I caught the 9:15 morning flight from JFK to Burbank, California. The purpose of this trip was to visit a place where a great friend had died and to see other old friends who were under attack by Cancer and age-related conurbations. I anticipated a grim but necessary experience. Since I’d begun to accept the notion of my own mortality, I wanted to know how old friends were facing the end of the line.
One friend, Jim, called it a farewell tour and reminded me to, “give Karen a call.” Two other buddies, both named Dan, had been diagnosed with cancers that had metastasized. Another, Paul, had recently suffered two strokes. And then there was David, a cancer survivor–which seems oxymoronic in a way–who had undergone significant operations that left a seam in his neck that could make you shiver.
As far as I knew Keith was in good health. The only thing he suffered from was a surfeit of pursuits.
Per Jim, I called Karen soon after landing and we arranged to have coffee later in the week. Before saying goodbye she mentioned that she was wearing hearing aids. I chuckled.
The route to Burbank covered large parts of the Grand Canyon, which, when viewed from seven miles high, revealed what amounts to the watershed for almost the entire south-west. The sky was cloudless as we flew into the long morning. Emerging from the plane, onto a steel staircase to the tarmac, was like stepping back in time more than fifty years. The sudden fresh warm air was startling. When Burbank Studios were flourishing, the airport was a celebrity hub. The airport’s interior decor was from a decidedly earlier era. Walking down the corridor to baggage claim I pass a life-size statue of Amelia Earhart with her hand on a propeller all done in bronze, next to a display case featuring artifacts of her triumphs.
Having landed so close to South Pasadena, my first stop was the Happy Days health food store and restaurant on Lake Street in South Pasadena. John, the owner, had been the landlord of Leighton, who had fallen out of a hammock, struck his head on the floor and died. We had been close since college and had gone to graduate school together. Leighton had suffered from a sort of mental disorder and by early middle age had retreated into himself. His family, especially his daughter, had abandoned him. He lived on very meager social security and reserve benefits. He lived in a small room attached to a rundown house with a shared bathroom and kitchen. The house was in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
John said there was nothing of Leighton’s left. The police had cordoned off the room for nearly ninety days while they investigated his death. John went on to say that everything of his had been thrown out to make way for the next tenant, Frankie, another old friend from the same time period. Frankie considered himself an, “art worker.” His work encompassed building a collection of books and ephemera relating to the decade known as, “the Sixties”. The number of items, including books, ran to over eight thousand. He and I had remained in contact regularly. One day, however, I stopped getting answers to my texts and phone calls and emails. John told me Frankie had been sidelined by dementia and was still in Chico being watched over by social services. His incredible collection disbursed like confetti at a parade.
Although the news about these two friends was grim, at least my questions about what had happened to them had been answered. I left Happy Days relieved in a way (though sadder than when I had arrived) and proceeded to visit and have dinner with the first of the two Dans, who lives in the hills of Los Feliz, a neighborhood of LA.
Dan and I have been friends since the early 70s. He is a photographer and had a successful video production company that made movies and music videos. When we first met he was working as a still photographer for Charles Eames, whose studio was in Venice. Dan had a storefront studio on Oceanfront walk in Venice into which he had dragged a cement and wood bench that he placed against a backdrop of white paper. He would invite the beachfront’s habitués to take a seat on the bench and be photographed. There is one of me, long haired and sandaled, sitting on that bench with my first child on my shoulders. I am twenty-six.
Dan had recently been diagnosed with a prostate cancer that had metastasized. He had just finished a course of radiation and was taking some newly developed drug. The unpleasant side effects of the radiation were keeping him close to the bathroom. The previous year had been traumatic. Besides his cancer, he also had sold his house. It was a quintessential California bungalow with a large outdoor space, and lovely cactus and succulent garden. The house had a commanding view of almost the entire LA Basin, from Long Beach to Malibu and out to Catalina Island. He had lived there for nearly forty years and had moved into his partner’s house where I would see them and have dinner.
