Half Life

I’ve read, or heard people say, after a loved one dies the memory of what they looked like fades in a blur of time.  That hasn’t been my experience.  First off, don’t they have a photograph?  Unless they’ve fled from a pogrom, or went through a hurricane and no family albums survived, there must be a picture.  Or, it could be their imagination is faulty.  There must be people, visually challenged, who aren’t never-forget-a-face types.  It may be the pain of loss prevents them, protects them, somehow, from the recollection; suppresses the memory.  I’m not sure.  I may forget when and where something was said, but I see the face saying it.  I lost a five dollar bet with Kid when she was 15 about a scene in an old movie.  One of those 40’s madcap comedies we both love made with a stable of great Hollywood character actors.  I saw the actor in my mind, and could imitate him giving the line, but I bet on the wrong film.  I can call up my father’s face, the beginning of jowls perspiring, bristled with whiskers, like a clear cut slope after a rain, his handsome forehead, eyes the color of pumpkin pie, small ears, features as clear to me as if he’d just left the room.  He died almost fifty years ago when I was a teenager.  In fact, seeing pictures of him gives me the creeps, but I can look at him in my mind.

A boy, a hellion, I hung out with because I craved something sensational in those days, died, like James Dean, alone in a one car crash.  He had oily blond, wiry hair, combed back from a part on the left.  Some years later, when Jeff Bridges was first appearing in movies, he reminded me of my friend Mike, whose last name, it occurs to me, was also Bridges.  He’d encourage me with manic energy (which today would have been medicated) and his coyote laugh, to burn rubber in my Dad’s new GMC pickup, to steal booze and cigarettes, to skip school.  It isn’t Jeff I see in my memory’s eye, it’s Mike.  If I could lay hands on a yearbook, I know his picture would match my recollection, but, I don’t need the confirmation.  Ask me what year I was in Shaw’s Misalliance, and was it before - or after - I did Michael Weller’s Fishing, I’d have to pause, place it, chronologically, by the face of lovers at the time.  It’s the reason I write, and usually about the past: I see it, and that vision, a sense memory, helps me work out how I felt, or feel now; what I was wearing, textures, the light, an expression.  When our friend Audrey died suddenly in 2003, we were all those things that people are, sad, shocked, it can’t have happened, missing her.  Now that it’s been ten years or near about, I could write of her, a rectangle of a woman with bird legs, delicate hands, her voice, thought process, her loyalty, wisdom, the collection of miniature chairs, her beach house, the day she showed us her first cell phone.  I see Kate Rooney, a childhood playmate from Kansas farm days, with a fox face, kiwi-green eyes, gamine, a gentle hoyden.  I never got enough of that face.  We’d play imaginary games beneath bridges, climb trees, in and out of barns, walk the fields, talking for hours, sometimes, seriously, about the dysfunction of our families, though we didn’t know it was called that at the time.  Notwithstanding, a start of a smile was always on her lips and her laugh was like a trill of a golden flute.  Kate didn’t die.  After elementary school, our friendship became a wave in the hall, and since college, we’ve never seen each other.  I could give more details of her.

My step daughter, Shannon, was about 12 the last time I saw her in 1978.  I was stoned and on one of the arranged visits after I divorced her mother.  I asked her if she had been smoking marijuana yet.  It had been a couple of years since we’d lived together, and she was in New York public school, so I didn’t know.  Did she want some?  No, she said, thankfully.  We had lunch, she got on a bus, and it was the last time I would ever see her.  She told her mother I offered her marijuana, which I had, sort of, conversationally.  Robin called to say she would not let Shannon see me again.  Probably, deep down, it was what I wanted.  I was not meant to be a weekend father at that time of life, though there was a cost to her in my finding out.  It was a shameful way to go about it.  I wish that girl well, smart, wonderful kid.  I see her face, too.

 Anon, James

Do Super Heroes Have Sex?

