Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (20 page)

Each of us traveling to Israel was called a “young ambassador,” and for ten days we toured the country by bus. We visited Haifa in the north, worked on a kibbutz in the south, sipped tea in Tel Aviv, and floated in the slimy waters of the Dead Sea. At night we stayed with host families. During the day we took guided tours of sites. In Jerusalem at the end of the trip, we made plans to visit the Wailing Wall, the renowned prayer site in the holiest of holy cities.

On the bus ride over, our guide explained how the 187-foot wall, believed to be the sole remnant of the Holy Temple, had been a place for Jewish prayer and pilgrimage since the fourth century. She said, “The sages state that anyone who prays in the Temple in Jerusalem, it’s as if he has prayed before the throne of glory because the gate of heaven is located there.”

I decided that I would pray when we got to the Wailing Wall. I descended from the bus and walked down to the dusty base of the wall. Standing amongst Hasidic Jews draped with prayer shawls, all bobbing back and forth, I peered up at the Wailing Wall’s uneven surface. The midday sun, reflecting off the white stones, forced me to squint, but I could still make out hundreds of tiny papers—other people’s prayers—folded and rolled, poking from the cracks in the layers of sediment above.

On the bus, I’d written out my wish in pencil, earnestly hoping that sticking a prayer into the holiest wall in the holiest city on earth really meant something, that there was a reason so many people were swaying and bobbing and kneeling in front of this sacred place.

So, standing amongst scores of murmuring strangers, I felt along the rough stone above, found my spot, and jammed my tightly rolled prayer inside the crack. I pushed it deep, deep inside the wall so that it wouldn’t fall out, and as I did so, I repeated my prayer, under my breath:

Please don’t let my father get AIDS.

Please don’t let my father get AIDS.

Please don’t let my father get AIDS.

Since traveling to Israel, I’ve enjoyed visiting and praying in many of the world’s most venerable holy sites. I’ve prayed in Istanbul’s Blue Mosque barefoot and completely prostrate. I’ve kneeled in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, lit candles in Notre-Dame in Paris, and climbed the thick stone steps of Buddhist shrines in Kyoto, thighs burning, beads of sweat running down my back. Sitting in a plain wooden pew, I’ve enjoyed the extended silence of a Quaker service in a Brooklyn Friends Meeting House dating from 1857. I’m always moved by these different expressions of faith, these nuanced forms of prayer, the alternating grandiose beauty and powerful humility of these different houses of worship, all built and sustained by believers. But I’ve never been able to attach myself to any single faith, nor have I felt moved to believe in a single, all-knowing, all-powerful god. After that blinding day at the Wailing Wall, after all the senseless devastation that’s been known in our community, I can’t believe in a divine plan.

IN FEBRUARY 1988,
three months after my return from Israel, Dad received a call from Kevin Killian. Sam D’Allesandro had died of AIDS. Sam was the first friend we lost: beautiful Sam. He came to my sixteenth birthday party and then disappeared. After a few months of not seeing him, I asked Dad if Sam could join us at the movies and he told me that Sam was sick. I said we should visit him but we never did. And then, some months later, the phone call. In his journals Dad wrote about how shocked he felt: “I thought he was better.”

Sam’s boyfriend, Sean, later told me that Sam had been diagnosed only six months before he died. But he’d been sick for more than a year. He had CMV retinitis, an AIDS-related condition that causes the retina to detach from the eye, blinding its victims. He had tuberculosis in his adrenal glands. He had HIV pneumonia many, many times. But he refused to go to the doctor. Outside of Sean and Sam’s roommate, Fritz, nobody saw him. Nobody. When Sam started to go downhill, he retreated, quitting his job at the travel agency, never leaving his apartment. For a long time he refused to believe that he had “it,” even if a diagnosis meant more services and better treatments. “If I have AIDS,” he told Sean, “I don’t want to know about it.” Sam was only thirty-one when he died.

Sam was one of many men in the city who, after becoming sick with AIDS, disappeared from view. The gifted poet Karl Tierney, a colleague of Dad’s from the Small Press Traffic gay men’s writing group, dropped out of the scene once he was diagnosed. Karl had been twice a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and a Yaddo fellow. In 1995 he rode his bicycle to the Golden Gate Bridge and jumped off. He was thirty-nine.

Sam’s denial about having AIDS didn’t absolve Dad and me from our responsibility as friends to visit, to say goodbye, but it felt as if we inadvertently did the right thing. I can only remember Sam as full-lipped and beautiful, with that thatch of soft blond waves, an eighties Adonis. Maybe that’s how he wanted to be remembered.

