Uncle Tim, RIP

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My uncle Tim died today.

His like will not be seen again.

He was the last of the 50’s style of swanky jazz dude. Plus hippy Keith Richards. Plus some Elvis, in a way.

(Oh, they’re still out there. But he was a special case. Yeah, so is everyone. For sure, though, his generation won’t be seen again. Older than the boomers — in some cases a bit too old for Vietnam. Old enough to have been influenced by the remnants of the old West Wild, by those who saw the invention of the aeroplane, to catch a drawl and the storytelling bug. But young enough to still be able to relate to my generation.)

He almost made it to 70. He was riding hard on borrowed time for, well, decades so it’s really not so sad. His is a good story, though, in ways.

He didn’t live to see his ghost town gold mine town sold. Well, it sold but it hadn’t closed yet. I bet he had his doubts. Who wouldn’t. But the buyer just put another chunk into escrow yesterday and I was trying to phone Tim to let him know. It was odd that he didn’t answer. It was near Jeopardy time. He never misses Jeopardy. Not in 40 years.

Have you ever seen the movie “The Misfits”? It was Clark’s, Marilyn’s and Monty’s last movie. Eli got to be included. He was in hog heaven with the best. Of all time. Their likes have not been seen since.

That movie was Uncle Tim and his pals and his times.

But Tim was bigger than that.

He was a world class car mechanic. Got his first car at age 13. Knew everything and could do it all on any make. That’s something.

He preferred Citroen. Owned maybe seven of them at some point.

I’m glad I got to drive his light blue DS.

Down the gorge to his ghost town gold mine bar of Seneca.

I’m glad I got to drive with him in it at 90mph at night coming back from Seneca. And live to tell the tale.

I’m glad of everything I got to do with Tim. And his brother Kent, older by 10 years. (Who is still with us.)

I’m glad I met Tim’s friends, now all gone, too. Doug had Rover P6/2000’s mixed in with Tim’s Cit’s.

Now, this will be a long-winded memory. Tim reminds me of a wide range of things that happened to me in connection to him. He introduced me to a wide range of things. He liked talking about those things, too. He said he wasn’t gregarious and I suppose he avoided socializing much but he was engaging in a small circle of pals.

Tim had quite a shop, quite a yard. The city made him tidy it up some a few years ago.

The last thing Tim said to me was in a phone call just the day before he died. He was drunk, of course. Actually, he had called me, which was very rare. He was marvelous to talk to, but never called. He called and said “You know, I’ve been thinking about that minivan of yours and that sound it’s making. Have you ever looked at it at night?” An old trick is you open the hood and run a misfiring car at night and if there is an electrical problem you can see sparks. Then he said “You know, I never had kids but I always thought one would start to hang around and want to work on cars. That’s how I got into it. That way when I became old and feeble, like I am now, we could still get some things done. I could be the brains and he the brawn.” I told him I was surprised, too, that it hadn’t happened.

Tim wasn’t a mean drunk. He would get cheerier. And that yard full of Citroens and Rovers would’ve been unlike any in the whole US, perhaps. There was a West Wight Potter sailboat out there, too. A neat boat. And huge old apple trees with good apples. Right in town. There would’ve been loud jazz. When I visited I’d go for walks “of an evening,” as Tim would say. A constitutional. I recall chatting with young people on his block. Can you imagine a yardful of Citroens? All the different flavors, including a 2CV pickup.

He drove a hearse for awhile, and a limo.

I once asked Tim what he thought of the 60’s. He told me that Keith Richards was an amateur.

…Whoa.

Tim was the last of his friends. Well, of the Nor Cal gang.

Kent and Jerry and a couple others are left of the So Cal gang.

But the mountain cowboys and landlocked sailors are all gone.

They were a rowdy bunch. When Tim first moved to LA, he followed his big brother out. Kent was 10 years old than him, like I’m 10 years older than my bro Kelvin. I suppose part of my connection to Tim came from him being the adult in the family who was the closest in age to me. Also, he was winsome in his cranky way. Not gregarious at all, but good one on one once you got him going. Why, he might even sing standards in the wee hours.

