Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Stanley was my best friend when I was a kid. He had it all going on -- good-looking, outgoing, athletic, a guy’s guy and a ladies’ man. I wished I could be like him.
There’s a million things I could say about Stan – did he really run through the glass door in the Gibbs St. apartment on two separate occasions? – but the cultural influence he had on me was one of the lesser-known stories of our relationship. Hard to believe considering our adult selves, but back then I had very narrow, white-bread tastes, while Stan had a voracious appetite for the new, the different, the weird and wonderful. My first exposure to a whole range of cultural marvels came through Stan.
In the early ‘60s, when he lived in Brookline and I was in Maryland, we’d exchange brief letters now and then, and he wrote me one summer (would’ve been ’63, I guess) with “CASSIUS CLAY IS THE GREATEST” scrawled in big capitals across the top. Cassius Clay meant very little to me or most other people at the time, but before long we learned that Stan was right. But Stan had already moved on. I remember him arriving with the family for a visit to Silver Spring, probably in that inexplicable white Rambler, and he had two or three 45 rpm records lying out on the back shelf of the car, he’d brought them to play for me. Cassius Clay isn’t the greatest, the Beatles are the greatest, he told me. The Beatles? Who? He got that one right too.
So many other touchstones that I not only remember, but vividly remember Stan being there. Playing Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say” for me on a little portable record player on the back patio of Matthew and Winnie’s place in the Heights. It was Stan who turned me on to W.C. Fields and Mae West, the Marx Brothers and Humphrey Bogart (forgotten relics of the olden days at the time, not the universal icons they are today). Stan (I think inspired by his English teacher at Kennedy, Mr. Teunis) took me to see a production of Richard the Third, the first Shakespeare I remember enjoying. In the early ‘70s when rock music sucked, Stan had moved on to Willie Nelson and Duke Ellington, who it took me twenty more years to get to.
Stanley had an amazing enthusiasm for his new discoveries, and would latch on to each one with a total commitment and belief. As a grownup, his enthusiasms – as enthusiastic as ever – were confined to the path he had chosen, and he didn’t have much interest in anything outside that. I missed that aspect of him.
Stan’s passion for the Onset murder story inspired me to write a novel, and I was really glad I got to work on it with him over the past four or five years. We had many an excited exchange of emails over news articles and photos we found on the web, or Onset history and landmarks and people. Typically, Stan was passionately committed to an elaborate conspiracy theory of the case, which made it difficult to talk much about it, but I was looking forward to showing him my view of the case through the book. I finished proofreading my first physical copy of the book on a Friday afternoon, and planned to send it to him so he could finally read it. He died that same day.
