The Flesh and Blood Guy

 

Draft cover art for a book of his early short stories

You may be annoyed by my adoption of a name for him I’ve made up on my own. You’re thinking there’s a flesh and blood person inside there you’re not showing us much of.  What’s his story and why is it missing?

My answer may not be satisfying. What I have of him was wished on me unbidden. I never met him, never laid eyes on him in person. Never spoke to him on the phone or even exchanged text messages. He’s dumping responsibility for his legacy on me with no particular instructions. Who does that? My suspicion is that the original flesh and blood guy predeceased ‘ARIFLIP by some significant period of time. 

Did he ever exist? Certainly. Is there evidence of that? Yes. Voluminously documented in many ways but curiously censored in others that could be essential to a fully realized portrait. Of the 70,000+ image files I received, the number of photos of family and friends is almost in the single digits. There is a single picture each of his mother and his sister. Just one of the grandfather he called Boppa. A WWI military photo of the other, no pictures of either his grandmothers or other relatives. None of his first wife or passing romances. None(?) of his close friends from grade school on, including multi-year roommates. Zero. A mere handful of himself from what you’d call his real life, the one not subsumed into the computer and the Internet. One from childhood, one from prep school, one from a family dinner during his college years. Two, maybe three of his father. And yet maybe as many as a hundred ‘selfies,’ made suspect because there are so many W-I-P iterations, as if he is simply experimenting on himself to test out editing and filter software applications in combination for use in the real work of creating the ‘ARIFLIP digital reality, always plastic in his hands.

Two questions. Should we care? And if we do care, who was the missing person in his massively examined life? 

He knew what was missing in conventional, traditional terms. The photo scarcities he explained in part by the number of moves he made over the years, including two or three chaotic ones. One foreclosure, one eviction, one separation accomplished in a couple carloads of plastic trash bags. There were a couple decades of severe economic privation brought about by his own withdrawal from a profession in which he had made a handsome living with insufficient emotional fulfillment. Too, with regard to photographs of his family and himself, he grew up in an age when children and family gatherings were not continuously chronicled on smartphones and uploaded to social networks for the world to see and download. Physical photo albums get lost. Some we carry in our heads, not in tabs on matte black pages.

There is an even bigger reason for missing family content in his writings. A reason that may seem ridiculous nowadays, but one which was both authoritative in its impact on his literary life and on the innovative writing career he created in response. He has written straightforwardly that though his father did not object to his ambitions as a writer of fiction, he remained steadfast about his personal prohibition of sharing family business with outsiders. Period.

This, for example, is the obvious explanation of the missing first novel in his list of works. There was a novel, half written after his college graduation in which he began the process of writing autobiographically without exposing anything specifically personal about the people who raised him. The title of that unfinished first novel was Night Solo, a reference a very real defining moment in his father’s youth. As a fighter pilot cadet, R. F. Laird, Jr., was a 20-year old boy facing a critical milestone in his pursuit of pilot wings. He had to complete a successful night solo in an At-6 trainer.

Not his picture. Mine. Liked the night, the crouched pilot, the number 42. 

This traumatic event occurred in 1942, after the sudden onset of WWII.

Unclear exactly when things started to go wrong. (I’ve pieced this together from scattered references in his blog posts…) The young pilot had early difficulties with navigation and may have gotten briefly lost. Unknown. But as he returned to the desert airfield for his landing, he found that there were no landing lights. There were no lights in the tower. He had been forgotten. Panicked, he struggled to regain command of himself and proceeded to buzz the tower. Repeatedly. Lower and lower with each pass, all the time running low on the limited amount of fuel allotted to solo training flights. He was on the verge of giving up — one more still lower pass might hit the tower — and attempting a landing in the pitch darkness. He was lining up for his approach when a light flickered on in the tower, followed by runway lights, and a very shaky landing by a frightened young man. Apologies all around, incident filed in the memory hole so as to embarrass no one, night solo checked off, wings achieved in time for war over North Africa.

As a 20 year old Harvard graduate with no employment prospects, the young wannabe writer decided to do a ‘Fitzgerald’ and write a first novel immediately after finishing college. But he couldn’t write about his childhood without breaking the commandment regarding inviolate family business. He had done a couple of short stories skirting that line but showed them to no one. Emboldened, he used money from a part-time gig at the local newspaper to buy a cheap electric typewriter and start typing. For a book he could use as a model, he seized on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, an experimental novel written in first person by various characters in the plot. Each chapter was titled by the name of the narrator. 

The manuscript of this effort no longer exists. It disappeared with a big cardboard box of other early writings because of a vindictive gesture during his divorce 20 years later. The box was in a storage shed containing other personal effects of a failed marriage. Immediately subsequent to the divorce decree, the ex took what she wanted from the shed and left the rest behind for disposal without telling anyone. 

