Meeting Death
Days turned into weeks. All I could feel was my soul dying by inches, measured in loss,
as the world I cherished evaporated. The soul can’t survive in a broken heart beyond mending. The fear of dying, choking back frozen tears, hurt like reading the obituaries. Swan diving into the abyss, embracing sorrow, I surrendered to death, its terror, my powerlessness, and the unknown. Chaos became fluid. Familiar. Merging with the malaise, crushing the small “I” into cosmic dust, I tasted ecstatic liberty, echoed in divine oblivion.
Torn between two worlds, mundane reality faded to the tune of celestial sounds. I heard strange angels singing. Caught glimpses of heaven and hell, as I fell between the cracks. A strange faith was born in me, turning my godless religion into a torrent of blind faith. Lost in the underworld, I walked off the pages of a toxic life script, determined to write my own story, desperate to carve out a myth to live by. I wanted to believe in angels. Chose to believe in miracles, while running from the fear that life is a cruel joke, empty and meaningless as American Dreams and Apple pie. Life sucks, then you die. Dying is easy. Living in limbo is hard. Oscillating between euphoria and despair, I was an alien, cast into this world by accident, waiting for the mother ship to take me home.
Sleep was no escape. In my dreams, the world was darker, more sinister than the waking world. I was stalked by nocturnal demons, whispering homicidal lullabies. Through the looking glass, the world was overrun by vampires, masquerading as human beings, a bloody feast in the name of God and country. My people were a lost rainbow unicorn tribe crying in the wilderness, past the point of no return. Just beyond the valley of the shadow of death, a bridge back to life shimmered like a city on a hill. My heart longed to cross it, but a circuit party blocked the entrance. The boys in the band danced on blindly, snorting poison powders and guzzling their elixirs. I barely made it past the ceremony of the golden calf and the bridge trolls barring the way. Never made it to the other side. I was carrying too much baggage. Couldn’t part with all of the lost dreams from bygone lovers. Pots and pans, and broken teapots. A giant hope chest brimming with disillusioned delusions. Then, I stumbled back into “reality” every morning, anxiously waking, suspecting that there was blood on my hands, wondering who I had murdered.
I numbed out to survive. The con artist formerly known as “me” slipped behind a revolving door. A new character, more strange than the horror he came from moved in to stay. He was reckless, impulsive, and beyond my control. Stronger than me, he could face the horrible truth of any matter, and do whatever needed to be done to survive, pushing all of my feelings aside and getting down to business. He was cold, had a bulletproof soul, and no feelings to hurt.
The plague raged on, like a five alarm fire. Lost track of the dead and dying. Too many to count. When I ran into friends at Café Flore who had been absent a month or more, I hugged them ecstatically, grateful to find them alive, rather than rotting in Davie’s hospital, or gone home to die with their estranged families, quarantined in a shroud of secret shame. They vanished like thieves in the night. And for every dreamer who disappeared, another boy from Ohio got off the bus seeking freedom and fortune in the bright city lights of San Francisco. They never knew who they were replacing as they stepped directly into the sad empty shoes of a dearly departed stranger.
Who had I stepped in for? Was I going to survive? Or was mine just another number waiting to come up? Why had I been spared? By the grace of God, I missed the bygone days of bathhouses and the orgasmic frenzy of a self-correcting revolution. My generation missed the party. Inherited the aftermath. Surveying the wreckage, trying to stay afloat in the face of the hard cold facts as sure as pain, and as certain as emptiness, I became a glacier of grief.
The great American witch hunt made AIDS hysteria the new pandemic, a hay day for reactionaries, seizing the opportunity to criminalize consensual sodomy, while pounding hell fire from the pulpit. A self proclaimed “moral majority” espousing “family values,” flew in like vultures, blackening the sky, eviscerating the dead and dying, to the battle cry of God’s wrath as just punishment for a love that dared to speak its name. In the name of Jesus, God’s “good” country people kicked us while we were down, pushing us even deeper into our ghettoized sanctuaries converted into death traps, where we were backed into angry corners, transformed into righteous mobs shouting, “ACT UP FIGHT BACK!” Beacons of beauty erupted against a background of profound ugliness. We banded together in candlelight marches, flooding the streets with our determination to stand by each other in love and compassion, against all odds, bonded by crisis, as we became more estranged from ourselves through collective trauma.
My old friend, Michael, was a tall man, with a barrel chest and a lion’s heart, who strutted through the Castro like a Viking. He didn’t believe in AIDS. It was just a theory. A device designed to promote philanthropy for starving Africans and emaciated queens. He planned to live one hundred years, believing gay men were dying from too much of a good thing. Said all that partying was to blame. Sobriety was our only hope. What a shame. He never got tested, just stopped slamming speed and fucking, turning to art, channeling his mojo through oil paint on canvas.
First Michael painted his lover. A light foot lad who died from the disease he denied was there. A golden boy rose out of a hazy green mist of shadows and trees, smiling like the look of love, with laughter in his eyes. A lingering memory that refused to die stepped out of the painting, drawing me deeper into the tantalizing mystery of who he had been, and the secret behind his smile. Next, Michael turned baristas into angels, transforming Café Flore into a heavenly host of delicious divas, serving up hot steamy java on snow-white wings. He cast me as Christ, with my long blond hair and sad blue eyes. Painted me to the cross, engulfed in a sea of God fearing Christians, scourging me with scorn and blame, my right palm torn, ripped from the spike, shielding my eyes from the horrible shame of crimes committed in Jesus name.
When Michael died, I wasn’t surprised. I knew that AIDS was real. Couldn’t blame him for believing a lie, when lying was his only hope. We all have our own lies to live by. I was going to live forever. Refused to look down, afraid to fall, abandoning the truth for softer answers. Michael's soul was more present in his absence. Walking through the Castro, I saw him on street corners in my mind’s eye, shaking his head, saying, “We are in the land of the wounded and the lame.” Castro’s streets were haunted by specters of glory hole days, hovering in doorways, walking down narrow streets in the clove of evening, disappearing into shadows. I heard them whispering in the rustling leaves on Noe Street, moaning in the hollow trunks of trees. They were everywhere and nowhere to be found.
There were gay urban legends too, of white vans planted by the CIA barring gifts of tainted vaccinations for hepatitis B. And how gay men stood in line for them like lemmings, hoping to give their bodies a boost before partying like rock stars from dusk to dawn. Stories that made my head spin of sex and drugs, and fisting queens, gang bangers, blood sports, scat rooms, and pissing troughs. I stood in the ruins of their inevitable demise, wondering what was to become of those of us left to pick up the pieces.
Our sexual revolution was really an insurrection against hypocrisy and repression that has been choking society since God fearing Christians taught the world to fear. It was a rebellion of uniformed decisions, and a reaction to a toxic moral code. You can fuck yourself to death as surely as you can eat your way to a heart attack or diabetes two. Yes, “they” wanted to kill us, but we did the job for “them” by dancing off a cliff. We were dutiful sons, acting out self-fulfilling prophecies of doom, because it is better to reign in hell than to die of boredom in a hetero- heaven.
Black was IN. Obituaries were a mile long. In a season of never ending funerals, a tiny glimmer of truth pierced the darkness, indelibly branding my soul. Through the murky haze of death, I finally realized that life is not a dress rehearsal, and seized the day.
Comments