To Lamb

Lamb ♣ 24 | LGBTQ+ Serial Fiction - The Final Episode

A special thank you to these most gracious citizens of the Substack-verse, who attended the Lamb Wrap Party on Saturday. Your support and friendship are deeply appreciated—it was lovely to see you all face-to-face. You made it a very special moment to commemorate this final episode. 💜💜💜

Kimberly Warner

of

Unfixed

whose Unfixed YouTube Channel, memoir, and media projects promote visibility for people living with chronic illnesses;

Martine Proctor

of

The Roll Top Desk

, the prolific and widely-published author of short stories and the gripping new crime fiction novel, Love You Til Tuesday;

Donna McArthur

of

The Bright Life

who has inspired so many to look inward with kindness, and always to get back up and keep moving forward;

Nadia Gerassimenko

of

when hope writes

who writes poetry and video game reviews with equal parts flair and heart, and was my earliest Substack supporter;

Holly Starley

of

Holly Starley's Rolling Desk

, the seer of American highways and byways, with her exquisitely observed vistas and moments of connection;

Jeffrey Yamaguchi

of

Book Publishing Brick By Brick

, an accomplished poet and tireless friend to authors with his sage literary and marketing advice;

and

Annette Marquis

of

Annette's Wanderings

whose brave and captivating memoir of family secrets, Living Into the Truth: A Daughter’s Journey of Discovery, is available now.

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AND to my husband, Leo, who has supported this crazy writing adventure I’ve been on every step of the way: Happy 25th Anniversary, Ducks. 💚🦆🦆💚

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Start at the beginning:

We Regret to Inform You | Lamb ♣ 01

Original photo by Mekuria Getinet on Unsplash

PREVIOUS EPISODE

To Lamb

♣ ♣ ♣ 24 ♣ ♣ ♣

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“What do you think it was?” Lindsey asked me as we were drinking our chamomile tea.

Her mom really had started to feel a little ill and went into the bedroom to lie down. Turns out she was in the throes of breast cancer, and only lived long enough to celebrate Lindsey’s baby’s first birthday—Hazel, they named her after Gramma. The picture Lindsey emailed when her mom died was from baby Hazel’s birthday party, and Gramma Hazel looked strangely amazing with this wild blonde wig, like Debbie Harry came for cake and kisses with her grandbaby. Happiness can erase all kinds of troubles, if only for an afternoon.

Lindsey’s question smacked me between the eyes because I had been thinking back to a time when Lamb and I were talking about death, not that it was a common thing, but something struck me about what he said.

“It’s written somewhere, you know?”

I can still see us kicked back on the hood of my dad’s LTD out in the Mojave Desert. We drove straight out of Lancaster until we ran out of road, then turned off onto a dirt track with just a bunch of Joshua trees standing around us like bristling shamans. 

That far away from the city, the Milky Way was on full display—Lamb had never seen it before, and he was getting all Cosmic Carl on me. Star-stuff, he called us, goggling over the night sky, and how we both had been born in the space age, within weeks of the first man on the moon.

We’d made a bong out of a jelly jar and some plastic tubing, spray painted it gold—we named it “The Golden Gun”—and stayed out there until almost midnight smoking weed, drinking warm beer we stole from my parents’ garage, listening to tapes and talking about everything and nothing.

Written somewhere, he’d said, and I asked, “What’s written where?”

“What do you think it will be? What will kill us?”

I said I hoped it wasn’t a kill situation and more of a dead in the morning sort of thing. “But what do you mean by written?”

“Just that a hundred years from now, or however long, our cause of death will be written, and it’s a definite thing, you know, like it IS going to be something, and we just don’t know what it is yet, but someday someone will record it, and I’m just wondering what they’ll write down?”

“And when,” I added.

But that was the conversation I flashed back to when Lindsey asked me how I thought it happened. I hadn’t had any luck finding out Lamb’s cause of death. I did call Wolcott, but they had no further information and I didn’t even ask if they could get a message to Lamb’s mom and dad. I tried to search obituaries, but the internet was still pretty clunky back then.

The big ones: overdose, suicide, AIDS. We rattled them off, sitting there on the sofa, but neither Lindsey or I had the heart to start speculating out loud what it was, and just then, Hazel came out of the bedroom and said she was ready to get going home. We said our goodbyes, and come to think of it, that’s the last time I saw them, too, other than the picture Lindsey sent. We’re friends on Facebook, but we were never really close like she and Lamb were.

