by Marion Winik
Do you remember when it seemed impossible that people as young and strong as this would lie with their heads shaved and their bones sticking out, wearing diapers in St. Vincent’s Hospital? The year he died,1993, was near the peak of the dying, and by the end of the century about a half million American boys, and a few girls, would die of AIDS. Twenty-five million worldwide now. It-was-his-time-he-is-at-peace-he-is-free-from-pain-at-last. Who wants to hear these things? I’d rather take the whole last few years of his life, the addiction, the sickness, the breakup, crumple them up and hide them like a paper full of mistakes you don’t want anyone to see. I miss him more, not less, as time goes by.
The Art Star
I MUST HAVE taken the same acid he did at a Grateful Dead concert when we were fifteen, because his drawings look just like what I saw: the writhing, intertwined dancers, the fat black line between good and evil, the undulating burstingness of everything. His whole adorable symbology—the crawling baby, the barking dog, the blowjobs and dolphins, TV sets and serpents, flying saucers, dollar signs, and ticking clocks—made perfect sense to me the moment I saw it. Out the dirty window of an A train stopped at West Fourth Street in 1981. It was like when I read “Howl” for the first time: I felt I’d been waiting to see it, or that I had seen it already, that I just wanted to keep seeing it again. Well, I was in luck about that. Soon he was everywhere.
Six years after he died of AIDS, my mother and I saw a retrospective of Haring’s work at a museum in Toronto. There were glass cases of his diaries and comic strips and drawings from when he was a kid.
I was already in tears when I saw his birth date, May 4, 1958, three days before mine. Also that year came Prince and Madonna and Grandmaster Flash, as well as poor crazy Darby Crash, poor crazy Michael Jackson, and poor crazy Nancy Spungen. Also my second husband, the anarchist philosopher-king. It was a Chinese Year of the Dog, and the best minds of our generation were the dog minds, marking, always marking, always wagging our tails, thinking about sex, doing it, no sense of public or private, always wolfing the treats, never ashamed to slice the air with our proud egomaniac bark. Where would pop culture be without us?
The Junkie
IN MY YOUTH I was often told, usually by men, that I talked too much, so it was a relief to finally meet a guy who talked more. He was the son of a Chicano boxer from Texas retired to Pinebrook, New Jersey, the hometown of my future brother-in-law, The Carpenter. Growing up, they called him Bean—because he was Mexican, I reminded my sister the other day. Oh, boys will be boys: first tree houses and mischief, then girls and cigarettes, next roofing jobs and heroin. When we lived in the fifth-floor walkup on West Sixteenth Street, he’d show up at the door with his terrible complexion and boundless enthusiasm, sometimes with dope, sometimes sick, sometimes with his huge, silent friend Chris, sometimes with a matchbook on which he had written a phone number to buy a car, or drawn a diagram of how to grow opium poppies on the windowsill.
Remember how we all loved him despite his being somewhat unlovable? my sister said. I do. Having met him at what was probably the low point of my life, the infamous 1982, I was eager for nonjudgmental companionship, and was particularly transfixed by the way he concentrated on retracting the syringe when helping me shoot up. Together we watched my blood unfurl like fireworks in the clear liquid. I followed him around for a month or so, until he shrugged me off by shacking up with an old high school girlfriend. I was living far away by the time they all started dying. My sister remembers that on the way to his funeral she and her husband stopped at the SPCA. They adopted a blond lab and named it Bean. This was how we were back then, she sighs, meaning drugs flattened everything. On the other hand, when my son was 16 he named the puppy I gave him for Christmas after his dead father, so maybe they were just young.
The Showgirl
NOT UNTIL my sister and I were almost grown up did we know we had a step-grandmother: my mother claimed to have nearly forgotten herself. But then came the phone call, and the story. After her parents divorced each other for the second time and my mother returned to New York after graduating from college, she lived with her strict, short-tempered father in his apartment on West End Avenue. It was a tenuous arrangement and fell apart altogether when his girlfriend, a Rockette from Radio City, moved in, dumping all my mother’s clothes out of the closet by way of a wedding announcement. My mother moved down the street to her own mother’s apartment, where she lived until she married in 1952. She did not invite her father and his new wife to the ceremony, though she called him afterward from the reception and asked him to come. He didn’t, and he died not long after that.
