For the Love of Music

Dave’s love for music is unparalleled to most other loves he ever had. It wasn’t playing and creating music, but also listening to it that formed his passion. From age seventeen onward, he spent a significant part of every day listening to music. Before continuing with my ode for his musical passion, let me let Dave himself discuss his tastes:

“And like I said, hip hop is only one of my loves. Although I've been playing the guitar and dreaming of being a "rock star" since I was 14, I actually hated hip hop until I was about 17, lol. I'm now 26. I thought it was just stupid that they spoke their words instead of singing them. It just seemed very unskilled and talentless (I now realize that it takes a lot of talent to be a great mc). One day my best friend forced me to listen to it and after a few songs, I just "got it". However I love the blues, jazz, MoTown style soul music from the 60's-early 80's. Some of my favorites from the genre's listed are Marvin Gaye, Louis Armstrong, Bill Withers (Lean on Me), Al Green, and Nina Simone (listen to this specific song of hers and you'll understand a lot about the kind of person I am http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INLBcBGwr0g ). I also love Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison (their solo work, not too much of the Beatles), Bob Marley, Paul Simon, Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, Randy Newman, and too many more to name- I'm an old soul. I also love Hindu instrumental music, Asian, Arabic and Indian acappella songs of worship, African children choir "chanting" type music, classical music, and old sad Russian music, lol. Even though I can't understand any of the just listed, it moves my soul and gives me goose bumps.”

That is quite a wide spectrum, which is why I’d rather quote Dave than try to paraphrase him. I think it’s simple enough to say he loved music. Except that I want to add that I introduced him to Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and Bruce Springsteen. At one point, he and I bought harmonicas because we were supposedly going to learn together, and possibly create a band in which he was the guitarist and I the harmonicaist.

I imagine that if the need for Dave was elsewhere any more imperative, it was in heaven due to his musical prowess. Heaven needs his musical expertise more than we here on earth do. This, if true, makes his death a little more bearable.

Dave, as I've said elsewhere in this blog, could play a mean guitar. You could sometimes feel his soul reverberating through a playing of "Stairway to Heaven" or "Creep." The goosebumps would run up my arms and back, and I'd say to myself, Man, my brother can play! He eventually entered the John Lennon Songwriting Contest because he was that good, but nothing ever came of it. I think that part of the reason he decided not to pursue music full-time early on is that he didn't think that he was that good. But inside him flowed deep reservoirs of genius!

His equipment were the toys of a music virtuoso. Everything from pianos to keyboards to microphones, he needed and had it all. He didn't actually have a music studio in his apartment but he often said he did, so when he died I was surprised to discover that he indeed had the equipment for more or less a full-faceted studio but the items were scattered about. This is merely a peak at the side of him that loved to embellish things.

However, with all the music programs installed on his laptop, there is no doubt that Dave had a full-blown, state-of-the-art studio. How many hundreds of years would it have taken him to even scratch the surface of this colossal library?

I often try to find a theme in the songs that most resonated with Dave. There doesn't seem to be one. Most of these songs are simply what he described as anthems. Though he never gave a clear definition of what an anthem meant to him, I take it that he meant what it means to everyone: a song of praise or devotion. A song of success. Since this is all he aimed at, this is all that captivated his attention.

I was regularly bombarded by Dave's anthems when he still lived here. Given that his room was next to mine, they would blast through the wall and often awake me like a glass of cold water. It was 6:55am and all of a sudden, from seemingly nowhere, "Mo' Money, Mo' Problems" would roar into my ears. It was almost like being electrocuted.

I can imagine him now in heaven, leading the choir. He's a celestial Beethoven whose job is to make heaven's music shine.

Song written and performed by Dave, "I Wish I Could See You Tonight"

The Four Essential Daveisms

Four things characterized Dave's physical persona: his voice, smirk, walk and glasses. These were his personal signatures. Wherever he went, he was immediately recognized by these, for lack of a worse term, Daveisms. He could whisper in a cave and the deepness of his voice would reverberate outside; he could suddenly warm your heart with his smirk; his shuffling gait could make you smile with fondness; his glasses--. I don't know what to say about his glasses except that they weren't the most attractive pair.

