On the Loss of a Friend

For being so indecisive, my friend did a terribly decisive thing. He died.

On July 18, 2012, at 60, he quit all: excessive upper-body corpulence, the hauling around of which had crushed his feet; the crushed feet; the diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritis, and bad heart that also resulted from extreme upper-body corpulence; the filmmaking career he had never been able to slide into; the unemployment he had never been able to slide out of; the disability pension, a devil in disguise, that paid out too little, but then again paid out something every month, making him loathe to jeopardize those payments in any way, which bamboozled him into taking a tenner under the table now and again for $65-an-hour driving stints because the bandit limo company knew—anyone would have known—what was going on, forcing him to demean himself this way because being totally unemployed made him feel really out of it and really useless and he really needed some extra cash, but by now he was really afraid not to be unemployed and give up that disability pension; the paranoia and worse isolation suffered because he wouldn’t meet friends without his dentures, but couldn’t wear them (the dentures) because the term in his disability pension for refitting dentures didn’t start until after he had mashed down his gums not wearing them (the dentures) because they hurt so much and no one had ever told him that such a thing was possible (mashing down your gums) when you had no teeth and so he couldn’t be refitted for any dentures after that anyway, which only intensified the craving-to-break-out/fear-to-break-out dissonance he had no one to tell about; the five a.m. onset of summer rush-hour traffic heaving across the bypass 100 yards from his bypass-facing bedroom window kept open because air conditioning units were not in disability pensions, although fans were and he had gotten one, a ceiling one, but hadn’t realized at the time the advantage of getting a really rackety one, so even though he kept it whirring all the time it was too quiet to drown out the noise of the five-a.m., 100-yard-distant rush-hour traffic of corporate climbers, every one, piloting eight-cylinder high-octane-powered road rockets who had somewhere to be, so although he thought being unemployed at least entitled him to sleep in, this, too, was ripped out as if from the very innards of his living viscera; the early-morning nausea because of all of the above; the anxiety attacks because of all of the above. On July 18, 2012, a Wednesday, he left it all.

During the last weeks of his life he lay trapped anyway under six feet of water. So it seemed. The all of him glued motionless to his bed as if getting launched to the moon, his lungs the only movement under a flimsy carapace, that and his heart pumping away—he could feel it; it scared him; it exposed him; it endangered him; he couldn’t tell anyone—working hard to suck air down through all that water with something stuck in his throat. And he got just enough—an instant at a time—to bring him to the edge, another edge, another abyss, another panic, then God-struck awe, another toke. He concentrated on the next toke, aware, but very aware, of little flames erupting everywhere deep down inside of him. Those deep spots knew how deep down they were. They needed what was coming through his throat. They flared when a dose came, they flared when a dose failed, doses that would save him, help him maybe haul himself up to the surface, the hardest climb he would ever make, where he would be laved in oxygen he would breathe and breathe and breathe.

The doctors marched quietly in and marched quietly out after having done nothing but extend their report and impart fresh clinical optimism from highly skilled observations: greater movement had been detected in his right eye. Which only made it clear that the rest of him wasn’t moving at all, an apparent inertness belied by the diapers they had fitted him with. (Well, they hadn’t fitted him. He got regulation size because, as he had always said, he had no ass.) The left eye was frozen, whether open or shut didn’t matter because it was blind from the other side. Light zoomed back to a reception center no longer receiving. Which was to say my massive friend had had a stroke and his view up now would be his last and despite desperate, though imperceptible, attempts to rise to the surface, he probably knew now, finally—the deep, tormenting spurts of panic told him—the meaning of life; he knew now, and couldn’t tell anyone he knew, the greatest, most shattering, most penetrating wisdom of all: he wasn’t going to break surface. He was looking up from way down under at his final truth: life ended.

It had not always been thus.

