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Vaya con Dios y los Piratas, Lucius
Mar. 20th, 2014 06:11 pmText from Morgan: Lucius died last night. Tuesday night, actually, according to Wikipedia. We have to assume that Wikipedia gets those kinds of facts right.
I was stunned and saddened. But not surprised.
Lucius and I were Best Friends for well over a decade. He was my only pal who shared my enthusiasm for reality television, so we'd watch Survivor or The Real Housewives of New York from our respective domiciles -- his in Vancouver, WA; mine in Monterey, CA -- joined in long distance telephone communion.
See, the fascinating thing about Lucius was that he was kind of a literary savant. He wrote like Joseph Conrad might have written had Joseph Conrad been interested in chronicling Gully Foyle instead of Mr. Kurtz. I met Lucius when he was my instructor at Clarion West, and he was the very best mentor a writer could ever have. He knew writing inside out. He was like one of those anthropologists who can deduce an entire five ton dinosaur from one molar tooth. You'd show him a single sentence from an idea that had come into your mind and instantly he'd know exactly what you were trying to do and where you should go with it.
There was a huge disconnect between his writing persona and his personality. If you met Lucius and didn't know his work, you'd be inclined to dismiss him as a good ole boy with a limited vocabulary. He grew up in the deep South and had that shit-kicking stance. He could be pugnacious. He really liked sports, and he considered pissing off people he didn't like a kind of sport.
With Lucius, it was always hard to separate out the facts from the fiction of his biography. I've mentioned our mutual pal Alec McIntire here in another (tragic) context. One time chatting with Alec, I happened to allude to the years Lucius had spent living in Nepal, which Lucius had filled me in on in great detail.
"Oh, Patrizia," Alec said kindly. "Lucius had never even gone to Nepal."
Lucius's stories weren't lies in the traditional sense. They were reimaginings. His magic was that he could sit on a park bench for a week, imagine a whole world from that vantage point, and then pretend he'd adventured there. In a very real sense, he had. And often he would write about it too.
Our friendship fell apart for the reasons that friendships between men and women so often fall apart. When he was incredibly down and out, I'd let him live rent-free in my house for a year to give him breathing space so he could get his life back together. I have to say, Lucius was possibly the most singularly slovenly human being in the history of the planet. When he moved out, we literally had to call in an industrial janitor to swab out his room. So long as he kept this squalor confined to a room with a door that closed, I didn't mind. I just had a hard time imagining how anyone could function in such a highly disorganized state.
A decade or so later, he offered to take me to Europe as a payback for the year he'd spent living in my house. Turned out, however, that the trip to Europe was a chivalric attempt to rescue me from a bad marriage. I just couldn't see Lucius as my romantic rescuer, though. His feelings got terribly hurt and when Lucius's feelings got hurt, he turned mean. So eventually I had to ditch him and tour around Italy on my own.
Our friendship never recovered though I did speak to him a few times after that. Once in particular on an extremely bad day after the bad marriage finally unraveled and the rest of my life fell apart too so that I somehow found myself living in rural squalor in a part of the world where I had no friends. I was in one of those moods where you're so insane, so insane, that you grab your phone and start dialing numbers almost at random.
And Lucius to his eternal credit instantly knew the psychic state I'd called him from. "I have total faith in you, Patrizia," he said. "You will get through this. You'll come out the other side. I know this for a fact."
Lucius had a reputation as a heavy drinker. Actually, he wasn't. What he was was a heavy smoker and a guy whose preferred diet was Fanta Grape Soda and deep-fried Twinkies. He was a big guy, 6'4", a linebacker during his football days at Florida State. All that muscle turned to fat as he got older and began eschewing all exercise, even a walk to the corner store. When I first met Lucius, he weighed close to 300 pounds. His weight just kept going up. Every six months or so, he'd decide to do something about his weight and this decision always involved some extreme diet. He'd set himself the task of losing 100 pounds in some punishingly short period of time, and he'd succeed. But he'd always gain it back.
This yo-yo-ing was not good for his health, particularly combined with his two-pack-a-day cigarette habit.
He was in and out of hospitals. His eyesight was also deteriorating, and because his speaking voice was so very, very different from his writing voice, it was very hard for him to do the switch to voice-activation software, a transition that many other writers with failing eyesight are able to do.
Last summer came the news he'd had a massive stroke. The stroke had left him partly paralyzed and unable to speak for a time. Oh, Lucius, Lucius,, I thought. If you were looking to design a personal hell for Lucius, this would be it.
I knew he'd never climb out of that hole. There was just too much damage over too many years, plus he didn't have the type of support system you need to weather that particular storm.
I've thought of Lucius in his extended nursing care facility so, so often this past year. Surrounded by caregivers who don't have a clue about who he is or what his legacy was. Some of the caregivers would be good to him because that is their nature; most of them would be brusque because they're only getting paid $9 an hour. Some people from the science fiction community would visit him. His close friend Kathryn would visit him. His editor Ellen would visit him. His son would visit him.
But then those visits would end, and Lucius would be left in that institutional setting, which would have had to have reminded him of the mental institute his father had committed him to when he was in his teens. Lucius told me this story many times, but I confess, it was too, too horrifying for me to remember most of the details. Lucius's craziness, I seem to recall, involved the kinds of misdeeds that many rowdy teenagers get into. Drinking too many beers. Getting into too many fights. Maybe raising his hand against his father when his father tried to beat him. Lucius's father regularly beat Lucius up throughout his childhood.
But it was also Lucius's father who taught him to write like Joseph Campbell. So the snake swallows its own tail, now and forever.
