Eulogy for Kurt
Read at April 2008 funeral, Wheaton
Outside of my family, I have loved Kurt longer than I have loved anyone else. We met almost 21 years ago, when we were 13 year old high school freshman. He is one of my closest friends. I remember very little of my life before high school, and so almost every year of my life that I can remember contains an aspect of Kurt.
On my way here, driving from New York yesterday, I was jotted down page after page of notes about Kurt, each note indexed to a comment, a joke, a trip we took, a movie we’d seen. I can’t even begin to go through that list here, but I want to tell a few of the more characteristic stories. Although like Matt I too am a philosophy professor, I have nothing general to say, no interpretation of this event or way of placing into narrative that provides some kind of meaning. So I will stick with the particular stories.
We got to know each other on the Wheaton North freshman basketball B-team. Actually, we were on the second string of the B-team, and they hadn’t cut anyone that year. We were both around 5 foot 2 inches in those days, and not exceptional players. But there was one moment of glory that we never tired of recounting. We were playing against the freshman B-team from West Chicago, the other worst team in the league. We hadn’t won a game yet that year, but this was one team that we could plausibly hope to beat. Unfortunately the first stringers were failing us and we were some fifteen points behind at the half. Our coach, in a moment of frustration, sent in the entire second string. And Kurt just suddenly lit up the court. He was everywhere, and we all somehow rose to his level and outplayed the first stringers from the West Chicago team for the full third quarter and into the first part of the fourth. I remember coming down the court during a run-and-gun moment and seeing Kurt on the right hand side of the court, hurling it at him, and then watching him give a pump fake before hitting a long three pointer that put us in the lead. The other team called time out and we celebrated on our way over the bench, Kurt getting a hero’s welcome. And then Coach Bauer put in the first string and they promptly blew the lead and we lost the game. In the locker room later, the Coach said “Looks like I found my new first string.” But he never really put us in again, oddly, and we lost the rest of the games that season.
We were both rather awkward in the early years of high school, out of place in the usual social circles of the cafeteria, and so when the weather was nice we would go to Northside Park, near the school, and sit and eat our sack lunches together at place near the water. Sometimes we played chess, or just read books, or fed the ducks. Once we turned 16 and could drive we would occasionally go after school to the only bit of geological variation in these parts, Mount Trashmore, and sit there and talk. I’m not sure what we talked about anymore, but I remember one time getting up on our way home and looking at the imprints that our two bodies had left in the grass and thinking that we were somehow leaving our mark there. I remember wondering whether, when we were old, we would do stuff like that again, sitting on some porch somewhere, or some hillside, and talk about how strange life is.
Senior year I was the editor of the features section of the newspaper, and asked Kurt if he wanted to write the occasional column. He agreed, but what he produced was always a kind of rant about how screwed up everything in Wheaton was—except for the Theosophical Society, where he was a member—and so we decided that he should publish under the penname “Truk Nosnah,” which was of course just Kurt Hanson spelled backwards. Not all that creative, but I don’t think anyone ever figured out who it was.
In his public persona, Kurt was always trying not to stand out, and almost always failing. Speech class was particularly difficult for him. I remember him saying once at lunch that he was frustrated that somehow no matter what his speech was about, the entire class, including the teacher, seemed to crack up at his manner of presentation. So he decided that for his extemporaneous assignment he was going to try to give the most boring speech possible, and as a result collected a bunch of rocks at Northside park during lunch and put them into his ever-present backpack. And then he went up there in class and took the rocks out of his backpack one by one, slowly and banally describing each one. After that he pulled out an encyclopedia and read the entry under the term “Rock.” And still the class was laughing uproariously, which made him sort of laugh and blush at the same time in that characteristic Kurt way. After a few minutes of this, he tried to finish but the teacher said that the speech wasn’t long enough and that he had to go on for at least a couple of more minutes. And then, totally unpredictably, he started undoing his belt and pulling down his jeans, much to the horror of the class. It turned out that he had shorts on underneath (as he almost always did) and then he got up on the table in front of the class and cupped his hands under the back of his knees and flapped his legs up and down in order to make really impressive flatulence sounds. There were a few of us who literally fell off our chairs laughing, and I recall him saying that the teacher gave him an A- for the speech, with a comment that went something like “Utterly fascinating speech, Kurt, and certainly very unique. But a bit lacking in organization.” A good description of the speech, but also one that describes its speaker to a tee.
