I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (19 page)

That was a turning point in our relationship. I saw he was becoming the wiser and certainly more successful one even if I would remain the older one. Moreover, Perry and I—as southern boys at our core—couldn’t shake the religious faith that had been inculcated into us by our upbringing and had to find ways to incorporate it into our lives as gay New Yorkers; it is one of the deepest aspects of our abiding friendship. I always looked at Perry as nicer than I. A better person. His presence in my life became a talisman of goodness. When I looked at him I always saw that lovely kind whippersnapper of a lad—so tall, so handsome—I’d met at that Toys for Tots Christmas party. He even made
People
magazine’s list of 100 Sexiest Men one year.

Perry truly found a way to incorporate his deep religious faith into his fast-lane New York life when, in his role as an executive at Walden, he sought out the rights to the series of seven C. S. Lewis Narnia books, which are full of Christian allegories. He was instrumental in getting the first three films made—
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian,
and
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
—and served as executive producer on all three.

Yet he still had dreams of writing his own novel. I was so proud of him when he published his first one,
Hero,
about a gay teenage superhero. In fact, we were both nominated for Lambda Literary Awards in 2007—he for Best Children’s/Young Adult Novel and I for Best Men’s Memoir/Biography for
Mississippi Sissy
. Perry wanted us both to fly out to Los Angeles where the awards ceremony was being held that year, but I talked him out of it. I told him there was no chance that we would win and if only one of us did then the other would feel a bit left out. We did participate in a reading of that year’s nominees from the East Coast at New York’s LGBT Community Center, however, and Perry surprised me when, before he read from his book, he singled me out for how important I had been in his life when he first moved to the city and how much it meant to him to be a part of a reading that night with me.

We ended up both winning the Lambda Literary Awards for our books that year. When I found out the next day about our winning, I telephoned him. He hadn’t heard, so I was the one giving him the news. He started to cry and then I did too. We’d come a long way together from that Toys for Tots party.

In the year since that phone call about the Lambda Awards we had rekindled that friendship and spent a lot more time with each other on the phone and hanging out at our local Starbucks on 19th Street. It was good to get his phone call that day in 2008 when I was feeling so low about my life and the work on this book. “Do you think it’s a creative crisis or a spiritual one?” Perry asked me. “Sometimes I can feel as if I’m depressed, but it’s more of a spiritual malaise each time. Me? I head over to Grace Church for some prayer and solitude and meditation and partake in the Eucharist,” he told me.

“I’m not sure, Perry, if the Eucharist is the solution,” I told him, afraid to tell him that it might be the drugs I was partaking in that were causing the problem.

“Have you ever heard of the Camino?” he asked.

“I don’t think so. There was a kind of combination car and pickup truck when I was a kid called an El Camino,” I told him. “It was a Chevrolet.”

Perry laughed. “No, Becky Thatcher,” he said, calling me the name he called me when he was in a campier mood than usual and his other nickname for me, Tom Sawyer, wouldn’t suffice.

“Okay, Huck,” I said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You don’t know? I love it when I know something you don’t know,” he said. “It’s a spiritual pilgrimage across northern Spain. Shirley MacLaine wrote a book about walking it. I’ll get you a copy. Want to meet at Starbucks later this week at our usual time? I’ll bring it to you. There’s another book in Germany that’s a huge hit by someone whose name I can’t pronounce—something like Kierkegaard but not Kierkegaard. I can’t remember off the top of my head. I thought of buying the rights to Walden since the spiritual aspect fits into our family-oriented mission here, but I think it’s finally a bit too irreverent. It hasn’t been translated into English or published in America yet. And there’s a Paulo Coelho book about his walking it too. I do think there’s a film to be made somehow about the Camino. I’ve been trying to figure it out. I would love to walk it myself, but with all the back trouble I’ve been having and this chronic fucking pain from it I could never make it. It’s also called the Way of Saint James. I warn you, though—it’s very Catholic.”