Do super heroes have sex?  I ask sincerely.  Greek heroes and gods were randy and adulterous and it led to a lot of problems, though their pride, desires, egos, reflected the foibles of our own mortal souls.  To the point, however, the Olympians had families.  Parenting skills were in the early stages, but children were born of their couplings.  I didn't read a lot of comics, so I don’t know if they begat, etc., or even if they have the requisite parts for such practical purposes.  The physiques of super heroes make you look.  Muscles and breasts, O my!  Wonder Woman?  Captain America?  For all those tight suits and bulging deltoids you don’t see much in the way of a basket.  Maybe it’s the steroids.  I mean, you go to the ballet, and at least they have socks in their dance belts.  Bruce (how do you get lucky with a name like that?) Wayne and Tony Stark may be heroic but they aren't super heroes, they’re men of mystery.  Iron Man is more of a jet pilot.  It’s the clothes that make the man.  Rich, handsome and, “O, I’ll reveal my true self to you, Miss: I’m a hero on the side and I suffer for it.  Please don’t love me; it wouldn't be fair to you.”   It’s annoying.  I saw that kind of panty-dropping routine all the time in New York from privileged playboys.  Those with true super powers have the potential for gratifyingly intense sex lives, one would surmise.  Is it evolution's way of righting the population?  Would we really want breeders who are faster than a speeding bullet?  Spiderman?  Good luck, Gwen.  A peck of Peter Parker Spiderbabies would have you crawling up the wall.

I was a fan of Superman on TV during the 50’s.  My young romantic self could tell there was a certain fondness between Clark and Lois.  (How was she not able to see Clark Kent and Superman were one and the same?  Apparently, horn rims were an effective guise.  Maybe she’s the one that needed glasses.)  What might have passed for sexual tension between them was more on the part of Lois, a real, red-blooded woman, if impetuous, and darn fetching in fitted suits.  Kent had eyes, hell, he had x-ray vision!  There is the reality of being a professional woman in her day and age, having to work harder than Kent to prove herself in the work place.  That left little time for a personal life.  Kent couldn't reveal his secrets as it might have put her in jeopardy from various malefactors, I get all that, but he was continually coming to her rescue, anyway.  Having to save Lois, and Jimmy, from two-by-four situations must have been a terrible distraction.  Metropolis was a big city with tall buildings to leap, multitudes nefarious schemers, citizens in peril, and it might have been a big turn-off, her constantly stepping in it.  Thought bubble over Superman’s head: “Nincompoop!  I could go for her if she wasn't a member of the 40 Watt Club!”  Another bubble: "Now, Donna Reed!  She’s a whiz and mint.  May have to blow some wind up her skirt.”  And face it, Lois, for all her pertness, lacked a sense of humor.  Not to mention, what happened to all his business suits left behind in phone booths?  How about his cash and driver license?  Draft card!  (They probably could have used a man like him in Korea.)  I suppose he had to fly around downtown and upend some bum to get his stuff back.  Whatever the explanation, there was a lack of nookie.  What kind of life is that?  The futility just takes it out of you, I guess.  Clark put on the milk toast ruse, but Superman seems to have been deeply exasperated most of the time; to have an aspect both benevolent and condescending toward his flock.  And, how could Lois get close to a man like that?  Was he even capable of intimacy?  Maybe he liked Jimmy.  Perhaps, it isn't how his kind reproduced on Krypton.

Comic book super heroes make me rather sad.

Anon, James

Take a gander at Noel Neill:

http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1410117120/nm0624747

“Turning Retrospection to the Future”

Things come back.  Thin ties.  Cat-eye glasses.  Cocktails.  Writers.  Expect fins on cars.  My fashion dowsing rod is pulling toward the double-breasted jacket…again.  (I must check in the closet in the hope Darling hasn’t Goodwill-ed my navy blue Donna Karen double-breasted blazer!  Classic; just a hint of shoulder pad.)  Go further and bring back the “Hollywood Roll,” a double-breast style from the early 50s with a long, wide lapel and one button near the belly.  Not to mention, a nifty pun.

