The Bargain


...whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
or to take arms against a sea of troubles
and by opposing end them? ---Hamlet

On September 16, 2013, at some unclear time in the morning, my erstwhile writing mentor and occasional confidant, Les Pleko, deliberately stepped off the roof of a four-story building in Venice, California.

Les was a peculiar man. He had a wandering right eye and confessed to me that he often exaggerated it to unsettle people who were (and this was a frequent term he used) “phonies". . . He rode public buses because he enjoyed the experience. He wore neck scarves and sipped hot tea on oppressively warm August nights. He’d use superlatives such as “swell” or “the bees knees” with no irony. He did these things without self-consciousness and without conceit. He was a true eccentric. 

Les was also a funny man.  His was the humor of omission and understatement. I would laugh at what he left unsaid. Once, for example, when we were sitting on the floor of his apartment editing an overwrought short story, his telephone rang (he only had a land line). Les answered and spoke to someone who, from the sound of it, was complaining about her troubles. That’s awful…no…you’re not a terrible person…you’ll get through this…I know, it sounds horrible…hang in there…it’ll pass…I care about you too…yeah……stay strong…OK, you know, call me back anytime, that’s awful…I’m here. He got off the phone, exhaled, looked at me sheepishly, and asked: “Don’t you just hate it when people want to chit chat?”

For a man whose writing was so distinctly devoid of humor, Les laughed with unexpected abandon. He would laugh at things that others didn’t find funny and yet get curiously despondent in the midst of group laughter. His laugh was sudden, wanton, and an invitation to join him in tasting the exquisite flavor of absurdity. His laughter was honest...with no joy but also without nervousness or cruelty or motive. His laughter was infrequent, an oasis in a sea of dour moods and offhand condemnations of humanity. Another quote from my notebooks, this after he told me about a party thrown by some of his students that he felt obligated to attend: “Don’t those idiots know that we’re all fucked?” I choose to interpret the question as rhetorical but I’m not sure he meant it that way.

So Les killed himself. Approximately 40,000 people committed suicide in the United States in 2013. That’s about one person dead at their own hands every 15 minutes. Absent exaggerated sentimentality, Les’s suicide was nothing more than a banal denouement to an interesting life. Les possessed either the courage or the cowardice to “take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing them end them...”

I can’t quite reconcile Les's appreciation of absurdity with his leap from the building but it's perfectly consistent with his melancholy fiction and his pronounced social awkwardness. In our culture, we ostensibly tend to be forgiving of suicides: a person who chooses to pay such a final price to escape pain, we presume, must indeed have had many “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” to endure. A veritable shitstorm of slings and arrows. 

But forgiveness implies transgression. He flipped the bird to life. In contemporary psychiatry, it’s almost taboo to speak of personal responsibility for suicides. To my colleagues in the psychiatric profession, suicide is usually viewed as the after-effect of a medical illness. Like succumbing to scarlet fever. Reactions to suicide that don’t reflect the victim-of-mental-illness sentiment are usually spoken about in whispers. That selfish prick. What an angry gesture. Coward. . . 

Which face of suicide is not a mask? A sad result of being stricken by irremediable overwhelm?  

Or a weak act of surrender?

What strikes me most about Les’s leap is its decided absence of humor. It’s telling that, in his writing groups, he would find the idiosyncratically funny in anything. He was a gifted teacher.  But his novels are sober and tragic and humorless. I'm suspicious of anything that doesn't contain at least a suggestion of resilience, even in the face of horror. I didn't like his novels.

As happens with all people who die at their own hands, Les left behind many secrets. He was a bachelor in love with a married woman, devoted to her with such fierce loyalty that his liaisons with other women (mostly married themselves) he described as “diversions”  or  “biomaintenance”. He was a professed recovering addict with 20 years of sobriety who, at least twice with me, quietly locked his front door, reached underneath his kitchen sink,  and poured himself and me warm vodka straight. I’m not much of a drinker but I obliged both times. “Fuck sobriety,” he said the first time. I don’t do well with alcohol, an adjunct to seduction in my youth but ultimately a soporific that tastes bad. Again from my notebooks, a comment Les made when I mentioned how bad his vodka tasted: “Just go with it, let it do its job. Hold the glass lightly.” In retrospect, I might encourage Les to take the same attitude toward life: go with pain, let it do its job, hold it lightly.  

Murderers are given no mercy in our society. Les murdered himself. Does that make it any less criminal?  Les helped me write. He read my work and saw through its pretense and helped me to honor jumping into the unknown. He gave that same guidance to others and could have continued to be of value until his death by old age. But he chose not to do so. I suppose he practiced what he preached. He jumped into the unknown. 

Or perhaps it was just spineless fear.  Despite his quiet bravado, Les was profoundly afraid of loss. He couldn’t just sit with it. He didn’t cultivate the art of not having to pick up the shattered pieces of one’s broken heart.  In 2006, when I was considering having a child, Les advised me against it. He quoted Borges: “Mirrors and copulation are abominable since they both multiply the numbers of men.” Or, he said, now from my notebooks again: “Life rapes and defiles. I’ve seen parents. That love’s too deep, man. You’d have to be crazy to bring someone into existence.” His statement belies his unwillingness to accept the exposure to potential pain that comes with parental love. Bringing a new life into the world requires a leap into the unknown. It entails inevitable loss. Les recoiled from love's fundamental bargain. 

Well, Les, the answer to your question is: I don’t particularly hate it when people want to chit chat. Today, on March 16^th, six months after your death, I plan to take the public bus just for the fun of it (or if it is miserable, just for the hell of it).  That and tonight’s shot of warm vodka will be my tribute to who you were. Oh, and I did have a child and he owns my heart like no other. Slings and arrows are being flung at him and me...but we're also often hit with waves of laughter and joy. I'll continue to choose life, even with its grief and especially with its occasional wonder. You should have chosen life too. You went one way on Hamlet’s contemplated fork in the road (not to be) and I’m going the other (to be). Who is to say which is the right choice?  I’ll say it: I’m right. You should have chosen life despite it all. Perhaps because of it all. Slings and arrows be damned.