About thirty years later, this mystery stepmother called my mom. She had no family, she was getting older, and, as my mother and her sister decided, she herself had never meant to hurt anyone. She turned out to be a sweet lady, still trim and well turned out, and we took her to my aunt’s house in Delaware for Thanksgiving.
When she died, she left us what she had. A pearl necklace for my mother and a diamond ring for my aunt. My sister, a freshly certified accountant, did her estate taxes and cleaned out the apartment. My brother-in-law, the trash king, rolled her TV down the street in a shopping cart. When I came up from Texas for a visit, they took me over to get my share of the hair clips, the hats, and the dozens of gloves: lace, hounds-tooth, elbow-length, kid, lamé, and leather. Even the kitchen drawers were filled with feminine accessories, except for a couple devoted to take-out menus. For years I wore her zebra-striped wraparound dresses, and my sister still has her little sewing box, packed with thread in a dozen shades of purple. A slip of paper is taped inside with a motto typed in capital letters: TRUST YOUR LIFE TO GOD & LOOK OUT FOR NUMBER ONE.
The Driving Instructor
HOW MANY POEMS can you write about your father? Maybe one for every day of your life. Your father is the poem inside you when you wake up in the morning, the poem like a spine, shaping how you stand and sit, the poem that’s with you on the toilet, at the sink, in front of the coffeepot, the poem that leans back into the driver’s seat and spins the steering wheel with one practiced hand. Turn left. Left goddammit. For Christ’s sake, learn to drive. Anger, forgiveness, duty, money, jokes, your father is the chairman of all these departments. We used to say, Remember what an ass-hole he could be, but now we can’t remember that anymore. What’s left is the assholes we are.
Whole religions were made up so people could see their fathers again, and you don’t have to be Jesus or Abraham Lincoln to have your actual biography dwarfed by your never-ending story in other people’s heads. A thin gruel of memory thickened with everything that’s happened since. Twenty-two years out you can hardly taste the stuff you started with but you just keep stirring, stirring, and putting the spoon in your mouth. Every day there is another thing he never saw: my children, my books, my houses, my aging face, the sweet little dog we have now, the latest morons in Congress and the NFL. The things I learned and the things I never have been able to. My disappointments, which would have disappointed him as well, so I might have hidden them. In dreams my father is sitting at the kitchen table, young and smooth-jawed, looking suspiciously like my teenaged son. The phone rings, he answers it. Hey Daddy, it’s me. And look at this, still he gives the phone to my mom.
The Young Uncle
THE FIRST WEDDING I ever went to was the marriage of my mother’s much younger half-brother to my father’s cousin. Set in a luxuriant Westchester backyard in the spring of 1971, the bride wore embroidered Mexican muslin and flowers in her long, shining hair; the groom, sideburns to his chin. Off they went to their new life running a ski lodge in Stowe, Vermont, leaving my sister and me dazzled by the sheer romance of it all.
Since their parents died before my uncle was grown, my mother and her sisters helped raise my him. He lived with us for a while between semesters at American University in Washington and when he was on leave from the service, bringing textbooks and trophies and the smell of aftershave to the spare room over the garage, in wh
ich we would poke around when he was gone. For Halloween, I wore the jacket and cap of my father’s old Marine Corps uniform and my sister got our uncle’s, from the Air Force.
My boisterous, magnetic father commanded quite a bit of attention at home and everywhere else, and my uncle was first among his fans. Even as a little girl I noticed how he started to talk just the way my father did and use his expressions and write in all capital letters and how he loved to say my father’s name, and later he had the businesses, and the busyness, the two daughters and the fond, gruff impatience, the fine house and the fancy car, and then he died just as young in just the same way, from the heart.
