But I was reminded of my existing account for a very sad reason. I have spent the last three days, in my spare time, reading the e-mails of my friend Charles Horecker, who died last Friday. I didn't bother to listen to the details of his death, when his brother called up to give me the news. He was driving alone late at night and the car went off a road and did a couple of turns on the way into a ditch. I don't even know if it was near St. Louis, where he was planning to relocate, or in southern Illinois, where he had been living for the last two years helping out his aged grandfather (93) and girlfriend (65 or so, but she had had to have hip replacement surgery).
Charles lived an amazing life in the eight and a half years after his graduation from U Chicago in 2001 , apparently not always on the side of the law, and if he "never amounted to anything," that probably suited him just fine. It satisfies some bitter ironical side of me that if he should have had to die young --I think he just turned thirty-- it should not have been in the squalor of Chicago's South Side in 2003, where he went after dropping out of grad school in Classics in Yale and where he did some very dangerous things in order to make money; nor was it in his two long sojourns in Asia (financed in part by ridiculous stints of on-line poker play), which included being on hand for the big tsunami of 2005 although it also involved two stints of teaching computers and English in Beijing (a city he hated passionately) as well as a few semiserious and unsuccessful attempts to sneak into Tibet; nor was it from all the STDs he kept on threatening to acquire; but rather it was from a typical drunk (presumably) driving incident in the hinterlands of the Midwest, at the tail end of a just angelic two-year-stint being cook, chauffeur, and handyman for his grandfather and working in the labs of SIU-Carbondale so that he would be able to take science classes on the cheap.
I told him once that the only time I could be sure that he was taking care of himself was when I heard that he was taking care of somebody else, an absurd facet of his character for someone who never married and had no children that he was sure about. But he kept one of our mutual friends from dying of substance abuse in Asia in 2006, he cleaned up in order to escort his mother and a nephew in long trips throughout Asia, and his mother a second time, I believe, and his last visit to me in Oberlin, just two months ago, came after he had decided that he couldn't take care of his grandfather any longer because his grandfather's health problems were affecting his memory and his personality, and (my interpretation) he could deal with physical health issues but was frustrated with mental health issues, for which the grandfather's girlfriend was competent enough in any case. But no doubt the kind of sad, dumb, tragic way that Charles died could have happened on any weekend in Illinois, even while he was taking care of the grandfather.
Charles left an almost empty on-line paper trail, so it is with a small feeling of betrayal that I post this here, deliberately in case some idle ex-girlfriend or ex-friend (he alienated almost everyone he was ever friends with, except me; I think it's a self-esteem thing --he never said anything to me meaner than the things I say to myself) decides to google-stalk him to see how he is doing. I can imagine all sorts of people saying to themselves, "Gee, I wonder if Charles is dead yet," and so now they know.
