Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  Then about seven years ago they hired a new rector at Saint Thomas the Apostle. I never heard a word about it till much later, and first saw Father Carroll himself the following Christmas Eve. Apparently, right from the first, he’d been speaking positive thoughts from the pulpit about gay and lesbian people, and thus had roused the ire of a “family” man. A fourth-rate actor with jowls that flapped when he got on his high horse, who was damned if he’d let his children be fouled by such rank blasphemy. A storm of protest rocked the parish council, reaching all the way to the Bishop, egged on by this lowlife porker. Finally it was suggested that he and his family might be happier in another parish.

  All I could see, on my Christmas visits, was that Saint Thomas was more and more crowded, especially with queers. Father Carroll was very high-church, startling to me who’d never choked on incense before, not in the low church of my youth. For the first time ever I experienced a service sung in plainchant. I heard Father Carroll had opened the door to Dignity, the gay and lesbian Catholic group who’d been banished from all church property by Cardinal Mahony. Saint Thomas dedicated an AIDS chapel, with a book of names on the altar. AIDS memorial services became standard fare, as well as a myriad of support groups for those in the grip of HIV.

  I was proud of all that, and sent checks to support Father Carroll’s work. His assistant rector died of AIDS a couple of years later, and then his own son. He’s been through the fire. And over the course of time we’ve developed a certain undemanding acquaintance, Father Carroll and I. He looks politely puzzled when I tell him I’m an atheist who’s still a card-carrying Episcopalian. My mother, were she still alive, would welcome all this as a sort of prodigal return to the faith of my fathers—but then I’d probably keep the details from her still. When I had a letter some years ago from the Presiding Bishop in New York, head of the church in America, promising greater outreach in the fight against AIDS discrimination, my mother was beside herself for months. It might have been a letter from Jesus himself.

  But for all their liberal eloquence and their wide open doors, have they done enough? I remember replying to Bishop Browning’s letter with a query of my own. What was it like, I asked, trying not to be flippant, to mix it up with the other faiths at the National Council of Churches? Did they all play golf together? At the prayer breakfasts, did he bow his head in unison with preachers who wanted my people dead? It seemed to me that hatred of queers was at the very top of the list for most religions. So what did it mean to serve witness to the power of love if the hate was never challenged? The National Council ought to be a brawl, not just more tepid lip-service to ecumenism and One God. Christ, whatever he was, was not about breakfasts.

  I had a surprise visit not long ago from another Episcopal Bishop, this one from the Midwest. He was passing through L.A. and wondered if we might have a cup of tea. I readily agreed, having just begun these reflections. He was strikingly handsome, with a full head of white hair—and dressed in civvies, to Winston’s disappointment, who’d rather hoped for a miter and crozier. But the Bishop was very down-to-earth, no standing on ceremony. He openly admitted to being gay, out to himself for almost twenty years, and out to his wife and children too, the marriage having survived the revelation. Now he was nearly seventy years old, about to retire, and beginning to ready himself for the pilgrimage (his word) of his life’s next phase. No one in his ministry knew his secret—a conscious choice, apparently, so as not to bring controversy to the institution.

  But he knew he hadn’t done enough. Just as it wasn’t enough that a third woman has recently been elevated to the House of Bishops. Better, the Bishop allowed, but two hundred years late. Meanwhile I have no idea if he’s ever acted on his queer impulses—lying down with a man—but it was certainly clear to Winston and me that he wanted out of the closet, to march unfettered with his gay brothers and sisters. I suggested he work to put gay and lesbian issues into the seminary curricula, and to keep the pressure on to bring queers into the ministry. Winston, more daring than I, advised the Bishop to stand at the next House meeting and come out publicly. That ought to shake their miters.

  He gave us the most benign and thoughtful gaze. (So infinitely discreet had been his life.) He nodded and said he’d consider it—beginning to see, I think, how many miles you could travel in a single step. At the end he asked if I would consider giving some writerly input to the church’s task of composing a commitment ceremony for gay and lesbian couples. Auden, he said, had helped with the recent modernization of the King James prayer book—a bad job, I’d always thought, flattening out all the gorgeous Shakespearean locutions of the original. Did that mean I was a conservative Episcopalian atheist, kin to those retrograde Catholics who swear it’s never been the same since they took the Latin away?

