In the last interview Mike ever gave, he spoke of his deep contentment with having completed all the basic tracks for Legacy: “I have never, ever in my life been so fulfilled. . . . I’d love to be around when the album comes out, but it’s harder and harder to walk, to stand up.” He told the interviewer that he had all the usual fears about “a violent death, and a medicalized death, being a vegetable,” but he’d found that “dying can be an amazingly sensual, almost erotic experience because it’s very much about the body. I feel that I’m a person who lived in his head all his life and paid very little attention to my body, except during sex, which is why I was addicted to it.” But now, though his leg was swollen with KS and throbbingly painful, he’d somehow managed to regard the pain as “a signal that my body is trying to tell me something, it’s trying to get my attention and communicate to me. I just sort of feel tactile and sensual.” He’d been weepy of late but didn’t censor the tears; seeing a beautiful flower or biting into a luscious tomato filled him with unexpected bliss. It had nothing to do with “walking towards the light”—that stuff didn’t move him at all: “This life is the light,” he said. “If there is a heaven, this is it.” A case of denial? That wasn’t Mike’s temperament. Raw courage would be closer—recognizable to anyone not put off by its association with “sentimentality.”
By mid-December, Mike had lost all mobility and instead had to “crawl around on the carpet.” Nor could he keep food down, not even Ensure. His lower body had become a mass of purple, leathery KS lesions, with his legs almost entirely covered. Besides longing to be touched again, Mike’s ailing body ached with stiffness. He didn’t dare ask anyone for a physical massage, but Doug picked up on how desperately he needed it. At first, Doug later confessed, “I was frightened and even disgusted to lay my own hands on the leathery skin,” but he somehow managed to put his fear aside and to work regularly and sympathetically on Mike’s scarred body.
In New York, meanwhile, Patrick was doing badly. Mike wrote a friend that his “worst fear is that Patrick and I will die around the same time, being a double blow for Richard. . . . he doesn’t have a lot of friends, and doesn’t make friends easily, and I worry about him being lonely.” Patrick was still in Cabrini Hospital in New York City when Richard returned from Europe, and had still not told his family that he had AIDS. Richard felt they had a right to know, regardless of their reaction, and Patrick asked him to make the call. By then, he had so much trouble breathing that he’d been put in a respirator in the intensive care unit. Patrick’s mother and two sisters were all nurses, and after getting Richard’s call they immediately got on a plane in Portland, Oregon, and rushed to New York. The entire family proved—to use Richard’s word—“fantastic,” lovingly present for Patrick and expressively grateful to Richard. By now it was early December 1993, and Patrick was clearly losing his grip on life. In L.A., Mike, despite his own suffering, was intent on Patrick’s condition and sent him a message, via Richard, to “hang in there . . . I’m coming out there . . . just a few more days”—a clear impossibility, but an accurate gauge of Mike’s tendency to worry about others even when himself in extremis.15
Richard had the medical power of attorney for Patrick, and after consulting with his family, the decision was made to take him off the ventilator, as he wished. Within a few minutes, while they tightly held his hands, Patrick died. His father made the funeral arrangements at Redden’s on Fourteenth Street, and he consulted with Richard about how they should dress Patrick. Together they came up with the idea of putting him in the scuba outfit he’d bought but had never been able to wear. At the cemetery, Patrick’s family included and embraced Richard completely, and to this day they’ve stayed in touch.
Mike, meantime, had reentered the hospital and become wheelchair bound—and he was in agony; he was given a morphine pump, but it proved unable fully to blanket the pain. He and his doctors talked over the advisability of amputating his now-gangrenous foot but finally decided against it. Mike had been hoarding a large batch of the sleeping pill Seconal with the intent of committing suicide at some point. But while in the hospital he couldn’t find a doctor who’d help him do the deed. Richard, still in a daze from Patrick’s death, decided to leave at once for L.A.
