Mark’s death a week ago (a former close friend I hadn’t seen in almost fifteen years)  has brought  up a surprising amount of emotions, varied but mostly perplexing.    I’m left, as often while he was alive, shaking my head over the unremitting and ultimately downhill tragedy of the guy’s life.  

He was a classic example of the Repetition Compulsion, the perfect illustration of doing exactly the same thing over and over firmly believing it was going to be completely different this time.  Every new relationship, or pursuit, began with unlimited excitement and optimism.  It was the greatest!   Nothing could be better, he’d found the ultimate, the secret to happiness. He’d be euphoric reporting this excitement in great detail, often in a way that made unflattering comparisons between this truly amazing, talented, nonchalant, comedic, wise, warm, amazingly cool new person and the cursed losers he already knew and had mostly written off.   Myself included, of course.

Then, as predictably as night follows day, Act Two.   Within a very short time cracks in this perfection began to appear, something was starting to smell bad.   In Act Three, every single time (with almost no exceptions), the innocuous prop left on the stage in scene one would be wielded to deadly effect by a suddenly irrationally enraged putz after some horrific betrayal by said putz.    Along the way, and invisible to himself, the common feature to every similar three act story was that Mark was only concerned with his own happiness, a tragic and hopeless version of it, as it turns out.

He was the youngest of three boys, felt disrespected by his father [1]  and never loved enough by his mother.  Very much like Trump in that way (although young Donald had a little brother to take it out on before he moved his sadism on to larger and larger stages).   In fact, Mark was very close to that zealously controlling, eternally scowling, nickel and diming archetype of the ever-victorious Artist of the Deal.  The euphoria of “winning”, judging from Mark’s unhappy life (not to mention our current national disaster’s life), appears to be an illusory thing and seems to provide little real happiness, it turns out.   

Mark had a uniquely complex style, and I will dig up some more nuggets of it to share here in the coming days, I suspect.   Few things were ever straightforward for him — other than the bottom line, that he needed to somehow prevail in everything, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant.    This applied in every facet of his life, was the price you paid to interact with him,  and was at the source of his general misery.

I was close friends with this increasingly classic energy vampire for literally decades.   We met in camp in 1970 and were in constant contact from that time until some time after 2005.   A long run for a friendship.  In the end, an exhausting run.

It is no surprise, I guess, that I am feeling a variety of emotions on learning of his sudden and untimely death.    A wealthy man, a very smart man and a talented musician;  if he’d been at all generous, a bit more empathetic,  he could have had rewarding interactions with anyone he met and shared his good fortune with friends.   Sadly, his generosity, like so much about him, was largely transactional.   He wouldn’t give without some guarantee of an even larger return.  Some would not recognize this as generosity at all.

[1]  I’m very interested in reading the correspondence between Mark and his father though it will probably be a tough read.  His brother is checking to see if the box was tossed already.    I have authorized the recycling of many dozens of long letters I sent to Mark over the years, found among his piles of possessions.  I have too much goddamned clutter here as it is.

I called Mark’s older brother yesterday, the day after his text that Mark had been found dead of a cardiac event of some kind.   He was in New Mexico with his middle brother, at Mark’s squalid ranch house, going through the vast accumulation of things.   Signs of serious depression, he reported, the place was a garbage heap, Mark apparently never threw anything out.  On the overflowing desk the two surviving brothers collected and opened envelopes containing $30,000 worth of uncashed business checks.   Mark ran a food business, with several employees still at work to fill ongoing orders, and the brothers are trying to figure out how to keep those poorly paid green card workers employed (Mark made a little extra by paying them half by check, half in cash) while they arrange to sell the little food company.

Turns out Mark hit gold by investing, early, in an arts company called Meow Wolf, an investment that apparently paid off many times over. “He died a wealthy man,” his brother told me.  We exchanged a few short observations about Mark’s famous tightness with a dollar.   “When he was a kid he’d hide his candy bars, he was afraid we’d steal them.  At restaurants he always ate fast, to make sure we didn’t get anything off his plate.   When he was older he’d go through the bill and say ‘I didn’t order that, I’m not paying for that.'”  I reported having to top off the tip every time I split a bill with him.  His 12% on his end, calculated precisely to the penny, never amounted to anywhere near half the tip, but that was how it was.

He also mentioned that Mark hadn’t spoken to him in three years.   They’d had a fight and that was that.   His brother reported that it was his fault, that he’d blown up at Mark, wound up screaming at him, and that he felt terribly guilty now.   Natural to feel that way, I told him, but everyone has a breaking point.   Mark broke virtually everyone who ever met him, if given a chance.

They found a box of letters between Mark and his father, Al.   They’d only read one or two before they felt like voyeurs and closed the box.   In one of the letters Al, seemingly broken like everyone else by Mark’s stubborn resolve, chided him about wasting his great potential and telling him it was time to rouse himself from his lifelong solipsistic self-pity, or words to that effect.  Neither of us had any idea that Al had exchanged many letters with his unhappy youngest son.   I told his brother an iconic Mark and Al story he’d never have heard.    

