While requiring myself to read all the grave-dancing that pummeled my friend Christopher Hitchens’ still warm flesh, I superstitiously passed on adding my voice to the chorus celebrating what a magnificent bastard he was. Beyond a tweet or two, I couldn’t bear to eulogize him and, as any thirteen year old knows, if I never did so he wasn’t really dead.  I just drifted along on all the fond remembrances and hero worship that comprise the first wave of any celebrity death. All too soon, the second wave hit.

Impossible as it was to avoid the ‘glad ya dead’ articles, it wasn’t impossible enough. I found myself bitter and narrow-eyed as the DMs and links to savage takedowns began arriving in my various inboxes, none from actual friends (that’ll show me to tweet my sorrow). Interesting, I thought, how it isn’t enough for them to hate him; those of us who’d been foolish enough not to have done so now had to renounce him. We had to be made to know, really know, the full extent of his crimes. When you’re not one of the piranhas for once, it’s amazingly easy to see that this exercise, and presumably many such exercises, was more about the gargantuan egos of journalists than the subject at hand: ‘Look at how brave I am and how wrong you are! Betcha didn’t know he’d once kicked a puppy.’ Not that most of it wasn’t true. (Also, by the end, most of it was just plain bitchy.) Watching national-level journos become so enraged by others' approving of someone they hadn’t (or on whom they just had good dirt), put in perspective the satisfaction I feel in flinging the muddy truth on the Reagan hagiography never far from the bended GOP knee.

Basically, the media mic checked my friend’s funeral. Hard, and for a long time.

Self-destructive, brilliant-ass, never-knew-when-to-quit Christopher broke my heart when he was alive (am I really the only person who heard the Cowardly Lion’s ‘put em up!’ routine in their head when he was being particularly ridiculous?), so I thought his physical decline and medical torture would be the worst of it, but it wasn’t. That second death, that vivisection by a thousand cuts…well. It had to be done and I saw it through. He had it coming. The relish was a bit hard to take though; I couldn’t even get my Nietzsche on and trust that I had indeed been made somehow stronger once the man himself, from his deathbed, pronounced that nostrum a crock. So strong, I decided I could get away with not crying for Christopher; to even know of him was to know that this man would come to no good. Why cry for someone who always knew he was killing himself? Admire his bravado instead, his lovely light. Or so I told myself.  

Lists are always a great distraction for the anal retentive, so I began several vengeful ones. First, of those who seemed only to feel a duty to set the record straight, then a much longer one of jealous poseurs writing that which they would not have dared had the man been around to call them out. The worst jackals were the coat tailers who lucked up on my boy at his worst and pimped him for the one story anyone will ever care to hear from them, rather like a hat check girl having happened upon a narcotized Marilyn Monroe in the ladies’ and rushing to sell the decade old story to the tabloids before the body cooled. But, in the end, I abandoned my enemies lists. Why bother (though it might be a hoot to see how many peddled their stories pre-mortem)? If you fail to find the members of each group readily identifiable, then you're in one of the latter two vulture flocks.

Still, the bitter exercise chewed up time and diverted my attention from the mourned to the newly hated; the more fiercely they gnawed on his bones, the easier it was not to be sad. Not living in DC anymore also helped. The only good thing about the media’s scavenger hunt for new Hitchens dirt was the unearthing of so many of his unknown (to me) essays and reportage. Truth to tell, I’d always skimmed, or skipped entirely, much of his foreign affairs work. His essays, books and book reviews however, I devour and did so with gusto in the days and weeks, now months, after his death.  While this paleo-feminist hadn't known the full depth of his sins, I'm confident that having known of his every horrendous crusade would have still failed to turn me against him. No one’s politics are more hateful than that cave full of St. Louis based Neanderthals with whom I share DNA and you don’t see me cutting them off. (Frankly, it’s his willingness to involve his wife in the Blumenthal imbroglio I find quite cringeworthy. We never discussed it but jeez! What a need to win. We never discussed Iraq either. So sue me.)

Among all that Christopher was to me, he was my teacher and my boxing coach; he taught me how to take a punch, how to give one and how to be brave. It’s been my great good fortune to have had excellent mentors, supporters, and editors (remember those?) in my life, but it must be said that none of them ever really took the gloves off with me. They were and remain, well mannered unto near double-jointedness in finding ways to ‘constructively’ tell me something I’d said or written was hogwash. Hitchens would look me in the eye and bark, “Hogwash.” They’re Robert’s Rules. He was the Law of the Jungle. Thank god I’ve had both. It was because of Christopher that when a pinhead conservative radio host tried to censor me (he actually stopped the show to scold me for referring to Bush 43’s adventurism as ‘adventurism’ and forbade me to engage in further ‘spin’). So shocked I hissed, I rose from my kitchen chair while green stuff dried on my face, drew myself up to full height and put a curse on him: “With your gun to my head, with your knife at my throat and your boot pinning my face in the dirt, you will never control my speech.” Pure Hitchens.

