A Memorial for Alex Calibur
fall in here
underground shelter
i’ll cook for you
this nuclear winter
i’ll cook for you
in our underground shelter
come over
if you need a place to live
you’ll die out there
Those lyrics open “Underground Shelter,” a song Alex Calibur — legal name Alex Gulla — released in 2012. That was two years before he found himself homeless; living on the streets either in Colorado, or his hometown of New York City.
I first met Calibur sometime around 2005. Two friends brought me to one of his shows, and I was… confused, consumed, in awe, and brought into a music style that had not previously been open to me. On stage, in an art-cum-punk-rock vein that felt ubiquitously New York, was a very tall, very fit man with pools of sweat jumping around in red underpants. It was everything New York always narrated itself to be.
Ever since, unexpectedly, Calibur reached out to me this spring I’ve been in intermittent attempts to figure out what my options were — what his options were — . Myself a refugee kid hailing from a failed state, finding myself in drastically altered situations overnight isn’t incomprehensible. Throughout, I’ve prided myself on my problem solving, a certain resourcefulness, an ability to build bridges and traverse social hierarchies. But here, even with my attempts, I kept staring at closed doors.
On October 13th, in a message to me, Calibur wrote that he was happy to have found a meal he liked at one of the soup kitchens, a chicken-mush casserole. We had been planning on when I’d have a day to drive a van to re-storage his belongings, so he could then make his way back out to Colorado and away from the harshness of homeless reality in New York. On October 26th, 2018, Calibur went into a coma; two days later he was dead.
The circumstances of his death appear hazy. But, if getting people to care in life was impossible, there seems almost no point in opening up that can of worms in death. We all inherently know the worth of a street-life in this country. To say that it can be shoved under the rug would imply that it once lived above a rug, and that’s certainly not the case.
I first tried to profile him weeks earlier; written, unpublished, then scratched out and started again. In that first text, I had tried to balance a requested detachment. The editor responded by asking, “so what?” I spun around what fascinated me about my recent conversations with Calibur. In so many ways, they mirrored the contemporary discourse I was having in academic circles. Calibur would quote Tolstoy, clearly dismantling contemporary society’s ills; his views simultaneously pragmatic and lofty. Since his visions first started four years ago, he had made peace with a newfound spirituality that came with them. His view of the world was complex, coded, allowed for a door to the beyond. His mannerisms would veer between the social norm and eccentric as he interacted with both the visible and the invisible worlds. His acceptance of those visions or premonitions, paired with his situation, were used against him; “why are you giving a platform to a crazy man?“ I wrote-in local statistics on homelessness, on the mental health epidemic.
No surprise to anyone, both homelessness and mental health woes have been escalating around New York for a while now, with no signs of abating. Three days ago, a United Nations report declared the treatment of the homeless population within the United States a violation of human rights. It’s a war, on our citizens. With few resources or ways out. “Poverty has no causes,” urban historian Jane Jacobs writes in The Economy of Cities, “only prosperity has causes.” The false facade of self-responsibility or options is just that, a false facade.
In his relatively-recent prime, Calibur was known for his talent, a certain enigmatic presence, and for entering spaces and dominating them. As a cyclist, he would win race after race out of the gate. In 2004, Andy Shen captured his abilities and his blazé perfectly in an interview with NY Velocity, as Shen repeatedly tries to convince Calibur to go pro before finally giving in and asking, “so what are your other interests?” As a songwriter, Calibur’s word layering is complex, anemic, twisted, sharp as a knife. His lyrics for “That Can Be Deranged” darkly circle our body-modification culture to their likely yet unnerving alley-way ends. As a singer, the adjective “operatic” gets dropped most frequently when trying to describe his sound. His humility, again, falls in line with his talent — only when I ask directly, does he confirm to making it up the ranks to sing in front of the judges at American Idol. Jacky Tran, an ex-coworker of Calibur’s, mentioned that while not recently in touch, she’d nevertheless keep an eye out for his name in headlines, “I always expected that the next thing I’d hear would be news of his big music break.”
Ever since Calibur reached out several months ago, we had stayed in touch; a dinner here, some money there, a place to shower or launder his clothes or occasionally spend the night. In each of our interactions, Calibur’s optimism, eloquence, and constant awareness and consideration for other people repeatedly humbled me. In one of our conversations, surmising on the nature of God, Calibur said that God, like man, was full of multitudes and contained violent expression. The form of that violence could be, simply enough, “believing that tragedy is a comedy.”
