Lenny

Our neighbor and friend Lenny Bagarozzo died on Tuesday, after (as they might say) a long illness. Of course the end seemed very fast to us, but in retrospect he must have been very ill for a long time, and we’d chalked it up to his weight and odd lifestyle.

When people heard that Lenny had died, they said things like, “Wasn’t that the guy who wore the all purple outfits?” or “Is he the one who wore the mumus?” – and indeed, yes, that was Lenny. Covered with bling – often in pink bling, mixing cheap and expensive, taking child-like joy in the colors and sparkles. Lenny seemed to completely lack self-consciousness; rather like a force of nature, he steamed through the part of his life during which we knew him, craving and devouring experience but as Mr. Bear remarked in his last days, probably very lonely at the core.

Lenny and Mr. Bear - that's Lenny on the left,
with the white silk outfit, sparkly silver sandals,
and white silk baseball hat.

We knew him somewhat – we couldn’t honestly say he was a close friend, but he was a fixture, more like family, if oddball family. He came to the Tower West breakfasts every Saturday and held down a chair (on one occasion breaking one, as he was a large man). He was funny, and silly, and occasionally lewd, in a History Boys sort of way, petting any man around like he’d pet his many cats, gently but urgently, whether there was any chance of interest or not. He petted Mr. Bear from time to time, and the Bear didn’t seem to mind it.

He was retired from the post office, and had lost his mother some years before. He lived with her most of his life, and though we never met her, we sensed that she had provided a lot of order and structure for him, which went away with her demise. During the period we knew him, his main attention was for sports and to take cruises, generally with gay themes, and he went on them many times a year, bringing back momentos of the trips in the form of Peter Max paintings and oversized blingy jewelry that he’d buy on the islands or on board the ships. He also brought back funny posed portraits of himself, occasionally with a “friend” – serious but crazy and bizarre at the same time. He was entirely unselfconscious about all of this, which we found endearing and made it forgivable.

He might be dismissed as an odd eccentric, but there was the voice. He was a trained opera singer – amateur perhaps, but a powerful and beautiful voice that he would deploy with or without coaxing, bursting into bits from Carmen, or a Christmas song, or any other tune that passed through his head. His huge voice would boom through the lobby at Saturday breakfast from time to time. It was a remarkable talent.

Lenny loved a party, though he often would sit on a chair on the side and snooze. Many times he provided funds for Tower West parties, and I don’t think many people knew of his generosity. He liked to be there with everyone, and never missed a chance to come down and be with us all.

As the end became near, he made it pretty clear that he did not have a burning desire to live longer – none of the Kubler-Ross stages at all. He was matter-of-fact about the state of things, even in the hospital when we visited him last week he was as interested in the tabloids as he was in his own health. We suspected the doctors had not told him how near to the end he was, though he had symptoms that we knew were indicative of a close end. His eyes were so tired, and his body so bloated, it was heartbreaking. But he didn’t complain about these things. I’m glad we made the effort to see him while he was still alive.

He asked me to make him a pink sparkly necklace recently, and I had every intention of doing it. But I don’t normally make pink things, and didn’t have any stock to make one up immediately. I planned to buy some pink beads and make him a pretty one. But alas, now I will not be able to do that. Instead, I’ve put a pink border on the little cards we made him for the funeral tomorrow.

We’ve discussed since his death his curious absence of will to fight for his life. Mr. Bear, who is much more perceptive about these things than I, feels that he had grown bored of life and terminally lonely, and so to die was viable option in his mind. Lenny grew up in a time when a gay man had to struggle – to “come out” – to find a world that was safe and non-critical, and to live in a gay world where physical beauty mattered so much. Lenny was not beautiful on the outside, but he was on the inside. He was truly a rainbow crusader, proud to be what he was but apparently ambivalent about where that brought him. True to who he was in life, he will be buried in a New Jersey Devils jersey and a New York Mets baseball cap. We will miss him, in all his complexity.