Everything Is Cool

“Everything is cool / Everything’s okay / Why, just before last Christmas / My baby went away / Across the sea to an island / While the bridges brightly burn / So far away from my land / The valley of the unconcerned” 

— John Prine, “Everything Is Cool”

•••

SCENE: The downtown Portland studio of WCSH-TV, October 1992, the morning after local stand-up comedian Reno Libby won the Tonight Show With Jay Leno Comedy Challenge at the University of New England’s (UNE) Ludcke Auditorium. The intro to this morning-show segment — video footage of Reno’s act the previous night — is almost over.

STUDIO CONTROL ROOM: And we’re going live in three…

ROB CALDWELL, host, to RENO LIBBY: Sit up…

CONTROL ROOM: … two… 

CALDWELL: … and don’t swear. 

CONTROL ROOM: … one. 

RENO, to CALDWELL (lazily): Fuck you.

CALDWELL: And, Reno joins us on News Center. Congratulations on winning that. You must’ve been pretty excited. 

RENO (slouching): Yeah, I was. Thank you very much.

CALDWELL: Were you always the class clown as a kid?

RENO: No, not really. I just, as I got older, I thought, ya know, bein’ on stage would be like a good place for us who don’t fit too well in society to hang out, man [chuckles].   

•••

The opening of Reno’s routine the night before: 

“Wasn’t all fun and games growing up, poor. We took the trash in. 

“We didn’t even have soap. Yeah, once in a while we’d get like one of those little hotel bars of soap for, like, Christmas. Or one of us kids would smuggle some liquid soap home from school in a baggie. But mostly our folks just took us down to the river and beat us against the rocks. …    

“As poor as we were, I was fortunate enough to have a bicycle. It looked just like the kid’s next door, only his was missin’ and mine was spray-painted black.” 

•••

The Libby family was actually middle class. Mike Libby, an artist and licensed substance-abuse counselor, was the first of the five children, 13 months older than Reno. 

“The nickname? Growing up, my dad, maybe, called him ‘Steve-a-reno’ or something. I don’t really know. It was just something that one of my parents had said and somehow it just dropped out of the sky. … He didn’t have a last name. No one asked, ‘What’s your [last] name?’ No one. Stephen Libby? Stephen Paine Libby? Irrelevant. In some ways, at least for him, it may have been essential, in terms of finding his own voice. …

“Was it a dysfunctional family? Well, I think it’s fair to say it was a dysfunctional town. This was Central Maine in the ’70s. This is mill town, Waterville. What we were doin’, it just seemed like everyone else was doin’. A lot of experimentation. … It was just the air we were breathing. 

“There wasn’t a problem. I know that’s such a provocative statement, [but] I don’t think it was a problem, the drug use. … We weren’t hippies. We’re listening to Neil Young, but we’re kind of wannabe hippies, sewing flags on our jeans. … We weren’t necessarily doing drugs for enlightenment. That was more of the ’60s. But the music was changing and this is the ’70s, and we were just wantin’ to get fucked up.

“My dad renovated the attic and it was just this one continuous couch around the room, with black-light posters and a big table with bongs and a little window for a nice draft. Every day, morning and evening, before and after school, we’d gather and get high … there was probably six or eight or ten guys. 

“My dad would come home, as a salesman, for lunch … and he’s like, ‘What are you guys smokin’ up there, corn silk?’ He didn’t really want to know. My mom was sort of of the mindset, Well, as long as they’re doing it here, they’re safe. There was just no rules, right? Some friends would live with us, just [sleep on] one of the couches up there. People lived with us all the time. There were a lot of people comin’ and going, gettin’ high. And this was the norm. 

“This wasn’t a problem. This was fun. And you’re gettin’ high and you’re goin’ out playin’ frisbee, whiffleball, all this street life and activity.  

“Some people stop. They find careers or whatever. Reno was definitely true to this life. John Prine was super influential in his sort of lens on the world, and the comedy. Making light or finding value in the discomfort, or the pain, even.” 

•••

“You boys are living in two worlds and lost in both of them.” 

