It was lunch time. Izzy gave me half a BLT, I shared with him my French fries. We sat against the wall and braced the rain and chilly November air and became friends.
We were kids then. Two stupid, broke and starving kids trying to survive London, scrambling from gig to gig making ends meet, trying – and failing, at least on my part – to keep up with our studies.
Izzy was always better than me in that regard. He worked hard. He spoke about his future with clarity: plotting each move, each advance, each path to each milestone. By age 30 he planned to have retired, so that he could split his time between investing in start-ups focused on social causes, and lounging on the roof top of his Mediterranean villa with his then girlfriend and would be future wife. We used to camp out on benches in the Square Mile and look at the bankers go about their business. “To become one of them, you need to learn to act like them.” Izzy would say. So we studied the way these hedge fund douches talked and swaggered, and imaged ourselves wearing Zegna suits.
Izzy was born into a family of eight. They crammed into a small five by ten flat on a counsel estate. He went to a shitty school with shitty kids from his shitty block. Kids in his class beat up their teachers and made pocket money by mugging the elderly at knife point. Despite all that, he got himself into one of the world’s best universities on full academic scholarship.
He had that larger-than-live grit you only read about in the biographies and profiles of people who got to places. Day after day after excruciatingly long hours bouncing from job to job, long after I had surrendered to exhaustion and passed out drunk in my bed, he would still go to the library. Somehow he also found time to sustain a relationship. He dated a girl, of whom my memory has long faded into a silhouette of melodrama. They’d fight and break up. Izzy and I would get blazing drunk, and they would always get back together the next day. I think they had sex in my bed once, though he swore nothing happened.
The one topic we didn’t talk about was mental health. I suspect he knew something was wrong with me, and offered whatever consolation he could through the constancy of his friendship, and for that I will be eternally grateful. I only wish I had opened up to him.
We parted ways after school. Once in a while we’d meet for a drink. Now he owned the swagger, the talk, and the Zegna suit. I was truly happy for him but also felt small in his company, like a piece of driftwood caught behind an ocean liner. These meetings became less frequent, until one day they just stopped, because we weren’t living in the same world anymore.
Some point in early 2015, Izzy emailed me. It was the first message we exchanged in a very long time.
“How do you know if you’re on right path?” He asked. Offering zero context.
“Path to what?” I replied.
No answer. A few days later he emailed again.
“Sorry for the random message mate. Long time, how’s it going? What are you up to these days? I’m flying to Paris next week for a deal. Oh, and I broke up with Ally.”
Attached was a picture of him, looking older than he actually was, in a power pose. It’d have seemed obnoxious to others but it made me smile. We used to talk about how to project ‘gravitas’ in photo profiles. He nailed the cliché.
I never got around to responding.
Last week I met a mutual friend and asked about Izzy. He died a few days after the message, while in Paris.
Suicide.
#00117F 