MY BUDDY

He would call me late in the night from somewhere on the

road, a ghost town in Texas, a rest stop near Pittsburgh, or
from Santa Fe, where he was parked in the desert, listening to
the coyotes howling. But most often he would call from his
place in Kentucky, on a cold, still night, when one could hear
the stars breathing. Just a late-night phone call out of a blue,
as startling as a canvas by Yves Klein; a blue to get lost in, a
blue that might lead anywhere. I’d happily awake, stir up some
Nescafé and we’d talk about anything. About the emeralds of
Cortez, or the white crosses in Flanders Fields, about our kids,
or the history of the Kentucky Derby. But mostly we talked
about writers and their books. Latin writers. Rudy Wurlitzer.
Nabokov. Bruno Schulz.

“Gogol was Ukrainian,” he once said, seemingly out of

nowhere. Only not just any nowhere, but a sliver of a many-
faceted nowhere that, when lifted in a certain light, became a
somewhere. I’d pick up the thread, and we’d improvise into
dawn, like two beat-up tenor saxophones, exchanging riffs.

He sent a message from the mountains of Bolivia, where

Mateo Gil was shooting “Blackthorn.” The air was thin up
there in the Andes, but he navigated it fine, outlasting, and
surely outriding, the younger fellows, saddling up no fewer
than five different horses. He said that he would bring me
back a serape, a black one with rust-colored stripes. He sang
in those mountains by a bonfire, old songs written by broken
men in love with their own vanishing nature. Wrapped in
blankets, he slept under the stars, adrift on Magellanic Clouds.

Sam liked being on the move. He’d throw a fishing rod or an

old acoustic guitar in the back seat of his truck, maybe take a
dog, but for sure a notebook, and a pen, and a pile of books.
He liked packing up and leaving just like that, going west. He
liked getting a role that would take him somewhere he really
didn’t want to be, but where he would wind up taking in its
strangeness; lonely fodder for future work.

In the winter of 2012, we met up in Dublin, where he received

an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Trinity College. He was
often embarrassed by accolades but embraced this one,
coming from the same institution where Samuel Beckett
walked and studied. He loved Beckett, and had a few pieces of
writing, in Beckett’s own hand, framed in the kitchen, along
with pictures of his kids. That day, we saw the typewriter of
John Millington Synge and James Joyce’s spectacles, and, in
the night, we joined musicians at Sam’s favorite local pub, the
Cobblestone, on the other side of the river. As we playfully
staggered across the bridge, he recited reams of Beckett off the
top of his head.

Sam promised me that one day he’d show me the landscape of

the Southwest, for though well-travelled, I’d not seen much of
our own country. But Sam was dealt a whole other hand,
stricken with a debilitating affliction. He eventually stopped
picking up and leaving. From then on, I visited him, and we
read and talked, but mostly we worked. Laboring over his last
manuscript, he courageously summoned a reservoir of mental
stamina, facing each challenge that fate apportioned him. His
hand, with a crescent moon tattooed between his thumb and
forefinger, rested on the table before him. The tattoo was a
souvenir from our younger days, mine a lightning bolt on the
left knee.

Going over a passage describing the Western landscape, he

suddenly looked up and said, “I’m sorry I can’t take you
there.” I just smiled, for somehow he had already done just
that. Without a word, eyes closed, we tramped through the
American desert that rolled out a carpet of many colors—
saffron dust, then russet, even the color of green glass, golden
greens, and then, suddenly, an almost inhuman blue. Blue
sand, I said, filled with wonder. Blue everything, he said, and
the songs we sang had a color of their own.

We had our routine: Awake. Prepare for the day. Have coffee,
a little grub. Set to work, writing. Then a break, outside, to sit
in the Adirondack chairs and look at the land. We didn’t have
to talk then, and that is real friendship. Never uncomfortable
with silence, which, in its welcome form, is yet an extension of
conversation. We knew each other for such a long time. Our
ways could not be defined or dismissed with a few words
describing a careless youth. We were friends; good or bad, we
were just ourselves. The passing of time did nothing but
strengthen that. Challenges escalated, but we kept going and
he finished his work on the manuscript. It was sitting on the
table. Nothing was left unsaid. When I departed, Sam was
reading Proust.

Long, slow days passed. It was a Kentucky evening filled with

the darting light of fireflies, and the sound of the crickets and
choruses of bullfrogs. Sam walked to his bed and lay down and
went to sleep, a stoic, noble sleep. A sleep that led to an
unwitnessed moment, as love surrounded him and breathed
the same air. The rain fell when he took his last breath,
quietly, just as he would have wished. Sam was a private man.
I know something of such men. You have to let them dictate
how things go, even to the end. The rain fell, obscuring tears.
His children, Jesse, Walker, and Hannah, said goodbye to
their father. His sisters Roxanne and Sandy said goodbye to
their brother.

I was far away, standing in the rain before the sleeping lion of
Lucerne, a colossal, noble, stoic lion carved from the rock of a
low cliff. The rain fell, obscuring tears. I knew that I would see
Sam again somewhere in the landscape of dream, but at that
moment I imagined I was back in Kentucky, with the rolling
fields and the creek that widens into a small river. I pictured
Sam’s books lining the shelves, his boots lined against the
wall, beneath the window where he would watch the horses
grazing by the wooden fence. I pictured myself sitting at the
kitchen table, reaching for that tattooed hand.

A long time ago, Sam sent me a letter. A long one, where he

told me of a dream that he had hoped would never end. “He
dreams of horses,” I told the lion. “Fix it for him, will you?
Have Big Red waiting for him, a true champion. He won’t need
a saddle, he won’t need anything.” I headed to the French
border, a crescent moon rising in the black sky. I said goodbye
to my buddy, calling to him, in the dead of night