Dan seemed very stoic about his circumstances. Despite the unpleasantness of his treatment, he was honest with himself about the prospects for good health going forward, that it was going to be a job, one that had to be done, and would involve constant monitoring. Dan still had a lot to look forward to. He was secure financially and was devoting his considerable energy to a variety of projects around the house, from backyard ponds to a new sauna. Did he see the cancer as an impediment to his work? I don’t think so. His work ethic kept him going and, despite his illness, his gaze was relentlessly forward.
Moving from his house had forced him to go through his stuff and decide what was worth keeping. This is a cathartic experience anytime, perhaps even more so when so much of your personal history is crammed onto shelves and into cabinets. Without the pressure of meeting a closing deadline or death, such an inventory review might not have taken place. What the living do with the artifacts of the dead can be very arbitrary. Many babies have gone the way of the bathwater in the course of the survivors’ efforts to get on with their own lives.
Despite the physical ravages of his cancer and its treatment, Dan remained fierce in his convictions about himself and the value of the life he had led and continued to lead. For him, a sense of possibility remained vibrant and made our time together fly as we discussed health, ponds, and politics.
I had taken a room, a one bedroom apartment really, in the Su Casa, a small hotel on the corner of Paloma Court and Oceanfront Walk in Venice, and as I made my way back there after dinner I thought about those early years of our friendship and the life we had been living in Venice. In the morning, out on the beachfront, I watched the denizens emerge from their tents, campers and remaining tenements that passed for housing. Nothing had changed. The same cast of characters and roles playing out there on the edge of the Western World. The half-century that had passed from the time I’d lived there disappeared in an instant. There was no place else for the vagrants to go. A thousand feet of sand separated Oceanfront Walk from the Pacific Ocean. Across the court from the hotel was a resident twelve step program. A rough group of mixed ethnicities, furiously smoking cigarettes, were gathering on the beach in front of their building. I couldn’t tell if it was a sort of roll call or a therapeutic chalk talk by a resident therapist, or both. There they were, about 30 souls, mostly men, mustered out in the morning sun. Malibu this wasn’t. I took breakfast in the cafe at the hotel before setting out to visit the other Dan.
This one was living in a low income retirement project on Adams Blvd several blocks south of Western Avenue. The neighborhood was rundown—low-rent commercial sites mixed with low rise housing. It had a decidedly Latino flavor with many Honduran and Salvadorian eateries and bodegas on the main thoroughfares. For Dan #2 there are no wives, girlfriends, or children…only an older sister doing the best she could monitoring him from San Francisco, where she lived. Ancient sibling issues were in sharp focus.
Dan and I had also been friends since the early 70s when we were part of a men’s consciousness-raising group of artists originally formed by a therapist who was treating John Altoon. That therapist made the case that a kind of “support” group of like men would be useful given how the nascent Woman’s Movement had challenged the flagrant machismo pervading the visual Art-World of that time. This group met weekly in different studios. It was a diverse group that included James Turrell, Larry Bell, Sam Francis, Ed Moses and various semi and un-knowns. Dan was a painter and close friend of Sam Francis. Dan made Sam’s paints and lithography inks using rare and extraordinary pigments from around the world. He was also devoted to music and had a depth of knowledge unrivaled where contemporary recording technology was concerned, not to mention a strong grasp of musicianship. Dan was one of the first local artists to move into downtown, LA. He had a 7,000 sq. foot studio in an old garment factory that he shared with Guy DiConte, a French conceptualist who had erected several surplus canvass tents to serve as different rooms connected to each other by astroturf paths. Dan’s studio featured huge canvases leaning against the walls, and drums of exotic pigments and rare earths. His work sat at the intersection of bas relief and painting. The scale of his paintings is overwhelming. The paint so thick and lush that you wanted to reach into his surfaces and scoop up a handful of it.
On the phone Dan sounded just as he had when I’d met him 50 years ago. His voice was gentle yet authoritative. There is a sincerity in his tone that commands attention. He had recently been diagnosed with a Kidney cancer that had spread into other areas of his anatomy. He was still big despite having lost nearly 100 pounds. His pants hung from wide suspenders and billowed when he took a few steps.
