Rita Will_Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser

by Rita Mae Brown

  I sent the boys out to pick up the mail, a long way away, while I frantically called the dealer and returned to my original order. There was no point explaining.

  By the time Jerry and Herb returned I was in a better frame of mind. Except now they were hungry, and I can’t cook. I’ll give you tea, Co’Cola and Virginia peanuts. That’s it. They knew this, of course, but now we faced the ordeal of the barbecue.

  Two queens in the backyard, cutting each other up over the perfect barbecue sauce, drove me to weed my garden. I did, however, set the table.

  I don’t have a complete set of china. I’ve been collecting Tiffany’s black-bordered china hand-painted with a small rabbit or whatever around the rim. It’s called Black Shoulder. It should be called Highway Robbery. However, it is beautiful. I had only four plates, cups and saucers at the time. Here it is years later and I’m only up to six. That and the Hampton-pattern silver, again six place settings, are the only matched things I’ve got.

  They’re too formal for lunch under the walnut tree. I trooped out odds and ends I’d picked up at yard sales, literally a plate here, a cup there. I used linen napkins, red, and I created a country floral centerpiece.

  Jerry was actually impressed. “Where did you get the idea for different china patterns for each setting?”

  “Necessity.”

  “I like it.”

  “All you have to do is hit up the auctions and yard sales.”

  “He’s not going to an auction,” Herb grumbled.

  “Look who’s talking.” Jerry pointed his fork at Herb. “The last time you went to an auction you bought a building.”

  This was in 1984. The years prior to the Tax Reform Act gave all manner of tax breaks and incentives and federal funds for rebuilding inner-city houses. Jerry and Herb had taken advantage of this to buy a lot of houses in the core of Wilmington, Delaware, particularly houses situated around squares. Today those programs have vanished and legislators wonder why core city economies are again stalled out. The people now in government, but most especially the federal government, have no understanding of the profit motive.

  Fortunately, Jerry and Herb did. They replumbed, rewired and repainted old houses. Jerry put up the money, Herb put up the work. It was a good arrangement.

  In the thirteen years that they’d been together they’d accomplished a great deal financially. Whether they enjoyed the fruits of their labors I don’t know, because Jerry bitched and moaned about everything.

  He’d become embittered over the years. While he believed that DuPont was a good company, the pettiness of internal politics depressed him.

  “When I started work I tried to do everything right. Over the years, as I rose in the ranks, I figured out who got promoted and who didn’t.”

  “The straight people,” I said.

  “No, they just had to look straight, but that’s not how it works. The guys that get ahead create problems, then solve them. I see this over and over again and I can’t believe that upper management doesn’t get it.”

  Jerry was raised to work hard, give his best, put the welfare of the company above the welfare of the individual. It was the way we were all raised, I guess. Frustrated because he couldn’t give his best, because he had to play stupid games, he had grown crabby.

  No matter how many times I told him to leave DuPont, no matter how many times he agreed to do it, he didn’t. Herb had given up.

  I watched the boy I had known since I was twelve turn into a shrinking man emotionally. He still worked hard but at forty-one he knew he wasn’t going to make vice president, and it wasn’t just that he didn’t have a wife and kids. In his own way, Jerry was too honest. The irony was that he was completely dishonest about his personal life. He lived the Big Lie.

  The widening separation between his professional life and his personal life had become shockingly apparent to me for the first time about eight years before this. Jerry had been assigned to the DuPont plant in Richmond, with many visits to Waynesboro, Virginia, where another DuPont plant was situated. He may have even been plant manager in Richmond—I don’t remember his title.

  Initially, this big promotion and the subsequent responsibility were thrilling. And the great thing about Jerry from an employer’s standpoint, I would think, was that he had started as a chemist—he understood the business from the ground up and he was so motivated that he was studying marketing. He loved the whole thing the way I love literature.

