“I hate the idea of dying, because I’m afraid I’m going to miss something.  As long as you’re alive, there’s always more time,” Ed Bryant in Westword, May, 2000.

Ed Bryant died February 10.

Shock.  Surprise.  Sadness.  Hatred for the thirsty inevitability of death.

But also laughter.

This man, one of the giants of science fiction and horror, the single most giving teacher I’ve ever known, made me laugh all the fucking time.

He brought me a gift once.  I don’t remember why we were together…dinner or a literary thing or who knows what…but there was nothing special enough about that particular moment to bring a gift.

A gun sight for a bazooka.

Seriously. I was all like, “What the fuck is this?”

He said, completely straight-faced, “For a bazooka.  It’s a sight.”

I waited for him to say something like, “So you can blast all those editors who don’t buy your stories,” or “So you can explode the world with your literary genius.”

The man didn’t say dick.  He gave it to me, laughed, and walked away.  Turns out he’d found eight or ten at a flea market and just thought it was funny.

Yes, he taught me how to write, as he did for so many people.  He taught me how to channel and focus and develop all the stories whirling around in my head and that was great.

But he also taught me how to read.  He taught me how to see the deeper terrain of a writer’s words, the subterranean world all writers leave behind even when they don’t realize they do.

That was maybe the greatest secret he taught me about writing.

But don’t short change his own writing in everything you’ll hear about what an incredible teacher he was. The Thermals of August is one of the best things he ever wrote. Stunning in its simplicity but epic in its quiet scope.  It was just a love story, except the world trapped beneath that hushed love story was as deep and dangerous and wide as the sky through which the characters glide.

And for pure hilarity? Read Aqua Sancta.  Very short, like 100 words maybe.  Obviously I can’t tell you because that would blow the whole story but dig it up, I promise you’ll laugh your ass off.

Ed, above all, loved words regardless of where they came from, and championed newer writers.

When I went to World Horror Convention in Eugene, Oregon in 1996, I was a brand new writer.  I had published very little to that point, and nothing of note.  Yet at the end of his reading, in front of a packed room because everyone goes to an Ed Bryant reading, he brought me on stage to read a little something of my own.

He had no reason to do that other than helping a new writer who desperately wanted to be noticed and taken seriously.

Later, in Phoenix in 1998, I had sold a few stories, including to a few high recognition anthologies and magazines.  I was becoming a known quantity and had the ego to prove it.

Charles Grant, one of the giants of 80s horror, had surreptitiously shown up to the convention.  Crowds were agog because he was getting older and didn’t travel much.  The man had published, to that point, 104,027,207 novels and stories, and convention attendees were salivating to be in line for him during the mass signing.

A quick aside here, the mass signing is one of the coolest things ever.  Conventions stuff every attending author into a single cavernous room and fans wander table to table and get everything signed by all the authors.  They are great fun for everyone involved.

So for that mass signing, they put me at a table with?

Charles Fucking Grant.

I almost had a stroke. I had read this man as fervently as I had read Stephen King and Peter Straub and just could not get my head around the fact that I would be sitting next to him for the entire signing!  I would be able to pick his brain and learn and soak in his aura.

Uh…not so much.

The line to have Grant sign books coiled like a snake throughout the room, out the door, up the stairs, out the lobby, into the parking lot, across the Arizonan desert, along the Rio Grande River to the Gulf of Mexico where it boarded a steamer heading out for seedy South American ports, where it disembarked, found a sleazy bar, got some local agave juice, and drank itself into a stupor waiting for the line to fucking move!

And the line for Trey R. Barker?

Nada.

I didn’t have a single person.  Talk about a kick to the balls (it was actually a good reality check and since then I’ve tried to be more like Kirk Hammett in terms of ego…I fail miserably).

But in the midst of that humiliation, along came Ed Bryant to save my day.

With a large bag in his head, he made a beeline toward me.  Not once did he look at Grant.  This was all about me and having me sign for at least half an hour. It was obvious Ed had brought copies of everything I’d appeared in; magazines, anthologies, a chapbook, everything.  I was so excited.

“Hey, thanks, man, I really appreciate it.”

He nodded toward Grant, “Yeah, have him sign these for me,” and walked away, his shoulders bouncing up and down as he laughed.

I was speechless, not something that happens easily with me.  I spluttered and banged my fist against the table and ground my teeth and plotted way to kill Ed Bryant violently and brutally dead.

Except, way down in the bottom of the bag, the absolute last thing, was a copy of my chapbook.

I remember sitting there another half hour or however long the signing lasted, somehow content, opening the books of fans for Grant so he could sign them, a copy of my chapbook on the table in front of me, and shaking my damned head at Mr. Edward Bryant and laughing every few minutes.

Straight up Ed.  Supportive and funny at the same time.

There are a million other stories, from a million other writers, but in the end they are all the same.  Ed Bryant was about words and loved those who put them together earnestly.

I loved him, love him still, and will miss him as much as other friends I’ve recently lost. Ed Gorman…Melanie Tem…Tom Piccirilli…Sean Moore lo those many years ago.

It happens to everyone, it is life, but it still makes me angry.  There are so many more good words those guys could have written if they’d had time.

