The Stony Lonesome: Suicide

There’s nothing funny about suicide, unfortunately; one cannot employ humor to mitigate the horror, not and remain within the bounds of humanity and good taste. It’s just too sad, and even though I crack wise about nearly everything, particularly the difficult and painful, there are some hurts at which I will not poke. There are those who have no such hesitations. Those mean-spirited “jokes” that appear mere hours after reports of celebrity suicides, exploded astronauts, school shootings, and other tragedies are concocted by people whose first thought, on hearing about a fellow human being so completely consumed by pain that they could not even continue existing, is: what’s funny about this? Clever people surely. The jokes work as jokes, they have internal integrity, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if their perpetrators and the drones churning out all the late night talk show monologues were one and the same. But, damaged people. Heartless, passive-aggressive sociopaths.

Like a lot of people impacted by the music of Kurt Cobain, I took his suicide personally and grieved for the loss of the man and his music, and for his family. When I heard the first joke the next day, something about the lengths one might go to escape Courtney Love, I neither spoke nor hesitated but immediately and decisively expressed my disapproval with a poke in the snoot. Knocked him clean out of his wheelchair, because jokes about beating up cripples are always funny, and suicide is just not.

However.

Life — and by Life, I mean everything, the sum of it all and the way it falls together, the glittering mosaic of existence — has a sense of humor too. Beautiful, pure, and unrestrained by context or convention, Life cracks jokes in the form of serendipitous juxtaposition and the intrinsic amusement of unlikely extremes. It puns and rhymes without words, and its punch lines are often followed by funerals, and if Life wants to make a joke at the expense of a suicide, then who am I to criticize? You can’t apply human standards of taste and decency to Life. Life makes its own rules, and they are as whimsical and capricious as a drunken leprechaun.

It’s 2004 and I am in the process of moving my base of operations from Albion to Fort Bragg. The risks of driving hot every day, increasing with each successful trip, have begun to outweigh the benefits of being able to allow your drugs free rein and behave in ways that might raise eyebrows in your more populated areas. I’ll miss the soothing sense of security one gets up on the ridge, but I’ve got to be where the action (such as it is) is.

My friend Mike suffers from an infestation of imaginary parasites which requires his nearly constant attention and so I’m always moving into his spare room. I have some plans for a course of treatment, and if nothing else, I can always divert him by hiding his tweezers when the excavating gets too gory. Mike and I, accompanied by our friend Jennifer, are en route to Albion to pick up a load of my stuff in his pickup, a Dodge diesel crew-cab. Mike, the putative driver, is actually only minimally involved in the process, being wholly absorbed by his face in the rearview and the picking he’s doing on it. I, on the passenger side, am steering with my left hand and calling out commands for the foot controls. Jennifer is in the rear applying what might be the 30th layer of foundation on her face, given that the declivities and protuberances one generally associates with human physiognomy have disappeared under a blank, expressionless mask. It would take months for a dedicated team of archaeologists to reach her skin. Fine with me, as long as she’s on her face she’s not pinching my sack or picking my pockets. Jennifer has a, shall we say, eagerly acquisitive nature, unrestrained by moral concerns or ties of friendship. On the plus side, she’s not very good at it, easy to catch, and contrite enough when caught to offer up her personal physical gifts in expiation, so it works out for everybody in the end.

Yes, it’s all quite perverse and sick and wrong and icky but that is the nature of this insidious chemical.

We cross the Albion River Bridge and I call out for deceleration and a left-turn signal, and off we go up the ridge. It is high summer and the farther we get away from the coast and into the zone where summer is actually allowed to manifest, the lovelier the day gets. I roll down the window and, breathing deeply, take in the verdant redolence as salt gives way to greenery.

We approach H Road and I pat the flank of our big Ram and call out, Whoooaaa. Mike obediently decelerates and applies the binders as we turn on to the gravel road. We park and I get out — Mike and Jen are far too engrossed in their respective faces to offer to help — and I head down the path to our cabin.

