The young poet filled a paper cup with water in his room at the end of the corridor of the halfway house. He locked the door. It was Friday, October 28, one o’clock in the afternoon.
He swallowed several capsules of two powerful barbiturates, secobarbital and amobarbital, enough to kill himself three times over.
He stepped into the closet and placed a blue blanket on the floor. He closed the closet door and lay down on his right side, making himself as comfortable as possible on the blanket, his right hand under his head. In his left hand he held a small stuffed panda bear.
He closed his eyes and let the drugs do their stuff.
He went spinning off into oblivion.
His body was discovered the next day, Saturday.
On top of the chest of drawers were several poems he had written throughout his teenage years, one containing the line, ‘The only way anyone ever died was alone.’
With the poems was an essay he had written earlier that week entitled, ‘The Supernatural — Does it Exist?’
There was one other thing on top of the chest of drawers — a copy of a short story collection by William Saroyan titled ‘The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.’
The book was face down, open near the end of the first story:
‘He accepted the thought of dying without pity for himself… Through the air on the flying trapeze, his mind hummed. Amusing it was, astoundingly funny. A trapeze to God, or to nothing, a flying trapeze to some sort of eternity; he prayed for strength to make the flight with grace.’
The coroner put the time death at three o’clock on Friday afternoon. The young poet was nineteen.
The Supernatural: Does It Exist?
Does the supernatural exist? To begin with, the word supernatural suggests a concept that is basically unsound: the idea that anything which we perceive could be more or less than “natural”: that anything in existence could be other than natural is obviously a pointless proposition. What we term natural is nothing but the whole of existence: the only context for anything that manifests itself, through whatever set of dynamics.
We are natural beings and anything that our senses perceive or that our feelings and thinking can relate itself to can only be also natural. It is an old and common mistake to blame our own inability to supply an explanation for something on some imagined area of reality where that explanation is withheld and something exists only “in itself.” Such a vacuum of unreality has nothing to do with a rational perspective.
There is no “other side” to reality but madness or nothingness. There is also an almost limitless amount of the human experience that remains unexplained and unresolved. What some call the supernatural shouldn’t be allowed to suggest to us “another reality” colliding with “our own.” The so-called supernatural should only remind us of how much we still have left to discover about the internal dynamic and the rational meaning of all things.
The young man was determined not to fail this time.
At noon on Friday, October 28, he left the community college early and returned to Recovery House.
Recovery House was a drug and mental health rehabilitation residence. The young man, whose name was Kit, was in the first week of a three-month treatment program. Taking courses at the community college was part of the program.
Kit was nineteen years old and had no known family
He arrived at Recovery House just after 1 p.m. During the week, residents are not supposed to return from school until 3 p.m., but that previous night, Kit had asked Jeff B., his personal counselor, if he could have permission to go away for the weekend. He had been at Recovery for ten days and weekend passes were not allowed for the first month, unless for a “very good reason.” Kit told Jeff that his best friend was going to Europe and this would be their last chance to be together. Jeff decided that was a good reason and gave him a weekend pass.
Kit did not check himself back in—by moving a red tag next to his name on a board in the lobby from OUT to IN—but went directly to the dining room, where Susan M., the head of counseling, and two other staff members were having lunch. He handed Susan his school counselor’s business card as she had requested they day before. He then said to her, “Well, if it’s okay with you, I’ll go upstairs and get my things and be on my way.”
“He gave me a little smile,” Susan said later. “I had a good feeling about Kit. He was like a model resident. I remember telling Jeff: ‘Gee, I wish we had more people like Kit.’”
ENTER SABATINI
The best friend Kit had told Jeff about was an older man named Sabatini. Like Kit, he had no family. They had met two years earlier in the Greyhound bus station in Seattle. Sabatini was sitting in a booth waiting to board a bus for Los Angeles. Kit came loping over with a large fries and a Coke. There were no other booths available.
They were total strangers but Kit sat down opposite Sabatini and greeted him in a way that never changed. He was always this six-foot-two-inch slouching mass of intellect and talent with a super-serious expression and the ever-anxious greeting, “How’s it goin’?”
“Where you headed?” Sabatini asked.
“Wherever the next bus is going.”
“What do you do?”
“Write poetry.”
“Is that it?”
“That’s it.”
Sabatini held out his hand. “Sabatini.”
Kit took the hand. “Kit.”
“I’m taking the bus to L.A.,” Sabatini said. “You want to travel together?”
“Okay.”
LOS ANGELES
They took the bus down the coast to L. A. and walked around downtown.
“What do you think? said Sabatini.
“Nothing for the soul,” Kit said.
They took a local bus up Highway 101 and got off at Topanga Beach. Sabatini had saved some money from working in a bookstore in Seattle. Kit said he was tapped out. Sabatini rented a one-room cabin in a weekly rate motel on the Pacific Coast Highway. The cabin had two single beds, a small kitchen table and four chairs, a microwave oven, and a tiny bathroom.
