This will be my last post about my old friend Mark, who died recently. It will contain the last exchanges we had, including the final thing he wrote to me, which was gracious, touching and something I appreciate greatly. This long back and forth will not be for everyone. If you want to scroll to his kind and touching lines, the last thing he ever wrote to me, they are in large print, right before the footnotes.
Mark had a unique and maddening style, in part due to his long-windedness, in part due to his intense and unwavering self-regard and his need to prevail, and these last emails between us showcase this prolix, convoluted, battling style beautifully, or horribly. In fact, this post is almost guaranteed to extend to tedious, even excruciating, length, (Christ, I’m starting to write like him…). I write it for those with the appetite for the fascinating, terrible details. As well as to write the final words on this sad person I’ve been thinking about the last few days, since he was found dead in his home by a woman named Fatima.
I reconstructed our final exchanges last night (exchanges that occurred about ten years after our final falling out, mind you) and was shocked by the ferocity of my final words to him. Then I reconstructed our actual email conversation to try to see why I’d been so merciless. Once I read the back and forth, I was no longer shocked at how brutally I made sure never to hear back from him again. I accomplished this brutality by removing all traces of sympathy from my remarks.
Reading the last few posts you may think I’m hard-hearted to speak with so little affection of a long-time friend. This loss of my friendship was many years in the making. In fact, I worked very hard the last few years to try to save the burdensome friendship, writing long letters, spending hours on the phone, having long talks with him whenever he was in town.
His argumentative unhappiness was aggressive and growing, he was like an evangelist for misery. Enduring his own demanding unhappiness required reducing everyone he knew to his level of moral agony, bending them to his view of things. People tended not to stay around to listen to much of this, once he settled into his evangelical mode. In his world there was only his will, his unfounded hope, unrealizable expectations and senseless betrayal by a parade of merciless false messiah putzes.
He was insistent that only he saw the world clearly, a horrible world where even his musical heroes got hideously old and let him down by aging. It was exhausting to try to counter his grim emotional conclusions. In the end, after a marathon conversation in a Florida diner (during the most drenching rain I’ve ever seen) I finally reduced him to silence, a process that had taken maybe five years and a million words– not to mention a law license and several years practicing law.
He simply had no answer to what I finally said. He sat glaring at me, arms folded across his chest, the picture of churlishness, very hurt to have been trapped that way by his old loser friend. I found it a very satisfying moment.
I mentioned yesterday the profound similarity between Mark and Trump. It was embodied in one quality more than any other: an unyielding need to be right, motivated by a feeling of being at a permanent disadvantage in the world. Mark could not yield, though he’d sometimes, in an attempt to be conciliatory, refer to things like wishing he was wrong, or allowing the possibility he was seeing things badly, and things like that. His absolute refusal to simply yield when it was called for, when he was mistaken or wrong, is what made him so hard to deal with. My father had this quality too.
You don’t need to have a keen mind to be unyielding, as our president shows every day, if you’re consistent in your insistence that you’re the rubber and the other person is the glue and that whatever they say will bounce off you and stick to him. My father was by far the most skillful of the three, he almost never needed to outright bend the truth in order to prevail in an argument. Mark was also not an untruthful person by nature, but when he felt cornered, which happened a lot, he wouldn’t hesitate to insist, using easily disprovable assertions, that his feelings were right no matter what the facts might have to say about it. [1]
I noticed a striking example in his final emails to me. He mentions with hurt that I never responded to his many attempts to reconcile with me. I reminded him of every time I responded to one of his attempts to reach out. He agrees, when confronted, that, actually, I did almost always respond, at times beautifully. However, he reminds me, there was that one time I didn’t respond and he’s still terribly hurt by it. So the accusation that I never responded turned out to be an admission, when confronted, that I had actually written him back all but one time, but STILL!
Bear in mind, I had no obligation to respond at all to this overbearingly demanding former friend, outside of my promise to his mother to please not lock the door against him. I kept my word to her as best I could. When she died, and I got his final, completely characteristic, response, I felt released from that vow.
