Enjoy Every Sandwich

A tribute to a departed reader and Warren Zevon, two men who refused to "kiss the rancid ass of despair"

Warren Zevon, smirking/smoking past the graveyard, circa 1970. Photo credit: Michael Ochs archives/Getty Images

As a rule, I don’t like to enter Thanksgiving weekend all swollen with gratitude. It interferes with my seasonal affective disorder blues, throwing my system off-kilter. And I was going to skip holding forth on Why I Am Grateful, since I have more pressing concerns this week, like limbering up. Holiday stretching isn’t just important, it’s essential. At least if you don’t want to blow a rotator cuff while throwing the gravy boat at your squiffed uncle or idiot nephew when dinner-table political hostilities commence.

But the demands of my Thanksgiving physical regimen aside, I am grateful for two people in my life this year, even if both of them have now officially left it: Tom Missler, who died on November 12 at the age of 78 after a long battle with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and Tom’s spiritual kin, the late great singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, who left us 19 years ago at the age of 56 after a short battle with lung cancer. (More on the latter in a while, but they’re interrelated. Trust me.)  Many of you around these parts probably already know Tom Missler, or feel like you do. You might have run across him if you muck about in the comments section, where he was a semi-regular, thoughtfully assenting or dissenting, always the gentleman in either instance.

Or more likely, you know him from a piece I wrote this past August, called “Doubting Thomas.” Tom, a lapsed Catholic who grew into an atheist, was the titular Thomas. His parents had named him after Saint Thomas Aquinas, but it didn’t take. He’d tell people he was named after J.C.’s less-than-convinced disciple, since he enjoyed stirring the pot as regular practice. Back when he was a schoolboy, he used to inform classmates that his October 12 birthday, not Columbus Day, was the reason they had the day off.

The piece was an examination of belief (mine) vs. unbelief (his) – an uncontentious dialogue, really, a reprint of emails that flew between us, often in the midnight hour, when I suffered from overcaffeination as Tom was suffering from pain-induced insomnia in hospice. Even if I had the last word in the exchange (Tom should’ve started his own site if he expected to get that), Tom - an open-minded and open-hearted sort – loved it, writing to me in all lowercase, as always (he didn’t have enough time left to bother with the “shift” button, though I will capitalize his words since it’s too hard to fight my Microsoft autocorrect):  “Let’s hope we continue to share some words now and then. Having my thoughts on paper like this has proven important to my overall being. I have a path I can follow just because we communicated well with each other. I will reread this often and hope that some other souls who are suffering will understand that our ending does not have to be completely without joy.”  

Tom might have stopped believing in God, but he did still believe in the power of words. Whether using them as pool-noodle playthings (“we be finding some joy this day,” he’d write me while bedridden), or holding on to them as  a life preserver, Tom believed in the power of the written word to punch our buttons and penetrate our defenses – in their ability to leave a mark.  Just because he could no longer convince himself of a sacred being  - despite my best efforts - didn’t mean he didn’t still hold plenty sacred. Including the very act of me trying to convince him otherwise.  Even if he didn’t have much use for evangelical Christianity (the tradition I hail from), he was one of my best evangelists, inflicting my words and gift subs on his friends and family. It was Tom’s sister, Susan, who told me he’d passed (I found her email address after an uncharacteristic two-week silence from Tom – he’d gotten her a gift subscription). She told me, “Thank you for your exchanges with Tom. Nothing he enjoyed better than bantering with folks…..except maybe family and golf!” Tom once sent me a photo of a golf tee from one of his favorite golf courses, Muirfield Village in Ohio, writing: “I had my son bring it to me. It is large enough that a hole will be drilled into it and some ashes placed inside. I’m maybe more nuts about golf than you are about fly fishing.”

Tom Missler, 1944-2022

Maybe Tom’s love of words – sending them and receiving them – was endowed by his Maker somewhere along the way. Or as he’d put it, my Maker. I could’ve clobbered him over the head with the Book of John (which he probably already knew – Tom knew his Bible pretty well):  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  But some words that we wish to speak, we leave unspoken. Hoping that what we don’t say, says more. Once, around 3 am, Tom wrote me this. (I’ll leave it in his preferred lowercase and keep his line breaks):

when i stumbled over your beautiful work it set something inside me free. there is no longer any need for me to spar. i can throw the hammers

and take the return blows. the way it always should be. i'm up now to take some night time meds, and it's the perfect time to talk with you.

no pressure of my daily schedule to meet a pill regimen or deal with a nurse who doesn’t believe the twisted or shaking hands are doing enough of either.

maybe today i can manage a car ride with my son.
a chance to put him in charge, a chance {for him to understand} to let it all go, to pay attention to his fellow man. that it will be repayed 100 times.

more religion than you know sunk into this old bowmar. 

