The Glen Rock Book of the Dead

by Marion Winik

  It seems almost ludicrous when I think of it, like a movie with too much foreshadowing: the whiteface, the skits about death, the late-night readings of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. But at the time it was pure shock. Who would hang himself in the very room where his girlfriend and daughter were sleeping? He and I both turned 23 the month he died. Half the time it was clear it all had nothing to do with me, half the time I was flattened by loss and guilt, and using it as an excuse to get really drunk. Then I tried not to think about it for twenty years or so, after which I spent about five years thinking and writing about it all the time.

  Perhaps the real memory, the memory I’m still looking for, is not accessible this way. Perhaps it is heat, pressure, cells. The purple blooms on the morning glory vine outside my window, lit neon by the sun. Already closed the second time I look.

  The Humanoid from Houston

  THE SECOND TIME a man I’d loved died, there was slightly more of a decent interval, two years and not two months. This one was a pickup-driving, guitar-playing, beef-eating hang glider my friend Dana loaned me for a while when she went back to her main boyfriend. (I do believe Dana is the only person I’ve ever known who was able to make her opposition to monogamy a positive thing for all concerned.)

  Our aviator was a curly-headed, compact fellow with eyes as dark and sharp as a woodland creature. He seemed to think women were some kind of animals as well, burros perhaps, good for carrying the equipment, and he couldn’t get enough of sexist cracks and vegetarian jokes. I know this doesn’t sound attractive, but the silly ongoing badinage was fun, as if we were on The Honeymooners. Aren’t you ever going to shave your armpits? Hell, no, I’m not gonna shave my armpits. How about your legs? At least shave your legs. Me! What about you? You’re the hairy ape around here!

  Also, Dana had alerted me to other points of interest. Among these was the flotation tank he had built in the garage of his cubbyhole of a house on Nueces Street in Austin, also featuring a waterbed, a secret garden of skunkweed, and a black Labrador retriever named Lilly whom he loved with all his heart. When you meet a man who loves dogs but doesn’t think much of people, you just know you can slip in between the two categories and find something rare.

  With all his hobbies and his crabbiness and his fussy ways, his penny-pinching and his remote-control planes and his gentle heart, the Humanoid would have made a great old man. But he was coming back from a hang-gliding trip in New Mexico when a drunk driver going over 100 miles per hour on the wrong side of a highway made sure he never got the chance.

  The Skater

  THE THIRD TIME I lost a lover I was 36: it was my first husband, the father of my children, the heart of my heart, a gay ex–figure skater I met at Mardi Gras in 1983, which had started out looking a lot like 1982 but was transformed into something else entirely. He was a beautiful young man, and beautiful things formed effortlessly in his wake: double axels, rosebushes, pale yellow-green cocktails made from Pernod. When I saw him tending bar in the French Quarter, I fell in love with him immediately, as did everyone.

  Improbable as it seemed and seems, he loved me back. And so began his remarkable transformation from tank-topped Disco Thing to ponytailed stay-at-home dad. It helped that he was a person who felt no need to make sense of things, that despite his cool affect he was driven purely by emotion. Skater, hairdresser, gardener; lover of wall treatments, Virgin of Guadalupe icons, and synth-pop compilations on cassette tape: yet when you saw him with his little sons, who slept in their baby seats on the floor of the hair salon, there was no doubt as to his true calling.

  By the time we got married, we knew he was positive and I wasn’t. His old friends were already dying. I wholeheartedly believed we would be spared, but perhaps he did not.

  There were six good years and two nightmarish ones, during which we took a fair shot at outdoing the virus in wrecking our own lives. Then there was the day he checked out of the hospice and came home to die. He had lived too long in the valley of the shadow, where time bloats up as if having an allergic reaction to your presence, where a week has a million days.

  It made me sick when, just four months after he gave up, better drugs were announced, but I don’t know if he would have waited even if he knew. Our brother-in-law, The Carpenter, had sent him postcards from a road he never wanted to see.

