Hector (For Winnie)

I have two dogs. Buckley and Winnie. Buckley is named after the dog in The Royal Tenenbaums. He didn't make it out during the last fire drill. "Where's Buckley??" one of Ben Stiller's sons asks him, full of dread. "He didn't make it." It was just all some weird prepper's middle of the night, child-abusing drills, and there was no fire. But in their pretend apocalypse, Buckley, the little white and brown dog, didn't follow them out. He didn't make it. And so, he died. That's who my dog Buckley is named after, although he's much, much bigger than the little guy in the movie.

              Winnie is named after a conglomeration of ideas and references. I adopted Winnie when she was a puppy. A friend on Facebook, a saint who rescues dogs, regularly posted a pic of a little black puppy who needed a home. I'd always adopted older dogs, thinking I was their last shot. Adopting a puppy felt kind of awful. Any puppy would find a home, but she told me that this little puppy was likely to grow big, and most people returned little puppies if they got too big. People are generally awful. Even the non-heroin-addicted kind. And so, with a strong sense of guilt, I took this little black ball of fur into my home. She looked like a little bear, all chubby and furry and clumsy. I thought of Winnie the Pooh, making me think of Winnie. One of the truest and most awfully treated friends I've ever had. So Winnie, my now huge Belgian Shepherd, is named after my friend Winnie who I also wrote a song about.

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              I was in love with Melinda in Impact, the drug rehab where we both landed in 1990. I've told you all about it. One day a girl showed up in her own car, not a client, to pick Melinda up. It turned out to be Winnie who'd become Melinda's sponsor. We all had to get a sponsor, and they had to be willing to take us out for meetings and, later, overnight trips. That's where John Berry, he of the "Lord of the Flies in a van" story, came into my life.

              If only for her connection to Melinda, I was attracted to Winnie. But she was beautiful as well. The next several decades would intertwine us and make me feel incredible love and soul-crushing guilt. Winnie was one of the good ones.

              I kept seeing her every so often when she'd walk in and sign Melinda out and take her all away from there. The place felt so empty without Melinda. I smoked myself stupid, waiting for her to return. I grew to thread Winnie into Melinda, and they became a magical talisman. Either one would fill me with joy, and only when they were together would I wince because I knew it meant they were leaving. Leaving me alone with so many other broken characters wishing for lives that would never exist.

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              Eventually, Melinda and I left Impact, and by that point, we were friends in spite of us not being allowed to communicate with each other in any way. But we did. And we became friends. What she didn't know, I think, was that I had fallen in love with her and I wasn’t still just her friend. She probably knew, but that's been covered. After we left, we formed lives around each other and added others to our orbit. So many others. At first, I slept in Melinda's bed as I was couch surfing from a friend's place to place. And then we got an apartment together in Silver Lake, right down from where Spaceland started. In time we decided to move across the street as two single-bedroom apartments opened up, and it was there where my friendship with Winnie really started. She lived upstairs. Our friend Rosey moved in as well, and Marty, another friend, lived there as well. Marty is gone. He was a good man. But drugs took him early. Between us five of the six units were inhabited by our little gang. I can't even begin to picture who lived in that last apartment. I hope they're well, whoever they are.

              I saw Winnie every day, waltzing in and of my presence with a perpetual laugh or a rare sadness. She'd come down to have coffee which she rarely drank, a filled mug thrown away into the sink after she left. Small price to pay for such a friend. Winnie was beautiful, but she was like a sister to me, and she knew how obsessed I was with Melinda. Everything became entangled. I started fucking Melinda, and after a month, it ended, and after a couple of weeks of hearing her above me, moving around and getting into more intimate situations, I left. But we all stayed friends.

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              Do you know what it’s like to have someone who loves you? Someone who loves you like a family member? And do you know what it feels like to not be able to be there for them to the degree that they need? And do you know what it feels like to only reach out to them when you believe in all of your heart that there’s no one left to call? That’s what it feels like for me to be Winnie’s friend. I love her and alternatively hate myself for abandoning her for years on end.  Days, and weeks, and months and years and whole decades would pass between my disappearance and our reconnection. Whole lifetimes would be experienced by both of us while we lived not fifteen miles, at most, away from each other. Two simple presses on an iPhone screen. That’s all it took. And I just didn’t do it. Of all the people in my life who into their souls like a cyclone I blew only to vanish like a spring rain, Winnie bore the brunt of it. There’s a reason why I have songs and dogs named after her. She matters and I’ve spent years shrinking away from it. It..it is whatever makes her such a good friend and I think whatever that is scares the hell out of me. I think that in Winnie I see my most acute failings of human decency and so I just hide.

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              At one point I was, again, completely strung out. I was living here in this house with Fainche but we’d long ago broken up. We were roommates. I was at the end of the cord. Somehow Winnie became involved. She would always just appear like an angel when there was simply no accounting for it. Just like she did last week when she sent me a message on a dating app that I only recently and rarely even engage with. And there she was. Just saying hi.

