A Beautiful Death

The first time I met Denice Denton was on the cover of the UCSC Alumni Magazine. It was an uncomfortable meeting. Looking at me from the glossy cover was the spitting image of little orphan Annie on acid: kinky red hair, fat face, and red plastic glasses, the new Chancellor of the University. I thought, "jesus, all those bull dykes have finally got their leader." But Denton had more than good looks going for her. She had a resume worthy of serious consideration. PhD in electrical engineering from MIT, faculty appointments at Zurich, Madison, Washington, publications out the wazoo, and the ability to schmooze and get people motivated. She was to initiate an engineering program and, with her commitment to inclusion and social justice, was a great match for the public university. And then on old friend sent me the note. She'd pulled a Dan Osman off the top of a hi-rise in downtown San Francisco. Now this chick really had my respect. Not only had she lived hard but she went out in a blaze of glory, 43 floors worth.

In the immediate aftermath, M and I contemplated how it all went down. We tried to grasp the particular style of the leap, how fast it went, what went through her mind in those brief seconds, how it sounded when she hit the deck. I thought of the girls of a century ago leaping out the windows of the burning Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ass first, their dresses trailing and flapping in the wind, hands flailing and feet kicking. I thought of the grainy video images of people jumping from the burning World Trade Center. And I thought of that scene in Masters of Stone, volume V, of Dan Osman dropping vertically from the bridge, 11 mm rock climbing line around his ankles, dropping Superman style one arm fully outstretched the other tucked, perfectly vertical, resolute, a steel spike driving earthward in a gesture of resoluteness. Yeah, that's how she went.

More important than how was why. What were her motivations? She had gotten some grief for her compensation package. There was the 282,000 paycheck, the new job for her lady friend of 9 years (a 182,000 dollar "position" in UC Outreach), the 600,000 dollar renovation of the Chancellor's house, the 30,000 dollar dog run, etc. She became a target for thrifty public university kids. In the months leading up to her death, the newspapers were jingling with the scandals. She was constantly putting out spot-fires. On one occassion, students protesting the war had trailed her from one end of the campus to the other, jeering, finally circling her, making her watch a little anti-war skit of their own improvisation. Her staff were the object of scandal. She received threatening e-mails and late night visitors pounding on her door wanting to talk campus politics. And then there was the problem with her lover, but that's another matter. As for the scandals about her pay package, I find them all laughable and petty. Anybody who has been around UCSC knows how cheap a lot of the buildings are, flimsy modernist stucco crap rotting in the redwoods. The chancellor's house, perched below performing arts, hadn't been upgraded since 1966 and was no doubt filled with all that 60's burnt orange wool leisure couches and creaky T-111, like you find at the Kresge or Stevenson libraries. If the students were so concerned with corruption, I could think of a thousand better places to focus their rage.

Hers was a beautiful death. What a bold statement, riddled with paradoxes, knotted with difficulties. I'm sure there will be no small amount of hand-wringing and second guessing on the part of the faculty and students who drove her to her mad end. But I admire the gesture of it, the beauty and largeness of it, almost something Japanese about it. Its beauty consists in the mystery of the gesture and its wholeness, the absence of half-measures. In thinking it through I am lead to ask whether in her mind she was unworthy of this life or was this life, with all its imperfections, not worthy of her?