A Death in Summer
a Reason for Being in the World "preliminary chapter"
I’m still recovering from a bad New Year’s cold and plan, as well, to include this “preliminary” chapter in the final draft of Reason for Being in the World, so it fits well this week while I continue to feel better. When the essay originally appeared on Substack in July 2023, I still had fewer than 100 subscribers, so it is new for almost all of you. As you’ll read, it had an earlier history still.
Preface
When Julia and I hit the road for a year of travel in our motorhome in the late fall of 2008, blogging, especially political and cultural blogging, was reaching its peak. It only made sense to start our own blog to help tell the stories we sought to cover in Indian Country. We called the blog the sad red earth.* It was supposed to be our joint blog but very quickly became mine alone. Julia is a splendid writer, trained in journalism at the University of Nebraska’s graduate school, but the demands of her photography were too great for more.
I ended up blogging from 2008-15. Most intensively during those first 3-4 years, I was posting 5-6 days a week, 5-10 or more posts per week. It was like that in the blogging heyday. With the great recession, the sudden advent of the Tea Party, the astonishing, seemingly liberating election of Barack Obama, then Obama’s presidency, and the Iraq War and Afghanistan still high-pitched conflicts, I was offering, in addition to our stories about Native America, a lot of other political commentary. They were intense political years. Bloggers were energized by all that. I was energized, too.
I also maintained on the blog several running series, of poetry and jazz offerings, film criticism, memoir, and creative nonfiction. Those last two appeared as longer pieces.
What follows here turned out to be, unexpectedly, by far the most read blog post of all my writing on the sad red earth. Long after I published it and even after I ceased to maintain the blog, it continued to be read. In the afterword following the essay, I’ll talk about why that was and what came of my publishing it.
* In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, as Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty vainly search for Dean’s father in Denver, Sal goes for a frustrated walk on his own outside the city. He says in the midst of it that he “felt like a speck on the surface of the sad red earth.” It was Julia who suggested that name for the blog. She had recalled the line in her India journals during her five months of traveling near penniless there, shooting photo stories for a book just a few years before we met.
A Death in Summer
Among the many, varied jobs of my misdirected young manhood may be counted filling watchband orders on a rolling cart in a warehouse; selling wine to Manhattan’s Upper East Side upper crust, and shuttling in my taxi, on the overnight shift, among the island’s singles bars, heterosexual and gay, to ferry home the whacked out and the happily buzzed, the lucky and the not, and the tips to match, then falling asleep in my 8 a.m. sociology class at the City College of New York. Another was pitching driving lessons over the telephone for the Automobile Club of America Driving School.
We were a colorful crew, we voices in glass cubicles at Madison Avenue and Thirty Fifth Street, the better to be monitored, to be sure we kept to the script. We were actors, future physicists and opera singers, only mildly bitchy and very kind, but unkempt and disheveled queens — just to wreck your typology — and voice artists who finally made the big bucks and left when his brother produced a landmark PBS documentary history of the Olympic Games and gave him the voice over narration gig.
Fortunately, we mostly all liked each other, mostly because we were all committed to having fun through the long stretches of occasional-call tedium, and then the madhouse ringing of the phones after the TV ads aired that were then, in the mid-1970s, ubiquitous on the New York City airwaves. We’d pop from cubicle to cubicle to share the latest absurdity of the latest call – sing or intone or render disquisition. Once, having asked according to the script in which borough of the city the caller wished to take his lessons — consider my hand to have made whatever gesture over my beating heart your oath taking requires — the elderly Hispanic man with whom I conversed, obviously new to the city, replied, “Oh, no, I don’t want de boorow, I want de caaar.” I quickly placed the call on hold and stumbled out into the corridor convulsed in laughter for all to see. Joined by my fellows for the cause of my attack, we were soon all in an uproar of hilarity, at which point I was stood straight and directed into my glass booth like a woozy fighter pushed back into the fray.
