of my finger. Nobody was home and I didn't know where First Aid supplies were, but luckily a roommate came soon after and bandaged me up. I had bled all over the kitchen and bathroom so I had to re-clean all of that....anyways, the cut left a nice little scar on my pinky and I always thought of it as my Brett scar, reminding me of the help he offered whenever and whatever I was going through. I tattooed a heart over that scar this year because I wanted to forget about it, but now I think it's a testament of the love I had for Brett and I wear the scar and the tattoo proudly. Ok, ok, so now for the BEST Brett Memory of All Time!!!! It was a Rickshaw Stop holiday party and part of the adventure was kayaking on the Bay from West Oakland to Albany to this Italian restaurant on the water. My day had started with Jagermeister and maybe a bagel? Anyways, let's just say, I was already pretty silly by the time we reached the restaurant, we all were, and I sat down at a table with Brett and KTesch and numerous other co-workers. Me and Brett started making fart noises at each other, trying to top the last one each time. It escalated to us putting our hands up to our cheeks and mouths and making the LOUDEST grossest fart sounds and we were just laughing hysterically after each one. I'm pretty sure I cried I was laughing so hard and he definitely was. I dunno if I've ever laughed that hard in my whole life and I dunno if I ever will again.....(insert fart noises here)

Posted from Xeno with his permission 

It's been fairly tough for me to confront this thing. It's hard to acknowledge that Hayseed moved out of the vulcan years ago to go back to Bisbee. It felt like a defeat, to me.

I met Hayseed in 2003 on the work ranch (the 80, not the ranch where it is now). I had started DPW because I loved the event and the freedom it let me express. But I loved it more for the flame it was for all the weird and chaotic little moths that spun around it. I didn't meet anyone that really seemed to care who I was at the ranch, and I was OK with that. I was used to cool kids doing cool kid things and not inviting me. I was there to experience something different and I didn't need anyone's approval for it. But when Hayseed sat down next to me at the ranch commissary, he immediately made me feel seen. It was his first year, Dr. Fuckofski brought him to the ranch to get him to work through some shit ("stop sucking the glass dick" was how Hayseed phrased it to me. Meth is a hell of a drug and it takes a lot of intervention and love to move away from it) and our friendship helped with everything. Our dark humor and give no fuck attitude played together very well. I finally felt like I had friends in DPW. I was energized and invigorated by his prescience.

We made dumb videos together: https://www.youtube.com/watch…

After we shot a car full of bullets, the rangers dutifully and expeditiously towed the car out of the private land that we didn't have permission to be on. I decided that DPW was my family and I needed to be closer to the hub of it all. I moved from Seattle to Oakland with the hope of living in a warehouse as soon as possible. Hayseed was living in the mission, and let me crash at his weird apartment a few times. I didn't get to live in a warehouse for a while, I moved into an ex-grow-op in east Oakland that had its very own stoop. Hayseed's dad got real sickn while I lived there, it really fucked him up. We would spend hours on my stoop talking about his family and his duty to take care of things. When his dad got too sick, Hayseed went back home and spent months watching his father die. He would clean up his dads shit, literally wipe his ass and take care of him. After his father died, his mother let Hayseed know that he was artificially inseminated, and the guy he had just taken care of wasn't his biological father.

Hayseed was distraught and near suicidal, I gave him a key to my house and the couch that I still have and sit on was his bed and his "always home." I would never turn him away, and we spent hours on my stoop talking about his family, my fucked up background... everything. We bought a book of acid together and pledged to only give it to the "good" people. I knew that he would always be there for me.

He lived in a warehouse space and when a spot opened up he got me into it. After 8 years in the bay I had finally got to get into the thing I wanted, and it only because of his word. I would wake up to Merle Haggard and Hayseed doing yoga in our living room at 8am. I'd come home to random giant feasts because he just couldn't stop cooking for his friends. There were always left overs. We had a dumb fight where we stopped talking to each other, but one of our roommates died and I had to call Hayseed because police might come into out house. I asked him what needed cleaning in his room. He told me. I cleaned it up and we talked about our dead friend. After that, nothing came between us. The gravity of it knocked sense into both of us.

