Missing Patrick
Patrick Prentice (1943 to 2017)
I have a photo I can’t find right now of Patrick posing with his son in front of a bookshelf crowned with his three Emmies and featuring half a dozen of my books. The pic above is from IMDB.com, which listed his many video productions for the National Geographic. He had traveled the world more than I ever did, he’d thought about a ton of the same things I did, he was ten years my elder, and we came to love each other. When we first spoke he was dying of prostate cancer…
[Bear with me here. Blogger or the Internet or Something doesn’t want this post. Two whole sentences just disappeared. I’ll try to recapitulate them.]
… but he was still living large, spending long weekends with women he only winked over the phone about because gentlemen never tell. He was also drinking, as he knew I was, and we never upbraided each other for it. It’s what we both needed and did as a matter of course, no matter what the people around us tut-tutted about. We were both dying, him quicker, me slower. He was proceeding from one treatment to another in the prescribed order, and he knew when he had reached the last one, its failure like the others would end in his death. So we always knew how much time we had. We talked almost every day throughout the siege. But it didn’t ever feel like a siege. It was just us, enjoying the hell out of each other. He had a booming voice all the way to the nearly last conversation. He had Caller ID of course, and when I called he’d greet me, “Hellooo Robert! How are you today?”
How was I? I was thinking God has given me some favors, truly amazing favors, like the opportunity to have a daughter in an otherwise child-sterile life, a late-in-life wife who loved me enough to wait for my drunken midnight call 20 years after I turned away from her for a career to redeem all the promise I had frittered away, and a second writer life after having been banned and blacklisted by the American publishing world I had once sought with every fiber of my being.
So what was Patrick? The second great absolutely direct gift of God I had ever received. The first was the The Boomer Bible. The second was a man who understood me completely as a writer and therefore everything I had paid to do what I had given my life to. That simple. I had never had that kind of approval and support from anyone.
I met Patrick because of this post from early 2016 which has since been removed from the censors at Amazon Books:
“I stumbled on Robert Laird’s blog Instapunk about ten years ago, and it changed my life. My morning ritual consisted of a cup of coffee, a cigarette, a quick look at Drudge to see if the world had collapsed, and if it hadn’t, I went to Instapunk, where I knew I would find something I hadn’t thought about before, or if I had, Robert had thought about it more deeply, and written about it more beautifully than anyone else I had read. It didn’t take long to convince me that Robert Laird was the best writer and deepest thinker of the entire 20th (and by then, 21st) century, and it wasn’t even close. The first thing that astonished me about Instapunk was the scope of the intellect behind it – history, art, literature, cars, The Stones, Mozart, architecture, politics, quantum mechanics, what it means to be human – and the second thing that popped out in a pretty obvious way was the sorrow and the anger Robert felt about the collapse of the fantastic civilization humans had invented, and Americans in particular had brought to near perfection. Sorrow and anger that I shared. Back then, I NEEDED Instapunk to remind me that I wasn’t alone in my sorrow and anger. And he didn’t disappoint. Now Robert needs the rest of us to remind him that he’s not alone as he senses himself running on fumes. Remind him that he’s still the champ, that it’s just the 14th round, still plenty of time to do what needs to be done. So, Robert, do your job. Do what you were put on earth to do. Wade into the ring and flick that left jab into the hideously swollen face of your obviously senseless opponent, talk some trash, and, when the opportunity presents itself, deliver the knockout right. May God deliver you, and us, a well-deserved victory, a victory even the clueless desperately need, on November 8.”
So we fumbled to find each other by phone, and the rest is a short beautiful history of perfect friendship. He had my books, he had read them, and unbelievably he understood them. He knew exactly how good and ambitious and breakthrough Punk City was. It was as if I was reaffirming the beauty of life for him as he was losing his.
We talked a lot about writing. He understood what I was doing with multimedia and with words. We agreed about Poe. We disagreed about some things. Amicably. His tenure at NatGeo wasn’t just about spectacular dangerous nature. He was proudest of the work he had done to prove that William Shakespeare was actually Richard DeVere. He had a television production about it. He might have been right. To this day I still torture myself about that. I wasn’t completely convinced. Should I have, in those last days, told him I agreed when I didn’t entirely? I didn’t concede the point. Haven’t figured that one out. Thinking he probably understands.
We spent a lot of time on me, self-obsessed egomaniac that I am. Probably imitating Hemingway, I told him my own quest was not the “one true sentence” but “the perfect paragraph.” We sparred about that a lot. The new treatments weren’t working. “Helooo Robert,” just a little less hearty. “I think I did find ONE perfect paragraph.” It was in my book White Privilege, in a post titled ‘Babysitters.’
We were getting toward the end. I’d been trying to divert him, and he came back at me in his hearty manner, but this time with a “cut the shit” tone, and he said, “Yeah, it’s a perfect paragraph. Don’t you get it? They’re all perfect paragraphs. That’s the most incredible thing about who you are. You write fucking perfect everything.”
It got harder to reach him after that. The women who answered the phone said he was in treatment. We had one final exchange. He sounded weak and tired and resigned. We didn’t pretend. I said, “I love you, Patrick.” And he said, “I love you, Robert.” Our last words to one another. I heard the click as he hung up.
Even my wife doesn’t fully understand my friendship with this man. He understood me completely. No one ever has. Knowing he’s on the other side now makes me less concerned about what I will find there. He died a happy man. So may I.
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