HORIZONS LOST AND FOUND

Cheers to the wish you were here, but you're not.

I spent the weekend past at my alma mater, Seton Hill University, teaching and attending fiction-writing classes, appearing at a surprisingly successful book signing, reuniting with old friends and making new ones, and drinking entirely too much Yuengling Lager. It should have been a grand occasion. In a sense it was. But a pall hung over the lovely old campus (think: Hogwarts on a large green hill), and I could not escape its shadow -- the shadow of death.

There is never a good time to lose a good friend. Still, some losses can come at moments which seem not only to stick the knife between your ribs but slowly turn the blade, as if the Reaper is trying to exact as much pain as possible from the loss.

To be honest, I had not seen Chris in years, and it had been a long time since we had spoken even over the internet. We hardly fit the status of "good friends" as any reasonable person would define the term. But I am not a reasonable person, never have been, and don't really give a fuck if some would think I am appropriating the grief which rightfully belongs to others. There are times in life that you meet someone with whom you form a certain bond, feel a little simpatico, share a certain connection. You may not become friends in the classical sense, due to distance or other factors, but whenever you're together or even engage in a discussion by some cold electronic means, there's a strong unspoken sense of tribe. In my half-century of life I have had many friendships which seemed solid, complete and rang true when tested, yet also evaporated almost immediately upon the imposition of distance, leaving almost no trace behind. I have also enjoyed others -- not as many, but a number -- which shut down as if by a switch when one of us moved away, only to be reignited years or even decades later, the almost literal example of "picking up where we left off." And between these two and indeed, beyond them, there are a range of other types, the most precious I suppose being the sort that goes at full steam regardless of whether the two of you live next door or on other sides of the planet. My point is simply that friendship is harder to define than we would assume. It fits Michael Ruppert's quirky definition of a paradigm as "what we think about something before we think about it." I feel the same way about friends, and I feel the same way about Chris.

We met in graduate school, in the Masters of Fine Arts program, more years ago now than I care to tell you and certainly more than I believe possible. Actually we met without meeting, and this peculiar first impression lingers to this day. As an aspirant to the Writing Popular Fiction program, I was required to submit a sample of my fiction for the approval or disapproval of those responsible for my admittance to the school. It must have impressed somebody, because I was accepted, and thereafter as one of the tasks to be completed in preparation for my first residency at the school, I had to resubmit this piece to my peers for critique, as they had to submit their own pieces to me. I had a total of ten of these submissions to peruse, and it so happened that Chris P's was the first I plucked off the pile.

Now, I must confess here to a failing which I no longer believe applies to me generally as a person: arrogance. I retain a high belief in self, but only in certain specific areas, and I have come to understand that the more humble one tries to be even in those areas where one considers oneself greatly or supremely talented, the better one can become. And this process by necessity opens the door to further humility by virtue of understanding that if there is room for improvement, well, one is not as good as one thought. There is more to it than that, but for the moment we'll leave it there, and I'll just say that at the time, I always entered any situation assuming that I was the best in the room. So when I took Chris' work off the heap, I was prepared to look down my nose at it.

Five minutes later I distinctly recall feeling sweat on my upper lip. Not figurative sweat. Real sweat. I remember either saying aloud or thinking very loudly, "If this is representative of what they've got, how the hell am I even going to stand out?"

When I arrived at school -- this was the summer of 2006 -- I was eager to meet the guy that had clubbed my well-hidden insecurities with his typewriter. I don't actually remember if I wanted to hate him or not, but I do remember telling him what an amazing writer I thought he was, and meaning it, as Salieri meant his initial compliments to Mozart in Amadeus. Thankfully, Chris was not the sort to compete, or to gloat, or to let compliments go to his head. Indeed, as I was to discover, he was actually far too humble for his own good. Beneath that dryly witty-looking face (the more serious a look he tried to put on it, the more he looked as if he were about to burst out laughing) there lay a great creative genius, it is true, but that genius was untouched by egotism, by pride, or even self-belief as I understand the word. And it was here that I found him utterly infuriating, but I'm getting a touch ahead of myself.

