We Learn Nothing Page 4
For the last several years of his life, we weren’t even certain that Skelly wasn’t homeless. He seemed to spend a good deal of time at the library, and once told us a story about getting kicked out for falling asleep in the fiction department. One night when Kevin and I were in the city for a concert, we called Skelly up at the opera office because we were hoping to borrow twenty bucks’ drinking money against the $∞.00 or so we’d loaned him over the years and also maybe crash at his house. He said, “Gee, I’m actually working late tonight, and I also have to get in early tomorrow, so I was just going to sleep on one of the couches here. But y’all are welcome to stay here, there’s plenty of couches, they’re surprisingly comfortable.” Kevin told him not to worry, never mind, we’d just drive home tonight—nah, we were sure, it was fine, we’d see him next time. He hung up and turned to me and said: “Skelly’s lost the house.”
He did seem to spend a lot of time either illicitly sleeping at his office or apartment-sitting for friends and coworkers. I often asked him why he didn’t just sell his mother’s house and use the money to rent a place in Mount Vernon, the midtown neighborhood where not only his workplace but the library and all the bars he frequented were located—where, essentially, he lived his whole life—and quit having to catch the last bus at 11 P.M. and ride forty minutes to the city limit to get home. He’d just shrug. I could only assume he was just too attached to the house where he’d grown up, where his mother had lived. I once loaned him a substantial amount of money so that the city wouldn’t put a lien on the property. (One theory about where all his money went was that he was using it to pay off back taxes.) It wasn’t until after he died that I realized that he couldn’t have sold the house in the condition it was in, and, more important, that he could never have let anyone see the inside of it. I could only imagine, in retrospect, how cornered he must have felt when Kevin and I had called up asking to stay there, and I couldn’t help but admire how coolly he’d thought on his feet.
It’s hard to explain why we couldn’t just come out and ask him, “Skelly, do you have a place to live?” It’s not only because he wouldn’t have told us; it just wasn’t done. One of the more insidious properties of secrets is that they impose secrecy on the people around them, suborning them all into silence. In light of what we learned later, I wonder now whether we didn’t, as they say in twelve-step programs, enable Skelly’s habit. At first it was only out of common courtesy or discretion, an embarrassment for him, that we didn’t challenge his stories. But in the end, as the things we knew we didn’t know about him seemed stranger and more troubling and harder to ignore, it became a kind of complicity.
Occasionally, young women who learned that the things he’d told them about himself weren’t true felt betrayed. One of those girls, in a vindictive snit, actually snooped into his past and triumphantly spread the word about what she’d learned. I made a point of not hearing it. I knew that he really had been a lawyer at one time, although the only legal opinion I ever heard him offer, pro bono to Kevin and me over beers around three in the morning before our date to appear for a summons for illegal trespass, was: “I think y’all should blow off this court thing.” (“Is that jurisprudential jargon, Skelly?” we asked him. “‘Court thing’?”) A woman I dated for a while, who’d gone to the same college as Skelly, asked around among her old classmates and found out that he’d been disbarred. I didn’t stop her from asking, but I also told her I didn’t want to know about it. I doubt whatever his transgression was would’ve shocked me—probably just drugs, or a minor and strictly temporary misallocation of funds, some petty and illconcealed mischief. (Skelly had once explained to me, with the pleasure of a connoisseur of both language and human folly, the definition of the legal term detour and frolic.) But it would’ve felt like a betrayal of confidence for me to go behind his back and find out something about him that he clearly didn’t want us to know. The fact that his lies had worked on those girls always seemed to me like a more telling indictment of them than of Skelly. They were angry because they’d been exposed as not just credulous but shallow; they’d been impressed by facts about Skelly instead of by him. And knowing things about someone is not the same as knowing him.
As far as I know, none of Skelly’s friends cared about the facts of his life that embarrassed him so deeply. If anything, we were just sorry he’d ever felt the need to tell us these ridiculous stories. It implied that, on some level, he felt badly about himself, as if he didn’t believe we’d like him for who he really was. What someone’s lies reveal about them (aspirations to being an accomplished writer, fantasies of an exotic history and a cosmopolitan family) are always sadder than the fact of the lies themselves. These inventions illuminate the negative spaces of someone’s self-image, their vanity and insecurities and most childish wishes, as we can infer from warped starlight the presence of a far vaster mass of dark matter.
Years ago a friend of mine and I used to frequent a market in Baltimore where we would eat oysters and drink Very Large Beers from 32-ounce Styrofoam cups. One of the regulars there had the worst toupee in the world, a comical little wig taped in place on the top of his head. Looking at this man and drinking our VLBs, we developed the concept of the Soul Toupee. Each of us has a Soul Toupee. The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us. Contemplating one’s own Soul Toupee is not an exercise for the fainthearted. Most of the time other people don’t even get why our Soul Toupee is any big deal or a cause of such evident deep shame to us but they can tell that it is because of our inept, transparent efforts to cover it up, which only call more attention to it and to our self-consciousness about it, and so they gently pretend not to notice it. Meanwhile we’re standing there with our little rigid spongelike square of hair pasted on our heads thinking: Heh—got ’em all fooled!
