Percy, 39

I’m drinking gay coffee at Downtown when the woman at the next table announces that Percy died this morning.

She expects the waiter to be upset, but he doesn’t know who she is talking about. “But he was here all the time!”

Percy was a fashion designer, well on his way to being famous. He was only 39. He’d been found in his bathtub that afternoon. He slipped and hit his head and that was it.

The waiter, instead of being upset, tells the story of another man he knew who died in his bathtub. And he was only 32!

The waiter says that he is lucky, because he is poor and only has a shower. He says, “It’s always those big bathtubs where you have space to die.”

(Amsterdam, 10/09)