Watched The Big Sleep with Bogart & Bacall starring. Is there a reason to live besides no reason to die?

— journal entry from June 5, 1989

Between his breakout in The Petrified Forest in 1936 and his death at fifty-seven from esophageal cancer twenty-one years later, Humphrey Bogart starred in sixty-six films, and by the age of twenty-two, I had seen fifty-three of them, most of them during the summers I was home from college after my sophomore and junior years. These were the summers of 1989 and 1990, the summers of Lethal Weapon 2 and Die Hard 2, the summers of Milli Vanilli’s “Baby, Don’t Forget My Number” and New Kids on the Block’s “Step by Step.” While other guys my age were spending their nights sweating against drunk girls at Lower Greenville’s Club A as the extended dance remix of Real Life’s “Send Me an Angel” played in a numbing loop, I sat alone in the dark of what had once been my bedroom but was now my father’s study, doing nothing but watching the black-and-white flickerings of decades-old movies, studying every movement made by a man who I was convinced had never once felt as terrible and as lost as I did. 

Living now in the instant-access era of streaming video, I could easily knock out the thirteen titles still remaining on my list, but I don’t have much of an urge to do so, frankly. For one thing, the payoff simply wouldn’t be the same now, not without the challenge of tracking down the scarcest of VHS tapes and broadcasts of derelict cable channels at three in the morning. For another, though I do still love Bogie’s movies, I no longer need them the way I once did. For a while, though, they sustained me like something close to a religion, right down to the requisite shrine of reverential iconography. Again and again I would tumble into his midnight world of pale smoke and dark shadows to stare at his craggy, sad-eyed face and hear his low, lisping mutters. At least temporarily, I would forget all the things troubling me.

That first summer, uninterested in the current fare of sequels and silliness, I watched and rewatched the obvious ones first, the classics—Casablanca, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre—but I didn’t really get serious until I found myself, rather inexplicably, needing to watch more, and then still more: Key Largo, In a Lonely Place, To Have and Have Not, High Sierra, Dark Passage, Dark Victory, Dead End, Dead Reckoning, The Caine Mutiny, Sabrina, Angels with Dirty Faces, The Roaring Twenties, The Petrified Forest . . . .

After these then came all the rest, in a torrent and late into the lonely night, all the ones that almost nobody anywhere ever watched anymore. Some were interesting, if not necessarily great (The Two Mrs. Carrolls, Invisible Stripes, They Drive By Night, San Quentin), while others were boring duds (Sirocco, Across the Pacific, Action in the North Atlantic, Passage to Marseille, Sahara, Battle Circus), and a few were simply befuddling (The Return of Doctor X, Virginia City, The Oklahoma Kid). Regardless of any particular film’s overall quality, however, I gladly absorbed every second of Bogie’s screen time. Just as long as he was smoking, squinting, and curling his famously scarred upper lip, I was rapt, captivated—and I was because, in the end, no matter the role he might be playing, he was almost always the same, as well as exactly how I always wanted and needed him to be: implacable in his moral convictions, unflappable in the face of threats, and irresistible to every woman. And he never suffered fools, ever. Just watch how quickly, how expertly, he disarms Kasper Gutman’s henchman, Wilmer, of not one but two guns in The Maltese Falcon. Who else could do that so nonchalantly, so witheringly? No one.   

My days those summers were spent silently filing paperwork in a windowless room at a law firm high up in a Dallas office building while listening to nothing but tapes of The Smiths on a battery-draining Walkman. Morrissey, The Smiths’ infamously funereal singer and lyricist, beguiled me just as much as Bogie, but in a less healthy way, and I knew this. Knowing changed nothing, however. While Bogie was who I wanted to be, Morrissey—or Moz, as he was called by The Smiths’ guitarist Johnny Marr—reminded me of what I was and had always self-obsessedly considered myself to be: a loner and a loser. Crooning in my ears, his self-flagellating words intertwined with the unremitting stream of my own malignant thoughts until they braided an enchanting noose. For help and hope, I turned to Bogie, but Moz’s pull, his morose siren song, was often so much stronger, and that’s because it was, is, and probably always will be easier—and, perversely, more soothing, too—to wallow in misery’s waters than to climb out of them. And misery-wallowing is what Moz’s lyrics excelled at:

Oh, mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head 
See the sea wants to take me 
The knife wants to slit me
Do you think you can help me? (“I Know It’s Over,” The Queen Is Dead, 1986)