Hang on…

Fuck me, the collaborative novel that crew can write now that they’ve got endless time.  Holy shit, I’m getting light-headed just thinking about it.

Bye, Ed.

We’re closing in on the end.  Only a few days left for the East of the Sun Book Tour fundraiser.

 

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/east-of-the-sun-book-tour-books#/

 

https://treyrbarker.com/2016/12/12/2435/

 

Only five days left to toss some cash to the ’17 book tour effort……

 

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/east-of-the-sun-book-tour-books#/

https://treyrbarker.com/2016/12/10/2431/

Ed Gorman died.

While I wasn’t surprised, I was shaken.

He had been fighting cancer for years and I’m guessing he was just tired.

He was a good man, simply said.  All the superlatives fit him and all are well deserved, but in the end, his life and work and all the rest come down to that; he was a good man.

In the days after my heart attack, February 18, 2001, I received all kinds of phone calls and emails and letters and whatnot wishing me a speedy recovery and best of all possible worlds.  It was nice to open a batch of those every day and realize my world was a bit larger than I had consciously thought about.

(Though it was odd to be asked by an editor wearing  San Jose Sharks jersey if my heart attack was a publicity stunt…doubly so considering I had nothing out at the time that would have benefited from such a well thought out and not at all expensive…$38,000 for twenty-four hours in cardiac ICU…stunt.)

In the course of getting all these letters and cards and all the rest, I got a box (and yeah, for a few seconds, I thought I was in Jack Ketchum’s 1994 story, ‘The Box.’).  I remember sitting on the west-facing porch in Denver and just staring at the box for a few minutes.

It had Ed Gorman’s address and his handwriting.

During the year previous, Ed and I had gotten to be decent friends…by which I mean we talked on the phone often and via email constantly.  I never actually met the man face to face.  He didn’t much like leaving his home.

So getting a package from this man I was just getting to know both freaked me out and made me feel like a kid at Christmastime.

Inside?  Obviously…books.  Like every book he had published going back to the 17th century or something.  Westerns, crime, mystery, horror, a virtual guided tour of his novel output over the previous 20 years.

I sat there on that porch for the next six weeks, slowly mending back to health, and read every word.  Yeah, the man was an amazing writer, when he was at his best he was straight up better than damn near anyone else writing.  His plots were well paced and his characterizations deft and incisive, and it was an incredible experience reading that much of one writer in that short of a time (the literary version of binge watching Narcos or something on Netflix).

But what made that box, and those books, even better than the delicious words on the page was the fact that this man, who knew me only from emails and phone calls and my own writing, cared enough to package up a library and send it.

He was a good man.

From his blog, August 22, 2008:

“Last week I started rereading 2000 Miles To Open Road by Trey R. Barker. We had in common…the fact that we were both going through the early stages of battling cancer. Trey’s experience was brutal. But the cancer diary he kept is one of the most eloquent and articulate pieces of real life I’ve ever read. Happily he’s doing well now.”

I offer that not as some pat on my own back but to illustrate that even as he was trying to help a young writer by promoting my work on his blog, he was conscious of the things that make us all human.  We had exchanged emails back and forth about our battles with cancer and he laughed at some part of ‘The Cancer Chronicles,’ because he lived through the same indignities.

Elizabeth Engstrom, another of my favorite writers, had also had some battles.  Where Ed started with thyroid cancer in 2001, he soon moved into multiple myeloma.  Liz and I shared melanoma, and we spent many an hour emailing back and forth about the nightmare.

I found myself thinking about that box of books yesterday when I heard the news about Ed.  The wonderful simplicity of a box of books touched my soul as deeply as a black-hearted bastard like me can be touched.  I remember sitting there for what felt like a lifetime just slowly reading each word on the front cover, then moving to the back cover, then soaking in the artwork, then the reviews and blurbs in the first few pages, then moving on to the next book.  It was probably two hours before I even settled in and cracked the spine on one.

I still have most of those books, though some have become worn from constant rereading.  And quite a few of them have long underlined passages and highlighted sections, as would any regular text book from which someone wanted to learn.

I have learned much from Ed Gorman and suspect that learning is not yet finished.

Thank you, Ed, for everything.  Godspeed and just think about all the time you have now to read now….

So, it’s been a while since a thing happened but that thing has been much on my mind lately.

That thing was inexorably wrapped up with the writing of my newest novel, No Harder Prison back in the early aughts.  That book has just been published by Down and Out Books and for the publication I wrote a piece for the most excellent Lance at Omnimystery (most excellent writing about No Harder Prison)

The following piece is also about the novel, though at the time the book wasn’t finished nor did it have a name.  This was originally published in Cemetery Dance back in 2001, and I thought it might be an interesting to haul it out, blow the dust off, and take a trip down a rocky bit of memory lane.

***

Mid-February, 2001

 

February 18, 2001.

About 9:00 am.

I’m in a workshop, overseeing the building of a set I designed for a musical.  Lots of noise, lots of dust, lots of paint.  It’s a gray day, overcast with clouds looking like nothing so much as late-term pregnant women.  I hope they give birth, I love the rain.

