I met Trebor Healey in the mid-1990s, when I was working in the Creative Services Department of Pacific Bell Directory in San Francisco.

He sat right across the aisle from me, in his own cube, though I didn’t actually meet him until the second day on the job, which might have been better, actually. On that first day on the job, I actually wore a tie to work, and nobody there wore a tie to work. I had it off on the second day when Trebor sauntered down the aisle and into his cube.

There was a shift in the air when Trebor walked into view. Who knows what charisma is? Something physical, I guess. After we said our hellos, when I heard him speak more at length, into the phone, on one of his calls, I noticed he had a deep, resonant, almost aristocratic voice that somehow conflicted with his down and dirty, street-wise poetic sensibility. In the course of my days there, I saw him walk in with a dog collar and ski cap, buckskin and cowboy hat, jeans and a T shirt. I don’t think I ever saw him in a tie. He swam a lot, at the Y across the street, and he tutored a kid through a Y tutoring program. And he completed his work in that style that many in the artistic tribe seem to have, when they find themselves earning a living in an office: they work for (with their natural conscientiousness) and against (with their natural independent, if not rebellious, spirit) the system simultaneously.

What else was it about him that I particularly remember?

Maybe it was the little toy figures he had lined up on his cube. Maybe it was the shrine to the Madonna (the real Madonna, the Divine Mother, the Guadalupe, not the "Vogue," "Truth or Dare," "Ray of Light" Madonna, God bless her shining soul) he placed there, too. He had a habit of tossing me the sport pages of the Chronicle after he finished them. He’d get up from his chair and then, on his way out of the office, to go somewhere, he’d drop them over my cube wall and walk off without a word.

We had a lot in common, I think now, in retrospect, and a lot not in common. Our relationship, perhaps, was built on a thin bridge that went over the great divide. We were both writers, both Irish, both Catholic (at least, at one time) and both, I suppose, struggling to find our way on our separate artistic and spiritual paths. But there was the stuff we didn’t have in common. What was it that Robert Frost said? "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood ... " There’s a whole parade of men in America who have gone into the yellow wood and experienced things that another parade of other men never will and Trebor took the road less traveled by. The roads diverge and diverge again. Maybe all roads, like everything that rises (what was it that Flannery O’Connor said?), converge. I hope that, eventually, they do. But Trebor had gone his own way into the underbrush and up into the mountains and came back — you could see it even in the hallways of our cubicle environment — with the wet atmosphere of that distant territory still clinging to him.

I suppose that "wet atmosphere" in its most elemental substance is called "life" and Trebor had it all around him. He brought it with him wherever he went, and that’s why everybody liked him, admired him, and cheered for him, silently in our own hearts even if, sometimes, he was, um, difficult to be around. And that was only because he always led with his heart while the rest of us in that cube space were too busy thinking.

I read many of his poems, which he generously passed on to me. They talked about Native American sweat house rituals, the emotional turbulence of friendships and love. They were constructed along aural lines that are impossible to summarize. You’d have to read them for yourself. (Although some titles from his early chapbooks of poetry might give you an idea: Emotional Hardware, The Queer Love of Comrades, Whitecloud Eating Rain, Metal-Bending Blessings and The Big Cock Candy Mountain).

I thought, when it came down to it, that there was something downright Shakespearian about the way Trebor wrote. He was just a fountain of words and he put them all together so interestingly and so meaningfully. I said as much to a friend of his one night when I drove in from Burlingame to hear Trebor read at the Paradise Lounge with some other poets. Shakespeare? The friend looked at me bemusedly. It somehow did not compute. And I wondered: did Trebor’s friend not know the work of the Bard of Avon? Could he not see the connection? He knew Trebor from other circles, from circles, perhaps, that involved ministering to the sick, to those who needed healing.

Well, then, Walt Whitman, maybe.

