Hold Tight Gently (52 page)

                        
if I am indolent and content

                        
to lay here on my stomach . . .

                        
if I choose

                        
to be liked in this way,

                        
if I desire to be object,

                        
to be sexualized

                        
in this object way,

                        
by one or two at a time,

                        
for a night or a thousand days

                        
for money or power,

                        
for the awesome orgasms

                        
to be had, to be coveted,

                        
or for my own selfish wantonness,

                        
for the feeling of being

                        
pleasure, being touched . . .
⁸

Or:

                        
If he is your lover,

                        
never mind.

                        
Perhaps, if we ask

                        
he will join us.

In this, as in all things, Essex held to his own guidelines. He would scold Chris, for example, about going to see gay strip shows—on political, not moral grounds. “You don’t know what their, the strippers, stories are,” Essex said. “They might have been abused” or “compromised in some way or another. And here you are, objectifying them, and giving them money to take their clothes off.”

As Essex’s health declined, he was never afflicted with KS lesions but did come down with PCP—though why, given the availability of PCP prophylaxis, is unknown. What we do know is that after being released from the hospital, Essex spent most of his time alone in his apartment. As he put it,

Some days it seems easier to sort dirty clothes to be laundered than to be sorting my mail and responding, promptly, to what it contains. It seems easier to dust furniture and listen to hours of music from early dawn to late evening. I ignore my telephone. . . . It seems easier to sweep floors and change bed sheets, easier to roast chickens and de-vein shrimp, to weigh potatoes and onions, peppers and broccoli, easier to simply entomb myself in a thousand domestic chores, escape to a land of Joy, Bounty and Cheer. Go there, a fugitive from my present world, a fugitive fleeing terminal illness and death, fleeing to a land of shiny floors, scented soaps and fluffy towels. . . . Never once do I forget that death is so near, but that doesn’t cloud my head with fear.
⁹

After returning from the hospital, he tried to restore some of his vitality by exercising in his apartment, but then one day he happened to glance into a mirror and saw “the first full-length view of myself”:

                        
I was in the bathroom, at home,

                        
undressing to take a shower

                        
I wasn’t watching myself undress

                        
In the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling mirror

                        
As I finally peeled out of my underwear

                        
I glanced in to the mirror and was devastated.

                        
I was as thin as a sheet of paper.

                        
I could see my ribs, I could see flesh

                        
sagging from my thighs . . .

                        
I gathered up my bones

                        
and showered them,

                        
while fighting back tears,

                        
while the mirror fogged over

                        
what I couldn’t bear to see.

What little writing he seems to have done—some poems and a few prose jottings—were privately printed in a nineteen-page limited edition entitled
Domestic Life
. One of the unexpected, dominant themes of that final effort, obliquely but frequently stated, is the return of some semblance of Essex’s religious faith. Earlier, in his long poem “Vital Signs,” he appears resistant:

                        
I began looking at the world

                        
as a leather skullcap of countless

                        
driven nails meticulously bonneted

                        
on the head of the Christian God

                        
many offered me or tried to

                        
force-feed me. Or more often

                        
than not this figure was used

                        
to impose, contain and undermine

                        
my journey, all in the name

                        
of salvation, which was

                        
one more cemetery

                        
I sadly discovered.

                        
One more burning flag.

Yet in
Domestic Life
Essex sounds a different note, suggesting a turn toward a kind of faith not explicitly named as Christian: “on the few occasions that I have seriously considered suicide, I have been fortunate enough to return to reason and forge a new peace with my life, reestablish my purpose, affirm my faith. . . . Betrayal and disappointment have been visiting at my door, but so have faith and continuance.”

In one of the poems in
Domestic Life
, he moves closer to an ambivalent defining of his “faith” as a possible affirmation of “God”:

                        
. . . there is something

                        
Nagging to speak, something else

                        
That has had no voice until now.

                        
I listen to it calling my name,

                        
Clearly, gently calling me.

