We'd chosen the men and women from the worst we could find on the street. I wanted them looking as real as possible: their faces, their clothes, their broken-cup hopelessness.

As I spoke to them I felt no need to act or play. Outrageous as he appeared, Bloodstone was easy to "be" because his hatred was pure and sharp as the smell of shit. He was shit: no subtlety, no calm, no mask. Only hatred that came in one aroma, and too bad if you don't want to smell it; it's right here in your face.

I knew him because I knew my own wild hatred. It'll disappoint you, however, if you think I'm going to say I was my monster, that I was Bloodstone. Never. I never walked a street with curled Dracula fingers and stone heart looking for victims. Nor did I dream of his sins and wish I had the courage or kink to commit them.

But I'll tell you something. The heart of darkness or banality of evil is no more than interest. The fact we don't stand in wonder at the honors some people do today is proof enough that the dark things interest us too much.

What did Goethe say: "I can't imagine a crime I wouldn't commit in certain circumstances"? Update that to "I can't imagine a crime that doesn't attract me somehow" and you have our world. People "loved" Bloodstone and the nightmares he did because he took our few moments of crazed, invigorating anger and turned them into a lifetime. Rest in Piss.

The first day on the set didn't go well. The crew made many foolish mistakes getting used to one another. But that was usual when you began shooting a film.

More importantly, in the middle of my "sermon " one of the bums in the audience was supposed to fart loudly. I even remember the man's name, because he was famous in the neighborhood for being able to fart at will: Michael Rhodes.

When I said, "Any man who thinks his heart well is a fool and a liar," Michael Rhodes was supposed to do his stuff. In rehearsal everything had gone fine. I'd say, "a fool and a liar," and he'd let fly enough wind and sound to flap a sail.

But when the cameras started rolling and Michael's big moment arrived, his tail winds died. Not one toot, although the squeezed, panicked expression on his ruined face said he was certainly trying.

The first few takes it was funny. But you can laugh only so many times at a slipup. Then it gets boring and frustrating and hardens permanently into plain failure.

The fifth or sixth time nothing happened, I was about to call Cut! when someone let zap a blast that sounded like a tugboat crossing the harbor. Everyone on the set cheered.

Looking out over the congregation, I did a double-take when I saw a new face that hadn't been there before. Who's dat?

A little girl, but what a little girl! Short hair, gorgeous features. She stood out from those rats like a small but brilliant acetylene flame. Smiling wickedly, she held her nose with two fingers the way kids do when something stinks – P.U.!

Pinsleepe.

"You were here when Phil killed himself?"

Pinsleepe shook her head exaggeratedly from side to side, a child saying no too hard. "I told you – I came up here to fix him lunch but he was dead."

"You found him or Sasha found him?"

"I told you, Weber, it's the same thing! We're each other."

"Explain that." It was maddening. One moment she spoke with the aplomb of a career diplomat; the next she was only a little girl, crabby from too little sleep or too much stimulus. How was I going to find out all the things I needed to know?

"I have to go to the bathroom." She jumped up and left the room. I looked out the glass doors onto the patio. There was the chair he'd died in. There was –

The telephone rang. I heard the bathroom door close just as that first ring stopped. An extension was nearby so I picked it up.

"Weber? It's me, Sasha. Are you almost finished there?"

"Wait a second, Sash. Hold the line." Dropping the receiver on the couch, I moved fast for the bathroom door. If I caught the kid on the pot, tough. I had to see. The door swung open onto no one there. No Pinsleepe, no Sasha. An empty room.

I have a friend whose cat always knows when the phone is going to ring before it actually does. The child jumped up right before the ring and was out of sight by the time I heard Sasha's first words. Standing there, my hand still on the doorknob, I heard the girl's last words.

"It's the same thing! We're each other."

"A long long time ago this terrible thing happened. . . ."

Dumbfounded, I looked up from the paper. Across the grave, Sasha stared at Phil's coffin, an expression of dulled, empty sadness on her pale face. Wyatt Leonard stood on one side of her, Harry Radcliffe on the other. The two men were looking at me, surprised, but Sasha continued to gaze at the open hole in front of us.

I returned to the paper and the words Phil had asked that I read at his funeral, the words that were the voice-over beginning to Midnight.

"A famous poet once said, 'Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage, Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.'

"But that's not true. Dragons and monsters don't wait for courage and beauty. Only loss. Only death. There are people like that too."

If it were the beginning of his film, you would see the actress Violet Maitland, an infant in her arms, cross an airy, pastel living room to open balcony doors. Whispering sweet goo-goo sounds to the baby, she walks out onto her wide sunny balcony. The view from this high, expensive vantage point is splendid.

After a moment to allow us to share both the view and a delectable taste of her world, the woman heaves the child off the balcony as hard as she can. The only sound is her hoosh! of breath doing it.

But we weren't watching the film. We were several hundred standing around a gravesite with our separate thoughts about a man who was about to be covered up with a couple of hundred pounds of dirt for the rest of time.

Why had he done this? What was the purpose? Read alone, the quote from Rilke would have been moving, both because it was his favorite poet and the sentiment was very appropriate to Strayhorn. But to include the entire opening speech from that grisly film was tasteless and perverse.

Sasha gave me the envelope as we were riding to the cemetery. When I started to open it, she put her hand over mine and said that in his suicide note Phil had asked that it not be opened or read until the correct time. I'd assumed that meant he had something to say he wanted all the mourners to hear at the same time, a final important message. But not this. Not a macabre joke at his own dead expense in the last minutes many of us would ever have for him.

What else did his suicide note say?

At a certain point, I loaded my boat with all the important possessions I thought I wanted to take with me on the final trip to the old days of my life, across an ocean thirty or forty years long. All the things that were important – people, objects, ideas. But because of recent events (storms!), I've had to toss one after another of these things overboard until now, when my ship is so light that, amazingly, it has begun to float above the waters, which means there is even less control, even less possibility of reaching my previously set destination.

If Weber comes, please ask him to read the enclosed at my funeral. I would prefer that no one, including you two, see what it says until the ceremony. I'm assuming you and my parents will want me to have a funeral, but it makes no difference to me. My only request is that I be buried rather than cremated.

I'm sorry about this, Sasha. Please know it is in no way your fault. You have always been the peace and intimacy of a whisper to me. I love you.