Mike Jasper posted something on Facebook Monday that made me stop and think despite the cacophony of comments related to Robin Williams' death.
"Robin was our boy, our SF Bay Area boy," Mike wrote. "Sure, he was born in Chicago, but he was raised in Marin. Sure, he went to Juilliard, but he came back to California. And he went to LA, like everyone had to, but when he got some money he moved to Kenmore. And then Tiburon. He was our guy. Like Tom Hanks and Tom Fogarty, but even more so because he came back to the Bay. I saw him, you probably saw him, and if you didn't see him, you knew somebody who did."
I didn't see him. I knew which house was his in the ritzy Sea Cliff neighborhood in San Francisco - we all did. And Mike got it right; we had our own relationship to Williams because it felt like he was one of us, a neighbor, a guy who knew that in San Francisco Kearney Street is pronounced Kern-ey, not Carn-ey, and that Strawberry isn't a fruit, it's a quaint, old-school strip mall in Mill Valley. He had not sold out; he had not defected to LA.
Mike's Robin Williams sighting came in the late 1970s, when Williams was Mork and Mike was singing his songs in Sonoma County taverns.
"My one and only encounter with Robin was very strange," Mike wrote. "I was playing a restaurant bar in Kenwood, and he was playing a video game, back when you sat down at video games and they were horizontal, like Pong. So it's back in 1979 or so, and he's playing and facing me, about 20 feet away, and raises his head from time to time and smiles or nods at me as I strum my Gibson and sing song after song. It was very surreal, weird even, but very cool.
"Also ... he was damn funny. Gonna miss that guy."
Robin Williams felt approachable; the kind of guy who might be sitting there playing Pong in a bar in Kenwood, a Highway 12 wide spot where 1,028 people and 15 wineries share the shade of beautiful, fragrant, incongruous eucalyptus trees. Just a guy from the neighborhood who had done well, really well, who made everyone laugh out loud but also stirred our depths, most memorably in Dead Poets Society and at the Oscars.
His death is disturbing because it challenges everything we've always believed. If you're talented and hardworking, you can be successful and famous and rich. More importantly, you can do it in a way that makes people like you; you don't have to be Justin Bieber or Lindsay Lohan. And if you're rich and famous and everyone loves you, what else is there? That is, for most, the very definition of happiness. Certainly, there's no reason to be depressed.
And yet we know that Williams was depressed and that he fought with alcohol and that it ended the way it did for Ernest Hemingway, Vincent van Gogh, Mark Rothko, Virginia Woolf, Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Cobain and hundreds of others. Each had spent their lives making us feel, pushing us to laugh or cry or shout.
What's hard is that the emotion drawn out of others is dilution of the artist's own; the audience, no matter how moved, feels just a piece.
But the cauldron inside never settles, the storm is not quelled when the credits roll or the last page is turned. An estimated 60 percent of suicides are committed by someone suffering from major depressive disorder. The first step is to start talking about mental illnesses the way we talk about all other diseases, without the stigma and without blaming the afflicted.
Published: Thu, Aug 14, 2014
