"He taught me one thing I've never forgotten, Weber. Once when I'd really fucked up again with the parents, we were talking about it. I said I was going to kill myself because life was so useless and unfair. He didn't get mad or shake me. Just said, 'Remember this, sister. The world doesn't need anything from you, but you need to give the world something. That's why you're alive. Kill yourself now, and you're proving the majority right – you're no different from the billion other skulls under the ground. Give it something, no matter how short– or long-lasting, and you've won."
Phil went on trying to keep his family together and smiling until the day he graduated summa cum laude from college. His father shook his hand and gave him a Sinbad fountain pen from his own collection.
When Phil told them later that summer he was going to California to try to become an actor, his father called him a ridiculous ass and walked out of the room. Mrs. Strayhorn told her pride and joy to go and apologize to Dad. Phil packed his bag and left. They didn't speak again for two years.
When we got to Los Angeles, we rented an apartment together on Mansfield Avenue in Hancock Park and started trying to become famous. It didn't work. Both of us ended up getting nowhere with our careers and consequently waited tables at different chic restaurants in Beverly Hills.
In the middle of this confused and disappointing time, I published a collection of poetry. Unknown to me, Phil went around to bookstores from Venice Beach to Hollywood Boulevard, pushing it on any store that had a poetry section. In true movie fashion, a person who worked in development for an independent production company heard me give a reading at one of these stores. Coming up afterward, she said she liked my "dialogue poems" and asked if I'd ever thought of trying to write a film. That's how I got started. It wouldn't have happened if Phil Strayhorn hadn't gone on the road and convinced the skeptics my book was worth ordering.
I was lucky. I rewrote – scripts and then did an original. Phil heard every line of every one of them and was a clear and helpful critic. My original, "Cold Dresses," was handed around for a full year before someone said yes. They gave me a lot of money for it, but the film was never made. This new financial security did allow me to slow down and rethink things, which was exactly what I needed. The result was the skeleton of my own first film, The Night Is Blond.
Why am I talking about myself when this is Phil's story? Because he was trying as hard as I to break through, but without success. We'd always pooled our money, but he refused to take any from my rewrites when it came in. He said it was mine. No matter what I said, he shook his head. I could take him out to dinner but nothing else. When I bought him a good pair of Leitz binoculars for his birthday, tears came to his eyes.
There are some people in the world who aren't saints but almost unconsciously put themselves second to those they love. They don't do it as a sacrifice or for credit, but simply because they love. What is all the more heartbreaking is their surprise when some of that love or consideration is returned. I don't think they feel unworthy of others' concern; only astonished that another would think of giving it back to them. Most beneficent people are startled (as well as touched) by others' generosity toward them.
His bad luck went on and on. Those of us who cared for him tried to help however we could, but the long months were Phil's "slap-in-the-face days": his image. He said he woke in the morning already cowering from a hand he knew was going to come out of somewhere and start batting him back and forth across the floor of his life. He could duck sometimes, but this hand invariably seemed to find him. Maybe there were even two at work.
He was dating a woman who liked him in her bed whenever possible. That kept him calm and funnily goldfish eyed, but she also did a zigzag array of heavy-voltage drugs. Phil was too low in spirit not to be tempted by her tabs of "Purple Haze" acid and her experiments with freebasing cocaine. One afternoon they smoked a few joints of psilocybin-soaked grass from Colombia. His hallucinations were so strong he walked out of her house backwards and went – blocks down the street that way.
Then, thank God, he met the pig.
Her name was Connie, and she was a Vietnamese hanging stomach pig. Imagine a wild boar without tusks, a back that drops in a hairy swaying U from shoulders to hipbones, a stomach that licks the ground, an appetite that craves M&M candies, a very clever mind, and you have Connie.
Phil was one of those people who's never put off by anything, so when this creature appeared in our backyard one evening after we'd grilled outdoors, he only bent over and asked if it had come for dessert.
I asked what the fuck it was, and he said a Vietnamese hanging stomach pig. I didn't ask how he knew that, because Strayhorn knew something about everything. He was the only person I've ever known who'd read through entire encyclopedias for fun, turned down a full graduate fellowship to Cal Tech in physics to be an actor, and kept books like Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-philosophicus by his bed for a light read before going to sleep.
The pig wore an ornate leather dog collar with its name, "Connie," and a telephone number scratched on the side. I went into the house to call the number while Phil fed it Raisinets.
Fifteen minutes later a merry-looking old man appeared on our patio. He was short and compact, with the florid look of someone who spends time outside. A face as round as his body, talc-white hair in an army crew cut, quick bright eyes. He looked like a man who owned his own truck or worked in a plant where big guys used their hands and sweated out a quart a day.
"There you are, Connie! Hello, boys, I'm Venasque."
Phil's recovery had begun.
Venasque lived down the block in his own house with the pig and an old bull terrier named Big Top. They walked around the neighborhood – times a day, although neither of us had ever seen them before. Since they hit it off from the first, Phil began to join their parade whenever he could.
The only thing the old man clearly did for Phil in the months to come was teach him to swim. But obviously more was going on that I knew nothing about. The closer they became, the less was said. Yet it was plain from the first that the chemistry between them was very good.
Sometimes it is the smallest thing that saves us: the weather growing cold, a child's gesture, cups of excellent coffee. When I would ask what they did that day, Phil would smile and say vaguely, "swam." "talked," or "played with the animals."
Venasque was from France but hadn't been back there in thirty years. A Jew who'd fled the Nazis, he settled in California during the war because it reminded him of his home outside Avignon. He'd been married but his wife was dead. Years before, they'd owned a successful luncheonette across the street from one of the film studios. No matter when you went over to visit, he always asked, as soon as you came in, if you'd like a sandwich. They were hard to resist.
Phil and he spent more and more time together. At first I was perplexed, then a wee bit jealous. I asked what he saw in the old guy, but Phil said only "He knows things" – the greatest Strayhorn accolade of all.
Whatever Venasque knew, it made my friend happier and more at peace with himself. He stopped seeing the drug queen, quit work at the restaurant, and began doing professional research. For a time he had a small part in a dreadful sitcom that kept him busy and paid his many bills. Like me, he loved things and bought them whether he had money or not (he joked the words above the American Express or Master Charge offices should read "All Hope Abandoned Ye Who Enter Here"). Somewhere in our shared past we'd agreed that good therapy in the middle of a depression was to go out and buy something extravagant. So what if you didn't have any money – a new briefcase or first edition would cheer you up a little.