Dearly
Beloved
On January 8th, Bolivian-born DJ and nightlife icon, Ganem Haiek, AKA Kiwi, was the victim of a catastrophic hit and run– which left him, along with two friends, hospitalized, and a third friend dead. From his hospital bed, as a means of coping with the trauma and grief of the accident, he began compiling songs for a new mix, entitled Dearly Beloved. I sat down with Kiwi, newly on the mend and already jet-setting, to talk loss, hope, music, and his new lease on life.
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today
to get through this thing called life…
Electric word, ‘life,’
it means forever and that's a mighty long time…
-The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, Let’s Go Crazy
If you ask Kiwi about the accident, he’ll deflect into humor.
“Oh, you mean the ‘oopsey?’” he’ll say, chuckling. “I struggle to find the right word for it. An ‘accident’ is when you spill a drink on yourself. This was something else.”
If pressed, he’ll double down.
“When a car and another car love each other very much,” he’ll jest, smiling in a way that is both vulnerable and nervous. “They collide into each other at a high speed– leaving you and two of your best friends in the hospital, and taking another friend from you forever.”
While these jokes are, objectively, knee-slappers; there was nothing funny about it the night it happened.
When I found out, I was sitting outside with a group of French friends in Rio de Janeiro, drinking beer at a rundown bar and sweating through the swim trunks I had been wearing for 12 hours. As the conversation abandoned Portuguese and English and became totally French, I opened Instagram out of a literal loss of words. My signal was nonexistent, but there, frozen on my screen, was a photo of Kiwi in the hospital, with tubes running out of his usually animated and charismatic face.
“What the fuck?!” I said aloud, standing up and knocking over the rickety wooden folding chair behind me. Trying to refresh the screen, I got very few details from the stalled image. My eyes started to water as I ran around San Salvador Square hoping to snag a bit of service.
We’ve lost a lot of people in the queer art and nightlife community in the past few years, but for some reason, losing Kiwi seemed impossible. When I pictured Kiwi– running a muck on a Miami nude beach, dressed as an elf and blowing ketamine onto a crowd at a D.C. rave, or convulsing in tongues on countless NYC dance floors– he always seemed bathed in a warm protective light. Wherever I saw him, I could almost see his guardian angels (or more accurately, demons) swirling around him.
But there he was, helpless, on a gurney.
For about twenty minutes, I wasn’t sure if he was still alive.
But I’m here to tell you, there’s something else….
I finally got to see Kiwi, in the flesh and alive, in Buenos Aires about a month and a half after the ‘oopsey,’ and about two months before doctors initially predicted he'd be able to walk again without crutches. Not only was he walking, but dancing, a new long sexy scar snaking down his stomach. He’d come to town to DJ a friend's birthday party, and I met him at the rooftop pool where the function was to be hosted later that evening. We were joined by fashion designer MI Leggett and Kiwi’s best friend and fellow crash survivor Breakfast.
After swimming and shooting some photos, we settled ourselves down onto a pair of towels away from the other two. Buenos Aires has this very specific over-saturated light that brings out the browns and blues in everything. The day was hot and the pool smelled like sunblock and chlorine. Kiwi seemed himself, giddy and horny, as always; lining up dick appointments and making vulgar jokes with a wide joyful smile.
Kiwi began his immersion in nightlife when he started sneaking into clubs at 15. “I was going out for almost a decade before I realized I could participate in a more active way as a DJ,” he explained. “I knew what I wanted in a party, I knew what I wanted to hear, I just needed to learn how to do it.”
“What do you look for in your music?” I asked.
“A sense of joy,” he said. “I like music that makes you question things. I don’t generally think about music in terms of ‘genres.’ I think of it in feelings.”
“That definitely fits into your larger life philosophy,” I said. “Always seeking new and different forms of pleasure.”
“My worldview is certainly hedonistic,” he said laughing. “But it’s also exploratory and curious in nature.”
While in the hospital, out of both boredom and a need for catharsis, Kiwi began compiling a new mix based on the emotions he was experiencing, entitled Dearly Beloved. The musical genres are varied, as are the root emotions of the individual tracks, though a consistent vibrant tempo vibrates throughout. Clearly a mix made for dancing, it would be perfect for a 6 AM afters-set; the sun leaking through windows and the crowd giddy and sweating. “It expresses how I was feeling,” Kiwi said.
“How did you decide to translate this experience into a mix?” I asked.
“It was an intense process of grief,” he said. “A strange grief I hadn’t experienced before. Music is always the way I've dealt with all my emotions, but especially grief. Catharsis, letting the feelings happen. When I was in the hospital there were many songs that I was listening to over and over again. They reminded me of past grief, especially the loss of my grandmother…
“I got the news about my grandmother, who I was super close with, while I was setting up to throw one of my best friends a birthday party. I had about 70 people on their way to my apartment to party. I had a fork in the road: Do I call off the party and stew in my feelings? Or do I pretend it didn’t happen? I chose to keep the party happening, and rather than conceal my feelings, I just let myself feel all of them, and danced and cried with my friends. That whole week, I couldn’t stop listening to Janet Jackson’s ‘Together Again,’ which made it into the mix along with these other songs I had on repeat in the hospital.’”