The Mah Jongg Player
EVERYONE bossed her around: her silent, disapproving, soup-sending-back husband The Painter, her imperious Australian mother-in-law, her two sisters, and all four of her children but particularly my father, her oldest, who treated her with utter impatience and exasperation. Call your mom, my mother would remind him, and when he finally did, you could hear him bellowing for the next ten minutes. She was a talker herself, with a rasp that was the product of a million filterless Chesterfields, effortlessly filling in the paragraphs between my grandfather’s monosyllables, running cheery interference around his dour comments. She said ideer for idea and fathuh for father, and did she tell you about how she dated Richard Rodgers when she was a girl in Manhattan? She did hilarious impressions of her friends at the card table or mah jongg, how every blouse and skirt Betty Becker ever bought sat up and drawled, “Well, hellooo, Betty,” when she walked into the store. I’m sure Betty Becker bossed her around too.
She was bulletproof as only a purely sweet person can be, as if she were filled up with the honey she spooned into our mouths at Rosh Hashanah in her apartment, a tradition tailor-made for her and the only one she observed. Except for Johnny Carson, who was her nightly companion, followed by hours of insomnia. Well it’s 2:30 a.m. now, so I guess I’ll go to bed, reads a letter in her loopy penmanship. A love letter, about how good we are to her and how dear. She had a permanent quality of anticipation, as if something wonderful we had planned was just about to occur, and because she loved us all so much this was true. Even a phone call from my father was something to look forward to, and his death was something there is not a word for. The last time I saw her, dying in the hospital of pancreatic cancer at 83, she was eager to get a peek at my three-month-old son. On the table, she had some chocolate, a bag of pastel mints, a huge wheel of sweetened dried fruit. Take it, sweetie, she said, take it all.
The Queen of New Jersey
MY MOTHER’S best friend and longtime golf partner had glistening champagne-colored hair that was always fixed in a smooth bun, merry blue eyes, and a way of lowering her voice to a throaty Bette Davis growl to make comments that would crack you up. Her handsome, wealthy husband owned racehorses, Rhodesian ridgebacks, and parking lots; they had a sprawling house on an expanse of emerald grass overlooking the ocean, full of paella plates and needlepoint pillows and every other fine thing. Their two gorgeous boys played football and ran track, were close as kittens, and like everyone else, worshipped their mother. Even the housekeeper would have died for her. She was an excellent cook, and unlike others in her age group and social class, had a pretty clear idea of what was going on out there. Sweetie, she said to my mom, watching my sister and her boyfriend nod out in the Mexican restaurant, why are your kids always falling asleep at the dinner table?
As in a fairy tale, everything went horribly wrong. She and her husband were having dinner with my parents when the waiter came to the table with a phone call: their older son had been killed riding his bike on Ocean Avenue. Her husband, a heartless practical joker, left her for another woman, and her younger son married and moved away. The baby girl she had after the accident was still in grade school when the ache in her gut became a swift, untreatable cancer. Though the last time I saw her she was still smiling indulgently at this screwed-up world and its denizens, at the useless macrobiotic advice she was receiving from me. Be good to your mom, she whispered. The next time we went there, the palace was empty except for the housekeeper and the motherless princess, staring numbly at the waves.
The Golf Pro
THOUGH A GOLF CLUB is a hive of activity, a pleasure dome, a Peyton Place, a plantation, a parking lot for helicopters, golf carts, riding mowers, and Jaguars, there is often a sense of solitude when you are out on the course. Among the emerald fairways, the ribbons of oak and maple and cherry, the fluffy banks of pampas grass and pussy willow, the turquoise ponds reflecting geese, even the most overburdened, chased-down person feels he or she has escaped. It is this that helps to balance the aggravations of the game.
My mother weathered my childhood with frequent recourse to that verdant oasis, usually with The Queen of New Jersey and one or two others of their little group of devoted women golfers, and sometimes with a traveling golf pro whom she adored, a debonair Dean Martin in shades and cleats. He came to New Jersey in the summer and went back to Boca in the winter, but what he did for my mother’s swing lastedall year.
