Author: Frank DeMarco

Phew! I find it hard to read all that white-hot emotion even now, all these years later. You can see the boy’s attempt to be honest, filtered through so many illusions about the world and about himself. He reaches naturally for the pen to relieve the intolerable pressure, and he has to fight to not fall into stylized reactions. He doesn’t want to be over-dramatic (“would be tempted to play holy martyr”) and he certainly doesn’t want anybody to see what had to be obvious to everybody. Always the intent to hide his true feelings, always the inability to express them, and afterward the difficulty in even knowing what they were.

Note, too, the harsh sweeping unfounded judgments. That was a tendency that continued to plague the boy years into manhood, as, in the absence of self-reflection, it took a long while for him to see how little grounded in reality some of his certainties were. In those days, there was no idea of sending grief counselors into schools. Only after a couple of decades’ worth of traumatic experiences would society begin doing that. But how we could have used it in 1963!

But why should this event have been such a dagger to the heart? Millions of people around the world – hundreds of millions of people – were deeply saddened by Kennedy’s death, and the cutting-off of so much promise. He had touched so many lives, so deeply, in so many ways, for so many reasons. But most people got over the shock. If not right away, then within  months, or even years. But my life was haunted by this crime for twenty-five years!

The boy that I was couldn’t express what he felt in front of anyone, particularly his father, for fear of unspoken criticism. So when he wanted to cry, he wouldn’t, and then couldn’t. He pretended. And paid and paid and paid for it, because, as I would learn much later, unresolved feelings do not change with time. Or, as Carl Jung said somewhere, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.” Repress your emotions, refuse to let them resolve, and see where that leaves you.

 

Perhaps I haven’t sufficiently stressed how alone I was. Fortunately, I had my family. My youngest brother and I were particularly close despite the seven years between us. But other than Paul, I had no friends. Then for a few years I had one friend, then no one again.

I was isolated by a combination of factors. First, I was so often sick; second, I spent so much time reading and daydreaming; third, most of my schoolmates in the Catholic school lived in town, a couple of miles (and a different world) away. But mostly I was isolated by – what shall I call it? — my almost autistic self-absorption. It wasn’t egotism, exactly; more that my inner world was so brightly lit that the external world was often merely an inexplicable annoying interruption.

I knew the stories from the biographies and histories I was reading. I knew the world as dishonestly portrayed by the boy’s books of my father’s and my generation; I knew the televised world of westerns and action shows; I knew the fantasy world I constructed out of all that. But I didn’t know much about real life.

And in considering the factors that led to my isolation, I must not omit the mixture of superiority and inferiority complexes that made me strange, and, I suppose, unapproachable.

I knew I was smart: I excelled in standardized tests designed to measure IQ; I read years above my grade level. I could see that I lived in a mental world far beyond most of my peers. The only academic subject that engaged me, history, I mastered easily. (In my Freshman year in high school, I took home the heavy world history text and read or skimmed it in a weekend, because I wanted to know what had happened.)

But emotionally and socially, I was light-years behind my age group, and despite my best efforts to not know it, I did know it. My everyday life was a string of humiliating or enraging incidents. And girls – even though I had two sisters – were unknown country. I knew them more as the lying boy’s novels had portrayed them than as I actually saw them around me in class. You may imagine how close reality came to those portrayals.

 

The rest of that 1963-64 school year is a blur of remembered misery. I did what I was required to do, in school, at home. I’m sure I did a lot of reading. But I was dead inside. I had competing strands pulling me different ways, rarely taking note of each other, let alone coordinating efforts. (This was long before I had any idea that we are as much communities as individuals.) With Jack Kennedy dead, the path I had imagined had vanished, and with it any ambitions I had had. No particular future attracted me, and I was not in the habit of taking my life into my own hands except at great intervals. I drifted through my unsatisfactory actual life.

My sister Margaret, four years older than me, had gone to college, but for some reason I can no longer remember, I had picked up a prejudice against doing that. (Maybe it seemed like more high school.)

My brother John, six years older than me, had enlisted in the service, immediately after high school. It seemed the natural thing to do. During the Kennedy years, I had formed an image of the life I would lead, the same kind of life I imagined Kenney or Churchill had led. They had gone to war as young men, and had made a name for themselves, and that had served as their entrance into politics. Maybe I would do the same. So I decided I would enlist in the Army, become a helicopter pilot, and come home a war hero.

