“A man with a thickly accented, high-pitched voice said, ‘Dr. West, I would like you to buy a yellow moped.’ ”
The distinctive sound of the postal truck aroused the attention of our golden retriever, Baylie, from his mid-day snooze on the living room couch. I watched the mail lady, Irene, efficiently place the mail in a neighbor’s box, then move to the next house around our cul-de-sac. I was pondering whether her name actually was Irene, or if I just thought it was Irene because the white pith helmet she always wore made me think of Hurricane Irene and how a person wearing a pith helmet looks prepared for anything. My cell phone’s ring interrupted my speculation.
Not recognizing the phone number, I answered, “I’m hoping this isn’t a sales call.”
A man with a thickly accented, high-pitched Indian voice said, “Dr. West, I would like you to buy a yellow moped. Canary yellow—like Tweety Bird. Twee-tee bird. Guaranteed to not crash, probably, or to not attract hot women, definitely.”
“Huh?” I responded, and my jaw actually dropped. I recognized the cartoonish delivery and eerily felt the presence of the owner of the voice. But it couldn’t be.
“Hello?” the voice said. “Are you there? This is a call for Cameron West from far away, but closer than you think. Muuucchhhh closer, my friend.”
I felt as though a chain had jumped off a sprocket in my brain onto another gear, and my mental feet were trying to adjust. Robin Williams is on the phone?
Robin and I became acquainted when, perhaps at the height of his fame, Disney purchased the rights for him to produce and star in a movie based on my memoir First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple. Soon after we met, he shared the thought that, although our lives were very different, we were similar in that both our minds had many rooms. He promised to step gently into mine as he prepared for the role, and he hinted that some of his rooms were much darker than the ones he showed the public, which made him confident he could convincingly portray someone whose mind had been severely damaged by childhood trauma. The depth of Robin’s inner pain was palpable to me, though I couldn’t have guessed its physiological genesis at the time. The film was never made, and Robin’s darkness, misunderstood and misdiagnosed, took him from us way too soon.
However, in that moment, on that perfect California day, he was, unaccountably, very much alive and on the phone in the persona of an Indian man who wanted me to buy a two-wheeled vehicle. Something shifted, and I felt a sense of excitement tingle my belly; a grin crept across my face.
“Yellow moped, Robin?” I asked.
“Who is this Robin? My name is Ahmed.”
“Ahmed?”
“Yes, sir, that is me,” he said. “Ahmed Abigmistake.”
I laughed out loud.
He dropped the hilarious accent and said in his natural voice, which always hinted at mischief, “I know this is weird, but say you don’t care.”
“I don’t care,” I said.
“Great! Question . . . are your teeth bored?” he asked.
It took me a second to catch up. “Uh, yeah, I could eat,” I said.
“I will come to you. I want to take a hike at Las Trampas and eat a burrito from El Balazo. With sour cream, black beans, and spicy salsa. Get it to go. I’ll be there at one on the dot.”
“One on the dot,” I echoed.
Robin said, “Are we telepathetic or what?”
I laughed. “I don’t know what the hell we are.”
“It’s okay! Bring Baylumps!” Robin said, using his pet name for our old hound. And then he was gone.
Baylie and I were stationed in the car in the driveway, drooling at the smell of Mexican food that wafted from the bag on the seat beside me when, at one o’clock, a black Lincoln Town Car came down the street and stopped in front of our house. The passenger door opened, and Robin Williams popped out—in the flesh. He did a shuffle ball change step and finished with a ta-daaa. He was wearing a gray T-shirt, green cargo pants, and the irresistibly impish grin on his face that I, and the world, had missed since he’d been gone. He ran over, yanked open the rear door of my car, and jumped in next to Baylie.
The dog squealed with joy and licked Robin’s face. Robin clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Good to see me, huh? Let’s go!”
I started the car and turned to back out of the driveway. The Lincoln was gone. We drove the short trip to the park in silence, and when pavement gave way to gravel and houses to rolling hills, I took a left into the empty parking lot of Las Trampas Regional Wilderness.
Disembarking, Robin surveyed the relatively steep switchback and suggested we eat when we reached the top of the hill. I gave him a water bottle and stashed the food in my old red backpack, and we started hiking at a comfortable pace. We walked in silence, but for the sounds of our exhalations, footsteps scuffing dirt, and a light breeze disturbing the foliage. Cresting the ridge in about twenty minutes, we found a shady spot under a coastal oak and sat down to eat. Robin tore the silver foil off his burrito and I did the same with mine, and we ate like savages, agreeing that the grilled chicken and the chips and salsa from El Balazo were perfection. Baylie sat nearby and got his share, of course, and things were comfortable and relaxed. When the feast was over, I put the refuse in my backpack and, under a cloudless sky, we headed south along the ridge trail.
