My good friend Jeffrey Lewis died this day four years ago. I think of him often. He cancelled lunch with me just the day before he died, because he wasn’t feeling well, he said.

He died, in his mid-forties, from a massive heart attack, precipitated by a prodigious appetite for cigarettes and marijuana, but really Jeffrey killed himself with self-doubt and an abiding sense of his lack of worth. But of of all the people I knew, he was without a doubt the smartest, most curious, and most passionate. He worked as a programmer for what was then known as Shearson Lehman. This was a job that would be coveted by many, but Jeffrey despised it.

Jeffrey and I first met in the early 80s through our shared passion for classical Greek. We spent a summer reading Euripides Alcestis and Aristophanes’ The Frogs. I was at Columbia, poor and clueless, and Jeffrey was one my best guides to city life. Not restaurants and clubs and the manufactured entertainment that passes for experience in most circles. Jeffrey showed me the other side — his circle of Swedish friends and unaffiliated immigrants; the places where you could watch drug deals go down, and limo after limo picking up streetwalkers; the speciality bookstores, the divey greasy spoons with the best Galician white-bean soup, or cafe con leche. Most of all he showed me how to use my brain to feel, how to let an intellectual appreciation provoke an emotion. My debt to him is everlasting, because he lives with me still and always shall.

He knew Greek wonderfully well, as well as French, Swedish, Norwegian, and some Russian. He didn’t just know the languages, he knew the literature. In the original, he read all of Balzac, Flaubert, Lagerkvist, Ibsen, and Stringberg. And he didn’t just read them; they informed his intellect, his sentiments, his passion.

Intermixed were his scientific pursuits. When he wasn’t cursing the incompentency of his overseers at Shearson, he taught himself molecular biology and particle physics. Thoroughly.

Jeffrey was a huge man. He was about 6′4″ and built like a barrel, and he walked as if he was carrying one, his back straight and stiff. He was not so much attractive as imposing, both physically and intellectually. Most of his later years he suffered from back pain and sciatica.

I don’t even have a photo of Jeffrey. All I have is the guitar that he gave me after I recovered his other guitar from a recalcitrant friend in Paris. I’ll play it this afternoon.

As long as I knew him, he felt mortality as a close and constant presence. By his standards, his life was unachieved, wasted, but on this day I miss him terribly.

Posted by Antony in: General