Hollywood Chuck, Patron Saint of Wonderment
The only time I saw Chuck face-to-face was when he picked me up outside my Palm Springs hotel in his scarlet Jeep, his adult toy better known as “Big Red.” As he idled — the Jeep freshly hosed off and looking as pretty as a ruby slipper — he lowered his window to greet me. His joy at the sight of me buzzed from behind mirrored sunglasses.
“Going my way?” I said, trying to keep the smile off my face.
“Believe it or not,” Chuck said, “I am going your way.” He delivered his line with grave seriousness.
I could tell Chuck was nervous because when I buckled in, he hesitated, as if he wanted to lean over and give me a hug but decided instead to stick out his hand. A handshake? From the man who helped me plumb my soul?
Before it became more awkward, I reached over the gearshift and grabbed Chuck in a big hug. His lean body felt so solid in my embrace I knew he was real and not an avatar who only existed onscreen. Without hesitation, he hugged me back so hard I could feel the love pouring down his arms and surrounding me.
For the past two years, Hollywood Chuck and I had practiced a daily morning ritual of exchanging lists of things we were grateful for. Cars appeared often on Chuck’s gratitudes lists in a place of honor — #13: knowing I will find a big, red car for adventuring. I always sent Chuck ten gratitudes. Chuck always sent me thirteen. Having more gratitudes meant he had the last word. Chuck always liked to have the last word.
While he drove, Chuck chittering from topic to topic like a sparrow on speed, I was happy to just sit back and enjoy the ride. He stroked the steering wheel, fingers adorned with chunky silver rings on each one. Later he would tell me that every ring was a present from a friend who had died. I was grateful to call him my friend. We met four years earlier through a meditation app. After each meditation, the app displayed thumbnail photos of fellow meditators, along with the opportunity to connect through pre-programmed greetings. I enjoyed messaging random people with a friendly — Thanks for meditating with me! Hollywood Chuck was the first to ping me with a more personal message — Hey, you look like the actress Blythe whatshername!
When I’d checked Chuck out on Facebook, I was rewarded with a feed that sparkled with rainbow flags and photos of beautiful men with their arms around his shoulders. I sneaked peeks at him now as he drove. Onscreen, and in person, Chuck was Hollywood handsome with deep sea-blue eyes and choppy salt-and-pepper hair. He remained Hollywood Chuck in my mind, which also fit nicely since, while I lived in the Pacific Northwest, Chuck lived in West Hollywood.
After Chuck died, I canceled my subscription to the app and to my dismay our texts disappeared with him. For months afterwards, I couldn’t bear listing my gratitudes into the void.
***
Having that physical contact when we hugged inside Chuck’s car broke us open even more than we’d already been online. I think it was our daily lists that brought us so close, so quickly. At times our gratitudes were light-hearted — Chuck appreciating his omnipresent oat milk latte with cinnamon. Or getting a good haircut that made him look cute. Other times our lists veered into darker territory, such as my bittersweet appreciation of having a mother, who for all her faults and cruelties, encouraged me to pick out whatever toy I wanted on my birthday. Other girls played with Barbies; fairy tale books were my toys of choice. My mother also taught me to ride a bike so I could make friends when I had none outside the pages of those books.
As Big Red purred down the highway to Thousand Palms Oasis, a nature preserve at the northern end of the Coachella Valley, malls dwindled into desert, and I found a chance to insert myself into Chuck’s monologue.
“Only two more months until I retire,” I dove in as he paused for a breath. “How am I ever going to take off my technical writing hat and pull on a story writer’s?”
Chuck pulled off the freeway at a sign for Thousand Palms Oasis. He glanced over at me. “Write a story about elephants. Once one of their herd dies, the others weep.” Chuck was crazy for elephants and when we Facetimed, I could see his apartment had enough elephant paintings, pillows, and figurines to comprise a herd of his own.
“That’s probably a fantasy created by humans to feel better about death. ‘Love never dies’ is the ending that never ends. What a cliché.” My voice sounded a bit prim, even to myself.
