Gringo Commits Suicide in Cartagena Colombia

[The Dude]

John Nichols on Leo Garen

He Was a Friend of Mine

By John Nichols



Leo Garen was a friend of mine who died in early December, 2006. He committed suicide in Cartagena, Colombia, where he had lived for several years. Leo was a roustabout, a bon-vivant, a theater director, a screenwriter, a world traveler, a fearless sailor, a fanatical pussy-chaser, a manic-depressive personality, a TV addict, and a self-absorbed person of infinite curiosity. He could also be a kind and generous man.

He gobbled peyote at meetings of the Native American Church, and smoked marijuana to get in the mood for his daily travails. He was always overweight and clumsy and very bright and funny and abrasive and egotistical. He was totally excited by life during his manic phases, and suicidal when the moon turned its dark side to Earth. My pal had read all the books ever written. He had seen all the movies ever made. In New York City long ago he had directed Off-Broadway plays by Norman Mailer, Jean Genet, J.P. Donleavy, and LeRoi Jones. I saw the posters on his wall. He Had Been Famous.

After New York, Leo went to Hollywood. He directed one film, “Grasslands,” that starred Keith Carradine and Gary Busey. It was shot in South Dakota by a ragtag crew snockered on every hallucinogen known to mankind. The studio snatched the picture away from Leo and only released it in Europe. That killed my buddy. He became an assistant director on Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point.” Then Leo took to writing screenplays and he didn’t give much of a damn anymore. “Just show me the money,” was his attitude, and for the gelt he delivered the schlock. Yet I read at least one script Leo wrote on spec (and never sold) that was wonderful. Called “Double Eagle,” it was a saga about the salting of the old west diamond mines.

I met Leo when Dennis Hopper brought him over to my Upper Ranchitos home circa 1971. We emptied a bottle of Gallo wine and became fast friends. For years thereafter I lived vicariously through Leo’s fantastic adventures abroad. He recounted stories about Barbara Bach and Yoko Ono, Rip Torn and Geraldine Page. I pictured Leo as a randy squire galloping about in novels like “Tom Jones,” “Candy,” “The Ginger Man.” He reminded me of Peter Ustinov, Sidney Greenstreet, Orson Welles, Pavarotti.

Leo was a Taos resident off and on for many years. He had a little house in Los Córdovas surrounded by marijuana plants growing among the cornstalks. He directed a couple of local theater productions, but couldn’t stand the oversized amateur egos dominating our town. To be fair, it wasn’t easy to work with Leo, the sarcastic perfectionist. I bet he would have offended Mother Teresa simply by saying, “Hello.” Leo was a professional procrastinator. He tottered around Taos to garage sales; he spent hours schmoozing at Dori’s café; he watched movies instead of writing them; he picked up girls at Smith’s, at the Sagebrush Inn, at Kit Carson Park, at the TCA.

I recall a number of Leo’s cleansing diets, lasting for months, that featured lemon juice and molasses. When depression laid him low, he sat in a chair at my house with tears streaming down his cheeks, unable to function. Then he found a local shrink who saved his life … but the shrink perished in a plane crash. Leo wanted me to co-write a movie with him about a Texas rattlesnake roundup. I envisioned it as a dignified morality tale staring Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas. Leo was thinking more along the lines of a B-movie blockbuster featuring Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds. We actually pitched the idea to hotshots at Rob Reiner’s company in L.A., a mortifying experience for yours truly, yet my cohort in crime never even blinked. Hollywood? Schmollywood.

Leo collected weird gee-gaws and knick-knacks from Indonesia, Thailand, Gallup. His dwellings were full if those tchotchkes. I once gave him a painting by Dorothy Brett that he promised to cherish forever. Naturally, he pawned it when the money dried up. Leo enthralled me with fantastic stories about chasing hookers in Ensenada, Mexico. While living on the coast he would drive his old Jaguar down from Venice Beach into town and totter obliviously around the slums chatting up gangsters, pimps, corrupt federals. Probably the least violent person I ever met, Leo still had a remarkable instinct for survival.

I asked Leo how he attracted so many women.

“Just start talking to them,” he replied.

“But what do you talk about, Leo?”

“It doesn’t matter. Say anything. It needn’t make sense. Just start talking.”

Leo embarrassed me; he also shored me up. He critiqued the manuscripts of several of my novels in a way that helped get them published. He understood art and creativity. He told me often how much he admired my work ethic. Always a loyal friend, Leo repeatedly said that he loved me. For years he talked about writing an autobiography. Leo joked that the title would be “Memoirs of a Lounge Act.” We laughed, though I felt his pain underneath. Subsequently, he changed the title to “Foibles of a Footnote.” I eagerly awaited the book because Leo’s life had been so colorful, so rich with zany characters and spine-tingling adventures and sex scandals and all-around perils of Pauline. But he procrastinated and never wrote the memoir.

