The next day began bitter but bright. Despite the gravity of the evening, little more than a few hours past, I was clinging to the false hopes of denial and thinking that I would see him after work and he would some how be in better shape. Out the door and off to work I went with these hopes holding me higher than reality would allow. A second after I had crossed St. Mark’s I heard my name. It was Bette calling me from the opened window of her car. I turned and ran to her. She told me that she was on her way to the hospital, Eric was crashing and, that he may already be dead. With tears in her eyes she sped off. There I was left standing in the middle of the street, dumb founded but, only to a small degree. Denial disintegrated and melted away from me like last evenings snow in the morning sun. The moment was more real than I wanted it to be but, then the moment never really gives a shit about what you want or what you feel. The moment is what the moment is no matter how you wish to cloak it. I reached in to my coat's pocket and took out my cell phone. I called the studio and explained why I wouldn’t be in. I about faced and actually made it to the hospital faster on foot than Bette and Peppy in their car.
I reached the front desk and told security for whom I was there to see. I was told that Eric was in rough shape and probably wouldn’t make it through the morning. The elevator seemed to raise me through different levels and layers of existance. It was almost as if I were drifting through illustrations of the evolution of man, the rise and fall of the roman empire, the birth of distant stars, My mind was strangely staging a surreal montage of Eric conducting with languid, graceful, drunken gesture, the most absurd and beautiful ballet beneath my balcony with a cast of thousands, hand picked by him from St. Mark’s bountiful ebb and flow, awash in youthful energy’s stellar glow. The elevator ride was moments made to feel like hours by the barrage of sound and images flashing through my head.