— Dick Libby, to his sons, on more than one occasion

•••

“In kindergarten, I remember we were instructed to draw a picture of what we wanted to be when we grew up and we had to explain it to the class. We had the usual Betsy Ross–types, Willie Mayses, George Bushes. When it was my turn, I walked to the front of the class. I held up my drawing. It was my best rendition of a dump truck. The teacher said, ‘So, you want to be a trash collector.’ I said, ‘No, I want to be a dump truck.’ Well, she was horrified, my mother was called in and therapy was recommended. I’m a product of professional help. The doctor’s final analysis was: he’s either living in two worlds and lost in both of ’em, or he’s on a prescription drug from another planet.”

— Reno, UNE, Oct. 1992

•••

“No one fucked with Reno. It wasn’t like he was picking fights or anything, but there’s a wittiness about him, or a kind of presence that was beautiful, attractive. He was so talented in sports. He was this hockey player in high school that they still talk about. He was so beautiful on ice, and his stick-handling and his eye/hand coordination. 

“He went to prep school for a couple years. Got kicked out. He played on the varsity as a freshman [at Kimball Union Academy in New Hampshire]. And then he came back to Waterville, played I think one season. They wanted him to cut his hair; he said, ‘Fuck you,’ and then he quit. … He went off to Canada after, played some Junior A hockey. He was equally as good at foosball, and darts, and pool. What a great thing it was to play foosball with him, to be his partner. Holy shit. What fun was that? You’d just hear that ball hitting the back of the cage. He was remarkable!” 

— Mike 

•••

“He was a fantastic pool player. One time I actually put my quarters up and waited like forty-five minutes to get to the table, and I was playing against him. He ran it off the break and won without me even hitting one ball. And I was like, ‘Well, that was fun. Sure am glad I waited forty-five minutes for that.’”

— Kevin Goodell, friend and former bartender at Amigos, the Old Port restaurant where Reno was a regular 

•••

“I met Reno when he was bartending at Raoul’s [Roadside Attraction, a “dine and dance club” on Forest Avenue in Portland]. He was a bartender downstairs where the four pool tables were, the two dart boards, the pinball machine and the Pac-Man machine. I think it was either ’86 or ’87. … I spent a lot of time down there. I’d play pool, I’d play cribbage, I’d play in pool tournaments. 

“He’s just a really likable guy. … The funniest thing that I remember about him was, [Raoul’s] had the bar open downstairs for lunch, and it was really quiet down there. So one day I had lunch, and while I was waiting for food he came out and said, ‘Emo, I want you to show me how to play this Pac-Man game — I think it was Ms. Pac-Man. So I played about four games, because I was pretty good at it. He’s just watching me do it. Then I get out of work at six o’clock and I come back. He’s gettin’ off work, says, ‘Emo, let’s go over here and play some Pac-Man.’ I said, ‘OK.’ So I guess it was quiet that afternoon; he got to practice. After six hours of playing Ms. Pac-Man, he was better than me at it. I had no chance to win. He pissed me off to no end that day.”

— Emo Immonen, friend and future roommate  

•••

“[After high school], he’s traveling. He worked in Florida, Colorado. Just sort of a circuit of people from Waterville going off to resorts, ski resorts and whatever, working seasonal work. He did that a number of years. And then he returned to Maine, to Portland. 

“I had moved back to Portland. I was going to art school at USM. So I was living on Danforth Street, Reno was somewhere in town, and he’d need to use my car to go to comedy gigs. I don’t think he had a license. … I think he got pulled over once and said he was me. That was fine, because he knew all the information, my birthday [laughs]. …

“Reno lost his license, I think in high school, and he’s like, ‘Fuck that. I’m never gettin’ a license.’ Who does that? I mean, c’mon.” 

— Mike

•••

“I had an older brother, Mike. His only purpose in life seemed to be beatin’ me up. … I taught him how to receive an electrical shock. I got beat up for that one. 

“Every time I’d come up with an idea, he’d steal it and have fun with it, so I made this work for me. One winter I’m on the top of the roof, teetering on a toboggan. Mike spots me from the yard, says, ‘What are you doin’?’ I said, ‘I’m slidin’ off the roof. I thought of it, it’s a lot of fun, and you can’t do it.’ He says, ‘I’m doin’ it!’ OK, alright, well, after he’s done makin’ a face print in the front lawn, he yells up, ‘That wasn’t any fun — that hurt!’ I said, ‘Ah, I was just slidin’ the toboggan off. I wasn’t on it.’ I got beat up for that one, too.” 

