Lazlo Toth was my friend. To some of you, he was an acquaintance, or a former lover, or a family member. And then on January 6, 2010, a week into a new decade, he died. He passed on before we did, which is a shame for us. I don't know how he died, and maybe you do, but it doesn't sound good. Whenever they don't tell you the cause right away, it doesn't sound good.
I knew Laci (lah-TZEE) in high school; we lived on opposite ends of the boys' dorm at High Mowing. Back then, Laci was a soft-spoken soul with wide, round eyes. A gentle giant, probably not as tall as I remember him being, which is about 6-foot-6 because memory distorts things. He had a big mane of wild brown hair. Everybody who met him back then -- myself included -- always immediately assumed he was a gangly, awkward, shy kid.
And then there was the name. Lazlo Toth was the nom de' of Saturday Night Live's Don Novello, who undertook a writing project under the name of a Hungarian geologist who attacked a Michelangelo back in 1972. But that was the year I was born, and Laci was older than me. Did he just end up with a weird, star-crossed name? I never knew. But later on, after high school, I did end up reading Novello's collected letters, in which he wrote odd tracts to famous people and received unintentionally funny replies. I thought it was all low-grade toss. The Lazlo Toth I knew was the real comic genius.
"The Bee Gees were the true punks, people don't realize that," he'd say in a mellow deadpan. "You can really mosh to that shit."