Tim talked his cousin Dicky into following him out, in turn. They did it up. They had a little Cal 20 sailboat and sailed it all over, out to Catalina frequently. Got into storm trouble. They once lost the boat from Catalina and recovered it down toward San Diego. Then he stepped up to a bigger sailboat, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I told my bro Tim the news tonight as we biked along. A minute later we passed the only mechanic shop in Lansing that has 2 Citroens parked out front. I watched them as we passed.

We were biking with a French girl and a French-speaking Belgian couple. Over drinks later I asked them if they knew the movies of Jacques Tati. They said no.

The last movie I watched with Uncle Tim was “Playtime.” I told my new friends that we really needed to watch “Playtime.” They’d be happy we did.

Uncle Tim was a fan of Lucius Beebe. (Look him up.) Lucius was the fancy lad dean of American cuisine in the 50’s and 60’s. A writer of still-classic books on trains. On the cover of Time as “best dressed man.” Insisted on top hats and bowlers well past the day when anyone else wore them. Always used a long word where a short one would’ve done. He openly lived with his partner in a day when that wasn’t done. And when it wasn’t done to his taste in NYC they loaded up their private Pullman car (decorated in yellow, white marble and mirrors) and moved to Virginia City, Nevada, the last Wild West town, an open-minded town, where a classy couple could safely stroll of an evening in proper attire and Borzois.

Tim had a way with words, too. He probably wouldn’t like this story. He didn’t like the spotlight. But he was engaging and colorful just the same.

The first time I really remember meeting Uncle Tim was in the bar of the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. I was 14. Our family drove out from Michigan and met my uncles and Aunt Jo there. We spent a week at a relative’s place in Cripple Creek. But we rendezvoused at the Broadmoor. I walked in and saw my uncles. Kent was 6’6″, 300 lbs. I remember Uncle Tim had on a Panama hat and Ray Bans and was smoking and didn’t crack a smile. He was 29, also tall, and rangy. (15 years older than me.)

Then Uncle Tim came to visit us with Uncle Kent in Okemos, MI, in the late 1970’s. For my grandparents 50th anniversary, perhaps? They came to our house. We had cheezy little Opels when my bro and I were 15 and 16 and for the next few years. Tim looked in on them. We have a photo of him with a filterless Camel and a rocks glass on the fender, taking a look.

The next I heard, Tim had a bigger sailboat in LA. I was in college and drove out for a self-created internship at GunWorld magazine. We went sailing. It was a 30-foot wooden cutter with inboard Atomic 4. Nice.

This was in 1982. Kent and Tim showed me around Hollywood. On the side streets at night we saw dozens of hookers and boy-toys. Times have changed. Since then we’ve had AIDS, crack and gentrification. No more hookers by the score on the side streets. No more jazz clubs, either.

A year later I graduated and Tim had moved to Northern California and abandoned the sailboat. It was going to be given to the Boy Scouts. His job as a respiratory therapist (who smoked packs of filterless Camels a day) had taken him north. I said I’d take over the slip fees and bills. I drove 30 hours to Susanville and fetched Tim to go help me move the sailboat to cheaper moorings. It took over a month for me to get him to leave Susanville. We watched the whole World Series run-up and finale in 1985. Billy Buckner screwed up and lost it on his broken ankle for the Red Sox. I’d never been captivated by baseball before or since. Uncle Tim knew everything about baseball and explained it to me.

While I was there I participated in a cattle roundup, my one and only. I worked all day with real cowboys who rode in over the horizon in the rain in yellow raincoats, followed by dogs who were not to be petted. We lassoed and dealt with hundreds of 300-pound calves that day. And stood around afterward in a circle, everyone with a fifth of whiskey and we all finished our bottles in a half hour and puked as we were driven out of the valley. Whew.