Here is an email I sent somebody about my promise to Mark’s mother that I found from six months after my mother died in May of 2010:
The idiots who painted my mother’s apartment told me the enamel oil-based paint they’d have to use on all the doors was highly toxic. The idiot in chief advised me to sleep elsewhere when they painted it. I told him I’d be gone Tuesday and Wednesday night. He said, “very good. we’ll paint with the oil Tuesday and Wednesday.” When I got back to the apartment Monday night the air was so toxic, from enamel paint, my lungs began to ache after an hour in the house.
Luckily Sophie, the vampire Mark’s mother, was happy to have me drive up to her place and sleep in her guest room, which I did. The vampire was arriving the following day. It was somewhat ticklish. I arrived at 11:00 pm, Sophie and I talked until 2:30 a.m., mostly about Mark.
Mark has no friends, every former friend is a ‘putz’ who betrayed him. Sophie understands that he’s very difficult to get along with, she does everything he demands, she understands that he’s immature, and angry, and very unhappy, and bossy, and pushy, and so forth. She wishes she could do something to help him, but he lives in a world where everybody but him is the problem. She completely understands my point of view, why I can’t be friends with someone who, like Irv used to, views me as a rival to constantly battle. I told her I am a good fighter but I don’t want to do it anymore, especially not with friends.
The next morning we had breakfast and I left a few hours before he arrived. Standing by the car, leaning on her cane, this wonderful, upbeat, life-loving 94 year-old said as I started the car.
“I know all the reasons, and I wish it could be different, he doesn’t have a single male friend… and I love you so much, and I love him, it breaks my heart that you can’t be friends,” and she gave me that heartbreaking sunshine-filled smile of hers.
As I put the car into reverse she said, “maybe I shouldn’t mention this, but he’s jealous that you and I have maintained a friendship when you won’t be friends with him.”
“That’s because he lives in a black and white world,” I told her immediately. “he can’t see the shades of grey, the gradations that make the world rich, and complicated and beautiful.” We told each other we loved each other and I drove off, leaving her to two weeks with her loving and demanding youngest son.
His mother knows: Mark is immature and petulant, he sees himself as a victim, you’re with him or against him. He can’t hold contradictions in his head, or see that one thing may have nothing to do with another, or that not every two different things are mutually exclusive.
I’d promised her I’d reply to his email, sent to me on the eve of his coming to Florida, since he knew from his mother that I was there too. He sends out these feelers periodically when we are going to be in the same town for any period of time. I was at a loss to reply to his email about which my sister’s comment was the best “He’s completely insane and, to top it off, not a good writer,”
A few days ago I finally wrote back to him, honest and gentle as I could be, and blind cc’d it to Sophie, for whose sake I’d written it, hoping it would ease her 94 year-old mind and heart ache a bit. She never wrote a word about it, naturally, though she’s an old fashioned kind of correspondent, almost always responsive, but when I called her tonight, with Sekhnet on the line, she told me she loves me.
Here is the last exchange with Mark, minus my final, merciless-and-plain-as-Death words. I leave his kind final couplet as the last word on our long, tortured friendship, as I did, gratefully, in my otherwise brutal reply.
Mark wrote me this characteristic note on November 22, (JFK Conspiracy Day) 2014, after his mother died, when the brothers were arranging a memorial service for her in New York City:
Hey there — well here’s one exquisitely stanky hanky . . . . and I just want to check in with you, if there’s the slightest chance that my read of the situation is wrong, which could have very sad & profoundly tragic dimensions. You may have heard, there’s an upcoming NY memorial gathering for my mom. Several people have said to me — in light of your appropriateness to be there — “just let it go . . . . reach out.” To which I could only respond — first — that it’s never been me holding on to anything to begin with, this split was all your choice, so there’s not even anything for me to let go of . . . . and second, that I’ve already tried reaching out, repeatedly , and got no response. So I finally had to give up, as eventually it could only be taken as the very manifestation of the resoluteness of your choice, the confirmation. The art of answering without answering. Which was further seemingly confirmed by having received no personal reach-out in this, the most ultimate of moments.
