I sat down across from him.
I am going to try to tell you what I told Leo, not verbatim, because I did not speak in complete sentences and I do not have perfect memory, but in substance.
Danny was three years younger than me, which meant we had grown up together in the specific way that older and younger siblings grow up, with the whole range of that experience, the competition and the alliance and the particular love that forms when you are each other’s closest companion for the years when the world is very large and you are very small.
Danny was the funniest person I have ever known.
I told Leo this first because I thought it was the most important thing, because humor is one of the currencies of Leo’s life and I wanted him to understand that Danny operated in the same currency.
Danny had a particular relationship with timing. He understood, instinctively, the architecture of a joke, the setup and the beat and the landing, and he could execute it in a way that made you suspect he had been studying comedy professionally. He was also, like Leo, a reader, though the reading had come slowly for him, hard-won, and the joy he took in it was more visible than Leo’s because it had cost him more.
He had worked in a movie theater for eleven years, taking tickets and selling concessions with the specific pleasure of someone who loves films and is surrounded by people who love films. He knew the catalog of the theater by heart, which movies were showing in which auditorium and what time and which ones were worth seeing. He had opinions about films that were serious and specific and that he was not shy about expressing.
He had a best friend named Marcus, who did not have Down syndrome and who had met Danny at a community center when they were both teenagers and had been his friend for the rest of Danny’s life. They had watched every major sporting event together for twenty years, in the same seats on Marcus’s couch with the same snacks, and when Danny died Marcus was the person I called after my parents.
