mallorys_camera | Entries tagged with mark

And-d-d-d-d-d it is currently a balmy -2° Fahrenheit (-19° Centigrade) in my little corner of Trumplandia.

I did not go to the gym yesterday because I kept thinking about black ice and flat tires, both of which might have involved climbing out of the car and freezing to death in the scrub forest bordering NY 302, essentially a two-lane farm road far from civilization.

I will not be going to the gym today either.

But tomorrow is bikini weather, 20° F. Woo woo! Bring on those triceps presses!

###

I Remunerated steadily throughout the day in between talking politics with the kiskas and trudging out to the coop to check on the chickens.

In the evening, I watched something called Six Schizophrenic Brothers, a luridly produced documentary based on a book called Hidden Valley Road that I’ve been wanting to read forever.

Both documentary & book chronicle the history of the Galvin family in Colorado Springs during the 60s, 70s, & 80s. Mr. & Mrs. Galvin had 12 children—six of whom had psychotic collapses in their teens & 20s.

Geneticists salivate over families like the Galvins!

My own dear friend Mark belonged to such a family: Four of the seven Conly kids were diagnosed with MS, and they were extensively studied by the NIH although the NIH didn’t raise one finger to help Mark as he lay dying in a squalid room in Portland a decade or so ago.

###

Anyway, the geneticists did find a mutant gene in the schizophrenic Galvins, something called the SHANK2 mutation on chromosome 11. The gene is also linked to autism, and apparently, choline exerts enough of a protective effect so that the American Medical Association now recommends choline supplements for all pregnant mothers.

The gene was also detected in Mrs. Galvin’s DNA, so X-linked recessive.

The documentary failed to note whether the gene was found in any of the four brothers who did not develop schizophrenia, leading me to believe that it must have been, else the documentary would have emphasized the SHANK2 causality more forcibly.

So, we are back to that old question once again: Is it Nature or Nurture?

###

From my perspective, even without the schizophrenia, the Galvins were a fuckin’ train wreck, a 1950s ideal of the Perfect Family Richard Yates might have written one of his intensely bleak novels about.

Absentee father. Domineering mother. Or rather—mother who controlled every aspect of the domestic routine but remained entirely oblivious to emotional subcurrents. The 10 brothers, crowded into two bedrooms, seemed to loathe one another. They were always beating the shit out of one another. I suppose this could have been a sign of incipient organic mental illness, but honestly? Even without organic brain illness, it was a major red flag signaling deep psychological dysfunction.

I’m the mother of two sons. I can tell the difference between normal fraternal rivalry & roughhousing, and psychological dysfunction.

I get that the theory of the “schizophrenogenic mother” has now been entirely debunked, but man, Mother Galvin really fit that shoe.

###

The only schizophrenic person I know well is poor Cassie, who is very sweet and absolutely compliant with her medication regimen.

There is almost certainly a genetic component to her illness because her mother had the same symptoms. Though her sister does not.

Cassie used to tell me that her medication cocktail did very little to mute the voices. But it did make it easier to ignore them.

It is a very sad situation. Cassie was pretty & bright & a talented artist, and then one day, WHAM—“The Source” started talking to her.

A very, very, very difficult karma indeed.

Hanging with RTT was good, but hanging in Ithaca was not good. Was it the mood I was in or the time of year, so close to Dia De Los Muertos?

Ithaca was filled with ghosts.

They weren’t quite strong enough to materialize, but I could feel them everywhere I walked (and I walked quite a bit)

A blur that might have been Justin, leaning against a church wall in DeWitt Park.

A bright banner, flapping in the wind outside the Unitarian Church on Cayuga Street where Janet had been the first African American deacon.

The 7/11 in whose parking lot, Jason—Justin’s brother, Janet’s grandson—pulled a gun on someone. (Jason’s still alive but a horrific childhood plus juvie destroyed him mentally. He’s a floater in the land of the living.)

Ben on that stretch of State Street between the Diner & Gimme Coffee the time I first realized, He’s very, very sick, isn’t he?

How did I know Ben was very, very sick?

Well, because I was walking down that stretch of State Street one day a couple of months before I moved away from Ithaca & I saw Mark Conly, beaming broadly, arms outstretched. And this was odd because Mark Conly had died from complications of his multiple sclerosis just six months before.

Mark didn’t coalesce into Ben until he got within two feet of me.

As a sidebar, I will note this is often the way visions work. They are rarely hallucinations created out of thin air. Most often, they build on something that’s already out there in the physical universe.

Which, of course, makes it difficult for the person who’s having the vision: Are you becoming mentally unhinged, or are you actually vibrating on a supernatural frequency?

There is no way to answer that question.

Another fallacy about occult visitations: People always think they’re most likely to occur in the dark.

In truth, prime time for the supernatural is preternaturally warm days when the wind is high, and yet, and yet: There is an uneasy feeling of stillness.

Which described the weather in Ithaca while I was there to a T.

Anyway, I was so creeped out by the ghosts I could almost (but not quite!) see in Ithaca that the morning before I took off back to the quaint & scenic Hudson Valley, I insisted on visiting the Namgyal Monastery to purify myself.

Long-term readers of this diary—I think there may be 1.8 of you—may remember that when I lived in Ithaca, I was the English-As-a-Second-Language tutor of choice for the surprisingly large Tibetan population living there.

They also all wanted me to do their taxes!!!!!!!

The student the Tompkins County Learning Center assigned to me was Lopsang. (I forget what name I referred to her by when writing about her so long ago.) She’d grown up in the province of Kham, home of the Tibetan warrior princesses. A Tibetan monk smuggled her out of Tibet to the Dalai Lama’s compound in Dharamsala, India, where she lived for some years before emigrating to the U.S. and marrying the man who’d rescued her, now a medical coder & Tibetan monk no longer.

I improvised my ESL lesson plans. I didn’t see much point in teaching Lopsang the finer points of English language grammar. Did it really matter if she knew how to conjugate the past tense of irregular verbs?

Instead, I went over to Lopsang’s house & played her three-minute clips culled from old episodes of Little House on the Prairie. Then I’d make her talk to me about them. Full court babble—that was my goal. It was not important that she speak grammatically; it was important that she overcome her self-consciousness about how badly she spoke English and just speak.

Little House on the Prairie was about life on a struggling homestead in a non-industrialized economy, right? Lopsang had grown up a struggling homestead in a non-industrialized economy. Maybe she could relate.

Pretty soon, we were joined by other Tibetans until 15 or so were showing up for my thrice-weekly lessons.

It seems to me Tibetan Buddhism is very unlike other types of Buddhism.

The Tibetan Buddhists I knew weren’t into detachment at all. They were very materialistic! They loved Black Friday above all other holidays and could hardly wait to describe to me (in broken English) all the fabulous things they’d bought at BestBuy for a discount! They loved electronics.

The one thing that seemed to differentiate their conversation from other people’s conversation was that they were constantly throwing in allusions to past lives.

So, if I’d describe something that happened to me over the weekend, Lopsang might nod vigorously & say, “You know something like that happened to me two lives before this one—”

They were very serious about past lives.

Anyway, Lopsang & her husband were instrumental in raising the funds to build this monastery complex, and I’d gone there that morning half in the hopes I’d run into her.

I’d run into her there several times in the past.

But today, there was no one there at the monastery at all though the gates were wide open.

Still, the place seemed to do its magic ‘cause when RTT & I went back to Ithaca, I didn’t sense the ghosts anymore.

The vehicle above is the Dalai Lama’s very own jeep!!! He used it to power along all the back trails of Tibet, Mustang, & Nepal back in the day.

They’re dropping like flies, that cohort of mine and those figureheads that defined our moment.

Yesterday, I found out that Cliff F______ had died—someone I hardly knew at all personally, but someone who loomed large in the WELL creation myth. The WELL certainly played a significant role in my own creation myth.

And Ken Starr, the Clinton impeachment counsel, died.

When RTT was the tiniest of tiny boys, I used to make up stories about a trio of naughty creatures called Grumble Trumble, Wicky-Woo, and Ken Starr who were always doing the wickedest things—like trying to stick their fingers in electrical sockets, ripping pages out of books, and attempting to ride on the back of poor, beleaguered Sandinista the dog.

RTT actually shocked me a few months back when Ken Starr momentarily bobbed up in the news: “Wait! Didn’t you used to tell me stories about Ken Starr? You mean he was real?”

###

I think about death a lot these days.

I suppose I am trying to get comfortable with the subject.

Mostly, I wonder how much it will hurt. Like how could it hurt worse than childbirth, which is the most excruciating pain I have ever felt? I don’t actually mind the prospect of extinction of this self; what I mind is that it’s gonna hurt unless I can arrange to die in my sleep or be completely zoned out on morphine.

Sometimes I wonder who’s gonna come out to greet me when I finally make it to the other side. Normal people are greeted by their families: Dad! My God! You’ve lost so much weight! And Mom! Your hair looks great!

But nobody in my family ever liked me very much. I doubt that any of them could be roused from their nectar quaffing or harp lessons to trot on over to that great shimmering, disturbingly womb-like tunnel of light and watch me emerge.

I’m kinda thinking after this most recent incarnation, I’m finally quits with the entity that coalesced as Ben this time round. He was an asshole; I was noble. If ever there was a debt, it’s settled. I never have to see him again. He won’t be there (praise Gawd.)

So, who will?

Maybe Mark?

Maybe my grandfather? (He was the only family member who liked me a little bit.)

Maybe Rik?

Maybe Tom?

Certainly, my companion animals—Sandinista, Fritz, Milo, the Meezer, Rutger.

They will be happy to see me.

And for the first time, we will be meeting as equals.

###

Jean-Luc Godard, as it turns out, died by assisted suicide.

I guess he was in a hurry.

The dude was like 91 years old. It’s not like he was gonna last very much longer, right?

I’m ambivalent about assisted suicide.

I mean, I totally think people have the right to kill themselves. Not even the option to kill themselves. The right.

I don’t get why suicide prevention is such a big institutional push in this culture.

