Jesus Laughed

As you age, you begin to accrue griefs large and small that then stick to you like cold mud on your boots. When I was younger I didn’t realize how universal grief is; my parents, especially my dad, held the grief over my sister’s death in a drunk driving incident tightly, and it was so overwhelming that I understood it to be unique. And it was, in its way. Just as every person is different, every person who grieves their loss feels it differently. But in many ways it was completely ordinary. I now know several people, some my own age, who have lost children. I, personally, am down one sister, one foster brother, one niece, and three grandparents, not to mention a plethora of estranged uncles, beloved pets, and old acquaintances. I wear these feelings of grief all the time, more as tattoos than as clothing. Like tattoos they fade, but they never really go away.

I heard this morning that one of the best people I have ever known has died, at the age of 65. He was a priest and a teacher at my high school, decency embodied, more than anybody I have ever known. Father Ron watched out for me in a way he didn’t need to; I was the atheistical son of atheistical parents at a Catholic school, and there were certainly those there who viewed me as an interloper, one who did not belong, either to the faith or wholly to the student body. But Father Ron, though he was one of the most sincerely devout people I have ever known, wasn’t that sort of person, and he didn’t view me that way.

We were curious candidates for friendship, really. I arrived at Central Catholic High School keyed-up and combative about religion; as a 14-year-old who wasn’t entirely sure about his sexuality, I viewed Christianity as a monolith of oppression that the world would be better without. Father Ron was almost thirty years older than I was, and so deeply steeped in the Church, and so serious about the good parts of Catholicism — the parts I didn’t believe existed — that he initially interpreted my hostility to religion as hostility towards him. I was in his freshman Christian Life class (right? is that what they called freshman religion in those days? I think it is). I refused to capitalize “God” and was prone to poking fun at some of the more ancient and backwards (to me) aspect of the Church. Hell, I still am. Just as I am today, I was a person with sharp edges as a kid. Father Ron was one of the people who got cut.

He called me into his office after class one day to ask me: did I have a problem with him? It wasn’t a power move, or a scare tactic; he wasn’t that kind of priest. He genuinely wanted to heal what he saw as a wounded relationship. I explained to him, as best I could, that it wasn’t him I was hostile to, but the Church. The Church was such a part of him that I might not have expected him to understand, had I ever though about it. But he did what he always did: his very best. He took my explanation at face value, and for the next four years seemed to take a special interest in my well-being. To this day, I’m grateful for that. I can’t say I would have done the same in his place.

He was a beloved figure in our class, bearded, sweet-natured, somewhat heavyset — behind his back some of us called him “Father Rolo”, though I swear to you it was affectionate. When we had mass, all 700 students in the big gymnasium at the back of the school, he gave homilies on decency and fellowship. One of his favorite parables was about a group of people sitting at a table with bowls of soup and spoons longer than their arms, which made it impossible to feed themselves. It wasn’t until they realized that they had to feed one another that they were able to eat. That was his ethos.

Not that he was all sincerity and serious homilies. At one of those same masses, for some reason, the lights cut out. You can imagine what that scene must have been like: seven hundred keyed-up teenagers, bound up in their good church clothes, plunged together into darkness. Just as it was beginning to dawn on us that we had the teachers outnumbered and they had no way to hold us accountable, Father Ron’s voice came over the soundsystem: “Strangers in the night / Exchanging glances / Wondering in the night / What are the chances . . .” It wasn’t the most dead-accurate Sinatra impression, but it rendered a restive crowd of agitated adolescents neutral by making us all laugh. That was his ethos, too.

News of his death has been making the rounds among my peculiar group of Catholic school misfits today. It’s totally emblematic of the way Father Ron lived his life that all of us, the atheistical public school refugees who sweated out four years of religion classes and being gently but distinctly othered, remember him in much the same way, as a man of decency and humor who took seriously Christ’s admonishment to love everyone, even those of us who didn’t believe what he did. He was the kind of teacher you told stories about, years after you’d last been in his class, and the kind you could always look up when you went back to your hometown, and he’d be there, as open and good and gracious as he had ever been. I’ve never known a man quite like him.

In the Gospel of John one can find the very shortest verse in all of the New Testament: Jesus wept (11:35). There are a thousand ways to interpret the verse, and more: that Jesus’ tears are proof of his humanity; that he is outraged over the coming destruction of the Temple; that he is afraid to die; that he is moved by the grief of his friends. That last one is the one that makes the most sense to me today, the day I learned my old friend, Father Ron, has passed away. I am moved by the grief of my friends. It is a testament to the man for whom we grieve.