In the Spring of 1964, nobody was expecting war in Vietnam. Indeed, Lyndon Johnson’s re-election campaign would portray him as the peace candidate. Yet I knew, months before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, that we would have a war there. My life has been the strangest mixture of impracticality and inspiration.

I told my father that I wanted to join the Army, and he, knowing the local Navy recruiter, arranged for me to take the preliminary test in my home, I doing the work downstairs in our library room while dad and he talked upstairs. (Looking back, I think dad was silently nudging me away from the Army.) I passed, and that was one step taken. Next step, the physical and mental exams.

So on Good Friday, 1964, I took a bus to Philadelphia, presented myself at AFEES (Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station), and got a fast brief snapshot of Army life. All morning, I was processed as part of a herd, one of hundreds of enlistees and draftees standing in line after line, examined for this, examined for that. It wasn’t so different from Catholic school, other than being naked except for shoes. (A sign on the wall said yes, take off your socks.) And then at the end of the morning, at the last desk, when I thought all hurdles successfully jumped, the man at the desk looked at my papers, asked me to confirm that I had asthma, and casually said, “Of course you know…” and told me that this made me ineligible for recruitment. In the Spring of 1964, the services could afford to be picky. We had been more or less at peace since 1953.

And then, in a development Franz Kafka would have appreciated, even though I had just been told that I would not be accepted for enlistment because I had failed the physical exam, I was required to remain and take the mental and educational tests.

“Of course you know…” Of course I didn’t know! I had my heart set on getting into the service, because otherwise how could I become a war hero and run for office? What was I going to do? All the way home on the bus, I was asking myself what now.

At some point I went over to the county seat and asked the Army recruiter if I could talk to him off the record. (Immediately he said, “Trouble with the law?”) But when I told him why I had failed the AFEES admission process, and asked if I should lie about having asthma, his answer was immediate and definite. “Don’t do it.” He said if I got caught, I’d get a discharge for fraudulent enlistment, and if I didn’t get caught, “you’d be a hazard to yourself and to your buddies.”

So that was that. No military career, no war heroism, no obvious way to make a reputation. My 1-Y draft status and I would have to find a different path.

 

Jump forward to October, 1988. Being inspired by Robert Smith’s book Hugh Lynn Cayce: About My Father’s Business, I told myself that I wanted to open myself to the levels of life that had become blocked. I said, “God, your will, not mine. But if you will it, let me be whole: Remove the barriers that close me off from you, from me, from others. Let me be of service. Show me the way and keep me on the path.”

What you pray for, you will surely get.

On Saturday, November 19, 1988, I awakened half-remembering a dream prominently featuring a rendition of “Roll out the barrel, we’ll have a barrel of fun.” The previous week, on the occasion of the composer’s death, a National Public Radio piece had put it into my consciousness. But I awakened convinced that the dream was using the song in connection to the upcoming 25th anniversary of the murder of John F. Kennedy.

In 1988, the 25th anniversary year, I as editorial writer and occasionally columnist had said my say in the pages of the newspaper about his many excellences. Others too had poured out their hearts, reminding me that that political crime had done great psychological damage to many unknown individuals of all ages. And by then I had been seeing a psychologist, and with her help it finally came real to me (what my feelings had known only abstractly, theoretically) that 1963 had been a long time ago. In response to that dream, I wrote it all out, the whole ghastly weekend and the blank weeks that followed, and I knew that all things come to an end, even torture and deformation. “Roll out the barrel,” I wrote, “and we’ll have a barrel of fun. Finally.” But that was a long, long time after 1963.

 

[Sitting in eighth-period study hall on that ghastly Friday afternoon, writing  on the back of half-used three-hole punched lined paper, which is what I had available:]

[First page]

The President is dead. Kennedy killed. His wife and children. He’s dead. Lyndon Johnson is the President of the United States. [Segueing to the unknown assassin:] Death is too good for that son-of-a-bitch. When they capture him they ought to torture him for days without end.

Dead. Not even fifty. He was forty-six. Never hurt anybody deliberately, took on the toughest job in the world for the good of his country and gets killed for it.

