David D died...

in his early twenties. He was six or seven years older than I. His sister Donna was my age. I was in love with her in first grade. But her brother David was a local hero.

He was one of the funniest people I've ever met. His powers of observation and imitation were known to everyone. Our moms liked David. Our friends liked David. Our siblings liked David. Everyone who knew him liked David, except perhaps his mother.

David's mother kicked him out the house. She did it over and over, starting from the time he was about seventeen. David was a good person who drank and smoked and violated curfew. David never hurt anyone. He didn't drive fast or get in fights. She was a small town mother who worried more about reputation and discipline than where her son slept. I saw her crying at his funeral. She paid a huge and unthinkable price for her small-town morality.

I spent my fourteenth summer hanging out evenings with him and others in the park. He slept in his car when he couldn't find another place. He drank and smoked whatever was available. He was arrested once or twice for underage drinking -- once because he spoke up for someone else. The cop said, "blow in my face." David did. The sheriff smelled the alcohol. "Git'n the car," he said. David was never hostile. He never resisted. He had a bunk that night. He was back in the park the next evening.

David never spoke badly of anyone, though no one was beyond the reach of his humor. It was a privilege to be the subject of one of his jokes. A local dad named Owen had a signature gesture. His over the dashboard wave included wide eyes, a wide open O-shaped mouth, and an outstretched forefinger that tracked his long slow upward nod. We had all seen it all of our lives. It took David's powers of observation to convert something we'd seen a thousand times to the iconic "Big-O Wave". After David adopted Owen's wave, so did everyone else in town.

He had voices and gestures all his own, too, though many of them could be traced back to someone you knew. David always made us laugh. All of us, and our fathers, too.

I once spent a day with David trying to remove a heater core from an old car in a local farmer's barn. David was not mechanically adept enough to extract the used part. It was freezing. His good mood never flagged, though our ultimate failure meant he spent the winter with no heat in his car - a maroon Pontiac of some sort.

He accepted everyone. The rejection he suffered provides a metaphor for small town life. The range of the acceptable is narrow. Different parents handle their children's problems in different ways. David's parents handled theirs tragically. David merely drank. He wasn't a criminal. He wasn't violent. He wasn't abusive.

He was just enough of a clown to prefer a drink in the park to dying at home.

It has been over thirty years since that summer in the park, but I still miss him when I think of him. I felt very sorry for his baby sister Donna. His brother Bobby hugged me at David's funeral, and said, "We've both lost one now." I think I cried.

He left a lot of laughs in my heart, and a lot of tears in my heart, and a lot of laughs in my heart.

David used to laugh and say, "Don't bury me when I die. Just prop me up in the junk yard."

David committed suicide. As a final act of irony, he shot himself standing in a dump.

How can
             I
              not feel
                that
         we all
           killed
David D?