“That song is an homage to Janet’s friends who died of AIDS,” I said. “Did you want the bulk of the songs to deal directly with death and loss?”
“A few songs touch directly on death, but it’s really more a feeling,” he explained. “There are a lot of songs that evoke a visceral sense of joy and hope and healing.”
“It can be hard to make something that needs to be of high quality when it’s born out of emotion,” I said. “Did you have any issues in that regard?”
“I had to record the mix a bunch of times to get it right,” he said. “I kept getting too in my feelings and fumbling over the technical aspects of putting it together.”
“How was this creative process different from past mixes you’ve put together?” I asked.
“I’ve made other mixes, but with this one I wasn’t trying to prove anything. I wasn’t trying to show off my technical prowess or my ability to find obscure music– it was just, ‘This is how I’m feeling. Here are the songs. Some of them are pretty, some of them are corny, this is how I’m feeling.’ Originally, it was supposed to just be a gift to my friends and the family of the friend who passed. But I was seeing so many people in different types of grief, and thought maybe it could help them too.”
The outpouring of support from Kiwi’s community after the accident was immense. Beyond substantial financial help, there were gifts, well wishes, and lines of pierced scantily-clad visitors coming to visit him in the hospital. Surreptitiously hitting their vapes, his guests turned the hospital room into a kiki. “I just want to say sorry to my roommates and neighbors,” Kiwi said, recalling the visits, before emitting his most evil laugh.
“I was in awe how much everyone rallied and believed in me,” he said. “It was bigger than I could have imagined. It made me believe in myself more than I ever had before. It propelled me to do more with my life. To be more focused. Accomplish goals I’ve been putting off. Create new goals. I had a lot of time not-on-the-dance-floor to really appreciate why it’s important to me. It’s not just escapism. It’s a spiritual thing for me. In New York, we take it for granted, we are so overexposed. But being an immigrant, I remember being a very young queer kid in Bolivia and feeling like I wanted more than I could ever get there. It’s important to remember that what we have is really special.”
Just then two gray birds swooped down and landed next to us. “Are these your friends too?” I asked.
Kiwi rolled his eyes, not giving into my plea for poetic grace, before continuing. “Being uninsured, getting hurt is something that’s been a deep fear of mine since coming to the US. I had an incredible amount of support from friends, both financially and with bureaucratic advice.”
“How has the accident affected your worldview?” I asked.
“My goal is to feel joy,” he said. “To feel more. Although tragic, this has been a pivot I maybe needed. I've reconfigured some things. I’ve taken steps to make partying more sustainable for myself. I’m more selective about what I'll go to, I’m more present, I’ve been sober since getting out of the hospital. I’m paying more attention to the music, and only dancing when the music is moving me. It’s been nice to have more control and perspective.…There’s also an intrinsic new feeling of fear– not one that I wasn’t aware of before, but one that’s more real now.”
“What was your first time back out like?” I asked.
“I showed up, on crutches, to surprise my friends for the last hour of Carry Nation at Good Room – which is my favorite party. It was a very special moment. I was in tears. Everyone was in tears. It felt like a family reunion. It felt so joyous, and really helped my mental wellbeing, which I think sped up my physical well being. I healed so much better out of the hospital.”
“I understand that the driver of the car hasn’t been found,” I said. “Is that something that feels important to you?
“From the insurance side, yes,” he said. “I don’t personally believe in the prison system. I’m conflicted. This person affected my life so immensely. I yearn for the day that I can go 24 hours without thinking about it. It’s going to be many years, if ever. But I don’t think I would feel vindicated, emotionally. I’m not invested in throwing somebody’s ass in jail, but if other people involved want it, I’m siding with them.”
“And lastly,” I said. “You make a lot of jokes about this, why do you think that is?”
“As humans, but especially as queer humans, the quicker we can laugh about something, the quicker we can heal,” he said.
Soon the party rose up around us, with guests trickling in and music beginning to blare. Speedos and silk robes and thongs and glitter. Someone set up a fog machine and the roof misted in the cloud of a sunset gay party. Kiwi hit the decks, and everyone cheered.
Later, after his set, Kiwi and I ended up next to each other at the snack table. He turned to me, mouth full of crudité, and said, “I feel conflicted.” He swallowed and wiped his lips. “I don’t want this interview just to be about the accident. But also, I’ve gotten so many questions from friends, and I just don’t have the bandwidth to answer all of them. It feels good to put this out there, so people’s questions get answered, because I know they care. I’ve had to develop some evasive tactics to avoid talking about it constantly. It’s been hard to wrestle with being this person that reminds everyone else about their own mortality when they are just trying to have a good time.”
He threw away his napkin and ran towards the dancefloor, diving into its center and beginning to move to the rhythm. I stood back and watched. Seeing him, again in his true form, I couldn’t imagine anyone perceiving him as a bummer. There was Kiwi, the menace, the satyr; waving his arms, shaking his hips in abandon, and gesticulating like a mime on meth. I could again see his little demons of protection, buzzing around his head in circles, as if he were a concussed cartoon character.
“A world of never ending happiness;
you can always see the sun,
day or night…”