Much love to you, darling,
Michael Parker
I heard from friends whom I hadn’t seen or spoken to since college. Rehab really does bring out the best in people. Keith would chain-smoke with nothing in front of him but a pack of cigarettes as I sifted through my mail or read choice bits of Mr. Parker’s letters to him.
After I’d plowed through one particularly robust stack of letters, he offered me one of his cigarettes. I accepted.
“You know,” he said, exhaling smoke, “after the second or third rehab the phone stops ringing and the mail dries up.”
* * *
Rehab wasn’t what I expected, but it was better than I expected. First I had to wrap my booze-soaked head around the idea that I was in rehab, which wasn’t an idea, but a dry, hot fact. Once I got to know my inmates and learned how to negotiate with Coach, the novelty of being sober became a thrill. Just not being hungover every day of my waking life was worth the price of admission. It was better than any vacation I ever took. For the first time in my adult life I could completely let go of work and family and spend time thinking about me and not running from me. Being free of the outside world became sexy superfast. Okay, this is all I need. Three meals at the same time every day, a little therapy, a dose of recreation, some free time in town, and back to the safety of MH’s white stucco, dry walls.
I was making progress with a cast of characters—some unexpected—to help light the way. If Mama Jean was my benefactress, Dave my guardian angel on earth, Keith my kindred spirit, then Liz was my patron saint. Liz’s ghost arrived during the middle of my “extended Palm Springs vacation.” I was still in mourning and marinating in my favorite emotion, guilt, over not being able to be a part of her memorial. But the core of my guilt about Liz was that I’d tried to throw away what she would have given anything to have. Every time I thought of my feeble suicide attempt in the harsh glare of her death—“But I have so much more to do,” she had said when she was told she was dying—shame scalded my every nerve.
When the program for her memorial, along with The Many Moods of Liz CD, arrived in the mail with her beatific face on the cover of both, I wept all over again for her death and for my sins. I tacked the program to the wall above my bed so she could watch over me. Then I grabbed some headphones and a CD player, went outside under a canopy of desert stars, and let her talk to me through her “many moods.” Some of the songs I had suggested for her CD were on there: Judy Garland singing “The Man That Got Away,” Dusty Springfield’s version of “The Look of Love,” and Madeleine Peyroux’s “Dance with Me.” I thought of that marvelous, euphoric moment of disco dancing with her at the company Christmas party. It was our last happy moment together, the last time booze made me happy, joyous, and free. Four months later Liz was in a casket at the front of St. Ignatius Loyola Catholic Church. That was the last time I had been to Mass.
When I left for college, I stopped going to Mass. After eighteen years of going every Sunday, I didn’t have to anymore. Besides, why was I going to sit for an hour under the roof of a church that didn’t want my sinning sodomite self? During one of my visits home, Mama Jean, who was no longer attending Mass regularly herself (much to the consternation of Dad), spoke for both Dad and herself about their disappointment that I wasn’t attending church anymore.
“Come here. I want to talk to you.” She pulled me into the Miss Havisham living room, which was always as quiet and somber as a sanctuary. She sat in a wingback chair while I stood before her. “Your father is really upset that you’ve stopped going to church. He won’t say anything to you about it, but I will. Listen to me. I may not go to Mass every Sunday—and believe me, there is no church for me but the Catholic Church—but I was born a Catholic and I’ll die a Catholic. You’ll never see me under a Baptist roof—or even Episcopalian. No, ma’am! But I’ve never lost my faith. Not even during 1963.”
That was the black year. The year that her first husband, Len, died in the plane crash and her father, Big Daddy, died, three months later. Two thousand and six was my 1963.
“After the plane went down, I waited a week for them to find his body. A week. You can’t imagine what that was like.” She was right. I couldn’t. “And when they found him, I didn’t know how I was going to go on. But I had to. I had two little boys to take care of. Do you know what got me through it?”
“The Church?”