This is the first of three shows I’ll be working on during this one day.  Three different shows, three different theaters, sixteen hours with no scheduled break.

I did this to myself.

***

From:               <LarDunbar@aol.com>

To:                   <TRBarker@earthlink.net>

Sent:                Saturday, February 10, 2001, 11:24 AM

Subject:           Re: First Novel Blurb

Hi, Trey –

Very good idea to do up your first chapter as a chapbook and send it around to conventions for the goodie bag. I’d be glad to read your mystery and give it a blurb.
Best,
Dick

***

February 18, 2001

About 11:00 am.

I’ve left the workshop and am sitting in front of Temple Events Center in Denver.  My little Ford Ranger is crammed with audio and light gear.  Amps, mixers, PA speakers, a CD player, cables, lights galore, dimmer packs, more cables, colored gels, computerized light board, tools.  Lunch.

My truck sits way back on its rear axle.  It looks like a fairly straight laced 34 year-old white boy trying desperately to be hip with a low-slung truck.

It isn’t raining yet but will any minute.  The rain is so thick I can smell it.  I grew up in west Texas where it rained once a year whether it needed to or not.  I can’t wait, I love the rain.

I begin unloading the mountain of gear.  It’s for a dance show that’s raising funds for the earthquake victims in India.  They’ve been hit twice in only weeks and it’s hard for me to imagine going through something so life changing.  I can’t imagine anything other than the safe, comfortable life I lead.  A little chaotic sometimes but a good life, filled with the knowledge that everything will always be fine.

***

A paraphrase of a phone conversation on February 12 or 13, 2001:

Trey:  “…damned thing ain’t working for shit.”

Dick:  “You know, sometimes when I get stuck, I go to the end.  Write that last scene and then see what you need directly before it and write that.  Then go right before that scene and write that.”

Trey:  “Oh, that’s freakish, I never thought of that.”

Dick:  “If that doesn’t work for you, send me the manuscript and I’ll give it a read.  Maybe I can figure out what’s wrong with it.”

Trey:  “I don’t know, I’ve fucked it up pretty good.”

Dick:  “I’m sure it’s fine, it’s just hard to see sometimes when you’re that close to a project.”

***

February 18, 2001

About 11:15 am.

At first, I thought it was pollution.  Denver had had three days’ worth of a temperature inversion.  Our brown cloud would have made even LA envious.  Then I thought maybe it was because I was unloading all that audio and light equipment.  Lots of unloading, lots of physical exertion.  Had to be one of those two things, didn’t it?  This shortness of breath couldn’t be anything serious.  Hell, I’m only 34, what else could it be?

It still wasn’t raining and I realized, as the first pains thudded through the middle of my chest, that the lack of rain was bumming me out.  I wanted to see some rain.

I called 911 real quick.  In fact, my Texas homeboys will probably take away my Texas Native Membership Card when they find out I didn’t tough out the pain.

The ambulance was there within five minutes.  Then I was on the ground, staring at the sky—still no rain—and trying to tell the paramedics what was wrong with me.  I think I may have mentioned something about having two heads and three arms.  I don’t remember much of that conversation.

I just remember the pain.

***

From:               <Tom Piccirilli>

To:                   <TRBarker@earthlink.net>

Sent:                Wednesday, February 14, 2001, 2:54 pm

Subject:           Fwd: Laymon

Received this from Ed Gorman a few minutes ago.

<< Dick Laymon died two hours ago of a heart attack. >>

***

I didn’t see Dick when I had my heart attack, but he was there.

There was no apparition of Dick in the corner or floating over my bed or standing behind the nurses.  But he was in my head.  I was hypersensative to heart attacks because of Dick.  I called 911 more quickly than I probably would have because of Dick.  I was in the hospital, IVs and EKGs, making bad jokes at the nurse’s expense (memo: don’t make jokes about a woman holding lots of needles while she’s trying to save your life, its bad form) because of Dick.

My quick recovery is not a silver lining, there is no silver lining in death.

But Dick’s death did make me think.  It did make me call 911 quickly.

Dick’s death did help me, though it shreds my insides to say that.  Seems like a high price to pay for me to have suffered a mild heart attack instead of a massive heart attack.

***

Dick and I became—I like to think, anyway—quite good friends over the last year.  Mutual friends—Tom Piccirilli, Alan Beatts—brought Dick and I together, though I’d been a fan of his work for years.  He and I talked frequently about writing and publishing and similar topics that were oh so heavy and deeply thought out and full of philosophy.  But after that, like a cheap beer after an expensive meal, we talked about the kind of stupid, inane bullshit that so often seems to fill phone conversations.

But it is those very stupid things that made me realize Dick was more than just a writer spending lots of his own time helping younger writers.  It was those things that made me realize Dick was simply a cool guy and would have been cool whether spending his life writing or clerking in a low-rent convenience store in south-central LA.

Obviously, I will miss him.

Obviously, the world of literature will miss him.

There is no silver lining, but he helped me.  And maybe my heart attack can help someone else.  In a strange way, a perverse and dark way that Dick might have chuckled over, it’s what Dick had been doing for years.

By the way, it still hasn’t rained.