While I was there Tim and his friends played cards a few times a week. They were clever fellows so they played not poker but 500, a poor man’s Bridge. Ten times as hard as poker. A rancher, a sailor, a mechanic, a dirtbag, a bouncer, and me. And everyone would sit at the Round Table with a fifth of whiskey by their side.

Elvis was on the huge stereo at full volume. John Coltrane. The speakers were 5 feet tall with a horn-sized tweeter at the top. “Voice of the Theater.” (He still has them. They are grand.) I’m surprised the police weren’t called. Tim lived in a sprawling ranch house on the edge of a city neighborhood on his own 5 acres of apple trees. And Citroen cars. He must’ve been 40 then.

We’d play snooker down at the Pioneer Lounge. Snooker. Know the game? It’s like pool, only ten times as hard. What a game. I’m glad he showed it to me. I’m glad they had a table.

He’d just been bought out as the owner of the respiratory therapy service he’d set up at the local hospital. His last girlfriend, Marge, worked there, too, I think. Geniuses together. They didn’t suffer fools gladly. But she bought a separate house 20 years ago. Couldn’t live together. Yet they stayed close. He fixed her car. She looked in on him.

After the World Series the football started and he told me how the season might shape up and I said “We’re leaving tomorrow!” Then he packed his toolbox and we drove south in my 1980 Rabbit.

He gave me the title to his sailboat and we renewed its license then it moved it 50 miles south from Marina Del Rey to LA Harbor. …Marina Del Rey. Those were Tim’s old stylish digs. Airline stewardesses. I couldn’t afford that. Times had started to change and MDR, which had actually been cheap, doubled its slip fees. LA Harbor was the place for me: 200% industrial and a quarter the price. Oceanic tools 1000 feet long and 500 feet tall and making noise. That’s where I lived off and on for the next 3 years. It grew on me. I’d sail out of an evening after work with friends who just got out of the office. We’d grill Mahi Mahi on the grill that hung off the transom and we’d sail out past the lights of the city where we could see the stars and see the phosphorescence in the wake as we sail in the night.

Kent and Tim and I had a great time in Hollywood. We went out for, sometimes, 3 meals a day. Sometimes we went out for 2 dinners. Kent was a lawyer and was “flush.”

Jerry said Tim was the most Christian person he knew. He would give the shirt off his back to someone.

Actually, when I was about 4 years old my parents left me for the night with Uncle Tim in Topanga Canyon about when Sharon Tate got knifed there by Charlie’s gang. I remember sleeping in bed with Tim and waking up in the night when he turned on a flashlight and shot a rat in his cabin with an air pistol. I think I now have that air pistol. The next day I was walking around outside and almost fell down a hole that I then peeked down and saw through the hole at an angle to the canyon floor 100 feet further down. the little hole was near the edge of the canyon rim. The idea that the drop over the canyon edge could occur *back* from the edge of the rim of the canyon blew my little mind and I had nightmares about it for years.

Years later, Tim and I shared another bed in the out-building behind Kent and Jo’s bungalow. It was queensize and I’d usually fall asleep soon after hitting the hay after a full day of bookstores and a night of jazz clubs, while Tim would smoke a cigarette and read a little Dashiell Hammett by the bedside light before turning in, with his cowboy boots on his side of the bed. I am so happy I got to spend that time with him. People might think close quarters, or sharing space, is ‘weird,’ but I think not. He didn’t bat an eye.

After Tim went back north I would ride a 3-speed bike 20 miles across town to the Hollywood Hills on the weekends to visit Uncle Kent and Aunt Jo. Other days I would ride the 3-speed bike to Dominquez Hills velodrome and practice racing on the track with a loaner bike. I was ski racing in Colorado, grooming the XC trails of Breckenridge, and helping my dad sell the engineering book that he had written and which I had produced. At the time I also had an apartment on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder. I would go there for the winter and to LA in the summer. I would work the phone selling the book nationwide. We mopped up.