[Segueing to the kids in the study hall around me:] These crazy guys here don’t even give a damn. The girls do, but the boys don’t even seem to mind. Some damn idiot here laughing. Now it’s beginning to dawn. “The most important man in the world.” Leo. “He was cute,” says some girl dazedly. Then she mutters about his wife and kids. Some fool speculates on the next election. Now they realize what happened. Someone has come in and said that he is definitely dead. I wish to God that murderer were here. We’d tear the bastard to pieces. What kind of Goddamned nut will kill a man like that? Some idiots speculating on who takes over now. Can’t they realize that the man stopped living?

[Second page]

Don’t they realize he’s dead? Someone says, “Outlaw the Communist Party. They had something to do with it.” Maybe. Or maybe it was some goddamned nut of a Southerner.

What a shock. I feel like crying, but the tears don’t come. I feel like raging, but I’m numbed. All I can see is the president being shot and his wife and kids. My God Why.

Even the stupidest of these here are now shocked and sober. Some continue writing, some stare into space only I continue this idiot writing, I keep on writing without preparation as they come into my mind. I want to cry very badly.

There is a lead weight in my stomach. My arms are heavy, like when I want to sleep. My eyes and my brain alone continue undiminished. Almost against my will I keep on writing, and the more I write the more hypocritical it seems. And yet

[Third page]

someday I may need a record of my thoughts at a time of crisis and later, in a calm state of mind, I’ll analyze this and see just how rational I really am.

I’m glad I wrote so much. I think I’ve burned myself out. All I feel now is one of apathy to what happened. I can’t even feel intense hate for the bastard, at least not emotional hate. I think though that I’ll carry this hate I have for the rest of my life. Something is coming over the loudspeaker. Maybe it’s a radio broadcast.

[Fourth page]

It is night. The story of the day can be stated in three words. Business as usual. I talked with Cathy, among others. [She was a college student who worked at the drug store I worked in.] She expressed her feelings. When she’d heard the news she’d been driving home, and it hit her like a ton of bricks.  And then she realized that she was still driving, though she had to pull over when the shock wore off and the tears came. Business as usual. The show goes on. I went to church when I got there, left books and all, without really knowing what I was doing, and

[back of fourth page]

stayed there for what seemed eternity. [Can’t remember how I got from the high school to the church.] I wanted to die, and I prayed as I had, in school, I’d give my life for the President’s. Naturally I didn’t get my desire. Finally I realized that I couldn’t stay here and I left, and as I left I heard the four o’clock whistle. I started to walk to [my uncle’s] office [where my father was working in those years], and somewhere along the way I decided Business as usual. I would go to get the haircut I had planned on. I had nothing better to do. Otherwise I might have been tempted to play holy martyr which was the last thing I wanted to do.

I was still stunned, and dazed when I entered the office. I had seen dad in the car enter the lot [behind the building], so I knew he’d be coming in the back. As I went in I passed right by Aunt Mildred and Aunt Betty. I said something, I don’t remember what, and continued on. I met dad coming in the back door and, still distracted, I just told him I was going for a haircut and started to leave, not even thinking of what I would do after that. Dad did, though, and told me to come back when I was done. As I left the office I made some attempt at humor to Aunt Mildred, but as I couldn’t

[Fifth page]

even inject anything into my voice it was a complete failure, not that I cared. I walked head down all the way to the barbershop, stopping at one street when I saw a car which would have hit me. As for the others, I didn’t stop or slow in the slightest, just crossing at normal pace. Had I been struck down by a car I would have been the happiest man dead, but I couldn’t bring myself to step deliberately into the path of that one car which might have killed me (the driver looking the other way). I was very disgusted with myself then.

But the band played on. There was not a smile on the street in the afternoon and only on those idiots you would expect at night. People, tho continued. I got a haircut, and Cathy came to work.

[Sixth page]

The thing I wanted most was either to die or to go off somewhere alone, and I was allowed to do neither. Business as usual, the world turns on, the band played on, however you prefer to say it. Not even Mr. Kennedy’s death stops it. The president dies and idiot kids ride the avenue, a person comes in and buys athlete’s foot ointment and a boy gets a haircut and a girl comes to work. The whole of the ship of state is violently wrenched. I’m sick of writing. I want to forget this day and I never will. Maybe I can find a book for a while. I doubt it.

[End of the pages.]

And then there was the long shadow of John F. Kennedy. I’ve never known anything like it. Not before, and certainly not since.

