Further ruminations on Phil Kendall

Hobart, Mort, and Pomeroy - click to enlarge

I have been enjoying the slow accumulation of writings, and letters and photos on the Philip Kendall blog, a site dedicated to the memory of our late, great friend. The three gents pictured above were one of my strongest impetuses for going to college. As I explained here earlier (or maybe it was there), Mort drew me in, and soon enough, Jerry a/k/a Bart, and Philip a/k/a Pomeroy (later Root), were my brothers. We knew we would be friends for life. I think we even talked about that sometimes.

We talked frequently about our good fortune, how "this is the life," and how studying, reading, drawing, drinking wine, talking and telling whoppers and jokes all night, partying, scheming for girls, and immersing ourselves in music was as good as life would ever be. We knew--despite our relative poverty, living on food stamps, and just barely scraping by--that our friendships and the life we were leading was as good as it gets. As it turns out, as life goes on, other things come to fill the vacuum. But nothing has ever taken the place of Phil and he is memorialized as a special case, because he is fixed in time. When he died in early 1975, Richard Nixon was still President, the world was billions of people smaller, the Vietnam war still raging, and Elvis Costello, CDs, bottled water, global warming, and PCs were still years away. Willie Nelson was a fresh-faced kid! When you look back in time, there is the young face of Philip, fixed in that distant, analog world.

This photo is taken at 1636 Humboldt Street in Bellingham the year before I moved in with them.

I have about five poems and stories about Phil in germination, but I've been struggling with them. It's difficult to make connections and to trace the heartline across this vast lacuna of 33 years. Jerry Melin also died long before his time. But his time was to last 25 years longer. Jerry died before he was fifty, and in those years there were countless letters and later, emails; drawings and doggerel; dinners and drinks; a shared vacation; road trips, children, visits, and phone calls. Philip is fixed in time as a fresh-faced 21 year old, and I can't even really think of him as an adult because he just barely got there. Kevin Curran and I were remarking that as big a part of our lives as he became, the time we knew him was only a few short years. In those few short years we developed a bond that was stronger than most of the friendships I've had since. And it has now come back to haunt me. The haunting is not the regrets and the slow missing of those many years; I am haunted by not being able to remember everything he ever said and did because in such a short transit and eclipse every action and every word takes on a far greater import than it would had he been able to live the last 3/4 of his life.

Seeing his face again re-opens the wounds of his death, but also the joy we had in knowing him. The pain of his death only slowly waned, and never entirely went away. His death has always been painful to remember. We just didn't have enough time. Whenever I look at that face, it reminds me of everything that has passed these last 33 years, and how he would be horrified and amused to see all that has transpired. What would he think of the war, genital grooming, tattoos and hardware, computers, punk rock, indy music, iPods, digital cameras, situational ethics, modern literature. Would he still love Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare? Would he have liked Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, and John Coltrane, or Buck Owens and Bob Wills? Would he still love The Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan? Pieter Brueghel? Tuna fish sandwiches? William Blake? I'll never know.
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