Remembering Arlen Lawson (1980-2024)

Life, Death, Interlude

Before I talk to you about the singular writer and musician I’ll be struggling to put into words, a quick explanation as to why none of you have seen me all year: I’ve mentioned before that, as disability goes, Milledgeville’s infrastructure is far-less-than-optimal but the collective attitude about disability is a deep relief. I simply don’t have people stopping me on the street these days and saying things you wouldn’t believe about my body or my walking or my healing or my perceived flaws. Which means I haven’t had a whole lot to add to Hot and Disabled, as far as its initial theme. I do have a burgeoning passion for Sociology that will likely help later essays take shape, but for the moment, a break from my life. I’m stalling. Eulogizing Arlen is not something I’ve ever prepared to do.

He once told me that when he was little, 5 or 6, he would lay on the floor of his bedroom and try to feel the motion of the Earth. He was sad because he couldn’t feel it, even though he knew it never stopped. In some ways, this is a microcosm of the artist born Arlen Joseph Evan Evangel Lawson, a passion for physics and a natural inclination for poetry, and not far beneath, a persistent sorrow that it was, ultimately, impossible for others to touch, to transform.

To some extent, we thought he had that handled, because Arlen transformed his own pain into marvels of theatre and music. As part of Iowa City’s No Shame theatre, a weekly showcase of script-in-hand pieces put on every Friday night at 11pm, he often took the stage alone, unfolding monologues so complex and unpredictable in their singular sadness — often punctuated with unexpected humor — that he left us stunned. We’d sit in the dark, wondering how he did that, and knowing never to ask that tired and unanswerable question. But the query was so silently persistent that it was parodied in a No Shame comedy sketch. Someone asked, “Arlen, where do you get your ideas?” Adopting an uncharacteristic but convincing stoner voice, he answered, “I…do a lot of…drugs?”

I can remember the exact moment I went from being an admiring audience member and occasional contributor to No Shame Theatre to being Arlen’s friend. He and I happened to show up to China Star — an unassuming Chinese restaurant in Iowa City’s bleak-but-trying Old Capital Mall — for dinner. When I saw him sitting alone, I asked, “Can I sit with you?” but immediately regretted treating Arlen like a normal person and tried to recant. “Unless you want to be alone to like, think, or something,” I added quickly, firmly believing that spending dinner contemplating existence in silence was probably optimal for a philosopher like Arlen. But, to my delighted shock — a shock so resonant I can still feel it as I think back on the moment — he did want to have dinner together. That dinner became a whole evening, hours of conversation. I remember coming back home late that night to announce to my roommate and our friends, “I’VE JUST SPENT THE LAST FOUR HOURS WITH ARLEN LAWSON!” This was the Iowa City social equivalent of winning the Pulitzer Prize.

He would go on to star in the first full-length play I ever wrote, a 19th-century period piece called Lay Bare Strange Desires in which he played an Absinthe-addicted painter. I invented a tortured artist for him to be and he made my character mesmerizing. When my dad visited Iowa City to see the play, he left in awe of Arlen. The first thing he said, in the car, upon seeing him, was, “That is one HEAVY dude! The way he smokes those cigarettes? Man. Heavy.”

Arlen’s intensity was as palpable to everyone else as it was to my dad, and he was right to point out the cigarettes, which didn’t represent any ordinary chain-smoking. That night, after dinner at China Star, Arlen looked over at me after he lit up and said, “I know smoking is bad for you. That’s why I do it. I want to die but I’m afraid of death itself, so I do this to commit suicide slowly.”

I replied, “That beats ‘all the cool kids are doing it,’” and at the time, I was proud of my tone-changing response: it had that witty ironic distance so popular with the undergrad theatre crowd then, the one I could never properly adopt. But I regret that response now, just as I regret that I didn’t reach out to him in the years since 2015. I saw someone in Berkeley who looked just like him — his chestnut curls, his trademark brown corduroy jacket, his soft profile and sad eyes — and I wanted to email him and ask, “Was that you?” because he was originally from Los Angeles and was back in California at some point. But I chose not to. By that time, I had too much to navigate mentally and emotionally to be there for him the way I once had. But the fact of my 20’s was, I treasured every moment that he called me in the middle of the night, I was every second grateful that he opened up to me, that he trusted me. I remember one of those long phone conversations that ended with him telling me, “Okay, I can let you go, but only if you promise that you’ll call me soon.”

I was honored to make that promise and I thought I would always be. I didn’t want anything to come between us, to disrupt that trust we built together. I loved him and I’ll always love him, and all I can do now is hope that even in the space I had to take, he knew that love persisted. I hope he knows now, wherever he may be, in whatever form, that our moments of ridiculous youth mean just as much to me as his most profound art. Like the time he joined me and a motley crowd for I forget-which-event at College Green Park and couldn’t get the new Modest Mouse album out of his mind because he felt so conflicted about it. “I really want you to hear it,” he said. He wanted to know what I thought of it. Did he know my father was a gifted musician? I don’t remember how he came to want my opinion about music, because I wasn’t in the hipster crowd that shopped at Record Collector, but he brought it up at various intervals when conversation stalled. Finally, he said one last time, “I really want you to hear this album,” and followed it with, “Damn it, come to my house!”

He said this as though I was in the habit of rejecting invitations to his house, when in fact I — at that time — could have only ever dreamed of receiving such an invitation. That day was especially beautiful — an iconically “Youth, isn’t it grand” Iowa City Spring, and in it we walked a comfortable few blocks to his house, where we compared old Modest Mouse to new Modest Mouse and he lamented his prediction that “Float On” would become a frat boy anthem, which it did. He played me “3rd Planet” and “Tiny Cities Made of Ashes,” which are still favorites of mine. He also turned me onto Neutral Milk Hotel’s The Aeroplane Over the Sea, another still-favorite. When he asked me if I wanted to smoke pot I was enthusiastic to do so, even though that was not something I ever did. Smoking pot was one thing. Smoking pot with Arlen Lawson was another. When my father died, I messaged him, “I wish you were here to get me stoned.”

My dad, as it happens, once declared that he wanted to take Arlen out for a drink. In the moment, that surprised me, because my dad, with his full-body laugh and unshakable optimism, seemed to me to be an unlikely companion for Arlen. I said something to that effect, that the two of them are very different, and my dad, who very rarely ever made claims related to gender, sighed. “It’s a guy thing,” he assured me. “You wouldn’t understand.”

In retrospect, I think “It’s a guy thing” was a comfortably reductive way to say, “Sarah, it’s an unresolvedly traumatized gifted male artist thing.” My dad was given the nickname Smilin’ Jack in college, for reasons related to that unparalleled laugh, but as a musician, he was drawn to sad songs, especially sad love songs. I think there were more similarities between my father and Arlen than I had been willing or able to see, and now, yet something else in common, the thing none of us wanted: they both died too young.

Shortly after my dad’s fiftieth bithday, he wrote a song called “Half a Century Old,” with each verse dedicated to a different friend of his (and one of mine) who had committed suicide. Walking home yesterday, trying to process the news, in sunshine much like the light that shone on Arlen and me that day in College Green Park, I wondered how my dad might have added a verse about Arlen. I sang it as best I could. But I can’t compare to what my dad might have done.

A thought I’m deriving continual strength from, though, is the idea that they’re together now. That when Arlen got to that other side he had my dad to say, “Hey, nothing to be afraid of.” That, substance-free, they’re sharing the conversation my dad always knew they were supposed to have.

Still, Arlen, I wish we could’ve done more. I wish we had reached the unreachable. I wish you were still here.

Selfie taken at the request of Arlen’s brother Mike in February, 2024