I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see . . .
When I began crying it was for everything at once: For Harvey and George. For my mother. For my father’s inexpressible pain. For my own awkward journey of self-discovery. For the comfort of friends and lovers in the darkest of hours.
It was my youngest friend, Daniel, who spotted the miracle in our midst.
“Look over there,” he said excitedly, tugging my arm.
What on earth was I supposed to look at? We were surrounded by thousands of people.
“Over there,” he said. “Under that lamppost.”
I looked again and saw my parents about forty feet away. They were holding on to each other in the midst of all that heartbroken humanity. They had not taken a cab to their hotel after all but followed the river of light to its destination.
And they had not seen us yet. I stood frozen in amazement.
“Go get them,” said Daniel, giving me a gentle shove.
So that’s what I did. I hurried up to them and took their arms and led them closer to the stage with my friends. They seemed every bit as surprised as I had been.
“Is this your doing?” I murmured to my mother when the old man was talking to Dave.
She didn’t answer, just squeezed my arm and looked toward the stage.
“This woman’s voice is lovely. Do you know her?”
“That’s Joan Baez,” I told her.
“Oh no,” she said with a crooked little smile.
My father had hated Joan Baez ever since her days of antiwar activism.
“That’s okay,” I told my mother. “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
SIXTEEN
IT’S TIME TO TELL YOU ABOUT the way my friend Steve Beery and I met.
In the last month of his life, Harvey Milk had been introduced to Steve at the Beaux Arts Ball in San Francisco. Steve was dressed as Robin from the Batman comics, so the supervisor had tossed out an effectively corny line—“Hop on my back, Boy Wonder, and I’ll fly you to Gotham City.” On their first date Harvey had asked Steve if he was happy being gay, because Harvey, always on the run, wondered how much on-the-job training would be required. Steve took this to mean that Harvey saw him as serious boyfriend material.
I can’t tell you for sure how many times they got together—half a dozen at the most. On mornings when Harvey slept over, he would drive Steve to work at a credit union on Geary Boulevard and they would make out in Harvey’s Volvo in full view of Steve’s coworkers, much to Steve’s delight. They had made plans to spend Thanksgiving together, but a last-minute crisis at City Hall—reports of the mass suicides in Jonestown—kept Harvey working late again. On another occasion Steve recalled Harvey shrugging off a grisly death threat that had arrived in the mail. “I can’t take it seriously,” he said. “It was written with a crayon.”
Their last night together was the Friday before Harvey was murdered. Steve remembered a night of leisurely cuddling that turned into gentle lovemaking. On Monday morning, Steve got the news from a coworker who’d heard it on the radio. His boss took pity on him and drove him home, where Steve found a note from his roommate saying that Harvey had called that morning with plans for getting together that evening. Numb with disbelief, Steve had walked all the way across town to City Hall, where throngs of other people sobbing in the street finally made the tragedy real for him. He didn’t try to push his way past the police barricades; he had come into Harvey’s life too late to be a part of his official history. He had just been in love with the guy.
When Steve worked up the nerve to call Harvey’s office, Harvey’s aide, Anne Kronenberg, arranged for him to attend the memorial service. Arriving alone at the Opera House, he searched for a seat in the reserved section up front and finally found one next to me. Introducing himself as a friend of Harvey’s, he asked if he could take the seat. He was crying, so for most of the service I held the hand of this stranger. His face was blurry with grief, but I could see what Harvey must have seen: a bright, inquisitive, tenderhearted young man.
We parted after the service. Two weeks later, only a block from Macondray Lane, I saw Steve walking down Union Street. We stopped and spoke for a while. He still seemed distraught, and not just because of the loss of a month-long romance with Harvey. His dreams of being a free gay man had been shattered by those bullets at City Hall. He admitted to feeling that suicide was the only way out.
What was the point of anything, he asked, if the world could be like this?
I asked him if he’d like to have dinner sometime.