Chris and I hit it off, and last weekend, as I was walking and driving around the campus and the town in which it resides, I kept encountering the places where he and I and others had gone while jammed into my wine-red Buick LaSaber sedan. I remember how he told me that Primani Bros boasted "The Salad As Big As Your Head" -- and it turned out to be bigger, since the last time I checked my dome was 61 cm around (must be all that brain). I remember when we needed beer on a Sunday, and the only place we could get it, thanks to Pennsylvania's blue laws, was a dirty hole-in-the-wall dive bar nestled in the basement of a run-down brick building in the shadow of an overpass. We walked in, the room -- full of barflies and meth-heads -- stopped, and then a smoky-faced old junkie drunk, with shards of yellow teeth, allegedly female, screamed, "Lookeee here at them handsome boys! Hows a bout youse buy an old girl a drink!" And Chris, who was kind to seemingly everyone, replied suavely, "Another time, ma'a'm, for sure," as she wolf-whistled us out the door. And I remembered the nerdy arguments we'd have in the dining hall or somebody's hotel room, where a dozen of us would sit around, drinking and eating take-out and fighting about this or that novelist, whether he sucked or was over-rated or truly the genius everyone said he was, and Chris was generally the sole voice of diplomacy, if not necessarily reason. He seemed to be a natural diplomat, incapable of giving or taking offense, genuinely concerned with keeping the peace, willing to take a stand but not willing to hurt someone as a result. And this was why he drove me nuts.

As a writer, as in every other creative pursuit and many which are not creative, it is necessary to have a certain core of arrogance. Not just self-belief; arrogance. I use the word specifically because to be great means to believe one is great even if the evidence periodically indicates otherwise. One must believe that one has a claim which one may in fact not have, or not have yet; and one must cling to this belief in the face of discouragement, false counsel, and counsel which is well-intentioned and possibly correct in the moment but not in the main. In short, one must possess a certainty of greatness independent of logic or likelihood. And this Chris did not possess. Not creatively, I mean. He was far too malleable and pliable, far too open to accepting criticism at face value, far too willing to accept suggestions and submit to attacks from people grossly unqualified to give them. He seemed to lack any ability to discriminate between remarks made by fools and those made by people of genuine talent. His natural goodness meant he had to take everyone seriously, even those operating out of stupidity or jealousy, and his natural diplomacy meant he had to accept every critique with perfect democracy. This seriously effected his writing and it was the subject of a number of arguments between us, conducted primarily over e-mail, but occasionally in person.

"Chris," I'd say in exasperation. "Not everyone with a voice box is worth listening to."

And of course Chris, ever the conciliator, would agree and fail to mention my own reputation, justly deserved at the time, as an arrogant asshole with little regard for othe people's feelings and little respect for their abilities. He would just agree with whatever I said, make one of his heavily ironic jokes, and then change the subject and go right on listening to clowns unfit to carry his pencil. His writing suffered accordingly, yet when we graduated, and I was chosen to give the valedictory (admittedly after an utterly shameless campaign of self-promotion), he was the only person in my graduation class of twenty-eight that I called out by name. There were of course other large talents in the bunch, but Chris was something special, someone with the potential to go all the way -- agent, traditional publishing contract, Hollywood options, all of it. And I was sufficiently respectful of his talent and his human qualities, few of which I shared at the time but all of which I admired, that I wanted him to succeed to the fullest even if it meant he would be running rings around my sorry ass for the rest of our respective writing careers.

After graduation, I had only sporadic contact with Chris. Every couple of years I'd get intensely curious as to what he was doing -- the guy was legitimately a stud, if you can use that word in relation to writers -- so I'd hit him up by e-mail, or on Facebook or by some other means, and we'd get to jawin'. Then, following the birth of his daughter, he disappeared from social media for a long time - years, if memory serves. Can't say as I blame him: by all accounts being a father was the focus of his being. But eventually our ships passed in the night once more, and I distinctly remember him telling me, the last time we communicated directly, that he'd fallen away from writing for a long time, but was now working on a project and would let me know when it was complete. I was excited enough to offer him the services of my editor without actually asking that long-suffering individual if he wanted another client. But I never did hear back from him and once again we fell out of touch completely, with the exception of the occasional "like" on a social media status or a secondhand howdy.