On another occasion, having flirted quite stirringly with the young woman to whom I sold a lesson, I later inquired with the Bronx office manager, to whom I explained my interest. I was informed that the lesson had been canceled on account of the young lady’s not being able to fit behind the wheel. For the next week, in Auto Club offices all throughout the city, whenever the doldrums threatened, my erotic longing was invoked to lighten the mood.
But of all the fun-loving characters at the driving school, in all the cities of the world, none was more so than Antony Alda, who could deliver the pitch and contort his face with a mock-heroic, lunatic sincerity for his fellows to see above and beyond all other comparatively meager talents. Antony was the younger half-brother — by twenty years — of actor Alan Alda, both the sons of Robert Alda, a star of stage and screen in the 1940s and 50s, and still working in later decades, though eclipsed in fame by his oldest son. I was 22, then 23, when we worked at the driving school; Antony turned 19. He was studying music at Julliard and earning some money of his own.
For two years, Antony and I were good friends, pitching in to paint each other’s apartments, commiserating with each other over the pains of young manhood. But while I was 23 perhaps some years older than I was, Antony was 19 going on 18. He was a born comedian and Antony — in impromptu pastiche, practical joke, or absurd insight — just wanted to have fun. Dramatically handsome with his face in repose, he had the broadest, toothiest grin I ever saw until I met Julia, and truth be told, maybe still. When he smiled or laughed, the mouth expanded to take up half his face, and his eyes flared shockingly wide, as if God had just shared with him the ultimate scandalous secret.
I attended Antony’s wedding to Leslie Clark at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue and then the reception at the old Biltmore Hotel in Manhattan, now gone, across the street from Grand Central Station. (Amorously delayed with my lover at the time — that opera singer — we arrived in the church as Antony and Leslie were marching, post ceremony, up the aisle. Antony, who well knew my habitual tardiness, pointed to us as we scurried for a bench and flashed those teeth and flared those eyes.) After the grand affair, Tony and Leslie repaired with all their peers to a hotel suite for hours’ more celebration. I remember, still, Robert Alda, beaming in the joy of his youngest’s marriage, entering the suite and cupping my face in his hand in the beneficent pleasure he had to share with everyone that day.
At some point after, Antony and Leslie moved to Los Angeles, and we lost contact. We were both so young, and the friendship had grown up around the driving school and its little community, and that was over. But then, maybe a year later, fleeing that unfortunate love affair and a life continuing to go awry, I, too, moved to L.A. My older brother, Jeff, had already moved out to seek his fortunes (in those days, it seemed, half the people I knew were “splitting for California,” or wanted to), and Jeff and some New York friends had opened an antique importing and exporting business, along with two stores. I went to work unloading forty-foot containers from England and making repairs at the back of the Abbott Kinney Boulevard shop in Venice. Still have the bad back as a marker.
One late afternoon, heading back to Jeff’s Malibu apartment without him, so without transportation, I was hitchhiking back home there up the Pacific Coast Highway. Within the buzz of traffic, a sedan quickly pulled to a late stop some distance up the road. I ran in its direction. To my surprise, I saw driver and passenger emerge and run in mine.
It was Antony and Leslie.
“It’s the Arn!” Tony shouted, laughing and throwing his arms around me when we met.
We reveled in the happy serendipity that would have been a delight to any person but was a wonder of the universe to Tony. The two of them were at that moment headed to Robert Alda’s apartment, in a high-rise just where Sunset Boulevard terminates at the PCH, for dinner with Alan and his family, his wife and daughters. I had, of course, to join them — there was no question, I must — and I did. Alan hadn’t been at the wedding, so I met him only that evening — the far older brother, the star, whom Antony, the kid, wanted to be funny for his friend, but who, a sober adult, preferred not to perform for visitors over dinner at his father’s house. It was, instead, a lovely and warm family gathering.
Tony, Leslie, and I now spent time together again. Leslie confided to me that there were early troubles in the marriage. Antony had a band, and, staying up late, jamming and cutting up with his friends — as if he weren’t, quite, married now — was leaving his wife feeling the marriage neglected. Antony, despite the opportunities that might have been open to him for an acting career, wanted instead to be a musician. He never told me that he sought to make a different way from that of his father and brother, but it wouldn’t have been surprising that he did.
