When Dying Was Hard...

 

An older gentleman, a kindly neighbor of mine whom I'll encounter frequently, confounds me.  He is a fellow taller and somewhat stouter than my humble frame.  He is endowed with a diaphragm that sends his voice blocks further than mine. He's also notable for a tendency for something I've long been incapable of.  He can laugh his ass off at length.

There are a good many who at worst may find such a trait just slightly annoying.  At some point in time, I might have myself.  But in fact I don't, really.  I've come to look upon this wise fellow with great awe. If anything, any annoyance on my part is generated by a genuine envy.  I see this man double over in giggles at the slightest, most foolish little joke, and I don't see a man well beyond my middle years.  I see the eleven-year old boy I was in this same province over forty years ago.

Not since my pre-adolescent years can I recall such a steady run of predictable non-stop laughter.  As a child, perhaps through to my late teens, I can well recall occasions of heavy laughter.  My home and family were the source of plenty of well-meant laughter and humor, when things weren't occasionally miserable.  You know, the usual domestic anthropological environment.  I was a pretty good childhood giggler.  My mother was known to crack up riotously, amidst her depressive cascades.   She held fast to the concept of laughter and humor not as some frivolous enjoyment, but as a desperate life force.  She knew it's value, and never took it for granted.

I was too small to understand such science, but I sure knew how to laugh when a laugh came my way.  And I needed it.  Daily life as a child was not a welcome environment.  I was much the quiet, scorned outcast, the Charlie Brown no one wanted in their circle.  I never really made the effort to relate to the interests of the other kids, since they weren't about to show me too much respect, anyway.  They were all absorbed with sports, Star Wars, and KISS.  I was way more content with old Simon & Garfunkel and Bob Dylan albums, Golden Age Of Television anthologies and the hand-creation of designed model Rock-Ola jukeboxes out of old cardboard boxes.  Not bad for a ten-year old.  It beat the isolation of a world I couldn't live within too well.

This didn't make the pending transition to middle school any easier.  Particularly in view of the self-generated letdown I'd faced.   I'd been taken on a tour the year prior to see where my classmates and I were headed.  I saw the workings of a very mature looking interior.  Individual old-style desks, wooden floors, something akin very much to a Rockwell portrait.  I'd envisioned a way more sophisticated proscenium, much like an episode of Happy Days.  I wanted an argyle sweater.  Never mind the fact that this was the vulgar late 1970s.  My own world was the one I chose to live in.

Trouble is, that biosphere didn't do too well within the world we had.  Shortly after my arrival into the seventh grade, I was introduced to something more closely resembling Scared Straight.  I didn't know if I'd make it in this place.  It was during this ominous time that I found myself in the frequent company of an odd classmate named Alan.  We may have bore some kind of physical resemblance, though I was certainly a visible Felix to his haphazard Oscar.  I sported an unmanageable head of Beatlemania hair, while his was a scurry rats' nest.   He marched around in what looked like more than one layer of slept-in polo shirts, and rather than a trendy knap sack, he carried his notebook and papers all scrumpled in a flimsy convenience-store plastic bag.  There was something oddly comical about him. The only thing that made it less odd and more comical was Alan's personality.  It was a public confirmation on his part that his appearance and persona was to be simply laughed at and not questioned.  For a boy of twelve, just a few months older than I, this kid had a bizarre sophistication in his grasp of humor.  Probably not unlike an entertainer such as Robin Williams at a young age, this kid had serious comedy chops. He'd adopted the character of TV's notorious Archie Bunker as his own, and in an almost Hal Holbrook-like fashion, brought the character to life on the spot, bursting not only into well-known phrases from All In The Family, but projecting his own thoughts and reactions into the character in classic theatrical improv fashion.  I found Alan stunning, in a way none of our peers did.  I also found him outrageously hilarious.

I'd grown up on All In The Family myself, and thrived on it's humor.  Now I was an exclusive audience to an odd kid who sought me out.  We'd first gotten to know one another through simply a series of odd encounters, as often happens in school.  In short time though, two friendless kids shared an unspoken alliance.

In short, the attraction to Alan was laughter.  The kid's brilliance cracked me the hell up no matter what day or time it was.   I could be heading into a fatal math test and double over in stitches from his exquisite Bunker-esque outbursts. He absorbed the character the way Dick Van Dyke was known to absorb Stan Laurel.  It was on any level fascinating. 

Each morning Alan would expect me over in our corner of the schoolyard.  I'd have it no other way.  Our meetings to start the day were critical.  For the first time in my life, weekday mornings were something to look forward to.  I didn't know if I'd ever have this kind of blessed existence ever again.  So I wasn't about to take it for granted now.  

