But I share my birthday with someone, and I want to stop and tell you about him. Because nobody talks about him anymore, and when they do – they call him a monster.
The one time I had a bona fide industry job, I was a writer’s secretary to Clifton Campbell and Jonathan Lemkin, two really fine people writing for 21 Jump Street over at Stephen Cannell Productions and I was there between 1987 and the Writer’s Strike of 1988, a year I fondly refer to as “The Year of the Raisin Danish.” (I’ll let you find out what that’s about – Go Go Google It.)
This was both the best job I ever had, and the worst one. Best, because as the aspiring writer I am (and had the college education and internship to back it up), this was one of the best environments I’d ever landed in to observe, learn from and maybe, just maybe, break into myself. Plus, some of the most memorable people I ever met? I got to work with them. Best. Job. Ever.
Worst, because for 80% of the time or more, they were not in the office at all but up in Vancouver where the show shot. 21 Jump Street was the first of their shows to actually get Canadian winter-weight show jackets – up to that point, the “shooting up there” was still something of an experiment. I still have mine – it’s too heavy to wear, even during the winter here in Los Angeles.
So, for most of the time I worked there? I was babysitting a phone and reading books at my desk, alone except for the other secretary seated in the desk next to me. She was sweet, very smart but also very single (I was married) and we didn’t spend much time talking to each other.
I was very lonely, and very bored to be blunt.
I went through Shogun in a week. And then did it again. Went down the street to the used book store and bought more books to read at my desk. The HR department had made it very clear when they hired me – they were not hiring writers to be secretaries. If I was caught writing, I’d be fired. So there was that. The offices were lovely, Cannell’s Dad had been a carpenter, in the furniture business and the desk I sat at was absolutely the most beautiful thing in the world.
I spent a lot of time at it listening to the secretary at the desk next to mine watch television at hers – we often would be the only ones in the entire wing we sat in. The wing had five offices in it – two were my guys, a third belonged to a fellow who rarely came into the office and the other two belonged to writers who worked on Wiseguy.
And in 1987, Ray Sharkey came into the offices on his birthday - November 14th - and was introduced to me, after meeting with one of those writers. When I found out it was his birthday, I told him it was mine as well and tried – tried, mind you – to get him to sing Happy Birthday with me.
Okay, so I sang it to him, while he stood there and just glowed. I can’t sing worth beans, but he stood there and let me make a fool of myself like it was the best thing that ever happened to him. I guess maybe that year – it was. People in the office were talking about him, there were concerns – as there might be, with Cannell hiring a guy four days after leaving rehab for heroin to come work for him. But that was also Stephen Cannell – he did things like that. He was definitely a big believer in the “if your heart is heavy, get your hands busy” school. I can remember a lot of people showing up to discuss projects with him – Ben Vereen comes to mind, after one of his children died in a car accident that year (I think that work ended up on Sonny Spoon). There were others – but that year, Ray Sharkey got a second chance. And Wiseguy was a show then everybody loved, and people talked about how incredibly good their bad guy was.
I’ll never forget that – he was the kind of guy who when he paid attention to you? You were the only thing in the room and the ambient temperature raised at least five degrees. You were IT.
But when everybody else I met there shook hands with me when introduced – he didn’t. I thought it was odd at the time, but in hindsight it makes complete sense.
I didn’t think for a second he’d even remember me after that. I was wrong. In the months following, every time he came into the office, I would find myself being startled by a warm voice asking “Hello, Donna.”
Asking if I was well. Looking up, there would be that focus, that guy giving me his undivided attention until I responded. Flattered? Oh honey.
Let’s be blunt – in that job? I was furniture. Very few people even noticed I was there, and even fewer had any reason to care. I was nobody, completely and absolutely nobody. Best job ever/worst job ever. All alone at the end of the hallway, away from the offices and people he was there to see. Not even working on the same show I was. But he always greeted me, and asked how I was. I adored him for that.
