The Missing & Unforgotten

There are probably 100-odd people whose lives have at one time been intertwined with mine. The list of memories is full of double binds and half-hearted half starts. If you know of any of these people, please let me know. I've gotten to a point in my life where knowing that others have survived helps me understand my own continuation. Thus, these are the names of a few of the lost but not forgotten:

John Bush, Jacksonville Beach, FL 1972
John owned a place called the Sandpiper Hotel. There was no fancy sign out front, no neon blinking in the windows. Just two stories of simple rooms with baths, and two "penthouse" rooms on the roof. I rented from John from the time the Saratoga got back from the Med cruise, 1971, until I got out of the USN in 1972. He helped me put an antenna on the roof so I could play radio. Hauled me out of trouble a couple times when I got too drunk, this long before I'd begun renting the room from him.
The last time I was in Jacksonville Beach (about 20-odd years ago), the Sandpiper was a parking lot & none of the winos in the liquour store & bar across the street knew anything about the place, other than it had caught fire & been invaded by motorcycle bikers.

John Coughlin, RMSN, USN, USS Saratoga 1972
John was one of two guys who ran message boards back and forth from the MPC on the Sara to the Captain on the bridge. John was just about as crazy as a person could get away with being, out there in the middle of the ocean with a couple thousand other misfits. He's one of many folks from that time I often wonder about. Hope he was a survivor.

Steve Doyle, Dayton, OH 1970
Faint rumors once had it that Steve did not survive the 60s. People used to think we were brothers because I had adopted so many of his mannerisms. Like eyes almost shut looking out at the world over the bridge of his nose, head tilted back as if he were on the nod. He & a girlfriend moved out to Colorado while I was in the USN.

Joy Eastman, University of Florida, Gainesville 1972
I met Joy when I was hanging around with some friends in Gainesville. Joy was a much more serious student than I would ever have been then, and she eventually graduated from UoF with a degree (and considerable experience) in journalism. She was a good friend. Her awareness of the play of people in time and space was deeply affectionate. I miss her friendship. The last time I saw her, she was sitting in a window seat on a Greyhound bus, headed for Columbus, Ohio. According to public records available on the interweb, Joy married in Florida in the mid-70s. She and her brother & sister are still among the kicking. At least in print.

Janet Norton, University of Florida, Gainesville 1972
I have no pictures of Janet Norton, whom I met in 1971 via the friendship of two other people, one of whom passed on in the middle 70s. Janet's face, her friendly, elfin smirk of a grin, her honey blond hair and the sparkle of her eyes haunt me almost daily. Our relationship was silly, in many ways, because I kept my physical distance from her, pausing once to put my arm around her at a University of Florida (Gainesville) theatre entrance and then quickly drawing it away. For some stupid reason, I felt that my touch might seem threatening to her. She was a good friend and a soft voice when I listened. I never told her that I loved her, although my spirit was bouyed by her being part of my life.
At one time I thought that she had died, basing that belief on a record in the SSDI for someone by her name. That particular Janet Norton died 10 July 1993 in Zellwood, Florida. She would have been 47. My memory of that time, although dim, places the Janet I knew as being born in very early 50s, which would make her something like 54 today. Perhaps some day she'll come upon this page & wonder who I am. As if these pages did not tell . . .

Rich Richardson, RM2, USN, Ramey AFB 1968
Rich was my watch section supervisor for the first year-and-a-half at Ramey. He & I and a guy named Bruce Gilbert worked together. It was a weird team. Rich as from New York, street wise & crazy enough to regard the two white guys in his section as two visitors from another planet. He went home to New York from Ramey; I've often wondered what ever happened to him once he got home. He had talked about getting a government job working in the same communications area he'd seen in the USN.

Dennis Vorhies, OT2, USN, Ramey AFB 1968
I think I still owe Dennis money. I first met him when I was up late one night in the first few weeks I was at Ramey AFB in Puerto Rico. He came in howling drunk with one of the other guys, staggered into my room and asked me if I wanted to fight. I told him he probably didn't either. Later on, after we'd gotten used to each other we'd go out drinking and end up in deep philosophical discussions about things I don't remember. He left the NAVFAC for home in Washington State a few months before I got transfered. I slowed down on my drinking about that time too. Another survivor, I hope.

Fred Walton, EMSN, USN, Ramey AFB, 1969
Fred was one of the Puerto Rico gang. Everybody thought that he was crazy; maybe he was. He had an unruly demeanor that put most folks off. He drank with one of the other guys whose life was shattered at Ramey. With Fred the shattering came later . . . which is why he's listed here and below.

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Ellos Que Quedan Solo en Memorias Those Who Have Gone or Have Chosen to Leave

Every life has a history of discoveries, joys, tumult & losses. My life is thus no different than any other. There are places and things that have been such a part of my life that their sudden disappearances have touched me. I usually find out about these now unretrievable moments by accident, in obits in the newspapers, or news items in radio broadcasts.