But I’ve certainly had my experiences of the same reality being experienced completely differently by the two people involved (the source of so many problems & tragedies on this stinking planet), and if there’s the slightest chance whatsoever that that might be the case here, it’s too big and fraught a thing not to give you the courtesy of checking in on. And this is one situation where, contrary to how you’ve previously characterized me, I’d gladly welcome being absolutely wrong. But it’s not a thing for sugarcoating, I guess it’s a simple “yes, you’re right about the resoluteness of my decision” — or a not-so-simple (to-follow-up-on-but-I’m-willing-to-try) “no.” If it’s the first, well, then, so be it, but you’ll hopefully understand why I can’t even consider extending the invitation that you otherwise so rightfully deserve. Two of the very stankiest of hankies ever dealt me, at the very same time? Unthinkable & unbearable. There’s already more agony on this overflowing plate than it can barely hold.
Given which . . . if it is in fact the second, there’s still highly uncharted & choppy waters to immediately set forth on to see if it’d even lead to a place where, even then, the extreme existential discomfort factor could be mitigated to a level bearable enough for this most vulnerable & raw & emotional of events.
So this is me, reaching out,
Mark
I replied to his email [2] three days later:
Your note reminded me that each of us has his own terrors, his own style of terror, and there is very little one can do for another on that primitive level, even if a healthy, reciprocal friendship is there. The end line “this is me reaching out” was particularly terrible in the context of the rest of the email.
I’m done fighting, unless somebody comes to do me harm, even so, it’s hard to not point out that when you emailed me when my mother died, I wrote back. I believe I wrote back to another email you sent maybe a year later when we were in Florida at the same time. I didn’t answer the time you emailed to ask for my “most efficacious address” so you could send me a long letter and addressed me as “kind sir” or whatever it was. It would have been very easy to get my same old address or phone number, you didn’t need me to email it to you, except as a sign that I was game to play a game I’d already told you I was done with. I didn’t send a thank you card for your birthday CD of your newest composition in 2006, true.
But to say I never responded when you reached out is just rewriting history to make yourself the victim and pretending you don’t recall any of the many long discussions and long letters, over an extended period, that finally led to our not being friends any more.
I contacted Greenstein when I heard your mother died and gave him the option of contacting you again, as I’d done years back, another time you’d written him off as a putz and were planning on not visiting him while in London. He magically called you on the eve of your trip, you may recall, just as he magically wrote you shortly after your mother died, in spite of your having written him off again. (Not to say that he and I have remained close, sadly, though it was looking good for a while a few years ago. I think Gill doesn’t like me.)
Very sad that your mother died, but she sounded about ready to go, I think, she died peacefully in her sleep as we’d all choose to go and she was very old, after a very long life of mostly excellent health. Few people have their mother until they are sixty years old. Most would be grateful for that luck, but gratitude is a tricky thing, at best.
Your email made it clear that you’re still determined to be the blameless victim, the only one who suffers at the hands of others and seemingly always for no reason at all. You may have the least insight into your own role in your repeated miseries (and a remarkably consistent, predictable story arc virtually every time) of anyone I’ve ever known.
I don’t know what to say about that, except that the only possibility for change is if you start to do the hard, painful fucking work of dealing with your consuming anger, developing empathy and, also, kindness to yourself. The world is cruel, a merciless slaughterhouse, and then you age, decline and die, if you’re lucky. Otherwise you’re sitting in your car and a drunk in an SUV kills you, or cancer does, or you die at 58 like Howie — another person you wrote off as a putz, and the closest to a saintly person I ever met– waiting for a light to change.
Since you were hurt that I didn’t write to you personally when your mother passed on, I have rewritten the email Gary forwarded to you. Your mother was a remarkable woman and this remembrance of her was about the easiest thing I ever sat down to write.