Mark composed an opus for the piano on the grand piano he had in his living room. This piece was perhaps forty minutes long and had several movements, going through a gamut of styles and emotions.   Mark was nothing if not ambitious.   The piece showcased everything Mark had learned about music and playing the keyboard.   He’d probably worked on it for a year or more, learning to perform it perfectly with his gigantic, surprisingly nimble, fingers.  On a visit to his parents in New Jersey he described the piece to his father and arranged to perform it for him at the NYC apartment of a cousin who had an electric piano.   Al was an organist — the family had an organ in the den, though I don’t recall ever hearing Al play it.

They drove over to the city.   Mark sat at the piano in the small room, with his back to his father, and Al sat behind him as he played.  Within a few minutes Mark heard a clack and another clack.   Al was apparently glancing through a collection of CDs on a shelf.  Mark’s spine stiffened as he continued to play, his blood chilling in his veins.   He was instantly filled with the old rage of being dismissed by his father, and he played the entire opus to the end, with great emotion.    The incident proved to him everything he’d ever believed about not being taken seriously, not being respected, not being recognized for the great talent that he was.   

What it really illustrated, as his brother grasped at once, was that Mark was incapable of ever putting himself in anyone else’s position.  Only his needs were real.   Was Al supposed to have sat, hands folded, eyes closed, paying rapt attention to every nuance of the entire recital?   Mark and I used the “clacking of the CD cases” as a shorthand for the indifference of the world to even one’s greatest attempts.    The world, truly, and I say this almost without bitterness, generally does not give a rat’s armpit about the things we create, no matter how otherwise wondrous.

There is another Al story that is a mystery to me to this day.   The clacking of the CD cases is easy to grasp both sides of — why Al could hardly have been expected to do much differently (he could have perused the CDs silently, I guess)  and why Mark felt the way he did.   This other story remains a mystery to me almost twenty years after I played my little part in it.

Al was terrified of death when he got old.   So frightened that he’d breathlessly wake his wife several times every night out of fear that he might slip away while she slept.   Within a short time she was exhausted and at her wits’ end.   Their sons arranged to have Al taken to a nearby, nicely appointed rehab center where he was treated for depression.   Sophie was able to sleep, between daily visits to Al.  Sekhnet and I visited him there, and went out to dinner with Sophie afterwards.  I wrote Al a letter he was very grateful for.  

In hindsight, my letter was asinine, comparing the dysthymia of a healthy thirty year-old (me) to the death-inspired depression of a man almost ninety, but he told me he loved the letter.   He said it gave him hope, reminded him that depression passes, as it seemed to have in the end in his case.   He had a few good years after that and, thanatophobia apparently at bay,  stopped waking his wife every night.

They moved to Florida where he was eventually hospitalized for something serious and fell into a coma.  Mark came from New Mexico to sit by his bed.   On the wall was the Do Not Resuscitate order that Al had signed before slipping into the coma.   He was in a comatose state for a long time.  One day he woke up, and speaking to the doctor, told him urgently that he wanted to revoke his DNR, which they did.  Shortly afterwards he fell back into a coma.   Mark sat by the bed, day after day.  

He called me one day to tell me his father was awake and semi-alert and asked me if I’d like to speak to him.  He said his father was pretty incoherent, but that he’d hold the phone next to his ear for a minute or two if I wanted to say anything to him.

When Al heard my voice he practically chuckled.  “Eliot!” he said, “oh, man, it’s great to hear your voice.  How are you?   Any chance you can get down to Florida to see me?   I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around but I’d love to see you…” I told him unfortunately I’d just been to Florida a couple of weeks earlier and wouldn’t be back for a while.  He sighed philosophically and began to say something.  

Then Mark was back on the phone.  “See what I mean?” he asked, “totally incoherent… well, it was nice of you to talk to him…”

As many times as I think about this, and I have returned to it several times over the years, I barely have a theory about what the hell that was.

His brother and I spoke for a while (I didn’t bother to tell him the second Al story), both concluding that Mark’s life had been a tragedy.   A complete fucking tragedy and a waste of a brilliant and talented mind.   There was an undocumented Moroccan woman in the house, Mark’s roommate, thirty years younger than Mark. “He was her sugar daddy, apparently,” his brother said.    Very sympathetic, apparently, and expressing gratitude to Mark, saying she loved listening to his stories.  “And you remember what his stories were like, they never ended…” said his brother.   Fatima said she learned a lot of English from Mark’s stories.  

“He could certainly teach you English,” I said.  

She’d called at 5:30 when she was on her way home last Tuesday and Mark said very good, he’d see her then.   When she arrived at 6:00 she found his corpse.  The Medical Examiner had called the brother Mark hadn’t talked to in three years.  

“The Medical Examiner,” said the brother, “just like on TV.”

