Screaming Peacocks

Peacocks roam the grounds of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Have you ever heard a peacock scream? The sound is startling, unlike anything else, those screams. They’ll haunt you. By the way, that’s just how they sound. They’re not in distress―at least I don’t think so.

I last heard the screams at the outdoor memorial service of a friend, an acquaintance, really―a former co-worker. There were so many people there, I wondered: could he possibly have known all these people, all these beautiful, glamorous people, in skinny white jeans and carelessly-worn boots, who understood perfectly when to laugh or when to nod knowingly during his sister’s audition-like eulogy?

There was something special about him. Something made you forgive him for his awful behavior and dismiss it, like: well, he’s young, he doesn’t know any better. For example, I remember a time when we were at the office together and he casually started throwing sharpened pencils at me. I was just sitting at my desk and he was just sitting at his a few feet away from me. Strung out, probably. Still, I didn’t like it.

He was young, with full dark lips and golden skin, the kind of guy who gets used up and wrung out by Hollywood and its predators, thoroughly and quickly. He wasn’t an actor though. No, his ambitions were in politics, following the klieg lights of power. We saved some land together in the Ventura Hills, 3,000 acres. There’s a trail named after him. His name was Hunter. A problematic thing, when you think about it, to name your child Hunter. If it were me, I’d worry he’d always be searching for something, never find it. I don’t even believe that a name can determine your destiny, but why risk it?

I heard he wrapped a plastic bag around his head, maybe one of those from the dry cleaners. He left a note saying Sorry, I just can’t do it anymore. And for some reason I knew―even though I’m not an addict, just someone whose family was dysfunctional enough that if I was predisposed I could have been, so just lucky, I guess―that “it” was getting on the wagon only to fall off it again and disappoint everyone. I didn’t really know him well. I even wondered if I should have been at the service, or if I too was one of the hangers-on who found a certain glamour in his death and wanted to be part of his storied despair. There’s something so attractive about a tragedy.

The last time I saw him was at his going-away party. He was leaving Los Angeles to go on the road. He’d snagged a coveted spot on a presidential campaign, one of the ones built on hope for the future. I see him giving his farewell speech, glowing under the warm spill of yellow-ish light in the courtyard of whatever benefactor’s Spanish-style house we were at. So self-important, surrounded by his supporters, like he was a movie star, thanking the little people. The self-aggrandizement is part of the despair isn’t it? I’m not lucky enough to not know this.

I’m reminded of a rabbinical saying―I’m an atheist who takes wisdom where she finds it―that goes something like, You must hold two stones in your pocket, one that says the world was created for you and the other that says you are nothing but a speck of dust. Not an easy thing to do, especially for those of us whose internal self-worth gauge is broken or was never installed.

The moment I feared he would not make it was years earlier when we still worked together, now more than fifteen years ago. He had been going to AA, or NA, or both, and he casually mentioned that he had stopped attending meetings because, he said, I’m not like those losers. Maybe I said he should keep going, but maybe I didn’t. I was young too but already I knew that any advice I might offer would be like handing a person falling from a great height a fortune cookie.

It is this exchange I think of when I think about him, which is only sometimes. That, and those peacocks, screaming.