A Reading on Loss

I flew down to Savannah last weekend to visit my old friend David.

I rented a car. Went first to his place, then out to Tybee Island, where I toasted him at his favorite dive bar. Joined his parents and older sister at a reading of his poetry Saturday night in a tiny but charming bookstore in the historic district. Made a point Sunday of catching the early-morning sun over the marshes on Bluff Drive on the Isle of Hope. Thanked him for having turned me on to that beautiful spot—a narrow lane that’s framed by the water on one side and stately old homes and Spanish moss-draped trees on the other. It looks exactly like the set of a Civil War epic, and has served as one. Scenes from the 1989 film Glory were shot there.

David’s voice followed me everywhere I went. He always was the kind of guy you had to strain to hear—a classic low-talker long before Seinfeld made that term a cultural Thing. I spent the years 1989 through 1992 leaning into him with my better ear, hoping to catch the gist. He could amp up the volume when he was introducing jazz records on air, or reading verse to a rapt coffeehouse audience, or, later, teaching literature to college kids. But in one-on-one conversation he tended to be mumble city, his words delivered in a smoky timbre that made women swoon and guys wonder if precision wasn’t perhaps overrated.

Our mutual friend Fred Johnson, who’d worked with him in public radio decades ago, sometimes calls him “Lonesome David.” He did so Saturday night, telling the crowd of family, friends and old lovers what they already knew and were attesting to by their presence—that the nickname is meant to evoke gait, mood, and cadence, not popularity.

David Starnes went from low-talker to no-talker almost five years ago, having died instantly in a head-on collision caused by a woman driving on the wrong side of an interstate highway. He was 64 years old. At a May 2007 memorial service packed with family, friends and one-time lovers, his father—the elder David—eulogized his only son as “the freest man I ever knew.” He repeated that description at Saturday night’s reading.

What he meant was, David lived by his own terms, not society’s expectations. He never married, never owned a home, tended not to remain at any given residence or with any girlfriend for all that long. Only in the last decade or so of his life did he finally earn a steady paycheck for a sustained period and assume a public role—that of an English professor at Georgia Southern University. Whether all that amounted to “freedom” or was more the confluence of restlessness, romanticism and fluctuating depression, I’m not sure. It made him his father’s hero—a word the elder David uses at any opportunity to laud his cherished son. How awesome, and how heartbreaking, is that? I can see it. But David’s brand of independence more echoes, for me, a line from the song “Me and Bobby McGee”: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” I might be misinterpreting that Kris Kristofferson /Fred Foster lyric, but I interpret “freedom” in that context as being the life one wears after having surveyed many ill-fitting hats.

I first met David very early in my three-year stint as a feature writer and editor at the Savannah Morning News. It was late 1989 or early 1990. I was 31, so basic math tells me David must’ve been 46. I’d worked into the evening one day, since I had no social life in Savannah. David had come in to write his freelance column on the local nightclub scene. I’ve never been good at describing physical appearance, but suffice it to say he was short, lean and ruggedly handsome. When he shook my hand, he seemed at once to trust me as his editor and announce himself as my first friend in town.

By the time I moved to DC in late 1992 he no longer was writing for the newspaper, but he continued to live an itinerant life filled with house-painting jobs, handyman’s work, literary and musical enthusiasms, ever-changing residences and briefly glimpsed girlfriends. I wouldn’t seen him for weeks at a time, but then he’d call and suggest we meet for dinner at a riverside restaurant in Thunderbolt or that aforementioned dive bar on Tybee Island. For all the mystery, masculinity and vague melancholy that made him so magnetic, his depth of interest in my life was meant to suggest that I, in fact, was the fascinating one. Per a comment I later would post on the funeral home’s memorial page, I never felt as cool as I did when I was with him.

We corresponded over the years and visited back and forth. After his parents moved to Northern Virginia he came up our way every so often. He got to know Lynn, and she him. She totally got what the ladies saw in him, but professed not to have been tempted. By letter and the occasional phone call, I followed David’s progress from 50-something college student to graduate to professor. I visited him once in Statesboro, where his home refrigerator was decorated with photos and postcards celebrating me and other friends, and where he proudly showed me his university office. I sat in on one of his classes. He engaged students in a clear, audible voice and they called him “Mr Starnes.”