I have designs on the fashion of language and call for some of that old-time slang to reappear and, to put into the closet warn out, threadbare, contemporary slang.  ‘Whatever’ - needs a moratorium.  Says you!  Get out!  Who cares? Tell me another!  ‘Get a life’, can go buh-bye, as well.  Most of us use popular words and phrases as linguistic, trendy shorthand; it can be fun and current.  But, ‘24/7?’  Round-the-clock. Habitual. Ceaseless.  If I never hear ‘the whole nine yards’ again, I will be relieved.  (What does that mean, when you think about it?)  ‘Whole enchilada’ isn’t any great shakes, either.

I’ve begun to seed my conversations and missives with jargon from various eras.  It’s time for ‘dude’ to take a hinge and to bring back cat.  Cat has some dignity and edge.  It’s jazz age.  ‘Cool’ is the black of slang: you can’t go wrong using the word and I was delighted it reentered the scene many years back.  It may be irreplaceable, like, ‘like’ (talk about overuse), or OK.  That’s hunky-dory.  Why not vary it with keen, neat, hip, ace, top-notch, the berries, ducky, or copacetic?  (From Copacabana.)  ‘Right on’ surfaced during the millennium and ‘totally’ blew me away.  Utterly.  Flat-out. Sheer. Purely. Indubitable.  Anyway, we sound Swedish when we say, “toe-tahlee.”

I had to explain, and produce confirmation, to convince Kid, a college sophomore, that And, how! is a legitimate old time expression for You bet! Right on! Indeed!  She’d never heard it used or come across it reading.  (So many ways you can spin that one, too: Annnnd, how!  And, HOW!)  When I was a boy and saw the film “The Music Man,” I got a hoot out of Robert Preston warning the town folk of River City to watch out for words sneaking into their kid’s conversation.  “Words like – swell.”   At which point the chorus of folk all gasp!  I’ve been using swell, recently.  It takes people a back, at first.  They’re not sure what I’m saying, or whether I’m being sarcastic.  Not all of the old-fashion slang is wimpy.  I’ve commandeered one from my dad.  He would use balls as we use crap, hell, damn, give me a break, or even shit.  Perhaps, bull would be a back-up if balls is too hairy.  My mother, if I overstepped, would say, “Don’t give me any sass!”  Isn’t that the cat’s pajamas?  If she felt someone was a pain in the ass, she’d say they were a pill.

“Just sayin’!’, ‘no offense’ but we could all endeavor to be a little bit more creative, and if we can’t find an old-fashioned word, create a new idiom, with the proviso that at soon as you hear your invention said back to you, drop it, and find another.   In the nineties it was rather dear to hear a masculine man use ‘sweet’ for nice.  My 11 year old nephew says ‘awesome’ is passé and epic is now.  ‘Shut up!’  I recently attended a national sales seminar, where our trainer sprinkled modern idioms like confetti.  ‘Oh. My. God’, he used ‘Really?’ in that sarcastic manner of you gotta be kidding, forty-seven times in four hours.  ‘Seriously?’  The first dozen, I thought, well, he has the lingo to show he’s au courant…then, after a while, I started counting them and (‘Duh!’) not listening to his message.  ‘Shoot me now.’

When you get down to it, many idioms are pejorative, hurtful denigrations, and require a more serious discussion than I am up for.  It’s certainly demeaning to refer to a young woman as a ‘babe’, or a ‘chick’, and so many terms we all should stop using and perpetuating.  Euphemistically, older isn’t necessarily better: tomato, dish, toots, chica, skank, bushpig, fox, woofer, sea donkey.  (Old joke – so old nobody gets it: Why are mother-in-laws like seeds?  You don’t really need ‘em but they come with the tomatah.)  Skirt?  Dame?  (When it comes to a broad, I’m a gam man, myself.  But, then I’m a closet dick.  That is, I read old detective novels.)  There are instances where slang, a diminutive, shouldn’t be applied in gender, race, religion; respect should trump our baser motives.  Repressing the use of the word won’t make the hate go away.  Sad, isn’t it?

