Diane walks up to the podium in front of the crowd. It's been long enough that her anxiety is pretty well-managed, but she still shuffles her feet into position and pulls out her emergency note cards. Not that she doesn't have the whole thing memorized. Even now, she has the first words on the tip of her dry tongue as she looks out to the crowd. Hundreds of people in a crowd Mr. Peanutbutter contacted, all in seats Princess Carolyn and Judah ordered, next to a food bar Todd and Ruthie set up for guests that barely knew him.
As she looks down at her note cards she catches the eyes of the people in the front row. She doesn't really know or recognize these people, but she's up here anyway. She clears her throat to try to get her brain moving and whether she wants to or not she thinks about every time Bojack would clear his throat.
His ashes are already spread around the city. Princess Carolynn was set up as his Power of Attorney long before it was needed, this funeral was really for the entertainment industry. A sort of public reckoning with his legacy, she said. Diane looked at her speech and thought the writing to be very, very, stupid.
"Hello everyone. My name is Diane Nguyen, and I wrote his memoir, "One Trick Pony" in 2014. Arguably not a real memoir, but that's what we called it while we toured it."
She raised her voice a bit as she spoke. The microphone made speaking to the "back of the crowd" unnecessary but she needed to get to the point where she could keep going.
"Bojack Horseman was born January 2nd of 1964 to Butterscotch Horseman and Beatrice Horseman, maiden name Sugarman. He started his comedy career as a stand up comedian in L.A. before becoming the "Horse" of Horsin' Around."
Diane looked at her watch. Eulogies are supposed to be 10 minutes, Todd still had to go up on stage, she's talking too slow, her watch is already set and she's got 9 and a quarter minutes left for a very very very dumb speech and Bojack didn't even make a speech or carry it out once unless he was being vindictive, and Diane doesn't like this whole affair and everyone needs to know who Bojack WAS dammit. She shoves the cards away.
"But, this is a eulogy, and his biography is publicly available online. I had a speech all set up for this but if there's one thing Bojack could do on and off set it was improvise, so, if I stutter a bit... sorry, I guess" She looks down at her hands and feels her cheeks burn up a bit. In another universe everyone here went blind just before she got on stage, and she can pretend to be confident.
She looked at the casket. It was a nice casket, and if the public didn't demand more closure than anyone can ever really get it'd be perfect for some other rich asshole.
"My book painted a pretty negative picture of him, and so did nearly every piece of news that got out about him and anything he did, as well as his behavior. If any of you here or anyone watching this met Bojack even once before rehab you'd either think him as the most dysfunctional or most vindictive man on the planet, assuming he didn't just ignore you.
If you met him a few more times, you'd think of him as someone who was all of those things and more because he was just a narcissist. If you met with him any longer than a week you'd understand he was all those things and an absolute genius.
While I was interviewing him he once set aside all his plans for a week and a half to learn French grammar, ordered a copy of a letter Voltaire wrote to Catherine the Great, typed it up to make into a PDF, and quoted it in an argument online. He did all this to argue with a discussion board reply post where someone was justifying some sort of crypto fascism through Voltaire, and he absolutely ripped this 5 year old internet comment to shreds. I felt ashamed reading it, and I'm not even a fascist! I don't like Voltiare at all!"
A few people in the crowd laughed.
"After he did all that, he closed his laptop and said he was going to pick up a jug of Ethanol to cut with wine and orange juice, and asked his then-roommate if they needed toaster strudels." The crowd interrupted to laugh some more. "I told him if he really wanted to fight fascism, he had the resources to do it. I mean, he had more than enough fame and cash to lobby for better voting access or just …. donate some money. He blew me off but then, he said he'd donate whatever he spent on his bender.
It turns out, he'd decided to pick up some groceries and some liquor for the upcoming week, and then some extra in case he decides to blow through some of it ahead of time, and when he got home he decided to bank some more money towards whatever charity he'd picked in case he wanted weed. He donated everything that he spent so far, went out for weed, and came back with enough Ritalin for three horses. I think that bender he was out of it for a good 24 hours and when he came to, he called me and said,- Diane makes her voice hoarse and low - 'Are you happy now that I'm in a hotel bed covered in canned green beans and cheap lemonade, Diane?'"
