I first met Stuart Dodge when we were kids back in Lakeport, around 1972. He and my older sister Debi were a couple for awhile in high school, and I was the tag-along little brother.
In those days, he drove an old Chevy Impala station wagon that could haul eight or nine people. They usually stuck me in the third-row bench seat that folded up from the floor in the wayback and faced out the rear window. A carload of teenagers, cheap beer and eight-track tapes, headed to a swimming hole on the Russian River, everyone singing Caravan along with Van Morrison. “Turn it up… turn it up… little bit higher… radio.” Or the big station wagon fish-tailing around pear trees in some farmer’s orchard, Stuart laughing crazy and the rest of us screaming like a horror movie. Or just cruising Main Street on another restless smalltown evening, Stuart cracking us up with perfect recitations—and uncanny impressions—of Robert Klein and George Carlin routines.
Stuart and Debi didn’t last long as a high school couple, and I always had the impression that he got a minor fracture of the heart out of the deal. Debi married, had kids, got divorced, Stuart stayed single, but they kept in touch through the years.
And, when Debi found out she was dying of pulmonary fibrosis, it was Stuart that she called.
And he came to Red Bluff, from wherever he was, in a beat up, piss-yellow, 70-something Ford Pinto. And he stayed until the day she died several years later, a month shy of her 36th birthday.
He came as Debi’s long-lost boyfriend but over time became much more: handyman, secretary, chauffeur, housekeeper, caretaker, nurse, unofficial stepfather to two little boys losing their mother. He especially bonded with Debi’s youngest boy Shane, who was about five at the time and hard of hearing since a bout with meningitis as an infant. I still remember Shane’s joy the day Stuart taught him to ride a bike. And how no one else in the family took the time to learn even the rudiments of sign language, but Stuart did.
Around that time, I moved in with them, doing what I could to help out, but also staggering through the emotional storm of witnessing Debi’s decline. Of course, she had the hardest road to travel, but it can be a rough detour in a young person’s life to watch someone you love, especially someone close to your age, die in slow motion.
Stuart and I walked that hell together.
Wall calendars filled with doctor appointments and oxygen tank deliveries and prescription refills with masks and hoses included. All-day drives for dead-end consults with specialists up and down the state. A year-long paper chase with the Social Security Disability bureaucracy. Little League games and kindergarten graduation and karate classes and third-grade open house. Shuttling the angry, mystified, shared-custody children back and forth to and from their father, the ex-husband, jealous, resentful of his own guilts. Learning CPR and how to administer breathing treatments and injections. Watching the ravages of massive doses of prednisone. Counseling sessions with hospice workers. Negotiating the prices of cremation and interment.
Debi endured it all with an illuminating grace.
Stuart and I, not so much.
Raised in the cultural fallout of 1950s America with its clear segregation of gender—toy ovens and blonde dolls for the girls, fire trucks and BB guns for the boys, you know what I mean—the last thing these two young men were likely to do was talk about what was searing our hearts.
We never shared our feelings. We drank about it and drugged about it. We hung out about it. But we never talked about it. And maybe that was an important thing for us to give each other.
Between the shadows, we found solace and emotional sustenance in creating and facilitating minor distractions and adventures for Debi, her sons and ourselves. Loaded up the tiny Datsun with all five of us plus luggage and assorted medical equipment and headed for Disneyland. Organized huge over-indulgent holiday gatherings and family camping weekends up to Burney Falls. Co-captained road trips to the Dodge family vacation house on the Mendocino Coast. Stuart and I took pride—and a kind of refuge—in making these events happen, working together to plan the details, map routes, gather supplies, schedule pit stops, and executing the plans with our own wobbly brand of precision.
In the day-to-day we had other distractions in common: the San Francisco Giants, a love of libraries and bookstores and books, our ongoing Jeopardy! rivalry (Stuart was the best living-room Jeopardy! player I ever saw), reading newspapers and mocking the absurdity of American politics, similar tastes in music and similarly twisted senses of humor.
But at home we each had other demands on our time, Stuart with the bulk of Debi’s care plus the boys, and me with a nine-to-five printshop grind and a single man’s occasional need for female attention. So it was the road trips and other events that provided an ideal meeting place for our spillover energies and our unspoken appreciation for the oasis of our friendship in the desert of those years.
We specialized in Grateful Dead concerts, which all came with stories we laughed about and treasured for years. Dylan and the Dead in Oakland, when I was taken into custody for DUI, but Stuart was allowed to drive away in the Datsun without even showing a valid driver’s license, which, in fact, he did not possess. Then somehow I smooth-talked my way out of it and even talked the cop into giving me a ride from the police station to our motel, which pretty much exploded everyone’s mind. And the Dead at Shoreline in Mountain View, where handicapped seating was kind of a new thing, and Debi got an unexpected free upgrade to incredible seats in like the fifth row, and Stuart and I took turns being her plus-one, shrooming away with the band in our face and the music washing over us in electric waves. And then Frost Amphitheater at Stanford, where our plan to smuggle a fifth of Southern Comfort inside a hollowed out loaf of bread went sideways, and we had to get drunk on some very soggy sourdough.
