I was one of the many people who happened to cross paths with Keith around about August of 06. He was sitting next to me at Starbucks, and it wasn’t long after we started talking that I began to wonder who he was. It wasn’t just that he was completely physically present. I mean it’s true that you couldn’t not notice him, and not just because he was so prepossessing and spectacularly tall. But he also had this electricity about him, and seemed like the most vivacious, and intellectually searching person I’d ever met. Yes, I admit I was also very strongly attracted to Keith, but it was much more than that. I felt like I was in the presence of somebody extraordinary.

 

At first, I met with him now and then to give him my lights on his way ambitious club idea. He didn’t seem to let his almost complete lack of experience in both entertainment and business hold him back. I didn’t know where his self-confidence was coming from, but he clearly had a lot of good ideas. As I began to meet other friends of his, though, I started to wonder if something else was going on. That his friends didn’t seem to want to get as invested in his ideas as I did, made me think that – well, made me think that Keith could be full of it.

 

Then I met Keith's boyfriend, Benhur, shown, at right, in the photograph with Keith, in 2006. I’ve gotten to learn since then that Ben is himself a pretty amazing guy. He’s one of the smartest men I’ve ever known, and yet he can also be the life and soul of the party. Not though you would have known it back then, because he was withdrawn, and seemed so full of anxiety. Eventually it was Ben who told me what was really going on with Keith, and that was not long before things began to go south. I didn’t hear from either of them for about a week, and then I met them at our local watering hole, and it was clear that something major had happened. Ben privately told me that Keith had basically gone crazy, and had been arrested, and had spent several days in a psychiatric hospital, and not voluntarily. I’d happened to meet Keith, it turned out, when he was going off the rails with mania.

 

If you’d meet Keith now, for the first time, you would never recognize him by my earlier description. It’s not that he’s changed physically, not that he’s lost his smarts. It’s more like, before he was this one man supernova, and now he’s longer burning half as brightly. We both know from depression, and that’s made us into even stronger friends, but the person I’d first met would not have seemed likely at any time to be depressed. I didn’t know much about bipolar disorder at the time, so this has been my big education. It’s like you’re two men in one. The huge bright light – like some combination between Bill Clinton and Brad Pitt is one extreme, and the more quiet, thoughtful, introspective guy I’ve since gotten to know, they’re both the same person, bottled up inside, fighting for supremacy.

 

It’s kind of heart-breaking, in a way. I think Keith had always thought of himself as an outsider, and that’s probably why he was so bent on doing great things, when he was manic, but didn’t know he was sick. Now he has to hold himself back. He can’t trust that he can pull so many people into his dreams any more, and in some way you might say that he’s had to settle for being more ordinary, even though he still has all these great qualities.

 

But Ben and Keith are so good together, and for each other, that you’d really find it hard to believe they’d been through such hell. They came through it, and I actually respect Keith more now than I did that person who so greatly impressed me back in 2006. He’s pulled his life back together, and really you could describe him as having prospered. He has a very difficult and stressful full-time job, but hasn’t let depression stop him in his tracks. I mean he’s written a book about it. He could have been destroyed by this experience, but he’s found a way to make strength out of it.

 

Keith perennially wonders how an abnormally tall, working-class boy from the North Sea coast of England ended up in a house in the Hollywood Hills. He lives there with his partner, Dr. Benhur Lee, a leading medical research scientist at UCLA, and their two beautiful dogs named Indira and Dartagnan.

 

Although he writes for a living (computer code), he always hoped to do “real writing”, from experience. That opportunity came from being diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2006, after a serious brush with insanity.

 

Keith is 6'6, 215, age 44 (as of Nov 2009). He grew up in England, and studied physics at the University of London, then did a grad degree at U of Penn in Philly, before moving to San Francisco, where, he claims, he would have lived to retire had Benhur not been on tenure track at UCLA.