Earlier this week, we sadly reported that Blake Legge, one of Picktainment’s top writers, unexpectedly passed away. His dear friend Katrina Morales-Godsil wrote some reflections on Blake here.
By Katrina Morales-Godsil
Blake Legge was my dear friend for the past 11 years. We met at the Borders in Long Beach, and in a short period of time our friendship blossomed.
Blake was raised in Northridge, and had two siblings. He typically refrained from discussing his childhood, which I gathered was not terribly happy. Nevertheless, there were some things about those times that brought a smile to his face. One of those things was television and the movies. Since Blake was a child, he loved watching horror flicks, sitcom television and for that matter, anything that had to do with the movies. His capacity for memorizing trivia regarding movies, was unsurpassed.
Blake was an avid reader and amongst his many favorites, he had a particular love for mystery paperbacks He would scour the used book stores of Long Beach in search of that one gem he did not already own. We often discussed advances in technology that might someday eliminate books all together – a result which he despised. We often laughed because he had confessed that he not only loved consuming all books, but he loved the odor of the pages in a book. The last time I saw him, we spent the time walking around a used bookstore in Long Beach, he picked up a copy of an old book and said, “smell, you can smell the old book smell” – he loved that. Many people who knew Blake, knew that he loved to write. Although Blake did not finish college and secure a formal degree, (something that always weighed heavy on him) he was undoubtedly a proficient and creative writer. He wrote many stories, but just never fulfilled his dream of becoming a well-know, well-loved author.
I would be amiss, not to mention how much Blake enjoyed political conversation. He was passionate about his liberal beliefs and was so disappointed in the state of affairs of our government. Nothing could set him off faster than the discussion of our politicians today. He read anything he could get his hands on regarding politics, and was very up-to-date and knowledgeable about all things political.
We often discussed the times we worked together at Borders. He absolutely cherished working with a slew of wonderful people — kids who appeared to be a bit on the fringes of our society, who never quite fit in, but who never judged him. Those were the people that made Blake feel comfortable. While he never felt good enough about himself to open up and reach out to so many of his Borders friends, he still considered them to be his true friends. There were many times the Borders crew gathered together for a drink or two, and Blake recently reflected upon how he enjoyed that segment of his life. You know who you are, and on Blake’s behalf, I thank you for being yourself and not permitting this world to taint you.
Blake had his share of problems, and he tended not to meet the expectations of many people he encountered, but he was my friend. Through our shared interests in movies and books, Blake constantly reminded me that I was not just a mom/wife/suburbanite. I am so grateful to him for that. It was always fun hanging out with him, because he could make me laugh like no other person with his witty sense of humor.
But in the end, my sense is that Blake was severely disillusioned with his life and lack of family. He expressed a number of regrets, and could not find a way to escape his depression. In short, he simply felt completely isolated and alone.
Shortly before his passing, Blake sent me an e-mail that he asked that I share with his friends. He relayed that he wanted everyone to try to understand what he was experiencing. Here is an excerpt:
David Foster Wallace wrote that people who kill themselves are already dead, and that the physical act of suicide is merely tying up the loose ends. By my own estimate I’ve been dead a good 20+ years now. But my heart kept beating and my bodily functions went on as usual so I did my best to act natural and fit in with the living. But it isn’t easy. You try doing all the stuff other people do: going to college, starting a career, building a life—but you can’t see a future for yourself so all your efforts seem pointless. The goals you set seem arbitrary and working toward them is joyless drudgery. None of it makes any sense.
So you find things to distract yourself with so you don’t feel the emptiness. Sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll, whatever. You become self-indulgent because your indulgences are all you have, the only things that bring you fleeting pleasure. You become a slacker, an underachiever. People ask you when you’re going to grow up, when you’re going to take responsibility for your life. You get offended. You think to yourself, “If only they knew what a tortured soul I am!” But that’s bullshit really, because what do you expect? People judge you by what they see, they don’t want your goddam life story. And you don’t want to give it to them, because the only thing worse than scorn is pity.”
