I got the call from Jason, while on the road, returning home from Randolph. Jason’s voice sounded troubled on the other end of the phone. He paused for a second then told me that McCann had passed away.
Jason explained to me that McCann was on top of a parking garage and fell off. I was totally winded. I pulled into a rest stop after telling Deb the news and we both cried.
McCann was a close friend of mine in college. He lived just around the corner from me on Park Vale Ave, in Alston. He was a musician and a painter. His work is too prolific to even talk about without sounding totally pretentious. He was just simply talented. His artistic drive was matched only by his sense of humor. And a room would simply light up when he entered.
We spent many late nights together discussing sculpture, or quoting serious lines from Karate Kid. We drank whiskey, listened to Tom Waits, and threw furniture off of my apartment roof. We would sit on Susan’s couch while she made massive ink drawings on the floor in the kitchen.
In school it seemed like everything was so easy. It’s this crazy time when you get to be surrounded by a whole bunch of friends that are all interested in the same exact thing. We were all generally happy. Which is important, because for the short time McCann and I were friends, we did not argue or fight. We did not grow sick of each other. I greatly enjoyed his company.
After I left the Art Institute, we kept in touch. He even came out to our place in Nahant for a party. Once, on St. Patty’s day, when I was drunk in the subway, I called him. He told me I should crash at his place. I arrived and immediately passed out on his couch. During a conversation we had later about that night he told me it was okay that I was in the condition I was in. He said he was happy just to see me.
We lost touch after running into each other a few more times. He moved back to Vermont, was playing in a band at night, and working for a concrete company during the day. We spoke infrequently as we both settled into the hard reality of life outside of our sheltered college experience.
After a few years, I got McCann’s number from a friend and started calling him again. I couldn’t seem to get in touch, so I decided that until he got back to me I would leave him one ridiculous voice mail after another. However, it was not McCann that would return my call. Instead it was his father, Will. Will explained to me that McCann was sick, and had disappeared. He asked me to help find McCann. I was apprehensive at first, but the desperation in Will’s voice was apparent. I decided to try and help and thus began an interesting relationship between myself, and the father of McCann.
Will let me know that McCann had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was having a nervous breakdown. Apparently he just lost it, took off, and none of his friends or band-mates knew where he went. Will kept me up to date after a few days when he found his son. McCann was in terrible shape: he was hearing voices; he was delusional; he was suicidal. His parents had him hospitalized to try to save him.
McCann and I talked after he was released from the hospital. I took him to dinner. He was not doing well. The doctors had him on all types of meds to help with the delusions he had been tortured by. My friend was somewhere inside, but on the surface was a scared man, unable to make sense out of things. He was sure that he was being followed, being watched, and being lied to by everyone.
When he was hospitalized again, I brought a homemade canvas, CD’s, and some paints to his parent’s house in Barrington. I wrote him a letter. I wanted so badly to help my friend.
After a while, he wrote me letters and thanked me for my support. Deb ran into him at the library, and she said he was so excited to see her. After some time we went out to dinner again. McCann told me how good he was doing, but that he wasn’t sleeping because of his medication. He said he had trouble being creative, but was trying to pull it together. He told me he was not suicidal. He sounded okay. I knew very little about schizophrenia, and McCann tried to fill me in. I can honestly say that this illness does not sound like anything that any person could possibly understand unless they are suffering from it.
We did not connect for a while after that night at dinner. The next news I would hear about McCann came from Jason concerning his death. I found out later that he did not fall accidentally from a roof. It turned out that the sickness McCann was suffering from was too much for him to handle any more.
I had a tough couple of weeks trying to make sense out of everything. The reality of the situation hurt. I wished there was a way I could have helped. I created alternative scenarios in my head. I imagined myself running into him the night he died, talking to him, and walking him back to my house with my arm around his shoulder. I pictured a future where I brought food and gifts to his house while he got better. I saw myself years from now laughing with McCann like we had so long ago in his apartment.
Deb and I had a bunch of friends from school stay at our place after the service. We drank and sang songs McCann wrote. It felt good to say goodbye that way. But when conversations faltered or my mind wandered, I couldn’t help looking into the dark corners of the porch, or past people’s faces into the kitchen, or on the far end of the couch…for my good friend, McCann.
7 Comments
Great piece Leigh. As the father of a child with Bipolar Disorder I can tell you that there is no more hopeless feeling in all the world than watching your child struggle with something that is completely out of their control. I never dreamed that I would know half of what I know about medication, psychiatrists, therapists, etc., but there is nothing you won’t do if you think it would improve your child’s life just a little bit. I’m sure I’m much closer in age to McCann, but I immediately connected with his father and I hope he’s doing alright. The toughest part is accepting the fact that there is nothing you can do to make it go away for them.
Leigh, I’ve read your post and was saddened by it as I’m sure everyone who read it was. I hope it helped you to write it, it feels like it did.
I’d like to listen to some of Mcanns music, do you know if any is available on the net?
Namaste,
JB
Dave, I think it’s great that you’re so involved in the complications of your child’s condition. That’s so important. Will is doing okay. I’ve talked to him a few times and have seen him once. He is trying to reach out to people and talk about everything as much as possible.
