My friend Bill was an extraordinary fellow. He lived a life outside of the time he was meant for. But he knew that. Most of us are simply products of our age. “Life is all timing,” he often said. It was an unhappy voice that said it.
If he had been born a generation earlier, into an age of vaudeville and burlesque, and young enough then to have watched Buster Keaton and Harold Loyd at the Wednesday matinee, he would have been a happy man. Had he first heard Cole Porter and George Gershwin, Ella Fitzgerald and Ruth Etting on brand new 78s, he would have been a happier man. Had he been able to take his first dates to see Myrna Loy and Barbara Stanwyck or W.C. Fields and Mae West, he would have been a most happy young man. And if he had been able to sit at the next table from Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker trading barbs and bad verse at the Algonquin, he would have been ecstatic.
Technology allowed him to hear or see most of these at their best, and to enjoy them as he survived in these more barren times, by hoarding scraps from that past, pieces that reminded him of what he had lost out on by being late to the party but allowed him to immerse himself in that Golden age.
His appreciation of the present was entirely by comparison. He found the present lacking; lacking in grace, and style and purpose. The world he longed for was not perfect, or even perfectible. But it was worth the effort to be better and offered the satisfaction of trying. Men wore ties and jackets and women wore dresses then. The present was an empty vessel by any comparison, copying the surface of the past as if the look of it were enough, or just ignoring it entirely.
He appreciated the originals of our time—the effort to be original when coupled with a little genius and a touch of art. The range of this was startling to anyone stuck in their own ruts, from mysteries and science fiction to obscure history and biography from cookbooks to physics, from poetry to philosophy. He bought all of these from my small store and went far afield for the titles we did not have.
I first met him on the street when I was selling books from a cart in 1973. He stopped, and talked, and talked. He liked to talk. But at least he inquired about what I was doing and why and this brought him back. He was one of my first customers when we finally opened our shop. And he was one of the last when we closed almost thirty years later. In the middle of that, when we started publishing, he volunteered to help and more than once loaned us a little money when ends weren’t meeting ends.
As he grew old with the knowledge of his missed trajectory, he aged poorly. Unable to excuse his own failings, he ignored them. As most of us do. Thankfully, for those of us who knew him, the end of his misbegotten time came in his sleep. And this, at the end, may have been a wonderful thing. He told me recently that he was dreaming again, after years of seemingly not dreaming at all. And that he could make no sense of it. But he was dreaming in color—and technicolor at that. And I hope now that he was in the midst of such a dream of a better time when his heart stopped
Now, what made him extraordinary you still might wonder. That is less complex. He was generous. More than most of us find the time to be. He had little money, so that was made up for in time. He took the time to be generous. And he was kind. He made the effort to be kind that most of us put off out of inconvenience.
Given to small phrases, such as ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ one comes to mind now with a smile. “Here’s your hat, Bill. What’s your hurry.”