Once, a couple friends visited me from Colorado. Twin blonde girls. Jerry loaned me a big red convertible while they were there. We drove around town looking like a Doublemint gum ad. We went to the Improv. Every standup worked us into his routine. I took them out for a sail on the boat. We saw the movie “True Stories.”

That’s when I learned that the guy who took care of the boat the year that Tim gave it up was named Walter and he played bass at Simply Blues up 30 floors in Hollywood. A wonderful no-cover jazz club. I hung out there. Wonderful. I tried to get dates. Didn’t work. Well, one would’ve worked but she was too small and skinny. No chemistry but we were friends. She had an Alfa. Walter’s step son and his friends used to party on the sailboat and take it out. They were in a band. They invited me to their 4th of July party. But I was too busy. …The Red Hot Chili Peppers, ever heard of them?

Tim and Kent’s friend Jerry owned a building in downtown LA that was empty and waiting to be sold. I needed an office. They gave me a storefront space to use as an office for my telemarketing. The building had a second floor that was 100 yards by 100 yards in size. Jerry said we should open a nightclub there. The only price would be that we had to invite him. Every morning hundreds of bums were in the alley next door burning fires in barrels.

A couple friends had come out from Colorado to join me in fixing up the sailboat to adventure in it. We fixed it up. Didn’t open the afterhours club. We did buy 3 full suits from a thriftshop and went out to nightclubs. We went to the museum and posed all day this way and that to try to make visitors wonder. Then we all ran out of money and the adventure was over. But I did get to sail out to Catalina Island once. And arrive in the night and navigate that famous harbor in the dark and then explore its nightlife.

My cohorts had flown the coop by then so I only had a neighboring drunk to help me sail over. He was a fat guy. He drank 2 cases of beer on the sail over. We had $20 between us. I saved $2 and didn’t stay out all night and paddled our windsurfer board back to the boat. My friend swam out at 4am with his clothes on his head and got his smokes wet. The next day I ate hashbrowns and a glass of milk for $2 and stiffed my drunk pal. He wandered around and mooched $20 off of an instant bartender friend and came and found me and said “Let’s have steak for breakfast. Hashbrowns are chickenshit.” And he took care of me. When we went back to the boat we had to swim out. I crawled thru the shallow coral to deeper water to swim. My fat drunk friend stood on a high rock on the shore and said “Crawling is for pussies.” When a big wave came in he dove delicately into the heart of it and safely glided into the deep water over the coral. I was ashamed. That guy had flair.

I would eat dinners then by going to harbor happy hours. The one in Long Beach was deluxe. It was at the top of Palmer’s Lighthouse and featured FREE mahi mahi tuna and other delicacies for the price of a beer. I met a guy there who had just finished a stint of underwater salvage diving. He was letting loose. He had just made $10,000 in 3 days. He said they were working under the sea-bed of the harbor with air-hoses blasting their way under the mud and under these big timbers they would carry chains with them and then pop up on the other side of the sea-bed and wrap the chain around the logs so they could be hoisted to the surface. They were under the sea and also under the sea-bed and also in a cave of their own making. And he was alive. He had tattoos and earings and I thought “That makes sense.” It was the first time I understand that kind of thing. I thought he might throw a chair through the window soon and not give a rip. The girl with him, he said, was a hooker. “Isn’t she great? The next round is on me!” After being scared enough from doing small things on my boat around huge freighters and drunk criminals I appreciated his point of view.

I visited my Uncle Tim a few times after that up in Susanville. He had his ghost town gold mine bar up in the Lassen National Forest. It was at the bottom of a scary gorge road. We’d drive out and open the bar and serve the customers. The customers were all happy to arrive there. A good bar to have. It was hard to get to. The only such bar in the country, for sure. Tim owned 10 acres on both sides of the Feather River. We would serve the miners after their week’s work. I saw heavy gold.

