The Egatz Epitaph

A FoE just pointed me in the direction of this brief article by James Gavin for the not immediately identifiable site The Morning Call. Despite the brevity of the story and the site, which badly needs a redesign (call me, editors. My team awaits.), it got me thinking about something I literally think of every couple of days. Letter writing.

I miss letter writing. Badly. I had twenty years of intense letter writing with friends and other writers. Sometimes it was one-sided. I’d need therapy and would fire Howitzers of written rants about my life. Other times, I’d be on the receiving end, and take great pleasure in reading long letters about what they were doing far away. Now they’re either deceased or passed on to something worse: married lives where they’ve stopped being who they once were because of time constraints caused by financial pressures, television, home repair, and on and on and on.

My last great letter-writing friend was the poet Tom Trzaskos. I miss Tom rather badly. We were only in each others’ presence a few times during my long run working at the Sarah Lawrence Summer Writers’ Conference. His saint of a mother, Theresa, would drive him all the way down from central Connecticut for just a few hours, where he was able to glow in new surroundings and many other poets. He made no secret he loved me. As an only child, I imagine he loved me the way close brothers love one another.

Tom spent all the years I knew him in a wheelchair. He suffered from a progressive genetic disease not unlike amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or multiple sclerosis. He wrote me about it but I never asked him what the official diagnosis was. It didn’t matter. We lived far enough away that we rarely saw each other. Ours was a friendship of letters, and in that, there was something much richer than friends who see each other every week.

He had nothing but time, and I’d send him a letter, only to be replied to a few days later by an eight or ten page monologue about poetry, women, politics, or all that and more. The following day, I’d get another, then another. There was no way I could keep up, but I tried to write at least once a week. As my own life included other duties, my replies wouldn’t be as frequent, which was always a source of guilt.

Tom loved science fiction and spent endless hours making VHS tapes of space scenes from films and editing them together as he saw fit. He dreamed of spaceflight for himself, and the parallels between him and Stephen Hawking, whom he didn’t care much for, were unavoidable. With his own body failing him, but his mind brilliant, Tom would occasionally write me about the possibility of downloading his consciousness into some data format to be recompiled at a later time, i.e., eternal life.

The biggest thing in my life during those years was writing and women, two things you can never truly believe you’re doing your best at. There’s always room to improve in some way, it seems. I’ve written essays unread by others on parallels between these two issues. Maybe now with the Egatz Epitaph is back in action, I’ll post them some day.

That’s mostly what I wrote Tom about, I’m sure: writing and women. He always replied with encouragement to send more. He liked reading my crazy dating tales, my miserable struggles to attain the mate perfect for me, my stupid decisions, my tragic leavings. He wrote me in vivid detail of his own limited dating experience before becoming wheelchair-bound. His descriptions of a girl he took to one dinner were so heartbreaking I’ve often thought of looking her up to let her know.

One thing which made me crazy was reading about Tom falling in love with his caregivers. He was forced to live with his mother, and she worked a day job. Eventually, he needed full-time care, and I would see him go through emotional train derailments, pouring every waking second into his feelings for women who were just doing their jobs. He gave one of them a considerable amount of cash, while all she did was talk about a guy she was in a relationship with. It was tragic, but his letters were so rich and moving I couldn’t help but read them carefully, savoring the richness. It was difficult to not want to scream advice, but Tom had few options for emotional connections with the outside world.

His letters were filled with other pieces of heartbreak. The father who left long ago, and the soulless teenagers who once pulled him out of his wheelchair to leave him lying on a sidewalk were among two of the standouts I think of ten years after receiving my last letter from him.

We disagreed wildly over what we thought was good poetry. I did my thing fairly consistently, but Tom was all over the place. He suffered from the incomprehensibility of some kind of postmodern-tainted, broken narrative. His poems were often about the caregivers he had fallen in love with, and hence, they were, to use one of his favorite words, tragic. As equally important as sharing our poems, we turned each other on to different writers. I know Georg Trakl and Tomas Tranströmer thanks to Tom, for instance. I turned him on to Frank Stanford, whom Tom thought I looked like. He became absolutely obsessed with Stanford. He wrote letters to everyone he could find who knew the late poet. Later, he became pen pals with Ginny Stanford, Frank’s widow.

Tom couldn’t be bothered with submitting his poems to magazines and journals. He had been through that route before I met him, and as I later would, he gave up. Unlike myself, he self-published two large format books, which look like Kinko’s jobs: spiral bound, poorly designed, but full of hope, vision, and heart. Both were published in 1994. One is entitled A Gardening of Moonlight Beings, the other, Anglaise. They are varied, and, at times, seem as if they were written by different writers. I keep them on my bookshelves with all the other volumes published by firms with names you’d recognize.

I was dating a yoga instructor when Tom died. I hadn’t heard from him in a month or two, and that was very uncharacteristic. I wrote him a long letter about my new relationship, and how I thought it would be the last one I would ever have, which is how many people, including romantic poets, think each good one will be. Of course, it wasn’t. Tom’s mother wrote me back to explain he had passed away in a hospital after he was unable to battle off a germ which resulted in pneumonia. She had too many things going on to deal with a nutcase who wrote letters to her son, so I was unaware of his funeral. It felt like I lost him twice. Selfish, yes, but that is what letter writing is about: detailing what’s happening to us and waiting for commentary, giving advice when it’s rarely asked for.

My yoga instructor girlfriend cried when she read the obituary and newspaper article Tom’s mother cut out and sent to me. She said, “How could someone do that? How could someone pull a person out of a wheelchair and leave them on the ground?” Well, they’re human, and humans are capable of terrible things when their minds are closed. But what struck me as more profound than understanding cruelty of humans was that Tom’s accounts of the incident were infinitely deeper and vivid than what some newspaper hack had written. Tom was not only a poet, but a letter writer. He mined what he was and made literature out of it; a kind of literature rapidly disappearing from the world. We are all complicitous in this with each phone call made and each email sent—as complicitious as someone who watches the disabled pulled from wheelchairs and do nothing to intercede.

Of course, I miss Tom, and still love him like a lost brother I’m awaiting return from some difficult campaign. Of course, I know the reality, but I still find myself walking to the mailbox and looking for his crazy scrawl on an envelope. I can walk to the mailbox, unlike my old friend. Sometimes I find myself getting up on a ladder or crawling under my car or grabbing the woman I love and thinking how Tom couldn’t do these things for much of his life. In that, I feel selfish and guilty and mournful. As with so much of what writers do, I not only miss reading him, but I miss the opportunity to write him back. I have much to share with him; much more than an email or a phone call could ever convey.

Thanks to Oddity411.