— Reno, UNE, Oct. 1992

•••

“I think he’s one of those people that people just thought he was cool. So everything he did, whether it was or wasn’t cool, was taken as cool. That’s stemming from his laid-back, realistic attitude that I think a lot of people were envious of. … If he had insecurities, or if he had any particular faults in his personality, you didn’t know. And I think that’s why a lot of people were drawn to him, was because innately everybody’s insecure, and he didn’t appear to be. …

“Reno was kind of the original Dude [from The Big Lebowski]. You know, very casual. Just innately cool, without even remotely putting any effort into it, which made him that much cooler. … There was no pretension whatsoever. A lot of things didn’t bother him that would bother other people. And with that, I believe, comes a wisdom that you can’t really do anything about it, so why get your panties in a bunch?”

— Kevin 

•••

“Summary Keywords” from a Nov. 15, 2022, interview with comedian George Hamm at his home in Millinocket, generated by the artificial intelligence technology of Otter transcription software: “fucking, reno, people, amigos, comedy, mike, remember, contest, talking, bob, fuck, book, portland, trauma, heroin, maine, gigs, big, absolutely, party”

“He’s like fuckin’ Kung Fu. He’s like, ‘I walk the Earth.’ He just kind of did his thing. … He was kind of like a drifter, but he always seemed to survive.” — George 

•••

“If it wasn’t for money, I’d have everything.” 

— Reno 

•••

“He lived one summer in the median strip in some bushes, right outside of Marginal Way. He’d just crawl in at night. Another time he was in an empty garage over in South Portland. I think he actually stayed in Bob Marley’s parents’ basement. And it didn’t matter! This wasn’t like, poor Reno. This was the life. Think back on, I don’t know, medieval Europe and the wanderer guy. What’s wrong with sleeping in the bushes?” 

— Mike

•••

“For a while he was living out near SMCC with a guy whose name was Jimmy Carter. They called him J.C. And they lived in this really, really strange place. I went there to visit once and that was definitely no place I was ever gonna go visit again. There was a lot of stupid shit going on in that place.”

— Emo   

•••

“He had that look that he looked like Jesus. He had that long hair and the beard. He had that long jacket. …

“I met him at Amigos. I was working at [Three Dollar] Dewey’s. Bob [Marley] was already doing stand-up, like he was up at Farmington or whatever. The original group was Bob, Reno, Lisa Karahalios and me. At that time, T-Birds was the big room on Sunday nights, but Boston comedy, nobody would book you. So we just started booking our own shows, as the four of us. And it went, fuckin’, really well, you know? 

“At that point, I didn’t really know what I’m doing, obviously, but we were up north, we’d book our fuckin’ gig. You’re young. It was fuckin’ like partying and the jokes and whatever. We did some bars in Lewiston, we did University of Maine [in Orono]. I remember going up to Houlton and all that shit. 

“We did a gig up here, actually, in fuckin’ Millinocket one year. In East Millinocket/Medway there’s a fuckin’ hardware store. It used to be a biker bar. We got there, there’s no sound or anything. And then we’re like, ‘We need sound.’ The guy’s like, ‘Whatever.’ So he makes a couple calls and now we were like fuckin’ Aerosmith. Like, it’s overkill. We’re like, ‘Dude, we just need a couple speakers.’ I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ So then the guy’s like, ‘I need a two-hour fuckin’ show,’ and we’re all like, ‘Dude, we don’t fucking have that much.’”

— Hammy, naturally   

•••

CALDWELL: Now, do you do stand-up professionally? Is this something you’re really trying to make a career out of or did you do this as something of a lark? 

RENO: Well, right now it’s just a lot of fun and I’ve just been hangin’ out and doin’ it. I’ve done probably, maybe a hundred shows or somethin’ around New England, and wherever it ends up, it’s just a good time.      

CALDWELL: Everyone, you know, thinks it would be great to be a comedian. What can be better than standing on stage and getting laughs? But it’s tough work, isn’t it? 

RENO: Yeah, I’ve done a few shows to, like, three mill workers [laughs]. It was pretty exciting, you know. Like, one more joke, then everyone back to your trailer. But, you know, when you get in front of a good crowd, like last night, there’s nothin’ like it. It’s really great.    

•••

“Fire on the up-roll, boys!” 

