The Baltimore Book of the Dead

by Marion Winik

  Of his many performance personae—Ziggy Stardust, Major Tom, Aladdin Sane, Screaming Lord Byron, The Goblin King—The Thin White Duke was definitely the worst idea. A stylish blond neo-romantic hero, the Aryan Duke caused a hullabaloo by saying things like Hitler was the first rock star. Bowie later explained that he was doing so much cocaine at this time that he had no memory of even recording the album Station to Station (one of my favorites, his haunting, shaky cover of “Wild Is the Wind,” comes from this period). He ended it by moving away from Los Angeles. Luckily, what usually happens to rock stars when drugs get the better of them happened only to The Thin White Duke, not his creator. David Bowie lived another forty years, even completing an afterword to his body of work in “Lazarus.” He was leaving his cell phone down here, he said, to be free.

  The Camp Director

  died 2017

  MY SISTER AND I hated sleepaway camp, which didn’t get us out of going, but did get us sent to a different place every year. As far as I could see, the lanyards, the archery, the outhouses were the same everywhere. Then I came upon this in the summer camp ads in the New York Times: Greenfields. A “happening” for the youngster who desires to explore creative interests.

  The “happening” was in a fairy-tale forest with a deep quarry pool outside Woodstock, New York. Its director was a public school teacher who bought a small, dilapidated Catskills resort from his grandmother, then turned the place into a summer camp for kids aged twelve to sixteen. When we pulled into the driveway in 1972 in my mother’s emerald green sedan, he bounded out to meet us in some sort of flowing robe, tall and hearty, with a head of curls and an exuberant beard. His charisma and confidence were such that he and my buttoned-up mother quickly developed an unlikely mutual respect.

  What a camp! No songs, no traditions, real flush toilets! We made things out of stained glass and copper enamel, swam in the spillway of the Ashokan Reservoir, hiked Slide Mountain. The whole camp saw the Dead and the Allman Brothers at Watkins Glen. Boone’s Farm apple wine abuse, extreme teen melodrama, and spoiled brats were handled by the camp director with tough love and good humor. Cooking and cleaning were “community service” and, like that hellacious hike, you were not getting out of it.

  When I peeked in forty years later, he’d become a potter and the bunks had become a craft gallery. His curls had grayed and his face had weathered but his sarong-wrapped, leonine presence had lost none of its roar. Then one day his second wife found him crumpled among the silver bracelets and stained glass windows. He left us a few days later, having demonstrated conclusively that real men wear caftans and that it’s not just okay but necessary and gorgeous to be who you are.

  My Advisor

  died 2017

  I LEFT HIGH SCHOOL with a vow never to study history again; only earth science had a looser grip on my imagination. But when I got to college, I chose my classes by asking around for the names of the rock star professors. The Mick Jagger of them all was the Russian History guy. The class he was teaching in the fall of 1978, “Russia before 1800,” was limited to upperclassmen. But since doing things I wasn’t allowed to do was my most passionate avocation, I went to his office to make my case.

  The professor was a tall, lanky fellow with dark hair combed straight back from his high forehead and black horn-rimmed glasses, a kind of academic Clark Kent, in whose hands the epic saga of Russia was addictive, tragic, hilarious. For years I kept a pile of spiral notebooks filled with notes from his classes, sometimes copied from the board in an imitation of his eccentric, baroque handwriting, which somehow made English look like Cyrillic. False Dimitri, Michael Bakunin, Nizhny Novgorod. I was madly in love with him, which I expressed by declaring a history major. We majors got to go over to his house and listen to jazz or watch the Red Sox. I was generally not a very good babysitter but for his kids I tried.

  In later years, eager to show off this great person in my life—My Advisor, as I always referred to him—I brought friends and family to his house for an audience. By the last time I came through town, he had been struggling with Parkinson’s for a decade. Unbelievably, he’d had to give up reading and writing; now his canvases leaned against the walls, abstract, Marsden Hartley–type paintings that had the feeling of jazz. After his memorial in Providence, filled with more illustrious and closer disciples than I, his wife and kids took me home with them rather than let me wander drunkenly into the night looking for my hotel. A glass of milk in the downstairs kitchen for the perennial crushed-out student, the very last one.