Admittedly, old nomenclature may be just that: old and from an era that is best forgotten.  I wouldn’t want to see ‘Boss!’ invigorated, or ‘Groovy!?’  ‘Eew!’  ‘Get out!’  Trends can overwhelm our creative, snappy spirit and soon what seemed ‘fresh’, ‘dope’, ‘sick’, ‘rad’, jaunty, raw, crisp, recent, or just plain catchy, is spoiled forever; its very uniqueness, old hat.  (Does every ‘dork’ sport a pork-pie, now?)

Anon, James

Budding

I have a friend, let’s call him Bud.  He is older.  If I were casting Bud in a movie it might be Dustin Hoffman, trim, good head of hair, a schnoz, always has a bit of a smile, as if something is pleasing him deep down and bubbling up.  Costumed like a tidy professor.  Direct him to leap up from a table when a friend approaches - a spry 80-something bantam.

Bud greets his day with jauntiness.  His profundity catches me off guard.  I don’t know why it should.  I know him to be very well read, a culler of the Times, educated, traveled, retired from careers in the military and the arts, and to have been bruised by life.  Without spelling it out, Bud has faced what most of us shouldn’t.  Is it that face-off with tragedy that has made him so appreciative of the graces he encounters?  Whatever it is, he points them out with impunity.  That catches me off guard, too.  His compliments arrive stealthy, like a drone, with precision.  It’s easy to get used to, as with someone who massages the knot in your shoulders without obligation.  Such generosity of spirit is like beautiful weather: it makes you feel good.  Perhaps, it is faith (we don’t discuss it), but he’ll frequently use the word “bless,” as someone might pepper their speech with a “cool” or a “sweet,” a pronouncement of fact.

I’m not good at goodbyes and I can’t articulate the welling of feeling at the moment of departure.  I choke, verbally and emotionally, becoming lumpy.  I have stopped beating myself up about it, it’s just how I am, and those to whom I bid farewell, if they have half a heart, figuratively, pat me on the head.  Dear, dear.  My daughter very adroitly deals with this trait in me, by simply standing quietly outside of airports or a dorm, like ignoring a faux pas at a holiday table.  Bud, on the other hand, is good at so-longs.  He will sum up the visit, toss in a “bless,” and off he goes.  You begin to look forward to the next time he comes to visit in however many years.  Years.  Years can bollix even the most faithful.  In a recent email he confessed to being in a “mid-January funk,” to having “winter grumbles.”  Bud went on:

The last 10 days have been filled with obituaries of dear friends and lovers.  It is a sign of my age that when I call a former buddy to tell of another friend's passing, I discover that the former buddy has also recently died.

Dear, dear.

In Renascence, Edna St. Vincent Millay tells of a young woman (she herself was a teenager when she wrote the poem) who lies back in some fresh grass, looking at the sky, and naively, as a young mind will, probes eternity.  Abruptly, she is sucked down into her grave.  (Before we had CGI, there was poetry.)

I saw and heard and knew at last

The How and Why of all things, past,

And present, and forevermore.

The Universe, cleft to the core…

For my omniscience paid I toll

In infinite remorse of soul.

No hurt I did not feel, no death

That was not mine; mine each last breath…

After she has felt, infinitely, the agony of all dying souls, seen her vision of eternity made manifest, having “ceased” – just as suddenly - she is yanked from her grave, and her nightmarish vision, her “thatched roof”…

Fell from my eyes and I could see,

A drenched and dripping apple-tree…

Into my face a miracle

Of orchard-breath, and with the smell -

I breathed my soul back into me.

(I have never taken for granted the sight of rain dripping from a leaf, not in the forty years since reading that line.)

