This is a blog post from an old friend of my sister Gretchen who died many years ago. I guess I try to ignore this most of the time, but out of nowhere it always comes back.
The needle dropped onto “Blood on the Tracks” and followed the groove into “Tangled up in Blue.” I stood up my string bass, ready to play along to the recording. It’s a simple bass part that can easily be picked out on the A and D strings: D, C, D, C, A, Bm, D, G. I plucked the strings trying to follow the chord progressions.
…And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burning coal
Pouring off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you…
As I played along Gretchen appeared in front of me, fascinated by the bass. I recognized her but we had never really met. She wore an expression somewhere between amazement and stunned disbelief. When the song ended she said (and I paraphrase): “I’ve never seen anyone playing the bass in person before, but last fall I created an etching of a bass player. The image I made is you.” The hair on the back of my neck stood up. She told me that the image had come in a spark of creativity. That when she walked in to the party that night she felt as though she had stepped into her art.
Gretchen and I were classmates starting our junior year at Brown University. I had just moved into an off-campus house at 23 East Manning St., in Providence, RI, with six other students, one of whom, Amy, was a friend of Gretchen. A month or so before school started, my parents sold the house in New Hampshire where I had grown up, in preparation for a move to New Jersey, so when I left that home for the last time, I moved into 23 East Manning St. That first Friday night of the semester, September 7th, 1984, a few friends, stopping by in the afternoon to catch up after the summer had turned into a party. In the swirl of people Gretchen wanted to try playing the bass. She was too short to stand and comfortably work the strings so she sat on the back of the couch with her feet on the arm. She fiddled with the strings, felt the vibrations through the thin wooden body, and experimented with the way the bass is simultaneously beat and pitch. Before she left that night Gretchen invited me to go to the beach the next morning. After I accepted her invitation I worried that I wouldn’t have anything to talk about. I worried about awkward silences.
The next morning, Saturday, Gretchen drove us out to Barrington. She had these funky blue tinted sunglasses she was proud of and she thought everyone should wear blue tinted glasses. On the drive Gretchen told me about when she had first bought her car (it was a Honda Civic or some sort of compact car) she pulled into a highway weigh station and insisted that they weigh her. We spent the afternoon on the quiet, post-Labor Day beach. Without beach chairs we sat on the sand, swam in the calm water, and I tried to keep from getting sunburned. We never once had an awkward silence.
When Thanksgiving rolled around I literally did not know how to get “home” to New Jersey. I didn’t even know where to find the new house. Gretchen solved this problem by offering to drive me as long as I accompanied her to the “Van Gogh in Arles” show at the Met. As we walked around New York that day, she told me how one sunny day she had set out on foot in NYC in search of all the free art she could find: statues, free museums, galleries, etc. The most beautiful thing she saw that day was a bunch of construction cranes, a “crane convention” she called it, catching the sun when the streets were already in shade. She had cut her hair short and spikey just before vacation. When we got to the NJ home and she met my parents, my father said something like “What do your parents think of your hair?” She answered with a laugh: “They don’t care what’s on my head as long as it doesn’t reflect what’s inside my head.”
For my 21st birthday, Gretchen came over to dinner at 23 East Manning. I have a picture of her with Amy, laughing at the punch line of her own joke that she has written on our household message board. It’s the one about the dirtiest joke in the world. The joke is so dirty that all the bad words are filled in with “da,” and it goes like this: “Da da da da da, da fuck da da.” After dinner she said she had a present for me and said she needed to talk. Gretchen gave me one of her prints of the bass player (VI/VII). We went to my room and talked. She talked as if she needed to tell me everything all at once, as if this was the last night in the world. She showed a side I had never seen: crying, uncertain, and agitated. She had been seeing a psychiatrist. She was confused and didn’t know who she was. Her head was all mixed up. I couldn’t quite comprehend what she was saying and she herself couldn’t quite say. Later that night I wrote some hiku in my journal, then virtually nothing else for two months.
After you left here
My shirtfront wet with your tears.
Will they ever dry?
The next day she hand delivered a letter that tried to explain the unexplainable. At the time I taped the letter into my journal.
“After I got home last night I wanted to start the evening all over again. You see, I was trying to explain to you something I can’t even explain to myself. I’m so mixed up I don’t know what I’m feeling and don’t understand what I’m saying. But I do understand that I’m not happy—not happy with myself. And I want more than anything for you to understand that I have tremendous confusion and pain that has only to do with me. I’ve resisted the relationship for so long because I knew I had a problem and I didn’t want you to suffer my craziness but now that it is touching you I think you need to know.