His voice wasn't always deep. In fact, it used to be squeaky when he was little. However, little by lot, it turned into a smooth and elegant baritone that would make Barry White red with envy. Smooth talking the ladies, therefore, was never a hardship for Dave. However, this same voice made him the butt of endless jokes and impersonations from high school onward. He never minded these; in fact, he seemed to take an indulgent pleasure from them. He knew his voice was a gift, and for this reason and others, he genuinely loved to hear himself talk. This is perhaps the reason why he loved ball-hogging conversations.

His smirk lit you up like a lantern. Dave could say just about any horrible thing, and then almost at once make you forget it with his little smirk. All it was was a wrinkling of the side of his lip, but it could move mountains. Even now, I get ticklish inside as I see his smirk in my mind's eye. This and his voice are the two things I remember most vividly about him. Every thought that I have of him finishes with glimpses of these two things: a thunderous voice, followed by a soft, friendly smirk.

I've spoken about his walk before. Dave shuffled his way through life. His walk consisted of a side-to-side waddle that was punctuated by a constant raising of his pants. Maybe his baggy jeans were what caused his shuffling gait. He very rarely speedwalked because I think that comfort was primary for him when walking, and, sloppily put, his baggy pants didn't mix well with speedwalking. Besides, I think he deemed his walk regal and grandiose, and any alteration of it was essentially a compromise of pride he didn't want to make.

His glasses were too big for him! But maybe I am picky about this because I am by nature uninviting of lens that are bigger than my eyes. For me to put on glasses (which I have to every day), they have to be small. I'm talking Clark Kent small. I think that he probably fell in love with his glasses either because he wasn't particularly picky about glasses or some inexplicable love for them befell him. Be it what it may, he wore them just about 24/7--for one exception! He never wore them out on dates. This is why I suspect that he knew deep inside that they weren't likeable, at least to the majority of people. He might've loved them, but he was nevertheless self-conscious of them.

Dave is a mosaic made up of those four distinct physical qualities. You have to step back to take in the whole. It's a beautiful, beautiful sight. This is the essential Dave, regal and grandiose, simple yet profound. A true work of art.

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” John Keats


This self-taken photo of Dave highlights two of his essential Daveisms: his smirk and his glasses

Keep Truckin', Dave

Dave's sense of humor was something unlike everyday humor. Though he liked going for the shock factor, all his jokes had a subtle intelligence that often went unnoticed the first time around. You often had to think back to what he said to get it. His humor, which was mostly characterized by a strange, disturbing savvy, formed one of his essential cornerstones.

It wasn't only in the form of jokes that it came, however. It took whatever form the situation required. A lot of it, naturally, was body humor. Dave often made use of the objects around him to enhance whatever point he was trying to make. He'd often perform some act on them that would make you laugh at first, then cringe.

It was often just a sound Dave made. That's all it took. Like the time that he imagined aloud what the love-making sounds of our heavyset neighbor would be. Whatever that was, it definitely sounded more like the squealing of a hog. And, obviously, this was the joke.

Mimicking people was a huge part of Dave’s repertoire. Whether it was the way a person talked or walked, or laughed, if it was distinguishable you could rely on him to make fun of it. He loved doing effeminate, old, and deep (no surprise) voices. When he got into character, it was hard to break him out of it.

Some of Dave’s humor came in the form of pictures, such as the one below in which he is pretending to be a Cardinals-lovin' trucker. There's another one of him strutting his moves while posing as a faux ballet dancer. That was Dave. He was an actor, if only for laughs.

And Dave seriously wanted to become a comedian one time. Inspired by Andrew Dice Clay and his all-time favorite George Carlin, he actually began working on routines. Maybe due to his greater interest in music, or some forgotten disillusionment, he quit the pursuit of comedy as a career but of course never quit being funny.