At his best, a long time ago, Frank was pure helium captured in intense, flashing, handsome color, cheerful, snappy, vigorous, full to bursting with good humor, energetic, giddy with life, but not, unfortunately, a self-starter. So how many of us in this world are? Those leading tendrils shoot up and out into rarified heights to find, my goodness, the sturdy beam of Fate mysteriously there, lending support to what is unquestionably extraordinary talent, skill, vision, ambition, thrust, drive, and prestidigitation not to mention frenetically inspired shenanigans—don’t ask me what all else is in that mix, because neither I nor Frank was dusted with that magic. Nevertheless, I will add with chastened wisdom that Frank, myself, and just everyone found out about these spectacular “self-starters” because Fate happened to be there to carry them forward. They moved with it, no question about that, and they were self-starters, yes, they had had a brainchild of some kind or other, indeed, but the magnitude of their spectacular effect was aided by, could only be a result of, something no less powerful than Fate.

Needless to say, no limb of Fate was there waiting to convey Frank to greatness, but nor was Frank a leading tendril. He was more like a piece of clover in full bloom in a field of clover in full bloom, sitting day after day in glowing sun, shadow, darkness, moonlight, sun again, aquiver in the breeze he himself helped perfume, cheery bright soft luminous alluring waiting, waiting, waiting until a bumblebee should alight on his fragrant head to mine his treasures and make of it honey, history, legend, culture, art. No less did Frank expect. No less would satisfy him. Please note, it was not himself Frank needed to make all that, but the bumblebee. He needed that bumblebee. He needed the right bumblebee, a bumblebee that was going to turn him into a movie producer and filmmaker, because that’s what he had gotten into his head he was going to be. He was waiting for a bumblebee with seed money, financing contacts, powerful production partners, and equipment who was also on a first-name basis with Rumpelstiltskin. He waited thirty-five years. The bumblebee never alighted. Frank never made his move. Frank blamed the bumblebee. I know all about it because I got caught up in this for a few weird months. Maybe I like extremely weird things, because that’s when our real friendship began.

At that time, we had, both of us, been stupidly optimistic, stupidly arrogant, bumptious, convinced of our exceptional qualities, willing ourselves to succeed with a steely egotism that enabled us to shoulder aside any fool who did not agree that we were, yes, high-flying self-starters of earth-shaking potential. In this rosy phase of our lives, we met quite coincidentally in the grocery store where I worked and Frank, recently moved to the area, now shopped. Old high school classmates, I was quick to confide to him that I actually didn’t work in a grocery store, that I was the author of the recently completed play, “The Mollification of Louise.” (To imagine the quality of the dramatic text, perform a simple extrapolation of the title.) Without a blink of his flashing black eyes, Frank crowed to the overhead fluorescent lights that he would produce it.

To initiate the process, Frank set up a meeting with a guy who was to serve in some executive capacity I didn’t know a play needed. I attended the meeting—it was him, Frank, and me—in this guy’s scruffy apartment by a highway. Never mind that the guy was on Welfare, he was a mover and shaker in the world of visuals to whom Frank was desperately devoted because Frank had paid out so much in gas to haul this guy around already to get seed money from really big wheels in the movie industry who actually produced movies in other states and knew the guy by name, or at least the guy knew them by name, that Frank just had to get some of his money back.

I was invited to sit on a mattress on the very dusty wood floor and so I sat on it while the guy served tepid tea that might have been herbal or black, I couldn’t tell which. It gave Frank problems to sit so low, and I started feeling pretty squeamish about our relative positions and the seediness of the place and the guy himself, who made it all worse by pulling some dope out of his pocket and inviting us to partake. That made Frank sweat, especially since I wasn’t interested—I was there in a professional capacity. Frank meekly declined. The guy took a few tokes out of bravado, then put his kit away. But the gesture gave me an inkling of the general temper and potential of Frank’s play production meetings.