  Young, affluent, respected at work, he turned into a rock-and-roll party animal on weekends. He cooked up amyl nitrite in his kitchen, for him an easy thing to do. Then he’d sell bottles of it and people would make poppers, a little mesh-covered firecracker saturated with the chemical. Makes your heart race, and the guys would use it while dancing or having sex. He was making a lot of money with that, about three thousand dollars each month, tax free, maybe even more.

  Had I known I would have been so goddamned mad I would have killed him.

  The police got wind of it, arrested him and prosecuted. Both he and Herb got off but he had to leave the state of Virginia. DuPont stood by him during this embarrassing episode, probably because he was an outstanding prospect and because everyone is entitled to one whopping mistake. They were kinder than I would have been. I would have fired his ass.

  But this compromised him professionally. He wasn’t going to make the upper levels of management because his homosexuality was literally tearing his life apart. Had Jerry been heterosexual he might have indulged in drugs, he might have made amyl nitrite, but I doubt it. He needed release. He needed explosions of hedonism to be able to come back to work in a three-piece suit and pretend to be something he wasn’t.

  Once I got over screaming at him and throwing crockery—I threw some at Herb, too—I settled down. He’d been on the TV news. His case had been in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. I knew his career was all but finished. He thought he could overcome the scandal. Herb was smart enough to be supportive but I think Herb knew, too, that for the rest of his days Jerry would watch men far less qualified than himself rise.

  He was switched to marketing, traditionally a more free-form department. He worked like a dog to overcome his disgrace. Bright, perceptive, utterly outrageous in humor, he made friends as he always did.

  By now I had a name, and association with me wasn’t going to help him one bit. He no longer took me to company dinners or even allowed me to visit him at the office—he worked half the week in New York now and half in Wilmington. Not that I was dying to go to company dinners but still, it stung. His crazed weekends continued but without the amyl nitrite. God knows what else he took. He showed up every Monday for work, sober.

  We fought a lot. He hated women. He hadn’t been that way as a boy but for whatever reason, he’d learned to despise women.

  “You don’t know how stupid women are,” he’d yell at me. “You’re surrounded by the bright ones. The average woman doesn’t give a shit about her rights. She wants some rich jackass to take care of her. You don’t see what I see at work.”

  He was right, I didn’t. But I saw what work was doing to him. The buoyant, butch, athletic guy I’d known had become a real queen after work, a bitchy, hateful queen who cheated on Herb constantly, cheated our friendship and finally cheated himself.

  He had learned to hate himself.

  When I’d knock at him, tell him to find courage, he’d say, and once with tears, “You’re the one with guts.”

  I never thought I’d hear him talk like that. By the time Mother died he had lionized me in a peculiar way; it sounded as though he admired and loved me but it was also a way to keep me distant. Above is just as distant as below. Besides, I didn’t want to be the one woman who was the exception that proved the rule.

  Hard emotional work was ahead for him and he ducked out every time. Sex became an obsession, no longer a true pleasure. How Herb tolerated it I don’t know, and this isn’t to say that Herb was the little woman pining at home. I know he had affairs, too, he
told me so, but it wasn’t the kind of driven, haunted stuff Jerry was doing: going to the docks at night, etc. Nor was Jerry just into rough trade: anyone, anytime, anywhere. He was sick at heart and he couldn’t face what he’d made of his life.

  One of the terrible truths of belonging to an outcast group is that it hurts. It always hurts. No matter how beautiful you are, no matter how rich and famous you may become, it still hurts. The pain is systemic. You are judged wanting over irrational criteria: your gender, your race, your age even, and your sexual direction. No human being has control over those things.

  Jerry couldn’t face the encroaching pain. I faced it early. I hated it then and I hate it now, but it’s a fact of my life and I’ll be damned if I’m going to throw away this magical life, this earthly delight, just because people will harshly judge me.

  The pain takes many forms, but all outcast peoples struggle to be recognized as individuals. The damage of oppression is that it robs you of your individuality. You’re just a faggot. Or whatever—fill in the blank. Everything you do is seen through the prism of your gayness or your womanness or your blackness by some people.

