My Cousin Rusty (Norvell)

You wrote so engagingly about my cousin Rusty Norvell in the AVA after he died in a car wreck that I'm moved to round out the picture.

His neck was broken; his car intertwined with a tree. His life was over — snap the twig, just like that.

Rusty was not a careful person. Very likely, we'll find he was speeding and saturated with alcohol, on a fling with his only solace. He had lost Flo Ann, his life-long friend, wife and family backbone to stomach cancer the year before. He was dysfunctional in key ways without her and had just, months before, survived back-of-the-throat cancer himself with debilitating assaults of chemo/radiation on his face, skin, jaws and teeth, affecting his will to live. Rusty's son Cove, who built their first house in the Mendocino woods, says the wreck was better than the agony of having his tongue cut out, had throat cancer taken over his mouth.

Each of us had flashes that somehow, the end was near. Photos of suicide bombers in Baghdad show their heads being blown from their bodies as a futile statement of protest against a meaningless life. The end of Rusty's life was a statement as well — as an intellectual who liked to talk and teach, he beat cancer of the throat but then broke his neck right around the throat and couldn't hold onto his head, where all his activity took place and where his real problem lay.

As fun, smart, clever, creative and talented a writer and teacher as he was, I am struck by Rusty's other competing side — the dysfunctional genius, lifelong alcoholic and serious self-saboteur who could never pull his life's dream together — which was to found and fund an alternative school for writers and teachers of writers and related graphic arts/music/poetry. He waxed poetic about having seen and heard Billie Holiday as a young man; was an admirer and scholar of Lincoln; wrote unpublished books. “Royalty,” his novel, was the one I read, about gnarley aspects of his life and family, which he likened to “an oozing pimple.”

His incomplete textbook for teaching writers how to write was to have been used at his alma mater in Bell Buckle Tennessee, where he taught private high school students, who remembered his methods and wrote letters of thanks years later. Flo’s friendly margin notes like “Fix!” were scattered throughout the book, that wouldn't and couldn't be finished without her.

Rusty Norvell married Flo Ann Hedley, the wholesome artist daughter of a beachcombing family from southern California, who learned how to scrounge the beach for a modest living building rafts, sculptures and elegant island architecture from driftwood, abalone and ingenuity. She vowed that if she ever owned land on the ocean herself, she would allow public access to the beach from her property.

Rusty and Flo kept that promise when they bought oceanfront property and built their home on the Caspar bluffs, with a public path to the beach that skimmed the edge of their house.

The Hedleys were on the functional upbeat side of the family who made do with what they had. Rusty was on the downbeat dysfunctional side who never knew what to do with what he had.

When they moved to the Mendocino Coast in the 70s, they were inspired and inspired others. With humor and charm, the odd couple worked well as a team. Together with a small group of dedicated environmentalists, they formed Ocean Sanctuary to help protect the beauty of the Coast from oil drilling and federal intrusion. Riding a wave of united public opinion with hearings, slide shows, t-shirts, bumperstickers and an abiding love of the ocean, the coast community prevailed and kept the oil wells at bay. Flo and Rusty are widely regarded as having been critical in holding it together, keeping momentum going, “running interference between the egos” as one Sanctuary activist put it.

Regarding faltering plans for a book, Rusty remarked to me, “I realize now we can't do a book on the ocean without including the science of the ocean. That is beyond my knowledge.” Another dream unrealized…

Rusty's mother Alberta, an accomplished Spanish teacher wherever she traveled, had the one son whom she neglected, then divorced and remarried, as did Rusty's father. Alberta lived out her dying years in San Francisco with Rusty and Flo and a live-in Hispanic woman taking care of her. When Rusty responded to your question about Mexicans — “Hell, the country couldn't survive without them!” — he spoke from personal experience and feelings of appreciation.

But all in all, ours was a family of alcoholics and prescription pill addicts, including my mom (Rusty's aunt), their three other siblings and nearly all their children and grandchildren including my two sisters, except me. I use cannabis instead.

Rusty knew marijuana works as an alternative to alcohol and used it from time to time and sometimes regularly. Flo, being a practicing Christian Scientist, frowned on the use of “drugs” around the house and didn't realize how her attitude was another way she enabled Rusty's alcoholism. He would sometimes turn to me or Captain Fathom for access. But once he entered the hospital for throat chemo, he swore off smoking altogether since he feared a recurrence. Edibles were too hard to swallow.

I visited him during his treatments and noticed how weak and miserable he was. When I asked him what he was eating, he held up a can of “Ensure.” I looked at the ingredients and pointed out it was largely sugar water.

On my second visit, I came with topical cannabis salve for chemo burns on his face and neck and cannabis butter for nutrition and to improve his appetite. He couldn't digest the bread the butter was on. So I gave him a tablespoonful of straight green marijuana butter, soft and easy to digest, and then another. After a few minutes, Rusty walked to the frig for more and asked, “Have you noticed since you got here, how I have more energy?” It was working. Each visit, I'd leave with him a couple of jars of butter. They were eaten as vital medicine.

I also noticed little alcohol bottles in his trash during the final treatments. After he got home and was pronounced “in remission,” it was happy hour forever and it seems he never stopped drinking.

I am reminded of a story. I once shared marijuana leaf joints with low level psychoactivity with a well-known streetperson and alcoholic with AIDS who I came to know in San Francisco from my years of vending First Amendment protected messages on streetcorners and at streetfairs. Jub-jub was the poorest of the poor and was grateful for the medical attention. He never bothered anyone and was well-loved. With his health deteriorating, he went home to Georgia to die but came back to San Francisco with enough life in him to seek me out where I vended in the Castro. He hung around reading books always with a large cup of beer at his fingertips. One day I noticed he wasn't drinking much from his cup and I asked him, “Why not?” Sitting on a stoop, he looked up at me with such clarity and said, “Pebbles, when I do your leaf, I forget to drink!”

In light of that eloquent message, it seems to me Rusty needed everyday cannabis to restore his health and fight his depression — a regular regimen of edibles and succulents to break through his alcohol stupor, lift his spirits and calm his restless soul.

Instead he chose firewater and the fast lane to snuff out the flame.

This is my unvarnished view of the innermost struggle that finally got the best of my cousin Rusty Norvell. All the humorous anecdotes we tell to summarize Rusty's life with Flo can't hide the ultimate truth: he and Al K. Hall had a date with death.