Seeing Dead People
by Richard Froude

Charles Bronson, August 30th

Charles Bronson has never paid me a cent. This does not bother me:

1. When Charles Bronson was in grade school he was only once sent to detention. During lunch that day, he had written ‘fuck’ repeatedly on the asphalt playground with chalk taken from the library. Detention consisted of the young Charles cleaning his expletives from the asphalt with a wet rag. After two hours, he was dismissed by the headmistress. With his parents out of town, it had been arranged that Grandfather Bronson would pick him up, and hence it was Grandfather Bronson who waited two hours at the school gates. Charles sat in silence the whole drive home. After his grandfather dropped him off, Charles made himself a ham sandwich, poured a glass of milk, sat down at the kitchen table and cried.

2. Rarely have I met a man as polite and open as Charles Bronson.

3. At summer camp, Charles Bronson refused to eat the turkey sandwiches provided with a sack lunch. He believed that the tryptophan in the meat would make him drowsy. Bronson’s most frequent paranoia featured him falling asleep during a scheduled excursion and missing the bus back to camp. This rendered turkey inedible.
 
4. As a teenager Charles Bronson collected ghosts. He would find his ghosts in old photographs, as abnormal shadows, or spheres of light obscuring portraiture. He kept the ghosts in a brown leather album and kept the album in a wooden box under his bed. The box originally contained port wine, purchased by his father on the morning that would become the day that his grandfather died.

5. Sergio Leone felt that Bronson was the greatest actor he ever worked with. Charles has never mentioned this to me. Vivien Leigh told me.

6. Eskimos have thirty different words for snow. Charles Bronson employs this cliché while noting that a larger vocabulary is the product of acceptance and observation. He applies it as the first premise of an argument that proffers the basic problem of western society: there are not enough words for magic.