A Return to Spokane after 40 years
Spokane Valley, "The Whale," and "Oz" - an eventful weekend
Forty-some years ago, I visited my brother in Spokane, long before his slide into major depressive disorder and his 13-year molasses-like slog to suicide. I was running away, perhaps the first time in my life I ever did. I was coaching a little league baseball team in my late teens/early 20s with the girl I wanted to be my girlfriend. We spent too much time together, argued frequently, and couldn’t figure things out. I didn’t know what to do, not sure how to navigate my teenage emotions. So I ran. I arranged a trip to see my brother and his growing family. My niece was 3 or 4 years old, and my nephew was an infant if he was even born yet.
I spent the majority of my time playing the piano and talking on the phone with my would-be girlfriend. After about three weeks, she asked me to come home. I did. I came home to her not showing up for a date and then finding her walking the streets near midnight in the late summer, hand in hand with a guy she had never mentioned, caught in the glare of my car’s headlights. My first heartbreak.
I don’t remember many of the details of that trip to Spokane. My brother worked. I hung around with my sister-in-law and my niece. There was a box of kittens. My very young niece picked up one of the very young kittens, not yet ready to be weaned from its mother. It wriggled out of her hands and fell to the ground, breaking its nose. We rushed to the vet only to find that they wouldn’t be able to save it. My sister-in-law and niece were devastated, cryied nonstop most of the day. I had grown up with about 20 feral cats, a never-ending carousel of them, box after ill box of them, just to gather them and take them to the vet to be destroyed. I had no tears for the kitten, though I of course took no happiness in the event.
We also spent time watching triple-A baseball, the Spokane Indians. They were an affiliate of my Dodgers, though I don’t recall if they were at the time. No matter, watching baseball with my brother regardless of the team was as close to heaven as I was likely to get. One of my earliest memories is of playing catch with him.
Our recent weekend in Spokane was to attend a Rookie Weightlifting Competition, which my partner participated in, held in a Crossfit gym in nearby Spokane Valley. The drive from Seattle to Spokane was easy, over the beautiful, densely-forested Cascades into the wide-open agricultural lands of central and eastern Washington, the hills a golden-hued reminder of our home state, California. We put our 4 1/2 year old dachshund, Herman, up at a doggy daycare for the day during the competition, and for a reward, had barbecue and loads of junkmfood while watching television at a Tru Hotel by Hilton - cheap, lumpy pillows, but with surprisingly good service and a delightful lobby with games and a complimentary breakfast.
“The Whale” (spoilers)
In addition to watching episodes of Oz on the computer, we watched the movie The Whale on the hotel flatscreen. I really knew nothing about this movie other than it got recognition at last year’s oscars and Brendan Fraser won an academy award for his performance. The movie was directed by Darren Aronofsky, with his eye on all the domestic details of a dysfunctional life, a version of a play by Samuel D. Hunter. The movie feels like a play, with a very small cast and a series of interwoven relationships centered upon Charlie, a gay man who lost his depressed lover in a jump from a bridge (the very manner in which my own brother died). Charlie has an opportunity to interact with his estranged teenager daughter who is flunking out of high school, as he tried to recapture his relationship with her, though he left her when she was 8 years old and she has returned broken and angry and disgusted by this very large man, in the care of her alcoholic mother to pursue a love relationship with a former student of his.
Allusions and analogies to my own life zinged through my brain. By the end, I was a sobbing mess, the movie operating on many different levels in my own life in this Pacific Northwest city, the last place where I saw my brother in Washington State when he was sane.
Much like how The Waste Land intersects with my own life, The Whale also intersects with my life in significant ways. It features a protagonist who teaches online composition, something I did for years. It features a protagonist who has an interest in literature and writing and teaching, and a love for Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s masterpiece. I studied Moby-Dick quite thoroughly in grad school and even named my beloved Australian Shepherd “Moby-Dawg” after Melville’s whale, and “Herman” the dachshund after the famous author himself. The movie features a self-destructive mentally ill man on the verge of death, so large he’s unable to move well, hardly able to stand without the help of a walker or oversized wheelchair. And yet, despite not being able to look away from this trainwreck of a life, it’s Charlie’s hopefulness and belief in the power of language and love that has us cheering for him or at least not feeling as sorry for him as we might otherwise.
My brother was found of giving books as gifts. One year he gave me an edition of Moby-Dick with woodcut illustrations by Rockwell Kent, a prized possession in my personal library.
Lynn spent many the majority of his life similar in size to me, just over 6 feet tall (Lynn was 5’11 1/2”, I’m a bit taller) and about 170 lbs (I was skinnier and Lynn more athletic. He was probably more like 185 or 190 to my 170). Later, from years of depression medication and lack of exercise, he became bloated and fat, weighing over 300 pounds. The growing distance between us was mirrored in the growing size difference between us. As he gave up on life, I fought to have a place in it.
The movie asks and answers difficult questions about the relationships we have in life, with our spouses, our loves, our children, our friends, and ourselves. It’s a movie worth seeing (keep a tissue box nearby).
“OZ” - the final season
My partner and I tackle a series to stream and an occasionala movie (we’re on a Bond kick now, watching all of the movies in order, one a week as time is available). Once we returned to Seattle, we tuned in to the final few episodes of Oz.
For a long time in my life, I was without a tv, as was my brother. He had a worse television watching habit than I did, so much so that one Christmas when his in-laws bought him a television for the children, he cut the cord off the TV and put the television in the closet. He didn’t have the willpower to resist (westerns and Star Trek were his favorite).
Oz was one of the more daring, bold, extreme, and well-written series I’ve ever seen, and I was surprised that it had eluded me for years. It came out before The Sopranos, long the anchor of HBO, and it featured stars that would later appear in The Wire and The Sopranos. It holds back nothing, storylines that merge racial violence, Aryzan brotherhood, prison rape, torture, murder and mayhem. It’s realisitc, gritty, and deeply flawed while provided so much opportunity for astonishing acting and creativity and story-telling. The series features many well-known stars who were at the beginning of their careers.
When people talk about the great series of cable television, the three titles that most frequently come up are The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad. Oz deserves to be mentioned the company of those legendary shoes.
Inspired by recent reading and good movies and television, I’m returned to my memoir with renewed hope with revision plans. Querying will resume soon. Until then, I’m working on childhood stories, nostalgic memoir creative nonfiction.
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On this substack, I write about:
writing, literature, and the writing life
writing process
memoir craft
mental illness - major depressive disorder, suicide, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder
sailing
alternative lifestyles - polyamory and kink
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Until next time, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!