I wouldn’t be me, of course, if I didn’t find something lacking in the Bible, so here it is: Jesus never laughs. He is angry, and he is sad, and he is generous, and so on, but there is no verse that reads, Jesus laughed. For many centuries much was made of this absence of mirth, though most of that has gone out of fashion these days. I miss Jesus’ laughter, though, because that would be the balm we need in the wake of Father Ron’s passing, the one that would be most appropriate. Father Ron was a kind and gentle and decent man — and he was a man who laughed, often and well, and presented a version of Catholicism that was much less dour and stern than I had understood it to be, before I met him. I learned many things from him, not least of which was that there is goodness to be found in places where you don’t expect it, and that such goodness is a reason to smile.

I have no doubt that Jesus laughed; someone just forgot to write it down. Father Ron, though, was Jesus’ laughter, embodied. Good-bye, old friend. I miss you.

—>Building on Fire

I didn’t sleep well last night, and I didn’t realize until this morning why that might have been. I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning, watching Fringe and reading Wikipedia articles about serial killers and suicides — morbid, I know, but it’s what I do sometimes — and it wasn’t until I saw the first few fingers of the sun nudging into the sky that I realized what day it was: it’s the third anniversary of the Bad Day, the day my foster brother killed himself and his daughter in a fit of drunken madness that capped a several-months descent into insanity that we who loved him had watched, helpless to do anything about it. For that reason I can remember everything I was doing on this day three years ago. It was the worst day of my life.

I’m not going to subject you to those scenes, though they haunt me. In part it’s because I’ve written about them before and don’t wish to bore my loyal reader — but in truth, with the passage of time, it’s because I’ve come to believe that there is such a thing as a private experience, an experience that can be lived without having been told afterwards, over and over, in language artful and halting. I’m not embarrassed, and I’m not trying to avoid reliving the pain — I relive the pain no matter what I say. I’m just not going to write about it now.

I’m thinking about the risks involved in being human. It seems to me you’re born prepared to be open and whole, and as time goes on life kicks you around and you come to be closed and broken. If you’re lucky, the bruises and dents don’t really accumulate until you’re old enough to handle them, until your parents have herded you carefully through the fragile stages of your childhood and released you onto your own recognizance, trusting you’re strong enough now to take it. If you’re unlucky, like Jesse was, life begins to kick you when you’re small, and continues to kick and to kick until you’re shattered. It’s a risky business, this. If there were other options — not death, but something less permanent and also safer than being alive — I might take one. I think, in fact, it could be argued that I’ve tried very hard to do that through substance abuse, over the years. Being a drunken loner with a novelist’s eye for detail and no compunction about receiving sexual gratification without emotional commitment is, in fact, very much like being not-quite-alive, the riskless version of humanity writ large.

I was a drunk before Jesse killed himself, but the apocalypse in which he disintegrated is illustrative of the risks involved in being human that I have long been trying to avoid. When you consent to love someone, you expose yourself to enormous opportunities to be hurt: they may be unreciporicative, or they made be the sort person incapable of friendship, or they may love you back for a long time and then abandon you, they may take advantage of your affection for their own gain, they may persuade you to do things you shouldn’t do. Or they may commit suicide, suddenly, just when you thought they were getting better, and leave behind a scarred landscape of confused and broken people who can do nothing but compulsively, destructively mourn. They may kill someone else you love, because they have gone insane.

A few months ago, someone asked me, “You you ever wish you never met Jesse?” And I gave the honest answer: every fucking day of the last three years I have wished, at one point or another, that I had never exposed myself to the risk of caring about him. His final act doesn’t nullify the many pleasant hours he and I spent together, the nights he listened to my secrets and told me his in turn, but even three years after the fact I can’t help but feel, right now, that the pain has outweighed the pleasure, the bad outweighs the good. The scale tips only one way, in the end. Do I know which way it is yet?

But at the same time, every time you opt to love someone, to let them in, it is entirely possible that many years from now this kind of thing may happen. Not even Jesse knew he was bipolar when he and I became friends, twenty-two years ago. Life kicks you around, and it’s your responsibility to kick back, or you end up living the anesthetized half-life I’ve been living for a long time, and I have to tell you — whether or not having been friends with Jesse for most of our lives was worth it, never taking the risk of caring about someone is far worse. It’s the difficult calculus of armor and wounds. I’m no good at it. I’m not sure anybody is, really.