It’s not like there’s any analogous institutional push to help people get more out of their lives.

But you’re just gonna have to repeat the lifetime if you kill yourself.

The metaphor I use for reincarnation is school—like each lifetime is a class where you’re supposed to learn something, and if you kill yourself, you’re gonna have to take the class over, and who wants to do that?

Suffering is hard karma. But it’s part of the lesson plan, no?

###

Plus on the strictly legal end of things, assisted suicide is the first step down a slippery slope. It sets a precedent for taking a life when the right types of red tape are applied. Once that precedent has been set, red tape can be applied in any number of interesting ways. (Yes, I have seen Soylent Green! Why do you ask?)

###

What else?

I came within 3,000 words of finishing the Remunerative Project yesterday, and then my mind went Pftzzz, and little sparks started coming out of my mouth.

I should finish it this morning.

It is presently 27,000 words long. Sixty-two pages!

Dream with a complex narrative, most of which I can’t remember: I had written some sort of play without realizing the play was actually the fulfillment of some kind of college assignment.

The people who were supposed to be performing the play didn’t like me. So, I didn’t know whether they would actually perform the play.

If they didn’t perform, I would flunk the class.

I was explaining all this to Barbara Angell, and she was infinitely sympathetic, but had no advice to offer beyond the obvious: It’s probably not as bad as you think it is.

Then somehow, I was talking to Rick R_______. A very young Rick R_______. He was finishing up college finally—was very gung-ho about it, wanted to apply to medical school. Like your brother and sister, I said—although in real life, only his brother Steve—my one-time True LUV—was a doctor; his sister Susan—my one-time Best Friend and still Ichabod’s godmother—is a lawyer.

I couldn’t tell Rick about the play because Steve and Susan were two of the people who were supposed to put it on but who didn’t like me.

Then I met up with a homeless woman who’d found a place to crash—with Mark!

(I think this might be the first time I’ve ever dreamed about Mark.)

Mark was living on the top floor of this incredibly bombed-out-looking apartment building. Implicit in the dream was the thought: You have dreamed about this building many, many times before. Only I don’t know whether I have dreamed it really. The building lay on the farthest point of a mythical Flatbush Avenue.

Mark had been very ill but he seemed to have recovered to some extent. At least, now he could walk. His relationship with the homeless woman was unclear. Are they lovers? I wondered. But Mark was ever reticent about his personal life, his personal feelings.

He’d had his bathroom remodeled! He was very proud of it. He showed it off to me, and it was hideous—all cinder blocks and ugly, cheap, utilitarian fixtures. But, I supposed, an improvement over what had been there before.

I woke up…

“Thing about snowy landscapes is they all look the same,” Ben said to me once.

We were driving through a white-out landscape near Trumbull Corners, named for some Revolutionary War ancestors of Ben’s who had not yet simplified the spelling of their name. Some time during that first awful winter before he walked out on me.

“Ever notice? Snow is supposed to be this magical Currier & Ives ingredient. Whereas, in fact, just add snow and everything looks the same. Everything looks tedious and identical. You can’t tell one landscape from another.”

I don’t think he got that one right, actually. I suspect it depends entirely upon what landscape details one focuses upon.

But certainly he was correct about the landscape details I focus upon.

I’ve been thinking a bit about Ben the past couple of days because I heard through the grapevine that Francis died.

Ben was one of Francis’s keepers:

I remember very little about my time with the circus.

Which is kinda too bad because the circus was one of the more remarkable episodes in my life.

Partly that’s because I have a terrible memory—which is why I keep a diary although my diary for the six months I traveled with the circus mostly consists of histories of the strange little midwestern towns we journeyed through.

But partly that’s because my mind censors all memories tagged Ben.

I was a sucker for LUV, I think. And he never LUVVED me.

I think maybe that’s because I’m just not very LUVVABLE.

What else?

I did remunerative work.

I went tromping.

Kinda remarkable how one acclimatizes: Temps were just over freezing and that felt tropical to me. I stripped off my hat and gloves; I wanted to strip off my coat: It felt that warm.

Neighbor Ed must have sensed my psychic forlornness: He telephoned while I was tromping so I got to argue about AOC and third-party politics over WiFi while I marched through the chilling uniformity of the Snow Queen’s frozen kingdom.

And in the evening, the head Tax Bwana doyenne, Barbara ______, called. She wanted to thank me for being a Tax Bwana this year and to ask whether I would take on an additional shift.

“It’s been so awful this year!” she cried. “Practically no one has volunteered! I’m afraid they’re going to defund the grant that runs the program!”

“Well, that would be a pity,” I said. “Tax Bwana does good work.”

“It’s all so depressing,” she said. “Every day is just worse than the last.”

Depressing, I thought. Good heavens: That’s a word I don’t let myself use. Could it be that Barbara ______ is a real human girl after all?

Crossposts: https://mallorys-camera.livejournal.com/989376.html

My new ESL student is a 21-year old from Morocco, Imane (on the right.) She had absolutely no interest whatsoever in coming to the United States, but her father, an entrepreneur who owns a phone store, a deli and a snackbar in Rabat, has been signing every last member of the family up for the Diversity Immigrant Visa Green Card lottery year after year, and last year, Imane won. Like it or not, Imane is now the advance guard for the family’s new life.

I started working with her in May but had to stop during Ramadan.

Eid was July 5, so we resumed our work together yesterday.

###

Imane’s bilingual: French and Arabic. I think when people grow up speaking two languages, some solenoid in the language aptitude part of their brain switches on. She’s picked up English really quickly. Unlike, Summer, she’s interested in grammar and so is good for half an hour or so, frowning over the questions and answers I prepare for her:

___ do you live?

a. Who
b. When
c. Where
d. How long

I also screen movies about American teenagers for her – we’re halfway through Mean Girls – and then interrogate her about what’s going on, about the characters’ relationships with one another. I make her write a short essay, too: Would you have a “Burn Book?” Why or why not?

We finish every lesson off with 20 minutes during which she gets to teach me French. (Of course, I already speak French – or did speak French – some French – 50 million years or so ago. Which makes it easier for her.) The kicker is she has to teach me French using English as the instructional language.

I suppose I could have opted to have her teach me Arabic, but I’ve never had the slightest interest in learning Arabic.

I’m not exactly sure why Imane didn’t graduate from high school, but she didn’t, so our long-term goal is to get her to take the GED and then enroll her in a college. Preferably, a college that will throw some money at her.

Imane reminds me of a bit of the teenage French models I knew back in the day. French teenage girls are very different from American teenage girls, much more sophisticated, not quite as into being an animal in the undifferentiated herd.

###

Afterwards, I went on a very unsatisfactory errand that took me into the wilds of Peekskill, a particularly unpleasant town.

I use a credit union that’s based in Ithaca. I like this credit union; they went out of their way to help me rebuild my credit after my business collapsed. After the horrible way banks treated me, I will never use a bank again – not that, I’m sure, Wells Fargo, Citibank et al care if I ever use them again.

Anyhoo, using this non-local credit union had never caused me a bit of strife except that a recent client insisted on sending me a check instead of paying me via PayPal, and this has created all sorts of logistical difficulties in terms of depositing the damn check.

Supposedly, there was a credit union in Lake Mohegan that offered reciprocal deposit arrangements, so I went to check it out.

Alas! The credit union turned out to be in a high school, of all things. Because it was a teachers' credit union, you see. Except the high school was closed for the summer.

I’m one of those Wherever you are, that’s where you’re supposed to be! type former hippies, so I wouldn’t call the afternoon a complete wash. Obviously, the Universe wanted me to explore the really badly designed roadway system in Peekskill! And to get stuck on this roundabout, going round and round – once! twice! three times! – because I couldn’t figure out how to get into the correct lane of traffic to get on the road I wanted to get on, and there were no fucking signs!

I’m now an expert on traffic navigation in Peekskill, and I still have this uncashed check!

Possibly ISIS terrorists will storm the coffee shop I’m off to work in today and instead of asking me to recite the Quran, they’ll demand a full recital of Peekskill motorways! While every other soy latte aficionado is slaughtered, I will survive! Cue Gloria Gaynor!

###

Also I dreamed of Mark last night. Sweet, dreamy, gentle, never judgmental Mark. When I woke up, I wept. Oh, Mark. I was not as good a friend to you as you were to me. Forgive me. I just didn’t know how.

Over the weekend, I hiked from Springwood (FDR-World) to the Vanderbilt mansion, a seven-mile walk, which took me past a hidden cove on a remote part of the Hudson River, where I thought a lot about the relationship between what’s real and what’s not real.

Hyde Park, for example, is not a real village.

It was the strip of the Albany Post Road where the various taverns etc. that catered to the “downstairs” elements of the many stately mansions hereabouts opened for business.

As such, unlike nearby Poughkeepsie and Rhinebeck, Hyde Park doesn’t have what you might call a historic downtown, although it does have a post office – interior walls covered with hearty WPA-inspired murals of pioneers fishing, trapping, and lumbering – and it did have a train station.

Impecunious descendents of those early merchants and bankers started deeding the stately mansions over to the New York Parks Department 75 years or so ago, so a few of them still stand.

(Many more of them are in ruins, and, of course, those are the ones I’m actually interested in exploring. But they’re hard to track down. One of the few I did manage to stumble across is Wyndcliffe, a derelict mansion just outside Rhinecliffe, the strange little derelict river crossing just outside Rhinebeck. )

Came home and watched The United States of Amnesia, which is a documentary about Gore Vidal’s last days. A really, really depressing documentary about Gore Vidal’s last days.

Gore Vidal was one of my great intellectual crushes. Never cared much for his fiction, but his essays were – are – superb. Mark Conly gifted me with a copy of United States: Essays 1952–1992, which I read cover to cover and dragged around with me for years till I finally gave it away to Ranier, a college student who clerked at The Little Store.

(Perilous business, giving people books. Most of the time, they don’t read them, and so, I half expected to find United States: Essays 1952–1992 crammed into a Cannery Row garbage bin, kind of like the plantings in Steinbeck’s short story The Chrysanthemums. I didn’t. But then, Ranier was kind of an odd duck.)