I am a better person for having known Blake. I just wish he would have believed me when I relayed that very message to him. His final request was for cremation and no funeral service. I have been given the gift of his remains and will spread them somewhere “picturesque” as he desired. Get together with people that knew him, share some chicken wings, drink a beer and talk about what a swell guy Blake was. Those were his wishes.
Farewell my friend. Thank you for the precious little time that you gave me. May you truly rest in peace now.
I was lucky enough to count Blake as a friend. He was truly a special guy, an actual kindred spirit. Thanks for sharing this.
There was something about Blake that drew me to him, this magnetizing force that was unavoidable. He had this way of making me feel comfortable in any situation. When I first met him I’d just graduated college a semester before and was feeling both very old but very stupid. He never made me feel stupid either, he just listened. Here I was in a writing workshop trying to write, when I hadn’t lived. And here was this man who had so much to tell and his stories always captured my attention. I couldn’t help but hope that every week he had a piece that he wanted to read out loud, because his writing was addictive and I always craved more. Blake helped me a lot with my own writing, his critiques were always positive and he had specific comments on how to make something better.
One particular time everyone was talking about songs with their names and I felt so left out not knowing any song besides “Ring Around the Rosie” which everyone sang to me since I was a child but he smiled and told me I had a song by Neil Diamond named “Cracklin’ Rosie” that fit me. During one workshop, Blake read a piece he was working on about a pimp and a hooker which he named “Rosie”. It made everyone look over to me. I was embarrassed at first, but it made me want to laugh at his humor for not changing the hooker’s name. If a hooker was “Rosie” in his head, then why should he change the name? This prompted a conversation between a few of us about how we were going to write fellow writers into our stories but complete fictionalized opposites of their true personality.
I have always had this very open love of The White Stripes and I remember telling Blake about all the shows I’d been to. He told me he’d never gotten to see them. I meant when I told him that I wish I had known him earlier to take him to a show with me. Blake was the kind of guy you wanted in your life, he had a lot to tell. I didn’t know his darker side, I always assumed he was too cool and busy to hang out when I’d ask him down to workshops or to meet up once he stopped coming to class. I didn’t know but I wish I did. Blake was one of my favorite people from workshop and I will miss him and his writing dearly.
My most vivid memories of Blake are the smell of cigarette smoke on his clothes, and a tender gesture that a character from one of his stories, a father, makes towards his young son. That tenderness pierced my heart. I admired and envied Blake’s ability to get to a place like that in his stories. I suspected that this ability was rooted in pain; for many writers it is. Now I’m appalled at the enormity of what he was dealing with. And I’m in awe at the clarity with which he was able to articulate what he was experiencing. Why didn’t that clarity make a difference? Why didn’t the amazing words he wrote make a difference? He is at peace now, at least.
I only knew Blake from writing workshop, did not know who he was outside of those four walls, did not know his life. I only caught glimpses through our subsequent sporadic messages and comments on facebook, yet those glimpses might have been false impressions about an interesting, happy life that I now know he didn’t feel he had. In workshop, however, sitting across from him or next to him (and I have to admit, I always tried to sit somewhere in his area), I felt at ease in his company, accepted, liked, almost like you would with an old acquaintance. He seemed like this hard to come by combination of the really cool nice guy. Even his name was cool, and of course the blue bandana and handsome beard didn’t hurt his looks either! Blake exuded kindness, warmth, intelligence, and I was always so happy to see him in workshop, which he didn’t attend regularly. When he was there, it was an especially good workshop, you could always count on that. He was both an exceptional writer with a deep understanding of humanity and a good listener who took others’ stories seriously.
What a strange situation: There was this man, tortured on the inside, unhappy, not finding his place in life, yet none of this darkness touched the outside, at least not in the workshop setting. All he would give us is a bright, lovely, calm aura in which we could bask. I almost wished he would have shown more of his inner demons – would things have turned out differently had he allowed himself to show this hidden side? But maybe that what his special gift: To make others feel good, even though he couldn’t do the same for himself.
