“My Friend Pinocchio”

When I broke Kenny’s bedroom door, I was in the middle of a crazy argument with my girlfriend. Kenny and his wife, Cathy, were away, and, actually, I didn’t ruin the door, but I damaged it and hurt my hand. This was the girlfriend I’d run after in a panic-stricken, wild breakout that destroyed my first marriage and led to a nervous breakdown. Time in the breakdown lane. It turned out to be a kind of walking collapse, in the sense that pneumonia is sometimes “walking.” So I walked around pretty much like shattered pottery glued back together haphazardly, all the while drinking, with a teeth-gritted determination to hang on to my girlfriend and survive. Not that pottery can drink or walk. But I could and did, and one of the things I did in that time was break Kenny’s door.

She was in the bedroom, and I was outside it. We talked through the door, each of us drinking—which was a big mistake, a big miscalculation that went unrecognized at the time. I had some sort of idea or perception of her that manifested as this gigantic, ungovernable feeling that I couldn’t live without her. It was like I was midair and only partway down a long fall with no end in sight. If I wanted to be kind to myself, and to her, too, I could say that we were self-medicating. But, no matter what you call it, we knew enough to get away from each other, and I had to get a new door.

A good friend of Cathy’s was married to a world-famous rock star. Lots of noise, big drums, and a buried melody. Whenever the rock star and his wife were out of town, their fabulous estate was open for Cathy and Kenny to enjoy. Since my girlfriend and I were still staying with them—this continued for some time—we were invited along. It was hard not to feel that Kenny and I were making our way together, that with his help I’d arrived at a special place in the hierarchy of worldly things. It seemed bizarre when the gate opened in response to the code that Kenny punched in and all that luxury recognized us. We lounged around the pool while gazing over the rolling lawn. Watching my girlfriend swim was a perk. She barely splashed.

Another perk, or almost perk, had to do with my messed-up hand.

A film mogul had optioned a novel I’d published after getting out of the Army. The project went nowhere. But the mogul’s interest, as perfunctory as it was, left me with a certain afterglow that attracted others. A movie star of enormous charisma invited me out to his home in Malibu for a meeting. We sat in his living room with his girlfriend, a singer who was maybe even more famous than he was. He explained that he might hire me to look over some screenplays and evaluate their narratives. We talked a little about my novel, but what interested him most was my messed-up hand.

“A woman?” he said, glancing at his girlfriend. They smiled at each other. “A door?”

I felt exotic. It wasn’t the volatility that interested him but the suggested jealousy. Women fell into his bed. He was curious to study me.

It turned out that Kenny was gay. Not that I knew he was. Or even that he knew it. The possibility had occurred to me at times, but I’d never considered that what occurred to me in passing might be true. That’s a long story, and part of the one I’m telling, but mainly, as I see it, this is about our friendship. Graduate school—that’s where we met. We were roommates, along with two other guys, in a big, spooky, vine-encrusted mansion. The old woman who owned it was spooky, too. She lived in it with a spooky younger woman who was her caretaker. We rarely saw them, but we would hear them, like spirits arguing in the walls. We lived in a kind of ground-floor addendum that had been built as I don’t know what but was then transformed into an apartment with a long enclosed porch sectioned into bedrooms.

Now, in regard to Kenny and whether he was gay or not—and I know this will sound stupid because it will seem obvious that I should have known—but was he gay if he didn’t want to be? If he had sex with women? I didn’t know then how to answer these questions, but I did know that I didn’t want him to be gay if he didn’t want to be. This was something like sixty years ago. So a lot was different in people’s thinking. I viewed being gay as sad—not sinful or anything like that but tragic. I think Kenny did, too, but we never talked about it. We had bigger questions, prime among them, thanks to Salinger, was whether we could avoid becoming phony. Another was: Did Lucy Windsor like Kenny or me? I remember, once, the two of us in that creepy old house consulting a Ouija board about her and getting scared out of our minds when the force moving the widget to answer our questions, with undeniable acuity, identified itself as the Devil.

So we were in graduate school in the theatre department, and one of the things we had to do was design sets for a class. This meant that we picked a play, made a lot of notes, sketched out a set for a possible production, and then built a model. In this case, we were designing sets for plays that we ourselves had written. My model was a mess. I was on the floor struggling to get the paper, glue, and cardboard to fulfill my aims. Kenny was on our living-room couch, his exquisitely fashioned model completed hours earlier.

