Ways to die

 BEAR: Did you see the guest editorial by Robert Charles in Sunday's paper?

HOOKER: I don't read the paper any more. I don't watch television, and I don't listen to the radio. I don't do anything where there's a chance I will be exposed to news or images about the Golden Felon.

BEAR: Well, listen to you. Does it work?

HOOKER: No. What does Charles say?

BEAR: He wants to expand physician-assisted suicide to include everyone.

 HOOKER: Death with dignity for all! I like it. He give any details?

BEAR: At age 80, whether sick or not, even if completely healthy, anyone is eligible to apply for death-with-dignity.

HOOKER: That's too old. I'd do 70. Or make it part of retirement.

BEAR: Are you serious?

HOOKER: Of course I'm serious. We should have the right to manage our own deaths.

BEAR:  God manages our death, Hooker.

HOOKER: No, God manages man and gives him a mind capable of managing death for himself.

BEAR: I guess we have to agree to disagree.

HOOKER: Not for the first time. Charles is a writer right?

BEAR: He was a colleague, Hooker. English department. 

HOOKER: But adjunct faculty. Only on campus when he had a class to teach. We never crossed paths. You know him?

BEAR: No, but I have a friend who knows him quite well. An actor who's had roles in several of his plays. 

HOOKER: That's right, he's a playwright. He wrote that labor play that was banned from the State fair. Put Oregon on the news, made us look like backwater hicks.

BEAR: I went to one of his plays. Too dark for me. When I see a play, I want to laugh, not get depressed. You see any of his plays?

HOOKER: Maggie spoiled going to plays for me. She'd drag me to Neil Simon plays, one after the other. I thought they were mindless and sexist. She loved them, and she's a feminist!

BEAR: I like Neil Simon. My friend says Charles wasn't too happy about the circumstances of his retirement. He taught playwriting for twenty years, produced and directed a lot of student work, and ends up with no benefits. Not a penny. Or as Charles put it, I didn't even get a watch!

HOOKER: Adjunct faculty. Our union has been fighting that issue for years.

(Pause.)

HOOKER: Do you still have the Sunday paper? I'd like to read what Charles wrote.

BEAR: No. You might find it online.

HOOKER: Ever think about killing yourself, Bear.

BEAR: Only once. When Liz died. Fortunately, I didn't own a gun. Not then, not now.

HOOKER: I thought all Republicans owned guns.

BEAR: There is no Republican party any more. What about you?

HOOKER: A few times but nothing serious. I think most people have. What bothers me about suicide is not the act but the methodology. What you have to do is so degrading. Can you imagine the mess someone has to clean up if you blow your brains out? There are only two methods that don't freak me out. Carbon monoxide poisoning and something a doctor gives you. How about this for a healthy, common sense approach to dying? Along with Social Security, the government issues one of those pills given to spies during World War Two.

BEAR: That's insane.

HOOKER: You don't take it. You put it in your wallet. It's a security blanket.

BEAR: I hope you're pulling my leg here, Hooker. What is it you told me once? "Republicans are so easy to upset." Are you? (No reply.) Hooker?

HOOKER: It's never going to happen, so what difference does it make? But I do believe we have the right to manage our own death. Look how dramatically the poet Lew Welch did it.

BEAR: Have you told me this before?

HOOKER: I don't believe so. Have I talked about "Song of the Turkey Buzzard"?

BEAR: Nope.

HOOKER: Amazing poem. Here's the back story. Welch is an alcoholic advertising man in Chicago. He reads about the Beat generation activities in San Francisco, quits his job and joins them. He becomes a respected poet but never gets the press of many others. Anyway, at one point he's staying with Gary Snyder in Snyder's mountain cabin, trying to dry out.  One day Snyder returns to find Welch gone. Also gone is Snyder's shotgun. And there's a poem in the typewriter. Song of the Turkey Buzzard.

BEAR: A suicide poem?

HOOKER: Most people would call it that. I think Welch would call it a recycling poem.

BEAR: I don't understand.

HOOKER: The poem describes how he climbs to a mountain top and kills himself as an offering to the buzzards circling overhead.

BEAR: That's an alcoholic mind at work.

HOOKER: Welch gains immortality. " Not the bronze casket but the brazen wing." In the poem he calls it "my new form."

BEAR: Sicko, Hooker.

HOOKER: "Not the bronze casket but the brazen wing."

(End)