I have had a lot of older friends.  When I was 21 (no, it was not a very good year), I moved to New York City, and socialized with no one less than 70 for the first six months.  It happened those were the people I was first introduced to, and, subsequently, their cohorts.  I liked them and I learned of their wisdoms and was ever comfortable in their company.  For the most, I was ignored or spoken over.  What had I to offer other than to be able to go for gin?   I provided witness to the telling of lives.

I have continued to friend elders and heard their plaints and rants as they endured the price of long life, longer than those they have loved.

T.S. Eliot:

And I have known the arms already, known them all –

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair.

How do you say goodbye to that?  That memory, I mean?  Life, I really mean.  Repeatedly.

Don’t ask me.  I am soon enough to find out for myself.  In the – mean – time, it is mine to tut “Dear, dear.”  I have often quoted, in my lame attempt to condole, the etching on the grave stone of Emily Dickenson: “Called Back.”  I guess that’s comforting.  I am not religious but it doesn’t matter, we all go back to some essence.  It isn’t the past I address, but the present, with empty, tepid, puerile efforts.  But, then I apply the advice of Eva LeGallienne, my teacher and friend who was in her 70’s when we met, when she spoke about the task of acting, “DO something about it.”

I wrote to Bud:

Very, very difficult…facing such sadness…and no real help for it…perhaps the only thing to do is watch a silly, wonderful movie, like “Funny Face”…or any of the Thin Man series, embrace the day, eat a piece of cake, give a kindness – as I know you do, continually, generously.

A few days later, I received an email back from Bud in which he said he had been watching “Glee” on television.  (That fits into the Silly, Wonderful category.)

Yes, I'm in a better mood now.  I have a new tooth, $1100-worth, to smile on the bleak terrain.  And I've been to three musical evenings so diverse, I had to smile! Last Friday to hear the Shaun Booker Blues Band.  I've become a fan of the dynamic singer with shoulders to match the First Lady. 

Better than contemplating a wet leaf.

Anon, James.

Super Chief

Growing up we didn’t take many trips.  Two in seventeen years.  Money was a factor.  The oppression of my father’s illness was another.  They defeated any urge to pack up and take a holiday.  I don’t feel deprived from not having vacationed, not many in our farm community did, other than a camping trip at a lake.  Remove the illness factor and I would have been a happy camper to stay home and do whatever.  That was our lot.  The first trip we did take was fairly momentous.  If it wasn’t for my father’s problems we wouldn’t have.  For that matter, we might still have been living in the hills above Berkeley, and not in Kansas.  We moved to Topeka be near the Menninger Clinic, a psychiatric hospital established in the 1920’s by a man and his two sons offering an alternative from asylums as a treatment for mental illness.  My dad started analysis, where a lot of money we may have used for vacations must have gone.  At one point, things were so bad, and my mother so desperate, he was committed there for six months.  After a few years of the renowned regimen, he didn’t feel any better, and he was committed a second time.  He came home with a beautiful round wooden tray he made as part of his therapy.  For some time, he had been in communication with a psychiatrist in L.A., and it was decided he should go out for some consultations.  To his credit, for a man who had been a WWII Navy pilot, a captain for TWA, a onetime district attorney, a rancher, it took guts to reach out for help at a time when my mother’s family thought it all so ridiculous.  Just snap out of it.

Tickets were purchased on the Santa Fe Railway’s celebrated Super Chief, which traveled a route between Chicago and Los Angeles.  It was touted as the “train of the stars”, because it was the deluxe ride of choice for Hollywood celebrities.  Early one spring day my mother and father, my older brother and I, drove from our farmhouse to the depot in Topeka.  As an eight year old, I couldn’t resist walking on the rails as we waited.  The morning dew had left them slippery and one of my stiff-soled cowboy boots wedged between twin rails in a switch area as the engine, with its famous red and yellow war bonnet paint scheme, thundered into view.  I could not get my foot out.  My mother couldn’t get me out either and I would soon to be famous for being under the Super Chief rather than on it.  Finally, she pulled my foot loose, but the boot remained stuck.  Waiting passengers watched the drama, and cheered as mother, determining I needed both boots, wrestled it free as the engine screeched to its stop.

