Losing a Best Friend 10 Years Later — Remembering Mike Zigler
On Friday, October 16, 2009, one of my best friends, Mike Zigler, died.
It was a stupid death. One that was completely avoidable if Zigler hadn’t been the man he was, and maybe, if I hadn’t left Las Vegas two years before to continue my life in Chicago. When people ask me how he died I joke and say, “With his hands at two and ten” — the textbook instruction on where a driver should place their hands on the steering wheel. Zigler died in his car, in the garage of my Las Vegas house, which he was renting from me.
It was accidental and completely unsurprising. See, Zigler was an alcoholic, and if I had a dollar for every time he passed out in his car after a night or three-day bender of heavy drinking, I’d have about fourteen bucks. That’s what he did. Get drunk, get home safely and pass out figuring he’d deal with going to bed properly in the morning. Thirteen of those fourteen times — and I’m both under- and overestimating here — he parked the car in open air. Car ports and parking lots and driveways. It was that last time in the garage that put him in real danger.
The months leading up to Zigler’s death were good months. He had been sober. I last saw him in May when I traveled to Las Vegas. He looked good. He sounded good. When I left him, he was good. We spoke on the phone every day without fail. Sometimes two or three times. We were each other’s sounding boards and biggest fans and most honest critics. But we didn’t talk the day before he died. Work had been whupping his ass. He was recovering from an injury garnered playing in his intramural basketball league. Not one to mope, Zigler, like me, was quick to beat himself up when not living up to self-imposed standards.
The night he died, he fell off the wagon. I wasn’t there but I can only assume that it was really more of a step off the wagon. But with both feet. More a jump off the wagon. And he drove home with too much booze in his blood. Probably not enough to render him completely out of his mind — the guy had a professional drunk’s tolerance. But why’d he leave himself in the car? Knowing my dear friend the way I did, I’d bet my last dollar and the best parts of my soul that he pulled in with a favorite song playing on the radio. He let the song ride out to the end, but drunk enough to be a dipshit, he closed the garage. The carbon monoxide knocked him out then took him out.
See? Stupid.
At first, the coroner ruled it a suicide. But Zigler’s father contested the ruling. Following a series of interviews with Zigler’s family and friends, including me, the cause of death was ruled accidental. Because here’s the thing: Zigler’s mortal enemy was himself especially when he put people out or couldn’t be the incredible friend/son/brother/boyfriend he wanted to be. If Zigler was going to kill himself, he wouldn’t have gone quietly the way he did and he sure as shit wouldn’t have left his corpse in my house for me to deal with. Or more to the point, for me to live with every day after. That wasn’t his style. He would have headed off to some distant desert nowhere and offed himself in solitude. Like an old feral cat. Maybe. I don’t know. But I do know that leaving his corpse behind for his girlfriend to find in my garage would have appalled him.
But this was the man he was, in small part. So, in that way, there was no escaping this kind of inevitability. Unless, I’ve convinced myself, I had been there.
Maybe he wouldn’t be living in the house and, therefore, wouldn’t have had access to a garage. Maybe my proximity to him would have given him a safe place to seek shelter from his shitty week. Maybe I would have gone to the event with him that night and would have steered him clear of the booze. After all, he’d been doing so well sober and, overall, things were really on the upswing for him.
People have tried to convince me it’s not my fault. And it’s not. But they’ve also tried to convince me that there was nothing I could have done to prevent it. And I disagree with that. Not my wife, not my therapist, not anyone can convince me that my presence in Las Vegas that night could have saved him. Maybe he would have died another way, another time. I don’t know. But with the facts that we have, I’m sure I could have, at the very least, staved off his death on October 16, 2009. And I’m perfectly comfortable owning that responsibility. Life is about making decisions without insight into the future. This is what happened because of things we did.
✶
And so it’s been a decade since he’s been gone. Mike Zigler and I were a part of each other’s lives for about ten years, which means that on October 17, 2019, Zigler will have been gone from my life longer than he was in it. And that’s strange.
But he lives on. Of course he does. Memories, photographs, videos, his writings, the stories… He and my son share a middle name by design.