According to Doug, Mike “had made a pact with me about limiting his homophobic parents’ involvement” with his dying process. Under Doug’s tutelage, Mike had come to fear (in Doug’s words) “that their guilt . . . would make them want to coercively overcompensate at his deathbed.” Mike’s father had indeed held tenaciously to his view of homosexuality as a “disability” and had remained unbendingly rigid about it. Yet even he could sign off a letter to Mike with “love,” and he’d once written to him that he’d met very few people in his lifetime who had “what I call ‘substance’ . . . but you are one of them.” His mother had been much more effusive: “You are a great example to many,” she’d written Mike, “and you have truly MADE A DIFFERENCE!!!” As for his brother, Barry, he and Mike had always been close, and Barry, with his wife, Patty, had come to L.A. the previous month, stayed in Mike’s apartment, and made frequent visits to the hospital.16
Richard remembers that despite his “pact” with Doug, Mike did toward the end call his parents and tell them that “if you want to see me, you’d better come now.” And they did, accompanied by his brother, Barry. Doug was present when they arrived and acknowledges that Mike’s mother “did become more warm, present and humane” than her husband, “who remained physically cold, aloof and downcast [though] . . . it appeared like he was fighting back tears a lot.” Mike put the question to his parents that he and Doug had planned in advance: could they love him unconditionally for being gay? His mother said yes, but his father (according to Doug) “could only put his head on Michael’s sunken-in chest and silently cry.” Michael spent some time rubbing his father’s head in a soothing way, as if to say, Doug felt, “I understand your limitations.” When they left, Mike and Doug had a good cry.17
As Christmas approached, Richard got Mike discharged from the hospital, with the intent of taking care of him in his own apartment. But once there Mike, overcome with pain, woke up an exhausted Richard at three a.m. the night of December 23 and told him, “I can’t do this. I want to go back to the hospital.” Richard tried to persuade him to remain at home, but to no avail. To make matters more difficult still, Mike had been out of the hospital for just enough hours to necessitate going through the entire process of reregistering as a patient—it took from dawn till noon.
On December 24, Christmas Eve, Mike grew very concerned about drawing up a list of some forty-five people who he wanted to leave something to—a book, a record, a cooking pan. At Mike’s request a lawyer came to the hospital and they started going over the list “in excruciating detail”—that is, until they reached something like person number twenty, when Mike collapsed from exhaustion and said, “Richard should do what he thinks is right.”
On Christmas Day the lawyer returned to finalize the document as Mike’s will. An unexpected acquaintance showed up, too, and—much to Richard’s annoyance—started talking what he called “some New Age crap about going toward the light.” Mike had mocked that sort of thing all his life, but he was now too weak to fight her. At some point around then, Mike’s parents called, and with Richard briefly out of the room, the acquaintance took the receiver and told them that “they should tell him they loved him and say goodbye.” She held the receiver against Mike’s ear as first his brother, then his father, did just that. It was then his mother’s turn. She told Mike that she’d bury his ashes under his favorite apple tree in their backyard, and that she’d always love him. “I love you, too, Mom,” Mike whispered back, then collapsed in exhaustion.
At that point Doug and Tim arrived in the room. When the acquaintance told Doug about what she characterized as “a miraculous reconciliation” between Mike and his parents, Doug angrily responded that she’d “violated Michael’s very being—because Michael didn’t want t
o have anything to do with his family.”
Mike began to fade in and out. Since no notary was available on Christmas Day, the lawyer told Richard to get as many witnesses as possible. So he started calling people and explaining that they were needed for Mike’s will to be legal. Quite a few showed up, including Richard’s brother, Andy. Though he mostly dozed, Mike managed to say hello to everyone who arrived, thanking them for turning out on Christmas. He even started doing his yenta routine on Andy—“Have I got a girl for you!”—extracting a promise from Andy to call her. With the lawyer present, the gathered friends witnessed Mike sign his will. That done, Mike said he wanted to increase the morphine right away.18
As the drug took over, Richard rehearsed some last-second details with him—what kind of a memorial service did he want?; should anyone sing, and if so, what?; should the service be in L.A. or New York, or both? Somewhere in there, Mike turned to Richard and said, “No regrets. No regrets.” Richard would come to remember “that as the most extraordinary thing to give me to carry forward for the rest of my life.” Mike slipped out of consciousness, and Richard had the excruciating task of saying good-bye to each person as they left the hospital room.