The train was magnificent.  Maybe it wasn’t the Orient Express but it was a shiny, streamlined, American beauty.  For a kid who thrilled at riding in the back of a pick-up, to climb the steep steps was like boarding a spaceship.  Our berths in the Pullman sleeping car, a twinette for my brother and me, had bunks which disappeared into the walls, and a bathroom masterfully engineered for efficiency, with a fold away washbasin.  Confined to the speeding locomotive, I was free to explore the observation car and the lounge car.  The dining car had white linen tables set with silverware and sparkling glasses, infinite food served on china with Navajo designs, handsome black waiters in smart uniforms.

At one stop along the route, my mother bought me a silver ring I had spotted in the gift shop.  It had the face of an Indian chief in a headdress, like the one who walked the aisles of the train greeting passengers, with his long braid of black hair, beaded buckskins, and a feathered war bonnet that trailed the floor.  His nose took up a lot of territory on his etched face.  It wasn’t funny like Jimmy Durante’s, but like a bird of prey.  He looked dignified, strutting in the way of men with strong chests, nodding slightly as he passed as if inspecting us before going into battle.  Even then, I suspected he wasn’t an authentic Indian chief.  I hoped he wasn’t.  I hoped he was an actor from Hollywood parading for a living.

I had no idea who the elegant gentleman in the cream-colored suit and the cigarette was, but my parents did.  My mother whispered to me after he passed us in the aisle one morning.  She did not have a poker face; she had a stone face, like the chief, when she got excited and tried to hide the fact.  I thought it was Edward R. Murrow, but she explained it was Oscar Levant and he had been in the movies.  I remembered seeing him on Jack Parr, with a voice like the creak of a castle door.  (Years later I would see him on reruns of An American in Paris.)  My mother said he had problems with alcohol.  It could have been the moving train that made him unsteady.  Come to find out he had been committed several times in mental institutions, like my dad.  Maybe he was headed home to Hollywood after a stint at Menningers.

The morning we arrived in Los Angeles, I realized I didn’t have my ring.  I recalled taking it off the night before and putting it on the sink as I washed my hands in the observation car washroom.  I thought the soap would be bad for it.  With anything brand new, I was overly protective, like not bending my feet when I walked in new shoes.  I ran back to find the ring but it was gone.  My mother called me a dope for taking it off.  She was mad about wasting the money.

Anon, James.

Good Night, Mrs. Calabash

Darling mentioned we had been invited to a party, with a Day of the Dead theme, and we could bring pictures or items to honor our family and friends who have died and place them on a shrine the host will have set up.  Maybe we could take a martini glass for my mother, pictures of art works by Darling’s dad, etc.  “But, we won’t put up any pictures of them that contain people still living.  We could crop those off,” she said.  I liked the idea.  I love our Dearly Departed but never pray or think of them in Heaven.  Maybe their energy or essence is floating about the universe.  I see my mother’s face sometimes, as if drawn in a bubble above my head or my daughter’s head, with her wise, approving smile, or making that “tsk, tsk” sound if I’ve done something naughty.  I thought why not write out a list I could tack onto the shrine.

 

My very first death was in grade school.  Marty was in my class and once in a while I would go to her house after school to wait for mother to pick me up after work.  My father was in a state mental institution at the time.  Marty’s mom would make us snacks.  She was younger than mine, I don’t know how old, it’s hard to tell age when you’re young.  Early thirties, or younger, she looked more like a teenager than someone’s mom.  She had black wavy hair, a generous, red-lipped smile, and wore jeans.  Marty and I got dropped at her house one day but no one was there.  Her dad came home a few minutes later and said he had taken her mother to the hospital.  He was a virile young farmer, but you could tell he was shaken.  Someone came to pick me up and get me out of their hair.  Marty’s mom died a few days later.