Kenny, who at times almost sang my name, called out, “Donnyyy.” He explained how I should adjust my model to better accomplish what he could see I wanted. He suggested a backdrop, cut out a quick version, glued it in place, and lay back down on the couch. This was in the early sixties. Peter, Paul and Mary had a hit song called “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” I was so grateful—it was late, and I was end-of-the-semester tired—and I sang, “You are Puff, the magic dragon, who helped poor, clumsy me.”

I don’t know if it was that same night, but I think it was—I know it happened in that apartment. At some point, Kenny went to the refrigerator and took something out and then dropped it. “Kenny, what’s wrong with you, damn it!” he scolded himself, gesturing in this floppy, loose-wristed way. Instantly, he seethed with a rage very different from the one that had come when he’d dropped whatever it was he’d dropped. He looked at me full of desperate, furious petition and said, “Why do my hands do that? Why do they act that way? I hate it. I hate it.”

It was many years later—half a lifetime, really—that he got sick with what killed him. His divorce from Cathy was in the rearview mirror. He’d held a position with more than one Hollywood studio, big jobs that never lasted. He had countless friends in the business—directors, writers, producers who ran their own companies. Whenever feasible, we plotted to get something I’d written into the hands of this one or that one, hoping that it would lead to a project we could work on together, though this never actually happened. A singular but telling example of the way things went for us involved a director who was coming off a spectacular hit. He befriended Kenny, grew bright with interest, took us to lunch. Meanwhile, he was racing toward a crash even more spectacular than his success. He went to Morocco and never came back. Whatever we’d given him went into oblivion with him.

Kenny was always on the cusp. Opportunity arrived only to be lost. Over the years, my search to understand this seemingly fated pattern took me back to something I’d witnessed when I reconnected with him after getting out of the Army. It was maybe four years since we’d been in grad school together, and it was well before any of the California events. He’d got married and landed a job in insurance in Manhattan, an exec, junior probably, big building, fancy offices, smooth elevator. I don’t know how it happened that he took me along to work one day. As if I were his child. A lot of our relationship was predicated on the somewhat fanciful notion that he was an East Coast sophisticate while I was a lug from the Midwest. We had fun with these caricatures, finding intimacy in their exaggeration. I was not exactly a lug, and though Kenny was from Main Line Philadelphia—specifically, Radnor—his father was a fireman, his mom a homemaker.

We were in Kenny’s office when a man came in—about our age—very coiffed and tailored, as was Kenny. I was in my one suit, which was cream-colored and looked almost as if it were made out of paper. Kenny and this guy started talking about some pending issue at the firm, and Kenny was not only argumentative but dismissive. He was a tough boss, I thought. And then something happened that I can’t specify, but it made the moment like one of those drawings where you see the head of a rabbit until the perspective shifts, and you see something else. Well, whatever it was that happened revealed that the guy was not Kenny’s underling but his boss. He was treating his boss like an underling. More than once, I’ve wondered whether this kind of behavior contributed to his inability to hang on to any of the studio or company positions he landed.

When Kenny started getting sick with the illness that would kill him, he had no idea what it was. He was working as a professor in the theatre department at a college in Maine, I think, or some other Northeastern state. He was pretty much done with “the business,” long divorced, and, as he put it, having sex with a man. “A walk on the wild side,” he called it. Or, “Stirring the vegetables.” He said, “Can you imagine, Donny—two men, two egomaniacal men, trying to be decent together?” There were drugs, too. Maybe Ecstasy. Or meth. I think it was meth. Or maybe both. “I’m telling you because I want you to know,” he said to me on the phone. “Because we tell each other everything.” I laughed as best I could. I was surprised and not surprised, and I wanted for him what he wanted for himself. He went on, giddy with a sense of outrageous excitement that competed with his wish to reassure me. “But it’s nothing. He’s a total jerk, and so am I. So you have two jerks, two selfish jerks. It’s impossible. Just wild and for this moment. Can’t wait for it to end. He’s really quite awful. Without the drugs, it wouldn’t be tolerable, believe me. I know you understand. Do you?”

“What? Understand?”

“I know you do.”

Cartoon by Roz Chast

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I didn’t, though, not really. Had he lost a long struggle? Or won his freedom? I couldn’t figure it out, I guess, partly because he hadn’t figured it out.

