There are strange, strange things that happen, things so
inexplicable you can only understand them after years have gone by. The camera
zooms away, or zooms upward, so that more and more of the picture is revealed.
I loved two men. Loved – that’s the wrong word. It wasn’t a
sexual thing, I swear, because both men were known to be gay. They were also
arrogant, fiercely intelligent, and possessed of a certain social and
media-related power. They were tin gods, in other words, and how I could have
remained so attached to them, for so long, I will never know.
Maybe I was flattered when they allowed me to sit at the
edge of their bright circle of influence. Maybe. I certainly courted their
attention, and got bits of it, crumbs. When I was about to walk away in rage or
dismay, I’d be tossed another crumb.
Where do I start? The parallels between these two just came
to me tonight. It seems incredible I never saw it before.
For one thing, they’re both dead. They both died of sudden, violent, catastrophic strokes, literally
dropping in their tracks. They were not young, but neither were they terribly old. Before they died, they both
said and did things to me which now make me gasp at the level of casual
cruelty.
Paul was my teacher, so many years ago now it seems like
another lifetime, another universe. It was back in 1991. He taught anthropology
at a community college in a small town, a strange thing, because I was to find out later he had
two Masters degrees and a PhD. If he was so brilliant, as he seemed to think he was, why was he stuck in
this backwater?
The Anthropology of Religion wasn’t about religion at all.
It was mostly about Haitian voodoo and the power of certain plants to paralyze and
zombify – for the great zombie tradition comes from Haiti,
where death can be created at will, then revoked with a snap of the fingers.
I was enthralled. In the classroom, this man was charisma personified. He just seemed to know so much. When I saw Paul do mediumship at a
spiritualist church, I was enraptured. I had never known anyone like this, a veritable sorceror, and
he was actually allowing me to sit at the same table and talk about the same
subjects. More or less.
How I stayed friends with Paul through the years is simple –
I put in virtually 100% of the energy. Had I let it drop, the whole thing would
have fallen apart. Why was I so desperate? I don’t understand it, looking back,
except that I wanted some of his zombie power. I already had power of my own,
but I didn’t see that then. Whenever it threatened to show itself, Paul would
summarily clap it down.
Meanwhile, another friendship – this one really not a
friendship at all, but a correspondence, for I never actually met the man. Call him
Lloyd, because that was his name, so we might as well use it. He had been drama
critic at the local paper for a thousand years or so, then music critic, more or
less staying in the same job for all of his working life. Not turning left, not
turning right.
As a critic, he could deal blows and thrust his sword with a
nearly-indifferent cruelty that was sometimes breathtaking. It was enormously
entertaining for people to watch Lloyd eviscerate other people – a blood sport.
When they themselves were the subject, their enthusiasm withered somewhat.
One day, wanting to entice him or at least attract his attention, I sent Lloyd a column I had written in my local paper – what
was it about? Elizabeth Taylor’s visit to Eaton’s, I think – and to my
surprise, I got a very nice handwritten reply, quoting some lines from my column and saying
he was going to steal them: “I only steal from the best.”
After that initial contact, it wasn’t as if we passed notes
in school or sat around the campfire roasting weenies. As I said, it wasn’t a
normal friendship. We never had coffee, never even talked on the phone. But the
correspondence went back and forth for more than fifteen years. Mostly forth, for if I hadn’t kept it going
it would have immediately died. I don’t know why I let myself in for such
treatment, but I did.
In both cases, the connection waxed and waned, but there
were bright moments. Occasionally Paul the medium acknowledged that I maybe-just-maybe had
had some valid psychic experiences of my own (but more often than not he
dismissed them as “dangerous” or “just a fantasy”). Lloyd sent me Christmas cards –
yes, he really did, handwritten, cheery things that you would never know came
from someone most people perceived as a heartless Scrooge.