At Town Baptist, everyone knows Dave for his weekly The Dilbert Files. DF was a comic book written, drawn and created by him which used a fellow classmate, Dilbert, as the protagonist and, likewise, the butt of a whirlwind of jokes. DF became a cult classic, and his classmates often clamored for more. That was Dave. A comic artist, when needed.

When Dave and I were both studying radiography together, at Wright College, we took an Anatomy & Physiology class which would turn out to be the only class we ever took together. It was immediately apparent that he was a class clown. Every opportunity he got, he maximized it by making an abrupt joke. At one point during the semester, he raised his hand and said, "Yeah, so I know we're like in the middle of reviewing for a test, but my stomach is grumbling and I'm just wondering when we're gonna take a break." The entire class broke out in laughter almost at once. Though I simply smiled, I was supremely proud of my hilarious brother.

When Dave passed, he had a TV Guide cover hanging on the wall of his room; it read, Cheer Up! Wherever he is right now, I'm sure he's cheering up a lot of people. And that small fact brings me a world of comfort . . . and guffaws.

The Last Conversation

The last face-to-face conversation between Dave and I was not a happy one. But it sure was fruitful.

While the conversation began amicably, it soon turned sour when Dave suggested that I start helping our mom more with her laptop. With this simple suggestion, he pressed a button inside me that triggered a Pandora's box of emotions. I just think that I was too brash and felt too smart for brotherly advice. I genuinely felt like, Where have you been this whole time I've been helping mom? And I did say something to that effect, but his response was simply to walk away.

However, something brought Dave back. I think it was utter disbelief that I had mouthed off to him for only a minor suggestion. I think that he was thinking that I was on my male period. The emotions on both sides were boiling over--over nothing. This was the great tragedy of our last meeting, that we fought for nothing.

But here's the triumph: that we solidified our relationship.

You see, in the last months of Dave's life we kept little contact. This became increasingly frustrating for me the more I came to admire him. I merely wanted a front seat to greatness. So I decided to take that opportunity of boiling emotions to make an emotional appeal: that he try to keep more contact with me. It was something that I didn't want to have to say, because up until that point he and I were always cool with the occasional brotherly get-together. But unbeknownst to him, a desire to see him more was simmering inside me. Not only did I want a front seat to greatness, but I wanted to watch his development as a self-taught virtuoso and be a traveler with him on that journey.

Dave acquiesced, and a few days later sent me an invite on Facebook. I added him, but never really wrote him anything. I regret that. In any event, I can't help but appreciate the gesture. It was one of the fondest gestures he'd ever shown to me, although no equal to the moment at the basketball court several years ago when he was preparing to leave to Miami to live with Alex: he told me he loved me. Or the moment when he stood up for me when some rabble-rousers were trying to beat me up. It was at the same place: the basketball court. So many memories.

Dave said something in that conversation that has since intrigued me. After discussing the hassles of dating Hispanic women and his great passion to pursue music, on his disbelief return trip, he said that he and I weren't going to have our mom forever. We had to absorb all that we could from her. This solemn and ironic observation has haunted my sleep.

Another item that haunts my sleep is that on that same day, right after he left, I thought to myself, Why didn't you just let that issue go? What if that's the last conversation you ever have with him? I was, and am still, studying the Tao Te Ching, and I knew well that making something out of nothing is not in harmony with the Tao. I thought about it for a few seconds and relinquished the thought. Little did I know that it would come back with sound and fury.

Life has ways of giving us cues. That was perhaps a cue for me to call Dave and apologize, though I did not. The very fact that he added me on Facebook and later helped me troubleshoot a computer issue over the phone tells me that he forgave me. However, the question of how, exactly, he perceived me when he died ambushes me during random moments. Like everything else, it's another mystery that he took to the grave with him.

