blankpage

    Charlie looked over at me and told me he wasn't quite sure where he got it, only that it was in fact acid. He was repeating the word ?acid' enough for me to believe him.

     "Perhaps even ?got' is an overblown assumption. I can't say I would be surprised if the acid found me Henry."

     Charlie always found a way to describe life as a reactive experience. He said it allowed him to see humanity as a ?victim of history's consequences', whatever that meant Charlie saw it as his grand epiphany, though it always seemed more his grand rationalization. He was a man who knew his way, but never well enough to get there. In his last will and testament he decreed to the ?general magistrate', presumably myself, that all his ?worldly possessions' be burned ?upon his departure from the living'. Not that eccentric a request when you consider the pen and paper he used to write the will, along with the kerosene and matches he was giving me to burn them, were the sum total of his effects. I think he derived a certain joy from knowing he was leaving the world with no more than when he entered. As amusing as it seemed, I never understood how he could laugh at death the same way he laughed at everyone else.

     No narcotic had ever made things seem as surreal as the image of Charlie's emaciated body. He was under 100 lbs by then, sparse waifs of tissue stretched over fine, delicate bones, a skeleton virtually. The only thing left were the eyes really. Two shimmering pools of blue light reflecting off the jagged red lines that traced to his eyelids. The quiet intensity still lingering, flashing moments of calm realization and serenity. No regrets, no mention of God or any spiritual force. Just Charlie dying in a blue, drab hospital room, accepting it as everyone hopes to, but ultimately never does. I'm not sure if listening to him sing ?I am the Walrus' as the last few moments of humanity flashed by him cheered me up or not. It might have been simply that he was able to find some good acid to take away the agony of the last 6 months of steroid cocktails and radiation treatment eating away at every ounce of flesh that remained. Regardless, it was still easy to watch him fade away, death returned the smile the cancer had buried. In fact, watching Charlie actually die was infinitely less painful than watching him dying ever was. In that light, death did seem more an end than a tragedy, Charlie's finale had simply dragged on too long.

I never knew why it was so important to Charlie to follow his methodology so precisely. It was fine for his opinion to change with the setting and rising of the sun, but not the method. It was something he never deviated from, even in his most toxic moments he never wavered. I used to tell him it wasn't very different from Victorian etiquette, having such a strict regimen to one's life. He never failed to point out the inconsistencies of anyone who had made our acquaintance.

"Remember Bobby Hampton, Henry? Every day he'd come to school with that small wrinkled brown paper bag, one can of diet pop, half a tuna fish sandwich and one banana. That boy was 220 lbs in the fifth grade Henry. No one gets to 220 lbs in the fifth grade eating tuna fish and bananas, the parents had the right idea, have him eat healthier food, but the methodology was all wrong. You can't starve a boy all day and then be surprised when he eats like a pig when he gets home. That kid probably ate two boxes of twinkies and a carton of ding-dongs before his mother came home every day. Now he might be communist 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, but he's also a great big fat ass, isn't he Henry?"

      I can honestly say I waited my entire life for Charlie to make sense. Twinkies, obesity, Fidel Castro, motor oil, it all seemed interconnected in a series of shapes and configurations, held tenuously together with the most delicate of glues, Charlie's mind. The frail balance whatever sense he did make had, always seemed one hit of acid from spilling over into chaos. He was forever one cigarette short of brilliance. Each time a drop of philosophical genius dripped from his tongue, there always seemed to be a flood of muddled garbage to bury it. As we got older I started to consider if Charlie was so afraid of people arguing his ideas, he sabotaged them himself. It made me wonder if standing here, watching the final pages of the pad incinerate in the small fire we lit in the waist basket, was Charlie executing the final sabotage from beyond. Even the wit and poignancy of his final words were to be destroyed. It was enough to make you think it was Charlie and not the cancer that led him away from here so quickly. I don't know if I'll ever find out if Charlie just wanted to get out before anyone got bored with him, before anyone else decided he wasn't worth the breath.

If there was one regret, it was that I should've left the room right after he died. I've never erased the image of his weakened remains lying limp and lifeless on that hospital slab. He didn't look as dead as he did in the midst of the chemotherapy, but he definitely looked gone.

