Chris Westphal

Christopher Westphal 1961-1989

     I mentioned in my Short Bio, Part 2 post I had lost a dear friend shortly after my marriage and I cannot deny or neglect him here.  He was and is a foundation standing amongst ruins.  I first met Chris in my freshman year of high school.  He sat alone, never talked and always carried the same beat up copies of a Rolling Stones or Beatles biography.  I watched him in the back corner of homeroom until one day I dropped into the seat beside him and started talking music and he came alive.

     Chris had arrived in a problem birth-umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, barely breathing, mentally impaired to a degree and with a heart condition.  Chris could never achieve what society deemed cultural success but he was unique, all heart and carved his own life.  He was introverted and eccentric and from that first meeting on I dubbed him, The Monk, and later on, Monk, for short (Doc Savage's sidekick on one hand and on the other, a fellow fit for the robes in a monastic cell, researching his enlighted manuscripts for meaning).  He loved having a nickname and a friend and a group to belong to.  He called me Longe (as Barney Fife had called Andy Griffith, Ange) and The Lonz (after Fonzie on Happy Days).

     Chris became a constant companion in my life-a good friend for after school and late night adventures.  He was a walking encyclopedia of musical history and knowledge, relating all current events through the filters of a single-minded savant.  I cherished this guy because he was a true and honest boy and incapable of deceit or real guile and he was loyal beyond belief.  He was unconditional in all forms.

     Over time Chris went from being a lonely youngster with his head always bowed down and looking away to a man with a head held high and a gaze that looked straight into your eyes.  I admired him greatly because he overcame more in his life than most could ever comprehend and in spite of all his challenges he jammed and danced and loved and socialized and became almost everything he once thought he could only be in silent, isolated dreams.

     The above photo shows Chris singing, "House of the Rising Sun" at a friend's wedding, note perfect and thrilling.  Shortly thereafter, I married and our friendship transformed from the every day to the weekly, when we would get together for bowling and close talk.  He had lived a life expecting to die at any moment from his heart and often wondered long on his shortened mortality.  One night he was especially reminiscent and powerfully engaged on his fate.  I assured him once again it couldn't happen until he met Mick Jagger and we laughed and bowled and were 14 again-his magic year.

     The next time I saw Chris he was in the hospital in a coma from the Russian flu.  His mother related he had gotten ill and as it progressed quickly he had said simply, "I think this is it."  We rallied at his side and as the hours bled away into an early morning, his heart was the last to fail and he was gone.  Twenty-eight years old, but fourteen forever.

     Chris had quietly been with me through my schooling, girlfriends, high successes and shattering lows-always as a singular, non-judging and irreplaceable friend.  My dad had watched Chris from the first time I brought him over and had marveled over the change in him over the years.  When Chris died, it was one of the only times I have ever seen my father cry.

     As I live, Chris does not leave my mind and he gives me strength to this day.  I have written much about him and he figures large in my rambling missives.  I still have the ball I bought him sitting in it's leather case lying alongside mine in limbo because I have never bowled again.  The following piece is a short I pulled from a memoir and adapted for Boulevard Emerging Writers.  There are small changes in events and it is situationally adapted but remains a raw slice from my heart for the loss of a remarkable soul.

LISTENING IN TONGUES

     I lay down with my gut feeling like ruined threshed wheat bundled and tied and shipped off somewhere to make a kind of poisoned cereal.  Many thoughts streaked across my mind-fissured and splayed akin to the cracked glass of the one lonely mirror in my bedroom.  Grinding myself further into the bed I felt like a man out of sync, my fine moments locked from the movement of the world and all my time bottled into that broken hourglass view.

     I lay there and thought of days past played harsh like this one.  Nausea bloomed whenever the yammering noise from the TV crowed inertia around the corners of the flat.  The telecast words and feelings sprayed forth tainted and I felt all the movies, the magazines, the laymen in the street and the whole damn country full of bleeding, emoting, televised people were like dust mites-pain mites-cramming themselves and their worldview droppings into the pillows where my ears rested.

     I heard every syllable of bloated lives rotting; each hoping some seed from the vocal evisceration might bloom into a beauty that would make their whole existence mean something more than just life and death.  I wasn't a stranger to the presence of inner pain and its effects or a novice to the sacrament of loss; it's just that exploiting it never amounted to savored release or caresses that replace love lost with redemption.

     I was often thankful for the blessing of another day without an incidence of the emotional color of black which sorrow drags in with fangs attached.  Knowing the wake left by how bad the worst arrives in its ravishing black tie, I preferred to dance in the waltz of death on daylight hours, else night crawled sleepless and hungry for that poisoned gut wheat.

     I rolled over and remembered Chris slumped in the ICU with every opening of his body plumbed with tubes and machines, his breath not even his own.  My friend's simple influenza had burst out into a ravage of fevered coma approaching doom.  I had walked outside to control my own exhausted breathing, praying for a rally or simple ease.  I believed it was not a cold world where a young soul shimmering could dim into darkness as icy as that late winter's night without his seal stamped on life.

     I had been awake for dozens of hours ticked off mercilessly slow.  A macabre game of mental connect-the-dots led to remembrances of losses still raw.  The meter of memory coursed through my mind like a shiny pinball ricocheting wildly from bumper to bumper, bells and lights flashing along its mad journey until the ball dropped off the field of play in my head and swirled down into my stomach.  It stopped there and created that firm, cancerous knot.  Tilt.

     No score.

     It was almost funny how the perceived motions inside me while sitting in that hospital climaxed into a lone movement of tears canting awkwardly over my cheekbones, like small tendrils of water leaking from a pressure hose indifferently tossed about.

     Chris' parents had worried all his life that his weak heart would one day fail and he would be lost.  On his final early morning, it was the last of him to go, accompanied by my surety that a boy's good life could grant him the justice of one more breath.

     I helped carry his coffin at the funeral with unfeeling, frozen feet.  I was dreaming of fallen angels and sniffing through the chill of the morning, noting the fact that sometimes the world was cold and no one had taught me to dress proper.  I looked at his grave and listened for music still playing.  No score. No tilt.  I was istening in tongues to silence.

     That night I surrendered into bed with the TV on and felt a familiar wish for his presence.  The spell of his private verse heard only low and shambling down in my heart climbed up to my present and sang with a ramble in images of things past still felt seated as orchestra.  The song was thrash and painful in spattered comfort like the skew of reflection across my splintered mirror, with lost friends haunting the kaleidoscope, their voices echoing in the disembodied clamor of the eleven o'clock news.

     There was no pulling out the hurt and placing it under my pillow for the pain fairy to take away.  I just lay there in it waiting for the pain mites to add it to their collection so maybe another poor bastard wouldn't hear my moans and tears in addition to his while he writhed in the agony of his own demon aches.  I was pummeled down into a silence that saved others the atrocity of hearing anything I thought; lest it sprout a cancer in their own lusts for condolence.

     It was amazing how all my senses were on edge like teeth throbbing, tasting sugar after a day's sleep.  I smelled the last breaths of those I had loved rather than heard them.  I listened to the corruption of their deaths rather than inhaled it.  What I saw became more what I tasted and what I tasted became more what I felt and what I felt became what I was seeing.  The wheat was still being threshed.

     All of this was wrapped like steel in socks smashing the seeming hell out of all those acute senses until the numbness of the pain just crawled around the brain and chest and laid a festering shit of silence there.

     There was no sound to it.

     There was just the beating of a heart gone all quiet and the cries of the mites in my pillow telling me to listen...

     listen...

     listen.