Chasing the Light

ncle Rick was quite a character. Back in his heyday, he was notorious for drinking himself into stupors, doing lots of drugs and fondling young girls.

And he was a writer.

Rick was theothercrazy in the family. The first was my mother, a beautiful woman with a headful of demons. She leaped out of a window and killed herself when I was twelve. She was tired, I suppose, of running down railroad tracks naked, or being beaten by the strange and brutal men she would often bring home late at night, or being stunned with electroshock prods when they would throw her into the loony bin after some bizarre public episode and slip her into a straightjacket.

Being crazy, it seemed, was just an occupational hazard which came along with the family genes.

Although Rick was a writer, he never was much of one. Or much of anything else for that matter. He lived for his sensations, his booze and drugs, and spent most of his days washing up broke and strung out on the expansive shores of some relative's sympathy. Whereupon he would stay just long enough (usually a few weeks) to promise to thoroughly reform his life and then go about and thoroughly disprove that such a thing was humanly possible. After having worn out his welcome, the unlucky relative's finances and peace of mind, he would merely float on down the river and cling to the next family branch that offered itself.

Which is how I came to spend a month or two with him that spring when I was about 12. He had come to stay with me and my grandmother for awhile.

He was put up in my room, which was a real boon since he liked to stay up late and would often read to me. But also real pain since his breath invariably smelled of alcohol or marijuana and, even when it didn't, he had that smell about him that most single men do as they get into their forties: that oppressive male odor that comes from not having a woman around often enough to keep yourself smelling decent for.

So I'd often see him, if he wasn't out drinking somewhere, laying on the cot in my room, an arm flung across his forehead, either smoking a cigarette and staring aimlessly at the ceiling, or snoring off a drunk.

When he was sober, or reading to me, he was a lot of fun. Since we were both outsiders to the World of Work and Responsibility we could enjoy sharing his jokes about the dull, stupid businessmen who made the world go round, or his dramatic renditions of Holden Caulfield inCatcher in the Rye.

Rick, more than anyone else, was the person who introduced me to the world of books. Ever since I was a small kid, he had always read to me when he made his periodic visits. He would drift in and out of my life and, with him, the desire to read. He read comics to me, or fairy tales, and sometimes even Jules Verne. And now that my mother was dead, he was a link to a fuzzy and strange past.

But sometimes -- especially those times when he would just be staring at the ceiling -- Rick could convey such a feeling of gloom and sadness that it really made me think twice about wanting to grow up at all.

It was at times like that he would often just pick up and wander off by himself. I never really knew where he went. Except for that one time I followed him.

It was a bright Sunday morning and Rick couldn't have had more than two hours sleep after I heard him stagger in from his Saturday night out. Anyway, instead of joining me and my grandmother for breakfast, he just got up, showered and left without a word. Since my grandmother was off to a friend's house, I decided to do follow him.

So I followed him as he walked, sometimes crookedly, through the suburban streets of our town. Rick always seemed a bit out of place. As if he were a tourist to the world in which most people lived. The world was as strange to Rick, I suppose, as Rick was to the world. I followed him as he walked past shopping malls and fast food places and parking lots. I followed him as he peeked in store windows or stopped and looked up at the clear blue Sunday sky. Finally, he reached his destination.

It was a public park that lay maybe two miles from our house. As public parks go, it was not bad. Lots of space and green trees. And, since it was early yet, it was still very serene -- populated only by twittering birds and the morning sunshine.

I followed him as he deliberately made his way through the foliage, cracking twigs with his tattered shoes and rustling the bushes as he pushed through them. The air was fresh and clean, the trees dripped moisture from the evening cold, and the feeling you got from breathing in that morning air was like being clean all over. It was just me and him and the silence. I was having fun because I was following him. But I wondered whathewas following.

Finally, he emerged from the foliage and walked out into a grassy clearing that was surrounded by trees on all sides. He stood there, his rather bulky frame clothed in second-hand store fashion: a ratty jacket, the worn and tired looking brown sweater, the shirt with the frayed collar and the pants that were a size too small for him. He stood there, out in the center of that green, having all that space and silence to himself (or so he thought) and pushed back his jacket and put his hairy hands on his hips. And he stood there like that and merely put his face up into the sun, as if maybe he waited there long enough like that, the hand of God would come and take him away.

