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Wilcox, Starling Sullivant - 82 - Antigua, Guatemala
March 10th 1923 - June 15th 2006, Born in New York, New York

Dear Orphans of Antigua,

I'm not sure what all you have all heard, but Bo Wilcox died a few days ago in Guatemala.

Bo was 83 years old (“counting womb time,” as he was like to say). I heard that his health had been failing for the past few months, with lots of coughing fits, etc. But he had been working, and was still very much a part of the tribe. Right up until his death, he was actively living as the official “oldest misfit toy” on the island. Actually, I'm a bit pissed at him, as he completely fucked up my plan to scare him to death by jumping into the tequila bar and screaming hello in two weeks. Swallows to Capistrano. Drunks to No Sé. Fucking memorial rather than a drink. Bastard. Dirty escaping bastard. It was his round!

Yeah, it’s a sad time, made sadder by being removed from one another and away from the place and the life where we knew Bo. I find that when I’m laughing, it doesn’t seem so terrible, but it’s hard to tell funny stories to yourself. So, with that, I’d like to share a few thoughts about Bo with y’all. If you have any thoughts, please send ‘em back. 

First: How Bo Died.

If I have the story correct (most of the conversations with John are pretty clear in my memory, but the longer one actually happened at 3 in the morning and I was drunk) Bo was at the apartment, on Second Avenue and he began experiencing a pain spike throughout his body. Steve and John went over to the house and tried to make him comfortable, but he couldn’t lie down or sit up and kept oscillating between the two. Phone calls were made, inquiries about good doctors were undertaken, and an ambulance arrived. While in the ambulance, according to Steve, Bo grabbed the medic by the collar and threatened to punch him if he didn’t give him something for the pain. According to John, he was also calling out for Viagra. He died in the hospital shortly thereafter. The attending nurse who gave John the news said, “Your friend had a great sense of humor.” Lord knows what the old bastard did in the emergency room, but he died with a joke on his lips, making people laugh.

Well done, my friend.

And it is fitting that in his last hour on the planet, Bo – whose full name was Starling Sullivant Wilcox, III – gave us another story, another image to call up years down the road. Get the scene: Old Man, worried friends, a frightened ambulance attendant and the Angel of Death riding shotgun. Bo, moaning in pain and dementia grabs John’s arm and shouts, “Viagra, one of you bastards, get me Viagra!” I added the dementia part, just because it makes the sentence funnier, and because its okay for stories to change when they’re the only thing left alive. He was as clear the day he died as he ever was.

Who’d’a thunk it would be Viagra and not Gin? Randy old goat.

That’s the Bo that is easiest to remember: Bo the creator and distributor of hilarity. That’s why we loved him. Well, at least it’s part of the reason. With his stories, some slightly embellished tall tales (e.g. roping himself to a handrail so he could safely retrieve a bottle of gin during a hurricane); bits of wisdom (e.g. upon climbing the Temple Mount in Israel, he looks out upon the “holy land” over which wars have been fought for millennia and thinks, “My God, what an absolutely useless bit of real estate. Nothing but God Damned desert!”); some remembrances of drunk nights passed (e.g. when he would retell, over and over again, the story of Brendan trying to teach me how to fight when we were both pie-eyed drunk. “There you have it. Mike, teetering on his pins, arms at his side, slackjawed and glassy eyed, staring off into middle space, with Brendan dancing around him like a god-damned Banty Rooster throwing shadow boxing jabs. Like Mutt and Jeff… like Lenny and George!” Of course, as he’s telling the story, he’s doing impersonations of both Brendan and I and laughing his ass off. From what he says, I threw Brendan through a table that night. I don’t quite recall. The night is gone for me, but Bo retelling the story is a fucking treasure. You should’a seen him…)

For those of us who lived with him, we came to know Barbara, too. Barbara, Bo’s second wife, died about 10 years ago. She was the love of his life, and it was to her that he would allow his sadness and his love to flow. Every night, alone in his room, Bo would speak to her. He’d tell her he missed her. He’d tell her he loved her. And he’d promise her that he’d see her soon. Then John or I would yell at him to “Shut the hell up, ya drunk old bastard, leave her alone… she’s sleeping!” And we’d all bust a gut. But, really, it was a melancholy to hear my friend fall into night wrapped so deeply in love and sadness, and it reminded me, each time, that no matter how developed are my capacities for love and sadness, there are universes left to grow. I don’t know that kind of pain. I don’t know that kind of loneliness. I don’t know that kind of love. I just hope I can acquire the abilities that will allow me to go through the sadness that is surely coming with the same grace and humor as Bo, but less volume. One never knew, of course, if Barbara in heaven heard his nightly prayers, but the neighbors certainly did.

