When We Rise

by Cleve Jones

  It was easy to find Morrison’s grave, simply by following the graffiti. The mist was giving way to a warm light rain, and I walked through the sprawling labyrinth of crypts, tombs, and monuments in the direction indicated by scrawled messages: JIM→.

  As I approached the site, other young people emerged from the foggy lanes of tombs, and we found his grave, with several bedraggled travelers standing in reverent silence before it. A girl with beads and feathers and what appeared to be small lumps of clay woven into her hair placed a small tape player on the headstone and pushed play. Maybe it was the damp or the batteries were weak, but what came out was eerie and sad and strange and funny: Jim Morrison’s voice, distorted and slowed, growling, “Rider-r-r-s on a stor-r-r-m.”

  At Oscar Wilde’s tomb I met a very well-dressed older man who explained that the custom was to kiss Wilde’s monument while wearing red lipstick. I laughed that I’d forgotten my lipstick, but he seemed offended and said something disapproving to another well-dressed older man, who clucked his own opprobrium. I felt bad that they didn’t like me but I kissed Oscar anyway.

  It seemed there were quite a few solitary men exploring the cemetery that grey and humid afternoon in Paris. Some, like the gentlemen I’d already met, were well dressed. Others were working-class men wearing overalls or uniforms. Some, like me, were younger boys in denim with long hair. Something began to feel very familiar.

  As the afternoon gloom deepened I found myself following a scruffy-looking boy through the alleys and avenues of the dead. He was lean and dark, with a shock of black hair across his forehead just over the brow and a hawk-like nose. His pants were tight and he wore a bright blue windbreaker a half size too small. We walked and walked, and every time I thought to give up he would pause and look back over his shoulder at me.

  He disappeared after a while and I started to try to find my way back to the exit when I saw him slip into one of the monuments, an aboveground stone crypt the size and shape of an old-fashioned telephone booth.

  My heart pounded as I approached and stood at the doorway, hesitating, until he reached out and took my arm and dragged me in. I opened his jacket and put my arms around him, feeling his ribs and the muscles of his shoulders and back and rubbing the tight pale skin of his belly with my thumb. He pressed against me and we pushed into each other, kissing one another’s necks and fumbling with the zippers and buttons of our pants. He kissed me hard on the mouth and our tongues met while our hands grasped at each other. We both climaxed almost immediately, sagging against each other and the mossy stone walls of the crypt as we caught our breath.

  He said something to me urgently but I couldn’t understand. His brow furrowed and he repeated himself, but I could only shrug. He kissed me again and pointed at the sky, which was now black and heavy with rain.

  “Allez!” he yelled. “Allez!”

  He took my hand and we ran as the clouds finally burst and the rain poured down in great sheets—ran laughing past dead Jim Morrison and all the great dead French princes and philosophers, past dead Isadora Duncan and Sarah Bernhardt, past dead generals and revolutionaries, past dead Molière and Balzac and Chopin, past the Communards’ Wall and Edith Piaf, past dead Abelard and Héloïse, we ran and shouted as the rain soaked our clothes and hair and filled our shoes, past Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and dear dead Oscar Wilde, “Au revoir, Mesdames!” and burst out through the gates of the now silent cemetery onto the traffic-loud and bustling streets of Paris.

  I was starting to like France.

  April was half over and most days were still cold and damp. I still had a month before Scott would be in Amsterdam, so I set out for warmer climes on a night train south to Marseille, planning from there to see the Riviera, the fabled and fabulous Côte d’Azur.

  Jean Paul snorted derisively when I told him. “Just like the silly American tourists looking for movie stars, you should go to Monaco as well, and maybe you will meet a prince! I hope so because you have no money and c’est plus cher, mon ami, plus cher.”

  Jean Paul was already getting on my nerves and I was eager to get on the train with the latest International Herald Tribune, a baguette, and some cheese.

