A Long Essay on a Brief Life

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urricane Earl is brewing near Florida on the one-year anniversary of the death of Earl Rich. Every time I hear the news I'm struck by the coincidence. Earl Rich was quite the beach boy, at least for a guy who lived his entire 31 years in a suburb just outside Philadelphia. He loved Key West and vacationed there as often as he could. He loved the New Jersey shore too and surfed its modest waves with his buddies Toddler, Mike, and Buckey. He even looked like a prototypical beach boy with his sand-colored hair and sexy smile.

He was more charming and beautiful than Princess Diana who died a week before. On the day I heard the terrible news, I had to dig through endless articles about the princess to find the tiny two-paragraph notice headlined Montco man killed in N.J. accident.

~ ~ ~ continued January 26, 2002 ~ ~ ~

Here it is, four and a half years later. Earl Rich is still gone but not forgotten. But in truth there’s very little evidence that he ever existed. There is his web site, which I assume his family keeps as a memorial to him. Under the site’s “assorted distractions” link there’s a picture of the motorcycle brand he drove. If you visit that page don’t be alarmed to hear Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Earl discovered a classical music midi audio archive and couldn't rest until he jazzed up his site with it. Now the tune is creepily appropriate for the machine that launched him into eternity.

The home page claims it was last updated March 20, 1996, but I know that he added some things after that, like the photos of his friends surfing. A technophile will immediately see the site is an artifact from a previous Internet age, with the clunky frame design – frames were the exciting new thing back then - and the “computer stuff” section full of antique Windows 95 software links. One of the saddest artifacts on the site has to be his resume. There’s nothing like a dead person’s resume to remind you of how all the sound and fury signifies nothing.

So the web site is evidence of the existence of Earl Rich; there’s also a bench in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park installed by his family; and there is a wall plaque memorial at the headquarters of our old company, PTS. I’ve been to see the bench, but I’ve never seen the memorial because I quit PTS in March 1997.

I was hired as a technical writer by PTS in early October 1994, and Earl began two weeks after me. Actually I had beaten him out of the job, then they decided they could use two writers after all.

Earl and I shared an office for a couple of months before our jealous supervisor, whom we’ll call Lina, broke up the fun and installed him in her office, but it didn’t matter too much because email was the critical factor in our relationship. I would never have known Earl as well as I did but for the hundreds of emails we swapped. During office hours we sent Lotus Notes emails and nights and weekends we had AOL - I always think of Earl when I hear AOL's standard "You've Got Mail!" audio message. The email was constant for a period of about three months, from December 1994 through February 1995. We still emailed, with decreasing frequency, right up until his death, but that three-month email honeymoon was one of the most intense emotional experiences I’ve ever had. I came to feel a strong soulful connection to Earl Rich. I'm not sure if the feeling was mutual, and if so to what degree, but that was always a problem with Earl. You never could be entirely sure what he really felt. For example, I was never able to guess if Earl was really a Republican or not, even though he often claimed to be.

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He liked to tease me about politics, but he was capable of turning around and saying something quite sincere-sounding on the topic.

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I believe his ambiguity was due to the fact that he really had no serious interest in politics but he felt I would like him better if he did have an interest. Although his desire to please me was seductive, I came to find his lack of integrity annoying. I once complained to him that he was like Oakland California according to Gertrude Stein - there was no there there. In spite of that, during the email honeymoon and for months afterwards I was in love with him.

It is a sad thing to admit you were in love with a married man. But can anyone really blame me for it?

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You could say that Earl was a flirt. But his flirtation wasn’t typical, and it wasn’t limited to women, although he always insisted “I reek of heterosexuality.” When he worked with someone, or shared an office with them, he would make an effort to learn that person’s preferences and desires and would come to share them, or at least accomodate them for a period of weeks or months. It took me awhile to realize he did that to everybody, and not just me, and even then I thought it was an unconscious, inate aspect of his personality. But I had an ongoing email correspondence with his wife Michele after he died, and she told me that he actually admitted that he was like a mirror for the people he was with. I found this an apt description, and also, I was relieved to finally understand the weird feeling I sometimes got with Earl - I am also inclined to mirror people that I like, although not as often or as intensely as Earl. On several occasions when I was with Earl I had the distinct sensation of a psychological feedback loop - like we were two mirrors facing each other, reflecting back at each other into infinity. It is an experience both exhilirating and unsettling.

Michele also said he was often stressed out about social situations, and worried for weeks in advance about our company Christmas party. I was suprised by that - in spite of all the emails, I never guessed that he was worried, although he sometimes admitted to feeling besieged by his social obligations.

