Personal Interlude: "Solo Flights and Other Finalities"
A eulogy for Paul Mears
I first met Paul Mears on my first day in school after moving to Lewisville, Texas from Chicago: as we joked for decades, “December 7, 1979: a day that would live forever in infamy.” I was a scrawny kid with a big mouth freshly moved from the south side of Chicago, and he was less scrawny with less of a big mouth and about a year of life in Texas on me. We met because we shared adjoining lockers in gym at the end of the day, and apparently there was something about me that piqued his interest enough to extend friendship. Neither expected that it would keep going to the next summer: a lot of kids at our middle school moved around, North Texas was the current boom zone for those seeking fortunes connected to the then-current oil rush, and most of us only knew about someone’s family moving when that student didn’t show up the next Monday morning. We definitely didn’t expect or suspect that we’d still be friends four decades later, and we always cherished that connection, until it was gone.
Part of the reason why we remained friends for so long was because we had complementary tastes and interests. We rarely agreed on so many subjects, but we could express our own sides with something approximating coherence and articulation, which immediately put us past so many of our contemporaries’ automatic assumption that the slightest criticism could be neutralized by whining “Well, I liked it!” over and over. We LIKED debating, especially when it came to common interests, and while we never necessarily changed each other’s core positions, we definitely shared enough information that we each had a much broader perspective than we did before we started. Road trips and errands alike turned into an opportunity to share what we’d learned since the last time we hung out, not in any competitive way, but in asking “I know you’re still into X, so did you hear about…?”
Another reason why we got along so well was that we had no interest in staying still. For those unfamiliar with Lewisville, Texas, it was a perfectly suitable town in which to grow up, if you were into the local hobbies of book-burning, cross-burning, high school football semifinals, police brutality, brother-sister marriages, and blackout drunkenness, the latter usually while driving back from the nearest liquor store miles away. He wasn’t as vocal about the need for lyrics for our high school fight song as I was, but he chafed as much as I did on the limited options for music, reading, and life experiences. We had different routes to getting there, and when we’d meet up for another gathering, we always had plenty to share.
Right now, it’s impossible to describe anything in my life after 1980 in which he didn’t have some influence. His trek led him to the US Navy, first on the USS Independence and then on the USS Constellation, and the infodumps really got going when he’d come back to the Dallas area while on leave. By 1986, his and my respective haircuts (or my lack thereof) garnered comparisons to Mike Doonesbury and Zonker Harris from the longtime newspaper comic Doonesbury, with art imitating life literally a day after he’d gotten back and he told me “You’ve GOT to check your news” when I passed on the news he missed while on the plane. In between, he and I sent back regular packages of oddness we’d come across, with my learning that he wrote back a lot faster if I wrote messages with my left hand. (Life again imitated art on a trip back, after I had started a job requiring my working nights six days a week.) He pillaged Philadelphia’s and San Diego’s music shops and gave me homework, and I spent days tracking down Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Damned albums in Dallas’s admittedly sparse stores because I sure as hell wasn’t going to hear any of this on local radio. In return, I let him know about interesting new magazines and books, hanging onto many of them when he’d return to his ship for when he finally got discharged, and got him hooked on the new wave of British comedy TV series starting to make inroads in the US. (When he finally got his discharge, he changed his mind at the last second about renting a spare bedroom in my apartment at the time, mostly because we took just a little too much after Rick and Vyvian from The Young Ones, and for the rest of his life, he had no problems letting me know he was bored in a completely Adrian Edmondson manner.)
Most high school friendships fall apart by one’s early twenties, both by distance and by circumstance. The traits that seem so endearing at 21 get to be really, really annoying when pushing 45, and that’s without the additional stresses of relationships and friends loathing Significant Others and vice versa (Paul almost left a then-girlfriend of mine at a Dairy Queen outside of Austin), families, and the general grind wearing one down. That was never a problem with us, mostly because we were so good at what his Irish ancestors call “taking the piss” out of each other. One of Paul’s many passions (which included horses, falconry, metalsmithing, motorcycles, and European history) was to fly, and so he did, starting with ultralights at a field near Denton in the summer of 1991 and then a full helicopter license at the beginning of 1993. (He grabbed me for a flight south of Dallas right after he got his license, and what we saw when flying over the Scarborough Renaissance Festival grounds in early autumn burned our brains for life.) At that time, I had changed hair color and clothing styles so many times that the joke was I’d regenerated again, so after cutting off black hair in the summer the summer of 1994, Paul showed up to a Halloween party with the theme “Freaks” dressed as previous me. (That horrible fright wig later got dual use when he became the photo model for local underground filmmaker Edgar Harris in 1996.) He was best man at my first wedding and I was best man at his sole one. having met his beloved Holly at the soft opening of my carnivorous plant gallery in 2015. It was a friendship that just kept getting better as we got older, until it didn’t.