I’m not sure what I thought, honestly, about how Lamb actually died. In a way, the moment he took off without saying goodbye was when he died to me, and even though it was a hopeful absence until I got the note from Wolcott, the adjustment to SF without Lamb was harder than I expected. I’d been away for a year—lots of friends were leaving San Francisco in the early aughts, what with the tech boom and rising rents. The energy of the City changed dramatically. Eventually I hit my stride, but just when I started to feel settled, along came we regret to inform you…

Are any of the possibilities preferable to the others? For whatever reason, I didn’t think it was probably AIDS. We’d kept a fairly routine testing schedule—whenever it was time for me to get tested, whether because of a dick slip or just because a year had gone by and it was a good thing to do, I’d call Lamb and we’d head up to Health Center 1 on 17th Street in the Castro. We’d both always been negative. Even if he did fall into some unsafe shit near the end, I just thought it was unlikely that he would have slipped away so quickly.

Overdose? Of course, that seemed more plausible after Lindsey told me her friend’s addiction story, but again, it just seemed like a pretty steep dive from smoking meth to shooting up, which is how most of those things happen, or maybe that’s just my bias.

I had a hard time imagining Lamb getting into that anyway, he was such a huge baby about blood and guts and needles. HIV testing was bad enough, he’d always come out of the blood draw looking white as a ghost. One time the guy had to prop him up when he almost fainted; he said the room was really quiet and he heard his own blood squirting into the syringe and started to see stars.

The last biggie though, that’s what really got to me, because as much as it killed me to think it, I could see all of his troubles coming to a head and Lamb—lonely, who knows where, strung out—maybe taking a bunch of pills and slipping away quietly because he just couldn’t figure out how to move forward, and no way to come back.

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I know, now, what happened—sort of—the other most obvious possibility.

The walk down memory lane, after all this time—well, it was good. Good to remember Lamb, good to finally open up all those boxes, smell his grassy smell, read some of our old letters and peek into his journals. I shared some of his poetry with Lawrence, and I think that was OK, but this isn’t going to be some kind of Emily Dickinson thing where I’m championing his writing now after he’s gone because he was such a great poet or something.

Anyway, it all prompted me to peek around again online to see if I could find an obituary, and I finally did. June 15, 2003. That was it, just a date, so in the end it was almost eight months afterward that the notice from Wolcott came. 

There was a request in the obit for contributions in Lamb’s name to a Jewish temple near Bronxville, New York where his dad and step-mom had lived. A few more clicks, and I found a random note that his dad left a few years ago on the temple’s message board for a family grieving the loss of a daughter who had died in an auto accident, a friend of the family probably. Mr. Broeder told them that his own son had died the same way. 

So. Car crash.

Was he driving drunk? Was it his fault, or someone else’s? Did he die instantly? I don’t know, and honestly, I don’t want to. But also: Lamb was Jewish? Huh. The things you find out after the fact, right?

I don’t remember where I was on the day it happened—it was a Sunday, in summer—but I do remember the next day after our little service for Lamb. It was February in 2004, and I went to one of the gay weddings at San Francisco City Hall, officiated by DA Kamala Harris, of all people. It was a new day back then.

I kept the note I read during the candle pass, in case anyone is interested. Here’s what I said:

Thank you all for coming today—it may be a small group, but I don’t think any of us thinks less of Lamb because there’s not a whole gang of mourners. He was a very special guy—strange, some thought—even I thought—and different. Gentle. Serious. Ridiculous. He was all of those and so much more. 

I think back to the time he cried his eyes out over a little baby chick, and how I said to myself then Jeez, this kid is completely defenseless, all six-foot-six of him. 

For some very special people, there’s something missing, some essential ingredient, like leavening in bread—without it, you never get any lift. He was always floundering around, making the same mistakes over and over, and yet he was so bright, one of the smartest people I ever met, and it’s really hard to understand sometimes how our favorite people fall and never get back up.

Can we be our best selves without knowing someone like Lamb, someone who can’t cope—good through and through, but never tough enough to hack it here in this great blast furnace of humanity? Can we be our best selves without loving someone like that—the chick that never flies, the babe in the woods who never finds his way home?

Sometimes people are lost and never found. And their legacy for us must be not a turning away from the broken, the strange and difficult, but instead a warm fire of the heart to always return to—always another chance to rise.

I know I would have given Lamb another chance. I wish he had known it. I wish he had been able to shed whatever shame and fear he held inside and given himself that chance. 

We say goodbye today knowing that he has found his way. Please join me in raising a glass. May he fly at last. To Lamb.

♣ ♣ ♣

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THANK YOU for reading Lamb!

The ebook and print versions will be available in 2025 with additional bonus material. Stay tuned for more details.

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