Mark Kramer got in touch with me after I was interviewed by the Village Voice in 1999. For the next year or so, he was a regular contributor to my website. I’d pay him about $30 a story.
I couldn’t really afford to pay this, but he was so enthusiastic about my site and so eager to be published there (most other outlets were now shut to him), I couldn’t say no.
After about 18 months, he felt like I owed him more money for his contributions and we stopped talking regularly.
Mark was like a big brother to me. He was full of encouragement for my efforts and did everything he could to help me and to connect me, but I was always a bit reticent with him. He scared me. He didn’t seem fully in touch with reality and I knew the havoc he would wreak. I felt scared publishing Mark Kramer. I didn’t fully trust him.
I couldn’t completely say no to Mark because he was so kind to me and his own publishing history was far more distinguished than my own. We developed many writer-friends in common, people he put me in touch with such as Josh Alan Friedman. Mark got me interviewed by Anthony Haden Guest for British GQ magazine.
Mark was not an easy person to have in your life. He was particularly loathed by a friend of mine, the late David Aaron Clark (dead at 49 of a heart attack in 2009), who wanted nothing to do with Mark, even when Mark was ready to apologize for provoking him to a fight in New York circa 1995.
The Mark Kramer I knew was convinced that the world was out to get him. He seemed to be using drugs and appeared to be locked in to a downward spiral.
Mark loved my Jewish conversion and always threw in some Yiddish when we spoke. He seemed to have no connection to traditional Judaism and many of the topics he wrote on were dark and death-oriented (such as porn, body piercing, tattoos and the like).
A few times over the years, Mark apologized for blowing up at me and we had a wary rapprochmont. I’m not sure if I let him back into my life for the love of his friendship or out of fear of the damage he would wreak if he felt rejected.
I put a freelance writer friend (Kate Cote) in touch with Mark once for a story about a couple who committed suicide and set their WordPress blogs to post after their death and Mark was convinced for years that I had done this as part of some evil plot against him. Eventually, he apologized for his paranoia. He said he had been smoking too much dope.
Mark went after websites that I had owned and sold and hounded them to remove the writings he had sold to me. I replied to one such site owner in 2010: “Oy vey! He’s a complicated person… Use your best judgment. If you feel like it will make your life easier to comply with his wishes, then do that… I leave it up to you.”
I found out today that last July 18, after a long bout of depression followed by months of mania, he took his own life.
For every person who misses him, I’m sure there’s somebody who’s glad that Mark is no longer around to hound him.
I was lucky enough to primarily experience the best of Mark Kramer. He loved me and would do anything for me. I was not nearly so generous with him. I always kept him at arm’s length while never doing anything to sever relations entirely.
Here’s the last thing I remember from Mark. He posted this to Facebook on March 22, 2011 with the message, “Please kill me.”
I saw it and winced and determined to stay far away from him. I lived so close to the edge myself that I didn’t want to get tangled up with those leaning over the precipice.
On his birthday last December, I posted “Happy birthday!” to his Facebook wall. I didn’t realize he had been dead nearly six months.
Mark and I never met in person but we have five Facebook friends in common — Kate Coe, Iain Bruce, Mark Ebner, Adam Parfrey, and Lars Guillen-Creed.
I know a ton of people who deliberately walk on the edge of life as Mark did. I keep them all at arm’s length. I see them as drowning and I refuse to jump in to rescue them out of fear that they will take me down with them. On occasion, I help moderately, pointing out resources for recovery.
I must know so many because they recognize themselves in me. That scares me and I refuse to get close.
Here is Mark’s last published story.
Mark Kramer was an uncompromising writer with an integrity all his own. Like his cousin, the artist Lee Lozano, who during the height of the feminist era, chose not to speak to women, Mark was a refusenik. He chose to do only what made meaning to him, whether playing the guitar for days on end, selling books he found within walking distance of his apartment on his online High Line Books, or collaborating with his partner, lighting designer Leni Schwendinger on light projects; their “Vacant Lots of Love” will be part of an upcoming book on New York community spaces.
It meant a lot to Mark to be part of Westbeth, and it is sad and ironic that this community, with its festering artistic preciousness, did him in, as his outwardness and perception eclipsed self-serving entitlement. Ultimately, his biochemical demons were too persistent to overcome and the perception and uplift he gave to others he was unable to give to himself.
I, like others, will miss him terribly — his lurid, lyrical extravagance, his broad sociopolitical, historical, emotional layerings, and most of all, his ever-present generosity. Mark often lost his phone but he always had my number.
