I wrote the books thinking George would read the Cycle and go, “Wow, you think I have so many possibilities, you find me so inspiring, you wanted me to die young so much more spectacularly than the boring way I wanted to, you must love me, I mean you’d have to, and I must love you too, how could I not after all the work you’ve done, and I do,” but he killed himself before the first of them was even published.
When George was 18, he found a useful medication. It merged the half of him who couldn’t stop fidgeting and saying everything that crossed his mind at frantic speed with the other half who lay in bed and stared. He became as close to a complete George as he would ever be, and it was sort of possible to think that very strange guy was George and not just an experimental composition caused when both conflicting measures were being played at once.
Even that shaky George seemed a kind of miracle to me, and to him too for as long as that medication worked and while he lasted. And what I mostly would have wished from him happened, like for real. Some defect of the medication spun his mania into a sex addiction, and we had sex like we were wrestling each other for a knife, and our exhausted cuddling afterward would feel like love, to me at least, sometimes for hours.
The pill worked until his middle-20s. Then he tore apart again. We tried to edit ourselves back into friends, which we’d never really been. Being “put up with” at that age was too dark for George. He stopped talking to me. I moved away, so far away that I didn’t have a phone in my apartment. My letters to him bounced. I thought or wished another pill had eventually unified him. It was only years after he was dead that I was wrong.
George worsened. After three involuntary psych holds, he quit pretending he was sane. He threatened to kill a girl he didn’t love but wanted to be loved by and was arrested. He had to move in with his parents, and I guess, or can only think, having known him as well as anybody had, that he knew by then or thought he knew that he would never stop exploding under wraps, and there was no wrap left anyway.
In January 1987, George took an overdose of pills that didn’t work. Two days after being checked out of the hospital he tried to kill himself by totaling his father’s car, but he survived. At that point, his family gave up on him. He bought a gun and hid it for a few days. On his 30th birthday, he blew his brains out in his bedroom while listening to Nick Drake singing sadly to him about what he thought he heard as death.
You can make a movie based on Peter Pan and cast a pretty boy who has the minimum amount of talent needed, but he can never be more than the buffer or the life raft of the famous illustrations that deformed the story and preconfigured the appearance of their actor. Drawings can only hope to nail a character’s resemblance, and they’re just distractions from whatever wish was dying in the writer when he typed it.
The Crater
At 3 a.m., or whatever time it happens, life in San Marino, California, isn’t much, but it’s what it is.
A gun fires in a house, and now it’s something for them.
Others in the house, mother, brother, are roughly woken up. They think about the sound, recognize it, and that’s that.
It’s the least surprise ever. Or not it, or that it happened, or with a gun, or that they had to hear it, or why now, but why.
The brother, now awake, now just the brother, stands before the noisy door. He hears Nick Drake. He says, “George,” loud enough to penetrate the door and Drake, but it’s not a question.
His mother is behind him down the hall, he can feel it, but he’s too shocked to turn and say, “Don’t come.”
What do they feel? I don’t know, but it must be very ugly since so much of it is hatred.
The door is locked. “George . . . George . . . George.”
George is, I don’t know, sitting, slumped forward. Blood is pouring from his mouth and nose. I was told that. There’s a crater in his head. The top back part. It’s full of mangled brains and skull and blood. He fired into his mouth, I was told, and so it would have to be there.
The crater can’t talk or do anything. It needs an artist.
The brother kicks the door in. The room’s very small, and he sees what I described. What I described will be the only thing he ever sees when he remembers George beginning now and more resolutely once he has to make a choice between looking at a box of ashes on his mother’s mantlepiece or remembering this. This will be like George’s album cover.
“Don’t, Mom, don’t,” he says.
Someone calls Emergency, and let’s say a vehicle arrives. Two men in uniforms get out, both men since women weren’t thought capable of transcending this much trauma in the ’80s. They enter the house. One is older, tough. The other’s young and took the job for different reasons.
They’re shown George’s body and hate it.
The young one, Joe, let’s say, is the one who has to do things around the body, and the older one, named something else, who cares, is the one who has to go into the living room and ask the family questions and then use their phone to call in a report.
“How old,” the older one asks.
“Thirty,” George’s mother says. “It’s his birthday.”
