I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (4 page)

“Do you know about the Camino in northern Spain?” I asked him as the waiter handed us two forks. “It’s a spiritual path that people have walked for two thousand years. I’m doing it in a month. I’m walking from France. Over the Pyrenees. And, if I make it, all the way across Spain to Santiago, where Saint James is said to be buried in the cathedral there.”

“And what do you hope to find once you start walking?” asked Jackman.

“I don’t know. I’m hoping it finds me,” I said. “I feel somehow I’m already walking the Camino, having decided to do it. Coincidences are becoming even more heightened. Everything is beginning to connect. I just finished Shirley MacLaine’s book
The Camino
about her own walk along the path. She talks about her inner spiritual journey in it as much as the trek itself. There are even astral projections in it. Things like that. But all these heightened coincidences did begin to happen to me while I was reading her book.”

“Yeah? I’m listening. This kind of stuff fascinates me,” said Jackman.

“I was in Starbucks reading Shirley’s book when the door opened and I looked over and saw the most beautiful boy I think I’ve ever seen,” I told Jackman. “He kind of looked like an astral projection himself. He was backlit by the sun and his blond wavy hair seemed to be encircled by a halo. I guess he looked more like an angel than an astral projection, but angels like that don’t look at me anymore now that I’m past fifty, so instead of cruising him I turned back to Shirley’s book. A few minutes later, the angel tapped me on the shoulder and said he couldn’t help but notice what I was reading and asked if I was going to walk the Camino. He told me that he had walked it the year before but had to stop before he made it all the way because one of his knees blew out when he reached Burgos. We talked for a while about his experiences walking it and he gave me his name and number and e-mail in case I wanted to talk some more. His last name was Amore. He was an angel named Love. Can you believe that?”

“Yes. I can,” said Jackman. “I do.”

We sat in silence for a moment. “Have you seen Geoffrey Rush on Broadway in Ionesco’s
Exit the King
?” I then asked him.

“Yeah. I did. It was amazing,” he said.

“Yeah. It was,” I agreed. “Did the play speak to your own fear of death like it spoke to mine?”

“Of course,” said Jackman, taking a final bite of cake. “Not at the time, particularly, because I was so engrossed in Geoffrey’s performance and the virtuosity of it. But I woke up the next morning to meditate and the first thing that came to my mind was that brilliant … well … not a description so much as a showing, a sharing of that oblivion, the casting off of everything in that last monologue when the queen is talking and he, as the king, physically, silently, did what he did. That’s what meditation is. It’s that natural shedding of all this stuff. It was a completely different meditation for me the next morning after seeing
Exit the King
and I’ve been meditating for fifteen years. But it somehow changed my view, my perspective, what they call in Sanskrit your
bhavana,
which means what you bring to something, what you feel about something. I realized anew what a gift meditation is. It’s dying twice a day. I’d never thought of it that way. It is a practice of dying—what it’s like to get rid of the ideas, the desires, the body even. There is a part of meditation that is a feeling of bodilessness.”

Jackman turned and now looked right at me. There was no steeliness in his stare, no accusatory cast, as there had been years earlier in Sam Shepard’s, just utter stillness that, in turn, stilled me with its stern regard. He touched my arm. “I want to ask you a question, Kevin,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind. But I feel I must, in all seriousness, ask you this. Have you fucked the angel?”

And with that, I had the sensation of leaving my own body by burrowing down to its deepest desire, the seam in its ore. Jackman had just summed up my whole dilemma. It was the journey—the trudge—I had been on my whole life. How do I fully combine the spiritual with the carnal? Was this why the Camino beckoned me so? “Not yet,” was all that I could answer.

TWO

The Climber

Because my 1960s Mississippi boyhood was bracketed by the deaths of my parents I became lost in the wilds of an overgrown sorrow, a place even scarier and darker than Mississippi was in 1963 and 1964. It was, I have since come to realize, the tragic unruliness of my life and all that surrounded me that caused me to seek refuge in the world of celebrity even then. Kennedy was assassinated in the same year both my parents died. Medgar Evers was gunned down. Freedom Summer occurred, the decomposing bodies of Schwerner and Chaney and Goodman found in an earthen dam up in Neshoba County where my uncle Doots owned the hardware store off the town square in Philadelphia.