  “We don’t need their commitment service,” counters Malcolm Boyd, who took off his own mask a quarter century ago. A priest who donned the collar so he could join the fight for justice in Selma and Little Rock, who’d been challenging the church’s homophobia since I was a kid. “Why? So we can have marriages as screwed-up as theirs? We deserve better than scraps.”

  Iconoclast and gadfly—that’s Malcolm. He can’t abide the noblesse oblige of the Lincoln Town Car Protestants. In his own meditations and books of prayer, he wrestles God as Jacob wrestled the angel, till the breaking of the day. It would be inconceivable to him to wear the collar and not take a stand on the gathering rubble of the American empire, where justice is mostly a business expense, cheap at the price. To be a priest and stay in the closet, according to Malcolm, is to forfeit the moral center and live a coward’s half-life besides, accepting the scraps of internal exile. In his own life he had experienced an overflow of love, a long and healing relationship with Mark Thompson, his comrade of the heart. That bonding was its own blessing, requiring no official stamp. Indeed, Malcolm and Mark are the perfect marriage of Christian and pagan, priest and shaman, a balance of souls that neutralized all dogma.

  I leave it to my fellow queer Episcopalians to fight for a special service, if it brings them closer to what Tillich calls “the ground of being.” Wear white from Priscilla of Boston with an eight-foot train and illusion veil, if it feels right. As it happens, Winston and I do not require the blessing of the church—for any number of reasons, but mostly because we’re already married. Last April. Ma officiated.

  Ma is something else. A guru from Brooklyn who has never lost her stevedore’s swagger or street tough’s lip. She runs an ashram in Florida, with eighty or a hundred in permanent residence, and a constant flow of pilgrims. She would call herself a Hindu—I think—but her teachings cast a very wide net. Tattoos peek through her saris, and she has enough piercings and bangles to set off the alarms at LAX. A caste mark on her forehead, Revlon bright.

  But it was some months before I saw any of that. Stevie was in his last summer when the first calls came, messages left by one of Ma’s lieutenants asking me to come by and meet her: “You mean a lot to her.” I balked. I’d struggled with the various denial systems purveyed by a raft of New Age gurus, the ones who filled whole auditoriums in Hollywood, promising that if we loved ourselves enough we wouldn’t die. Tapes available at the door, $29.95, no checks please. Courses in miracles, follow the white light, anger will kill you faster than AIDS. Et cetera.

  The worst. Designed to make people feel that if they did get sicker, they weren’t loving their lesions enough, or keeping up with their positive imaging. In a word, the dying were losers. I had watched too many acquaintances, gulled into fairyland by Louise and Marianne, turn bitterly away from them when the disease began to win. The New Age ladies drew the line at visiting the dying. Play those tapes, boys, louder and louder. My neighbor Billy, who’d gloried in his role as Ed McMahon to the Wednesday evening “Hayrides,” went into a black depression when the lesions swarmed over his face. The New Age stopped returning his calls. He hanged himself from the clothes bar in his closet, undiscovered for three days, till a pair of lesbian friends
from back East arrived for the weekend and broke down the door.

  I was not in the market for gurus, thanks. By the time Ma’s people called again, about three months later, Stevie had been dead a week and I was stiff as a corpse myself, staring at the ceiling. I was given to understand that Ma made regular visits to Los Angeles four times a year, taking over the house of one of her disciples and welcoming people in, especially those with HIV.

  “But what does she do, exactly?” I asked in some confusion.

  I could hear the shrug through the phone, as if there were things that didn’t translate into words. “She teaches,” came the reply at last. “Your book is very important to her.”

  A bungalow south of Melrose—tidy little front yards all up and down the street till you got to Ma’s place, where the overflow of pilgrims spilled out and sprawled in the grass. The porch was a heap of shoes, because you were meant to walk unshod into the presence of the guru. Inside there were men curled up on the floor on straw mats, clearly in the very last stages. Others slumped in wheelchairs. But the prevailing mood was holiday bustle, as several long-haired types in harlequin deshabille bore platters to the groaning board of the vegetarian feast, for three days of feeding round the clock. No evidence, as at Lourdes, that anyone had flung his crutches aside, healed by faith. Nothing, in fact, that smacked of religion.