The rear window of the cabin looked down a ravine to the ‘Snake Pit,’ a derelict community of tarpaper shacks and broken trailers inhabited by drunks, drug addicts, thieves and probably murderers. The front window of the cabin had a view of the beach parking lot on the other side of PCH, and, beyond that, the beach and the ocean.
Many of the vehicles in the parking lot were homes to losers, people on the lam and families down on their luck. Two laid-off auto workers from Detroit, and their dog, lived in their beat-up Chevy in the parking lot. They bathed every morning in the Pacific Ocean.
Kit went down to the beach every morning when it was still deserted and the Pacific Coast Highway behind him was a solid stream of southbound traffic. Sabatini stayed in the cabin, writing his endless novel. When the beach started to fill up with people Kit came back to the cabin to write and Sabatini went down to the beach. That way they gave each other room. Sometimes they were on the beach together, admiring the sandpipers and the bikinied women and all of God’s creatures.
COCKTAIL HOUR
They lived simply—poor boy subs for lunch and microwaved burritos for dinner. There was always beer in a fridge in the cabin. Sabatini managed to pay the rent but there were many days when they only had a few bucks between them. At cocktail hour in the cabin (a 12-pack of Bud and Doritos) they shared reflective moments.
Sabatini said, “Do you have any family?” When Kit didn’t say anything, Sabatini said, “Your parents—what about them?”
Kit lit a cigarette and looked out the window at the sun going down behind the ocean. He said, “Well, I’ll tell you… my mother’s in an asylum for the incurably insane—”
“Jesus Christ,” said Sabatini.
“Yeah, that’s something, huh?”
“Do you ever see her?”
“No.” He looked at Sabatini and added with a slight smile, “But every year I send her a get-well card.”
Sabatini didn’t return the smile. He said, “And your father?”
Kit kept looking out the window in the grey light. After a while he said, “He was a reporter. War correspondent.” He paused and then he said, “He was killed in the war.”
“What war was that?”
“They’re all the same.”
Sabatini didn’t know whether to believe Kit’s account of his parents or not.
As the light continued to fade, Kit became sullen. Sabatini lit a cigarette. He asked Kit if he would read one of his poems. Kit said he didn’t want to do that. His surliness was sometimes insurmountable, but it was honest. Sabatini understood. Others recoiled. And then in the next moment, Kit had a sweetness that would break your heart.
DREAMERS AND SCREAMERS
From then on they tramped around North America. “Dreamers and screamers,” Kit called them. They travelled by Greyhound bus and walked the streets of cities and towns. Any job would do.
Kit somewhere in America
In Toronto, Kit found work as a laborer in a bakery, scrubbing out pots big enough to sit in. Sabatini worked in a bar at the Edgewater Hotel. They shared a room upstairs.
Walking the streets one evening, they passed the lighted window of a basement apartment. Inside a young man and woman were sitting down to dinner. There was a bottle of red wine on the table. Kit stopped to look. He said to Sabatini, “I could live like that.” — Knowing he never would.
Sabatini said nothing.
They walked on into the night.
When they weren’t working they drank beer and smoked pot and Kit wrote his poetry. Poetry he hoped would make sense the next morning.
SOME TWENTY-FOUR HOURS OF AUTUMN
1. Night
Again a year, an Autumn night
Another parting, one more parting
Stars that rise
For the eternal
And leaves that float
For the earth
And entwined in the shadows
That grow from the trees
A forgotten number of lives
Never joined
By the return of a King
But always
A remembrance for the Autumn
2. Morning
A solitude was waiting here
For a peace to meet your fear
Close your eyes and see the sight
A glowing red as deep as night
A hand that cups your face in light
Open softly, still, your eyes
Upon a web erected
Sun reflected
Hold your gaze
Upon a maze
Colors branching for the skies
Sun filtered as tears for your eyes
SIGNALS FROM SPACE
Sometimes they went separate ways. Sabatini took a bus to another town and Kit hung around the bus station, now crowded with loneliness.
One time when they weren’t together Kit called Sabatini with wild stories that people were reading his mind. He said he was receiving signals from space. He said they were driving him crazy. Sabatini thought he was stoned and did not analyze it. He didn’t know Kit was on a wilder trip than weed.
Back together, in New York City, standing outside the Dakota apartment building on 72nd Street where John Lennon used to live, Kit said, “The Beatles were great, by the way.”
“So I heard.”
“That fucking madman.”
“Chapman?”
“Don’t even say his name. The name we must never mention, as Paul McCartney said.”
Then Kit said, “He should have killed himself instead.”
THE SUPERNATURAL
At Seneca Community College on the morning of October 28, Kit handed his teacher, Mr. Bloom, an essay that had been assigned to students as a homework the previous Monday entitled, “The Supernatural: Does It Exist?” Bloom handed it back to him and said that all students would get to read their essays at the next class, Monday, October 31—Halloween. The essay had been assigned as a Halloween-type piece.
Bloom later described Kit’s appearance and attitude that morning: “He was fine. He had just gotten back the use of his right arm and he seemed to be quite up and in good spirits.”
