How often do you think about dying? I think about it every day. I don’t dwell on it. I don’t long for it. But I’m aware of it. It’s a universal truth that unites us, one that we endlessly contemplate, ruminate on, hold to the light like Hamlet with poor Yorick’s skull. We can’t stop thinking about death because we don’t know what comes next. It’s hard to accept that the answer may be nothing.
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Fitzpatrick isn’t the type of sensitive soul you imagine meditating on death. He’s less Hamlet than Falstaff, charging to center stage all bravado and bluster. Fitzpatrick is a character in a movie about the kind of Chicago that exists only in movies: He wears hats the way that gentlemen used to. He doesn’t compliment you on your nice eyes; he tells you you’ve got great lamps. He calls the mayor impolitic names. When the car is too warm, he yells that it’s hotter than a nun’s ass on Good Friday, and then, as if to clarify, says it’s hotter than a monkey’s nut sack.
But then Fitzpatrick learned of the death of Lou Reed—a musician whose words had wound their way to Fitzpatrick on a Catholic school playground decades before, offering reassurance: There’s a whole wild world out here. You’ll get there. Years later, Reed saw one of Fitzpatrick’s drawings on a wall and sought him out. People say you should never meet your heroes; you’ll only be disappointed. But in the ensuing years of his friendship with Reed, Fitzpatrick never once was.
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