Nik: Now Voyager

The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted,
Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.

~ Walt Whitman

I met Nik back in 2000, I think it was. After reading one of my stories, she wrote to me about writing. She wrote to me in a way that was passionate and dreamy. She praised my skill with words. She waxed on and on about my poetic turn of phrase and my ability to build a slowly so that the end result was not only a foregone conclusion, it was the perfect forgone conclusion.

Nik’s praise turned my head, spinning it into a big, cloud-filled thing, which allowed me a great deal of room and grace to push my writing further than I would have thought possible. For Nik, you see, believed in writing, she believed in the power of the story. But mostly, she believed in me.

We bonded when we wrote a lengthy series of stories together, specifically fan fiction based on the 1966 TV show “Dark Shadows.”  We wrote stories that explored the background and relationships of a non-central character by the name of Willie Loomis. Most Dark Shadows fans loved Barnabas, or Angelique, or Victoria, or, for no reason I could ascertain, Dr. Julia Hoffman. I guess for those folks, Willie wasn’t central enough, or glamorous, or rich, or powerful, or evil. He was just Barnabas’ dogs body, a character to be shifted about in the plot as needed. Or, based on the actor’s whims and his tendency to want to be elsewhere (Los Angeles) other than where he was (New York), written out of the story altogether.

Yes, he as the one who released Barnabas from his coffin, and set the story off and running, but that act only served to marginalize him, to make him a despised grave robber and nothing more. You can look up Willie Loomis on the interwebs and find only a handful of sites devoted to him, compared to the hundreds about Barnabas Collins. Willie is seldom even mentioned on websites devoted to the show overall. What is worst of all, I think, is the dearth of fan fiction that uses him as a central and sympathetic character; most don’t even bring him into the story.

But to Nik and myself, Willie was “the” guy, an archetype of a dark, unsung hero, a drudge right out of a Victorian melodrama. He was someone who had untold potential to do good, even if his own past was littered with only bad deeds, where he did nothing right. He terrorized everyone in Collinwood and irritated at least half the town of Collinsport. And he suffered for it.

But you see, the thing is, he suffered well. Willie Loomis was cute, and he had this hair and this lush mouth, and was not only very good looking, he had this way of anguishing over whatever evil thing Barnabas and his crowd was up to. He would shake, and tremble, and quiver in such a deliciously angsty way, even when his lord and master wasn’t home. He was simply beautiful to watch; when they say poetry in motion, they mean this character.

Moreover, because he’d been such a bad boy in his past, the transformation to hero was amazing. Nik and I surmised that because Willie was so bad, when he came across an evil (that is, Barnabas) that was more bad than he’d ever been, he couldn’t help but turn over a new leaf. He wasn’t a shining knight on a white steed, though. No, he was a lone tin soldier trotting around on his spotted mountain pony. Even in our stories, he wasn’t able to affect much change, but he tried, oh how he tried.

So in writing this series for love of Willie and no money at all, I got to know Nik fairly well. Not as well as others might, but well enough to be very familiar with her faults as well as her virtues.

Of her faults, there are a number I could list, none of which would come as any surprise to those who knew her. She drank a lot, to start with, even to the detriment to her relationships with those around her, but mostly to the detriment of her own health. She was self-indulged to the point of self-destruction. Even to the point where her perspective was skewed.

For example, she would rant and rave against seeing a therapist (or complain about her current one) because a therapist had never been, and thusly could never understand, what she was going through. Many a phone conversation between us (both drunk and sober) failed to convince her that although no therapist had ever been what she’d been through, many a therapist had tools and experience helping people work through what Nik was going through.

But perhaps Nik didn’t want to be convinced about what the reality of it was. The reason for that was, as near as I could figure it, because reality, Real Life, wasn’t dramatic enough for her. For example, if she got stopped by a traffic cop and given a verbal warning about speeding, then her version would be that the cop had ordered her out of her car at gunpoint. You can any event you like, and Nik would turn up the wattage until, like Marty McFly’s amplifier, the entire event turn into an explosion of the most dire order.

I don’t mean to malign Nik for this, although yes, it did make being her friend a little confusing sometimes, hellish at worst, and an uneasy balance between truth and fiction at best.  For I was forever slogging my way through our conversations, trying to find the kernel of truth and attempting to separate that from her tremulous insistence that she’d truly, this time, barely escaped the jaws of death. I never mocked her for this, but I’m sure my exasperation came through, just the same.

When she spoke of friendship, she always added some dash and flash to it. A meeting between old friends would begin to sound like a suicide pact had recently been formed. She would sound so sure of this, would express any relationship in such florid terms that I would, for a good many moments, be swayed by her description, to the point of being convened that the suicide pact was about to be enacted at any moment. So, you see, it wasn’t just that she believed it, she made me believe it too. But then, when reality settled down amidst the cloud of description and drama she’d created, I felt the fool, and it always irritated me.