Robin took a long sip of water and burped loudly—a good, long, multilayered belch.
“Good tone,” I said. “Nice finish.”
“Food is good. . . . I miss food. Except for one thing that I used to like that I can’t eat anymore, not because I’m dead but because something bad happened.”
“Do tell,” I prompted.
“Well,” he began, “I was at Juilliard in New York in ’74, about this time of year. I was in the student union, last night of the term, nursing a beer and listening to the music, and Stevie Wonder came on the jukebox singing ‘Blame it on the Sun.’ ”
“Beautiful ballad,” I said. “He played all the instruments on that.”
“Uh-huh, so when the song came on, this girl grooved up to me. She was maybe five-two, straight brown hair almost to her shoulders and kind eyes tucked into a nice face. Which was good, because that’s the kind of face I have, except my eyes are mauve.” He fluttered his lashes.
I fluttered back. “Her figure?” I asked.
He lifted an eyebrow. “Half Barbie, half Gumby. Gumby on the jeans half—no hips, flat ass. All Barbie under the peasant blouse.”
“I remember those,” I said wistfully.
“I remember hers,” Robin continued. “Kathy . . . she asked me to dance.”
He stopped walking, closed his eyes, and began to dance with an imaginary partner. He started singing the chorus of the tune, “I’ll blame it on the sun, the sun that didn’t shine . . .”
I joined in, “I’ll blame it on the wind and the trees . . .”
Robin gave me a mischievous grin, threw down his water bottle, grabbed my hand, pulled me close, and, cheek to cheek, we danced and sang together, “I’ll blame it on the time, that never was enough, I’ll blame it on the tide and sea . . . but my hearrrt blaaaames it on meeee.”
Robin bowed, stepped back, and grabbed his water bottle. We walked on.
“So after a few more tunes,” he continued, “we went back to my room where my single bed awaited. You’re a very stylish dancer, by the way.”
“I’m not going back to your dorm room in this or any other world,” I replied. “But Kathy did, and . . .” I beckoned him on.
“Well, for all of my solo practice, I was still a rank amateur at the finer points of sex, but Kathy, to my surprise and utter delight, had some heat in those Gumby hips and an ardent desire to perform what I perceived to be mouth-to-cock resuscitation, though the patient was very much alive and well at the time.”
I let out a “Hah!”
Robin threw his hand up in the air and shouted, “Can Ah preach it like Ah feel it?”
“Amen!” I responded.
“Damn right,” said the preacher, then Robin was back.
Softly, almost reverently, he said, “Seven, maybe seven-and-a-half seconds later, I’m in love.”
I belly-laughed, almost pulled an intercostal.
“She spent the night,” he went on, wiping a little sweat off his brow. “In the morning, as I daydreamed of a summer filled with CPR and sleepovers, Kathy told me that she had helped animate a short film that was going to be shown in two weeks at a small film festival and she was going and wouldn’t it be great if I came along, and by the way it’s in Switzerland.”
“What’d you say?” I asked.
“I said I have a passport and three hundred and eighty-four dollars. I’m in.”
“Very cool,” I said.
“So a couple weeks and one flight later we’re in Switzerland with backpacks, green cotton sleeping bags, and a matching green Michelin guide. We went to see the film the day we landed.”
“Was it good?”
“No idea, but we walked to a park, got into my sleeping bag in broad daylight, and celebrated. My penis was as animated as the film. Afterward, we sat and watched a lady tell her dog in German”—Robin stiffened his body and said in a commandant way—“ ‘Rex, setz dich hin.’ The dog sat down. I loved that. Rex, setz dich hin. Baylumps would have said, ‘Huh?’ ”
We laughed and wound our way down the trail to an area where some cows were grazing and stopped to watch them.
I said, “Baylumps, setz dich hin.” He wagged his tail and looked at the cows with his tongue hanging out. “Baylumps, sit,” I said, and he automatically did, without taking his eyes off the heifers.
Robin laughed and went on. “We hitchhiked through the Swiss Alps down into Italy and over to Genoa. Then we caught a ride all the way into France past Nice with an old Italian guy in a watermelon truck, who spoke no English but had a big gapped-toothed smile and, inexplicably—or explicably in Italian that we didn’t understand—dropped us off by the side of the road in the very late evening in what felt like the middle of nowhere.”
