Monday, March 24, 2008

Jonathan Edward Cowperthwaite: I really thought he needed to put on a pair of pants

In his first year at the College, Tim's rock-format radio shows on WHPK were 2–4 a.m. at one point, and 4–6 at another. The best way of making sure he'd be awake for these was just staying up — and keeping me up with him. We were the guys who annoyed everyone else at 3:30 in the morning by talking too loudly at the picnic table outside Hitchcock Hall while he rolled cigarettes.

Over the course of a few months of these late nights, at first Tim would leave a mug in my room, then maybe a sweatshirt and shoes, then all of his books (he was going to be studying in my room anyway…). By the middle of the year he'd effectively moved in. I went out of town one weekend in Winter Quarter and returned to find a note from our resident assistant: she'd used her keys to let Tim into the room because he couldn't function without everything he'd left inside it. He was annoyed and slightly surprised that I'd be so inconsiderate as to lock him out of our room.

I have a vivid memory of a photograph from that spring: it's of Tim wearing just boxer shorts, seated in my armchair, reading a Playboy. I snapped it one afternoon upon returning from class to find him there, in what was a pretty common sight. Tim would rise mid-day, wrap himself in his duvet, lumber across the hall to my room, and set up camp. He was unsheepish about answering my phone and taking messages for me, loaning my books out to others in our hall, and, well, not bothering to get dressed. He'd made himself at home.

I share this not to make fun of Tim — at least not exclusively… — but to try to assign a perspective to my sense of loss upon hearing of his death:

We hadn't stayed in close contact after we left the dorms, although I dutifully attended a few of his shows, and was, as he predicted in that Reader interview with Liz Armstrong, bewildered and displeased when he asked me to participate in a noise-music panel at his Festival of Marginalized Subgenres. We did a pretty terrible job of keeping in touch; I hadn't even seen him in two years.

But my experience of my first year in Chicago is inseparable from my experience of life with Tim.

What I lack in the way of specific stories is offset by an entire year's worth of conversation: what we were reading, what was wrong with the world and the stupid people who ran it, whom we found attractive, how I really thought he needed to put on a pair of pants. I owe him some of my skepticism about economics majors, and a begrudging appreciation for music not found at Barnes & Noble. My GPA benefited more than once from finishing homework I would've ditched for bed except that Tim was sitting on it.

It's humbling to realize that the catalyst for an entire year's worth of experience wasn't events, or things, but a person, whose omnipresence I took for granted at the time but will now sorely miss.

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