Dear Mark:
I heard an echo of your mother’s graceful style in the way Gary broke the news:
My Mom and your buddy passed away peacefully in her sleep Wednesday am. She got this, her final wish, a royal death.
Sekhnet cried when I read his email aloud to her. She agreed that when we talked to your mom a month or so back, it was the first time we’d heard her voice any kind of weariness. I guess it was her time, and a blessing that she got her royal death after a long, full, royal life.
I realized that I am older now than she was when I first met her at 807 Edgewood Lane. If I could live the rest of my years as well as she did those 40 plus that remained to her when we met, I would be very blessed.
She was, as Gary said, your mom and my, and Sekhnet’s, buddy. I realize she could be vexing at times to you kids, demanding and so forth. All mothers cause some vexation to their children, as, sadly, we all do to our mothers. Though I could see what could be vexing about her as a parent, I was privileged to never experience it personally.
“I want to be Sophie when I grow up,” Sekhnet said often. If talking to Sophie she’d say “I want to be you when I grow up!” and Sophie would laugh the easy, distinctive laugh she practiced often. What Sekhnet meant was Sophie’s joy for life, her sense of adventure, her ready embrace of the good side of whatever else the thing might be. Her robustness and optimism, the way she drew people to her by these qualities.
She became friendly with my parents in 1999 when they met for the first time. You will recall that my parents came up from Florida for my law school graduation in the spring. The graduation was in Newark. You mom emailed my parents, inviting them to stay with her and Al. The email was typical of Sophie — charming, well-written, mischievous.
She laid out the many advantages of staying in her home and stressed what a pleasure it was for her and Al to be able to offer this hospitality, and how small an effort it would be for them. “If you say no, we’ll say you’re being stubborn,” she ended, closing the deal. Our parents became friends at once.
Not long after Al died, my father was hospitalized suddenly with only days to live. Your mom was then close to ninety and didn’t drive on the dangerous Florida speedways, but she wanted to say goodbye. She took local streets, Military Trail, State Road 7, etc., a trip with traffic lights that took several times as long as going by the turnpike, and a journey much longer than any she’d driven in years.
I will always remember her face as she sat by my father’s bed a few hours before he died. It was like the sun. She beamed a smile on him as he feebly gestured and made such small talk as he could. She showered him with love and a huge smile in a room where everyone else was frowning and fretting. It was about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. She stayed a short time, hugged and kissed us all, and made her way back the way she’d come, while there was plenty of sunlight to navigate by.
A few years later she and my mother booked an apartment in a residential building in the West Village, the Chelsmore, that was rented out as a cut-rate B & B. The two of them were going to share a place for a week and then my mother would move to a studio apartment for the second week of her last visit to New York.
I brought them to the apartment and when they opened the door my mother looked around and let out a gasp. “Oh, my God,” she said to Sophie, looking around at walls that needed painting, almost no furniture, a mattress on the floor in the living room “what a dump!”. My mother turned her expressive face to Sophie– the expression was of someone about to throw up. This cracked Sophie up.
“Oh, Evelyn!” she laughed “it’s an adventure!” She immediately offered my mother the better of the bedrooms and they had a very nice little adventure together in that perfectly adequate semi-shabby apartment on West 15th Street.
Walking with them during that visit illustrated another contrast between my mother, a glass half-empty gal, and Sophie, for whom the glass was always, at the very least, half-full. My mother walked with a cane at that point and would walk quickly until she had to stop, breathless and feeling she was about to die. “I can’t breathe!” she’d say with some degree of panic, “I can’t breathe, I have a sharp pain…” she’d point to her heart and double over slightly as she struggled to catch her breath. I’d calm her as she caught her breath and then she’d be fine, dash off on her next sprint. Sekhnet and I switched walking partners after she and Sophie caught up to us.
Your mother walked slowly and deliberately at 92. She would take your arm and cause you to walk at her pace. She would converse, and observe, and laugh, never running short of breath, walking at a slower than average NYC pace, but steadily onward. She made the whole process of being old and wanting to see and do everything seem effortless.