He left the Vulcan warehouse to go back to Bisbee. I think that, without Dr. Fuckofski, he backslid to his old problems. I feel like the

bay area failed him, he needed a different sort of community and the hustle was too stupid here. But when I had a crisis at DPW, decided that I couldn't keep working there because it was moving away from my moral compass and also that my mom was incredibly sick... When my mom was falling down in the middle of crosswalks and unable to get up, when she was forgetting what she was saying literally in the middle of her sentences... when I quit DPW because I needed to be a good son and take care of her, I let Hayseed know that I might need to quit my job, move out of my dream house, and go to Astoria. All he said was "When do we leave?" He was looking at ways to live there and build a business and thrive when I was just a puddle of panic mud. He was ready to drop everything in his life to help me take care of my mom. It wasn't necessary ultimately, we figured out what was wrong with her and she got better, but he didn't bat an eye at upending his life to come help me with family work.

He was a dark, chaotic wizard.... he helped me get through a shit ton of stuff, I helped him too. I feel lessened by his passing in a way I haven't felt with others, I feel like the world is more difficult to

deal with without him. I wonder what impact I've had.

An aboslute gem from Xeno. 

In 2018, I asked Brett why he moved to Bisbee. This is what he told me."I have never been able to feel at home. Everywhere was a journey. And I loved that for a long time. I don’t love it anymore. I wanted to be home where all my heart worn remedies could be let out and I could be myself. I chose here. I will live here, on and off, forever.

Cause I finally figured out where my heart rests."It gives me some kind of comfort, to know that he was right, and that in the end, he was right where he wanted to be.

Brett again reading his own poetry, on December 7, 2018. This one feels a little more personal (I always feel like he's talking to/about me in the beginning, then I'm not so sure near the end, as it becomes clear he's talking to/about hismelf), but it also feels so much like him that I wanted to share with other people who love him. What especially gets me is the end.

To himself, I think:"If you are anything, you are humble. you try. and that makes you the best person you can be.

And then, a promise to me/us:

"I will never stop trying."

And I think that was true. That's one of the beautiful and tragic things about him. He didn't just succumb to his suffering, he cycled with it. He tried to climb out, then would dive back in. He strove. He  stumbled. He searched. He yearned. He... TRIED.

Did he stop trying and that's why he died?Or did he just not have another chance to cycle back around?

I don't know. But when I think of him, I think of him as someone who was always trying to be a better man. To be a happier man. To find a happier place. To find a home. Maybe now, finally, he can stop trying.

Brett reading his own poetry. He often sent poems but only occasionally sent videos like this. I uploaded it to YouTube just to share it here. I'm thinking he wouldn't mind.

This was November 30, 2018, at 8am. He sent along with this message:

My words are not perfect in this dear writer....

But they are from

Where I’m from

P.S. It's the wink at the end for me.

I posted this on FB but was asked to share this here too so here you go. I hope to write more, and more personally, about him soon. First, though, the updated invite to the shared Spotify list (it expires every few days)

https://open.spotify.com/play…

+++

I have been too heartbroken about the passing of Brett Behrens (aka his other FB identity Brett Behrens) to write a big thing about him yet, though I hope I will soon. If anyone deserves writing about, it's our gentle poet Brett. My dear, close, eternal heart-friend Brett. (My... more than friend. I don't even know what to call it. That's for later.)

But, as it turns out, it's really hard to write coherently about a loss that's big and deeply personal immediately after it happens, when you're numb and then crying and then fine and then exhausted and then sobbing without warning in a Zoom writing class.

I should know. I've tried. A lot.

In the meantime, I've been trying to just sit with the grief, and also maybe with his spirit, and definitely with my memories of him. And I've been been finding joy and solace and an expression of my grief by listening to music that reminds me of him.

For me, that's the Rolling Stones. Mostly it's "Angie," a song he would sing to me at karaoke, looking me straight in the eye, in case I happened to miss the message. And also the entire album "Let it Bleed," which we'd listen to together during our long late night soul sessions at ArtSF, and then his various homes and squats through the years. (And wow, does the titular song characterize the kind of friend Brett was, and the kind of life and community we shared in 2008/2009.)