— Dick Libby

•••

“We started out little. We’d get fifteen, twenty people. But then as we started doing booking — I mean, Bob was pretty much the guy that made the phone calls and got the thing — we started doing good. … Bob would kind of close most of them. Reno would go third, usually. We’d switch it up a little bit. I was fuckin’ filthy back then. That was my thing. So I remember saying to Bob, ‘Dude, I wanna go fucking like, third.’ He’s like, ‘Dude, you’ve gotta go first.’ …

“When we were on the road a couple times, I remember, I would always split the room with [Reno]. We’d have fuckin’ great laughs. Back then I’d get like a fucking pint of Senator’s whiskey and he’d be drinkin’ his fuckin’ beers or whatever he’s drinkin’, and smokin’ a little weed, maybe. A lot of laughs.”

— George

•••

“Back in the early ’90s, Amigos was definitely a place where — especially for me, being behind the bar — you look out and you see the punks, the musicians, the jocks — everybody playing pool together. Once in a while there was maybe a little bit of a buttin’ of heads, but not often. People just went there to have a good time. At one point, Reno actually said, ‘Not only is this my favorite bar, it’s my favorite place on Earth.’ …

“We called PBR ‘Preferred By Reno.’ … I don’t think I knew of, at the time, anybody who disliked him. At that particular time, especially at Amigos, you couldn’t say that about hardly anybody. What’s someone gonna say: ‘He’s too laid-back’? There was really nothing.” 

— Kevin

•••

“Now, a hero of Reno’s, without question, [was] John Prine. … In high school, he knew all Prine’s lyrics, and he’d go to see him. There was one time, I think it was in Portland, he went with my mother and our youngest brother, and he came in late, and they had great seats down front, and he’s walking in — you know, when Reno walked into a room, even if it’s a concert, [people noticed]. He just walked in and John Prine acknowledges him, just this nod. 

“The listening, the memorizing, the pain where Prine’s music comes out of — it’s its own kind of comedy, isn’t it? There’s a lightness in a darkness. And this is Reno, too, right?”

— Mike

•••

“I was walking down the road, man / Just looking at my shoes / When God sent me an angel / Just to chase away my blues” 

— John Prine, “Everything Is Cool”

•••

“I got a dog. Anyone got dogs here? Good people, huh? I got a dog, he’s like seventeen. I was thinkin’ about it the other day: that’s seventeen times seven. Wicked old, right? I got a feelin’ he’s gonna die pretty soon — I’m gonna have to start doin’ the dishes again.”      

— Reno, UNE, Oct. 1992

•••

“Duke was a dog. Duke lived with our family growing up in high school. Reno had Duke for a while. Reno went off to Colorado. I had Duke for a while. I lived out in the woods with him in 1979. My mom had Duke for a while, and then Reno had him back in Portland. This dog was seventeen years old, a big, brown, Lab mix. Great dog.”

— Mike 

•••

“Another interesting thing about him, he had this Golden-Lab, and that Golden-Lab somehow was what always seemed to keep him in line. Sometime before he became my roommate, the dog had died. I think that was a really devastating thing for him. He loved the dog so much, he’d always take care of the dog.”

— Emo

•••

“There was a night at The Living Tree — after The Tree [Café] had closed, but it turned into The Living Tree — and Reno was on stage, and he was not doing well. He had even said, ‘I apologize. My dog died today.’ He had this dog that he loved and he talked about. … It really upset him. And so he kind of kept saying, like, ‘Where the fuck is the emcee? I want to get off stage, I want to get off stage.’”

— Kevin

•••

“I saw a hundred thousand blackbirds / Just flying through the sky / And they seemed to form a teardrop / From a black-haired angel’s eye” 

— John Prine, “Everything Is Cool” 

•••

“We all probably were doing it a year or two, maybe, but he was the most polished out of all of us. Everything was great. … He might swear once in a while, but relatively really clean. …

“I didn’t get in; I didn’t make the [Tonight Show] contest. Bob didn’t make the contest. They had maybe, like, eight contestants or something. … I mean, it was no fucking contest. When he came out, he fuckin’ crushed it. He was confident. And he was so different. 

“He was very quiet. … And then he would do a joke and he would throw his hair back, like, whatever. He was not like an assassin, but he was real dry, and then when he would hit [claps], it would hit [claps again]. His timing was really great. He just relied on his material, and his material, I thought it was just fucking strong. So when the punch line came, it was great.”

