I Am So Popular: Sudden Death

Last week, I was driving to West Texas for some speaking gigs, and the news of Scott was very fresh, and Charlie was still in a coma (fostering small but still some hope he’d live), I had a chance to look at the very big sky. This was a fitting background for my Scott reflections. Because in large part two factors led me to move to Austin. Knowing Scott was one. And another sudden death, back in 1990, was the second.

Scott and I met in Knoxville in 1987 when we worked for the same magazine company. I took his place, promoted from intern to editorial assistant, when he switched from the editorial side to the business side and transferred to Texas. We, his friends thought maybe he was a little nuts for making such a move—like a lot of other non-Texans we didn’t know about Austin and imagined Texas as either very wild or very conservative, or maybe just wild with conservatism.

But Scott took the gig and about a year after that, I left my job and my former college roommate, Elaine, and I hopped in her little car, setting out from Tampa on a drive that would take us all the way to Victoria Island, British Columbia and back. We stopped to see Scott along the way, and that was my introduction to Austin, where I visited Sound Exchange and paid homage to the Daniel Johnston mural long before Cobain made it famous, and I ate at Virginia’s where two cranky old ladies yelled at the customers (that was the draw) and served up big sweaty jars of cold sweet tea, and I discovered BookWoman which just cried out to my burgeoning feminist heart.

I have other vivid recollections—those webbed footed horses in that sculpture on campus, an HEB so huge I couldn’t comprehend it, and—even bigger—the Texas sky. Now I’d heard about big skies before, but I grew up in the crowded Northeast and then moved to Florida, which is the New Jersey of the south. The concept of big skies did not compute. I had to see it for myself and then, click, I got it.

Scott was gone from Austin by the time I got here in 1990. Elaine had moved down a few months prior, in a not entirely successful bid to escape the ghost of the boyfriend who’d hung himself at the tail end of ’89. She’d invited me to join her any number of times, and finally I did, packing up my nine month-old baby, eighteen boxes of mostly books (that I’d later sell off at HalfPrice), not having a job or a house or a plan, just $2000 and the memory of that big sky. Two weeks hence marks the anniversary of that move, which I used to think was a whim but now, I must say, feels like fate.

Because this is home to me. It’s a place where I fucked up and I grew up, doing far more of the former until I finally, thankfully, I got the hang of the latter. Which brings me now back to Charlie. The cold truth is, Charlie drank himself into that coma. And then he had a massive heart attack. And then his organs failed. And then he resurfaced long enough to refuse dialysis. And then he kicked it, sixteen hours after I called to say goodbye.

When I say I try to have no regrets in life, I do not mean that cavalierly. What I mean is, when I stop to think about how drunk I was and for how long and under what circumstances, and the things I did, and the prices I paid (in every sense), and the there-but-for-the-grace-of-god things I was spared—car wrecks averted and couches miraculously never set on fire and no coma of my own— whatever gratitude I have (and I have plenty) is more than a little tempered by the pain of knowing I cannot go back and undo any of it. That is what I mean by no regrets.

So I was driving under the big Texas sky, and the clouds were spectacular, and I came upon field after field of those crazy huge ass windmills, which Warren says makes the ground look like it’s fixing to take off and fly away and which I think look like a yoga class full of three-armed giants. And I recalled that, without Scott, I might never have seen that sky, the very thing that pulled me here for good. And I thought about a long strand of wooden beads Charlie gave me twenty-three years ago, which sit in the bottom of my little jewelry box. And I wondered if I should selfishly keep them or send them along to his little son, not yet eight.

Then I thought about my own son, who was about that same age when I finally put down the bottle for good. I still do not know the extent of the fallout that awaits him as he will, necessarily, reflect back on the days of before and after his mother sobered up. (And yes, I am thankful that the memory of little children is sometimes mercifully blurred.)

When Henry was in second or third grade, he reached a stage where he decided to rollerblade to school. I would follow along with our very difficult dog, Satch (who also died recently, though not suddenly). Perhaps because he had some heeler in him, Satch was very keen on keeping the pack together. And as Henry would get some distance between us, Satch would bark and whine and pull. He could not bear that our pack was separated, even if only by a block.

I left my own pack of origin, the bio-fam back in Jersey, on the cusp of nineteen, and save for a couple of months post-college, I’ve never been back for more than a week or so at once, and these visits are always peppered across vast expanses of time. Perhaps that is why, for so many years, I was so keen on keeping close to my pack of choice. Wherever I moved—and until I moved here, I moved often—I found the most astonishing friends, and I cherished our friendships. And when I left, I kept in touch. Letters, lots of them, long and written by hand, on paper and sent with trinkets and photos and mix tapes.

I still keep in touch with some of them, though less often than I would like. As my own life has gotten busier, and increasingly deadline heavy, I’m embarrassed to say that sometimes months can pass between visits with my Austin friends, people who live ten minutes away. But perhaps this, too, is one of those things that happen over time.

All I know is, as I set out on that trip out West, alone in the car, I had a very uneasy feeling. My pack was scattered. Warren behind me in Austin. Henry far away in Portland, where he recently went to visit, but looks like maybe he’ll stay. The dogs, also left behind, would not be spending the night doing their Cirque du Soleil routine on top of my head. Too many friends I haven’t seen in too long.

I recalled another young-Henry memory then. His first trip to NYC, when he was around three. Whenever he would get very tired from being trotted all around the city, he would cry out, “Take me back to Austin, Texas RIGHT NOW.” It was a cry he even used once or twice when we were already back in town. And I always knew what he meant was, “Take me back to my house, my room, my bed, my dogs, my friends RIGHT NOW.” Because that is where he felt safest, and that is where he felt best.

Because I am so lucky to have such a huge pack—now scattered not just around the country but around the world—I understand, on some level, that there will never be a time when we are all together again. I have drifted away from the ritual of remembering nearly every single friend’s birthday, and calling or writing to say so.

But I stop sometimes, and a memory seizes me, and I recall someone I haven’t seen in so long, and I remember the roles we played, and how what was random then now seems like maybe it was some grand plan. And I hope, like some fluffy white cloud in the big Texas sky, that these thoughts of gratitude drift across the universe and reach my pack, the way you sometimes just know, before the phone rings, that it’s going to, and you know just who’s on the other end.

Spike Gillespie is very sad about Scott and Charlie, but grateful for the roles they played. She blogs at www.spikeg.com and KnitBuzz. She’s teaching a writing workshop soon. Email spike@spikeg.com for details.