Which meant that, for me, communicating with Nik about everyday life was exhausting, somewhat like attempting to keep up with a melodrama, with a  cast of a thousand characters, each endlessly roaming the stage, back and forth, each carting a thousand feelings, and expressing great excitement and drama and emergency every which way they turned.

But Nik was kind; that was her biggest and best virtue. She not only saw the good in everyone, she believed in the good that she saw. She was generous, perhaps overly so, and was like a queen handing out largess wherever she saw the need. She bought gifts whenever the mood struck her, which was often, even when she couldn’t really afford it.

I don’t know what her other friends thought, but I was sometimes embarrassed at her generosity. She once sent me a Lady Godiva gift basket that not only contained pounds of chocolate but which was delivered packed in dry ice so that it didn’t melt in the summer’s heat. Of course I ate it, but I also shared it, too; even so, that chocolate lasted a long time, there was so much of it. I finally got to the point where I asked her to stop. Which, if you knew Nik at all, would already have surmised that that didn’t work.

Oh sure, the scale and expense of the gifts decreased, but at the same time, the thoughtfulness increased. Tenfold. She once sent me a little family of ceramic snowmen, with all with the names of the characters we wrote about hand-inked on each one. Let me tell you, I was teary for days. But I couldn’t let on how much I appreciated that particular gift (and ones like it) because that would only encourage her.

And this was because, especially in this day and age, such passion and love and grandness of style must be kept quiet and shut in a box. Right? So I shoved all of this, all of her, and all of my feelings about her emotionalism and creativity, in a box, shoved all of that energy and passion and love in a box and slammed the lid shut. I only opened the box for a peep when I felt I had the energy to resist more than that and always had to close that box back up, right quick.

While Nik and I mostly burned through midnight e-mails and drunken (as well as sober) phone calls, we I did manage to meet up in person. Once or twice it was at Dark Shadows conventions. Nik didn’t do well in strange towns, and I think that this was because they unsettled her. For all her flexibility with reality, she needed a solid home base around her. Hotel lobbies seemed to make her start to sway back and forth, as a prelude to some coming panic, and hotel rooms (and convention halls and museums) made her act like she longed for nothing than to be at home, in her own bed.

One time, I invited her down to my folk’s house in Florida, where my Dad adored her like he never had with any of my other friends. Nik wasn’t a good traveler, but she insisted on driving down from North Carolina to Florida. So Nik, being Nik, got turned around about halfway through. Which meant that a simple back-track of a mile or so resulted in a frantic phone call, to which even my soothing “there, there” could not ease her insistence that she was lost and hours behind schedule and the man who owned the gas station where she’d stopped to call was insisting that she get off his property or he was going to have her towed and probably arrested.

Twice during our relationship, I visited Nik at her house, and it was there that I learned some of the heart of Nik. She had, when younger (and against everyone’s advice), bought house built in 1910 that had been mostly used as a boarding house. It was built of some kind of pine that was easy to ignite, so under modern ordinances, all the fireplaces were blocked up. That meant she had no heat at all. None whatsoever.

And while it never gets that freezing in South Carolina, it can get pretty cold, cold enough for a hot ceramic baking in the oven to shatter into pieces when Nik would withdraw it into the cold kitchen to place it on the stovetop. I got several phone calls about that type of event, as well as a few where Nik would describe what it was like to sit in a kitchen so cold, that her breath would frost in a ring around the single candle she had lit in front of her. Just like in the Old House, she would say, a trifle breathlessly. At which point I would reach for the wine or the beer or whatever was handy, just to be able to deal with the onslaught of reaction I would have to that simple, but emotion-filled description.

As for summer, which is when I visited her, the place was a swamp, with moist heat oozing through the rafters from above, and soaking up from the ground below. At night, the heat would dissipate not at all, and even a summer’s storm would only ratchet up the heat and the humidity, making the wallpaper peel in an attractive and vampire-sh way. And if you walked barefooted (which of course I did) on those wooden floors, the moisture from your feet would meet with the moisture of the wood, and you would leave behind footprint-shaped droplets that sparkled like little stars in the dim candlelight we always had burning. For atmosphere, you see.

The majority of the rooms in this house were more like museum pieces than anyplace anyone actually lived in. Nik did have a bedroom, but while it had a bed and a dresser and everything a bedroom should have, she mostly slept on the couch. She would typically only go in the bedroom, because that’s where she kept her computer. That is where she wrote, typing away on a Mac while facing a blank white wall. Seriously, a blank white wall and she could write like she could?

