Uncle Teddy died this morning. He rotted away near the end but we were all most shocked that he lived this long. But he really did live, like a fire in a dry forest on an endless night, he roared in all directions.
This guy had a native intellect that defied high school, which he left when he ran away to San Francisco at age 16 in 1966. Stories of my grandmother walking through the communes up there as the last beatnik Victorians were absorbing the early flood of kids who were preternaturally hip and would become Hippies.
He got into narcotics in a short time and would never abandon them, nor bemoan them. His brilliance could be mirrored in a fascinating statistic: forty plus years on smack and never arrested. He had that gift of gab called charisma and it must have served him well, along with almost psychic street smarts.
Now don’t take this as a love-fest. He was, first and foremost, a taker and a spoiler. You might stare in wonder as you realized he had managed to be quite content and fulfilled, healthy and upbeat without ever having worked a day in his life and then he would say the nastiest thing that cut to your soul, and not even for some demented, dysfunctional pleasure but simply to fill the air. And what hurt was that the pain he inflicted was delivered all so matter of fact, so convincingly. But that charisma was backed with a wild journey few ever took and there was no screening his words – one time he was hanging out with us and stated waxing about the joy he had over a scab developing at his injection point that he could lift, shoot up, and push back down and some of the little nieces or nephews are standing there listening and we aren’t even supposed to say “fuck” around them and here is this guy taking us all down the unknown pleasure path of junkie minutia and I was paralyzed with panic the kids would parrot this shit to the parents and equally fascinated over what he would say next.
My father was nineteen years older than him. Could there be two more opposite people from the same DNA? Think about 1929 and 1948 – bookending quite the deep dive America took, they describe two separate generations – the one raised during the Great Depression and the one raised during the plentiful 1950s. Teddy took those days of plenty to heart and fancied himself a “Seeker” in a world that had so much to give and give … and he took and took and took, high in the sky for most of it.
One day I met another long-term junkie, Keith Richards, at a recording studio. Friends were making an album across the hall from them. A few of us were walking through the lobby and Keith stopped for a quick “hey fellas” chat. He instantly reminded me of Teddy, top to bottom – the slur in his speech, the self-administered cackle at every phrase, the twitching that had long turned into bastardized tai-chi mannerisms. So I spoke to Keith like I would speak to Teddy when I wanted to hear some wild junkie sixties tales. You can bring up anything and Teddy, the center of the room, spun a tale of depth and description, outlandish facts and embellished details for a little decor. Now the only thing about this is, you will be in the middle of this wild narrative and after about ninety seconds the thing starts to fade in his mind. His voice cracks, the rollercoaster he created doesn’t crash, it just… disappears. A fried egg is not sharp but a fried brain can still be sharp until you hit part of the mushy center or the crispy edge. And so what I learned with Teddy was to not coax another hairpin turn out of the ride we were just on, but rather to bring up a new topic, to metaphorically holler “fasten seat belts”, to cue up that gift of gab and clutch of exploits and instantly inspire him to let another one rip!
And there we were, in the lobby of A&M Records and Keith Richards is a freakin’ xerox of Teddy. I get him started on a casual tale of his winter vacation and just as he peters out at a minute and a half of monologue madness I impolitely introduce another topic – ah but there are no ill-mannered sleights in Friedbrainville, just the joy and taking centerstage and riffing out a precious recollection of some unbelievable glory or hilarious tragedy. And I keep Keith going like this, like I had done with Teddy, tale after tale, entertainment from the bard with stories on a path I would never dare walk down. People thought Keith and I were old mates when the sound engineer finally walked in on the festivities about an hour later and tugged at his shirtsleeve.
I might add that Keith was aware enough, perhaps good manners picked up in London, to not tell stories with the gutter vocabulary of Teddy. Teddy bluntly chose the worst possible word to describe people, in hindsight or in front of them, it made no difference. Ill-mannered, politically incorrect, or just a downright mean bastard, his words were raw and his life was sordid and you were getting it all when he spoke. If he entered the room and you had not warned people of what was about to explode, you had to gather your friends fast and flee – if they were five pounds overweight they were “fat fucks”, women were all “whorish blowfish” and need I pass on how he described anyone who wasn’t white or straight? He was shooting up to kill some pain, some inexplicable thing that needed to stay numb, some perceived wrong from a childhood that did not do him all that wrong, really. But if his mangled hate was just the salt and if you had no open wound you would eventually find the sugar. He had an aesthetic for antiques and details in embroidery that would defy any notion of him as a thieving junkie but there it was, capping on modernist furniture as “Fifties Ugly” and obsessing about floral relief patterns within seconds of barking that he would put a bullet in the head of a passing homeless person.
It must have been a wild ride, the people you meet and the places you go when you are always fixing to avoid feeling. The last few years the HepC was eating him up but otherwise he was shockingly unscathed by decades of grabbing everything he could and using it all up with no conscience to ever consider doing it any other way. There are a bunch more Teddy stories, none believable but all true.