The peace that Dave and I reconciled our relationship, however, will always harbor in me.

From Russia with Love

Dave was always fascinated with Russian life and culture. Looking back, I can't quite tell when this fascination began. Sometimes I wonder if it was when I gave him a copy of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. He gobbled this book, reading it in a matter of a couple of days. He then moved on to the longer Brothers Karamazov, but never quite finished this one. I think it was due to the fact that he had his hand everywhere: trigonometry (which he taught himself), business, religion, music. He was really exhausting his cognitive limits.

I like Tchaikovsky today because Dave loved Tchaikovsky. Even now, I can't find words to describe the enigmatic focus and intensity of Swan Lake, except but to echo Rilke's definition of music: the breathing of statues. Dave was fond of the self-taught musician who rose to prominence through sheer effort and genius. He was fond of it because he saw a little of himself in that story.

Not long ago, I saw a movie called Cold Souls that reminded me of Dave in so many ways. In the movie, Paul Giamatti plays a spiritually and professionally mangled version of himself. He deems storing his soul away in something akin to a futuristic storage warehouse the only solution to his problem. However, by storing away his soul, he only finds that his problems worsen. When he tries to retrieve his soul, he learns that it has been stolen and somehow has found its way into the Russian black market, where soul-buying, thievery and trading is quite common. His journey from this point forward becomes nothing less than the search for his soul.

I wonder if Dave sought his soul in Russian life and culture. Why was having a Russian partner so imperative? So much so that he transformed his keyboard from qwerty-English to Cyrillic Russian? Why the Russian neighbor he befriended, who was perhaps his closest link in the last months? That mystery is one that Dave took with him. No one but Dave knows where his soul was at the end, or where it went.

Sometimes I also wonder if Dave played Russian roulette with his life. I wonder if he considered the odds of dying during that fateful moment. Or, like Nick in The Deer Hunter, did he simply not care? These are questions that keep me up on sleepless nights, when the howling wind gnaws at my window.

Spirit of Dave is about life, not death. However, as a blog and as an open forum for discussion, it invites these questions; it seeks to address these contemplations, even if they are solely mine. It subscribes to Socrates' essential tenet, that the unexamined life is not worth living--not just yours, but everyone's. I'll take this further, however: the unexamined soul is not worth inhabiting. I think that that is ultimately what Paul Giamatti learns in the film. It is a lesson I can only hope Dave learned.

At the Movies with Dave

Dave and I watched many movies in our short time together. The movies were always a favorite pastime for us. Everything from Faces of Death to Spanish action films starring Jorge Reynoso with our uncle Anival to Beavis and Butthead Do America in Miami (to the horror of Dave's dad, Damian). The movies provided entertainment and escape in a way that no other media form could.

One of the stronger memories of watching a movie with Dave also included our mom. That day, we went to the theater to watch Gladiator. We'd actually somehow managed to bring a box of pizza into the theater, whose job to carry was all but mine. I apologized to a woman sitting in front of us as the large square box eclipsed her upward vision. The movie was harrowing to the end. Dave and I sat neck in neck at the edge of our seats, captivated by the story of Maximus, though I closed my eyes whenever the goriness made my stomach queasy. Years later, when a drunken Russell Crowe approached me and offered me a cigarette after performing a gig at the House of Blues, all I thought was: "Damn, Maximus just offered me a cigarette!"

About a year before Dave's passing, we'd spent much of the trip to nearby Niles (to pick up a sofa he purchased) discussing movies. He wanted my picks for the year. I told him that Battle in Seattle was really good because it used handheld cameras to tell the story of the WTO riots. At that time he was watching Che (he would watch it in snippets of about thirty to forty minutes every day, which is why he had been watching it as opposed to having watched it). I was stunned when he asked me not to ruin the ending, because I thought he'd known the life of Che Guevara all too well: after all, I had about six books of his in the library at our home, which he must've browsed through at some point or another. I finally told him jokingly: "Well Che does die," to which he responded, "I know that!"