Anyway, Gore Vidal did not come to a happy end. He spent the last decade or so of his life as a querulous, incontinent old fart, living on memories. Intellectually sharp to the end, sadly, but that was a curse. He was one of the few intellectuals, for example, who spoke his thoughts out loud that the U.S. should share part of the blame for the 9/11 attacks – a very unpopular stance, as you may imagine.

Alas! Voicing such controversial sentiments did not make Gore Vidal any more relevant in his miserable old age.

One scene in the documentary stuck with me particularly – Gore Vidal in his wheelchair, looking particularly scrupulous and miserly, while an old friend – presumably from his Exeter schoolboy days – trotted behind him.

They were both in their 80s. But the friend looked vigorous, while Gore Vidal looked like Dorian Grey’s portrait.

And I thought, Wow! Okay! If you ever need convincing about why you must drag yourself to the gym three times a week and walk at least 25 miles a week, here it is! Because if you don’t, you’re gonna end up spending that last decade – and girlfriend, it is looming – being physically helpless and perfectly miserable!!!!

###

Getting old is such a weird experience! I don’t know whether the inner narrative me still relates to myself at the age of 18, but I can certainly relate to myself at the age of 30 – when I looked enough like myself at age 18 for some narrative continuity.

At what point do people just start looking just generically old?

One of the games I used to play in crowds – and don’t anymore because it’s just too-oo painful – is to try and imagine what the people around me looked like as children.

Somewhere around the age of 40, people's features seem to lose any similarity to their childhood and adolescent selves. It’s a progression peculiar to humans, I think. You don’t find it in other animals.

This is me at the age of seven or so:

This is me at the age of 17:

Here I am again at 34:

And here I am today:

Is there any continuity? I don’t see it. And that's painful. Very painful. Not because of vanity. Although I can't articulate the nature of the true "because."

Lyme Disease, the doctors told him.

Fucking Lyme Disease.

Wow.

“I think they could be wrong,” he added.

“Well, the good news is that Lyme Disease responds very well to antibiotics in the early stages,” I babbled. “And this would be in the early stages – you’re monitored pretty closely by physicians. Why do you think they could be wrong?”

“Because I could not be that lucky,” he said.

“Sure, you could,” I said. “And, hey – it’s not like Lyme Disease is up there with winning Lotto.”

But I knew what he meant.

###

Shortly after noon yesterday, Ben texted me that he was going into the hospital. Felt like shit, peeing blood.

“Do you feel like you’re slipping into the zone?” I asked cautiously.

“I feel like – yeah. I could be,” he said. “Don’t tell Robin.”

On this point, we were in firm agreement.

I felt very weird when I got off the phone.

I mean, it seems very clear to me that unless he gets a liver transplant – which seems unlikely for any number of reasons – Ben will be dead within the next three to five years. Not sure how to wrap my head around that, so for the most part, I don’t.

But when I’d seen Mark at the Family Dollar the day before, I immediately thought of Ben.

Now.

I did not see Mark at the Family Dollar. Mark died in 2011.

What I saw was a black guy of approximately the same age that Mark would be if he were still alive and who reminded me so acutely of Mark that all I could do was stand there gaping while the cashier repeated, “Ma’am? Ma’am? Ma’am!” with rising irritation.

The time before that, though, I really did see Mark. On the sidewalk, walking toward me, right outside the Ithaca Diner. Mark right down to the fading freckles, the receding hairline, the impish grin, the funny old-fashioned newsboy cap he always wore.

And Mark turned into Ben. It was really Ben that was walking toward me. My mind had played a trick on me. But what a trick.

A short time later, Ben was in the hospital. Dying, I thought. Although that turned out not to be the case.

###

When I got off the phone with Ben, I think I was freaked. I don’t know if I was freaked because truth be told, I seldom feel anything in times of crisis. Oh, I cry plenty – at feral cats when I see them staring hungrily at me from under parked cars; at little children when I see them skipping down the street, holding their mothers’ hands; at climactic scenes during Parenthood and Switched at Birth. But I hardly ever cry when something bad happens in my actual life.

I texted Max: Ben’s in the hospital. I’m worried about Robin. He has finals over the next two weeks, and I’m afraid he’ll freak out and flunk out of school.

If it came to that, I’m sure he’d have the foresight to take a leave of absence, Max texted back.

He didn’t when Justin committed suicide.

That’s true, but it seems like he’s got a better handle on the Big Picture these days. I’ll talk to him.

No! Ben and I aren’t going to tell him unless Ben’s hospitalized for more than a couple of days.

Max read me the riot act! This was not going to go over well with Robin, Robin was not a child anymore; if it was his (Max’s) parents, he’d want to know, and in fact, this was kind of insulting to Robin – Etcetera.

Well, thought I, scrambling to put down the phone. That certainly didn’t go well.

So I called up Jeanna.

“Damn!” she said. “Well, that certainly sucks. Are you going to have to go up to Ithaca?”

“I might,” I said. “Apparently the girlfriend is moving to Tennessee –“

“Wow,” Jeanna said. “Do you think that’s why he got sick?”

“Maybe. Of course, I found out about this in typical Ben dissembling fashion. When I was up visiting Robin a couple of weeks ago, Robin had a major meltdown, worrying about his Dad. Told me the girlfriend had packed up all her things, was moving to be closer to her work or maybe moving in with her son to look after her grandkids. He was totally freaked out that his Dad was going to be all alone.

“So when I got back to Poughkeepsie, I called Ben and said, ‘This is none of my business except insofar as it impacts Robin. But it is impacting Robin. So I gotta ask, What’s going on?’

“And Ben laughed and said Jayne had just packed up some hutch she owned because it was taking up too much room in their apartment. And that maybe she would move because this past winter had just taken it out of her, all that driving, all that snow. But that she was looking for other jobs in Ithaca.

“And then when he told me he was going into the hospital, he added, 'And, oh, by the way, Jayne’s moving to Tennessee tomorrow.'”

“Huh,” said Jeanna. “His heart’s broken so he got sick.”

“Seems like it,” I agreed.

Then I told Jeanna about Mark.

“Denine sees Dad all the time,” she said.

Denine is my recovering meth head sister.

“Ick,” I said.

“She says it makes her happy.”

“Keep going to those meetings, Denine,” I said.

“We’re a very psychic family, Patty. I mean, I don’t know anybody else whose father organized Family Ouija Board nights.”

“I see dead people!”

“Well, how do you think it happens, Patty? There’s no such thing as ectoplasm. They slip through holes in people’s auras and they manifest through those people’s bodies when they have something they need to tell you –“

Jeanna is a very chakra-y kind of gal, but I love her anyway.

###

I thought some more about what Max had said, and in the afternoon I ended up calling Robin. “I thought you’d want to know,” I said. “Do not freak out! I’m sure it’s something minor. I will keep you in the loop on all developments. Your Dad is really, really proud of you and of how well you’re doing in school, and the best thing you can do for him is study hard and really ace your finals –“

Robin took the news really, really well, so Max was right: I underestimated him.

I’m still pissed off at Max, though.

The Meeze picked up on those supersonic, suboracular telepathic frequencies and returned.

I am struggling mightily w/various Saturn in the 12th House issues.

It snowed.

I dreamed about Mark last night, which was disquieting. I asked him what it felt like to be dead.

He laughed. "What a question! Why should it feel like anything?"

"Well, you know," I said, "I wrote to your sister. I wanted to go to your memorial. I'd like to visit your grave –"

He shook his head. Bemused…

I spent the summer of my twentieth year picking fruit in the Hood River valley w/Mark, hanging out at a commune in Pe Ell, Washington, making periodic trips into Portland to pick up unemployment checks. This was not my idea of a good time, it was Mark Conly’s; but I was in love with Mark Conly, and Mark Conly was in love with Woody Guthrie, Tom Joad, and their peculiar version of the American dream.

Being lazy and terrified of heights, I was lousy at picking fruit. Also I hated Pe Ell, a ghost town clustered around a long dead mill with a vaguely sinister aspect. I passed my time there smoking dope and walking long distances on the railroad tracks, pretending the single rails were a tightrope and I was balancing 40 feet above the heads of an invisible crowd of admirers and detractors. This allowed me to keep out of the way of the speed freaks in our little hippie collective.

Loved Portland though. Loved, loved, loved it. Being in Portland felt like one long assignation in the lobby of a noir hotel.

Mark moved back to Portland – oh, about ten years ago before he died. Suspect because of Oregon's liberal suicide policy.

The last time I spoke to Mark while he was still alive, he’d told me the same anecdote three times in a row. Something that happened in Ghana when he was in the Peace Corps. Something having to do with corn crops, economic development.

I didn’t complain. A part of him knew he was repeating himself. Finally he said, “My mind is going, Patreetz.”

“Is that part of the disease process?” I asked cautiously.

“I don’t know. I can’t tell. Docs say it shouldn’t be. Docs say I’m depressed.”

“I wonder why,” I said.

Mark still had that braying laugh. “All I want to do is sleep.”

“Sleep? But why?”

“In my dreams, I run,” he said simply.

I called Mark after that from time to time. Infrequently. Busy signals every time – beep, beep, beep, beep. Honestly? I was glad. I didn’t have to have my heart broken but I still got to lie to myself, tell myself I’d made an effort. Sometimes you have to be shallow to survive.

I honestly don't know why bad things happen to good people.

Say. That's a catchy phrase.

Someone should use it for a book title.

Should be doing Useful Work but my mind is just skittering and scattering.

The Quaff-orama™ was loads o’ fun. I’m going to have to create a special filter if I write in depth about it, though, on account of I spent most of my time interviewing a real live Dom about his sex life, his former job as an emergency room MD, and his tastes in science fiction! For many, this will fall under the heading of TMI.

