17 November 2003: Tig

My friend David Tignor died last week.

Tig. I was going to call him Quip in this journal, whenever I had occasion to mention him, but Tig is the name by which I think of him, the name by which his friends called him. I’d decided to go with Quip to preserve anonymity, something that doesn’t seem relevant now. So Tig it is.

Memory: a slightly younger mutual friend, not terribly bright and very, very stoned, trying to call Tig on the phone. Tig’s dad answers. “Is Tignor there?” the friend asks.

“Which Tignor do you want?” Tig’s dad asks. “We’re all Tignors here.”

The friend, completely flummoxed, hangs up the phone in a panic and never dares to call the Tignor household again.

Quip, by the way, was the name of an old and longtime RPG character of his, a nimble fellow with four arms. Seemed appropriate. I’ve always thought of Tig as having four arms, even though two of them were immaterial in this most recent incarnation. What with all the development happening in the field of genetics these days, perhaps next time around he’ll be able to have those extra arms visible and material without drawing an inconvenient amount of notice.

Memory: the first time I saw Tig, he was on the lawn of Princeton High School, playing with a hackeysack. He was skinny back then, and always dressed in jeans, denim jacket, and Converse Chuck Taylors. I remember his long straight white-blond hair whipping around as he twirled and spun, catching the hackeysack with one foot or the other and flipping it back up in the air without looking at it, like he had eyes everywhere, like it was moving in slow motion. I watched for five minutes or so and he didn’t drop it.

I saw the hackeysack up close later; it was black and white, with a black circle in the middle of the white part and vice versa, so that it looked like a 3-dimensional yin-yang symbol.

Yep, definitely the four-armed type. He was extraordinarily clever, excelling at games of strategy and coordination.

Memory: Argus and I hanging out in a local pizza parlor, leaning against a wall, passing a notebook back and forth, taking turns writing lines in the play we were working on, as we watch Tig play Space Harrier for two hours on a single quarter.

Tig was painfully shy and had one of the softest voices I’d ever strained to hear. He was astoundingly well-read and open-minded, and treated any idea or philosophy he encountered as being worthy of careful consideration. He was a Taoist and a practicing Druid. He was kind to children and animals.

Although I hung out with Tig a bit in high school (always in the company of others), there was no way for two people as horribly shy as he and I to really connect, since neither of us were capable of the degree of forwardness necessary to breach the barriers of the other’s reticence. We were friends with each other only by virtue of our both being friends with the outgoing and charismatic Argus, who seemed to be friends with everyone (as he still is, despite his frequent preposterous assertions of shyness and insecurity, obviously false and invented just to make the rest of us feel better).

My friendship with Tig didn’t really start to develop until sometime in 1988, nearly two years after we’d graduated from Princeton High, when his experimentation with LSD caused his schizophrenia to burst into bloom like a garden of dark fractal flowers. In hindsight, of course, it was easy to recognize that the seeds had always been there, waiting, sprouting slowly – that his slow quiet speech was the speech of a man gingerly plucking what clear words and concepts he could from amidst thorny tangles of confusion and delusion; that his awesome powers of concentration were the product of years of training himself to ignore the legion of alien voices in his head. But, like I said, that was hindsight. At the time, it was a complete surprise to everyone that Tig was insane.

His closer friends, the ones he’d been doing acid with, figured it was just a bad trip that was lasting an unusually long time, and that once he’d been properly talked down from it, he’d be the same old Tig again. But they couldn’t seem to talk him down from it, and it started to scare them. So they sent him to me, because by then it seemed like everyone even peripherally connected with the Pack knew that when someone got really fucked up on something, and needed help getting unfucked, I was the one to call.

When he called me, I'd just come down from an acid trip of my own. I was living in a crack house in New Brunswick, worst living situation I’ve ever managed to get myself into, although at that time it hadn’t got really bad yet – I hadn’t yet figured out that two of my housemates were crack dealers and crack users, and I hadn’t yet started waking up to find unconscious crack whores on the couch or in the bathtub. At that time, it was just a moderately sucky second-floor apartment in a moderately sucky neighborhood in a moderately sucky college town, and I was so exhausted that I was grateful to come home to it on that particular miserable grey afternoon, after being awake for about 30 hours. But no. No sleep for me. Tig called just as I got in. When I heard how bad he sounded, I told him to come right over.

We sat on my roof and talked, and I could tell right away that this wasn’t just a bad acid trip I was looking at. He hadn’t done acid in days. I already knew enough about schizophrenia to recognize it from a few minutes of conversation.

I told him to focus on physical activities that would help to ground him, and explained to him how my aikido practice kept me grounded and probably kept me from going nuts. I recommended that he take up aikido or some similar grounding practice. I told him to call me when he needed to. I told him to seek professional help. I told him that under no circumstances should he ever take LSD again.