But that wasn’t the phone call I intended to talk about when I brought up his teaching job in Maine, if that’s where the school was. This “walk on the wild side” call happened before the one I intended to speak of, but they both came from that New England school and occurred more or less in the same time period. The call I intended to bring up was about brain fog. He was upset about the brain fog he was having, and he thought I might be able to help. He knew that I’d had a more than fifteen-year struggle with candidiasis after getting Lyme disease twice in the early eighties, almost back to back, which meant continuous heavy doses of antibiotics. The doctor who’d prescribed the antibiotics didn’t understand that candidiasis could be caused by antibiotics. Few people did then. Nobody told you to take probiotics. This doctor looked at me like I was nuts. And brain fog was the least of it.

Luckily, I found a nutritionist who told me what I had, but he said in the same breath that he had no idea how to cure it, only how to control it through what I ate. That advice, along with digestive enzymes, got me by for more than a decade, until another nutritionist, a madman of sorts, cured it. He tested every bodily fluid I could produce, then set up a program combining supplements and homeopathy, did more blood work, adjusted the program, adjusted it again, and cured me.

I’d told Kenny about this, and he thought something similar might be going on with him. He wondered if there was a way to lessen his brain fog without all the testing, blood work, and consultations. After I told him about the partial relief I’d achieved using digestive enzymes, I explained where he could order some. A week or so later, he called to tell me that they were helping. He thanked me, and we blabbed for a while about other things. His work, his ex-wife, his kids, my wife, my kids. I was divorced and remarried by this time. He laughed about the silliness of his teaching a class on film history, watching old movies and reading like crazy to keep ahead of the students. But at least his brain fog was lessening, thanks to the enzymes. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what was happening. If the brain fog was lessening, it was an anomaly, a coincidental anomaly.

Because what was happening to him wasn’t candidiasis but the onset of Lewy body disease. It got going full force not long after that, the brain fog, anxiety, and confusion getting worse and worse. There was an interlude when I didn’t see him or even hear from him. There were some intermittent reports, I guess, because I recall him telling me that things were not so good. He panicked about how the digestive enzymes, which he took scrupulously, had stopped helping. He was furious at the way he felt. “What is it? I can’t think. It’s all shadows.”

He scared me a little. Actually, quite a lot. I’ll admit it. I wasn’t sure what to say to him. He didn’t understand what was happening to him, and I didn’t, either. One call turned into a rant about his mother. Every name in the book, punctuated by “manipulative.” As I listened, I couldn’t help but think about a time when he’d stood in the doorway of his son’s bedroom, looking in on me lying down to sleep in his son’s bed. This was during a visit I’d initiated some years back. Our friendship had lasted for more than thirty years by that point. The visit was impulsive on my part; I cast myself up on his doorstep, seeking refuge. This was well before his brain fog, before his “walk on the wild side.” Before a lot of things.

I stayed for a while. Every evening, we’d say good night. I’d go to bed, but he would stay up. I’d hear him pacing around, maybe talking on the phone. Sometimes he’d bang on the drum he’d brought back from one of the poet Robert Bly’s men’s retreats. I was in awe that he’d actually gone to one of those. That he’d dared to be vulnerable with strangers, talking, playing his drum, maybe dancing.

On most of these nights, he’d knock before it got too late. I’d say, “Hey,” and he’d stand, backlit, in the doorway, talking about lawyers or his kids but mostly about the script he was incessantly writing and rewriting. No matter how small the changes, he would reprint the entire script every time, because he wanted the margins perfect. This was in the early days of inkjet, and his office was just down the hall, so I would hear the printer going clackity-clack. And then, in the morning, he would drive the new version down to the Writers Guild to register it.