At dinner last night I had a text from the older brother of a long-time close friend I had to finally write off not long after my father died in April, 2005.   Sudden heart attack and the guy I’d known quite well since we were teenagers was gone.  The brother and I agreed to talk today, and I’ll call him in a little while.  I remember our last chat, after their beloved mother died.  

The brother, although very aggravated by his aggravating youngest brother, was in despair for my one-time good friend.  “He’s a total mess, he’s falling apart and you’re the only friend he has,” he told me, though it had been about nine years at that time since I’d last had any contact with the now recently deceased Mark.  

I got a short (by his standards) convoluted email from Mark a few days before the memorial service for his mother.  I should dig it up to give you a taste of how his marvelous mind worked, even though one’s not supposed to speak ill of the dead.  Let’s see, ah, here it is.  You know what?  I’ll put it as a footnote [1].   I had a few laughs just now reading Mark’s oldest brother’s great deadpan reactions to his brother’s long coiling, uncoiling and recoiling emails, including this afterthought:  

One more thing,  Mark is staying with me for a week, commencing this coming Monday evening.  So,  feel free to come hang out, ought to be a barrel of laughs.  

The middle brother apparently simply hit delete whenever a long email from Mark arrived.   Scroll down to the footnote if you want a taste of Mark’s ornate writing style. 

Their mother had completely understood when I told her, more than a decade earlier, that I had finally reached the breaking point with her demanding, unhappy, angry, critical, other-blaming, eternally nickel and diming youngest son.  She thanked me for staying friends with him far longer than anyone else ever had and asked me only one favor: if he contacts you to make amends, please leave the door open to him.   I tried to hold up my end of that bargain, though, admittedly, I had little patience for the guy’s couple of characteristically odd attempts over the years.  He’d coined the phrase “idiosyncratic riffing patterns” to describe a great guitarist friend’s unique improvisational style.   It applied to nobody better than it did to Mark himself.

Anyway, I suppose it was thinking about Mark’s death, the end of his sixty-five years of mostly suffering, that led me to dream the dream I had last night:  

The wife of the California harmonica player who recently wrote me off after decades of friendship had apparently put her foot down and told her husband to stop being an asshole, that I was coming to visit and he simply had to accept that she and I were going to remain friends, whatever he thought about it.  He was obviously unhappy with the arrangement, but as the house, the expensive stereo equipment, the BMW sports car and everything else was paid for by his wife’s inheritance, he couldn’t squawk too loudly.   So he set conditions as soon as I arrived (and his wife was out of earshot):  you do everything I say, you don’t talk to me unless I talk to you first, you ask permission to do anything, etc.   He reiterated these rules a couple of times during the dream visit, anytime I presumed friendship.  I woke up realizing again that you can’t mandate somebody stop acting like an asshole.

Trying to overlook asshole behavior does not work in the long run.   I tried it for a long time with a mentally ill friend of many years.  We agreed, as a condition of our reconciliation, not to talk about his vicious wife, Hitler, who had broken up our friendship for a year or two at one point (it had a happy ending, they eventually divorced).  After we renewed our friendship (years before the divorce)  she crept into our conversations a couple of times and in the end, the brilliant but crazy bastard orchestrated some other escalating, irrefutable cause for our falling out and this time I had no choice but to go with it.

Mark was a very intelligent guy, also very talented– he was an accomplished guitarist– both finger style and flat picking — wrote many tunes, music and lyrics, and played the piano with some degree of self-taught virtuosity.   He was an excellent photographer, with a great and unusual eye, and, out of the blue, did some whimsical small paintings at one point in his adult life.  He was also, surprisingly, an excellent cook.  

At one time he had a good sense of humor, some of the best laughs of our high school years I shared with him.  There was one scene, in the home of our tormented friend Jeff (who eventually gassed himself to death in his parents’ carefully prepared garage), where we laughed longer, louder and more uncontrollably than any other time in my life that I can recall.   And you don’t forget a thing like that.   We were literally rolling on the floor laughing our asses off, ROTFLMAO!   Now I’m the only one alive who can remember that hilarious scene in Jeff’s parents’ kitchen.

Good to remember these things as I prepare to call his oldest brother, a guy with an excellent, dark, sense of humor himself.   Reading over our emails back and forth just now, the ones we exchanged prior to the memorial for their mother, I had a few laughs at his unsentimental and spot-on observations about his brother.    It was hard to have infinite patience for Mark, though that was what was required.  The only person who seemed able to do it was their mother, Sophie, a remarkable soul any way you look at her.    Oy vey.  

If you want a little taste of how Mark’s unique mind worked, and a glimpse at the complicated, endlessly compounded tragedy that was his life, read the footnote — written a few days before the memorial service for his mother, right before I sent him a personalized copy of my memories of his mother Sophie (linked above <– and here too, fine…).  Mark’s style is probably not for everyone.  And in fairness to him, you need to picture how devastated he was about his mother’s death when he wrote the sample below.