Well, the first thing I should address is the fact that I haven’t posted in three weeks. Consistency has been an issue for me, but also I’ve been busy. In the last three weeks, I’ve celebrated a birthday (yay!), traveled to New England to spend time with some people I care about very, very much (yay!), and have either moderated or participated in five separate panel discussions (yay!). I’m also just, like, living life. It’s (now almost officially) summer in New York City, the weather has been surprisingly solid so far, and people (including me) wanna be social. So I’ve been focusing on off-line life. I suppose I could’ve written something during that time, but updating this wasn’t really top of mind. I promise to do better. Actually, the idea that popped into my head today that I’m gonna make it a point to post twice a week-Thursdays and Mondays. So why are you seeing a post on a Wednesday night? Well, at least partially because I’ll be on a plane tomorrow and I’ll probably not get a chance to post. And also because I’m inspired. So let’s move on.
Loss and change has been on my mind a lot lately, and not because I turned another year older. Obviously (maybe not to some) we live in a world of constant change and tumult. Two of the last three books I’ve read have dealt with change and loss in different contexts. Jayson Greene’s “Once More We Saw Stars” deals with the painful and sudden loss of a child. I’m also reading a biography of the Notorious B.I.G. called “It Was All a Dream”, and while loss will obviously come into the picture via B.I.G.’s murder, there’s also so much that has changed in the last thirty years, specifically regarding hip-hop (a genre that, at least from a “what’s popular commercially” standpoint, I barely recognize in 2024) and Brooklyn (which, via gentrification, has changed for a variety of reasons and not all of them bad).
This all sort of intersects with the loss of my friend Neil Taffe. I was participating in one of those panel discussions Wednesday night when my phone kept buzzing in my pocket. When I get an insistent phone call, I deduce one of two things: either something’s on fire at work (or someone thinks something’s on fire at work), or someone’s dead. I waited until the panel was over, went to the restroom and checked my phone. In this case, it was my lifelong friend Maurice, telling me that his brother Neil had passed earlier that day. Maurice and his three brothers (Kevin, Neal, Duane) grew up just up the street from my grandmother’s house, where I lived from 1979-1984 and again from 1987-1994 (with lengthy summer-long visits in the years from ‘84-’87). They, along with my next door neighbors The Stewarts, were my best friends in the neighborhood (Maurice & I were closest in age and I’ve remained tightest with him).
To quantify the amount of time we spent together would be a fool’s errand. My grandma ran a tight ship, and I was rarely allowed off of my block until I was 16. This was indicative of having strict Caribbean parenting and the fact that there was way too much bad trouble to get into in late ‘80s/early ‘90s Brooklyn. I see parallels with B.I.G.’s mom Voletta. Strict immigrant parent, would barely let her child leave the stoop until he got too big and headstrong for her to control. The demons (violence, drugs) swam dangerously close and often in those times. Maurice & Neil’s mom, also an immigrant (from the UK via Jamaica), saw those demons swimming close too. Maurice had started running with the Decepticons (an infamous group of troublemakers who wreaked havoc on Brooklyn for a solid decade), and she grabbed her kids and hightailed it to Georgia right around the time I graduated high school.
Neil made his way back to New York (my memory’s hazy enough that I can’t fully recall if he ever actually left) and eventually landed on Broadway, which turned into landing in Vegas, which turned into touring with Gladys Knight for a decade. That Geico commercial with The Pips? Neil is one of those Pips. To get out of the surroundings we grew up in and to succeed to that level? Although Neil wasn’t my homeboy in the most traditional sense (he was five or six years older and generally only entertained us with insults), I felt a sense of pride.
We collectively lost touch for about a decade but social media brought me back into their orbit, so I was connected to the family when Duane died by suicide six or so years ago. I remember being in Phebe’s, the local watering hole for our office, as I got the text (again from Maurice) and then Googling Duane’s name and reading details I can never un-read. My heart hurt for his three brothers and his mom. Now my heart hurts again for the remaining two brothers (Maurice had his own brush with mortality last year after being diagnosed with severe kidney disease. He received a new kidney last year). It hurts a million times more for their mom, who now has to bury a child for the second time.
Neil was one of the first people to agree to do Detoxicity. I’m not gonna link directly to the episode because part of me feels like it’s in bad taste. I’m tempted to listen to it again myself, but I’m not ready to confront that particular demon yet (illness and death has always sat in a very uneasy space for me). But I encourage you to look for it and listen. In those early days of the pandemic, Neil’s positivity and humor put me in a good place, and it was so great to hear a voice that reminded me of a home that doesn’t really exist anymore. The houses are still there, but with new families living in them. The corner store is gone. Even the old buildings have a new coat of paint on them. My therapist asked me yesterday, “does it feel like seeing ghosts?” Yes. It does. And I guess this is what getting older is. Ghosts all around you.
My brain just went back to the documentary that came out a few years ago about Quincy Jones. Q has about 35 years on me, and if I remember the scene correctly, he was standing in a room with lots of his career artifacts. He noted that every person that was alongside him for these accomplishments is now dead. I can’t imagine how that level of loss feels, what it’s like to be damn near the last person standing. I don’t know if I ever want to get there, because thinking back to my childhood and realizing how many people aren’t here anymore is scary enough as it is.
I will promote the latest episode of Detoxicity, which opens with a tribute to Neil and features an interview with my friend and former co-worker Brian Wilkins. The episode focuses a bit more on work-related topics than most in the series, but I appreciate the balance this particular subject matter provides. Brian and I have been sort of peripherally in one another’s orbit since we stopped working together in 2008 or 2009, but we reconnected in person earlier this year and it was nice to get a bit of deeper insight into what made him the person he is.
Love one another, folks. And love loudly. We’re not here for a long time. And we don’t always have the option to “tell someone next time”.