“Okay, then, how ‘bout a story around Big Red? She’s such a beauty.” Chuck patted the steering wheel as he parked, his chunky silver rings flashing in the morning light. His voice dropped. “But when I saw her this morning, she was covered with water spots. I’d left her in the driveway and it rained last night. I’d wanted you to see her perfect.” Chuck stared straight ahead, as if glancing my way might cause him pain at disappointing me. I was touched that my friend cared so much about the first impression his car was making.
Chuck was wearing a black T-shirt with a skull and crossbones on its front, a stark contrast to the man I knew online. Though Hollywood Chuck had his sassy side, he was one of the gentlest souls I’d ever met. This was a man who sent me videos from his balcony so I could hear birdsong.
“She’s perfect,” I said. Chuck breathed out and his T-shirt flattened with his exaltation.
Later, over lunch at a nouveau Korean restaurant, Hollywood Chuck inhaled more than his share of the salt and pepper chicken we ordered. When I bit through the crust dappled with bits of black pepper, the chicken burst, releasing its pent-up juices and flooding my mouth. The excess of salt made me want to lick the plate. Chuck doused his chunks with a violently red-hot sauce. After his last bite, Chuck leaned back and patted the distended belly on his slender frame.
“Perfect,” he said, looking at me.
A few days after that one-and-only meeting in Palm Springs, before he knew he was dying, Chuck called me.
***
I could hear the tiny birds chirping from his balcony overlooking the Hollywood Hills. Within seconds, throbbing music exploded, techno, obliterating the birdsong. As usual, Chuck had put me on speaker so he could move around his apartment while we chatted and he danced. “You know how I create movies?” he began.
That was a Chuck rhetorical question. For the last year Making movies with my iPhone had routinely placed number one or two on his gratitudes lists. It was his retirement passion project. I yearned to make writing storybook tales mine, but my once overflowing childhood imagination had dried up long ago.
“You’re now a movie star,” Chuck cackled. “Check your email.” Then he hung up.
When I opened the attached movie file from his message, THOUSAND PALMS OASIS appeared across my screen in bold letters. And here I’d thought he’d just been taking tourist snapshots.
As the title faded, there I was, my white hair sparkling in the sun while I wandered on wooden planks through towering green palm trees. I marveled that palms were able to grow there, when just moments ago we had been driving through desert sand and scrub brush. When a murmuration of tiny black birds flew overhead, then landed on the top of the nearest palm, I turned to Chuck and only pointed, so overcome I couldn’t speak. We continued walking through the palms — which became greener and greener — until the path ended abruptly at a small pond. I stood for a while gazing at the miracle of water in the desert.
At the sound of Chuck’s voice breaching the silence on the screen, I jumped. My friend had dubbed in a soundtrack. His disembodied Cheshire Cat’s voice seemed to come from up in the trees. “You see,” the voiceover intoned as the camera came in tight and focused on my face. “Like palm trees gathering in the desert, unexpected friendships can flourish anywhere.”
When The End scrolled on the screen, along with the credits — Director, Chuck; Editor, Chuck; Cinematographer, Chuck — I couldn’t move. I was used to feeling invisible, and here in Chuck’s movie, I had a starring role.
Meaning that much in another person’s story took my breath away.
***
Hollywood Chuck knew all my secrets, especially the ones I felt ashamed of. No one else but Chuck knew I ate dinner by myself growing up. My mother, a once beautiful model, banished me to eat in the kitchen in solitude without telling me why. While she, my father, my brother, and grandmother ate together in the formal dining room, I read Alice in Wonderland next to the refrigerator.
After our visit in Palm Springs, Chuck and I fell into a bi-monthly pattern of Zoom lunch dates. When I revealed that I once ate in solitary confinement, his face contorted on the screen. He dropped his chopsticks onto his plate. They clattered as a chunk of salt and pepper chicken rolled onto his table.
“Your mother sounds like the Queen of Hearts. She might as well have said, ‘Off with her head!’” He paused, his thick, movie-star eyebrows rising and falling. By this point, I knew that was Chuck’s “tell,” as in whether he should tell me what he was thinking. I didn’t see his tell very often. “I’ll just say it. She didn’t deserve a daughter like you. If she were still alive, I’d hunt her down in Big Red and give her a piece of my mind.”
