I know it isn't my place, but I had black friends all over Pittsburgh growing up who watched me from a distance, read my letters to the paper and cared about me. Christian was one of them. When my counselor for deafness and overly lucid tendencies saw that I was moved to emotion by his death, she asked me, "If you were asked to write a eulogy for Christian, what would you say?" So, I came to Douglass-Truth Library.
Maybe it's good that I wasn't there, in Pittsburgh, didn't see or contribute to the breakdown that led to this, because it means I can eulogize Christian the Miracle, the ideal, Christian ... the sakura (cherry blossom) without being forced to dwell on Christian the byproduct of Pittsburgh. I simply cannot help wishing that Christian, instead of me, had gone to the Governor's School.
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It is bad enough to live in a world where people do not know how to care, and I mean anywhere, it is a problem all over America, people who do not know how to stop a moment and consider, much less to lend a hand, even if they do not dare to take a hand; it is bad enough ... without having to live out your days in a city that hates.
Thinking about Pittsburgh last night, not Christian so much at that late hour, just a city I haven't wanted to look at or hear from, into whose Poetry SLAM website I recklessly wandered looking for Christian only to hear the glum news, for one moment I sympathized with the ultra-rich in the class struggle. How wonderful it would be to live in a world where someone's tears meant something.
The image the Slam conveys is of an angry, hostile man who finally died by his own ropes. Sorry, but I don't buy it. I believe that Christian died in tears. He died a little boy in pain. He died in sorrow He died sad. He killed himself because he saw that he had given his life ... his whole life ... all of it ... tooth and nail, to people who just wanted him dead from the day he was born and for nothing would hear him out.
If someone had tried to stop him from the bad acid or puffing the doobie or whatever it was that was going in without coming all the way out, his friends, and I mean even what you would take for his good ones, would be all over that poor soul with, "What's wrong with you!" They dreamed of Christian being a super-griffin in that lucid dream from hell. I didn't. I saw him as a decent human being stalking, if anything, understanding. Without a soul to be found, even when he yelled to a packed hall or a basement mob scene in Wilkinsburg; a man who wanted you to listen because he had something to say and didn't feel the need to wait a hundred years to say it.
When I first learned about Christian on my own reconnaissance I wanted and I still want to punish that City of Faceliars and those terrible ideologues of academia who just sit in their fairy tower and rape that poor city black and blue. Christian was groovy and he was on the move.