“No. My faith. My faith carried me. I cried and I prayed and I cried and I prayed some more. And when I didn’t think I could cry any more, Big Daddy died. Well, I thought they might as well bury me. But as hard as that time was, I learned that I’m a survivor and there’s a God more powerful than me.” Really? There is something more powerful than Mama Jean?
“Your father disagrees, but I don’t need to go to Mass every Sunday to prove my faith. I’m secure in it, but you’re too young to understand faith. That’s why I think it’s a big mistake for you to stop going to church until you find it.”
I promised her that I’d think about it, but I never went back to the Church, except for Christmas and Easter with Dad and her. And faith? I poured my faith into all those beautiful liquor bottles that came in gem shades of green, amber, and blue like the stained-glass windows of St. Anne’s.
After listening to The Many Moods of Liz that night, I wasn’t ready to surrender completely to the notion of a God, and I hadn’t prayed in years, but I assumed my former altar-boy position at the foot of my bed and got down on my knees. I prayed to Liz as her twinkling lunette eyes stared back at me. I prayed for forgiveness. I prayed to her for help. I prayed for my life. Dave’s words bled into the page of my journal entry on November 1 about that moment: “As an old Catholic girl you must know that today is the Feast of All Saints. Perhaps you’ve found a saint to help take care of you.”
The next afternoon, when I returned from my successful negotiation with Coach on the baseball diamond, Liz’s photo over my bed had been framed with a rosary. My bottle of Wet, my personal lubricant of choice, had gone missing. Dave eventually confessed to hanging the rosary. The Katie Couric lover said he would swear on a case of Coors Light that he didn’t take my lube. Some things can’t be explained. I choose to believe that Liz took my Wet away.
The “wet” was gone, but the guilt and shame were like oil stains that continued to spread. Mama Jean couldn’t get over that I had tried to kill myself, and I hadn’t fully accepted that I actually did that. I wrote in my journal, “I know I did it, but I keep rationalizing it. I only did it because I was drunk.” With bloodred ink, Dave had underlined the last sentence and written in the margin, “I would rethink this.”
I took Dave’s advice and thought about Paul Rosenfield. And Genevieve. And then I thought about myself. I was glad to be alive, but my feelings vacillated from waking up filled with joy and enthusiasm—I’m an alcoholic, and I’m sober!—to being hopeless and fatalistic by nightfall—I’ve squandered my passion, ambition, and thirst for life.
“Where is Susan Hayward from I Want to Live! when you need her?” I wrote in my journal. To which Dave shot back in red, “You’d better start channeling her.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Feelin’ Good
The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies was something to live for. Located on the Walk of Stars strip, the show boasted “the world record for the oldest chorus line!” Who’s tracking these figures? “1940s Music, 1940s Cast!” It was made up of showgirls and boys old enough to have seen Ginger and Fred, Gene Kelly, Ann Miller, and Cyd Charisse. Heaven.
Keith and I were strolling along the Walk of Stars slurping our Jamba Juice pomegranate smoothies one Saturday afternoon of town time when I stopped dead in my tracks on Liberace’s star to read the marquis announcing GOGI GRANT: OUR FABULOUS GUEST STAR, OCT 31 TO DEC 31, 2006.
“No!” I said to Keith, and pointed. “Gogi Grant. She can’t still be performing.”
“Huh?”
“You don’t know who Gogi Grant is?!” I said, sounding like Mama Jean
and Dad.
“Jamie, I barely know who Debbie Reynolds is.” Keith pointed to her star beneath his feet.
“I have to investigate.” I walked up to the box-office window and left Keith behind, shaking his head as he stood on Debbie.
The lady behind the window was preserved in frost: frosted-blond helmet, frosted-pink lipstick, frosted-silver nails, frosted, snow-white dentures.
“Excuse me, but next month’s guest star: Is that the Gogi Grant? As in ‘The Wayward Wind’? Was the singing voice for tons of Hollywood stars? Dubbed Ann Blyth in The Helen Morgan Story? That Gogi Grant?”
She let out a Virginia Slims bronchial chuckle. “Only Gogi Grant I know of, hon.”