In my files I have many letters and postcards from Leo, mailed from Bali, Costa Rica, Morocco, even Cuba. Here is a random sampling:

“After 66 whirlwind hours in Tokyo and Kyoto temples, I am en route to the fabled fleshpots of Siam.”

“John, you would love Bali because the entire island is one gigantic irrigation system of ditches, canals, tunnels, bamboo pipes and Rube Goldberg contraptions run by ditch committees called ‘subaks’ and fantastically effective for centuries.”

“Well, here I am again in a luxury hotel in a 3rd world country at year’s end. Much of Morocco looks uncannily like northern New Mexico.”

“Dear J, I was in Jerusalem for 4 days. It’s a gorgeous, lively, intense, exhilarating, compelling city. I went to the wailing wall and had a personal epiphany. I am astonished to learn that I’m much more Jewish in my soul then I ever realized.”

“Juan, mi querido. Hablo español un poco ahora, and love it. My vocabulary has been improved mightily by chicas Mexicanas, particularmente damas de la noche, who have taught me many synonyms of words like follar, coger, chingar, joder, tirarse, etc., and useful phrases like ‘metétela en la boca.’”

“Will be leaving Ensenada March 15th, back to L.A. for several weeks, leaving early April to join a sailboat in Newport, Rhode Island, for eight months, sailing to the South Pacific. Aiming to be off Tonga on New Millennium Eve, sitting on the International Dateline when Midnight officially begins.”

“Dear J.N.—Have been in Falmouth, England and the North Atlantic and Vigo, Spain and Madrid and Miami, Fl. and am now in San José, Costa Rica. A fine country. Will stay 6 months, maybe come back to live here….”

“Arriba El Máximo Lider, Commandante El Jefe Juan Nichols!! Enclosed you will find one T-shirt, bought in Havana at the Museo de Revolución, the former palace of Machado, Batista, etc., now an excellent museum whose photos, papers, maps, weapons, clothing with bloody bullet holes, and so on document and display every twist and turn of the Revolution, its Heroes and Martyrs, and anything else its organizers deemed worthy, proper, and politically correct to display.”

Then one day not too long ago, Leo hired on to be the one-person crew of a sailboat traveling from Jamaica to Cartagena, Columbia. The other guy on board, the captain, turned out to be a monster who tried to murder Leo in mid-Caribbean during a hurricane. They parted company in Cartagena.

Leo’s first postcard from there said: “Juan, mi amigo viejo, am in this exquisite, friendly city, remote and protected from all the pain and violence that besets the rest of benighted Colombia. Am living in the walled old city, in a house built in 1580, undoubtedly by Indian slaves before the Spanish started importing Africans. The women are downright gorgeous. I’ve never been anywhere with such a high percentage of staggering beauties. How’s by you, boychick?” At first, Leo loved that picturesque city. He called me on his computer phone ecstatic about everything. The women were all as beautiful as Playboy bunnies, and he was planning to marry one. He even learned to speak Spanish quite fluently, an extraordinary feat at his advanced age, now approaching 70.

Yet after a few years he wanted to come home and speak English again. No more ex-patriot. The marriage had not worked out. A venomous spider bite had landed him in the hospital for several weeks. He felt lonely and very depressed. There was a catch, however. In retirement, Leo’s income derived from Social Security and a pension from the Writers Guild. But the IRS attached some of the loot every month to pay off Leo’s past obligations. He called me on the computer phone, locked in a miserable depression, bemoaning his tragic finances. He couldn’t afford to return to America. I said, “But I know you, Leo. You’re a survivor. You always manage to get by.” This time he didn’t. In the end I guess he ran out of options. The meds did not work anymore and he was tired of feeling bad. So he checked into a small hotel, asked not to be disturbed next morning, and swallowed the pills. While he had it, that bawdy soul had sure flaunted it. Then “it” dissipated for good. Yet I never actually believed that one day he would kill himself. I dedicated my 1979 novel, “A Ghost in the Music,” to Leo. The novel’s plot revolves around the making of a cheap action film in Taos, a theme right up Leo’s alley. My fictional movie crew is stabled at the Mabel Dodge Luhan house during the early 1970s when Dennis Hopper held sway over that loony bin. The dedication of the novel reads:

For Leo Garen, Corpulent Odysseus, my good friend.

When last seen, he was slouched in a smoking blue pickup filled with dry piñon, rattling along an October aspen-flanked dirt road one thousand miles—and a million heartaches—and way beyond the old Hollywood Pale. I will miss my friend Leo.

http://www.taosdaily.com/index.php?f...rticle_id=1670

[JMitch1959]

Thanks for sharing the story of your friend's life.

I'm sorry for your loss.