It was a happy reunion for the three of us, but after only three months in L.A., I decided not to run away from my troubled emotional life and the life I really wanted, which was in New York. I returned there, and I never saw or spoke to Antony or Leslie again.
Sometimes over the years, especially after the internet changed all our lives, I would search for what I could learn of Tony. It seemed he never made a name as a musician, at least as leaving one’s name in public records is a sign of it, but he did act. He did an episode of MASH with his father and brother. He had a recurring role on a TV Soap. I think there was a pilot or two for TV, never picked up for production. That was all I could learn.
A couple of nights ago, in preparation for the visit of one of my oldest friends from New York — l live now, oddly enough, in Los Angeles — I was doing some research into activities that she and I and another old high school friend who lives in L.A. might pursue during the week. I was looking into some theater we might see, checking out the latest show at the Mark Taper Forum. It is Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore, and I noted on my computer screen that in its cast is an actor named Ian Alda.
Though I’ve lived in Los Angeles, now, for eighteen years, I never thought after returning to look for Tony, whom I last saw over thirty years ago. It had nothing to do with my feelings about him. Julia, like the small-town girl she is, though she has long pursued her destiny far from her hometown, lives with her past as beside the neighboring houses on her quiet, rural Nebraska street. She is still in touch with everyone, and they all call out to her each morning as she exits our door, a continuing part of her life, in the nourishing, ever expanding community of her biography. For me, as L.P. Hartley wrote in The Go-Between, “the past is a foreign country.” There are homes of friends there, sunlight and music, but also old, forbidding houses at the ends of lonely streets, dark alleys where bad things happened, vacant lots where something was lost or taken from me. When something ended — and it ended, I came to believe, for a reason — I didn’t go back to it.
Sure enough, I quickly discovered from the links that appeared on the screen before my eyes that Ian Alda is Antony’s son. The twenty-year-old, the exuberant boy whom I remembered, had naturally not frozen in life as he had remained frozen in my memory. He now had a grown son, probably not that far from the age at which I remember the father. And then — oh, I imagine it would be a sight, to look at the eyeballs of a face scanning the search results on a computer screen, rapidly wandering, darting and shifting — a word among all the random words jumped out, as if it had become bolded and raised from the screen — the word died.
Antony died last year, just over a year ago, on July 3, 2009, at the age of 52.
By now it was about 2 a.m. People who get emails from me, if they check the time, will know that I stay up late. I sleep only a few hours a night. For me, these days, feeling the press of time and of things to be done, and like a character in a story I’m currently working on, “sleep is just time taken away, death making deposits on a layaway plan, but I don’t want to sell.”
I searched more. There wasn’t much. Antony and Leslie hadn’t made it. Tony had married Lori in 1981, and then they, too, divorced in the early 90s. There were some rumors about how Tony died. I found nothing authoritative, but the blog of a friend said it was from liver disease. At 52.
And then I found the video on YouTube that Antony’s sons had made for his memorial service. He had two sons, the other named Zan. I caught up in this meager way, a little, on Tony’s life. There were photographs and home movies, excerpts from TV shows and films. In most of them, he was very much the young man I knew. Near the end, I got to see the fully adult man I never knew, forty and older, now no longer alive. People left comments, loving and appreciative. Someone wrote something about Tony not always having made the best choices in life. I know something about that.
It was 3 a.m. now, and my sorrow was deep and unnerving. Memory. Antony was only 20 years old for me. How could he have died? And even if not, he was only 52.
Somehow, I had entered into A. E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young.”
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
I thought that if I searched for Tony on the internet, I would find him there as I knew him, cyberspace and its universe of information somehow a reflection of the lies that memory tells, a place where time stops to preserve what we seek there, a Valhalla of eternal youth and promise.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.
Finally, I sought the sleep I resist.