Anyway, on one particular night, he spoke about how, as a child, he’d believed he was Pinocchio. Or like Pinocchio. Really believed it. It seemed to explain so much, he said. He grew not loud but emphatic, fighting for the precision he needed to make me understand his remembered plight. He’d been around ten years old, he thought, living through days of total desolation because he was Pinocchio and thus wooden and not quite real. He’d walk around the block repeatedly, begging and praying—I don’t know to whom, but I think to his mother—that he’d get to become a real boy. A real flesh-and-blood boy. I guess he could have been praying to someone other than his mother—Jesus, or God, or the Virgin Mary. He’d been raised Catholic, as had I, and though we’d both “left the Church” that didn’t necessarily mean that the Church had left us. We’d tried, though. I’d managed enough distance to seek what felt like a hopeful alternative with a guru, living for a while in his ashram. I’m not sure how Kenny got out. Or if he did. If either of us did, really. That doctrine is pythonlike, monitoring your breath, waiting for a fearful gasp. The annexation imposed by the Church on the imaginative children we both were went deeper, I suppose, than we knew, or even could know. The play Kenny designed a set for that night in grad school when his hands betrayed him was called “The Transfiguration of Anthony Royal.” It was a little of Tennessee Williams and a lot of Kenny.

“I’ll be back in a second,” he told me and went off. I waited, puzzling over the implications of his childhood identification with Pinocchio. Ice clinking in a glass announced his return. “Should I have brought you a drink? I didn’t think to ask.”

I shook my head.

“O.K.,” he said. “Good night.” But instead of moving he sipped his drink. Then he murmured the name of a wonderfully talented novelist-screenwriter. While Kenny knew the man personally, I knew him only by reputation. “He had AIDS. He killed himself, you know. Sleeping pills.”

I said I knew only that he’d died recently.

“Ecstasy, too.” The details Kenny shared next made me wonder if he had been present somehow, or on the phone with his friend. “He said he was ‘peaking.’ It was the last thing. ‘Peaking.’ ” In this second iteration, the word almost strangled him. I didn’t understand fully, because I didn’t know then that this was Ecstasy jargon. The drug “peaked,” or delivered its full effect, about forty-five minutes after being ingested. So, if Kenny’s friend’s last word was “peaking,” he was probably arriving at a state of ecstasy as he died. “Peaking,” and it was over. I waited, feeling that Kenny wanted the moment to be set apart, left to float.

That visit, which had begun a few days before the Pinocchio story, was memorable in many ways. As I’d got out of the taxi delivering me to Kenny’s doorstep, with a bottle of whiskey and a vat of yogurt, I was also stepping out of a marital dust storm. I’d just spent a difficult week with my wife, Amy, in Utah, where she was doing hair and makeup for some older movie stars in decline and some younger actresses foaming to replace them. The bright blade of resentment and ambition had been blinding as they shared smiles on the set of a TV movie of the week.

We’d had an argument, my wife and I, the afternoon I arrived at the motel in Utah, one that—with its ready access to easy-to-assemble insults—threatened our stability. Our standoffs, I knew, weren’t going to lead to divorce. They were a sort of training in high risk. We were like tightrope walkers dropping our balancing poles in order to feel how much we didn’t want to fall.

My departure was nearing when our days of glaring across rooms developed a flaw. Her smile peeked out, or at least there was the promise of one, so I offered my best version in return. When Amy reciprocated, I felt a rush of relief and gratitude. The sex we had was fuelled by the danger we’d escaped, the groaning bed enduring the bundle of confused flesh we’d become. Anger and fear contributed to her teary finish, while I clenched in a kind of wail or groan that indicated survival.

As the taxi’s tail-lights shrank in the distance, I looked up at Kenny’s house and believed that I saw him in a ground-floor window—a pacing silhouette with a phone to his ear, while his free hand gestured in what I took to be a wave, signalling welcome.

By the time I reached the door, worry that he hadn’t actually seen me had me ringing the doorbell. I’d phoned ahead, of course, and though he had told me to “hurry and get here” he’d sounded tentative. Now he raced up, ballooning before me behind the glass panes of the door. He let me in, presenting his bright smile, pointed to an armchair, and mouthed the word “Sit.” He talked excitedly on the phone, went into the kitchen, hung up, and came out holding two glasses, shiny with ice, for me to fill from the bottle I carried. He took a sip, ordered a pizza, and told me that he and Cathy were getting a divorce.

“What?” I said, struck by a hollow feeling that was larger than disbelief. He’d suspected for a while that she was involved with somebody, he said. With no idea who the man was or how they’d met, he’d grown watchful. I listened closely. The man was shadowy and seemed poised to enter my life. With a mischievous grin, Kenny explained that he’d popped a big bowl of popcorn, got out a bolt-action .22-calibre rifle that he had because of coyotes, and sat in the living room, waiting.