  They led me in to see her, sitting in lotus on a wicker chair, more veils than Salome, though none to cover her beaming face. As soon as she saw me she shrieked in Brooklynese to the twenty or thirty disciples who jammed the little bedroom: “All right, now nobody mention God! He doesn’t want to hear that crap!”

  Then I was enfolded in her embrace as she brayed with excitement, calling in more and more people till we were like sardines in there. “This is the man who wrote my Bible,” she announced with a gush of pride, then made me sit on a chair face to face with her while the others sat cross-legged on the floor. She told me how she visited the county homes in Florida, where the most wretched of those with AIDS were taken to die. Many of these had been abandoned by their families, denied the comforts of “traditional” religions. And Ma crawled into bed with them and kissed their lesions. Her raucous guttersnipe’s laugh preceded her down the puke-green corridors as the dying perked up to greet her. She came to them completely unafraid of death, honored in fact to be in its presence, and gave them all a bluesy sort of comfort. Without the God crap.

  Ma worries that I paint too bleak a picture of the county homes—which aren’t so bad, Bina assures me, run by dedicated and compassionate staff. My own theory is that if it’s not so bleak, it’s because Ma’s presence has changed these places, given them life. Apparently she often reads aloud from Borrowed Time, especially the parts that tell about loving till the very end, the minor victories: a walk to the corner, a good foot rub. I don’t know if Ma understands that the book and I are not the same, or to put it another way, that I’m not remotely as wise as the book. Not that I’m being humble—a feeling my friends would never accuse me of—but rather that I have a sense of the book’s own journey, the dark places where it can go and I can’t.

  The bedside of a frightened man of color, for instance—hardly a bag of bones as he arched against the pain. He loved to hear Ma read about me and Roger, almost a folk tale to him. “I wish I had one of my own,” he sighed, meaning the book. “But you can’t read, can you?” retorted Ma. Illiterate all his life, and almost blind besides, he shrugged, like Bina over the phone when I asked her what Ma did. She handed him her copy.

  It was his prize possession, apparently, from that day on. His only possession, Ma would be quick to tell you, there in the death camp of Palm Beach County. And just before he went a few weeks later, he summoned a nurse so he could dictate his will. She must’ve thought it was the dementia creeping up, but humored him by getting paper and pen. “I leave my book of Borrowed Time,” he whispered, “to anyone who can read.” Signed with an X and duly witnessed.

  Who is the priest here? Where is God exactly? Don’t look at me. These deathbed wills are like those Christmas trees at Starcross—they’d throw you out of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on your ear if you tried to pass it off as fiction. I admit – to a certain amount of religion by association, but for healing purposes the touch and the teaching are all Ma. I am just a useful text. If people get restless during a group audience, chatting among themselves as they shift their aching knees, she is liable to bellow for silence. “I’m the holy mother around here,” she squalls. “And there’s only room for one, so shut up and listen.” The Auntie Mame of gurus.

  Winston took to coming with me when I made my seasonal visits, figuring this was the nearest he would see me in a spiritual mode (if you don’t count ripping up the Pontiff’s picture, which I do out of solidarity with Sinead). Ma embraced us both. We didn’t stay for darshan, her hour of public teaching in a rented tent in the back yard. I made my salutations and withdrew, more out of respect for her than for a faith I didn’t share. But when, one Sunday afternoon in spring, Ma happened to mention in passing that she’d married a lesbian couple the night before—well, it seemed the most natural thing to ask her to bless us too.

  Ma is emphatically not the sort of person you have to ask twice. Scarcely pausing for breath, she drew our hands together and held our eyes with hers—“Look at the dot”—as she spun the ritual out of her heart. Seemingly impromptu, but then blessing is what Ma does. Word spread quickly among the assembled disciples and pilgrims, and they all hugged us joyfully and led us out to the driveway feast. Ma introduced Winnie and me and the lesbians at darshan—we made an exception and stayed that night—and Arlo sang us a wedding song.