Richard spent the night, with Mike off and on aware of his surroundings. Then, on the afternoon of December 27, he became agitated; the nurses took him off the bed, cleaned him up, changed his sheets, and smoothed the covers down. He then became calm again. Richard took a quick break to stretch his legs. When he got back to the room, the nurse told him that Mike had suddenly sat up, looked to the window—and then died. He was thirty-eight years old. It had been seventeen days since Patrick’s death. Tim Miller showed up and went off with Richard to the stairwell, let him scream and cry, and gave him big, big hugs.
Thanks to Richard, Legacy was released posthumously.
10
Home
Though Essex had earlier publicly revealed that he had AIDS, he kept the details of the progress of his illness from even his friends. Yet as one of them has put it, “I don’t think Essex or anyone else was doing a good job of hiding his illness. Everyone knew he had AIDS.” But after his emergency hospitalization and near death while in Chicago in 1994, he talked more openly with close friends like Ron Simmons about his condition. He went into few details about symptoms or treatments but simply revealed the basic facts. It was typical of how Essex handled AIDS: he went about his business as long as he was able, neither clarifying nor lamenting—and certainly never exaggerating—his condition. And throughout 1993, he did manage to keep to most of his routine. While still on the West Coast finishing up the Getty fellowship, he continued to put in a number of appearances elsewhere.1
At one of them, the University of Oregon, the local branch of the NAACP called the university and protested his presence, presumably because he was gay, though the exact reason given isn’t known. The event went on as scheduled, but the audience of mostly straight, black students proved unusually hostile. Quoting the Afrocentrist Molefi Asante, they attacked Essex’s homosexuality and accused him of “not doing anything for the race.” Essex did his best to be understanding: “they’re trying to protect the little bit of masculinity that’s been constructed . . . an assimilated masculinity—in other words, ‘I want to be like what oppresses me.’ ” It helped to make him realize “that just because one comes from the realm of discrimination and prejudice does not necessarily guarantee that your consciousness is going to open up and you’ll understand the connectedness that exists all around. Colin Powell proves that point again for me, just as some members of our own community have proven that point to me, as I’ve lived and breathed.”
Essex extended those thoughts in a prose-poem he called “Loyalty”: “We constitute the invisible brothers in our communities, those of us who live ‘in the life,’ the choir boys harboring secrets, the uncle living in an impeccable flat with a roommate who sleeps down the hall when family visits; men of power and humble peasantry, reduced to silence and invisibility for the safety they procure from these constructions.”2
Ron Simmons had himself tested HIV-positive in 1989, and in 1991 he had joined a black gay male support group, Us Helping Us. At the time, he’d been teaching for twelve years at Howard University while working on completing his doctoral dissertation. But in 1992 the university had failed to renew his contract. They gave as a reason his insufficient record of publications, though several of his essays were in print, including his seminal “Some Thoughts on the Challenges Facing Black Gay Intellectuals” in Brother to Brother, in which he candidly addressed the homophobia that characterized the work of such black leaders and scholars as Amiri Baraka, Nathan Hare, Louis Farrakhan, and Molefi Asante. It seems unlikely that Ron’s closing admonition in that essay—“We [black gay people] have been blessed with gifts to share in a society that views love and tenderness between men as a weakness”—did anything to advance his bid for tenure.3
When Essex broke the news of his AIDS status, Ron had been seeing an herbalist named Prem Deben for four years in an effort to control his own condition through holistic methods. It was Deben who’d told Ron about Us Helping Us. Ron has stayed with the group down to the present day, and it was only in 2003 that he started taking medication of any kind. Us Helping Us featured internal cleansing, fasting, meditation, the intake of oxygen, and the harnessing of sexual energy (having orgasms without releasing sperm) to aid in the healing process. Ron became executive director of the group, and in 1993 Us Helping Us got a $20,000 grant—its first—from the Washington AIDS Partnership, a local foundation.
