Del Taco

There's a line in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest: “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

Somehow, I've become very careless in 2026, but not with my parents. Both died quite some time ago – 1998 and 2012, respectively – so technically I'm exempt from Wilde's charge. But then my sister-in-law Suzanna died earlier this spring, my good friend from college, Jay, died of cancer not long after that, and at the end of August, my close local friend Chris G died of cancer when we all thought he was doing well. Mr. Wilde is beginning to look pretty accurate.

I would prefer that this trend calm down for a bit. But I spoke to older friends about it, and all of them had bad news to tell me: you are over 60, and this is what's about to happen to everyone you know and also possibly maybe to you.

I have a personality that delays responses to horrific, sudden news. I knew Jay got skinnier and skinnier. I knew he had been in and out of cancer trouble for a few years. And he would call me as he got sicker, and would say things like, "Well, I'm about to die. What's up with you?"

Chris was shocking. A slow-moving cancer became a fast-moving cancer. One day we're planning a visit to Fat + Flour, the next week he's in the hospital, and then he's dead.

Because of my emotional lag time, I'm good at conducting robot tasks like sorting through items left behind. I go to Chris's house with Alonso, Aaron, and his husband Brian. Chris's family is there to let us in. Aaron and Brian organize the record collection for what will become an Amoeba estate sale. Lots of rare albums and singles. Bins in the garage full of CDs.

My job is to catalogue a personal museum's worth of art and art books. There's paperwork on all of it somewhere, we hope, but currently it's beyond locating. And he had a lot of art. All over the walls. Stored in a closet. More in another closet. Bubble-wrapped and leaning against a wall in a stack. He wasn't Agnes Gund, but he bought real art and cared about it.

Chris and I spent a lot of time in galleries, looking and talking. And because it's much less fun to talk about all the excellent artists whose work we loved and experienced together than it is to talk shit, here are some bitchy things he said to me at some of those galleries:

"Tell me I'm not crazy for hating that. Why is that good?"

"Who does this remind me of? It looks just like [insert artist's name that we both agree arrived earlier and did it better]. It's practically plagiarism. Why doesn't anyone notice that?"

"Why is this here? This should be at [insert name of Los Angeles gallery that we both agree shows a lot of bullshit]."

"I'm going to lie down on the floor and take a nap because this is so boring. Hope this guy has tenure somewhere."

Then sometimes he would say, "I like this. Should I buy it?"

My answer was usually that he should.

"What makes you want to buy something?"

My answer to that one, always, was that I only ever bought art when I couldn't stop thinking about it, and when I decided I really wanted to have it in my life so that I could see it every day, and then only after I'd made a plan, and after I'd done homework about the artist. It also had to be in my tiny budget. I told him he needed to watch out for that slippery little catch, because his bigger budget allowed for more impulse spending. "You're fancy," I'd say.

"Yes, well, I have a career. You have... whatever it is you do. Your little writing jobs."

I'm in the living room, the dining room, the hall, the bathroom, the office, the bedroom, the storage area in the garage, taking photos of all the art, front and back. Then there are all the books.

Friend and neighbor Gary accompanies me out for a second visit to the house. I talk to the family. Some of these books are rare and out of print. There are places that buy those. Gary arranges stacks so the spines can be seen. Others he holds up, front and back. I take more photos for a separate list. There's a tiny little Yoko Ono book. Dozens of monographs. A small book-like/box-like Jenny Holzer thing that turns out not be a book at all but a collection of small posters. The most imposing: Tauba Auerbach's enormous pop-up collection [2,3], unwieldy and surprisingly heavy.

When you're looking for a dead person by sorting their stuff, small moments of memory are what you find. You also find a lot of questions: where did this thing come from/what even is that/was there a plan in place for this sort of outcome/where is the documentation/is there documentation.

There's a book on a shelf about Millard Sheets. His mosaics are on buildings in a lot of cities, many in Southern California, on what often used to be banks. Whatever those buildings do for a living now, those incredible mosaic tile images announce a sense of importance. It's a very Chris book. When driving around anywhere, he could tell you what a building used to be – always something cooler than the 24 Hour Fitness they turned it into – and when it closed. and what he did there, and how everything sucks now.

Additionally, there is stuff. Ephemera. I am not responsible for dealing with random items. An old lunchbox. A vintage Disneyland matchbook, full, unused, on a side table that I gave to him years ago. I don't know where those are going next. Someone else can decide that. I've taken all the pictures. I'm hungry and covered in garage dust.

After we leave the house, probably for the last time, Gary sits in the car for a moment and cries. We talk about all the stuff and how Chris would be mortified that we were touching it and how long it's going to take to place everything with the right people and why people hold onto so many objects in the first place. I can only speak for myself, but I like my stuff, all the books and art and music and furniture. It makes my home feel the way I want it to feel and I know Chris felt that way, too.

Goodbye to the house, one so old it has a literal milk door on the side. Goodbye to the beautifully landscaped backyard. Goodbye to the live-saving central air we enjoyed when heatwaves took over. Goodbye to pranking Chris by ordering lots of caviar and waterskis with Alexa – easily cancelled, obviously, the pleasure was in making him upset – while he was in the bathroom.

Then Gary drives through the Del Taco closest to the house.

Because he was a big fan of that particular fast-food place, I decide it's the Chris G Memorial Del Taco. "Not necessarily," says Gary. "His preferred Del Taco could be an entirely different Del Taco because maybe this Del Taco used to be something better, or he hates the supermarket that's also in that shopping area, or this Del Taco's fountain drinks don't have the right balance of carbonation to syrup, or an employee was rude to him once, or something else is mysteriously wrong with that entire block and fuck them."

I can't disagree with this. Any of those things, maybe all of them, could be true. But without our dead friend along to corroborate, we just get burritos and eat them in the parking lot.

[photo credit: me, trying to take a picture of a Brice Marden book and ending up with blurry bins]