A biography I’ll never write

“Do you sometimes feel like you try to look through people?” asked Ed.

“I feel like I do,” I replied. “I try to pick them apart, I don’t know why.”

“I know I do,” said Ed. “I don’t know why, but I know I do it.”

He leaned back into the wooden chair at his computer desk. He crossed his legs and ashed his cigarette in a stone ashtray.

“I don’t like people that don’t like the earth,” he said after some time.

As he spoke to me about being a teacher, working at the nuclear power plant, and trying to kill himself, he kept stopping. He would shut up for a moment and stare at the small baby possum I was holding against my chest with my hand. She was fast asleep on me like she’d known me forever.

“Idn’t that something? My, I’ve never seen this. She knows you’re different,” said Ed. I figured he meant she could tell I was a female. I assumed she smelled my hormones, and my lover’s hormones on me. Yes, I was definitely pouring hormones from a steamy moment earlier that nearly made me late for this.

It was funny that he told me he tried to kill himself. Not because that amuses me, because it doesn’t. It’s not funny.

It’s funny to me because I told him stories were important. Then I brought up Johnny Murphy, at the Hermitage Retirement Home in Rockingham, who tried to kill himself and failed. He never said how exactly. He lost a lot of fine motor skills but over the years has regained them with the help of music, playing the piano. Johnny was a man with no family. He had unofficially adopted the Thursday morning nurse, who had two children. He said this made him feel like a grandfather. His girlfriend of five years spent her days beside him in a motorized wheelchair. She had some form of mental handicap which I could not identify. She was nice, and invited me to be her guest at the retirement home’s next dinner function. She told me a man would come to sing on their stage, and Johnny would play the piano and the harmonica.

“That’s my singing partner,” she said to me about the singer. “He said he doesn’t sing without me. He said I was his singing partner. When I sing I get glad. It makes me happy. I sing for the Lord, I’m a Christian.”

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure why I brought it up to Ed.

Ed’s girlfriend Karen was awesome. She was a writing teacher at a nearby community college. She knew a lot about wildlife. She told me all about possum defense mechanisms and diet.

“They are omnivorous; they can eat pretty much anything,” she explained. “It’s difficult to keep them in captivity because they need to have a very diverse diet.”

Ed seemed to be on the same page as me. He didn’t like people, apart from the storytelling he did on stage at various events, sometimes attracting hundreds of listeners. He spun lies and tall tales and amused you with the fantastic and ridiculous. But at the end of the day he just wanted to go home to his possum and sit in the woods, drinking coffee.

“Dawn, I’m pretty much reclusive out here. In the five years I’ve been here, not more than ten different cars has come down that dirt road of mine. But you’re welcome here anytime. I wouldn’t invite just anyone down that dirt road. I might meet them someplace else. No one comes here.”

I actually found it a little odd when he told me about sitting in the woods at 2 a.m. drinking coffee, waiting for his possum to wake up. Maybe it wasn’t really coffee.

I was raised by parents who believe in having standards. I’ve been thinking for a while that standards get in the way of real life. I don’t have time to judge people if I’m here to write their stories. To get at the meat, I have to go where real people are.

Ed Duke lives in a single-wide trailer somewhere on the line between two cities, but not within city limits. He has several cats, smokes cigarette after cigarette and probably has a drinking problem. But for whatever reason I can’t seem to judge him. Even when he busted open his hand and was bleeding all over what I imagine is one of his only clean shirts without noticing, I couldn’t judge him. I felt a pure friendship, a platonic trust for him. I felt sympathetic towards him, and asked him frank questions. I did what I could to keep him talking because his voice had a deep, smooth quality to it that rolled like boulders on granite slabs.

He was like a mountain, ancient and weathered. I was like a tree, growing and bending to adapt.

Sometimes when I don’t know how to act in a social situation I just pull out the reporter cards and pretend I’m interviewing.

If they are being emotional, I shut up and let them talk. Silence pulls on the heart, and after a while the words come.

There were several times I thought he might cry. He said it was old age that made him stop killing things. Karen and I agreed it was sympathy, or empathy. He insisted on it being old age, but later revisited the topic with tears in his eyes in the middle of another conversation.

