Smoking a cigarette outside Borderland Books in San Francisco, Michael walked up to me.
“Do you own any other shirts?” he asked, matter-of-factly.
I’d recently moved to the city and was very much in the process of finding somewhere to live, couch surfing at my friend Jason’s place. Michael was right, I didn’t have much in my inventory at the moment, most items packed in a rented storage shed.
“I do, just most of it’s in the bottom of a bag somewhere,” I replied, somewhat embarrassed.
To be fair, we’d run into each other three or four times over the last couple of weeks and I was probably wearing that Front Line Assembly shirt each time. I’d scored it from the legendary industrial music mail order store Isolation Tank — not only was it my favorite shirt at the time, most of my stuff truly was at the bottom of a bag somewhere.
“OK, so I know you like FLA, what else you listen to?” he inquired.
At the time I was knee-deep in my goth industrial phase and still believed that knowledge of obscure bands equaled coolness. I rattled off a few bands I was into at the time — Haujobb, Wumpscut, Velvet Acid Christ — hoping the name drops would give me a few points in the cool guy department.
“OK, so a lot of German industrial stuff, anything else?” he asked.
I sort of stammered for a bit, my brain deciding that was the moment to stop working as I stamped out my smoke.
Depending on which angle you looked at him, Michael looked like Chris Cornell or Kirk Hammett. He’d grown up Bay Area and radiated an effortless cool manifested in a flip of his long black hair. Was I trying to impress him? Yes. Did I have a slight crush on him? Also yes.
We wandered back into Borderland Books, the after-hours party underway in earnest at this point. It might have been Halloween, it might have been a Tuesday night — I don’t really remember other than that night was an epic party that eventually found me waking up on the backroom couch, sneaking my way out the back door and fumbling up Hayes to Jason’s apartment on Scott Street.
And somewhere along the way, Michael and I would become friends. We’d talk about music — he was as deep into music as I was — go to concerts together; either one of us was almost always up for a show, always gravitating toward each other whenever our large group of friends got together. He was loud and obnoxious in social settings — a defensive skill he’d acquired after years of being the picked-on outcast — and he was vehement in his opinions on bands, books and politics. Say what you will about Gen X, at least we knew how to have an opinion.
He grew up in Vallejo and held no love for his home city. Vallejo is the kind of Bay Area city that peaked when the Navy yard at Mare Island closed and has been trying to figure out its personality ever since, acting like it’s a rugged urban powerhouse while everyone else just uses it as a cheap bridge to Napa.
After an ill-fated attempt to reconcile with my then girlfriend and mother of my child, Michael, Pandora — my half-rottweiler, half-lab puppy — and I became roommates once I moved back from Ohio. We settled into a third-floor, two-bedroom apartment off Scott Street overlooking one of San Francisco’s most beautiful and iconic Victorian houses at the corner of Scott and Fulton. Local legend holds the house has been everything from a Russian tea house to the home of Satanic Church founder Anton LaVey, his incantations bouncing off the walls as furiously as the orgies the home is purported to have hosted. A quick Google Maps inquiry lists it as the William Westerfeld House — it’s truly a marvel.
Even though he worked in the technology field, Michael despised all the recent transplants to the city and took an extremely punk-rock/anarchist approach to voice his disdain. We were walking home one night from a lower Haight pub crawl, having just participated in a communal Simpsons viewing at the Toronado, when we approached our apartment to find someone had decided the answer to San Francisco’s notorious parking problem was to park up on and block the sidewalk. As we maneuvered our way past the newer model car, Michael whipped out the keys to his own ‘80s-era Bronco II and raked it from bumper to bumper, his fury at the driver now a clear disruption in the shiny paint job. How I didn’t make his shit-list is beyond me, but I was thankful I was his friend and didn’t have a car.
Eventually I would reconcile with my ex, she would move out to San Francisco for a spell, ultimately leading to us moving back to Ohio. Michael and I kept up with each other mostly via email. We both loved to write, so massive screeds back and forth circling an insanely wide range of topics kept the conversational fires burning. Here’s one such example — a note from 2014, Michael writing to me after I’d been watching a Salinger documentary and wanted to talk about it:
I’ve been meaning to write you for ages, and I’m sure I’ve started to a half dozen times already, but, as always seems to happen to our correspondence, something keeps happening in between. It’s been that sort of life recently. I noted to myself that yesterday already seems so far away, and the day before even further, and yet tomorrow seems to keep coming far too quickly.
It would be nothing for us not to talk to each other for weeks, months at a time, to suddenly engage in a conversation that lasted weeks — this went on for several years.
Bouncing from Ohio to Arizona and then Wyoming, I was closing the door on that chapter. The former ex-girlfriend, now soon-to-be ex-wife, was in San Diego. Kerouac — our son — was spending the last bits of summer and early fall with my sister in Arizona. In addition to ending the Wyoming chapter, I was preparing for what would become my last long-term military deployment, to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Leading up to the final days I had planned a trip to Arizona to pick up Kerouac, spend a moment with the family there, drive him to San Diego, a moment there, and then up to San Francisco to say goodbye.
