I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (6 page)

*   *   *

When the group returned, exhilarated by their extra feat of physical daring, we slowly made our way down toward our next camp beneath the Barranco wall, which, in turn, we would go straight up the next morning at 6:00
A.M.
sharp. The acclimatization worked as we went lower and lower into the welcome lushness of a valley we approached through a concatenation of gigantic cacti. My headache disappeared. My appetite returned. Dinner that night was so rollicking that we even made the two old codgers “honorary homos” because they were cracking jokes as sexually risqué as the rest of us. It wasn’t until we heard a deafening whoop come from their tent later in the evening that we had to renege on their new titles. The sixty-nine-year-old had brought a hand-cranked radio on the climb for what we all thought were his nightly BBC news updates. Instead, he was trying to find out the score of the NFL play-offs and that night he finally heard that his beloved New England Patriots had made it into the Super Bowl. The rest of us emerged from our tents to find the two men anxious to tell us of the Patriots’ achievement.

We all, however, quickly fell silent with the sight that was before us. The moon, one night shy of its fullness in what could only be called a firmament at this altitude, was slowly rising over Kilimanjaro’s peak and whitening it even more. We all contemplated whatever thoughts were passing through our minds after the arduous success of the climb so far: tomorrow’s final ascent to the summit, our newfound camaraderie, the Patriots’ chance at a three-peat, Tom Brady’s ass.

For my part, I said a silent prayer of thanks for being right there on that mountainside and nowhere else on earth. For the first time since my diagnosis, I did not simply want to run out the clock on my life. I knew—knew with all my heart—that I wanted to live. As I watched the rising of that moon, I believed more strongly in God than I had ever believed before. I felt a divine forgiveness. But I still did not feel my own.

*   *   *

The next forty-eight hours were, as those blogs I had read predicted, the hardest of my life. We climbed for nine hours during the day—up that Barranco wall and down and up and through the Karanga Valley in a constantly spitting rain until we reached the Barafu campsite at the base of Mount Kili’s highest peak. We filled up on pasta that evening in our dinner tent before lying down for three hours. After I popped a Sustiva tablet—one of my HIV meds that should not be taken on a full stomach—my altitude sickness suddenly combined with the dizzying disorientation that Sustiva can sometimes cause. I began to panic, worried that it would be my HIV medication that would stop me from going any farther. I lay on the hard, sharp ground and begged the God in whom I newly believed to make the Sustiva cease causing its side effects. Was this a form of prayer, this begging I had been brought to? I finally fell asleep for an hour, too exhausted to beg any longer.

We were roused precisely at midnight by Ringo, our lead guide, to begin our ascent to the summit. I sat straight up and checked for any Sustiva signs. No, I concluded, all I was feeling was altitude sickness, which, believe it or not, was preferable to my HIV meds’ vertiginous side effects. Relieved, I strapped on my headlamp and layered on my clothes, grateful that all ten of us in the group had made it this far.

The scree though which one had to maneuver for the final steep four thousand feet up the mountain made it difficult to gain one’s footing in the six hours of darkness required to make it to the top. For every three steps I took forward, I slipped back one step, sometimes two. And as I climbed higher and higher, the altitude sickness became more pronounced. Suddenly those Sustiva side effects didn’t seem so bad compared to what the thinner and thinner air was now doing to my body. The frigid temperature made my teeth chatter. My heart raced faster and faster. My breath became more labored. My head began constricting around my brain—or was my brain swelling? Whichever was happening—I was too disoriented to reason it out—I had the sensation of my skull scraping against whatever was inside it until I feared for my cranium.

I hit many walls that night of the ascent and fought through all of them—the utter fatigue, that blinding headache, the recurring nausea, even hallucinations. I thought I saw small animals scurrying around my feet at several points, but as long as I could tell myself they were not real I knew I was still okay, still lucid. I was quite literally brought back to earth when the ground rumbled ferociously, then rolled beneath us. A small avalanche crashed down by us on the right. Ringo turned, more than slightly shaken himself, and remarked that in ten years of guiding groups up the mountain he had never experienced an earthquake or a volcanic reminder or whatever it was that had just happened.

