Most of you think of Mike Carrington (aka Malcolm Carrington III) as that hulking mass who ate four sandwiches at lunch (without chewing), played on the football team and was always in the accelerated class with the LHS brainiacs. You are pretty much right as it applied to those days. Mike used to do his homework on Friday nights to get it over with. Will all of you that did their homework on Friday night please raise your hands? But there was another Carrington lurking within, the one who suddenly got up in front of English class and sang the song “O Shenandoah” a capella. He had a pretty good voice, too.
Mike was also always blowing his nose, a very annoying habit.
He and I did some hanging out through high school until I dropped out of that insane accelerated program because the likes of him, Steve Schifferes and Roger Tsien were killing my spirit by just exhaling clouds of 200 level IQs.
The story picks up in the fall of 1968 when Carrington came through the door to my Northwestern U. dorm bathroom while I was shaving. This was the 160 lb. Carrington who had to give up all that weightlifting because he had developed rheumatoid arthritis in both feet. We were roommates for three years after our required year in the dorms. We discussed philosophy and took drugs — which pretty much summed up our undergraduate education. On his 19th birthday I had a cake made that said “Fuck You Carrington” and bought him a six pack of Guinness and a fifth of Irish whisky. At the time Mike had a love for all things Irish and a fascination with Irish political instability. We drank all that booze in a couple of hours. He did a backward roll over the cake completely flattening it. It took him 30 years to admit to me that he also shat his pants.
Mike hung back at Northwestern after graduation and something started to happen to him. He was losing some kind of inner structure that keeps us all from imploding. I was running around the world and passed through Chicago about a year after graduation and found a different person. He did return with me to Hawaii but whatever black thing growing within him continued to thrive. He was afraid all the time. Without structure he was falling apart. He left Hawaii and eventually wound up in a Yahoo House in Massachusetts with what they said was “personality disorder.”
Mike fought a battle that few can appreciate. He got himself out of that institution and woke up every day to a world that he didn’t want to experience. The act of becoming conscious took an incredible amount of courage. He stayed at his parents’ home. Eventually he got a menial job. Then he got a better job. He finally found a home at Prudential Insurance where he was to happily live out his life in a cubicle.
He was a true hero. He had every ounce of courage, as much as anyone who has ever gone into battle or been chased by a large predator. And nobody knew. Mike’s one and only desire was to complete his movement into normality and legitimacy while everyone around him took these qualities for granted and even saw them as mundane.
Mike finally got the guts to fly out and visit me in Berkeley in the 80s. He was as thin as a rail and white as a sheet. He should have gotten the highest possible civilian honor for having braved this trip. Most of his visit he was like a piece of furniture and immediately established a route for walking every afternoon to the place where he could buy a Wall Street Journal, one of his many security blankets. In spite of all this we laughed, laughed and laughed because the tie that bound us was our ironical sense of humor. Ever see that Laurel and Hardy movie where they have to move a piano up a zillion flights of stairs and it always wound up at the bottom? We saw that happening everywhere. I still do. Self-inflated people did not need apply to our never growing two-person irreverence circle.
Mike visited once or twice a year from then until he died, but something magical happened a few years later. He met a woman, married and settled down in Morristown. He took on her stepson. They lived in some great big house labeled as some kind of knock-off landmark. It was surrounded by a massive lawn. He joined the Episcopal Church. He became a member of neighborhood organizations. He even ran for Morristown City Counsel. He progressed as far as he wished at Prudential. He told me that he gave himself a B+ for his efforts to help his parents through death.
So here is the point: Mike was a true champion who overcame a task of mythical proportions armed only with sheer guts and determination. He made it back to normality and never complained a word about it to anyone, not even me. I have inferred everything I know and write about Mike just by knowing him for about 45 years. Any fool can get on a horse and go charging up San Juan hill. But only the best, toughest and truly dedicated can do it every single day, day after day after day.
This past fall Carrington was mowing his beloved normal lawn in Morristown and came in to take a normal nap on his normal couch. A big blood clot broke loose from some place in his arterial system and plugged up the hoses that service his heart. Then he was dead. The protoplasmic organization that was Mike Carrington ceased to function.
He will always be my friend and, most important, my incentive to move forward in the face of fear. He is an unsung (perhaps unstrung) champion. I would be remiss to see Carrington’s face on the “In Memoriam” web page and not break silence with these words. Yeah, I know it sounds like I’m breaking sappy wind and even if it is true that we are grease spots on the driveway of the universe, some stories need telling, especially to those who only remember the hulking, sandwich eating Mike Carrington as frozen in 1968. Thank you for listening.
Michael
(Michael Schwartz didn’t exactly graduate with us, having been spirited away during our senior year. But he remains a LHS ’68er in his heart and we hope to see him at our reunion in September.)
Posted by Ken Segall 