  Many years later, when they were almost men, I gave his boys the tape he made them before he died, a tape I had listened to once and slipped into a drawer. They sat side by side on the bed, unbearably tall and handsome, one with the recorder on his knees, the other pretending to do something on his laptop. What sports do you play? asks their father, his voice high and soft from the morphine drip. He thinks he’s talking to the little guys who just visited him at the hospice. Are you taking good care of Mama? Do you remember the day at Grandmom’s when the boat floated away and Daddy had to jump in and save it so we could get home?

  Three Lost Boys

  ONE WAS the snappish waiter at the Morning Call in the French Quarter, the guy who looked like a sailor: wavy gold hair, Aegean eyes, weathered, ruddy skin. Another was his boyfriend, a dignified sort with perfect posture and a trim moustache who cut my hair on a velvet barstool in their little slave-quarter apartment. Some of The Skater’s friends dropped him after I appeared on the scene, but these two didn’t mind.

  Our first whisper of the nightmare ahead of all of us came after we’d moved to Austin and they came to visit, pulling up in our driveway in a clattering jalopy, purportedly stopping to refuel on their way out west. Neither was working anymore, they said, or feeling very well. Both were drinking heavily and stealing pills from the waiter’s mother, a frail person they had carted along with them from her home in Lake Charles. With their circumstances and charms so reduced, they quickly outstayed their welcome. Then stayed another month. At least it was the kind of thing that makes a good story. I told it for several years without understanding the bad part wasn’t the long distance phone bill, or the coffee cups full of port and Coca-Cola.

  Their deaths were old news by the time we heard about them, but by then things had started to make their senseless sense. By then you might be handed an informational pamphlet with charts of mortality rates: rows labeled “Men who have sex with men,” “Injection drug users,” and “Recipients of blood transfusions.” By then bravado was becoming very important.

  A few years later, I watched my husband rollerblade through Jackson Square with a third boy from that crowd, a young protégé of a dress designer with a studio on Decatur Street. He had learned from the designer how to hand-paint silk and he made beautiful scarves. So adorable in his cut-off shorts, he was a bit of a liar, a wily Southern climber with a well-defined jaw and thick shiny hair, right out of Tennessee Williams.

  Both he and my husband knew who was dead and who was alive, and they both knew which side they were on.

  The Photographer

  THERE WAS a picture of me in the Austin Chronicle in 1988 nursing my infant son at a picnic table in a beer garden with a paper bag over my head, mous-tachioed drinkers on either side. “Hey forget the titty bar, I think I’ll just stay here at La Leche League,” the caption read. It was taken by a photographer friend I had asked to do me a favor.

  She was a rich lady from Corpus with corkscrew curls, button eyes, and skinny rag doll limbs. She had run away from her husband’s ranch at 35 to see the world, or as much of it as you could see from a pretty little house in Austin. Motherhood had taken a lot out of her: one disabled son, the other his father’s macho mascot, and all she could do and buy and say would never be enough. Finally it was expensive schools, phone calls, and guilt.

  She appeared in our world as a wonderful oddity—dry humor, big accent, rooms full of elegant furniture, real art on the walls, and flourishing plants. Way out past Fredericksburg she had another house she called Wit’s End. She found our little cadre of artists and hairdressers just as exotic and amusing as we found her; Yankees! Jews and Italians! Members of the middl
e class! Though she had a deep appetite for solitude, every once in a while she would throw a party at which her banker friends from Dallas stared at other guests in eyeliner, coming in groups out of the bathroom.

  All these people were “cute,” and the Mexicans on the East Side were “cute,” but the pictures she took of them showed more than that. She was the best student I ever had, her old photography teacher told me, too bad she had so much money or she might have had more drive. The teacher and I had less money but better luck: we lived to meet again under the arch in Washington Square Park and talk about our old friend, who died of cancer in her late fifties. How cute she had been, and how much more than cute as well.

  The Bon Vivant

  ONE OF THE ASSETS of the man I dated after I was widowed—the restaurant critic at the Austin Chronicle—was his best friend, an old college roommate and colleague in the food section. He was the youngest of three boys raised in the swamps of East Texas by a Jewish salesman of women’s clothing, and all three emerged from that thicket with elegant Southern manners, true modesty, and rare taste.