But, no, he couldn't have thought that. Rick was a life-long atheist. And even through all of his drinking and drugging and depressions, he never lost his deep faith that no such thing as God existed. And, in fact, about the only thing he ever wrote (besides his notebooks) was an anti-religious tract called "God: The Con Man."

So I stood there, still hidden in the foliage, waiting for him to do something. But he didn't. He just stood there for what must have been an eternity. The smile he had on his face wasn't a blissful smile. It was a determined smile. The smile of a man whom the world has taken a fancy to beating down but who will grab his share of satisfaction nonetheless.

Finally, being a kid, I had enough of waiting. Pushing the branches I had been standing in aside, I just strode out beside him.

"Rick, what are you doing?" I asked.

It's the kind of question you ask somebody for a very specific reason in light of a very specific thing. But it didn't come out that way. Sometimes the world takes the small things you do -- like an innocent, specific question -- and somehow turns it into something much bigger than you intended. It has something to do with you and the person you're talking to and just the way the world is. Anyway, my question came out sounding much bigger and more general than it should've. It came out sounding like a question about his entire life. My question to Rick became the world's question to Rick.

And even though I was too young to ask that kind of question, I knew, standing there in all that Sunday morning sunshine and splendor, that it came out sounding that way anyway. And he knew I knew.

He didn't do anything for a moment. He just stood there like he had before I said anything. As if perhaps by ignoring me, I'd go away. But then he sighed deeply and looked down at me, taking his hands off his hips. Even in the midst of all the Sunday morning freshness and the purifying dew of the park, I could smell that smell of alcohol and tobacco he exuded. That smell of decay he carried with him.

He turned towards the bushes out of which we had come and pointed.

"You see that light over there in the trees?" he asked, quietly but confidently.

I looked over there. Into the trees where he said the light was.

"No," I replied. For there wasn't any damn light over there. Just the morning dew dripping off the leaves and branches.

"Well, that's what you could say I'm doing. I'm chasing that light," Rick said, ignoring my answer. He wasn't about to let a simple thing like a contested perception stand in the way of his dramatic flourish.

That was a long time ago. Over twenty years, in fact. In the meantime, Rick and I have seen each other very rarely. I went through a couple of marriages, a couple of careers, and more than a couple of broken dreams.

Soon after that summer, Rick moved into some seedy boarding house on Sixth Street in San Francisco, the heart of Skid Row. He's been there ever since. Living on welfare and writing in his notebooks. It was also there that he wrote his book about God. The Con Man.

I went to see him there a few years ago and found him passed out in a bare room the size of a closet, with a naked light bulb hanging from an electrical wire. He lay on a filthy and discolored mattress that smelled of urine. There was no linen. Some empty beer and whisky bottles lay scattered on the bare floor. An old box of cookies, a roach or two on the wall, and old paperbacks and notebooks strewn about the room completed the pretty picture. Rick was snoring as he lay there, just like I had remembered him doing all those years ago in my room.

I decided not to disturb him. I did, however, notice one thing before I left. A faded copy ofCatcher in the Ryelaying on the floor next to his outstretched hand.

The last I heard Rick had sworn off all of us relatives. Another uncle of mine went to try and visit him, along with some cousins. But Rick came down to see who had rung his room, only to turn his back and walk away when he recognized them. They said that he muttered something about them being "Christian Nazis who had wired his head so they could persecute him."

So I wondered what kind of light Rick was looking for there on skid row.

And me, well, like I said, I've been up and down and all around. And if I'm not on skid row, I'm not exactly raking in the millions, either.

But, you see, now I'm a writer, too.

I'll be sitting here at the typewriter late at night sometimes and I'll think about Rick. I'll think back to that time he came to stay with us and I followed him that Sunday morning into the park. About how he stood there with his face to the sun, then pointed over into those trees when I asked him the world's question.

And I have to smile a small smile and shake my head. Because after all these years, now I'm chasing that damn light, too.