Thus began a fifteen-year friendship that was every bit as epic as a great romance. Steve was the buddy I had sought since childhood, someone to roam the woods with in search of adventure. He had a childlike appreciation of life. His little studio at the top of Telegraph Hill felt almost monastic with his treasures of the moment laid out like icons—a rubber Mighty Mouse doll, a Nancy Mitford novel, a Batman poster signed by Bob Kane. He was so self-contained that he could snuggle in anywhere and make it home. I saw him do this in a cabin on a cruise ship and in a villa in Lesbos and a cottage in the Cotwolds. In the end, when he was too weak to live by himself, he adjusted to the inevitability of Maitri, the Zen hospice in the Castro.
“I looked around,” he told me one morning, “and saw the garden out back, and all the nice people who bring food, and I realized I could live here.”
SEVENTEEN
MUMMIE HAD THE TOY FOX IN bed with her at the hospital in Chapel Hill.
She was on morphine by then, pale as an ivory Quan Yin, and getting some things off her chest. She wanted me to know, for instance, that I had neglected to pay back the thousand dollars she had bailed me out with back in the day.
“That was my mad money,” she reminded me.
I told her I was mortified to hear that. I had just been careless.
“I want credit for getting you on your feet.”
I told her I would think of a way to do that.
“It isn’t about the money.”
“I know.”
I had wondered all these years, so I asked, “Why was it ‘mad money’?”
“Because it was mine.”
“I mean, where did you get it?”
Daddy had a Japanese sword, she said, a souvenir from the war that had been packed in the attic for years. She read somewhere that a knife-and-sword vendor was passing through town, and she wanted to see how much she could get for it. Daddy gave her permission and said she could keep whatever she got. She went down to the auditorium and talked with the dealer, and made a good deal. She kept that thousand dollars for years.
“It was the only money I’d earned since the war, so it meant something to me.”
I told her I was so sorry I hadn’t paid her back.
“And I want you to write a sweet book one day, something like The Snow Goose.” She had always loved Paul Gallico’s tale of a bitter hunchbacked artist who retreats to a lighthouse but is rescued by the love of a sweet young girl and a goose whose wing he mends before rowing troops to safety in the great evacuation at Dunkirk. I told her I would work on that. It stung a little to realize that she didn’t think of my current book as sweet—the one about the pot-growing transgender landlady who offers one last chance of love to a dying businessman. I had certainly been going for sweet.
“Do you want to see a trick?” she asked.
“Sure.”
She extended her leg from beneath the sheets and splayed out her toes in every direction, wiggling them. Each toe was its own little puppet show. It was mildly grotesque, not what I’d expected.
“I’ve always been able to do that,” she said proudly. “I did it for the nurses at the hospital on the day you were born.”
“Why? Because I was coming out backwards?”
“No! I wasn’t in labor yet. They were very impressed.”
She started wiggling her toes again, so I grabbed her foot and subdued it for a while. It was more intimate than
anything I could possibly have imagined.
“It’s a very nice trick,” I said, still holding on.
It was devastating to think that she saved something from the very beginning to share with me at the very end.
“Go on, Teddy. Go home. Get some rest.”
I let her foot slip out of my hands.
“And come back early in the morning. I’ve got an orderly I want you to meet.”
EIGHTEEN
I NEVER KNEW MY GRANDFATHERS. Both were dead before I was born. My maternal grandfather had been a bona fide Victorian—born in England in 1865—almost thirty years before my grandmother. He gave her six children to raise while scattering seed elsewhere with great abandon. My other grandfather had been a quieter sort, that Raleigh businessman who had been home with his wife and kids, as usual, the night he killed himself with a shotgun.
Both men were phantoms to me, rough sketches at best of what a living grandfather might have been. I cannot claim to have felt the absence of a male elder in my youth. My grandmothers had been enough for me—a gracious plenty, as my Southern grandmother used to say—a talcum-scented tag team of Old England and Old South. For years, nice old ladies were all I needed. It wasn’t until I left my twenties and finally claimed my manhood in all its clumsy, unregrettable glory that I realized that a gay grandfather figure might come in handy, someone to tell me how things used to be, and how they might be in the years to come, for men like me.
