Charlie Dean died in Laos in 1974. A few months earlier, he had been living just west of Cairns, Australia, with my uncle Kim and Kim's best friend Richie on Rosebud Farm, the commune that Kim and Rich had started a few years earlier.
Louella Bryant, wife of Harry Reynolds, who went to high school with Kim and Charlie, just wrote
a book about Charlie, and, a few hours ago, she drove up to my grandfather's house, where she's spending the next two nights.
When Hal, my grandfather, handed me the book a few weeks ago, he directed me to one chapter in particular. It was set on the Great Barrier Reef, and Hal wanted to see how well I thought the author had described it.
I read:
Eager for a swim, they took turns jumping overboard with speargun and snorkel, careful not to brush up against the hard limestone corals - a gash could be disastrous. Those aboard watched for sharks and box jellyfish, whose tentacles inflicted fatal stings. The blue-ringed octopus, the size of a golf ball with a poisonous beak sharp enough to pierce a wet-suit, could kill a man in minutes. All of the fifteen species of sea snakes on the reef had small fangs with lethal venom, and the barbs on a stingray's tail would cut deep. If any any of the men was adept enough - or lucky enough - to spear a fish, there was real threat of shark attack. So, the trick was to keep out a wary eye, and if you hit your mark, head back to the boat and climb aboard with all haste before the sharks smelled the blood. Not well I told him. Sensationally. Hyperbolically. And totally unnecessarily so.
One of the first things I found out tonight, of course, was that Hal had passed my review immediately back to the author, and, as soon as she connected me to the objection Hal had brought up with her, she wanted to hear more.
Luckily for me, as soon as I started explaining, Hal interrupted, told a ridiculous and tenuously tangential story, derailed the train of thought, and accidentally rescued me.
So I stayed quiet and listened. Louella talked about Charlie, Kim, writing, and the questions she had been asking audiences on her book tour, and Hal, the archetypal 87 year old ex-politician, raved on about Vietnam and India and philanthropy and government, paying little attention to questions asked or subjects under discussion.
And, quietly, off to the side, I developed a little theory.
Louella Bryant, an author quite distant from the story she's telling, has gathered her events and settings and characters from people like Hal. She has built her book on material collected from incorrigible storytellers, from entertainers whose language sprays out sticky from the sap of their overflowing imaginations. She is
embellishing upon embellishments, and, when she describes the dangers of diving on the Reef at least, she drifts a dangerous distance from the truth of actual experience.
Maybe. It's the beginnings of a theory anyway.
I started to tell her about it when I walked her to her room, and we'll discuss again tomorrow night I'm sure.
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