I'll miss Lucius. But I'm glad he's no longer trapped. He's with Maximon now in the eternal Honduras in this the holiest season of the year.
I was stunned and saddened. But not surprised.
Lucius and I were Best Friends for well over a decade. He was my only pal who shared my enthusiasm for reality television, so we'd watch Survivor or The Real Housewives of New York from our respective domiciles -- his in Vancouver, WA; mine in Monterey, CA -- joined in long distance telephone communion.
See, the fascinating thing about Lucius was that he was kind of a literary savant. He wrote like Joseph Conrad might have written had Joseph Conrad been interested in chronicling Gully Foyle instead of Mr. Kurtz. I met Lucius when he was my instructor at Clarion West, and he was the very best mentor a writer could ever have. He knew writing inside out. He was like one of those anthropologists who can deduce an entire five ton dinosaur from one molar tooth. You'd show him a single sentence from an idea that had come into your mind and instantly he'd know exactly what you were trying to do and where you should go with it.
There was a huge disconnect between his writing persona and his personality. If you met Lucius and didn't know his work, you'd be inclined to dismiss him as a good ole boy with a limited vocabulary. He grew up in the deep South and had that shit-kicking stance. He could be pugnacious. He really liked sports, and he considered pissing off people he didn't like a kind of sport.
With Lucius, it was always hard to separate out the facts from the fiction of his biography. I've mentioned our mutual pal Alec McIntire here in another (tragic) context. One time chatting with Alec, I happened to allude to the years Lucius had spent living in Nepal, which Lucius had filled me in on in great detail.
"Oh, Patrizia," Alec said kindly. "Lucius had never even gone to Nepal."
Lucius's stories weren't lies in the traditional sense. They were reimaginings. His magic was that he could sit on a park bench for a week, imagine a whole world from that vantage point, and then pretend he'd adventured there. In a very real sense, he had. And often he would write about it too.
Our friendship fell apart for the reasons that friendships between men and women so often fall apart. When he was incredibly down and out, I'd let him live rent-free in my house for a year to give him breathing space so he could get his life back together. I have to say, Lucius was possibly the most singularly slovenly human being in the history of the planet. When he moved out, we literally had to call in an industrial janitor to swab out his room. So long as he kept this squalor confined to a room with a door that closed, I didn't mind. I just had a hard time imagining how anyone could function in such a highly disorganized state.
A decade or so later, he offered to take me to Europe as a payback for the year he'd spent living in my house. Turned out, however, that the trip to Europe was a chivalric attempt to rescue me from a bad marriage. I just couldn't see Lucius as my romantic rescuer, though. His feelings got terribly hurt and when Lucius's feelings got hurt, he turned mean. So eventually I had to ditch him and tour around Italy on my own.
Our friendship never recovered though I did speak to him a few times after that. Once in particular on an extremely bad day after the bad marriage finally unraveled and the rest of my life fell apart too so that I somehow found myself living in rural squalor in a part of the world where I had no friends. I was in one of those moods where you're so insane, so insane, that you grab your phone and start dialing numbers almost at random.
And Lucius to his eternal credit instantly knew the psychic state I'd called him from. "I have total faith in you, Patrizia," he said. "You will get through this. You'll come out the other side. I know this for a fact."
Lucius had a reputation as a heavy drinker. Actually, he wasn't. What he was was a heavy smoker and a guy whose preferred diet was Fanta Grape Soda and deep-fried Twinkies. He was a big guy, 6'4", a linebacker during his football days at Florida State. All that muscle turned to fat as he got older and began eschewing all exercise, even a walk to the corner store. When I first met Lucius, he weighed close to 300 pounds. His weight just kept going up. Every six months or so, he'd decide to do something about his weight and this decision always involved some extreme diet. He'd set himself the task of losing 100 pounds in some punishingly short period of time, and he'd succeed. But he'd always gain it back.
This yo-yo-ing was not good for his health, particularly combined with his two-pack-a-day cigarette habit.
He was in and out of hospitals. His eyesight was also deteriorating, and because his speaking voice was so very, very different from his writing voice, it was very hard for him to do the switch to voice-activation software, a transition that many other writers with failing eyesight are able to do.
Last summer came the news he'd had a massive stroke. The stroke had left him partly paralyzed and unable to speak for a time. Oh, Lucius, Lucius,, I thought. If you were looking to design a personal hell for Lucius, this would be it.
I knew he'd never climb out of that hole. There was just too much damage over too many years, plus he didn't have the type of support system you need to weather that particular storm.
I've thought of Lucius in his extended nursing care facility so, so often this past year. Surrounded by caregivers who don't have a clue about who he is or what his legacy was. Some of the caregivers would be good to him because that is their nature; most of them would be brusque because they're only getting paid $9 an hour. Some people from the science fiction community would visit him. His close friend Kathryn would visit him. His editor Ellen would visit him. His son would visit him.
But then those visits would end, and Lucius would be left in that institutional setting, which would have had to have reminded him of the mental institute his father had committed him to when he was in his teens. Lucius told me this story many times, but I confess, it was too, too horrifying for me to remember most of the details. Lucius's craziness, I seem to recall, involved the kinds of misdeeds that many rowdy teenagers get into. Drinking too many beers. Getting into too many fights. Maybe raising his hand against his father when his father tried to beat him. Lucius's father regularly beat Lucius up throughout his childhood.
But it was also Lucius's father who taught him to write like Joseph Campbell. So the snake swallows its own tail, now and forever.
I'll miss Lucius. But I'm glad he's no longer trapped. He's with Maximon now in the eternal Honduras in this the holiest season of the year.
