Another weekend, another Monday taking stock of the aftermath.  Thanks to Bobby V. and Karen for the Rancho Cucamonga shower curtain and for the concrete, should add a couple more feet to the wall when the wind stops.  Thanks to our other weekend guests for their contributions and for the first ever double ear piercing at East Jesus.

And thanks to an old friend of Charlie’s who sent me this e-mail.  I edited it a bit.

He arrived home safely on Friday, the tenth of June, 2011 at around nine at night. The kids were already in bed, but Grace was still awake, so she came down and did a cursory inspection. “coooool” she had said. Later, when leaving for soccer practice she had said ‘can we take the cool car?’. He smiled to himself and thought they had made it under the bar where the kids grow to the age to be embarrassed by such foolishness.

Saturday, a high school acquaintance and onetime girlfriend of Charlie’s, Linda, posted a one-line Facebook message to his gmail Facebook account, the account he doesn’t use so much anymore.

It said simply:

‘Charlie Russell died May 12’

Sunday, He saw the email from Facebook with that one line.

“Bullshit”, he thought. He wrote her back “wtf you talking about”, then sent a reply to his last email from Charlie from April first: “Charlie, are you there?”

There was no response.

Charlie died in his sitting chair, apparently peacefully, apparently from some kind of natural causes, perhaps from a heart attack. He had been complaining of back and stomach pain for a few days, and had had a local friend stay with him. He was starting to feel better, and the friend went home, only to return the next day to a dead Charlie, still sitting where he had been left the night before. There was no sign of struggle. Charlie was forty six, same as him.

Charlie was a strange and wonderful guy, and a dear friend, and he was afraid of Charlie, because Charlie said things that he did not understand, or only understood minutes or years later. But sometimes Charlie said silly things that made no sense, so it was always a puzzle to untangle the words.

Charlie was very smart. Charlie beat him at chess with monotonous ease, which he found humiliating, since he thought of himself as a smart kind of guy, and this was also his reputation. When he was 10 or so, he made a perspective drawing of the word ‘LAZER’ and proudly showed it to Charlie. Charlie said ‘you misspelled Laser’.

Charlie helped him make the Electric Dog Polisher for Mom for Christmas one year. She was very impressed. She loved Charlie because he was such a naughty boy. Charlie made the analogy between sneeze and orgasm in front of Mom, and Mom laughed. This only confused the others.

Charlie and he would climb in and out of Charlie’s second story bedroom window just for fun. It was allowed. Charlie’s dad took them for drives around the neighborhood in his old manual automatic beetle; it was a manual shift without a clutch, which was very cool. The paint was faded red and it was a most glorious thing to behold.

Charlie could be mean. He once needed help at the bus stop downtown near Lincoln First Square, and handed Charlie his books. Charlie reached to hold them, then didn’t grab them and they all fell into a puddle. He felt betrayed by this act of foolishness on Charlie’s part.

Charlie came to their wedding. He was polite and charming; he had a brief chat with Eric in German before there was any idea of Germany for them. He has no more recollection of Charlie’s presence at the wedding. He wishes he could remember more.

After they moved to Redwood City, somehow they got in touch with Charlie, and he drove up and spent some time. He loved to mess around with Grace but would also say slightly inappropriate things which made the others just a little uncomfortable. Charlie penned the Th. Metzger poem “Cinnabar Charm”on his artcar bus at the curb outside their home on Castle Hill Road. He also installed his solar panel there; on the pop top. For the chocolate martinis.

Charlie worked his way south to the desert after they had left for Berlin, founding his own alternative community in the Bureau of Land Management managed, ex-army depot called ‘Slab City’. His contribution was named ‘East Jesus, population 1’. They kind of lost touch after that apart from the sporadic emails back and forth. Because of the time lag perhaps, the correspondence became more personal.

Here is an excerpt from the last exchanges between them: 

31.Mar.2011

“Hey Chuck,

Franz!

how are you? what is up? are you still in slab city?

Well; the sky; affirmative!

…..

we’re in roch(ester, NY) as you well know. its been nearly 4 years here. i think you’ve been in touch with mom. she is still going strong though does not walk much and is in and out wrt reality. she has alot of anxiety and fear. Jim and I visit 1 or 2x per week. the winter has taken its toll on her: edema, etc.

Yeah, we corresponded some around the holidays…. seems like it was a struggle for her (and her assistant) to get even a short email out, but she was DOING it, which says a lot. I’m amazed she’s still hanging on. My dad’s death was – from my perspective – a fucking walk in the park. One day he called and told me he had cancer and it was serious; we talked on the phone about once a week for that summer, and then he died. He was “with it” all the way to hospice. I didn’t fly to Roch to see him on his deathbed and he understood; he would have already gone to sleep forever by the time I got there.

the kids are growing. i’m still looking for weekender vanagon, maybe one in virginia.

hope you are well. I visited Meg’s grave on her birthday the 13th. it was cold and wet and the kids ran around and the dog disappeared over the gorge several times only to reappear minutes later at full blast, muddy and panting. we scavenged flags and flowers that had blown away from others loved ones and stacked them high around the footstone. it angers me that i spend effort to talk to her without response. and my hands have become so frail and wrinkled; i stare at them while driving. the sun makes it stand out in especially madenning relief. we are aging and it is ungainly – for me at least. perhaps i am just dehydrated…

Aging is just one of those things. It is inevitable. I have seen people age gracefully, and others not so. I am rehearsing a cheerful, pleasant and very, very gradual fading out into oblivion. And I’m aggressively fighting the known biological enemies of youth. Getting serious about exercise finally, for the first time in like 6 years. Helps having a dog to walk every morning, and this chick out here turned me on to kettlebells, which made it a whole lot easier and cheaper to start weight training again…. you only need one.