One trouble with living long and having old friends is that eventually they all die. Your mom kept up with the children and grandchildren of old friends and continued to make new friends everywhere she went. She was an inspiration, my life was enriched by knowing her, watching her remarkable example. I hope very much that Sekhnet gets her wish and grows up to be her.
May her memory be a blessing,
Eliot
Mark’s well thought out email reply, sent four hours later (I have inserted some paragraph breaks where Mark should have, to make the going a little easier):
Jeez, “fighting.” that’s the last thing I want or am thinking of, my intention was the exact opposite of that. Feeling that may be the clearest indicator of an impasse that does deserve to be honored. It seems that that feeling came up for you because you felt I was presenting you with inaccuracies, which reveal the un-unravelable tangle, to embark upon which yet again would be soul-wearying & fruitless, plus feel like a fight.
This has previously come up frequently, has been an intrinsic part of this impasse. Me responding to things where the theme is “misunderstood, misinterpreted” — which feels like an argument to you, thus untenable–and a Catch-22 for me, not allowed to respond to what feels like erroneous perceptions. That is an impasse indeed.
Do not think I reject your critical observations out of hand, I certainly have issues & difficulties — and can be difficult, not the blameless victim at all. You are capable of a rare degree of insight, though often so stabbing as to be painful, and vindictive-feeling, though that could very well be a self-protective misinterpretation. And I’ve certainly had a lousy repeating pattern, that I may never unravel. Hopefully I’ve made some progress.
Which you of course wouldn’t know about. For what it’s worth –and please don’t construe it as “fighting” or even arguing — just allow me to revisit the few things you mentioned to describe the view from my shoes. Most importantly, this thing of “you not responding to my previous reach-outs” which I’m guessing is the crux of what put you off to my note — what seemed like a rewriting of history so as to maintain my fatally erroneous, eternal blamelessness. I could have gone into detail then but didn’t feel it appropriate, possibly alienating. But hey, I managed to alienate you anyway, so now here it is, for what it’s worth.
You wrote me back a really nice letter to my letter following your Mom’s death. And yes, you certainly had responded to previous “reach-outs” that had given me hope that the break might not be permanent. That very nice & full letter was different — by far the strongest suggestion of that, possibly the first strong one — in those difficult years of struggling with this soul-blowing break & hoping it could be gotten past.
Given that whiff of what I hoped was an open door, I wanted to eagerly go for it– for which my antipathy towards this e-medium made it feel not appropriate. Something my Mom said had suggested that you had given up the Seaman apartment, so I simply wanted to know where to send a proper letter. And that there is the sum total of the “no response” feeling– I asked several times & finally had to conclude the obvious, that you did not want me to write you.
Which, by the way, I did not envision as simply taking up the rounds of this wearying wrung-out back & forth issue. If there were to be any hope whatsoever, it’d have to be putting it behind, which I was prepared to try to do, but never got the chance. I really did not know any other way of ascertaining your address, plus it wouldn’t have made sense to even think of ways to get it elsewhere– if you didn’t want to give it to me, that spoke for itself. I certainly had no “game” in mind, don’t even know what that game could be, it was just the simplest of logical questions.
The way you’ve contacted Greenis on my behalf demonstrates great consideration, soul & graciousness, and I thank you for it, you have eternal respect & gratitude there. I don’t recall ever thinking of Howie as a putz– I always think of him with love & respect — or of ever writing Greenstein off (since the recontact 20 years ago).
No, the epicenter of my problem is being overly-sensitive to perceiving that it’s ME that’s getting written off, and having a horror-aversion to imposing myself where it seems I’m not wanted, and reacting too quickly & strongly & overly-sensitive to that perception (and to go forth trying to be a performing artist with that personality trait is downright comical & ludicrously misguided. Plus it leads to others often getting a feeling of overly-demanding expectations, need for reassurement, hence off-putting, hence leading to pulling back, hence the vicious cycle, the self-fulfilling prophecy).
