Reverse Shitlist

My brother Pat had a shitlist, or rather a reverse shitlist.

He was a loner by choice, and a proud one at that. He liked to hitch-hike, same as me, but we never did it together so as to have our own special experiences and then to report back to each other and compare notes.

The same patterns of interaction continued past the 70s and into our own trips – me a copy editor and Pat a housepainter back in the hometown. He was always alone. He was legally blind. He didn’t sleep – he would just lie down and listen to the radio all night long and sometimes record blues from Bloomington to send to me on cassette wherever I was – Champaign or Peoria or such.

But then I moved to Nebraska to escape some situation, and Pat helped me move. It was a great adventure on the way out and then he had a super great train ride and adventure on the way back to Illinois, meeting a couple women he knew in Iowa. Meanwhile I entered into a super duper lonely experience in Nebraska.

But let me tell you about the Reverse Shitlist. Well, sir, lots of people keep a list of contacts of some sort. Back then – the 90s – Pat kept a paper list of names and addresses and phone numbers of his friends around the country: old Knox College pals, our mutual friends, the names of girlfriends of other guys he liked a great deal, etc. And then every Sunday he wrote letters to a couple people on the list. He wrote great descriptive letters about the ordinary but noteworthy or funny things he saw every day in Streator. If he was writing to me, he’d include a cassette of blues tunes or some old 50s tunes all on a nice mixtape. I would always respond in kind with pictures and a cassette from my hiking and camping adventures in Nebraska. We were each other’s mutual support and it certainly got me through many a rough time.

But it wasn’t the same for other folks on Pat’s list: If the person didn’t respond with a letter or phone call within a certain reasonable amount of time, he would just take them off the list – run a line through them and then periodically update the whole list. In effect he was creating a virtual shitlist – the people remaining on the list were on the Reverse Shitlist. Sometimes a person would be restored to the list if they finally sent a letter, but otherwise zip! Delete! When I was visiting, I would watch him do his letter writing and list updating. He would laugh, and we’d both laugh. And sometimes we’d burst into song:

There she was justa walkin’ down the street
Singin’ Do Wah Diddy Diddy Um Diddy A

Boy, those were the greatest times. I loved my brother and he loved me. It was the screwiest thing in a family where no one ever said, “I love you” or treated you like a human being. I am probably exaggerating, or maybe not – I’m sure there was no malicious intent – but in such an environment it’s really important to have somebody you can count on, and for me that was Pat. When he died suddenly in 1995 and I went through his very minimal effects (he kept hardly anything) I found the Reverse Shitlist, the last list of his very best friends – who called or wrote him back. And there were a lot of people on the list, enough for an SRO funeral. One guy even got into a car crash (nothing serious) on his way down from Chicago. All friends, all on the Reverse Shitlist.