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People told him he should go into politics, but he wasn’t interested in being a professional charmer. But although he was an amateur, he was nevertheless a tenth degree blackbelt charm master. As Michele observed, had she died instead of him, they’d be lining up to take her place. But as far as I could tell, Earl never physically cheated on his wife, although perhaps that’s a technicality. Certainly if I found out my lover was emailing someone else night and day for three months I’d be devastated, and I do feel guilty about any anxiety I gave Earl’s wife. But it wasn’t a new or unique situation for their marriage. The deadly combination of Earl’s beauty and charm caused many women (and I’m sure several men) to fall in love with him, and they employed a great variety of seduction schemes. And since Earl hated to say “no” to anyone, he would often wait until the last minute to apply the breaks to the run-away love-train, and by then the poor shmuck had gone over the cliff. Like our supervisor Lina.

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Then to complicate matters further, Earl and Michele’s friend, “Don” came to work at PTS as a technical writer, thanks to Earl’s recommendation. Don was the anti-Earl: unpopular, unkempt, mean-spirited, and closeted. Lina moved Earl into her office and put Don in mine. While at PTS, Don gave daily phone reports to Michele on Earl's activities. By this time I was totally whacked out on Earl's affection.

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I wanted to do a painting of Earl - masculine beauty has always been the sharpest spur to my artistic impulses - and he agreed to let me take photos of him for reference, since Michele had already refused permission for in-person modelling sessions. We took our lunch break at Valley Forge and had a fine, productive, non-adulterous time in the park, but I became acutely blissed out by so much direct, non-email-mediated exposure to Earl. By the time we got back to the office I was in no condition to concentrate on work. The Lotus Notes flew.

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I never took his threat/promise seriously, but even so, by that point I was reeling with desire from his unexpected and expert coquetry. His actual wish was something totally absurd – I was instructed to get a goldfish, keep it in a fishbowl on my desk and name it “Newt Gingrich.”

I don’t know how I managed to drive myself home after all of that. While I was partially relieved that I wouldn’t be confronted by hard-core temptation, I was also extremely frustrated, and more in love with him than ever.

The only thing that saved me from losing my mind during that email honeymoon is that a few years earlier I had shared an office with a guy named Chris who was even sexier than Earl, as improbable as that is. I was so enamored of Chris I think I suffered some mild brain damage, but it left me partially innoculated from the effects of unconsummatable concupiscence.

The next day in the office I emailed him to complain that his torment had left me in some pain.

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He started to insist that I be discrete about the photos and the photo-taking session, which I found absurd - I wasn't aware that it was supposed to be a big secret. But I knew why it was suddenly an issue - Don was calling Earl's wife with exaggerated reports. The whole thing seemed utterly childish, I though, with the three of them, Earl, Michele and Don, going around and around. It was not the last time I would see this sideshow either. Of course I was completely smitten with Earl, I could not help myself - but I hadn't done anything illicit, and so I couldn't see any reason to sneak around. It was like getting all the heartache and hassle of an affair without all the hot sex. We got into a little snit about it.

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~ ~ ~ continued September 07, 2004 ~ ~ ~

September 7. Seven years since the death of the inimitable Earl Rich. He died in 1997, right in the middle of the golden economic years of the late 1990s. What would he have made of George W. Bush, I wonder. No doubt he would have pretended to be pro-Bush just to annoy me.

I'm currently working on a production of one of my plays, TAM LIN. Earl died right before the first full-scale production of a play of mine at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. I learned from his wife that at one time he had a dream of living in Greenwich Village and being a writer. He was quite a good writer, and was very well-read, which of course made him even more attractive:

~ ~ ~ to be continued ~ ~ ~

Earl Rich

Earl Rich
Valley Forge
January 31, 1995

Earl Rich
Earl Rich

Earl was a beautiful man, but photos never did him justice.

Earl Rich
Earl Rich

I tried to capture his beauty through sketches

Perhaps one percent of the time, someone who has an idea that smells, feels, and looks indistinguishable from the usual run of pseudoscience will turn out to be right. Maybe some undiscovered reptile left over from the Cretaceous period will indeed be found in Loch Ness or the Congo Republic; or we will find artifacts of an advanced, non-human species elsewhere in the Solar System. At the time of writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study:
(1) that by thought alone humans can (barely) affect random number generators in computers;
(2) that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation;
(3) that people under mild sensory deprivation can receive thoughts or images "projected" at them.
I pick these claims not because I think they're likely to be valid (I don't), but as examples of contentions that might be true. The last three have at least some, although still dubious, experimental support. Of course, I could be wrong.

Carl Sagan
The Demon Haunted World: Science is a Candle in the Dark, March 1997