  The Golden Boy

  died 2016

  ONE OF THE PEOPLE I idolized at college was a genius boy from Westchester with a motorcycle and well-stocked quiver of left-wing ideas. When I showed up in the fall of ’75, he was on his way out west to attain biodegradable nirvana. One of his glamorous qualities was his charismatic older brother, who had arrived in Providence a few years ahead of us. This guy had ruled his prep school in Princeton and had taken over here, as well. He was already launched on what looked like a career in Rhode Island politics, while also managing a big local band and finishing his degree. This was a time when there was a lot of cocaine everywhere, including Wall Street and Hollywood, and his connections in that regard only added to his sparkle.

  Then he crashed into the wall of a very serious bust that even their well-connected family could not completely fix, though the Golden Boy did no jail time. He never graduated, either. Instead he tumbled into a far-from-golden cycle: bailout, rehab, job placement, recovery, then just a little, why not. His little brother watched from a distance as his parents buckled under. He kept a list of beautiful, wrecked cars: GTO, Corolla, Tempest, Mustang, Fiat.

  The last time he saw his brother, both were in their mid-fifties. By now my friend was a city planner, a proud father, a golden man, stopping in Florida on his way back from a tour of Cuba. He found an ancient-looking wreck with a rotating cycle of slurred, self-aggrandizing stories, nonetheless still able to rob you while telling you how much he loved you.

  Some years later, he received a few boxes of personal effects gathered from the room where the Golden Boy had taken his last breath. A file of their mother’s recipes, a vast collection of AA and NA paraphernalia, a framed story about him from a local magazine. And a scrapbook containing old black-and-white photographs of two little men, mugging for the camera in their overcoats, their suits and ties, the big one with his arm wrapped protectively around his smaller brother. As moved as my friend was, he found he could not remember those times at all.

  The Warrior Poetess

  died 2010

  WHEN I MOVED TO Texas in 1976, there was a rollicking poetry rodeo in full swing, featuring lyrical blowhards, Spanish-speaking divas, a taxi driver Kerouac, a deaf detective, grizzled drunkards, delicate Houstonians, and, moving regally among them, a somewhat terrifying queen: a soft-voiced, full-bodied woman with a cheerleader’s smile and straight blond hair to her waist, a feminist, a pacifist, an activist, a relentless crusader, with a raised eyebrow that could hit every note from amused dubiety to all-out disgust.

  I—an eighteen-year-old enfant terrible wearing a bustier or an ice-hockey uniform to read poems about my ill-advised liaisons—registered somewhere between the two. So we weren’t close, and then I went away, and several decades later, I heard she had died. A brief struggle with cancer, said the obituary; though sixty-five is too young, perhaps brief is not so bad.

  In the meantime, the press she started in 1975 had released 350 titles and she herself nineteen collections of verse, winning three Austin Book Awards, one Violet Crown Award, and the 1990 prize for Texas Woman of the Year. She founded festivals and conferences and workshops and mentored countless young writers, but as was suggested in the resolution of the eighty-second Texas Legislature that honored her life, she was known as much for swimming as for any of these things.

  She swam every day year-round in the icy emerald waters of Barton Springs, where a single lap is a full half mile, where
the pool, the birds, the cliffs, and the trees surrounding them were threatened by development, then aggressively assailed from every side, and she served on the committee and spoke at the meeting and recited poems at the city council to denounce this, the men in black suits with their evil plans and pronouncements, their beards diplomas with no courses in literature or ethics, philosophy or art. Onetwothree—breathe. Onetwothree—breathe.

  That is from her piece in the 1993 anthology Barton Springs Eternal, ed. Turk Pipkin, where we will always be together, her quietly furious and me half dressed. Poetry heaven.