I felt a fist in my gut, the punch that knocked me flat when I thought of my mother. Later as an adult, when I learned of the undiagnosed dyslexia that caused her strict father to beat her and call her stupid, I gained some understanding of my mother. My voracious appetite for reading must have been hard for her: I was a reminder of everything she couldn’t be, and I was nothing like she wanted me to be. But by the time I felt compassion for her, it was too late. Her voice with its entwining notes of disappointment and disdain was too deeply entrenched in my head.
Breathe, I told myself.
“She was only shown love when she won beauty contests,” I said. “And she made it clear I was no beauty. My mother made me straighten my hair when I was nine. The chemicals were so strong I woke up the next morning with a burning scalp, chunks of hair on the pillow, and pig bristles on my head.”
Chuck’s eyebrows stilled. “Who cares how you looked? You are worthy of love, my love.”
In the four years I knew Hollywood Chuck, I believe we provided the salve to each other’s past wounds. I wonder now if his quick acceptance of me was because I had so quickly accepted him. He and I were part of the same herd, the same family of Misfit Toys. Chuck, too, had been shunned by those who should have loved him. When he told me the story of knocking on his nephew’s door, the nephew he’d once taken in when the boy was living on the streets — and the nephew wouldn’t answer even though Chuck could hear him inside — I intuitively knew this was a human who would never hurt me.
And then he died. And it hurt.
***
Once I asked Chuck why he always wrote thirteen gratitudes. Why not seven or twelve?
“It’s a number most people are afraid of, but it’s always been lucky for me.” He was quiet for a moment, and then added, “I was lucky the day it brought you to me.”
Chuck’s luck didn’t hold. Soon after our time together in the desert, Chuck started having stomach aches so severe that he wound up in the emergency room. The doctor diagnosed ulcers and told him to lay off fried foods. No more salt and pepper chicken doused with hot sauce.
“Stress can cause ulcers,” I said, “maybe you should meditate more.”
“Maybe you should mind your business,” he said, cackling as he hung up the phone.
***
Early in our friendship, when I told Chuck about writing and illustrating my first tale at six, he was so silent on the phone I wondered if he was seeing the movie version in his mind and making a shot list.
“I’d drawn a leg on a foot with a hand on top in order to tell a story about a little girl who woke up one day without a head,” I said. “Her friends didn’t care since she still could dance on the one leg she had left. And the hand sprouting from the top of the remaining leg waved at everyone. She was everyone’s friend.”
“Sounds like your own private Hollywood,” Chuck said, breaking his silence. I heard the scritch of a match. He was probably lighting the candles around his apartment. Chuck was never one to sit still, even for a good story. “I’d pay money to see that.”
“That’s not the reaction my mother had.”
“Let me guess. She didn’t love it.”
“When I showed the drawing to her, she had to force her attention from the TV where Jack LaLanne was performing jumping jacks. She was constantly exercising and dieting.”
“Was she wearing a leotard? With a head band?” He took a sip big enough to tell me his beloved oat milk latte had cooled while he had been sparking wicks.
“Focus, Chuck,” I said. “Let me tell you the story of my story.” I cleared my throat. Truth would be easier to tell as fiction. “Once upon a time there was a Queen Mother renowned throughout the kingdom for her extraordinary beauty who spat on her daughter’s creative endeavors.”
I dropped my narrator’s storybook tone and continued in a haughty voice. “’What is that?” the mother said in a voice that echoed through the castle. She pointed one red manicured fingernail at the hand drawn on top of the leg, recoiling as if the little girl had brought a dead rat into her chamber.”
“Wait! I know how this goes,” Chuck said, inserting himself into my story. “The mother crushed the little girl’s dreams of becoming a writer. But that wasn’t The End.” Under a sudden blast of techno music, Chuck raised his voice. “You’re a big girl now. And big girls write their own damn stories.”
***
The year before Chuck died, I’d been deep in the throes of retiring. I told him I didn’t know how to leave behind the identity that put food on the table and reclaim the other that fed my soul. Just because I’d been a professional freelance writer didn’t mean I was a Writer with a capital “W.” I hadn’t thought my own writing for such a long time and hadn’t written a story since childhood.
Any time I thought about writing one now, I froze as if encased in a block of ice. Maybe the ideas wouldn’t flow as easily as when I was young, before my mother made it clear her ideal daughter would have been a gymnast training for the male gaze, not an unkempt, wild-haired girl often lost in her own world populated with magical creatures.
