Giving Up the Ghost (33 page)

From talking to people who were in and out of Laura’s life at this time, I gathered that she worked very hard to hide what happened to her in New Orleans. Laura knew no one in New Orleans, had never been there before, and had no apparent connection there at all. One day she had simply gotten it into her mind to go and was gone. She seemed to have befriended a group of homeless kids and gotten immediately caught up in the drama that surrounds homeless kids. Different people heard different versions of different stories, but some people thought there may have been drugs involved and some run-ins with police. A few suggested that Laura had been assaulted during her time there, which just drove her further underground.

After several attempts, Laura’s mother convinced her to leave New Orleans and come home. Laura agreed, on the condition that her family not ask why she had gone to Louisiana or what she did there. Once she got back to Canton, she seemed fine—until it was time to return to New York.

On the way to the airport, Laura started crying that she didn’t want to go back. They turned around and went home to Canton. Laura and her dad did drive to New York a few weeks later to retrieve her things, but otherwise she never returned to her life there. She got a job as a waitress in Canton and started looking for an apartment.

While learning all this deepened my understanding of her and what she went through in the time after our friendship, it felt so foreign to hear these things, which were so unlike the Laura I knew. I still can’t decide if this bothers me because her
life headed in a direction that was so different from what I expected or because I have locked into my head a vision of her that can’t be changed or grow into something different. I can’t imagine I will ever be able to fully reconcile the two.

All this new information provided no insight about our relationship, how she had felt about me, or what kind of significance I had to her. Outside of a single birthday card, none of the letters or scribbling I gave her have survived.

One of her best friends throughout her life, a girl named Kris, wrote me a letter after a long phone call, a pile of emails back and forth, and reading some of my reflections on Laura. She told me something I heard regularly from people and had to admit to myself. Despite her thirst for life and singular personality, Laura was an insecure kid. Though she may have looked and acted a bit different, she wasn’t all that different from other eighteen-year-old girls. The big difference was that Laura decided not to settle. She cast herself out into the ocean but had trouble keeping afloat.

“It’s so clear to me how much you meant to her,” Kris wrote. “I believe she gave you her all as a friend, but not more, because that was what she had to give at that point. I feel strongly that because you and your friendship meant so much to her, she valued you too much to delve into territory where she did not have the confidence to handle. When you really care about someone, it’s too scary to embark on a path that screams out danger the way intimacy does. It was because she loved you that she couldn’t go there with you.”

While Laura was back in Canton, Kris was camping with a boyfriend in California. One evening she had a terrible dream (which she does not remember) and woke up worried about Laura. Even though it was the middle of the night, Kris was so freaked that she went to a pay phone and called Laura back in
Ohio. They talked for a few hours, the conversation ending with Kris apologizing for calling so late.

“You never need to apologize for that,” Laura told her. “I love you. You need to remember that I am always here. Always here for you whenever you need me.”

The next morning Laura was on her way home from the drugstore and was killed.

When I spoke or corresponded with Jason and the others, I kept hearing references to Other Laura. I’d come to learn that Laura Patterson had a deep friendship with a girl named Laura at the same time she was friends with me. Not at relatively the same time, but at
exactly the same time
. When I spoke to Other Laura, we realized that we would often be hanging out with Laura Patterson on the same night. Other Laura spoke about Laura Patterson showing up at her house late at night with some clove cigarettes and wine—clove cigarettes and wine she’d taken from me when I dropped her off. Laura Patterson and Other Laura would go see concerts together, drive off to remote places to talk for hours, and treat each other like best friends. And yet Laura Patterson had never said a word to either of us about the other one. Until I contacted her, we were complete strangers.

“I remember one night we were in the Flats in Cleveland before a 7 Seconds concert,” Other Laura told me. “She liked going around there. We were walking around some old useless warehouses, then we came across a brick wall where someone had spray painted
IF YOU CAN’T COPE, USE THE ROPE
. Hanging in front of the wall was a noose, suspended under an overpass.”

The noose was high off the ground, but not that high. Laura and Other Laura were a little drunk at the time but figured they could reach it.

“I think the conversation went, ‘You probably couldn’t hang yourself in that, could you?’ ‘You probably couldn’t die here, could you?’ ‘Let’s try it,’ ” Other Laura told me.

Eventually, Other Laura ended up on Laura Patterson’s shoulders putting her head inside the noose, just for kicks. The noose looked like it was long enough for Other Laura to reach the ground, so Laura Patterson started to step away and let go of Other Laura.

The noose wasn’t long enough to reach the ground.

It quickly tightened around Other Laura’s neck. She called out to Laura Patterson for help, and Laura quickly put herself under Other Laura to support her weight.

Other Laura struggled with the noose. The rope, thick with hardened grime, wouldn’t loosen. Laura Patterson happened to have a pocketknife and gave it to Other Laura. The pocketknife was about as effective as a toothpick would be for cutting a steak.

“And the more I struggled with the noose,” she said, “the tighter and tighter it became. I was choking and struggling and thrashing around. Laura was holding on to my legs and trying to prop me up on her shoulders.”

The Lauras had no idea what to do. Laura Patterson was struggling to hold Other Laura up. Both were at the point of exhaustion. The noose was in a small open area surrounded by abandoned buildings in a neighborhood of abandoned buildings. There was no one around. No way to call for help.