I suppose we were trying to make up for time lost and future time lost, with Debi, with family, with each other, with our younger, less haunted selves. All the drugs and drink, the hunger for experience and memories, on top of the demands of Debi’s care—we were running at life hard and fast as long as her health would allow.
There were glorious triumphs. Like the time we scavenged two-by-fours and turned a camp chair into a makeshift palanquin—a mobile throne mounted on poles held by a man in front and another in back—and Stuart and I carried Debi, portable oxygen and all, out to the very edge of the surf at Ten Mile Beach so she could feel the ocean foam tickle her toes for the last time.
And ironic failures. Like the time Debi and Stuart fought over some insignificant thing and Stuart disappeared for a day. I found him at a bar in downtown Chico, and we had a couple beers and a funny conversation about how we should author a Frommer’s Guide to the Dive Bars of Northern California because, between the two of us, we figured we already had a good head start on the project. We devised a five-star rating system on the spot, and this became a favorite running joke.
That was the thing about our relationship. We were just two smartass smart guys who really dug each other, but here we were, in the midst of all that darkness. We each had times when we fell short of our own expectations. We drank too much, drugged too much, spent too much, bitched too much, hid too much. And laughed just enough. But we never called each other out.
We were each great company for the other’s misery.
Eventually, the desperate treatments, the avalanche of steroids and the drastic surgeries, were killing Debi faster than the disease itself. And finally we came to The Last Everything. The last road trip, the last birthday, the last night at the movies, the last concert, the last family gathering, the last futile operation, the last hospital room.
Christmas 1990 came shortly after she took a hard turn for the worse. She’d been in the hospital for weeks, and Stuart and I and my mom were living there around the clock, sleeping in waiting rooms or cars. Sneaking coffee and donuts in the staff lounge, smoking in stairwells. The two of us moved the tree and the lights and all the presents from our house to Debi’s room in the terminal care wing, where we had the last Christmas.
She died on January 5, a cold and overcast Saturday morning. A small circle of family stood around the bed, holding her hands or touching her gently, comforting ourselves as much as her. It was the first time I was present for a last breath.
The nurses and doctors came in. The room began to clear. I had to get outside. Stuart had gone out the same door I chose. He was collapsed in the dirt at the bottom of a small run of concrete stairs. I slumped down, a few steps above. We both wept, without words.
There was a funeral. The rent came due on our big house in Chico. I took a studio apartment closer to my job. I wonder now if Stuart and I ever discussed getting a place together. I don’t remember. That stretch of time is almost a blank in my memory. I distracted my grief with work and an effort to tidy up my dirtiest habits. I took tentative steps toward a more disciplined life, something at least a bit more functional than functioning addict. It took time, there was a steep learning curve, a cumulative processing of madness and loss.
I guess the next time I saw Stuart was at my wedding in 1994. There was a cheesy little tiki bar at the hall we’d rented for the reception. He appointed himself bartender, and I tuxedoed up to the counter and played customer for a beer. I gave the place—and the service—a decent review, four stars, not five, and we laughed.
Not long after that, I was at Stuart’s wedding. He was as happy that day as I ever saw him. And in her own way, his lovely bride Deon proved to be as devoted to Stuart as he had been to Debi. And I think she also came to understand, perhaps more than she wanted to, the permanence of the scar on his heart.
I knew, because I have the same scar.
Years and years blurred by, as they do. I ran into him now and then, but I was busy doing time as a middle manager for a group of community newspapers. More years blinked by. I was running a business publishing local travel magazines. I heard he was sick, and eventually that he’d been placed in assisted living in a home up in Willits.
One day I got a Facebook message from a mutual friend saying that Stuart would be visiting Deon for his birthday, and would I like to see him. Yes, when, where, what time. It was somewhat short notice, and my wife and I had tickets for an event that night on the other side of the lake, one of those murder mystery dinner things, a fundraiser for my wife’s civic group. The day came and I went to Deon’s, but there was a delay in Stuart’s transportation, and I couldn’t stay long enough to see him. That was February 2019, only weeks before Covid shut down the world. I never did get another chance to see him. He passed away on November 13, 2021, a chilly Saturday in Willits.
I wish I’d been able to stay around at Deon’s that day to give him a hug and finally say a few things out loud. Then again, I like to think he didn’t have to be told. I like to think he knew, like I know, just how lucky each of us was to walk through hell with a friend.
There’s a nice little dive bar just up the street from my house. I think I’ll stop by this afternoon and have a drink. Two pool tables, Van Morrison on the jukebox, a generous pour at a reasonable price. Four out of five stars.