Such an occurrence, however, did not scare me. I felt instead newly energized. I picked up one of the rocks that had rolled at my feet to put in my pocket as proof I had been on that mountain heading for its summit. I climbed onward with a new vigor. I looked up and saw the moon, now full, hanging close over our heads in the crystal-clear sky. The Southern Cross seemed to rest weightlessly atop my left shoulder. I saw a falling star. But I did not wish upon it. Wishes seemed an affront on such a night, when sheer will was all that seemed to matter.

*   *   *

The first to turn back that night was the married couple from Boston, the youngest two members of our group. They had made a pact that if one were to have a problem then both would return to camp. After one of them began to have trouble standing without passing out, they decided to head down. The next to follow them was my friend’s partner from GMHC. He feared edema was setting in. The rest of us were saddened by their departure but climbed steadily upward. I was third in line right behind the sixty-five- and sixty-nine-year-olds. As long as they were making it up, I was determined to follow. About seven hundred feet from Stella Point, the first milestone one reaches on the final ascent at 18,800 feet, the sun rose around us. I turned to see the morning’s rays hit the gigantic glacier I did not know had been looming right above me, its glittering beauty blinding me for a wondrous moment. I was finally certain I was going to make it to the top and began too excitedly to scramble in the scree. “Pole, pole,” said Ringo, the Swahili word—pronounced “poelee”—meaning “slowly.”

At Stella Point, as we marveled at Kilimanjaro’s crater, our friend from Mexico City collapsed in an exhausted heap and refused to keep climbing toward the summit at Uhuru. He turned back and, after taking a short break, the rest of us found what reserves of energy we had to keep climbing. A kind of comforting delirium had set in with me and I began to carry on a speedy conversation with Bernard, who had been assigned to accompany me to the top. I told him about being HIV positive and how this whole climb had been a journey toward self-forgiveness. Unlike many Africans, who still feel uncomfortable with the subject, he sweetly listened without seeming to judge me as I told him about the last three years of my life. “But time is running out on this trip,” I said as the summit came into view. “As happy as I am to make it all this way, I feel a little disappointed that I haven’t had … well … the epiphany I came seeking,” I said.

“What does this word mean?” he asked. “‘Epiphany.’”

“It’s when something dawns on you that you’ve really known all along,” I tried to explain to us both. “It’s a secret that tells itself.”

Tears stung my eyes caused by the wind as it whipped across the glacier within Mount Kilimanjaro’s deep and dangerous snow-filled crags right into my face. I looked out at the world below and all that I had left behind—my fear of death and yet my longing for it. I shivered in the unrelenting wind and heard that howl my heart had finally found. I turned and reached the summit.

*   *   *

The descent was even more difficult.

Bernard left me and assisted Babu, as the guides, using the Swahili word for “grandfather,” had nicknamed the sixty-nine-year-old. He and his sixty-five-year-old buddy, my friend’s unerringly reserved father, had also both made it to the summit through pure Yankee grit. But Babu’s knees were now killing him and the walk down on the scree would prove to be quite painful. My friend and the Columbia internist and the Martha Stewart stalwart started down ahead of them. I soon was falling behind, only a little ahead of Babu, my own knees finally giving me trouble.

My friend’s father, at one point, found himself next to me. It was easy to see where my friend had gotten his resoluteness, his pluck, for his father, head down most of the time, taciturn, had walked steadily, single-mindedly, without complaint for the last five days. “I bet when you heard about your son’s HIV diagnosis you never dreamed you would be climbing Mount Kilimanjaro with him twenty years later,” I said to him after we had walked a while in silence.

He did not take his eyes off the path ahead of us. “Yep,” he finally said. “We thought we were going to lose him in two or three years.” He dug his walking sticks deeper into the scree. “We even joined a support group of parents whose sons had just been diagnosed. Out of everybody in that group, my wife and I are the only ones who still have a son who’s alive.”

He paused.

“Is that a hawk?” he suddenly asked, motioning toward the sky with one of his walking sticks as the bird reached its pitch.

We stood for a moment.

We caught our breaths.

We stared at the hawk’s soaring grace.

