Marlon and Owen

Me and Marlon and Owen

I got drunk on the night Marlon and Owen died. I sat in my house and drank all of the whiskey procured a week before – before G had left to go to the beach – before I realized that I, too, had a reason to be here.
I had seen Marlon last on the waterfront as he was in the midst of a continuing struggle with the big business thugs there. I had seen that movie some 20 times. It was sad that he had become so secretive as we grew older. I knew nothing about him in his old age, or his waning health. I knew he had become an island. He had gotten fat and came out of ‘hiding,’ it seemed, only for recent awful movie parts. He was the first person I ever saw on the screen that seemed real. Even though I was much younger, and there was plenty to attach myself to in terms of screen reality, no one, except possibly Paul Newman, could rivet me in that way. (Bogart entertained, but he never seemed real.) I wrote a song about him one day. Or rather it was a song about a loved one in which I imagined him and his solitude. I will miss him.
Today as I gazed up at the TV while at work – CNN – and saw the ticker telling the story of his death across the bottom of the screen, I became ‘misty-eyed’ and pulled off my headphones and excalimed to my boss. “Brando’s gone!’
Only a couple of weeks since Reagan went and I am feeling a celebrity death really for the first time. Reagan bothered me not in the least. The best I can say about him is the same that so many seem to be saying around me lately… “He had charsima!”
Marlon Brando gave me a reason for living at a time in my life in which I was ready to turn out the lights. I know it sounds hokey, but it is true. Some turn to God, I turned to Brando, and it seems to have worked out fairly well so far.
Owen Meany died today also.
A few weeks back G and I had been discussing the book and I was sure that I had read it. As it turned out I had not. For God’s sake I hadn’t. I had read ‘Garp’ but not ‘Owen’ and it was made clear to me that the book was requisite reading if this whole thing between me and her was to ever work out.
Owen and I quickly became friends and I found myself thinking of him at the most odd times of the day. I expressed my obsession with G and she began to worry of my sexuality. She knew the Wally story and it had plagued her for some time, so she was perfectly willing to believe that I could fall in love with a man who I had never, and never would, meet in person.
What I knew of Owen after some time, was that he would die on July 8th – at least that’s what he thought, and that I would somehow be complicit in the tragedy. He died a few days earlier than even he expected requiring a new slab and a new cut with a sterilized diamond blade. It was alright in the end, I suppose. He saved Vietnamese orphans returning with nuns during wartime. This ain’t no party. (Stop reading now if you haven’t read the book and plan to.) He had his arms blown off by an overzealous piece of white trash (and I use the term knowingly) who was armed with a 1968 Chinese hand grenade.
He knew how he would die, and roughly which day he would, and he knew he would be a hero, and he knew a few things that would come to pass as well:
“WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS COUNTRY? THERE IS SUCH A STUPID ‘GET EVEN’ MENTALITY- THERE IS SUCH A SADISTIC ANGER…SOON THERE’LL BE AN EVANGELIST IN THE WHITE HOUSE; SOON THERE WILL BE A CARDINAL ON THE SUPREME COURT…”
He never knew he would die the same day as Marlon though. He never knew Reagan, or that he would die within weeks of him. He never knew that he would leave me reeling in the way that he has tonight. He would look compassionately, yet condescendingly, on the fact that I am trying to drink his death away. He would tell me that I should eat something – and I should.
I remember Johnny Gou’s poem from college, open-mike night, in which he described Brando while performing ‘Streetcar’ on Broadway. How Marlon would go out the back stage door during his down times and have a drink at a neighboring bar, in full make up, and character.
I imagine Owen was a little like that. He never left his character, although the character changed. He knew his destiny was to be savior, yet he finally let righteousness wane a bit. He would have skipped out on a funeral to have a drink with me.
Brando would have done the same.
I miss that in friends. The drop-all mentality and uncomplicatedness.
G will be back tomorrow and we will talk about it all. She did not know that so many would fall away while she was gone. You will have to suffer me less.
But even her return will not bring back Owen or Marlon. Thus, something in me dies today, I realize this now.
O God – please give them back! I shall keep asking You.