Back at the dude ranch I was on the pay phone to Michahaze. “I know what we’re doing when you come to visit. We’re seeing The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies, and Gogi Grant is the guest star!”
“Sounds wonderful,” Michahaze said with true enthusiasm. Then a beat. “Remind me. Who is Gogi Grant?”
I had accepted that Michahaze was coming for a conjoint. Conjoint is a bear of a rehab term. This term I looked up. It has multiple definitions. In recovery it means: “a type of therapy in which a therapist sees the two spouses, or parent and child, or ‘other partners,’ together in joint sessions.”
From the beginning Dave had been pushing for a conjoint with Michahaze. I agreed and he was on board, but I wasn’t completely. I subtly tried to deflect him from coming. “Don’t worry if you can’t get the time off or if airfares are too expensive. I’ll be back in New York soon enough.” Even though we spoke daily, I hadn’t shared many of the details of my therapy sessions, of my “recovery.” Kind of like I hid just how excessive my drinking was. I ruminated in my journal that I was unsure about how much I wanted to let him in on what I was going through. Dave’s red ink: “Translation—how much I need him.”
One of my care packages was a box of books from my boss, Debbie. I grabbed one of them as if it were a forgotten diary, Exiles in America, by Christopher Bram, about a gay couple in a long-term, sexless—and open—marriage. I put all of the recovery self-help books Dave had given me on the bottom shelf and dove into that book, hoping to find the answer about whether Michahaze and I should be together. It only brought up the same questions, and a few more, that I had already been asking: Is companionship, deep friendship, a good home, and a little on the side enough? Dave’s red ink posed one more question: “There is no answer because it is not an intellectual issue. The real question is ‘Is Michael my emotional home?’”
Michahaze showed up. After we hugged, he pulled back and looked at me. His blue-green eyes, with that beautiful circle of gold around his pupils that I’d noticed the night we first met, looked different. The look of fear and worry of the last few years had been replaced by relief. He looked at my no-longer-bloodshot eyes and said, “Do you know that in our sixteen years, this is the longest we’ve ever been apart?”
Sixteen years. Forget straight people. We’ve been together longer than most lesbians. “I hadn’t realized that. Wow.” I hugged him again. Long and hard. “I’m so happy to see you.”
“I got the tickets to The Palm Springs Follies, and the Czechoslovakian bowl arrived last week. It’s beautiful. You’re right. It’s perfect in the apartment. It’s sitting on the dining-room table … waiting for you.”
The next day we saw the Sunday matinee of the follies. The poster for the show barked, “Every performer 53- to 83-years young!” When Michahaze and I stepped into the theater, I took a look at the audience with canes, walkers, scooters, and wheelchairs and said, “And the audience is slightly older.” I looked at the show’s poster and saw a one-word ringing endorsement of it from Katie Couric: “Wow!” Wow, indeed. I thought of Coors Light and turned to Michahaze. “I’m so glad that Gogi Grant and Katie Couric have been a part of my recovery.”
That night Michahaze got to go to a 12-step meeting with me. I gave him a primer of what to expect. “Now, if you don’t want to introduce yourself when they ask if there are any newcomers or visitors, you don’t have to. There will be a speaker who will tell his story about what a booze bag he was and how he got sober and how his life now is all singing birds and sweet-smelling farts. Then they open it up to shares from the room—”
“I understand.”
“This particular meeting is a round-robin, where they go around the table in order and everyone shares. You don’t have to share if you don’t want to, you can just pass. And you can share whatever you want to share—if you want to share—but I understand if you don’t want to—”
“Okay. I get it.”
He chose to share.
I cringed and held my breath as he told the roomful of strangers about coming home from work to find me passed out in our bed with an empty pill bottle and a glass with three fingers of melted ice on the nightstand. It was my first time hearing this and was typical of how we communicated. We left the big things unsaid until asked by an outsider, and then we’d share with the outsider in front of each other.
