We Are Still Married (45 page)

They agreed that death must have come as a big shock to Larry, too, since he was only forty-three and looked not so bad—if, that is, he had been aware of himself dying, which Sarah's sister Star hoped that he had been. She felt that a moment of awareness, a clear split second, would enable a dying man, even while falling forward, to make his peace with the world. Star, whose real name was Starflower, said, “The brain has these almost incomprehensible powers when it is focused and I think that in one incredible flash it could give up this life and reach for the next one, and I feel Larry would have wanted that as a matter of dignity, like knowing your address or something.” Some others hoped he had gone instantly, without knowing, because he was so committed to life.

“When I go, I want to go
bang,”
said Stan, Larry's best friend, or so he told Sarah—she didn't know Stan; she and Larry had only been together a few weeks. She was wrapped in a white chenille robe, a gift from Larry, and though her eyes were red, she looked serene and lovely. Larry's children, Angelina and Andrew, were with his ex-wife, Jessica, in Boston, and Sarah was meaning to call them with the sad news the next morning. “I think it's better to hear about something like this in the morning, when you have a stronger sense of life,” she said. “Of course, I'm a morning person.”

His friends didn't stay long, because Sarah was beat and also it was sort of depressing around there.
To die while cleaning out your garage,
Stan thought—to die in a heap of rusty tools, bike parts, stuff to be recycled, some sad little plastic toys, some rotten pumpkins from last fall, and four or five of your unfinished projects, including a busted rocker and the workbench you started to build three years before. It was also depressing to sit on Larry's sundeck, which, frankly, was an eyesore, built of three-quarter-inch plywood that sagged under their weight.
Why couldn't he have learned about joists,
Stan wondered.

Still, everyone planned to give him a good sendoff, of course. Star and Sarah sat down the next morning to call up all the numbers Larry had written on the wall by the telephone in the kitchen and invite those people to his funeral. “I'm sorry to be the one to have to tell you this,” Star said to one of the people who answered. The man on the other end was quiet after she gave him the bad news. Then he said, “Larry... Larry. Larry? Was he the little guy in the red cowboy boots who slept in the Chevy?”

After he divorced Jessica in 1972, Larry moved around quite a bit for about a decade, doing a variety of things, including joining the Sky Family, a communal operation in the mountains, where people came and went freely. Now, a few years later, not many of the Skys remembered exactly who Larry was, perhaps because there had been an emphasis on seeking new identities at the time. The Family believed in renaming yourself every day as a way of recognizing the new possibilities of life, and this ritual sometimes occupied most of a morning: meditating under a tree or in a car or up in a tree, seeking to know one's true name for that day, trying to free oneself from preconceptions such as Larry or Janice or Stanley, and to find the one word that most perfectly expressed your aspirations, such as Radiance or Bear or Venus, and then going around and introducing yourself to the others, some of whom wanted to know why:
Why
did you decide to be California? Or Peaches. Or Brillo.

So the name of Larry Rose didn't ring a universal bell. “No,” said Sarah to a woman who thought Larry was a guy she remembered from a trip to Mexico, “he wasn't like that at all. You must be thinking of someone else. Larry is a very
nice
person, very gentle, very caring. I mean he
was
—he's dead now, of course.” She hadn't been in the Sky Family—that was long before her time; she was only a kid then—so she looked through Larry's stuff for an old picture so she could describe him to his old friends, and while rummaging through a cardboard box of his papers she found his will, typed on three pages of yellow paper, single-spaced.

The will made it clear that Larry had thought a lot about his death. He wanted no funeral but, rather, a “Celebration of Life,” and as for his remains, he asked to be cremated and his ashes be divided up and put in manila envelopes and mailed to people he admired, such as writers, actors, teachers, healers, religious people, and rock stars—hundreds of them—as gifts. Those people also were to be invited to the Celebration of Life (and given a chance to perform or speak “if they want to, it's entirely up to them, and nobody should bad-mouth them if they don't, maybe they just want to sit and rest or be part of the crowd”), and so were Larry's extended family of Sky people across America, everyone in Market Falls, and motorists on Highway 7. Friends of his were to stop cars on Celebration Day and hand out printed invitations that began, “Dear Traveler, Can you take just a moment to join us in a celebration of another human being?” Friends also were supposed to organize the Celebration, which would be “a free-form coming-together (nonsorrowing) of Survivors to share music, games, food, history, personhood—to exchange tokens, totems, lifelore, etc.” It was to take place in the country, in a grove of trees by a river. There was more about the friends' duties (sharing memories of Larry and pledging themselves to carry on his life in their own lives and nurturing each other and being happy), but her mind had wandered off toward some practical questions.
Who did she know who owned property in the country who would want to host a bunch of campers for a few days, some of them drunk, most of them with large dogs?