He never believed in religion. Charlie used to say ?When you're gone, the grand transformation is human being to fertilizer, nothing else.' Some people repent atheism on their death bed, all Charlie did was hum the beatles. I Don't imagine you could find a better person to watch die than Charlie, but I can't think of a more difficult person to have taken away. I've never recovered from losing him, but I was happy to see him move on. After knowing Charlie for as long as I did, I should have known the bliss would be fleeting. It had been five years since the last time I did acid, and as a grown man I will concede it was not, in hindsight, my finest hour, but it seemed as logical as anything at the time. This was the first time I ever felt the urge to replace him.

       Leaving the hospital seemed to give the entire ordeal more closure than I was prepared for. The long narrow pathway leaving the hospital seemed to wind on forever. By the time I reached the car I felt I would collapse. I've never faired well in the heat, but this was beyond even my delicate frailty. I found myself sitting on the pavement, even hotter than I had imagined, staring up in to the sun, musing what it would be like to dive off a cliff and right into the heart of its infinite spectrum of nuclear explosions. I could feel the heat washing over every inch of my skin, searing off each layer of flesh, bone melting into formless drops of wax. Where I was, who I was, why . . . All spiraling into one flowing kaleidoscope, swirling thought and flesh into an indiscernible fog. Peeling myself off the pavement, I stumbled into the car and pointed it in the nearest agreeable direction.

      I couldn't shake the feeling that Charlie's death was the last party of the evening, and I was the final confused reveler vainly looking for a place to happen. I don't think I've ever bought into any of the popular death rituals, that's probably why I was so relieved to hear Charlie wanted to have his ashes scattered across the hospital parking lot by the least experienced orderly. I remember fighting the notion of arguing that mocking the modern death rituals wasn't very far removed from participating in them. I think at that stage I was choosing my battles. ?Strategic Friendship' Charlie used to call it. He was a master. Despite all of the flaws and eccentricities, Charlie had a Zen like mastery of people management. The more I knew him, the more I suspected that all the rationalizing, all the playful antagonism, the flip-flopping convictions, ridiculous new world manifestos, were just conversational devices to draw people out. To expose, good or bad, their bare humanity. Part of me thinks he was a genius and part of me fears I imagined him that way. I don't think Charlie would have cared which it was, I think he just would have poured me a drink.

       "Henry, you think too much, I'm afraid one day that overstimulated brain of yours is going to explode, Cognac?"

        The road was beginning to unfold into a dangerous straightaway (Charlie used to say this any time his life gained any sort of order). I found my eyes staring too intently on the vanishing point in the distance, wandering hopelessly through some exaggerated Dali painting, ready to explode into some acid head animation sequence. Through the now checkered board highway and dancing Egyptians emerged a thin, finely angled shadow. I slowed the car to get a better view of the now luminous design of random figures. I pulled over and drank about half of my water bottle, wiped off my forehead and eased my way out of the car.

"Didn't think anyone would stop out here."

Didn't think I'd run into anyone out here."

"Is that why you came?"

"Here?"

"Yes, is that why you came here?"

"Why?"

"Sorry, I'm asking too many questions, do you think I could catch a ride with you?"

"Sure, where to?"

I sounded like one of those sterile cardboard fathers on nineteen fifties television and he was whatever my imagination decided to draw him as.

"Just a little up the road."

     A very influential part of my brain began to convince me that this humble appearing vagabond riding beside me was more than he first appeared. When he spoke I could hear brimstone crackling violently in the background and the steel of my resolve began to weaken. He was at peace. The serene, smooth talking, lecherous beast reached calmly into my chest and rummaged around in search of my soul.

     ?Bring the ecstacy of the devil's head in mine oven!' I shouted at him or at least I thought to. There had to be a way to straighten this out peacefully. I felt enough sense return to realize he was a simple hitchhiker. I wasn't even hallucinating, I was living inside another reality. Charlie would have appreciated that sort of hyperbole, it was his favorite form of expression.

     ?Henry, have you lost your sense?' I can hear him asking me.

     ?Henry, I reckon that's all you have left.

     I hated Charlie's criticisms, they were his ugliest attribute. While his flair for lavish praise and endless comparison set him apart, the scathing razored censures his tongue excised could make the most patient soul an enemy. What made it difficult to stand was not the origin or patronage of his motive, rather it was the sheer joy the sight of his abrasive, ill-tempered diatribes cajoling contempt from even those he respected. These were the letters I received from Charlie in his life. I never in correspondence witnessed the kind or elegant repose that won Charlie favor in person. In letters, and perhaps nothing else, Charlie found his outlet for idle cynicism.