  “Thanks for the advice, Jean Paul, I know it’s expensive—it’s the fucking Riviera.” I spent my last two nights in Paris at a youth hostel.

  The train cars were divided into compartments; within each compartment bench-like seats for four faced each other. Sliding glass doors opened to the corridor that ran the length of the car. The door and the exterior window were curtained so that, if one was lucky and had the compartment to oneself, it was possible to close the curtains, stretch out across the seats, and get some sleep. In the mid-1970s the trains were filled with young people on hitchhiking adventures as well as ordinary traveling businessmen and families and soldiers on leave. I always traveled late at night and, by sleeping on the train, avoided hotel or hostel expenses a few nights a week.

  The train to Marseille was delayed almost immediately after we left the station and would be delayed frequently throughout the night. I nestled into a seat by the window and tried to read the newspaper but couldn’t keep my eyes open. The compartment’s occupants changed with each stop as passengers got on and off. Occasionally someone would speak briefly, but most dozed and any conversations that occurred were incomprehensible to me. Sometimes I tried to imagine what each passenger did for work, though some were obviously students or soldiers. It was also easy to spot the grumpy nun who took a seat by the door and frowned at each new passenger entering the compartment.

  As the night wore on, the train alternated between bursts of speed and hours spent unmoving, dead on the track. I dozed frequently, encountering new seatmates and different views each time I awoke.

  At one point I opened my eyes to see bright moonlight and a landscape of fields and scattered farms. The train was moving fast and smooth through the countryside. The other passengers were asleep.

  A young child slept with his head on his mother’s lap, one arm flung out, palm up.

  The old nun was asleep, head back, mouth open, wheezing gently. An exhausted young couple sat collapsed and intertwined and unmoving except for the slight rise and fall of his chest and her breasts, he with one arm protectively around her thin shoulders. An old man sitting across from me snored with his big farmer hands and hairy knuckles clasped over his protruding belly.

  It was warm and dark in the compartment, and through the window the moonlit land outside stretched far and flat away from us in the night. I pressed my forehead against the cold glass and gazed out at the endless fields and sleepily wondered what crops they bore. The train sighed and slowed and leaned softly and I could sense by the motion that the track was turning now. The others shifted in their sleep.

  Outside, an orange glow flickered almost imperceptibly onto the dark fields, then grew and became brighter. The train was racing straight ahead, fast and powerful and heading towards the orange-red light. My eyes were wide open now and I looked around the compartment to see if anyone else was seeing the strange light playing outside the window, but they all were fast asleep. I turned back to the window and then we were upon it and sweeping past: a giant barn completely engulfed in flames surrounded by emptiness; it receded behind us, leaving one intense, rapidly diminishing point of orange light, completely alone in the vast dark flat land.

  Sometime in the early dawn the train stopped again and some French soldiers boarded on their way home from military exercises. European trains were full of soldiers then, with the Cold War in full frost with hundreds of thousands of US troops still garrisoned in Europe almost thirty years after the end of World War II.

  The soldiers getting on the train that morning in Lyon were young even to my eyes, just kids really. They weren’t boisterous, but tired and worn out and falling into their seats gratefully with groans and good-natured elbowing. My compartment was mostly full but one young soldier took a seat across from me, between the old farmer and the grumpy nun. The
soldier heaved his pack on the luggage rack above with a grunt, sat, and settled in to his big coat and hood with a sigh. But before he turned his head to sleep his eyes caught mine, held for a beat—they were green, with long dark lashes—and then closed.

  Later I woke up as the train clattered through some empty town crossing, and caught him looking at me. He looked away immediately, but then back to me and then to the old nun, the only other passenger now remaining in our compartment. She was looking out into the corridor at the moment, monitoring with disapproval the soldiers who gathered there to smoke. He frowned.

  He looked back at me again. We looked into each other’s eyes for a long moment. The nun rustled in her robes like an old hen and our eyes slid away.