A recording of my mother’s voice played louder and louder in an endless loop. Not good enough, not good enough, not good enough.
Chuck, who was already five years retired, shushed my lamenting and said something I still ponder. “Quiet, you. Forget retirement. You will land in wonderment.”
Hollywood Chuck paused before continuing. “You already have.”
That stopped me. What did my friend see?
Every now and then, while he was still alive, I stared at my computer screen trying to will the muse to make a house call. I wanted so badly to read Chuck a bedtime story I’d written before he took his last breath. But when the words wouldn’t come, I wondered if I should just back away from the keyboard.
I watched the curser blink on and off and hoped the pulsing was actually a heartbeat.
***
Because of Chuck, at least I’d had a daily writing practice, even if it was only a list of ten things I was grateful for. For weeks after his death, I couldn’t bring myself to write one gratitude.
When my shock thawed in the spring, I stood in my kitchen and whipped oat milk while the coffee brewed. The whirring of the electric whisk in my hand felt grounding. I added the white froth to my morning mug and took a sip. What was it missing? Rummaging in the pantry I found the Indonesian cinnamon that was Chuck’s last birthday gift to me. I sprinkled liberally, then savored the latte’s spicy warmth.
Fortified, I wandered into my home office and cracked open my gratitudes journal to the next blank page. And began.
Number One: Oat milk lattes. I felt a nudge, then added, with cinnamon.
Number Two: I once visited a special place with Chuck.
At the memory of Thousand Palms Oasis, a ghostly hologram of Chuck sparked to life. His see-through image demanded a spot on my list. Though the fact of the matter is — Chuck is and always will be — on every list of what I am grateful for, whether or not I actually write his name. I felt Chuck staring hard at me from behind mirrored sunglasses as he leaned against Big Red. He raised his eyebrows. Not being in the mood to argue, I skipped forward and added: Lucky #13: Hollywood Chuck.
I could hear his cackle.
I looked around the room in search of further wonders to flesh out my list. My windowsill was a bar of books on writing, stacked side-by-side and leaning against each other like tipsy pals. On top of my file cabinet, a bronze dog meditated in lotus position, eyes closed. After a few minutes, my gaze fell on a small, carved wooden flamingo on my desk. With its impossibly long neck, the flamingo reminded me of the one the Queen of Hearts employed as a croquet mallet. I wished I could text this next gratitude to Chuck: Found a flamingo in my office.
My initial flush of joy plunged into grief as I fell into the full loss of not being able to share this moment with him. And this brought me all the way back to my first plunge into grief over my friend. When Chuck had called me a year ago with the news that the initial diagnosis of an ulcer had morphed into cancer in his gut, I instantly knew something was wrong.
“Tell me,” I said.
“I’m just sitting here staring at the wall,” he said. “I’m stage four when I didn’t know I was on any stage.”
“I’ll fly down.”
His “No” came through loud and clear. Dying was something he needed to do on his own. He didn’t want to go through chemo only to live a few more years puking and in even more pain. Hollywood Chuck wanted to go out on a high note. Instead of waiting for the disease to rob him of every last joy, he chose Death with Dignity. With a death doula at his side, he would drink the poison that would stop his big heart.
“What can I do to help?” I asked. He coughed a little, and the birds cheeping behind him stilled, as if even they were listening.
“You’re a writer,” he said, “Write.”
***
In our final conversation, I thanked Chuck for showing up in my life, for being my magical companion. I could hear him struggling to breathe. Then he said so softly I could barely hear him, “Darling, you were the latest and greatest thing ever to happen to me.”
Now I was the one who could barely breathe.
With neither of us being able to hold a conversation, we simply breathed together as we’d learned on the meditation app. Slow breaths in. Long breaths out. Slow in. Long out. Slow in. Chuck left the call so quietly it took me a few beats to realize I was breathing alone.
Two days later Hollywood Chuck was gone. He legally committed suicide and cheated cancer of its final say-so. Chuck always did like to have the last word.
When I received the text from his sister that he was dead, I just sat staring at the wall.