“Popcorn?” Cathy said, when she discovered him there, sitting in the dark. Seeing the gun, she added, “You’re not serious.”

I asked him if there was any hope they might get back together. He said, “No, no, no.”

He wanted to talk now about the script he was writing. The ending! The ending! The poor little old man. He was all of us. Everyman. Every man. The script said everything! He wanted me to read it as soon as he’d given it one more pass. I felt sad for him and Cathy and confused in my own right. I was the writer in our duo, Kenny the producer. If he was writing, what would I be? I sat staring at my hands. The news that my good friends, whom I’d known as husband and wife for decades by this point, had crashed and burned alerted me that Amy and I needed to be more careful.

Over a couple more drinks, we joked about the weird adventure of our lives. He directed me to the second-floor bedroom that belonged to his son, Philip, who was with his grandmother, if I remember correctly. The narrow bed was surrounded by shelves of CDs and books, iconic posters of bands on the wall. When I turned my head that first night, I had a view out the window. I couldn’t see the moon, but a silver haze curtained the erratically clouded sky.

It was Academy Awards time, and, given our mixed-up histories, et cetera, et cetera, in the business, we were interested.

We watched TV in the master bedroom, because the set there was the best in the house. Kenny pressed the remote, and the TV, disposing of a commercial, landed on Kevin Costner. This was long ago. Even Kevin Costner was young, promoting his film “Dances with Wolves.” We watched, mesmerized by the way his hybrid shyness and confidence conveyed his aversion to the kind of self-promotion he was excelling at before our eyes. We envied him for his easy good looks and for his rugged confidence, but mainly for his success.

I railed against the film for what I saw as its manipulation. Costner was credited with exposing our barbarous treatment of Native Americans because he dealt with the slaughter at Wounded Knee. But there were no images of Wounded Knee in the movie. There was only a scroll describing the massacre. The final frames were of our hero with his woman, riding off to safety. I pointed this out to anyone who would listen, which in this case was Kenny. He agreed. If the film was going to be credited with showing Wounded Knee, it should have shown it. But we were not hitmakers. An offscreen voice declared that everyone was certain that “Dances with Wolves” was going to win Best Picture.

As my visit continued, Kenny had consultations with his lawyer about the divorce and meetings at the bank about his mortgage. There was a lunch or two with people he hoped to interest in his script. I was caught in a kind of limbo of worry that I could neither define nor escape. I watched TV and went for short walks. I called Amy regularly to check in. I told her about Kenny’s divorce and surveilled her voice to detect secrets.

One evening, when Kenny was out late, I made the mistake of lighting up a cigar. The whiskey I was drinking and the smoke I inadvertently inhaled and the cigar juices I swallowed combined to rock my equilibrium. I was on the stairs, and I almost fell the last few steps, swooning on the living-room rug. Flat on my belly, I lay gasping for the oxygen I needed to counteract the imbalance. When I heard the front door open, I called out, “I’m fine. Just need a minute.”

He stood looking down. “You don’t look fine.”

“In a minute. Cigar. Smoked one.”

“You’re not going to throw up.”

“Don’t think so. Trying not to.”

“I have to go to the bathroom. Wait there.”

When he came back, I tried to sit up, but nausea collapsed me. I lay there gulping air. “My wife says I’m impossible.”

“I think you’re easy to live with,” he said. He’d settled on a nearby footstool. “I don’t care what anybody says. You don’t complain about the way things are going. You don’t judge anybody. You just go about things. I’m really enjoying your visit, and I’m glad you’re here.”

“I judge Kevin Costner,” I told him.

“Do you think it’s about us?”

Cartoon by Avi Steinberg

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“Well, sure.”

A bad feeling swept over me as Kenny sat nearby, thinking kindly of me, smiling down at me. It came not from the cigar or the liquor but from the memory of the worst thing I’d ever done to him. It was long past but in that moment too immediate. It had to do with that novel I’d written, the one the mogul had optioned.

