Three Layer Cake

Kerry McCoin Unplugged 

The Alitalia strike should have been a harbinger for what was waiting for me.  You know, the fact that the strike was confirmed, but my flight was not part of it so I departed anyway.  First New York, then Washington, then Nashville.  I told myself then that there was a reason my flight was exempt, my mind racing to all of the disasters I must have been escaping by not changing my destiny.  If only I had known.

Whenever I go home to Nashville, I am always there “incognito”.  I only want to see who I want to see, and this time (as every time) I wanted to see Kerry.  Kerry was my best friend from fifth grade through now.   Not only could we complete each other’s sentences, we could complete each other’s thoughts.  We didn’t have to talk to communicate, to laugh so hard we had asthma attacks.  We were always on the same page, the same sheet of music, the same refrain, the same everything.  But we were also different.

Kerry and I met in the fifth grade at our magnet school, the first of its kind in the city, a school for the ‘gifted’.  I was from one of the ugliest streets in one of the best parts of town, one of few black families in the neighbourhood.  She was from a solid middle class family, outside of Goodlettsville, a predominately white town.  She was quiet, shy.  I was not.  One day, I was told by a teacher to take a typewriter to the bomb shelter of the school which was used for storage.  I got to choose someone to help me because the typewriter was heavy.  I chose Kerry, "You.  Help me take this to the bomb shelter."  I didn’t know Kerry.  I didn’t really know anyone.  I’m sure she was terrified.  On the way to the bomb shelter, we tried to use a cart to help us but there was no elevator.  We dropped the typewriter so many times, if it wasn’t broken when they gave it to us, it definitely was broken when we delivered it.  We probably laughed more in those few minutes than most people laugh in five years.  I don’t think we ever stopped laughing from that day on.

Kerry and I, an improbable duo, became good friends.  She became more outgoing.  We became best friends.  We couldn’t look at each other without bursting into laughter at some common memory that was as funny when it happened as it was the 5000th time we remembered it.  Instead of talking in complete sentences, around eighth grade, Kerry began to communicate with me with song lyrics.  I would tell her things, she would respond with a line from a Dio song, or a perfect Axel Rose imitation.  Sometimes she sang the line to me, sometimes she just spoke it.  I was in turn forced to learn a lot of songs to be able to communicate back properly.  

After graduation from high school, I went off to California, Kerry went to University of Tennessee in Knoxville, the school which was also an integral part of her identity and dreams til then.  Kerry and I exchanged handwritten letters, decorated with stickers.  When Kerry later had access to email, we exchanged emails as well as letters.  It’s hard to hand write a letter of only song lyrics, but once we hooked up on email, Kerry reverted back to song lyrics.  I got one-lined emails from her which summed up her emotions and where she was in her life, and I responded accordingly.  And so back and forth we communicated through music.  Sometimes she’d call with just one song line to share.  And of course, I responded in synch.

Kerry and I were exactly alike.  At least I thought we were in almost every way that wasn’t related to genetics or our families.  Kerry didn’t think so.  She thought she was less.  And honestly, I never felt that Kerry was a sister.  I felt that we were the same person, no more no less, or maybe she was more and I was less.  When Kerry shared her fears and doubts about herself, I couldn’t accept them.  If she could look at me and say that I was smart enough to do anything I wanted, for me it meant that she was even smarter.

A few years ago, she had a job in a company which allowed her to combine her love for music and being around people.  She worked her way up to manager over a staff of more than twenty people.  When that company folded, she was down on herself.  I pointed out all of her strong points (all of the things about her) and combed the job sites and sent her job announcements daily.  One of these came through, right down the street from her family home in Goodlettsville.  Her pay was the best she’d ever had.  She was over the moon!  So was I!

I came home a bit after she had started that job.  I was only home for a few days.  I didn’t tell anyone but Kerry.  She called in sick to work, and came and picked me up from my father’s house.  We spent the whole day together laughing at new stories she had to tell me, and at old ones we remembered.  We had lunch at a fancy restaurant and went to see Monster.   She said she just couldn't stop smiling at me because she was so proud of me.  And I was of her.  Shortly after that visit home, she wrote me to ask if she could borrow $250.  I didn’t ask what for, nor did I hesitate to arrange for my father to give her $250 the next day.  I doubted I’d get it back because she was going through a hard time and trying to get things in order, but it didn’t matter, what mattered was that Kerry could count on me when she was in need.

