The Sea of Holes.
I have been asked several times since I began this invasion of privacy, exactly what my motives were/are. There are many motives really, but most were induced by a need to repay - somehow - a lifetime of entertainment and puredee fun. I wanted to find a way to make him once and for all realise that he is the luckiest of us all by far and how much we envy his characteristics and his overall joie de vivre. It sounds so helpless whenever he feels down, that all we can do is assure him once again just how valuable he is in our own lives. And, in truth, it's also selfish of us. In quiet moments of supreme honesty I have to admit that part of me is appreciative of his aloneness, that I have often had doubts that he would be able to maintain his ... essence if he fell in love and settled down and learned "proper" social skills. I honestly used to feel that way.. but an incident in my own life changed my perspective.
Everyone has a point in their lives when they get too close to the edge... when they find themselves looking over their own version of Holmes's Reichenbach Falls into certain doom. Most of us pull back, often without any help at all. When I had last seen the Reet, in Texas en route from the brink of his own disaster into his far rosier future, he had managed to regain a footing almost single-handedly, and headed off into the calmer waters of Captain Video - land.
This time, it was me making the journey up the coastal highway towards Santa Barbara. I was driving a rental car at ninety on the twisting road, on a bright summer morning. My eyes were blurred with tears pouring down my face and I was drinking whisky from the bottle, despite the fact that it was not yet noon.
I had failed miserably at "ending it all" during the previous night, and spent the morning in the home of an old and good friend who had tried earnestly to help me out of my doldrums with a little shade tree psychiatry which had the entirely opposite effect. After I had hurled venom at him, I squealed tires out of his Hollywood driveway and found the freeway headed North. I hadn't known where I was headed.. and my poor desperate friend, in panic, called my soon-to-be ex-wife.... she gave him Reet's number.
My friend called the Reet, at work, in hysterics... babbling about my condition and not knowing where I was heading. Unbeknownst to me, our hero calmed my friend by telling him, "Don't worry, he's on his way here".
My friend asked how he could be so sure and the Reet said, "because this is where he will come if he is in that bad a shape.. - don't worry, I'll take care of him". My friend had spent very little time around the Reet, and knew mostly his eccentric side...so, in his mind, it was hardly a fitting place to send someone as close to the edge as I was. I doubt, to this day, that he knows how completely and utterly wrong his assumption was.
It is of little import to this tale exactly how I came to be dangling over the precipice of my own life... one failed romance and a tantalizing possible replacement were clashing with my business life and my relationships with my children. Finances were chaotic, health was intermittently failing, I was drinking and smoking too much, not sleeping well, listening to savage and unholy sounds that played in the air around my mind... the usual stuff of advancing age and the effects of one's own rejection. It was the murk and mire and swirling debris which is not generally life threatening until it all climaxes within one's nervous system at the same time. I had allowed the details of my day to overcome the substance of my life and couldn't get the balance back.
I didn't know any of this as the car screeched around bend after bend...I could think of nothing save to simply crank the tape deck louder. Somewhere in my mind I knew where I was going... somehow I got there... stopped the car and floated into the Reet's store. He moved forward and simply held me, as sobs racked my body uncontrollably. He patted me, told me he loved me, and somehow.... some unbelievable how... he took the agony away.... just stood there and gave me strength, gave me breath, gave me myself back again. A chaos of white blind terror that had been months in the building had disappeared like the closet monsters when the bedroom light goes on. In a matter of moments, I could feel the precipice retreat from my feet, and I pulled myself upright. He pointed me towards the back room where I went and sat for a moment., trying desperately to strengthen my grip on my own sanity. When I returned to the main room of the store, he simply handed me the keys to his apartment and told me he'd be home in about an hour. He told me where everything was that I might need in his apartment, asked me if I was OK, and sent me on my way.
I drove around the corner and parked while I tried to come to grips with the events of the last forty eight hours. The astounding thing was how intuitively I had come to the arms of the one person on the planet who would not do as most others would have been tempted to do - as my friend had done, clumsily but with the best of intentions. The Reet didn't appeal to my intellect, nor to the logic of facing the reality of my situation. I have no doubt at all that he looked at me and SAW the demons for himself.... saw them as real and knew how to dispel them. I know that my friend in LA hadn't given him any details, simply that I was running crazy. The Reet had, almost effortlessly, drawn on his own experiences and achieved something that absolutely no-one else would have been able to do. I don't pretend to be able to begin to define the combination of Zen, psychology, training, experience, outright love and lessons imparted from a lifetime of classic and obscure movie scripts and the unknown but potent range of wisdom skewed by his own uniqueness... I only know that it was a tangible force.. that it had stopped my agony immediately and also obliterated it completely. He had given me, not just a temporary respite, but a brand new emotional clean slate. I am not a creature without my own sense of personal strength but this was a different thing altogether. I realized that he had also given me the dignity to leave, to know that I had enough fresh calm to begin again. The knowledge that my friend and savior had enough faith in my "cure" to let me out of his sight, and with his keys as well... was the foundation I needed to simply rebuild. After all, most of the original blocks were still in place and still working.
I spent three days in Santa Barbara. We listened to music, talked, drank, smoked, talked, walked, watched television, talked.. even ate a little. We walked to the cliffs and watched the ocean that he swims in each day. He listened and I rambled, gradually putting the pieces of my life back in place.. eliminating the residual poison from the remains of my panic. I saw clearly that I had misplaced priorities and rocketed off on several tangents at the same time. I had allowed minutia to manipulate mentality until there was no longer a distinction between friendship and oppression, partnership and prison, money and meaning, childhood and charity, work and women......when you can't differentiate reality from hell there is little room for logic and untrustworthy attitudes. I left after three days. I was really no better than the moment that he had taken his arms from around my shaking frame in his store. I was simply more secure.
I've known the Reet for most of my life.. and most of his. I've seen him in almost every light there is, not always the most flattering to either or both of us. By any measure he has demonstrated friendship beyond any reasonable limits and yet, what he gave me in a video store in Santa Barbara, had little to do with friendship. I believe he would, and probably has, demonstrated exactly the same degree of involvement in the life of anyone in inner pain. Beyond all the eccentric weirdness, all the difficulty with societal morés, all the wild enthusiasm and plummeting depression... beyond both the Reet and Peter Alan Glass, there's another entire being contained within that ghostly balding frame - a being that he's never seen or met and probably doesn't even believe exists.
He surely regards this sort of babbling as embarrassing gibberish from an overactive imagination... an imagination that he's had to deal with for many years now.
To those of us who have seen this inner being, who have had it shape their own lives in many major and minor ways it is a very real being. It is the being that hypnotizes our children and pets, that allows the most outlandish behavior to appear both humorous and acceptable. It occupies the transcendent space halfway between Harpo and Margaret Dumont, somewhere between Radar O'Rielly and Mickey Hart.
I'm not sure that I will ever again need to draw on the power of this inner being.. I doubt it. From now on, it'll just be the Reet and me and between us we'll be able to handle all of it.
But I'll never forget the other... person... - the one who took my hell away with the power of his simplicity and the brute force of his love for me and all others who are in devastating pain.
I live, each day of my new rebuilt and happy life, with the knowledge that I owe it all to this man who swims in the ocean and rents tapes and makes movies... the man who squeals with pleasure and cries real tears while the rest of us repress in embarrassment.
and for that
I love him. - tony