I would visit Tim and we would watch movies on his big screen projection DVD system. He didn’t have money for cable. He knew everything about every good TV show. The writers, directors, character actors and their careers. He especially liked the character actors. Warren Oates, Slim Pickens… But he was encyclopedia with movies, too. Same with books. Same with everything. He knew the good old stories behind it all and when a connection would come up, “a propos,” he would lay them on me with his well-timed cowboy drawl.

He taught me how to sharpen a knife up there in Cripple Creek when I was 14.

He preferred duck hunting with a .410. And he was still deadlier than the others. Anyone who knows shotguns knows what that means. He used a .243 Savage 99 to hunt antelope.

I have to remember the movies we watched. “Playtime” was one of them. We had a splendid time, every time.

The last few years he took to his chair.

Just him and the chair and the TV.

We got him to quit smoking many filterless packs a day because he decided he’d like to live. He made it almost to 70, I think.

We didn’t get him to quit drinking.

(He was a carton a week and a fifth a day for 30 years.)

(My mom says such a waste. And that’s true. The downsides made her sad about him, and for Marge. He was frustrating, infuriating, stubborn, selfish, self-destructive, addicted, in denial. (A chainsmoking, alcoholic respiratory therapist and medical expert?) Yet, yet… But, but…)

When it was time to go open the bar he’d be watching TV and I’d remind him that we were going now and he’d get up, pick up his cigar box of money from under one side of his easy chair and his pistol from the other side, and put his can of tobacco under his arm and walk out the front door, without turning off the TV, the lights or closing the door. His pistol was a lovely Mauser mini.

His other nice guns were takedown Savage 99’s in small calibers, in briefcases, if you know what that is. It’s nice.

Most times when I called him he was marvelous to talk to. One of a kind. Quotable. I’d put him, unbeknownst, on speakerphone sometimes when friends were over. Their eyes would get big. He’s real! I wasn’t making it up.

About this time I learned that he and Jerry used to do the Carrera Panamericana Car Race. He was the mechanic and Jerry the driver. Across the entirety of Mexico, jungles and all. Drivers getting killed, spectators getting killed. Mayhem. I never knew.

I also just learned that Jerry is still driving a rainbow painted Rolls Royce that he got from a guru in Oregon for legal services rendered. Jerry also put himself thru college and law school playing poker. I keep finding out new things about these guys.

Tim’s health was failing and he wasn’t always stoking his woodstove “of an evening” so I worked with contractors by phone to get a furnace installed in his house so he wouldn’t freeze to death. Then I tried helping him sell his ghost town gold mine bar. He wasn’t going to be making that drive anymore. It had languished in recent years yet no realtor would take it on. So I gave it a whirl. I put it on Craigslist. I wrote up a huge story for the ad. It sat there. Then a few months later suddenly it went globally viral. Peewee Herman did it — he tweeted it, then ‘boom.’ I guess it was weird that such a thing was on Craigslist. There were several levels of weird. Tim and I talked to basically all the national print, TV, radio and web media almost every day last fall. A lot of global, too. That was something. I think he liked that. I think the reporters liked that. They talked to him for hours on the phone. They drove up to see him at his scary bachelor house, and chatted for hours in his scary den. He had a way with words. Could turn a phrase.

He connected the 1800’s to the 1950’s to today.

Not everyone can do that. Nobody ever will again.

Damn, he’s only in our memories now. He never sent an email.

His girlfriend, the longsuffering Marge, couldn’t live with him. Didn’t see him for years sometimes. But couldn’t live without him. “The Buell sisters of Gardnerville.” Interesting people, interesting town. (Basque. Great food.) (I just googled it out that “Marge” Buell was the creator of Little Lulu, Martha’s patron saint cartoon. Neat — same names!) They were much closer the last couple years. She went to look in on him last night and found him.

I’ll probably be headed west soon. I might be driving old brother Kent north from Hollywood to Susanville in a rainbow-painted Rolls. And then… Maybe I’ll be driving a rental van with a trailer towing a Citroen DS and a couple “Voice of the Theater” speakers and a DVD projector and a cargo of fine firearms back across the country…