Faces on the Screen

A friend who lived in Hollywood tried to take his own life about three years ago and failed. That wasn’t a big surprise to either of us because he was always lousy at planning things out.

Charlie had taken an excessive number of prescription pills washed down with bourbon and it had made him violently ill. The reason it made him ill, we learned later, was because the pills contained disulfiram.

Disulfiram is a medication used to treat alcoholics. When you take one and then drink booze, you vomit. Ideally, the reaction will cause you to give up alcohol. Either that, or you will spend the rest of your life drinking and vomiting.

Charlie’s thinking when he took a handful of the pills was that he would simply float off to eternity and wake up feeling refreshed and burdenless in a place where all is forgiven.

As it was, he ended up in the emergency ward of a county hospital, feeling sick and stupid, surrounded by overworked people who could treat him for his sickness but not his stupidity.

I remembered Charlie yesterday as I watched a student videotape documentary called “A Journey Back” that dealt with a family’s efforts to come to grips with a father’s suicide.

The tape was made by one of the man’s daughters and won an award given by the Anti-Defamation League of Los Angeles. It said something to me and it ought to say something to you.

Life is short and laughter fleeting.

I don’t know why Charlie tried to end it all and, similarly, Louise Gallup never knew specifically why her father, Sam Gallup, shot himself to death.

As Sam’s life unfolds in film clips and photographs, we see a boy become a man in easy stages of progression. He earns a medical degree, marries and begins raising a family.

He seems content with his lot, at ease with his surroundings. But is there something in the hesitant smile that suggests life will one day become unbearable?

Is there anguish churning in the soul of the man as he stands by a tent in the rain, looking toward a distant forest? What does the forest hide? What does the smile conceal?

Sam had been an Army medical officer during the wars in Korea and Vietnam. When he returned from Vietnam, he seemed distant and remote.

One son in “A Journey Back” says it was “like someone had poured ice cubes in his heart.”

Sam was treated for depression and seemed to be improving. But then one day, a Thursday, he went out into a barn, pointed a gun at his chest and pulled the trigger.

The family was stunned. Why had Sam done that to himself? Why had he done it to them? He had been emerging from the gloom of depression. The ice cubes in his heart were melting.

Then . . . bam!

It was only later, Louise Gallup says in her narration, that they discovered why the burden seemed to be lifting from Sam in the days before his suicide.

It was in his journal: “You need to release me. I’ll always be a part of you, but I’m getting tired. I feel a strong, silent inner peace I’ve never felt before. . . .”

Louise says softly, “Dad had already made up his mind.”

Charlie was embarrassed about his failed suicide attempt. I’m not sure what embarrassed him most, the attempt or the failure. That’s not the kind of question you ask a guy who has just blown a trip to Kingdom Come.

“Boy, was I sick,” he said when I visited him in the hospital.

“The pills make you throw up when you drink,” I said.

“I know that now,” Charlie said. “They ought to sell them as suicide pills. You try it once with those things, you’ll never want to try it again.”

Charlie was a writer. He reminded me of Oscar Levant, the iconoclastic pianist who spent his life in and out of mental institutions. Charlie even looked a little like Oscar.

Levant, who died in 1972, was funnier than hell and so was Charlie. The night Charlie took those pills, he had me laughing over a short story he was writing about a guy who fell in love with a seal.

“It was those big, liquid eyes,” I remember Charlie saying. “But he couldn’t take the fish smell and the barking.”

Then Charlie sighed and said, “It’ll never sell. What you write sells. What I write gets flushed.”

I thought about that later and wondered if I had been a reason for Charlie’s suicide attempt. By succeeding, had I become the measure of his failure?

Louise Gallup dealt with feelings of guilt by producing a movie that says Sam’s death isn’t the family’s fault. It’s a beautiful film, full of love and sadness.

I don’t know what happened to Charlie. He left town after the suicide attempt and I haven’t heard from him since. I’ll miss him. He made me laugh.