The book had received surprisingly positive reviews that did nothing for the sales. Kenny, who had read an early draft, was still at his insurance job, but his aspirations were to become a theatre and film producer. He asked to option the book, and I agreed, dreaming of our bond actualizing in the world. He hired a lawyer to work up a simple agreement that we signed months before publication. Not long after that, the mogul approached my agent for an option. He was a far more realistic opportunity than Kenny could ever be. This guy could snap his fingers and the next thing you knew the film would be opening. Believing I could convince him to partner with Kenny, I told him about the situation. He looked at me as if I’d insulted him. He seemed to no longer know me. The moment was excruciating. Ambition chomped at me. I talked to Kenny. I worried. I demanded without demanding. Ultimately, Kenny tore up our agreement, freeing me to sign with the mogul, who promptly hired a buddy to write the adaptation. From that point on, everything went according to the stock Hollywood-fiasco plan. The stranger produced an inept screenplay, which was accepted as proof that only a fool would try to make a film from my novel.

Later that night, at Kenny’s house, I was in bed, mostly recovered from my errant ways, when the clackity-clack of the printer started up and kept going for a long time. When Kenny appeared in the doorway, he held a stack of paper. He flipped on the hall light and his grin confessed his obsessive behavior. “Let me read you just this one thing. Can I read it to you?”

“Sure.”

“This is at the very end. The poor guy is on his deathbed. He’s in the hospital, and he’s dying, and he knows it, and his mother comes to sit with him. ‘I don’t want you here,’ he says. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she tells him. ‘Let me comb your hair.’ And he says—Arturo is his name—he says, ‘No.’ ‘But it’s all messy,’ she says. ‘Momma, please.’ She says, ‘You never did know what was good for you.’ Arturo, sadly, disconsolately, a distant look in his eye, pulls the covers up over his face the way people do over a dead body. ‘I’m gonna die now.’ Momma tells him, ‘No, you’re not.’ ‘I am.’ ‘Don’t you try and scare me. It ain’t gonna work,’ she says. Silence. ‘I’m just gonna sit here, Arturo. I’m not gonna go away. I don’t care how long you stay under there, I’ll be here when you look out.’ Silence. ‘Arturo.’ Silence. She sits there beside the sheet covering him, and as she sits she looks at the sheet. Something bothers her. It’s crooked, wrinkled, the ends untucked. She stands and tucks the sheet in. She moves from one corner of the bed to another until she has tucked all four corners in and the sheet over her son is neat and smooth.” Kenny looked up. I could see him well enough to know that he was earnest and hopeful as he awaited my response. “Wow,” I said. “Wow, Kenny.” It was easy because I thought the scene was strong. “But who’s going to make it? This is Hollywood.”

“But it’s like this beautiful little foreign movie.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“I don’t care if anybody makes it. It was so much fun to write it. I’m going down to the Writers Guild first thing tomorrow to register this version,” he said. “Come along if you want.”

“Sure.” I recognized that the consolation we provided each other was the solace of people stuck on the margins of a glittering world they hoped to enter. I saw also that my ambitions had been subverted from the beginning by a deep, ingrained allergy to the dazzle.

“And then I have to go over to my agent’s and replace it there.”

It was raining in the morning, a gentle mist that made the air seem pale. At the Writers Guild, he scurried off, the script in an envelope tucked in a plastic bag cuddled under his shirt. He bent forward as he ran, turning his body into a protective shell. His agent’s office was next, and once that task was completed he asked, “Hungry?,” as we drove off.

“Sounds good.”

“Let’s go in there first.” We were at a red light, and his gaze led me to the display window of a sex shop.

I chuckled as he turned to me with a shrug that seemed to declare that the source of his suggestion was unknown. “Now?” I asked.

“If not now, when?”

The rain had stopped, the sunlight piercing the clouds in shafts. So many people were defying the sexual norms. Swingers. Wife-swapping. Plato’s Retreat. Not that I was inclined toward any of those pursuits, and I didn’t think Amy was, either, but the Zeitgeist with its daily news flash of the illicit becoming licit seemed an opportunity I should look into.

The exterior of the store had predicted a smaller interior than the expanse I found. Shelves of X-rated videotapes, larger-than-life cardboard cutouts of both male and female porn stars, glass cases full of dildos, metal clamps, and restraints surrounded us. Bondage outfits. Whips. I gazed into a rubbery pink clump that claimed to be an authentic, battery-powered duplicate of Rainy Diamond’s vagina.

We wandered around separately but ended up side by side every now and then. We gawked like mischievous schoolboys. But we hadn’t been there very long when I experienced something odd about the air. It felt dry, arid, parched, each inhalation scant in qualities essential to breath.