“Well, I bought a ticket to New Orleans for a change of scenery. That’s about as Catholic as I can handle right now,” I told him. A snowy February had given way to a bitterly cold lion-like first week of March that was just blowing in. After all my years in New York, the memory of the quiet beauty of that first snowy Mississippi night had given way to the reality of the beige slush of New York sidewalks. I had to escape the weather, if not myself. “I can see you at Starbucks, though. Bring Shirley’s book. I’ll read it. Thanks. Love you,” I said.

“You too,” he said.

After meeting Perry at Starbucks later that week, I came home and put the Shirley MacLaine book he brought me on my bookshelf. I didn’t take it with me to New Orleans as he’d suggested. The next day I boarded Archie at his favorite kennel (this was before Teddy came into our lives) and headed for New Orleans to gather myself and try to figure out the funk I was in. I’d often head Archie-less in the past down to New Orleans to write and drug and drink and fuck and either feel something perverse and new that would move me forward, or, failing that, get so high and stoned I’d deplete all feeling and start anew.

Sitting at the Meauxbar Bistro on North Rampart the Saturday of March 8, 2008, I ordered a hamburger and a vodka and read
The New York Times
. In the past, this was the initial antidote I would self-prescribe for any semblance of depression or, at least, the aching loneliness that could creep into my life and settle into my chest like the low hum of an electrical current. Not even Archie’s company—or Perry’s—could cure it at that point. But sometimes a deliciously grilled patty of ground sirloin and a vodka on-the-rocks could. The Old Gray Lady smudged my greasy fingers as I slowly read each of her sections and calmed my mind with thoughts of the world’s woebegone state and not my own.

That Saturday evening a profile in the
Times
by reporter Mark Landler caught my eye. Finishing my hamburger and ordering one more vodka before returning to my hotel room at The Soniat House on Chartres Street, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Yet another moment of kismet was occurring in my life. The title of the
Times
story was “A Pilgrimage Tale (Not Chaucer’s) Amuses and Inspires.” The story, with a dateline of Dusseldorf, Germany, concerned a German comedian to named Hape Kerkeling and his pilgrimage on the Camino. The article was all about the book that Perry had mentioned in passing only a few days before. Mr. Kerkeling, I learned, had kept a journal during his trek across Spain to palliate his own palpable loneliness but had locked the journal away once he returned home. He didn’t have any plans to write a book about his experiences until he discussed his pilgrimage on a talk show. A publisher then called him with a proposal. “The Camino really begins after you’ve finished it,” he said in the article. “Life becomes more challenging.”

Could life really become more challenging than it had been the last year or so? I wondered. But when I put down the newspaper I knew in that very moment that the trip to New Orleans was just the first part of the pilgrimage I had begun. That night I began to plan for my walk across the Camino. A year later I was in Spain retracing the steps of Kerkeling and countless others who have walked the Camino over the last two thousand years. Like Kerkeling, I kept a journal of my time there. Like Kerkeling, I put my notes from my journey away until right now.

4/29/09

Before falling asleep on my flight over to Barcelona I listened to my iPod trying to find the appropriate song to play as I set out on the Camino up the Pyrenees on the first day of my pilgrimage in a couple of days. I decided on “Human” by The Killers before settling in for the few hours of sleep I got before we landed here in Spain.

Took a nap once my room was ready for me, then took a five-hour warm-up walk to the Rambla and the Old City in Barcelona. At the Rambla I heard “Human” being played—was I imagining it?—and discovered that it was accompanying a street acrobatic/dance crew. I’ll take that as an omen that I am doing the right thing by being here and embarking on this trek. Bought a postcard to send to Perry and thank him for putting this idea in my head.

I can’t sleep.

I am jet-lagged.

I am worried about what awaits me on this pilgrimage.

What have I done?

What am I about to do?

4/30/09

There were nice friendly people on the train, but I was late getting to Pamplona and missed the bus to Roncesvalles. Shit. The next one is at 6:00
P.M
. It is now 2:45
P.M.
I have to sit in the bus station until then—my idea of hell as I set out on this trek that will supposedly get me closer to heaven. This is my first lesson of letting go. I am worried, though, about getting across the Spanish border into France to St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, an unofficial starting point for pilgrims, too late to get my “passport,” which gets stamped along the way to prove one has walked the Camino. I am also just worried about finding an empty bed at a hostel. I said my first prayer—not to get there in time but to stay calm and let God get me there when I am supposed to get there. The danger is competing with myself, to make this journey as quickly as I can.

