ISTM #52: Remembering Charlie O'Brien

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. I always do pause for a moment and reflect on things I am thankful for today, as well as the many things that have made me thankful previously.

At Thanksgiving, I always remember Charlie O’Brien, the best friend I ever had and the person that I spent more Thanksgiving with than anyone—with the possible exception of Paula. He was my mentor, my big brother and someone who I had seemingly endless heated and wonderful arguments.

Charlie has been gone so many years now that I cannot remember when he passed away. I would guess it’s about 25 years.

I want to share with you the eulogy I delivered at his memorial. I hope it explains why I still miss him and why I am so thankful to have known him.

No Roast

Here’s what I said:

“Finally, I have the last word.

After 37 years, I’m free of O’Brien’s editing. He can’t hammer me with a: ‘Jesus Christ, Israel, just cut to the bloody chase.’ No more will Charlie O’Brien review my news articles and tell me to move a paragraph up here or make a chop there. When I’m done talking to you today, Charlie won’t be able to turn around and rebut what I am saying with the opening words of, ‘What really happened was … .’

Charlie would have enjoyed being here today. To him, family and friends getting together was as good as it got. I can picture him sitting here, listening—shaking his head side-to-side, tugging a beer, toking his cigar, waiting his turn, which would be wise, irreverent, and as distorted as my version?

I wish this were a roast. Painfully it is not.

Essential Jousting

For nearly 40 years, O’Brien and I laughed together, often at the expense of one of us or the other. Jousting was essential to our relationship almost to the end.

So was humor: Hiking three years ago at Tahoe, we sat drying on a rock after Charlie insisted we take a shortcut that guided us neck-deep into a snowdrift. Shortly before that, he had asked me to stop giving him pep talks about the cancer that was relentlessly devouring him and asked me to accept that he would die soon.

I was uncharacteristically silent. As we sat there, I asked him if he had any wisdom to impart. “Is there something you now see that you hadn’t seen before? Something that can help those of us you’ll leave behind?”

He thought for a long moment, then spoke slowly and deliberately. “I might have overrated the vitamins,” and then drifted back into silence.

If you knew Charlie, you probably were aware that he consumed entire mountains of vitamin pills along with flour sacks filled with a vile protein powder.

Three years after Tahoe, I would sit on a barstool next to Charlie, knowing it was probably the last of so many bar-room conversations we had had over so very many years. The cancer and antibiotics had reduced him to sipping a soft drink through a straw. By contrast, I was downing draughts at a steady pace. He had just started taking Cannabis pills to ease the pain, and we both laughed at the juxtaposition of recreational preferences. The juxtaposition of preferred recreational substances would become our last good laugh together after so many years of laughing together in so many places under so many wonderful and whacky experiences.

I cannot believe Charlie’s really gone. I expect to see him at any minute. I picture him packing for yet another trip. Charlie loved to travel.

Our travels together began in 1968 with a hike up a New Hampshire mountain. Over the years, we probably took more than 40 adventure trips together, many on extended Thanksgiving weekends.

There were three rules for each annual trip:

(1) An adventure had to be involved.

(2) It had to be cheap.

(3) Neither of us had done it before.

Cheap fell away first. We repeated a few destinations, but the experiences were always different. We did some amazing things.

We once hiked the Grand Canyon in a single day. Of course, Charlie packed a beer which he drank when crossing the Colorado River: Once, a Mayan guide brought us on burros through the Mazatlan Jungle to remote Seychelles Sea caves. On our return, we stopped at a Mayan village with locals who lived in thatched huts and communicated by cell phones.

Once, we kayaked to a desert island on the Sea of Cortez, where a monsoon marooned us for three days. Our tour guide eventually abandoned us in disgust. Charlie was far better at kayaking than me, and he easily could have left me. But he stayed close to me and we shouted banter as we paddled in a storm with no land in sight in any direction.

Charlie called over to me, saying it was a fine day to die, but it turned out to be a better day to live.

Five weeks after I married Paula, Charlie and I snuck into Cuba on Thanksgiving Day ( when it was still illegal). We spent two unsuccessful days searching for an authentic Cohiba cigar, which Charlie yearned for.