“I had a bad feeling all day,” he said to the room of strangers. “We speak several times a day, and all of the voice-mail messages I left were never returned. When I opened the door, I knew it wasn’t going to be good.” Not good, I thought. “And it wasn’t. I found my partner of sixteen years passed out in bed. I was able to wake him, and through slurred speech, he told me that he’d taken some pills. ‘How many?’ I asked. ‘How many?’ He couldn’t tell me. I called our friend Bunny, who is a nurse practitioner and lives nearby. He came over. By that time Jamie was in the kitchen pouring shots of gin. Bunny and I took him to the hospital as he begged us to stop at a bar along the way. It was the scariest day of my life.” Michahaze looked away from the table of anonymous faces looking at him tell his story. He turned back to them. “But now he’s here and I’m thankful that he’s going to be okay.”
He didn’t have to share that honestly.
The conjoint with Dave started to scrape away the layers of dirt that had hardened over the years and till the fertile soil that still lay beneath. We sat next to each other in Dave’s sun-drenched office, Michahaze in his white linen shirt and seersucker, striped trousers (the ones I had picked out for him). We stared intensely at Dave as if we were telling a doctor the symptoms of our illness and waiting for his remedy, which is exactly what we were doing. Michahaze made it abundantly clear that he loved me and would stand by me through everything. Then he expressed his concern over the hold Mama Jean continued to have on my life.
“From a thousand miles away Jean still has a vise grip on Jamie. Emotionally.” As he said this, I could feel him blocking from his peripheral vision any possible looks from me. “She continues to have this idealized view of Jamie, and I think he nearly kills himself to live up to that. Jean simply can’t accept any behavior that deviates from her norm.” Then he added with his trademark giggle, “She told me that she blames me for him becoming a Democrat.”
We all laughed.
In her eyes, my unacceptable behavior was always someone else’s fault. Some might say that she turned me into a drunk. The truth: no one turned me into a hydrophobic, liquor-swilling, sometime-cocaine-snorting, homosexual Democrat but me.
After the session, Michahaze and I sat by the pool and talked about what the future would look like.
“What are you concerned about most?” Michahaze asked.
Before I answered, I looked at the wavy double helixes of sunlight in the pool. I thought of a David Hockney pool painting in which a man is forever submerged at the deep end in midswim. He never has to emerge from the cocoon of that chlorinated womb. I turned back to Michahaze’s gold-rimmed pupils. “I’m afraid of leaving the safety of this place and not being able to handle it out there. Of picking up again.”
“You can do it. You can do anything.” He hugged me and I believed that he believed in me and loved me almost as much as Mama Jean did. And now I had to love him back just as much.
Of a
ll the conjoint definitions I found, the first one listed is the simplest: “joined together; combined.” I shared this with Dave in my journal. Dave gave me the validation I needed: “Michael is a gem. So are you. Create a setting worthy of you both.”
* * *
“You know, I still can’t get over the fact that I tried to commit … that I tried to kill myself,” I told Dave at our next therapy session. “Hearing Michael tell that room about finding me … made it real.”
“It’s called shame, kiddo.” Dave stared at me over his reading glasses. “But you first have to accept that you did it before you can get over the shame and move on.”
“I see what you mean. But more than that, I can’t get over the fact that Jean can’t get over the fact that I … did that.”
“Maybe Jean can finally take you off of that gilded pedestal she erected and placed you on.”
“Funny. That’s what Mr. Parker said to me while I was in detox. I thought I had made a dent in gaining my independence when I shit in the nest last Thanksgiving, but I’ve thrown myself back in the crib. I’ll never be free of her obsessive love.”
“Do you feel that her obsession with you actually robbed you of being a child?”
“You think? I don’t know. Maybe. I spent so much energy being the adorable, happy, cheerful boy she needed me to be that there was no room for my feelings.” I shared with Dave a passage from a highbrow self-help book that I’d been reading, The Drama of the Gifted Child. The book’s premise—that the intelligent, sensitive, “gifted” child is essentially denied a self of its own, as the needs of the parent are always paramount—was pure catnip:
Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir Page 21
