New Yorker, music lover, sneaker freak and so much more
I recently found out with unfathomable sadness and shock that Stefan Hakakian passed away on October 25, 2019. He was one of my very best friends. Stefan loved Boards of Canada, cats and CatPower, and his brother. He would have turned 42 today. We no longer had friends in common, so no one reached out to tell me he died. With no ritual or people to grieve through or with, a death seems like a life erased. Information about it all is sparse and I have little contact with those who knew him. So I must write about him, today, his birthday, so he doesn’t entirely disappear, and a piece of me along with him.
I met Stefan in February, 2000, at the El Cuco trance festival, somewhere in a canyon in Puerto Rico. I had traveled there by myself from Montréal, to my first international trance festival, and stumbled headlong into the madness of the New York Psytrance scene. I don’t remember exactly how I met Stefan, but I do remember falling in love with him. He was without guile, naked and perceptive. He saw people for what they were. He saw me for what I am. And it was good. That is one of the deeper pains that come from his passing, that one of the few people who knew me is gone. And so I have died a little too.
Stefan was pure and the truth is you can’t be that, you can’t be so without being a little bit mad. Stefan had a thing for sneakers. When I met him, he had something like 300 pairs, 3 copies of each type. After the trance party in Puerto Rico, once I’d gotten back to Canada, he called to ask that I purchase some Air Maxes that had recently come out, but only for the European and Canadian markets. This guy, whose last name I didn’t even know, wired me about $1000 so I could go to a store and buy 3 pairs of Nike Air Maxes. I have yet to repeat a $1000 cash purchase but in Stefan’s world, the possible was an invitation, and I was on the guest list.
Delivering the sneakers gave me the perfect excuse to visit him in New York City. Even though I grew up close to New York, I’d never been before. I was thoroughly disgusted and flummoxed and fascinated by how things worked in the City. Thankfully, I had a guide in Stefan. If I think of a New Yorker, I think of him. Stefan in his black North Face puffer jacket and sneakers. Stefan, who carried cash, not cards. Always aspirational, always looking up, up, to self-optimization and perfection. Stefan taught me to run for an express train and to sit in the middle of the train near MTA personnel if I was scared. Our romance was very short-lived. For all his awesomeness, it wasn’t possible to stomach other features, like the fact that he had a long-term girlfriend. I visited him a couple of times in New York City before cutting off contact. Briefly.
We ran into each other a year later at the another festival, this time in Morocco. I was hanging out with an impossibly giant Moroccan guy who kept calling out “Mustapha! Mustapha!” to someone on the dusty dance floor. That someone was Stefan, dancing in the desert outside of Ouarzazate. It was a…Casablanca moment of sorts, but common enough for party people I guess. Finding each other again was like coming home. It was a confirmation that romance wouldn’t be needed between us. We were soul friends.
I moved to New York City after college and saw a lot more of Stefan. The cracks I saw shortly after I met him widened. It was hard to be with him. But he had this charisma, this magic about him. He could walk up to the head of the line at a party or club, where I’d been waiting half an hour like a lemming, and waltz right in. He had no shame and confidence in spades. He was wicked smart and funny, but obviously haunted. He could not bridge the chasm between his love, privilege, looks, charm and smarts with the deep hurts that life had dumped on his head. And he hurt himself trying and it was impossible to watch. So our relationship was one of many disagreements, yet we kept coming back to each other, like magnets.
I went to LA after New York, a shocking and terribly exotic move to make from the East Coast. Stefan called me on the bus ride between LAX and Santa Monica and asked, with genuine curiosity, what it was like out there. I looked out at the squat buildings on Lincoln Blvd., and confirmed him how weird it all was. We spoke everyday, but then one day he asked me to stop, because I threatened his other female relationships. I was heartbroken, but he wasn’t wrong. Of course, only a couple of years later, he called me in distress. And so it was for many years, lulls and silence and reconnects. I eventually indirectly met my husband through Stefan. (Neither was impressed with the other). Somehow, in my socially patchy, 3rd culture, Irish Good-bying life-style, Stefan remained a constant in the past near 20 years. His passing has rent a large tear in my tiny universe.
Stefan managed to pull himself out of the dark hole of dependence and had been living a respectable life the past 10 years, a feat I will always respect him for. We would gab on social media. He would remind me of things I said ages ago, anchoring me to someone more interesting and inquisitive than the harried woman I am now. I had so much faith in him after he cleaned up and started working, even though we both knew that perhaps real estate wasn’t his calling, that he was too much, so much, this giant soul who saw too much.
Looking over our messages and texts, they are peppered with references to death. Twice, I see, he asked me: ” Do you remember when you said, Stefan have you truly accepted that you’re going to die one day?”. Reader, I do not. I have forgotten. I traded, as many of us do, some of my soul over the years in exchange for acceptance and respectability. And I think that Stefan wouldn’t or couldn’t do the same. I see in our conversations a theme, of his despair and his pain, themes I dismissed as unavoidable features of living. He would muse on his perceived failings in life, and I would offer ruthlessly boring solutions.
Our last exchange was trivial, but dated just days before he died. It’s left me so angry and sad, grappling with my own failure. Why didn’t he talk to me or share his pain with me? Maybe I could have helped. I didn’t know it was that bad. I don’t know if he was alone in that darkest time. I am angry at him, at myself, and at this world mostly for not quite making room for him. In truth, too, I am irritated at the banality of his end, an aspect of his death that compounds its betrayal.
I wanted to joke about Covid19 confinement over WhatsApp with Stefan. That’s how I found out he died, some quirk in his account that led to a Google search, with not enough results. My stupid romantic younger self never took pictures on her travels: I felt they compromised the purity of the moment. Now I am left with so few memories of him and of us. The memories I do carry are sensitive, and not entirely mine to share or commit to collective memory. Ironic, given that we both shared a near complete embrace of the irreverent.
Here’s to you Stefan. You were very much loved and will be so missed.