***
One morning, after Chuck had been absent from my life for three months, I eyed the computer screen in my office trying to conjure a story. The voice in my head was giving me a headache. Knowing that every writer, every person, has their inner critic didn’t make it any easier. Not good enough, not good enough, not good enough.
My unmoving fingertips felt glacial on the keyboard. I reached for a tube of hand lotion to thaw them. The label — I’m A Delicate Fucking Flower — always made me smile. Chuck had bought me the lotion in a boutique on his way out of Palm Springs. When I’d opened the package, the card tucked inside read: The sentiment reminded me of you. The scent of me. It was signed, Love, love.
I unscrewed the top of the tube and sniffed the notes of sandalwood that were Hollywood Chuck’s signature. My friend had made it very clear, though his favorite gift was candles, I was never to send him ones with a girly fragrance. Sandalwood, however, was approved: spicy, earthy, and made for a gentleman.
At the whiff of sandalwood on my hands, a thought popped into my head. I could still gift Chuck another candle. For years, the cylindrical glass holder containing a prayer candle, the type of candle that Catholics light in honor of a loved one, had kept vigil from a top shelf in my office. I’d bought it without knowing why. I wasn’t even Catholic. But now I knew.
Searching online, I found a photo of Blythe Danner. With her fluffy white hair — if you squinted — the actress did look something like me.
With ceremonial care, I taped the actress’s photo onto the candle’s glass.
Surveying my office for the perfect place for my tribute candle to land, I perched it on my windowsill between my well-read copy of Bird by Bird and a miniature plastic elephant Chuck had spray painted gold and sent to me. The slapdash trinity would make a fitting shrine to Hollywood Chuck, Patron Saint of Wonderment. He would have loved it.
I lit the candle. Blythe glowed. The smell of holy wax filled my makeshift chapel, and the smoke spiraled and braided upward. The need to hear Chuck’s voice became so strong that I scrolled through his voicemails and played one at random.
My Darling, he coughed, then his raspy voice filled the room. I’m not telling you that I love you any more. Go and love yourself.
***
I lowered myself in front of my computer and looked down at my hands. As I massaged each knuckle with sandalwood, one by one I felt them thaw. An unfamiliar voice wrapped its warmth around me: You’ve been holding your breath for your life to begin. It’s time to breathe out until you are empty, so empty that the happiness has room to flood in. My inner critic was starting to sound suspiciously a lot like Chuck.
When I looked up, it was as if Write Me was waiting on my computer screen.
The flame of Hollywood Chuck’s tribute candle flickered taller from the windowsill. I could sense him in this room, his exhale breathing more life into the flame. I thought: How very Chuck-like of you to send me a message when I can’t talk back.
I could hear him reply with his usual sassiness: It’s about time you focused more on joy rather than fear.
“Quiet, you,” I said, finally ready to have the first word. “You want me to write? Then stop talking and let me hear myself think.”
And in that moment, I felt the creative part of my brain wake up from its long slumber and start to grow a tale. The overall shape wasn’t clear, though; I didn’t know where to begin.
For inspiration, I closed my eyes and flipped through an imaginary album filled with snapshots of Chuck. A picture of us with our arms around each other — me with hair the white of a dandelion, him in his black pirate tee-shirt — flitted by. The happiness of seeing him again was so intense I whimpered. I wanted to stay tucked here inside our story.
When I turned to the last page, small hieroglyphics scratched by tiny birds skittered across. Though I couldn’t read the words, I knew they were the missing texts that had disappeared after I stopped using the meditation app. So many texts. Four years of texts. Texts that if you laid them one after the other, spelled out a clear path to an undying friendship.
I kept my eyes closed, the better to see us clearly. My fingers ventured onto the keyboard. The small bump under the J, the other under the F oriented me. The longer my hands hovered, the antsier they became to start spinning their yarn. But doubt threatened, and my fingers filled with concrete.
Start close in, my heart told my head.
My fingers began to move, jerkily at first, picking up speed keystroke by keystroke, word by word, until they were driving toward their final destination down a smooth highway.
“The only time I saw Chuck face-to-face,” I began, the keys warming under my tapping fingers, “was when he picked me up outside my Palm Springs hotel in his scarlet Jeep, his adult toy better known as ‘Big Red.’”
I opened my eyes.
And kept going.