Ben Guild
I had known Ben since the music started. We'd both been among the first students to open up the history of Wright State University, back in the early, middle & late 60s, when our lives seemed so bullet proof and resistant to wear. But time seems to have worn on Ben more savagely than most of the rest & he departed this life one autumn afternoon in a recent October. He left behind a string of friends & colleagues who formed a line around the block outside the funeral home where his jaded form finally came to rest. Now all that is left is the memory of his cane on the tiles, his limp & laughter in the hallways and his almost Fidelista swagger & moderate improprieties. His passing makes me more aware of the mortality that shadows us all and of that certain dread of the dark that keeps me alive. Era cabrón, este hombre, y ahora solo puedo decir que el ánima se fue.

Kathy Alexander
This woman's face is the face that I remember now, eyes searching my face as we said good-bye many years ago. I met her first at the Ringgold Street hangout of a local hippie potentate, back in the late 60s when I was, as Bukowski so wisely noted near the end, "so unbelievably young." Kathy and I shared a space and time that is rivaled in my memory only by two other women's places in my life. I last saw her in 1971, when I was home for a weekend from the USN. We met, we loved and we parted and I carried the look on her face with me across the Atlantic, around the Mediterranean and back to Florida. I last talked with her in 1972, when she called (collect) to a friend. She told me that she loved me and missed me. She said that she was going to Washington, DC, coming from her digs in California, and said that she would not be able to stop by and see me then. That was the last I heard of her until, some years ago, Cindy pointed out a death announcement in the local paper. That was 15 June, 1985. Kathy died at the age of 38, a victim of the 60s.

Terry Graham
I learned from Bob Stanton (leaning out of the rigging in the picture here) some months ago (circa Christmas, 1997) that Terry Graham, with whom I served time in the military in Puerto Rico, had died some years before. He was found floating face down in a river somewhere in France, apparently the victim of foul play. The story of Terry's eventual demise is his own. Suffice it to say that I owe to Terry a debt, for it was he and Bob who introduced me to the soul of Janet Norton, mentioned above. Bob and I have survived. That is all there is, except for the sorrow.

Jerome Fetsko
Back in 1964 or 1965, when it was just becoming fashionable for men to grow their hair any longer than an engineer's sideburns, Jerome Fetsko and I stood talking at a folding table in what was then the student lounge of the early forms of Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. We developed a friendship that included Indian "classical" music (both Karnatik and Dravidian), burned some reefer together and hung around with other hippy friends. We discussed languages, people and places and came to be the two guys who, if the other had survived and we'd both straightened out, would have been hell-on-wheels linguists. Jerome spoke Turkish and Russian and we spent time comparing how language worked, thinking in ways that only later became popular when Noam Chomsky became famous. The last time I talked to Jerome was one night around 1973, when he called and begged me to come over to his house and talk. I declined the invitation, saying that I was going out to get laid and spend some money in a bar with another man's wife. I didn't know that he had died until many years later, when another friend who had played in a band with Jerome, mentioned that he'd been gone.

Fred Walton
There was something strange about Fred Walton, something that was apparent from the first moment that I met him. He was one of the many drunks of NavFac Ramey (see above) and considered by some to be a complete nut case. When he got out of the USN in 1969, he went home to his parents in Indiana, where his behavior was deemed unredeeming and where he was subjected to a series of electro-shock therapies that left him pretty much blotto. I last heard from Fred while I was still in Puerto Rico. I wrote in response to his description of his hospitalization with words of encouragement. I thought they were words of encouragement, at least. His sister felt otherwise and send me a scathing letter telling me in no uncertain terms to stay the hell out of her brother's shattered life. This was, of course, long before Vietnam vets were recognized to have what is today a well known psychopathology of "post-traumatic stress syndrome." If Fred is still alive, given the technology of medical science, I would consider the possibilities of divine intervention to be fairly considerable. Otherwise, as my life has taught me, we have hell enough here as it is.

William S. Burroughs, Jr.
I will miss William Burroughs. He was a voice on paper from my younger times, one of many whose style struck me full face on. Of all of them, he is the one who taught me most. I remember thinking, when I was a young sailor, that he had trashed language as time and rewritten space between the words. There was an incessant carnality in Burroughs' work that I was reading then. Ticket that Exploded. Nova Express. A short story in Playboy magazine. Time itself in Mexico, one hundred years of solitude.
Such solitude is evident in Burroughs' last words, recorded in his journal and presented in a recent New Yorker magazine to a witless world as witness for Burroughs' own self-awareness of the presence of ending.
So now William Burroughs is gone, his voice silent, his eyes closed to the softness of sunsets and the forecasts of sunrises, his friends mourning the empty space of his missing energy. And I easily see in his passing that my story is going on until finally someday, like my father's story or like Burroughs' story, I will say no more and become the ultimate hombre invisible.