Hero-worship is one thing. It wasn’t that. By age 13, I had already had heroes, not only fictional heroes but real ones, like Abraham Lincoln. What is a hero, anyway, but maybe someone you place your ideals on, someone you fall in love with, confusing a flesh-and-blood person with an idealized image in your mind.

I don’t think this was that. Once I was fully fixed on John F. Kennedy, my attention never wavered. I admired Bobby and, gradually, others of the family as I read about them. I came to love Bob after 1963, because he had loved Jack, and because he so obviously suffered the way I did. But nobody ever took front and center the way Jack did. Kennedys were glamorous, but only Jack was Jack.

It must have been hard on my father, to know he was being compared with JFK. Fathers find it hard enough to hold the respect of their adolescent children. Try competing with someone rich, handsome, talented and famous, and an idealized version, at that. But it wasn’t exactly hero-worship. Really it was that Jack and I were parts of one thing. It is the only explanation that will make sense of my early life. When he was killed, I was shattered.

What did he and I have in common? A quick sense of humor, voracious reading, an intense continuing interest in history, a childhood plagued by illness. Catholicism. That was all. Everything else – all the essentials – couldn’t have been more different. Not only the externals such as the worlds he inhabited as he grew, but elements of character such as my flaming temper. (If Jack had such a temper, I never heard of it, and I’m sure we would have read of it as we read of his father’s.) Didn’t matter. I absolutely identified with him.

The physical life I lived was a pale shadow of the events I read about. History and current events were the world my mind lived in, and I assumed that it was only a matter of time before they were where I would live my life. I took it for granted that I was destined to do great things on the world stage. I suppose it was like kids feeling the difference between themselves and their family, and imagining themselves as changelings. And then –

Why is it that my world was shaped and shattered before I was 18 years old by a man I would never meet? I ask, and the answer that I get is: Relate my experience as I experienced it, and let the meaning emerge.

.2.

In the Fall of 1963, I was in my Senior year at Vineland High School, having transferred from Sacred Heart High at the end of my Junior year. I had asked my parents to let me transfer, and I probably would have done it two years earlier, if it had occurred to me that it was in my power to change anything. Grade school had been okay, but I had experienced Catholic high school as jail. It was many a decade before I began to understand my own part in my failure to fit into a closed system.

But in the Fall of 1963, there I was in a vastly larger school, happily lost in the crowd. I still didn’t fit in, but none of the boys around me cared enough to make it an issue. The pecking order had been established years before I arrived, and I was scarcely affected by it. I didn’t have any real friends, but I had a few joking acquaintances, and the contrast was startling and enjoyable. I had three months of this happiness. September, October, November.

On the Friday before the weekend before Thanksgiving, I was sitting in Miss Ostrander’s social studies class, in the back of the room, near the right-hand corner. It was the next-to-last class period, with only a study hall to follow. Miss Ostrander had been called to the door, and I was joking with a couple of guys (In three months, I had already become known for telling jokes). When she returned to the room, she told us, soberly, that President Kennedy had been assassinated.

I felt the blood drain from my face. Months later, Miss Ostrander talked to us about the reactions she had observed that day and said that some of us were scared. I knew she meant me, for I had seen her see me. But I wasn’t scared. My world had been shattered between one moment and the next. It was as unnatural as if the sun had risen in the west. In a way, I had been killed, and that 17-year-old had no way to process any of it.

I don’t remember the rest of that class period. I do remember sitting in study hall next period and finding that the only way to deal with that awful pressure was to write, write, write. I remember Leo Darmstadter looking over at me, quizzically, as I filled the pages furiously. I kept those page, and they will form the next entry.

 

Six cousins. On the left: Margaret, John, and Frank.

On the right, Anne Marie, Francis and Charles Reilly.

We need to look back to my childhood, which was dominated by asthma, and by the woods behind the house and across the street, and, after age 11, by books and by a good deal of daydreaming, Also there was farm work, and the other-worldly result of reading so many stories of all kinds and there was the security of family, often disregarded and overlooked until well after the support had been taken away by time and life.

 Asthma comes in several forms. You may experience wheezing, or coughing, of moment-by-month inability to draw in breath, or a combination of two or more symptoms. None of it is conducive to your getting a night’s sleep, or even rest. Lying down makes everything worse. You can’t rest while sitting up unless you have adequate support for your head. It occurs to me now, my parents probably didn’t realize the mechanics of the situation. All they could see (and initially it must have been terrifying) was that I could not breathe, and it would go on by the hour, frequently all night. What could they do but sit by the bed (mom, mostly) and wish they could help? This continual background presence shaped my life in various subtle ways, as will become clear as we go along. They were long nights.

