Wanda died in a car accident in October 1991, on her way to
Moses Lake, Washington, where she had enrolled at Big Bend Community College in
their pre-med program. At nineteen, she was just beginning as a Freshman there,
and had been my very first friend—of the two that I had—in Washington. We met
in September at Messenger House, a care center for those with Alzheimer’s and
other forms of dementia. I’d moved to Washington that July, on the day of my
twentieth birthday. I had to beg, borrow, steal, and kill just to get a job
mopping up urine in the locked dementia wards, thanks to my credentials as a
Certified Californian looking for work at the height of anti-California
hysteria.
I’d previously held down a nice office job as Division
Secretary for the Southern California Rent-A-Center franchise chain. Not a
milestone career, but pretty nice gig for a guy in Community College, and a
damn sight better than dealing in adult incontinence for a living. But there I
was, having spent three months of impenetrable solitude looking for a job in a
town that literally had fewer people in it than my Senior class at Long Beach
Poly. I’d been job hunting four hours a day, five days a week for three solid
months before I got that shit detail, and had not made even one single friend
while stranded in the lush no-man’s land of Kingston, Washington. Not until
Wanda Rose.
If you think Alzheimer’s is bad from the outside, you should
try watching the gears turn on the inside of the locked wards; tragedies
churned out daily. It’s demoralizing even at the best of times, but somehow
Wanda Rose took it all in stride. She had her plans, her exit strategy. She was
the first person that didn’t look down and spit on the ground every time my
name got mentioned, and the only friend I had for a thousand miles in any
direction. Day one, she'd been assigned to train me on how to properly mop up
lakes of diarrhea. Turns out it’s all in the wrist.
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| Messenger House Care Center, Bainbridge Island, WA |
She introduced me to her crazy boyfriend, Chalon, who came
to work at Messenger House several weeks later. He was an affable hippie type;
a bit of a douche, but harmless enough and generally well-intentioned. After
Wanda Rose headed to Moses Lake to secure a job and an apartment in advance of
school starting, Chalon and I kind of fell in together, both just waiting for
her return. I never had a lot in common with him, but three months of solitude
in the wilds of rural Washington make for strange bedfellows, believe me. I was
into the Smiths, the Cure, and Depeche Mode. He liked Steve Miller Band and the
Doors. He had brown hair almost to his shoulders and seemed like the living
embodiment of Shaggy from Scooby Doo. One citified kid, a stranger in a strange
land, thrown in with a hippie stoner behind the locked doors of a tragedy
factory. What could possibly go wrong?
Chalon got the news of Wanda’s death at work. It’s funny how
seeing someone you love somewhere they don’t belong can immediately fill you
with dread. His mom showed up while we were sitting at the ersatz break table
on the loading dock. It was really just a discarded wooden spool from a
high-voltage line roll, but with a couple of crates to sit on, it made for an
OK place to catch a smoke out of the view of the powers that be. Plus we could
keep an eye on all the cute CNA’s that came by. I happened to be looking at
Chalon as he caught sight of his mom approaching from the parking lot, and saw
the change that came over him. He knew something was wrong before she even
spoke. When she said, “It’s Wanda,” he disintegrated instantly, his whole world
over. I’d known him for four days.
Circumstances kind of dictated the strange sequence of
events that put me in Chalon’s house listening to “Riders on the Storm” in the
gloaming of October 31, 1991. There’s a set protocol of events that kicks into
gear when someone dies in a single car accident. Questions to be asked and
answered, tests to be run. It’s not like a heart attack or falling off the
roof. It might be drunk driving, it might be suicide, who knows? And you can’t
bury the body until there are some reasonable answers. Turns out Wanda’s
friend, the driver, had simply fallen asleep and driven them into a tree. Which
constitutes a reasonable answer, I guess, and so it came to be that by the
conclusion of these inquiries Wanda Rose was buried on Halloween Day. There are
no good days to bury your child, your sweetheart, or your only friend. But
there are worse days.
Halloween has got to take the cake. Dia de los Muertos, the
Day of the Dead. All of his friends and hers came to the funeral, and then
every single one of them had somewhere else to be. Life goes on. After all, it
wasn’t just any Thursday. It's Dia de los Muertos, man. Got my best suit and my
tie, a shiny silver dollar on either eye. So off they went, and there I stayed,
having inherited Chalon and his grief, bequeathed to me by Wanda Rose as the
vig on the loan of her friendship for the six weeks I’d been sustained by it. I
try to be a stand-up guy, but even when I’m not, I never forget the debts I
owe. So I drove him home to his parent’s house on the edge of the Suquamish
Reservation.
It overlooked Puget Sound and took advantage of the view with floor-to-ceiling windows on one full wall of the house. I remember thinking that the water was the exact same gray as the clouds that day, and then grasping for the first time that the color of the sea is a reflection of the sky. It had never occurred to me until the moment I saw them meet at the iron gray horizon-line out those windows. So I sat there as an ambassador from the faraway Land of Decency, where one's friends—not virtual strangers—bore burdens like this, prepared to console a dude I'd known for forty working hours, total. How, I knew not. Chalon cued up a CD from the stack Wanda had left behind.
“Into this house we're born
Into this world we're thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out on loan
Riders on the storm”