I met Christopher Isherwood at an Oscars Night party thrown by one of the producers of Saturday Night Fever. That should nail the era for you. John Travolta was up for Best Actor, but there was a whiff of disgruntlement in the room, since the Academy had already declared the Bee Gees ineligible for a Best Song nomination. “Stayin’ Alive” and those other monster hits in Saturday Night Fever had not been written specifically for the movie. The party was lively, if not exactly star-studded. (We were in West Hollywood, after all; the studs outnumbered the stars.) For me, the main attraction was the bantam rooster standing at the edge of the room with a drink in his hand. His eyes were the tip-off: piercing blue and all but parenthesized by tumbling eyebrows. I recognized that gaze from a television interview in which he had spoken with breezy candor about being “hommo-sexual.”
Isherwood had already been my hero for most of the seventies, having written The Berlin Stories, the source material for Cabaret, a film that had not only set the tone for my life in San Francisco but had also offered a template for my fictional newspaper serial. (It was no accident that “Tales of the City” took place in a shabby apartment house with an all-seeing landlady and carnally adventurous tenants.) My love for Sally Bowles (and, okay, I’ll just say it, Liza Minnelli) had been my gateway drug to the literary addictions of Down There on a Visit and A Single Man and Christopher and His Kind. Isherwood struck me as the obvious tribal elder for our new breed of open queers. He called himself queer, in fact, way back then, believing that the blithe use of the word was the way to embarrass our enemies. He never dodged his sexuality with coy semantics, the way Gore Vidal did, or equated it with decadence like Truman Capote and way too many others. He was sassy in his public presentation, but never bitchy. Kindness, in fact, seemed important to him.
I wriggled through the Oscar revelers to get to him. He was there with his sweetheart, the artist Don Bachardy, a beach-bred stunner in his early forties whose glossy gray mane suggested some higher breed of blond. Both men were drunk and jolly. I remember telling them about my serial in the San Francisco paper, and how convincingly Isherwood had mumbled, “Oh, that marvelous funny thing,” as if he had actually heard of it. I offered to send him the book when it was published in the fall. He graciously acquiesced, so I confirmed my shamelessness by asking him if he could maybe, possibly, if he liked it, review the book for the Los Angeles Times. He countered shrewdly with the offer of a blurb, and told me, as he often did with hyperventilating pups like me, that he was listed in the Santa Monica phonebook.
That’s just my version of things, of course, a memory I cherished for years like a smooth stone found on a beach. Thirty-four years later, when the final volume of Isherwood’s diaries was published, I found that he had recorded nothing about that night at the party. He was feeling especially slothful that week, he said, so he was using a tablet called Dexamyl to kick-start writing. Both his left eye and “Old Mr. Right Knee” were giving him trouble, but he was proud of the fact that he could still make it down to the beach and back up the steep stairs to his house. His sleeping hours, tucked into bed next to Don, were the only ones that never felt squandered.
He told his diary that he was seventy-three and a half years old, adding the fraction the way a child would do, only more in urgency than eagerness. He said he did find “a curious strength in the terminal condition of being old [since] it cuts out such a lot of shit.” Still, he was ashamed of what he called “senile resentments” when asked to autograph books for strangers. “It’s very seldom that I really enjoy being a celebrity, though I guess I would miss it if I weren’t one. The young need so much support and one should give more and more. That’s the only creative way of keeping one’s mind off oneself and one’s ailments.”
I have taken comfort in Chris’s diaries, since there are parallels in my own life now that I am seventy-two and a half years old. I am slower now, lazy more often than not, and have diabetic neuropathy in Mr. Right Foot. Like Chris, I try to curb my grumpiness, though I sometimes surrender to it in private. My writing doesn’t come as easily as it once did, so, when I need inspiration, I vaporize a strain of cannabis called “Girl Scout Cookies.” Like Chris, I’ve finally found lasting love with a younger man (named Chris, as fate would have it), a photographer whose career dovetails with my own, since words and pictures naturally complement each other. Chris and Don distinguished fidelity from monogamy, preferring, as my Chris and I do, the durability of the former to the folly of making sex the deal-breaker in a union between men. When jealousy arose, as it inevitably did upon occasion, Isherwood took it as proof he wasn’t indifferent. “It’s so French,” he once told me not long before he died, “that thing of not being jealous.”