The woods. As with so many things in my life, the environment I grew up in didn’t easily fit into any one category, being neither urban nor rural nor suburban. Our house was on two and a half acres of land, far enough out of the center of town to have tracts still covered in trees. Behind the house, and across the street, were patches of woods. It was a jolt, late in life, to realize that before I had books, I had the woods. I spent a lot of time playing in those woods, probably enacting cowboy daydreams. I learned very early that wooded land is not the same, energetically, as land without trees. I wished I was living in Daniel Boone’s Kentucky. I thought: What was I doing growing up in Southern New Jersey?

Farm work. Dad was working the farm that belonged to his parents, about four miles away from our house, so I didn’t exactly grow up on a farm, but I did grow up with farmwork, and it was interesting, except that it always went on too long. Picking daffodils in early Spring for the cut-flower market wasn’t exactly fun (the knees of your corduroy pants wet and muddy, hands cold and stiff) except when we did it along with our Reilly cousins, but we got paid a little for each dozen picked, and that was useful. Picking strawberries, the same. Later in the year, when the weather was more pleasant, there would come time to pick peonies, and tomatoes, and other things. And the older we got, the more we were allowed to do. At age 10, I got to drive the tractor, steering it down the row while my father and my 16-year-old brother rode the planter attachment, putting in tomato transplants. At the end of the row, my brother would climb up onto the tractor, turn it around, and then I’d drive it down that row. At the end of the day I knew I had actually been useful, surely a good experience for any child. And of course as the years went on, I did more and more tractor work, cultivating, plowing, discing. I always liked doing it, but I always knew it could not be my life. My life was going to be books.

Books. My Aunt Nonnie (Donata) gave me a Tom Swift Jr. books for my 11^th birthday, and that opened the world of books for me. It led me naturally to the books my father had had as a child, “series” books like The X-Bar-X boys, the Radio Boys, the original Tom Swift series, the Hardy Boys, Ralph of the Roundhouse, etc., etc. I can’t say they were a good influence. I was isolated enough and innocent enough to take these formulaic books as realistic portraits of the world, even if a world already long passed away. It didn’t help me deal with the world I actually lived in.

Family. When I came to study astrology, years alter, I realized that no two of the eight of us had the same sun sign. My brothers and sisters were earth or water signs (my father, air; my mother, fire.). I was the only fire sign among the kids. Is this why, whenever there was a squabble, I was always half of it? (That’s what my father said once, and I have reason to believe it.) I was a stormy petrel, but not by inclination. I think it must have had to do mostly with my lack of self-awareness.

Difference. A happy childhood? Yes, I suppose. But even then, a different childhood. Was it that asthma periodically removed me from the daily routine world? Was it that the habit of daydreaming enhanced my ability to see things differently? looking back, it seems to me it was never in the cards for me to have a normal life (not that I wanted one). It’s like the tag line to old joke: “Just lucky, I guess.”

 

On the Friday after the seminar, before my article appeared, I called my brother Paul in California, and told him that I had had a dream in which Bub said, “The first 40 years were mine. These are yours.” I was 40 years old at the time. So far, he’s right on target.

But what had happened in 1987? Had the seminar really changed anything? Certainly it had not, as I had hoped it would, changed everything. But my expectations – my hopes –  showed my inexperience. Only much later did I realize that transformation, like aging, like maturing, like anything worthwhile, comes gradually. You don’t return from visiting a sacred site instantly and utterly transformed. Transformation comes about more like infection. The change comes gradually, perhaps unnoticed except in retrospect.

That change came in little bits, not obviously connected. I think of Stephanie, and Starborn, and Suni Dunbar, of Fran Slocumb, and dreams, of a “New Age” party in Virginia Beach, and Jess Stearn, and of John Nelson and Bob Friedman. They were all results of my deciding to follow the hint provided by my miraculous healing.

