Where's Bruce?
On a heavenly plane of Irish whiskey and dark women; no brakes, no regrets, no demons.
Last Monday, I heard the sound of an incoming call through Instagram, and it lit me right up. Thank fuck, I thought; just the person I needed seventy-two hours after my boyfriend walked out on me a la oneway flight to NYC—of course, Bruce intuitively knew and was calling on me to give bitchfest. He is the only one who could understand the trapped and lonely feeling of a vagabond birdy with clipped wings—even though he has no kid keeping him from his old one-way plane ticket ways.
He'd understand.
Though decades passed since our initial meeting when we absolutely hated each other, and through our toxic romance that quelled that hatred, Bruce remained my favorite connection to New York City long after we made our final getaway from that life in 2013. He is the most challenging love and leave of my life thus far; he is, and he was, the person I talked to regularly from that period—the early Lower East Side aughts, aka my halcyon heaven; Bacchlian nostalgia at its finest.
Yeah, Bruce gets it. He gets me.
But he didn't get anything when that call came through Monday, July 29th, nor was he on the other end of the line waiting to absorb my blow. No, that afternoon Bruce wasn't getting shit, but instead laid comatose inside the ICU of a community-based, non-profit hospital in Scranton, on life support, with a fractured skull and bleeding brain. The person helming such correspondent info was the other Ashley—same halcyon, same role, same era, same Bruce.
She and I made peace over their matching New Year tattoo acquisition affair during one of the more extended fractures in Bruce's nearly five-year-long relationship with me. Since then, Ashley remains the only woman I ever punched in the face, but we made peace with that, too. Still, I don't want to answer the call. I'm not interested in jiving with this girl on a Monday afternoon. I pick up nonetheless because I already knew before hearing the urgency of her voice that something had happened to Bruce. Call it guttural intuition. Call it soulmate. Call it cellmate. We were all that and more.
For days, I can wax poetic about Bruce Allen Scherer Jr.—lovingly known to many as Brakeless Bruce because of his fixed-gear bike messenger, recklessly Manhattanite life. I have stories of revelry forever stained with blood, tales of a liaison love—wild and raw and wounded and sizzling—that would make Sid and Nancy squirm in the grave. I might sing to you all of his favorite songs, but I won't. However, I will snarl my lip over the bedside brain death playlist curated by the woman with him when he suffered the injury that took his life.
Why would you choose Dropkick Murphy's to score his final scene? Shame on you! The Pogues, The Specials, The Cramps. Come on!
I'm not here to sing, though, contemplate, eulogize, wax on, wax off. Instead, I'll honor—in the best way I know how—the man whose [grafitti] tag forever remains tattooed on my left ass cheek where he put it with KP Lawless's tattoo gun, which we discovered while rummaging through desk drawers for discarded coke bags on Halloween night in 2011 during the month we sublet her Avenue C apartment.
Through artful word porn memorandum, I can pay homage to the man I loved more fiercely than anyone I've loved thus far—shit, and maybe I sing a few songs, too. Bruce loved it when I sang. He called me Karen Dalton because I can't but do it anyway. And, although I also cannot release the chapters of my memoir manuscript, which bathe him in all that blood, sweat, and shadowy lightning, I can disclose the pages that brought us back together, my wounded ex-lover and I, over the years leading up to his death. During those precious years—me as a mother, him a hermit—he insisted I read to him during our late-night Instagram calls. Vignetted liner notes must suffice for now until the manuscript becomes a published book. He wouldn't have it any other way, though, of course.
Ballad of A Sick Girl, unabridged notes from The Bruce Chapters, Parts IV & V, respectfully.
I'll never forget the night I told Bruce I was writing a book. I had forgotten about the first memoir to literate Bruce as the protagonist, an amateur delight authored by the girl he dated when we met—when he played bass in a band with my boyfriend, the drummer. This band subsequently broke up when I left said drummer for said bassist. Imagine that. And the girl? Her skin was darker than mine, and she harbored much disdain for me; I well knew it. Yes, long before, I left a fracture in that rhythm section. Back then, my ex sat next to the bespoken author, Maya, at the bar where I worked at the time, and when provoked to regard our romantic kerfuffles, the drummer told her: Show me the hottest girl in the world, and I'll show you a guy that's sick of fucking her.
