A Big Laugh

I once worked in a design studio. The studio was open plan. So, it was just one big space that several artists rented out-all doing different things. So we were all in one space, eclectic, eccentric and everyone thinking they were more high-minded than the next guy.

There was a man named Harry who worked in the space next to my space. He was one of the most esthetically driven people I have ever met, but very very impractical. He once told me to clear the desk off of all of the papers and magazines I was working on, just so it would be clean. He was a minimalist. He was a minimalist. He often had a vase of white tulips on his desk. He loved Basquiat and sushi from the Food Emporium. He stole our cokes in the fridge. He never paid the bills. He walked around with no shoes on, just socks and even if I could not see his feet, I knew he had no shoes on, because he was suspiciously quiet when he walked. He talked on a portable phone and had it on speaker, but held it up to his ear. He sometimes tucked himself away in his boxes of organized clutter and set up a chair and slept. We followed the snore and we found him. He never finished anything but he had new ideas every day. He was the editor of a quarterly magazine, but it only came out once a year. He owned two apartments next to one another in the West Village. He once told me he hated money. He had a wife named Marion, but they weren’t married.

But most of all, Harry laughed. He laughed so loud and deep that when you heard his laugh, you wished you were laughing too. His laugh started with a drawn out {Ha}, then a pause, and then more {Hahahahah’s} followed. It carried through stairwells, through walls and doors and into reluctant hearts who he owed money to. Harry died this week and the world is less one very big laugh.