• At some point Stephanie was seated next to me at the seminar. She described her psychic experiences and I was fascinated. This would have important, and unfortunate, consequences. At the time I had never heard of the concept of “trans channeling.” (Not “trance channeling,” but “trans channeling.” It means contact that begins on a 6^th chakra level and moves immediately to the 2^nd. This is a formula for lots of trouble for the unwary!) From being interested in her as a psychic, I moved quickly into believing that I was in love with her, and began an epistolary relationship. She lived in western Pennsylvania. I was living in the Hampton Roads Virginia area. I had a wife and children, and was not prepared to rip up my life and begin again. So what kind of future did this promise? But I was experiencing (though not yet realizing) that I was not one thing, but several, not all of whom talked to each other
• Starborn. I never figured out how he did it, but somehow John Nelson mailed me a copy of his first novel quickly enough that it arrived in the morning mail at the office on the day after my article ran, He suggested that I might want to review it. I did read it, though I didn’t review it, and remembered the author’s name. John would become a good friend, but the immediate effect of this overture manifested later that year, with an introduction at a party.
• Suni Dunbar. I was invited to join a group of seminar attendees who wanted to meet on a regular basis, I think once a month, and I accepted. The first meeting wasn’t impressive, but I was too inhibited to say that Few people there seemed to really know what they were talking about. (One woman was talking about Kundalini, apparently thinking it was a physical snake. I very tentatively said that I didn’t think it was a snake, and I later learned that one of the women muttered, “Oh, so he does know something.”) Of all the women there – as I remember it, everyone there was a woman except me – the one who drew my attention was a woman named Suni Dunbar. She was old enough to have been my mother; it wasn’t a romantic attachment. But there was some link there, and we both knew it. The group soon ceased to mee, but Suni and I got into the habit of my going to her office in Virginia Beach every so often for a lunchtime talkfest.
• Fran Slocumb and dreams. Fran was a Jungian analyst. She sponsored a brown-bag luncheon to discuss Jung’s concepts, which had interested me ever since I stumbled across Modern Man in Search of a Soul in 1970. I seem to remember that I was invited because Suni and she were friends. In any case, after that luncheon, I had a dream. in three pieces. The first two laid out the roots of my major emotional problem. The third part consisted of Fran’s face smiling at me. I can take a hint. I called her up and arranged to begin a series of weekly sessions of dream analysis.
• A “New Age” party. In mid-summer, I was among those invited to a party in Virginia Beach to meet author Jess Stearn. A man came up to me and introduced himself as John Nelson, and I said something about his book. “Oh, so you did read it,” he said. “Let me introduce you to my publisher.:” And there, standing next to him, was a fairly short man with interesting eyes that seemed to have a quizzical expression, as if – I told him much later – he was saying, “Well, so you finally showed up.” And this was Bob Friedman, who would open so many doors and present so many challenges. Ahead of us was a long, complicated, productive, infuriating, satisfying, difficult, enlightening relationship.

These threads came at me one by one, seemingly unconnected, and only over time did they weave together, but the pattern they wove was a far cry from anything my life had been, or would have been, if I hadn’t spent a night watching a TV special, and then experiencing a healing, and then risking $300 to see what else might be in store. I had always wanted an extraordinary life. Earlier ventures hadn’t gone all that well. Now life was offering another opportunity. I couldn’t see its shape or its scope, but there was something there.

 

Remembering Bub

Newspaper reports talked about a heroic death in an unsuccessful attempt to save a seven-year-old from a fire. His viewing filled the funeral hall with people; the funeral Mass was con-celebrated by nearly a dozen priests; attendance at the funeral was among the largest in years. I can imagine Charlie Reilly looking on with amusement and delight at the dramatic and moving reaction to the abrupt end of his brief life.

But it isn’t drama and spectacle to his family; it is amputation, so unexpected, so unimaginable, as to be still nearly unbelievable.

When you lose a limb, at first the nerves in the area cannot report pain, and so there is only shock. Then, for a time, there is a sort of numbness, which functions as a sort of gradually deflating cushion. Then, the injured stump begins to throb, and the throbbing gets stronger, and the pain begins and gets worse. From that point, there is only the twofold necessity of learning to function without the amputated limb, and outliving the pain.

Journalists throughout the Delaware Valley knew Charlie, and I imagine that quite a few of them sat down at their typewriters to try to bring him back to life, if only for a few minutes. Many of them knew him far better, and were far more closely associated with him, than I. But I have a special point of view, for his mother and mine are sisters, and so we were cousins, and so I knew him when he was a boy called Bub.

