At the Strangers' Gate by Adam Gopnik

Author:Adam Gopnik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

Our meeting was, in retrospect, the great turning point of my life “in town.” A mentor can seem to resolve our problems—but even more to make our problems seem to vanish, becoming not problems at all. The mentor magician, and Dick was mine, is the kind who fills with you with confidence that all the things that looked terrifying don’t really exist. The mentor teacher—I had one in my teacher Kirk Varnedoe—shows us his subject and then ourselves. The mentor magician shows us his world, and then our possibilities. He makes the world’s contradictions look like connections, hidden to lesser eyes. Of course, mentors can teach us only what we want to believe, for as long as we want to believe in it. Falstaff showed that it was possible to be both witty and woozy, a drunk and a man of language with a sharp tongue, because Prince Hal wanted to be both. Then we sober up. Look before you leap, the mentor teacher teaches. The mentor magician says, Leap, and look after, and—what d’ya know!—you’re on the other side. This works out because most of the terrors are in your mind, and most of life’s leaps are easy. Until the day comes when they aren’t, and you have to jump by yourself.

Eventually, of course, that day came for Dick and me. It had to. The last trip he ever took—to San Francisco, to shoot people engaged in the 2004 presidential campaign, we shared. Although he was in first class and I was in coach—he still came back, as the flight attendants fluttered worriedly around like pigeons in a pigeon coop, to sit on the edge of my seat and show me the boards of his new spread, white-haired now but leaning over with the same avid eagerness as he had shown twenty years before. Never for one moment was I disillusioned by him—but over time I gained a sharper sense of the sources of the illusion. When we are befriended by magicians, they are not the less impressive when we know the way the tricks work. That gaffed deck that Sky Masterson’s father feared is all the more interesting when you know how it squirts cider.

So I came to understand that Dick’s capacity to charm was inseparable from his need to dominate and control—as, of course, my capacity to be charmed was inseparable from my need to have stories to tell, people to inhabit my life who could become characters within my writing. Even at the height of our friendship, when he asked me to write an essay for the catalogue of his museum exhibition, “characterize” him is what I did: I portrayed him as he was, an amazing original presence, walking the length of Fifth Avenue with an unnamed friend, me, full of schemes and strategies and plans. But by showing him so, I owned him a little, as, by choosing us, he owned a part of me.

He took it, I see now, in good spirit, but he was wounded by it, too.

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