You can guess the rest.
In two days, George will be ashes. He’ll weigh 4.7 pounds. There’ll be a funeral to which almost no one is invited—the estranged father, stoners from the park that George had started hanging out with, people who’d been kids when George was and haven’t seen him since. They won’t invite me. They could call my mother’s house and try to reach me, but they won’t. Nick Drake won’t be played. There’ll be no obituary in the local paper. No one in the family will want to write it. They’ll redo the room, sell the house, move. They won’t tell the newer owners. They’ll just erase an awful, sick, depressing man.
Joe is in the room doing things he is assigned to do. He looks at the body from different angles, in detail, up close, at the bloody face, at the bloody floor, at the gun, at the hand it’s resting on, always writing notes or checking boxes on a form clamped to a clipboard.
He keeps looking at the crater, he can’t help it. He has no feelings that he knows of, and the wound is fascinating to him even though it’s what it is and there is nothing to write down about it.
“Why are you so interested?” asks the crater. The voice is male, like the body would have had, but not as hued as you’d expect the voice of someone who would do that to himself to be, and the crater doesn’t move in sync with it or even shiver like a woofer.
Joe is startled, but he’s always startled when something like that happens. Death is so unknown.
“I’m an artist,” he says. “I look at everything artistically. It’s easier that way.”
“I was an artist too,” the crater says. “Or I tried to be.”
“What kind?” Joe asks.
“My body played guitar,” the crater says.
Joe goes back to doing what he’s told to do. The crater has gone silent for a while, so maybe it has died.
“You there?” Joe asks it.
“Thinking,” the crater says.
“About what?” Joe asks.
“A friend,” the crater says.
“A good friend?” Joe asks.
“Yes, but not good enough,” the crater says.
Finale (1976)
I worship the ground he walks on. I wish there was a way for me to let you know that cliché was blurted into language, that an impulse I could not control just grabbed those words to get it out.
I wish I could type something that would immediately detail my love’s massive extent and indicate what love’s crippling effect on language has reduced or enlarged me to.
It definitely feels like I’m enlarged, but my thing for language hasn’t come along yet. I’m too in love with him to talk coherently about it.
I love him so much that I’m nothing but that. Everything else I feel and do is
like a habit or a doomed revolution.
I would literally declare everywhere he steps to be a sacred site by means and powers I don’t know or have if there wasn’t so much trodden ground already, and if I owned the footsteps’ rights and weren’t so busily in love with all the rest of him.
If he stood somewhere long enough to leave an imprint of his shoes, and if I saw the dents, I would want to hire an architect to do something visionary with them until I thought about a greater and even less constructive way to honor him.
Reality is so controlling, and I’ve never tried to stay there when I write before. This is the first time in my life that someone in the world has made me want to undermine my fiction when it frees me to forget the world and to seduce or fuck or murder or be loved by him or anyone I want.
I’ve never written fiction like I think and talk and feel before. I’m not sure why I believe that being willfully vulnerable and the verbiage that might result are a tribute to him or why I’m willing to bet this will talk to you.
It’s a lot to ask since what I feel is not something I can capture, other than to say, Look, I’m another writer who is obviously in love and who has lost my way linguistically. How do I make you care, since no one cares that much about another’s love.
I want to use my love as a perspective that will turn my writing into his devotee and insider and turn you into his, I don’t know, admirers maybe. At the same time, I’m writing this for him, to him, no one else, and you’re my, I don’t know, imaginary witnesses.
You want literary kicks, and I realize that for you he’s circumstantial. He’ll work for you or won’t. You’re there to be convinced and help me prove my love is not meaningless to him. If I can sway you, and if he thinks I did, he’ll know how incredibly I love him, if that matters to him, and if he doesn’t know already.
This is a novel that only wants to really, really matter to him in the hope that, if it does, that’ll mean he loves me too because he’ll know I could do anything I want right now, and I wrote this.
I worship the flowing lava and whatever else a billion years ago that eventually formed the ground he walks on.
Acknowledgments
Dennis Cooper is very grateful to Carrie Kania, Mark Doten, Kier Cooke Sandvik, Gisele Vienne, Michael Salerno, Frederick Boyer, Jurgen Lagger, and Jeremy Davies.
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