When I broke Kenny’s bedroom door, I was in the middle of a crazy argument with my girlfriend. Kenny and his wife, Cathy, were away, and, actually, I didn’t ruin the door, but I damaged it and hurt my hand. This was the girlfriend I’d run after in a panic-stricken, wild breakout that destroyed my first marriage and led to a nervous breakdown. Time in the breakdown lane. It turned out to be a kind of walking collapse, in the sense that pneumonia is sometimes “walking.” So I walked around pretty much like shattered pottery glued back together haphazardly, all the while drinking, with a teeth-gritted determination to hang on to my girlfriend and survive. Not that pottery can drink or walk. But I could and did, and one of the things I did in that time was break Kenny’s door.
She was in the bedroom, and I was outside it. We talked through the door, each of us drinking—which was a big mistake, a big miscalculation that went unrecognized at the time. I had some sort of idea or perception of her that manifested as this gigantic, ungovernable feeling that I couldn’t live without her. It was like I was midair and only partway down a long fall with no end in sight. If I wanted to be kind to myself, and to her, too, I could say that we were self-medicating. But, no matter what you call it, we knew enough to get away from each other, and I had to get a new door.
A good friend of Cathy’s was married to a world-famous rock star. Lots of noise, big drums, and a buried melody. Whenever the rock star and his wife were out of town, their fabulous estate was open for Cathy and Kenny to enjoy. Since my girlfriend and I were still staying with them—this continued for some time—we were invited along. It was hard not to feel that Kenny and I were making our way together, that with his help I’d arrived at a special place in the hierarchy of worldly things. It seemed bizarre when the gate opened in response to the code that Kenny punched in and all that luxury recognized us. We lounged around the pool while gazing over the rolling lawn. Watching my girlfriend swim was a perk. She barely splashed.
Another perk, or almost perk, had to do with my messed-up hand.
A film mogul had optioned a novel I’d published after getting out of the Army. The project went nowhere. But the mogul’s interest, as perfunctory as it was, left me with a certain afterglow that attracted others. A movie star of enormous charisma invited me out to his home in Malibu for a meeting. We sat in his living room with his girlfriend, a singer who was maybe even more famous than he was. He explained that he might hire me to look over some screenplays and evaluate their narratives. We talked a little about my novel, but what interested him most was my messed-up hand.
“A woman?” he said, glancing at his girlfriend. They smiled at each other. “A door?”
I felt exotic. It wasn’t the volatility that interested him but the suggested jealousy. Women fell into his bed. He was curious to study me.
It turned out that Kenny was gay. Not that I knew he was. Or even that he knew it. The possibility had occurred to me at times, but I’d never considered that what occurred to me in passing might be true. That’s a long story, and part of the one I’m telling, but mainly, as I see it, this is about our friendship. Graduate school—that’s where we met. We were roommates, along with two other guys, in a big, spooky, vine-encrusted mansion. The old woman who owned it was spooky, too. She lived in it with a spooky younger woman who was her caretaker. We rarely saw them, but we would hear them, like spirits arguing in the walls. We lived in a kind of ground-floor addendum that had been built as I don’t know what but was then transformed into an apartment with a long enclosed porch sectioned into bedrooms.
Now, in regard to Kenny and whether he was gay or not—and I know this will sound stupid because it will seem obvious that I should have known—but was he gay if he didn’t want to be? If he had sex with women? I didn’t know then how to answer these questions, but I did know that I didn’t want him to be gay if he didn’t want to be. This was something like sixty years ago. So a lot was different in people’s thinking. I viewed being gay as sad—not sinful or anything like that but tragic. I think Kenny did, too, but we never talked about it. We had bigger questions, prime among them, thanks to Salinger, was whether we could avoid becoming phony. Another was: Did Lucy Windsor like Kenny or me? I remember, once, the two of us in that creepy old house consulting a Ouija board about her and getting scared out of our minds when the force moving the widget to answer our questions, with undeniable acuity, identified itself as the Devil.
So we were in graduate school in the theatre department, and one of the things we had to do was design sets for a class. This meant that we picked a play, made a lot of notes, sketched out a set for a possible production, and then built a model. In this case, we were designing sets for plays that we ourselves had written. My model was a mess. I was on the floor struggling to get the paper, glue, and cardboard to fulfill my aims. Kenny was on our living-room couch, his exquisitely fashioned model completed hours earlier.
Kenny, who at times almost sang my name, called out, “Donnyyy.” He explained how I should adjust my model to better accomplish what he could see I wanted. He suggested a backdrop, cut out a quick version, glued it in place, and lay back down on the couch. This was in the early sixties. Peter, Paul and Mary had a hit song called “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” I was so grateful—it was late, and I was end-of-the-semester tired—and I sang, “You are Puff, the magic dragon, who helped poor, clumsy me.”
I don’t know if it was that same night, but I think it was—I know it happened in that apartment. At some point, Kenny went to the refrigerator and took something out and then dropped it. “Kenny, what’s wrong with you, damn it!” he scolded himself, gesturing in this floppy, loose-wristed way. Instantly, he seethed with a rage very different from the one that had come when he’d dropped whatever it was he’d dropped. He looked at me full of desperate, furious petition and said, “Why do my hands do that? Why do they act that way? I hate it. I hate it.”