One lesson: Slow down.

Another more earthly lesson: Bus stations are the same all over the world. I am looking around the station right now and seeing some scruffy young people. They look like they might be runaways. I just looked into their dirty faces and realized my face might look just that dirty and emaciated in a month after walking the Camino. One more prayer, one more lesson: God, don’t let me be running away but toward.

*   *   *

I am now writing in my bed in St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port.

Back at the bus station in Pamplona, a black man from Toronto sat down next to me. His name was Basel and he told me his lovely accent was a Barbadian one. He too had come to Pamplona on the 9:20
A.M.
train and was about to walk the Camino as well. He too had gotten lost.

“Why are you walking the Camino?” I asked him.

“My path in life seems to be changing, so I thought I’d walk this path to see if it could point me in the right direction,” he said, reflecting my own reasons.

I asked, “Are you Catholic?”

He chuckled dismissively. “Far from it,” he said. “Very far, in fact. I am an ordained Methodist minister.”

“I was raised a Methodist as well,” I told him, remembering that first day I had gone to the Methodist church with my mother back in Mississippi.

“But this is not a religious trek we are about to undertake,” he told me. “It is a spiritual one. I came to terms with being a gay man two years ago and that has made me less religious yet more spiritual.” He also told me he had a seventeen-year-old daughter and a fourteen-year-old son. I didn’t ask if they knew he was gay.

We rode together on the bus to Roncesvalles and then in the taxi/van that was waiting for us pilgrims to take us across the border into France. That’s the first time I’ve referred to myself as that—a pilgrim.

We were in the last taxi to arrive tonight and there were no more rooms for us at any of the hostels. So at a kind of welcoming center we had to be matched up with whatever bed-and-breakfast that could be found with an empty bed. We had met a hippie-like couple from California in the taxi ride over. At first I thought they were mother and son, but I figured out they were a couple when they began to make out in the taxi. They offered to get a room with the minister, but he declined, saying he would get one with me. The look of panic in my eyes—not only at that thought but also at not fully understanding anything the French intake person at the welcome center was saying—must have scared him off. Thank God. Funny. That’s the first time I’ve thanked God on this spiritual trek as well.

So …

I have a room to myself my first night. Perfect for this solitary man who is about to walk deep into his own solitude.

5/1/09

I didn’t finish writing last night because the proprietress of my bed-and-breakfast opened my door at 10:00
P.M.
and said “Finis!” before abruptly switching off my light. This morning at breakfast I referred to her as “the sergeant” and everyone around the table smiled knowingly. There was a very handsome—pretty, actually—preppy young guy from Austria named Toby. German friends walking the path together who said their names are Peter and Elga. An Irish father and son. And a Canadian woman who said she was a newly divorced schoolteacher literally walking away from her marriage. That’s why she was embarking on the Camino. Everyone seemed to be embarrassed by her acknowledging such a personal reason right off the bat to a breakfast table full of strangers, but I was oddly touched by her forthrightness. We exchanged a smile over the others’ frowning discomfort.

Yesterday when I was getting my “passport” stamped in St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port—they call it one’s credentials in France—the woman who was doing the intake kept saying, “Don’t walk the difficult route over the Pyrenees, but walk the alternative one around the mountains and along the river.” Someone standing next to me interpreted her warning to us, “It gets too cold up there, too strenuous, too much snow—two people died last month going over the mountain. Don’t do it. Listen to an old woman like me.”

When I got to the fork in the road to make the choice about how I was going to begin the Camino, I instinctively chose the harder route. I’d been taking my altitude sickness pills for two previous days in anticipation of a mountain climb. And I didn’t come all this way to take an easier path. This is as much a physical test in my fifties as a spiritual one. In my forties I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. What will my sixties bring? Will I even live that long?