In 1996 I didn’t know what to do there, I just knew I had to be on the internet. There was a little internet cafe around the corner from my apartment on Broadway, Seattle’s hip, gay neighborhood I’d just moved to from Philadelphia. The place was dark and had only five or six monitors lined on a foldout desk. You paid a small sum and logged on.

I’d heard you could find anything in the world on the internet so I navigated to a chat room for the British post-punk band The Fall and went looking for someone I could talk to. Pretty quickly, I met Jon Cook. We soon became friends and pen pals, trading tapes and handwritten letters for years to come.

I got to know Jon Cook through his letters, perhaps only a few a year, accompanied by the much-treasured bootleg tapes or curiosities he’d include from bands or genres that ran parallel to The Fall. The tapes, like the letters, had the same handwriting: slanting to the right, all caps, sparing, neat. On occasion we wrote just for the sake of writing without including tapes; Cook’s return address on the back of the envelope simply read,

SENT BY:
J. COOK
FLAT 6-A
7-9 VICTORIA ST.
SOUTHPORT
MERSEYSIDE
UNITED KINGDOM

One of the last letters I saved is from early 1998, the year I moved to France for five months and tried to track him down at his flat in Liverpool. (At least I assumed it to be Liverpool, though his address was Merseyside. It was hard to tell, were they one and the same? We couldn’t ask search engines yet, all we had were maps.)

In his letter, Cook thanks me for my last postcard, the one I mailed from Amsterdam. Which would have been the spring of ’97. I have no memory of this of course, what I did in Amsterdam more than 25 years ago anyone can say.

Cook references the latest Fall studio album and offers some rare bootlegs of that tour, was I interested? And rumor had it, The Fall were coming to the States. Which was newsworthy, they rarely played outside of the UK.

Cook goes on to explain he’s not doing the tapes anymore because he was more of a middle-man and someone revealed his source (that someone he calls a c-word), and anyway, he hopes we’ll stay in touch.

Cook doesn’t have email, doesn’t share his phone number, and isn’t on social media because it doesn’t exist yet. So when I’m living in Europe later that summer the only way I can hope to meet him is by literally going to his apartment on Victoria Street and ringing the bell.

Spoiler alert, I never meet Jon Cook. I’m in Liverpool as part of a month-long visit to the UK, the highlight being the Notting Hill Carnival, a reggae festival over the bank holiday weekend late August.

My childhood friend Loren, a sound artist who does experimental music, has been invited to perform at an electronic music festival in Liverpool. As part of my visit to London I tack on Loren’s show, in hopes I’ll meet Cook.

But all my plans reflect the simple mind of a 27-year-old, and when I ring the bell at Jon Cook’s flat there is no answer, so I leave a handwritten note from my pocket notebook saying I was here, and where I’m staying, but I don’t have a cell phone or any other means for the two of us to connect and so we never do.

The last letter I get from Jon Cook is around the time of the first White Stripes record, post-1999. Cook is excited to share he’s written a letter to the band’s management including a photo of himself for use on their next album cover. And the band wrote back!

Apparently, Cook was on the beach in Calais, just on the other side of the channel from England, and got so drunk he passed out. As he lay there unconscious in the sun the skin on his stomach burned and when he stood, the rolls of his fat revealed white stripes alongside the red. A perfect image for the next White Stripes record!

The band is not impressed. But instead, they offer mature-sounding advice for Jon to watch his drinking and always wear sun protection.

This is how I’ll remember Jon Cook, through the image he shares with the White Stripes and me. I could look him up now and reach out but it seems like the time we shared has come and gone. The world is a different place. Is it bigger or smaller? Darker or brighter?

I have gone looking on the internet for images of that internet cafe from 1996. There is nothing. All that remains is consigned to memory. And that is part of why I keep these letters from Jon Cook, because they only exist here, with me. While there could be an analogue on the other side of the world (my tapes and letters, in Jon Cook’s flat), for all I know Jon Cook is dead.

This letter from 1998 has a forwarding sticker on it from the post office: he tried my address in Seattle but I’d moved to Pennsylvania, enroute to France later that year. So the letter, which started in the UK, landed in Seattle, then back to Pennsylvania, then back to Seattle when I returned there in late ’98. And now it’s with me in a VRBO in Utah as I write this post.

I should start parting with things like this, but the reason it’s hard is they become symbols that mean something so personal, they become an extension of who we are. In some cases, they represent missing parts of our lives: imagined dreams, the gaps and what-ifs that never get resolved or accounted for. And if that’s true, how could I burn these letters without burning a part of myself? How would it feel to do that? Best it’s me who lights the flame so I can think one last time about this person I never knew, but maybe I did.

When we’re young, the world seems so big and vast it feels like anything is possible–we can go anywhere and do anything. But as we get older the aperture narrows and we realize we can’t the way we once could.

Departing with once-saved treasures can be freeing too. A letting go of someone we thought we might be with an acceptance of who we’ve become. And a recognition, perhaps these things are only things.

Categories: music, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, Memoir