                        
I answer tentatively

                        
I have suspicions and doubts,

                        
But I answer because I think it’s God

                        
Or the distant whistle of my train.
¹⁰

Essex rarely spoke about his failing health, even with Wayson Jones, probably his closest friend. “I don’t even really know what his morbidity”—the incidence of disease—“was,” Wayson told me years later. Even before Essex learned that he was HIV-positive, he told Wayson that he didn’t think he’d live to be very old; perhaps, Wayson thought, because he’d “had a hard life, really.” The episodes of abuse and family dysfunction while growing up had left their mark. And in Wayson’s opinion, Essex as an adult “had never had a good [lover] relationship. I never met a boyfriend”—there had been only two extended relationships, Mel and Jerry, each lasting about three years—“that I thought was good for him, really.” Wayson knew whereof he spoke, since evidence has surfaced that one of the two lovers had assaulted Essex and threatened him with a gun. Chris echoes Wayson’s verdict, adding that Essex tended to be attracted to abusive men. Of the two relationships that proved more than casual, neither gave him the sustained comfort he craved. Essex put it this way in “Vital Signs”:
¹¹

                        
I am searching for whatever

                        
we relinquished that was

                        
deemed sacred between us.

                        
A living memory of this exists

                        
and I want to find it . . .

                        
We were not loathsome then,

                        
We were not dealing in cruelty,

                        
sabotage, torment, grief . . .

                        
I am searching

                        
for the irrefutable clarity

                        
to all I don’t presently comprehend

                        
at any hour

                        
about the hatred in our lives,

                        
the misplaced anger,

                        
the presence of death.

Essex did tell Wayson that he was getting fevers and night sweats and had neuropathy in his legs, and Wayson could see for himself that Essex was becoming perilously thin. Yet as late as May 1995, Essex somehow—his willpower was strong—managed to host a showing of Marlon Riggs’
Black Is . . . Black Ain’t
at the University of Toledo Student Union. Only about fifty people showed up, and only a handful attended a community reception the following day. It had hardly been worth what must have been a difficult outing for Essex; the sole consolation was financial—Essex was given a handsome fee.

According to Wayson, Essex not only refused to participate in any of Ron Simmons’ Us Helping Us programs, but he “really never took a proactive stance with his own illness.” Ron feels that toward the end, Essex may have begun to suffer from dementia. When he reached him by phone one day and asked how he was doing, Essex replied, “I’m busy right now. I’m about to go down to the courthouse.” Startled, Ron asked him why. Essex said something about how his last boyfriend kept calling him up and bothering him, even after he’d told him to stop. What did that have to do with a trip to the courthouse? Well, Essex said, “I need to get a restraining order” to keep the man from pestering him. Ron tried to persuade him that maybe the ex-boyfriend was just trying to show his concern and wasn’t intent on stalking or harassing him. But Essex wasn’t persuaded.
¹²

Soon after that exchange, Essex was in and out of the hospital. On one of his better days, a friend gave him a haircut and, finding him “in good spirits,” wheeled him around West Philadelphia for an outing. But within days after that, he was reported to be “fading fast,” and it became clear that Essex was no longer able to take care of himself. He entered the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, and very few visitors were allowed to see him. Wayson and Chris saw him for the last time in August 1995. He was having considerable pain from neuropathy, and Wayson sat on his bed and massaged his legs—just as Doug Sadownick had done for Mike Callen. After that visit, one of the
few reports that came through said that “Essex was no longer able to speak, he could only point and a horrible rattle came from his throat.” Chris called often, trying to reach Essex, but finally gave up. In one of his last poems, Essex had written:

                        
I am getting ready to depart

                        
for where, God only knows.

                        
I have no meaningful guesses,

                        
I have no hints, no clues

                        
It is better this way

                        
that I not be expecting

                        
more than what may come.

Essex, age thirty-eight—the same age at which Mike Callen had died—passed away on November 5, 1995, with his family around him.
¹³

                        
When I die,

                        
Honey chil’

                        
my angels

                        
will be tall

                        
Black drag queens.

                        
I will eat their stockings

                        
as they fling them

                        
into the blue

                        
shadows of dawn.

                        
I will suck

                        
their purple lips

                        
to anoint my mouth

                        
for the utterance of prayer.