Suffice it to say, I liked the Dom a lot. He had an air of cozy familiarity about him. Realized afterwards this was because we’re both Jewish, and so share the great lingua franca of sarcasm. When he asked me for my phone number though, I demurred. It’s a little too intimidating to go out with a Dom. As he cheerfully admits, he’s a dog. Once he got done humping my leg, I doubt he’d stick around long enough to sniff my ass and do all the other things dogs do when they really want to get to know you.

One of the things I liked about the Dom is that while he was perfectly aware that he was a nexus for various women’s projections, he didn’t seem to take any of it particularly seriously. There was nothing sinister about him. One got the sense that he was rather bemused by it.

“How did you get started in the Dom racket anyway?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Well, I’m a doctor. From a physiological perspective, I know what it takes to turn a woman on. More to the point, I know what a woman looks like when she gets turned on. So, I’m not buying it if she only pretends to cum. Most men do.”

“So it’s a combination of being pleasured and being busted that predisposes women to want to be dominated by you?”

The Dom laughed. “What can I say? I’m a lucky guy. Women like it. And I discovered I had a talent for it. Naturally, I like it too since I’m in the catbird seat. But, you know, it’s just a continuation of the power dynamics that exist in every relationship.”

His two live-in girlfriends were there too, the immensely charming Jane (who is not really named Jane), the hoydenish Annette (who is not named Annette.) When I call Jane “immensely charming,” I mean just that. She has that gift of settling her attention upon you as if you were the most important person on the planet so that when she finally withdraws that attention, it’s a small heartbreak.

Underneath that charming, cultivated veneer, Jane’s a Maenad. She lives to cum. She’s a woman around my own age, cultivated, educated, dresses much better than I do (okay, okay – that’s not saying much.) Has money. Could easily be married to a Democratic Congressional candidate. And she’s a complete slut. She’ll do anything. She particularly likes cumming in front of groups of people.

Jane seems very happy and very well-adjusted. So does Annette. There’s nothing desperate or crazed or cracked in her affect. It’s kind of like some women take up landscape painting in their late middle age, and Jane took up having orgasms.

In other news, I’m almost finished with Charles Shields’ biography of Kurt Vonnegut, And So It Goes. It’s fascinating the degree to which Vonnegut’s biography reads like one of his novels. For example:

• His mother chooses Mother’s Day on which to kill herself.

• His career at Sports Illustrated lasted exactly one morning: He was assigned a story about a runaway racehorse, spent three hours staring at a blank piece of paper rolled into his typewriter, finally typed, The horse jumped over the fucking fence, picked up his hat and left.

Also Ben called.

After we finished chatting about the Kid and Rutger’s continuing absence, there was a longish pause. I asked Ben gaily, “Read any good books lately?”

“No,” he said. “I had to give up reading. I just can’t concentrate anymore. I forget what I’m reading in the middle of a paragraph.”

“Is that psychological?” I asked carefully.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Of course, it’s not. One of the classic symptoms of hepatic failure, in fact, is forgetfulness and confusion, secondary to circulating toxins that the liver can no longer filter. I wasn't going to tell him if he didn't already know.

I felt so sad for him then. I mean, Ben was so smart and I always enjoyed talking to him, watching the way his mind processed ideas, turned them into new inventions. Such a loss if that’s gone forever – and then I remembered Mark telling me what it was like when your mind began to go. Mark had MS. Died of it eventually. But before that spent a year in bed in a fetal posisiton. And because I can never think of Mark without crying, I began to cry.

Fortunately, the phone chimed again seconds later, and this time it was Jeanna, in the midst of yet another spectacularly baaaaaaad romance, and in five minutes, I was laughing so hard I’d already forgotten about Mark and Ben.

I suppose one of the reasons I hate doing laundry so much is that I do it so infrequently that it all piles up so that when RTT finally runs out of boxer shorts, I’m stuck washing 70 pounds of laundry. Then it has to be loaded up in the car, chauffeured to the laundromat, stain-treated, loaded into washing machines, washed, dried, folded, sorted, driven home, stashed in dressers, hung in closets. An enormously dull task broken down into even duller constituent parts.

The laundromat I go to has a juke box. Today someone was playing tunes from the very first Jackson 5 album. I used to listen to this album a lot when I was living with Mark on 41st Avenue in Oakland. I think of Mark practically every day, but I hadn’t thought of 41st Avenue in years till this music brought me back there. And then I couldn’t remember any of the important details -- What was I doing for money? What was Mark doing for money? Where did I think I’d be in 40 years? Certainly not in Freeville, NY. All I could remember was the horribly claustrophobic layout of the rooms and a peculiar smell that emanated from the apartment upstairs whose tenant -- increasingly beknownst to us -- was slowly going mad.

The Jackson Five album made me melancholy, but, of course, that’s kind of my ground state these days. Melancholy. Not depressed. Mark’s dead, and it was all so transient, and I never guessed that while it was happening. Not that I would have slowed it down or anything. Mark and I had Issues, and I was already thinking it had been a bad idea to fall in love with him -- though I really had control over that. No, if anything I would have sped things up. So I could lurch into the next, ill-advised period of my life -- which I think was the ménage a trois with George and Suzanne. Although, honestly. I don’t remember.

I was also maybe more melancholy than usual because it was the 17th anniversary of Tom’s death. Christ, I know a lot of dead people!

But Tom is the dead person I mourn the most because we were friends, not lovers, and because he stuck around after he died. For years and years I could feel him taking care of me.

And then one day, he wasn’t.

###

When Craig, my horrible next door neighbor, came back from Florida, it was really obvious he was dying. Hadn’t been so obvious before he left.

They were gone a long time, him and Punching Bag Janis. I actually thought maybe they had decided to stay in Florida.
You know how in every Stephen King novel there is always one character who’s slowly rotting from the inside out? That’s Craig. You look at him and you kind of know his organs are foul smelling liquid, held in place by slippery membranes. His insides are one big basket of poison sausage.

I don’t like Craig. But he lives next door. Best to be polite and neutral. Problem for me is that unless I’m actively emitting whiffs of poison gas, I can be easily co-opted. Thus, I’ve had conversations with Craig in which it has occurred to me that he’s not unintelligent. That the problem is that he made the wrong choice, the most lethal choice, at every possible branching of the probability tree.

Plus when someone who has six months to live asks you for a favor, and the favor merely consists in driving him to Ithaca -- where you’re going anyway -- can you really say no?

Well. You can. You have boundaries.

I couldn’t.

So yesterday, I gave Craig a ride to Ithaca. And I think maybe he’s got brain metastases because not only was he evil which is kind of his ground state, he was also stupid, and you know what Hannah Arendt says about the banality of evil -- it’s the very worst kind.

So throughout the entire drive down there, I had to listen to his crazed monotone. “So we’re sittin’ in the Red Lobster and Janis gets so drunk that she starts pukin’ her guts out all over the table. Didn’t go over big with my family. So I said something, and then she slugs me right in front of a cop. So she gets hauled away to the lockup and I go back to the motel to get her purse and they wouldn’t even let me back in the room ‘cause my name wasn’t on the motel contact or whatever the shit it is. She’s got the credit card, right? So then I call my wife -- I guess she’s my ex-wife except we’re still married, I didn’t get no divorce -- and she says I should come and live with her, that she still loves me. Janis just fuckin’ hates her. I had to call Janis’s daughter, the chiropractor, to get the money to get Janis outa jail. That took three days. So Janis gets out, and she starts cussin’ me and hittin’ me again ‘cause she says I spent three days with my ex-wife.” Craig chuckles. “Well, she did slip me some Roxies --“

I am finding this unutterably sordid and also inappropriate with RTT in the car. I slip RTT an anxious glance, but he is oblivious in the backseat, texting 8 million teenagers simultaneously on his phone. Like anything old people say is worth overhearing, right?

I look at Craig sitting beside me. His face is grey. I swear. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody with a grey face before. And of course he is a horrible human being, but it’s also true that he’s being medically mismanaged --

“-- supposed to do the MRI and the biopsy tomorrow,” Craig is saying. “But then I get this call from Syracuse University: We can’t do the MRI ‘cause you got heart stints, and we don’t know if they’re metal or plastic. So now I gotta call that hospital in Florida --“

“Craig,” I say. “You shouldn’t have to call anybody. There should be a medical social worker or case manager who makes calls like that --“

But he isn’t listening. He’s ranting on and on. And I want to stop at the side of the road, open the door to the car: “Sorry, buddy, the ride stops here.”

But he’s dying of liver cancer, so I can’t.

Instead I try to focus on the fact that Craig was once an adorable pink baby. That some doting mother counted Craig’s little pink fingers and toes. Maybe she had a Craig baby book with a stiff white satin cover.

“What did your father do for a living?” I asked Craig. Fully expecting the answer to be, Oh, he raped 12 year olds and made moonshine.

But instead Craig said, “He was an architect.”

And that made it all so much worst!

Christ!

He came from a professional background!

This was atavism, like some fucking Jack London story. Craig told me he used to smoke crack regularly. I didn’t realize smoking crack could do this kind of number on your brain cells.

By then we were in Ithaca. I parked by New Roots which fortunately was also near the Commons where Craig was going. Watched anxiously as RTT got out of the car. “Have a great day, honey!” I said. “Love you!”

“Yeah. Love you too,” said RTT, not looking up from his phone.

Then I drove to the coffeehouse where I regularly write my stupid fluff pieces -- on the agenda today, Arizona short sales! Plus NYC limousine services! -- sat in their parking lot and cried for 15 minutes.

Fucking Craig.

Horrible thing is that I’m sure I’m going to end up giving him rides again, because you can’t say no to someone who’s dying of liver cancer.

Every gritty little city struggling to reconcile its booming manufacturing legacy with the new realities of the service economy has a place in my heart, but none more so than Oakland. I didn’t grow up there but Marybeth and the Raffantis did, and I tapped into their memories. I did spend a major part of my young adulthood on the Oakland/Berkeley borderline, and sometimes when I have insomnia I try to remember the exact layout of the churches and the businesses that line Telegraph Avenue from 51st Street to Alcatraz Avenue. Goodnight Moon.

