Magic

Magic

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve actually been expecting something like this and yet every time it happens it is a little disturbing because it feels like I should be more prepared for it. I’m not stupid. It’s not like it’s the first time or the hundredth, but there it was again.

It’s hard to say that I’ve been thinking of you lately because I think of you always, but you know that and yet it doesn’t make a difference. The last few weeks it seems like you have been on my mind more than ordinarily. I’ve been doing all the usual things to try to avoid thinking of you. I’ve gotten good at taking great care not to mention your name or even anyone with the same name….avoiding looking at your pictures which is easier since they are only in three rooms of the house now instead of every room…oh damn it. You know I can dust the mantles or dresser and your picture, clean and polish the frame without ever once looking at you. Yea, don’t start with the “why have the pictures if you’re not going to look at them”. They are here in case I want to look at them and sometimes I do. Sometimes I can’t stop looking at them.

Anyway, like I said I should have seen it coming. I was getting ready to go to my first writing class this evening. As I shut the dresser drawer your picture fell over. Now that just really pissed me off because there was no reason for it. It was just more of this STUFF that goes on between us. I was in a hurry and when I picked it up to set it back in place my eyes locked on yours and I was stuck there looking at your picture.

I was late for class.

The class was very interesting and I think that I will enjoy it. The writing exercise we had was a little frightening at first, but once I let go and started to write it happened and it wasn’t half bad. When I read my story no one threw up and no one threw tomatoes. End of the class came and our writing assignment with it.

“Write about someone from your past who continues to have an impact on you to this day”

Its days like today that make me glad that I don’t carry a gun…and just when I was starting to like her.

All the way home I thought about other people I could write about. And then I thought about you and writing about you and my stomach rolled over. Back to the others…surely I could write about someone else…anyone else. Yea I could, but what has been burning, what has been festering? You know sometimes I think I could just kill you and then I think about how childish and desperate that sounds.

Swallow it down…take a deep breath…

So, have your way. You and the teacher and my councilor and the writers who put characters with your name in the T.V. shows and the studios that make the movies with the plot lines that remind me of our romance….you can ALL HAVE IT YOUR WAY. Remember the Paranoid’s motto: “Just because I think they’re out to get me doesn’t mean they’re not”. There may be something to be said for that.


Alright, so…..you qualify as someone from my past. How long ago? Good Lord has it really been 18 years since we met? How can that be? Time is such a strange thing. Eighteen years and yet it is as clear as a star strewn night.

How do we get expressions in our language? They don’t just happen. They are there for a reason.

“Love at first sight”

Even as I say it now it seems unbelievable to me. I’m not the type. I have to stop and remember how it was or it seems trite and impossible.

I was 37 years old; no babe in the woods. I certainly had my share of experience in romance and relationships and the last thing that I was looking for was another. As a matter of fact I would have described myself as jaded. I was busy…much too busy with career and community and obligations to organizations and charitable boards and people and oh Christ I just didn’t have time for this. You were clearly NOT on the agenda. And then suddenly you were there…

When our eyes met I felt it and I didn’t know what was happening to me. Even now it comes back to me…that unease in the stomach…the slight numbness in my fingers. The room was much too warm and yet it was cold at the same time. A slight shivering almost a quaking started deep somewhere inside of me and settled in my middle for the duration. That was the physical. Mentally my head was swimming. My mind drifting and I was thinking who is this…. where have you been all my life…why are you talking to me…what do you want….oh why me…do we know each other…oh I’m in a shit load of trouble…RUN.

You were talking and I wasn’t sure what you were saying. I was trying not to sound like a complete idiot. I have no idea what I said to you and you told me later that it was the same for you.

Two people trying to talk and saying nothing. Two people searching each others eyes for the answer to a question that was yet to be formed in their minds…two souls finding each other ……again?

After you walked away I guess I looked kind of stunned. One of my employees came over and ask me if I was alright and then sometime later the manager came over and asked me the same thing and I thought I better leave.

It was three months later in Georgetown during that weekend that you said to me “We have walked together before”. It was then for the first and only time in my life that I believed in reincarnation for I knew that what you said was a universal truth. We had walked together before and we would walk together again. I know the exact spot where we ducked between the buildings on our way to the tidal basin and stole a kiss. It was 8 years until I could bear to go to Georgetown again and another 3 until I dared to find “our spot”. Even after all those years when I walked back onto the street, from that alley, people looked at me strange. I know I must have looked bad.

