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Afternoon is the time of Woman: the Unknown
Io ritornai da la santissima onda
Rifatto sì come piante novelle
Rinovellate di novella fronda,
puro e disposto a salire a le
stelle
.
— P U R G A T O R I O, XXXIII. 142–5
CLEAN [Michael]
Dancing With The Stars
He
was in LA, in preproduction on a film. Catherine was shooting a Fosse-themed Glee. Ryan told him that a guest stint by Catherine had been in play long before Michael sent his fan letter.
Karma.
. .
He met the little cancer gal & her mom for tea at the Peninsula.
Then he did something that surprised him.
Michael told the driver to take him to the little cemetery in Westwood where his half-brother was buried. (He didn’t question his instincts anymore.) Anyway, now was as good a time as any to pay his respects to the dead; he wasn’t able to make the Reaper’s recent gala, and had respectfully RSVP’d his regrets. He’d be attending soon enough.
The actor’s asst called the park to make sure he wouldn’t be disrupting a funeral by his presence. The coast was clear. A caretaker met him at the car & walked him to Eric’s flat stone. The mood of that shitty day — Eric’s funeral — washed over him. He knelt a moment, running a finger over the grass on the grave.
The actor meandered through the modestly-scaled tombs. It felt like a minefield. He stepped over, around & in-between the engraved invitations in a superstitious foxtrot (or minuet, holding Death’s hand like a child without knowing it), which was more or less what he’d done with cancer — with sure foot and unwavering eye, he picked his way through the cellsplitting grunge & muck that tried to abduct and to claim him, to snatch him back whence he came like an incensed parent denied custody. The fuckers on the Internet who laid virtual money that his time was nigh had already lost their shirts. He felt like Keith Richards. He’d outlive all the jackals, & have kicks along the way.
Everyone knew that Marilyn was buried here but as he walked and surveyed, the profusion of showbiz dead surprised him. His dad’s time was well-represented: Malden & Matthau, Leigh, Lancaster, Lemmon. The manicured morgue was as eclectic as a guest list off the old Tonight Show—Capote, Coburn, Cassavetes — Gene Kelly, Don Knotts, Merv. Dominick Dunne’s murdered daughter was here and he wondered why Nick buried himself in Connecticut instead of with his child. Michael couldn’t bear the thought of being separated from his children, even in death. He shook his head at the Zappa & Joplin markers… unfuckingreal.
He soft-shoed between Natalie Wood and Billy Wilder, suddenly standing over Farrah. That was a tough death. It was one thing to go on Letterman and tell the world the cat got your tongue, & entirely another to announce the cat crawled up your ass and died and was taking you with it. In those first frightening months, MD thought of her a lot. He watched her documentary — all in all, a damn brave girl. Hella courage. And to have them film you like that, hella courage all around. He remembered something a friend said when the family was vacationing in Fiji. They were floating in a coral reef when a small, black&white-banded snake swam between his legs and disappeared. His buddy told him it was poisonous but not to worry, it had no interest in human beings. Michael asked where the hospital was, if you happened to get bit. “You could drive to the clinic in town,” he answered, “but I wouldn’t recommend it. It wouldn’t be the best use of the hour you had left.”
MD wondered how he’d behave in the face of losing numbers: that was the real Hitch-22. (Jesus, losing Christopher was a loss. What giantsized balls the man had.) He knew the producer in him — the warrior — would never want to concede, but the actor just might… He agonized over the question: When do you stop NetJetting to clinics in Switzerland, South Africa, Brazil for experimental treatment? When the only result is twitter rape, videos of your emaciated bodyhusk struggling in and out of vans, your haunted, anguished huffin and puffin visage HuffPosted to the world. Ryan O’Neal had stayed by her side, steadfast & true. MD laughed a little, thinking: he won’t be by my side, least not if I can help it. There were so many things you’d lose control of once you crossed a certain threshold… Ryan had leukemia himself, for the last ten years, same type Ali had in Love Story. And now he’s got prostate. It’s Cancer’s world, we just live in it. At least Ryan was still alive. Wasn’t he?
He headed toward the car, pausing at another stone:
DOROTHY STRATTEN
FEBRUARY 28, 1960—AUGUST 14, 1980
IF PEOPLE BRING SO MUCH COURAGE TO THIS WORLD THE WORLD HAS TO KILL THEM TO BREAK THEM, SO OF COURSE IT KILLS THEM… IT KILLS THE VERY GOOD AND THE VERY GENTLE AND THE VERY BRAVE IMPARTIALLY. IF YOU ARE NONE OF THESE YOU CAN BE SURE THAT IT WILL KILL YOU TOO BUT THERE WILL BE NO SPECIAL HURRY
WE LOVE YOU DR
Strange. He wondered if the mom had written it. Maybe. In a raging delirium of grief, no doubt.
Star 80 was probably Fosse’s best film. His most director-like film, anyway.
She was only twenty. Star 20. . . . .
Some were made like his dad, royal tortoises mobb deep in guardian angels, while others breathed ICU nursery O2-tank air for a few mayfly minutes before expiration.
One needn’t be a philosopher to grasp the insignificance of temporal goings-on; one needn’t even be pretentious (tho sometimes that helped). In the design of things, there was utterly no significance in whether you lived an hour, a year or a hundred years — the span of human life was cloud graffiti. Michael couldn’t remember the context, but one of his doctors in Montreal used a wonderful word, blessure, which meant injury to tissue, a break in the skin. (The actor rearranged it in his head as “surely blessed.”) Last night as he fell asleep, he meditated. If every soul who’d ever lived and died on Earth — Yahoo! put it just over 100 billion — were to suddenly manifest & vaporize, the Unknown* would have no more awareness of the thunderous lamentations accompanying their collective outgoing breath than an insect would have knowledge of a microblog devoted to its industrious ways. The unfathomable cessation would incur no celestial blessure, the Ineffable not suffer the slightest bruising whatsoever. Something he read in his college days at UC Santa Barbara stayed with him all these years, something one did have to be a philosopher to have said, or a philosopher-poet, anyway. “Life is the rarest form of death.” Wasn’t that wild? The old joke of life being a near-death experience. Was that George Carlin? Or Mr. Nietzsche?