BRENTZILLA

Escaping my house once again, I crossed paths with Mica in the hallway. He had this expression of just utter, complete happiness. I’d seen it a few times before — one time as he strolled down the street, seemingly amazed by the beautiful day that often strikes us here in Berkeley. His beatific smile always made me wonder what was just… so… great…

This time, I asked. He said:

“I just had this amazing experience.” Big grin, complete with the wide eyes of a seeming innocent suddenly struck by joy. “I got my bike back, took it from a crackhead downstairs.”

Peering through his bedroom window, his bike, stolen a week earlier, had suddenly appeared before him, ridden by a less-than-upright denizen who frequented the drug den below us.

Mica flew downstairs, forced him off, brought the bike back. “He was all, ‘I borrowed that bike from my friend and he ain’t gonna be happy.’ I told him to send his friend to me if he had a problem.” My roommate wasn’t worried. He was elated beyond the circumstance. He was so thrilled with something not so consequential.

I thought it neat.

Mica died on Wednesday, October 31, at 10:31 p.m. He overdosed on heroin, a drug most of us didn’t know he was using. Moving in a few months before, I knew he and others smoked weed, but that was it, and they only needed me to accept it. Here in Berkeley, California. Of course I accepted it.

Mica was not a junkie. He cooked and ate three meals a day. He usually went to bed before me, got up in the morning around the same time I did, biked to work, where he designed jewelry. Mica enjoyed wide respect for his work. Once, I tried foisting my employer’s “do it yourself” patent books on him, to explore protecting his designs. Mica, however, had no need: “Someone stealing my designs would just be laughed at.

“Anyway, my customers want my work, not something massed produced in China.”

Day to day, Mica was engaged with his world. He had no time to be a junkie.

I think he revisited a past in which heroin may have played a role. I think he overestimated what he could do on Halloween night. I think he died simply because he passed out on his back, rather than forward. The vomit, I think, suffocated him.

Everything above is speculation, but this: Mica was not a junkie.

At his memorial, I held his brother’s hand as a group of us encircled Mica’s shrine. Seconds after choking back weeping, he summoned forth joy: “Goodbye Mica! Goodbye!” He smiled.  ”You were here, man! You made it!”

I barely knew Mica. We weren’t close. But I respected him, and waited for the day we would have occassion to really talk. He’s gone and I’m still processing. He should be here.

Three days before he died, I knocked on Mica’s door at 2:00 in the morning. He created his own music, and the heavy bass beat knocked through the walls and into my ears. An… interesting… sound, but certainly something I couldn’t fall asleep to.

He answered, face clammy and red, eyes flat and unfocused. “Can you turn it down? Gotta sleep.”

He made a noise as if trying to speak, but unable. Closed the door, and the music was off.