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CAROL

As Peter's mentioned, Caroline is named after the late, great Carol Kalish. Sadly, it occurs to me that many of you have no idea who she is. (Heck, it stunned me when I thought about how long it's been-- I missed the memorial service because I was leaving on my honeymoon.) Trust me, if you didn't know her, you're a poorer person for it.

So I'm going to run this BID out of sequence so you can get some sense of the wonderful woman Peter and Kathleen have named their daughter after.

And I'd like you all to do us a favor-- link heavily to this column. Right now on Google, the first thing that pops up when you search on "Carol Kalish" is a screed by Gary Groth that is not the way she should be remembered, and I want that damn thing out of first place.

Oct. 11, 1991

Ariel's birth had gone smoothly on Labor Day of 1991. Over the next several days I called a number of friends and joyfully informed them of the advent of my third daughter.

I didn't call Carol.

Damn me, I didn't call Carol.

I called Richard Howell and told him. I knew Richard, Carol's long-time companion (making him sound vaguely like Margo Lane, I suppose, but Carol as the mysterious unflappable Shadow isn't too off-base) would tell her. I didn't want to bother her because I knew how busy she was these days.

So I blew my opportunity to have a clear-cut, precise, "the last time I spoke to Carol was--" type of memory. I am such an idiot. Because now I can't say for 100% certainty when I last spoke to this woman who was one of the most important individuals in my life. Who got me into the comics industry, setting in motion a career in sales that eventually gravitated towards writing.

I didn't call her.

On September 5th we brought the baby home. I was seated in the living room, staring at the small bundle of new life that was on my wife's lap, and marveling at the wonder of her very existence.

And then the phone rang, forty-five minutes after Ariel came home, and it was Stevel Saffel at Marvel with the news that Carol was gone, just gone.

The phone slipped out of my fingers and, when I eventually found words, they were simply, "I'll call you back."

The next several days were an emotional rollercoaster. We had imagined that people would be calling to say congratulations about the baby. Instead every phone conversation was somber, tinged with mourning. Every word in the house became strained. All the happiness supposed to be associated with a child's homecoming was blackness and depressing, and worst of all I felt guilty and selfish over the shattered homecoming because how much worse was it for Richard, and Carol's sister Candace, and the rest of her friends? And for Carol--

Carol had loaned Fred Bauman, my sales assistant, $20 at a poker game at a convention the previous week. Now Fred was going to repay the loan, and Carol was in her office with a distributor. So Fred, without preamble, walked into her office, placed the $20 bill on her desk, said humbly, "Thank you for letting me work here another week, Miss Kalish," and exited without another word. The distributor went into hysterics and it's the only known time when Carol was at a loss for something to say.

I couldn't write. For the better part of a week, no words would come. My output consisted of a script page of X-Factor, a page here or there of something else.

It was announced that Terry Stewart of Marvel was putting together a memorial service for Carol and that people could get up and talk about her. I wanted to say something. I had even been asked to speak at the ceremony.

Still I was stuck. About her humor and good grace, her constantly sound advice, and the moral center she provided for so many things, I could not adequately express myself. I wasn't in shape to write a grocery list.

And I couldn't look at my new child without thinking about death. Or into the mirror without thinking, "It could have been me. Hell, Carol was in so much better shape than I was. On statistics alone, it should have been me."

Finally I sat down and had a talk with Ariel. Actually, I was lying down, and she was on my chest. I thought, Maybe she has answers somehow. Certainly none of the adults did. So I stared at her, propped her head up. She drooled on me a little.

And I thought about when she'd been first born. Lying there in the warming bed, and her grip on life had seemed so tenuous.

It was hard to believe that anything that small and helpless could possibly be alive. She seemed ethereal, as if, were we to turn away for just a moment, she'd vanish back into the ether.

And that's when I realized that it never really gets any more secure. When we lie there, naked and trembling and weighing under seven pounds, the thin thread that binds us to life is extremely visible.

As we get older, can walk and talk and feed ourselves, we, in essence, polish up our act. We develop a certain degree of self-confidence about our invulnerability.

And we forget that the thread has gotten no thicker in the passing years. That our hold on life is just as flimsy and uncertain as in those first few seconds.

And I thought of what happened to Carol and realized that the question of "Why did that happen?"-- to which there is no answer-- can just as easily be asked when looking at this birth that had dropped into our lives. "Why did that happen?" Others struggle to conceive, others who are as much or more deserving. So why were we blessed? No one ever seems to question why the good things happen; they just rail at the bad, and the bad seems to drown out the good.

I wrote the first draft of my attempt to memorialize this splendid woman. I thought it was OK. I ran it past a writer whose advice when it comes to writing I respect above all others. He suggested changes which I implemented.

I dreaded going to the memorial, but it turned out to be a good thing, and I am indebted to Terry Stewart for organizing it. On September 5th, The Day the Comics Stopped, everyone who had known Carol was seized with an overwhelming sense of loss and a desire to do something-- anything-- because otherwise returning to normal function was going to be close to impossible. And the memorial service provided that, and people left feeling glad about having come together, not for Carol-- because nothing we could do would help her-- but for us.