Dan was overwhelmed by his diagnosis. It overwhelmed his cognitive capabilities. He read me some material that the one of his doctors had given him and it sounded very ominous. He had given his older sister his health proxy and she was aggressively overseeing his treatment with the result that his doctors spoke first to her about Dan’s condition, which left Dan feeling as though he had no agency.
When I entered his apartment I caught my breath. It was a nice one bedroom, but every wall in every room was stacked floor to ceiling with various electric and electronic…things. There were only two chairs to sit on and the bed was half covered with boxes of papers, boxes of power chords and low-voltage chargers. It was like a third Collier brother, but instead of newspapers it was electronics. Speakers, tape recorders, amplifiers and components, printers, ganglions of cables, deep, high, and wide. Dan acknowledged that it was a problem and that if he didn’t clean it out he’d be out. He had already received written notice from the manager.
He said that he’d kept all this stuff because “it has value,” as he put it. I said that was true but it was making it impossible for him to get to his art and estate. I reminded him the most important thing now was the organization and disposition of his art estate. Who was going to control it? Anything that got in the way of him taking care of that wasn’t good. We talked at length about what questions needed to be asked and who he ought to be asking, and what needed to be done, immediately. He allowed me to start throwing things out. At first he was nervous…I might chuck something valuable. He even went downstairs to look into the dumpster where I was throwing stuff. As I wheeled out carts full of detritus, one after another, Dan began to have second thoughts. I wondered out loud what was the most important thing–squeezing a few bucks out of his inventory or getting rid of it and focusing on his studio estate? After our back and forth, I rolled out four more carts to the dumpster.
It was a tribute to Dan that he was able to accept that this had to be done. He was able to talk about his problems and his goals, and bring them into alignment with reality. I could see the conflict this created for him. To have all that stuff suggested that there was a future in which he was going to use or sell things. To throw it out was, in a way, acknowledging that there wasn’t going to be a future as he imagined it. Life does not go on indefinitely. At some point your track runs out and you go horizontal for the last time.
Dan was a trustee of an estate left by his mother whose only asset was a remarkable house in Benedict Canyon. His stake was worth something on the order of a quarter to half million dollars. He needed that money now to put his estate in order and to pay for legal advice. I located a lawyer with a specialty in elder law to advise him and help him draft his will. He is struggling to get real. The friction from his despair being his greatest impediment.
The next day I called Paul, my oldest friend, and arranged to visit him. When he answered the phone the sound of his voice evoked a very distant past. It was a kind of magic—going back in time sixty years and having the same feelings in the present moment as we’d had then. The following day I drove up to the Simi Valley where Paul and his wife lived. He was like my brother growing up. He spent more time at my house than his own. As teenagers, besides racing motorcycles on courses at Rosarito Beach, Mexico and the Corriganville Movie Ranch, we would take several weeks each summer and drive across the country and back. We visited every state other than Alaska and Hawaii. In New York my father would put us up in a hotel for a week. Paul and I did some crazy shit on those trips. Driving through the Deep South in 1964 was the sort of eye-opener that you don’t ever forget. For a couple of Jew boys from LA, all the segregation brought memories of the treatment of Jews under Hitler.
When I’d last seen Paul, some six or seven years ago, he had a successful business. In his corporate office, behind his desk was a wall of curtains. He drew the curtains back revealing a…mechanic’s shop. He had been a professional race car driver–Corvettes–and had a press pass from a magazine he wrote a column for about the racing circuit. Paul had made lots of money and indulged himself in two passions, mini bikes (small motorcycles) and hot rods. He was a class A+ mechanic and loved speed. He had about twenty mini bikes and was in the middle of tricking out a 1956 Chevy which eventually swallowed about $120,000 in improvements.