     ?I read your novel Henry. I imagine it will continue to bring you the steady stream of wealth you seem to enjoy swimming in. I find it reprehensible a man, or human to be fair, of your caliber would drag your feet so low as to tread in this vulgar, excrement fortified mud. It disgusts me Henry, I thought this dead in you. How could you, as a man who claims to be my friend, offer me this banal refuse as my last words from your pen? How could you watch me fade out of this world without offering at least a tiny glimpse of your genius?'

     It didn't matter that Charlie never did a thing with his own life. It didn't matter if he pissed every opportunity he ever had into the world's largest figurative urinal. I guess he was never really as vile as I remembered, though he could inspire contempt. I couldn't seem to coax the details from my conscience, maybe it was a dilemma to resolve the blasphemous desire to damn him and my child-like dependency on maintaining an impossible, imaginary insistence of his virtue and perfection. Every sentence, paragraph, every word seemed to poison the text with this strangely compelling notion of unrest. The guilt and exhilaration of romanticizing the conflict seemed neither positive or negative, opposite or identical. I cannot say I understand those feelings. Despite any gains in intellect and comprehension, I have never understood my emotions. I never wanted them, I think I hid from them. Charlie's death threw them all back in my face. The demons in his death chased after the webs of nerves I buried. I needed the hyperbole to end. I needed to get straight and say something to the hitchhiker to ease his fear.

     ?It's hot today, isn't it?'

     He wouldn't even look at me.

     ?You look kind of nervous, do you want to get out of the car?'

     There was a part of me that wanted to scare the living shit out of the guy, start laughing maniacally and hammering on the gas pedal. I couldn't believe how scared he was, I had no idea how far gone I must have looked.

     ?Listen, if you want to get out, I'll understand, I don't want to frighten you, you seem pretty far off.'

     I was turning into Charlie, transfering the blame onto a perfectly innocent party without the slightest thought. Surely he was the one suffering through paranoid dementia. This seem to be my only coarse, to challenge his sanity, his sense of well-being. I wasn't sure if I could. I still feared the possibility I could indict myself further, exposing more weakness, more folly. Even my internal dialogue began to sound like Charlie's, or at least how I imagined them.

    ?Excuse me sir, I don't mean to be rude, or ungrateful, or even provocative, but I have to ask you, was it worth it?'

     I knew when I turned to look for him he'd be gone. I stared at the letter on the passenger seat for about a mile before I pulled over to the side of the road. By the time I held it in my hands there was no envelope, just the letter.

Henry,

I've always wondered exactly what beauty is. Vanity, with great assistance from illness, has kept my eyes in a Monet brushed landscape for the better part of these final six months. I have to only assume there is beauty in every blurred, fuzzy form or shape that passes by these flawed, and increasingly ornate, eyes. It seems more the effort of getting glasses would be in vain, rather than my intentions. Not that spectacles can't be charmingly decorative, I've always admired how those gold wired rims glasses you've been wearing for most of our lives can suddenly transform you so completely from ordinary to sophisticated. Unfortunately, sophistication has never been a luxury extended to me in this life, Henry. I'm sure you'll testify to that.

       What I see in this life, other than increasingly less, is neither ugly or beautiful. Everything has slowly lost it's spectrum. The axis, as well as the arc, on which my thoughts and emotions once turned, has melded into one solid indiscriminate form. Unchanged by agony or sentiment, precluding any sense of subject existence. I realize the mere use of language negates one's ability to be objective, so perhaps I'll refer to it as my half-assed take on Buddhism. You could always appreciate my half-assed takes on things couldn't you Henry? My greatest fear and hope, all wrapped into one, was to be a character in one of your novels. I always tried to maintain a certain sense of composure whenever I read one of your books. Silently praying to be the cantankerous yet benevolent, drug addled self expressionist longing for understanding and compassion. I imagine you've never felt comfortable writing anything that personal, six best selling spy novels more than attest to that.. It'?s this that worries me about you Henry, that you seem content to live in a world built solely by your mind's own construct. I've had that cold surreality forced upon me in death, I can't imagine why you've chosen it in life. How will you know your humanity if you never express it Henry? How will death show you the depth of your life if you've never bothered to live it? How will you ever know beauty standing in the darkness of your own shadow?

