Toward the end of the eighties, My closest, oldest friend Richard Bohle was informed he had lung cancer. I don’t know if the docs told him it was terminal, but he figured it was, and set about getting rid of as much stuff as he could and preparing to make his departure as easy for his survivors as possible. That was typical of Richard, who thought of everyone else he cared about before himself, always.
The news hit me pretty hard. We’d been friends since we were 10 years old, we knew each other so well that we scarcely needed to talk or to say a few words of a punchline. We’d lived through every part of our lives together (except for the years he was in the Army in Korea and, later, I was in the Army in Germany). We were brothers.
The Silence
Grief is such a silence
and the scimitar moon
has fallen already
behind the mountain.
Once over a beaver pond
outside Fairplay, I saw
a full moon set,
and as it disappeared,
a flash of silver outlined
the whole black rim
in both directions.
I swear I saw that.
Tonight it’s only black,
and the silence is greater
for some unseen joker’s
footsteps on the wet sidewalk.
Richard’s mother served as Den Mother to our Cub Scout troupe. I don’t remember anything this troupe might have done except consume sugar bread in vast quantities at our weekly meetings, thus giving our Den Mother time to get a leg up on her daily half-gallon of wine. She was a functioning alcoholic and I imagine she contributed a good deal to Richard’s low self-esteem, though his immensely competent and talented German father Friedl probably served the same purpose, however unintentionally. He would have been a hard man to live up to – an engineer, a talented ceramicist, a music lover who built the most perfect speaker I’ve heard in my life, he could pretty much do anything he set his hand to and do it well.
He’d built a very large grape arbor in their back yard, and Richard and I and Andy and, at times, the rest of our contingent of Outsiders spent many afternoons out there under the shade of the vines, trading our scurrilous, contemptuous views of society as we were coming to know it. One endless summer afternoon someone brought a b-b gun over, and I used it to take a shot at a songbird sitting on the back fence, and nailed it.
I’ve never forgotten the sickened shame I felt when I picked up that soft, still warm corpse whose life I had ended. That was the last time I ever shot at anything living. Our other pursuits were less lethal. One winter Richard, Andy and I spent a long, cold afternoon rolling up and stacking and sculpting the snow that had been falling, again, all day. I’m not quite sure how we expected our creation to be received. Many years later, called upon in a poetry workshop to come up with a spontaneous poem, I recalled that snow statue:
Jayne Mansfield
I think we were eleven
that winter it never stopped snowing.
Old enough, anyway, that when we set to rolling up boulders
of the heavy, wet stuff,
we began to see in the three classic, stacked globes
something new, something waiting to be revealed,
something that would not require buttons or a top hat.
We set to work then, sculpting
with our soaking, frozen gloves
under the vault of black oak limbs and branches,
and a frenzy came on us,
a hilarity that nullifed the cold and coming dark.
We were temporarily safe at school next day
when my mother discovered our creation,
a heroic statue of Jayne Mansfield,
celebrating her most celebrated attributes,
standing among the snow-plastered trees on our parkway,
gleaming in the early sun brilliant as alabaster.
When we got home that afternoon,
we found Jayne Mansfield reduced to snow chunks.
Only her foundation remained, disbodied, pillaged –
they had pillaged her, ruined her,
knocked her to pieces.
My mother had done it with a broom, I heard later.
She said we were not ready for such things.
I see now she was right,
but those who wait until they’re ready
quite often die before they even start.
I can’t remember now who recounted my mother’s Mansfield blitzkrieg to me, but I do remember they were most impressed with the fury of her attack. She was such a mild-mannered person, ordinarily.
Nevertheless, she was unrelentingly vigilant. A few years later, when the same three miscreants met at the corner where the bus to high school stopped, paused there briefly, then took off for parts unknown (in fact, only for the regular city bus stop), she was watching. She’d had a feeling.
It had been another of those endless midwestern winters, the snow piling up since October, turning black, the wind off the Lake never letting up. That morning, without need for much discussion at all, we tacitly agreed that another day of high school would be unsupportable. We took the bus all the way down to Howard Street, caught the el into the loop, and spent the day at the Art Institute. Compared with most of our off-the-books adventures, this one scarcely merited the name of delinquency. Didn’t matter. My mother, who had of course no idea what we might be getting up to, called the school and ratted us out. I was somewhat indignant when the vice-principal meted out a week’s suspension to me, assuming I was the ring leader (given my reputation as a “brain” and also as something of a lunatic), and Andy and Dick weren’t suspended at all. I imagine they were the more indignant at having to go plodding back to school.