Now understand: I am as cynical and grounded a person as it is possible to be, and I do not hold with beliefs ethereal or mystical. I do not believe in omens or portents, and I don’t think that places have “energy” except power plants, gas stations, that sort of thing. But as I walk down that trail, I feel that something is off. It is utterly still, and while peace and quiet is Albion’s default setting, I mean tomb-like. No insectile whirrs, no avian twitters, no feline slinking, no equine grazings, no kitchen sounds, no klezmer music — none of the sounds I might expect to hear here on a sunny Sunday morning.

Dead still.

I get to the front door which is slightly more open than ajar, open perhaps six inches. I don’t know why this bothers me until I first suspect, then know with absolute certainty, that the door is in the exact same position it was in when I left on Friday. I go cold with dread and apprehension. I don’t know what I expect to find inside but I have never before experienced a situation that so clearly screamed wrong.

Something is definitely wrong, I don’t know how I know it but I do and when I finally push the door the rest of the way open, wrong gives way to horror. There she is, hanging from a light fixture, at the end of a burgundy velour sash, feet a disconcertingly inappropriate distance from the floor. My body passes through several states of matter before settling on a semi-liquid disperse phase, hot and electric. My eyes leave the appalling sight of her face and in looking for a place — any place—to land, I notice her right hip is exposed where her skirt has fallen down and I think, Oh, no. She had second thoughts and this is the result of her futile thrashings as she slowly strangled to death.

Be strong, kids, I haven’t gotten to the funny part yet.

As it turns out, I can definitely state that that is not how the skirt fell down.

Everything has an opposite number; it’s not always immediately apparent, but if you pay close attention the inverse condition of anything will ultimately reveal itself. And then sometimes it just jumps right out at you.

As it turns out, the opposite of a suicide, the diametric counterpart of this grisly husk that shouts Look at me, look at how sad I was — is an eight-week-old kitten. In this case a piebald sprite named Milhouse, whose tiny galloping I hear as he charges in from the bathroom. He sees me and slides to a halt on the linoleum. He regards me for a moment, literally vibrating with life and excitement, eyes glittering madly, pert, insouciant, go-to-hell. He charges forward on the same trajectory and leaps into the air, fully extended, glorious in flight, and lands, claws finding purchase on the Batik skirt at about knee level. He sways with the material for a moment, then scrambles up the body and perches calmly on her right shoulder. His tail whips around and settles gently around his hind feet as he raises a forepaw to his tongue for a little grooming.

Oh, Milhouse, I croak softly. Come on down, buddy. I reach out my hand and make little snick noises to coax him down. In response he gets up on his hind legs, forepaw raised, claws extended, and begins whipping her hair into a frenzied cloud. Like a boxer working the body he swings left, right, left right, hair flying every which way and falling over her bulging eyes. I laugh, God help me I laugh hard, and Milhouse, startled by the sound, looks at me and charges pell-mell down the floor and up my leg, climbing up to my neck where he pushes his little head in and sets up an aggressive, uneven purr. I stroke the little heat engine and I can feel his rumblings in my clavicle.

We go outside and I sit down on the stoop and pull out the phone to call 911 and my mother. Milhouse sits contentedly on my knee, blinking up at me occasionally as I try to explain.

When I got back out to the truck and broke the news to my friends, Jennifer gathered her bottles and brushes and charged off down the road. Mike, bless him, found something within himself that responded to crises and put his amphetamine psychosis on hold for as long as it took to deal with the sheriff and the coroner, then took me home and fed me Vicodin and tequila until I passed out.

No, suicide is never funny, and if I could choose a superpower it would be the ability to find and comfort anyone considering it. One thing I’d tell them is: it’s really not just one damn thing after another. Give life a minute. It’ll surprise you.

Rest in peace, Rocket Mama. You too, Michael.