Do different landscapes summon different emotions or is the emotional resonance a human constant whatever the landscape it attaches to? There used to be a steel mill close to this freeway and back in the day when you could actually put yourself through college if you worked hard enough, Mark had a job at that steel mill as a night janitor. I used to visit him there a couple of nights of nights a week, riding my bicycle, without a light, over rusty railroad tracks, through the crazy streets west of San Pablo. I remember the shadows his flashlight made as I trailed him on his rounds, monsters without bodies, the huge casements and scaffolding and vats.

I’m the solo guardian of those memories now.

Maybe the sense of place is determined by just how many such memories, from hundreds or thousands of people, are embedded in any particular landscape.

Would make a nice central core to a Borgesian, dark urban fantasy story but I can tell -- I'm blithering.

Very weird.

Was supposed to meet Ben today to go over Robin related college stuff and generally hang out since I hadn’t seen him in a while.
There was a mix-up about where we were supposed to meet – I’d said the library, he’d said the State Street Gimme. So I began walking over to the coffee house thinking my own thoughts when all of a sudden I looked up and saw Mark Conly walking towards me, Mark Conly who died in May.

Only it wasn’t Mark. It was Ben.

But even after I knew it was Ben, I could see with my own eyes it was Ben, some other part of me persisted in seeing Mark, right down to the scruffy newsboy cap that Mark always wore.

Ben as Mark. Huh.

It was a really, really strong hit.

The days are going fast. Frighteningly fast. Has something to do with the cyclical nature of the plant life in these part.

In California the plum trees bloom in early March, there’s a brief flurry of anemic looking daffodils, tulips, hyacinths later in the month. For a few brief weeks after the rains, the hillsides around the housing developments come alive with orange poppies and purple lupine.

But basically in California all the vegetation lives or dies without much reference to the calendar. There’s a kind of sameness to the scenery, irrespective of the month, even if the ur-California landscape -- sere grass on the rolling hills, the spiny green of the live oaks clustered on the leeward side of the arroyos, blue sky so intense it almost vibrates -- is engraved on my left ventricle.

Here, something’s always coming into season or dying off. We’re already on to our fourth cycle of spring flowers: First came the crocuses, next the forsythia, then an explosion of daffodils and tulips, and now the lilac is coming into bloom.

Wild flowers just coming into bloom on the path Milo and hike each day. Wild honeysuckle. Tiny violets. Things that look like forget-me-nots but aren’t. Blue, purple and yellow are the key notes for these spring wildflowers. Yesterday I even sighted the first Sweet William – strictly speaking, those are summer flowers. On its way. On its way…

I suppose if I were busier, I wouldn’t pay attention to stuff like this. But maybe this is interesting. I don’t know.

Spent two hours on the phone with Eleanor yesterday. Of course we talked about Mark. I kept repeating that natty little homily that’s served as my mantra for the past month or so: You’re lucky if you can count the number of your true friends on the fingers of both hands…

What’s a true friend?

Why, somebody who’s got your back.

“What do you think his life would have been like if he had gotten into medical school?” Eleanor asked.

“Not so very different,” I said. “I mean, he was pretty conscientious about keeping up with the medications. One has to assume that Kaiser gives its members the very latest in MS treatments, no? To prevent exacerbations, I mean. Kaiser is all about prevention.”

“You know his body odor actually changed towards the end,” said Eleanor. “He always had the sweetest natural scent - like freshly mown hay.”

“I remember,” I said. Although strictly speaking, I didn’t.

“And then in the end – just before we broke up – he started smelling like – I don’t know. Burning metal or something.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “I mean – MS strips the myelin sheath off neurons. Sweating is a parasympathetic nervous response. Makes sense that if the afferent neurons are altered, so is the sensory response. Would you have stayed with him if he’d stayed in California?”

“Oh, probably. And it would have killed me.”

The story I want to write for Mark is the story of the Raymond basketball tournament. Took place during the summer Mark and I spent being itinerant fruit pickers in the Hood River Valley, alternately living at the Pe Ell commune and the Deeses’ messy house in Portland. Quite the miserable summer for me it was, but now that I’m so much older I can see that was because reasonable contentment was just never in the game plan for me: I simply do not know how to be happy the way other people are happy.

Once upon a time Pe Ell had been a logging town. Now it was nothing. Rusty railroad tracks ran through the center of town, past the empty storefront that must have been a barbershop once because it still had its candy stripe pole, past other empty storefronts that were who the fuck knows what, and the one business on the corner that had remained open all these years, a bar. There was nothing to do in Pe Ell but drop acid, but I was more or less past my psychadelic phase by then so I spent all day walking the defunct third rail, training myself to run it, to hop it, to skip it. Only other person I I have a clear picture of from that summer was the beautiful Emily Hudson (who went on to become a hedge fund manager), and that’s only because I worried she might be more beautiful than me.

I don’t actually remember very much about the Raymond basketball tournament. I’d have to make everything up. I’d people it with the other members of the meteor cluster that Mark circulated in even though most of them weren’t there: psychotic Viet Name vet Louie Block; his homicidal brother Billy who disappeared without a trace one day in the late 1980s; Larry Deese, an alcoholic slide guitar player who for reasons unknown to me was always called Raeburn; the Deese brother who died and whose name I can’t remember; fragile, eager, big-eyed Susie; saturnine Joel, the Deese patriarch; Cassius “Creepy” Crowley; El Ron whose real name I can’t remember; Alma, El Ron’s plain, silent wife; blue-eyed Claude Hudson who went on to become a New Jersey limosine service tycoon; silver-tongued Ed Huges, nicknamed Turtle, who after a brief, meteoritic career as a poet and lecturer in residence at the Moscow, Idaho university also upped and disappeared abruptly one day; his girlfriend, Whitey; Rodo a/k/a Tom Rodriguez at whose Raymond squat the basketball game actually took place.

Looking at this list, it suddenly dawns on me that quite a number of these people just… vanished. Is that typical? I figure Billy Block’s body is probably helping the cement provide an earthquake-proof foundation for some Oakland high rise, but what about Turtle? He wasn’t the type to have enemies or to do himself damage. I have the vaguest recollection that the dead Deese brother -- Greg! his name was Greg! -- ODed…

###

How many years ago was this?

Eleanor, her boyfriend Bill and I sitting in some fucking hippie restaurant. Eleanor and I talking about Mark, that old familiar song: how we wished things were different, how we wished there was something we could do for him that would make things different. But of course we knew there wasn’t –

“Good!” Bill interrupted. “And now that we’ve established Mother Teresa isn’t sitting at this table, can we talk about something else?”

Ah, Mark. I’m not sorry you died. I’m only sorry that at the point you checked out, death was a better option than living.

I was watching Malcolm X’s favorite movie when the phone rang. Of course I knew the moment I heard Eleanor’s voice. The only real surprise is that he hadn’t died five years ago.

This is how I’ll always remember you, Mark, at the Berkeley Free Clinic or the Funny Walk Festival the day after our Organic final – an imperially slender youth with a grave half-smile and eyes so piercing they could see beneath the horizon.

“I like to sleep,” you told me once – several years into the ordeal. “Because when I sleep I dream, and when I dream I can still run.”

So unfair, Mark. So goddamn unfair. But the heartbreak for me is the lonely guardianship of all those memories, floaters from an increasingly ephemeral past.

###

The present tense consists of this computer, a jam jar filled with the last daffodils and several branches of Eastern Rosebud’s magenta flowers, two three-wicked candles, an enormous spider plant, a card from Susan depicting the pastel facades of a row of houses on a Venice canal, a card from Marybeth depicting a woman in a gardening hat taking tea with an over-sized rodent, and my roundup of Crafty Chica books – this week if I can find some microscope slides, I’m going to make a luminaria.

This present tense feels as though it’s always been my castle though some remote, switched-on portion of my brain assures me: It was not. Mark? Did I read about him in some book? Was he a character in a novel? And who is Eleanor?

I think I’m feeling something but mostly it is filtered through the neuronal equivalent of gauze or cotton tacking. About five years ago Mark stopped making sense on the phone so I stopped calling. I suppose I should have just kept calling and babbling into the phone receiver so he could hear my voice. I suppose I wasn't a very good friend... But it was hard. So hard.

###

We were lab partners in the basic survey Chemistry class for pre-med students. Later we would joke about it: “There was chemistry between us from the start!” But strictly speaking, that wasn’t so. He thought I was a flake. I thought he was a dweeb. He took the experiments very seriously; I was always racing through them, adding the wrong quantity of reagent. He was good at math; I wasn’t. He got an A; I got a B-.

I did better in Organic Chemistry though which was the kind of extrapolation from a few basic logs of knowledge that I’ve always enjoyed. Kind of like solving a cross-word puzzle. I still remember the final for that class: it involved synthesizing a very complex organic compound; you had every inorganic catalyst in the world to jumpstart the reaction, and you had EtOH – alcohol.

I’m not sure why he agreed to be my lab partner again. We had started becoming friendly acquaintances – I knew a little bit about his life. He had grown up in Plainfield New Jersey, had emigrated to the West Coast with a group of male friends who were running away from the draft en masse – this was the height of the Viet Nam War. They did everything together, this group of male friends, and some of them had women who became reluctant satellites. They’d gone to Oregon. They’d picked fruit. Then the lottery came, and Mark – called “Coon” – and Ed Hughes – called “Turtle” – had low numbers so they decided to see what their shadows looked like in California. They moved to Santa Monica, with Turtle’s girlfriend Beverley – called “Whitey” -- in tow, and went to Santa Monica City College as a way of scamming student loan money to live on only Mark discovered he had an aptitude for hard science along the way.

They’d also worked for some crazy outfit distributing eight-tracks. Mark told me a number of stories about that particular scam, howlingly funny although of course I can’t remember any of them now. We were trading, I thought – he was amusing me and in exchange, I flaunted my pretty little self in front of him, allowed him to paper the walls of what seemed to me to be an awfully pedestrian, utilitarian existence with sexual fantasies.