  That’s the deal.

  I do not think for one instant that Jerry’s pain was as horrible, as wrenching, as devastating as that of parents losing their child to leukemia. But such parents will be, I hope, supported and loved as individuals by the people around them. They will be remembered in prayers and in deeds.

  The homosexual suffers alone. He doesn’t even suffer among other homosexuals if he doesn’t make common cause with them. Sleeping with another man doesn’t connect you to him except physically. Jerry wanted nothing to do with gay groups. He was different. He was going to make it. Those gay people were losers, that’s why they had revealed themselves. They couldn’t call attention to themselves via their accomplishments.

  Jerry wasn’t the only gay person to feel that way. He wasn’t the only one to refuse to examine the dry rot that sets in. Jerry wouldn’t be morally responsible and I don’t mean about sex. The human animal struggles with sexual rules and always will. He was immoral because he lied. In the long run, it always gets you. It got him good.

  Because he was brilliant he could rationalize anything. Why should he sacrifice his career to come out? Well, he sacrificed it anyway, didn’t he?

  Because he could elude his pain with bouts of madness, if you will, he thought he might win in the end. This is perhaps the crudest aspect of being a homosexual or a lesbian, the belief that you can escape. You can’t escape yourself.

  And I don’t think straight people are that dumb. After the age of thirty roommates look suspicious.

  Who knows who would have comforted Jerry if he had told the truth. Who knows what kind of community he would have been part of.

  He turned his back on the Catholic Church, too, which I understand to the marrow of my bones, but there is still holiness amid the ruins—the prejudice, the appalling antiwomanness. There is no perfection in the church, because it has been created by imperfect people, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t love there.

  Helpless, I watched the man I loved destroy himself.

  He lied to his family, too, except to his middle brother, Bob, who was also gay.

  He had a glib answer for everything he did. In not telling his family, he said he was protecting his father, that the truth would kill him.

  I knew Jerry’s family. It might have jolted them. It wouldn’t have killed them. There was so much love waiting for him there and he brushed it away because he thought he would be rejected.

  In the end, Jerry spoke to few of us. I think he was honest with me. He was honest with Herb, although Jerry didn’t tell him about his nonstop philandering. He was honest with a good friend from his college days, Lloyd, who was also gay although I don’t know if he ever came out.

  But in the end all he did was complain.

  I guess it was during the wallpaper fight that I realized he was dying. He didn’t know it. He was dying inside but I sensed he was also dying physically. He was tired. He said he’d been to the doctor and Herb confirmed that. But detection was spotty in those days. He had AIDS. I felt it.

  As the months rolled by, he grew even more tired. He’d have to take naps. Finally he took sick leave from DuPont, which continued to pay his full salary. They paid it to the end.

  By now, most of you have seen someone die of this disease. I don’t need to chronicle its progress.

  But the end was dreadful. Even though I thought I was prepared, it was ghastly.

  Because Jerry had AIDS—which he would never admit, by the way—Herb couldn’t find a day nurse. Herb stopped working—he ran all the buildings they owned—hired a super to do repairs and nursed Jerry.

  The virus attacked Jerry’s brain. Lucid moments were few and far between. He’d call me at the strangest hours, the middle of the night, and talk as though we were back at Fort Lauderdale High. It was unnerving.

  I was writing Starling from Scratch at the time, a writer’s manual for which my publisher had no enthusiasm. (Fortunately, the public did.) I’d sit down at the typewriter and my mind would go blank. I couldn’t remember what I’d written or what I was supposed to be writing.

  Herb took Jerry to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where they had a condominium. Jerry loathed Wilmington, another problem he never fixed although he could have lived somewhere else. Herb thought Jer would be happier at Rehoboth, at least when he was capable of knowing where he was.

  I’d seen Phil Mandelker, the producer who hired me to write The Long Hot Summer, die of AIDS. Funny, energetic, driven, he was a lot like Jerry except he was in a business that allowed more personal latitude, although not nearly as much as the public thinks. If you want to run a major studio in Hollywood, being gay isn’t going to help your chances.

