The Funeral

The original ending somewhat updated.

My memories of the Haight are bound up with my memories of my friend.  How could someone who so profoundly affected my life be so illusive?  Carol slips through my fingers and through my memories like water seeking its own level.  Did she really exist?  A wisp almost without substance from the start, a startling discovery in a dark hall, gliding like a ghost.  She is a half heard melody, a taste not quite connected to a memory, the memory of a smell, life that rises up and smacks me in the face with its overpowering sewer smell, shitty diapers and rotten compost, wholly organic.

A day at the ocean, digging in the sand, howling through the tunnels dug during WWII to fortify the coastline around the San Francisco Bay.  Running down the sides of Mt. Tam and eating cheap Chinese at a walk down dive in Chinatown because of the tile floor, mahogany booths and black bean sauce on wood ear mushrooms.  A walk by the empty crates of packing straw strewn with vegetable garbage, drinking on the corner of Grant and Green, cheap ruby port from bottles stuck in a brown paper bag, laughing, dancing around the pool table in a bar.  Sittin' by the dock of the bay listening to the fog horns moan in the wet salty night, dangling our feet over the edge of the pier, laughing.  Eating so much crab and sourdough bread we might just puke and laughing while the butter runs over our chins, having another bottle of wine.  Chess and Hearts and pool and art films and the Who turned up as loud as we could to drown out the banging on the ceiling.  Our friendship epitomized all that was the very best about the Haight.

We came to San Francisco to become enlightened.  It ennobled the pursuit of what took us to the depths of hedonistic pleasures and sanctioned outrageous indulgence.  Something like justification in the pursuit of pure science although it could be classed purely Machiavellian in a non-political forum.

Life seems more complicated now.  My priorities seem skewed.  I forget that time is relative and that there is more to life than meets the eye and that this isn't real, this waking dream we call life, reality.  Remember, we all have met before and we will meet again and that the joke of Carol's death is a joke on me.  She is chuckling wildly somewhere at my dilemma and waiting for me with that impatient cosmic finger tapping.  Lila.  It is the game that keeps us going.  As soon as I grasp one idea, one principle, one situation, another one comes up or it changes.  The more things change the more they stay the same.  There is no substitute for the real thing.

But now Carol is gone.

“O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost!  Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost Lance-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door.  Where?  When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved ghost, come back again."

Now she is dead.

What will the funeral be like? What will happen to all her stuff?  The Tibetan mask, the copies of William Blake and Tolkien, the lavish Saudi thob that Kevin brought her from the east?  Who will treasure these things after she has gone?  Her life will vanish without a trace.  I hardly knew her husband, whom she married after I moved away.  I knew the others, those we had in common, the line of friends extending back through blurry experiences and shaky camaraderie years earlier in the Haight.  The two Great Loves. 

There won’t be a grave.  She and I had talked about cremation but it sounds like she already took care of that.  What kind of memorial service will her husband have?  Will he have one at all?  I can’t imagine.  I prefer to think of her leaning against the wall of the Fillmore, silly smile frozen on her lips, hair tangled about her face in an acid halo of misty half-life as the Grateful Dead beat time in a stoned improvisation on universal themes; her hands falling limply to her sides and her gauzy blouse skimming her bony shoulders, all of her softened by the glow of know that comes with the pain of ego loss, thin before we knew what anorexia was, her threadbare bell bottoms floating provocatively around her fashionably slim hips...Androgyny.  That night was the beginning of the end.  She smiled sweetly, almost softly at me and I could see her fading into the cold concrete wall at her back.  I hated this new Fillmore, the Carousel, I hated change.  She laughed at my discomfort in a kindly way as if to say, "Relax, baby, don't take it so hard.  It just goes on and on."

Thank God she’s been spared a lingering disease.  Her death was fairly quick.  I’ve had nightmares about being trapped in a burning car.  Did she suffer; seeing the flames engulf her? Was it painful?  Was she plucked from her body and stranded in the bardo, looking back with chagrin? Was she contrite to have lost the precious commodity that gives us cache in the tangible world, a body?  Was she floating free and angry, a little peeved that she'd lost her form?  Bad form, that's what we would say, isn't it?  Bad form, or, no form.  No body.  She had become disembodied.  Was she wandering like an Angry Ghost, praying for a new body, having to do it all over again.  What is the sound of one hand clapping?  Does a dog have Buddha nature? Is she hovering near me with the answer, ready to hand me the last piece of the puzzle?  Too short, we might say, but she was spared the grim despair of Alzheimer’s, the crippling of arthritis and the loss of her hearing or having to wear diapers again.  She was spared old age, but did she know it?  And if she didn't get to know that, what was the point? 

