IN A LOG HOUSE on the Yellowstone River in the Paradise Valley, Arnold Schwarzenegger sat on the floor in front of a stone fireplace smoking a cigar. He would take a puff and then stare at the cigar ash, closed into himself. Charles Gaines, who had brought Arnold to Montana, was in the open kitchen working on dinner with friends who lived close by. A couple local writers were there too, all of them standing around Charles, reluctant to engage with Arnold.
“What are you thinking over there by the fire?” Charles called into the living room.
“I am thinking, ‘What a vunderous thing to be Charles Gaines,’ ” Arnold said, mocking his own accent. “He is so handsome, so brave…”
Everyone laughed. Being Charles Gaines did look good: promising novelist, television sports correspondent and, now, discoverer of Arnold. The next day they were going into the Yellowstone backcountry to shoot a segment for ABC’s popular American Sportsman with Doug Peacock, who was known then for talking to grizzlies, even shouting them down. It was crazy, but Peacock had done it.
The segment was about Arnold too, of course, part of the exposure and polishing Charles had been giving him, taking him home to meet his family in Alabama, introducing him to Andy Warhol at the Factory, having late dinners at Elaine’s in New York. It was 1984 and most of what I knew about Charles came from his novel Stay Hungry, about a son of southern gentry who finds his identity in the decidedly unliterary culture of bodybuilding. What I knew about Arnold came from Pumping Iron, the documentary Charles had made with George Butler. The film ended with Arnold being declared Mr. Olympia and celebrating by smoking marijuana and announcing his retirement. Butler was quoted widely calling Arnold “our Pygmalion.” Charles never said anything like that.
Joints were passed at dinner, but Arnold smoked only cigars. The wonders of fly-fishing were discussed interchangeably with literary gossip and recent assignments. Arnold listened quizzically, refusing to be drawn in, but you could see his sharpness. At the end of the dinner Charles proposed a toast to him.
“No,” Arnold said, raising his glass. “To Charles Gaines, and the rest of the American grizzly bears who want to eat me up.”
A COUPLE YEARS AFTER that dinner, Charles called with an idea. The “Survival Game,” as he explained it, had been inspired by “The Most Dangerous Game,” the 1924 short story by Richard Connell about a wealthy big-game hunter from New York who winds up in an isolated preserve, where he becomes the quarry of a bored aristocrat. In Charles’s game, players armed with those Nel-Spot pistols used by ranchers to mark trees and livestock with splats of paint would stalk one another through the woods, testing their various survival skills as they tried to capture a home-base flag.
“And they blast each other?” I asked.
“They can eliminate one another,” Charles said. “But I’m interested in which skills will win out.” The first players would include a Vietnam vet, a New England forester, a turkey hunter, a doctor and an investment banker. They would compete in the woods surrounding his farm in New Hampshire, and I was invited—or should at least send a reporter to cover it. (The forester won.)
Paintball, as it came to be called, grew into a billion-dollar sport played by millions around the world, but Charles sold his interest after a year and never seemed particularly bothered by his timing. He said he would always be a writer first. For a while it seemed like every writer I knew wanted to write about fishing, but none more than Charles, and editing him became an exercise in channeling his angling enthusiasms. Most great fishers win ugly, which means they simply will not be denied their chosen fish on any particular day. Charles went the other way. He was not obsessed but, rather, so graceful in his fishing life as to pass from time to time into what his friend the sporting writer Vance Bourjaily called “the trance of instinct.” Charles said this was where his life was most vivid—sacred, even. But he was funny about it, calculating that the amortization of the market value of the fish he caught some years would run to $500 a pound.
His writing alluded to Hemingway and Zane Grey in both anecdote and spirit, and he got them into the same piece with musical references to “Bayou Pon Pon” or Dion and the Belmonts. He would introduce you to the “Hegel of fishing guides,” and he knew his fish. For example, most saltwater game fish lived like Greek playboys, following pleasure and abundance from one sunny spot to the next. Charles had a lot of that in him, too. Beyond the reflective silences of the tiny trout stream, he knew all about the nonstop wet dream of fun in a faraway place catching huge fish to loud music with a buzz on, as he described it in an Esquire piece about marlin fishing in the South Pacific.
