Leslie Louise Harpold

It wasn’t that Leslie didn’t care what your opinion was — because she did. See, the faster she could learn what you thought about something, the quicker she could enlighten you on every conceivable way in which you were wrong wrong wrong. Because, among the many things that Leslie found intolerable in this world, spending a whole lot of time suffering your crap was high on the shit list. So chop chop, and another cigarette gets lit and another Diet Coke gets popped.

Leslie’s time in San Francisco did nothing to buff the edges she’d been sharpening for years in New York City, and I think her west coast friends uniformly enjoyed the long deadpan stare followed by the extended oratory followed by the phone number of someone you should definitely call followed by more hotdish and then when you got home, there was this amazing email full of flirting and coquettishness and affection and usually ending with the assurance that you were now best friends forever. They always had tons of typos and a paucity of capitalization (and frankly I suspect she never actually read most of them before hitting “Send”) but emails from Leslie were always the best.

And then there were the gifts. Always gifts, extravagant or modest but always just the thing. Gifts for no reason other than it seemed like something you needed. Zip files of mp3s from bands you need to hear now, clip art I can’t believe you don’t have, and all the fonts you need to make that design not suck as much. Jeez. One day, completely out of nowhere, Leslie sent me every mp3 she could find of bands covering “Never My Love” by the Association. She stopped what she was doing and went out and found them on Limewire or whatever and then sent them to me. Here you go.

Leslie loved Johnny Cash and gossiping (my God, she loved to gossip) and having a nice couch and keeping lots of different liquor on-hand. Leslie turned every thing she did into a ridiculously dramatic production (remember the carpet cleaners and the checkbook?). Leslie made every one of her friends feel like a fucking rock star, whether they wanted to or not. But who doesn’t want to feel like a rock star?

Leslie had a tiny easel on her commode where she’d prop up a new Oblique Strategy every day.

The news that Leslie is gone is very hard for me to understand, and I have no idea what to do with it. No personality that big should be able to go away so quickly.

I really wish I’d gotten one last chance for her to set me straight.