I told Tom that for an atheist, he made a helluva good Christian.

I started calling Tom “The Ice Cream Man.” I’d mentioned his favorite ice cream in “Doubting Thomas,” one of the small pleasures he was always on the hunt for as his body was irretrievably breaking down. Specifically, the Black Raspberry Chocolate Chip made by Graeter’s, the ice cream company that is the pride of Cincinnati. After the piece was published, Tom asked me for my address without specifying why. I thought he might send me a book or something. He was always forwarding articles he found interesting, on every subject from why fog was disappearing in the Bay Area, to the latest misadventures of Trump, who Tom disparagingly called “the ferret wearer” to his MAGA-inclined relatives. He never stopped being interested in the world that he still inhabited. But a week or so after his address inquiry, a large Styrofoam cooler packed with dry ice and about a dozen pints of Graeter’s Black Raspberry arrived on my doorstep. It had to set this dying man in hospice back a good 150 bucks.  He could’ve spent it on a new driver, which he’d need if he could gain enough lung power back to swing a golf club. (A fantasy he repeatedly voiced, that was not to be.) “I can now watch golf and think about my swing in my head,” he wrote. “Not as much fun as standing in a trout stream, but one day that will be a memory for you.”

I’d like to report I ate all the Black Raspberry Chip, but my gluttonous family beat me to about half of it. Even my dog, Solomon, got in on the action. I think I can speak for all of us – even the dog – when I say it was the best ice cream we’ve ever had. And not just because of the taste. There was a card inscribed by Tom and his wife, Mary, who nursed him until the end. It said, “enjoy this in good health.”  The ice cream is long gone. But I will keep that card until I tag out of this world.

It’s a strange thing, making an old friend in three months. But that’s what Tom became to me. A new old friend, as it felt like I’d known him for years, instantly. Three months isn’t all that long. I have t-shirts that haven’t been laundered in that time. I might be wearing one now. (It smells like barbecue and summer musk.) Tom was a feisty, retired money manager – the same age as my own father - who’d only become one after leaving his first-love job working in a golf shop (he said he was best known in his retirement village in California for teeing up with a cannula plastered on his face due to the COPD during relatively healthier times).  Tom had introduced himself to me at the end of July, telling me he liked my stuff, but was in hospice, so he asked if maybe he could buy a six-month subscription, and we’d take it from there if he lived longer?  I told him not to bother, I’d comp him. But a few days later, a paid subscription notice showed up. He’d bought a year-long subscription anyway, ever generous, and ever the optimist.

So I knew I was going to lose Tom as a correspondent/reader from the moment we met. But he had such an expansive spirit, he seemed worth the emotional investment, even if I knew how it was going to end, and that the end would come soon. I could hear his timer ticking from the jump. Though no more loudly than he could. When I asked Tom what he was up to one day, he wrote, “Trying to stay one step ahead of a guy running at me with a scythe in his hand.”

And yet, I sometimes came to think Tom was pulling my leg about dying. Not that he wasn’t dying – we all inch closer to checkout from the moment the starter pistol’s fired. And not to go all Tuesdays With Morrie on you, but Tom didn’t write like a dead man walking. He wrote like a man who had too much life in him to relinquish it. He wasn’t some self-denying stoic, pretending pain wasn’t happening.  He’d speak of the indignities: his feet enlarged from the fluid retention caused from the pills, the pee problems, the dizziness, the punishing fatigue, the tremors in his typing fingers, the embarrassing sponge baths administered by strange nurses as his “wiggler decided to look like a walnut,” the not being able to be who he once was (the hardest pill of all to swallow). But my old/new atheist friend seemed hellbent on extracting every last pleasure from life, as if he was in a contest to find the goodness of it all. Sometimes, this came in the form of gushing emails about his Florence Nightingale for a wife. Or his son, Josh, who professionally caddies at places like Pebble Beach, and who he hopes will dip into their vast email correspondence to each other over the years, which was often about golf, but as with so many conversations between fathers and sons, Tom regarded as just a cover to say what they really meant.

