Lucking Out - James Wolcott [78]
Which is not to say Lester didn’t have the capacity to change and climb out of his immersion tank of alcohol, cough syrup, and seaweed-choked moods. It’s to Lester’s credit that he did clean up his act and may have been on the road to recovery and perhaps eventual sobriety before his internal house of cards collapsed. The angel of mercy who presided over his makeover was a Southern woman whom I was dating during the period, a blue-eyed, fine-cheek-boned, auburn-haired sweetheart with a mild voice and a wild streak that didn’t show itself in public. Within the slashy confines of CBGB’s she couldn’t have appeared more demure and self-effacing, as if she had taken a wrong turn on her way to the cotillion and ended up doing missionary work among the permanently hungover in the casualty ward. In DeRogatis’s biography he writes that Lester became “a player in a love triangle” between me and the woman whose initials are the same as mine, but it wasn’t really quite that way, it was hardly as Jules and Jim as all that, doesn’t matter now. There’s no question, however, that her velvet coaxings and grooming tips had a turnaround influence on Lester, a dramatic before-and-after effect. The next time I saw Lester was, appropriately enough, at CBGB’s, where he no longer lumbered around as if having fallen asleep in the laundry hamper. Gone were the usual promotional rock T-shirt that had been through the Punic Wars and occasionally used as a table mop and the baggy jeans that helped inform an unkind article in the Voice (with incriminating photos) about Lester’s slob-dom in which he was described as “a walking dirt bomb.” Now he looked spruce, round cheeked rather than rubber faced, his hair neatly trimmed and his complexion unglazed with booze-damp, wearing a sweater—a sweater! in CBGB’s!—that looked as if he were readying for a weekend at the lodge spent with the crackling of autumn leaves and fireplace logs. He looked a lot like me, actually, a cousin once removed. We exchanged glances that fell somewhere between sheepish and so-what, and that was it. I didn’t intend this to be one of those years-long grudges so beloved by the more militant grievance-hoarders of the Voice (and later, The New Yorker—some of those passive-aggressive infighters kept the snubbing disdain in the freezer section for decades). In time we would have shrugged a mutual let-bygones-be-bygones and chitchatted like normal people comparing notes on the latest rock-scene follies; the woman we both dated was such a deft diplomat and tension defuser that at some point she would have maneuvered us into a peace settlement before our foggy egos could object. But that particular night, I just wasn’t in the mood to be nice.
Moods aren’t always the most reliable guidance systems to go by, because that “next time” turned out to be the last time I would see Lester. There was no way to know, but there’s almost never any way to know. I got a shaken phone call one day from J., who told me Lester had been found dead, his body sprawled on the couch, as if he had lain down to take a nap, except his eyes were open, his skin had gone gray. The word “suicide” didn’t flashcard in most of his friends’ minds. It didn’t fit his state of morale. Even though Lester was prone to dive-bomb depressions, nearly everything was looking up for him now—new girlfriend, the prospect of decamping to Mexico to write a novel without Manhattan jamming his frequencies. So an accidental overdose was the likely candidate, and yet that assumption didn’t make for a neat fit because Lester had made such strides in recent months getting off the intoxicants and obliterators that had