 I was sleeping in the basement room of a Hollywood Hills mansion in which my friend Alice lived with her mom. She told me I could stay there. I’d get heroin and crack and retreat to this little, beautiful room just next to the well-lit pool and I’d get high and smoke crack and watch pimple popping or bot fly or other such atrocities on youtube while smoking cocaine. This is where I ended up. And somehow I spoke with Winnie after years and she told me to come to Venice, to her, and she’d help. A few days passed in which I used as much as possible and I counted the minutes until this weird and ugly and subterranean holiday ended. I drove to Winnie and she took me to a doctor in the hopes of getting some sort of take-home detox kit. He wanted me to go on Suboxone maintenance. Even I was against that in spite of its promise of some sort of mind-altering aspect. Just give me Valium I told him and with enough pressure he relented and wrote a script for beautiful, angelic, light-blue 10mg Valliums and we filled the prescription and drove to Winnie’s apartment. She was sober. So was her boyfriend at the time. That first night I laid on a leaky air mattress in her living room and let the heroin withdrawal start to take form. She had a rabbit. Like a real rabbit. A bunny. A pet. It ran about the place free. He was so beautiful. I woke the next morning on a completely flat air mattress and a hole in my head where the bunny had slowly chewed into me. The rabbit chewed a hole in my head! I was too sick to care. His name was Boscoe. God love him, he slowly and methodically nibbled on one spot on my head all night as I started kicking a massive habit and I awoke to blood-stained pillows and shirts.

              I got high that night. I got away from Winnie. I only needed about 45 minutes and so while she went to a meeting with John, another John, her boyfriend. I drove downtown like a demon in my recently passed and handed-down Dad’s Saleen Mustang which boasted 605 horsepower. It was a supercar that I ultimately sold because I knew it would kill me despite how much I wanted to keep it because it was my Dad’s. I so desperately wanted to keep something he loved safe and under my care. All I have is his driver’s license in his wallet which I’ve used since the day he passed. I’m sorry Dad. I just couldn’t handle it. I bought some balloons and got back before Winnie and John returned and climbed the locked fence and shot up in the bathroom. I remember her boyfriend eating a Big Mac as I walked out, right as rain. Blood was all over my right arm. The next morning I did more and overshot. I was way too loaded to hide it. Winnie knew. I just laid with her in her bed and vaguely watched Little House on The Prairie in the bright morning Venice sunlight until I came to my senses and after a few hours, we checked me into a detox which I ran away from in hours. I was in six places that week. I couldn’t stop. I just kept running and getting high and apologizing and running and hiding and getting loaded and looking at my shoes and God kept trying to pull my face up but it was stuck. All I could see were my shoes. My God, those shoes. Eventually, I wound up at a place in Pasadena, Las Encinas, and after running away from there within hours they somehow got through to me and said I could come back if I was there by midnight. I sat in the parking lot from about eleven o’clock until twelve smoking crack, scared and exhausted and crying and wanting to die but having no real idea about how to go about that in any way that wouldn’t hurt my mom and a couple remaining friends, like Winnie. Winnie, someone I’d been dodging for years but had somehow appeared and put into motion this whole machine of me finally getting clean (for a while again) and whose imagined heartbreak at my suicide helped keep me alive. And so I went in and just stayed.

              That was about fifteen or twenty years ago. We stayed in touch for a while and it again became too much for me. I could so clearly see all of my fractures and failings of what it really means to be a friend in her and I’d eventually shy away. At one point her boyfriend John relapsed and OD’d and wound up all but comatose for months and I showed up for her then for a few weeks. I gave her my iPod for him to listen to in his hospital bed inexplicably in Lancaster or some other weird high desert hospital. I never knew why he was there and not in LA. But I drove out there a few times to sit with Winnie; I really didn’t know John well. It felt so good to be there for her but then that feeling of being a hero or at best, a good friend made me feel like such a fraud I just slipped away. She’d call every so often and we’d make vague plans of getting together but I could never pull the trigger. Winnie just truly freaked me out. No one has ever made me feel so worthless simply by their goodness. I guess the way the snake may have felt around Christ. And none of this was anything she did or even realized was happening. She was just a really good friend and a good person but my perception of her and how I compared to her just made me wither.

              The next time I saw her was at a memorial for our friend John Berry, my friend we tortured as he went on tour with us for three months. He just died one night. I don’t think any of us ever knew how. It was very mysterious. The obvious guess would be OD but I don’t think it was. I think he just lived enough and decided to try something new. It got too bright for him here and so he closed the blinds and turned off the lamps and slipped into the darkness of wherever that takes us. I stood and hugged and was so happy to see Winnie. I always was. My reticence of being around her was so torturous because I loved her. I truly loved everything about her. I loved that she watched the same eight movies over and over again and that she still had metal lunchboxes and other kitschy things in her life. I never took a step away from Winnie for anything other than feeling like I didn’t deserve her or at least I couldn’t be enough for her. I’ve never felt that way about anyone else. And no one has been there for me, as if by magic, as much as Winnie.

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Like I said, a couple of weeks ago she said hi on a rarely used dating app. I responded and we texted how’ve ya been and such and we should hang out and so on for a day or so. She said I should say hi to Melinda. I was actually shocked. I asked her if she could ask Melinda if I could have her number. She did and that led to Melinda reading all the parts of this thing, and more, which I’ve written about her. She sent me a message that I would have waited lifetimes to receive. But this isn’t about Melinda. It’s about Winnie appearing like an angel just when I most need her.

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Writing this book has been alternatively wonderful and awful. I had no idea what I was signing up for emotionally when I started. So much of my life has been uncovered and it rises and floats on the surface of the decades uncared-for swimming pool of my life. I’m not in very good shape. I feel wildly out of balance and my life is full of things that are eating away at my soul and it turns out there are so many things that can do that to one besides drugs. I’d leave if not for a my Mom and my dogs and a couple of friends. But you know what? Winnie has appeared. Maybe that means I’ll be okay. Maybe I’ll go see her and catch up and laugh about bunnies eating holes in my head and some of her eight favorite movies. And maybe I won’t disappear this time. Maybe I’ll just be the friend she deserves and maybe, in turn, I can save myself.