I miss Meg too. It still feels weird that she died years and years before I ever heard about it. I guess it was the kick in the pants reminder that I had let a lot of my friendships languish from inattention. But in this life, there are only so many hours in the day, and so many letters you can write and so many calls you can make, and then the eight million other things on your mind…. but it sounds like you need to eat some ice cream. I’m sure your hands look fine.

tell me what is new in your life.

Aw, mind your own goddam business!!

Lots more solar finally installed, with some more still to be slung up; the monster batteries are healthy and performing better than expected, though the real stress tests are yet to come. Been getting about 18kWH/day, now running A/C in the afternoon and the batteries are still full enough that they spend about 4 hrs in absorption mode… took the plunge and got started on aquaponics – just the planning stage right now, but it’s pretty exciting and, as it turns out, very well suited to my climate. tilapia, tomatoes, basil, flowers, green onions, mixed greens, peppers if i can figure them out. I started making no-knead bread and I’m totally hooked. Now all I dream about is viticulture, olive groves, citrus trees… goats, chickens, and a few pigs… I began humanure composting a few months ago and that kind of radically changed my life for the better – now I view shit and piss as valuable chemical nutrients when managed properly. The whole civilized world is still shitting into its drinking water, which is a perversity perhaps on par with greenhouse gas emissions…. For about two months a friend camped across the way came over and donated an enormous amount of labor to the extension of my bottle wall (shit i still have to post some pictures somewhere….), I adopted a cat in November and just last week a dog, another dog coming soon (I picked her out of the litter in the fall, she’s still growing up.) Got lots and lots and LOTS of indoors-type projects ready for the long summer – radio stuff, reading, music. I haven’t gotten laid since Burning Man 2009. Hoping to establish a 501(c)-3 soon, if for not other reason than so I can apply for grants and pay artists and engineers I like to come live here and do their work, and have decent health coverage. What else? I’m slowly putting a ’79 Toyota pickup back into shape, a wonderfully decrepit vehicle with a heart of gold. My pack mule, my rite of passage into white trash desert rat adulthood. East Jesus itself is acquiring a growing cult following, and a few insanely generous contributors. One guy has already brought me like 3.5kW of photovoltaic panels, 4kW of diesel gen power, and has been refurbishing two Kubota diesel gensets, all from military throw-aways. Me having a MARS license makes the process of recovery and donation very easy, so it turns out that was a good thing for me to spend last spring/summer on. The International Brotherhood of Hitchikers [sic] have established their permanent, year-round camp on the outskirts of EJ, which I’m glad about. Just had a dozen college kids camping out in back for their spring break, and man, nothing has ever made me feel so old. The youngest woman I can even get a hard-on for is about 35. Shit, 35 sounds old to me. How the fuck did I get to be 46? Can’t complain, though, I’m still in my prime afaik. And I’m thinking if I keep myself together and healthy for another 25-30, I can buy another century or two. Learn to play the piano, master architecture, sculpture, bioinformatics, yadda yadda, and get really good at writing erotic horror fiction…

You? Xerox? Family? Kids?

Thanks for writing, I always appreciate hearing from you. If I take a while to respond, rest assured it’s only cuz I need a day or two to think of what to write.

Charlie

And then, a day later…

1.Apr.2011

“Franz,

Let me ramble a bit, quasi-random responses to things, just blurting out -unedited- what the moment brings…

……

Contrastingly, my father expressed a great deal of enthusiasm and interest in what I was doing out here in the desert, having explored the Mojave with his family at a very young age. When I told him I was building *into* the trees and attracting hummingbirds by the dozens, he said, “THAT’S creation!” Someday I’ll bump into a ceramic statue of St. Francis and put it in one of the gardens as an homage to him.

Just had a funny thought… you know how some carny jerkoffs (and serial killers) have LOVE and HATE tattoo’d across their knuckles? I’ve never seen HAWK and DOVE…..

As a friendly gesture I bought a working mom out here a complete tattoo setup recently. She’s been busy. Today I saw my neighbor Marty, a 50-something hitchhiker with a miniature pinscher companion, with his new cartoon caricature of himself & his dog out on the road, thumbs out… i was quite impressed by the lack of blood and scabbing, and the coloration was pretty good. I have commissioned her to give me a tattoo of a butt with a tattoo of a butt on it on my butt. Note the clever recursion. What ever happened to Beavis & Butt-Head?