Later we both had growing spurts and though we didn’t play organized basketball again we did play disorganized basketball a lot. Kurt played quite a bit in the gym at this church, in fact, and always appreciated the opportunity to do so. There were some black guys down in the city with whom Kurt would sometimes play, and they loved him. According to another friend of ours who lives down there, he used to be called “Psychedelic” or “The Franchise” on these courts. He had an amazing behind the back drive to the hoop move. And his arms were so long that you would think you had a clear shot and suddenly out of nowhere he would be there and block the shot. Sometimes he would get mad at everybody fouling him all the time and one time in a fit of anger he drove to the basket, getting hacked all the way, and then emphatically slam dunked it. Everyone started hooting and laughing, but Kurt just looked sort of embarrassed and mumbled a kind of apology to the opposing team.
At the end of high school I gave the graduation speech and thought that this was my big moment, worked on it pretty hard. Afterwards there were a lot of kudos from teachers, friends, and parents, with the exception of Kurt, who came up to me and said that I had had my chance to be prophetic but that he and Erik (his brother) thought that I just pandered to the parents. Kurt was nothing if not completely honest.
Kurt loved to travel. His email address is “mendicant2@juno.com.” In some ways, the writer of the obituary notice in the Sun Times this past Friday got it just right when he referred to him as “Kurt Hanson, a man of unidentified address.” He did have a home at 529 S. Gables, of course. He also lived in Portland, in some other town in Oregon, in Chicago, in Nevada, in Lombard, in California, in D.C. The year after high school I went and lived in Amsterdam at a kind of Christian youth hostel. And when I got back I told Kurt about it and said that he should go there and see if he could get a volunteer job. Which he did, and worked as a maintenance man for a while, but apparently the rather overly organized Dutch person for whom he worked didn’t agree well with Kurt and he ended up leaving Amsterdam and just backpacking around Europe a bit. He went to Belgium for a while and then decided to go check out England. So he took the boat over to England and at the customs checkpoint when he was asked what he intended to do in England he told them that he was “just hoping to be homeless for a while.” Which of course got him immediately sent back to Belgium, and with that rejection stamp on his passport he couldn’t get into any other countries either and so he was stuck living on a park bench in what he called “the most boring city in Europe” for a few weeks, before flying home.
After that we both got jobs at Shoney’s in Danada square. This was the first of many many jobs that Kurt had. The problem was usually that he was too smart and sensitive to take orders from bosses whom he didn’t really respect, and at the same time a little too scattered to perform these jobs in the way they desired. So I recall that after a few months of dropping the occasional tray and the like the Shoney’s managers had reduced Kurt’s section to one table. But there were numerous parties of people—I remember a group of middle aged women in particular—who would always come in and request Kurt’s table, and sometimes even wait until that one table was free in order to have him as their waiter. And sometimes his tips from these regulars would rival the wad of cash that those of us with larger sections took home. That job ended rather humorously when a customer complained that Kurt was pressuring him to finish his steak—repeatedly asking “uh, are you done with that”-- and then finally whisked it away and, before he had even made it through the doors into the back of the restaurant, picked the steak up off the plate and starting munching on it himself.
Then there was the Dominick’s job, bagging groceries, which he lost because he refused to wear socks, which was apparently part of the uniform. And the job driving illegal Polish maids around Chicago, which he lost after he got so distracted by the maids yelling at him in Polish that he crashed the truck. And the Wheaton mailman job, which he lost when customers reported that although he delivered the mail quite reliably, they were a little aghast at the fact that they would often see him relieving himself in the bushes of houses along his route.
Perhaps my favorite was his tenure as an ice cream man. Somehow Kurt found this really dubious company which only had two very ramshackle trucks which didn’t have doors on the drivers side and went about 25mph max. Kurt would troll around various Wheaton neighborhoods playing this kind of sinister ice cream truck music (although once in a while he put in his own tape with rock and roll), but business was never very good because although the kids would come running out to buy stuff, they were often followed by moms who took one look at Kurt and assured their children that they had ice cream in the freezer that they could have.