What’s so ironic and sad about this is that the very parts of ourselves that we’re most ashamed of and eager to conceal are not only obvious to everyone but are also, quite often, the parts of us they love best. Skelly’s stories themselves—not their content, but the fact of his telling them—were part of what we liked about him. Here’s one of my very favorite Skelly stories: One Saturday Skelly was supposed to take a train up to my cabin to meet my friend Nick and me after work. Nick and I reluctantly left the deck overlooking the bay where we’d been eating oysters and drinking beers all afternoon and drove twenty-five minutes to meet Skelly at the train station. The train arrived: no Skelly. I checked my voice mail and found the following message (transcript verbatim from memory):
[Background noises of what is unmistakably the Mount Royal Tavern—loud conversation, raucous laughter, clinking of glasses, TV] SKELLY: Hey, guys, this is Skelly. Uh—I missed the train! I’m really sorry about this, but I was in a meeting that ran longer than I expected and—BLUUUUUUUUHRPP—I tried to catch it but I was, like, three minutes too late. So, I checked and there’s another train at seven-twenty that gets in at seven-forty-five. I’ll definitely be on that one, so hopefully y’all will get this message and be there to meet me. Um, okay, again, I’m sorry about that. I hope I’ll see you soon.
[Forty-five seconds of fumbling while Skelly tries to figure out how to hang up borrowed cell phone; continued bar noises in background]
Nick and I had both been pretty peeved that we’d torn ourselves away from our pleasant setup on the water and driven half an hour down Route 40 to meet Skelly’s train and he’d stood us up. But when I heard this message it became impossible to sustain any ill humor. I didn’t even try to describe it to Nick; I just handed over the phone and let him replay it for himself. As he listened I saw his own annoyance deflate in the face of the sheer Skellyness of the message. It was amazing: no allusion to the aurally obvious setting of the call, no acknowledgment of the cartoonishly loud, elongated belch that interrupted his excuse. Sober, dignified, perfectly reasonable. Vinta
ge Skelly. By the time he finally arrived we’d had another pitcher and replayed the message a half dozen times, finding it funnier and more incredible with each listening, slaying ourselves repeatedly. We greeted him more like a man returning from a moon landing or World Series victory than a guy who was an hour and a half late. Skelly seemed nonplussed. So he’d missed a train. What was the big joke? I’m quite sure we bought him dinner and beers.
There was something reassuring about Skelly’s constancy—every time you saw him you remembered that no, you hadn’t been exaggerating in recollection: he was exactly as you remembered, if not even more so. He was always broke, he always hit you up for a twenty (“forty would be even better, if you can spare it”), he was always the first to spill a beer, and he always happened to have that Led Zeppelin concert DVD along with him in case you were interested in maybe watching it on your computer later on. He was as dependably changeless as Wimpy from Popeye with his hamburger-on-credit habit. But that same quality also imposed a certain ceiling on our friendship. I became conscious, in those last couple of years, that there were certain boundaries I was never going to get past with him. I was always glad to see him, but we weren’t getting any closer. And relationships have to grow to live. It was frustrating, but we all understood that you had to accept certain conditions with Skelly’s friendship.
The only time I ever called him on his reflexive secrecy was once when we were having beers and I noticed that one of his fingers was swollen, black, and bandaged. “What the hell happened to your finger?” I asked. “Oh, you should’ve seen it a few weeks ago,” he said, as though we were talking about a curious flowering plant or conjunction of planets. It emerged that he had developed a septic infection so serious he’d been hospitalized for a few days. He’d told no one—not his friends, not family. “Skelly,” his friends tried to explain to him, “you gotta tell people if you’re in the hospital. We want to know. People care about you.” He just shrugged. “It was fine,” he said. “I got to lay around and watch golf for a few days.” We gave up in exasperation. Fuckin’ Skelly.
He did tell me one thing in those last years that seemed touchingly revealing. Skelly had always had very troubled sleep—actually, “tortured” is more like it. He thrashed and snarled and pleaded with unseen persecutors. I think it may have been for his friends’ benefit as much as his own that he cranked up the stereo whenever we all slept in the same space. What he told me was that sometimes, when he was trying to fall asleep, he would imagine himself buried under a pile of leaves, and tell himself: They can never find me here.
One weekend up at my cabin Nick and our friend Gabe, who both played in an informal semiweekly hootenanny in the back room of a South Baltimore bar, wrote a song about Skelly. It was kind of a mournful, stoic western number called “The Ballad of Tumbleweed Skel.” The title was an allusion to his unpredictable appearances and abrupt and unexplained disappearances. You’d be drinking with him for hours and then at 11 P.M. or so you’d look around and say, “Hey, where’s Skelly?” and he’d be gone—he’d have slipped off to catch his bus home without saying goodbye rather than face the inevitable gauntlet of peer pressure to not be silly and stay for just one more round. There were verses about his knowledge of Middle Earth arcana, his insistence on cranking up the Led Zeppelin when everyone else was trying to sleep, his terrible night terrors.