We were out of touch for a year and a half.  I tried desperately to contact her.  I was worried and called her parents.  Kerry was in rehab and it wasn’t possible for me to see her that summer.  When she got out, she went to live at home.  She was down on herself again.  She wrote some pain-filled emails.  She said she’d been out of touch because she was ashamed of where she’d landed.  She apologized for not paying me back.  I wrote her that she should never be ashamed as far as I was concerned and that we’d be friends forever, and she could pay me back whenever.  Then I picked up the phone and called her.  I listened to how she felt as she choked her words out through sobs.  There were no song lyrics.  She said she didn’t think she would ever amount to much, she didn’t know where or how to start over.  I told her that she could do whatever she wanted to, she just had to decide to do it.  She had the brain, she had the foundation.  She said to me that I had it.  I said you have so many abilities and have been so fortunate that the only piece missing from your puzzle is for you to decide what you want to do, and it will be yours, and there are plenty of people who love you who will be there no matter what. You've done it before, you can do it again and keep doing it.  I wrote to a few friends and asked them if they could send her emails, that it might cheer her up and make her feel loved.   I felt rotten for not being able to do more.

She wrote me an email at the end of November this year to tell me she was at her parents’ for the holidays.  I wrote her and told her about a great book I read, a really inspirational book called A Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown, about a woman who turned her life around after fifteen years of hard core drug addiction and abuse.  I recommended the book to Kerry because I thought it might be influential in helping her see her potential and helping her realize that she could in fact turn her life into whatever she wanted it to be.  Her birthday was a few days later.  I sent her an e-card, the same one I send everyone year after year.  I never told her I’d be home at Christmas and I’d see her.  I wanted it to be a surprise.  I don’t look forward to anything really when I go back to Nashville, but I was looking forward to seeing Kerry, or Kirby as I called her (a childhood nickname she was given after she received a piece of junk mail which mistakenly called her Kirby McClain instead of Kerry McCoin).  I was flying home on December 23, and I’d see Kerry.  She was the only person I was going to tell I was in town.

I thought I’d see Kerry.  I planned on seeing Kerry.  I got to the U.S. on December 15, thanks to Alitalia.  Thanks to Alitalia, I say with 20/20 hindsight.  On December 16, I was checking the threelayercake user logs and saw that someone had done a Google search for “Kristina Gill Italy”.  They wound up at my website.  It was from a Nashville IP.  Who could be looking for me?  The Terminator, again?  I went to dinner.  When I got back, I had an email with the subject line “Kerry McCoin’s Memorial Service”.  I was in shock.  I sat staring at the computer.  I wished that my spam filter had caught that one.  I couldn’t open the email.  You’re not supposed to open spam, right?  Because it sends a message back to the sender that your account is alive, and just provokes more spam.  Cognitively I knew it couldn’t be spam because I knew the sender.  But that’s another spamming trick to get you to open the email, isn’t it??  I tried to convince myself.  I went through all the other emails in my inbox.  After I had dealt with all my other mail, I came back to the spam, only it wasn’t spam.

Kerry died in her sleep that morning, very early.  The determined cause of death was a heart attack.  Her funeral was scheduled for December 18.  I booked my flight from New York to Nashville immediately.  If I hadn’t been on the Alitalia flight on December 15, if I had postponed my trip to avoid the hassles of the strike I may have missed her funeral.  My friends in New York asked if it wouldn’t be economically wiser to just visit with her family on the at the end of the week when I was scheduled to be in Nashville anyway, instead of going for one day and coming back.  My response was a flat no.  They understood my decision, but I didn’t know how to explain to them that one of the reasons I had to be there was because of a skit we did in Mr. Brown’s junior year English class.  Kerry’s group chose to interpret the passage from the Great Gatsby in which Nick calls everyone to let them know of Gatsby’s death.  Kerry chose Ewing Klipspringer, Gatsby’s ‘boarder’ and party pianist who was more concerned about getting his shoes back after the party than with Gatsby’s death.  Kerry took off and tied her red converse high tops together to use as props for her skit.  When I saw her do this, I realized immediately who she was supposed to be and laughed uncontrollably that she had chosen such a minor character in the book that no one else seemed to remember.  The image has remained in my mind since then, a constant source of laughter for the past 20 years.  I didn’t know how to explain to any of these people who didn’t know Kerry of the emotional link with the Great Gatsby and how I just couldn’t let Kerry’s funeral be unattended.  If no one else in the world were at her funeral, I had to be there for her.  For me.

I sent a flurry of emails to some of our closest friends.  I got an inbox full of one lined responses, “If you need a ride to the funeral, let me know.”  Kerry’s funeral was practically standing room only.  Along the back wall were her friends from school.  As if class were still in session, we nudged each other, leaning forward, craning our necks, reaching out for each other’s attention to whisper some funny memory of Kerry.  Our stifled laughter was mixed with silent tears during the funeral and burial because every immediate memory of time spent with Kerry was hilarious and we missed her.  We had rarely been together without Kerry as the glue binding our group.  I kept looking around to see when she would walk in, if I could catch her eye for the silent exchange of a funny memory.  The majority of the laughing I have done since that day we met in the fifth grade has been Kerry related and it seemed so strange, almost disloyal, to be laughing without her.

Just so you know, Kerry’s tox screen was negative.  She’d been clean a week.  She spent that whole week staying at her best friend Sally’s house, a safe place, and on the phone looking for a rehab program.  She found one that would accept her and was scheduled to enter it the day of her funeral.  She had decided to turn her life around.