In those days I was quite the little druggie. I dropped acid whenever I could get my hands on it which was generally several times a week. My trips were always a little like archeological excavations – I saw civilizations rise and fall, and the visuals were always quite enchanting. For example, if I was thinking about Spanish history, then the world around me would seem to be spun from wrought iron and glass, the color scheme would include a lot of blacks and grays and muted scarlets, I would walk ramrod straight as if someone had replaced my spine with a wrought iron rod.

I liked to share these adventures with the various people I met and so on our final day of class I asked Mark, “Wanna drop acid after our Organic final?”

“Sure,” he said.

So we did.

And the funniest thing happened – I fell madly in love with him.

To be continued if I can ever find the time. Oh – and we both got As in Organic Chemistry.

June 26

Jump: Chamberlain, SD → Miller, SD – American Legion Complex: 70 miles
LEFT out of the lot… LEFT onto I-90 BUSINESS to downtown Chamberlain
RIGHT onto HWY 50 to Four Corners… RIGHT onto HWY 34 EAST
LEFT onto HWY 45 NORTH to Miller… arrows to the lot on RIGHT as you enter town
Shows: 5pm/7:30pm

Is Ed McMahon a big enough celebrity to round out a funerary trifecta that also includes Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson?

I maintain he isn’t.

Brandon and Tamara argue that he is.

“I mean, who remembers Johnnie Carson anyway?” I ask, flinging my arms about wildly. “Not me. And I’m actually the age where I should remember Johnnie Carson.”

“You’re forgetting about the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes,” Tamara points out. “The Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes is very, very big throughout the Midwest.”

She’s from Indiana. She should know.

Brandon and Tamara are the show’s ticket takers. Tamara’s 24, a cute brunette; Brandon is a couple of years older and 6’7”. Brandon kind of looks like a Civil War lieutenant, a physical type that’s always appealed to me so when Robin trots out his latest variation on The Game, I choose the Brandon option whenever it’s available.

The Game goes like this:

“All intelligent life has been wiped off the planet. It’s up to you to repopulate it,” says Robin.

“I can’t repopulate the planet,” I say. “I’m post-menopausal.”

“What’s post-menopausal?”

“Never mind. Anyway I don’t want to repopulate the planet. Not with human beings anyway.”

“That’s irrelevant,” says Robin crisply. “And being post emancipated doesn’t affect it at all. You have to choose. And your choices are: Adolph Hitler, Michael Jackson or Brandon.”

“Oh, I pick Brandon.”

“That was a trick question,” Robin informs me loftily. “Michael Jackson’s dead.”

“So’s Adolph Hitler.”

“You don’t know that. They never found his body.”

“Oh, I think it’s a safe surmise.”

“Maybe Hitler’s in South America somewhere.”

“He’d be really, really old.”

“Maybe he’s being kept alive on a secret formula of crushed Viagra and the lymph of Jewish virgins –“

“Robin! That joke’s in really questionable taste –“

“Maybe Michael Jackson’s still alive,” says Robin. “Maybe he’s being kept alive with daily injections from the scrotal sacks of 14 year old albinos –“

“Robin!”

“Well, they’re the whitest people I could think of –“

“Robin!”

“Remember when I was scared of Michael Jackson?”

I do indeed. It was back in 2002, during Jackson’s trial in Santa Maria. There was so much media coverage that Jackson was transformed into an archetypal bogeyman. Robin was seven. He didn’t know what Jackson was accused of exactly, only that it was bad and that it had to do with boys just a few years older than him. He made me check his closet and underneath his bed before he’d settle down at night.

“Any guesses what big star is gonna croak today” I ask, changing the subject. “They always die in threes, you know.”

“Why?”

I shrug. “It’s an immutable law of magic.”

“David Carradine.”

“No. Victims of autoerotic asphyxiation are the sole exception to the immutable law of magic.”

“What’s autoerotic asphyxiation?”

“Never mind.”

“Oh, come on, Mom. I know what autoerotic asphyxiation is. It’s when you jack off with a rope around your neck –“

“Robin!”

“Okay. You’ve been picked up by Al Quaida and they’ve sentenced you to be executed. You’re gonna die. But… But… You get to choose how you’re gonna die. You have three choices: you can overdose on heroin, you can get hit by lightening. Or you can die by autoerotic asphyxiation after the biggest orgasm of your life –“

“Robin!”

“You’re right. Mothers don’t have sex lives,” he says and goes off to pet the tigers.

###

I suppose one reason why I’m resistant to the thought that Ed McMahon is the third dead celebrity is because I was never obsessed with Ed McMahon the way I was obsessed with Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson.

After Mark and I came back from fruit picking and scamming unemployment in the summer of 1972, we rented an apartment on 41st Street in Oakland, not far from the Berkeley border and mere blocks away from the place where Patty Hearst was kidnapped – famous Patty alert! collect the whole series! The apartment was a bargain! Two bedrooms, a huge kitchen, a big back yard and only $350/month.

We didn’t have to sign a lease. It was a month to month arrangement.

The woman who lived upstairs from us was severely schizophrenic. She’d confided this to me when we first moved in.

Classic case of too much information, I thought. And anyway she seemed perfectly normal.
As if reading my mind the woman said, “See I’m on my meds now. But every summer I go off my meds and, well… I just thought I’d warn you. Do you like the Jackson Five?”

As it turned out I did like the Jackson Five very, very much. Never Can Say Goodbye had become my secret theme song for my fixation on Mark.

The first sign that out neighbor’s meds were wearing off came one night around 2:30am when she played Never Can Say Goodbye fourteen times in succession while clomping around her dining room – first clockwise, then counter clockwise. It was the base line that gave the song away, I couldn’t really make out the singer’s voice. Our neighbor was laughing a lot, talking as though to someone else in the room – although I supposed it was really some aberrant part of her own personality that had separated out. “No,” I heard her screeching. “No-o-o-o-o. I’ll never say goodbye. And they can’t make me.”

Even Mark couldn’t sleep through that.

“Can’t you go up there and knock on her door?” I raged. “Tell her to shut up?”

“No, I can’t go up there and knock on her door,” said Mark for whom laissez faire was not an economic concept but a religion. “She’s obviously having a private moment.”

The next day Mark went out and bought two pairs of cheap wax earplugs.

But of course I wasn’t going to use mine.

And promptly at 2:30am, the concert started again.

It was obvious the vinyl LP had suffered some damage from all that jumping around the night before. There were noticeable breaks in the base line where the record was scratched. This time she played the song thirty-three times. And instead of tromping round and round, she jumped up and down. Five jumps. Then three. Then five again. “I am not a bad girl,” she screamed. “I will not say goodbye. “They will say goodbye.”

The earplugs worked: Mark slept straight through it.

The next night she went back to fourteen again.

By this e my never entirely latent Serious Bitch Potential was manifesting in full force.

“I don’t understand it,” said Mark. “I mean, it’s a total waste of money – the wax ones work perfectly fine – but if you want me to buy the expensive ear plugs, I will –“

“Expensive ear plugs won’t make any difference!” I snarled.

“Well. They would if you used them,” Mark observed mildly.

“I’m not going to use them. She can’t make me use them. She should stop playing Michael Jackson at two-thirty ayem in the morning!” I screamed.

That night she played Never Can Say Goodbye forty-six times.

Thing was I felt a certain horrifying sense of identification with my insane upstairs neighbor. I didn’t want to feel it, I must hasten to add. But how was it that out of all Motown’s vast repertoire she’d picked this particular song to orchestrate her madness? A song I hummed to myself ten times a day while agonizing what to do with my relationship with Mark?

After an entire week without sleep, I was pretty bat shit crazy myself. One night Mark and I got into an argument over who was the greater writer, D.H. Lawrence or John Steinbeck. After Mark quoted Woody Guthrie for the third time, I tried to pick up his dog – a cockapoo who frequently pissed on my clothes to show his contempt. “Well, what do you expect?” asked Mark. “He is a barbarian,” for the animal’s name was Conan.

“What do you think you’re doing?” asked Mark. “Put Conan down –“

The dog growled and snapped at my face.

“If you ever mention Woody Guthrie again, I’m gonna kill your dog!” I screeched. “In fact, I’m gonna kill him anyway. I hate him and I hate you –“

(Credit where credit is due: this was long before the famous magazine cover!)

I lurched towards the open window. Of course we lived at ground floor: if I had been able to throw Conan out the window, he wouldn’t have been hurt. But of course there was no way I could lift thirty-five pounds of furious, writhing dog high enough to get a good aim.

And anyway my true goal was to rouse Mark out of his utter passivity. Other people thought it was bonhomie. I knew better.

This I succeeded in doing.

“Put. Him. Down. NOW,” said Mark, and he pushed me away from the window. I fell backwards against the fireplace mantle. One of its square edges got me in my left temple.

Within 60 seconds there was a lump as big as a tennis ball rising from my skull.

We went to the emergency room. “No insurance at all?” asked the admitting nurse. The ER doc spent exactly six minutes shining a flashlight into my eyes. He didn’t think an x-ray was necessary.

The next night Mark stayed awake with me and on the fifteenth repetition of Never Can Say Goodbye, we called the police together.

They were very familiar with our upstairs neighbor. As was our landlord – she was his sister, it turned out. And the reason why our rent was so cheap.

His voice was cold over the phone. “I really don’t understand why you felt the need to do that,” he said. “It’s never been a problem for anybody else. I mean, I understand it’s a bit irregular. That’s why we reduced the rent. Anyway, I want you out at the end of the month –“

It took me another year to figure out that I could say goodbye to Mark after all.

###

My fixation on Farrah Fawcett was your standard Brunette Amazon Lesbian Crush. I was – am – tall, big-boned. I was born with a white streak that quickly spread to take over my whole scalp. Before it spread, I had very, very dark hair. I am swarthy – “olive skinned,” if you’re being polite.

Farrah Fawcett, on the other hand, was petite and blonde.

Are blondes human?

