Gary Indiana in HIS NEW YORK APARTMENT, FEBRUARY 2002. Photograph by SYLVIA PLACHY.

“Live Free or Die” is a false dilemma as well as the state motto of New Hampshire, where Gary Indiana was born and raised. The aphorism originated with the American Revolution and was revived in the sixties to boost up the boys sent to kill and die in Vietnam. New Hampshire began stamping it onto license plates in 1970, when Gary was twenty. By then he was living in California (state motto: “Eureka!”), having fled west at sixteen. What has proven true in the ensuing decades is that Gary lived freely and died anyway.

Gary’s lifelong quarrel was with the unexamined, dangerous, and ridiculous banner definitions of his time, fallacious state mottos and all. The grudge survives in his work as one long argument in favor of nothing left to lose. He often homed in on death or threat of it, writing characters, sometimes, who would just as soon take life as spit on it. And if dignity isn’t even on the table for most, what difference does death make? To him it was a personal question. Also edifying. “One still hopes some widely held notion of the common good will compel human beings to value empathy over the easy options of self-interest and violence,” he wrote at the 2014 Whitney Biennial in a tract titled A Significant Loss of Human Life. “If the existence of persistent, principled, rationalist resistance to barbarism ceases to be the case in the time ahead of us, the world will belong to any tyrant who claims it,” in Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt, 2005. From his memoir, 2015: “I wanted to scream from pain but didn’t. I looked at the baby and saw a future of scrapes and bruises. Life is short and full of pain and always beautiful, besides.” 

Gary resisted, celebrated, skewered, and suffered enormously. Living was his way of preparing for death, even when the cancer limited his abilities to move, snarl, laugh, and cause uproar. I have felt sadder than usual these past several weeks. I have also felt challenged and inspired by the righteous superiority of his intellect, his observational power, his appetites, the clarity and direction of his demanding yet lyrical insight. 

He knew what was happening, even as he dwindled just so before going. He was too smart to not know. When last we spoke, three days before he died, he rehearsed or repeated a few funny lines. Funny not because I found them amusing, funny because they passed through the lips of an expert still adamantly in need of pleasure, still in possession of a sense of timing despite time running out.

“There are a million of them out there, but only one of me. I don’t want anyone getting in my way,” he said. Having established his terms, he was free to go. “I’ll be there in a while … A WHILE!” This gave way to bouts of grim laughter, like firecrackers hitting wet blacktop. Not knowing the exact hour when the reaper might reap was too disturbing and therefore too good to let slide without caustics. That kind of unpredictability drove him nuts, like a tardy dinner date. He interpreted lateness in others as lack of concern. Delayed or missed appointments cranked his various insecurities up to an angry eleven. Gary was always on time, which I saw quite clearly to mean that he cared.

Nevertheless, only now may we refer to Gary Indiana as late. “Hope springs eternal,” he used to say. It was a joke, but a large part of him meant it.

This eulogy was commissioned by the Poetry Project, and was originally published in the Poetry Project Newsletter.

Sam McKinniss is an artist based in Connecticut and New York. The first major monograph dedicated to his work will be available this spring from Rizzoli Electa.