It was not the make-believe quality of show business that attracted me. It was instead that one could exert such control over that make-believe. I hovered closer and closer to the TV screen because happily-ever-after only happened, as far as I could figure out, there inside it where narrative after narrative came to nest. Sitting in front of that TV screen is where, in 1965, I built my own nest after my parents died. I would not only seek it out—narrative in all its forms—but begin to look on my own life as narrative as well.

Andy Griffith’s make-believe life in Mayberry was what I longed for mine to be and found comfort not only in the show but also for the first time in longing itself. Yet I could only visit Mayberry on Mondays after Lucy with her latest made-up last name had helped me laugh. Sundays were for Ed Sullivan and the Ponderosa and the pearled blindfold of Arlene Francis. Tuesdays were for Red Skelton and
Petticoat Junction
. Wednesdays,
The Beverly Hillbillies.
Thursdays,
Bewitched
.

But after yet another long week in fourth grade, Friday night was the one I lived for. That’s when my favorite two Wests would stir me with an unseemly appreciation for inseams and pet ocelots. Robert Conrad starred in
The Wild Wild West
and his tightly tailored nineteenth-century secret agent trousers barely hid the treasures buried beneath them. I’d sit in front of the TV screen and try to get just the right angle to catch the best view of the preening Conrad. Anne Francis, a half hour later, was the star of
Honey West,
a twentieth-century sleuth in possession of the pet ocelot that almost made her as exotic to me as that beauty mark beneath her lower lip. I’d skip
The Addams Family,
which came on during the half hour between those two shows—the idea of family macabre enough that first year I was without parents—and take a hurried bath before carefully pointing a Bic pen (my Honey West ritual) beneath my own lower lip, inking on a beauty mark as perfect as a period, the punctuation on a sentence my flesh kept trying to write.

On Saturday I chose
The Hollywood Palace
over Rod Serling’s western,
The Loner,
starring Lloyd Bridges. I tried
The Loner
once—the name appealed to me even then—when Brock Peters starred as a black Union soldier going home to see his father, who had been lynched by the Klan the night before Peters arrived, which proves just how surreal the world was for me back then, for it was Rod Serling who gave me my one dose of reality on the TV screen. I quickly turned the channel back to
The Hollywood Palace
and saw for the first time three other black people who blended more smoothly into the happily-ever-after world I was creating for myself. I stood and mimicked their movements—these women who dared to deem themselves the Supremes—and surprised myself with the ease with which my hips, my hands, my head mirrored their rhythms, my grandfather peering in from the hallway door and ducking quickly back behind it when I did a pivot identical to Diana Ross’s and caught his disdain at such a display.

On Saturday afternoons I made sure to have the old Zenith turned to yet another rerun of Johnny Weismuller in one of his twelve Tarzan movies that the local CBS station in Jackson would air as a weekly double feature with one of the twenty-six episodes of
Jungle Jim,
Weismuller’s follow-up 1950s TV series. My younger brother and sister would be running about the yard playing their usual Saturday afternoon games while I, sitting inside, would sink deeper and deeper into the sadness about our parents’ deaths. I would be wondering if my mother and father were together in heaven, as I was told they were in both dismissal and comfort by the adults always hovering about that first year, or whether death had made them disappear altogether. Obliterated them. Blown them away like the dust the preacher on both occasions had said they’d become.

Mostly, however, I’d wonder if it had turned them into bits of the darkness that I stared into when refusing to fall asleep. My fear that year was a second abandonment as they purposefully slipped together further and further away, death the place where they had escaped me. I’d lie awake trying to memorize their faces or how different their flesh felt when I’d tug at them, touch them, parenthood still tactile when they were taken away from me. I’d even try to conjure their different smells. But it was the sounds of their voices I missed the most when they’d talk down the hall on other nights when they were still alive and the low hum of their presence lulled me to sleep, how they’d overlap each other, laugh, then lower their laughter before laughing some more. I even missed the troubled sighs that would invariably slip from them in my sissy presence. I lay in bed that first year of their absence as their combined sigh-less silence grew louder and louder, louder than the crickets, louder than the creak of my mattress, louder than my grandfather’s snores in the next room that goaded me to stay awake if he so easily could not. It was not that I was scared of the pitch-blackness of a Mississippi country night. Just the opposite. I welcomed it, for I could then be a sentinel, staring straight into it, if prayers were answered and my parents were sent back to me to be discerned in such utter darkness.