I now know that he never intended for such histrionic lyrics as these to be taken deadly seriously—at least not entirely so—but that’s how, in my fragile state, I always took every single one of them. The fact that he often sang with his tongue in his cheek mostly evaded me, especially as I kept listening again and again to the bleakest of his bleak songs, convinced as I was of their genius and gimlet-eyed truth-telling.  Though it’s embarrassing to read now, my journal from this period brims with melodramatic, self-pitying proclamations about what these songs meant to me. From April 14, 1988: 

[L]aying [sic] on my bed in complete darkness and listening to The Smiths / Morrissey. I feel so good, so relaxed, so depressed, so dead, so invisible, so alone, so wonderful. All of it at the same time. A state between consciousness and sleep. I want to stay there forever with The Queen Is Dead playing, and playing . . . Time seems to stop, I’m no longer Kevin, or a son, or a student, or an employee, or anything.
I just breathe. Shallowly.
Why can’t I do this forever?
I don’t want to see another face, hear another voice besides Morrissey’s, I don’t want to see the sun, or walk or eat. . . 

Despite my anguished state of mind at the time (and my elevated hair, which I’d had cut to look exactly like Moz’s pristine quiff in the video for “Stop My If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before,” which, fittingly, consists of Morrissey clones bicycling after their idol through rainy, gray streets) my job at the law firm was still, ostensibly, part of my plan to apply to law school after graduation, but my experiences at the firm, while still fairly limited in variety there in the dreariness of the filing room, were already causing me to reconsider. I realized that I didn’t really want to work for or with French-cuffed blowhards who yelled abuse through the open door of their offices, much less become one. Besides, they all worked so hard and so late, and I certainly didn’t want to do that. All I really wanted to do was lie in the dark and listen to “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side,” and “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby” until the world ended. Was there something else I could do instead? I had no idea, which left me feeling even worse. Becoming a gangster or a private detective like Bogie wasn’t an option, unfortunately, but even if it had been, I was neither tough enough nor cool enough to pull it off. Like Moz, I was too skinny, too delicate, too vulnerable, too easily breakable. I was the effete bibliophile Bogie pretends to be in a scene from The Big Sleep, not Bogie when he’s slugging wise guys in the chin.   

To instantly become both tougher and cooler, I decided to take up smoking. Before I even took my first drag, I knew my brand would have to be unfiltered Camels—because I was going to do this all the way or not at all (even though I knew that Bogie had smoked Chesterfields). And there’d be no Bic lighters, either, only matches—matches that flared dramatically in the darkness. Once I got over the coughing, I did my best to keep each cigarette dangling as insouciantly from my lips as possible, but I was no natural like Bogie, whose eyes must have been carved from ivory; the rising smoke stung mine to the point of streaming tears. I quit after only a couple of weeks. The only aspect of it I ended up enjoying was the launching of butts into the air with disdainful, world-weary flicks, but because I could never stop worrying that I might accidentally start a blaze, I always eventually hunted them down so that I could crush them safely out.    

Reading from my exhaustive journal entries, I can see again how unrelentingly awful I felt during this period. Away at a university with a student body of 50,000 (including actors Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger, neither of whom I knew, though they were both there when I was), I spoke to almost no one but my roommate my entire time there. All I did was go to class, study three times as much as I needed to, listen to The Smiths while lying in the dark, and write about how much I hated everything, especially myself.

April 6, 1988: “When is it going to get better? Or is it? Will I take my life?”

· January 26, 1989: “Unoccupied time allows me to think and I really hate that. That’s when I’m most dangerous to myself.”

· January 25, 1990: “I just don’t know how I can survive the whole thing. I just don’t think I can accept my life being this terrible any longer.”

· July 21, 1991: “I’m in the doldrums, in limbo, in a coma . . . I feel like I’m on a life support system, not breathing on my own. . . . Sometimes it just seems I will collapse from lack of energy for life. I wish I knew what people get out of life that I don’t seem to be getting.”

I could fill dozens of pages with more quotations like these. Though I cringe at the histrionic tone of so much that I wrote to myself about myself during this time, I also know that I was truly hurting—teetering, in fact. I never imagined I might actually last long enough to be able to read them as the decades-old personal history of someone I would barely recognize.

A couple of months after that last entry, the one from the summer of 1991, I collapsed in a crying heap in front of my bewildered parents and finally acknowledged that I was in desperate need of help, which they helped me get. Only later would I begin to understand how little had been keeping me tethered. Yes, it was certainly more than the films of a man who had been dead for thirty-two years and the music of a misanthropic masochist from Manchester, England, but it wasn’t all that much more, either. 

