Remembering Pat
May. 11th, 2004 02:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redthroatedloonI just found out that my colleague Patrick died a week ago Monday. He was 43 years old.
Forty fucking three years old. With a wife and two kids. Of a heart attack.
I first worked with Pat back in 1988 at a magazine called Personal Computing, which was located in New Jersey. I lived in Brooklyn with no car, so I used to get rides from a fellow Brooklynite who, however, was an observant Jew, so on Fridays I'd get a ride home from Pat. He lived in Queens, so he'd drop me off in Manhattan just before he took the bridge into Queens, and I'd take the subway the rest of the way.
Pat was one of the most laid-back guys I knew. Good writer, good editor, met all his deadlines, and just the nicest, sweetest guy... The only time I ever saw him lose his temper was when we were driving south on the FDR drive and somebody cut him off. He'd apparently had a bad day at work, and so he started playing chicken with the guy, cutting him off and being cut off for several miles. When we finally pulled over so I could get out, I stared at him with my best cold-as-ice furious face and said, "You are not going to do this again when I'm in your car." He apologized profusely, and said he'd never do it again. And he didn't.
When that magazine closed, we both got jobs at the same Ziff publication, and worked together until the mid-1990s, when he got a job elsewhere, and I (having been laid off) went freelance. Haven't kept in touch, except loosely by the network of old friends.
But even if I hadn't actually talked to him in several years, I remember him clearly. And remember him well.
Forty fucking three years old. With a wife and two kids. Of a heart attack.
I first worked with Pat back in 1988 at a magazine called Personal Computing, which was located in New Jersey. I lived in Brooklyn with no car, so I used to get rides from a fellow Brooklynite who, however, was an observant Jew, so on Fridays I'd get a ride home from Pat. He lived in Queens, so he'd drop me off in Manhattan just before he took the bridge into Queens, and I'd take the subway the rest of the way.
Pat was one of the most laid-back guys I knew. Good writer, good editor, met all his deadlines, and just the nicest, sweetest guy... The only time I ever saw him lose his temper was when we were driving south on the FDR drive and somebody cut him off. He'd apparently had a bad day at work, and so he started playing chicken with the guy, cutting him off and being cut off for several miles. When we finally pulled over so I could get out, I stared at him with my best cold-as-ice furious face and said, "You are not going to do this again when I'm in your car." He apologized profusely, and said he'd never do it again. And he didn't.
When that magazine closed, we both got jobs at the same Ziff publication, and worked together until the mid-1990s, when he got a job elsewhere, and I (having been laid off) went freelance. Haven't kept in touch, except loosely by the network of old friends.
But even if I hadn't actually talked to him in several years, I remember him clearly. And remember him well.