 

Pals in high school.  Danny, David, and who was the other?  Their car was hit by a train as they were going to a basketball game.  Three funerals in one day.  Catherine, a scrappy, funny woman who I worked with at the Palace clothing store, where I had a part time job in the boys department, was a mother of two teenage girls.  Her youngest, 15, was killed when the car her boyfriend was driving stalled on the tracks, and they, too, were hit by a locomotive.  I didn’t know her daughter that well, but Catherine was like a spunky aunt, always joking.  Not after that.

 

I had a first adolescent crush on Charlotte.  She was only so-so about me, but I could drive, so we had been dating.  When I rang the door bell, she opened the door, and said, “Come in. We think my dad may have been in an airplane crash.”  Her mother and her younger brother were inside.  Her dad had a small plane and had gone somewhere on business or hunting with a few other guys.  The phone rang and they received the news that he had been killed.  I didn’t know what to do, everyone was crying.  After a few minutes a neighbor lady came in and told me I should leave.  Charlotte never went out with me after that night.  I grieved more about that than her dad, who I only met once.  He was handsome and nice to me.

 

Then my dad died of a heart attack in my mother’s arms.  I guess that part was good.  I heard about it on the radio while I was driving. He was 57, mother was 50.  I was 17.

 

Mike Brooks was always one step ahead of incarceration in high school, and probably had ADHD.  I remember driving Mike around in my dad’s new GMC pickup and showing off for him, “burning rubber,” racing around, which made him howl with excitement.  He wasn’t mean but he was ornery.  When we graduated he got a job at a factory and driving home after a graveyard shift, he fell asleep at the wheel of his pretty ’56 Chevy.

Steve Paxson was on the debate team with me.  I found his name years later on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington.  No one could figure out why he enlisted.  (If you want some details about his death, you can read “Engraved” on this site.)

 

My grandmother Beatrice, “Red Cross,” died while I was in college.  We called her that because she was one of the earliest Red Cross volunteers during the Spanish-American War and, because she was a caring woman, the perfect grandmother, in my eyes.  There was always something in her suit case for me.  She lived in Oakland, CA, where I was born, and would visit us in Kansas when I was a kid.  My dad couldn’t abide her.  Not sure why.  Anyway, my mother went out to close her apartment and settle the estate.  I didn’t go with her, nor was I invited.  It seemed to be something my mother needed to be alone to do.  I did visit a whore house with a Marine buddy.  The one and only time.  Not that is was a bad experience, though it wasn’t all that pleasurable, for her either, I suspect.  Just business.  It was the 60’s, who needed to pay for sex?

When I first moved to NYC I spent a few weeks at the townhouse of my mother’s cousin, a successful businessman, and his family.  His daughters had moved out, two girls my age or near.  Not long after, while on a vacation with her fiancé in the Bahamas, the youngest was paralyzed after a scooter accident.  I visited her in the hospital when she was brought back to NYC.  Later, she had a special chair and an apartment.  I didn’t see her during that time.  The fiancé, who had been driving the scooter, broke it off.  After a few years, in her late 20’s, she’d had enough, and killed herself.  I didn’t learn how.

 A young, sparkling actress I knew socially was a regular cast member on Captain Kangaroo.  Debbie Weems was one of the few in our circle who was famous, really, and lived in a nice high rise apartment.  One February, just after her 27^th birthday, she jumped.  She was depressed because she felt she’d always be type-cast as the cute girl on Captain Kangaroo.  She always will be.

 I guess an actor dying makes you pay attention.  Trey, 30, was just another actor when he was killed by a falling board from a construction site on 7^th Avenue.  Raul Julia, Ron Silver, fellows I knew and honor.  Court Miller: Aids.  Julia Murray, a lithe, sassy actress who was lovely in the Arthur Penn movie, “Four Friends” was in my acting group, got cancer of the jaw, which they removed but didn’t save her, and like Hamlet, I have kissed those lips.