He spoke to me frequently after that, whenever he felt down or confused or frightened, but he didn’t seek professional help. And several weeks later he was hanging out with some other friends, one of whom had obtained a quarter-sheet of blotter acid, and his friends each did a little bit of acid, and while they were in another room tripping, Tig ate the rest of the quarter-sheet. The mutual friend who’d originally sent him to talk to me visited me at work two days later to tell me that Tig had been institutionalized.

Tig kept in touch. Tig got his head back together, with therapy, medication, lots of support from his family and friends, and lots of hard work on his own part. He got out of the institution, moved to Philadephia, and kept on getting better.

He still remembered my advice. He called me up one day and asked me to recommend a good aikido dojo in Philadelphia, which was easy, since I’d lived in Philadelphia and practiced at a wonderful dojo there. He went there. He trained.

A few years ago, he visited Berkeley for Argus’ birthday. that was the first time I’d seen him in years - and, as it turns out, the last time I saw him in this lifetime. We went out to lunch with Argus and Opsimath, and had a fine time. Tig was the happiest I’d ever seen him. He came to one of my aikido classes. He’d just gotten his brown belt at the time. It was wonderful watching him do aikido.

Sometime after that, Yoko started training at the same dojo in Philadelphia. Last year, Argus visited the East, and got Cogito and Tig hanging out together (they’d known each other slightly in Princeton, all those years ago, but hadn’t reconnected even though they’d both been living in Philadelphia for a while and Cogito was close to Yoko). After that, Tig hung out with Yoko and Cogito frequently, and he and Cogito became best friends. Tig probably spent more time in conversation with Cogito than he ever had with anyone else.

Earlier this year, Tig earned his black belt in aikido, something that very few people have it in them to do, with or without the handicap of schizophrenia.

Tig had been calling his parents every night. When they didn’t hear from him for a few days, they called the Philadelphia police and asked them to check on him. This past Thursday, the police found him dead in his apartment. Apparent cause of death was heart failure, probably due to health problems caused by the medication he was taking to keep his brain chemistry balanced.

One of Tig’s sisters called an old high school friend, who emailed others, including Argus, who immediately forwarded the email to me. I got it when I got home from school on Thursday night. I dug up a bottle of sake from my kitchen, went out on my balcony, and made many a toast to Tig. I forgot that I had an empty stomach and had come home badly needing food, so after a few toasts I was quite drunk. I went out and spent a few hours drunkenly tromping around the UC Berkeley campus, honoring the memory of my nimble friend by climbing everything I could find to climb, and praying whenever I found myself atop anything that offered a particularly good view.

At the memorial pool for the UC students who died in World War II (you might remember coming upon it with me in our ramblings in May, Ace), a haiku came to me. Since haiku that come to one while drunkenly honoring the dead are gifts from the spirits of those dead (a superstition which I drunkenly invented on the spot), I was terribly afraid that I might forget it. I had pen, but no paper, so I wrote it upside-down on my shirt, which I’m sure Tig would have laughed at. Now my shirt is in the laundry, and the haiku is safely posted online, right here.

When I staggered back into my apartment much later, I emailed Yoko with the news, and asked her to inform the folks at the dojo. In addition to being the proper thing to do, this was the discharging of an old karmic debt. When I vanished from Philadelphia in early 1990, my psyche was in such a state of collapse that I forgot all propriety and neglected to inform Cecelia Sensei that I wouldn’t be showing up at the dojo anymore. The next time I had contact with her was at an aikido seminar five months later, and she was justifiably hurt and justifiably chewed me out. So it was only proper that, thirteen years later, I take it upon myself to make sure that Cecelia Sensei and everyone else at the dojo find out as soon as possible that another one of their black belts wouldn’t be showing up anymore. Like I said, it was a debt.

There are always signs and portents visible in retrospect. A good rule of thumb is that before getting major news about an old friend, one will first be reminded of them in small ways twice. In the week before his death, because of interactions in the online journaling community, I had two occasions to spend time fondly remembering Tig. On November 7th, I mentioned him in a response to one of Yoko’s journal entries. I called him Quip, prompting an email from her asking who Quip was, since the name was from a phase of his life that happened long before she met him, which led me to dwell upon the names and faces (and occasional spare arms) that we all leave behind as we move through our lives, and to think about who Tig had been and who he was and who he might become.

And on November 11, Lila posted a journal entry about how she and I met as a peculiar result of my love of the music of T. Rex, and this of course reminded me that it was Tig who introduced me to that band.

Memory: Tig wincing at Bauhaus’ cover of “Telegram Sam,” playing the original for me later so I’d understand just how much better it was. Which it was.

And that’s about it.

So it goes.

You did well, Tig. See you around.