Like Blackberry Pie

Harrison Chambers was a fellow of incredible strength. I knew him well, I was one of the few who did. Many thought they knew him, many more wanted to know him, and seemingly even more than that had worked with him at some point or other in his short, illustrious career.

As I’m sure you know, he worked as an actor of sorts, though it was not always so. At the beginning, he was a busboy at a small diner in a Midwest town. It was a quaint set up. He had to wear one of those mostly white uniforms with a ridiculous paper hat. He quickly discovered that if he would keep the guest’s coffee cups full they would occasionally slip him a dollar, or a quarter, even dimes. Though he never accepted pennies.

“I have standards,” I remember him saying in reminisce years after the fact.

After a few months of keeping cups full and tables empty he started working the grill in the back. It was unpleasant work, but it mattered very little to Harrison.

“It paid 5.25 an hour. That was good enough to sweat over.”

In the summers the other kids would go down to the old stone quarry and swim, or fish or toss about in the bushes when they thought no one was looking.

But not Harrison.

He worked bailing hay when he wasn’t working the grill at that quaint, little diner.

One day he did decide to join his friend Jacob Brown at the quarry. It was a Saturday, full sun and high 80’s with the humidity at full tilt. Harrison liked everyone to think that he was uninterested in sociality. And the fact of the matter was everyone did think did that, until that Saturday in July.

Ned Filmont brought beer. Susan Moore brought her bikini that none of the other girls were brave enough to wear. Harrison brought a blackberry pie that he had bought with some of his wages from the diner. Everyone else brought towels, liquor, and cans of coke.

After a few hours of drinking beer and swimming Harrison noticed that no one had touched the pie, he had brought. It had cost 8.35, which equaled about an hour and a half of sweating over the grill. An hour and a half of wishing he was at the quarry. An hour and a half wondering what Susan Moore was doing at that exact moment. He had, one time, seen her eat a piece of blackberry pie when she came into the diner. In fact, it was later that week when Jacob Brown invited him to go swimming at the quarry the next Saturday. The Friday night before Harrison was so excited he could barely sleep. That morning he had bought the pie. That afternoon there it sat untouched.

“Who brought a pie?”

Harrison snapped out of his thoughts and looked at the speaker. Susan had just noticed the pie sitting on a somewhat flat rock.

“No idea.” Replied Ned.

“What a stupid thing to bring to the quarry.” Scoffed Susan.

Jacob shifted uncomfortably.

Harrison’s stomach turned. Suddenly he had drunk too much beer.

What a stupid thing. He repeated to himself. He stood and walked over to the pie and looked at it. As he did it was like every minute that he had spent earning the 8.35 to buy it passed through his mind and before he could stop himself he felt the words escaping his heart through his mouth.

“I thought you would like it.”

Susan looked at him with a markedly repulsed face.

“Who invited you?” She spat. “And what makes you think I would want to eat that?”

Harrison didn’t respond. He couldn’t think of anything to say.

Ned scoffed and started talking to her about something inconsequential.

Susan resumed pretending to care.

Jacob lit and cigarette and looked in any direction other than Harrison’s though seemingly everyone else was doing the exact opposite.

Harrison stood for a moment, then stooped and picked up the pie and walked to the edge of the cliff that everyone was jumping off into the water 45 feet below. He threw the pie as hard as he could. It sailed gracefully through the air before crashing unceremoniously with the water.

No one had noticed.

Nor did they notice that he didn’t come back the next Saturday, or any Saturday after that. He stayed at the diner. No one noticed him when he was working the grill, he found that oddly comforting.

At the end of the summer, Harrison took all his savings and moved to New York City and got a job working on an indie film set. And as we all know, that launched him into his wild career. Two or three blockbuster films a year. No one worked as hard as Harrison.

He was still in the diner.

One time, after the recent completion of one of our films together, I sat down with Harrison and we started talking about scotch, which led to the topic of beer, which led to the topic of our teenage years.

He told me the story I just told you. He changed for a moment. It was like up until that moment he had been in character. And when he was acting he had been a character playing a character. But in that moment, he slipped out for a minute and I got to see the real Harrison.

It was beautiful. If only he believed that too.

“I think that’s how I’ll go.” He said to me. “Like that old, Blackberry pie. Suspended in serenity for a full second before being suspended in nothingness for all eternity. Like that old Blackberry pie.”

Which I guess brings us to where we are now. When I was asked to give the eulogy I wanted to talk about the time we smoked cigars outside the set in Nicaragua or the other time we accidentally lit the director’s car on fire. I wanted to talk about all the other times he let himself slip out of character in those good years. I wanted to talk about how he teared up the first time he met my newborn daughter. Or about how he teared up when he met the stillborn baby girl of his own. I didn’t want to talk about how he never teared up at all when her mother moved on. Or about how he never slipped out of character again after that.

I wasn’t surprised when I got the news. I guess it ended how he wanted.

Like that old Blackberry pie.