About twenty people attended the funeral service at the Rothman Chapel two days later. It was sad, and some of them cried, but then the Methodist minister pronounced the deceased's name Lawrence
Rosé,
like the wine, and that cracked everyone up, and then Stan stood up to give a personal tribute. Though Larry's best friend, he was a stand-in for Sarah's first choice, Star, who had decided that morning to go to Montreal instead, with a former ballplayer named Roy. “There is so much a person could say about Larry it is hard to know where to begin,” Stan said. “It's hard to tell just one story and leave out all the hundreds of others. He was a good man, but, then, you know that already, otherwise you wouldn't be here. I wish we had time for each one of you to share your personal memories of Larry, I know it'd be great. But perhaps we should just have a moment of silence and each of us remember him in our own way.”

Sarah remembered the morning he went out to clean the garage. He'd had a cup of coffee and a bran muffin, smoked another Pall Mall, and said, “I'm getting tired of all this junk of mine. I keep saving all this
stuff
and I don't know why.” Those were the last words she heard him say. It wasn't an ignoble way to die, she thought—trying to get your life out from under the debris. Had he lived longer, he might have thrown away his stupid will. She felt a little guilty about not having the Celebration but not as guilty as she had expected to feel. The service was over in twenty minutes, and after a few hugs and handshakes on the sidewalk everyone went away. She took Angelina and Andrew to lunch, and then Jessica picked them up at the house. She honked; she didn't come in. Sarah gave the kids some of his rings and a couple of old hats. The next day, the garbageman came and emptied the garage of everything. Sarah put the house up for sale. A lawyer told her she was entitled to part of Larry's estate, he thought, though the will was reticent on the subject of material things. The real-estate woman advised her to get rid of the sundeck, so the garbageman came and got that, too. It was surprisingly easy to remove. Underneath was a patch of bare dirt, and a few weeks later the place was thick with green grass and weeds.

During four days of speeches, delegates broke one taboo after an-
other, adding new zest to Gorbachev's policy of
glasnost,
or openness.
One delegate attacked Politburo members. Another touched off debate
over whether the party should relinquish its monopoly over Soviet
politics. Two others feuded publicly. By the time the meeting ended,
the sense of openness had built up so strongly that Gorbachev declared
glasnost
a hero of the gathering.

—Washington Post, July 3, 1988

 

 

 

 

 

S
OME GENIUS FROM MINSK with yogurt in the corners of the mouth making a stinky speech against the Politburo
gospodin
and you call this
glasnost,
my friend?
Ha!
And the “debate” about monopoly schmopoli—
tovarishch,
in my city, Kiev, we stuff that stuff in chickens but you call it
glasnost?
In Moscow, the intelligentsia belch and it's called a debate. And then two sturgeon snappers in baggy blue suits and white polyestiya shirts and shlumpy ties with tractors stand up and trade three wimpnik insults and this is
glasnost?

Give me a break.

Stop with your stories of Moscow and the great historic “open” party conference. Moscow is a parking lot. Bad food, bad whiskey, no ice. Beds full of bedboogi. City full of Amyerikans shlepping cameras looking for samizdat, refuseniks, raskolniks, what a laugh. Ha! This is me, Leonid, being open with you, sharing. Stop wasting the time. COME TO KIEV. In Kiev it is completely open city, the Center of Openness, Kiev the Honest it is known to all peoples, it is THE GATEWAY TO
GLASNOST.

Don't take the word of me for it. Come on to Kiev and see this for yourself all right out in the open. Babushkas, borsch, shashlik, the real Russia. I drive you myself in my big car (free), we to go to GUM (open til ten) and buy pair of Levi dzhinsi, listen to Amyerikan dzhass on the dzhyukbaks down at Boris Nikolayevich's BaBaKyu Russe (yes!). Here the light bulbs are dim to permit the special openness and they sell vodka cheap (a hundred kopecks, you get a snootful), chase it with a
glasnost
of beer, have a big plate
zakuski,
get crazy, and open yourself up if you wish or just watch me.
Nichevo.
It doesn't matter.

October is when to come to Kiev, the month of the Congress of Peoples, a hundred thousand people will be there, lot of action, big fun, no shyit, it makes Moscow look sick. Moscow is Plastyinki Mir. Kiev is Openville. It is good morning, U.S.S.R. Wide open. Total
glasnost.
Guys in hotels dropping water balloons, guys in little hats with tassels riding around on big motorcycles. Vroom, vroom. Big fatniks and little shmoozers making whoopee in the Hotel Lenin lobbiya, singing “Volga Boatman,” getting shnockered—

You don't care for that?
Nyet?
Guess what. Neither do I. No! Cossacks is what those guys are, fools, crooks. Pigs. We'll round them up and throw them in a dump truck and—
poof
—they're all gone faraway bye-bye.