Selections from Uneasy World by Zack Kopp © 2023 Zachary Kopp
ANOTHER old friend of mine named Tewodros Magness, who was an M.C. from D.C. plagued by health disasters who I’d met at Zylon Research years ago—he’d stumbled on that magic job one day selling steak knives door-to-door—posted a video of himself lying on the floor after falling out of his wheelchair, begging for donations to support his continuing battles with kidney failure and diabetes. I sent him a message: “Hey man I want to come visit you soon. Dealing with some family stuff but maybe a week or a week and a half from now. Let me know if you need anything.”
Tewodros never answered the message I sent about coming to see him in a week or a week and a half a few months ago. I checked my Instagram and he hadn’t read it yet, but it said his account had last been active 48 minutes previously. His latest post still showed him tipped over in his wheelchair on the floor with breathing tubes in his nostrils and a pathetic look on his face. I’ve written about this hero in a lot of the books on myself over the years. I think I’ve always given him the same fictional name, which came from one of the surveys we did at Zylon years ago—and led to an answering machine saying, “God is in control.”
You might say Tewodros is the true main character of this ongoing series on Wally Jack Mack or Porkowski Styles or Howard Plumber or Henry Alarmclock or any other names I give myself in this fantastic biography. Said polynomic representing me goes in and out of all his adventures of drugs and sex and unrequited love and A.I. and his mom dying and what have you, intermittently waxing philosophic about his poor friend Tewodros or visiting him at home or in the hospital, having thoughts like, “Maybe I’ll get tested and see if my own extra kidney would help save my poor friend,” but never doing it. That’s one way of looking at it, anyway. If I find out he’s still alive, I thought, I’ll do it this time. And if he’s dead, I can officiate his funeral now.
One night a few days after Mom passed I called Tewodros Magness again and he answered and asked if I was coming over. “Well, not tonight, but—”
“Come over right now! It’s an emergency!” There was something in his voice.
A cold feeling spread in my nervous system. “An emergency? What should I bring?”
“Just bring yourself and your phone.”
“My phone. And you’re still at the same place?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s that address again? All right. I’ll see you whenever I get there.”
I started walking toward the light rail hub just off the campus. Why did he want me to bring my phone? What could I do? His voice sounded different. What’s the emergency? I had the feeling some kind of downfall might be waiting at the end of this adventure but I had to go. My cellphone rang when I was standing at the intersection of University and the long curved strip to the train station waiting for the light to change. It was Claire, calling to check in on me. “Well, do you know Tewodros Magness? I just called him and he told me to come over, it’s an emergency. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m on my way to the light rail right now.”
“Oh, an emergency. I hope it’s—I mean, usually when people say it’s an emergency, it’s not something good. I wonder—”
“Yeah, I don’t know what to expect but I’m on the way there. You could come, or—well, I guess you probably wouldn’t want to do that. I’ll let you know whatever happens.”
“How about you text me in a few days?”
“Sure. Thanks, Claire.” I put the phone back in my jacket. The light changed and I crossed University and headed for the train station. Halfway through my trip I realized the one I was on didn’t stop at Union Station, switched to another without much delay, and in about half an hour I was walking through throngs of downtown partiers and sportsfans, looking for his street, which I knew was somewhere around there. I ended up asking a friendly security guard with an English accent where Chestnut Place was.
“Well, I can tell you where Chestnut Pavillions is. You cross that pedestrian bridge right there.” He pointed. “Get to the other side, and it must be around there somewhere.”
“Thanks.” I went around the block, climbed up a staircase and started walking across the bridge. Maybe it is Chestnut Pavillions, I thought. All I know is Chestnut Pl.
I found the building and his name wasn’t listed. I took out my phone and called Tewodros. “What’s your apartment number?” As he was telling me, someone came out of the locked building and held the door open for me. I went inside and rode the elevator up to his door and knocked. “Just a minute!” he called from inside.
I stood there in the hall in a vortex of noise from the other apartments lining it on both sides. I heard the chatter from at least one party of adults and children in one apartment and a loud, repetitive techno beat that seemed designed to induce hysteria from another that was otherwise silent. “Any second now!” shouted Tewodros again from behind the door.
“Okay!”
What’s going on here? I wondered. Is there someone else in there? I’d started going into a trance when his ex-wife Selena spoke up from behind me: “Sorry! It took longer than expected at the store.”
“Hi. I was waiting for him to let me in.”
When I got inside I realized he couldn’t have done that from his position on a hospital bed in the center of his living room, making a steady flow of quiet self-soothing noises, in his emergency of wanting me to see him one last time before he died, shirtless, thin and bandaged in several places from diabetic complications, vanilla-beige against his brown skin.
“I think I got pneumonia at the hospital,” he said slowly. “It’s difficult to get the cough out.” Suffering all these years, no one giving him a kidney, getting written about by me periodically as the living epitome of systemic imbalance. Even the band-aids in this rigged game are designed for white people, I remembered anew.
I walked right over to him and patted him on the head since he seemed propped in a precarious position indicating fragility. “You’re a great man,” I told him.
