Snakes in the garden

So it turns out that while Eleanor and I were busily avoiding talking about Mark all weekend, somewhere in New Jersey his brother lay dying.

I've been buzzy and distractible all week. I can't help thinking that's part of it. Eleanor called Tuesday night while I was out. I called Mark but couldn't bring myself to call Eleanor back. I'm a bad friend, I know. Just couldn't do it. Couldn't answer the question – "What's going to happen to him?" Didn't want to have to be the one to ask.


Mark was on his way out the door when I called.

"Hey Mark," I said.

"Patreetz!" says Mark cheerily. He wanted to talk about the stock market. Wazzup with that Don Carty anyway? Is he an idiot or what? Did I think American Airlines would go under? You know, you could make a case for nationalizing the airlines –

"Mark," I said again.

"Gotta go, Patreetz," he told me. "I already missed one plane. El Ron's here getting me dressed. Then I guess he's going to put me in a box and ship me via Federal Express. A lot cheaper than a plane ticket and at the rate I'm going, probably a lot faster."

In the background I could hear El Ron laughing.

Three of the Conly brothers have – or I guess I should say had – MS which makes them the kind of disease cluster that CDC epidemiologists have wet dreams about. Is it hereditary or is it environmental? Most likely neither. Who knows why a body turns against itself? In Mark's case, of course, the MS is complicated by a spooky resonance with his personality. Mark is, at the same time, one of the brightest, most engaging and emotionally numb people I have ever met. The disease process is eerily appropriate in a way that gives me heebie-jeebies, as though God were really one of those dreadful Victorian allegorical novelists.

I was 19 when I met Mark. We were organic chemistry lab partners at UCB. He was very smart, very focused; I was flaky and disorganized. Still, I was smart enough to recognize and appreciate his singularly elegant thought processes: organic chemistry is a lot like writing computer code, there are many avenues to the same result but naturally the best one is the one with the fewest intermediate steps. Pretend you're on a desert island with every inorganic catalyst and reagent you can imagine and a shitload of ethanol. Now synthesize 2(N,N-dimethyl)amino-4-phenyl-3-hydroxy-prop-2-enoic acid. The final was something like that.

Mark finished the exam half an hour earlier than anyone else in the room. "Don't leave," I said. "I have a present for you. You'll like it."

I guess this intrigued him. He was waiting for me outside the chemistry building when I finally finished the test.

"If I was on that desert island, I'd drink that ethanol," I told him.

He smiled politely.

I opened my palm. Showed him two bright orange tabs of LSD. "Now you see it," I said. I grinned at him, tossed one of the pills into my mouth. "Now you don't."


Of course he was game, and of course I don't remember too much of the next eight hours except that at some point we wandered up to the Botanical Gardens where the Alstromeria were in bloom. In those day Peruvian lilies were much rarer than they are today, not so much of a Sunset magazine suburban garden standby. There was a huge bank of the flowers, every hue of the spectrum between yellow and violet and I had the odd sense that the rest of the world was in black and white, that these flowers had somehow pulled all the color out of everything else. I remember we also saw a rattlesnake. At that time, D.H. Lawrence was my favorite writer and I'd just read a novel where one of the Brangwen sisters finds a snake in the garden.

When I came down from the acid, I was utterly imprinted and had made up my mind to be in love with Mark.

This proved to be inconvenient for both of us. At the time, I was living with Luke and Mark was living with a woman named Gay. Nevertheless I pursued him relentlessly over the next year. Various hilarities ensued – I gave him crabs the first time we slept together (I'd acquired them innocently enough by studying in the Moffitt Undergraduate Library where the upholstered chairs were infested) and then, eventually, when things got to the tormented stage, Gay decided she wanted to meet me. She picked the White Horse on Alcatraz Avenue for our rendezvous. The White Horse was a notorious gay bar. I didn't have a clue what she looked like and so I got to humiliate myself walking up to every unaccompanied woman in the place and asking in my best antic voice, "Are you Gay?" until finally I found her.

Eventually Mark and I ended up living together for two years. This was a predictable disaster. His interior design sensibilities ran towards ghetto squalor while mine were all fuscia paint and Cost Plus candle-holders. And, too, he ran with a pack – bizarre individuals, outcasts with Jersey accents who'd migrated en masse from the Garden State and had who all had nicknames – Turtle, Whitey, Creepy, Roto. Mark was "Coon."

"That can get you shot in Oakland," I said.

He laughed. That braying donkey laugh of his. He still has it. "For God's sake, it's not racist. It's short for Raccoon." And then he launched into a complicated story arc involving Turtle and Creepy – or maybe Roto and Whitey – and some kind of complicated scam. For a nice Irish boy who seriously considered the priesthood at one point, he had a real attraction to scams. Kiting travelers checks, unloading bootlegged eight-tracks, hustling speed chess in Washington Square.


After I broke up with him, we stayed close. In 1978, I started working two jobs so I could save up enough money to take a year off and ride my bicycle across Europe. One of the jobs I took was at the Danville post office, 30 miles away from where I lived in Berkeley. In those days, I couldn't drive – I'd grown up in Manhattan, after all; who needed to drive? – so I hit upon the plan of hiring Mark and my best friend Eleanor. They'd trade off. One day, one of them would pick me up at 3:30 AM; the next day, the other would pick me up at 3:30 AM. I would pay them the princely sum of five dollars a day. I left it to them to coordinate their schedules.

One day I got a phone call – both of them on the line. They were calling me up to quit. They seemed pissed off.

"What's your problem?" I said. "Five bucks is good money. What else are you going to do?"

They had that one figured out. They were going to stay in bed and fuck like crazed weasels. The hours they'd spent on the phone on my behalf had borne unexpected fruit – they'd fallen in love.

Eleanor and Mark ended up living together for twenty years. She saw him through the beginning stages of the MS and the middle stages when he grew too spastic to walk, when fucking Kaiser Hospital wouldn't pay for a wheelchair, when increasingly his body and its needs to urinate and evacuate was the third wheel to their relationship.

And then two years ago Mark decided to move to Portland. And Eleanor decided not to go with him. He's playing out the end stage alone.