Well, shit
I wouldn't always have believed it, had someone told me I would one day shed tears over dannye. I would have been wrong.
Like a fucking decade ago now, I once had dinner with dannye. He was in town for business and asked if I'd like to meet. I wasn't going to say no. I was to meet him at his hotel, anxious because although by then we'd worked together on the editing staff here for years, this guy was the equivalent of my hardest, harshest English professor, never quite satisfied with anything I did; always, always smarter than me; and never quit forcing me fiercely, relentlessly toward better work.
I knew I was nervous but it didn't occur to me until walking down the hotel hallway that I was FUCKING TERRIFIED, because DANNYE, but then there was his unexpectedly open door, and inside it this guy I had lionized for years, lying on his back on the bed, sipping whiskey and watching tv. I did a timid little knock-knock and he gestured toward the paper cup on the nightstand. Drink?
Easy as that. I didn't digest this particular lesson for years, but when it sank in, god it was handy. Approach a stranger with the assumption you're going to get along like gangbusters.
And we did. Our differences managed to fuck off and we had the best time eating shrimp. We talked for hours and laughed a lot; I remember he performed certain unexpected gentlemanly gestures re opening doors and pulling out my chair. Unexpected from anyone, certainly from this person I was used to thinking of as a certain special kind of difficult. And he was that. But he was a lot of other things as well.
I put e2 on an equal par with college with regards to what taught me to write, and maybe my education as a whole. Dannye was a fundamental part of it. I don't think I realized I considered him a professor until today. God, what a fucking crab he could be, what a talent, what a funny fierce singular guy.
Make of these what you will:
A year and a half ago, dannye sent me this image, without comment, titled "My Baby Cow Saying hi to my Baby Deer." http://imgur.com/8YDj4#.T2FGEOscgG4.email
2005.03.03 at 04:24 dannye says Well, my cornbread just got done and I'm going to eat dinner and sleep in my own bed with my own wife for a while. Take some Vitamin C and hope it doesn't last long. 'nite.
2005.05.10 at 22:22 dannye says This is something that should have happened to you: I'm walking my dog (2 miles on a hot day) just now and there are two little girls selling lemonade for a dime near my house. I want to buy some on the way but have no money. On the way back, they want me to buy some as badly as I now want and need a drink of it. But, again, I say, "Sorry, I have no pockets nor money. How long are you going to be here?" (I'll get a drink then go home and bring them money back.) "Just a couple of minutes more."
Oh, well. I walk on. Less than half a block later, I see pennies lying on the ground. Guess how many? I pick the ten pennies up and walk back for my drink. Is that spooky weird or what? Ten pennies just lying there in the street. I've never seen more than one penny lying on the ground anywhere in my entire life.
For the last couple of years fully half his intermittent messages to me were reminders that I needed to read Mark Helprin. He was right.
We were arguing over some edit I'd made; he didn't so much disagree with my choice, as think I was being silly to bother with it at all. Here is the last message he ever sent me:
dannye says I think you need to find something more worthwhile to do w/ your time.