I have no idea what life would look like had Zigler lived through that car nap ten years ago. Things would be different, for sure. Better? Worse? Different. Of course, none of that matters because this is what it is. We have no choice but to miss him and remember him always. And since our lives are like puzzles that we’re constantly rushing to find and fit the right pieces in the right place, my puzzle will always have a piece missing. You can make out what the puzzle is but the table will always be visible from where Zigler’s piece once was. Such is life when faced with death. I think of him every day and I always miss him terribly. And I’m angry about it. Even a decade later, I’m still angry that he died when he did, the way he did. But mostly, I’m angry over the when part of it.
He was too young to go. There was too much still to do. Too many adventures to have, too many road trips to take, too many questions to help each other answer. We weren’t done. Zigler wasn’t done. But his luck ran out. And I’m angry. My wife won’t know him. My kid won’t know him. Most of you reading this won’t know him, and that is the travesty.
So today, I find myself a little more sad than usual, a lot more angry than usual, and far more alone than I actually am. But that’s exactly how I want to be today. Because that’s how I choose to lose a best friend ten years later.
✶
At his very strange memorial service a few days after his death, planned not by his family or friends but by the giant corporation he worked for, I got up to say some things about the man. It can only barely scratch the surface of him and our friendship, but it’s something. And the feelings in those words are as tangible and raw today as they were a decade ago. Here they are.
Zigler’s Eulogy According to Himmel
I have maybe millions of Zigler stories I could tell. Many of them not suited for discussion outside the confines of him and me, a few select friends or a road trip to some western Americana.
But here’s one…
Back in college, Mike, Tom Carrow and I decided we were going to take a weekend and drive to Lake Tahoe to go skiing. We hopped in Mike’s truck and about ninety miles out of town we approached a small town called Beatty, NV. The three of us being eternal adventurists, Mike turned to us and said, “Let’s stop off here, have a beer, see what this town is about. We walked into a tavern called the Sourdough Saloon. It was a great place: A large bar in a horseshoe shape with a fire burning and books on the wall. There was a jukebox full of Credence Clearwater Revival, The Animals and Dion and The Belmonts. Right off, we were smitten.
We saddled up to the bar and ordered our Miller Lites. Mike was sitting next to a big burly guy in a flannel shirt and trucker’s cap. Always quick to make friends, Mike turned to the guy and said, “So, what do you do for fun around here?”
The man took a long pull from his bottle of Budweiser and said, “Well… there’s a stop sign at the end of the corner that’s fun to look at…” Mike looked at Tommy and me as if to say, ‘You guys gotta here this.’
The man went on. “It’s the wrong time of the year, but in the summer, when people are paintin’ their houses… it’s fun to watch the paint dry…”
Right then the bartender, who was this Amazonian monster of a woman, began screaming at a guy across the bar from us. And he was screaming right back. And there were curse words and swear words and four letter words I’d never heard of and it was getting violent and louder and threats were made. And the three of us are wondering what the hell was happening. We looked around and no one else in the bar seemed to notice this. They’re going about their drinking, chatting and thinking of stop signs like nothing out of the ordinary was happening.
Then I made eye contact with a little old man in chinos and a button-up shirt and an old ball cap and glasses. He sort of nodded at me and started to make his way around the bar towards us. I told Mike and Tommy, “This is great. Looks like the only normal looking guy in the bar is going to explain what’s going on.”
The old man came up to me and pulled something out of his pocket, held it to his neck and spoke with a raspy, mechanical voice, “mmm… It’s OK, they’re brother and sister.” The man spoke through that little device one would wear after a tracheotomy. Upon realizing this, we laughed and watched the siblings continue to shout it out and ordered one more round – and a Budweiser for our new friends.
I tell you this story because the thing about Zigler is that he was always up for an adventure with his pals. Twice I was called by Zigler saying, “Let’s go. I rented a Jeep, we’re going off-roading.” And just a week or two before I left town, he and Kara came to my house early on a Sunday morning and said, “We’re going to the Grand Canyon.” And I said, “Okay, I’m bringing my bb gun and we’ll shoot cacti.” Kara was very excited about that.
Zigler and I were best friends. We taught each other how to get into trouble and how to get out of trouble. Mike and I went back to Beatty several times and always returned with a new cast of characters for our stories and more often than not, our trivial stresses and concerns of daily desert life worked out and understood.