The class talked about the supernatural and one student spoke on death and dying. “Kit then contributed a statement, a very erudite one, I thought,” Bloom recalled. “Kit referred to Nietzsche and his endless cycle of time, that all events in the present would be repeated and repeated and repeated. That is, the cycles of time are repetitious.”
Kit’s essay, along with some poems he had written were found on top of the chest of drawers in his room at Recovery House.
“The Supernatural: Does It Exist? Does the supernatural exist? To begin with, the word supernatural suggests a concept that is basically unsound: the idea that anything which we perceive could be more or less than “natural”: that anything in existence could be other than natural is obviously a pointless proposition. What we term natural is nothing but the whole of existence: the only context for anything that manifests itself, through whatever set of dynamics. We are natural beings and anything that our senses perceive or that our feelings and thinking can relate itself to can only be also natural. It is an old and common mistake to blame our own inability to supply an explanation for something on some imagined area of reality where that explanation is withheld and something exists only “in itself.” Such a vacuum of unreality has nothing to do with a rational perspective. There is no “other side” to reality but madness or nothingness. There is also an almost limitless amount of the human experience that remains unexplained and unresolved. What some call the supernatural shouldn’t be allowed to suggest to us “another reality” colliding with “our own.” The so-called supernatural should only remind us of how much we still have left to discover about the internal dynamics and the rational meaning of all things.”
LOCKED DOOR
Kit climbed the stairs to the second floor of Recovery House and walked to the end of the hallway where his room was. He went into a bathroom across from the room, removed a Styrofoam cup from a dispenser and filled it with water. He went into his room with the cup of water and locked the door from the inside.
He put something in his mouth and drank the water. He took a pillow and a blanket from the bed and opened the door to a walk-in closet. He stepped inside and lay the blanket and pillow on the floor. He closed the door of the closet. In the almost total darkness he lay down on the blanket and rested his head on the pillow. He was lying on his right side facing the wall. He closed his eyes and let the overdose do its stuff.
IN THE FLOW
No sense, no gravity
Every sense seduced by weight
Just sight and voices left free
No blood, no air, no way to circulate
Another night in numb grips
Unloving fingertips
Go over the ground
Trace the known its only way around
I grapple in wound and surgery
Opened staring and woven plea
All the nervous faces
Averted gazes
Each day is glazed
Shelter down to the skins is razed
The only way anyone ever died was alone
Shelter in numbers builds a home
Even carried in constant movement
In pain
I’m alone
Dying for a leap
Backward for the rush
It’s better than the blindness
Of the root, the first
Always sunk in a hold, and
Being taken
BARBITURATES
The autopsy showed he had taken enough barbiturates to kill himself three times over. He wanted to make sure this time. The first time had not been successful.
After the first attempt Sabatini stood next to the hospital bed in the psychiatric ward and said, “I hope you don’t try this again, man, because I don’t know if I can survive another one—and I’m into survival.”
Kit’s sparse response was, “It’s good you know that about yourself.”
Sabatini did survive. The novel he had been writing for the past ten or twenty years finally found a publisher. Across Many a Bad Night came out to fair reviews and modest sales. The title was taken from a quote by Nietzsche. “The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort: with it a calm passage is to be made across many a bad night.”
Sabatini lives alone by the sea. He misses Kit. It’s been several years but Kit’s death is always with him. He retraces Kit’s steps up the staircase to the second floor of Recovery House. “If it okay with you I’ll go upstairs…” And down the hallway to his room. “…and get my things…” Sabatini’s thoughts are locked inside that room. “…and be on my way.” Sabatini’s thoughts are forever in that closet.
He is tormented by questions. Could he have saved his friend? He should have seen the warning signs—the voices, the signals from space, the personality changes, what Kit said outside John Lennon’s apartment that day in New York. He should have been more aware.
Sabatini thinks about Kit’s thoughts the night before as he lay in bed planning his own death. Was he hearing the voices? Was he thinking about the madman who killed John Lennon? Had he decided to take his own life before he possibly took someone else’s? That last night haunts Sabatini. Was Kit overwhelmed with loneliness? Or did he lie there perfectly calm, resolved, happy even, with his decision?
When Sabatini saw Kit’s body in the coffin he tapped his friend’s chest. It was as hard and hollow as a barrel. “This is not Kit,” he said to the funeral director. “I don’t know where he is, but this is not him.” The funeral director nodded politely and walked away.
Sabatini’s guru believes in an afterlife. “Don’t worry about your friend, man, he’s all right.” He told Sabatini he will see Kit again. “Imagine both of you walking along together, totally happy, knowing and seeing all, and that walk will last five minutes or five thousand years.” Sabatini didn’t understand the last part of that and the guru couldn’t explain it any better, but as usual, with the guru’s outlook on life and death, Sabatini loved the idea.
Sabatini wants to take that walk with Kit. A psychiatric nurse told him after Kit’s death that a suicide in a relationship sets up an alternative. He doesn’t know why she said it but Sabatini thinks about that. What are the possibilities? Would it speed him to his friend so they can take that walk. Or would nothingness result?
He waits every day for a signal from space.
[The two poems and the essay on the supernatural were written by Kit.]