And after I'd spoken, I felt ... better. Not great. But better. And here is what I said:

As you flip through the pages of the book of your life, you find it studded with images. Existence caught in midmotion, like a camera in your head just snapped a photo of an instant.

*Click.* JFK was shot. *Click* A woman you love just said she's pregnant, and you will always be able to envision everything from that moment with clarity you can taste, touch, see, and savor. Because these are the moments something important has happened to us. We've gotten news, or learned something about ourselves, or someone else. In lives cluttered by trivia, crammed with nonsense and commercial breaks and garbage up to our nostrils, it is the important moments, the important people, that we keep with us.

*Click* It's 10 years ago, and Carol Kalish is in her office making a model kit of a pterodactyl. Carol's wearing a white blouse, blue jeans, and red-and-gold vest. She appears to be ignoring the résumé being pitched by her would-be assistant who had less weight and more hair than he does now. His voice trails off. Finally a burst of exasperation. "What are you doing?"

She answers. Her shoulders bubble up and down in sudden enthusiasm, her head bobbing like a miniature spring-head baseball player in the back window of a '63 Ford. "This is Rhodan, and when I'm finished, he's going to fly through the air and destroy Tokyo unless Godzilla stops him." As she speaks, she reaches across the desk for a stray pterodactyl leg and *shoof* her chair shoots out from under her and she vanishes underneath her desk. And then, from out of sight, she calls, "So why do you want to work at Marvel Comics?"

"She's crazy," I realize. "This is a crazy person. I mean, I'm nuts, but she's certifiable. God, I hope she hires me."

She did. Time passed. Her hair got more silver. Her clothes got more uptown. She got no less crazy. She was boss, mentor, teacher, confidante, friend. She always had all the answers, even when she didn't have a clue. And she had the ability, as do all truly important people, to make you feel important as well.

And if she really liked you-- she made you nuts. The more she liked you, the more nuts she made you. I think she must have liked me a lot. And this was perfectly fitting behavior for someone whose stated role models were Doctor Doom and Maleficent.

*Click* A report has been screwed up, and Carol shakes a wrathful finger at me and bellows, "You're a disgrace to the forces of evil!"

*Click* We are standing in front of the Marvel office, and I am screaming in her face, gesticulating like a madman. We had been heading out on a business trip, and we had to catch a cab to JFK. "Come on, let's catch a cab over on that corner," I said.

And Carol replies, "No, that corner is better."

"Carol, that corner is one block further downtown. There's more empty cabs."

"But," she replies, "that corner is further uptown, we'll be one block closer to JFK."

"That's ridiculous! Let's go there!"

"No, let's go there!"

And back and forth, and suddenly I take a step toward her and say, "Black!"

Without blinking an eye, she shoots back, "White!"

And I start jumping up and down and shouting, "I knew it! I knew it! All these months when you've been disagreeing with me about everything, making me always think I was wrong. But it wasn't me. It was you! You're trying to make me as crazy as you! But it won't work! See? Bwwaahhahah! I'm still sane!"

And there she stood, *click*, with this demented, satisfied gleam in her eye. I recounted this story to her friend, Paul Dini, and he said that Carol was Bugs Bunny and the rest of the world was Daffy Duck. He's right. That's what she could do to you. "Shoot me now! Shoot me now! I demand you shoot me now!"

She never, to my knowledge, lost a fight-- except one. And even then, Death wouldn't take her in a fair fight because he was afraid he might lose. Why not? She was tougher, stronger, smarter than anyone else. So she got sucker-punched while her back was turned. Pitiful display. The Forces of Evil would have been proud.

*Click* The second we hear she's gone, and we'll all remember where we were, because that's how important she was. So important that we sit there, stunned, and go, "That can't be."

"How could this happen? We want answers! Who can we turn to for answers? I know. We'll ask--" And the silence of her passing becomes that much louder.

"It can't be," we say. "Not the superwoman of comics. It had to be ... a clone. Or a Skrull imposter. Or maybe she was spirited away by the CIA to testify against an international drug smuggler and then enter the Witness Relocation Program. Anything makes more sense than that she's just gone. Not Carol. Carol? That's ... crazy. That's just ... crazy."

Well-- leave it to Carol that she did pull a victory from the craven attack. Because of how many people can it be said that, damn-- right to the end, in death and life-- they were consistent?

Carol comes into the office, and she's wearing a skirt. I mime fainting. I have worked for her for four and a half years and have never seen tier legs because she never wears a skirt or dress. 1 had speculated aloud that she had wooden sticks or something rather than normal legs. She had said she'd wear a skirt on my 30th birthday. She did. I appreciated the gesture. And she had nice legs.

After the memorial I go out with about 30 or so people, in an expedition organized by retailer Lori Raub. We drink sodas to Carol's memory. And then I go home and hug my baby.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, misses his friend.)

Posted by Glenn Hauman at December 11, 2002 02:36 AM | TrackBack | Other blogs commenting