* * *
Before Antony and Leslie were married, they lived for a time in New York in an apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens. They invited me to have dinner there one night with both their parents. Just the parents, Antony and Leslie, and me. Tony wanted me to meet his father. And his father, he said, just had to meet “the Arn.” I felt privileged.
I had a lovely time meeting and talking with the two sets of parents. Everyone was relaxed and friendly, gracious, and welcoming. When it came time for dinner, I was informed that the parents wanted to treat the young people as special and let us dine first and serve us. Only after would the parents dine. I can’t recall anymore what I thought of this oddity, except, almost surely, just that, and I kept my perplexity to myself.
It was a big apartment, so the three of us sat at a large table in a spacious dining room while the elder Aldas served us, from an old-style kitchen, through a swinging door, what were pretty meager portions of soup. The subdued conversation among Tony, Leslie, and me proceeded stiffly, especially for us. Then Robert Alda and his wife served up the main course, for each of us a plate with a single slender slice of beef, a couple of small new potatoes, and a few leaves of lettuce. Tony remarked how good the food looked.
I began to cut into my single slice of beef, when the room erupted in laughter.
“Did you see his face!”
“He was trying so hard to act normal!”
“He couldn’t believe his eyes!”
Antony was pointing at me, his mouth wide as the opening to a cave, his eyes ablaze with the joy of the joke. He cackled.
“Look at the Arn! He was just gonna keep quiet and eat it!”
In an instant, bowls of pasta and salad, what appeared a side of beef, bread and cheese and wine all flowed from the kitchen in a hubbub of talk and laughter and the pleasure of the delicious practical-joke hors d’œuvre served to the merriment of all, including me.
I felt very loved.
* * *
In 2001, Antony wrote and directed a film called Role of a Lifetime, starring Scott Bakula and himself. There is an excerpt of it in the memorial video. In it, Tony’s character says to Bakula:
“Isn’t it funny how you never know you’re asleep until you wake up? Like, if you didn’t wake up, you’d never know you were asleep.”
Afterword
At the time I published the memoir, Antony had no Wikipedia page, as he does now, and the pages of links that now show up on a search weren’t there in those days either. So if people searched for him on the internet, there was no prominent place to which they were readily and reliably led. Until my piece. And it turned out many people searched for Tony. They searched in the thousands.
And the more they searched, the more they found my essay and the higher my remembrance rose in the search results, until it became the top one, for quite a few years, when I distractedly let the blog’s original domain registration lapse.
Many people who searched and read also commented. Friends from Tony’s high school days in Rome. A girlfriend from Rome. Relatives. Fellow students from Julliard. Other actors from the soap, Days of Our Lives. The man who introduced Tony to his second wife, Lori Corelli, when Tony and his father were touring the Midwest in a show. Many of them didn’t know Tony had died. Some of them who knew each other, long separated, spoke to each other through the comments section of the blog.
I heard from Leslie, privately, long since remarried and living happily in Maine, pleased to be remembered so fondly, remembering me the same.
I heard, too, privately, from Lori, who was a stranger to me. Though she and Tony divorced, they had never left each other’s lives, and she was with him during his final illness and death. We wrote several times. I liked her a lot.
All who wrote were happy to see Tony, as they told me, brought so vividly back to life. Said one correspondent, “EVERYONE can but hope to be remembered so fondly by at least one other human being.”
All this was my reward.
AJA
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Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
Jay, there's lots of great stuff here. I am continually amazed at the fascinating life you have led and all the people you have encountered. It's quite the ride, my friend.
This paragraph in particular spoke to me:
"For me, as L.P. Hartley wrote in The Go-Between, “the past is a foreign country.” There are homes of friends there, sunlight and music, but also old, forbidding houses at the ends of lonely streets, dark alleys where bad things happened, vacant lots where something was lost or taken from me. When something ended — and it ended, I came to believe, for a reason — I didn’t go back to it."
This has been the way I approached the past as well. It baffles my wife as she is so good at keeping connections with everyone we have ever encountered.
Even better on the second read with the Wikipedia link in the afterword. To lose life to death at such a young age is to define the uncertainty of existence.