Shrines

J.J. keeps a shrine to his dead cat in his apartment. He really, really loved this cat. And so, after its untimely demise, J.J. erected a picture, some miniature statues, and some sticks of incense to pay tribute to this cat.

When I moved away from Minnesota one of the very first things I did was erect my own shrine. A shrine to Minnesota. Everyone I liked an awful lot got their own slot in a collage picture frame. There are pictures of my friends pretending to be Satan, sitting with stuffed bunnies, smoking cigarettes, and writing the next great American novel.

J.J. got a slot near the top of the collage. In the picture I selected he's posing in the typical J.J. way: flicking off the camera. I have thousands of pictures of J.J. where he's frowning and flicking off the camera. Whenever my friends from back home would page through my photo albums they would note that all J.J.'s pictures looked the same. "He looks grouchy," they'd say. But J.J. is not a grouchy boy. He's easygoing and fun. He has a pretty smile.

My mother would tap at his picture, concerned in a way only a mother could be. "What's his problem?" she'd ask. She thought there was some sort of deep psychological trauma that made J.J. want his photo taken like that. I told her I thought maybe he was proud of his middle finger. It was very straight, after all. A fine middle finger. A dashing digit.

And so that's the kind of J.J. photo I selected for my Minnesota collage. People who stop by my room and see the collage always comment on its inappropriateness. Everyone else looks so wholesome--in fact, there's even a picture of me holding on to a friend's chubby, squirmy baby. People are scandalized. Why is there a picture of a man flicking off the camera next to a picture of a innocent baby?

I have to tell them J.J. means no harm, that he's not a bad sort, that his flicking the camera off is just a thing, a tic. If he were a supermodel, it would be his signature move, one that he flashed at the end of each photo shoot. If ever he he retired from modeling and started his own daytime talk show, his people would put out a retrospective of his work--a book of every single flick-off he ever did. It would sell like hotcakes.

So, really, to have a J.J. picture in my collage that showed him doing anything else would have been wrong. That's the way I'd like to remember him: sitting with a beer in front of him and his stick-straight middle finger pointing up to the ceiling, up to the sky, up to God.