“Thank you.”
“Do we have a signed book for him?” asked Selena.
“Yes. In my room.”
“You wrote a book?”
Selena went in there and brought out a book about the 60s by someoene who’d lived in the projects and once been on the same baseball team as David Berkowitz. “Wow, thanks.” I sat there flipping theough it a few minutes while Tewodros kept making those noises as she repositioned him and worked on his back with one of those electric massagers and an oxygen-producing machine hummed steadily against the wall beside his bed, trailing green tubes. Tewodros and I had recently discovered our moms were the same age and he’d once asked me to ghost-write a book on his mom’s life. “So my mom passed a few days ago,” I told them.
“I’m sorry,” they told me, first him then her.
“It’s all right,” I tried to explain away my lack of devastation, which was happening more and more lately, saying things like, “I guess I could be a lot worse off.” I asked Tewodros how his mom was—”Hanging in there”—and told him I could help him with that book if he still needed it. I asked him if he’d heard from a couple of people we both knew.
He said he hadn’t, “but they know how to get here.”
“I’ll get together a pack of friends for a visit.” Sure. I’d post it on Facebook. “Is there anyone you don’t want me to invite?”
“Thanks, man,” he responded. “Monday is best.”
I did it again before leaving and he said, “You gonna pat me on the head like a dog?’
“I’m sorry, man.” I didn’t mean it like that, but there it was. “I wasn’t sure how delicate or in pain you might be. Can I give you a hug?” I spread my arms.
“Sure.” I leaned down and gave him a hug and I could feel him hugging me back. “You’re the greatest,” I told him. “So long, Selena.” I went back down in the elevator and stepped out into some weird back end of the first floor lobby. A man was exiting through a side-door. “Excuse me, where’s the front entrance?”
“Right there.” He pointed. “Thanks.”
I walked outside into the street, looking around. There it is. I started heading for the green neon WHOLE FOODS logo I remembered passing after getting off the light rail.
PRESTON Talbot drove the two of us back over the next day. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. He started talking some political jazz on the way downtown: “I think the citizenry takes on the character of whoever’s the president. When Trump was in, everyone was sort of mean. Now with Biden, everybody’s got the forgets.” People were always talking shit about something. “Well, you know, I don’t really follow that game.” Where did it come from, this allergy of mine? I think very possibly it may have to do with both of my parents having been ministers, prevented by tax exemption from mentioning political matters in their sermons or the talks they gave. They had their opinions about politicians like anyone might, but their ministerial selves seemed the thing to model oneself on. I think that must have been the seed of it, that early child-perception. “Anyway I’d rather have a president with the forgets than some mean asshole, but I’ve been called a rageaholic(k).”
Then he said something about the Boomers being bad in some way, and how Generation X was going to be overlooked.
“Yeah, those labels,” I agreed opaquely, thinking of Ray C. Buck—who I’d just found out was running for president in the 2024 election—pointing out our generation ( X) had its roots in analog and had grown into digital. Buck was currently on a global listening tour, getting feedback from Millennials or whatever the next one is called. Buck said running for president knowing he wouldn’t win gave him power in the simulation reality was. Things like that work in America sometimes when the future hits a visionary. A fine piece of art, whatever happen with the votes, and I know he’s not kidding.
We got to the street Tewodros lived on, parked and walked up to the door of his building. I tried calling a couple of times on the phone and Preston tried to get him on Messenger, but neither one of us got through, and no one came out of the building, so the door stayed locked. “Well, thanks for coming out,” I told Preston on the way back to his car. “Yeah, no problem.” He said he’d help with the yard sale when it happened, too, and gave me a lift back to the pad. I texted Tewodros and someone responded saying he was in the hospital with pneumonia. Maybe I’d go see him this coming Wednesday with another co-worker from Zylon, but I’d missed the last two library volunteer shifts, so it didn’t seem likely.
One day I’d just gotten back from a visit to Mutiny and received a text from Tewodros Magness’s number: “I have some bad news . . .”
It was his ex-wife and caretaker Selena letting me know Denver Health had said this would be Tewdoros’s last night alive and to come pay our respects in room 708. I sat there in the kitchen for about ten minutes before heading back to the light rail stop. There was a big marquee on Broadway DENVER HEALTH but that wasn’t the right entrance, which turned out to be three blocks west. There were two security guards, one standing, one seated behind a long metal table. “I’m here to see my friend,” I explained.
The seated security guard sneered at me from inside his blue costume and said nothing. “You don’t seem very excited about that,” I added.
“Place your metal items in the bucket, sir.”
The lolling security guard disinterestedly pushed a pink plastic bowl along the metal desk toward me and I started taking things out of my pockets, magic rocks, and money and slips of paper. “Do you want all of this or just the metal items?” I was so disconnected the whole thing seemed completely irrelevant and inapplicable. The seated security guard said, “SIR, put your items in the bucket,” then the one standing said something in a friendlier tone like, “That’s okay, sir. Now that I know that’s what you’ve got I know it’s okay. As long as you don’t have a knife. Just walk down there and you’ll find there’s an elevator to the right.”