Because Zigler and I were always a support for each other. Through good times we were each other’s cheerleaders and biggest fans. And through tough times we were each other’s cheerleaders and biggest fans. A co-worker and college friend of ours, Krista Kulesza once asked us, “Don’t you ever get sick of being around each other?” To which we both looked at one another and turned to her and said, “No.”
Cute, ain’t it?
Zigler loved a philosophy I’d stolen from my mentor at UNLV, Dr. John Irsfeld: Give people permission to be who they’re going to be. Zigler did that. He gave permission to his parents, his friends, his co-workers, even his political rivals and often to the hitchhikers, downtown drunks and Beatty bar barons he so often shared stories with. Another theory and I lived by – also an Irsfeldism — was living by The Platinum Rule. While The Golden Rule tells us to treat others as we want to be treated, The Platinum Rule says to treat others as they would have you treat them. It’s a less self-absorbed way of living in a functioning society. And Zigler lived by that Platinum Rule.
When friends or even acquaintances would come to town, he would bend over backwards to hook them up with a show, dinner, passes to Studio 54, a place to stay… He was always running around, but he always had time to have lunch with you. When I came back to town in May and needed to fix a few things in my house he was renting, he spent two days patching and hammering and helping me install a new door even though he was about as handy as a three-year-old. He did do a great job of running back and forth to Home Depot, Lowes and Subway for me though…
Zigler and I were likeminded in nearly every aspect of like-mindedness. We understood each other. He understood me with such an understanding that he never once questioned my decisions or made me feel guilty or thought any less of me. He just understood and was there for whatever I needed: A ride to the airport. A job. A beer at the frog. A trip to the Indy 500. Talks on my patio until four in the morning about love and family and that voice in our heads that always told us, “Go do something spectacular…”
I live in Chicago now and I spoke to Zigler nearly once a day. The night before I left town two years ago, Zigler was over helping me pack. He was up with me all night. He told me that he didn’t want me to leave, but he knew and understood why I was going. “To chase the dream, be with the girl, do something spectacular.” I just wrapped a show I co-wrote and produced at a Second City stage — part of the dream. Mike designed the programs. And every Saturday morning following the Friday night show he would call just to see how it went. An hour before Jarret Keene called me and told me what happened to Mike, I received word that another show I pitched got picked up for a run. Zigler would have been just as proud, maybe more so.
And I admit that for every step I make that’s closer to spectacular, it won’t have the same feel because Zigler won’t be there to share it with me. And I won’t get to see him write that book he was talking about or bring Liberty Watch back to newsstands or make his way to the national stage and make Ann Coulter and Bill O’Rielly, that putz on MSNBC and his boyfriend, Rachel Maddow and all the other pseudo journalists cower at his brilliance. And that is crushing.
Zigler and I became friends by challenging conventions. By writing news and opinion at The Rebel Yell. By forming the UNLV Student Radio Association battling mean old administrators for some kind of student involvement in their campus radio station. By questioning religion and politics and taxes. And knowing that spirituality and fewer politics and no taxes were a much better way to go… We both agreed that sometimes things seemed so absurd and so lazy and thoughtless, but we laughed and regularly found such beauty in that absurdity and in the irony of it all.
Zigler never believed in heaven. But he did believe in legacy. It doesn’t matter what each of us thinks about where he is right now or who he’s with or if we think nothing existential like that at all. He’d be fine with us just thinking. What does matter is the legacy, the fact, the proof that Zigler was here. Because to Mike, the facts were what mattered. And the fact that his generosity and loyalty and friendship and alibi and wisdom and humor and fairness were unmatched.
There was a restaurant on the corner of Sunset and Patrick called Venice Beach a few years back. It overlooked the landing planes at McCarran Airport and at the right time, the setting sun. Zigler and I would go there, order the same thing every time and sit in silence while we filled our journals. Then we’d chat about what we’d just written.
For me? I can’t say I’m alone or don’t have great friends and people who will be there for me no matter what. But I can say that I feel a little lonely — a little misunderstood. And if there is some kind of heaven, which I think there is, I’m hoping the first stop on the way there is a place like Beatty. And I’m betting Zigler’s already got a few dozen friends and a million new stories to tell.
But if not — and I don’t know for sure — I’ve got plenty of Zigler stories to last me just a little bit longer.