But then, when I recently did an image search for him online, I found, amongst the beautiful shots, a photo taken by Robert Giard. After seeing
A Normal Heart
, Larry Kramer’s play about AIDS, Giard took hundreds of portraits of gay and lesbian writers. In this portrait, Sam looks gaunt, with hollowed-out eyes, like a grinning skull in a wig and sweater. When I found it, tears sprang to my eyes and I turned away. It pained me to look. Why did he pose? Kevin Killian thought Sam might have been thinking of the big picture . . . that he wanted, not his own peers perhaps, but future generations to know something of the horror of AIDS.

The story of how we lost Sam troubled me long after he died and I left San Francisco for college. In that fall’s freshman composition class I wrote an essay about him that dealt with homophobia and AIDS, about how the loss of Sam turned me into someone who’d speak out whenever a cousin or a classmate yelled, “Don’t be a faggot!” But in this essay about my newfound bravery, I never mention that my own father is gay. I never mention that he could be HIV-positive and might die of AIDS himself. Just as Sam didn’t want to admit that he had “it,” I didn’t want to admit that Dad might get “it.” The fear and shame wrapped up in the diagnosis was too powerful to shake. Given my own level of denial about my father’s illness, in all likelihood my feelings about Sam were encased in worry about my father.

AFTER MY TRIP
to Israel, I set my sights on how my life would evolve post–high school. I started to adopt what I considered to be sophisticated habits. I took to wearing a beret and walking down Haight Street carrying an antique cane or a single long-stemmed white rose symbolizing peace and spirituality. I started to patronize a café that had just opened in the Lower Haight called Ground Zero. The café hung large abstract paintings on its walls and attracted a clientele of pale college students in thrift-store trench coats clutching beat-up black portfolios. I liked that Dad didn’t go there and that no one I knew in San Francisco yet went there. I returned to Ground Zero every week, always ordering Earl Grey tea with milk (another “grown-up” discovery) and reading Tama Janowitz’s collection of short stories
Slaves of New York
, which fed my fantasies about the city.

I’d become infatuated with New York en route to Israel. Visiting the city for the first time, I took the subway from our midtown hotel to Astor Place in the East Village. I wandered along St. Marks Place and down Lafayette, eventually finding my way into Keith Haring’s Pop Shop. The t-shirt I bought there—Haring’s radiant baby in orange on a gray background—became a staple of my wardrobe. Keith Haring would later illustrate the famous
Silence = Death
poster for the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) before dying of AIDS himself in 1990.

Back in San Francisco, with my nose deep in
Slaves of New York
, I dreamed of the life Janowitz depicted: making jewelry, loft living with an artist boyfriend, wearing a neon-green and orange coat, living a quirky creative life informed by the history of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground.

In my final year of high school, San Francisco felt provincial to me. Dad was plugged into the vibrant “Queercore” community, playing elder statesman at Klubstitute, Club Chaos, and Uranus, underground scenes he’d later describe in his Pynchonesque novel
The Lizard Club
. But I powerfully longed for my own life, apart from Dad and relieved of my past. I knew I wouldn’t find it in San Francisco. I couldn’t walk down Haight Street without running into a classmate, ex-coworker, ex-fling, or someone I knew through Dad. I felt an itch to grow and stretch, to walk unfamiliar streets in the great throbbing heart of bohemia, which I then believed to be New York City. Thanks to my “big sister,” Dede Donovan, I got there.

My father was pretty hands-off when it came to my school plans. He had a vague idea that I should attend college but was too busy with his own work to focus on the efforts needed to make that happen. Once Dede emerged as someone who would help me, he simply stood aside and let her do it. She wrote to several schools requesting applications. She tirelessly worked on these applications with me, redrafting essay after essay over pots of peppermint tea at For Heaven’s Cake. She secured recommendations for me from lawyer friends I’d met at her Christmas brunches. When I was accepted by New York University, I was thrilled. I didn’t consider going anywhere else. Dede even secured me a summer job working as a nanny for a pair of her college friends who lived in the city.

Dad was happy for me too, though sad that I’d be moving so far away.

BEFORE I LEFT
San Francisco, we took a sauna together. I remember both of us naked except for thin white towels wrapped around my chest and his waist. We chatted a little, but it was too hot to chat more so we decided to play cards instead. Gin rummy was our game.

So there we were, alone on the wood slat bench, naked except for our towels, and I was shuffling the deck. The air was so hot and dry I could barely swallow. My skin felt like it was on fire. I remember the sweat dripping down my back and down my forehead, trickling into my eyes and ears. I had to stop shuffling so I could wipe my face with another thin white towel. Then I cut the deck and let Dad deal each of us a hand. We took turns pulling cards off the open deck, hoping to find a consecutive run of three cards from the same suit or a set of three cards of the same rank.

