Forward to: Highlights of a Lowlife: the Autobiography of Milan Melvin
by Peter Laufer
Milan and I were friends for over thirty years.
I was on the list of those who received that sobering and sad message. As was
the case with so many of us, for me, Milan dying was difficult to believe. Not
only was he relatively young, but he had led a death-defying life of mad
adventure since before I met him. Perhaps he wasn't going to outlive us all, but
it was beyond his living legend to consider he was about to succumb to something
as mundane as sickness.
Had I heard he had been shot by smugglers and bandits, pushed out of a CIA
helicopter by his superior officer, was rotting in a Third World prison charged
with fomenting revolution, or had simply disappeared, it would have been much
easier to accommodate than this pancreatic cancer diagnosis.
Milan was a Zelig-like figure for the latter half of the twentieth century. He
seemed to be everywhere and do everything -- and be there and do it first. From
the post-War tedium of the paranoid Fifties, through the sex, drugs, and
rock-and-roll Sixties, on to the world-trekking Seventies, the self-reflective
Eighties, the capital-building Nineties, Milan was a player, a teacher, and
always a student on the world stage.
In many ways, as his autobiography makes clear, he lived the Baby Boomer fantasy
life: rarely compromising, highly political, self indulgent, seeking
enlightenment and instant gratification simultaneously.
A few weeks after that death-sentence e-mail, I was stuck in Washington, DC with
all flights home to California grounded. It was September, 2001, and I was
wandering around looking at Hum-Vees and National Guardsmen on patrol in
Georgetown, watching the Pentagon smolder from the Key Bridge, when my mobile
phone rang with a call from Milan in Mexico. He was dying faster than he had
expected. In the midst of the national tragedy, he and his friends and family
were suffering a personal tragedy.
He told me he wanted me to come to Puerta Vallarta and debrief him. His memoirs
were unfinished. He wanted these interviews to complete the story and then he
wanted me to compile and edit the material.
"I don't want this job," I complained, still stunned at his diagnosis.
For me, Milan was always like an invulnerable older brother.
He reminded me that when he first became sick I offered to do whatever he
needed.
"Here's a lesson," he advised. "Be careful what you offer."
Over the next few weeks I made two trips to see him in Mexico. He talked as long
as his strength lasted. Once in a while we laughed. He took me up to his dream
ranch, where the workers were putting the finishing touches on his new house.
He told stories, ancient and contemporary.
Pointing to the laborers, he remembered when they were taking a break while
finishing the roof. "Come on you assholes," the foreman had yelled at
them, "we're not up north!" Milan clearly loved Mexico.
At his apartment in Puerto Vallarta he gave me a Zip drive filled with his
stories, letters, e-mails, and other notes for his autobiographical works. He
asked me to retrieve boxes of more letters, photographs, and other ephemeral
material from his sister's basement in California.
We agreed I would compile the collection into the memoir he had always planned
to write, adding commentary only when necessary to provide context, editing only
for clarity.