  Despite his unassuming demeanor, our friend could perform miracles with a foie gras or a pan of Brussels sprouts; he could patiently explain the history of cinema, the work of Philip Roth, Patrick O’Brian, or Belva Plain. He sat at the table with the wine enthusiasts as the St. Emilion swirled in the glass and the adjectives flew. Leather, barnyard, tobacco, soil. He waited. Sipped again. Grapes, he said thoughtfully. I’m getting . . . grapes.

  He and my old boyfriend would face the night with a bottle of Bushmills Irish whiskey and a pack of Camels and make it all disappear. You wouldn’t think there was that much to say about cauliflower. Oh, but there was.

  Then on the morning of his 39th birthday, when we were away in San Francisco, he got up, fed his dog, laid out some clothes, and wrote a quick note. He called the police to alert them so they’d be the first to arrive. Then he went into his backyard and shot himself.

  We had been trying to pin him down for weeks on how he wanted to celebrate; finally we understood why he’d been so vague. So how long had he been planning this? Since the morning in Port Arthur thirty years earlier when he’d found his mother’s bodyon the floor of the living room?

  As a parent, you mark out the limits of the possible. As a gentleman, you do not complain. When he left us, it was like taking Saturday out of the week or May off the calendar, and yet somehow we had to get used to it. If anyone knew this, it was our friend from Port Arthur. I am sure he was counting on it.

  The Counselor

  A FEW YEARS after the death of The Carpenter, my sister started dating a much older man, an oddly priggish Vietnam-vet-turned-drug-and-alcohol-abuse-counselor she had met at her twelve-step meetings. I didn’t cotton to him much, and was glad when they broke up. Once he was long gone, I wrote something a little condescending about him in an essay, later collected and published in my first book.

  Well, guess what. In the meantime he and my sister made up, got married, and had a child. Without actually reading it, he became aware that an essay in my book mentioned him, and he began to recommend it to his drug-and-alcohol-abuse clients. Finally one came back and said, Isn’t it kind of weird what your wife’s sister wrote about you in her book? So he took a look. There was a showdown between us at the beach club that summer and I admitted that I’d been out of line to write what I had.

  My excuses were thin—I thought he would never read it, and I thought he was gone forever—and both turned out to have been nearly true. That winter, with a baby at home and my sister into her second pregnancy, he had a relapse, overdosed, and died. She found him on his office floor. Then a few days later in her mailbox she found something else: a pathetic love letter he had written to another woman, marked return to sender.

  The following July, amid much blood and tears, she gave birth to his second son. I stood by, holding her hand, wearing the wristband that said Father, so angry at him that I still feel anger now, after all these years. Her older boy, in particular, has his lips and eyes; sometimes a familiar bemused look crosses his face. I want to say, Yeah, I’m bemused too, buddy, but how long do you carry on an argument with a ghost?

  The King of the Condo

  A LIFELONG animal lover, I was disappointed by The Skater’s aversion to pets—then completely taken aback by the kitten he hid in the bathroom on my 29th birthday, a week before my due date. How would I take care of a new baby and a cat? A few days later our baby’s heart would stop beating and, as we could eventually stand to joke, that kitten would all but wear the onesies.

  We lived in a condominium complex then, and Rocco grew up like a kid in the projects. During the day, he hung out on the wall that bordered the parking lot, authorizing arrivals and departures. He ate and slept at every apartment, had twenty-four-hour access to homes I’d never seen. Many people didn’t know whose cat he was, and he probably had at least a dozen names. I once heard a redhead with a briefcase call him Mr. Big.

  Moving to a single-family house with a yard was not an upgrade for Rocco, but he tolerated his diminished social position with dignity, as if living in rural exile. He never forgot who he was. In 1998, after exceeding all expectations for cat performance for more than a decade, he suddenly grew very thin and listless. When the woman from the vet told me it was feline HIV, I said, Oh my God. My husband died of AIDS four years ago. Well, ma’am, she replied, he didn’t get it from the cat. Ah, I wanted to say, but did the cat get it from him?