With all Bo’s stories, the ones he told and the ones we overheard, he helped us contextualize our lives. He helped us see just how few years we’d really lived, how young we all still are, and how much hilarious and beautiful shit we can still stuff into the balance if we don’t mind suffering, laughing, and being a bit absurd.

Bo was absurd. It was absurd for an octogenarian gringo to be living in a Central America jungle, or to move to Antigua from Belize at a million years old, or to work at a bar, or to get shit drunk on a regular basis and fall down on cobblestone streets without really getting hurt, but having, at all times, at least 10% of his surface area covered with “New Skin.” It was absurd that this crusty son-of-a-bitch was still chasing women and (I’ve heard some rumors) occasionally catching one at his state of superannuation. It was absurd that he had a condom in his wallet when he died, but he did. True story.

But here’s the thing: Bo’s absurdity was by choice and design. One part Monty Python, one part Ernest Hemmingway, and one part Walter Mitty, he’d often say.

And that absurdity was possible because of a few specific gifts, one of which was a gift of sight. Bo, better than most of us, could choose how he would see the world. Said otherwise, Bo had a gift for changing the world that he saw – not in a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. kind of way, but more as an artist, choosing what to emphasize and what to blur as the images and days passed before him. What lines to focus upon, and what to fade. I’m not sure how long he had the gift, probably always in one form or another, but it must have gotten stronger over the years. Bo’s gift comprehended that God doesn’t write comedies, and that if you’re going to get through life with some sense of joy, you’d best make an ally of absurdity. You’d might want to figure out a way to see all the tragedy around you as something else entirely. In God’s plays, everyone dies – sick bastard. And Bo, who had over the course of his life buried hundreds of friends, knew this better than anyone else. Imagine that. Everyone “departing stage-right” before him. He’d joke often about how he had been ready to die for 10 years, but all these other assholes kept crowding into line before him. All of them. Except us.

Think about all the old folk you know. Some of them are biding time, a fair number are just miserable to be around, a few are fantastic. The miserable ones, as a rule, never quite made peace with the tragic, and it has broken and embittered them. The fantastic ones figured out some way to cope with tragedy, and for my dime Bo’s way was the best (The Tao of Bo?). Bo could stare down tragedy until it cracked a smile and by so doing became a ridiculous monster we’d never really be scared of again. Bo could stare down a friend’s death, as he did when H.B. kicked off last year. He kept staring at the bare tragedy of it until it snapped and the miserable author of all this madness gave up a story. A damn funny story. (The one I’m thinking of involved H.B.’s corpse, a giant penis, an unfortunate slip while transporting his body, and an attractive and naked young woman.*) That done, Bo would tell it to you, and you’d split a side, happy to know that you were going to make it through another day of this horror-show with a grin.

Battle won. Fuck the larger war. Everyone loses that.

That is an alchemy I’ll miss. I hope I learned enough from him to keep it up, but to do it – to survive on tragedy transformed to absurdity you’ve got to have an audience. You’ve got to have people to whom you’ll tell the stories. You’ve got to have someone whose ribs you can poke. You’ve got to have someone with whom you can roll eyes when an idiot walks into the room. You’ve got to have someone you can regale. And you’ve got to be willing to be the audience for them when they’re transmuting the pain of their life to gold. And we should never forget that for all the beauty Bo gave us, that is what we gave to him. And that is love. And that is brotherhood. And that is what is best of us.

The real forum for this is the Café, and I wish we could all be there right now, glasses in hand. But here, maybe, is another one: If you got anything, get to it. In other words, gimme a story before I cry.

So... anyway... I love him. And I love you guys. And tonight I'm gonna be knocking back a gin with bitters, telling a story about Bo to any fool unfortunate enough to park himself in the stool next to mine. The subtext of the tale will be this: The script we've been given ends terribly. Feel free to improvise.

To Bo with Love!



* Said woman was also dead.

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This Remorial was Created By: Brendan Byrne