I was in the Creative Services Department on a long-term temporary assignment (that I could not commit myself to permanently) and the assignment afforded me with (especially now, in retrospect) some fine benefits of life (despite all the usual drawbacks of such a late 20th-century assignment in one of our interior cubicle farms). First of all, our offices were in the Rincon Center of San Francisco, only a block from the Bay. At lunch I could walk out of the office and go to what is now the Herb Caen Promenade, walk along the water, and stare at the magnificence of the Bay Bridge suspended in the sky over and above me. I could mingle my thoughts with the shower of water that fell from the ceiling in the atrium of the Rincon Center — a beautiful place, incorporating a renovated Post Office, built in 1940, whose interior walls are most notably marked by 27 Anton Refregier murals (commissioned by the Works Progress Administration), which depict the history of San Francisco — right near the coffee shop where we would all get our morning cappuccino — or decaf, or lattes — and pastries.

The people in my office were a plus, too. You were always bound to meet friendly, intelligent, artistic people in any office like that, in San Francisco, people who gave the place meaning and who could make the place pleasant, in spite of the tight invisible harness we all had to strap on as soon as the doors closed behind us and we walked to our particular cube. PBD, after all, was a part of one of the largest telecommunication corporations in the world. Every one of us, in the Creative Services Department, were, more or less, on the same wavelength.

And Trebor was the beating heart of our particular department — on the human level.

"Fight the bureaucracy!" he emailed us in his bon voyage message when he finally left the place, shortly after he finally broke down and dyed his hair blonde. ("It was now or never," — or words to that effect — he muttered to a coworker when he walked in on that day, with his new hair.)

So, even though I — we all, maybe — felt the place might be calmer once Trebor left (in those days, he often reacted so electrifyingly to anything you said) I certainly knew the place would not be the same. I left before him on the day he left for good — I was going to be leaving myself, soon — and I caught him in the kitchen, standing at the counter.

I stood in the hallway, and shouted in:

"See you, Trebor! All the best."

He turned around, forgot momentarily all the big or little things that might have been swirling around in his head, and locked in on me.

He smiled.

"Yeah," he said, enthusiastically. And, "hey, let’s keep in touch about that technical writing."

Years passed.

My wife and I moved to L.A. One Thursday evening, as my wife was looking through the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times, she said, "Hey, isn’t this that guy you knew ... back in ... ?"

Trebor was going to appear at the West Hollywood Book Fair. He was scheduled to appear with a number of spoken word artists in an event billed as "It’s Very Queer: Spoken Word from Across the Kinsey Scale." He’d just published his first novel, Through It Came Bright Colors.

When, on the next Sunday, we walked into The Abbey, where the event was to occur, I wasn’t sure if I would recognize Trebor — it had been so many years — but I did, even though he looked different.

He read a piece from his novel. It was a piece about a young boy who almost drowns one day, going underwater away from the beach, out near the dock. The boy was saved by an older brother and then carried back to shore by a lifeguard:

Then the lifeguard carries the boy back to shore:

The lifeguard leaves the boy with his mother. The boy didn’t want to go.

These scenes are flashbacks, in a book mostly concerned with two characters — Neill and Vince — and the hard love affair that exists between them ("Vince went like a dam in the end — one with his enormous, beautiful, Lenin-esque, Che Guevara of a face painted on it, rupturing and disintegrating in slow motion, swallowed by water."); with the freedom of the mountains; and with a bond between wounded brothers.

The book travels from the suburban escapes of the eastern parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, into the heart of the city itself, amidst many of its often-unseen shadows, into the hospital corridors and rooms where cancer patients are treated. It travels outward, up and into Yosemite’s mountain country, and it goes even beyond that, further, into the land of dreams.

It’s a big-hearted book, and at Trebor’s reading of it in West Hollywood, and after the reading, I was reminded once again that we all have something big-hearted and open-hearted about us, just like he does, something passionate and adventurous, connected to the immutable powers, so distant from the mutable, mechanical ones that enslave so many of our suburban, or even urban, hours; connected to the rain and the earth, to the lightning and the thunder. An artist’s life is emblematic of a freedom expressed only in individual ways (something you don’t have to die for; something that can only be lived), and Trebor is one of those individuals who express it.

After the reading, my wife and I wandered over to the Skylight Books booth, and Trebor signed for us a copy of his new novel.

"It was cool to see you," Trebor said, smiling, as we walked away.

I went home to read his novel.

And Trebor went off to start his way across the country on a national book tour: to experience the land and to leave behind him the echoing beats of his own heart amidst it.

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