Darling’s father, an affable man, an artist, teacher, generous with his time as a grandfather, loved his early retirement in southern Oregon.  He could build a house.  In his sixties, he contracted brain cancer.  His daughter and granddaughter were there for him.

 

Rochelle was a chain smoking analyst and the wife of a director friend.  You could not bullshit this lady.  She looked like a European intellectual, with silvery hair and brown tinted horn-rimmed glasses, but she was from Brooklyn. She told me a joke that was so goofy coming from a woman who was so accomplished.  “What do Brooklyn and pantyhose have in common?”  Flatbush.  (Cancer.)  Joyce Lasko, also the wife of a director, and a therapist [ah, New York.]  An Irish beauty and onetime actress, with an acerbic wit.  (Emphysema.)

Audrey.  Break my heart.  A mom and a friend in Portland.  Some people get to you more than others, I guess.  She was so loyal it made you give it back in kind.

 

My mother, like hers, died at 90.  I saw her in hospice, tiny, unconscious, or so it seemed, yet fighting.  We buried some of her ashes at dad’s grave in Kansas, along with some vodka and an olive, and scattered the rest in a pasture we once owned.  Kid and I crawled under a barbed wire fence.  Some of the ashes blew back into our hair.  That gave us a good laugh.

 

Anon, James

Bleak Heart

Except for shaving, I try not to look into mirrors, now.  I lived a fairly narcissistic life, without a lot of justification, mind you.  Growing up lonely on a large farm in an empty area, I required my own attention.  I wandered all over hell talking to imaginary friends; they didn’t brush me off like my older brother, or get angry, like my father.  When I could, I sought the refuge of a ravine, or the bank of a pond, and got accustomed to quiet thoughts.  Dad and I shared some very, very long summer days until I was old enough to drive.  I certainly made friends over the years, but I’ve come to realize, for a long while, I was psychologically isolated.  During my young-man years in New York, where I worked as an actor, a career choice which meshed with my narcissism, I spent very little time alone.  I utterly gave myself over to professional and physical connections, or both, rather than personal.  Understand, in those twenty years, I certainly felt love and those former lovers have remained lifelong relationships, miraculously, like sound artifacts pulled from the ashes.  I am grateful for them.

I found comfort within this bleak grip.  My screw remained loose through therapies and kindnesses, and became a predilection – to reserve the kinds of feelings and spoken thoughts which lead to closeness.  This reservation is an important distinction.  It wasn’t that I didn’t feel or have genuinely tender thoughts.  I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, pronounce them.  Unless, I needed something.

This led me to disappoint.  I occupied disciplines, alternatively, healthy or destructive (exercise or drugs; relationships or betrayals).  I could be a passionate friend, colleague, lover, pen pal, mate.  I was told once by a woman who had had some knocks, “Well, at least, you aren’t a flake.”  That was the best that could be said.  Eventually, I would run down, like a cell phone battery.  I re-charged in some form of solitude.  If lucky, an acting job would take me out of town.  Then, alone, I would have too much of my own company.  A definition of crazy tedium.

As with smoking, I got weary of bronchitis.  On free days, I began to take myself away to a house I found in the woods with no phone or television, no distractions, and I nearly healed.  I could leave the woods, the self-imposed quiet.  Eventually, I left New York, which I loved, because new habits required fresh scenery.  At first, it was a bad reaction from withdrawing from all I knew.  After months of living in a few cities, a true vagabond, I breathed easy.

The spell was remedied when I met Darling and we made a decision to have a child.  Kid was born.  It isn’t so sappy.  I was a kind of Strangelove who managed to keep my hand off my throat.  In our fluky, mad-for, bull ride of a nurtured romance, we’ve hung on.  Sometimes I daydream about the house in the woods, or crave, with phantom appetite, an unctuous proclivity.  Inescapable love is revealed when you embrace the bona fide humanity and beauty, the vulnerability or strength in someone, even yourself, stop rummaging in your own lousy psyche, and move past the reflection.

Anon, James