  The Jewish Floridian

  died 2011

  ALWAYS READY TO GET the party started, my first husband and I took a trip to Miami right before our wedding. We stayed with my oldest friend, who was herself staying with her grandmother in her condominium complex, where the newspaper slipped under the door was the Jewish Floridian. My friend’s elegant grandma was happy to have us, though she sent us to dinner with her credit card rather than appear with us in public. My hairdresser fiancé was sporting platinum-blond hair extensions wrapped around his head with rags, and I was running around in a blue negligee and peignoir I had received as a shower gift.

  If we had any sense, we would have listened to her fashion advice. In the thirties, my friend’s grandmother had started a dress shop on the front steps of her mother’s house on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, an outgrowth of a lingerie business she and her sisters had run after the war. Once the front steps got so busy the neighbors complained, she opened a real store on Neptune Avenue. Exclusive but not expensive, it was particularly beloved by wealthy Syrian Jews, who were moving to Brooklyn in droves as their homeland became increasingly anti-Semitic.

  Who knows what would have happened career-wise if her heart hadn’t been broken one day in 1951 when one of her two daughters was killed in a car crash. This darkness changed the story in ways nobody wants to remember anymore. My best friend was named after the aunt she never knew and was raised to select her clothes with passion and individuality. In the twenty-first century, she brought up her own daughter the same way. And so the one hundredth birthday of the Jewish Floridian was celebrated by four generations of beautiful women in beautiful clothes, and me in my blue jeans, bearing a homemade challah.

  The last time I saw the Jewish Floridian, she was no longer in Florida but in an assisted living center by the Jersey Shore. It was a perfectly nice place, as these places go, though everyone who lives there just wants to know why can’t they go home. Perhaps the answer was a sign in the lobby that looked like a ransom note, with cutout words collaged together. Today is Monday, August 10, 2009. The Season is SUMMER. The Weather is HOT and HUMID, and The Next Holiday is LABOR DAY.

  This may be everything about extreme old age I need to know.

  The Brother-in-Law

  died 2010

  IT STARTS WITH GIN and Wink in Tupperware tumblers on the dock of Lake Wallenpaupack in the Poconos, where I had come with the love of my life to meet his family. His younger brother was carrying the drinks from the house on a tray. A more compact, sturdy version of my willowy beau, he was by far the most hospitable person in the family. A wide smile on his face, goofy jokes, considerate ways. A Metallica T-shirt. A joint in his pocket for later. Hair thinning a little already, at twenty-four. I felt like I could have gone to high school with him; gotten high together during study hall. Fun-loving, super-bad white kids from the seventies, that’s what we were.

  Not long after we got married, my new brother-in-law got married, too—a hardworking, blue-eyed local girl with three young sons, close together in age, whom I always thought of as Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Helping her raise those boys was the best thing he ever did. Never missed a ball game, a road trip to the beach, a night of fireworks on the lake. Having grown up himself with a nasty, violent dad and a gentle stepfather, he was nothing but kind to those boys, knew enough to leave the discipline to their mom.

  Huey, Dewey, and Louie were just about grown when she stopped drinking for good; he never did. It didn’t help that his lifelong profession was managing Pennsylvania State liquor stores. But the baseball cards, the gambling, the women, all the ways of spending money he didn’t have: it’s as if he was two different people. That shadow self, the one who lied and stole and sneaked around, just wouldn’t let go. A few months sober here and there; never enough to give his liver a chance, not with hepatitis C.

  Two weeks before he turned fifty, he fell down the stairs. It could have been a trip to the emergency room, a cast, something to tease him about at a family dinner. Instead it was a chance to give up. The two different people that he was agreeing at last. Fuck this. We’re out.

  Who Dat

  died 2013

  THE BAR FOR “CRAZY” is high in New Orleans. Same with “alcoholic” and “drug addict.” I once heard someone there explain that he knew he didn’t have a drinking problem because he stayed in on Fridays. This aspect of the city’s culture made me feel right at home when I arrived in the early eighties. My New Orleans hosts were a couple of old friends who had moved down from New York State. Now they were birds of a feather in a flock of odd ducks: underground musicians, visual artists, psychics, conspiracy theorists, voodoo queens. Their main man and direct line into the indigenous New Orleans music scene was a cadaverous guitar player who, still in his twenties, was already a legend. Though his style was more experimental punk than funk or blues, his band was everywhere, opening for the Meters or Professor Longhair, backing up Earl King or Little Queenie. He was widely considered the city’s best songwriter, though few could name a single song he’d written.