Paul had had two strokes in rapid succession that had left him physically weakened but had not affected his mind or speaking capacity. Now the Chevy and the mini bikes were gone. He was mostly in his house with his wife, smoking vast quantities of pot and hoping to die. He told me that he’d done everything in his life that he’d wanted to do and that he was ready, even wanting to die, but didn’t have the ability to take his own life despite the constant physical pain he was enduring.
He had been born with two congenital defects. A short Achilles tendon and an underdeveloped right arm. He had undergone multiple operations as a child to mitigate these problems as best as could be done in the 1950s, and now, post-strokes, the pain was a constant. Despite that he was still able to laugh and took great pleasure yelling at me when my sense of direction, or lack thereof, got me on the wrong road: “You haven’t learned anything yet have you?
Despite his physical handicaps, or because of them, Paul went through life unintimidated. After his children had gone off to college, he and his wife decided to sail around the world, despite the fact that neither of them knew anything about sailing. He had a catamaran built in Cape Town SA and they took sailing lessons in Ventura. A month later they flew to Cape Town, picked up their boat. Ten years and 40,000 nautical miles later, they sold it in New Zealand and flew back to California where he started another successful business.
He kept reaffirming his sense that he’d done everything he’d wanted to do and had seen just about everything he’d wanted to see. He was ready to die–in fact he wanted to die–to get relief from physical pain. In the midst of this sturm und drang, he got himself fitted with a pair of hearing aids.
From Simi I continued north to Ventura where another friend from way back, David, had a weekend house high on the slopes of the Santa Ynez Mountains. The views west went far out to the Channel Islands, some thirty miles distant. David is a well-known ceramic artist. He’d gone from graduate school to a professorship in the Claremont group of colleges. He had been a Fulbright Fellow twice and had spent his fellowships in Peru.
Some few years past he had undergone a complicated operation to remove a cancer that had formed in his mouth. At one point he had a quarter-size hole in the roof of his mouth. The disruption to his life was nearly catastrophic. After a lengthy recovery he spent some time traveling and managing his studio. When the second cancer appeared, as a lump on the side of his neck, he again went under the knife. This time the scar looked as though he had been subjected to an attempted decapitation.
Somewhere between operations David had decided to liquidate a substantial part of his studio. He was a master of the trompe l’oeil and used his skills at representational rendering to produce pieces of astounding reality creating work that reflected his angles on life and society. He is represented in significant public and private collections throughout the world. Now he and his wife moved back and forth from their house in Claremont to their house in Ventura accompanied by their three white German Shepherds.
From David’s perch in the Santa Ynez Mountains I headed north to Santa Cruz to visit with Keith, who I’ve known since graduate school at UC Davis. He was in the theater department. Keith stood out. He had come from a working class family in London’s bombed out East End. His father had been injured in the war and he spent three years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp and died soon after his return. The local Council had identified him as a, “bright boy from a broken home” and sent him, at eleven, to a boarding school and then on to Phillips Andover in 1964 just in time for the race riots that were engulfing America. The marriage of his working class roots with his posh education allowed him to move vertically through social caste systems. Like David, Keith became a university person and wound up a Dean at UC Santa Cruz. Keith’s outsiderness spawned a razor sharp wit and exceptional observational powers. He was alive to practically everything from the large-scale social and environmental surrounds to intimate facial expressions. He took everything in, ranging easily from art to politics.
In graduate school we became partners in the creation of the Goshen Mustang Light Show. His knowledge of stage craft and lighting were instrumental in the development of the Show’s use of light as a space filler.
Over the course of his post-graduate life, he became an expert on pre-Columbian cultures, going so far as to discover and document a pre-Mayan civilization, the Chachapoyas, in the Andes. Somewhat later, using Google Earth to carefully look for subtle anomalies in the topographic surface of the Andean landscape he discovered additional pre Incan settlements.
I asked him what plans he had for his various collections of ethnographic, cultural, and political material. He was vague. Wrapping it up, so-to-speak…at the same time he was all shoulder-to-the-wheel with a resoluteness he applied to one of his current activities…translating Mayan Glyphs as narrative stories.