Serious question. I grew up in New York City where everyone is ethnic. Ethnic people are not blondes. Grace Kelly, Catherine Deneuve, Swedes, Norwegians, every member of Hitler’s defunct Master Race – they’re mutants who somehow managed to rig the genetics game to make it appear as though they’re the big winners in life. They’re not. Natural blondes are more susceptible to all sorts of sinister melanomas while unnatural blondes court non-Hodgkins melanoma every time they reach for the Lady Clairol.

Naturally blondes are an object of erotic fascination for me.

I remember the first time I saw Logan’s Run. Farrah Fawcett had a small, forgettable part in the film. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I was instantly transformed. I was Caliban. I was Humbert Humbert. I was the nameless male protagonist of John Fowles’ The Collector. I was every person rendered hideous and misshapen by the sheer weight of a desperate, impossible yearning.

Later that year came the poster. That hair! Those teeth! Those nipples…

Also, of course, that boxy jaw, that horse-shaped face, those rather narrow, foxy eyes. But see, that’s the thing about great beauty – it’s not prettiness, it’s not classical perfection, it’s always flawed. (Back when I was working for People Magazine, I once interviewed a very young Julia Roberts. She wasn’t pretty. In fact, she looked something like a weasel – very long boney face, thin lips, eyes a tad too close together. But then she smiled, and it was like sunlight streaming through grimy stained glass.)

Back then I had girlfriends as well as boyfriends. I did the girlfriends mostly out of a sense of political obligation – this was Berkeley in the 70’s after all and I was a member of the Berkeley Feminist Health Collective, Helping You Make Friends With Your Pussy Since 1971. I worked there a few hours every week, on Tuesday afternoons.

We did pap smears and routine STD checks mostly. Yup – we were practicing medicine without a license. The Berkeley City Health people were happy to look the other way though: every milky microscope slide, every drop of dishonorable discharge was a specimen they didn’t have to take. We also taught women how to look at their own cervixes. This part I didn’t like so much. If God had intended us to look at our cervixes, I figured, they would be on the outside, right?

I liked the looking at pussies part though.

Problem was I didn’t like looking at the women attached to them. They were all very butch at the Berkeley Feminist Health Collective, one big sea of blue work shirts and bandanas.

They didn’t like me either. Every shift ended with an invigorating criticism/self-criticism session. Rickety folding chairs were dragged out, arranged in a big circle. We’d sit on them, go round the room, enumerating our grudges against ourselves and one another. It reminded me of Synanon.

TBC…

Pissy mood all this week.

The Portland fall-out, yes, but also the realization that even if I could figure out a way to stop sleeping, it would now take me approximately 120 hours to catch up on all the things I should have done last week. I suppose that means I'm officially beyond the Point of No Return.

Life as Triage: the new 21st century model.

The store didn't do so well last week and the whyfores baffle me: except for one day when the fog did its rain dance, the weather has been unremittingly balmy & bright; tourists abound, ripe fruit for the picking; and I inched the family several months closer to the Maytag box under the bridge by investing in several thousand dollars worth of People For the Eating of Tasty Animals teeshirts and assorted kitsch. We cleared three grand. I was aiming for four.

The couple who used to own Salsas, Etc. wandered into the store yesterday. They are Australopithecus to my own Homo Erectus – or maybe that should be Homo Claudicatio (ha-ha, I know Latin and you don't!) – so naturally I was very interested in what they had to say, although mildly irritated too because people kept wandering into the store throughout and I couldn't really focus on selling those people hot sauce – or offensive teeshirts or overpriced ceramic kitsch – what with Mr. and Mrs. Etc bending my ear.

They put a lot more into the business than I've ever done, I must say. Development deals up the wazoo. Sold Walls of Flame to every restaurant in a fifty mile radius. Knew every hot sauce maker and food packager on the West Coast by first name. And they still couldn't make a go of it.

What hope is there for me?

One thing's for certain: I've got to buff up that website. When they finally gave up and sold the business – and they broke even on the sale – it was the website that the guy with the checkbook was actually buying.

"We threw a clause into the contract too," said Mrs. Etc. "Five percent royalties on every sale, in perpetuity."

"That was smart," I said.

"Well, yeah. But we've never been able to collect it. The guy turned around and sold the business to those people in Yuba City –"

"Ah, yes. A branch of the Patel family, seeking to expand beyond the lucrative motel franchises –"

"I didn't know that," said Mrs. Etc. "Got a piece of paper? I'd like to write that down –"

"Well, the only people who seem to be able to make a go of hot sauce are the immigrant families," I said. "Light My Fire in the LA Farmers Market are Koreans. Then you have the Hot Licks empire out of San Diego – they're Mexicans. I guess when you don't have to figure labor costs into the equation you stand a chance of coming out ahead."

I've been redesigning the website for four months now. Crashing halt came because I've played obsessive/compulsive over one minor design spec – I wanted a particular torn paper edge look to one particular jpg on the home page and I decided it would take too long to do in Photoshop so I needed to download a particular set of filters which are all over Limewire for PC's but not for Macs. As it so often does, the focus shifted – I've completely forgotten what I wanted the software for and am doggedly invested in the hunt. How dumb is that? How typical is that?

Meanwhile in a parallel universe, someone who looks like me is sitting in a room with white walls and a view of the ocean, grieving for Mark, and raging at God: asshole, if you do exist, what is the point of all this human suffering?

So. Portland.

Byron yammered about his sex life. Mark filled me in on his suicide plans.

In between, I stayed in a Really Good Hotel.

Other people's sex lives can be entertaining if other people tell the truth about them which Byron clearly wasn't. There is this guy in Miami, see, and he and Byron spotted each other across a crowded room. The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer orchestra descended on a purple cloud and began playing, "Some Enchanted Evening." The guy in Miami had a lot in common with what some of us might call rough trade having grown up in a series of foster homes and embarked upon his hustling career at the age of 14. Only he was not rough trade, he was the most intelligent, sensitive man you could possibly imagine with the biggest, hugest, rock hard cock – not that the two are always inversely correlated, but still. And he practically cried when Byron shoved money into his hand, he didn't want to take it, but Byron insisted because see, that's the thing about Byron – he's a rambling man, he doesn't want to get tied down even though he knows this thing with the guy in Miami is the Real Mojo, two souls finding water in the desert –

Uh-huh.

All this was recounted at the Food Court in the Multnomah Mall (another proud jewel in the Amalgated Aggregate corporate diadem), a few minutes after our meeting with the marketing manager. I had to wonder what it was about the marketing manager that had set Byron off like this – was it her frilly lace-trimmed pink cardigan? The little yesterday-today-and-tomorrow pendant dangling in the valley between her virginal breasts? The fact that they are now apparently handing out MBA's to daycare graduates?

I just smiled, keeping time with my eyebrows, and shoveled food into my mouth. Panda Express isn't half bad for mall food – the frozen greenbeans in the General Mao chicken add a lively crunch. Byron's saga expanded – now they were meeting in Atlanta, Byron murmuring in the Miami guy's with the freighted tenderness that only doomed passion can inspire – 'cause a rambling man's got no time for LUV, no; the Benjamin is always on the pillow – "What's a young black stud like you see in an old fat white guy like me?" This kind of threw me out of the story. I mean, c'mon: this isn't what the cowboys tell each another in Louis L'Amour. Sometimes one can but marvel at the human capacity for self-deception – Byron's, the two Jessica Simpson look-alikes at the table next to us pawing futilely at Chad Michael Murray in the glossy pages of Teen People, and of course, my own.

Not Mark's, though. I stayed over in Portland an extra day on JDK's dollar just so I could see Mark and we'd barely finished the air kisses before he gripped my hand. "Tell me what would you think if I… suicide…"

"It's why you decided to move to Oregon," I said. "I knew it at the time. I didn't say anything but I knew. Is it time?"

"I think so," said Mark. "I'm working on my will."

"Well, don't leave me anything."

"Don't leave you anything," said Mark and he laughed.

"Okay, leave me some photographs. And your diary. You know how I am about other people's diaries."

"I don't keep a diary."

"Well then start one. And leave it to me." I sighed and sank down on my knees next to his wheelchair. Kissed his hand, which continued to grip mine with abnormal strength. Spasticity. "This really sucks, you know."

"Life's unfair," said Mark. "And then you die."

"That's not really an accurate syllogism. Even if it were fair, you still die."

"True," he said. "True."

Sweeney, his caretaker, had wandered into the room and silently taken a chair.

"I'm getting worse, Patreetz," Mark said. "I'm starting to forget things. And sometimes when people are in the room talking, I don't understand what they're saying. It's like they're speaking a foreign language. I've got to –" he pulled his hand away from mine and played with the controls of the wheelchair. Made it lie flat. He was in pain, I could see, when he sat up straight.

"Mark, you really don't have to sit up for me –"

"No, no. I want to. I have to ask you a medically related question. What's the best way?"

"To commit suicide, you mean?"

"Yeah."

"Well, pills, I should think. Phenobarbitol or some other barbiturate. You want to stay away from opiates – they'll make you throw up. Have you talked to your doctor?"

"At Kaiser? No. No. They're not going to go along with assisted suicide."

Then what was the point of moving here? I thought. But again. Said nothing.

A lot of nothing was said around the edges of the something over the next two hours. I was very animated and bright. Chatty Patty. Walking, talking David Sedaris robot in a dress. I told him all about JDK and the circus – "The most useful skill any circus performer can possess is a CDL license –" and the hot sauce store, and Max as a young man and potential presidential candidate, and Robin as a human incarnation of Puck, and the plot of the serial killer novel I'd just finished reading the night before at the Mallory Hotel and how faced with the horror of nothing to read I'd pulled myself out of the air-conditioned room and run down to Powell's –

"Powell's!" said Mark. I think he was smiling. It was hard to tell because his mouth muscles have frozen into a kind of permanent rictus. "The world's greatest bookstore. Patreetz, do you remember the summer we spent up here after we cashed our unemployment checks we'd always run over to Powell's –"

"— and buy armloads of books!" I smiled and nodded. "I still have that copy of The White Goddess –"

"Have you read it yet?"