Perhaps in the midst of what seems to be a disengagement of that sort it’s certainly possible I could’ve uttered an untoward epithet, out of pain & self-defense, but that’s a small picture thing. Greenstein I’m at my wits end about, it’s been a 30-year occasional dialogue-about-dialogue that he certainly hates & so do I, but I’m at a loss for what else there is to say in the face of resolute non-initiating. His thing is “I just don’t have that communicative urge or need , but I’ll always respond” & my thing is “if someone never initiates, indicates a personal interest, lets it go for years, what does friendship even mean?” (an ironic flip-image of one of yours & mine past main issues)
And then the next level of that, friendship consisting of encompassing & honoring this dialogue as a means of learning what bothers each other & with the basic premise that there’s caring, accommodating accordingly–well, there’s none of that, it’s his way or the highway, what to do at that point?
Finally, I don’t know how you read into my barely-mentioned reaction to my mom’s death as being “the blameless victim suffering at others’ hands,” how you made that leap. And how as if I don’t recognize the blessing of having had her so unusually long, as if because of that blessing and her great life, it’s wrong to be extremely sad & somewhat unmoored by the loss of that constant presence, love, anchor, rock, support, orientation point? You’re even criticizing me about my reaction to my mother’s death? Did somebody mention anger?
There were many wonderful touching & expressive heartfelt notes we got, but your eulogy was way far above & beyond any of those, a whole other league. Which was no surprise– you are a true writer & extremely sensitive soul, and I hope you’ve continued, and will continue, to find suitable ways & outlets to have that artistry make its deserved impact on many other souls.
MF [3]
[1] and, as a friend wisely pointed out to me, feelings themselves cannot be wrong or right, they are how you actually feel. The trouble comes when your persistent feelings cannot be changed by anything, not by looking more objectively at what upset or excited you, not by realizing the importance of seriously listening to people who love you, not by working on your perceptions to avoid feelings that have little or no basis in what actually happened.
[2] These two friends nailed a lot of truth in their comments about the first email from Mark, which I’d forwarded them as I tried to formulate a reply:
Not ever having really known him–I was around him at times but have no recollection of actually exchanging any words with him directly–I could only vaguely comprehend the basis for your position. His email opens a window. Very manipulative and emotionally Byzantine, the art of placing blame while trying to appear not to have done so, but rather to have made a bold and mature gesture. Very frustrating, if not infuriating, watching someone bob and weave so strenuously to evade emotional connection and basic responsibility, seeking to anticipate and counter objections and arguments rather than open a line of communication. I can only assume it’s infinitely more exhausting for him than it is for the recipient, and that’s saying something.
and
The man’s style is insufferable and unparsable. An interesting read, I suppose, in the sense that a fatal six-car pileup is an interesting sight. No pardone necessary, though. I think it’s been established by now that communication ain’t always pretty, and besides, since MF (hmm, suggestive initials) has figured in your narratives from the get-go, it’s instructive for me to get some verbiage straight from the source. Your characterization of it as a fly-covered turd strikes me as accurate, erring, if at all, on the side of charity.
[3] I’ll leave that lovely, generous observation as Mark’s last word.
I replied to his last email by removing all ambiguity about where I stood, in the end thanking him for his buried lede about how much he appreciated my words about his mother.
As I wrote to another correspondent at that time, still fuming over Mark’s “response” email:
The punchline he predictably sent back stuck sideways in my craw, going on 8 hours or so now. If I could only see him for a minute it would be enough. [account of bar room style violence deleted] Then, nothing but ahimsa for me going forward.
listen) (German for “leader principle”) prescribed the fundamental basis of political authority in the governmental structures of the Third Reich. This principle can be most succinctly understood to mean that “the Führer‘s word is above all written law” and that governmental policies, decisions, and offices ought to work toward the realization of this end.[1] In actual political usage, it refers mainly to the practice of dictatorship within the ranks of a political party itself, and as such, it has become an earmark of political fascism.
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