This was the fall of 2010. In addition to all of the shared interests I’ve mentioned, Michael and I were both also huge baseball fans. I’ve been a Baltimore Orioles fan since the days of Shelly Nesbit — different story for another time — and Michael was a lifelong Giants fan. Having lived in The City for so many years, catching them first at the ‘Stick and then being there when PacBell Park (now Oracle Park) opened, the Giants were easily my second favorite team. And that fall, the Giants were in the World Series, squaring off against the Texas Rangers. All while I was in San Diego I would slip away to catch a score, see an inning, rooting on the crew of Lincecum, Bumgarner, Posey, Huff, and Renteria. As I made my way north, as soon as I was able I picked up KNBR, AM 680, and listened to the familiar voices of Kuiper and Krukow calling the game.
Sometimes the universe finds a way to line things up in perfect sequence. Lincecum had pitched a hell of a game, allowing just one run over eight innings, but at 3-1 in the bottom of the ninth, nothing was promised. As I eased off Highway 101 in The City, Brian Wilson was on to close out the ninth with Nelson Cruz at the plate — and just as I pulled onto Laguna, Cruz struck out and the Giants won their first World Series since 1954.
The. City. Exploded.
The streets were absolute bedlam as I struggled to find a place to park anywhere near Michael’s Fell Street apartment. I ended up far away — I don’t even remember where. I called Michael and we met at some corner bar, smashed each other in a massive hug and entered the fray. We tried to catch up but the noise and celebration of the bar made it nearly impossible, so we wandered out to find food, stumbling into a sushi bar down the way. The sushi joint was a little less chaotic but still in a raucous mood as the owner introduced us to his new world champion rolls. We finished eating, hit the corner liquor store and made our way back to Michael’s third-floor apartment where we camped out on his roof, smoking cigarettes and engaging with the crowds below.
“Dude, you’re making me nervous,” a half-drunk Michael called out to me.
I’d taken to pretending I was a tightrope walker, going back and forth along the edge of the roof as I yelled down at the crowds.
“Oh fine,” I said as I jumped down off the ledge, laid down with my head over the edge and continued talking to a giddy San Francisco below me.
We talked for hours, just catching up — where our lives had taken us, what we’d been up to.
“Can you believe Kerouac is almost eight,” I asked him.
“Man, I’m having a hard time believing he’s five, let alone eight!”
Eventually we both crashed. Michael had to get up for work the next morning, so he was up and out pretty quick. I had to get going back to Wyoming but on a little less of a tight schedule. I made my way back to my car, jumped in, stared out the window for a moment — only to find the most San Francisco of artifacts attached to my windshield: a parking ticket. Seems my perfect parking spot wasn’t so perfect after all.
It would be a few years before I saw Michael again, this time with K by my side. We were up in the Bay Area visiting her high school best friend and I desperately wanted to introduce her to him, so we met at a local bar. Somewhere during the night, K and I slipped off to grab a series of photos in one of those three-picture photo booths. That strip still hangs on our fridge — I think I can do a better monster face these days.
“I really like her,” Michael said to me as we parted ways for the night. “And she clearly likes you, much better than…” His words trailed off, both of us knowing what he meant.
The last time I saw Michael was somewhere just before the twins were born, around 2017. He was down in San Diego for Comic Con and dropped in to our home for a visit. Again we caught up like old friends, but something was just slightly off. The election of 2016 had weighed heavily on both of us and it’s hard to overstate just how vitriolic the fight between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton had been. I refuse to relitigate that whole debacle, but if you were any sort of progressive or leftist during that primary season, a part of you died when Clinton took the primary and Trump took the election.
Michael used to say you could tell how loved a person was by how many people showed up at their funeral. It was a chilling line, and whenever he dropped it, it was leveled with such certainty and clarity that I often felt slightly perturbed when he said it.
As per the norm, we dropped into communicating via email and the occasional appearance on each other’s social media feed. I feel strongly that historians will one day mark 2016 and that election cycle as the year Facebook committed to its own demise via the now well-known process of enshittification. Michael showed up less on my feed until it finally occurred to me that I hadn’t heard from him in some time.
I fired off some emails — Hey man, you still out there?
Life had gotten the best of me — new twins, retiring from the military, leaving San Diego for the Sierra Foothills. I pinged a few of our mutual friends — Heard anything from Michael?
The replies were all the same: haven’t heard from him in a while, he said something about dropping out.
This really wasn’t surprising. Michael talked about that often — about just one day packing it all up and moving to Europe or some far-away country and putting everything else behind him.
Every so often I’d fire off another email, convinced I’d either done something to offend him (I often assume I’m at fault) or that he was living it up somewhere in France or Amsterdam. All of the messages went unanswered and I continued with life.
Fast forward to just a few days ago, sitting outside the local grocery store. Tristan, one of my 8-year-old twins, is crawling all over my lap as his brother Lucien is in the passenger seat, half hanging out the window. Michael had been on my mind a lot lately for some reason, and I was determined this time I was going to figure out where he’d gotten off to. I’d done a few internet searches in the past, to no avail, but this time I got a result.
“Michael Alan ‘Mike’ Heins, 49, passed away suddenly on Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2018 at his home in San Francisco.”
I’m sorry it took me so long, my friend. But I’m here. I showed up.