A clerk, whose open shirt exhibited a wedge of curly, black chest hair, had been appraising me. When he stepped toward me, I gestured to Kenny, pointing at the door. “Not just now,” I said to the clerk, who sent me a sour smile.

“Weird,” I said, when I stood with Kenny on the pavement.

“People,” he replied. “What do they want? And what will they do to get it?”

The subject felt beyond me. Fielding an impulse, one that expressed its perfection through the illogic of its appearance, I asked, “How far are we from Santa Monica?”

“Why?”

“The ashram. Let’s go there.”

“Now?”

Paradox, contradiction, the spontaneous generation of opposites, I thought. “If not now, when?”

It was believed then that sex could be transformative. Spiritually speaking. Or, more precisely, that orgasms could be transformative. Or the more traditional opposite—that stymied orgasms were the way to go. Kenny and I wondered if such a metamorphosis could really happen, and what it would bring. “Tantric” got thrown around with a lot more ambition than understanding. I think people today would find the idea laughable. I also think my impulse that day to go to the ashram may not have been as unprompted as it first seemed. Our visit to that sex shop, with its dead air and machines—its cold assertion that sex was a matter of pumps and pulleys, devoid not only of spirit but of emotion—may well have called for an antidote.

Snarls of traffic thinned as we drove, and soon the ocean came into view in the glaring sunlight. When I first attended the ashram, it was housed in a circuslike tent covering a motel parking lot. Now it was in a modest building with a pristine walkway between neatly trimmed hedges.

As we passed several statues of saints, among them a sculpture of the guru’s big-bellied guru, I faltered, as if that effigy might know of my quiet disillusion. “I haven’t been here in a long time,” I told Kenny.

“I’ve never been here,” he whispered.

The attendant waiting in the antechamber smiled. “We have no programs this afternoon. But the hall is open.”

“Good. Thanks.”

We removed our shoes and entered in our stocking feet. I told Kenny that we needed to kneel and touch our heads to the floor, and then we could sit on the chairs lining the back wall. The air startled me with its kinetic, palpable, vibrating density. Kenny knelt and bowed, then stood and slipped away. The wide aisle in front of me led to an elevated platform holding the guru’s empty chair. Near it, a woman sat in the lotus position, while a man stretched out on his back across from her. Taking in the familiar scent of the incense, I lowered myself, bowing until my forehead touched the rug. I sank. Warm. Peaceful. It seemed as if an infusion of calm and comfort poured into me or up from within me. I could have raised my head, but I didn’t want to disrupt that sense of receiving a kind of nourishment I’d wanted for a long time.

When I finally looked around, it was like waking from a restful sleep. Kenny, wearing a curious expression, watched from his chair.

We exited the hall, and as we put on our shoes he wanted to know what I’d felt kneeling there for so long.

I said I didn’t really know. “How long?”

“I say, if they walk that slow—shove ’em.”

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“Twenty minutes. Maybe half an hour.”

“The air,” I said. “Did you feel it?”

“I know. It hummed. Maybe because it was so different from in that other place.”

“You felt that, too?”

He nodded.

All this happened years before the afternoon that he telephoned me worried about brain fog. A decade at least. His illness concealed its nature and intentions for a while longer, but once it started it advanced swiftly, altering his behavior, shrinking his abilities. Increasingly, the reports I received came from Cathy, who was overseeing Kenny’s care, rather than from him. His moods became unpredictable, his behavior erratic. I contacted him several times, but he sounded suspicious, and I felt intrusive. Unable to maintain his house, he now lived in a small apartment. His driver’s license was revoked, because he could no longer be trusted behind the wheel.

And then, one day, the ringing phone brought Kenny telling me that he was coming East. He sounded stressed, his excitement manufactured and racing out of control. He told me the date and time he would land in Philadelphia. He would visit his mother, and then he wanted me to meet him for dinner in New York. We could go to a play.

Cathy phoned that evening, alerting me to be careful. His trip might occur, and it might not. He might be O.K., and he might not. I heard nothing more until days after his scheduled arrival, when Cathy called to tell me that the flight had been difficult. He’d caused a disturbance, and when he went to visit his mother he’d flown into a rage, screaming, cursing, erupting with such hatred that he had to be restrained. Pinocchio, I thought. I had a sense of drastic, terrible anguish unfolding beyond everything I knew, or thought I knew, or could know—one that Kenny and Cathy and their children were enduring.

