Michael Tolliver Lives

by Armistead Maupin

I’ll give you a moment to do the math. Ben is twenty-one years younger than I am—an entire adult younger, if you insist on looking at it that way. But I really haven’t made a habit of this. My first lover, Jon, who died back in ’82, was a year older than I was, and Thack and I are only months apart in age. It’s true that lately I’ve gone out with guys who might be described as, well, less than middle-aged, but it never lasted very long. Sooner or later they would bore me silly with their tales of “partying” on crystal meth or their belief in the cultural importance of Paris Hilton’s dog. And most of them, I’m sorry to say, seemed to think they were doing me a favor.

  Before Ben I’d had little experience with daddy hunters. I knew there were young guys who went for older guys, but I’d always assumed that it was largely about money and power. But Ben claims he’s lusted after older men since he was twelve in Colorado Springs and began jerking off to magazines. He remembers rushing home from school to search the latest issue of his dad’s Sports Illustrated for the heart-stopping image of Jim Palmer in his Jockey shorts. And several years later, in the same magazine, he read a story about Dr. Tom Waddell, the retired Olympic decathlete who established the Gay Games. The very fact of this aging gay gladiator filled him with the hope that some of the men he wanted might actually want him back. And all doubt was finally removed when he moved to San Francisco after college. The daddies Ben met down at Starbucks or the Edge were sometimes slow to read the gleam in his eye, but given half a chance and a little encouragement, they could leap whole decades in a single bound.

  God knows I did. Ben called me the very next morning, and I invited him over for dinner the following night. I told him I was making pot roast, just in case he didn’t consider this a sex date. And just in case he did, I popped a Viagra half an hour before his scheduled arrival. He appeared at the door exactly on time in well-fitted Diesel jeans and a pale-blue T-shirt, bearing a bottle of Chianti that clattered to the floor as soon as I grabbed him. When we finally broke from the kiss, he uttered a sigh that suggested both arousal and relief, as if he, too, had worried that we might have to eat pot roast first.

  “You should know,” I said, releasing him. “I’m positive.”

  He looked in my eyes and smiled. “About what?”

  “Don’t get smart with your elders,” I said, leading the way to the bedroom.

  “You know,” Ben said afterward. “I think I’ve seen you before.”

  He was lying in the crook of my arm, thoughtfully blotting the wet spot, his fingers arranging my chest hair with serene deliberation, like a Zen master raking sand.

  I asked him what he meant.

  “I think you do the garden at my neighbors’ house,” he said. “No kidding? Where?”

  “Out on Taraval.”

  “Not Mrs. Gagnier?”

  “I don’t know her name, really.”

  “French-Canadian, right? Prematurely gray. Makes jam out of her lavender.”

  “Well, I don’t know about the jam part, but…”

  “I do. She gave me some last Christmas. Tastes like shampoo.”

  He chuckled. “Do you always work with your shirt off?”

  I scolded him with a playful yank on his ear. “Only when I think someone’s spying on me in the bushes.”

  “I wasn’t in the bushes, I was on my roof.”

  “Why didn’t you yell down or something?”

  “I dunno. I couldn’t tell if you were queer from up there.”

  I gave him a puzzled frown. “How high is that roof, anyway?”

  He laughed, snuggling into my side again. After an interval of uncomplicated silence he said, “So how do you know the lady you were with?”

  I explained that she had been my landlady years ago when I lived on Russian Hill. I told him about her backyard marijuana garden and her huge collection of kimonos, and the rambling old house itself, tucked away in the alps of those high wooden stairs.

  “How does she manage that now?”

  “She doesn’t. She had a stroke a few years ago, so she moved down to the Dubose Triangle. There are people who help out, you know, in the building, so there’s a number of us to…share the load.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “Not that it is one,” I added. “I love being with her.”

  “Sure.”

  “She affects a lot of people that way, which is good. She’s still got it going, you know? She still gives a shit about things. Most trannies never make it that far.”

  He blinked at me for a moment. “You mean…?”

