Tribute to Richard
By Maria Kubacki

Richard and I met either in an English class or maybe at the campus radio station at UNB-SJ in the late 80s. I was lost and adrift on a sea of youthful angst, a vague outline of a person, whereas Richard was already fully formed, as I imagine he was from the start. I picture him as a witchy little gay boy growing up in 1970s suburbia, a miniature version of his grown-up self, precociously experimenting with dazzling scarves, spells and devastating one-liners. He would have unsettled the hell out of most people, for the very reasons that later drew everyone to him: his intellect, sharp wit and effortless style, and his refusal to be anyone but himself.

He was unlike anyone I had ever met, and, as the only child of two Polish psychiatrists, I was a bit of an oddball myself in 1980s Saint John. We became fast friends and throughout our twenties and into our thirties, he was my brother/sister/dance partner/confidante/fellow book nerd.

Richard was a huge extrovert who loved a party. He never failed to bring together people who had absolutely nothing in common and get them into a heated argument about art or politics.

It was a revelation to me that he wrote poetry. I don’t even know how he found the time - he lived in a whirl of brunches, openings and social events. Maybe he wrote poems while others slept.

I remember the first time he read his poetry, at a student arts event. It was a poem about Moby Dick, something about Captain Ahab, sailors, furtive encounters, a threat of violence – a dark and sexy tangle of words that was almost impenetrable but cast a spell, like the language of dreams or music. Reading his last published poems in The Fiddlehead, I had the same sense of overhearing a dense, private language, or of floating down a river to the underworld. Beneath his sparkling wit, there were depths and jagged edges. Both aspects of him were real and true, although it’s easy to read backwards from his death and focus only on the darker elements.

For the last 20 years or so, we lived in different cities and rarely saw each other in person but kept in touch until the end. When he went missing, I was hoping that he was holed up in Berlin, or maybe in Assisi doing research on St. Francis for the purposes of writing some naughty poems about him (he thought St. Francis was “a bit of a gay.”)

I emailed him every night, with subject lines like, “Goodnight, wherever you are.” I told him that he’d better turn up, because the police had posted a very unflattering photo that looked nothing like him.

I sent my last email the night before he was found. I told him what a huge presence he was in my life throughout our formative years: “You were and are one of the funniest and smartest people I have ever met. I was so insecure and lost back then, but becoming your friend made me feel smarter, funnier and more interesting than I thought I was.”

By this point he had been missing for more than a week. “It is getting really weird for me to keep emailing you, but tbh I will probably keep doing it until either you resurface or we have some concrete news.”

It is tempting to keep sending emails into the void, because it is too sad to think that what should have been a lifelong conversation has ended, and that I will never hear his voice again.