“I was sittin out there and I was watching Dude hunting a frog who was hunting a bug. Dude got the bug and the frog got to live.”

He choked up.

“It really taught me something, you know?”

He stood in the trailer’s kitchen, looking out over the sink into the living room where Karen and I sat. He leaned forward, propping himself up with his arms. He talked for a minute incoherently about losing family, or taking them for granted, I’m not sure which. He sunk his head for a moment and was silent.

The possums are his teachers.

I’m a firm believer that you have to find your vibration in the world. The world around you is composed of vibrations moving slowly, quickly, all speeds, making matter. There is always a perfect harmony to be achieved. Some people find their vibration in an airplane, while weaving, meditating on the back deck or fishing. The woods give Ed his vibration.

“People don’t know how to listen to the trees anymore. I can hear them.”

I remember the first time I found a vibration I liked. On the car ride to and from school as a child we would leave the village and drive through farmland through a forest to the Army base. Just before the forest there was some property that had a pond on it. I can recall seeing the fog change over the pond, seeing the vegetation change during the seasons and over the years. And one blue heron. He came back year after year. Perhaps it was a different heron each time, and perhaps there was only room for one at that pond. I’m no scientist, but as a child I was fascinated. I could feel that pond inside me. I could draw that place to this day. I would have dreams about creeping up on the heron in the fog on the opposite side of the pond and scaring him off on purpose, just by startling him. I would stand up among the reeds, and frogs would slip into the water. And sometimes the blue heron didn’t get startled.

I pride myself in being able to match most people’s vibrations.

I can connect to anyone. I can relate. There are few I cannot relate to. Ed feels like he can relate to me. Yet I’m a 23-year-old girl and he’s a sixty-something-year-old man.

He had a stroke a few weeks before. He said he can’t use his right hand as much anymore. I wanted to cry.

He likes to make people laugh. He’s kind of a clown. So even when he’s serious, he’s still entertaining. It’s hard not to laugh sometimes.

When I want to cry, I give a small giggle instead.

He gave me a book by a writer he knew that did well. He was a North Carolinian Thoreau, and his book was called “Coming Out of the Woods.” Ed seemed to think this man could get me published if I wrote something good.

IF.

“If you ever need some place to just get away, you can come here,” he told me in all seriousness, tilting his forehead down to me and raising his eyebrows. “You don’t even have to get out of your car if you don’t want to talk to nobody. I’ll leave you alone. Hell, you can get out of your car and walk butt naked across the yard and won’t nobody see you but The Lord.”

I told him I believed that each interaction you have with another being should be a positive one, because if you have a negative reaction, it will somehow affect you.

“It might come back to you right around the corner. It might come back to you long after you’re dead. But it will.”

He has a tattoo on his arm that says, “Acting or Reacting?”

What is it called when you do both at the same time?

Channeling?

We are channeling an experience. How odd that we should project this into TV. Someone saw how fundamental this part of the experience is to the human species.

We talked about TV. We talked about light and the effects of being indoors, away from the sun.

“That’s rock and roll right there, huh?” he said about his TV in the corner. It was a silver box that sat on some kind of wrought-iron farm equipment. This man was more interested in having his portraits taken with an antique chamber pot than having a nice TV or even a computer for that matter.

I wonder what “Coming out of the Woods” is about. Right now I can only think of going in.

On my way to Ed Duke’s house I got lost. I got lost on the way home as well.

The world is not enough. But it is such a perfect place to start, my love. And if you’re strong enough, together we can take the world apart, my love. People like us know how to survive. There’s no point in living, if you can’t feel alive.

Several months went by in silence from Ed. I often wondered how he was getting along, in the woods by himself. At some point he called me and told me he was taking a road trip with his possum, to do some storytelling. Then a few more months went by.

One morning I received an arrest notification from the Sheriff. Ed had been arrested for assault on a female and intent to kill with a deadly weapon. According to the arrest report, Ed had chased his girlfriend into her own home and pistol-whipped her and threatened to kill her. The news startled me and his mug shot made me want to cry, although I couldn’t. Perhaps the disbelief held the tears at bay.

Ed is in jail under bond until his hearing. I don’t know if I’ll hear from him again, the possum rehabilitator, the man who begged me to write his biography so he could take his life and have something to leave his daughter.