When we were younger, and ethnic identity seemed more important than it does now, I remember being aware of the Irish quality which was so strong in him. Whereas both my parents were of Italian descent, he was a volatile mixture of Italian and Irish, and to me that Irish quality seemed so strong….

In retrospect, it seems stronger than ever. I think of Brendan Behan, or Jimmy Breslin, or an American Republican version of George Bernard Shaw. Such was the intensity of life, the devouring of the moment, and of the people around him. Such was — one suspects — the recurrent feeling of lostness, a feeling carefully concealed and denied. Such was the projection of an image of tough, hard-headed realism, covering an interior sensitivity and vulnerability.

(I am aware, writing this, that it may seem maudlin for a relative to compare a relative to Behan and Breslin and Shaw, particularly when the relative neither sought nor achieved the fame and accomplishment that these luminaries did. But they serve as examples everyone knows, and besides, I was convinced that Bub had a streak of greatness in him; I always thought that if he ever got down to writing seriously he would turn out stories of first-rate quality.

(Too late, now, to hope that he will someday take off that year he occasionally talked of — the year to do nothing but write. Now we can only hope that somewhere in all those boxes of papers, he left the stories he was working on as much as 20 years ago.)

Such accounts of Bub as I have seen have praised his energy, his drive, and his ability. All of this he had, in great amounts, but it was not for these that I valued him, but for the sense of “aliveness” he radiated. I think of the song in which Frank Sinatra says his life seems to him like “vintage wine, from fine old kegs; from the brim to the dregs.” Most of us seem to me to live as though only half-awake; we’re stuck on the middle registers of the emotional scale. Bub hit all the notes, from the very high to very low, and his intensity produced an almost magical effect on his friends.

Very few people reacted to him neutrally. He was well-loved and well-hated. And he was well aware of it, and encouraged it by his great flair for self-dramatization. I think of a night in 1966, when I was 20 and he was 27.

My parents and I were in the small Salem County community of Penn’s Grove when our car broke down.

He was editor of the paper there, and we called him and he met us, and by his presence turned the rest of the evening into magic — at least for me.

First he called a garage owner he knew, and the men interrupted his supper to pick up the car. Then, with the car in the garage, the four of us went out to eat. As soon as we walked in the door, it was, “Hey Charlie,” “how ya doing, Charlie?,” “Hey Reilly, what’s up?” from all sides. He knew everybody, and you’d swear he was an old drinking buddy of half the town. Which maybe he was.

All through dinner he regaled us with stories of his life there. He relished the telling of his stories, going into great detail. They all centered around his activities, which in a lesser storyteller would have seemed mere egotism; he raised it to a sort of personal mythology, in which he was sometimes hero, sometimes jester.

So he told how he had uncovered a numbers operation in a dry cleaner’s shop by counting the number of “customers” per hour while sitting outside in his car. “That’s the place I go to get my clothes cleaned,” he said with a laugh. “She calls me Snoopy now. I go in there and she says `here’s Snoopy,’ and I say `how y’ doing, Money?’”

I said I was surprised he still dared patronize the place. That big pixyish Irish grin of his: “The first time I went back there after the story ran, I expected her to give me my suit back with a big iron mark on it, but she didn’t.”

And he talked about a run-in with the mayor over something or other. In the middle of his complaint, the mayor asked Bub what he had ever done for the town. “I knew he had bought his car in Wilmington, so I say `well, Mayor, at least I bought my car here.’” And he talked about the threats to “wrinkle his face” which followed his stories on local corruption, and how he had started to carry a gun, just in case. (Those stories later led to a grand jury investigation.)

And he told how the mayor had told him, one time, that he was canceling all the city’s legal advertising because of some story or other. “I said, `mayor, you just made the front page. If that’s your decision, I can’t do anything about it — but hang on for the ride.’”

And on and on, all through dinner, keeping us amused, fascinated, interested in everything. He was always `on.’

Then we went back to the garage, and my father couldn’t believe it was so low. Turned out the man had charged for the part he had replaced, but not for the labor. “But it’s Sunday night” my father protested. The man smiled. “I wasn’t even open,” he said, and gestured with one hand toward Bub. “But for him…” and he would not take any more. That’s the kind of effect Bub had on people.

I keep thinking of how he went back into the fire to try to rescue that kid, and I think I understand the various things in him which set him in motion.

