The first time doesn’t exist in my head, it’s just gone, one of those origin stories you lose in the noise. But there’s your laugh, like gravel and light, cutting through those parties at my parents’ place. There’s me, just a kid, watching some play you’d put together, and you, you, asking what I thought. Not humoring me. Actually giving a shit about the answer.
High school. I’m in some grad student’s production, probably terrible… maybe not, and you corner me afterward. “You’re going to have a life in theater,” you say. Like it’s a fact. Like you’ve already seen it. I tell you you’re out of your goddamn mind. No way. Not happening.
Then there’s the phone call. You need someone to drive your wife to a doctors appointment at the Palo Alto Medical Clinic. So I do. And she introduces me to every single person we pass as her boyfriend. Just chaos and affection and absurdity, all at once. She was awesome.
Your Brecht seminar. That’s where it happened, where I fell hard for the machinery of it all, the gears and pulleys of how stories work, how they move. Grad school meant hours in your office, thousands of stories passing between us like contraband, like secrets, like currency.
The last time you saw me perform, you just grabbed my arm, pulled me close, said it was like watching the ghost of my father. The same stage where you’d directed him decades before, when he was even younger than I was then. Full circle. Generations folding in on themselves.
And then the end, my end: years where I just couldn’t. Too much loss, too little left in the tank. Phone calls every few months. Dinner once a year if we were lucky. I wasn’t there. Not the way I should have been.
Carl Weber. Charlie. You’re in everything I make, everything I’ve done, everything I will do. Past tense, present tense, future conditional, you’re one of the through-linse. One of the things that holds.