LETTER FROM MIKE -- PART ONE
"If I die before you, I'll be writing you letters for half of eternity, spend the other half trying to find a mailbox."
-- Michael, letter dated 1985
June 16, 1984
Dear Mogwai, my young one.
I have never gotten silver letters from anyone such as yourself before, and I didn't know how -- what to wear to answer it.
I finally found something to go with my orange pants. You know, right there with your second letter was the first letter from the police I've ever gotten in my life.. Some liar claims he stood in the dark and watched me break the antennae off someone's VW bug, just because he saw me do it. I'm getting off easy, by paying damages, without admitting guilt or anything, on advice of my lawyer, Graham. I called him for the first time, since he's made a point of checking to see if I carry his card in my wallet over the years, and I do. He was very good, sharp and kept me from making it a social phone call long enough to decide what to say to the Man.
Anyway, don't worry about the Times not listing you among the graduates. It's possible it's because those people in that section knew you were related to me, or just clerical error. Hell, I looked in the old files one time and it doesn't even list any of our BIRTHS in the family, not one anywhere, but plenty of others, so there are worst things, and who cares about them, too? The only important thing in life is for everyone to lose weight immediately.
I've heard from Mom about Dad's car having a fire fit when last taken up next to the Shonkwiler lawn again. I guess Dad meant it when he said he'd never go on that land again, but he only said "as long as I live." Even though Mark bought it, I think we all still considered it Dad's car.
I'm glad Eric was with Mark. I heard Mark kind of froze inside the car even with it on fire for a bit. Is it true? I heard Eric is coming up to see you, or already did. He wants to fly to California so bad -- if he does, I've already got half an itinerary of things he'd like to see, some because they're beautiful (Golden Gate Park in the fog, walking up into the trees and finding buffalo straight out of the old American West, breathing smoke. You can find them in the fog like that any day of the week, the fog is so frequent.) I think I'll take Eric to Stinson Beach, too -- the nude part. He'll be dumbstruck. Graham was, and he's kind of been around. Graham started to make a scene about two gay men making out outside once and I had to grab him and shut him up fast. He didn't know San Francisco is the gay capital of the world. I told him "Man, we outnumbered about 100 to 2 and if you don't shut up, I'm leaving quick, make it 100 to 1." He said "That's two MEN!!!" I laughed. He never heard of this? I said "Now we just have to figure out how they mistook each other for women so bad." Anyway, I think I'll watch Eric on the nude beach, because there'll be plenty of ladymeat there for him to watch, and he'll probably be a trip.
Thumbelina, have you heard the Pretender's song "My City Was Gone?" It says, at one point, "I went back to my city…but my city was gone." And I heard that in a store and said to the clerk "Sounds like my city."
Then the song goes "there was no train station, there was no downtown…" and I had a dream Portsmouth was deserted, five years ago, with tumbleweeds blowing downtown and I'm going to walk the streets then, too, and I said to the clerk:
"Man, that really sounds like my hometown in Ohio."
And the song said "I went back to Ohio…but my city was gone" and I jumped and said"
"HEY! That IS my town!!" But the clerk was gone.
Thumbelina, do you remember the name of your first best friend? Besides the stuffed, sock-eye kitty? My first was Tom Qualls, hope I haven't done disrespect to a forgotten friend by saying as much.
Glenda, I want to tell you, kind of formally, that you are the person I want to take possession of my possessions if I die before you, not that I'm planning suicide. It's just that I have so many private things that I don't want anyone else just poring over. With me, it's always been comforting to think that I have you to take care of my things and giving out things to everyone I care about, things you think they'd care about, and I hope you'll accept this request of mine, and show them this paragraph if any dispute rises, because there can't be anything done that I expressly don't want done. You are the one. This isn't my handwriting, but my signature at the end of the letter will be, and if anyone doubts this is me, let them find someone else to come forward and write just like I do. I guess that would pass for some kind of ID. Of course, who's to decide? The Federal Bureau of Individuality. Coco brings you his stuff in a bag for you to take to the sacred grove.
