Michael’s light was dimming while the bright light of loss grew brighter and brighter in us until we were blazing with the grief of losing him, yet unable to warm ourselves. But I could swear that I could see things more clearly once he’d passed. Clearly and completely different, at least for a while.
Over time I found that my love transformed into longing. A slow turning, like winter to spring. And it was in the spring that I started to breathe a little easier. I noticed the flowers that were growing instead of those ones that I placed on a grave. I looked at things and thought, “He’d have loved to see this”—a swarm of fireflies, sunset on a lake, a two-headed fish, the palest of blue eyes. I found myself looking two and three times, again and again, at these glories that I was continuously stumbling across, looking once for myself and once for the one who had gone missing.
But I tell myself at least I had them for as long as they lasted, whether it be a friend or my father. Having lived alongside them, I hope to one day catch them up at last on what they’ve missed, smoking the weed that grows on the ground above you both, above all of us eventually. They can show you the ropes until the day we can all swing from them. Together again, laughing in the heavenly breeze, having lived to the half-empty, half-fullest—having lived until all that’s left to do is die. Would you forgive me for beating this fucking metaphor to death? Here’s hoping.
Had I had these experiences, these intimate brushes with certain friends’ deaths, as a way to prepare to escort my dad to that last big club date in the sky? And if so, why hadn’t I been given the opportunity to use my hard-won skill set? And if there is a reason, would knowing what it was really matter? At least I have his voice captured like a rare butterfly in the saved message section of my cell phone. Trapped, a digital prisoner, still leaving me messages from the good to great beyond.
My love for my dad was always more like longing, and it retains that quality, only now it can never be relieved. But in the end, finally, it doesn’t have to be, because before it was too late, he was mine at last.
Edwin Jack “Puff Daddy” Fisher passed away on September 22, 2010.
There hadn’t been a note he couldn’t hit, a girl he couldn’t hit on, an audience he couldn’t charm or bring to their feet cheering. He’d done everything, and whatever he’d done he’d done to excess. Emptied that glass, drank the last dregs of the best wines, brandy, Champagne. He’d lavished his women with jewels—there was talk of a diamond and emerald necklace worth some impossible sum that he’d given to Elizabeth Taylor, who didn’t just love but required gifts, and preferably, if not exclusively, jewels.
I see the scene: Elizabeth is seated in front of her three-way mirror so she can be seen full face and from either side. There are lights around the mirror. Glowing, they line the top, dropping off straight down both sides. She is framed in illumination. Her shining dark hair is held up off her pale neck with a few well-placed bobby pins, as she gazes at her reflection, chin up, those extraordinarily colored eyes of hers sparkling with the curiosity of a recently arrived guest. She holds a soft pink puff shimmering with the almost invisible glitter of powder, a powder that hangs over her, a devoted, loyal cloud.
We see Eddie appear—her interim spouse, the mate that would escort her from her first great love to her last. My father kept Elizabeth Taylor warm and entertained and bejeweled between Mike Todd and Richard Burton. The later loves that dotted the rest of the spectacle that was her life were in some ways inconsequential.
There he is… see him? He appears over her shoulder, brandishing that black velvet box, holding it out to her, his eyes shy and hopeful. She puts one of her perfectly manicured hands to her throat, a diamond blazes from the third finger of her pale left hand. Her so-called violet eyes sparkling, she bites her bottom lip, her head tilting to one side. “What have you done, you big silly man?” she says, smiling.
Eddie shrugs helplessly, placing the mysterious dark box into the small swell of her tentatively outstretched hand. “Open it,” he suggests warily. The thrilling proximity of treasure is implied. Her right hand—the one temporarily unadorned by jewels—stretches toward her almost unexpected (but always somehow deserved) prize. Eddie is important now, as he opens the top of the box, and the bright flash of diamonds is revealed. Bright gems interspersed with deep green ones—the diamonds making the emeralds just that much darker, the emeralds making it that much easier for the diamonds to claim the light. Elizabeth’s eyes study this offering, almost as if recognizing it from somewhere else. That place where all jewels begin making their smooth otherwise uncharted way straight to her. Jewels arriving in her hands, having found the shortcut to get to her, a cut sharply forged by desire.
In my father’s case, perhaps a feeling that he didn’t really deserve to lie by her side—that this time with her was only temporary. Soon the bubble would burst, the clock would strike midnight, the footmen would return to being mice, and her real mate would arrive to claim her. So there in the charmed meantime, Eddie would keep the area around her littered with jewels, with furs, with any and all things a queen both requires and deserves. It is her due. Allowing him access to her beauty—this is the price paid to travel that distance beyond looking to touching. He hurries quickly, his pockets filled with offerings, to fill the suddenly empty place his now deceased best friend has left for him to occupy. Recognizing his duty to keep her warm and shining with jewels until the arrival of the male who was more actually fit to be her partner, her equal, her mate—a king for Her Highness.
So Eddie takes the time, whatever time he is allotted. Remember this moment, he tells himself as he drapes the jewels shadowing past her face. Glowing with satisfaction at her glowing, he closes the circle of jewels around her proud neck, her consort till King Richard arrives to claim her. Somewhere he must’ve known that she’d converted to Judaism not for him but as a belated tribute to his predecessor, the mighty Michael Todd. And maybe that was all somehow as it should be. But, whatever and whichever way it was, this was his time.
My father’s time to stand in the light with her, with Elizabeth. So still, and yet he could swear they were dancing.
In 1967, when William Manchester was about to publish his book The Death of a President, the author balked at making certain changes that Jackie Kennedy requested—changes which actually altered the truth. She tried to stop its publication and, counseled that such an action could make her look bad in the public eye, she famously retorted: “The only thing that could make me look bad would be if I ran off with Eddie Fisher,” who, among other things had a few years prior been publicly humiliated when Elizabeth Taylor left him for Richard Burton.
Having waited the appropriately respectful month following my father’s (timely) death, I hesitated only briefly before Googling him—the post-modern form of grieving electronically in the twenty-first century. PDDD. I was surprised to discover that he had only been dead—an awful word when actually applicable—a little more than a month. It seemed like he’d been gone so much longer, and really gone this time. This was final, there was no getting around that this time he was undeniably, permanently, and conspicuously out of reach, except for those cell phone messages he’d left me, now embedded like a rare insect in digital amber. Somehow I’d known it might come in handy to save them, I just didn’t realize how soon.