What does a man look like when his heart has been whip lashed from a time of glory…. through a time of pain, failure, and loss and then you are suppose to walk among mere men and try not to look shell shocked? Yeah, that’s not easily done.

How could we have let that fight get so far out of hand? Over the next two months I waited for you to call. I tried to find you. I knew you were angry. I was desperate. I called everyone you had ever spoken of. They had either not heard from you or maybe were just saying that. You had said you might go to Houston. I made a point every day of memorizing the weather in Houston including the forecast. I thought maybe if you called and wouldn’t tell me where you were I might “talk about the weather”. I didn’t know how I thought I would find you. I didn’t get that far, but if I thought you were in Houston I was going and nothing would stop me. Nothing

Life, I have found, has many regrets. I hope that there aren’t any worse coming along. The last words I had spoken to you were in anger and I was near crazy to try to fix it somehow. Pride be damned. I was yours and we both knew it.

Swallow it down…take a deep breath…


I talked to my business partner and told him to expect me to be leaving on short notice and that I would be gone for some time. He didn’t like it. He knew it was about you and knew there was nothing he could say or do to change it and so he was ok about it…as ok as he could be. He couldn’t fight anything as big as this nor would he try. No one on this earth knows me as well and he knew what you meant to me. He wasn’t about to take that one on.

Why couldn’t you have been in Houston? Houston could still have had a happy ending. I was mad at you for not calling me. I alternated between anger, pain, longing, fear….if there is an emotion then I was feeling it and I was feeling all of them all of the time every day. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I lost 15 pounds. I had circles under my eyes. Friends were getting concerned. I had just learned the meaning of the expression “heart sick”.

Two months of Hell…

And then when I thought it couldn’t get any worse I got the phone call. You know it’s really really hard to write this even now. As clear as the time of our meeting was this part is very blurry to me and I rely on accounts from friends as to what happened as I can’t really swear to the details.

I do remember the call.

“Lucky wants to talk to you. Could you hold the line?” As you know he was a long time friend and business associate so of course I held the line. His first words were “Chuck, I need you to come over to my club as quickly as possible and I want you to do me a favor”.

What he wanted was for me to trust him…to ask no questions …to hang up the phone and come directly to his club. He said there were two detectives there that wanted to speak to me about you. Over my objections he reminded me of his request and added rather cryptically that the detectives were gentlemen and that he would be with me the whole time.



“When was the last time that you saw your boyfriend Kevin Cauldwell alive”? That I remember! That I will never forget.


Swallow it down …….take a deep breath…..and then try to take another

Why couldn’t have been Houston? Better that you had left me. I don’t remember all the questions or even how long we were there, but I was told it was less than an hour. It seemed much longer. Lucky walked me to the car. I remember thinking that he looked real bad. I guess it was the pity in face.

You know when your life has turned to shit it really isn’t surprising when it just keeps getting worse. As Lucky was giving me a parting hug good night; something I don’t recall him ever doing before or since, I looked at him and asked something like this:

“Lucky, did you get the impression that they were suspicious of me…I mean like maybe they thought I had done something to Kevin…I mean like maybe I was a suspect?” He said “Oh, Sweetie….you’re the only suspect.”

There’s another one of those expressions….”the-icing-on-the-cake”.

Well, fortunately I wasn’t a suspect for too long, but it does get in the way of grief.
And then there is closure or no closure….the funeral was in Detroit and I wasn’t invited. The madman who crushed out that wonder that was Kevin Cauldwell took his own life and so there was not even a trial. And all I have are a few photos of that weekend. Or not, because you seem to be here with me a lot and as I said a lot more lately.

It’s that damn Brokeback Mountain movie. When I read the story I knew it would be a problem for us, but I didn’t expect the film to haunt me so. In that story it took Jack’s death for Ennis to realize his love. That may have been the case for him, but it wasn’t necessary in this story. You didn’t have to die. It wasn’t crucial to the plot. We already knew.

But I guess I have much more than the photos. I hear people speculate about Ennis and Jack in Brokeback and wonder if Ennis would do it all again if he had a chance to go back given that it would end badly anyway. They had just that summer on the mountain and then 20 years of stolen interludes a couple times a year to maintain a love and yet I think the answer would be yes. Another expression.... Better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.

Agreed.

I can tell you this. You and I had a lot less. We had only that one summer ….without the mountain and 18 years of me cleaning and polishing the picture frames…

Sometimes avoiding looking at you …sometimes unable to stop…..

And sometimes I can’t swallow it down and it’s hard to take a deep breath. But yea, I’d do it again…

For it was Magic .