The crowd laughs. Not really her point. She puts her voice back to normal. "I wasn't even going to criticize him for all that -" the crowd laughed harder. Diane glared. "-Not with his addiction and all." The crowd shut the fuck up.
"I do not think that Bojack had the absolute worst substance abuse the world has ever witnessed. It was bad, and awful, and horrible and terrifying to watch, but I don't know very much about addiction so... I can't really say just how horrible it was compared to your average addict. What I can say is that if I was as addicted as he was I would not have ever gotten sober once."
The crowd stays silent. Good. Jackasses.
"Bojack Horseman went to rehab when he was 55 years old after drinking, smoking, and doing drugs regularly and with increasing frequency and severity for at least the last 31 years of his life, if not longer. He relapsed, we quit talking, he sobered up, relapsed again, sobered up, and it took until he was 60 for him to get sober and stay sober.
I truly believe that if he was functional he could have had the whole world in his palm or on his shoulders. He could burn through dense books from the 1700s like they were matches, and he could analyze anything anyone has ever made and see right through it. He could see right through you, too. He could either tear you down like Jenga or say everything you've ever wanted to hear depending on his mood and what he wanted from you. He knew every reason Vietnam started and every way his father could have dodged the draft that was smarter than the real way and every way a horse's fur could be painted in the 1600s to show reverence or war or the artist's horse fetish.
In another universe somewhere Bojack is just as dead, but instead, he spent his whole life building empires of accomplishment."
Diane motions as if waving over a wide area, ending the arc near the casket. "Hell, he did accomplish a lot, and a lot of it good." Diane uses her fingers to count. "Horsin Around, the Secretariat Movie, his acting in Philbert, he supported me during my divorce, he saved his friend from a cult, he made me famous, and so much more I can't even get into here."
Diane stole a glance at her watch. Three minutes left. Whoops.
"This isn't a eulogy about wasted potential. Even if it is, I'm glad he was 'just' a former sitcom actor so I was able to meet him, as messy as our time together was. I do wish this whole thing didn't need me to dance around everything else he did." Diane lowers her voice. "He could have done just about anything, but what he wanted to do was get people to love him. He didn't really know how to get to that point, and... I don't know if he ever truly figured out you can't really make that happen."
Diane looks at the crowd. A part of her expects him to be there. Even drunk Bojack would be able to make it something like her first public speaking job. He was grey when she cut him off and old when he died, but a part of her always thinks of him as chubby with a sports jacket.
"I do know that in the end, he did get that. He may not have ever realized it, he was pretty far gone, but I know he felt the love everyone had for him. I don't like talking about silver linings when there's so much wrong with the world, but I really am glad he went the way he did. He had thousands and thousands of chances to die much, much worse deaths, but instead we all gathered around him and … had a nice conversation, I guess. One that was almost lucid through the fog and fatigue, and nice enough that he fell asleep halfway through it"
Diane realized she was staring directly at some skinny frog guy instead of wherever you're supposed to stare at when you make a speech. Whoops again. It felt like it was close to time, and her watch confirmed it. She wanted to sit down anyway.
"Bojack Horseman was born on January 2nd of 1964 and died on January 3rd of this year after 68 years of age and a prolonged battle with early onset Vascular Dementia. He was calm when he was diagnosed, told everyone what he wanted, and then he declined. He died in his room in the nursing home believing that it was 1977. He asked his good friend Todd to put his feet under a pillow and when he did, Bojack asked how he was here if he wasn't born yet, and Todd just said he didn't know. Bojack took that for a good answer, nodded his head, laid his head back and quit breathing."
The crowd was silent. Diane made eye contact on purpose this time to find them wide eyed. Her chest got tight at this, but she pushed it down. They don't need to be satisfied with her eulogy specifically, they just want to see a casket in the ground. Todd would cheer them up anyhow.
"I don't know if there's another side after this one, but if there is I hope Bojack is as happy there as he was at that moment."