"I don't have to read it to know what's inside of it –"

"That was the summer you spent picking fruit in the Hood River Valley, right?" asked Sweeney. "Good times."

"Not really," I said. "Mark's friends all hated me. But we bought a lot of books."

I was chattering like a maniac but I was frozen inside.

Finally in the midst of all that chattering I fit in "good bye." I could have stayed longer but I wanted so desperately to get away that even the security lines and the spectral overhead voices at the airport came to seem like sanctuary. What kind of friend are you anyway? chimed a reproachful voice in my brain. A bad friend, I thought. Maybe if I had been a better friend, Mark wouldn't have had to slink away to Portland to die.

But the truth is that bad things happen to the people you love and your own life goes on. You wave at them from the back of the train. It's all you can do.

Scratch that. I did call one person back: Mark. About whom I have been feeling horribly guilty lo these few months past. Around Xmas I had some scattered thoughts about going up to Portland, spending a couple of days cleaning his apartment and stockpiling food. There aren’t enough lepers in Monterey whose feet need washing, you see. Thoughtlessly, I explored the notion with Mark by phone so that when the Grand Gesture – something more than a fantasy but something less than a resolve – fell through, the only option was to ignore him for a couple of months.

His birthday came and went. I ignored it.

Eleanor’s birthday came – I sent her a card. She called. "How are you?" I asked.

"My doctors are weaning me off Prozac," she said.

"How’s that going?" I asked.

She sighed. "It’s like waking up from a hundred years sleep. Except there’s no prince waiting in the wings to kiss you."

In the background I could hear her present boyfriend yelling at her about how calls made on landlines cost real money. "Just lay off me," she told him, but a few seconds later we hung up.

But then it was my birthday and Mark called me. At the store. How did he get that number? I wasn’t there, of course. I was home cacooning, curled up on my bed with the dogs, reading about why Tom broke up with Penelope and planning my sixty-second birthday party.

But at least he remembered. Not only my birthday but the name of my store. Oriented to time and place.

Ben called to tell me.

"How did he sound?" I asked.

"Weird."

"Depressed?"

"No. Weird. Like he was having trouble breathing. Like the MS has progressed to some kind of diaphragmatic involvement."

Penelope probably figured it was just too weird to be involved with someone who misspelled her last name, I thought. Or maybe it was the Scientology. Or the closet homosexuality. Or the fact that two high-profile brunettes just look wrong together at movie premieres. I sighed. "I’ll call him," I told Ben.

I waited three hours though. During that three hours I thought back to those days in Berkeley, our early twenties, long ago. I tried to remember that acid trip where I first fixated on Mark – blind puppy opening its eyes. I passed Death somewhere on the fire trail that leads from the Botanical Gardens to the top of Grizzly Peak, and I stared Death down. Or so I imagined. Now that I’m so much closer to a formal sit-down, I worry that Death will remember me like Death remembers Mark.

Finally I called him.

"Patreetz!"

Ben was right about the voice.

"Happy birthday. Many happy returns! What are you doing to celebrate?"

A little choking thing every three words or so. A gasp, a stutter. I imagined Mark sitting alone in that shabby Section 8 apartment with its horrible clutter and its caged animal smell. Mark has the least aesthetic sense of any human being I’ve ever met. The place he shared with Eleanor looked like the Gulag rec room. The current boyfriend has a sense of style: he and Eleanor live in a high ceilinged house with a lot of antiques and a view of a garden. When I drove up to Portland the year before last and offered to take stuff to Mark, I thought Eleanor would throw together a care package. Candy, books, CD’s. That kind of thing. Instead she boxed up every single one of those hideous industrial lamps with the fraying cords and the chair whose Naugahyde leaked stuffing through multiple holes – a fixture in the Oakland apartment for the twenty years they lived there – and when I finally got there I had to lug it up four flights of stairs.

"I’m vegging," I told Mark. "A rare luxury for me. But how are you?"

"I’ve been better. A lot better."

"You don’t sound good, Mark." No one could ever accuse me of tact. "You sound like you’re having trouble breathing."

"You’re fading out on me, Patreetz."

I did my Verizon commercial imitation, shouting into the phone. "Can you hear me now?"

"Damn! These cordless phones. You know the batteries run out and then you can’t hear anything. I got to get new batteries."

I had this sudden horrible premonition that he hadn’t been out of the apartment in days. That he couldn’t dress himself. "What’s going on?" I shouted.

"Well, you know, my eyesight’s going. So I can’t even read anymore. Damn."

"What does your doctor say?"

"Patreetz, I can barely hear you. You know I’ve been wanting to read the Torah. The Torah! That’s the real Holy Book of the Jews, you know. They don’t really relate to the Old Testament. It’s like their Bible."

"More like their Upanishads," I said. "Rabbinical interpolation of primary source materials."

"Really? I didn’t know that. That’s fascinating."

"Mark, what does the doctor say?"

"I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you at all. It’s like there’s no one on the phone."

This went on for a few more minutes. There seemed to be a pattern – he could hear me when I lapsed into intellectual babble but couldn’t hear me when I asked him about medical symptoms. That kind of selectivity argued something psychological was going on. Or did it? Possibly his multiple sclerosis had sentience: it did not like being talked about. Or maybe it really was just a flakey phone.

I felt like shit when I hung up. Glanced at a clock: you couldn’t even last ten minutes on the phone with him, you fair-weather friend, chimed a voice in my head. It reminded me horribly of conversations I might have with my mother those last dreary months and I thought to myself: he’s dying, and he shouldn’t die alone.

Mark’s family is something of a medical rarity. Among six siblings, three – brothers – developed MS. A cluster! The CDC was hot for them.

The surviving siblings all live on the East coast.

Then I did something that would make Mark furious if he ever found out about it: I did a Yahoo People Search and located his sister’s email address. Carol, I wrote:

I think Mark's at a point where he can't live independently anymore. Or if he does live independently, he needs to live closer to a social network -- and that would be his family since his friends are scattered. The bottom line is that Mark needs to be close to people who love him. He needs it very much.

She emailed back immediately. They were all terrified by what was going on with Mark. But he was stubborn. He did not want their help or suggestions.

Your work cut out for you, I thought to myself. You’ve got to call him every night. You’ve got to persuade him to go home.

But I already knew I wouldn’t.

Full moon rising over its fish-scale tail in the dark ocean waters. I watch moodily from the parapet, smoking a cigarette; twenty feet below, a guy sits on a piece of driftwood, playing his saxophone. We are joined in this moment, me and Mister Stranger. Life’s a beach, I think, and then we die. I put the cigarette out and go back into the store.

Death’s been on my mind a lot these past couple of days. Got a letter from Janie and another check – “Oh, Patty, seventy is so very, very different from fifty. Or even sixty.” – and I know she’s been thinking about my mother again, plotting her own Death In Venice moment. That’s what happens when you have literary sensibilities. I think of Mark Conly in his wheelchair alone up in Portland, whom I haven’t called in months, and speculate idly about the trip east Eleanor and I will be making together, probably sooner rather than later, to attend his funeral. Via the estimable Marybeth comes the news that Tim Ware (Tim Ware!) spent a good part of last week wafting in and out of ER’s with chest pains and is now scheduled for an angioplasty. Tim Ware, professional Puer Aeternas. If it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone. It might happen to me…

“We think we have control over things,” said Marybeth in her comfortable bourbony matron’s voice. “But we don’t.”

Indeed.

Shortly after I go back into the store, a man comes in, toddler in arms. Ugly-looking toddler with thin blonde hair and receding chin, no doubt about her paternity. “Dew yew have Dive’s Insanity Soce?” the man asks, and when I come out from behind my counter and lead him to it, his face brightens.

“Had a buddy who used this to play quite a trick with this,” he says. “At Camp Pendleton. People were always stealing his sandwiches. He wanted them to quit. So one day he doses a batch of sandwiches with Dave’s! There was some hollering, I can tell you.”

“Camp Pendleton,” I say. “Are you a soldier?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says. “On three weeks leave.”

“I’m not trying to get you to buy anything,” I say, “but if you do decide to buy something, we have a fifteen percent military discount. We support you. We’re behind you. We think you’re very brave.”

The man shifts the toddler in his arms and holds out his free hand. “My name is Jeremy,” he says.

Shortly afterwards I close shop. Ben comes by to pick me up. “I witnessed a scene of generosity tonight,” says Ben. “It was quite uplifting. Testament to the human spirit.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“I was at KFC buying a bucket of chicken for the kids.“ Halen and Kodiak had invited themselves over to spend the night with Robin; Max always eats for four. “One of the homeless guys who lives under the wharf here was hanging out on the bench outside the store. So I place my order, I’m hanging out waiting for the chicken to be ready and this well-dressed black guy sails in followed by the homeless guy. ‘A bucket of chicken for myself,’ says the black guy, ‘and a chicken sandwich for this gentleman here.’”

“That was very nice of him,” I said.

“Wait! It gets nicer. When the black guy’s starts to pay, the Hispanic guy behind the counter reaches into his pocket. ‘I’ll take care of the sandwich,’ he says, and puts a five dollar bill into the till. He’s making – what? Minimum wage? Anyway, I was impressed.”

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.

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Every Day Above Ground

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Mallory's Camera

Entries tagged with mark

Nature v. Nurture

The Tibetans of Ithaca

The Lesson Plan

Of LUV and the Sameness of Snow

How I Will Survive the Upcoming ISIS Slaughter

Of Hyde Park, Gore Vidal, the Continuity of Inner Narratives, and the True Because

I See Dead People: Part Quatre

I See DEAD People!

In Which Our Heroine Talks To the Dom

Of Laundry, Mark and Hannah Arendt

Saudade or Welschmertz?

I See Dead People!

The Great Raymond Washington Basketball Tournament

Mark Conly: March 12, 1949 - May 9, 2011

Immutable Laws, Never Can Say Goodbye & the True Face of Beauty

Torn Edges

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Mark

Testaments to the human spirit

Snakes in the garden