I came late to the journalist's life and he was among the first to reach out to me. Were I now to criticize his critics for criticizing the dead, he'd find a way to return from the beyond, pause his cigarette mid-arc, swivel that always stubbled chin (drama queen he most certainly was) and pinion my eyes in disappointed surprise. He'd fall silent for a moment, verifying to himself that I was indeed daring to indulge in reaction and nostalgia in his presence, then say in that most recognizable of voices lowered to just above a wolf growl, "Debra [long theatrical pause]. Surely you're not [insert blistering takedown here].” Then the evil cat-about-to-swat-the-mouse smile. “Are you?"  All the warmth and charm the shameless flirt had been flinging my way would evaporate with a sizzle until he’d decided that my hangdog expression was hangdog enough, then pour us both another and return to whatever fray he’d entered before I’d so disappointed him. If he ever cut anyone any slack, it wasn’t me and he liked me a lot. If he ever threw a rhetoric- or intellectual transgression in a lecturee’s face later, it wasn’t me and he told me off a lot. I learned this lesson the first night I met him at a DC online magazine launch in 1997 or so. A John Leo column came up and, when someone asked what it was about, a young journalist was quick to toss off, "Doesn't matter. They're all the same," the kind of line heard frequently from newbies at DC parties, accompanied by wan smiles and a polite lack of critique. With a quickness, Christopher roared, "Shame on you." (Only he could roar without the necessity of an exclamation point.). He went on to excoriate, briefly, witheringly, the reprobate’s cheap shot and spared not those of us who’d stood in complicitous silence while mere bitchery was substituted for careful analysis. A wet behind the ears journalist at 36, I’m looking at this dude and thinking: either avoid this psycho entirely or up your game and roll with him. I chose to roll. But yeah. He was psycho.  

There's been little death in my life, so rather than count my blessings, I feel especially aggrieved when I lose a duckling, like him, like Marjorie Williams. I ran into Carol and Christopher (I never called him 'Hitch'. I loved his impish formality.) in the vestibule leaving her National Cathedral memorial. I’d left DC by then, so our elation at being reunited beyond email and phone quickly turned somber. Marjorie was so beloved. I remarked on the number of people who had died recently though I can’t remember now who they were. Christopher looked back into the sanctuary where she lay and said so sadly I had to hug him, “Yes. And all the wrong people.”

Grieved, but still an asshole. 

I arrived to join the journo-social circuit just shortly before that magazine launch and was still awhirl from trying to figure out how to be a writer and from meeting all the luminaries I’d been following for so long. When the hostess took me aside to tell me that Christopher Hitchens (CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS!!!) wanted to meet me, I ‘bout had a conniption. Isn’t he the guy who rips people’s heads off and empties his ashtrays down their spinal columns for disagreeing with him? Or just because it was handy? The one who smokes even in the shower and dares the water to put his cigarette out? Wants to meet me? Once I was assured that she wasn’t joking, I was told to stay put and -- right hand to the Father -- she had to go get him and escort him over. Had he been worried I would say ‘hell to the no’ and actually used an intermediary rather than just barging up?’ CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS?

If I’m lying I’m flying: the man was blushing, counting floor tiles, shuffling his feet, and simply could not quiet his fluttering hands. Christopher Hitchens did not know what to say to little old, unknown me. She and I had to put him at ease. Cutest fucking thing I ever saw. I was his.

He regained his faculties (see the above takedown witnessed later that night) and began interrogating me, actually squinting with curiosity, given my having appeared out of the DC blue as I had (long story). With his last vestige of hesitance, he invited me to meet him the next day at that stinky, tourist free, dive he haunted on DuPont Circle. Freezing cold, I arrived in boots, gloves, hat, coat. He arrived in flip flops, a homeless guy’s trench coat flapping open in the wind, clothing so disheveled it could have easily come from Wardrobe and more razor stubble than could possibly have grown since just the night before.

“What?” he purred mischievously when my eyes asked WTF, “You’ve never seen a dandy before?” And so it began. As I headed home six hours later, I decided that the world could kiss my ass. Him drunk and wrong was a much better ride than most other folks sober and fact checked (I never saw him stumble). In fact, I suspect that may be why I forgive him everything; we were both supposed to be well behaved scholarship kids, grateful and pliant, and he’s the only one of us who said ‘fuck that’.  This good girl enjoyed the chaos he caused and his refusal to apologize. So sue me. 

So why mourn him now, when he’s been dead nearly two months and I’d so skillfully manipulated his enemies into insulating me from my grief? I’d inured myself to still seeing and hearing him on TV and the internet by intentionally booting him up some days, I clicked on links to him, knowing there’d be photos. Rather than him being cryogenically frozen, waiting for his cancer's cure, I froze him in the amber of history and visited him often. Why not? As thinkers go, he made history all the time. Given that, it really shouldn’t have sucker punched me the way it did when I bumped into him while weeding my Contacts a while back. The bastard sneaked up on me. He escaped from ‘the discourse’ straight back into my heart.

Dead, but still an asshole.

"...recent American history contains a powerful warning against letting random legislators determine who gets cut off by their funders. Years ago, when Hollywood screenwriters invoked their constitutional right not to incriminate themselves in front of the red-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee, the private members of the Motion Picture Association put them on a blacklist, never to be employed again. In the years since the McCarthy fever abated, the blacklisting episode has come to be a symbol of political cowardice and wrongdoing. Komen does itself a disservice by replacing the pink ribbon with a black list." 

...It was clear that not only did she want to kill [the Marines], but she didn't care about anybody else nearby who would have been blown up by the grenade or killed in the firefight. Children on the street, people in the houses, maybe her child...

She was too blinded by evil to consider them. She just wanted Americans dead, no matter what.

My shots saved several Americans, whose lives were clearly worth more than that woman's twisted soul. ...I truly, deeply hated the evil that woman possessed. ...

Savage, despicable evil. That's what we were fighting in Iraq. That's why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy "savages." There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there.

...The number [of his kills] is not important to me. I only wish I had killed more. Not for bragging rights, but because I believe the world is a better place without savages out there taking American lives. ...

I had a job to do as a SEAL. I killed the enemy--an enemy I saw day in and day out plotting to kill my fellow Americans. I'm haunted by the enemy's successes. They were few, but even a single American life is one too many lost."