People talked. Said he hadn’t gotten away from the IV drug use in time – he’d caught something, but was denying it. This was 1987, remember. AIDS was a “gay disease” and being gay then? Often the assumption was you were a pedophile, particularly if you were male (prevailing assumption was you’d been turned gay and perverted after someone had raped you as a child, no joke). AIDS was a “dirty” disease you got from sexually promiscuous individuals who were doing it wrong – denial in the face of ignorance. People didn’t know the transmission vectors, there was no really good way to test yet to see if you had it or had been exposed to it. You got it, you got a year and a half to put your life in order and that was that - hope you could find someone to care for you. We knew activists who were attending five to seven funerals a month, often two or more a week then.
Sharkey had gotten a second chance. But I remember how very careful he was about touching anyone. He didn’t. I never once thought that man would ever harm me, either deliberately or by accident – he was never anything but good to me, for no reason at all I could tell.
The Writer’s Strike in the spring of 1988 closed the offices I worked in. I spent most of that year temping, hoping to return after the strike was over but a position opened up with Coca-Cola that did two things – paid twice as much, and exposed me to database report writing as a skill that would eventually lead me to the job description I have now. I couldn’t go back, not with a diabetic husband who needed health insurance (and couldn’t stay employed because he was seen as a liability).
In 1991, all avenues here in the States to keep my husband working exhausted, we went to Switzerland where his uncle manufactured a job for him. We returned in 1992, wiser for the experience but it would be nine months before husband would secure another position of any kind. I was the only one who could find a job, and I never stopped working. (Unless they found out I had a diabetic husband, and then suddenly things just didn’t work out anymore, and I had to find another gig.)
Working at whatever I could find – but not as a writer – I did bang on a number of doors trying to find my way back to the entertainment industry, and did end up hanging out in the production offices of Quantum Leap for a time. (It didn't hurt it was a great show, and the people were nice to be around.) When I found out Ray Sharkey had passed away at the age of 40 from complications from AIDS in June of 1993 I tried to tell people about this guy who had been so kind to me.
I was told he was a monster who had taken over a hundred people with him and they said he did it on purpose. “Did you know him too?” “No – “
I did. I knew a guy who’d had just enough self-acceptance to get sober, but to accept AIDS? Couldn’t do it – it’s clear from the stories he told when asked.
So that’s a monster. I can’t say – the people he took with him were very real, and it was just as awful for them as it gets. He didn’t fight the legal challenges, he was found guilty after he was dead with nothing left in his estate to pay reparations.
What else is there to say? This was a survival-level error. His life may be a terrible lesson, but he was no monster. I think he did the best he could. I think he always did the best he could, even if that was trying to make everything look better than it was. Was it impossible for him to know he'd knowingly taken those people he loved with him? The civil courts certainly seemed to think so and it's matter of public record at this point. If he infected others, he himself was infected by someone - was it just timing that makes him a monster and not a victim? Or just - both?
To me, that's important. Because to me, it's very clear - here was someone who did something heinous in denial, juxtaposed with what he did do right at the same time. What was the wrong? He had AIDS and his behavior transmitted the disease to others. The courts decided after his death that he knew at the time. The people who knew him best believe that he knew it at the time. Reasonable thought insists he had to know it.
Does that negate everything else about him? Do we deny that to balance it all out? Two wrongs won't make this right - it remains what it is.
Did you know him? Today’s his birthday. He would have been 62. If you want to remember anything about him in addition to what you can Google up on him – I’d appreciate it if you would think of the small kindnesses he was capable of, the warmth and focus he could bring to bear and the incredible heart he brought to the roles he did.
He was good to me, that’s all I can say for certain. As I always add when I talk about Ray Sharkey, I have the privilege of not being one of the people he hurt. I can speak of him fondly when I remember him, never forgetting he was an addict, that it killed him and he took others with him.
But he was good. That also is true.
Good people do stupid things. Good people make mistakes that do bad things to other people and denial is a scary, scary phenomenon that makes monsters out of them - that's why society steps in between people in denial and the rest of us.
One, do your best. Be prepared, know your stuff and give it your all.
Two, if you make a mess, clean it up.
Three, never forget that anything you do, whatever decision you make, it's going to hit everyone you know - and likely, a ton of people you don't know. Decide carefully, and think about it - okay?
That's the lesson of Ray Sharkey -
And that's what I remember.
This story has a postscript, as you might expect one like it to have - that conversation in 1993? Ended abruptly when I stared a hole through somebody.
