Photo courtesy the author Luke O’Neil has written for Esquire, New York Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Playboy, Slate, Vice, and many other publications. A longtime musician, he currently performs in the indie rock band no hope / no harm. A native of Massachusetts, he lives in that state with his wife Michelle.

You have eternity to be dead so just wait

The electrician found the body that morning but I guess it took a little while for the news to spread. It had been waiting there for three days but we didn't know that yet we just knew all of a sudden that a person was a body now and that was that. It would have been early evening when I found out about it. April. My football coach broke the news to me in a football coach voice because that was how you found out about things back then. You’d walk around not knowing some shit until someone would tell you and then you had to wait to bump into someone else and go ahead and tell them. I don’t remember exactly what he said but it was something like ay your boyfriend Kurt Cobain killed himself. Football coaches don’t like it when you care about anything other than football such as music for example which is for homosexuals. Kurt was 27 years old which everyone remembers as the famous age to be dead at. I remember my coach mispronounced his name as Co-burn he said which is something a football coach would do on purpose to fuck with you and then we had to go and lift weights. I don't remember if we listened to Nirvana while we lifted the weights but I hope we did not.

Like fifteen years later a friend of mine was at a state fair in New Hampshire and he took a video of an Army guy at a recruiting tent doing pushups while "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was blasting out of his truck speakers and I sometimes wish he hadn't shown me that shit.

My football coach would have been around 33 back then which is insane to me because that is how old a little tiny baby is. I'm gonna picture him in my mind right now. He's got a blue shirt on and it's really tight and he's got really big arms and they're folded across his chest and he's yelling about some football business that isn't my problem anymore except for sometimes when I dream about it and I never can find my helmet in the dream and everyone is pissed off at me vis a vis the helmet's whereabouts. The only reason I know how old he was by the way is I just saw his name in a police report. He's a teacher at a different school now and the police charged him with indecently touching a child under fourteen and then touching her again when she was over fourteen and that is very surprising to me because he was a hard ass but I wouldn't have thought he would go and do something like that. I asked a lot of my friends from high school and some who worked with him as teachers later on and they said they weren't that surprised about it to be honest and they would know better than me because I am awful at remembering things.

Photo courtesy the author Luke O’Neil has written for Esquire, New York Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Playboy, Slate, Vice, and many other publications. A longtime musician, he currently performs in the indie rock band no hope / no harm. A native of Massachusetts, he lives in that state with his wife Michelle.

You have eternity to be dead so just wait

The electrician found the body that morning but I guess it took a little while for the news to spread. It had been waiting there for three days but we didn't know that yet we just knew all of a sudden that a person was a body now and that was that. It would have been early evening when I found out about it. April. My football coach broke the news to me in a football coach voice because that was how you found out about things back then. You’d walk around not knowing some shit until someone would tell you and then you had to wait to bump into someone else and go ahead and tell them. I don’t remember exactly what he said but it was something like ay your boyfriend Kurt Cobain killed himself. Football coaches don’t like it when you care about anything other than football such as music for example which is for homosexuals. Kurt was 27 years old which everyone remembers as the famous age to be dead at. I remember my coach mispronounced his name as Co-burn he said which is something a football coach would do on purpose to fuck with you and then we had to go and lift weights. I don't remember if we listened to Nirvana while we lifted the weights but I hope we did not.

Like fifteen years later a friend of mine was at a state fair in New Hampshire and he took a video of an Army guy at a recruiting tent doing pushups while "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was blasting out of his truck speakers and I sometimes wish he hadn't shown me that shit.

My football coach would have been around 33 back then which is insane to me because that is how old a little tiny baby is. I'm gonna picture him in my mind right now. He's got a blue shirt on and it's really tight and he's got really big arms and they're folded across his chest and he's yelling about some football business that isn't my problem anymore except for sometimes when I dream about it and I never can find my helmet in the dream and everyone is pissed off at me vis a vis the helmet's whereabouts. The only reason I know how old he was by the way is I just saw his name in a police report. He's a teacher at a different school now and the police charged him with indecently touching a child under fourteen and then touching her again when she was over fourteen and that is very surprising to me because he was a hard ass but I wouldn't have thought he would go and do something like that. I asked a lot of my friends from high school and some who worked with him as teachers later on and they said they weren't that surprised about it to be honest and they would know better than me because I am awful at remembering things.