Starting a relationship after so many years of confusion and fear brings all this stuff to the surface and makes me finally face the fact that I do have a problem which I’ve been avoiding. That’s a scarey thing. If I were brave I would face it directly with you and let it work itself out. But I’m not brave, I’m scared.
From the start I’ve doubted myself—not you or the relationship—but myself in the relationship. I don’t think I can do it and as long as I feel this way I won’t be able to do it. That’s really the problem. But at last I have the courage to deal with it and I want to do it alone. It hurts too much and holds too much potential hurt for you.
What you must understand is that you are not the problem—you are wonderful. All you said last night was beautiful. I couldn’t ask for more and I doubt I deserve even that. You are there for me but I don’t know where I am. I must figure out myself before I can give myself to anybody. I wish this wasn’t true.
I’m backing away from a relationship but I’m not backing away from you. I love you as I love all my friends and want to love you more but I can’t right now. I’m sorry.”
About a week later word came from Gretchen’s parents that she had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital after suffering a “breakdown.” In 1985 among the well-educated and privileged people I knew, mental illness wasn’t a topic of conversation. I certainly didn’t have any way of understanding it. Nothing about the events made any sense, and I didn’t know how to make sense of them. I didn’t even know who was aware of Gretchen’s hospitalization or if this was anything I could even bring up.
She was in and out of the hospital that spring and was sometimes back in Providence. In the middle of April, we hosted a barbecue at 23 East Manning. I invited Gretchen and she came. The photographs of her that day show a far away look in her eyes. After the party, I sat in my third floor room, alone, and I watched a Mylar balloon, floating in perfect equilibrium, spin an erratic path, pushed by light spring breezes, and I obsessively listened to Cyndi Lauper sing “Time After Time”;
Lying in my bed I hear the clock tick,
And think of you
Caught up in circles
confusion is nothing new…
If you’re lost you can look and you will find me
Time after time.
If you fall I will catch you, I will be waiting
Time after time.
A few days later Gretchen said she would be in her studio and invited me to come by. When I showed up she begged off, hastily washed brushes and cleaned up before leaving. Our relationship had become one of all awkward silences. I was never so sad.
After graduation I headed west, to start my work as a National Park Service ranger, teacher, and Westerner. During the summer of 1987, I was full into the backcountry/letter writing phase of my life. With lots of time on my hands I wrote letters. I reached out to Gretchen and I blind-mailed a letter to her parents’ address in Chadds Ford, Delaware. I received a letter from her on August 5th, 1987, mailed to the Mora Ranger Station. She writes:
“Old faithful—that’s who you are. Finally at the end of my journey—I reached that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow—that American Mecca—the Jersey Shore! Yee haw. I knew I was irreversibly homesick as I sat naked basking in the sun on the crystal clear Aegean Sea surrounding the Greek Islands, thinking of Stone Harbor, New Jersey—cigarette butts in the sand, rows of identical mail order houses in a rainbow of colors, happy hours starting at 3:00 o’clock, screaming babies packing sand in their ears, and the 21st Street Boardwalk which is farther from my idea of 20th century reality than the African Bush. Or maybe it is reality. Actually if I’ve learned anything in my travels in the past seven months, I’ve learned there is no reality aside from pain, fear and perhaps love.* The rest is as temporary and fabricated as the mail order houses mentioned above… It has to be. How else can Africa and Stone Harbor occupy the same planet?” *Add always, the movies.
In October, 1987 Gretchen mailed me a letter to my P.O. Box in Olympic Valley, CA. In it she writes:
“I went to my 5th high school reunion…All these used to be carefree adolescents are now snorting coke and pumping caffeine as a relief from a 60-hour-cut-throat-investment-banking-the market-has-packed-up-week and that’s why I love bar tending. Yes, I graduated Magna from Brown and I’m tending bar when I’m not painting and no worries, no pressure, no problem. A very nice life. And I thought of you and your choice to “tend forest” and now enrich children and I loved you for it.”
On Nov. 13th , 1987, she wrote from Providence:
“1st snow of the year. In fact record breaking snow in November. Two weeks ago we had record breaking warm in October. What ozone? What future? Earth. So I was out early this morning doing donuts in the parking lot of IGA with my new 4-wheel drive rig—driving circles around little old men in ’72 Chrysler LeBarons. I gave a ride to some guy up Angel Street—as he hopped out of the bed he said “I’m a lawya—if you need a fava gimme a call.” I got connections all over this town. I love Providence. And despite the weather recently, I love Earth.”
In 1989 a letter to Gretchen came back “Return to Sender.” I again tracked her down via the Chadds Ford address. Her last letter, undated, but post-marked 25 May 1990, came to me at the Hoh Ranger Station.
