On a warm day recently in the courtyard of a bookstore in the west L.A. enclave of Brentwood, David Milch perched on a raised chair and entertained a group of some 50 friends and admirers with a reading from a book. He's done this kind of thing before.
This time, though, was different. This time the book was not written by William James, or Mark Twain, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, from the cadre of writers he devoured and took deeply to heart throughout his life in letters. This time the book was his, written with the help of his family, his personal archives, and what memories he could muster through the mists imposed by the disease discovered and later named for Dr. Alois Alzheimer, a 19th century German psychiatrist and neuropathologist.
"You're always aware there's an irreducible mystery that at best you're going to approach but never going to capture," Milch read, holding a microphone in one hand and his book in the other. "And reverence for the mystery is itself the organization of the story. My story."
"Life's Work" is the name of the book and a title that will trip satisfying switches in anyone who has owned a television set since, say, around 1982, when Milch's first script aired as the first episode of the third season of "Hill Street Blues." It was a network cop show like no other, courtesy in large part to the unfettered creative energy supplied by Milch, followed in the 1990s by "NYPD Blue," a network cop show like no other, again.
Then came "Deadwood" for HBO, Milch's magnum opus and the reason his name is whispered among fellow TV writers as a peak they could never hope to climb. Bloody, literary, and profane, "Deadwood" had everything anyone could want in an exploration of the Old West, including gunfights, blood stains, and brothels.
As "Deadwood" was about to debut on the cable network, in March of 2004, management of Santa Anita Park rolled out a promotion for the show that included sky high banners imprinted with images of the show's characters and a faux gold rush for kids in an infield sprinkled with hidden coins. Then again, it was the least a racetrack could do for one of its best patrons. Milch at the time was not only a racehorse owner of note, with two Breeders' Cup trophies and a champion to his name, but also a pari-mutuel Moby-Dick among whales. The man came to play.
In "Life's Work," Milch does not shy from the various sides of his life that give the rest of us pause, including an obsession with gambling on horses that qualified as disease. His father was inspiring and horrifying by turns. His school days were a miasma of drugs, violent mischief, and intellectual brilliance. Everything he accomplished, working with literary greats like Robert Penn Warren and Richard Yates along the way, seemed to happen in spite of himself. He married and had three children, taught at Yale, and ruined what health he salvaged from his teen years. By 40 he wondered why he still was alive. He was not alone.
The answer was the work. Always the work. "Absent action, all animals are sad. I had to get back to work," Milch writes of the time between the end of "Hill Street" and the beginning of "NYPD Blue." Save for a pause here and there for rehab or heart surgery, Milch did nothing but work.
This is a good place to either remind or inform readers that I had the blessed good fortune to work with Milch's team of writers for his racetrack drama "Luck," which lasted for a single season on HBO in 2011. It was an exhausting, exhilarating year and a half, during which I was given a peek at a genius at work. The particulars of the show's cancellation in mid-thought are covered by David in the book, which at least spares me the pain of telling ever again.
Many of the recollections included in "Life's Work" bubbled up through David's monologues during "Luck" story conferences. Everything he'd ever done was always in play. As he writes, "To show the proper weight of the past as it's experienced in the present and how the present goes on, on its own terms—that's the most difficult challenge in the world." That was our challenge, whether we figured it out or not.
Readers of "Life's Work" will have a blast savoring a bounty of inside dope on how episodic TV sausage is made. They also will lean into Milch's abject love for the actors who grabbed his words and ran hard. Some of them were there for David's bookstore appearance to read from the book, including Ed O'Neill, who played the ex-cop Bill Jacks in "John From Cincinnati," and Robin Weigert, so indelibly vivid as Calamity Jane in "Deadwood."
It was Weigert who stood at Milch's side, one hand on his shoulder, as she read from the chapter titled, "Zenyatta," which amounts to an articulation of why so many people find themselves irrevocably drawn to Thoroughbreds. His focus was on Zenyatta's last race, which he watched on TV as she lost for the first time in 20 starts. At the same time we were in the midst of writing an episode of "Luck" that featured the spectacular debut of a young racehorse. Weigert read, in David's voice:
"Afterward I was bawling like a baby and had been from the head of the stretch in a sort of inextricable association of feeling appreciation for her performance and gratitude for the opportunity to feel that appreciation. It seemed to me in the aftermath of the race, the last gift which was given had to do with the separation of that feeling of appreciation from the illusion of invincibility. That the final and deepest gift she had to give was the opportunity to accept all the qualifications of our finitude without having to dilute or alloy the joy that she made available to us."
In the throes of his steadily advancing illness, known to more and more families these days as the "long goodbye," Milch can summon what always has been a healthy sense of comic self-deprecation, now fueled in large part by his affliction. On that afternoon in the courtyard and the debut of "Life's Work" he did a respectable imitation of someone who recognized old friends and took pleasure in their presence. We exchanged a hug as if nothing had happened since we'd last met, five years earlier, for lunch with our pal, John Perrotta. Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Still, it is reasonable to think that "Life's Work" is Milch's way of saying farewell to the large and loyal audience he has served so well. Then again, Alzheimer's is a flighty ride, sometimes allowing its passengers a moment of clarity before again lowering the shade. Who knows what Milch might summon during such moments?
"All you can ask for out of life is to get into an environment where you try to do your best," Milch writes near the end of his memoir. "The mistake, which is one that I make a lot, is not to spend enough time appreciating how lucky you are."