  Little he said made logical sense, and he was impossible to pin down about anything. His eyes looked sad all the time. He had a young son and a wife, later another wife, and he was devoted to all of them. He was kind. Acutely aware of the invisible things around us, he had personal experience with alien abduction. He also had amazing drug connections. So amazing he eventually had to leave New Orleans to get away from them and wound up living in voluntary exile for the rest of his life.

  One time, we stopped in Atlanta to visit him and his wife. They had a rambling, two-story house with a huge kitchen. Diane took us to the farmers’ market, where I bought three bunches of Swiss chard for a pasta dish from Sundays at Moosewood. The details of that recipe are the thing I remember best in this whole story. Ziti con bietole. Try it.

  Though we had been out of touch for decades, he found me on Facebook and called when he learned he was dying. He was sixty-two, diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, and since I had written about my role in Tony’s assisted suicide, he wondered if I had any ideas for him. Other than that, he just wanted to say hey.

  The Artist

  died 2016

  THE FIRST TIME I saw him, 1999 was far in the future and we were as bad as we would ever be. My sister and Steve, Tony and me, high as kites at Radio City Music Hall, in our terrible eighties clothes and our big pink hair. He sang “International Lover” from a flying bed. When it was over, we found the car sitting right where we’d parked it on Fifth Avenue, despite having left the keys dangling in the door.

  The next time I saw him was again with my sister. It was the new millennium, and our luck had flip-flopped several times: both the boys from the first scene were long dead, and she had ten years clean. We were with our third and second husbands in the very last row of the Meadowlands. He was far away, a five-foot-two vegan Jehovah’s Witness from Minneapolis with a genius as big as the moon.

  The last time I saw him was shortly after the Baltimore uprising, when he gave a concert for peace on Mother’s Day. As if I knew it was my last chance, I paid $1,000 for my daughter and me to sit in the third row. The fog machine started blowing, the purple lights came up, and then they poured out one after another, the top ten on my subconscious jukebox. The swelling, melancholy chords of “Little Red Corvette,” the skittering riff that starts “When Doves Cry.” Ten thousand voices singing You, I wo
uld die for you, and it felt like something good could happen in this maddened city. I was bent over, sobbing. Mom, said my daughter. Watch the show.

  I was so proud to have been born in the same year as him. Prince, Madonna, Keith Haring, Michael Jackson, and me, I used to say. Now Madonna and I are holding down the fort. I could not believe he died of an overdose until the autopsy came out. The original straight-edge, taken down by shattered hips and platform shoes. He saw it coming, had called a doctor who was on the way to take him to rehab. For weeks, I couldn’t stop searching for articles about it, as if one might have a different ending.

  The Young Hercules

  died 2015

  THE ORIGINS OF THE idea of dumping cold water on one’s head to raise money for charity are unclear, says Wikipedia, but in the summer of 2014, that wacky idea went viral, and videos of the Ice Bucket Challenge were legion. Once soaked, the dripping victim would pass on the challenge, and the person named would either have to donate to ALS research or get dunked him or herself, though most did both. One of these videos now lives on the website of KSAT, a television station in San Antonio. In it, a man in a wheelchair, a man who cannot move or speak, has fourteen buckets of ice water poured on his head while his mother and his best friend address the cameras.

  Unlike similar videos, which are hard to watch because of the vicarious head-freezing, this one is hard to watch because the man’s limbs are wasted and his body is curled in on itself, his neck is crimped and his beard is prematurely gray. He is forty-two, and he has been living with this disease for fourteen years. Using the last working muscle in his body, he can approximate a smile, and he does, briefly, with half his mouth. His eyes tell another story, electric with yearning.