  He pushed the hood back on his head and let a few locks of light brown hair cross his face.

  We looked and looked away.

  He moved his legs and stretched.

  I watched.

  He looked up. I stretched.

  He watched.

  We looked away, looked back—and then away again.

  Finally, what seemed like hours later, the old nun tilted a bit to one side and began to rattle in her throat, and the soldier lifted back the edge of his tan greatcoat to reveal the swelling in the crotch of his brown uniform pants. He glanced over at the snoring sister, looked at me hard, and then closed his coat. I could barely breathe or swallow but briefly lifted the folded copy of the International Herald Tribune from my lap, where it had been concealing my own condition.

  The train swayed and our eyes locked again.

  At the next stop the nun bustled to gather her belongings and exit, and the soldier moved quickly to close the curtains to the corridor that the nun had insisted on leaving open for propriety’s sake. As more passengers disembarked and the newly boarding found their seats, the soldier and I sat across from each other, waiting wordlessly, without expressions, to see if anyone else would claim a seat in our compartment. The train lurched out of the station; the conductor checked our tickets and closed the door behind him.

  We were alone.

  I looked up at the soldier and had only the briefest of moments to register the astonishing sweetness of his sudden smile before his lips reached mine.

  Daniél. He took me home with him to Cannes and I stayed for two weeks.

  It was beautiful there, of course, and Daniél was handsome and funny and kind and fluent in English. He introduced me to some of his friends, took me for long walks, and we boasted about our travels and sexual conquests. We also talked about politics; he was a socialist and we shared the same strong positions opposing the war, supporting women’s rights, and legal abortion, but his opinion of the new gay liberation movement was similar to Jean Paul’s.

  “Yes, of course I am what you call ‘gay,’” he’d say. “I am attracted to men, I want to make love with men, be friends with men, fuck with men, but I like women and I want a family, too. This label that you propose I must declare for myself comes with some limitations, I think. I will never announce to my family that I am gay. These issues are more important in your country because you Americans are so repressed and sexually primitive, we don’t think so much about them here.”

  I did not accept that and told him so. “I think that you do think about these issues, you just won’t talk about them. And harm results from that silence, you know it.” I was a little bit angry.

  He smiled at me with his big white teeth and big green eyes, which I now saw were flecked with gold. “I’m not saying that you’re repressed, you know…”

  Then he laughed and told me I was too serious and changed the subject, which I permitted because when one is alone on an empty beach in the south of France with a boy who’s looking that good on a warm April evening it would be a damn stupid shame to waste all of one’s time talking about politics.

  Jean Paul had been right about one thing; the area around Cannes was insanely expensive. Daniél had to rejoin his unit and I was in a hurry to get back to Paris and to catch up with the news. I’d been devouring every issue of the International Herald Tribune and asking Daniél and his friend to translate the French newspapers for me every day. I was feeling a strong desire to speak with other Americans as one of the saddest and most brutal chapters in the history of our nation came to end.

  I sat in my compartment on a train back to Paris while thousands of miles away, from the rice paddies, air bases, villages, towns, cities, and jungles of Vietnam, the Americans were leaving. The American War, as the Vietnamese call it, began with covert US involvement in the year of my birth. The Gulf of Tonkin fraud of 1964, when I was 10 years old, escalated the war and brought it into the open with massive deployments of conventional forces.

  A youth hostel in Paris had a television set tuned to the BBC, where I caught some broadcasts and watched in horror and shame the evacuation of Saigon on April 29 and 30.

  On May 1, 1975, the annual May Day observances around the world were transformed into a global celebration of the US withdrawal and the end of the war. I marched in Paris but felt no elation, just a deep and dark anger at my core: anger that the war had continued for so many years after the American people demanded its end; anger for the needless death and unspeakable horrors that the war had unleashed upon both the Vietnamese people and the American troops sent to fight them.