Richard enrolled at the University of Illinois in 1960, but characteristically rejected the straight and narrow path to a degree. Enrolled in the usual required 1st semester general education courses, he refused to grace any of them with his presence, opting instead to sit in on a senior Melville seminar, whose prof somehow accepted his presence even though he wasn’t enrolled or qualified to be. He was not invited back to U of I, and, having no clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life, joined the Army, spending the bulk of his three-year enlistment in Korea. I still have a copy of J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, a book we both worshipped, that he mailed to me from Korea, inscribed, “Stolen from the post library with you in mind.”
When he’d tired of his post-Army life clerking at a tuxedo rental shop, he enrolled at Denver University. I’d just come back from my own Army stint, had no idea in the world what I was going to do with myself, and signed on with Richard to drive someone’s car out to Denver. We roomed together there while he actually worked on a BA and I became a bartender, met and married my first wife Nancy, and took off for Claremont Graduate School. After a year out there and a year back in Denver, we moved down to Colorado Springs, where Richard joined us and put his BA to work as a liquor store clerk, a job he kept until he couldn’t work any more.
I suppose most people would consider his life less than inspiring. He was content to work at menial sales jobs, which he took seriously and did well, but they hardly provided opportunities for him to shine. And yet shine he did, simply being himself. He had no patience at all for pretension, pomposity or cruelty, and he was a deadly expert at lancing those human boils with quick, dry wit. He had the greatest ability to coin devastatingly accurate nicknames of any white person I’ve ever known.
What he loved, he loved quietly and deeply, and what he loved were children, women of character, a few friends, and animals. These, especially animals, served as subjects for his black and white photography, to which he devoted most of his free time when he wasn’t cooking great meals for his friends. I’m in no way qualified to evaluate photography, but to my eye, his portraits of the animals imprisoned up at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo and of his friends’ children are some of the finest, most moving products of a camera I’ve seen. He was unique, and in the nearly thirty years since he left hardly a day has passed without my thinking of him and missing him.
We were united most deeply by our sense of humor – not “senses,” sense, for what struck one as funny for a great variety of reasons (if humor is a matter of reason) struck the other one as funny for the same reason (if humor is a matter of reason). We secreted certain jokes in pockets of our brains for decades, and would race each other to apply the punchlines to newly arrived people or situations. One such joke we referred to as “The Deaf Panther” (thus blowing the punch line). I’d written a bunch of poems to accompany his zoo photographs for a book he put together by hand, and threw in one with no photographic inspiration – generated, instead, by The Deaf Panther joke. Richard drew a two page illustration for it. (I printed the poem, “Music Hathn’t Charms,” in My Checkered Career.)
He got the word early in the Spring of 1990. The word was “inoperable.” By September, he’d gotten into the Hospice, at that time located in an old former Catholic institution up in the foothills with a view from its terrace down a sloping meadow lined by aspens turning gold. Hardly a vista designed to reconcile you to leaving it behind, and Richard showed no signs of wanting to do so. After a couple of months, they threw him out (an occasion for many rude jokes) and he went back to his little rented house, where he stayed until early the following year. When he returned to hospice, it wasn’t for long.
During his time of dying, Lis Steiner and I had become first friends, then lovers, then moved together into the old house where I write this today. Lis and Richard had for a while lived together when Lis’s daughter Julia was a baby, and while their parting hadn’t been an easy one, she still cared for him deeply. It was in the kitchen of this old house we got the phone call from hospice. We were drinking there that night when we heard a bird back in the pantry, singing for all it was worth. Thinking to capture and free it – though it was a dark, cold January night outside – we went back into that little room, where we could find no bird at all. It kept singing on for a couple of hours after we’d quit trying to find it.
In addition to our two daughters, we’d merged our collections of cats (and Lis’s dog Aussie), and one of them, a regal old girl named Sophie, began her own descent toward the grave shortly after Richard. Kidney failure, one of the usual causes for cats. She grew thinner and thinner until we put her down.
The Stare of the Dying
for Sophie
The dying stare beyond you
into some other world
when you look into their eyes.
They gaze intently
beyond your care, your grief,
beyond your dream.
One night my friend said to me,
“Please don’t. Don’t say
anything.” I went to bed.
Tonight, you stare up toward
where my friend sang his last song,
silent as he was.
He’d been gone a day,
and where you look now, a bird sang,
wild and lovely as a meadowlark.
Our grieving is so hard,
even when we know it foolish
and selfish. We want to go with,
To that place you see with placid,
waiting eyes. We want to join you
where death can’t unjoin us ever again.