The discussion of the matter for which we had gathered began with this guy and Frank launching into budgetary details: how much money they would need to produce my play, which they had mysteriously, unanimously, urgently decided they would produce—without having read it. The necessary minimum budget escalated until it was in the millions of dollars, discussion of which they protracted ingeniously with perfectly straight faces, nodding ingratiatingly to me from time to time as if I were the source of all this wealth. They then discussed with whom they could “interface” to get these millions of dollars; what federal, state, local, and institutional budgets they could tap, zap, penetrate, cruise with, and knock open; and how big it all was. When the meeting finally broke up, the guy meant to reassure me, I’m sure, by telling me he felt positively that they were in a position to interface with a bona fide producer with investment contacts on an imminently future date when they would feel out with this source the possibilities which they felt for sure were there for co-production and equipment dealings. Despite receiving abundant invitations thereafter, I refused to attend one of these meetings ever again. My play, for the good of all, was never produced.

What surprised me is that for the next three decades and more, that is to say, until the end of his life, Frank did continue to attend meetings of this kind and grumble about the futile follow-ups, the waiting around, the constant paying out to fund efforts he felt this time would hook him up for sure with real movie people whose names the guy knew and had contact with and could interface with to start a meaningful dialog for a production whose budget just got bigger with each lapsing year.

The tragedy was, Frank did nothing else. His specious hope allowed him to ignore all the symptoms of a life falling apart: seriously increasing obesity, diabetes, tobacco despite heart problems, weed despite anxiety attacks, exhilarated cavorts with other substances of recreational abuse despite severely restricted means, bad women, worse women, a woman needing help in the form of brand-new TVs and stereos to give to major drug dealers to finally free herself from bondage—Frank bought all of this one: the story, the TVs, the stereos and got slammed in the face by a two-by-four-swinging pimp for his trouble and to his credit slammed back sans two-by-four to laudable effect, unemployment, eviction, the move back home, the death of his Mom in 2008, severe isolation, and the setting in of serious depression disguised as grief. All because, so my take had it, Frank believed some guy who promised him a career as a high-flying movie man. Obstinate Frank, sensitive Frank, proud Frank would settle for nothing less. Although he did. He settled for a lot less. He had to. He was settled on it. A hot, high, stinking pile of something just awful, which emerged as the waters of health, wealth, and fortune slowly, but irrevocably receded.

I say it didn’t have to be that way, but who was I to give advice? I was busy doing a bunch of nothing myself and failing. Which brought us to the bedrock of our friendship: we may not have discussed the existential mystery of why weren’t we stars, but we witnessed it in each other, experienced it in ourselves, and pondered it for both our sakes.

Yes, we wondered unspoken together (friendships can do this) how all our efforts could end in nothing and how, after a lifetime of wasted opportunities, we might possibly catch up just one of the loose threads to stitch together a life at this late date. We had not been blessed as self-starters, that much we now knew, but we were suspecting quite soberly that perhaps we weren’t high-fliers either, that something cleverer than we had fooled us into thinking so and now, after all the hoping and the scrambling and the blustering, we found we were in fact tunnelers, and that our tunnel had come to an end and that that tunnel, our tunnels, had turned out to be rather short, more of a keg. We had gotten tossed in and that was it, while the self-starters, the darlings of Fate, the high-flyers, were getting shot out of long, sleek, well-oiled, helically grooved barrels to break into the affairs of the world at a muzzle velocity many, many numbers long. But let this not obscure the point, and let us never forget, heroic Frank, that those speed-of-sound projectiles also end at the end and that that end is their limit—that they too have a limit—at which point, the conditions of the universe being what they are, they stop, just as we stopped, with a solid wall of ‘no’ right before their eyes. But there is this difference: Stopping a kegger—Frank or myself, for example—provokes in the kegger frustration, doubt, anger, anxiety, fear. Stopping one of those missiles elicits in the pilot some satisfaction at having come so far and a readiness to rocket again should the opportunity arise, which in this paradigm, with fatal justice for the keggers, it doesn’t.

Such was the mutual morose contemplation that formed our special friendship, Frank’s and mine. We had set up a wavelength in an exclusive tonal tunnel on which we perched like mournful birds. My friend flown, I shall perch on that wire no more forever. That wavelength no longer exists. I shall find elsewhere to roost, I am sure, while Frank’s animating spirit is flying high at last, but not necessarily comfortably. I suspect he is grouching about his wings.