There was no clock in our sauna. It didn’t matter, because there was no place to be. We were neither alone nor burdened by company. There was no pressure to entertain or to find a clever remark or conversational strand. We just played gin rummy, taking turns pulling cards until:

“Three sevens. How ’bout you?”

“Nine, ten, and a queen of hearts. You win.”

Over time, the heat of the sauna curled our playing cards so that they reminded me of the little Fortune Teller Miracle Fish cut out of red plastic film that kids would sometimes bring to school. The way it moved in your hand was supposed to reveal your “true heart.” A moving head meant “Jealousy.” A moving tail, “Independence.” If the fish turned over, your heart was “False.” If it curled up entirely you were “Passionate.”

I remember sitting there and remarking on those curiously curling playing cards, coming to life in our palms, attesting to our love. And I remember our nakedness, which was so natural and easy.

PART V

Departures

And one of the things I’m really happy about is my relationship with you. And your letters. I don’t think I ever imagined it would be this wonderful & enjoyable & interesting. I guess when you were growing up I had my hands so full of trying to be with you in the present & keep up w/ your changes that I never had time to imagine what the future might bring. But it’s really neat when “the future” turns out better than one expected.

—
STEVE ABBOTT
,
letter dated December 10, 1990

15.

W
HEN I WAS
a little girl, my father and I used to play hide-and-seek among the thick conifers of Golden Gate Park. One day when he was hiding and I was seeking, I couldn’t find him. After I called his name, all I could hear was the sound of eucalyptus leaves rustling in the wind. So I sank down onto the nearest park bench, waiting for him to emerge and wrap his arms around me again. But waiting for him, watching all the not-my-dad men walk by, the minutes slowed. I imagined what would happen if I was still sitting on that park bench after the air cooled and the sky darkened to black. Would I join the legions of orphan characters I knew so intimately from books and movies?

For each storybook orphan that rose above tragedy to become king of the elephants (Babar) or to star in the circus and beat up the town bullies (Pippi Longstocking), there were those orphans that were cruelly mistreated before redemption (Little Orphan Annie, Shirley Temple in
The Little Princess,
Jane Eyre) and the orphans who died of neglect before finding redemption in the afterlife (“The Little Match Girl”). I was especially scarred by a 1970s TV version of this Hans Christian Andersen tale, which shows the match girl freezing in the wintry streets while busy Christmas shoppers ignore her offers of “Matches! Matches!” By the light of her last match, she’s warmed by a brilliant image of her dead grandmother before ascending to heaven to join her.

I deeply believed (in a ritualized exercise in self-pity) that my father was the only thing standing between me and the fate of the orphans I loved so much. With morbid fascination I studied these stories, thinking that if I familiarized myself with their different shades of tragedy I’d be better equipped to survive should anything happen to him. Every time my father and I temporarily separated—at the market, the street fair, or Golden Gate Park—images of the forsaken orphans would flood in. Who would take care of me now? Would anyone love me like he did?

When I was very small playing hide-and-seek with my dad, I could always get him to appear. If I called out, “Where are you Daddy?” he’d answer, “Here I am!” until the sound of his voice led me to him.

In July of 1988, I moved to New York, living for the first time beyond the sound of his voice.

NEW YORK
felt hot: dirty, hot, and sweaty. I was riding in a taxicab from La Guardia Airport over the Brookyn-Queens Expressway. The taxi had no air-conditioning so I kept the windows rolled down. But the wind whipped my hair around my face so I rolled them back up. When the cab finally pulled up in front of a red door in the East 80s, I smoothed down my hair and emerged into the humid evening.

I carried my suitcase to the Weiksners’ door, wiped my face, sucked in my breath, and pressed firmly on the bell. Though sticky and tired, I also felt energized, taking in the sights and overripe smells of summer in New York. Then the door opened and I saw a small child with brown bangs and a candy heart necklace.

“San-draaaa! Alysia’s here!”

This little girl was my new charge, Sarah Smiley. I gave her my friendliest grin and followed her into the townhouse.

“Hell-
ooo
!” This was the contralto of my new employer, Sandra Weiksner, calling from the back of the house. After lugging my suitcase inside the front door, I walked toward her, stepping over a leather floor mat, which had been tastefully painted to look like an oriental rug with a corner pulled back and overlaid with windblown yellow gingko leaves. Trompe l’oeil, Sandra would later explain. “It’s French for ‘fools the eye
.
’ We had an artist do it.”

Sandra sat at her kitchen island with a thick stack of papers, a glass of red wine, and a plate of Boursin cheese and crackers.