We visited Death Valley, where Charlie duped me into watching a pantomime ballet performed by a 75-year-old pot-bellied woman dancing in a roller skating skirt to music from a wind-up Victrola. We laughed so hard we had to leave to pee, and then the door guard wouldn’t let us back in because we were too disruptive.

2 Gringos at the Bar

Once, we were drinking in an Ensenada dance hall where locals paid ten pesetas to foxtrot with extremely short Indian women. Federales with machine guns suddenly appeared, lining up everyone up against the wall to search them, except for us two gringos at the bar.

The last moments of the last night of most jaunts were usually savored on some hotel or motel balcony overlooking outrageous beauty. We’d share (non-Cuban) cigars, cognac, philosophy, and humor.

“GREAT TRIP” Charlie declared, then he would fall asleep in his chair with a drink in his hand. Our next trip would have followed the Civil War from Gettysburg to Shiloh when his cancer severed our tradition.

Charlie’s versions of these stories and mine were almost always at odds. It doesn’t matter whose was more accurate. Often, we were both too loaded to know anyway. But is true is that we shared huge chunks of life together. They were among the best of my life and I will forever be thankful for them.

Luck of the Draw

I first met O’Brien in 1967 at the Quincy Patriot Ledger. He was an editor, and I was a beat reporter. I applied to be his #2. Everyone thought I was the worst possible choice, but Charlie swung the bat for me, and I got the job.

We sat facing each other from midnight to 8 am, five nights a week for nearly four years. We got to know each other in eight-hour doses. He was my boss but he became my friend and eventually the best friend I would ever have.

We were adventure companions and sailing buddies. As roommates for two years, we were the oddest of couples. He was my mentor and surrogate big brother.

Our adventures nearly killed us a couple of times: We almost got arrested or into a brawl more than once. We laughed a lot and argued a fair amount. He understood who I was but liked me anyway.

He was always calm—even facing death. Most perils, he described as 'a bit hairy.' He described having deadly cancer as 'the luck of the draw.'

Charlie gave me the two things I needed most – encouragement and shit. He gave a lot of people encouragement. He saved the shit for a select few of us. His encouragement pointed me toward the top and his shit stopped me from going over it.

Charlie taught me about life and living; about death and acceptance. He taught me ethics without preaching, about tolerance without suffering assholes and about patience even if I wouldn’t get to the bloody point.

Charlie usually focused on others. He was always non-assuming. I never knew him to break a confidence. He contrived little customized rituals with people he liked.

He became my wife Paula’s cooking assistant, where he gave her sage advice on children and her husband. He very rarely lost his temper except once when Paula hid his liquor on a camping trip.

Charlie was actually a very simple person. He didn’t change that much in the years I knew him. In the end, he just wanted to have more good days than bad, and the good days were often defined by whom he spent them with. He enjoyed reading or hearing 'a good yarn.' He cultivated a hard-ass image but everyone knew he was a softie.

Disdain for Republicans

He had disdain for self-important people, Republicans and hypocrites. He didn’t’ usually trust people in uniform, except Park Rangers. (Brother John didn’t’ count ‘cause he never wore the damned thing.) He was a committed atheist. He usually had a buck for the panhandler. He read voluminously and slowly. He preferred fact to fiction. His three favorite books were: “Memoirs of US Grant,” “Into Thin Air” and “Undaunted Courage.” The only thing I ever heard him call inspiring was “Tuesdays with Maury.” He almost never lied and was consistently objective and logical. He almost always drove too fast.

Above everything, he valued his family and friends, even more so near the end.

Charlie considered himself a better editor than a writer. Yet, he authored a truly unforgettable work: “Health Updates,” a continuing series, which we friends received by email. It broke newspaper rules by burying hard news inside little good news sandwiches. In the middle graph, we’d find telltale words like “inoperable” or “a mild discomfort in the lower jaw.”

As the author warned it would, “Health Updates” ended sadly.

Before it did, we learned about courage, strength, reality, and that justice has nothing to do with it.

I last visited Charlie two weeks before he died. I stayed for only a few minutes because he was clearly suffering. There just weren’t enough good days left.

I miss him terribly. I’d give anything if he could tell me now to tighten and rearrange these few paragraphs. I still see him shaking his head from side-to-side, saying: “Jesus Christ, Israel-would you just cut to the bloody chase?”

I'd give anything to talk with him just one more time.

I’d even give him the last word.

---