*

On the anniversary of her death, I’m going to tell you a story about Maribella, who would be almost eight by now, and probably ten feet tall. Maribella was a willowy mophead who had her father’s leanness and grace but really looked much like her mother — sometimes it’s hard for me to spend time with Maribella’s mother, because an expression will cross her face that’s so familiar I’m sent cascading down into a pit of despair. She was the girliest girl who ever girled, a devotee of all things pink and purple, anything to do with a princess or a unicorn, and everything to do with getting dressed up in dresses and heels and makeup she didn’t know how to apply. She was bright and funny, and devious in a way that — and I mean this fondly — I think she must have got from her father.

One day when she was probably three, I found myself babysitting her. I had expected to be completely up to this task, the task of entertaining and safeguarding a three-year-old, as I had been three years old once and felt sure I remembered what it was like. But she mastered me quickly, and soon understand that she could easily manipulate me because I found her funny and cute. The first thing she did was steal my glasses off my face, which I thought was quite amusing until she dashed off up the stairs with them in her sticky little hand. By the time I understood what was happening, she had disappeared into her bedroom. When I came huffing and puffing in after her, I found her standing at the foot of the bed, her empty hands clasped primly at her waist, a thin smile just preparing to burst into a laugh.

“What did you do with them?”

And that provoked the laugh. She threw back her head and laughed, a garrulous, fried-out laughter, the laughter of a cartoon villain, and I realized that I was going to have to find some other way of getting my glasses back than just demanding them. I tried searching, but the room was overflowing with stuffed animals and clothes and — you may have spotted this already — I couldn’t really see. Finally, after several fruitless minutes pawing through drawers and under furniture, Bells laughing behind me the whole time, I realized that I was going to have to bribe her. Or rather, give in to her blackmail. Ever since that day I’ve wondered if that was premeditated or not, and which would be the more impressive — artful planning, or spontaneous criminal genius?

I was made to play with a procession of little felt dolls that I couldn’t really see, and then to play “store” — a game in which I offered to buy Bells’ toys for escalating prices and she declined until such a point as I was offering her real money — and then to give her several “plane rides”, which involved lying on my back, putting my feet in the air, and letting her lie prone on my feet as I pushed her up off the ground. Finally, I heard the car doors slam out in the driveway and knew her parents were home, and stood up.

“Okay, kiddo, for real. I need my glasses so I can go talk to your dad.”

She flung herself against the door, arms spread across it, and looked at me with all the seriousness her round little face could muster.

“You can never leave,” she said, and I believe she meant it.

And though I scooped her up right then and carried her downstairs to meet with her parents’ scolding, she was more right than she could possibly have known. Years later, now that she’s dead, I find myself back in that room with Maribella often, playing dolls and giving her airplanes, and forever my image of her will be the little girl in the purple sundress, her strawberry blonde curls wild from several consecutive minutes dangling in the air, telling me I’m never allowed to leave her room. And I never really will.

*

This entry is called “—>Building on Fire”, not because the actual lyrics of that song are particularly relevant to Jesse & Maribella’s lives and deaths, but because of how I sometimes feel about all the love that I poured on the two of them. On this date in 2014, that love transformed into a building on fire, and the fire still burns. It consumed Maribella’s mother, it consumed me, it consumed Maribella’s half-sister, it consumed what remains of Jesse’s biological family, and it consumed the way in which we all related to each other. I, personally, have done bad things, hurt people I care about, because of how consumed I was by the fire Jesse lit that day. Let me tell you: this is not a story with a happy ending. There isn’t any uplift here. I’m not going to give you a heaping bowl of redemption. Suicide and murder fill the lives of those who survive with grief, shame, suspicion, paranoia.

The calculus of armor and wounds. It may in fact be unsolvable.

Some Losses

1. Grief as Paranoia

    I flew down to Bend for my cousin’s wedding over the weekend. Flying to Bend is always a bit of an odd experience — the flight, which only covers 120 miles or so, usually takes about 25 minutes, so that getting to and from the airport is a bigger ordeal than being in the air. When I got down there, nobody was there to pick me up. Not a big deal — the Redmond-Bend airport is not much more than a glorified bus station, so there’s nothing arduous about getting in and out — but I wondered, sort of, if I’d been forgotten, so I called my mom to see if someone was on the way. She said my dad was, but he was running a little late.