Of course, we didn’t have our dinner during that failed visit, and not long after that, back in Los Angeles, Kenny lost his little apartment and relocated to a studio in a community of mostly gay men. He had a caretaker who was gay, a young man from the neighborhood who shopped for him and drove him around. It was impossible for me not to see Kenny as resembling a character in one of the Tennessee Williams plays he loved, a wayward soul living out his days lost in the world. Had he moved into such a community sooner, might he have found a male partner? But it was too late now. Did he wish he had done that? I wanted to ask him, at least to talk to him. I called and discovered that his phone had been disconnected.

When I saw him, finally, it was the last time I would ever see him. We were at Harbor Hills, a treatment center that specialized in the care he needed. When the illness had robbed him of the ability to maintain even the rudiments of independent living, Cathy had organized his admittance there. She was his most frequent visitor and monitored his treatment so that everything that could be done for him was done. She told me that the first days after he was admitted had been tumultuous, his furious abuse of the staff threatening to get him thrown out. But he’d settled some in the subsequent weeks. I was in L.A. and wanted to see him.

I waited at a patio table while Cathy brought him out in a wheelchair. He grinned, but he was crumpled and weak. Our effort at normalcy relied on basic conversation about our kids, old neighborhoods, other friends. I think the three of us had struck a tacit agreement that if he could enact enough of the person he’d been and we’d known, even the most tattered shreds, we would fill in the rest from our memories and he would be there with us. This worked until his ability to participate in a commonplace exchange existed only in a way that mocked him. It was his failure to come up with a street name that started his fall. A flurry of related frustrations became a flood until he was drowning in panic. He asked and then demanded that Cathy take him away. It may have been embarrassment that swamped him, or disappointment, but I think it was the worst kind of loneliness, as Cathy and I, who sat beside him, became unreachable.

I flew home a day or so later. Our minds are so strange. I was waiting in the security line at the airport, inching forward a body’s width at a time, when I thought, Oh, my God, Kenny is going to die. I was surprised. Shocked, even. How was that possible? I knew he wasn’t going to get well, but to think that there would be no more phone calls, to think that our once serious, then ironic, and finally playful bond as East Coast sophisticate and Midwestern lummox could end . . . I wanted to remember if he’d forgiven me for the way I’d coerced him to give up the rights to my novel. But in my mind there was only his brave smile as he tore up our agreement.

It was early evening when Cathy called to tell me it was over. “It was merciful,” she said. I repeated the phrase. I don’t know what I said then, but it prompted her to tell me, “I don’t see Kenny as tragic.”

I knew only to say, ”Do you think I do?”

“Do you?”

I had no answer. We’d begun in folly and innocence, grad school, that Ouija board, me breaking the door, Kenny refusing to admit that he was gay, if that was indeed what he’d done. Looking back is looking back. But now we were here.

I can’t say whether a lot or very little time passed before I thought of a message he’d left years earlier on my answering machine.

I don’t want to make too much of this. Getting to it now could create the impression that I view it as conclusive in some way, which I don’t. On the other hand, it feels wrong not to include it.

“Donny,” he began. “I was meditating—following this old man who is my guide, and suddenly I see him as very young, very strong. And there’s this beam of blue-white light coming out of him, just this fucking ball of blue-white light, but it’s so fucking powerful, and then he’s Jesus carrying his Cross—he’s beaten and bloody—and he turns to me, and he says, ‘I want you to help me carry my Cross.’ ” Kenny’s voice shivered. “And I said, ‘I can’t do it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I can’t do it.’ I don’t know why I’m getting all crazy here, Donny, but it’s a very emotional fucking thing. And then he turns around, and he points to me, and he blasts me with this fucking light, and he blasts the shit out of me—it’s so fucking powerful—this white-and-blue thing, which I later realized was, like, his halo or something. And he turns to me, and he says, ‘It’s O.K. You don’t have to. But I will help you carry yours.’ ” Kenny’s voice grew small with what felt to me like disbelief at the possibility of his being loved. “And I don’t know—that was really about it—but it kind of fucking destroys me when I think about it.”

So, anyway, Kenny died. I knew him a long time, and then he died. I have other friends who are still alive. Some of them are older than Kenny was. I’m older, too.

But Kenny’s gone. ♦