After Dave moved out, he borrowed most of the movies in my collection to make copies. I'm guessing that he watched on average something like a movie a day, which is my current average, though he probably watched multiple movies at once as opposed to watching one movie in one sitting. I used to watch him watch movies, and his patience often wore thin.

The most vivid movie-watching experience that we'd ever had actually took place over the course of a few days. During those two to three days in the summer of 2000, we sneaked into the theater everyday and watched Castaway at least twice, which amounts to about six viewings of a nearly three-hour movie. Something about this modern-day Robinson Crusoe resonated very deeply with us. And this was a saga that Dave could bear. (He often used the word saga to refer to anything that took a long time; a medical visit, therefore, could become a saga depending on how tardily the doctor saw him.)

Relationships are kept together by binding ties. The binding tie between my oldest brother, Alex, and me is sports--most of our best and most intimate conversations revolve around what trade, game, or controversy consumes the only three sports that matter to us: basketball, baseball and football. Dave and I had more than a few binding ties, but movies was definitely one of the more important ones. When we got together for any conversation that lasted over ten minutes, movie-talkin' would be on the agenda.

Dave subscribed to Blockbuster's movie-by-mail offer, and The Go-Getter was the current movie he had when he passed. He apparently had already watched it, sealed it, and only had to put it in the mailbox. When I looked at the title, it occurred to me that it perfectly described his character--he was a go-getter. When he decided that he'd pursue music, he let nothing get in his way. Additionally, the movie's protagonist is an alienated teenager. Dave suffered bouts of alienation (the song below describes this). Sometimes, I picture him and I in something like Borges' Library of Babel discussing The Stranger and The Metamorphosis. After all, I've been there too. We all have.

I'm an emotional movie-watcher, and it isn't rare for me to get red-eyed during sentimental scenes (particularly those aided by musical scores). Dave didn't share this "weakness," in his words, with me, but I could often see him tremble during climactic scenes. Now, whenever I watch a movie where a character dies, I especially have this weakness. The death of Sitka in Brother Bear was particularly distressing for me. At Sitka's funeral, I had to simply stop the movie as my emotions bubbled up. I eventually regathered myself and finished it.

One day, I hope to make a documentary about Dave. Not because he's my brother and I will always love him, but because he's a historical figure in every sense of the word. His intelligence and musical talent is unparalled in human existence, not to mention his joie de vivre, which is probably more important. I'm always reminded of him when I read Longfellow's "The Warden of the Cinque Ports":


Meanwhile, without, the surly cannon waited,
     The sun rose bright o'erhead;
Nothing in Nature's aspect intimated
     That a great man was dead.

Song composed and performed by Dave, "Little Girl"

Conversations with Dave

Conversations with Dave were almost always spontaneous. By this I mean that they began spontaneously and focused on spontaneous things and events. They meandered at certain points and gradually changed from thing to thing to thing. However, the things always had one thing in common: they were symbiotic exchanges of influence.

Take, for example, our last conversation in person. The conversation began where our last had finished: he asked me if I’d seen any of the pick-up material that he’d burned for me. I told him that I had not gotten the chance yet. Swimmingly (which means fueled by his chattiness), the conversation moved along to the hassles of dating Hispanic women, his attempt to learn Russian in order to court Eastern European women, an aesthetic review of my ex-girlfriend (not good), spirituality and the nature of God (he argued that Conversations with God made God seem like a white suburbanite and therefore was tacky), and his passion to create music. The jump from wanting to learn Russian to the nature of God is a leap indeed, and it certainly didn’t occur this way--however, these are the items that I vividly remember, perhaps due to my own predisposition to them.

At this point in the conversation, Dave shifted gears to something that was more important to him: music.

