Kentucky Buddha

Patricia Mulcahy

The author with her friend, Charles

Word Count 1145

I never argued politics with Charles, my friend of forty years, a Trump supporter who reveled in his outlier stance in New York City. We shared many dinners, often chicken over orzo, cooked at my place two floors above his, because his kitchen was impassable given the number of oversized bins stuffed with papers of unknown origin. The hallway was similarly jammed, with bolts of fabric and reams of wrapping paper in big wooden crates. Books in towering piles hovered in every available corner. A creative director at a publisher, Charles read more than anyone I knew.

Photographs and artwork covered all the walls, and even the kitchen cabinets and the bathroom door were adorned with oversized reproductions of idealized figures from mythology and classical dance. The living room was usually lit dimly. A Buddhist shrine, surrounded by twinkling white lights, sat serenely between two windows that faced the street, competing for the eye with his vast Barbie doll collection. Charles contained multitudes.

The fight against excess was ongoing. As another neighbor put it: “In Charles’ place, more is always more.”

For me, he was our building’s beating heart—the scaffolding of my personal memory palace. Since the two of us met at Penguin in the late 1970s, when I was an editorial assistant and he was assistant managing editor, we were never out of touch. Charles came to New York to work in children’s theater at the Public and somehow wound up, as so many of us did, going into the so-called “accidental profession” that attracts cultural gadflies of all persuasions. He and I befriended our 4’9” receptionist, Frieda, a former member of the Communist Party.

Over the years, we developed an unspoken mutual support pact. One summer on a trip to Block Island, Charles had his pocket picked in Penn Station, so I had to pay for everything that followed in our long weekend stay. Never did he question that I would have his back; never did I doubt that he would pay back every penny.

By the time I drove over to see Charles in Queens years later, I was drowning in debt incurred at a coffee shop I owned in Brooklyn. As we traded stories about our financial woes, Charles described himself as “allergic to prosperity,” a phrase that stuck in my head for weeks. As a frequent bidder at auctions for antiques, Charles may have been living above his means; but he was also thrifty. I saw him as the king of high/low. After purchasing an antique chair for his already jammed apartment, he would buy new shoes at Payless.

That day, Charles told me about a recently renovated apartment in his building. “What could it hurt to look?” I knew any neighborhood he’d moved to would be a good investment.

I moved in, having been to Queens exactly three times.

My new neighbor was thrilled: “Great! You’re here to get me chicken soup when I get sick.”

“Of course,” I said reflexively. He had a stent in his heart, and we both assumed I’d be the one helping out if needed.

But after eye surgery, I was escorted home by none other than my old friend. In a small café down from the hospital, I sat with one of my eyes covered with a plastic shield with holes for ventilation.

“Will I look odd walking down the street like this?” I asked Charles.

“You’re on 14th Street in the East Village,” he replied. “Everyone looks weird.”

Once, for almost a year, he refused to speak to me. He pulled a hermit number when I called or emailed. I could only surmise he was in retreat after failing to show at my sixtieth birthday party.

Did he lack a way to convey regret for the no-show? I had no idea; only Charles knew, and he wasn’t saying.

I was hurt much more by his silence than by his absence at the party. One day months later I saw him in the building’s basement laundry room and simply said, “Hello, how are you?” No recrimination; no request for an explanation.

In truth my ability to tolerate silences, a cultural inheritance and often a drawback in close relationships, was an asset with people like Charles, a reader who needed solitude and was also wary of emotional entanglements.

After all, I’m that way myself.

When I was hurt by Charles’ lengthy silence, I also recalled that he didn’t attend his own mother’s funeral—and not for lack of love. Once Charles confessed that he did not know what love is; how wrong he was—even if he felt more comfortable expressing it in writing. Even if love inevitably leads to loss.

One spring day in 2019 he sent me a text asking me to come downstairs; he was ill with what he said was food poisoning. I brought down tea and toast. Later on my way home from the gym, I stopped in with a bottle of Gatorade to help him replenish electrolytes. He did not look good at all, but he resisted my entreaties to call 911: “I hate Elmhurst Hospital,” he declared flatly. When I went to check a while later, he looked pale and quiet; but I decided he was sleeping.

Back upstairs in my apartment, I couldn’t concentrate on the editorial work on my computer. I returned to his place, where his little dog Max, normally a riot of noise and activity, was eerily quiet at the edge of Charles’ bed.

Finally, I saw what my mind had not been ready to comprehend: my friend of nearly half a century was gone. I called 911, and suddenly his cozy art-filled domain was swarming with EMTs, followed by the police.

His sisters Jackie and Vicki hopped on a plane and were here the following day, with their broad Kentucky accents, can-do attitude, and uproarious sense of humor. When she had to go out, Jackie hid a wad of cash under the Princess Diana doll’s emerald-green skirt.

And as she struggled to cope with the endless piles Charles left behind, she threatened to kick his butt, if only she could reach it.

After castigating myself for not calling 911 earlier, I left that regret behind when Jackie told me he had been sick for days right before he died, but never even called his doctor.

Charles once told me he didn’t want to grow old in New York City; now he wouldn’t have to worry. He also outran the Covid epidemic.

For all my days, I will miss Charles. As my wise mother put it: “When you lose a close friend, it’s like an arrow to the heart.”

I had to accept his passage the way he did, a devout Buddhist out of Harrodsburg, Kentucky’s oldest town.

I am grateful I was there at the end to help him on his way.

Patricia formed the editorial consulting service Brooklyn Books after over twenty years in book publishing. She started as a temp at Farrar Straus and Giroux and left as Editor in Chief at Doubleday. Her authors included bestselling crime writers James Lee Burke and Michael Connelly. She is the co-author of It Is Well with My Soul: The Extraordinary Life of a 106-Year –Old Woman, by Ella Mae Cheeks Johnson (Penguin, 2010) and Making Masterpiece: 25 Years Behind the Scenes at Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery! on PBS by Rebecca Eaton (Viking 2013). Her writing has appeared in Publisher’s Weekly, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, and in the anthology Brooklyn Noir 3 (Akashic Books). A member of the editorial collective 5E, she now lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York.