Then one day I received an e-mail from Fred that David had been killed.

I never read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the bestselling book about a scandalous local murder and the sordid underbelly of Savannah—mostly because, my friendship with David aside, my years there were so dull and pedestrian that I’ve always felt a little bitter about everything I apparently missed. Anyway, the “Bird Girl” statue on the book cover once adorned a gravesite in Bonaventure Cemetery, an incredibly evocative place of weathered memorials, Spanish moss-decorated trees, sandy soil and marsh views that’s near my old apartment and was my go-to destination for mopey walks. Those perambulations sometimes would include the newer, adjacent Forest Lawn Memorial Park, which was where I found myself standing in May 2007 as David’s coffin sat poised to be lowered into the ground.

I revisited the gravesite last Saturday afternoon for the second time since the interment. The first occasion had been a fiasco a couple of years ago involving an ill-anchored bouquet that kept falling over and a lot of very awkward one-sided conversation. This time, while I felt compelled to audibly greet David despite my continuing near-certainty in death’s finality, I didn’t linger at his marker.

I did take a leisurely walk around David’s eternal neighborhood, though, and spotted some epitaphs and memorial bench adornments that I think he would have enjoyed as much as I did. One read, sensibly enough, “Nonexistence didn’t bother me before I was born. I don’t think it will bother me after I’m dead.” There was this sentiment, engraved on a bench on the cemetery’s periphery, overlooking the river and marshes that border the site: “Finally, waterfront property. This is as close as we can get.” On another bench, a drawing had a man reeling in a big fish. The tribute read, “Life enjoyed him.” It was signed by “Your favorite ex-wife, Linda.”

The big event this past weekend was, of course, the poetry reading, which in part was a book-signing without the signing, for obvious reasons. A faculty-mate of David’s had compiled and seen through to recent publication a second chapbook of David’s poems—the first having been published during his lifetime by a small university press. Family and friends read from both collections in the cramped bookstore space, many sharing personal anecdotes and remembrances. I read a poem that doesn’t appear in either book, but that David had enclosed with his holiday cards in 2004. It’s a sweet Christmas-morning story that speaks to his love of family. It was well-received by kin in attendance, as I knew it would be.

In fact, the main reason I’d flown down for the event was because it was almost certain to be the last group celebration of David during his parents’ lifetime (and perhaps ever). While David remains his father’s hero and his mother’s darling “Davey,” they, in turn, were far more vital to their son than one might have thought any set of parents could be to such an iconoclast. He always spoke reverently of them, which made me like them before we ever met. That would have been sometime around the turn of the new century, at their Annandale, Virginia, apartment. That was the only time we'd meet before they and I would reconvene at the memorial service, as it turned out.

It’s an odd aspect of my relationship with David’s mother, Jackie, that we’ve been e-mail correspondents for a few years now but we never physically see each other, even though our homes are only about 10 or 12 miles apart. At any rate, she seemed delighted to see me at the bookstore in Savannah. She even snuck me a special thanks from her daughter Toni’s computer a few days later, while they were still out of town.

I e-mailed back that David would’ve done the same for me. I can’t imagine he’d have missed my memorial service, had our fortunes been reversed. Or any subsequent celebration of me that was within his logistic reach. Naturally, I do wonder what he’d have said about me. He’d no doubt have made me out to be far brighter, more talented a writer, cleverer and more interesting than I’ve ever considered myself to be.

My friend had all the attributes he’d have assigned me, and more. Though I can’t quite consider him a hero. He’d have rejected that label himself, I feel sure—mindful that freedom has costs for both the allegedly unfettered (see “Lonesome David”) and those who’ve been, well, cut loose (see "girlfriends"). But I will say the outsized loss I still feel speaks to David’s importance and uniqueness in my life.

The truth is, I couldn’t have stayed home last weekend—any more than I could have resisted a friendship that was so immediately and completely extended to me more than two decades ago.