“Did you have to forgive him for getting infected?” I finally asked.

“I’m religious—not as religious as I should be, perhaps—but I do believe God put my son in my life to teach me tolerance,” was all that he said, the steady clicks of our walking sticks hitting the mountain the only sounds that were left between us.

*   *   *

I was the last to make it to Barafu. Both old men had even made it back there before I had. We were allowed to rest for one hour—it had taken me three hours to make it back down—before descending for five more hours to our final camp. I had crossed over from the heady spiritual high of making the summit to the dour state when the body begins to recoil from such punishment. I had gotten through the whole climb without blisters on my feet and in those eight hours of our descent my two big toes had become encased in them. This was not what I had come to the mountain for. I wanted to be enlightened, not laid low. I was now truly suffering from exhaustion. I could barely look at the food at dinner that evening and headed for my sleeping bag at 7:30.

The next morning after duct-taping moleskin to my feet, I felt a bit better but still felt oddly depressed, having physically accomplished what I had come to do yet still not finding the one spiritual answer I had come seeking. I focused on the rain forest we were now walking back through and let go of any hope of conjuring my own forgiveness. Of all the sensations I had felt in the last few days, that was the final one that pulled at me and caused the most pain: the letting go of hope.

“Kevin!” I heard Bernard call my name from where he was now leading the group while Ringo stayed in the rear with Babu and his own pair of painful knees. “Come up here. I have something to show you.”

I limped up to Bernard’s side and he pointed to a large green plant by the path we were on. It didn’t look like anything special to me. It certainly wasn’t beautiful. Just a big green leafy thing that I had ignored in its abundance as we’d started our climb five days before.

“See this?” Bernard asked. “Every Chaga household has this plant in it. It is dry
Cena afrimontana—
more commonly known as
masare,
” he said. “But we Chaga call it the Forgiveness Plant. If we have a fight with someone in our family or a neighbor, we take a cutting from one of these plants and give it to the person that has angered us and in that way they know that all is forgiven. This is the secret that I think I am to tell you,” he whispered close to my ear. “Is this the secret you came to hear? Is this the secret that must tell itself to you?”

I watched him walk back to the front of our group. I then bent down to take a cutting from the plant in order to give it to myself. That is when I finally heard it, the sound of love itself, the low laughter of it, the overlapping of its two voices, its presence no longer a sigh of confusion but of comfort. “Kevin, honey, what are you doing?” I heard my mother’s voice. And then my father’s: “Son, there’s nothing to forgive.”

I stood.

I moved on.

I did not touch the plant.

I left it on the mountain.

THREE

The Role-Player

It was January 2009. Nineteen years had passed since I’d been on Madonna’s doorstep. It had been three years since I’d made the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. The same glow from the TV screen that would lull away all the pain that life had dealt me when I was a child in Mississippi was, however, still in my life. Honey West? She no longer walked her pet ocelot before me on the screen, but a naked man did have a leash around another naked man’s neck there in a pornographic DVD. I turned my eyes away from the image and watched the overaged urchin sitting at my desk in front of my MacBook aglow in his own kind of light. He had stopped long enough clicking through the Manhunt sex site online—where I had earlier found him; twenty-two, he’d said, versatile, he’d said, into role play, he’d said—to focus on the glass pipe he now put to his chapped lips. He lit the torch beneath the pipe’s bulb into which he had just dropped two big crystals of meth. The meth melted, then sizzled, the torch’s flame flickering shadows across the planes of the youth’s drawn beauty. His concave cheeks collapsed even farther as he sucked the resulting smoke down into his ready lungs. He put down the pipe, cooling it on a wet paper towel, and walked over to me where I lay on my bed watching him. His body knew how to be naked, how to be watched, how to walk toward me. I could not resist him as he bent down to give me the only kind of kiss he had left, puffing those sallow cheeks of his out as far as they would go and exhaling into my mouth, down into my own throat, my own lungs, as he locked his lips on mine, their chapped roughness like the loveliest of razors, until I was forced to swallow the smoke inside him he allowed now to ooze deeply down into me, the very sinew of it seeking the depths of my body. “Fuck me some more,” he whispered as the delirium hit.