Like an emcee at the fever in the dJ booth

I suppose that today I am thinking about death, but only to recall the days of endless living. For every end there is an open door and for some there are a thousand little entryways. I'm thinking about the Beastie Boys, and Adam Yauch specifically. His iconic voice, gritty like sandpaper, and the incisive yet reserved drawl of his delivery. If there was ever a true rhythmic heart to the Beasties, you can imagine it caged in his chest. The man who helped the group find new direction, who pushed them away from a ledge they could have fallen over into an abyss, who grew and challenged himself and his perception of the world.

The first time I heard the Beastie Boys, it was in endlessly rewinding most of “Professor Booty”, heard first on a mixtape some hopeful suitor made my sister in junior high. Only that’s not true, because the first time I heard the Beastie Boys, it was from the budding misogynists caterwauling along to the lyrics of “Girls” in the smoke pit just out beyond where the soccer field turned off-green in the oncoming winter. The first time I heard the Beastie Boys, they were featuring Q-Tip, playing on a boombox sitting unsteadily on the table at a house party. Someone was about to put an active cigarette out in someone else’s left eye on a dare, and everyone was just drunk enough to laugh it off. When the cigarette’s ashen cherry touched down on the iris, and when the man released horrid screams, they still couldn’t smother the velvet chorus on “Get It Together”.

These are memories filed away within me, and they are just samples of thousands more. The snapshots of a life that are stuck forever to the songs that made each of them indelible. Today is many things, but it is to me and many more a memorial of the day that Adam Yauch died in 2012. A day so far behind us now that still somehow feels so close. As if it might still be there if you reached for the pages of its calendar.

I want each of these memories to be the first time I heard the Beastie Boys because I want their history to live on the delicate lines of a thousand possible futures. If every open door leads down a new and winding path, then there are some days in the present where Yauch is still alive, where the Beasties are still going strong, and we have at least one new record from them. There’s a joke in an early episode of Futurama where the Beasties Boys are heads in a jar performing at Madison Cube Garden. When Fry, himself a man out of time, mentions that he loved them back in the 20th century and had all five of their albums, Yauch replies that was a thousand years ago. Now they have seven. In the past, he lives to see the year 3000, albeit as a head in a jar, and in the present he will never get close to this dream.

In 1998, a friend and co-worker at the grocery store told me she had a mission at lunch, and that I was going with her. Hello Nasty had just dropped, and she needed to pick up a copy before there were no more to be found. It was a task that could have easily been done alone, but this wasn’t the path she wanted. This was something she needed to do together, to build a memory around, a shared story of our time and history. We sped to the store, then returned, smoked cigarettes and ate cheese buns with her car doors open and blasted “Remote Control” at the shipping dock across the alley from where we parked. When the men loading pallets into the back of road-weary Kenworths asked us to turn it down, she nudged the dial on her stereo up just another notch, and pretended she couldn’t hear them. The next day, she presented me with a dubbed copy of Hello Nasty on a cassette, and I loved that album so much I have owned it on CD three different times (and one deluxe vinyl reissue) in the years since.

In the early 2000s I moved to Alberta, first to an apartment with my future ex-girlfriend, then a punk house owned by a friend who sold drugs and played Halo 2 all day, and finally the spare room in my sisters' basement. I worked long and gruelling hours, then drank at night to help my body forget the weight and pain it was absorbing. On the few off days I had, I would drive aimlessly around the city listening to The Five Boroughs, and even though it is a record I have never fully loved, it still found time to form memories like muscle on my bones.

Years later, back home in the Yukon, I was invited to a super-hero themed house party. Not a Spider/Super man party, all attendees were asked to invent their own hero complete with costume and arrive fully realized as someone new. I was still weary from working long hours, and recreated myself as Super Tired. I wore slippers, pyjamas, and a bedsheet for a cape, with a sleep mask trimmed out at the eyes. At midnight, all in attendance flooded out of the house and onto Main Street to stage an elaborate street battle together. As there was always a CCTV monitoring the road, we set a tape in the VCR to record our wild antics, to record and relive it all forever. When we were all safely back inside, we learned that the tape had never started recording and our story would only ever be just that. We mourned what could have been for a second, then someone turned a turntable on in the living room, and we danced to “Shake Your Rump” in our bedsheets and hand-cut masks and shook regret from our bones.

They’re a band I have loved my entire life, present in the breath of a thousand stories. In the years since Yauch left this life I have wondered about all the possible futures in which he might still be here. A common exercise played with the dead, our lost loved ones and those that made art that found shape in our slabs. It’s comforting to imagine that there is some life and some world where everything is different, but that’s not the way of things. We are all dots on a line that traces back to where we began, a path built of stories that we are lucky to remember at all. Sometimes, often, I want to imagine that it was better and that we are better, but that’s me wishing for a line that was never drawn. And so today I’m thinking about Yauch, and I’m thinking about death and it’s presence in memories, and instead of being gripped by despair I’m choosing to be grateful that there are so many memories, and so many more yet to recalled.