Chapter 13 Kibitz Kismet #2
Of course I relented, and Martyn came over to my house. He wanted to make amends and say he was sorry for everything. He was sober and doing well. He was no longer with his wife.
I had a friend there that night. When he left the room, she said, “Fuck! Martyn’s hot.”
“Dude, go for it,” I said.
“I can’t,” she said. “He keeps looking at you.”
Something clicked in that moment, and I invited Martyn to come with me to the Big Island.
I hadn’t officially said “Please leave me alone forever” to Lee, and he was still calling. I told a mutual friend to ask him to stop. Lee mostly left me incoherent messages.
There was one I could decipher that he left while I was in Hawaii: “Don’t give up on me, Scooter.” That had always been Lee’s nickname for me.
It was a Sunday evening. I listened to the message, and then I put my phone down and looked out over the ocean from my hotel room. Martyn sat next to me, watching the same sunset.
I thought of Lee in that dingy apartment on St. Andrews, one of the worst places he could be. I felt guilty, and sick, in that beautiful hotel on that gorgeous island, watching the purest sun imaginable sink into the Pacific with a man I was beginning to fall in love with.
I thought too about how Lee had always said that he wasn’t going to make it to his twenty-seventh birthday.
“Yes, you are!” I’d say. “You’ll hold on and beat Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and all the rest of them.”
Three days later, while I was still in Hawaii, I got a text from a woman Lee had known in Alaska who had worked for the boat company. I had never been much of a fan of hers, so I was surprised to see her name pop up.
Have you talked to Lee?
I texted her back.
Why are you texting me?
She got right back to me.
They found him.
I immediately called her.
“What are you fucking saying?” I said.
“He’s gone,” she said.
And I just dropped my phone.
Much later, I checked the timestamp of the message Lee had left me, asking me to not give up on him. I realized that Lee had died about one hour after he’d called me. His body wasn’t found for three days.
He was twenty-six years old. He hadn’t hung on after all.
I flew Lee’s parents out to Los Angeles to identify his body, but because he’d vomited at the end, they weren’t allowed to look at his face. The stomach acid had eaten it away in the days he’d lain there alone. Instead, they identified him by his tattoos.
This is the truth of addiction, the thing no one ever tells you until it’s too late. These facts are presented here not to be gratuitous, but as a warning, as a witness, as a plea to do whatever you can to avoid this terrible fate and to help those who fall into addiction.
We held a memorial service on a yacht because Lee had always said he wanted to be buried at sea.
Martyn helped with all the photo montages and everything else.
I brought in all of Lee’s friends from New York and rehab and his parents and anyone who knew him and loved him.
It was a lot of people. He was that kind of guy.
I went into a tailspin for a long time after Lee’s death.
I thought it was my fault. I still do some days. Perhaps if I’d taken his call, if I hadn’t made him move to St. Andrews… So many ifs, constricting my throat, filling my heart with more self-loathing.
Though gone corporeally, Lee Grivas stayed with me for a long time in spirit.
I was haunted by him.
For the longest time, every night I would wake up at 3:15 a.m. precisely. Some nights, I’d awake to find Bella, my white cat, the one who had played with his needles, staring into the darkness with her fur up.
I could sense him too in the room.
Finally, one night I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Fucking stop it, Lee. You’ve got to stop. I have to work. It’s okay if you’re here, but you’ve got to stop waking me up, man!”
The following night, Lee didn’t show.
The day after that, a friend of mine called.
“Did Lee come to you at three fifteen as usual?” he said.
“Nope,” I said, “he didn’t.”
“Well,” my friend said, “that’s probably because he came to me.”
“Tell him to stop!” I said. Which my friend did, and Lee stopped.
Lee’s mom called that same friend the next day.
“Guess who woke me up at three fifteen last night?”
I didn’t understand the significance of three fifteen for the longest time.
But then I stumbled upon something eerie.
According to people who say they know these things, the veil between this world and elsewhere is thinnest at…
you guessed it, 3:15 a.m. The barriers were down.
Something impenetrable was permeable. Lee had decided to show up.
I say Lee “haunted” me, past tense, but I think he might be back.
Recently, I was reading in bed when my glasses flew off my face and right across the bed.
Am I crazy? Don’t answer that! But I know it’s him. Recently, I was at home getting a treatment for my pain with an acupuncturist. She taught alternative medicine at Harvard, so she’s no quack—far from it.
We got to chatting, and out of nowhere she said, “Every time I walk into this room, I hear the phrase, ‘To thine own self be true.’ ”
I almost passed out. Before Lee died, he had tattooed “To thine own self be true” across his neck.
This is not something the acupuncturist could have known. There are no photographs of that tattoo anywhere. Hell, I hadn’t even mentioned Lee to her—why would I, when he’d been dead for nearly seventeen years by that point?
There was more.
“I can hear things,” she said. “There’s someone here, watching over you.”
“How do you know that I know this person?” I said.
“He’s giggling.” I remembered all the childish fun Lee brought to my life. “And I see a bird tattoo.”
That sealed it: Lee and I have the same bird tattoo.
So yes, Lee is back. He’s a genial, friendly presence, and still playful. I don’t mind. Sometimes I find myself saying out loud, “Come on, buddy. You’ve got other places to go, surely?”
But it doesn’t upset me. It’s fine if he wants to be here. He’s a very benign ghost. He was one of the nicest guys I ever knew. There were times he could be a dick—he was a man, after all—but it’s fine if he’s hanging out.
I have all the time in the world.