To be continued…
Ed. Note: Coco left his bag of stuff with a stranger wearing a familiar face, and all of it is gone. Even his writing went to someone who hopes to make a buck putting their own name on it, instead of to this sacred grove. I suppose I could take this letter (and one other in which he additionally demanded that I control the dispersal of his belongings) to a lawyer and try to recover at least his writings. But I have not motivated myself to do so. By its own admission, the strange one threw away all of Mike's unfinished research. How could I ever know I had recovered it all? In the end, all is vanity. I will share with you what I kept and what I still receive of Michael. Here is our latest adventure:
After the inappropriate one had stolen and thrown away and sold all he could of Michael's possessions, excluding even Michael's own mother in the dispersal process, there remained a cardboard box in his mother's garage, full of videotapes Michael had made of various television shows. It was in some small way the product of Michael's singular and curious mind, so rather than leave it moldering, I removed it to my home, where, attempting to pack all of the tapes into the closet in my office, I discovered a home movie made by Michael. On the tape, there is a scene of him chanting to somebody to take him to McDonald's. It made him alive again, as he had sung that song in my car on many occasions.
On this Thanksgiving Day, I was driving the Appalachian Highway toward Maysville, Kentucky, to visit our mother. No cars on the road anywhere. Just me and the mountains and the eight lanes and God. On a two mile straight stretch between curves in the road, I saw a (closed, of course) McDonald's far up ahead on the right. You have never seen such an outflung McDonald's in your life. It is across the highway from a large park-and-ride, where people from three impoverished states catch a bus to work at the atomic plant in southern Ohio. If you don't realize the two acre park-and-ride is there, it just looks as though somebody stuck a McDonald's by the highway between mountain ridges forty-four miles from the nearest chipmunk.
So after looking at the McDonald's all the way up the highway until I am close enough to determine that, indeed, this is another place that refuses to sell coffee to weary travelers on this day for fear of disrespecting a pagan harvest celebration that is neither a religious nor a national holiday, I see a huge blackbird light on the road. In the middle of my lane. It has a wingspan of WELL over two feet. I am within an eighth of a mile from it, and it is standing flat footed in the lane facing my car head on, which I am thinking is how he will die. Because his eyes are on the sides of his head, he needs to turn to one side or the other, so he can see me rolling up his ass. Is he deaf? Sick? Then, four more blackbirds. They come banking down like something in an animated film. Feet and necks jutting forward, wings fixed straight out, they slot into place around numero uno. I slow to a crawl. Where are they coming from all the sudden? I didn't see them approach. The trees are cleared way back around the roadsides in both directions. Twelve more blackbird behemoths land. I come to a complete stop about twenty feet short. Twenty more blackbirds. I am now certainly still at home asleep, or else I have wandered into an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Car at a standstill. Over fifty ginormous black birds standing shoulder to shoulder in ranks, facing my grill. On our right, a closed McDonald's. The world a ribbon of cement winding through a mountain range toward the sky. Eerie situation to be in without a witness. Then, I think about the McDonald's. (I went straight to McDonald's after Mike's funeral, and bought myself a black coffee and a second coffee with extra cream and sugar for him.) And I say out loud, inside the car, with the windows rolled up: "Mike! Is that you dicking around?"
The birds lift up off the road at that elegantly precise moment, like particles in a black cloud, bank to the right and are gone. I drive forward, and reset the cruise to sixty, looking back in the rearview mirror. The lane is blank. No roadkill on the surface. No birds resettle there. I look at the closed McD's, and say "Okay, Mike. If you're so smart now -- Who killed Kennedy?" (Because I recently told Mel he probably knows by now for sure.) One huge blackbird looms into view from the upper right corner of my windshield, and settles on a dark green sign up ahead on the right. Only blackbird in sight. When I arrive, it just sits there turning its head as I go past, and I see the sign says "Oliver Road."
So that evening when I go home, I look up "JFK assassination," and also "Oliver," on the computer, to see for a lark if there were any suspects at that time named Oliver. The search gives me "JFK" -- the movie by Oliver Stone, about the only criminal court case resulting from the Kennedy murder. A prosecutor named Jim Garrison tried a Louisiana man named Clay Shaw for conspiracy. So is Mike telling me Garrison was right? Is Mike forever silent? Am I nuts? What are the odds I got a message from Beyond from the Garrulous One? What are the odds that fifty two giant blackbirds appeared in the middle of nowhere to block only the one lane of eight lanes that I was in, so as to make me stop at a McDonald's? I'm thinking who does it hurt? I'm renting that movie, and watch it again.
Einstein had his uncalled-for moments, but I was with him all the way when he said:
"There are only two ways to look at Life. One is as though there are no miracles. The other is as though EVERYTHING is a miracle."