  Philosophers of justice talk about “moral luck”—the difficulty of assigning blame when the consequences of a single act can be so diverse. Truck driver A and truck driver B take the same route, run the same stop sign, but a child darts out in front of B and dies. B is a murderer; A is not. A cat doesn’t have to worry about this. Nobody thinks it’s his fault he got AIDS, or that anyone else got AIDS.

  The people who took care of Rocco while I was house hunting in Pennsylvania expected him to die every day I was gone. But he waited, literally dragging himself to the door on my return.

  The Texan

  HE HAD THREE siblings and all were his twins, in away: his biological twin, a brother; his spiritual twin, a little sister; and his dark twin, a brother who so lacked the others’ gifts of irony and discernment he fit them like yang to yin. The four grew up in the Permian Basin on the western edge of Texas, where the oldest rocks in the world hide deep pockets of oil and gas, a place that sharpens you like a knife with its dry winds and fierce brightness, a place of which the family owned many acres. The children ran in circles and invented games of chance and torture while downstairs their Cajun father drank and their mother made decisions.

  There was only one gay bar in town and eventually three of them would know it well; the fourth would drink elsewhere. Anywhere, really. Wherever they went, the dogs waited outside, sleeping on the sidewalk with their noses tucked between their hind legs.

  I met the Texan in Austin in the early ’80s after his little sister came to my poetry reading. She and I became best friends literally overnight, via one eight-hour conversation held in the apartment she shared with him and his boyfriend. The boyfriend wasanother dog lover, a kid from Kerrville; their relationship, new then, was to endure twenty years. There would be apartments on both coasts with cream-colored leather couches and good kitchen equipment, delicious dinners of rockfish and pistachio, occasional arguments and betrayals, frequent and joyous reconciliations.

  During their New York period, the boys acquired a wire-haired fox terrier named George, born in the Bronx. George would inspire the foundation of People for the Aesthetic Treatment of Animals, as well as a wildly successful line of canine jewelry, bedding, bath products, sweaters, and jackets, which still sell like hotcakes on the Internet and everywhere fine pet products are sold.

  They would have been a wonderful elderly gay couple, but it seems no elderly gay couples of our generation were allowed. My friend’s brother died at 43 in San Francisco a month before the turn of
the century. Shortly afterward, his older brother drank himself to death and his twin nearly did. Their little sister wrapped her arms around a border collie and sipped her beer as slowly as she could.

  The Democrat

  BY THE TIME I took a job at her son’s start-up software company in Austin, she was a sweet old lady who wore fuchsia lipstick and pastel muumuus, aproof reader at the shop where we had our printing done. She corrected our errors with deliberateness and calm despite the extreme sense of crisis her son and I were prone to generate in any situation. I knew she loved poetry and music and politics, but I didn’t know her in her heyday, when she and her husband were the entire staff of the only newspaper in Marble Falls, Texas. When she wrote press releases for Ralph Yarborough and campaign ditties for Adlai Stevenson and Lyndon Johnson. When they begged her to sing song after song at parties attended by Ann Richards and Billy Lee Brammer and Willie Morris. I didn’t know how it was when her husband left, I didn’t know why she never married again. And then, gradually, she didn’t know these things either.

  When she could not think of the word, could not remember the name, could not work, could not be alone, she bore the bewilderment with grace. Though there were times when it was too much. To be lost, surrounded by strangers, everything so wrong and idiotic, sometimes you could just smack them all and run out the door. You wouldn’t think there could be so many years of this, that death could be so patient, determined not just to take you but to erase you altogether. Yet one warm spring day in the timeless time after she couldn’t recall the names of her children or even that they were her children, those abandoned loves took her out for a walk. She burst into an aria, sang it full throat from beginning to end. Had she ever sung Italian before? Where did she learn opera? She marched on a half step ahead of them, betraying nothing, a smile on her still-red lips. Bravo, cara mamma, bravissimo!