He might send me paeans to his beloved golf cart, which he had to sell since it was growing moldy from disuse, or to his departed dog: “You’d have loved Max, a one-eyed terror who loved every soul he came around.” He loved it all, and dearly.  Even my wife’s prayers. I promised to sic her on God on Tom’s behalf, since she has a clearer line to The Almighty than I do. I figured if there was any static in the connection, she might still get through. Tom thanked me for those prayers profusely, eagerly embracing them, willing to throw the dice on Pascal’s Wager, to a limited degree. He didn’t believe in praying anymore, but if anyone else wanted to do it for him, as an amateur gambler, he didn’t see any harm in hedging his bets. He often told me how “Anaylyn’s”  prayers seemed to be doing the trick on any given day.  “Thank Analyn for the prayers. They got us this far….She must have a powerful beam working its magic.” (Her name is Alana – but what kind of monster would I have to be to correct a dying man?) Tom was the very best kind of atheist. The kind who foreclosed divine possibilities, but who still hoped to be proven wrong and shown otherwise.  He didn’t hate God. He just didn’t want to be disappointed in God by finding out, once and for all, that he didn’t exist. Because Tom knew what a powerful drug hope was. Better than anything the hospice nurses were pumping into him.

So he extracted joy from found materials to keep himself going, even if just writing about it to me: “Ireland reminds me of Big Sur. It is by far the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen.”  This was an actual paragraph which typified a Tom exchange, misery capped by pedestrian ecstasy:

Have been super under the weather. Just completely unable to do much but piss and moan for almost a week. Began a new drug today and it is by far the most powerful drug I have ever taken. It’s high risk {with} some really terrible side effects. But I felt I need to take it just to try to put the fire in my stomach and mouth out. So far so good. I have a strange suggestion for you. It is a program on Netflix called ‘Fantastic Fungi.’ It is a wildly entertaining 80 minute film that might really interest you and eventually your readers.

Or here he was on my piece on a truly puzzling subculture, Christian furries: “I laughed and laughed at this, but realized I didn’t understand much of it all.” Tom regarded laughter as being the only drug more powerful than hope. Show me a man who is not afraid of laughing – even and especially at the inappropriate and horrendous– and I’ll show you a man whom the universe embraces, and who embraces it back. That was Tom:

Matt, by now, I’m betting you realize I’m a stubborn old guy and any day will be way out there on the horizon. Love to keep the crowd guessing, so we will keep on looking to learn something each day. To find some joy and to laugh or cry, as both are imposters…….Thinking a banana milkshake with real bananas is my dinner tonight.

After that one, I shared with Tom a favorite line from David James Duncan, a fellow fly fisherman who writes about it beautifully. (If you’ve never read The River Why, you’re cheating yourself.)  In an interview once, Duncan shared a line from a letter that a friend of his sent him while he was still in high school, which has stuck with him all his adult life: “I refuse to kiss the rancid ass of despair.”  I told Tom that in my opinion, as a professional student of human behavior, that was him, too: a champion of not kissing despair’s ass. A good thing to be when we can help it. And sometimes we can. Tom liked the sound of that. Though always willing to work blue, he countered, “There are some asses to be kissed along the way, but they belong only to your partner of choice.”

Tom had some company in the not-kissing-the-ass-of-despair club.  Namely Warren Zevon, Tom’s spiritual soul brother. A musical amateur might only know Zevon as the Werewolves of London or Lawyers, Guns, and Money singer.  But as I conversed with Tom over the last several months, I was repeatedly reminded of Zevon.  Zevon was the son of a bookie who lived on the wrong side of the law - his dad reportedly won him his first piano in a poker game.  And despite decades’ worth of alcohol-and-chemically-induced flame-outs, Zevon became a singer-songwriter nonpareil, writing some of the slyest, funniest, darkest lyrics in the business, and putting them to very pleasing music.  But around 2002, in his mid-fifties, Zevon was diagnosed with fatal mesothelioma,  a cancer of the lungs and chest walls,  and was given three months to live.  He ended up living about ten, but trying to beat the clock, Zevon wrote and recorded in a fever, putting out one of his best albums, The Wind, which contains one keeper after another. As I wrote at the time of his death for The Weekly Standard:

Of all the English-major huggy-bears from the golden era of the singer/songwriter in the 1970s, Zevon wrote the smartest, slyest, most biting lyrics. A genuine rock star for about five minutes in 1978, when he charted with ‘Werewolves of London,’ Zevon was more of a struggling everyman, albeit a very clever one who always smiled through the pain, and never lapsed into unbecoming self-pity. The son of a professional gambler who won Zevon his first car in a card game, Zevon was a noirish spirit to the point that he once house-hunted in Santa Barbara simply because Ross Macdonald lived there. Through the years, he turned personal failures into lyrical gems. After a two-decade-long drinking binge, he emerged sober with ‘Detox Mansion’: Well I’m gone to Detox mansion/Way down on Last Breath Farm/I’ve been rakin’ leaves with Liza/Me and Liz clean up the yard.