— George

•••

“I saw him do his routine once at Cadillac Jack’s. It all depends on what your sense of humor was, whether you liked Reno or George or Bob better. They were all good comedians. But he was definitely more thought-provoking than either George or Bob. What I mean is, sometimes, if you weren’t paying attention, or you might not be the smartest tool in the shed, something might go over your head. Bob’s and George’s jokes always were right in your face. Sometimes you have to think a little bit to catch Reno’s jokes.”

— Emo

•••

“Anyway, true story, I was walking down the street the other day and I died. Yeah, I did. There was no bright lights or tunnels, just a toll booth. I’m thinking, Great, like everything else it costs money to die, you know? There’s a sign that says ten percent of your earthly earnings. I’ve got fifty cents — I’m in. The rich people around me are lookin’ a bit nervous, though. They’re like tearin’ their clothes and throwin’ their jewelry away, like they’re gonna pull something over on God. I’m thinkin’, Finally, justice, ya know? On Earth, a hundred-dollar speedin’ ticket to the rich is the equivalent of me breakin’ a returnable bottle. But not in Heaven. Heaven is cool. 

“So I walk in. Everythin’ peaceful, calm, real beautiful. I look to the right and I can’t believe it — it’s God. He’s sittin’ in a La-Z-Boy watchin’ television. He motions for me to approach. … 

“He’s drinkin’ a SlimFast. He says He knows they don’t work, He just likes the way they taste. I ask Him why He wouldn’t let me become a dump truck, you know? He said He’s sending me back to Earth to warn y’all about the ten-percent fee in Heaven. I said, ‘Well, if they believe me, should I collect it?’ He said, ‘No, we’ve got enough people on Earth collecting from believers.’” 

— Reno, UNE, Oct. 1992

•••

CALDWELL: You’re definitely going out to California. You get to see The Tonight Show, and if you win the next phase of the competition, you actually get to appear on The Tonight Show. Is that a little intimidating, to think about that? 

RENO: Nah, I think it’d be a riot. Why not, you know? I mean, it’s gonna be, what, three minutes? Anything can happen. We’ll see what goes on. I’m lookin’ forward to it. 

CALDWELL: That’s an absolute dream come true for any comic. If you’ve made it on The Tonight Show, then after that you just see your career go wheeshttt! [makes rocket-launch motion with hand]

RENO: I figure I already got this great t-shirt. [displays black Tonight Show t-shirt] 

CALDWELL: That was your prize from last night? Well, go ahead, hold that outstanding prize up. 

RENO: I figure the people who hang their clothes out in the neighborhood are safe for one more day, you know? 

•••

“Reno and I weren’t that close, by the way. I would run into him. He’d be wearing one of my old shirts. It was like a memory. I’m like, ‘Isn’t that my shirt?’ We were friendly with each other, and it was fun to run into him at Amigos or on the streets of Portland, but we didn’t hang out. 

“I had an engagement party with some friends from school at USM’s Art Department, in another friend’s house in Casco. … He came up to this gathering, and it was my evening, with [an] engagement announcement, my first marriage. I was like, Holy shit. I was shocked that he came. I didn’t know he knew about it. He didn’t have a car, he didn’t have a license — Casco, from Portland. And he just says, ‘Well, I gotta give up a Saturday night for my brother once in a while.’ And that whole evening, perfect strangers, my friends, he just entertained and was being so endearing, so profound. Everyone was just curious, like, Who is this guy? One person there, friend of a friend, she mentioned this book, A Prayer [for] Owen Meany, and he hadn’t read it. …

“He was working at the Ramada Inn, near Libbytown, as a set-up guy for conferences. So he was proficient at this job that didn’t require much of his attention, and that’s what he always did. There was just something super attractive about Reno, and it seems like he always had a girlfriend.” 

 — Mike 

•••

“As far as I can tell, he had a lot to live for. When he was living with me, he would walk the railroad tracks. We lived on Lincoln Street, which is [near] the [Great Lost] Bear. He’d walk down to the railroad tracks and walk the railroad tracks all the way down to the Ramada Inn. And he found — I don’t remember if it was a gerbil, but it was some kind of small, little furry animal, and he kept it at the Ramada Inn in his locker. He was more excited about finding that than he was [about] winning that thing to go out to L.A. It seemed pretty weird to me.”

