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."
He used to put disco records on his turntable and play them backwards, and he could swear he could hear evil messages like "I love Satan" and "Fuck Jesus."
And so Laci spent his high school years as a highly misunderstood individual. But unlike most hormone-addled teenagers who were just looking for a place to fit in, Laci didn't care. He was a mysterious study in contrasts and contradictions, but he always fit perfectly inside his own skin.
Laci loved music. He introduced me to a lot of those old crusty post-New Wave punk bands like the Minutemen and the Circle Jerks. He had all these thrashcore records with black covers. But he also loved old Genesis, and I thought about Laci a lot when I went through a "Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" auto-repeat phase last summer. He had the full collection of former Genesis member Anthony Phillips' "Private Parts and Pieces" series, which is about as close to the boundaries of actual classical music that progressive rock ever came. Laci was a gentle soul who was also so hardcore.
Laci and I were in a band together, along with Zak Nilsson. We called ourselves Anal Shrapnel, and got together after evening study halls to record "albums" on my boom box. Zak would start the preprogrammed beats on his Yamaha keyboard, Laci would play guitar, and I'd bang on stuff. Then we'd all intersperse freestyle raps with farting noises. Anal Shrapnel had songs with titles like "Dingleberry Rebel" and "I Got One Wet Spot For You, And It's My Asshole." We did a tour of campus bathrooms.
It was the most juvenile, eight-year-old thing in the world, but it was Laci's ironic, dead-serious attitude about Anal Shrapnel that made it the funniest thing in the world.
Laci left High Mowing after the 1988-89 school year, if I remember right. But I do recall this: he was living in a spartan two-room apartment in Boston when I visited him a year later. Laci, Keith Vanetti and I went down to Harvard Square and bought some fake acid from a shady dealer. Then we went back to the apartment to stand around, waiting for the drugs to work. They didn't, of course, because we had dropped 20-weight copy paper. Finally, Laci went over to the stereo and flipped the switch. It was "Night Fever" by the Bee Gees, from the "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack.
We knew what to do. We slam-danced in his kitchen, breaking one of the chairs in the process.
And that, almost exactly 20 years ago, was the last time I saw Laci. In those two decades, social networks, online class reunions and magic phones have made it virtually impossible to truly disappear after high school. But Laci was gone to me whenever I tried to find him -- his infamous name made him completely and perfectly un-Googleable.
When I heard about Laci's death, I was on my way to a basketball game, which is my job now. I was standing on a train platform in Philadelphia, miles from home, wearing a pinstripe suit with my hair slicked back. In my iPhone earbuds, I was listening to a ridiculously filthy Kool Keith rap song about space aliens licking his balls. And just then, that's when the news came in, via a Facebook alert. The shock gave way to a quick realization that news of his passing had interrupted a scene of bizarre audiovisual contrast -- in other words, a Laci moment.
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Our life in the First World, wrapped in a cocoon of government, corporations, supermarkets and persistent computing, has made human instinct and survival drive obsolete. To fuck or kill, or not to, are choices of convenience. We're all social animals now, defined by our interactions with fellow humans. In other words, we are made of other people.
Since we last spoke, you and I have been shaped, changed and transformed by those whom have crossed our lives. None of us are the same as we were back in high school. And I don't know the person Laci turned into over the course of the last decade, or the men and women who moved him in the directions he decided to take. I don't know what path led him here, to his death.
What I do know is that my time with Lazlo Toth, at a formative time in my own journey, changed my life and inspired me greatly. And even though he's gone from this earth, I will always carry a part of him with me.