Some nights I’d pretend that darkness was the chalkboard at the beginning of the hospital show
Ben Casey,
on which symbols were written and a man’s voice intoned, “Man, woman, birth, death, infinity.” I’d lift my hand toward the darkness left in front of my face by my parents’ deaths and pretend to trace the symbols into it and intone in my tired little whisper, “Man, woman, birth, death, infinity,” trying to keep myself awake.

Each night I traced those symbols in the darkness I’d remember that awful day I drew them for my mother on a piece of paper when she was in her real hospital room and I had pointed out what each had meant, trying to impress her and cheer her up and take her mind off the pain with which her by then brittle, brutally thin body, nothing but cancer cells sheathed in the flimsiness of a hospital gown, was wracked. I had memorized the names of the symbols especially for my visit that day because she loved
Ben Casey
and I’d overheard her complain to my grandmother during my last visit that her own real doctors weren’t as cute as he was. Dr. Casey had the swarthy good looks of my already dead father and I knew somehow what she was really saying was that she missed my father as much as I did. “Is that why you like Ben Casey, Mama, ’cause he looks like Daddy did?” I asked her when I was left alone with her that day to draw those symbols while my grandmother took a break to get some lunch.

My mother started to say something but then screamed out in pain and grabbed her bony body beneath the hospital bed’s tightly tucked sheets. “Kevin, I’m sorry!” she moaned, then screamed out again. Another scream. Another. Then another. I backed up against the wall as far away from her screams and her pain and her writhing as I could get without leaving her alone in the room. A nurse came bustling in, her brogues screeching on the well-waxed tile floor sounding almost like my mother’s screams, which kept on coming. The nurse had a bottle with her and hung it from the pole next to my mother’s bed. A tube and needle dangled from the bottle and swayed to and fro, its shadow like an agitated snake appearing suddenly in the room along with the nurse. I pressed my body against the wall and whispered “Man, woman, birth, death, infinity, man, woman, birth, death, infinity” to calm my fear as I watched the nurse find a vein in my mother’s arm. Another nurse then entered to hold my mother down so the first nurse could stick that dangling snake-like needle in her vein. Whatever was in the bottle they had hung from the pole filled the needle and then my mother’s vein and then her body, instantly calming her writhing. The second nurse left, never having looked my way, but the first nurse stopped and cupped my face in her hand and asked if I wanted a Popsicle. I shook my head no, freeing myself. My mother moaned behind her. The nurse left and I walked over to the bed and asked my mother if she wanted to drink some water. She nodded yes with her eyes closed and, on tiptoe, I put the bent straw from a glass of water into her mouth. A bit dribbled down her chin and I wiped it off with my finger. I stared at the needle in her arm. I looked at the veins in my own arm. I wanted a needle in one of mine so I could feel what my mother was feeling. I was tempted to pull the needle out of her arm and stick it into me so I too could feel that instant calm. Instead I watched the liquid in the bottle—something I’d heard the nurses call morphine as they walked away down the hallway moments before—slowly empty into my mother’s stilled body. A smile creased her dry lips. She moaned again and sighed, but not out of pain. Something else seemed to cause her moans now, her sighs, something much like what could elicit such moans and sighs from her when I’d hear them in happier times as I hid in her closet with her clothes and shoes, back when my father was still alive and lying with her on their bed. Her eyes still closed, she reached up with her hand toward the utter darkness my father’s death, her husband’s, had left in front of her own face. She traced in the air the symbols that I had just drawn for her. “Howard,” she then said my father’s name instead of intoning the names of the symbols. “Howard, you’re here. Do you see him, Kevin? Say those symbols again for Daddy. Your son’s so smart, Howard. Kiss me. Ben Casey. Howard. Hold me. You’re here.” I stared at the needle sticking in her arm. Was that what was making her so happy so suddenly? Was that all it took to take her pain away when I could not with my recitation of symbols from some silly TV show? She stopped talking to my father. She stopped talking to me. She was completely quiet. An indecipherable bliss had settled over her. I stood in her silence and watched her drift away.