I will cut to the chase, because this could become
book-length. There was a breaking point in each case. I had lost touch with
Lloyd after he finally retired from his only job, tried to leave a message on a
blog he was keeping, and heard nothing. Then suddenly – and this was unlikely,
because he hated technology – there he was on Facebook! Stupidly, I messaged
him and said, “I hope this gets to you.”
What I got back was, “This was a mistake. I’m not on
Facefuck, so you can go fuck yourself. I hope this gets to you.”
I spent considerable time spinning around in confusion,
telling myself maybe it wasn’t really him (it was), and then – one day –
receiving a kind of vindication when a friend of mine – OK, a psychiatrist –
said, “It’s well-known that this man is the most sarcastic, vindictive,
narcissistic, selfish, ruthless, heartless. . . “ – and on and on. OH! I
thought I was the only one, and here this man’s patients – apparently more than
one – had been seared as well. In fact, maybe that’s what sent them to the
psychiatrist.
I can’t remember ever being that angry, but I had a plan. Paul had taught me all about it, in The Anthropology of Religion. I wasn’t trying to do
harm – of course not. My plan was to show Lloyd the
error of his ways, to hold up a mirror or a magnifying glass, and to make him feel even a degree of the pain that he had caused other people. I had no idea if I was applying the principles correctly, so I winged it, using Haitian music, a great deal of
jewelry and beads and crosses, candles, incense, dance, and written statements
of intent. Silly, really, but I just had to do something - he had just told me to go fuck myself! I thought he was my friend, or my "something" at least. When I made the doll it seemed extreme, but what is a doll but a toy, an
effigy, a likeness? This wasn’t him. The person I was trying to reach was
probably unreachable.
So what happened? Exactly nothing. So that was that. I filed it under "useless attempts to get someone's attention".
Fast-forward several years, and the news came (in the paper he used to write for) that he had suddenly died, and
his life was gone. The saddest thing was realizing that his
colleagues (most of them dragged out of retirement for comment) had to awkwardly scrape together nice things to say about him. I didn’t react well and posted something pretty harsh on my blog, which I took down when I realized it was hurting people who had
cared about him.
But suddenly, now that he was gone, he was this bon vivant, this sparkling wit,
this Oscar Wilde of the Lower Mainland, and far from hating and fearing him, performers had lined up to receive his vicious barbs as a sort of badge of honour. Right. Others said he had wasted himself and
should have written for the New Yorker or some other publication that mattered.
The saddest thing of all was when someone said that after working with him for
25 years, no one knew a single thing about him – where he was from, if he had a family or an education or any working experience prior to his
decades at the Sun. Outside the office or the concert hall, he was a cipher.
My anger fizzled out in pity. My mojo seemed ridiculous,
which I suppose it was. I had not affected the outcome of this strange, sad story. But stranger still was what happened years later, and
that’s the thing that makes the hair on my scalp prickle. Paul’s death was so
similar, it was downright eerie.
Paul too was celebrated in his tiny circle, but his wit was
known to be cutting. He seemed to love busting people down to size. Like Lloyd,
he had his limited little fiefdom, and stomped away from the spiritualist church he had
founded when the other members didn’t want to do things his way.
He lived far away by then, and we had an on-off correspondence, but when I excitedly began
to write to him about some information I had received about George Gershwin, at
first he seemed supportive and almost enthusiastic. I sent him several
documents about how friends and family members had actually “seen” him after
his death – a dire and restless death, the kind that sometimes leaves behind
that unhappy camper known as a ghost.
I wanted to know more about it, and surely Paul was perfect to ask about ghosts. Mr. Medium
himself! But then I sent something that
wasn’t an attachment, but included in the body of the email. His response told
me that he hadn’t read any of the other stuff at all.
He told me that, “speaking as a psychotherapist” (which he
wasn’t), I should “approach such manifestations with extreme caution. They may
either be mere fantasies to restore a sense of personal power and worth, or
out-and-out delusions born of your psychologically fragile state of “
BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.