  I smiled in the affirmative. “She was the first one I ever knew.”

  “She pulls it off pretty well,” he said.

  I told him she’d had some practice, that she’d been a woman for over forty years, almost as long as she’d not been a woman.

  Ben took that in for a moment. “I’d like to meet her sometime.”

  Already that sounded so right to me.

  After that first pyrotechnic night, we saw each other about twice a week for three or four months. Ben was kind and bright and appreciative of everything about me I’d recoiled from in recent years: the thickening trunk and silky butt, the wildfire of gray hair sweeping across my chest. Some people think we finally become adults when both our parents have died; for me it happened when someone desired the person I’d become. For years I’d been in a state of suspended boyhood, counting every crow’s foot as I searched for the all-loving man who would finally set things right. Ben made me think that I could be that man. Not as some father figure, if that’s what you’re thinking—Ben was way too independent for that—but simply as someone who knew how it felt to be cheated of a father’s comfort and tenderness. Someone who could give you all that.

  Loving Ben would be like loving myself, long ago.

  I tried to stay cool about it. There was very little to indicate that Ben was even in the market for romance. The emails he sent me from work usually closed with “Hugs, Ben”—a surefire sign, I felt, that he saw us as compatible fuck buddies and nothing more. True, Ben had been partnered several times already, and always to older guys, but there was something distressingly self-contained about him. My heart sank when he outlined his plans for remodeling his tiny one-man apartment, or rhapsodized about hiking in the Alaskan wilderness, where he’d perch on mountaintops for hours on end, reveling in his solitude. Even Ben’s job with a South of Market furniture designer was a little troubling, since one day, he said, he hoped it would afford him the chance to live in Milan or Paris.

  None of these scenarios left much room for me, I felt.

  But all of them turned me on. I loved picturing Ben in that matchbox room on Taraval, making hibiscus tea before bed. Or swimming naked in a mountain stream, his jeans warming on a nearby boulder. I often fell hard for such manly free spirits when I was Ben’s age or younger, though very few of them returned the favor. That my prince should come now, desirous as he was desirable, was almost too much to believe.

  So I took each day as it came, dutifully noting even the slightest sign of hope along the way. The day he showed me sketches of a sideboard he was designing. The night he brought us white peaches from the Farmers Market. A Sunday trip to the Headlands, where we lay all day on an army blanket, comrades-in-arms, without having sex at all. Little doubt remained, in fact, when “Hugs, Ben” became “Love, Ben” and the floodgates finally opened, inundating our emails with reckless Victorian endearments:

  My Darling Boy

  My Handsome Man

  My Wonderful One

  My Own

  We were sitting on a bench at Lands End, watching a sunset exactly the color of the bridge, when he popped the question:

  “I don’t think I could ever be totally monogamous, do you?”

  I was momentarily at a loss for an answer.

  “I mean,” he went on, “it’s not like I’m a sex addict or anything. I don’t want you to think that…but sometimes, you know…opportunities arise.”

  I laughed nerv
ously. “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “And if you really love the guy you’re with…and you see yourselves as soul mates and all…then you should want each other to have those experiences, shouldn’t you? I mean, shouldn’t your love make that possible?”

  “Mmm.” It was more of a noise, really, than an actual reply.

  “Everyone I know who agrees to monogamy just ends up sneaking around, deceiving the person who matters to them most. That hurts a lot more than just…adjusting the rules, so that your love for each other can just make things better. Men aren’t designed to be monogamous, in my opinion, and the ones who force themselves into that mold either break each other’s hearts eventually or just…completely neuter themselves. I don’t mean a new playmate every week, or even every month necessarily, but…as long as it’s out in the open and doesn’t impinge upon…you know…your intimacy with each other, or becomes, like…romantic or something that’s really…consciously hurtful, then I don’t see why two people can’t just agree to….” Flustered, he gave up the effort altogether. “Feel free to jump in any time, Michael.”

  I stroked his cheek for a moment. “You’re too young to be monogamous,” I told him. “And I’m too old.”