At Wheaton College I was an RA during junior year of college and after first semester one of our floor-mates moved out and so we had an empty room. I moved Kurt into the room of course and he stayed rent-free for three months or so, learned how to sneak into the dining hall where I often saw him holding court at the little singles bar at which the philosophy majors always ate. After a while it seemed that Kurt had more friends at Wheaton College than I did, even though he never matriculated there. I recall more than once someone coming up to me on the quad or in the dining hall and saying, hey, aren’t you Kurt Hanson’s friend?
Over one of the winter breaks Kurt and I were still around since we lived here and the girls varsity team was practicing in the gym when we were there shooting around. And they asked if we knew three other guys we could bring in and run a scrimmage, since they wanted to run a practice game. So we called Matt and Dave Shoemaker, two high school friends who still lived in the area, and someone else I can’t remember. In good Midwestern fashion it was decided that we would play shirts versus skins, and Kurt immediately and rather devilishly suggested to the girls that we would prefer to be shirts. That didn’t happen, of course, and so we played skins, which we all hated since we were five pretty emaciated guys. Kurt’s rather macabre sense of humor came out when someone else, maybe the assistant coach, came in and asked who these five shirtless wonders were and Kurt blurted out: “Team Auschwitz.” We played three or four games against the girls and that day Kurt was decidedly NOT the Franchise: he seemed to be playing really easy and not hardly guarding our opponents at all. Later I yelled at him for being too easy on them and he looked flustered and said something about being incapable of guarding people who have breasts.
Kurt was in some ways chaotic and disorganized, but in many other ways totally dependable. He has given me umpteen rides to the airport, and I would always be running late and he was always ready half an hour before I was and would then start harassing me to get going. He would give you his last two cents, though he often didn’t have even that much money on him. He was always the person you could call in a pinch to give you a ride or help you out of trouble. At some point I was with a friend Tracy Swan down in Chicago and our car broke down. I called Kurt and asked if there was any way he could come and pick us up. He agreed of course, but didn’t mention that the only wheels he had access to that night were those of the ice cream truck. So hours later he finally appears at the designated meeting point, and then we went 25mph all the way home on the Eisenhower, hazard lights on and blasting Nirvana from the external sound system which is supposed to play ice cream truck music, eating ice cream after ice cream and laughing as people gawked at us while they tried to pass.
Kurt was there for me and my family during my mothers death and funeral in ways that I will never forget. He was there for Matt and Susan when they got into a serious car accident. He drove through the night from Wheaton a few years ago in order to be the surprise guest at my 30th birthday party in New Haven. He was there for me two summers ago when I needed help closing up our family house and loading a Penske truck to drive everything to Ithaca. He was always ready to chat on the phone about everything from the Cubs to eastern philosophy to girls to what our families were up to, to high school memories, to movies. Especially movies. His favorite was “My Dinner with Andre”—a cult classic involving two men who sit at a dinner and talk in sort of vaguely philosophical ways about the meaning of life for 2.5 hours. In a way my life with Kurt sometimes felt like a really extended version of “My dinner with Andre.”
Once the job situation started looking increasingly bleak, Kurt would say that he was looking for what he called “a benevolent benefactor” who would somehow set him up with some money and an apartment and let him just read and watch movies. He always said that Matt Halteman and I should write a book about him and then sell it and let him live off the royalties. He was frustrated that he seemed to have all these ideas and no one really listened to them. It was hard sometimes to communicate to him how much we appreciated him, he didn’t seem always to receive love very well.