Our shared iconoclasm amidst a mostly square student body bore no intimidation on me, certainly.  As Peg on a later episode of Married With Children explained it to Marcy with regard to sex, "When Peggy Bundy is getting it regularly, we go with the flow.."  That was generally me with this.  

And there was just one reason:  The hard laughter never stopped.  I never forced a laugh.  Not once.  I stifled too many.  There was indeed an entire school year during which I basked in the guiltiest pleasure of genuine, uncontrollable laughter nearly every minute.

Not surprisingly, it had to end.  One day, after an unwelcome encounter with some terrorist bullies, a frustrated Alan took to excoriating me for my lack of aggressive defense.  I could easily have accused him of the same, but his whole form of semi-theatrical dialectics prevented any kind of conversation.  It was then, eight months into our friendly association that I began to recognize a few troublesome things about Alan.

I'd already met his mother, who would come to retrieve him after school.  A fairly young woman, she appeared well older, and worn.  She bore a personality almost louder and theatrically more comical than her son's. But not quite as funny as slightly dubious.  I didn't know too much about mental health at age twelve, but I knew something wasn't quite right about these folks.

My instincts were not wrong.  Yet this boy remained functional enough to attend public school.  Until he wasn't quite up to it.  Turned out, he would transfer after that year to some sort of privatized school for challenged youngsters.  I was told little about it in depth, but it was clearly a behavioral issue.

The prior spring, Alan abruptly decided I was the ineffective enemy to his resolve to turn vigilante of sorts.  At his initiation, we parted ways at term's end.  After a mostly lonely summer, betrayed and frustrated, I was met in the fall by a very different looking Alan.  He took the liberty of approaching me with kind of an impatient arrogance.  He said he wanted to introduce me to a friend of his.  That friend in the schoolyard was Isaac, the leader of the bully team that threatened us months before. Alan had decided to join up with the ruling party.  Fortunately, he was unable to take himself quite so seriously.  After his unceremonious transfer out of our school shortly thereafter, he phoned me and insisted we get together on a Saturday.  His just-as-riotous mom joined us and would escort us on a voyage through Chinatown and lower Manhattan, amidst some of the Big Apple's deepest seeds of the year 1980. It was not as bizarre as it was drop-dead hysterical.  Between their exchanges and those I shared with Alan, I fell behind in our march, crippled with laughter.   The precious gift was back in my life, albeit once a week.  On tour.

My mom never flinched at my desire for these frequent outings. In fact, she knew how critical they were.  She somehow knew, after meeting Alan's mom that where a higher intelligence lived, visible traits were not so much something to be fearful of.  And there wasn't.  We roamed all over the city in it's worst time, and made out unscathed.  A time indeed.  I'd get home on a Saturday evening still wracked with laughter over lines I couldn't even remember.  I'd share the ones I could with my Mom, who roared with me.

It didn't stay that way.  The shelf life was predictably limited.  Alan was always kind of a wit, but the dark side of him took over. Within a couple of years he would become just more aggressive, sometimes violent.  We've all read stories of how a semi-psychotic Sid Caesar once shook his young writer Mel Brooks outside a high-rise window.  It's not so funny when you're the comedian's punching bag.  That's what I became.

In my teens, my mother implored me to disassociate with him.  I wasn't about to, and frankly neither was Alan. Our relationship become only more co-dependent despite the violence.  But when the humor began to fade and an dangerous menacing took over, our late teens saw the parting of the ways for good.  I had bigger problems around that time and didn't care.  Apparently neither did he.

The only setback would remain the one I did not really take note of at the time.  That laughter fountain was gone from my life.  I was ushered into a quieter, more reserved existence, and perhaps a more solemn one.  It would for various reasons border on depression at times, but I also grew into an expansion of thought.  Nothing unusual for a nineteen-year old.

Going forward, I'd make new and valuable friends, and there were certainly some pockets of laughter on occasion.  But nothing as powerful as I'd known with Alan.  Not before and never since.  I never would know what became of Alan, nor would I ever bear any interest.  

It was maybe twenty years ago.  I'd sought out therapy for the first time in a misguided quest to combat a genuine first-time encounter with a clinical depression, something I never thought my brilliantly witty, comic mind would ever allow.  As I walked home from my ambivalent session, I passed a curiously familiar figure, an elderly looking woman whose expression I insisted I knew from somewhere.  Blocks past, I realized who that garbage-clutching vagrant was.  It was Alan's mother.  Of all the things I chose to forcefully block from my mind that afternoon in an effort to consciously and therapeutically act "as if", that was one of them.

And to this day, in the remains of what was once the best, limited time of my life to date, amidst every blessing I maintain to this day, I can only remain in gazing awe of that elder man, and those men and women like him, who can do so effortlessly that which I've yet to learn.  I knew not of it's value until long after it was gone.  If I can't get it back, maybe I'll be blessed enough to be with those who help me fondly remember when it was there.

N.F