Silverio Montelongo was the best boss I ever had.

Back in the late 1980s, I was putting myself through college; NYU. Dirt poor, I lived a long train ride away in a neglected neighborhood for the cheap rent, snagged every scholarship, grant, and loan I could, and took a work-study job on campus in addition to the three other part-time jobs I already had. Silverio was my work-study boss.

Silver managed all the money for all the student clubs and organizations. He approved budgets, expenditure requests, anything having to do with how clubs got funding for their campus activities.

If people were nice to Silver, respectful, they generally got their budgets approved. But talk shit to him, act like a privileged asshole, and he could slow-boat your funding requests endlessly. More than once I watched him slide some twit's paperwork to the very bottom of the pile with a chuckle.

I was good with numbers, grokked basic spreadsheet foo, was quick to learn and showed up for work on time. We got along just fine. I was also an officer in the NYU Science Fiction Club, so our gang saw a few very plush years there, where we got to screen some seriously good sci-fi movies, and our annual zine went to a much better printer than usual.

Then Silver started getting sick a lot, and I would be there alone in his office space, crunching the numbers and balancing the books, wondering when he'd be back. At one point, he took a two-week vacation to a tropical beach. When he came back, the tan couldn't hide the circles under his eyes. He coughed all the time. He got thin.

One day, he invited me over to his tiny apartment, I forget where. Brooklyn? The Lower East Side? Mostly I remember the interior of the place, every room long and narrow and claustrophobic. Sitting on his couch, my knees almost touched the edge of the chair against the opposite wall.

Silver wanted me to meet his cat, Spot. I didn't realize it at the time, but he was looking for Spot's new home. For whatever reason, I didn't pass Spot's sniff test. We greeted each other, but the chemistry just wasn't there, and so Silver never popped the re-homing question.

I visited him once in the hospital, where he lay panting in a bed, in a room with many beds, each with a curtain around it. He was angry that I was there; I didn't stay long.

I didn't attend the funeral, though the president of our club did. My mother had ingrained in me that funerals were to be avoided. I can't blame her, as she'd been severely traumatized by death and privation during the Great Depression. At any rate, I didn't know any better at the time, didn't understand death, had never grieved anyone, barely grasped what was happening with aids, the gay community, the government, medicine. I should have been there, I should have been more aware, I should have been more active. But most of my friends were racial minorities and they weren't about to bother trying to educate my dumb white ass – it was the 80s. It wouldn't have worked anyhow. I never knew at the time just how shallow those friendships were, how little I could be trusted.

Silverio was done in by the dual whammy of neocapitalist fascism and white ignorance. He didn't deserve the Reagan years. And I didn't deserve his openhearted friendship, his patience, his extraordinary humor, and most certainly not his cat.

#storytelling