One of the front rooms of the house was done up like the Front Room in the Old House on Dark Shadows. It was a perfect replica, from the wallpaper, to the chairs and tables, even to a copy of the portrait of Barnabas Collins above the mantel over the fireplace. No lie. I only went in there once or twice, as I expect it made me dizzy and want to sway from side to side, longing for home. It was that realistically done.

Another room, which was ostensibly a guest room, was done up like a little girl’s room. I think I heard Nik mention that it was supposed to be Sarah’s room, but I always imagined it was the kind of room done up in memory of the little girl Nik never felt she was.

Of the other rooms, other than the living room and kitchen, I have no memory, and that is perhaps because we never went back there. But I think I understood it, even at the time, that there were rooms no one ever went into because, of course, at the Old House there existed the same conditions, dismissed by a vague description from time to time from one of the characters on Dark Shadows: “oh, you mean the west wing, well, no one goes there.” Nik was, to the best of her ability, recreating Collinwood. Which, everything else being equal, would have been fine; Nik’s house was her own personal hidden hidey place. Everyone has one, even I do. But added to everything else about Nik, and it almost became too much. Still, I loved that house, from the bat-infested attic to the spirals of crepe myrtle that trailed artlessly over her porch.

Sadly, I can never go back there, because Nik had a heart attack on the 2nd of December, 2008, and went into a coma. Diagnosis was never good, she was brain dead from lack of oxygen, but they kept her on life support until they pulled the plug on the 9th. She breathed on her own for a bit, they moved her into hospice, and then on the 13th, she finally passed away.

No one is responsible, because only Nik could make Nik take the medication that she needed, and nobody could stop her from drinking, in spite of the fact that her doctor told her it might kill her if she kept it up the way she did.

The story I was told about the night the ambulance came leaves me feeling horrified to this day; the aftermath and the funeral are not my story to tell, but suffice it to say, the whole thing sounded like a selfish, ruinous tragedy from start to finish. The house as I knew it is gone now, and no doubt those deliciously ragged and romantic hedges are all trimmed neatly back, the crepe myrtle torn down, and a new coat of paint splashed over the whole thing. Someone else probably lives there, so no doubt they’ve torn out that beautiful claw foot tub, and it’s a foregone conclusion that Barnabas’ Front Room has made its way to the dumpster. But the biggest tragedy is a life cut short, and my regret that I never appreciated it while I had connection with it.

Believe me, I am well aware of all that I lost. Nik was a better write than I will ever be and that is, ironically, because she saw life as a drama everywhere she went. And not only that, she was able to translate that drama directly onto paper where, since it would be considered fiction, it was much easier to absorb. To this day, I’m still regretting closing that box, slamming that phone down, or worse, not answering the phone at all. Not answering her emails, not trying harder to reach out when she clammed up.

And here’s my confession: The week before she died, I got a very drunken phone call from her about 1:30 a.m., which meant that it was 3:30 a.m. her time. Which meant that she’d been drinking all night, had never even slept. (This was the phone call about the therapist who couldn’t possibly understand.) After a fruitless effort to convince her otherwise about the therapist, I was able to hang up and try to go back to sleep. And while I lay there grousing and complaining out loud, I promised myself that I would never accept any more of her phone calls, they were just too draining. The next week, Nik passed away, and I felt that I had a heart as black as anything, that I was the worst, wickedest creature on earth, for you see, I had gotten what I wanted.

Nik and I had our differences, in personality, in lifestyles, in the scope of our interests, in how much we drank, how we made and spent money, in short, you could not get two people who were as different as Nik and I were. We were not like peas and carrots, no, we were like the grasshopper and the ant, and guess who was the ant. Yes, me. She even gave me two little iron statues, one of each, to represent us, and they have been on my kitchen windowsill ever since.

At the same time, we sparked off each other, like flint and steel, like Rogers and Hammerstein, like John and Paul, lighting fires and burning through paper, boiling with passion for our subject. In a tight two-year time span, we wrote around 20 stories, perhaps more, and wrote I don’t know how many words. She was my audience, and I was hers, and it was a writing partnership that I fear will never be repeated.

I can never quite explain the fusion we created between us, the conversations we would have over the smallest detail, the glee Nik would express to me when I would pick up a thread she had laid in a previous story, and then continue on with it in mine. And she would do likewise, for me.

I miss those days, as you can imagine. I regret being so irritated so often. I regret not appreciating her more, or that I never toned down my irritation enough. But mostly I regret not sending her more gifts (because I did send a few), and in not telling her how fabulous and creative she was in a way that she could believe. Because I did tell her her, but because I was never dramatic (at least with the spoken word) I don’t think she really ever heard me. But I should have known how; I should have shouted it. I should have called her at 2 in the morning, having lit a candle in the dark, to tell her, breathlessly, about the way the light drifted about itself, when small bits of dry mountain air would waft its way. I should have.