I also looked at the list of books again he read and shared with me and others online. There are 405 titles on his virtual bookshelf, most of them books you would find on nobody else’s shelf. I used to laugh when I saw his recommendations. Blake again with his weird, totally out there books, I thought. Not exactly easy to read! Not quite my taste either, but I thought this was even more interesting about him, his unusual taste in literature. Looking at the titles now, I think they are telling us something about him: The Metamorphosis, Underworld comics, The Ice Storm, Mildred Pierce, In Dubious Battle, The Boulevard of broken Dreams, My Brain is Hanging Upside Down, Wish I could be there – notes from a phobic life; authors such as Kafka, Steinbeck, Chabon, Eggers, Bukowski….
Some people say rest in peace, Blake, and peace I do wish you, others might light incense and pray for a beautiful rebirth into a better, happier life. I am glad to have known you, just a little, in this life.
I have no words that can do Blake justice. I had the pleasure of knowing Blake for 8 years. During that time we became fast friends. He lived with my girlfriend and I for some time on Grand Ave in Long Beach. He always did what he could to help his friends and the few people in his life he trusted enough to let in. What I remember most about Blake: Movies, Books, Writing, Politics, those Damn Indian Spirit Cigarets, Bandanas, his Contempt for this life, how much he loved my pets, and undoubtedly a rather twisted sense of humor. He was so intelligent and sweet, but lived with a bleeding heart and a broken soul. He went through his life always feeling so uneasy and suffocated by so many things. I pray that he has found, in his departing, everything this earth/world had failed him. Perhaps this was the greatest twist to his story, the final chapter that ended with his life. I will remember you always Blake and keep your memory in my heart!
Blake Legge was a good friend, one of those you don’t really appreciate till they’re no longer there. We had our ups and downs over the course of our roughly fifteen year friendship. Blake was dating a friend of mine, when we first met. I found him to be a very intelligent, interesting and likable guy. We became friends around the time he worked security (he really hated that job) for a club I managed in O.C. We shared a love of film and books and became roommates for a while. Over the years we shared countless movies and endless discussions, debates and many heated arguments about everything from film and books to politics. We took a few trips and shared many holidays. During the lean times we shared a lot of meals. I often ragged him about those nasty cigarettes. Like me, Blake was extremely stubborn and very opinionated. How he loved those dark, gloomy, overcast days, I never understood it.. He was kind and helpful, my family loved him and he thoroughly enjoyed being around them. My mother was always feeding him when he was at her home. He blushed, but loved the attention he got from her. Blake never had a real relationship with his own mother.. I feel it was probably the root of his depression. His childhood was something we didn’t often speak of, but on those rare occasions when we did, I quickly learned not to push him about it. He once told me that he had absolutely no recollection of his mother ever holding, hugging, kissing or even touching him with any sort of affection. It was the saddest thing I had ever heard. I couldn’t hold back the tears, even thinking about it now.. The last time I spoke to Blake we had a heated argument and I never got a chance to apologize to him. “I’m so sorry Blake”, “I will miss you so very much, my friend and I pray you are at peace.”
I have taught Thursday nights at Irvine Valley College for almost all my nineteen years there: a fiction workshop which attracts the usual students looking for a few transferrable credits and the unusual, those dedicated to a certain art, a craft: writing. Those students, those Thursday night regulars, who enroll again and again until forbidden by regulations, form bonds. Some of them becoming lifelong friends, and I follow them as they move on, continue to write, go to grad school, publish, fall in love, marry, fall out of love, have children, face one crisis or joy after another…
Blake Legge, one of those students, died last week and all last weekend I thought of him, all through the long cool rainy days which also found me observing the end of Dia de Los Muertos in Santa Ana and tending my own altar at home, a little overcrowded this year by recent departures, none has heartbreaking as Blake.
I can still see Blake’s font choice: the old school typewriter block letters of a Courier style, his name, first and last, in the upper left corner and the story that followed it below, the shapes of the paragraphs, the openness of each word, sentence. I was never disappointed by the stories he wrote. They were always worth my time and everyone else’s. Something was always at stake. The workshop always cared about his characters and what they would do. The workshop rooted for his characters even if they failed.