A few days before I left for the In Your Write Mind Workshop at Seton Hill last Thursday, I was at my sink, washing the dishes, when my glance fell upon one of the numerous (we're talking hundreds, folks) of framed photographs I hang from floor to ceiling in my rather overlarge single bedroom apartment. These pictures change from time to time, reflecting new experiences and cataloging old ones, but they are primarily of people that I care about, even if no longer speak to them anymore. This one depicted a much younger and infinitely more handsome version of myself standing between Chris and a third writer. I'd forgotten the photo was even there, and it pained me to see how badly I've decayed in the intervening years, but the mock-serious look on Chris's face made me laugh. It was stern and pompous, incredibly reminiscent of the character of Wesley Wyndham-Price in Buffy and Angel, so ably played by Alexis Denisoff, but from the very compression of Chris's lips in the picture, you knew the son of a bitch was about to start laughing. The guy was simply incapable of taking himself seriously. I thought, "I hope he goes to the conference. I miss that guy."

The next day, or the one after that, I was at my desk at work when a random e-mail from the Alumni Relations Department at the university hit my inbox. It informed me that Chris had passed away. For a few moments I just stared at it with what must have been a very puzzled look upon my face. Then I set out to prove that it was nonsense, a mistake, the wrong guy's obituary. If only. Chris was dead all right, gone.

The news hit me much harder than I would have expected. I am now almost 52 years old, and certainly past the age where one is rawly shocked by the news of a premature passing. My relationship with Chris was intermittent at best: no one was going to mistake us for Butch and Sundance, or even Fonzie and Richie. We were two guys who knew each other from graduate school and had gotten on well together; we respected each other's work, and that respect survived over the years we had little to no contact. So too did the knowledge that if we ran into each other in an airport lounge in Phoenix, a dive bar in Quebec City, or a charity marathon in Chicago, we'd be able to resume our last conversation as if it had ended the previous evening. Yet it is precisely because I was confident in my ability to reconnect with him at will that I never did so. I didn't even reach out to ask him if was going to attend IYWM this year, which would have been easy enough. I just took it for granted. I took him for granted. And now he's gone.

I am unashamed to say that later that night, long after work had ended and I was sitting here, where I write this now, I wept a little. What shames me is that the tears were not really for Chris. I did not know Chris well enough to weep for him. The tears were for myself. They were for the sadness that overcomes me when I see my reflection and realize I'm not looking at a picture of my father, who died at 54, but myself at almost 52. The tears were for the missed opportunities, the unfulfilled dreams, the lost horizons. To quote Lawrence Sanders: "I wept for all of us. The losers."

So yes, my four-day excursion to Seton Hill, successful as it was, left me feeling thoughtful and sad. Very few of the people attending the conference ever met Chris or even knew who he was, which furthered my feelings of isolation. It heartened me slightly to raise a toast to him at dinner with friends, but it heartened me more that I was having dinner with friends, and making new ones in the bargain. It heartened me that at least this tragedy had made me realize how rare and precious such moments truly are in our lives, how little time we actually spend with the people we care about. To quote Orwell, "There is time for everything in life except that which is worth doing."

There is a song which has been playing in my head for a week straight. Unlike most earworms it is not annoying or aggravating: it seems completely appropriate, even if the lyrics apply more to the vast circle of people I have cared about or care about than Chris specifically:

Do I have to die to hear you miss me?
Do I have to die to let you say goodbye?
I don't want to act like there's tomorrow
I don't want to wait to do this one more time

I miss you
Took time but I admit it
It still hurts even after all these years
And I know that next time
Ain't always gonna happen
I gotta say "I love you" while you're here

Somewhere in this apartment I actually have a crystal ball. Unfortunately -- or perhaps very fortunately -- it doesn't tell the future. Like everyone else, I've no idea how much time I'm granted on this rock. I could live to be 103 like Ernst Jünger, publishing all the way, or tap out shy of fifty-five like my old man, with my pen very far from having gleaned my teeming brain. The only thing I do know is that the death of Chris, as much as any of the losses I have sustained in this year of loss, has served to remind me just how fragile a thing life is and just how much of it I have taken for granted. To break the pattern of entitlement, to shatter the belief that "next time is always gonna happen" is going to be a job of work, but by God I am going to give it a crack. I owe that much to Chris.