I spent the night at his house and the following day we drove into the redwood forests that had recently been burned down. The scene of devastation was overwhelming. As far as the eye could see all the flora was burned black. We turned onto a dirt track for a couple of miles that led to a community garden and several impromptu campsites pitched by people whose houses had burned down along with the forest. A feeling of brittleness in the face of such vast destruction settled on us like a yoke of despair.
Keith pointed out remarkable signs of life that had already begun to appear in the form of green lateral shoots emerging from the charred trunks of some trees, life cycling back on a geological time frame that put paid to the human time frame and the ego that goes with it.
Still there was work to do. That drive against despair which was propelling all of us to do something, to keep moving, to tweak our external and internal environments in ways made our life as meaningful as those green shoots emerging from the charred forest tree trunks.
On the way back to LA I stopped in to see Paul. It was like stopping for gas, my sense of time extending backward and forward in the memory-bath that engulfed us. It was the same with each of my friends who had shared their lives with me. Despite being quite different from each other, all of them had a similar curiosity. Their engagement with the world had not diminished over time.
The next morning I went back to see the “Dan” with the electronic excess, and to meet Karen for coffee late in the morning. I wanted to have a talk with Dan about his life and (and his after-life). Having his older sister controlling his days was not helping him do what needed to be done. There was the matter of his art, his own and that of others, which he owned. He also had a several hundred thousand dollar interest in his mother’s house. He needed to hire a lawyer to create a trust and to write his will. He was incapable of confronting his sister to assert his own wishes. He needed professional counsel. As we said our goodbyes he assured me that he understood why he needed to make a will and create a trust and why it was imperative to find a lawyer to represent him.
When it was time to meet Karen I got to the restaurant early and sat down at an empty table. A few moments later Karen walked through the door. Into the second half of her seventies she still turned heads. Tall, erect, trim, and dressed to perfection. Smallish talk mostly. She had come to prominence in the LA art scene of the late sixties and seventies and was still making art, that collectors bought, in her old studio in Venice and another at her Montana ranch. It was at her old studio in Venice that I’d left my own art when I moved east in ’83.
She seemed settled in in a way that my other friends (all men) were not. Maybe it was the long established rhythm of her work routines…
When it was time to go she sarcastically wondered whether or not she was going to get Jim’s once-a-year call. She was still tough and punchy.
At my wife’s urging, I called David. Maybe it’d been five years since we spoke. He and his wife had moved to Santa Monica where their daughter and her husband lived. It was a dispute over seating arrangements that muddied things up. He appeared from inside as the garage door opened beckoning me to park inside. It was like seeing my buddy Paul, time suddenly compressed (as it expanded).
Michowitz was his name for me. I don’t remember when I was awarded it but the extra syllable gave it some heft. He’d recently retired from a successful journalism and publishing life and was locked on a project. David’s body-mechanics were betraying him. Knees, shoulders, that sort of thing. He’d sustained injuries early as a soccer standout in middle school and beyond. A sports man through and through, he also had wit and candor. A Class A conversationalist, he brooked no bullshit, unless it was funny.
We talked about what we’d each been up to in filial tones that gave a kind of warmth like good chicken soup. We shared a sense of relief at having communication between us restored. It felt melancholic when I considered the time that we had been separated. Letting go wasn’t hard, though the shadow of absence remained.
We may have all the time we need, but time eventually runs out. Dealing with the slow fade requires a kind of resourcefulness and a certain cleverness as one looks for the workarounds necessary to keep going in any meaningful way. Most of my friends have had the knack…so far. For some, the struggle to remain serviceable and productive continues unabated. For others, the vicissitudes of physical, or mental decline, have brought a near halt to forward motion. The finish line may arrive out of the blue. But there are lucky ones whose approach to the last mile is planned in advance. They roll with the precision of a Formula One driver who has studied the track to avoid any irregularities that might deflect their trajectory. As a friend reminded me many years ago, “as long as you wake up you gotta shot.”