We began our dance with death way back at the beginning.  It was never far away with the drugs we took and the needles piercing our tender veins and driving dangerous vehicles while under the influence or just walking down the sidewalks of the ghetto with light skin and a short skirt.  The concept of death was no stranger.  It lurked in the Tarot cards and hid in the heroin alleys brown powder nameless unknown dose.  And ego death was there with every acid trip whether you wanted it or not.  It came in a blinding flash or crept in on the soles of a moment of despair.  It lurked in the corners of your mind.  On the endless whirl of the Wheel of Life, Kali clutching fists full of dripping heads, Arjuna on the battlefield, Shiva tap-dancing on the bodies of the destroyed.  Lord Buddha promised release.  But what was release?  Only another form of death.  Ah, it was everywhere; the world is lousy with it!  It’s been my preoccupation since the time I knew it existed. Your death marks the death of so many things.

The Memoirs of a Flower Child.   The Haight is reduced to a location joke; you had to be there.  It doesn't matter where you go because there you are.  That special time is a reduction of sweet and salty memories.  When I die my memories will lie like the photos of my family, in boxes without names, without meaning, sold in a garage sale to someone who will look at them for a moment before chucking them in a waste bin.  It's too sad, too depressing a thought.  I miss those friends from other days.  Age creeps in, tiptoeing around the lines in our faces and changing our bodies into unrecognizable forms.  There is no pill to cure what ails you.  It is the malady of Life.  There is no instant enlightenment.  Be careful what you wish for.  Tread softly in the night and dream of a good Beast perched upon your heart.  It will not harm you.  It is your Watcher come to guide you home.  The paths you may take are as endless as your ability to breathe and altered by the blink of an eye.

Carol’s funeral took place in San Francisco.  The whole funeral, so funereal, an event for the living.  It is, after all, only a piece of fiction.  None of it is real.  The nature of reality is unknown because it changes from second to second.  We never really know, do we? 

Memories of San Francisco, Candlestick Park, the Cow Palace, the smell of sweet potato pie and a woman who dressed like Mammy selling them. Twin Peaks, Coit Tower, Lombard Street and Chinatown, the Tenderloin and Union Square, the strip joints in North Beach and the Art Institute, Fisherman's Wharf, cable cars, has it changed?  City Lights is still there, up a short jaunt from Grant Street, through that little alleyway with its semen stained brick walls.  And Vesuvio’s is still there, bottle of absinthe waiting.  But it looks a little off, a little skewed and the music is not the same.  I try to connect memories, hard enough when we are in possession of all our faculties, harder still when they are blurred by the milky lens of pot and LSD.

It really was all a dream, a short and inspired dream.   This small piece of time connected to other pieces of time with less significance branded into my soul.  I cannot let it go.  I think there are many of us who can’t let it go and have buried it deep in some secret place.  It was a very special time and we have not even begun to plumb the depths of its meaning.  We will be turning this over and over in our minds for all of our lives.  Longing and loathing are linked arm in arm as we walk around the edges of consciousness and memory. 

Carol’s funeral is at the Episcopalian Church.  I sit in the pews surrounded by clichés, her aura floats over us all, a gauzy haze, a distant cowl.  Old friends are there, lovers, old acquaintances and some new people.  It is quiet.  She isn't the first to go.  So many others dropped by the wayside, victims of Life, victims of their own excess, someone else's lust, someone else's greed.

It is always hard to age.  We talked about aging gracefully, or not at all.  And rich and thin, how much thinner can she get, I ask myself.  I hear her laughter.  Her death was not gentle or reasonable.  It was unexpected.  Is death ever expected?  Does it knock on the door and request entry?  Is it Max von Sydow in a long black gown with his chessboard tucked neatly under his arm, "Ready for that last big gambit?" he asks with a toothy grin?  I think not!  We are uncomfortable, sad, wondering if we are next because, you see, it happens at any time, rarely with preparation or permission.  We are not immortal. 

These collections of the past, the vain memorabilia that gathers around us like ruffles on a skirt, it is useless.  You are right to make a joke, you are right to raise a cynical eyebrow and pluck the breath of meaning from the moment.  Looking for a meaning and a purpose to all of this is a waste of time.  How little fame and glory is meted out in the end.  We will definitely end up thin if not rich.  The sweetness is in the prolonged agony of the journey from birth to death and if death can be drawn and quartered and thinned and stretched out, then we can wring the last blissful essence of it for the living.  The dead don't care, they are dead, they are gone, it is only the living that attach themselves to meaning.  Maybe death is so sad not because we lose our loved ones, but because we cannot join them.  Believe me, my friend, they are off the Wheel, and there is no sorrow in that.  Perhaps by the time we leave, we really are ready to go.  But Carol?  She is as crisp as burnt bread in a short-circuited toaster and for a brief moment she knew that.  Was it wonderful, was it awful?  Damn, I want to know! Will I ever know?  I can only imagine her pain and somewhere in a dim Haight Ashbury past recall something about the bliss of release. 

The sweat breaks out on my brow and behind my neck for Death is in the pew with his bony hands on the row in front, grinning his skeletal greeting, turning to size up the crowd, tapping his long sepulchral fingernails on the polished mahogany, whistling a tune like the whisper of the cold northeaster.  The telephone rings, nervous laughter ripples through the church.  It's for you, I say to the corpse.  No, she laughs, it IS me.