We stopped on the path under some trees and had a drink. I gave Baylie a couple of smoky-smelling treats I had in my shorts pocket.
“I like today, Cam,” Robin said. “Las Trampas, being with you and Baylumps, telling stories, saying ‘setz dich hin, Rex.’ ”
I looked at him, and our eyes locked. I opened my mouth to tell him just how much I liked it, too, but, choking back a rush of emotion, all that came out was “I . . .”
Robin held me in his gaze and let the moment pass.
We walked on, and he continued. “It was a warm night, so we decided to sleep under the stars, and we walked a bit off the road and settled down . . . right near a damp, swampy area with a lot of mosquitoes—an entire French Foreign Legion of bombardiers!” He waved his arms and swatted the air and ducked imaginary attackers. “Buzzing and diving and biting and stinging . . . it was the worst night of the trip.
“The next morning, we hitched a ride into the nearest town, St. Laurent-Du-Var, to get some anti-itch cream and breakfast. Outside the market, Kathy and I slathered each other’s bug bites with cortisone cream and ate two yogurts apiece. Mine were strawberry. After we ate, we were heading in single file down this narrow sidewalk and the street was winding and dug up in places from some roadwork. I was stepping around bricks—not bricks, but those old paving stones—and focusing on the sidewalk, and then I turned to ask Kathy if the itch cream was working and . . .”
He jumped a one-eighty and paused, clearly absorbed in the memory.
“And?” I prodded.
“And there was Kathy crawling out of a hole in the road about twenty feet back, and her mouth was all bloody!”
“Holy shit!” I said.
“Right! So I ran back and grabbed her face and looked closer, and there was a slice in her upper lip and it was big and gushing blood. She looked pretty stunned and opened her mouth and I could see that her left front tooth was broken in half on an angle and the missing half was gone. She’d stepped or tripped into the hole and smashed her mouth on the stone.”
“That’s terrible,” I said.
“Terrible,” Robin repeated, shaking his head. “I barely know this girl. I’m in a foreign country. She’s hurt. She needs help, and I don’t speak the language.” Robin stopped and pointed off in front of us. “Aw . . . there’s the parking lot. We’re back so soon? That’s sad.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
Robin took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He turned to me, put his hands on my shoulders, and shook his head, looking very dejected.
“What happened is I puked up two strawberry yogurts,” he said, with a double dry heave.
“Oooooh,” I said.
“Yup. All over Kathy and my self-respect,” he added. “Right there on the rue in St. Laurent-Du-Var in front of anyone who was looking. To the day I died, I couldn’t eat strawberry yogurt.”
He unscrewed the top of his water bottle. “Fortunately I can, however, still drink water . . . at least I can today.” He tilted his head back and drank the last bit, swallowing with a lip smack and an “ahhhhh.”
We made our way back to the car, still the only one in the parking lot. Robin opened the back door for Baylie, and the hound joyously hopped in, tail wagging and tongue hanging out. Robin followed.
Neither of us said a word for the five miles back to my house. I fought the overwhelming impulse to tell him how much he was missed and to acknowledge his pain and apologize for everyone who let him down. Instead, I looked in the rearview mirror every few seconds, just to take in the sight of his peaceful, rascally face and the puckish glint in his smiling eyes. And I savored the utter joy of having shared a perfect burrito, danced to Stevie Wonder, and heard one more wonderful story told by the funniest man I will ever meet.
Back at my house, the Lincoln was again parked out front. As I turned into the driveway, I glanced at the driver. It was our mail lady, Irene. She wore her white pith helmet down low and stared straight ahead. In the back seat, Robin was hugging Baylumps. He looked up and caught my eye.
“Thanks for this, Cam,” he said calmly.
Choking back tears, I managed, “Anytime, Robin.”
He let himself out of the car and walked to the passenger side of the Lincoln. Irene reached over and opened the door for him, and he climbed in the front seat and fastened his seatbelt. She put it in drive and, just like that, my deceased friend and my mail lady eased down the street and out of sight.
Irene was back behind the wheel of her mail truck the next day, but I didn’t see or hear from Robin again. On subsequent walks at Las Trampas, I did bring the subject up to Baylumps, who wagged his tail but didn’t say a word.
Cameron West, PhD, is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple and the novels The Medici Dagger and Futurecard. An avid musician, runner, and dog lover, Cam and his wife, Rikki, live on the central coast of California, where they are currently writing a novel for young adults.