Dave had been a musician since roughly the age of seventeen when, influenced by Jimi Hendrix, he began playing the guitar. (This time also coincided with his spiritual metamorphosis.) He played the electric guitar at first but soon found it either difficult or boring and from then on switched to the acoustic. The guitar soon became an escape from his daily mundane existence here at home. He referred to his guitar-playing moments as “jam sessions”. He matured as an artist, began appreciating the music of Bob Dylan and Bob Marley, and played the guitar while composing his own songs until his chronic pain prevented him. He also played the piano but never quite mastered it. The song sheet in his piano when he died was “You Are So Beautiful.” Maybe due to his pain, he put his music on hold as he studied to become, and became, a radiographer.

I saw a spark turn on inside of Dave as he described to me the type of music he wanted to create: music that would “move the masses.” He used countless hand gestures as he recounted the story of an old, frail Pablo Casals who, stricken with rheumatic pain, would nevertheless walk to his piano every day and play till the pain drained out of him. He continued: “When asked why he kept playing the same Bach concerto well into his nineties, he replied that he always noticed a little improvement.” He loved that story, and would use it to inspire himself whenever he felt pain or lacked inspiration.

Dave didn’t discuss his pain too much with me and I never asked him about it. I never thought that he was anything other than okay, which is why I’d question my mom whenever she used words such as “sickly” to describe him. Maybe he spoke to her more about it than to me. But deep down, I don’t think I would’ve ever been able to see him as sick. After all he’d always been my older, stronger brother, something nearing a superman. The knowledge that he had pain was always intellectual, but the reality that he was indeed sick didn’t come to me till I saw him lying on the floor dead that fateful night. It was then that all my mom had ever said of him came flooding back into my ears. I wonder, though: even if I would’ve broken through to his illness, what would that have resolved? Was Dave unreachable?

What Dave talked about was just about everything else. He was a really no-holds-barred, nothing-off-limits type of person. I guess what I really enjoyed about conversations with him was just that: that they were about every and any thing. And also that he brought a level of intelligence and rationality that not many people I’ve known have been able to bring. In short, he was my intellectual counterpart. In areas where he lacked, I teemed, and vice-versa. I often see us as a Hispanic, low-budget version of Frasier Crane and his younger brother Niles. I know he would’ve liked that one, especially since it was him that coined “low-budget” among us two.

On trips to the Dominican Republic with our mom, we’d pass the long hours talking. On top of that, we talked the only language we ever talked, which was English, beautiful and alien to hear in Dominicana. Once, a conversation ignited a daring game where he agreed to walk the rat-congested floor in our aunt’s house in Higüey for a peso, which amounts to about six cents in American currency. He won the bet (and therefore the peso from me) and yet I still didn’t wanna give it to him, though he ultimately forced me to do so--I was giving him what a peso could buy: cold water pouches, with the occasional flavored water choice.

What conversations with Dave ultimately represent is the influence that he was able to exert on me. Though he also used his life as a glowing example, his conversations more than anything helped construct my worldview. Maybe our worldviews are such that if looked at through an external lens, it is difficult to tell where his end and mine begin. To be sure, the conversations and the flow of knowledge was always symbiotic.

Les Brown often makes the observation that cemeteries are the wealthiest places on earth because they hold all the intrinsic worth of people’s deferred dreams. Dave died before he could really get started. He often referred to Malcolm Gladwell’s belief that true mastery of anything is gained only after 10,000 hours of practice, and he surmised that he was at 2,000 hours as of March 31, 2010, just two months shy of his passing. When his ex-girlfriend Gina told me that he told her that he enjoyed talking with me, I was happy to know he likewise enjoyed our conversations and to such an extent that he’d say so aloud. I think that more than the intellectual exchanges, he loved the fact that I believed in him. It kept him driven.

Every year on June 5, the day that Dave passed, we should all remind ourselves of our life’s priorities and whether we are living up to them. The reality is, that we should do this every day. See June 5^th as a new New Year’s Day. The resolutions will be the priorities. There will be no fireworks and confetti, there will only be silent observation.

Song composed and performed by Dave, "Come Home"