Letter to a Murdered Friend:
Johnny Bingo Dawson, 1957-2009
from Kevin Annett 

Dear Bingo,
 
Your picture sits on our piano these days, and just now I was looking at you again as our fire sparkled and Carol and Sean Rei and I listened to Christmas music and ate sherbet in the warm home that you never got to know.
 
Carol is working on a stencil of that image of you, the one of you smiling as you always did so well. We’re going to plaster it all over the walls of the downtown eastside next Monday, on the first anniversary of your murder.
 
Your corner is still there, but the messages people scrawled to you are gone from the building, wiped away by those who want you forgotten. And you will be forgotten, but not while I live and breathe.
 
We’re all mostly scattered now, Bingo, since as you and I both know, when the best of us is struck down, a light goes out in every heart. I still see Clyde and Frank now and then, and we talk about holding some more rallies to remember you, and all those little kids. And then we talk some more.
 
I wish I could tell you that the world is less stuck now, or that Harry Wilson is not still spending his days and nights in the bus cubicle at Gore street. Last week, as I walked alone near there, I imagined a ream of things to tell you, but they were all bad. And even though I am supposed to know these things, I can’t say for sure where you are – or if you can hear me.
 
I remember you as unafraid, and of course that’s what got you killed. I was there when you and Frank walked fearlessly to the front of the Anglican cathedral mass with our banner, even when the cops were on their way. I heard the sergeant tell you to stop your troublemaking – or else. But I was safe at home, held by Carol and my own exhaustion, when they beat you so badly that you died.
 
Long ago, when I started conducting funerals, I used to drop what seemed to be meaningful thoughts on to the unsuspecting mourners: like, how our loved ones become that much closer to us after they die. I’ve tried to believe my own words, Bingo. But you are so far away now, and fading fast.
 
Nobody talks about you anymore, except me. They’re afraid to. You said it yourself, that day we sat in the sunlight at Main and Hastings and you surveyed the shuffling, anxious crowds, and muttered quietly, to my regale of laughter,
 
“Fucking barnyard critters.”
 
You weren’t part of that herd, brother, but how you still loved them all, even as you saw through them. You were better than me, in that way.
 
You loved me too, and you said so, that one time after the fifty of us left the Catholic cathedral, so exhilarated, after our occupation. That golden moment on the steps of Holy Rosary, when the critters had finally turned the tables on the predators, and the cops ranted impotently at us, as we all laughed and cheered our victory: that was worth a lifetime of loss.
 
Those glimpses of forever are what keep me going, and you’re right there, swimming in the moment with the rest of us: even with William, who overcame his drinking after our victory, for awhile at least, and who still today can remember his courage when he strode into the church of his torture with us and laughed, rather than puked, at all the pain.
 
Something in that perfect memory, that fruition of all my hopes of setting captives free, stays with me, and it warms my nights without you and shows me where to walk through that dank and dangerous path we were both given to trod.
 
At the memorial service we held for you at your corner, after some of us had split off and taken over the street and freaked out the cops all over again, and marched to the church where you and Frank triumphed, and after the cops had shouted at us and Carol shouted back that they had murdered you, and asked them what happened to their souls, and they couldn’t look her in the eyes, after all of that, Frank stood with me and gazed at the church, and he actually smiled, and he said quietly,
 
“I feel like he’s here now.”
 
In the beginning was the deed, and at the end. For it’s there that we come to know, and be known.
 
So I’ll see you at the next church occupation, my brother Bingo. I expect to hear you rant long and hard and loud, in my voice, and in Frank’s, and through all those whom you love.
 
It’s just the way of things.