Happy Bastille Day.
Also, Happy 100th Birthday, Woody Guthrie. It’s cool that a white, working class
southerner whose ever-present guitar was sometimes plastered with a sign
reading “This Machine Kills Fascists,” shares a birthday with France’s
“Fourteenth of July.” Guthrie was most
famous for his anthem “This Land is Your Land,” as well as for being the
primary inspiration for Bob Dylan who used to visit him in the New Jersey
psychiatric hospital where he lived while being treated for Huntington’s
disease.
I also have to say a personal Happy Birthday to
Guy, my college roommate and, for a time, best friend, whose home was a mile or
so from that very hospital where Woody Guthrie and Dylan used to meet. I spent a summer with Guy painting his
family’s house while they were away on vacation. Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” album* had come
out recently, and we had it blasting out of speakers set up in the windows as
we painted the huge, two-story mansion that doubled as Guy’s father’s doctor’s
office.
Guy had about as much influence on me and my view
of the world as Woody Guthrie had on Bob Dylan.
My suburban/bourgeois upbringing didn’t stand a chance in the face of
his bright, iconoclastic mind. When I
met him as a freshman in college, he struck me as the smartest human being I
had ever encountered. He played an
astonishingly good game of chess and he always seemed to have an understanding
of things that I had never thought about.
We became roommates when I moved into his dorm room soon after his
officially assigned roommate left college for alcohol-related reasons. We continued to room together for the next
three years until I got married and he dropped out of college.
Guy was not only brainy, he was bohemian. This appealed to me immensely. Having grown up in a small town in Florida, my
only inkling of a bohemian world came to me through high school lectures on the
dangers of marijuana and heroin (which convinced me that they were essentially
the same thing), and the occasional off-beat pop song redolent of Greenwich
Village. One I remember in particular
was called “Walking my Cat Named Dog.” Its absurdity broke through the many layers
of my Ozzie and Harriet upbringing to tug at that part of my heart that longed
for something else. Guy represented that
something else. Growing up within
striking distance of New York City must have helped him become the post-Beat
free-thinker that so impressed me.
We spent hours together, driving around the South
and hanging out in the French Quarter.
We weren’t always the most mature dudes on the block. One of our “fun things to do,” was, after
quaffing a bit of this or that heady stuff in a Quarter bar, to climb around on
the local architecture. Sometimes it was
possible to go up a fire escape, slip over onto a ledge and be off on an architectural
adventure, going from roof to roof.
Once, after we had scrambled from one building to another, we decided to
drop to the pavement. What we didn’t
realize was that we had landed in the middle of the enclosed courtyard of a
very wealthy elderly lady who saw us plummet from the roof into what she
(rightly) considered part of her living quarters. She came out and faced us with anger, but we
could also tell, a bit of fear as well.
We felt awful for having unintentionally frightened her and, in our most
contrite, college boy manner, we slunk toward her gate and, apologizing
profusely, let ourselves out. No more of
the French Quarter roof ballet for us.
We did, however, continue our midnight dockside explorations. Like I said, we were 18 or 19, but inclined to act a few years short of our actual ages. Once, while making our way to the docks, we had to cross a railroad track that was blocked by a stationary train. Guy, a high school wrestler, was quite agile, and he hopped up on a connector between two cars and jumped off on the other side. I used the more pedestrian, seemingly less risky method of slipping under the coupling. As soon as I stood up on the other side of the train, a horrendously loud clank indicated that it had started moving. Guy and I looked at each other in astonishment and then laughed, but as we stood there watching the train move off, I think he must have, as I was, been contemplating how different our lives would have been had we been a couple seconds slower in crossing the tracks.
On the docks we used to keep track of where the
different ships came from and, when we saw one from a Latin American port, I
tried to engage the sailors up on deck with a bit of broken Spanish. I think Guy’s favorite moment came late one
night when, as we strolled down a deserted dockside, along came a man pedaling
a small ice cream cart. Guy couldn’t get
over the absurdity of this: here we were in a place overrun with cat-size rats
and dark, hulking ships, a place where finding an unfortunate mob-crossed corpse
wouldn’t be beyond possibility, what did we find? The Good Humor Man.
Guy specialized in appreciation for the absurd;
sometimes he seemed almost to live for this predilection. One incident I recall involved Guy dancing
with his semi-girlfriend Susie in the downstairs Rathskeller where our
university generously made beer and other drinks available to us. During the wild bouncing dance, Susie lost
her footing and collapsed on the floor.
She lay there laughing with embarrassment, but Guy’s response was to
continue dancing, circling around her and laughing himself as though this were
all part of their “act.”