Recently we were driving to a party in some fancy-shmancy seaside town and came upon a small enclave of unusually modest homes. Oh, look where we are, said my mom. This is where my friend the golf pro grew up. He brought me by once to show me. I could picture the two of them, in a big 1970s car, wearing sunglasses and cardigans, my mother happy and relaxed. He was a big ladies’ man, she said.
It was winter, when he was in Florida, that he fell ill. My mother, visiting The Queen at her apartment down there, got word and went to the hospital to say goodbye. At his bedside, they spoke in whispers, like spectators at a golf match, like the rushes at the edge of eighteen.
The Second Cousin Once Removed
ONE OF THE FIRST of millions of women thrown from the wreck when American marriage lost its brakes around 1970, she was pissed off for the rest of the decade. At least. Left with three girls and not much else by that goniff, that nasal-voiced, hatchet-nosed, Vitalis-slicked putz in golfing attire, goodbye Charlie, she was done with men. An early feminist, a single mother, she wrote for the local paper, made watercolors of the Jersey coast, took photographs of lilies, was friends with the horn player from Springsteen’s band. Interestingly, she was my father’s second cousin, a relationship more theoretical than manifest, a bridge of mysterious Loises and Bruces I could never keep straight, but which intrigued me because no other family member showed the faintest tinge of bohemianism, and few others were actually heavy though all talked about weight all the time.
The three girls were pretty and huffish, often in conflict with their big mama in the tent top and red glasses.
Their father sometimes sent for them, randomly, and never without repercussions. Complaints and arguments and fallings-out grew in as naturally as molars and bosoms, and one daughter wasn’t even speaking to her the year of her death, another quick cancer, but she herself had had it with being angry by then. She made greeting cards from thick folded paper and photographs of flowers and sent them around.
Perhaps that old Mildred or Fanny in our family tree who passed down our shared affinity for musicians and pasta had this other thing as well: the will to stay afloat in murky waters, what, a little schmutz won’t kill you, to make out some small but possible bliss in the distance, a dinner party, an art project, and get out the tape and scissors.
The Publisher
YOU CAN CHANGE people’s lives by publishing their poems, and this was a power he wielded with generosity, glee, and occasional madness. Out there in his rock house in the Texas hill country he pasted up his literary quarterly by hand, a tabloid, like the American Poetry Review or the National Enquirer. In ten-plus years he published everybody from Charles Bukowski to Naomi Shihab Nye, from Judson Jerome to me, twenty-two and sultry-banged in my thrilling appearance on the cover.
So debonair with his shock of prematurely white hair and liquid brown eyes, he drove a blue Dodge pickup, kept goats, had to clear the pool table o
f the poets of Bangladesh and Buenos Aires to shoot a game with a visitor. A special issue on the magical realism of Nacogdoches was in the works. A can of beer in one hand, a couple of pain pills in the other. His damn back again.
To this day I can clearly conjure his fine, tan skin and the elegant line of his nose, and he was a bit of a flirt, but I was his daughter’s age and he was a family man. He might have liked to be worse than he was, but you can’t fight your own native goodness. He must have felt, after years of chronic pain and Percodan and surgery that didn’t help and a yearlong recovery that only took him back to square one, that there simply was no other way out than the one he took on a backcountry road with a hose from the tailpipe of his Dodge threaded into the window. Otherwise he could never have forsaken all those people who had already received their letters of acceptance for the spring issue.
The Clown
THE DEATH of a lover haunts you differently than any other. The first time I learned this, it was from a boy who hanged himself just a couple of months after our ill-fated coupling in the driveway of the home he shared with his girlfriend and their baby daughter. She was one of my closest friends, ten years older than me, an artist and a playwright, a freethinker and a bit of a pothead. He was winsome and slender, a mime and a clown, his irony and his poker face concealing a hard edge of anger and despair. Their half-assed attempt at an open relationship was partially fueled and deeply complicated by her unquenchable attachment to another guy, a mythologically obese, unhappily married local musician, who would screw up her life thoroughly by the time his basso profundo was silenced by an overdose of pain pills in Oaxaca, where he spent the 1990s hiding from the DEA.
