By the time the afternoon was over, when they left, Ernest was drunk as a skunk. His head was falling on the table. I was embarrassed for him. This was a man who’d won the Nobel prize. I found it a pitiable thing to see a man of this power, this nobility of spirit, demeaned in this way. I didn’t want to see any more of it.
I left. I was at the Nacional in Havana. It was empty, I had the whole floor to myself – and I hadn’t rented the whole floor that time, as I did years later at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. Matter of fact there was a parade while I was there and Castro himself came marching down the street. I watched it from my window.
I went back once more to see Ernest. It was even worse. I don’t know what had gotten into his head, but naturally he wanted to know all about what I’d been doing in the past years. I didn’t feel the machinations at Hughes Aircraft and troubles at TWA were the things that really would have fascinated him, but I gave him a brief rundown on it, and all he could do was criticize me, and harp on the fact that I was wasting my life on involvements with this kind of thing and the kind of people I had to deal with. Now I knew this. That’s precisely why I had come to see Ernest. I was like a man who had a crippled leg, and I had gone to the doctor to see if he could cure me, and all the doctor could say was, ‘Your leg is crippled, your leg is crippled.’ What I was looking for was the cure.
Ernest offered me no suggestions, only harped on the fact that I was too involved with these people. I would say, ‘Yes, I know that, but I want to become uninvolved, and how do I do it? And where do I go? How do I cut loose?’ I may not have put it in such childlike terms as that, but it was clear that I was there for help. And instead of helping me, Ernest tried to bully me.
When you bully me, I vanish. Usually I vanish physically, but sometimes I just vanish mentally and emotionally.
I crawled into my shell, and the more I did that, the more Ernest tried to pry open the cover and knock holes in me. He still had a lot of the old charm, he wasn’t unpleasant enough for me to pick up and walk out of his house, because every time he saw me getting really uncomfortable, he’d slap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Oh, shit, it’s good to see you, Howard, or Tom’ – he called me both names. People in Cuba thought my name was Tom Howard or Howard Tom. Ernest had kept his promise, I think it amused him that he was the only one who knew.
We didn’t go fishing this time. Ernest was in no condition for that. He was worried about whether the government was going to take over his farm and he didn’t even want to leave the house. He was worried about his health. I remember the doctor came out and took his blood pressure right there at the table.
But there was still some of the old Ernest left. We drove into Havana together, and the car broke down halfway. Ernest cursed up a storm and started a speech about ‘goddamn modern machinery,’ and got out to open the hood. But I could tell what the trouble was from the way the motor had sputtered. I told him, ‘You’re just out of gas,’ and that’s what it was. His gas gauge was broken.
This was where the old Ernest popped up out of that crotchetiness. There was a car parked nearby, not far from a house or a few houses. Ernest took a length of rubber tubing from the trunk. ‘Indispensable, Howard,’ he said. ‘Never travel without it.’ He siphoned a gallon or so of gas out of this other car, sucked it up with his mouth, which made me terribly nervous. I shudder to think of what fumes went down into Ernest’s lungs. And if the owner of the car had seen it he might have fired a shot at us.
Anyhow, we got to the city all right and filled the tank there.
It was a bad visit. It was a mistake. It colored the good memories of Ernest with an overlay of this unsuccessful meeting. What I most deeply regret is that I hadn’t known Ernest as a younger man, and that we hadn’t kept in touch. If I had known him during those years, let’s say even from 1946 up to 1959, that might have changed my entire life. But events intervened, and you don’t always see what’s the right course to follow, and we had lost touch.
I never saw him again. I was deeply saddened when I heard of his death, that he’d blown his brains out. Not that I object to suicide. I feel it’s every man’s right to put an end to his life when it’s become intolerable to him. But what preceded it – the sickness and the periods of insanity, the decline of a brilliant and fine man into a wretched shell – saddened me deeply.
What about you, in your life? Have you ever contemplated suicide?
I imagine every man has. The first serious time was when I broke up with Billie Dove. That was a totally demoralizing experience for me. The other times were flashes of despair. But I have to tell you one thing, and then you’ll understand a lot about my life, about these past years.
After my crash in the F-ll, when I was in the hospital and the doctors had just about given up on me, what saved my life was my will to live. And I’m not talking about an unconscious instinctive will to live, like the fox that bites off its foot in a trap – I mean a conscious repetition of my intense desire to go on living. I lay there in that hospital bed and I repeated it to myself time after time. ‘You’ve got to live. You’ve got to live.’ Not: ‘You’re going to live.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to live.’
That phrase burned itself into my mind, I had repeated it so often so that years later, when things were really bad and that flash of despair came to me, which I suppose is common to all men, it was always overpowered by an echo of what I had said to myself in that hospital bed: ‘You’ve got to live.’
The only time I thought seriously about doing away with myself, other after the breakup with Billie, was during my last marriage. It came then from a deep sense of shame at having failed – I don’t mean only in my marriage, but in my life. It was as if over the years, all the bad and wrong things I had done, the promises I had made and broken, welled to the top. I’m not just talking about promises where I said, ‘I’ll buy these planes from you’ and then I didn’t buy them. I’m talking about promises in human relationships, promises that are not given in words, but that you make by virtue of the obligations you take on. Time passes and you find you were unable to fulfil them because you’ve changed, the other person has changed, and life interferes. And yet, what it amounts to in the end is a mountain of lies and deceptions beyond your control. They pile up inside you – each one is a little hard stone that seems to grow. You feel the weight of them year after year as each one gets added to the pile, and there’s no way to get rid of them. You can’t vomit them out anymore because the weight is too great inside you.
And then I suppose a moment comes when you feel this interior heaviness at the mistakes you made, and these personal failures, so much so that you think you just can’t go on. Cancer of the memory, you can call it.
But I went on – for which, all things considered, I’m grateful. No man can be certain of this, of course, but I don’t believe I will ever commit suicide. I feel my spirit caged in this decaying carcass, yearning to get out. But I will do nothing to hasten that departure.
There’s a story I heard about you from a friend. It has to do with a man named Bob Balzer and a house you rented from him on Mulholland Drive.