Dear Bob,
We knew of each other before but I first ran into you in person at a Flagler Education Foundation event 16 years ago when I took that picture above, when you were either the organization’s president or one of its board members, and we both shared that discomfort with places designed to let the local bourgeoisie parade in gala glitter. We were at the Hammock Dunes Club. You were leaving. You’d had enough, your innate humility having maxed out on flummery.
I don’t think either of us could say exactly when we tipped into friendship, but it was years later. There’d never been anything grudging about my admiration for you, though we had few occasions to meet and back then Palm Coast was a beer desert.
I remember being surprised, before they body-snatched even me, that you were a Republican. I’d always thought we shared affinities for John Brown and the Cathars, not the Wuhan-lab mutations of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. So I was perplexed at your decision to run for a Palm Coast City Council seat in 2016. But you had been on Palm Coast’s zoning board for the previous seven years, and it’s not as if as the general counsel for ITT’s Palm Coast colony you hadn’t been a sort of proconsul in the city’s founding years. Maybe the question wasn’t why were you running, but what took you so long.
Between you and Nick Klufas for those four years you carried the plurality of the intelligence quotient on the City Council and, but for Jack Howell’s brief tenure, the near-totality of its capacity for wit. We weren’t friends yet, but you were a reassuring presence, as if all could not possibly be lost if you could still be elected in maga-reddening Flagler. You never quite lost your sense of attorney-client privilege in your council years, so you were a nearly useless source for me, and paradoxically were an open book as you did your best to steady the roils of the HMS Milissa Holland.
If there was a tipping point for us, I’d place it at around six or seven years ago, when you’d told me that you wouldn’t run again. I forget if it was because of your cancer or the cancerous politics. Same thing really. You never had the gladiator in you. You’re more of the siren-searching scuba diver. You left the council for the same reason you left the Hammock that evening in 2010: it was enough.
You were no longer constrained by professional discretion and I was no longer constrained by journalistic distance. We started communicating more often. Then just as mysteriously, ours turned into my closest friendship in this town outside of my four-wives-in-one, even though, like two 18th century correspondents, we hardly ever meet, our periodic hajj to the Brown Dog aside.
It occurs to me that our friendship was made for Mann’s Magic Mountain, if not on it, like Hans Castorp who went to the sanatorium for a three-week visit with his cousin and, despite watching the tubercular dead bobsledded down the mountain, stayed seven years. Of all the people I’ve suggested that book to, you’re the only one who read it, conquering its 800 pages in a matter of weeks, deciphering its metaphors about the joys of life despite a rotting society, and doing so in a few sparkling lines, as with everything you wrote. If friendships have scriptures, ours is The Magic Mountain. “Hans’s view of life expands with the length of his stay in spite of the at times almost claustrophobic routines,” you’d written, as if describing what you’ve meant to me in this claustrophobic town.
It is in that sanatorium that I joined you and Jake in a group chat that by now must’ve exceeded Mann’s Magic by half. Ours has tended to be a friendship of vampires, almost all of it pre-dawn as we exchange epistolary SMSs on our literary euphorias and whatever despairs lie ahead for a day that for me doesn’t start well without your Pensées. Beyond our mutual dismay at the deconstructions of our beloved country, my daily hackings through the scumlines of local politics are undoubtedly a cakewalk compared to the Bataan of your cancer for the last several years.
The mornings of nothingness have been more frequent lately, and the morning is approaching when you’ll have involuntarily tripped into the great perhaps and my sun will not rise. “But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than what kills him because he knows that he dies,” wrote Pascal with Cuff-like clarity. That knowledge, our fatal flaw, is why we both like cats, who have mastered the art of eternity as an orgasmic nap. Beats the other kind for sure.
The last scene of Magic Mountain is of Hans’s silhouette disappearing in the trenches of the world war. No sense waiting until then to send you my answer to Thomas Mann wondering if it is all ever worth it, if our seven years transcend the absurd, if love ever survives the bobsleds and the underworld. A friendship like ours tells me it does. Enough.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece aired on WNZF.
Pogo says
Well said.