  I had an idea of what was going to happen but even with Phil’s sad example before me I felt crushed each time I saw Jerry. I acted bubbly. Sometimes he recognized me and other times he sat in his wheelchair, face blank.

  Rehoboth isn’t easy to reach from central Virginia. Either I took the Virginia Beach way, which was more scenic, or I circled Washington on the Beltway and then drove over to the coast. It took five hours no matter how I did it. I was exhausted. Herb was exhausted.

  Jerry’s parents came up from Florida to help. They were exhausted. I don’t know why I was so tired. I didn’t have to face 90 percent of what they did.

  The last time I saw Jerry he was sitting in his wheelchair staring at the television. He snapped out of his trance and imagined we were playing mixed doubles in the city tournament at Fort Lauderdale. I’d take the backhand court and he’d take the forehand, which threw our opponents because I’m right-handed and Jerry was left-handed. Typically, lefties take the backhand court so they can field the wide shots on their forehand when the opponent goes for the alley. Same on the forehand side. But my backhand was strong, reliable and accurate. Also, we could both cover the middle with our forehands. We were lethal. We urged each other on, praised a good shot, pooh-poohed a bad one, giggled constantly.

  “Jerry, if you don’t serve aces, this guy will clobber me.” I pretended I was at the net.

  “Just watch me.”

  We played a game out in our minds except he thought it was real. He was happy again. Herb laughed.

  When I left Jerry had again lapsed into his torpor and Herb was trying to feed him onion soup but he wouldn’t eat.

  A week later, Saturday, September 14, 1985, Herb called. Jerry was dead. His parents had been with him, as had Herb.

  They couldn’t get anyone in the county to pick up the body since it was Saturday and, more to the point, he had died of AIDS. No funeral parlor wanted him either.

  Herb was frantic and in a towering rage. He had every right to the rage. I told him I’d drive up. Jerry’s huge frame had shrunk to less than a hundred pounds. We could wrap him in a heavy plastic sheet and I’d take him home to bury him on the farm. Clearly, we had to do something d
rastic.

  Herb said to hold off. He finally found an undertaker in Wilmington who came to take the body but by the time the man got there rigor was setting in. He couldn’t fit Jerry, all bones but long bones, into the box. Herb said he broke Jerry’s legs to make him fit.

  By the time I reached Wilmington, where the service was to be held, I myself was in a rage. The knowledge of how one contracts AIDS was available but people paid no attention. AIDS affected drug users and queers. “Let ’em die” certainly seemed to be the response of the Reagan administration. I think in the years to come what Reagan will be remembered for is that he had the chance to stop the plague and he chose not to because the “right people” were dying.

  In his forty-two years Jerry entertained thousands of people, had hundreds of close acquaintances, and had twenty or twenty-five good friends. He was the belle of the ball, or, as I used to tell him, “the belle of the brawl.”

  Only two gay friends attended his pathetic funeral. Except for Herb and me, no one was there apart from his older brother, his middle brother, his mother and father, Herb’s mother and father and brother, and four couples, people Jerry had worked with.

  No other gay person wanted to go to Jerry’s funeral because he had died of AIDS. If they were seen there, people would know they were gay. I guess that’s what they figured, anyway. Lloyd showed up. He had some balls, for which I was grateful.

  In a clear moment, two days before he died, Jerry had asked Herb to have me deliver the eulogy. I did. I still don’t know how I got through it. I didn’t cry until I mentioned how his parents and Herb had suffered. Herb was sobbing. Mr. and Mrs. Pfeiffer were holding up. Bob, the middle brother, was bent over with grief. God, it was awful.

  Three months earlier, Jerry had beseeched me to take his ashes and keep him on my bookshelf. When Herb died Jerry wanted me to mingle their ashes and dump them in Rehoboth, where they’d been happiest. Herb took Jerry’s ashes, as he should have.