Haywire

  “May she see him now?” Pamela asked him.

  He hesitated. “It might upset her,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked, suddenly wanting to reclaim control over what was happening to me.

  “Because I’ve had to bind him up.”

  “What?” Strange horrible images flitted through my mind.

  “A handkerchief—” He made a wrapping motion around his head.

  “Did he hemorrhage? Is there a lot of blood?” I asked, terrified.

  “No, no,” Brother Paul gesticulated awkwardly. “We have to do that—it sets so quickly.”

  Then I understood. And at that moment, for the first time, I truly realized that Father was dead. I took a deep breath.

  “Please,” I said, letting it out. “He’s my father and I want to see him.” Not that I’m brave, I thought, because I’m not, but squeamishness aside, there’s something else: I have to see for myself. Now. No obituary tomorrow or funeral in three days can have the same meaning. Arid how dishonorable it would be if I walked away without saying goodbye. Properly, face to face.

  He nodded, and Pamela left the room.

  We went over to the bed.

  Brother Paul folded back the sheet. The only dead body I had ever seen before was an anonymous corpse being dissected in the morgue of the Roosevelt Hospital. I hadn’t been allowed to see my mother or sister. Now I steeled myself to look down, thinking, I must be sure; this time I must know. I knelt beside the bed.

  The most shocking sight, as Brother Paul had warned, was the blue handkerchief tied all the way around Father’s head to hold his jaw in place. After I got over that, I forced myself to look at his face. Amazing, I thought, trying to stall my emotions with clinical detachment, the accuracy of every description, however trite, I’d ever read. I put my arms around his head and lifted it up. Amazing the aptness of hackeyed phrases like “deathly pallor” and “dead weight.” Amazing how quickly life goes when it goes; how quickly everything empties, body temperature drops, flesh implodes into matter, skin becomes as hard and cold as a sea shell.

  I looked down the length of his body: it, too, had altered. It was smaller, shrunken; his stomach, distended for so many weeks as if pregnant, was flat. He had borne his death and was free.

  I imagined him traveling through space faster than the speed of light. Grounded far behind, I envied him. I wanted to let go of his head and follow, like a speck of dust, up past the moon and the sun. Where were Bridget and Mother at that very moment, I wondered, reaching out to him over the edge of some distant star? What address should I write in my telephone book after the name “Hayward, Leland”?

  His head was very heavy. I cradled it against my chest and ran my hands over the stubble of his hair. Even it felt dead. I began to weep. My tears drenched his face, glazing it like ice. They soaked through the blue handkerchief and trickled in chilly rivulets back onto my hands. I sobbed and sobbed, soundlessly so that Brother Paul couldn’t hear, holding on to Father’s head with all my strength as if it were the last thing left in the world. I wept for my family, all of us, my beautiful, idyllic, lost family. I wept for our excesses, our delusions and inconsistencies; not that we had cared too much or too little, although both were true, but that we had let such extraordinary care be subverted into such extraordinary carelessness. We’d been careless with the best of our many resources: each other. It was as if we’d taken for granted the fact that, like our talents and interests and riches, there would be more where we had come from, too; another chance, another summer, another Brooke or Bridget or Bill.

  I laid his head gently back down on the pillow and kissed his forehead. It was time to go.

  I got as far as the middle of the room before I stopped, feeling him over my left shoulder. If I look back now, I thought, I’ll never let go; maybe that’s why Brother Paul keeps his vigil tonight—to guard the living as well as the dead.

  So I started for the doorway and the dark corridor beyond, knowing, as I passed through it, that my only choice was to keep moving forward.

  n the thirty-odd years since Haywire was originally published, for me the most noteworthy personal events have been the deaths of many of my best friends, as well as my brother, Bill, who shot himself in the spring of 2008. Though I’m still alive and well, not a single day or night, not twenty-four hours, goes by since the death of my mother, my sister, my father, and my brother that I do not think of them.