    Then a weird thing happened. A couple of minutes later, I was still waiting, and she called me back. When I saw her name on the caller ID, I became convinced that she was calling to tell me that my dad had been in a wreck on the way to pick me up, and was dead. This is a completely ridiculous, irrational fear, but it was so strong that I almost didn’t answer the phone. When I did, she just wanted to say that she’d talked to him and he would be there any minute. Even as she did, I spotted his car pulling up to the curb. Everything was fine. Nobody had died. Of course nobody had died.

    When I was a kid, my dad hated answering the phone, and the explanation given was always that he associated unexpected phone calls with answering the call that informed him that my half-sister, his oldest child, had been killed in a car wreck. I sort of pretended to understand that — it made sense in an abstract way — but I never really did. It wasn’t until I got a similar call a couple of years ago that I started to understand. Now — now, my grief over that event has largely subsided to a background noise, something that’s always there but rarely all-consuming. It has, however, manifested as this very specific form of paranoia. If there’s a way for my brain to line up events in such a way that someone has died, it’ll do it. And though I know it’s ridiculous, I can’t help it. Every phone call is a disaster in the making.

2. Grief as Public Rite

    When David Bowie died, I was as surprised as anybody, I suppose. But what really surprised me, far more than the actual fact of his death, was the response to it. My Facebook feed erupted in a collective cri de coeur, one which roared for a full day but still hasn’t really petered out. Links to his videos, teary-sounding tributes, lots of agreeing, head shaking, and digital hugging went around. The rending of garments was elaborate.

    This surprised me because David Bowie meant exactly nothing to me. I don’t begrudge anybody else their fandom or their grief — God knows, most of them will all be mystified when a small minority of us are totally crushed by the inevitable death of, say, Stephen Fry — I just don’t understand it. I always found Bowie’s music to be a little bland; it always seemed to me that the theatrical aspect of his art rendered the music qua music not very interesting, much of the time. My favorite Bowie record is probably an Iggy Pop record. (The Idiot, btw.) My favorite Bowie song is probably a Queen song. (“Under Pressure”.) The only time I ever saw Bowie live, it was because he was touring with Nine Inch Nails, and I spent most of his set (he was in Thin White Duke mode that night) idly wondering when Trent Reznor was going to come out.

    And it’s funny, because in many ways Bowie seems to have stood foursquare against a lot of the things I despise: rote fetishization of the authentic; reflexive privileging of emotion over intellect; the idea of perfection in art. Bowie was weird and daring and sometimes sloppy. He took risks that didn’t always pay off. This is the kind of artist I usually love; it’s the kind I try to be. He stands with Neal Stephenson and Richard Linklater and Margaret Atwood in this way. And yet, somehow, I just never locked in with him. My failure to lock in caused me to have a blind spot as to his massive cultural significance.

    It’s weird to be reminded so viscerally of the ways in which you’re out-of-step with the zeitgeist. If Bob Dylan or Mick Jagger had died and this been the response, I would have been as all in as everybody else. But the death of David Bowie, even at the relatively young age of 69, did not rock my world. I kind of wish now that it had. I’m obviously missing out on something.

    The night Bowie died, I was walking up Clinton Street in the dark, and I saw a big crowd gathered around a firetruck and an ambulance. My first instinct was to take out my radio gear and see what was going on. But as I approached, I heard a boombox playing “Under Pressure”, and then “Rebel Rebel”, and I realized something public, important, but not necessarily newsworthy was going on here. It had something to do with David Bowie, though I couldn’t tell what. I never did figure out what the firetruck and ambulance were there for — nobody was hurt — and eventually I moved on. Really, I probably should have taken out my gear anyway and started asking around. I’m sure there was a story there. Maybe, though, I was not the person to tell it.

3. Grief as Public Rite 2: The Re-griefening

    But then Alan Rickman died. Rickman and Bowie were both English, both 69 years old, both died of cancer. I was actually shocked to find that Rickman was the same age as Bowie — his rise to fame came 15 years later, with his iconic performance as Hans Gruber in Die Hard. I think I would have pegged him at about 55, if you’d asked, though I don’t know why you’d ask me how old Alan Rickman was when you could just Google the guy. But it gave me a window into what other people were feeling about Bowie. A reminder, really; I’ve been getting bummed out by celebrity deaths since the suicide of Kurt Cobain at least. I don’t know that I’m gutted, the way some people seemed to be by Bowie’s death. But I’m not happy about it. It scares me — not least because Rickman was younger than my father and not much older than my mother. And it feels completely not real. Like, how is it possible that Alan Fucking Rickman is dead? Hans Gruber sure isn’t dead, even if he is. Severus Snape isn’t dead, even if he is. (Spoiler alert, Potter newbies.) How can the man who brought them to life be dead?