CHARLIE





I'm sure there's a word to describe what I felt the day after Charlie died. It wasn't fear, I have never been afraid of death. Not the act, the reality or the looming specter of it. When I was eight my dog died or more accurately my parents gave my dog away when I was eight and told me he died. I remember crying pitifully because I never got to say goodbye, never got to give him one last pet. My Grandfather came over to me, put his arm around my shoulder and whispered softly into my ear

?Stop wimperin' like a baby, you're eight now, act like a man.'

That was his catchphrase, I heard him say it to every human being I ever saw cry in front of him.

?Now you have to understand this about death Henry, it's the end, nothing more and nothing less. If you have a beginning, you have to have an end, that's nature.'

?I don't understand'

?Well, Checkers, he started somewhere, inside his mother, so once he started it meant he had to end somewhere, I guess that's now.'

?You mean like, he was goin' somewhere?'

?Sort of, it's like this, we're made from the earth, I mean, the parts that make up the earth are the same as the things that make up what we are. We live off the earth and after the earth can't support us anymore, it takes us back, so it can support other life.'

?So Checkers went back to the earth?'

?Yeah, so the earth could use him to make other things, like trees and birds and fish.'

?So he didn't go to heaven?'

?I don't know that, that's one thing I can't help you with.'

?Well if he went to the earth he must have went to hell because Dad said that Hell was under the earth and that the devil took everyone bad down there and punished them ... and made them do chores forever. Is Checkers going to be doing chores forever?'

?You're father told you that?'

?Yeah, and he said that only good people go to heaven and that there was a doggie heaven but it's different from normal heaven, but he also said that you can go and visit your dog in doggie as long as he's been good.'

?Well, I didn't mean to say that I thought Checkers was going to hell or not, I was saying that as a creature of the earth, he was going to return to it, to bring new life, not to do any chores.'

?Not even if he does that thing that he did to Uncle Dave last Christmas while he's in heaven?'

?No, I don't know how much anybody can know about that stuff, I tried to stick to what I know Henry, and I know that when Checkers started there was going to have to be a time when he ended, but that's reality, it can make you sad, but's it's the whole reason we're breathing.'

Of course I didn't understand what he meant until years later, but I believed him. It wasn't because he made sense or that he wasn't bombarding me with these stories about Jesus that were just as confusing and even to an eight year old, irrelevant to the moment. It was because he addressed me as a human being, as a person, not some eight year old fertilizing egg that needed to be protected from the world at all costs.

?Jesus has taken Checkers to heaven Henry'

?Dad, I thought he was taking him to doggy heaven'

?He only drops them off there.'

?How come they don't get to be with Jesus? Does Jesus not like dogs?'

?No, they're just different, that's why he brings them to doggy heaven.'

?If Jesus loves all of us, and knows everything we do, and forgives us for our sins, how could he have time to bring dogs to doggy heaven? Does he have somebody do it for him?'

?Jesus can do anything'

I've always felt that with a catch phrase like that, there was no way Christianity couldn't be a hit with the masses. If telling me the same thing I didn't understand the first time the exact same way didn't help, ?Jesus can do anything' was always waiting in the wings. I was glad my parents didn't enjoy discussing religion, it was always a short debate. Whenever I wanted to know the truth about anything I would bike over to my Grandfather's and blurt out every question I had asked myself on the way over. I know he was never that patient with my father, he never expressed himself very often. As a teenager I thought my father was jealous of the relationship I had with him. Later I could see it was just pain from all the neglect he had suffered, seeing me and my grandfather together only intensified that feeling.

My grandfather died about three months before I met Charlie. He and my father had made peace about a year before that when my grandfather was diagnosed with Leukemia. It made our relationship easier, although I don't think he's ever really grasped why it was Grandpa and I got along, but I don't think Grandpa would have at his age either. He figured it out though, how to relate to people, how to be a part of it all. Maybe it took him awhile, but he did it. I think that's always been my one prerequisite with friends or even acquaintances, that they communicate like human beings, not in some prescribed social dialect, but as REAL people. Whether I met Charlie because I was sub-consciously seeking out a surrogate grandfather or because God willed it so, or even if it was total bullshit luck, I don't really care. I loved him, as I loved my grandfather, because he always made me feel human. There must be some divinity in that.