  He studied me seriously for a moment. “You mean that?”

  I nodded, smiling dimly. “In some ways I wish I didn’t, but I do. I know too much about life to think otherwise. Which is not to say I can’t still get jealous—”

  “Good,” he blurted.

  “Is it?”

  “Well, yeah, because I can get jealous, too. And I could get really jealous about you.”

  Why did that make me feel so much better? “We’ll work on that together,” I said.

  He was grinning broadly now, revealing that adorable gap again. “Could we take about thirty years?”

  I counted soberly on my fingers for a moment. “That may be doable, yeah.”

  The next day he removed his personals ad from the website.

  And that spoke more eloquently than any marriage license from City Hall.

  3

  Far Beyond Saving

  Okay, thirty years might be stretching it, given the virus I’ve lived with for the past twenty. I’m still in the Valley of the Shadow—as Mama would put it—but at least it’s a bigger valley these days, and the scenery has improved considerably. In my best moments I’m filled with a curious peace, an almost passable impersonation of how it used to be. Then my T cells drop suddenly or I sprout a virulent rash on my back or shit my best corduroys while waiting in line at the DMV, and I’m once again reminded how fucking tenuous it all is. My life, whatever its duration, is still a lurching, lopsided contraption held together by chewing gum and baling wire.

  And here’s the kicker: the longer you survive the virus, the closer you get to dying the regular way. My current recipe for continued existence, a fine-tuned mélange of Viramune and Combivir, now competes for shelf space in my medicine cabinet with Lipitor, Wellbutrin, and Glucosamine Chondroitin, remedies commonly associated with age and decrepitude. (Well, maybe not Wellbutrin, since even the young get depressed, but that was no big deal in my own youth.) There are plenty of ironies in this, lessons to be learned about fate and the fickleness of death and getting on with life while the getting is good, but you won’t read them here. I’ve had enough lessons from this disease.

  Strange as it seems, I can remember a time when I was sure I wouldn’t outlive my dog. I acknowledged this to Harry, the dog himself, one drizzly winter night when Thack was away on business. As Harry lay curled in my lap, I told him I’d be leaving soon but not to worry, that I’d be in a better place. I don’t know what got into me; I don’t even believe in a better place. But there I sat, morbid with fear, soft-pedaling oblivion the way parents do with their kids. And five years later my little white lie blossomed into black comedy when I laid Harry to rest under a stepping-stone in the garden.

  I made the same assumption about my mother. Back in the days of night sweats and endless fatigue, it was reasonable to believe that I’d beat Mama to the grave. In fact, Mama herself argued energetically for my exportation to “a nice Orlando memorial park just down the road from Disney World.” My father had been buried there several years earlier, so Mama was bound and determined to launch a tradition: a family reunion of sorts, without the dirt bikes and Jell-O salad. I turned her down gently, but my brother Irwin caved in and bought a plot that could comfortably accommodate his entire family, even the daughter who’d moved to St. Pete to work for the Home Shopping Network. Irwin is fifty-seven, a Christian and a realtor, and so thoroughly committed to both disciplines that he belongs to an organization of Christian realtors.

  I’m not fucking with you here; they have a website and everything.

  It was Irwin who called to tell me that Mama was feeling poorly and that I might want to think about coming home soon.

  “I don’t wanna scare you, Mikey, but I thought you should know.”

  “That’s okay, Irwin. I appreciate it.”

  “It could be six weeks or six months, but…it’s not looking good.”

  As hard as it was to hear this, I wasn’t surprised. My mother’s emphysema, the result of decades of liberation by Virginia Slims, had already confined her to a Christian-run convalescent home in Orlovista, Florida, where, for the past six years, between walls of yellowing family photos, she’d been convalescing her way to death.

  “Is she hurting?” I asked.

  “Not really,” said Irwin. “Just kinda…wheezy, ya know. And her color isn’t good. She’s been asking about you a lot lately.”

  “Well…tell her I’ll be there soon. I’ve got some miles saved up.”