(One of the little things was his making a trip to take care of my cat Parker when I was locked up in hospital, my having nearly died of a ruptured appendix in October 2023. Paul was ambivalent about cats, particularly mine: he had a horrible set of scars just above his knees from an encounter with my late cat Jones in early 1991. At the time, I had apartment neighbors for whom the term “alleged human” was stretched to the utmost, with one thinking it the height of entertainment to lob Budweiser bottles through an open window onto the sidewalk below, just to hear them smash. One night, he and I were talking and Jones was basking in the window when “Johnny Revolta” decided it was time for entertainment and chucked a bottle to where it broke right underneath my window. Jones freaked out, jumped off the windowsill and onto Paul’s knees, where he dug in to launch himself again, leaving Paul with scratches that didn’t stop bleeding for hours and left him with scars for years. Parker, though, was a cat with whom he could communicate, and my last memory of him in person was sitting on my couch with Parker in his lap, which Parker only did with him.)
The last time I ever saw Paul, we were going out for lunch at Afrah, a Middle Eastern restaurant that was a particular favorite of ours. He gave no hint of any issues in his life other than the usual: he was laid off from his disaster recovery position at Citibank the previous November, and we spent the drive over to Afrah commiserating about the free-range Soylent Green pretending to be technical recruiters that had been crapping in our voice mail all day. He was actually thrilled to track down some of his family heritage, and knew I was one of the only people still in his life who’d appreciate the discovery that his mother’s side, generally categorized as Polish for the whole of the Twentieth Century, was actually Tatar. (He wasn’t obsessed with confirming or denying family heritage like so many others: he just loved knowing where all of the pieces of his genome came from.) We talked about the incredible lentil soup offered in the Afrah buffet, which I credit for getting me up and going after leaving the hospital, plans for my making strawberry-rhubarb ice cream pies (he was a big fan of my getting into homemade ice cream, and got great joy off my cinnamon ice cream pies when I tried those around Christmas) and how I was biking a full 20 miles every day for the first time in over two years. We talked for a bit about how the organizers for our high school class reunion were trying to get people to buy tickets, and we agreed that we had a medical exemption due to our severe allergy to Stockholm Syndrome. We fell into a big rabbit hole on plans for the St. Remedius stories, with his being the only person on the planet to hear most of the background, and went back to my house so he could borrow a book I’d mentioned and to pick up his motorcycle. If I knew that was the last time I’d ever see him, I would have asked him to hang around just a little longer, but he had plans and I had plans, and we gave each other a good hug and sent each other on our way.
Roughly the same went with the last time I heard anything from him at all, about two days before he died. As was typical for Dallas, small but intense thunderstorms passed through the area that Wednesday, and he sent a quick text to see if any rain had hit my place. A quick picture of his back yard, with the caption “Sunny with light rain,” to which I responded “You’re lucky. I got bupkis.” And that was it.
When a friendship lasts as long as ours did, it would be really easy to go on and on with stories. We had plenty of them. What really sticks, though, are the lessons we imparted to each other, and one really sticks. We were both at that age where we were losing a lot of friends and a lot of inspirations, what Harlan Ellison called “angry candy years,” as well as that sense of loss of one more person with whom you can share a common past being unavailable for a late-night trip to a coffee shop to shoot the shit. That’s a pain I’ll particularly feel for the rest of my life, considering how closely entwined our lives were: it’s bad enough doing laundry without coming across one of the T-shirts he’d always pick up for me when he’d make a trip somewhere, or going through my library and realizing how many books in it were either ones he’d recommended or that I’d bought while we were pillaging one bookstore or another over the decades. A pair of kestrels made a nest in a big oak tree across the street from my house, with the pair and their fledgeling flying over the house while chasing cicadas as I write this, and the pain of not being able to send him photos and invite him over to observe them himself is on a level with wanting to discuss oil painting techniques with my grandmother, and I’d blow up the sun without hesitation to see my grandmother one more time. He was a friend, and a hero, and a constant inspiration, and someone for whom “brother” was a horrible generalization that came nowhere near describing our friendship. Next March, on what would have been his 59th birthday, I’ll be older than him, and that’s something I truly hoped would never happen.
Anyway. The lesson. When Paul got his helicopter pilot’s license, he told me about the number of perpetual students at the little flight school, ironically just down the road from where I live today, where he took his courses and made his practice flights. At the core of getting that license was the solo flight: the first flight taken without an instructor or trainer who can step in and save a bad situation if the trainee pilot can’t remember a function or messes up. Paul told me that a significant number of trainees can’t deal with their solo flights, and keep taking flights with an instructor aboard until they’re finally cut off. They so badly want to fly, but can’t bear taking that last leap and depending upon their own skill to complete the flight, so they become the flying equivalent of an “All But Dissertation” student. Some just give up and never fly again, and others go to other schools once they get kicked out and try it again. The ones that channel their fears and their insecurities, though, get to fly and see the world with a level of control that others can only imagine. For over three decades, Paul was proud to be a pilot, and he was thrilled when I told him last year that his anecdote was a major inspiration for everything, from my first book to the plant gallery to the current writing project, I’d done that required that extra push.
July 12, 2024, was the first day I truly flew solo. I think I’m okay with that now, even if my feathers are well-sodden with tears. I have no delusions that we’d ever meet in an afterlife, especially considering our wildly diverse views on same, but I hope to wave one of these days. Hail and farewell, old friend.
Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.