— Emo

•••

“That tear fell all around me / And it washed my sins away / Now everything is cool / Everything’s okay”

— John Prine, “Everything Is Cool” 

•••

“I never really seen him in a bad mood, you know? He’s always just chill. … The weird thing was, I had seen him [in the late fall of 1992] out on Forest Avenue. And he seemed a little distant. But I was like, ‘Ah, whatever.’ He didn’t seem fucked up, I guess. But I didn’t even know he was doing fuckin’ heroin. … He hid it pretty well.”

— George

•••

“Well, let’s get the elephant out of the room right away: he had a drug problem. I didn’t know that until near the end. When I found out, I was like, OK, that makes sense. Just the way he would act sometimes. But then you just kind of go, OK, he was high. Whereas before, if you weren’t thinking of that, you wouldn’t suspect that. He was very much stupefied. But not often, though.” 

— Kevin

•••

“That was a pretty bad day. What happened was, it was eleven o’clock and he wasn’t up yet. I didn’t think anything about that, so I went off and did a bunch of things. I came back around three o’clock — still no sign of Reno. So I opened the door and there he is. He was already blue; been dead for some time.”

— Emo

•••

“I had heard Reno was doing heroin. There was a certain taboo about that, just growing up, and then he was dead. So I never had a chance to ask him about it or talk to him. And that would have been mostly if I ran into him. Half the time, I didn’t even know how to get ahold of him. We didn’t have cell phones. 

“After he died, the city just stopped. Everything was in slow motion. … All these people that were Reno’s sort of tribe or community were coming up to me and filling in details, much of which I didn’t really want [to know]. I was just trying to walk. … It was just like these ghosts, you know, and they’re doing heroin, right? And just coming out of the woodwork. This wasn’t how I perceived my brother. The impression — and maybe what I wanted to believe — was that this was a new kind of thing. And it was sort of new to Portland, frankly, the heroin — drugs come through the city.” 

— Mike

•••

“Stephen Libby, 33, died Thursday [Dec. 17] in his apartment at 81 Lincoln St. in Portland. Two empty packets of heroin and a needle were found near his body along with a gram of cocaine and five full, single-dose packets of heroin, police said. 

“The packets were stamped with ‘Undercover’ and ‘Royal Flush,’ the heroin processors’ brand names. …

“Since 1986, heroin use in Greater Portland has exploded from about 25 users to an estimated 200, police said. The number of heroin arrests and overdoses more than tripled between 1990 and 1991, when several heroin deaths a year were reported.”

— “Comic dies of heroin overdose,” by Martha Englert, Portland Press Herald, Dec. 19, 1992, page 4B   

•••

“I know he was drinking a lot, and I know he smoked a lot of pot, but I had no idea — I guess it was said that it was speedballs was what killed him. I didn’t know he was using that. 

“The day I found him, obviously I had to call the police. One time, two cops came in to talk to me for like an hour, and they left and three more cops came in and talked to me for another hour after that. Turns out I’d seen four of these five people hanging out in the bars. I didn’t realize that the early ’90s they had undercover cops hanging out in bars to see what was going on. …

“The rest of the family — his two brothers and his mom and dad — came down to the apartment. I said, ‘He only owed us probably two hundred dollars in rent, and that’s his TV, that’s his microwave, and that’s that. If you let me keep those three appliances, I don’t even care about any money.’ They said, ‘You’re willing to do that? Great.’ That seemed fair enough. 

— Emo 

•••

“He left a message on my answering machine the night he died. He didn’t say anything. All we could hear was a John Prine song playing in the back ground.” 

— Bruce Mills, friend and Amigos owner/bartender 

•••

“He died listening to this tape mix that I had for a long time, with John Prine, Billy Joel. … He never threw anything away, and the music he listened to was from that era, as well. So he had this mixed tape that he was listening to and he died in his loveseat in his room. …

“My mom paid the rent for at least two or three months [afterward], and this became this sort of place she would go, like a shrine of sorts. We all went there. So you see his room, and it’s just this single mattress in the corner, no box spring, just on the floor, and right next to the bed is this used copy of A Prayer [for] Owen Meany. This guy meets this person at this place and she makes this recommendation, and within the timeframe of a few days, he goes out and gets the book. That’s extraordinary. …

“And it was really kind of cool, actually, to just see this life, this minimalism. There was this mannequin right by the door, and it [had] a hat or something that said ‘Gatekeeper.’ They said Reno was The Gatekeeper.

“These guys, they’d be doing heroin together. They’re like, ‘How the fuck did Reno die? He was The Gatekeeper. We’d be doing heroin and he’d stop us. He’d say, “You’ve had enough. No more.”’ The Gatekeeper died.” 

