For many years in a row, in my hometown of Burlington, VT, there was always HalloWEEN. Yes, the band Ween would come and play at a local venue, we would all dress up and get shitfaced and dance. Cocktails weren’t a thing back then. I may have had a classic highball every so often like a Jack and ginger, gin and tonic, or rum and coke, but that was about it. This all took place pre-millenium and in the years following, mind you. The craft cocktail movement hadn’t begun and it certainly didn’t hit sleepy ass Burlington for many years after it happened. I didn’t drink a properly made old fashioned until I started working at Rustic Canyon in 2015. Funny considering how simple and easy it is to make a good one and how few ingredients go into it.

Anyway, thinking back now, there’s no tinge of nostalgia for those days. Yes, life was much more simple, but I was also a bit edgier for no real reason at all. Funny how that works, how life can be so simple with no responsibilities and yet it was all pissed away. I get irritable around the younger people at work for the same behaviors and choices, for complaining when there’s nothing to really complain about but that’s life, it’s a constant learning experience–not about life itself, although that’s something to think about–about ourselves and the choices we’ve made to get where we are.

I remember sitting in my apartment in Astoria, Queens, one night on Halloween. Depressed and unemployed. A sort of hand in hand type of experience. A knock at the door…My downstairs neighbor, Joe, an older dude, a guy connected in small ways to the construction union. A friendly guy who loved to smoke weed and always tried to cheer me up by getting me out of the house.

“What are you doing tonight?” He said.

“I don’t know, just sitting around.”

“Nah, that’s not acceptable.”

“It is for me.”

“C’mon man, it’s Halloween, let’s go out.”

“I’m good.”

“No, you’re coming out.”

“I don’t have a costume.”

“Neither do I. Grab your jacket. Let’s go.”

Something broke and I ended up out there in the cold streets with Joe. He lit up a joint and we handed it back and forth as we walked to the train station. A freezing breeze shifted the leaves and litter around our feet as we walked up Steinway past the Greek bakery, the hookah lounge, the eyebrow threading and took a sharp left onto Ditmars, Joe’s personal walking preference that took longer but involved more scenery, namely people. He said hi to every person he saw. For men, “Hey, how ya doin,” women, “Hey honey, how are ya?” No one actually said anything back to him. There were nods and the occasional smile.

I have no idea what Astoria looks like now, but in those days it was beyond gentrification. Still a cheap place to live but Ditmars was still lined with live chicken shops, pastry cafes where old men watched soccer and where butchers displayed skinned lambs and goats hanging unrefrigerated on hooks in the front window. We stopped into the local Irish bar and each had a couple of Guinness to stoke the fire before walking up the stairs to the train.

As we entered the city and exited in the West Village, Joe began telling me about his childhood as we walked.

“I got laid for the first time in that apartment up there,” he said and pointed. “That’s the boys school I got kicked out of when I was 13. That’s the place where I grew up. That building over there used to be a gymnasium.” It went on and on as we walked. The West Village was always one of my favorite places to hang out. My best buddy from school had lived on 4th for years right above Pastisserie Claude and down the street from a million watering holes but our favorite was a place with no name, just a neon sign outside that said “bar.”

Joe and I ended up in some crazy old school red sauce Italian joint where he knew every single person who worked there. Our waitress was an older woman who Joe had known his entire life. There was a lot of back slapping and guys saying things to me like “Watch out for this guy,” and “Joe and I go way back.”

I had been fired a few months earlier from a “real” Italian restaurant on the fringes of the Upper East Side where the menu was in Italian and the menu changed once a month. Great bread. You know the place. No red sauce. Chicken al mattone, ming blowing, simple food in the style of the old country where seasonal ingredients spoke for themselves and were barely altered.

We sat and had some wine, the bread came…Cold and hard and white with plastic encased butter packets. I ordered the chicken parmesan which came slathered in cheese atop overcooked spaghetti. Joe had the veal marsala and switched his side out for baked ziti…Alfredo style.

The place was busy, real busy. Everyone on the staff, clad in long white aprons and stained white shirts, was over 40 and seemed to actually enjoy working there. To me, the food was awful but the scene was amazing. A corner spot where we watched all the people clad in costumes walk by en route to the parade. Yes, the big Halloween parade Joe and I ended up watching to my own chagrin, feeling just like I had many years earlier at a Halloween party with no costume. It’s those times, in your own lack of prepartaion and participation, that you can feel like a true asshole. I’ve been there many times. Underdressed at an event where everyone wore a suit and I wore jeans, a wrinkly, shitty shirt, and sneakers.

After the parade we strolled for hours, smoking doobs, stopping at an occasional bar where Joe knew everyone, just in awe of many of the costumes we saw.

And then, like a wraith, this guy from my hometown, Ari, a Dutchman, this total doofus, a barfly who for whatever reason just annoyed everyone all the time because he always had this permanent smug smirk on his face. He stood right in the middle of the street and I went up to him and said hi and he barely even registered who I was even though he and I had been drinking in the same Burlington bars for years together. He was dressed in a clown costume and told me he had lost all the people he was with.

I told him my name and then with a huge smile said “Oh yeah, how are you, man, nice to see you!” I shook his hand and then broke off.

“That guy is from my hometown,” I said to Joe. “I ended up dating his ex girlfriend briefly, she was a twin, also technically a tiny person. Only four eleven.”

“What guy?”

He smiled, stoned, half drunk.

“I’m so grateful you got me out of the house tonight,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

When I went back north for Thanksgiving that year and went out drinking with some old buddies, some guys who stayed, others who did not. The old haunts. I told someone about seeing Ari in the middle of the street in New York.

“He died awhile ago, dude.”

“What?”

“Yeah. His houseboat sunk in the middle of the night and he drowned.”

“What the hell? When?”

“This was before Halloween, way before.”

“There’s no way. You’re shitting me.”

“Ask anyone.”

The next morning I consulted the local obituaries online and couldn’t find anything. I thought maybe the person who had told me about Ari had for sure been fucking with me. I forgot about it and never really found out when he actually died and of course, strange thoughts ran through my head about all of it. The first being that I saw his ghost but the reason why escaped me. I barely knew the guy. My friends hated his guts but like anyone else earning that distinction I always thought of him as a wallflower and he never did anything harmful to me in the least. He was just that smiling, drunk guy from the Netherlands who frequented the same bar I did. At any rate, afterwards, I was filled with all sorts of reasons why his ghost would appear to me and the only one I could come up with was the girl, like maybe the people you know connect us all in some way.

I haven’t thought of this since it happened. Don’t know why it’s on my mind now, but I have to know.

After an hour of google searching I found him. Ari didn’t die on a sunken houseboat in Burlington but got hit and killed instantly by a 17 year old drunk driver going 50 in a 25 zone in Millburn, South Orange, NJ. He wasn’t from the Netherlands, but Finland and hadn’t lived there since he was three years old. As stated by several sources, the date the incident occurred was January 29, 2009. I didn’t move into my apartment in Queens until the middle of the summer of 2009. I remember because it was hot, one of those sticky, sweaty summers and I was still employed. I lost my job at the end of summer 2009. I’m certain of this because I moved to Boston at the end of November, 2009. How do I know for sure? I lived on unemployment while in Queens and it lasted until my move to Boston until I started working at the now defunct Dogwood by the train station in Jamaica Plain. This is pretty common knowledge that the payments only last 12 months and I wasn’t on it that long because I started working at the Dogwood in the summer of 2010 because I had to.