The Theory of Relativity proved you would come back younger from a voyage to the stars, right? I think even when you come back from New York on JetBlue, you’re technically younger. Infinitesimally so — but hell, I’ll take it. Have to. It’s like that old line about pregnancy — you can’t be a little bit pregnant. You either come back younger or you don’t. So we went through this phase, got our degrees in the jitterbug-ology of Death. We blew through verbiage, waving words like the man who waved his whisk before God, as the Sufi wiseguy once said. Danced our jive asses off to Motown… how it can dance! Had Ryder dancing with us too, we each held one of his little absent hands though that was tough because, see, the three of us actually used to do that, had our sweaty, popcorn’d Soul Train — American Bandstand Saturday nights. But Kelly and me danced through it, pretended Ryder was there, full-on boogie’d with and acknowledged him. I was the coach, Ryder the quarterback, and Kelly the head cheerleader for Team Zombie. O yes — the walking and dancing dead.
Dead man meditating…
Then one day it was over. Guess you had to have been there. You know, I learned a lot from Kelly. She was magnificent. I don’t think that’s been adequately conveyed in the few hours we’ve spent. Kelly was simply magnificent.
About a week after Ryder died, I spoke to a friend who lost his kid two decades back. He said the hard part came after the wake, when friends stopped bringing food and folks stopped calling, to give you your space. Or because they didn’t know what to say or whatever. “These are the good times,” he said. “Savor it.”
The irony is that the death of our son was his teachable moment to her. But I think she’s going to have to wait a long time to learn its lesson. Hopefully, she’ll get it, at the TM of her own death: the lesson of Impermanence.
There’s a marvelous little story that Sir Richard Burton recounts in his Anatomy of Melancholy. That book didn’t leave my side for three years after we lost our son.
A young man, disconsolate over his debts, saw no way out. He went into an abandoned shack to hang himself. He’d already tied the rope on a rafter when something caught his eye. He went over to a caved-in closet to investigate and found a trove of gold coins. It was meant to be hidden but a rotting beam had broken under its weight. He couldn’t believe his reversal of fortune. He crept away with the treasure chest under his arm. A while later, another young man entered the shack. When he saw that the treasure that he’d hidden was gone, he used the rope left behind to hang himself. Isn’t that lovely? Like something from Boccaccio.
I hope you don’t think it too strange, my telling that. I’ll tell you why I did. Have you ever had a bad breakup? Or unrequited love? And when it’s over, you keep thinking you see their car? You see it everywhere: on the freeway, in parking lots, in front of you, behind. You see it in your dreams… I did that for years once. I even knew it wasn’t his car anymore, someone told me he’d bought a new one but there I was, trapped in time, still on the lookout for a yellow Corolla with a dent on the passenger door. Couldn’t help myself. It’s like that for me and hangings now. Whenever I read about one in the paper… I’ve got a book of clippings. Maybe that’s carrying it too far. I don’t do the tarot anymore. For some reason, I shy away from the Hanged Man, though I’m a real fan of upside-down crucifixions. St. Peter and all. Go figure.
What can I say? There’s perverse comfort in it. I don’t know the psychology. There’s a hidden fraternity, you’d be surprised, of people whose loved ones hanged themselves. And folks like me, who found them. Thank God for the Internet.
He laughed, smiled to himself, then placed his hands together in his lap and closed his eyes like a guru who was done for the day. I took the liberty of boiling water for tea but in a few minutes he broke free of his thoughts and leapt beside me. “No no, don’t fuss with that. You’ve listened so patiently that a parting cup of tea is the least I could do.” We drank in relative silence, with Charley resuming the lotus position. A pleasant smile of what I took for catharsis suffused his features. He asked me a few questions about where I was going next, when I thought the anthology would be published, and so forth.
I was in my car and halfway down the winding hill when he appeared, out of breath. He looked not so much anguished as startled. I asked what was wrong. He said he’d left something out—“a rather crucial last piece of business. I’d kick myself if I never told you, whether you decide to include it or not.” I told him I would turn around but he said the afternoon’s talk had exhausted him. He apologized again for any inconvenience, offering two choices: tomorrow — here at lunchtime — or later on at 2 a.m. when the baths at Esalen open. It appealed to me to end our encounter at the place it had begun.
The superb night was cold and crystalline, and made me think about his comment of the pilots who get so close to the stars and the blackness — and about Big Sur being a place where one cannot expect to be healed. Only one other person was in the tub; she got out and nodded to us in leavetaking, a cue to begin. Then she was gone.
I told you I wouldn’t hold back and I meant it. What I’m about to tell you may sound egregious or vulgar — TMI alert!
Here goes.
I think pretty much everyone knows that a hanged man gets a hard-on. Most of us have heard it before, somewhere or other. Wikipedia calls it “angel lust” but you never really know what’s a bullshit Wiki entry and what isn’t. Someone could have heard “angel lust” on Grey’s Anatomy, which means it may or may not have been made up by smartass Hollywood writers. So pretty soon you’ve got fake entries in there that look real and maybe even become real if they catch on. Somebody could have put “angel lust” in there and it’s bogus but the wikitectives haven’t caught it yet or maybe never will until it’s actually entered the vernacular. In which case, it’d stay on Wiki anyway. At any rate, it was true with my son. He got a hard-on. Or had one when I found him. The death erection, what they call a “terminal” erection. I’ve studied up on this a little — I mean, since. When a man is hanged, he gets hard and sometimes climaxes. Of course as his dad I saw his penis in every way, shape and form — you change the diapers and see an adorable stiffie, a confection, you want to take a bite! A terminal confection. Kelly and I would joke about it, I think that’s probably something most parents do, you could see the purple vein, he’d pee straight up, oh do all kinds of things. It seems to me that in the delirium of the moment, my son hanging from the rope and me lifting him, hefting the weight of him, that infernal dance of ours frozen in time, tadpole thickened to anemone-sized tentacle by the hanging trauma, its familiar now very unfamiliar purple vein not a rebuke but a wild reminder of God, that now Ryder wildly belonged to God—I wasn’t aroused, Lord no, never, more like a frightened boy myself, making up for my shyness by clutching a tall girl at a cotillion dance, holding on too tight — what a simple heartbreak scene drawn in my head forevermore! His little balls made a horizontal 8, the Infinity sign, I saw myself as a boy just his age, see myself now as we talk, skittish child-victim of the clergy cotillion — there’s my son, dead, hard — helplessly, incognizantly aroused by his yanked, roughshod transition to boodafield…