Affection into Anguish

Threnody for Michelle Belaskie, 1959-2024

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

—Charles Bukowski

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Her physique would not allow her be introverted. . . .

As a highly-esteemed professional copy editor, she navigated a low-esteem world in endless need of correction.

As a fellow writer, her modest bio mentioned a life goal: “to make the world a better place. I try to do this by helping others and being a good person. (This really comes above all else.)”¹

And as an old friend, she kept teaching me, inadvertently, invariably, in deferred reflection.

Like right at this moment.

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. . . Naturally, heads swiveled towards her. A majority of males, in varying degrees of intoxication, would simply gape in outright objectification.

Initially, way back in the mid-1980s, I would have accompanied her anywhere, as fleeting rock star-poseur to bemused boyfriend to just naïve hanger-on, trying to adapt to all the sloppy seduction stares, all the attention beset by what she wore and what it showed.

Most would also likely notice her infectious laughter, perhaps along with an occasional parenthetical wink. She radiated an unusual smoldering compassion, self-deprecating humor and honest sincerity. She also modeled a quietly transformative feminism, to transform even the more arrogant mansplainers and manipulators into something better. . . .

Those fortunate enough to be closer sensed something more, unconsciously, maybe some magical potion, something to pull aside and inhale at a slight distance, as if happening upon one of the young celebrity talents she kept discovering months, sometimes years before the masses joined the hit parade.

For one of her odd abilities accurately prognosticated pop culture, beginning with the early rise of Prince, Madonna, U2 and an endless stream of TV and film releases, in her podcasts, blogs and seemingly endless social media traffic.

Decades ago, within my fledgling rock band of fragile egos, we were truly touched by her avid fandom, by her verbal and published praise when it seemed like maybe we weren’t destined for inevitable obscurity.

Embarrassingly, despite my extended self-identity as a discerning film critic, she also took me to task, when it took me 20 years to finally view one of her favorite idols in one of her favorite films. It instantly became one of mine, Some Like It Hot (most agree as Marilyn Monroe’s best role).

In the final week of her life, slipping away in so much pain, she still urged people to watch Season Three of “The Bear” as a likely repeat Emmy winner (even if not as good as the first two seasons).

Yes, the day before she perished, she continued her astonishing pace of masterful proofreading and copy edits, as if whispering a vibrant laugh at any bad deadline jokes. . . .

Yet her constant electricity, with posts and notifications popping up like requests for takeoffs and landings at the busiest of airports, also concealed an affliction more evident in this world of instant yet often superficial communication, what a therapist might call an attachment disorder, hiding in plain view.

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Detroit, Chicago, LA — she found a way to grandly inhabit all three in her three-act, sixty-four year comic-tragedy. I last saw her in person at her mother’s funeral in 1999, yet I’m writing about her now in real time, as if awaiting her next text or a Substack retort to these rambling thoughts.

Forgive my fragmentation, as I keep sorting through an assorted memory swirl.

For instance, in May of 1995, I recall visiting her high-rise Chicago office, at the world headquarters of the Playboy Corporation. She greeted me with a funny aside, “I know you’ll notice an abundance of quite attractive people here, yet they are all addicts or in recovery.”

She made it clear she self-identified as being in recovery.

As one of her old friends echoed, she was bigger than life. . . a life only a two-year war with aggressive carcinoma and feckless medications could extinguish, as if fentanyl, oxytocin or a morphine drip could erase her 35 years of sobriety.

Not to mention slow starvation.

Losing the ability to chew, to consume, to swallow the unopened ice cream and smoothies left with good intentions in her uninhabitable fridge and freezer, I stumbled upon these remnants along with an enormous debris field, from wall-to-wall hoarding inside her office-home, when her two loving sisters, a few neighbors and I tried vainly to sort out a few belongings in late July.

It seemed as if she wanted to leave behind an avalanche of Black Box flight recordings, as if we could somehow reorganize all the details to what happened, to the suffering, to answer the questions we all still quietly carried.

Within her countless journals, she left lists, not just of things to do, but her favorite radio memories, songs, live shows, movies, even a Top 100 of Most Influential Friends (rumor had it she somehow ranked them).

I had intended my vacation to Los Angeles originally as wellness check or hospital visit, surely with much discussion about the city she fell in love with after moving from Chicago in 2000.

Or at least a more theoretical conversation about why bad things happen to good people, about why lives end way too soon, in a sad world too toxic, and too disconnected, despite all the gadgetry of modernity.

She did speculate on her own obituary, and she would surely want me to include a sample Madonna lyric, to slightly offset any heavy lament.

So here, I found one:

I lost my memory in Hollywood
I've had a million visions, bad and good
There's something in the air in Hollywood
I tried to leave it, but I never could²

At her informal Detroit Memorial on September 5, on what would have been her 65th Birthday, I did learn so much more, including a caveat on how she became enamored with Charles Bukowski. 40 years before I did.

Of course.

In one of her last messages she confessed, “In my dream, you said, ‘I never want to be more than a day’s car ride away from you.’ And I cried, cause I felt the same.”

It’s no accident probably hundreds of her 5,000 online friends still do not know of her passing. About 30 just obliviously posted Happy Birthday wishes, five weeks after others had acknowledged her death notice, as if such a flicker of life would just keep flickering.

So, I must yield my time for now, to Bukowski, and to Michelle Belaskie, this truly good person who helped so many others, even long after she could no longer help herself.

TO BE CONTINUED. . . .³

Love & Fame & Death

by Charles Bukowski

it sits outside my window now
like and old woman going to market;
it sits and watches me,
it sweats nervously
through wire and fog and dog-bark
until suddenly
I slam the screen with a newspaper
like slapping at a fly
and you could hear the scream
over this plain city,
and then it left.

the way to end a poem
like this
is to become suddenly
quiet.

1. LinkedIn, 9/11/24

2. Madonna, 2002.

3. Note: a special memorial and spreading of her ashes will occur in LA this December. Details pending, but I’ll try to pass along any notice for her California friends.