5.

If you want to write horror, think of the person you love most in the world, then imagine the worst possible thing that could happen to them. But what if you don’t want to write horror, but rather its opposite? What if you want to change a sad or tragic ending to something noble and bright? Then you have to become some other kind of writer, one who uses the stock of his own experiences as well as those of his friends and lovers to alter the life that you have led, both real and imaginary, both what was and what might have been. Therefore, I was shocked but I wasn’t surprised when I learned of Red Mark’s death. It had always been hovering about him, that desire to perform one brilliant gesture brilliantly. We once traded favorite books. I gave him All the King’s Men, the story of a man who learns the secret of his past. He gave me Exile’s Return, the story of a man who died at the right time. Red Mark was all about timing. He took all the shenanigans that accompanied hanging out with me in perfect stride.

For example, on the return to Texas after a weekend of Jazz, booze and sun, my car broke down on the long causeway over the Atchafalaya Swamp. There are few places worse to pull over than the side of a bridge. The big rigs are merciless, blowing by you in a hail of horns and wind streams. Each one that passed shook the very foundations of the bridge, throwing Red Mark and I off our balance. Meanwhile the curious cars sped or slowed as they passed following every rule of the road except the most important one, watch where you’re going. And yet with all this gravity and danger, Fortune was kind to me and my half-assness. The problem that had stopped our momentum had occurred six months earlier. A brace under the driveshaft had come loose, applying pressure to the parking break and disabling third gear. A crawl under the car revealed the need for a bolt and a nut, both of which I had in the trunk, leftovers from the last time I imperfectly fixed it. I pulled out the little package. But for a nail the kingdom was lost.

“That’s all we need to get moving?” said Red Mark.

“Yep.”

“Excellent,” he said.

That was it. Excellent. Crawl back under, both of us, and while one holds the driveshaft in place the other screws the bracket back and cars scream by and the 18 wheelers could run you into a flatness that would match the quality of your mind right now and pieces of broken glass and angry little pebbles bounce across the shimmying concrete as I turned the bolt by hand and made the whole thing stick if only long enough to get us to an auto parts store.

We had dodged death and dismemberment that day but we couldn’t dodge Life. It came so fast and left so quickly you weren’t sure it had happened or you merely thought it happened. Red Mark was graduated from the University. He moved to New York City, one foot in commerce, the other in a bottle of hooch. The artistic ideal that he longed to live seemed to have died the moment he put Austin in his rearview mirror. Even returning to that riverine city a few years later did little to put him back on his path. He got married. He used his degree in math to write computer programs. I saw him rarely, the way things go when you’re still single and your friends are hitched. You are less and less welcome at their gatherings for the wives fear you, what you represent, how it may appear that you have the Secret, the will to live alone that their men secretly crave. But every so often I’d put on a Clash record and Red Mark would roll by in his antique flesh-colored Lincoln with the suicide doors. He’d have a cigarette stuck in his face like a dart from a blowgun, clouds of cowboy smoke surrounding him in a nimbus of ashy grey. ‘Go straight to hell, boy,’ the Clash would sing as Red Mark and I shot the shit about old times. He admired the work I was doing in theatre, how I’d converted my home to a playhouse. And he might say something about that weekend that we went to New Orleans.

One afternoon I showed him the photos we took.

As usual, I had waited nearly a year to get them developed, a time capsule that might explode beautifully or randomly depending on the sobriety of the photographer. But I had done a good job that first day of the Fest. There was the girl in the straw hat. There was Feganowitz making an obscene yet lovely gesture. There was his girl, bottle blonde and nubile and seemingly always smiling a set of ghostly white teeth. And there was Red Mark. Somehow the last frame in the roll had gotten stuck and so it was exposed numerous times. The picture started out as Red Mark lying on the grass, sunglasses on, asleep. But what it became was an explosion of Wild Turkey bottles and the unwashed crowd and the sun and Budweiser and other faces, other people, other unnamed souls. All of that and more and it was exploding out of Red Mark’s head like so much bone and blood and brains.