  Bill had remained an obsessed motorcyclist from his days as a coproducer of Easy Rider in 1968, and was seldom seen in anything but his black leathers and boots. Until his death he belonged to the Uglies, a motorcycle gang, and in the early years of 2000, he was badly injured in a terrible accident while riding with them. I visited him in a veterans’ hospital north of Los Angeles where he underwent treatment for six months; he barely recognized me and at that time was only partially recovered.

  A few weeks after he was released, he called me in New York City where I’d been living for twenty-odd years married to Peter Duchin. Bill told me he was suicidal. Somehow I convinced him to see a doctor and go on antidepressants. Reluctantly he agreed, after arguing they would damage his sex life. “Well,” I replied, “it’s either life or sex.”

  Two weeks later he called again. “Much better,” he said. “Thanks. But now I realize I can no longer live alone. I need to be looked after. I need a mother and a father. Any suggestions?”

  I came up with Larry and Mai Hagman, old family friends, who had a large estate on a mountaintop in Ojai, just south of Santa Barbara near the coast. Amazingly, they agreed to let him live in their guesthouse, which he did for a few years. Then Larry generously bought him a luxurious mobile home, which Bill installed on the property of one of his Ugly cohorts.

  In the middle of the night in the spring of 2008, I received phone calls from both Larry Hagman and Peter Fonda telling me Bill had shot himself in the chest in his mobile home.

  We decided he should be cremated. Larry gave a memorial service on top of his mountain overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Among the guests were the Uglies who brought a cannon that they set up below the house. At the end of the service, the Uglies shot Bill’s ashes out of the cannon down the mountain, toward the Pacific.

  After Haywire was published in 1977, I had returned to New York. What a pleasure after sixteen years in Los Angeles! In 1981 I bought a loft on Nineteenth Street and Fifth Avenue—an extremely unusual thing to do in those days—and was asked to write an article about it for House and Garden. Thus began a new career: many years of writing many articles for many magazines.

  I was also under contract with Knopf to write a book about Los Angeles and the art world of the 1960s, but my ex, Dennis Hopper, threatened to sue me if I did. The best First Amendment lawyer in New York City at the time took me to lunch and explained that such a book, if honestly written, would have a catastrophic effect on Dennis’s career and I would lose the suit. Needless to say that book has never been written.

  Then in 1985 I married Peter Duchin whom I had known since the fifties when he was at Yale and after whose dad, Eddy, I named my pet squirrel (Mr. Duchin) in 1943; we separated in 2008.

  From time to time the distant past does creep up on me and I wonder why I started Haywire in the first place. In 1973 I was thirty-six years old and I had written nothing since a children’s book at the age of twelve, which my mother would not allow to be published. Living in Los Angeles, I became very involved with the Daniel Ellsberg trial. The New York Times sent a reporter, Martin Arnold, to cover it, and sitting next to each other everyday in the L.A. courtroom, we became friends. One night at dinner he asked me about my life, and after I described my childhood, his response was, “Write it. It’s a book.” I stuttered that that was an insane idea—I wasn’t a writer. Marty replied, “Let me be the judge of that. Write three pages beginning with your sister’s death, and I’ll tell you if you should continue.”

  So I did and he did. But that was the easy part. It took me another three ye
ars to complete—and then only with the help of two other friends (Marty had gone back to New York) who were also good writers: Johanna Mankiewicz (who was killed by a taxi in 1974) and Buck Henry, who made me continue for her sake. Buck took over editing the last part before I turned it in to Bob Gottlieb (the publisher and my editor at Knopf). I remember Buck saying, “Look at all these tenses! When I write a screenplay, thank God I only have to deal with one tense—the present!”

  Bless you, Buck, and of course, Bob Gottlieb, who confided to me when we finished, “Damn good. Let’s hope someone out there reads it.”

  —Brooke Hayward,

  May 2010