Josh, it did help to write down everything as I remember it. I’ll try to get some of McCanns music over to you. You may not like his last band though, it was a sort of folk/death-metal theme complete with costumes.
i miss him so much i was doing a google search for him and found this. i had seen him the two days before it happened. went to seaweeds and got weiners at NY system with him and curtis and saw him at the library the nest day. i tried calling him the night it happened because his bike got stollen and i was going to hook him up with one. he was supposed to go to vermont that night but he never did. he taught me a lot…we had great conversations. he was a living contemporary folk tale of sorts. we laughed about our days at AIB. thanks for posting this.
Thank you for these words on McCann. I wonder if we met back in Allston all that time ago. I used to live with his bandmate Dave, down the street from McCann for the second half of college. I met McCann in my freshman year and he and Dave and I hung out quite often in Boston. McCann seemed to have the same effect on a whole lot of people. For me, I couldn’t say anything about his music and art other than that it was at a genius level. I have tons of memories watching him and Dave recording songs and practicing and when that wasn’t happening, which was most the time, I remember him really immersing himself in his art. To me, McCann was sort of like a Bob Dylan character, just completely uninhibited and as a reflection of that kind of fearlessness, his art and music always stood out. Hanging out with him made you feel like you were in a Kerouac book or something. After graduation, I moved to NYC and eventually all the way across the country to LA. I saw him a few more times after school had ended, he played some shows in NY with his band and we were able to catch up a bit. But I never really knew he was having all of these problems until I moved out here. It hurt to think that someone so talented and brilliant could be tortured by his very own mind. It was something hard for me to grasp. A couple of months before he passed, he sent me a CD which was somewhat an anthology of all his music over the years. It was really a kind gesture as he always knew what I fan I was of his stuff. It didn’t occur to me that the CD was some kind of a goodbye, but my guess is that it was.
Dave began telling me about his problems at the end there and I felt bad that I was as far away as I was, although I suppose that even had I been closer, there was little I could’ve done.
When I found out he died, I was sorta shocked, it was something which didn’t hit me at first. But over the last year it snuck up on me. I think of him a lot. Many memories have flooded back to me and he remains in me, a major part of my own drive to keep going, to keep trying.
Ironically, this year in LA, I am in a play right now called, “Standing on my Knees”, by John Olive. It’s a story of a young woman who is a poet and her affliction with schizophrenia. I suggest reading it to anyone with a curiosity on the subject.
I miss him very much and I hope that wherever he is now, that he can feel how loved he is by the ones who knew him.
Anyway, thanks for writing about him. It’s amazing how similar our times in Boston were.
I was recently going through my music library when I came across some of McCann’s music, which made me think of him and how he had died. I decided to look him up on Google and found this site. I had heard about his death from my friend Bek, who he went to AIB with, and through whom I got to know him. I dated McCann VERY briefly back in the Allston days, but he nevertheless made a big impression on me. Although our brief relationship was a bit weird and difficult, he taught me some important things about myself, probably not even knowing that he had.
Something rather important that I want to note here, relating to McCann’s illness, is that I’m aware that he had done quite a lot of LSD when he was younger. That’s what he told me, at least. I think it is important to remember how a drug like that can contribute to altering a person’s brain chemistry, possibly leading to illnesses like schizophrenia. Even when I knew him (and please remember that the time I spent with him was relatively brief, so I don’t consider myself to have know him all that well. I just consider myself to be a fairly insightful person) McCann had a certain sadness/madness about him. So although I think he was probably having a lot of fun and doing some amazing things in his college days, I don’t think that I would say that he ever seemed truly happy, or even okay, on some level. Because of this impression (which I own as my impression of him and which probably differs from the impressions other people had of him) I actually was not that surprised to hear how he had died. Saddened greatly, of course, but not so surprised. I think that if many of his friends look back and recall McCann’s situation and demeanor, they might come to a similar understanding. I’m not saying any of this to disparage McCann’s life in any way. He was an amazingly inspired artist and musician. I do though think that in life it is also important to acknowledge the dark side that so often accompanies such traits, particularly in someone so prolific. I wish I could have known him better and on better terms, and I am so sad for everyone who was truly close to him in his life. I know that he is missed by many, and that his impression upon the world will be felt and seen and heard for a long time to come.
Something to keep in mind is schizophrenia is also hereditary. So if it’s in there LSD can help to stir it up, but the idea that past uses of LSD will LEAD to schizophrenia is a myth.
None of McCanns actions, for the many years that I new him, would make me any less surprised over the news of his death. He actually seemed very happy to me on a regular basis, up until the last year or so of his life. Was he wild and crazy? Yes. But that didn’t make him stand out any more than the other people that we all hung around with. We went to an art school, where sad and dark and zany and funny and oddly dressed people go to learn about painting and shit. I’m sure I had a different relationship with him as did my other friends, because it was not romantic or sexual, so I wouldn’t know anything about that side of him.
These are not just my feelings, my friends who looked back came to the same understanding when we discussed the situation. A lot of them had not talked to McCann since the old days and were confused. I had to explain to them how drastically he had changed from the person they remembered.
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