“This is my Pimlico pencil. That’s right. I went to the races and I won $4.60. (As my friend Peter pointed out, if you subtracted the parking, admission, one hot dog and a beer I actually lost around $9.00. Obviously Peter doesn’t understand the races. I put two dollars on Icy Cindy to win and she won by a nose. Thus I won $4.60.) My dad’s coming down to visit this weekend and we’re going to take him to the races. It’s really fun—you don’t even have to bet but of course it’s even more fun that way… I’m going to be moving to a new apt. soon so if you ever write again, just send it to the Chadds Ford address.”
In the next two years I had four different addresses and my parents had moved from New Jersey to California and then divorced. The mail system couldn’t track me. In the pre-internet age it was easy to lose touch with friends.
When I joined Facebook in 2010 (not an early adopter) I was amazed that people found me so quickly. One of the first “friend” requests came from Amy, one of the original East Manning roommates who I hadn’t seen since graduation in May, 1986. She sent me a link to an article “Girl Disconnected” ( http://clatl.com/atlanta/girl-disconnected/Content?oid=1240984&showFullText=true ) from April, 2003 about Gretchen, with a subtitle declaring that when Gretchen’s “career took off, her life spiraled out of control.” The article opens at a gun range and the second paragraph ends “The other shooters who were in the firing range at the time never saw Gretchen turn her attention away from the target, lift the gun to her head…” At the time Amy sent me the article I couldn’t read past that point. There was nothing forcing me to confront the reality of her suicide and I stayed comfortably in the denial stage of grief. I recently started mining my old journals for blog materials. The pages from the fall, 1984 and winter, 1985 and even through 1988 are full of “Gretchen.” I couldn’t ignore her any more.
The “Girl Disconnected” article chronicles, in stark detail, Gretchen’s struggle with schizophrenia. It is a hard read. The author writes:
“Gretchen heard the voices continuously. She suffered, by most accounts, from an extremely self-destructive strain of the disorder defined by constant suicidal thoughts, auditory hallucinations urging her to kill herself and a paranoia so profound she would often be convinced that people — whether a stranger walking across the street from her or someone in the room at a small gathering — were conspiring against her.”
The article also circles back to the 1985 when she “was overcome by feelings of paranoia, delusions and the sound of ugly, ranting voices in her head.” In “Runs in the Family” (The New Yorker, 3/28/16) Siddhartha Mukherjee writes about the devastating effects of schizophrenia. The author argues that the pop culture idea of the “’crazy genius,’ a mind split between madness and brilliance, oscillating between the two states at the throw of a switch” is overly romantic. He goes on to “emphasize that the men and women with these mental disorders experience terrifying cognitive, social, and psychological disturbances that send gashes of devastation through their lives.” I’m in awe at the strength Gretchen had to shield me, and others I’m sure, from the full horror she held in her head.
I’ve been stingy with my memories of Gretchen, keeping them, and her, close to my heart for more than half a lifetime. Over the past month as I’ve allowed myself to mourn Gretchen, I’ve studied my “archive.” I’ve come back to the bass player print, which hangs framed on our wall. The print is not titled. And since Gretchen created it without a model, the bassist could be playing anything. “Midnight Moonlight” (most famously recorded on “Old and in the Way”) by Peter Rowan comes to mind but the lyrics are too blunt, almost too sad to write:
If you ever feel sorrow for the deeds you have done,
With no hope for tomorrow in the setting of the sun.
And the ocean is howling with things that might have been,
And that last good morning sunrise will be the brightest you’ve ever seen.
In Gretchen’s print the spare lines of the bassist lean against the instrument and the neck bends. The bow moves frantically. The song needs more blues and jazz than traditional Bluegrass. The bass player is literally bending blue notes. I think of Richard Davis’s bass on the studio version of Van Morrison’s “Sweet Thing” off of “Astral Weeks.” Actually any of the tracks from that album would work. If you don’t know this album, and even if you do, listen to it with the bass turned up.
And I will raise my hand up
Into the night time sky
And count the stars
That’s shining in your eye
Just to dig it all an’ not to wonder
That’s just fine
And I’ll be satisfied
Not to read in between the lines
And I will walk and talk
In gardens all wet with rain
And I will never, ever, ever, ever
Grow so old again.
This morning, in the pre-dawn twilight I finally fully realized Gretchen was dead. Is this the acceptance stage of grief? I don’t know. But in living with these memories of Gretchen over the past weeks, of this I’m certain. That first night in Providence, the arcs of our lives crossed in a crowded living room. We spun vinyl, sang, danced, ate, drank, and talked into the night. We were young and alive. When Gretchen held me with her gaze I felt as if she could look into my soul, as if she could see me fully formed.
No one will ever look into her eyes again.
Another letter from her will never arrive.
The bass player will forever bend an unheard note.
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