When he discovered I'd documented us too, it wasn't just Bruce's discovery that he was the star of yet another published tale, but the circumstances of the call—one of the first that rekindled our friendship, decorated with the lies I told him; the facade I maintained as truth for the following weeks. I came clean once our audio calls graduated to video chat. I could no longer keep up the act that saw me married to a bazillionaire after the final fracture for me and Bruce Christmas Eve, 2013.
That summer, I could no longer usefully convince him he'd caught me soaking in one of the many spa tubs within a multi-million dollar residence where I lived with my only child, a wealthy spouse, and a live-in maid called Esmeralda. No matter how many times I drunkenly hollered, "EZZZZZ-MAAARRRR!!!!" at the top of my lungs, often answering myself in an appropriating accent during our hours-long phone calls.
I bet he never believed me in the first place, though he claimed to have. And I'm glad I finally came clean from one of two bathtubs in my two-thousand-square-foot rental house, or those bubble bath rendezvous with my ex-lover and sometimes only friend would mean nill now that he's dead. I would never fucking forgive myself for that.
Molly never forgave herself, either, after leaving Bruce. Molly came after me, other Ashley, and Maya, who authored Eight Weeks of Bruce. She came after everything, including Bruce's soulmate, Sharo—the mixed-race girl from Bay Ridge Brooklyn, who adopted a Jew of orthodox parents who hated Bruce and were the reason for their ultimate demise. Molly came after all of us, and I'm glad she did because Molly loved him the most.
Suppose it weren't for Molly being too young to handle Bruce's bullshit. In that case, she'd never have written the letter she sent to me two years after he and I broke up and stopped speaking—the letter that sealed the deal on her being a crucial, generous part of my life; the letter that sealed the deal promising she was his girl now and would save him from the trauma I'd caused. Molly's intention with that letter was to expose the chaotic spinster I was that I'd turned him into. Neither of us knew it at the time, but our meeting, Molly's and mine would seal the deal on deciding the fate of Bruce's assets once he ceased living—an undertaking both of us knew was inevitable, although we didn't realize we'd do it together.
After I talked to other Ashley, I immediately called Molly. Though a few years already removed from the world of Bruce, a new mom with a new love and life, she answered the call. And, little did I know, she hadn't given up on Bruce. Physically, she'd walked out on him and stopped answering his calls, and although she couldn't give him quite the grace I did via late-night social apps, that's precisely what made her mentally and emotionally equipped to love him until the end like none else could. Molly doesn't give up, and I want you all to be aware of that—be mindful of her, I beg you.
When the hospital pronounced Bruce brain-dead that Tuesday, she called me back to update me.
"I talked to his mom."
I waited as the three dots hovered. Could you give me more, Molly? Come on!
"She still doesn't want anything to do with him. Organs to be harvested today. No body, no burial, not a even a fucking obit, Ash."
It's unacceptable, and here we are. The best I can do is wax nostalgic and poetic about soul, cell, blood, tears, and shadowy light. But that's enough—all thanks to Molly.
"I went to his apartment. I got the things you asked for."
She included a photo. She returned far more than I ever asked of her. She did more than she had to, needed to, or wanted to. She did everything right—everything her tender soul called her to do. And even if she never fully accepts it as truth, I know she did precisely as he required of her, as he needed of her.
She gave us the answers despite the storybook nightmare it was. She wrote the last chapter of his story, a ghost of all his fairytales past.
“I don't even know if he fell down stairs or when the steps came just to play tbh cause the landlord and his mom said that he had been out with these people, the women, doing whatever they did and he wasn't acting right and fell and then he showered and still wasn't acting right and was refusing to go to the hospital and once he finally did go to the hospital they found there wasn't any blood flow going to his brain because of the injury from his fall and I literally don't even know what to think of it because we've seen him fall but they said he also hadn't been looking good physically recently either so I really don't know what the real story is or if we'll ever know for sure what happened to our guy but I got what we needed and I said goodbye to him ( and buried Bruce Sr there too ) for us over his garden. ily ♥️"
I'll close with what I wrote to my mom after receiving Molly's transmission of perceived closure, for whatever it's worth.
We all fucking loved you, Bruce. And we always will.