Mad, Bad, and Dangerous

On Display February Collab: Influences

For Glenn

I was 15. He was 18. I wore a pale blue shetland sweater and barrettes in my hair. He wore ragged jeans and a faded army jacket. I was a good girl who never smoked, drank, or did drugs. He was a high school bohemian who drank six or seven cups of coffee and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. I remember thinking then I would be surprised if he lived past the age of 30.

It was not that I was in love with him; rather I was in awe of him. He was, as Lady Caroline Lamb said of Lord Byron, mad, bad, and dangerous to know. He was also brilliant, perhaps the most intelligent person I'd ever met up to that point. He had read books by authors I'd never heard of. He had long intense conversations with me, monologues really, since I couldn't keep up with his mental gymnastics.

He challenged my assumptions about my safe little world. He made me question the values my parents stood for. He gave me books and music; Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks remains one of my favorite albums ever. He opened my eyes to the ills of the world. He fought the local political machine, running for county office as the youngest candidate in county history. I campaigned for him. He lost, of course. I think secretly he was relieved. He always saw himself as the outsider, the challenger. I don't think he could have coped with becoming part of the establishment.

We were never lovers but we loved each other. We each were involved with other people, but we remained close friends.

When I moved to Maine two years later, he wrote me long, long letters. Twenty pages of yellow, legal-sized paper, written on both sides. Looking back, I think he was then going through the first of what would be several mental collapses.

We lost touch with each other for years at a stretch, but periodically he would reappear in my life. He visited me at college several times. I remember saying goodbye to him once on a rainy, cold, November night at the T-stop at Harvard Square. He was on his way to the Greyhound station in Boston. He had his return ticket, but I doubted he had any other money. I handed him all the money I had with me, $10 or less, and told him to buy something to eat. He was always so thin. I hugged him and inhaled the familiar smoke-smell.

We saw each other now and then in the years that followed. Then came a period of several years when I heard nothing from him. In December 1992, I was five months pregnant with Daniel when I had a call from him one Saturday afternoon.

"I'm in trouble. Please come get me." He was at a bar in a nearby town. Against Tab's wishes, I drove out to get him. He was my friend. What could I do?

He was having some sort of breakdown, but not a violent or loud one. He sat quiet and trembling at a small table. I sat with him and held his cold hands in mine for a long time before I could convince him to come with me to the crisis center at the hospital. I waited there with him until he was called in to see a counselor. He wanted me to go with him, so I did. He told the counselor he had been on Prozac the year before, and it had helped him, but he had stopped taking it. He was given the pills he needed, and we left.

I haven't seen him since, though not a week goes by that I don't think of him and wonder how he is.

I see him whole now, and not through the eyes of an infatuated teenager. I see that his brilliance was always tinged with madness, that he professed to avow tolerance yet was rigidly intolerant of those who didn't share his view, that his self-destructive behavior was merely self-destructive and in no way glamorous. But I'll always love him for what he represented to me then, for all he taught me, and for opening up my world.

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