And Blake, he always cared about the workshop’s stories too. Not everyone does, but Blake did.
I never saw the demons that his other friends have referred to in recent days. I think I didn’t because when I saw him, when Blake walked into the modest institutional college classroom, brightly lit and too chilly from the dark night outside and entered the workshop’s clean well-lighted place, (a story he must have read with the workshop once, twice, perhaps three times), when he became not a stranger but a fellow writer, student, when the class made our own warmth around the tables we pushed together, when we sat there and read and listened, spoke and shared, what the class and I saw of him was perhaps him at his best, who he wanted to be. Any demons were left outside.
Whenever he came into the room, joined the circle, he was welcomed, warmly, for who he was, for who he was with us. As I mourn him, I am comforted by remembering this. This is what I tell the other students as I send emails, make telephone calls. We were there for him. We always welcomed him. We saw what was good in him and told him so, again and again.
I don’t know where people came from before class or what they go home to. Sometimes I learn, sometimes I do not. I understand now that for Blake there was pain, grief, an unbearable loss.
In the Hemingway story, two waiters, one young, one old, observe an old man while they finish their night shift in a café. It is one of Hemingway’s Spanish stories and the language moves smoothly between English and Spanish. The old man drinks too much. The old man, it is said, tried kill himself. The younger waiter is impatient with the old man, the older waiter less so. At the end of the story, the old man shuffles off, the younger waiter goes home to his wife waiting in bed and the older waiter says farewell:
“Good night,” the other said. Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself. It was the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread, It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.
“What’s yours?” asked the barman.
“Nada.”
“Otro loco mas,” said the barman and turned away.
“A little cup,” said the waiter.
The barman poured it for him.
“The light is very bright and pleasant but the bar is unpolished,” the waiter said.
The barman looked at him but did not answer. It was too late at night for conversation.
“You want another copita?” the barman asked.
“No, thank you,” said the waiter and went out. He disliked bars and bodegas. A clean, well-lighted cafe was a very different thing. Now, without thinking further, he would go home to his room. He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it’s probably only insomnia. Many must have it.
I worked with Blake at the Kyjen Company in Huntington Beach and feel so blessed to have had the opportunity to call him a friend and experience the talent in his writing and photography. We were travel partners to a show in DC in 08 and that is when I got to know this wonderful guy more than just working along side of him. You will always be in our hearts and now you can rest in peace.
No words can adequately describe my feelings upon learning of Blake’s passing. He was my friend for 10 years-not a friend I saw every week or even every month, but a friend who made an impact on me even if we spent one day a year together. His wittiness and humor was unmatched and when I saw him my smile widened and my heart swelled.
Blake and I took a photography class together in the fall of 2001 which is when our friendship really began. I would have never taken the class if it wasn’t for Blake! He made ordinary Tuesday evenings exciting (when he would actually show up for class…) Along with his brilliant writing skills he also had an artistic flare with the camera which I was able to witness. We often went for drinks after class and wondered how many people thought we were a “couple.”
I had the good fortune to share in another of Blake’s passions-going to the movies. Together we saw such classics as “Memento” and “Dude, Where’s My Car?”
The “tortured soul” part of Blake he hid from me and my kids. Instead, he only shared his fun-loving self. I will miss you my dear Blake and will always be proud to call you my friend.
Hi Katrina:
Did Blake go to Cleveland high in Reseda?
Iby
Calabasas/Grover Cleveland High and he was from Northridge. Did you know him? Please contact me on fb if you knew him.
I knew him when he was a young man in high school, always with a book in his hand, we used to hang out by the library and talk about everything. He was kind to me and treated me with respect and we were friends. I wish I would’ve looked him up sooner, It would have been nice to catch up, finally fess’ up about the crush I had on him and thank him for inspiring me to write. I hope he is at peace and smiling, gosh he had a great smile..