Sandra and her husband, George, were friends from Dede’s Stanford days back in the sixties. They’d once been sympathetic to the New Left, but now were members of the corporate elite. George worked as an investment banker and Sandra was a partner at a prestigious law firm on the bottom tip of the island. She’d been looking for a “mother’s helper” to take care of Sarah, her three-year-old niece visiting for the summer while Sandra’s sister studied acupuncture in China. Dede had arranged for me to watch Sarah in exchange for room and board.

“It’s so nice to meet you. How was your flight? Good? Good. Good. Welcome! Listen, is it okay if Sarah gives you the tour? I’ve got to finish these notes tonight. You’ll meet George later. He’s working late. The boys are playing basketball in the neighborhood. They’re due back for supper. I don’t know how they do it in this heat! Isn’t it disgusting? So . . . is that okay? If Sarah takes you? Your room’s on the top floor.” She waved me toward the nearest staircase.

“Yes. Thank you, Mrs. Weiksner.”

“Sandra, you can call me Sandra. No need for for-
mal-
ities!” she sang.

As I grabbed my suitcase and followed Sarah up the stairs, I looked back at Sandra. She wore her dark hair short with straight bangs that she kept brushing off her forehead into a middle part. When she spoke, her eyes were bright and her bracelets jangled up and down her arms with each exclamation. As she settled back into her work, she carefully put each bracelet back in place and took a sip of wine, as if to center herself.

Sarah led me up the stairs to the second floor, an airy, light-filled living room with upholstered wallpaper, Louis XIV chairs, and twelve-foot ceilings. The corners and tabletops were crowded with African sculpture, delicate silver boxes, and painted porcelain fruit the size of babies’ fists. The walls were hung with paintings, including a small Braque (“My mother gave it to me when I was sixteen,” Sandra later told me), a Sonia Delaunay tapestry (“through a client of George’s”), and a Mirò.

I was studying these when the three-year-old grabbed my hand. “C’mon, lets go upstairs!” She pulled me up the carpeted staircase toward the next floor as if she were the grown-up and I the distracted child. I moved slowly, holding on to the thick wood banister with my free hand, trying to absorb my new surroundings. Within the dimensions of the house I felt small—tiny, even. I’d never seen anyplace like the Weiksners’. My only reference for material comfort was Munca and Grumpa’s two-bedroom ranch house. Their all-white living room, with its tasteful modern art, black piano, and sliding glass doors facing the deck, had been the height of elegance for me, and the site of many pretend balls as a girl.

After showing me around the third floor, including Sandra and George’s room and the “library,” Sarah led me to the fourth floor and pointed to a series of doors: “Mike’s room. Nick’s room. My room. Bathroom. Your room!”

“This is such a beautiful house!” I said.

“Can we go downstairs now? I’m hungry.”

“Okay, Sarah. Let me just put my bag down.”

I settled my suitcase into the corner of my new room, which was hung with muted watercolors of clowns and acrobats. I peered out the window facing 81st Street and felt an immediate and powerful urge to rush outside, to walk everywhere and see everything. I forced myself to take a deep breath before heading back downstairs.

Later than night, after a light dinner in the walled garden with the rest of the family—George Weiksner and the Weiksners’ two robust teenage sons, Mike and Nick—I lay in my little bedroom in a bed next to the window. Jet-lagged, I had a hard time falling asleep. I imagined my father back in San Francisco where, it being three hours earlier, he might be drinking a latte at the Flore, or be perched on the edge of his futon at home talking on the phone, or sitting cross-legged, scribbling in his spiral-ring notebook.

Did he miss me? Was he thinking about me? I wanted to tell him everything.

At eleven at night, the city was still thick with activity. As I lay in bed, I tried to isolate and identify each sound I could hear through the window. There was the distant pulse of traffic and car horns on Lexington Avenue, a large truck wheezing and rumbling down 81st Street, a group of kids talking and laughing, a radio playing from a distant apartment window. Thinking about all the life happening outside, in every direction, my whole body buzzed. In my head, I started repeating a single phrase over and over, and each time I said it I felt a little more excited: “I’m in Manhattan. I’m in Manhattan. I’m in Manhattan. I’m
in Manhattan
.”

BACK IN SAN FRANCISCO,
my father was sitting on his futon, hard at work editing
The Zombie Pit
, a collection of stories by Sam D’Allesandro. Since he was again trying to quit smoking, he was also sucking on a Hershey’s Kiss, which he’d unwrapped from its foil after pulling it from a bag he kept in the drawer of his end table. Dad was still not drinking or doing drugs, but quitting smoking seemed harder. His nervous energy was constant, expressing itself through the shaking of his right foot as it dangled over his left leg, and the way he’d fidget with the tinfoil wrapper in his lap. Early the next morning, he’d calm this energy by sitting zazen meditation.