First, there was courage. It was an integral part of him, like his brain and his story-telling and his readiness at any minute to move. (One night my father said to him, “Bub, did you hear about the stick-up on the Walt Whitman Bridge?” Before he could get to the punch line, which is “some kid threw it there,” Bub was on his feet, moving to the phone to contact his newsroom. And then laughing at how he’d been victimized.)

Beyond courage, there was a certain recklessness, maybe a seeking after excitement, or a compulsion to test himself against all possible pressures and adversaries, or simply a delight in action. (His addiction to sports in all manifestations may be a part of this.)

And beyond recklessness, there was his involvement with others. He had a sensitivity which he denied in words and demonstrated in actions, as for instance in the scholarships he silently provided which put at least two black kids through school.

Beyond the courage and the recklessness and the sensitivity, I am convinced, was an absolute inability to believe that anything could kill him. Even more than the rest of us, I think he thought he was indestructible. (And, lest you think that such a conviction detracts from the courage it took to return to the burning building, imagine yourself imagining third-degree burns while standing on the roof before reentering.)

And now he is dead at 39, and already our treacherous tendency to warp the past through hindsight is beginning to make the shortness of his life seem almost inevitable, as though all that living on coffee and cigarettes and nerve endings had already given him a full life. But it is not so. It’s just that the living bury the dead and find ways to live with the fact.

Bub

At one point, Shirley MacLaine had told us to contact our soulmate. I had always thought of soulmates as romantic connections, but to my surprise the soulmate who showed up was my cousin Charlie Reilly, known to his family as Bub. He was seven years older than me, and to me he seemed a larger-than-life adventurer, going from one thing to another, laughing, fighting, and turning anything that happened to him into an entertaining story. I admired him greatly, if more or less from a distance.

Besides, I owed him.

In the early 1960s, Bub was drafted into the Army, and one day, on leave, he stopped by to chat. My mother (“Aunt Vee”)  and I talked to him about this and that as he and mom drank coffee. I can’t remember anything we talked about, but it was perhaps the only real conversation he and I ever had. Later, in a letter to my mother, he said that he had been surprised at how mature I was. My mother didn’t want me to see this, for fear I would get a swelled head, but in fact I desperately needed that indirect reassurance., and silently clung to it.

A few years later, he was responsible for my getting my first real job after high school. He was even the person who introduced me to drinking coffee! And he was the first newsman in the family That had its effect.

In all,  I didn’t have any difficulty in thinking of him as a soulmate. I lived in hope that he would write novels. Assuming that he could make the translation from speech to print, what lively things his novels would have been!

But it was not to be. Before enough years had gone by to diminish the effect of so much difference in our ages, his life and mine had gone in different directions, and we were rarely in the same place at the same time. Also, political and other differences assured that he and I would have required time and effort to get on the same page. Before that could happen – if it ever could have happened – he was dead at age 39, killed by fire, attempting to rescue his girlfriend’s little boy.

After the Higher Self Seminar, I went back and found a poem I had written in the immediate aftermath:

Night Snow

His possibilities dead, behind him

He leaves crystallized rationalizations

And a thousand cigarette butts and

Tickets to every sporting event within a day’s drive.

And memories. And plastic idols. And discarded

Unnoticed bystanders, captured by the smile.

Too late! Too late! Too late!

 

Bewildered by the terrific din

Of cessation of that eternal motion,

The survivors stand amazed, forlorn,

Numbly gathering shards of reminiscence,

Exchanging reassuring myth of

Inexplicable catastrophe,

Lest they be forced to rectify their lives.

Too late! Too late! Too late!

 

You terrible others, why do you not mourn

Possibilities foresworn? The death

Was only culmination of the life. Not

That he died, or died too soon, but that he

Retreated from himself, hammered up a legend,

And died unable to return. Every

Silent nighttime falling snowflake calls,

Too late! Too late! Too late!

As you can see, a sense of irretrievable loss, of chances thrown away, of a life perhaps wasted. That’s the mental world I lived in, in those difficult 1970s.

Bub died in December, 1978; Joe, in September, 1979. From here, half a long lifetime later, the years between the two deaths and the Higher Self Seminar seem few, but in January, 1987, the deaths seemed a long time past. When Bub died, I was 32, editing a free-distribution paper in my home country. I wrote a sort of eulogy, which I will publish here as the next installment of this memoir.