  “Great…that’s great, Mikey.”

  I asked him how Mama had liked the birthday present I’d sent several weeks earlier: a silver-framed snapshot of me and Ben, taken just after the wedding, standing beside a waterfall at Big Sur. I hadn’t a word from anyone, so I’d been wondering.

  He thought for a moment. “Oh, yeah…the picture.”

  “Right.”

  He chuckled nervously. “Good one, Mikey. You had me going for a while.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “C’mon. He works for you, right? Or he’s a friend or something.”

  “No,” I said evenly, as if talking to a three-year-old. “That’s Ben. That’s my husband. The one I’ve told you about.”

  “Oh…sorry…I just…he looked so—”

  “No need to be sorry.”

  “But wasn’t that annulled or something?”

  I had no choice but to torture him. “What do you mean?”

  “You know…the state court made a ruling, didn’t they?”

  “You’re shitting me!”

  “No. They revoked it. It was big news, Mikey…even in Florida.”

  You bet your ass it was. Singing and dancing in the streets no doubt. Might even be a state holiday by now.

  “This is awful,” I said glumly.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t hear about it.”

  “Do you know what this means?” I said. “We’ve been living in sin!”

  After a moment, the light dawned and he groaned in exasperation. “You see,” he said, “this is what I mean. Always jerkin’ my chain. Can’t trust a darn thing you say.”

  “Or even a damn thing,” I added, laughing.

  Now he was laughing, too. “I mean, c’mon, bro. You send us this picture of…I dunno…Huckleberry Finn or somethin’…and you tell us he’s your husband…”

  “If it helps any,” I said, “he’s older than he looks.”

  A silence, and then: “How old is he?”

  “How old was Jesus when he rose from the dead?”

  “Mikey, if you’re gonna be disrespectful—”

  “I’m giving you a reference point, Irwin.”

  “Oh.”

  “Ben is a grown man, is all I mean. He’s had a life already. There’s no training required.”
/>   “He’s thirty-three, you mean?”

  “Very good. Big gold star on your forehead.”

  “Well…” Irwin cleared his throat in preparation for a brave leap into the abyss. “He does look nice…I mean he looks like a nice guy…from the picture.”

  “He is, Irwin. He’s got a heart and a conscience and there’s a really solid bond between us. There’s stuff to talk about, you know. The age thing isn’t an issue.” I was trying to be straight with him now, since I wanted him to understand the gravity of what had happened to me. “I’ll be bringing him with me,” I said, “if he wants to come.”

  It took him a while to respond. “Well…that’s good. I mean…it’s good to have support, isn’t it?…at a time like this.”

  Not bad, Irwin.

  “I’d ask you to stay with us,” he said, “but Lenore’s got her puppets spread all over the guest bedroom. You never seen such a mess.”

  “Look, we really don’t—”

  “And…I almost forgot…we’re having the floors redone, so the whole place will be…you know, pretty much of a disaster area.”

  “Well, thanks for the offer, but…I think we’ll look for a motel. I kinda like the idea of a motel, actually. A neutral place, you know. And some privacy.”

  “You sure now?” Irwin’s relief was all but spewing from the receiver. “I could find y’all a condo at least. I think we’ve got an empty demo over by the Gospel Palms.”

  The Gospel Palms was Mama’s rest home.

  “That’s okay,” I told him. “We’ll just find some place near.” (Even in Orlando, I figured there had to be a decent gay bed-and-breakfast.)

  “All right, then.”

  “I’ll call you when we’ve set a date.”

  “Mama’s gonna be mighty happy, Mikey.”

  “Well, give her a hug for me, when you see her.”

  And the picture, big brother. Give her the fucking picture.

  Let’s put this in perspective: My family has known I’m gay for going on thirty years. I wrote a letter to my mother in 1977 when she joined Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign, hoping against hope to save her own two sons from recruitment by homosexuals. The news that I was beyond saving—and happy as hell about it—was met first by silence, then by a lone pound cake that I chose to regard as an awkward step toward enlightenment.