After six years of going to the Hartford Street Zen Center, Dad had evolved into a devout Buddhist. The previous summer we had spent ten days in Kyoto, Japan, an experience that inspired his book
Skinny Trip to a Far Place
, and he sat zazen every morning. He saw his practice as the only reliable way of letting go of unproductive thought patterns and habits. Facing the wall, he’d crouch down, folding his legs around a stiff round pillow on the tatami floor, silently sitting with several other members of the community as incense swirled in the air and the gong rang.

He now had another dimension to his practice: every Friday afternoon Dad walked upstairs from the basement meditation room and into a small room with a rubber tree plant, a hospital bed, and two chairs. There he’d sit for several hours with J. D. Kobezak, a twenty-three-year-old with AIDS.

In 1988, AIDS continued to ravage the gay community. At the end of 1985, there were 15,527 reported cases of AIDS in the US; three years later, that number had swelled to 82,764. But while newspapers ran articles about quarreling AIDS researchers and pundits and bureaucrats argued over policy (with some advocating tattooing AIDS patients), little attention was paid to people actually living with the disease, especially those suffering through its late stages. Men who were still closeted in their hometowns were forced out of the closet once they became sick and bedridden. Often forsaken by their families, these men had to rely on friends and lovers to care for them in their final months. Others fell through the social net and, unable to care for themselves, ended up homeless and on the street.

One day, Issan Dorsey, the abbot of Hartford Street, found a homeless kid with AIDS sleeping under a table in a local laundromat. Issan understood what it meant to live on the street. Decades before, he had performed as Tommy Dee, The Boy Who Looks Like the Girl Next Door!
—
a cross-dressing opening act for comedian Lenny Bruce. After some years working the North Beach nightclub circuit, he started shooting drugs and eventually would wake up in the gutter. It was through a chance encounter with Allen Ginsberg and LSD that he found his way to Buddhism and a devoted practice that led to his opening and then running Hartford Street, the city’s first gay Zendo.

Issan took the homeless kid back to Hartford Street and set up a bed for him upstairs. Within a year, thanks to the generosity of one of the Zendo members, Issan bought the Victorian house next door so he could convert the space into an eight-bed AIDS hospice, the first of its kind in the country. The hospice was named Maitri House (
maitri
means “compassionate friendship” in Sanskrit).

Maitri House was one of a dozen AIDS organizations that formed in San Francisco in response to the epidemic. Much as in the late 1970s, when Anita Bryant and John Briggs had posed a common threat with their anti-gay political campaigns, the gay community was energized by the AIDS crisis. Lesbians, some of whom still felt more kinship with the women’s movement than with the gay movement, organized blood drives and marched alongside gay men in angry ACT-UP demonstrations demanding cheaper and faster access to AIDS drugs. Filling the void left by a brutally indifferent federal government, a slew of organizations formed to provide counseling, health care, home visits, and education for anyone affected by AIDS, including the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

This powerful response was due, in part, to the tightly woven sexual communities that had been forming for decades. In
Stagestruck
, the writer and historian Sarah Schulman argues that the bathhouses, bars, and other meeting places that were blamed for the AIDS epidemic were also the very structures that allowed for efficient organizing and dissemination of knowledge once the epidemic began.

To support the transition of the Hartford Street space from a Zendo into a twenty-four-hour AIDS hospice, Issan asked members of the community to volunteer their time and talents. My father, who’d overseen benefits for Cloud House and
Poetry Flash,
helped organize a fund-raiser for Maitri, and every Friday afternoon he sat with J. D., the kid from the laundromat. Sometimes Dad pushed J. D. in his wheelchair around the neighborhood or out to the Gay Pride parade or the Folsom Street Fair. In a letter to a friend, he described these Fridays as the “happiest time of my week.” His experience, as detailed in the epilogue to
View Askew
, was common to many gay men who suddenly found themselves caring for sick friends and lovers:

AIDS is neither a curse nor a blessing: it just is. I see its inexorable progression in a 24-year-old friend whom I’ve been sitting with every Friday for the last nine months. I got to know J. D. in a healing workshop. He came up to me one night and gave me a hug because, he said, he just felt I needed one.

J. D. is such a beautiful person I found it hard to believe at first that he was sick. But last fall he became bedridden. I wasn’t sure if I could cope with helping care for him – I’m not trained as a nurse – but it was just something that needed doing so I did it. I felt awkward at first but he encouraged me and gave me confidence.