(Tom, too, was “between drinks” as he put it, having enjoyed his last one in 1989. Even if he could have sorely used one in his last days, he was worried he couldn’t stop if he started again. So he didn’t.)

While Zevon was enduring the final countdown, one of Zevon’s superfans, David Letterman, who championed Zevon over two decades when even Zevon’s record companies sometimes abandoned him, invited him on his show, giving Zevon the entire hour to celebrate him, and to say a proper goodbye. In a recent piece in The Ringer, which recounted this episode that is still crystalline in my memory after nearly twenty years, Letterman told writer Alan Siegel, “It was the only time in my talk show history that I did anything like that. I’ve never sat down and talked to anybody on television where we both understood they were about to die.” After the show, Letterman, who tended to not emote much on-air – or ever - and who often didn’t even mingle with guests backstage, visited Zevon’s dressing room. As Zevon was packing up his guitar while making small talk, Letterman told Siegel: “He puts it in, closes the lid, snaps it closed, hands it to me. And he says, ‘Take good care of this for me.’ And I burst into tears. Uncontrollable. I had no idea that I would be bursting into tears, but I did. And I hugged him and I said, ‘I just loved your music.’ And that was it.”

What Zevon did on the show was even more memorable. After Letterman invited him out for a sit-down, clearly uncomfortable, trying to speak of the unspeakable, Zevon defused the tension, saying: “First of all, let me say that I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years. It was one of those phobias that really didn’t pay off. The only person I ever go to is Dr. Stan. You know Dr. Stan – the dentist…..And I always said that if he can’t fix it, I’m screwed.”

Zevon’s swan song with David Letterman

Zevon, though joking, wasn’t joking. He was screwed. But when Letterman questioned him about the grueling crunch of working on what would be his last album, Zevon conceded: “Yeah. They certainly don’t discourage you from doing whatever you want. It’s not like bed rest and a lot of water will straighten you out…..I’m working harder, and, you know, you put more value on every minute, you do. I always thought I kind of did that. I really always enjoyed myself. But it’s more valuable now. You’re reminded to enjoy every sandwich and every minute of playing with the guys, and being with the kids, and……”

Enjoy every sandwich. Enjoy every pint of Black Raspberry Graeter’s. It might sound like the stuff of treacly desk calendars, or worse, TED Talks. But these are the things that men who have seen the finish line, and who have then crossed over, keep repeating to us. Maybe they know something we don’t. Maybe even if they don’t believe the same as we do, we should believe them on this. We can always argue about the rest on the other side. Though if there is another side, Tom will be forced to concede defeat. I’m a good sport - I’ll buy him a drink, if he’s not still in between them.  

Just as I’ve missed Warren Zevon for two decades, I will miss Tom, even if he made only a brief cameo in my life. But he left a mark. I thought maybe I was doing him a favor, befriending a dying man. Instead, he accepted my meager kindness, and returned it tenfold.  He taught me, in a very short amount of time, some things I didn’t quite grasp before meeting him: How to die with your boots on, even if your feet are too swollen to wear any. That sometimes your own hurt can help people in ways you don’t quite fathom, just by allowing them to bear witness. That you can still be most alive right before the lights go out. That death is scary and painful, but you can laugh at it, just like you would anything else. If that’s inappropriate, who cares? What are they gonna do? Kill you? 

I am going to miss seeing Tom’s “alphapoppa” Gmail handle turning up in my inbox. Because I knew that on the other side of that click, I’d be the better off for it. But on this Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for having the privilege of having lost him. Because to lose somebody means you had to have them in the first place. And I had Tom, right in my ear for several months, saying to me in a steady voice: “I stay positive. I'm guessing that the pain level can still be controlled. Another reason: why choose to piss and moan if you can laugh?”

Yeah, Tom. Why not?

Bonus tracks:  Here’s the last song on the last album Warren Zevon ever recorded, “Keep Me In Your Heart.” 

Here’s a song I have to include for obvious reasons, “Don’t Let Us Get Sick” off Zevon’s 2000 “Life’ll Kill Ya” album:

And here’s my very favorite Zevon song, “Mutineer,” off a 1995 album. If you want to see Zevon’s affecting performance of it on his Letterman farewell, here it is.  I am very attached to that rendition, even if he’s at something like half-breath. But I also deeply love this cover of it by Jason Isbell and his angel-voiced wife/fiddle player, Amanda Shires. Which is why I’m running that, too. A perfect thing of beauty: