The Velvet Rage (27 page)

In the retelling of my story, I find myself slipping at times into my own heroic fantasy in which I somewhat prophetically discover the secret to a fulfilling life and radically change my life for the better. But if I'm honest, I must admit that's not what really happened. Truth is, I had pushed myself both physically and emotionally beyond any reasonable limits, and I was utterly exhausted that day in Phoenix—not to mention very angry and disillusioned with my boss, whom I had come to see as an immoral corporate sellout. The quitting of my job was as much a personal temper tantrum as an enlightened choice. I was tired, pissed off, and scared of my future but more scared to die without having really lived.

Not long after I quit, the money ran out, leading to some rather drastic changes in my life. No longer could I afford the comfortable San Francisco house on the hill, the dinners out, or any of the other lifestyle features that go along with a corporate salary. Within six months, my partner and I relocated to a comfortable but very affordable “shotgun” just off Magazine Street in New Orleans. Here we could stretch our meager savings and buy mostly time to recover and rebuild our lives.

My partner at the time was a struggling artist who had enjoyed a few moments of notoriety in the art world but not enough to make a living from his paintings. He, unlike me, had never really struggled with finding his passion in life. He loved more than anything to make paintings, and he had never abandoned that love except when forced to take part-time jobs to support himself at a local deli or in a gallery selling the works of artists he had
once studied in art school. In New Orleans, where time and rent were affordable, he could paint full-time, and I began chasing my recurring dream of writing a book about my experiences as a psychologist in the corporate world.

Within eighteen months' time, we went from living a plentiful life in San Francisco to floundering in the sweltering heat of New Orleans. I wrote furiously, sending off manuscript after manuscript, hoping to publish something—anything that would help me build the all-important resume of a writer. Everything I had read for aspiring authors said virtually the same thing: if you want to be published as a writer, you have to already have been published. (If you're thinking that sounds crazy and circular, it is. But nonetheless, it is the most common advice given to beginning writers even today.) I turned every intriguing thought or memory I had into an article for publication and rushed it off to the mailbox. Surely somewhere, someone would want to publish me. And after almost two years and literally hundreds of rejection letters, it happened. The
Christian Science Monitor
, which at the time was going through a corporate downsizing of its own, asked to publish an article I wrote under the title “Memoirs of a Corporate Executioner.” The business editor, who was clearly more distraught over his own company's pending layoffs than he was enamored with my insights, published the article as a backhanded rebuttal to his managing editor. Then, shortly after publication, the
Los Angeles Times
republished the article in syndication, and, much to my amazement, within days a New York book editor with a smoker's voice and cynical laugh called and asked if I would be interested in turning the article into a book. Would I!

I was finally on my way. With half of a $5,000 advance in my hand, I went to work writing my first book. I eventually took an office in the French Quarter that I shared with another writer
who was at the time the food critic for the local newspaper, the
Times-Picayune.
I spent my early mornings riding my bike down the tree-lined avenues of the Garden District and the Creole-inspired Esplanade Boulevard, which ended at the entrance of the New Orleans Museum of Art. There, I found the Rene Magritte painting that would become the cover of my first book. Afternoons were sometimes spent sitting in the fabled eateries of New Orleans, sampling the fare and sipping Sazeracs while my office mate would chat up the chef, be it Emeril Lagasse or Susan Spicer, while the waitstaff treated us like royalty, knowing that their very jobs depended upon whatever kind remarks might be published in the following day's review. Little did they know I was just thrilled to be dining off a menu that I couldn't have otherwise afforded.

Before I published my first writings, nothing was more discouraging than reading the story of a writer that would begin with something along the lines of “as luck would have it . . .” Was luck the only secret to becoming a successful writer? Surely there had to be something more. And if not, how does one go about acquiring this luck? I found those well-meaning stories so utterly demoralizing. But now, I must say, it
was
as luck would have it. Coinciding with the publication of my first book,
Corporate Executions: The Ugly Truth About Layoffs—How Corporate Greed Is Shattering Lives, Companies, and Communities
, AT&T conducted the largest single layoff—40,000 employees—that was ever recorded. My book was thus propelled to the top of the news, and I was subsequently doing interviews for CBS's
Sunday Morning
, the
NBC Nightly News
, and
60 Minutes
. Publications including the
New York Times
,
Wall Street Journal
, and
San Francisco Chronicle
ran articles about my book and my personal story of having been a corporate “executioner.”

As it turned out, my value as a “media voice” was greater than as a writer. Despite being a frequent commentator on just about every talk and business show of the day, the sales of my book were mediocre. Nonetheless, I finally had my “writer's resume” and had established myself as a presentable, media-capable author.

It's hard to pinpoint the day, month, or even year when it happened, but somewhere in all of the bright lights of television studios and the limo rides between airports and radio stations, I once again forgot about those moments of bedside contentment in San Francisco. The siren's call of momentary fame and the promise of writing the next best seller hijacked my plans for the future. I was once again seduced by the fantasy of success rather than the quiet comfort of contentment.

I published several more books, each one a successive attempt to charm the publicity gods and achieve best-seller status, over the next few years. I moved from New Orleans to New York City, then to Key West, Florida, and ultimately to Santa Fe, New Mexico. A best seller remained just beyond my reach, and my limited fame proved to be as fickle as the stock market itself, ebbing and flowing with the angst of the times.

In 1996, the plague that had personally taken a home in my veins took a turn for the worse. My life partner fell seriously ill with pneumocystis pneumonia. He had gone in to the doctor that morning with what we thought was bad chest congestion and was admitted into the hospital that afternoon with a potentially terminal illness. I was scheduled to begin the book tour for my second book,
Beyond the Looking Glass
, the next day. Racked with anxiety over his health, my own dark future—for I was quite certain I would soon follow him into the hospital and likely the grave—and feeling the pressure of my publishing company, which had spent a great deal of money to arrange the book tour,
I arranged for a friend from San Francisco to stay with my partner in Key West while I began the tour. Miraculously (and there is no hyperbole here), protease inhibitors had just been approved by the FDA for the treatment of HIV. Like Lazarus rising from the tomb, within days of receiving this new medication my partner came back from the edge of death and soon returned to work in the old beer locker he had converted into a painting studio.

Unfortunately, although the new medications could bar the plague from the door, they did nothing to quell the rising existential anxiety that was coming to a boil in those of us who had buried more friends and lovers before the age of thirty than most people will in a lifetime. Life, it seemed, had played a cruel hoax on so many of us. Out of our tightly clenched fists it wrestled our lust for life and dangled us above a painful and horrible death. Then, on a whim, it simply ducked, turned on its heels, and mockingly laughed. How were we to ever trust life again?

In 1997 I encountered another unexpected turn in the road. On July 2, I received a call from my cousin's partner, Sylvia, that she was dead. Dead? At age forty-two? “But she's a lesbian,” I remember thinking as Sylvia and I ended the call. “They don't get AIDS.” For Betty Lynne, it wasn't AIDS but her diabetes that took her. I was more devastated by her death than anything I can remember before or since. She was the only person in my large family that truly accepted me as a gay man. She was my rock, my soul, my conscience. Until her death we had spoken by phone virtually daily. I could feel the dark, ugly mire of bitterness and resentment rising in me. Would everything—virtually anything—that meant something to me be ripped from my tattered life?

The last time I saw Betty Lynne was just a week before Sylvia unexpectedly found her dead on the kitchen floor clutching
Thich Nhat Hanh's book
On Becoming Peace.
It had been a particularly clear and warm evening in June, and we sat on the deck outside the house looking up at the stars. As we sat for hours, talking as we often did, she said at one point, “Whichever one of us goes first will be the guardian angel of the other.” I had no way of knowing at the time how important those words would be to me—and still are today.

The day Betty Lynne died, I called my parents, who were preparing to leave on vacation, to tell them that their niece had died. My mother, not one to allow much to interrupt her plans—much less the sure-to-be-uncomfortable funeral of her lesbian niece—decided that it was best if they went ahead with their vacation plans and not attend the funeral.

I remember sitting at the piano, playing for the funeral. As I gazed into the audience, clearly one-half of the congregation was my rather uptight family, and across the aisle the other half was the most colorful collection of lipstick lesbians and gay men you'd ever see. At one point before the service had started, my cousin who went by the name “Uncle Beverly” as a waitress in a gay bar in Provincetown entered the back of the chapel clad in leather. Her throaty voice carried throughout the room as she spewed, “My God, I've never seen so many fags in one room in my life.” Necks tightened and eyes widened on my family's side, and there were scattered bursts of nervous, muffled laugher from the other side. I played the piano just a little louder.

My aunt, Betty Lynne's mother, stared stoically forward during the service, seemingly scared that the lesbian energy in the room might be catching. After the service, she refused to attend the reception being held at Sylvia and Betty Lynne's beautiful ocean-front home. She had never set foot in that den of iniquity, and she wasn't about to now that the end had come.

I will never fully understand how a mother could keep herself from seeing, if for the last time, the life her daughter had created. For if she had, she would have seen a gathering of wonderful, educated women and men who loved her daughter dearly. She would have been forced to challenge her own tightly held belief that there was something sinister about a love between two women. And that just maybe her daughter had actually found the love she herself had never found in her own life, having divorced her husband in her mid-sixties after a long and tortured marriage.

The death of Betty Lynne was the death of hope for me. My family had little to do with me because I was gay, and I could only imagine that they would secretly whisper behind my back that HIV was God's punishment for being gay. It was a dark period, and honestly, I don't remember much about it other than being very discontent, an angry and emotionally shut-down lover, and deeply cynical. My partner at the time should be awarded sainthood for all that he put up with from me.

As the century changed, the landscape of lower Manhattan was scarred, the ire of the American public turned toward terrorism, and my life once again began a radical transformation. My relationship with my partner fell apart, and I found myself living in a small studio apartment in a charming but centuries-worn adobe building in the very heart of old Santa Fe. While not nearly as distraught as I had been when I walked away from my corporate career, I again found myself digging deep to find the passion I had on occasion tasted but never been able to hold in my life. I loved writing, but now I found myself with nothing inspired to write.

All throughout this journey, I continued to work more or less as a psychologist, and this above anything else brought me a
quiet contentment. But now, after having followed my now ex-partner to Santa Fe, where his paintings sold to well-heeled tourists for a small fortune, I lived in a state where I had no license to practice as a psychotherapist. The road to gaining that license was particularly long and difficult, for New Mexico's regulations were designed to restrict an influx of out-of-state medical professionals. Living alone, struggling financially to make ends meet, I found myself working on the San Juan Pueblo, about an hour north of Santa Fe. Here I could gain the supervision I needed to meet the requirements of licensure as a psychologist, which would allow me to once again practice as a psychotherapist. I became the clinical director for a small drug-and-alcohol treatment facility called New Moon Lodge.

On my first day of work on the pueblo, I remember pulling up on the dirt road and parking in the dust-filled yard next to the mobile home that was my office. As I walked through the yard, my shiny black Prada shoes disappeared in the mounds of fine dust that seemed to cover everything in New Mexico. I cried without tears as I brushed aside the sad and toothless dog on the porch and opened the half-broken screen door that opened into a waiting room covered in worn carpet of a color that was virtually indistinguishable from the brownish-red dust from outside.