    A few years ago, I was poking through some website looking for an Adventure Time t-shirt, when I ran across something far better: a baseball undershirt with blue sleeves and, positioned smack in the middle, an airbrushed glamour shot of a young Alan Rickman, sandy-haired and, in his weird, beaky way, very handsome. I knew immediately that I had just found the greatest item of clothing ever made. I will admit that some of that was the seriously WTF nature of the person on its front — Rickman was famous (very, after his turn as Snape), and seriously talented, but he wasn’t a celebrity in the way that the people who get their faces on t-shirts usually are. His dalliances didn’t make the pages of People magazine. I have no idea where he lived. I’m actually not entirely sure whether he was straight or gay. Until he took the role of Snape, he had been a slightly-more-handsome-than-average character actor. Even after he took the role of Snape, he was still a character actor — it was just that he was probably the single most famous character actor in the world. Why was he on this shirt?

    But there was more to it for me. Rickman had always been one of those guys that I felt a little bit of ownership of. One of the things I used to do, back when I had a membership to a fabulous brick-and-mortar PDX movie rental shop called Movie Madness, was fall in love with an actor or actress and make a project of plowing through every movie on their IMDB page. The whims that took me could be capricious, weird — I watched every terrible movie that the terrible actress Jennifer Morrison (of the terrible TV show House) made, for instance. But one of the more rewarding ones of these projects was Rickman. I never finished — he’d been in over 40 movies and TV shows by the time I took it up, some of them quite hard to lay hands on (I never managed to find a copy of a BBC miniseries called The Barchester Chronicles, in which Rickman plays a reportedly very minor role, for instance). But you’d find Rickman doing solid work in the weirdest corners of cinema and television — as the title character in an HBO movie called Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny, for instance; or as the nasty Outback imperlalist Elliot Marston in the dopey Quigley Down Under. Though he was often typecast as the heavy, he could do just about anything, as attested by his comic turn as The Metatron in Kevin Smith’s Dogma, or his unexpectedly heart-throbbing Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility. When finally he was tapped to play the role that would make him a worldwide icon — Severus Snape in the Harry Potter franchise — it felt like there was no other actor on Earth who could breathe life into JK Rowling’s most complex, dangerous, and magnetic character.

    He was probably too old to play Snape, really; the Severus of the books is still a relatively young man (some rudimentary math would suggest that he’s in his early 30s by the time Harry and the gang show up at Hogwarts), but Rickman was 55 — old enough to be the father of the character he was playing, if you think about it. But still he seemed perfect. Rickman’s specialty was the character who was supercilious, hyper-intelligent, malevolent. Snape was all of those things. He was scary and mean and cruel. The thing is, a lot of people could do that. But the part called for someone who could play all of those things, and then make it convincing when he finally displayed something many never expected him to have — vulnerability. When the moment came, Rickman was more than up to the task. By that point, seven-and-a-half movies in, the Harry Potter franchise was not really featuring the acting skills of its players very much; the books were far too long and complex to be adapted into movies, especially when the movies made the mistake of concentrating on the action at the expense of the things that truly made the books special — the characters and the humor. Rickman was just about the only adult with a big moment to play in either of the final two films. Many other very fine actors — Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Gambon, etc — were reduced to little more than cackling villains or noble godheads by that point. But Rickman nailed it. Inasmuch as the bloated, overstuffed behemoths that were the last few Harry Potter movies had a heart, Rickman’s Snape was it. He pumped hot blood through a cold franchise almost single-handed.

    I still kind of can’t believe he’s gone. I no longer follow movies as avidly as once I did, but the idea that the upcoming flicks Eye in the Sky (a star-studded techno-thriller in which Rickman stars opposite Helen Mirren) and the certain-to-be-dreadful Alice in Wonderland sequel, in which he’ll voice the Catarpillar, will be his last? That just seems wrong. I re-watched Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban, and every time he was on the screen, I tried to convince myself that he was really dead. I never got there. Somehow it just doesn’t make sense.