There are scraps of recollection here and there about the novel draft (including one remembered letter by the author’s sister expressing fondness for one of the book’s characters, the only compliment he seems ever to have received from her about a specific work), and at least one brief surviving passage that made an appearance in the book Punk City. Names of principal characters got written down somewhere, along with notes about their backstories. The action was set, not surprisingly, in the one substitute he had had for a family since leaving home for boarding school at the age of 13. The headquarters of all the comings and goings of the characters was a Harvard final club, both university and club renamed and lost to memory. The narrative was third person limited with each chapter devoted to one character’s point of view. There was a painter, who developed the ability to enter his own paintings and live there for deeply felt scenes of romantic obsession. (Fitgerald much? ‘ARIFLIP insists he never tried to ‘do’ FSF in his fiction..) There was a second story man who pursued the solitary hobby of breaking into people’s apartments and rented rooms when they were absent. He to traced their patterns of movement by inspecting wear patterns on rugs and sofa cushions and the contents of kitchen sinks, etc. He stole nothing. He was simply in search of their rhythms, their daily cycles of life. There was a driver, who delighted in provoking police pursuits through the tangled streets and highways of Boston, always escaping to do it all again another day. There was a divinity student, modeled on a real person, who had acquired a charismatic following in a church across town and as he preached his powers grew until he threatened to become a dangerous demagogue. 

The lives of these characters intertwine, of course, building to a (presumably) violent climax featuring the driver rescuing the preacher with the help of the second story man, while the painter slides ever more deeply and inescapably into his painted romantic fantasy. One of them is destined to die, of course. But still unwritten, the doomed one remains alive in phantom manuscript form. What a way to go. Shroedinger’s Martyr.

What we’re looking at here is what a first novel is supposed to tell us. Night Solo’s cast of characters represented the disassembly of the author into specialized facets, masks, of his extraordinarily disparate worlds of interest, within which he is always somehow alone and always somehow engaged in intense drama with life and death stakes.

What killed the book was the intervention by the impassive internal observer who was always in attendance at ARIFLIP’s turning points. The observer realized the manuscript was not good enough to submit to a hard-nosed critic. It had promise, but it had also exposed just how much work was required before the necessary writer had been created. An offer to have the manuscript read by an old friend of his father who was a writer’s agent was ultimately postponed. Indefinitely. Pending revisions that were never made. Because there was much drinking that had been left undone during the writing process.

The life and fate of the flesh and blood guy were always intimately bound up with the drinking. For about a decade after graduating from prep school, the Laird guy had a series of night solos, all of which ended in crashes on dark runways. From 17 to 27, he was continually in the process of buzzing the tower, which had no lights burning. 

The Funeral of St. Nuke in 1981. Ten years on from 1970.

It’s easy to say, as almost all of his family and friends would insist, that the biggest enemy of R. F. Laird was alcohol. One can appreciate their point of view. They knew him personally. I have the luxury of never having met him, drunk or sober. Would I have liked him if I had known him in person? I tend to doubt it. At this distance I can admire what he accomplished as a writer. It’s overwhelming. Awe inspiring. Up close in any kind of day to day situation, I think would have turned my back on him, just as almost all of his intimates eventually did. In onemof his sites that bears a content warning, he wryly recounts the most direct conversation he ever had with his ex-wife about why she left him. 

“Why?” he asked her.

“You’re too much for me,” she said.

“Too much of what?”

“Too much of everything.”

He understood, he wrote. Why, I’m convinced, he repeatedly failed at the one writing project he felt he owed posterity, a coherent, chronological autobiography that detailed all of the challenges he faced and overcame in a wide variety of arenas, even when overcoming was simply surviving to fight another day and create the next worthwhile leave-behind capitalizing the insights gained by experiencing so many of the heights and depths of American life. The insurmountable obstacle in the way of such a straightforward work was the pronoun “I,” because he so often wound up the central actor in whatever was going on, wherever he was. He hated the pronoun which had always given him the most trouble. I have found at least three different false starts at books for which he (typically) already had titles and cover designs backed with between three and five opening chapters before leaving them to work on the usual slew of competing projects. What these orphaned manuscripts all had in common was that his life story would be recounted by a third party, friend or foe or fictional character, who was investigating or seeking him in some mystery hiding place.

Why I’m avoiding that temptation here. This post is the sum total of my interest in the irascible, arrogant, impossible star of the R. F. Laird life story. My interest is in, as I have said too often perhaps already, the motivations and output of the superposition of identities I call ‘ARIFLIP.  And without alcohol, that volume and quality of output would never have been achieved.

When I look at the timeline, and the series of decisions he made over the years, it’s hard not to see that the story of his relationship with alcohol has been both damaging and lifesaving. Without his three years of committed drunkenness at Harvard, there would be no need for this book. Everything in his life up to that point had been aiming, directing, pressuring him to go to law school and become a lawyer.