Hold Tight Gently (50 page)

Soon after, Mike was released from the hospital, Patrick returned to New York to get ready for his scuba-diving trip, and Richard had to take off for Europe on one of his band tours. Doug Sadownick picked up the slack and organized a small team to care for Mike during the times when he was home. Doug drew up a list of recommendations to coach the group on how they could best be effective: “Mike is one of the most generous and grateful people I know,” Doug wrote in a group letter to the team, but “he’s not always great at making his needs clear for fear of offending his friends. . . . We all must call before visits and never stop by unannounced. . . . Encourage Mike to rest, rest, rest. He may want to entertain you with his wit when you come over, Diva that he is. . . . I’m getting a cleaning person to come once a week, but no doubt the house will get untidy between then as Mike is not able to vacuum, dust and polish. . . . Never hesitate to call me.”
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Soon after Richard returned to New York, Patrick had to be hospitalized as well, yet Richard had to fulfill his obligation to perform in Europe. When his band reached Prague, the promoter put up the members in a B and B that lacked phones in the individual rooms. Using the one at the front desk, Richard called Mike and Patrick in their respective sickbeds in L.A. and New York. He thought Patrick sounded despondent, and learned that he’d had to cancel his diving trip. Mike was home, but his building had become filled with druggies, he’d been robbed, and he no longer felt safe. Mike told Doug Sadownick that he wanted “to move into the bowels of West Hollywood,” the center of gay life, to die (and live a while) among “my people.” He was to an extent being campy; he’d sounded a different note much more often in the past: “I honestly don’t believe there is a gay community—as in a
monolithic group of people who think alike, work together, and have a common ancestry.”
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Doug somehow managed to find a two-room apartment in West Hollywood for Mike that was far nicer—it even had a patio—than the dilapidated HUD studio Mike had been living in; the new apartment was mostly paid for by “Section 8” housing—the city of West Hollywood required new developments to have a set-aside (Section 8) for low-income seniors and PWAs. Doug and the O Boys managed the complicated move in late September 1993. True to his role as a “controlling bottom,” Mike sent Doug in advance an elaborate list of precautions and reminders that elevated obsessiveness to a charming new level: along with instructions to sprinkle boric acid in the bottom of each carton to avoid transporting roaches and their eggs, he urged Doug “to give free reign to the Jewish mother side and treat all the packers as I would—in other words, feed them well. . . . Please don’t be stingy. Use some of the cash to order pizza, beer, whatever people want. Reward yourselves each night with a nice dinner at some place of your choosing. Generosity deserves to be rewarded with generosity.”
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When Richard next phoned Mike from Prague, Judy Peabody happened to be visiting him and was busy following Mike’s directions for making homemade gnocchi. Mike also had a visit from Mary Fisher, the wealthy HIV-positive woman who’d electrified the Republican Convention in 1992; she and Mike immediately hit it off and she told him how much she admired him. By this point, Mike was barely ambulatory, and then only with the help of a cane (Mary Fisher got down on the floor to talk with him). Along with mounting digestive problems, his KS was also continuing to spread; “I’m slowly turning purple,” he told a friend, “the color of gay royalty.” By November, Mike was in what Doug called “soul-sucking pain.”
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When alone, Mike read and read, mostly books that were gay related. He also talked a great deal with Doug about the gay-affirmative therapy he’d been in for a year with Richard Levin, one of its leading exponents. Doug himself had entered gay-centered therapy three years earlier and later became a leading figure in the movement. Both men felt (as Doug has put it) “deeply moved by the basic principles of what we were learning therein, namely that a crushed gay child lay in tremulous hiding among the foggy recesses of our uncharted unconscious
psyches, a sweet fey youngling badly bashed but not really destroyed by foul heterosexist parenting.”
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Doug found Mike’s “Wildean wit” and his strong androgynous spirit a wondrous combination—“to say nothing of his Martha Stewart panache at orchestrating elaborate, seven-course Marcella Hazan–informed ‘Italian Kitchen’ meals.” Mike could no longer manage the meals, but his wit was intact and the more he read and talked about “gay psychology,” the more he entrusted to Doug his wish to die “in the most gay way possible.” That meant, among other things, nothing that smacked of standard spiritual or religious ritual. Mike held firmly to his atheism and to his skeptical rejection of any “higher power” other than reason itself. Yet he was powerfully moved by his gay-affirmative readings and his talks with Doug.

What followed was a brief interlude of contentment. Though Mike awoke each day “aware of a decrease in my capacities,” his current strategy, as he wrote his friend Holly Near, “is just to float—let the current take me wherever at whatever pace it decides to.” While the mood lasted, he focused on what “a good, full life” he’d had, the “wonderful things” he’d experienced, the many “truly amazing people” he’d met. He told one visitor, as if summing up, “The next generation is going to have different problems than we did. Our problem was invisibility—the stigma that kills so many of us. We have shattered that problem for all time. Now you can see us everywhere. . . . But homophobia is firmly, firmly entrenched. I believe [this new generation] has been raised to expect instant success because so much progress was made so quickly. They’re going to find a severe backlash that’s waiting in the wings.”

On December 1, 1993, Mike received the City of Los Angeles Lifetime Achievement Award, and he insisted on being wheeled into the ceremony to accept the honor. He somehow pulled that off, but for the next big event—the premiere of the film
Philadelphia
, in which he and the Flirtations briefly sang “Mr. Sandman” as background to a party scene—he was far too ill to attend. But a friend reported back that at the premiere she’d told Tom Hanks how ill Mike was and Hanks said the news made him very sad; he asked her to tell Mike that he’d prepared in his trailer by listening to the soundtracks from the Flirts and from Mike’s
Purple Heart
. She did report all this to Mike, and it did make him happy. Later, when Hanks received the Golden Globe best
actor award for his performance in
Philadelphia,
he mentioned Mike in his acceptance speech, saying “the streets of heaven are too crowded with angels.”

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.
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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.
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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.