It might be appropriate here to say I have no picture
of Guy, but he looked a bit like Rudolf Nureyev; and he had a lithe and
athletic dancer’s body.
Guy was kind of the world’s first
post-modernist. He was ready to challenge
every cherished truth and unquestioned assumption held to by common sense and
current intellectual fashion. Sometimes
it drove me nuts, but it was always a refreshing exercise to talk to or debate
him.
We plowed through different intellectual fads –
Nietzsche (what college student back then didn’t experience a Nietzsche phase?), Freud,
James Joyce. Once, during our
deep-into-Freud phase, Guy was complaining about his parents’
incommunicativeness. His parents, who
were actually a couple of sweethearts, had a kind of Germanic reserve and Guy used
to say they wouldn’t respond to him. So,
one evening, while he was writing a letter home to his mother, he turned to me
and asked, “What can I say to her? She
doesn’t pay attention to what I write anyway.”
So, in a flippant mood, I suggested writing something about masturbating
and crying “Mother! Mother!” in the night.
Guy liked that idea and decided to put it in his letter. A week or so later he reported triumphantly
that his mother had written back but had said nothing to him in response to his
outrageous claim.
When I left New Orleans, Guy, no longer a student, stayed behind. He seemed happy enough when I saw him in
subsequent years, but he was clearly spending too much time drinking. Eventually he wound up living at a charity institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, where such basics as housing and food were
taken care of. I went to visit him in
the 1990s with my daughter, Grace, and I found him, as always, happy and
upbeat. He talked about how much he
enjoyed riding around on the back of the charity’s truck as they cruised
neighborhoods picking up donations.
Guy would have been 66 this Monday, but I found
out a couple days ago that he had died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2010. Even as his health deteriorated he apparently
kept his good nature and upbeat spirit.
He was unique and if our mortality is extended mainly through the
memories of those whose lives we have shaped, Guy still has at least a few
years to go - through those of us who remember him. He was dear to me and I’m a different person
for having known him.
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Here's a picture sent to me by an old friend long after I had written this:
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Here's a picture sent to me by an old friend long after I had written this:
Guy, looking untypically serious, in our New Orleans apartment
*Blonde on Blonde: Still the greatest album ever.
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ReplyDeleteI had to do some editing. But this is what I posted, then deleted and reposted (with typos corrected, I hope)
ReplyDeleteI figure I should wait to post this comment until I stop crying....but I'm overwhelmed with memories and sadness for what could have been. And then a little voice in my head says, "He had all the opportunities in the world, all the capabilities to take any path he wanted and he chose that path as surely as Bob chose his and I have chosen mine." But he was an immense force. He hitchhiked all the way to California to talk to Norman O. Brown. But I will say this; his, what seemed to me then, scathing sarcasm was intimidating. I just didn't have the confidence to meet him on his own terms. And I was jealous a lot of the time...because your friendship with Guy was important, and it was very clear that you were an immensely important person in his life, as well. But he did lack something we had, Bob. One thing I am convinced of is that, for all their conventionality, one thing our "Ozzie and Harriet" childhoods gave us was a lot of love. Guy, it seemed, didn't have that and as a result, he did lack the ability to connect with another human being in a real way, in an intimate way (and I don't mean sex) and I do think he lacked the ability to love as we did-each other, our friends, being in New Orleans, our parents and families. His need to be....something, I'm not sure what, prevented him from achieving what you and I have-true, solid relationships with the people in our lives, to give and to get back love and happiness....Happy Birthday, Guy. For whatever you were, one thing is for sure: you are not forgotten!
This is a moving tribute to an old friend, and ALS is a nasty way to go. I remember those times, and I did have those friends who pushed me, still have them in fact, same friends and new ones too. As time passes, we understand so much better what all went on and how important it was. But also I've noticed there's other stuff we don't understand. Guy was smart and motivated, hitchhiked all that way to meet Norman O. Brown. And then seized up. It sounds like he may have died very much alone. When I was in college, a freshman, there was a senior from Ohio edited our school paper, was a star English major, wrote brilliantly, and was the leader of a band of thinkers at our school who were poised for the radical times that were just ahead. I always wondered what became of him, used the modern internet techniques to find him and dropped him a note. His response was "I'm not the one you're looking for." He was, though. I did have the right person. I was advised by another old friend from back then that he's sunk into a hermit's life with almost no contact outside, and in mind I can see him so clearly back then--who he was and who he is now is a true puzzle to me. What could have happened to change him like that. Time is a real torrent, or it can be, and 50 years is a lot of torrent. Bob, I'm sure if Guy could look back at how you've handled it all, he'd be proud to have played a part in making you the amazing, stalwart solid good soul you are.
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