Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (22 page)
Read Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s Online
Authors: Brad Gooch
I cast around for Howard. I had the reflex to share a look with him that would be lilting and indicate that I had thought of something funny and would tell him later as this was such an inappropriate moment to share sexual or comic thoughts and innuendoes. Then
I felt, really, his true absence. His erasure. I started a deep, mourning crying that came from some cyclonic source. It came time to shovel in the dirt. I remember saying, “I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to.” I don’t know if I was actually screaming the words, or saying them softly, or not saying them at all, but just hearing them in my head. Someone pushed a shovel handle into my hands—felt like a push, a thrust, but may not have been—and I reeled toward the hole in the ground. I shoveled the dirt almost angrily—it sounded like loud hail hitting the coffin below—and then reeled back, crying.
There was Elaine, again, next to me. She was murmuring comforts. “You know how he always used to disappear,” she said. “He’s up there in the sky again. He’s on a trip. Like on an airplane. He’s gone into the sky on a trip.” Lester said, “Remember that bouncing walk? When he bounced away from us on trips and disappeared?” Howard was forever departing, in their remembering of him. Then they recited primeval Hebrew chants together, the family. It was the Kaddish, and they were chanting all the words in unison.
“Can you believe we’re saying it for Howard?” Steve cried.
I was one of the last to leave the grave. I talked to Howard for a while. It was now sunny. There were flowers on the grave from Jim and Sara. The tag read, “We love you Howard wherever you are.” I felt the same. But I also felt that I knew where he was. For the second time that day he was as present as he had ever been. He was hovering, while I talked with him. I was pouring out everything I had absorbed of the sensations of the day, his birthday celebration, only this time he was there but he was also a very strong bright light in an oval shape that was suspended high in the skeletal branches of a nearby tree.
After I left the cemetery that late afternoon, I never saw Howard again.
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For their help and support in writing this book I wish to thank: Jonathan Burnham, Joel Conarroe, Frederick Eberstadt, Joy Harris, Barbara Heizer, Sarah Lindemann-Komarova, and Paul Raushenbush.
_____
BRAD GOOCH
is the author of the acclaimed biography of Frank O’Hara,
City Poet,
as well as
Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor
, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography, along with other nonfiction and three novels. The recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities and Guggenheim fellowships, he earned his PhD at Columbia University and is Professor of English at William Paterson University in New Jersey. He lives in New York City.
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City Poet
: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara
Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor
Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America
The Golden Age of Promiscuity
Zombie00
Scary Kisses
Jailbait and Other Stories
The Daily News
Finding the Boyfriend Within
Dating the Greek Gods
_____
SMASH CUT
. Copyright © 2015 by Brad Gooch. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Cover photograph by Paula Court
Cover design by Milan Bozic
EPub Edition APRIL 2015 ISBN 9780062354983
ISBN: 978-0-06-235495-2
15 16 17 18 19
OV/RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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