As a sidecar to his journalism Charles started a travel business, identifying and booking high-end fishing and hunting destinations. His criteria for the lodges started with excellent game, but he also demanded that days spent have symmetry, excitement, and spiritual comfort to them. His job as CEO was both the scouting and the quality control—his market rich, middle-aged white guys eager to boast that they had enjoyed a drink with Charles at Ballynahinch Castle in Connemara or Wilson’s on the Miramichi, or maybe even Perry Munro’s smallmouth spike camp on the Black River. His life was so full of sport, travel and action that boredom had to be a sitting duck. If you looked at Charles from a distance he was like those playboy game fish, following pleasure and abundance from one sunny spot to the next. But he was writing less, and his time on the road pulled at the seams of his life.
LIKE HIS OTHER EDITORS, I was invited to visit, first at his New Hampshire farm, where he and his wife, Patricia, entertained streams of houseguests—writers, movie people, artists, athletes, charter captains, venture capitalists, academics…Patricia was beautiful, a former Miss Alabama, and an artist. Charles was tall and assured, vigorously handsome. When they separated, it was as if the good life was taking revenge on them—victims of the fast lane that had run through their farm.
Charles stayed in New Hampshire, alone and depressed, brooding about his failures as a husband, how vain, feckless and bullying he had been. He called me once during that time. Painting alone in her apartment on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, Patricia had fallen into despair and given away all her jewelry, including her wedding and engagement rings, to homeless women on the street. Did I know anyone in the NYPD who could help get it back? More important, he wanted Patricia back.
When she agreed to give the marriage another chance, they found 160 acres of wild land on the northeast coast of Nova Scotia and wove a plan. It had forests and meadows and cliffs overlooking the sea. They would build a house there with their children over the coming summer, and they would build it with their own hands.
The book that came out of that summer, A Family Place, was careful, heartening. Charles’s narrative followed the house building, living in tents without electricity or running water, relearning the pleasures and limitations of a simplified life. It was as far as you could get from flirting with movie stars and the carelessness that left incriminating debris. Patricia had once walked in on Charles to find the wife of one of his best friends blowing PCP up his nose with a straw. Charles had found letters to her from another man not meant for him to read. Now, echoing on every page, was the story of two people who, unconsciously and not, had been bent on destroying their marriage but had found a way to save it.
IN 2009, WHEN THE MANUFACTURERS and promoters who’d profited most from paintball decided to establish a Hall of Fame, they wanted Charles to be in the first class. I talked him into writing a piece for Sports Illustrated. It had been almost thirty years since that first game on his farm in New Hampshire. His lede was One way of measuring a life—maybe as good a method as any other—is on the basis of how much peculiarity you have helped to generate.
Perfect, I thought; not cynical but with an edge. It was the same voice you read in his sporting journalism, and it made you smile. His collection of pieces, The Next Valley Over, was the book Meriwether Lewis might have written about fishing if he had had a sense of humor— or maybe just been a better writer and as good a fisherman as Charles, which he was not. Reading it, you saw Charles leading his own personal Corps of Discovery, exploring life’s possibilities way beyond shooting jawbreakers of paint at your friends to get your adrenaline rush.
Because I had edited many of the pieces, Charles asked me to write an introduction. I wrote that Charles was an animist who believed in the ritual of fishing, but I was thinking about that house in Nova Scotia, and what it had taken to rebuild his family with it. When Arnold was elected governor of California in 2003, Charles wrote a story for me at Men’s Journal that called Arnold a wizard of his own growth, saying that his story is like Gatsby’s…not because of its payoff of riches and fame, but because it says unequivocally what we all want most to believe about ourselves: that we can be our own Pygmalions.
Like Charles, I thought, who in his own words had been caught and released.
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