It wasn’t 100 percent clear to me how Skelly, who had forbidden me ever to draw him, would react to this song if he heard it. But the next time he showed up at a hootenanny, months later, they busted it out unannounced. I wish you could’ve seen his face as he heard it—he was so abashed and flustered at finding himself the center of attention, but he was also helplessly grinning, laughing uproariously and clapping his hands at a good lyric, quickly recovering himself to catch the next one. It was like watching the face of the guest of honor at a celebrity roast, torn between chagrin and delight. I’m so glad he got to hear that song. He died less than a year later. It was our way of letting him know, in the most affectionately mocking way possible, We’ve got your number. And he loved it. Personal motto notwithstanding. For all his secrecy and his fear of being seen, he was touched that we had observed him so closely, and with such love. He loved that we knew him. This is one reason people need to believe in God—because we want someone to know us, truly, all the way through, even the worst of us.
After Skelly died, a few of his best friends went through his house to clean up before his extended family arrived. Suffice it to say we learned what had tormented Skelly in his sleep. He had secretly been mentally ill—or at least that’s what we’ve been taught to call it in the twenty-first century. You could also say, with as much real understanding, that he had been plagued by demons. Even as he had run his office and joked with his friends, at home, by himself, he had ceased to live like a human being. He hadn’t had electricity or running water for a long time. The house was littered with drug paraphernalia, but it was clear to us that the drugs were only self-medication for the real problem. We also found objects whose purpose—or meaning—we could not understand. We hauled thirty-three large, industrial-strength bags of garbage out of that house. After we’d stacked them all in a line in the back alley Kevin said, “There,” like an exasperated mom who’s finally forced her kid to clean his room. “Now was that so hard?” We all laughed, a little hysterically. It had been an unspeakable day. When Kevin and I had to go back in there after dark to check on one last thing, we were frightened, like kids setting foot in a house known to be haunted. We agreed that, if it hadn’t been a row house, the thing to do would’ve been to lob a Molotov cocktail in there and watch the place burn.
I couldn’t understand how he’d imagined no one would ever find out about his secret life. He had simply had no long-term plan. At some point he had stopped living as though he believed in a future. Something seemed to have suddenly changed in the last year and a half—that was around the time he’d stopped bothering to open his mail or change his calendar. He’d assured me, about a year before he died, that he’d just had a physical for work and they’d told him everything was fine. In retrospect, I can’t believe that I believed this. Maybe I just wanted to let him give me a reassuring story so I could back off gracefully and let a touchy subject rest. But I wonder now whether he might not in fact have seen a doctor, perhaps when he was hospitalized for that infection, who told him something he didn’t want to hear—a story whose ending he decided to rewrite.
In the first shock of discovery, I thought that Skelly had been a worse person than the one I thought I’d known. But now I think he was a better one. I’ve had other friends afflicted with huge, disfiguring secrets who ultimately revealed them. They integrated their secret selves into their normal lives, despite the pain and upheavals it caused. They freed themselves rather than let themselves be consumed. But Skelly was no less courageous, in a more inglorious way. He had to face more terrible monsters than most of us will ever have to know, and, in the end, he fought them to a draw. He kept them at bay, locked inside that house. They can never find me here. Like struggles to the death between submarine leviathans, it was a battle fought in utter darkness, invisible to the sight of the world. What tortures he suffered, and what unimaginable depths of bravery he summoned, are known only, if He exists, to God.
Skelly and I had had a sixteen-year-long running barroom argument over moral and metaphysical matters. He considered himself a Christian, albeit of an unorthodox, pot-smoking type. He always considered it a minor victory to get me to admit that we don’t know why the universe is here instead of not, that this life is a mystery. After failing to convert me yet again he would affect to despair of my redemption and call me an “unabashed moral relativist” and we’d have another National Bohemian. I never said so, because I’m too polite (and because I imagine, like most atheists, that believers’ faith is far more fragile than it is), but I always privately thought that religion was like one of Skelly’s stories—an attempt to pretty up a cruddy and
lusterless world. Skelly, like C. S. Lewis, thought the gospel was too strange, too unlikely, not to be true. It was simply too good a story.
He told me once, after reading an especially vituperative screed I’d written about the cruelty of the church or the cretinous bigotry of the Red States, that I was a better person than my beliefs. This is one of the things we rely on our friends for: to think better of us than we think of ourselves. It makes us feel better, but it also makes us be better; we try to be the person they believe we are. Skelly believed in his friends’ best selves. It was another story he told—like most of his, better than the mottled truth. But it was also one of those magical stories, like those old science fiction tales about voyages to the moon, that make themselves come true.
In reciprocation of his generous suspension of disbelief on my behalf, I choose to believe that I did know Skelly, despite everything he dissembled and kept hidden. Of course we knew him. We spent hundreds—thousands—of days and long nights talking and drinking and eating with him and crashing on the same floors as the guy. He and I watched the sun come up over the ocean while silently trading sips from a bottle of whiskey in a hotel room in Atlantic City, with all our friends passed out around us. If that moment was not true, then nothing is. We knew his sanest, best, and, I would maintain, his truest self.