Taking leave of Lou Reed

We don't have to grasp for words to describe what life's like without Lou Reed - or, for that matter, without anyone we may have loved - because Lou Reed left the words for us.

More than 20 years before he died last week, Lou took on death itself for the duration of Magic and Loss, an album recorded after he lost two close friends to illness. The title summarizes Lou's back-of-the-envelope rationale for enduring suffering and struggle in the face of inevitable death: "There's a bit of magic in everything/ And some loss to even things out."

Recorded two decades after the revolutionary run of his Velvet Underground, Magic and Loss (1992) was far from his best known or beloved work. But in its opening lines, Lou (to refer to him by anything but his first name would seem too formal given the intimacy of his work) plainly captures human despair in the face of death:

Life's like a mayonnaise soda.

And life's like space without room.

And life's like bacon and ice cream.

That's what life's like without you.

Between expressions of almost childlike disgust with irrevocable loss, Lou gives us that four-syllable universe: "space without room." Death breeds space, but not the kind craved by those confined to tiny apartments or failed relationships. It's emptiness without freedom - a void devoid of the slightest suggestion of comfort. That's what life's like without Lou.

But Lou had a way of leavening his staring into the abyss with sour humor - a sort of mayonnaise soda to wash it down. Later in Magic, he unbearably imagines a desperate man's fierce mutilation of his own face, which is only a prelude to cutting his throat. The story ends like a joke, though, when the man wakes up in a hospital, realizes his suicide attempt has failed, and hears a doctor deliver the deadpan punch line: "Son, we saved your life, but you'll never look the same."

"And when he heard that," Lou concludes, "Harry had to laugh."

The untimely death of Lou's friend and mentor Andy Warhol prompted other extended reflections on mortality. In "Dime Store Mystery," on New York (1989), Lou turns to Jesus and Descartes in an effort to come to terms with the "duality of nature" that "splits the soul." Then he cries out in a voice that might be his, Warhol's, or ours, "I wish I hadn't thrown away my time/ On so much Human and so much less Divine."

The next year, on Songs for Drella, with his former Velvet Underground band mate John Cale, Lou went on to examine Warhol's life, art, and death for an entire album, and from a range of angles, before finally addressing his old friend directly and colloquially, as if he were still there, in "Hello It's Me." Considering that it concludes a labor of immense love for Warhol, the eulogy takes a surprising number of detours into petty resentment. Then, with his last goodbye, Lou regards the loss helplessly while hoping the magic made it worthwhile:

Oh well now, Andy, I guess we've got to go.

I wish some way, somehow, you like this little show.

I know this is late in coming, but it's the only way I know.

Hello, it's me -

Good night, Andy.

Perhaps we shouldn't be as shaken by Lou's death as he was by Andy's. The cold actuarial facts would have us marvel that he made it to 71; his signature song, after all, from the Velvets' 1967 debut, was "Heroin," the most convincing first-person account of a drug trip ever rendered in words and music. Its protagonist ultimately reaches a state described as "better off than dead" - which doesn't sound that good until you hear Lou shout it over feedback and a pounding heart of a drumbeat.

And yet Lou lived this long - long enough for the world to grow deaf to the desperation of his ironic ode to a "Perfect Day," which has just been repurposed for, of all things, a video-game commercial. Oblivion lurks just beneath the fleeting joy of the unlikely jingle, in which a good time in good company is a reason just to "keep . . . hanging on."

Lou's most explicitly declared death song, "The Black Angel's Death Song," apparently isn't about death or anything else. He said he just strung its words together, heedless of their meaning, because they sounded good. And they do sound good, not to mention a bit like dying:

Cut mouth bleeding razors forget in the pain

Antiseptic remains coo goodbye

So you fly

To the cozy brown snow of the east

Maybe it wasn't meant to mean anything, but try to find a more memorable, and funereal, evocation of an East Coast city than "cozy brown snow."

Speaking of which, in the film Blue in the Face (1995), Lou explained why he never strayed far from the brown snow of New York: "I think one of the reasons I live in New York is 'cause I know my way around New York. I don't know my way around Paris. I don't know my way around Denver. I don't know my way around Maui. . . .

"I don't know very many people in New York who don't also say, 'I'm leaving.' I've been thinking of leaving for 35 years now. I'm almost ready."

I hope that, having contemplated death so thoroughly and so well, Lou was as ready as he could be to leave - or at least readier than I was to hear he was gone.