Like any number of the people I once knew and no longer do, he continues to haunt me, even though I don’t remember his name. I am not good with names, I never have been. But I remember his energy, his kindness, his sadness, his embrace of and even the way in which he ran toward his fate, and I wonder – did he? Did he die young, as his father and uncles and grandfather and great uncles had? Or did he live beyond expectation, beating the odds?
He was an actor, originally hailing from Boston, and was from a large Irish family that was, due to the early deaths of so many of the men, heavy with females. This included his mom, who fretted about her son way off in NYC. He felt familiar to me, his background, and he was an actor, as was I at the time we met. His kindness, too, perhaps reminded me of my dad, another weak, sad man burdened by family and fate. He was also, like my dad, married to a bright, driven woman standing just over five-foot tall; she did not like our being friends, but was also – or so it seemed to me – using him, his money, his connections (was there a maternal uncle, or two, in the NYFD or PD?) to promote her own desire to succeed in the Big Apple and the business of show. She had pushed him into moving to New York; they had a window of opportunity, of life, and they were stepping through it.
He was not ambitious, not in an overt, hungry way; he just wanted to do good work. But she – the wife – wasn’t wrong to dislike me, as I did love him, in a way. We were working on audition material together, or was he directing me in a piece? I don’t remember. I just remember long, slow conversations and the frustration I felt in his running toward what he believed to be his fate. Why do that? Why decide you’re going to die young, live into those lousy odds? Defy them dude! I must’ve been very annoying.
So, yes, what I didn’t love, or like about him, was his defeatism. He was a smoker, you see, at least a pack a day, and the thing that was killing off the men in his family was sudden, deadly heart attacks, compounded by congenital heart problems. Was his heart enlarged, or does that simply sound and feel right because his kindness was overly large, including everyone, it seemed, except perhaps himself. His father was dead before the age of forty, before this man whose name escapes me was out of elementary school; his uncles also died before attaining forty years of age, his grandfather and his brothers, too. All these men he never met, spoken of in reverent tones, as tragic noble heroes dying young, in stories he heard time and again as a child – how wonderful and special they all were! Why would he not want to live up to, or down to that? The noble sainthood club of absent men!
When we became friends this kind, decent, sad man was in his mid-thirties, and expected death daily, if not hourly. And, regardless of all this, he kept doing life, moving forward, making friends – and, he kept smoking, which I have to say drove me mad. He told me all about this, the deaths, the heart issues, his acceptance of his fate, on a mild sunny day on a street in the mid-forties, west side. Hell’s Kitchen. We were outside because he needed a break to have a smokey treat. I wanted to shake him. Ridiculous. This is ridiculous. Your dad isn’t some fucking hero, he’s a long-gone dead man, a myth, not someone to emulate, but to mourn. They – he and the wife – had decided not to have children.
We lost touch. We both moved on. He might have returned to Boston. He might have died suddenly and I never heard about it because in the days before social media and cell phones, how would I have been notified regarding a random man’s death in NYC, a man I knew well but briefly during a period of my life in which I moved twice in one long, interesting year, making changes in location, in spirit, in substance. His wife would not have kept my number, would not have followed up. He was sweet. He was lost, as we all are, and dying, as we all are, only his death was, if not in substance, in vision much closer than most. We are all dying. I say this at least once a week, because it’s true. We are all dying. Nobody gets out of here alive. I wonder what ever happened to that kind, sad man? I hope he lived.