“I kept telling Laura that it was okay. I told her, ‘You have to just let go. You aren’t strong enough,’ ” Other Laura told me. “She refused. She told me that she wouldn’t let go. That she’d never let go.”

Eventually, Other Laura forced the noose open just enough to pull it over her face, causing lacerations and burns over her
cheeks and ears and even pulling some skin off. They both fell to the ground. They cried and laughed and held each other. They sat there smoking and talking and trying to recover. Then, with Other Laura still bleeding from the rope burns, they decided to go ahead and see the show anyhow.

While listening to her tell the story, I could practically see it playing out in my mind. I knew those warehouses—the same ones that Laura and I had visited. I could see the rope, I could see them horsing around. I could see them getting into trouble. I could see their gratitude at finding a way out. Had I heard this story when it happened, I probably would have seen it as a metaphor for Laura’s strength, pushing herself to the point of exhaustion and refusing to let go of her friend. But hearing it now, I see it with another, darker dimension. Knowing more about the complexity of her later life, I can’t help but wonder about what she’d do if it had been
her
neck that ended up in that noose. I’m not sure she’d have struggled so much.

“That was the moment,” Other Laura recalled. “I knew. I just knew I loved her and I knew that she was the best friend I’d ever have. I know it sounds so bullshit and cinematic, but it was probably the most real moment of my entire life.”

A few years ago, not long before my dinner with my friend Matt, with most of this story uncomfortably stuffed into the corners of my head and almost-but-never-really forgotten, I moved to Washington, D.C. I was upstairs in my loft unpacking boxes of books. Or at least I was
supposed
to be unpacking. As is usual when I’m unpacking, I was lazily browsing and reminiscing as opposed to putting any effort into systematically removing and locating the items I was supposed to be paying attention to in the first place.

I was thumbing through some of my surviving old notebooks and journals when I saw a stray piece of paper flip out of the box and flutter to the floor next to my foot. I wasn’t sure why, but my attention kept returning to that fallen piece of paper. Then it dawned on me.

It was the Mystery Poem.

I’m not entirely sure where it had come from, but it had obviously been stashed inside one of those old journals, where it had stayed safely hidden from me for close to twenty years. If I had had it along the way, I’m sure there were various times that I would have shredded and burned it, used it to console
myself in my grief or to try to make sense of my past. Instead, it had sat unintentionally nestled between some pages of bad poetry I’d written. It had managed to remain undetected all this time, until I was ready to deal with it.

I sat on the floor of the loft for an hour just staring at this tiny scrap of paper and reading it over and over again.

I’d remembered it almost perfectly.

It seemed more dramatic and melancholy than I remembered. It felt more antagonistic than I remembered—like the writer was blaming the Teacher for whatever situation they were in.

But what did it mean? Was I supposed to be the Teacher? Or was that Laura?

Reading it felt like being back at square one. I had no clue what it meant. I had no clue what it was. I had no clue why she had given it to me. I had no clue why she had insisted on not answering my questions.

“Just think about it for a while. You’ll eventually figure it out.”

The Mystery Poem was the only relic of Laura’s and my friendship. I had no photos, no letters, no cards. This was all
that was left. Yet, twenty years later I still felt clueless, dense, and like I was missing something frustratingly obvious.

Over the years I had made various stabs at trying to root out its origins. With the evolution of the Internet, I’d periodically Googled parts of the Mystery Poem. I’d pretty much given up, assuming that Laura had written it herself. With it sitting there in my hands, I decided to try one more time. I entered “teacher bring me to heaven” and started combing through the W.A.S.P. lyrics and early home-school education materials that littered the results. On the second or third page, I noticed the phrase “or leave me alone” in the search results quote. The site was in German but contained the first three lines of the poem and a reference to a book by Allen Ginsberg called
Sad Dust Glories
.

A week later a used chapbook arrived in the mail. It was a very rare collection of poems that Allen Ginsberg had written during the summer of 1974. After combing through the book, I found it. The Mystery Poem was actually a stanza, the second stanza of a long poem, one of three in the chapbook, a poem called “To The Dead.”

I slumped against the wall as I read the first lines of the poem.

What was this? I thought. My first reaction was that it seemed better suited for Laura than for me. In fact, it was perfectly suited for Laura. It made a knot form in my stomach.

Then came the stanza I’d been carrying in my head for twenty years.

I stopped reading.

This was
really
making far more sense as something I would say to Laura, rather than she to me. It was also a prophecy. She was in cities, then she was gone. Bones in the ground. Dead branches. But there was no way she could have ever known where I’d be when I’d figure out where the poem was from—no way she could possibly know what would happen to us both in between.

But she didn’t say it was about her from my perspective. She specifically said the poem, or rather the stanza, was just “from me to you”—which really told me nothing.

From there, the parallels kind of fell off a cliff. The poem rambles on about pine trees, Buddhism, and sleeping with young boys. It doesn’t even end with a lingering deep thought—it just ends.

It didn’t seem to answer much. This poem was about Allen Ginsberg, not Eric Nuzum, and not Laura Patterson. Like everything about Laura, the more I learned just made things less certain, made me feel farther away rather than closer.