I first
met Hugo in a bar in some quiet little town in the West – He was raising up a holler,
and I can remember three things about him; Firstly, he loved his women.
Secondly, he loved his drink. Thirdly, he loved the world. He came into town in
a fucked up Ford Ranger that might’ve cost two hundred dollars - might as well
have been born that way, too - and across the tailgate were the scratched and worn
words:
‘Death is an old man who went to
sleep.’
I could
talk to you about Hugo for weeks, he was a crazy spirit born out of time. I
could tell you about his brief stay in the army before he was kicked for
disorderly conduct. I could tell you about his time on an Atlantic cruise,
where he raged and raged like the animal he was. I could tell you about his
son, and his wife, and the scraps of dollars he somehow finds to send them
every week – I think his name is Carl, but he calls him Brando because he loves
Streetcar most out of all of Tennessee Williams’ plays. I could tell you about
his jobs that mostly ended in fun and violence, about his penchant for gambling
and lucky streaks (which didn’t mix well with his violent joy) or even about
his brothers – he has eleven brothers, of three mothers. Paul, Chriss, Jackob,
Michael (or Mikey), Dean, Mark, Donny, Jack, Peter, Sean and Hurley. He has a
sister, too, but she moved away to become a lawyer or something, and they don’t
talk now. He never told me her name.
No, I
won’t talk about his life – just about one night, when he came to a rare stop,
in a beautiful clearing in Canada in a nameless place. We’d been hiking like
madmen through the cold, having spotted a bear some ways off above us by a
cliff, and this was the moment when we’d cleared the trees for an instant, and
taken cold drinks of water that we’d chilled in the ice. We both slumped our
packs away, and against the trees, and we both were lying on our backs staring at
the stars. I was a city boy growing up, but had family in Scotland – they’d
taken me to see the stars one night, not quite as cold as this, and not quite
so stupid, but there they’d been just as majestic and cold and colourful. Colourful – you knew you’d left the city
when the night sky was Colourful. Hugo hadn’t seen a Colourful night before, and
he just stared and stared. We had one conversation that
night. Hugo was a man of a thousand stories, a million jokes and thoughts, but
tonight he just said;
‘Do
you know why I scratched that little sentence into the back of my car?’ I didn’t;
I said so. ‘Well’, he breathed – his words trembled and hung like ghosts – ‘I
was walking a ways back into Sacramento, along the 80, when there was this
little old man. He was sitting in a chair, by the side of the road, and he was
smiling. I was exhausted; no food, no water, I was plain-shit dumb back then.
Maybe sixteen? Well, he was there, and I was there, and I stopped for a while
to get my breath and study him a little. Thin – thinner than bones. I remember
thinking he was a paper man, with brown paper skin, and envelopes for lips and
eyes that must’ve been pure white underneath his lids – you know, like blind.
Anyway, he was there, and I was there, and I just waited for the longest time.
Cars drove by – one even stopped for a while, thinking I was hitching. I let it
go, and just waited. After about thirty minutes, I move closer to him, sit on
the ground by his feet. I turn to him, and I ask, ‘Are you even alive?’ and
that tickles him something savage, I mean – he’s practically rolling, exploding
with laughter. It’s dark and cold, and I’m thinking, ‘I’ve only gone and
murdered this gentle-man with a question’, and he was gentle, and creased like
paper, and brown. He finally settles down, and says, ‘No, son – but if I was, I’d
still be just as happy.’ Death is a miserable thing when you’re young – you don’t
even really feel that, really, you just accept the fact of it like a gift. I
said so, I was nearly crying with the earnest of it. He keeps smiling, eyes closed,
and says, ‘imagine completing just one thing in your life, just one thing – the
means are exponential, the stories go on and on, but at the end of it all, you
can say simply that, ‘I was happy’. You do that, and then come back here, and
sit a while on it.’’
We pondered this. I looked at
him; he was looking up at the greens and the purples, finding written there
something captivating. I liked Hugo tremendously, but I knew that he was a
crazy creature, all fury and fire – and vulnerable, desperately vulnerable.
A match in a storm; but oh, such
a match.
‘Death;
death comes for us all. I left him on the roadside, to be picked up by a lonely
soul – or not, I don’t know. But I’ll one day go back there, and sit a while. I
think I want to be buried there. Maybe, if I’d looked up, I’d have seen the
stars. Maybe that’s what he really wanted me to do, right then. Maybe. That’s
why I took you along, John, that’s why I took you with me. I wanted you to do
some things that you’d have wished you’d done later, when you were falling
asleep as well.’
I hung around with Hugo for about
another year after that, and then he went racing into New York to write poetry
for his wife and stories for his son. I heard nothing of him, until he died
about five years ago. Death is an old man who went to sleep. Hugo was
determined to go to sleep with a smile on his face, and I’m sure he did. I
drive past his grave sometimes, though I’m in Europe and it inconveniences me
massively. His grave is a little ways out of Sacramento, right off the road. It’s
just a stick in the ground, and sometimes I have to return it, because the
police think it’s vandalism to put wood in the ground unless it’s a coffin. I
don’t put flowers on his grave – I put stories instead.