— Mike

•••

MAINER: How do you know Jason [surname redacted] was with Reno the night he died? 

KEVIN: Because Jason told me. I guess he said there was some [heroin] left, that Jason was gonna do, and Reno said — and this is the part that I think bothered Jason a lot — ‘I’ll do it.’ The way it was explained to me was sort of like Reno taking a bullet for him.” 

•••

“Jason was with him the night he died. Bill [surname redacted] wasn’t a heroin addict, and Bill and Reno were close.* … Bill said that it was the anniversary of Duke’s death. … ‘One more for Duke,’ Bill said. I don’t think he was there. Or maybe he was there. It sounded like he was speculating. But that was the overdose: ‘One more for Duke.’ …

“Jay Leno called my mother, I believe on Christmas Eve, to offer his condolences.” 

— Mike 

•••

“They had a memorial service for him at the Ramada and that was fucking tough. It was fucking brutal. … I thought it would be, like, his family, some people from Amigos, me, Bob, Lisa Karahalios. I get there and there’s not even enough fucking seats. It’s jam-packed. He’s one of those people who touched a lot of people, but you wouldn’t realize it.”

— George 

•••

“There was a group, probably a couple hundred people, that were really tight with him. It was really, really sad that he’s gone, because he was a fun guy. 

“Maybe he thought he was Superman — nothing’s gonna kill me. … I didn’t ask him tons of questions, and who knows what kind of secrets he had going on in his head. Smart guy’s got a lot of secrets going on in his mind.”

— Emo 

•••

CALDWELL: Do you do a lot of stuff that’s oriented towards Maine, or is it more universal? 

RENO: I like to do stuff that deals with, you know, at the time when you experience it, it’s painful, but then, when you look back on it, it’s humorous.   

•••

“It’s just a shame. It’s a fuckin’ tragedy … especially having something like that to look forward to. … I was excited for him. That [contest was] like a big deal. … That’s like being shot out of a cannon. I would love to have seen his career progress. And I would fucking love to have him as my fucking dear friend, most importantly. And then just his wisdom. He was always a straight shot. …

“My opinion is, it’s fucking definitely complicated, but I look at addiction as trauma. Maybe in some cases it’s not, but most of it is trauma, whether it’s fucking childhood trauma, sexual trauma, some trauma, and then somehow you get high and then fucking whatever. I always think, if they don’t treat the trauma, you’re never going to treat the addiction. But then treating addiction became a fucking billion-dollar business, right?” 

— George

•••

“And I find it real surprising / For myself to hear me say / That everything is cool / Everything’s okay” 

— John Prine, “Everything Is Cool” 

•••

“R.D. Laing, this psychologist from the ’60s in England, he said, ‘Insanity is a sane response to an insane world.’ In some ways, this really does resonate; that if we’re going to identify a problem, it’s us, it’s not them. The problem isn’t addiction. The problem isn’t opioids or heroin. The problem is the dislocation, the isolation, the alienation. …

“Everybody’s doing the best they can. You can speculate, but part of that speculation is that there was some problem here. Like, dying of a heroin overdose — why is that a problem? It is a problem that we want to fix and feel better about ourselves somehow. That’s strange, coming from a substance-use counselor, but this is a narrative, right? There’s risk in life. And, sure, it would be a different conversation with someone that’s in active use and hasn’t overdosed and died. But after the fact, I just have such caution around trying to understand this problem. We should all be so lucky as Reno to find our voice and to be attractive and build community as he did. …

“Emily Dickinson has a poem: ‘To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, / One clover, and a bee. / And revery. / The revery alone will do, / If bees are few.’ Reverie. The daydream. The daydream alone will do if the bees are few. I love the bee metaphor. Buzzing, right? … And the honey, the clover, the nectar, the bees, that relationship, that connection, and what is it about us that’s attractive. Are we making honey? My brother Reno, he made honey. 

— Mike

 

*CORRECTION: In the print version of this story, Mike Libby was quoted saying Bill was a heroin addict; that quote has been amended here to reflect Mike’s assertion that he misspoke, and Bill was not an addict, to his knowledge.

Mike Libby is showing his Parking Lot paintings and related work at Oak Street Lofts Gallery (72 Oak St., Portland) this month. Viewing hours are Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to noon and Fridays from 1 to 3 p.m.