Isherwood and Bachardy slept intertwined with each other; so do Chris and I. Chris the elder believed he and Don could communicate with each other in the midst of sleep. We believe that, too. Isherwood once remarked to me that “life gets so much simpler once you’ve narrowed it to one other person.” Now I know what he meant.
As Chris grew older he cared less and less for air travel, especially if it took him away from Don. When it came to cars, he was a reluctant driver and a jittery passenger, so he made a practice of lying down flat in the backseat when Don was behind the wheel. (He explained it to me this way: “I believe I’m the only person who’s fit to be on the road at all, therefore I prefer to just miss it when other people drive.”) I can relate to that. I’m grateful that my husband does the driving these days, but I can’t keep my mouth shut when he looks down to his cell phone for traffic conditions or Shazams a song that catches his fancy on a freeway full of tractor trailers. True, my backseat driving is still happening in the front seat, but Chris assures me—my Chris, that is—that banishment always remains a possibility.
In one way or another, it’s hard not to think of Chris Isherwood every day.
THE BOOK I mailed him—that first edition of Tales of the City—was an oversized trade paperback, a broad, floppy thing with the cartoon map on the cover that made it look less than literary. I was anxious for weeks until I received a letter—written by hand, if you can remember that quaint custom—telling me he couldn’t put my book down and that he loved it for the same reasons he loved the novels of Dickens. He even apologized for the delay in sending the blurb, saying that he found them to be as difficult to write as sonnets, since there was the same necessity to be brief.
Not long afterward I was invited down to Santa Monica to sit for a portrait by Don at their house on Adelaide Drive. This would be the first of
many sittings for Don. The portrait that remains most memorable for me is the one that opens this chapter, drawn less than a month after my mother’s death. For some reason I had yet to cry over that loss, but thanks to Don’s gift for psychological insight, the pain of it is clearly visible in my eyes.
The place struck me as grand and rambling at the time. It’s not—just a few smallish rooms and a studio tucked into the hillside, with only their tile rooftops visible below the street above. You can’t see the house from anywhere nearby, so it has to be experienced from the inside out, where the glint of the sea through the tall, blue-shuttered windows wildly inflates the imagination.
And Chris and Don had a similar effect on me. These fabled lovers had met on the beach below the house when Chris was forty-eight and Don was eighteen. They had lived here since the fifties, playing host to movie stars and writers while scandalizing a tight-assed company town with the very fact of their love. I had entered their aerie through a carport containing an old beige VW bug and a set of barbells, but I felt as if I were arriving at Noël Coward’s Goldenhurst or Somerset Maugham’s Villa Mauresque. I was already in awe when I descended to the garden.
And what had Isherwood expected of his visitor that afternoon?
Thirty-four years later, his diary provided the answer: “Armistead Maupin was unexpectedly attractive and youthful. Not all that much so, but I realize I was expecting something terribly closet-elegant.”
Not all that much so? Okay, fair enough. But closet-elegant? I was a fledgling writer, a lowly newspaper serialist whose only substantive achievement was being out of the closest. I can’t help wondering if Isherwood had found something in my work that suggested age and pissiness, the same arch quality, perhaps, that had prompted him to remark that his friend Wystan (Auden) would have loved Tales of the City? Or had he simply reacted to my behemoth of a name, a name like Addison DeWitt or Sheridan Morley that immediately suggests some grand old windbag? I had endured this impression since childhood. At summer camp in North Carolina, a counselor had decided that Armistead was too much of a handle for an eight-year-old and announced to the cabin that he would call me Butch for the next two weeks. You can make your own joke here: I’m pretty sure that counselor had.