Ron had first met Essex back in 1982, at a benefit for Blacklight magazine, but for a number of years they’d known each other only in passing. After Ron became involved in Us Helping Us, he tried to interest Essex in joining but got nowhere. Essex told Ron that he didn’t think he could beat “this thing” and had become fatalistic about it. Something the gifted black gay writer Craig Harris, who had died of AIDS in 1991, wrote about his own medical condition is suggestive of Essex’s attitude as well: “My quality of life is a control issue. I refuse to be controlled by a daily regimen of oral medications and radiation therapy, controlled by weekly chemotherapy treatments, controlled by the increasing number of side-effects, fatigue or depression, medical bills or reimbursement checks. I refuse to be controlled by limitations imposed upon me by my race/ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and health. I have made a commitment to relinquish control only as a last resort.”
When Ron tried to get Essex to at least give up cigarettes and pot, Essex stopped returning his calls for a while. “That was Hemphill,” Ron says philosophically, “sometimes he would get just stuck on . . . [something] that you really couldn’t shake.” When Ron talked to him about his own Afrocentric views regarding body, mind, and spirit, and the importance of affirming and tending to all three, Essex would vaguely reply “uh-huh,” the equivalent of a yawn.
Essex had much more of a falling out with Larry Duckett, with whom he’d performed many times and who’d gone out to the Getty in 1993 to help Essex collect his things for the move back East. What Larry called “our explosion” came while they were still in California—it apparently centered on Essex feeling that Larry had failed to come to his defense when a store clerk had “disrespected” him. But that may have been merely a surface excuse for breaking away from a relationship that had become untenable.
In any case, they had no contact for the last two years of Essex’s life. In an unpublished and largely incoherent three-page account of their relationship that Larry later wrote, he wobbles between describing Essex as his lover, his “partner in the arts,” and his intimate brother, implying, somewhat bizarrely, that he “allowed” himself “to be distanced from Essex” by certain unnamed brothers who “saw Essex as a sexual boy-toy” and saw Larry “as being in their way.” But several of Essex’s intimates have described Larry Duckett as being unrequitedly in love with Essex. In any case, Essex was uninterested in repairing the friendship; when he l
ay ill in the hospital toward the end of his life, Larry asked Chris Prince, a mutual friend, to ask Essex if he could call or visit. Essex said no. Chris tried coaxing him, vaguely suggesting that there might not be another chance to patch things up, but Essex refused to reconsider.4
“He was a fierce boy,” Chris said by way of explanation. “He was a diva. Humility was not one of his assets . . . [but] he was a warm man . . . and sensitive, not arrogant, not a showoff . . . smoke and mirrors wouldn’t fool him.” Essex himself referred to his “basic tenaciousness” and as having been, earlier in life, “demanding of attention.” He was also, Chris added—as if afraid that his portrait of Essex might come across as stern—“so much fun to be around . . . and that body, child. Ooh, that boy had a fierce body. Before boys were workin’ out . . . he was so sexy.”
Through the latter part of 1993, Essex worked now and then (along with Michelle Wallace, bell hooks, Cornel West, and Angela Davis) with Marlon Riggs on his last film, Black Is . . . Black Ain’t. But then Marlon’s health took a bad turn and he had to be hospitalized. According to Steven Fullwood, a curator at the Schomburg Center for Black Culture, “Much of the final text of Black Is . . . Black Ain’t was developed by Riggs one night in his hospital room: ‘It was as if the film were rolling before me,’ Riggs purportedly said, ‘and I was just transcribing; I almost couldn’t keep up.’ ” He’d known since December 1988 that he was HIV-positive, but he now became critically ill for months. As he later told an interviewer, “It was all-consuming. The agony of being weak, of vomiting, of nausea, of fever, of blood coming out of all of my orifices, of being disoriented, drugged, having nightmarish dreams because of the drugs. It was a feeling of utter loss of control . . . I wasn’t thinking about art: I was driven down too far into the basic consciousness of just staying alive.” He was finally able to leave the hospital, but his spirit was diminished, and his once inexhaustible energy reduced to a few hours of early morning work. Riggs never completed Black Is . . . Black Ain’t, succumbing to AIDS on April 5, 1994. Posthumously, co-producer Nicole Atkinson, co-director/coeditor Christiane Badgley, and Signifyin’ Works finished the film.5
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