Three months before I finally went into counseling and was put on life-saving medication, I finally got to see Moz for the first time. This was on June 17, 1991, at the Starplex Amphitheatre in Dallas, on his first North American tour as a solo act. Because a film of it was officially released on VHS a year later as Live in Dallas, I can revisit this concert whenever I want to, which I do now and again, always hoping to finally catch a glimpse of myself right before my rescue, but because I didn’t join the throng that swarmed a Moz stripped shirtless on the gladioli-strewn stage during “Everyday Is Like Sunday,” thus prematurely ending the performance, I continue to remain hidden in the shadows, thrilled simply to have been in his gloomy, glamorous presence for a little less than an hour.  

Today, I’m a fifty-five-year-old husband and father of two. Without even a week’s break, I’ve been on psychiatric medication for thirty-three years now. Miraculously, four pills every morning after my second cup of coffee somehow keep the black cowl from falling over my eyes and shutting out the light. Bogie made three films during his fifty-fifth year—two lousy ones (The Left Hand of God and We’re No Angels) and one fairly good one (The Desperate Hours). In all of them he looks dreary and haggard, as if he already knows the end is drawing near. The following year, he would make the aptly-named The Harder They Fall, and then that would be it. The biggest of all was gone.    

On the opposite side of the living room from my favorite chair, Bogie stares at me from an original poster of Tokyo Joe, the movie he made right after what was, arguably, his career-best performance as greedy, paranoid Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Tokyo Joe, however, is a lousy movie—one that probably no one has ever seen twice, unlike Treasure—but its yellowed poster is great, and it remains one of my prized possessions, unlike all of my old Smiths posters, which I shed somewhere along the way, thanks mostly to Morrissey’s subtle and not-so-subtle xenophobia over the years. Tokyo Joe had been a gift from my parents one Christmas during those terrible years three decades ago. They’d known I’d grown obsessed with the actor but had no idea why. More importantly, they had no idea what I was going through or how much it meant to me to be able to hang this poster on my wall. Gun in hand as always, Bogie now watches my front door perpetually, always prepared to take action if necessary. My children have never not known his presence in our home.

Over the years, as my son has grown older, I’ve managed to coerce him into watching a few of Bogie’s best films with me. Afterward, when I’ve asked him what he thought, he’s mostly shrugged and said, “I guess it was all right.” 

“All right?” I say. “You guess it was all right? We’re talking about an American icon here—maybe the American icon—a man who could convey more in a glance or a sneer than most actors can in an entire film! Couldn’t you feel his strength, his self-assurance, his beautiful gravitas? Couldn’t you feel him resonating through the screen like heat from a fire? I mean, seriously: don’t you wish you could be just like him?” Had I ever actually said this, my son would’ve merely shrugged again, confused and possibly disconcerted by his quiet, bookish father’s unexpected passion. Instead, I continue to bide my time, determined that I’ll eventually find the right film to reel him in.

My son is now the age I was at my worst, at my lowest, at my most lost and my most hopeless. Again and again, I tell myself how grateful I am to be the father of such a confident, well-adjusted, healthy son. When he’s home on break from college, I stare at him when he’s not looking, searching for signs of brokenness and despair that I know so well from the inside, but I see nothing except a much handsomer version of myself. He hugs me tight (he’s so much stronger than me!) before getting on the train that will take him back to school in DC, having heard from me again that if he ever needs to talk—about anything—to call me. “Like what?” he asks, confused by my vague emphasis. Because he’s still oblivious of my younger self’s struggles, he doesn’t grasp my truest meaning. I try to explain, telling him that I’m talking about things more important than grades, more important than school—things like feeling down, things like sadness—but I can’t quite get myself to say what I want most to say, which is things like thinking about killing yourself, which was what I had thought I wanted to do at his age. These words are just too raw. I’m ashamed at my cowardliness. It’s almost as if I’m afraid I’ll put an idea into his head that’s never been there before, the idea of death. “You know, just anything,” I finally say, echoing both myself and the words I ignored so completely from my own father, all the while hoping my son will never be anything like me.        

Kevin Grauke has published work in The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, StoryQuarterly, Fiction, and Quarterly West. He is also the author of Shadows of Men (Queen’s Ferry), winner of the Steven Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. He teaches at La Salle University and lives in Philadelphia.