I don’t know what it is about me and assholes, me and men
like that. I didn’t marry one, at all, and I don’t think there are any left in
my life – for Paul just dropped in his tracks, like Lloyd, in
a stroke.
But not before my mojo. For after all, Paul taught me about
mojo, and how to create it. I was very specific. I wrote out my wishes, and
specifically stated that I meant no physical harm to either Paul or his partner
(also named Paul). But it was full-on, and I made a doll in his likeness, with
his face on it. It was part of the ritual.
But I never expected anything to come of it. It was mostly a catharsis for myself. It felt eerie when I heard he had died like that, with a
lightning-stroke like Lloyd whose little empire crumbled straight down like a
tower being demolished. I did not feel good, I was not glad. It felt even worse
to find out that his devoted spouse of 25 years had been left completely in the lurch. He wasn’t just left
with no money. He was left with a yawning abyss of debt, something like
$200,000.00, which he had known nothing about. The spiritualist church had decided to put the past aside and try
to help “young Paul” (for he was much younger than the other Paul, and somewhat
intellectually challenged, certainly no threat to his many-degreed spouse).
Something woeful had been revealed, not just about these men
and their talent for turning their pain outward and inflicting it on others. There was something shadowy about both of them - they were not what they seemed. But what I really didn't want to see was what it revealed about me. Why did I ever suck up to people like this – not
once, but twice? These weren’t powerful men at all. Their darts
had entertained me – for a while. Casual cruelty can be vastly entertaining, as long as it's not about you.
There will be no more mojos, no more dolls, nor any of that
stuff, ever again. I don’t want to need it, and I won’t. I only did it because I felt so damn powerless, and regretted my attachment to a couple of arrogant assholes. I don’t know why all
these parallels, for it looks like there are quite a few, and why I did not see
any of this until just now. But I do know something for sure, something I have
believed for quite a long time now, and as years pass I believe it more all the
time.
The way you die is the way you live. It’s an accurate
reflection, like a tree reflected in water. Energy, charge, karma, charisma, whatever it is,
can only build up in the machine for so long before it backfires. If someone
holds up a mirror or a magnifying glass, the concentrated rays can set the person on fire until they are
completely consumed.
I had watched two parallel examples of how a person’s life can
implode by the way they conducted their life. It was a very strange kind of self-destruction, not by cigarettes or
alcohol or drugs, but by a sort of personal self-immolation. I don’t think I
stood there with the match, because I don't have that sort of power, but I was powerless to put the fire out. They had
created it, fed it, banked it. I don’t know what kind of brokenness lay behind
that level of rancor and bile, and I don’t care now because I am busy living my
own life. But empty is empty. Leaving the person you love the most in massive
debt is not love, nor is leaving your friends with no clue, no trace of who you
have been. It’s abandonment. Abandonment of life, abandonment of self,
abandonment of those who have made the fatal mistake of caring whether you live
or die.
POST-BLOG. A couple of times I've had to take posts down because people bolted in the other direction. But I simply needed to write this, though I know it is odd and a bit creepy. Long after Lloyd died, I found some references to his death and the way it was perceived that I found intriguing, not to mention revealing. They mostly highlighted his great narcissist's talent for throwing people off-balance, in life and (incredibly) even after his death. One writer was incensed that people had said things like, "He should have been writing for the New Yorker!", implying that he had ended up in a permanent backwater. The protest kind of proved the point, exposing Vancouver's "world-class" pretense like the raw nerve of a tooth. Another person stated in their blog that they were grateful to Lloyd for teaching them to write, but made it clear that "he wasn't a perfect person, and would have been insulted to be portrayed that way". She then went on to say that he was difficult to deal with, isolated himself for weeks at a time, cutting people off and making himself unreachable, and was known to inexplicably dump longtime friends as casually as Sweeney Todd dumping his victims into the pit.