In fact, as I was going through the Facebook messages that he'd send me every few weeks or every few months, usually at 4am but not always, often long poems but not always, I found this simple message from October 30, 2018:

"Let it bleed

Just came on!

And I still love you!"

I realized a lot of people probably have songs or albums that remind them of Brett. Music was such a big part of his and our life. Music that made him cry. Music that made him joyful. Music he'd belt with friends at a party. Music he'd dance to in a dress while Dominic Tinio sings in a bee costume.

So I made a playlist for us to all share together, where we can collect our sonic memories of him, and celebrate him, together.

I encourage you to share the invite and the playlist with absolutely anyone, and to add anything that reminds you of him, or you think he would like. I am very much craving community around mourning him, and also just wanting to bask in the glow of the essence of him, and I think this is one way those of us who are far apart from each other can have and do that.

The invite is here:

The name of the playlist, "The Soul Stuff I Carry," is from a line in a small poem he once sent me. I'm sure so many of us have those poems, and are reading them now.

Again, I hope to write more about him soon. I may need to listen to this album and read those poems a dozen more times before I do.

Also, if anyone is organizing any kind of online memorial, please include me. Brett was absolutely precious to me, and I really want to honor him. And/or if there's an in-person memorial, if there's anyone who can figure out a way to make an online component that's accessible to the disabled, covid vulnerable, and far away, I would GREATLY appreciate it, and will help facilitate it any way that I can.

Sending deep love and compassion and condolence to anyone feeling his loss right now. And if anyone wants to talk about him, I'm here. I do too.

I have some hard-love things to say. 

In talking with our extended family of friends we are all saying to ourselves, "If only I had: called more, visited, reached out, talked to him." 

"IF ONLY..."

Brett struggled with addiction his whole adult life. Dionysus was his God, for god's sakes. Look, he just felt sooooo deeply, he really did. The extremes of love and woe that swept over him we can all identify with, but I dare say, he spent more time at these extremes than most. His love and woe were two sides of the same coin and indivisable, and a huge part of why we held and hold him so dear in our hearts. The woe was a hole in Brett, and he could not fill it, not with all the love life and laughter that the world could offer.  We've all been there, but it became too much for him. The results of the autopsy are not known, but it was this hole that killed Brett.

His addictions ate him, and all that's left to do is celebrate and remember him in our best, worst, and in-between times. Let us make sure we are supporting those taking care of his worldly affairs left behind, and connecting to others, together mourning. 

Listen, Brett made choices for himself. He moved to Bisbee, the place he felt he belonged to, his well from which to draw strength. ...Or so, that's what he told me. Regardless, he chose that. 

We did reach out to him, he wasn't honest about how far in his hole he was, not with most of us, and probably not with himself. He didn't always reach back. You just think you'll see that guy again next time he comes through, like he always does, me too. Please try not to "IF ONLY" yourself. This is just Brett's life, and that's okay, death is a part of life. And listen to me! He was loved, and had adventures, and touched souls, and fucked shit up, and broke hearts, and fed us all magic and food, and got lost, he played the hero, he played the fool, and poetry and performances; a full life. Many of us had decades with him, which is a long time and something I am grateful for. 

Finally, whatever hardships, whatever "bad-foot" you may have left with him, let it go. When you face the eternity of death these marred interactions become trite and meaningless and nothing matters but the love. Forgiveness comes with love, so talk to someone about your pain and regrets and fears and work it out. Forgive yourself, Brett's love for others was deeper than the hole that ate him. Brett loves you, can you hear him saying it? Like, over and over and over... "I LOVE YOU!"

Looking handsome, cool, and murderous. Loud patterned bottoms. Brett was one of my all time favorite people in space and time. I could come to him with anything and he would be honest, healing, and fun. We cried together and more often laughed. We laughed so hard one time be both flashed backed and watched the room turn to rainbows. I love you Brett, I don't think you ever really knew how much. — with KT Tesch and Brett Behrens