It was many years later—half a lifetime, really—that he got sick with what killed him. His divorce from Cathy was in the rearview mirror. He’d held a position with more than one Hollywood studio, big jobs that never lasted. He had countless friends in the business—directors, writers, producers who ran their own companies. Whenever feasible, we plotted to get something I’d written into the hands of this one or that one, hoping that it would lead to a project we could work on together, though this never actually happened. A singular but telling example of the way things went for us involved a director who was coming off a spectacular hit. He befriended Kenny, grew bright with interest, took us to lunch. Meanwhile, he was racing toward a crash even more spectacular than his success. He went to Morocco and never came back. Whatever we’d given him went into oblivion with him.
Kenny was always on the cusp. Opportunity arrived only to be lost. Over the years, my search to understand this seemingly fated pattern took me back to something I’d witnessed when I reconnected with him after getting out of the Army. It was maybe four years since we’d been in grad school together, and it was well before any of the California events. He’d got married and landed a job in insurance in Manhattan, an exec, junior probably, big building, fancy offices, smooth elevator. I don’t know how it happened that he took me along to work one day. As if I were his child. A lot of our relationship was predicated on the somewhat fanciful notion that he was an East Coast sophisticate while I was a lug from the Midwest. We had fun with these caricatures, finding intimacy in their exaggeration. I was not exactly a lug, and though Kenny was from Main Line Philadelphia—specifically, Radnor—his father was a fireman, his mom a homemaker.
We were in Kenny’s office when a man came in—about our age—very coiffed and tailored, as was Kenny. I was in my one suit, which was cream-colored and looked almost as if it were made out of paper. Kenny and this guy started talking about some pending issue at the firm, and Kenny was not only argumentative but dismissive. He was a tough boss, I thought. And then something happened that I can’t specify, but it made the moment like one of those drawings where you see the head of a rabbit until the perspective shifts, and you see something else. Well, whatever it was that happened revealed that the guy was not Kenny’s underling but his boss. He was treating his boss like an underling. More than once, I’ve wondered whether this kind of behavior contributed to his inability to hang on to any of the studio or company positions he landed.
When Kenny started getting sick with the illness that would kill him, he had no idea what it was. He was working as a professor in the theatre department at a college in Maine, I think, or some other Northeastern state. He was pretty much done with “the business,” long divorced, and, as he put it, having sex with a man. “A walk on the wild side,” he called it. Or, “Stirring the vegetables.” He said, “Can you imagine, Donny—two men, two egomaniacal men, trying to be decent together?” There were drugs, too. Maybe Ecstasy. Or meth. I think it was meth. Or maybe both. “I’m telling you because I want you to know,” he said to me on the phone. “Because we tell each other everything.” I laughed as best I could. I was surprised and not surprised, and I wanted for him what he wanted for himself. He went on, giddy with a sense of outrageous excitement that competed with his wish to reassure me. “But it’s nothing. He’s a total jerk, and so am I. So you have two jerks, two selfish jerks. It’s impossible. Just wild and for this moment. Can’t wait for it to end. He’s really quite awful. Without the drugs, it wouldn’t be tolerable, believe me. I know you understand. Do you?”
“What? Understand?”
“I know you do.”
I didn’t, though, not really. Had he lost a long struggle? Or won his freedom? I couldn’t figure it out, I guess, partly because he hadn’t figured it out.
But that wasn’t the phone call I intended to talk about when I brought up his teaching job in Maine, if that’s where the school was. This “walk on the wild side” call happened before the one I intended to speak of, but they both came from that New England school and occurred more or less in the same time period. The call I intended to bring up was about brain fog. He was upset about the brain fog he was having, and he thought I might be able to help. He knew that I’d had a more than fifteen-year struggle with candidiasis after getting Lyme disease twice in the early eighties, almost back to back, which meant continuous heavy doses of antibiotics. The doctor who’d prescribed the antibiotics didn’t understand that candidiasis could be caused by antibiotics. Few people did then. Nobody told you to take probiotics. This doctor looked at me like I was nuts. And brain fog was the least of it.
Luckily, I found a nutritionist who told me what I had, but he said in the same breath that he had no idea how to cure it, only how to control it through what I ate. That advice, along with digestive enzymes, got me by for more than a decade, until another nutritionist, a madman of sorts, cured it. He tested every bodily fluid I could produce, then set up a program combining supplements and homeopathy, did more blood work, adjusted the program, adjusted it again, and cured me.
I’d told Kenny about this, and he thought something similar might be going on with him. He wondered if there was a way to lessen his brain fog without all the testing, blood work, and consultations. After I told him about the partial relief I’d achieved using digestive enzymes, I explained where he could order some. A week or so later, he called to tell me that they were helping. He thanked me, and we blabbed for a while about other things. His work, his ex-wife, his kids, my wife, my kids. I was divorced and remarried by this time. He laughed about the silliness of his teaching a class on film history, watching old movies and reading like crazy to keep ahead of the students. But at least his brain fog was lessening, thanks to the enzymes. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what was happening. If the brain fog was lessening, it was an anomaly, a coincidental anomaly.