  It was difficult to be an American in Europe at that time because our nation was being judged so harshly. But everywhere I went I met people who were able to distinguish between the American people and our government, who expressed their affection for the people while condemning the policies. Sadly, even today, most US citizens never leave the country and many never, or rarely, leave their home state. This lack of curiosity about, let alone respect for, other cultures is a hallmark of US nationalism and part of why Americans continue to condone stupid and self-defeating foreign policies.

  When the train pulled into Amsterdam’s Centraal station I was in love with the Netherlands, just from what I’d seen from the train window. To this day, Amsterdam is one of my favorite cities; I feel almost as at home there as I do in San Francisco. By the time I got there, Amsterdam had somewhat recovered from the first wave of hippie traveler youth that had peaked in the summers of 1967 to 1969. Vondelpark and Dam Square were no longer completely overrun with unwashed, acid-dosed children in sleeping bags. By 1975 the scene had calmed down, but the city was nonetheless bursting with kids from all over the world, and many of us were gay.

  With a few days yet remaining before the scheduled rendezvous with Scott, I marshaled my resources, ate in free vegetarian kitchens, and munched falafels or pickled herring on Leidseplein at night. I’d checked into a youth hostel on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, near the Damrak, where the American Express offices were located and where I was to meet Scott the following week.

  A few nights before Scott’s arrival date I stayed up drinking and smoking hashish in Vondelpark and then went to a dance at a city-sponsored gay youth center. I was quite impressed and happy to find so many cute Dutch boys who spoke English and were interested in politics and in gay liberation. I missed the hostel’s curfew and ended up walking the streets and canals all night with my new friends—some Dutch lads and two Italian boys from Milan—and sleeping for a couple hours on a bench before being gently rousted by the always polite police. I went to bed early the next day at the hostel but woke up with a fever and a hacking cough and couldn’t get out of bed all day.

  The next morning I knew I had to get up and out to get some cash, no matter how much my head hurt or lungs ached. This was before the banks were linked or ATMs invented. To get local currency, you had to go to an American Express office or a bank, present your passport, and sign paper traveler’s cheques. I was in the lobby of the youth hostel on my way out when I suddenly felt very hot, then very cold, and then very shocked to find the floor rushing up to crack me on the head.

  When I woke up I was in a hospital. For a moment I was confused and felt the panic rising but
then heard the reassuring soft sounds of the Dutch nurses and orderlies.

  “Excuse me,” I called out. “Hello?”

  A nurse came over at once and smiled down at me.

  “Feeling better now?” she asked, in perfect English.

  She told me I had a severe bronchial infection but that the antibiotics were already working.

  “Great,” I said, “Time for me to check out then.”

  “No, we think you should stay at least for one more day, maybe two, so we can be sure.” She was very friendly but firm.

  “That’s very kind of you, but I have to get out of here,” I said. “I can’t afford this, I don’t have insurance or any money.”

  At this she smiled again, “Yes, I know it is different in America, but here everyone has health care. Everyone. Now be quiet and relax, and let us make you well again.”

  One more reason to love the Dutch, but I wanted Scott.

  My most intimate and long-lasting relationships have not usually been sexual. Or maybe they began as sexual but soon became something else. I loved Scott the moment I laid eyes on him and I know he loved me back, just as strongly and just as immediately.

  Scott was unique. He was tall and thin, square-jawed, lean, with kind and gentle eyes and a ready lopsided smile. Part Jackie Kennedy, part David Bowie, part Dalai Lama, he was a psychedelic, Buddhist, Kansan cornflower from the prairies. When Scott walked down a crowded street, people all around, without even being aware of it, would lower their shoulders and smile and relax a little bit.

  I got out of the hospital in time to meet him at American Express on the Damrak. I got there early, slung my pack down on the pavement, and sat there shivering and sweating and sick and knowing I had hardly any money left and Fuck, what if he doesn’t show up, what am I going to do?