A good friend of mine put this image up on his Facebook page:
This was taken at my friend’s wedding in 1979. I was his best man and this is the only time I’ve ever worn a tuxedo. (I’m on the right…yeah, the short one…)
Seeing this brought forth a cascade of memories, many of which aren’t all that great, but all of which are absolutely vital to who I am today. See, this is a marker of the moment my life changed. The next several months put me on an emotional roller coaster that finally stopped some time in early 1980.
Look at that face. I thought I was a cool guy, at least near the surface. I wasn’t, but then, really, who is in every aspect? Or even in most?
That’s Greg. He married his Judy that day, a wonderful person, and they’re still together. (There is another photograph in their album of all of us, including Judy’s sister, lined up in the hall after the ceremony, waiting for people to file by. It’s funny and revealing. Greg, Judy, her sister, all of them are crying. I’m on the far end grinning like the fox who just got away with a fresh chicken. In my mind, I was having a good time and feeling coy because it wasn’t me getting hitched! False bravado, really, though I believed in my independence—but I was intensely lonely, refusing to acknowledge it.) I’m not that short, he’s just that tall.
Fresh-faced, I suppose you would call that. I still had some notion of being a world famous photographer then. I remember watching the wedding photographer and being thoroughly unimpressed. Notice this shot isn’t especially sharp? But in truth, I was still a-forming and had no idea what I wanted to be.
I had just finished my first novel not very long before. (This is the one that Shall Never See Daylight. All we writers have one of those.) I thought I could eventually Do It All. Photography, writing, music. Yeah, I still had some extremely vague notions of picking up music again somewhere along the way, but that wasn’t really going anywhere. I’d been teaching myself guitar the previous couple of years, writing some absolutely wretched songs. (The lyrics, anyway. Musically I don’t think they’re too bad, but I wrote some incredibly bad lyrics.) Not sure which of these was going to make it for me, but I had time. I thought. I had time.
But then things kind of went pear-shaped on me.
I won’t go into detail. Yes, there was a woman. Yes, there were late nights and soul searching. Yes, there were likely half a dozen more clichés.
Basically, I was following my usual learning curve, which is rather like a ski jump. Plunging headlong into things, full-tilt boogie as we used to say, and assuming a stable landing. I’ve always been like this. I don’t do things methodically, in reasonable steps. I go along fecklessly convinced of my completeness until I realize I want something else, then eschew any systemic approach to the new thing and dive in. Take big bites. Grab what you can with both hands.
I said I was lonely. That year—and maybe seeing Greg and Judy get married drove it home—I realized I was going down a blind alley. If I stayed on the path I was taking, I would be a bitter old man with nothing to show for all of the flailing and sweat.
Or so I thought.
I did not know what else to do, so I just declared a change in direction, reached out for what I thought I wanted, and hung on for the ride until I crashed.
Crash I did. By October that year I was a mangled wreck. I grew a beard, walked endlessly around the city, often into neighborhoods I had no business entering. There were some ugly scenes. I came out the other end hollowed out and cynical.
I started writing again. In fairly quick order I wrote four more novels. Not very good ones, they too will remain in boxes, never to see the light of day.
Sometime early in 1980 I met Donna. Turns out, I wasn’t as hollowed out or cynical as I thought.
I’m toying with finally shaving off the beard.
Symbolically, metaphorically, the man (youth, boy) in this picture pretty much died that year. I am not him. I was not him by 1980, but I contained his history, and since whatever new person I was had nothing of his own yet, I used that history on which to build anew. Not in any conscious way—who is ever that self-possessed?—but the results were an amalgam of what once was and what would soon be.
Seeing this picture reminded me that I spent that year trying in very large ways to Be More, to Live Fully. I didn’t know how. The instruction manual so many people seemed to have was written in a sanskrit for me. So I launched myself into unknown territory and got badly burned and busted up.
It would be nice to believe that the best parts survived, but that is perhaps not for me to say. But I wouldn’t have done it differently. If I had, what followed would have been other than what I have, and I like what I have.
Salute.