I‘ve never been one for elaborate New Year’s rituals. I don’t thump the walls with bread to rid the house of evil spirits, as some do in Ireland. Nor swing caged fireballs around my head to torch last year’s misfortune, as they do in Stonehaven, Scotland. I don’t make hollow resolutions, since I might fail not in expected ways, but in spectacular new ways yet to be imagined.
If Christmas is about giving, New Year’s is about taking. So come New Year’s Day, I take a fistful of ibuprofen and a nap. Then, after coming to, I take mental inventory of the old year’s final moments, praying it was my wife I goosed as the ball dropped, since a sour-mash fog leaves me easily confused, and all white people start bearing strong resemblance.
There is one sacred ritual, however, that I observe every new year: I read about dead celebrities who didn’t manage to escape the old one. In memoriam columns and slideshows make great clickbait, so by January 1, they’re featured by every other news outlet. I read them all, to see who I missed and will be missing. It’s not that I’m a celebrity worshipper; far from it. It’s more that I can truly appreciate them once they’ve taken leave, much as watching an obnoxious child sleeping endears him. We all become innocent when we dream or die. And whatever you envy celebrities for in life—their fame, their fortune—you wouldn’t switch places with them now. Death is the ultimate democratizer.
We lost many last year, too many to name, since even as the herd-of-the-famous is culled, they seem to multiply faster than they subtract. The Onion once ran a headline that nicely captured the faux-celebrity produced by wall-to-wall reality shows and YouTube suckerfish: “32 Percent of U.S. Citizens Still Not Famous.” Decades from now, it is not hard to imagine entire memorial columns being taken up solely by Kardashian offshoots—their sex-tape costars, their baby-daddies, their collagenists.
And yet we lost some real stars as well. The replaceable irreplaceables. It was a bad year for musical Kings, as we lost B.B. and Ben E. It was a bad year for the sports/animal kingdom, as we lost Jerry “Tark the Shark” Tarkanian, Ernie “Mr. Cub” Banks, and Ken “The Snake” Stabler. I likewise seemed to have lost half my childhood television family: no more Dick Van Patten (Eight Is Enough) or Al Molinaro (Happy Days) or Wayne “Trapper John” Rogers (M*A*S*H).
On a more personal note, I lost NBA great/Chairman of the Boards Moses Malone. When I was a ballboy for the then-Washington Bullets in the ’80s, Malone once gave me a surly look, then threw a bloody Band-Aid at my head—or “passed the torch,” as I related to my high school basketball team, where I played twelfth man. And there went Jethro Pugh, who was not the most famous member of the Doomsday Defense. He wasn’t even the most famous Jethro—he was no Cousin Jethro or Jethro Tull. And yet, when I was a second-grader growing up in Texas, I looked at his face every single day, since he adorned my wall when my world seemed no bigger than the 1977 Dallas Cowboys.
And while I wasn’t looking, there went the New York Times‘s David Carr, one of my earliest editors and friends in Washington. An eccentric parade-float of a man, Carr, who had given up the sauce years ago out of necessity, was one of the rare souls who could blow into town, sit at the bar all night, and nurse Diet Cokes while still seeming to be two drinks ahead of you.
We lost a lot more. There will be no more Anita Ekberg seducing Marcello Mastroianni in the Trevi Fountain. There will be no more Cynthia Robinson, Sly Stone’s funky horn player, imploring, as she did in “Dance to the Music,” that “all the squares, go home.” There will be no more Rowdy Roddy Piper, the most entertaining wrestler of all time. He lost partial hearing after his eardrum was ruptured in a dog-collar match. But he never lost his ear for perfect dialogue: “I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”
These people weren’t the poles of my life, just the random stars who briefly illuminated it. Which is what stars do, helping us pass the time, until our own time has passed. Noting their endpoint is the least we can do, a favor returned. For as Yogi Berra said, before we lost him last year at age 90, “You should always go to other people’s funerals. Otherwise, they won’t come to yours.”