"Oh, him? He's just like that guy in the Chaplin movie - what's his name? You know what they're saying about that guy, right? He's going to be amazing if he doesn't kill himself first."
And then invited me to go watch a screening of Chaplin at the studio there, it was still running. Like it was no big thing to tell me a friend who had just died was a monster, then slammed some poor slob I'd never heard of with the same epithet - praised him at the same time - and then slammed him again. "Do you know him? Anybody every met him?" "No - "
You know who that was, do I have to tell you?
My family is littered with addicts - at least four generations, and there is only one male in any of them that escaped it. In 1993, I'd just found out my father had not died of the flu when I was six - that had been the truth, but not the whole story. The whole truth was he'd died of a Seconal overdose, and had been using a year and half before he died. My mother had been too ashamed to tell me, too wrapped up in keeping up appearances for my sake. 31 years old, when the man had died when I was 6. I'd been terrified of the man and relieved when he'd died - now I knew why.
Mom had an alcoholic brother who got sober in the fifties - a real rascal, from all reports. Rode the rails from Iowa during the Depression to Hollywood to seek his fortune, did middling well (I think) between getting sick, nearly starved to death before WWII where he was drafted and sent to England. Married an English girl - also an alcoholic - had two kids, marriage failed and he came back to live with Mom and us, got sober and I got the benefit of him for those years.
He was wonderful. Kind, generous, thoughtful, tolerant - and the best audience. You needed someone to watch you do your thing, he was right there in the front row. Patient, and if I'm wise - he's the reason. An artist - ended up a commercial artist designing packaging for OXY Petroleum before he died of a heart attack (just like his brother and his father) at 59.
Mom never drank so much as a glass of wine without looking at it twice while we kids were growing up - he, Dad and probably her father-in-law were why. We knew we were at risk - I can't recall a time I didn't know it. That doesn't stop it from happening. I have the younger brother who went to jail, and got clean there in the late 90's. How's he doing? He's magnificent, thanks for asking. I have a sister whose addictions have shown up in some spectacularly bizarre ways, most of them completely legal and above board - but just as devastating.
I know better than to have a WoW account. And I don't do psych drugs. Reasons.
It's not being generous or liberal to hold out help for an addict to take it from you. What you get back when they make it out is so worth it. My conservationist self knows you don't throw anything away - and that includes people. Wasteful. And if you do throw people out, they have just as much reason to bump your ass on the sidewalk as well. Pick a reason. It's better to stay in the conversation if you can.
But reaching recovery? They have to do it, it's not something you can insist on or shame anyone into. Trust me on this. For the ones who made it to recovery, I have twice as many or more to show you who didn't. It's a disease process, a chronic one - and its hallmark is relapse. So you set boundaries, keep your head on your shoulders, and have a plan (what am I going to do if is how mine begins). It's family, it's people. *shrug*
So there's that working in that office back in 1993. You're going to believe what you've heard, act on something third or fourth hand and make a judgement call on someone you've never even met - Nope. Not while I'm around. I won't do it. I think also that was what aghast really felt like. I was speechless, but I have my mother's eyes and when she was angry at us? All she had to do was look at us and we got the message.
The person I was speaking to stopped talking mid-sentence and it got very quiet there for a few moments. Then she changed the subject and the conversation went on to other things.
1993, and I never forgot that poor slob. I would later make a very conscious effort not to pay attention to "news" reports because it felt like being handed a personal possession someone had stolen from him. I'm peculiar? Okay. What I need to know is what anyone would know about me on being introduced - you recognize me, know my name and maybe my job description. That's it. I don't need pictures, I don't need gossip - you know that guy? You met him? No? Shaddup already, I can't do anything with it. I didn't get it from the person you're talking about themself, so it's none of my business to begin with. And we're talking about someone not in the room, why? That's rude. You're fictionalizing a real person - stop that.
When I started seeing the movies getting made, the "shows what you know" was strong with this one. Smug, oh you bet.
Doesn't matter if I think he's good or not. Never met the man.
If he's a good man, I believe that - I knew Ray Sharkey.
I know that's possible. In spite of "what they all say."
Happy Birthday. It's going to be the best day ever.