He did give love to many people though, in all of the ways I’ve just mentioned. And also to animals. Kurt really loved animals. When his dog Shadwick died he was inconsolable for months. In the fall of 2005, he moved into my house in Ithaca in an attempt to start a new life there, but at the time my other two bedrooms were full and so he moved into the unfinished basement. It wasn’t the prettiest place: a somewhat bleak and dirty basement room where Kurt had a TV and a mattress and a space heater and some books about world war two and eastern philosophy. Kurt didn’t seem to mind at all, except to note once in a while that there were spiders falling on his head while he was sleeping (something he did a lot of). We used to call that place “Kurtsspace.com” in part because at the time Kurt was very into the new Myspace.com technology and spent a lot of time working on his profile. At some point in September, a stray cat appeared and moved in with us. We didn’t realize until it was too late that she was pregnant. One night in October when I and the others were out, and Kurt was sleeping down in his basement room, the cat went into labor. She went downstairs to Kurtsspace.com and started making groaning and screeching noises. Kurt later told us that he woke up and kept pushing her away thinking she was going to be sick, and only belated realized that she was giving birth to three kittens. He promptly put them in a cardboard box with a blanket, and when we got home he had already named one of them: “Alan,” after Alan Alda, the actor from Mash and the other one was called “Jelly.” I named the third one “Sven.” Kurt was so tender and gentle with those kittens: sometimes I come in quietly and overhear him downstairs singing their names at them, and after he left he wrote emails to me regularly asking how they were doing. The whole story involving Kurtsspace.com and the cats now seems to me representative of Kurt as a whole. There was a lot of grit and dirt and even some darkness about him. But at the very center there was a kind of gentleness and kindness, almost a kind of innocence, that even this hardbitten stray cat sensed and sought out when she realized that she was going to give birth. There was no other place in the house, perhaps no other place on the planet, where those kittens could have been so fittingly born.
Matt and I didn’t write a book about Kurt, or at least we haven’t yet done so. But Jim and Karl wrote a song for him. And Kurt’s response to that was almost a bit of confusion, since as I said he didn’t receive affection very well. But there was one time when he had to receive it. In the Fall of 2006 I was back in town for a conference, and Matt and Susan drove down from Grand Rapids for the Detholz! album release concert at the Empty Bottle Bar in Chicago. Kurt came down early and was waiting around for me in the city and Matt and Susan showed up and took him out for dinner. At the concert he was wearing his usual outfit—hair long and unkempt, a thrift store blazer of some sort over two or three shirts whose tags had been ripped out because they scratched his neck, some jeans and a pitiable pair of docksiders, worn in a little oddly due to his slightly pigeontoed and bent over stance, a dirty white wallet that he tied around his neck with a string so that he wouldn’t lose it, and some sort of beatup Krishnamurty paperback in the pocket of his blazer, ready to be flipped through in an idle moment. We bought drinks and listened to the band play a couple of songs and Kurt was clearly enjoying being out with old friends, nodding to the music, talking to other Wheaton and Chicago people who were around. And then Jim stopped the show and directed the attention of the entire bar towards Kurt, and announced with fanfare that the song was dedicated to him. Kurt couldn’t very well get away from the attention at this moment, and so instead he sort of straightened up and smiled and blushed and seemed just utterly pleased that someone had done something like this for him, had listened to him and created something in response.
Astrid my ex girlfriend, who spent much of her youth with Kurt and me, is a priest in Manhattan now. She called yesterday to say that she received a postcard in the mail on Thursday, the day that Kurt died. It was sent on Monday from Pennsylvania (which is where Kurt and his folks were on that day), and written in what she thinks is Kurt’s handwriting. (I’m not sure what to think about this, since in a way this doesn’t really sound like Kurt to me, but she is quite convinced that it was him.) On the front it had a painting of the Road to Emmaus Story (Luke 24:28ff), which was the reading in many churches (including the one that Andrea, Kurt’s sister, attended that Sunday). Again, I don’t think we’ll ever know whether Kurt sent that postcard or not, but in any case I want to conclude with some verses from that reading.
As they approached the village to which they were going, the man acted as if he were going farther. But they urged him strongly, "Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over." So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he vanishedfrom their sight. They asked each other, "Were not our hearts warmed within us while he talked with us on the road?
Kurt was not the messiah, obviously, nor will he rise from the dead and speak to us again. But he did have, as the Detholz! song says, the “lips of a prophet” for some of us sometimes. He was a man apart, an immensely lonely person, despite our faltering attempts to love him. But as a result he gave us some of the wisdom that this sort of suffering and loneliness affords. Perhaps we did not fully recognize this until he vanished. But surely we can say that our hearts were warmed when he spoke to us.
AMEN.
-Andrew