I started working out too – my bp was way over 140 and i was getting worried. but after working out and taking L-arginine for few months, its under control – 109/81 tonight after my little round on the nautilus machines.

I have no idea what my BP is. Would I become liable for some of the Mexican Gulf oil disaster if I did? I don’t care to know what I weigh, either. All I want to know is, 1) can I see my penis on a cold morning? 2) how much does it hurt when I bend over to pick something up; 3) Could I hike the Appalachian Trail for my 50th birthday? I think the most important thing is to actually commit to something; otherwise, what the fuck are we doing? A daily walk 20 minutes long is WAY better than just sitting on my arse all day; add to that a 25-min kettlebell workout 3-4 times a week, and already I don’t look quite so disgustingly fat and hopeless as I did same time last year. This is my niveau; this is what I’m aiming for: not being gross and disgusting. It’s going to happen eventually, but I have to make damn sure that when that time comes, I’m a fucking celebrity and the young nurses have to fight each other over the privilege to wipe my ass. And I’ll be nice to them, and appreciative, and as articulate about my appreciation as I can be… “Nancy? Izzat you? You got SUCH a NICE ass…. I’m so glad you don’t mind wiping the fecal matter from my mummified BUTTOCKS…. how bout a hand job?”

My midlife crisis is starting to bloom and i find myself thinking of legacy, but also just the stark fear of mortality.

Yeah, that.

Mortality. I think it was last spring when it started bugging me, and it was different now, because when I was just some snot-nosed punk motherfucker I had nothing to lose, so death meant nothing to me, and now I found myself in my “MidLife Crisis” age thinking, “Jesus Christ, if this is colon cancer, I am SO TOTALLY FUCKED…” I got plans now, and work to do, and Holy Shit is this the WRONG TIME TO DIE…

But fuck, man, you could get run over by a frigging bread truck tomorrow morning. You could die in your sleep. You could zip-out any second. And this is part of your LIFE. And it’s part of what keeps you going. The samurai contemplates daily the many forces that could annihilate him – being burned alive; being engulfed by water; being torn apart by animals or enemies; being cast out into the cold emptiness of space…

Legacy. I got no kids, I can’t relate on an even playing field, but I feel ya. I worry a lot about my unborn children, and how they’re going to take care of my shit when I’ve turned to dust. And even if it’s not my offspring, it’s gonna be a quorum of close friends….

Mom said to me the other day, in between anxieties of her massive black weekend aid who uses the dreaded lifting machine to get her off the toilet, she said “I’m still afraid to die. I’m not ready”. which makes me nuts because you should be getting ready to die when you know its coming but that’s when we will hold on most tightly, at least until the 7 stages start to kick in.

I started seriously contemplating my mortality when I was in my mid-twenties, in Germany (may be an optimal place to reflect upon death, I dunno….) And I got through it, and I realized death was OK. Now my only trouble was, what to do with my life….

Now that I have something I might call a life, after all these years, it means a whole fucking lot more to me than it ever did, but I’ll be damned if death is gonna cramp my style…. No matter how long I think I may live, death is the great inevitable. Even if we figure out how to slow entropy down to zero, the Universe will ultimately slow down to nothing…. I do indeed hope for – and strive for – a radical extension of life, but death is still my friend, and I hold him very close

……..

INVEST IN YOURSELF. BELIEVE IN YOURSELF. TRUST YOURSELF. GOD MADE YOU YOU FOR A REASON.

Make sense?

I love you, Franz., I really do. You are like family to me, and I’m sorry I don’t say that as often as might be fitting…

Charlie”

It clearly made sense to Charlie. Unfortunately, his plan didn’t exactly pan out as expected. But life and death rarely go according to plan. Charlie always put out the impression of surety, which could have been authentic, they’ll never know. Charlie’s strong opinions were compelling; he could convince those of us with weaker wills just by his forceful speech and salty language. In this case though it was more than a little off.

……

Charlie did have a quorum of close friends and it sounded like they pulled together to protect his compound after they found out. Stuff in slab city generally gets disassembled and the possessions pilfered pretty quickly after someone leaves (one way or another). Sort of a self cleaning system they have; ad hoc, but efficient. Charlie’s quorum was actively rounding up support for 24/7 guarding until they came up with some solution to this problem. It’s not clear how that worked out, but that’s all going down in California, and they are in New York, with no plans of getting back there to assist in the effort.

He’s been poking around Charlie’s website, which is still up. He feels silly that he didn’t look at this before; it’s great stuff. He hadn’t appreciated how versatile and talented Charlie was. Now it feels like lurking; posthumous peeping tom. While listening to these songs, he half expects Charlie to talk directly to him out of the media player, ask how he liked it, ask for a donation to his 503c, ask for a cigarette. He recommends the videos. The Leonard Cohen stuff is really very good. Stahlrohr zum Dritten Auge reminds him of Eno.

Just googling Charlie now, there are many many eulogies, and regrets of not spending more time to visit and keep in touch with Charlie, which makes this whole rant redundant. But it’s His, so He’ll keep it.