My old friend’s hospital room was full of visitors when I got there. I took a chair among them, sitting mostly silent for about half an hour as the unconscious Tewodros lay there between us all softly breathing and going, “HahhaAH” now and then and people came and went with their respects. One guy came in wearing a sleeveless black denim vest with a calculator patch and a number 2 on the right breast pocket. His baseball hat also read 2. “I’ve only got five minutes,” he told everyone. I wondered what his job was. Tewodros had friends in all the camps of life. He leaned over Tewodros and hugged him and kissed his forehead, then picked up his hand. “You’re one of my favorites, I don’t know if you know. One of my very favorites.”
He was quiet for a little while, just stood there holding his hand, then he said, “All right. We’ll do it again. Even better next time. All right. I gotta go.”
I sat there as people came and went, thinking of what I would say before leaving. Matter rots, but meaning never dies, and meaning matters most. Something like that. The guy sitting on the other side of his bed said, “I think I might fall asleep I’ve been sitting here so long. You can go anytime.”
“I’ll drift out of here pretty soon. I’m just thinking about what to say.”
I don’t know how long I stayed. Before I left, I picked up his warm alive hand and held on for a second. I told him, “Thanks for everything. I hope you surprise me again.”
I rode the elevator down and washed my hands in the bathroom, then walked out through the same door I’d come in, saying thanks to a female security guard. “Have a good one,” she bid me. I walked back up to Broadway and started heading for the light rail stop. Well, Tewodros might be about to die now, I thought. He’d been a friend of mine for so many years now, we’d been through so many of the same times, and his death didn’t feel real to me.
Around 3rd or 4th I found myself walking behind someone in a wheelchair and offered to give them a push. “Would that help?”
“Might help a little.”
The man in the wheelchair had one leg, which he used to pull the chair along the pavement as I pushed from behind. We worked in concert like that. After a while he wanted to take a break and I walked around to the front of the wheelchair to get a look at him. “I’m Zack.”
“Howard,” he said.
“Nice to meet you, Howard.”
Howard was a black man with a gray beard on his chin wearing a grey sweatshirt with a hood. His other leg was shorn off just above the knee in a very straight, clean cut. “So how’s your day been, Zack?” he asked.
“I just came from visiting a friend in Denver Health. They say it’s his last night alive.”
“That sucks, Zack.”
“Yeah. It does. But it feels all right. I’m glad I got to see him for the last time.”
“How old are you, Zack?”
“51. I just turned 51.”
“Well, happy birthday.”
“Thanks, Howard.”
“I’m 68., but I’m gonna live to 108!’
“You’re gonna do it!” I encouraged.
“Well . . .”
“No reason not to try!”
Howard smiled and seemed to agree with me. “It’s funny how we cling so hard to life,” he mused.
“Yeah, it is. I guess because it’s all we know.”
“Say Zack, are you a musician?”
“I’m a writer.”
“A writer. Well, I always say teach the world what you know. Pass it along to the children. Kindness.”
I’d heard that one before somewhere, I recognized it right away, but hearing it now, after visiting my friend’s deathbed, made it feel more deeply true. “I like that one. Some wisdom for the ages. Pearls of timeless truth. Teach the world what you know. Pass it along to the children. Kindness.” Then we said it together, two voices in concert. “Teach the world what you know. Pass it along to the children. Kindness.”
Now let me break the sixth or seventh wall and let you lucky readers know I’m sure I met a man named Howard out there somewhere a long time ago because I remember having to change his name to Carlos because Howard was my own name in that story. Was this the same guy? Probably so. I’ve been in Denver so many years it stands to reason I’d run across the same people, but it seemed especially significant this time. As if my life were being lived with that motto overlaid the whole time. For all I knew it was life’s only lesson, and I’d be hearing it again in another exceptional circumstance the next time it slipped my mind. Had I manifested that reminder for myself? All Life boiled down to learning and passing on knowledge to strengthen the Oversoul or the Algorithm or the Meaning behind all this Matter..
“Say, would you mind crossing over to the other side of the street? I don’t wanna go in that dirt up there.”
“Sure, Howard.”
“Oh, bumps.”
“Sorry about that. Let me know if I’m going too fast.’ I pushed Howard across Broadway in his chair and along the sidewalk through droves of bargoers, stopping once to greet some friends of his halfway between 1st and Ellsworth, then continuing until we got to the corner across Ellsworth from Mutiny, where he said, “Okay, Zack. This is far enough.” We were standing in the doorway of a sandwich place. “I just made you famous with that knowledge,” Howard told me. “Thanks, Howard,” I told him. I waved goodbye and headed south down Broadway to Alameda, then cut across the giant Safeway parking lot to the light rail stop. There used to be a Dollar Store and an Ace Hardware at the other end of it but now all that space was for rent. I wondered what kinds of stores would go in there next if they would tear down those building and put up something else. It rained again the next two nights, wild specks of water beating on all the windows.