  No time to register at Geary’s or send out Tiffany invites. All our friends would hear about it after the fact, some of them crushed not to be included. But they quickly came to understand that it was the right sort of wedding for us. In the pictures taken that day, we are shawled in perfumed scarves and grinning, as if we’d been showered by a couple of wayward angels. No priest in evidence. Perhaps the faintest sound of drumming.

  Seven months later it’s Saturnalia, the pagan turn of the year, under an ink-blue sky awash in stars, cold enough for a topcoat even here in L.A. For what is shaping up to be my last Christmas—oh well, my second-to-last then, denial being intrinsic to the ho-ho of the season—I’m pulling out all the stops, but not for Baby Jesus’s sake. The tree from Starcross is up in the living room, decked and gleaming, as well as a wreath on the front door, the latter sent gratis by Toby and the sisters because I’m their friend. Tomorrow night we’ll be going to St. Thomas for the singing. I will take a small vacation from my hammering at the Vatican, like a ceasefire over enemy lines, a prayer for peace in a babel of tongues. The fighting will start up again next week.

  At Gucci in Rome, the fur account of the Vatican is said to be the largest of all—those ermine shrugs and sable-lined dressing gowns, chinchilla throws on the daybeds, millions and millions of lire to keep the tyrants cozy, the emperors of God. Meanwhile Gambone, my ex-Jesuit, writes to tell me he’s off to a cabin in the northern Minnesota wilds, to figure out the next step. Father Tom is readying for a season in Rome, to grapple with the hateful dogmas—or to find love, he isn’t sure which himself. At the spring convocation, the Bishop just might stand up and declare himself. Or the volunteer firemen in Santa Rosa may show up for the next emergency, gloved and masked to be sure, but determined to save a baby’s life.

  There is no God, I’m sure of that. But the more they’ve sought me out, the more convinced I am that there are holy men and women. So I send blessings, such as they are, to all my priests who constitute the Resistance. Down with the fur and the edicts. And if they like, they’re welcome to include me in their prayers. Can’t hurt. None of us will free the world of intolerance alone. We need the people of God, especially if He isn’t there.

  3275

  THERE ARE TWO perfect graves. Well, actually three, but I haven’t the wherewithal or the str
ength these days to travel as far as Samoa. Stevenson himself was sicker than I when he made his voyage there, a last-ditch flight to paradise. Or did he see it as his own Treasure Island at last, a chance to consult with parrots and pegleg castaways? Free from Edwardian clutter and the satanic mills of England, perhaps he expected to stumble on a pirate’s map. Which in turn would lead him to a sheltered cove, the strongbox hidden in a sea cave whose entrance lay underwater except at the ebb of lowest tide. A boy’s adventure for a dying man, hammocked in coconut shade as his own strength ebbed.

  His grave is on a promontory overlooking a thousand miles of ocean, so vast you can see the curve of the planet, but maybe that’s another boy’s illusion. Cut into the slab of stone—granite? quarried where?—is what amounts to the granddaddy of fin-de-sieclè epitaphs:

  THIS BE THE VERSE YOU GRAVE FOR ME:

  HERE HE LIES WHERE HE LONGED TO BE;

  HOME IS THE SAILOR, HOME FROM SEA,

  AND THE HUNTER HOME FROM THE HILL.

  Exquisite, that use of “grave” for “engrave,” as if the action of the stonecutter and the place itself are one. A lookout, surely, worth a journey halfway round the world. I can see myself there, one foot planted on Stevenson’s brow, the trade wind billowing my sailor’s blouse as I lift my brassbound spyglass and comb the lordly Pacific. My very own National Geographic special.

  But not to be realized in the flesh, not in my time anyway. I leave it to stauncher travelers to make the trek to Stevenson’s summit, there perhaps to deconstruct the romantic gush of fantasies like mine. Happily no one can desecrate or diminish my other two totems, because I’ve actually been to them. To the snowbound chapel where Lawrence is buried, in the Sangre de Cristo foothills, on a perch that looks across the high desert beyond the Rio Grande all the way to Arizona. And to the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, where Keats is buried with a half-strung lyre on his tombstone and that final statement written in fire. Surrounded by a meadow of shaggy grass, electric-green, an echo of England in April, the spring that never arrived for the choking poet.