Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  MUSTERING

  WE DIDN’T KNOW till the last minute whether we’d make it to Washington for the March. I couldn’t pack; I couldn’t even think. In those last days I was on a scavenger hunt for medicine, a doctor who would somehow halt the downward slide. I was just coming off four weeks of radiation—my second course of it in three months, only this time it hadn’t worked. My radiation team had triumphed in the first go-round, excising a cluster of KS lesions on my penis, more horrible to contemplate than causing any pain or problems making water. Radiation hadn’t even hurt. That is, until the radiation burn came on at the end of treatment. Two weeks of walking bow-legged as a cowboy, wearing boxer shorts sized XXL so as not to rub myself the wrong way.

  But this second course was a trickier business. The area to be zapped was my left thigh, which had been swelling with edema for some months now, returning to “normal” size only after a night spent prone in bed. No pain. You couldn’t see anything—no purple spots, I mean—and for months my oncologist’s advice was to leave it alone. The thigh hadn’t really “bloomed” yet, and Dr. Thommes wanted to keep me off chemo as long as possible. This is called buying time in the cancer business. Besides, I had a slot in a protocol at UCLA for a new drug that showed promise in treating KS, and I’d have to drop out of the study if I was taking chemo. The problem was, the UCLA drug still wasn’t available—a monthly broken promise by the pharmaceutical company, which kept finding reasons to postpone the study. My swollen leg did not factor into their decisions.

  All my oncology team agreed I’d better go ahead with more radiation, for the area along my inner thigh had begun to harden—turning “woody,” to use their grisly euphemism. Clearly the KS had spread to my lymph system. Still, I plunged ahead confidently, stoked at having been given back my penis minus the purple nasties, convinced my thigh would respond as quickly.

  But two weeks into treatment the leg was swelling more, not less. Blips of lesions began to bloom on the surface of the radiated skin. The most difficult aspect of all of this—getting over to the hospital every day, finding a parking space without resorting to my Uzi—had finally become a physical challenge. I’d developed the beginnings of a gimp as I struggled to get out of the car and made the trek to Radiology.

  They finally gave up on my thigh, muttering in frustration about this “leg thing.” It was cropping up more and more these days, it seemed, and dodging the zap of their x-rays. I could’ve told them that my very first case of AIDS—Cesar in 1983—had started with a leg like mine, swelling over the next two years till it was truly the size of a tree trunk, woody indeed. Then it began to suppurate and developed gangrene, not perhaps the thing that took him in the end but the major assault of his illness. I knew about this thing. But since it was time to move on to chemo, I blocked all memories of the sufferings of the past. Surely treatment had advanced in the ten years since César had been experimented on.

  What it all had to do with Washington was that my first dose of chemo was scheduled for Tuesday, the 20th of April, the day before we were leaving for the March. Don’t worry, the chemo team reassured me, we can take care of this. Sounding ominously like the radiation team a month before, though it seemed bad faith to bring that up now. Perversely, now, I missed the radiation staff—missed even the daily trips to Century City Hospital. As if to leave behind the brute technology of zapping were to wave goodbye to a simpler world, Arcadian compared to the exigencies of chemo.

  Still, they all agreed I could go to Washington as planned, though warning me I wouldn’t be at my best for a few days after. Meanwhile they would withhold the really toxic drug in the chemo arsenal, the one that takes your hair and makes you want to throw up all the time. For that they would wait till we got home. Despite these assurances, Winston and I were gun-shy. The previous June, just hours before we were to leave on a book tour, the bags packed, my doctor called and ordered me into the hospital. My brain scan had revealed that I was abloom with toxoplasmosis (I was turning into a veritable garden of exotic flowers), thus explaining my peculiar site-specific headaches, as if I’d been beaned by a golf ball. There followed the arduous hit-and-miss of trying to find a treatment I wasn’t allergic to. We stopped the infection with 566C80, a last-ditch protocol. My brain had been stable for seven months, but the memory of unpacking lingered, a curse on flying away.

  And now the headaches had returned. The doctors deemed it prudent that I submit to another brain scan. Which I did on the Monday before the Wednesday departure. I was scarcely able to keep the two emergencies separate in my head, the brain infection and the cancer—it was like careening down a mountain road and having to steer two cars at once.

  Why were we going to Washington? Our friend Victor put it most succinctly: “I guess because we’re still here.”

  On Tuesday evening when I came home from a string of doctors’ appointments, Winston had everything out, ready to go in the suitcases. My barber kindly paid a house call, hacking at my unruly mop so I would be presentable in the nation’s capital, instead of looking like the fourth Stooge. I dripped my daily IV infusion to keep from going blind. By midnight the phone hadn’t rung, so Winston went ahead and packed the cases. We hardly slept at all, expecting a six-thirty cab to the airport. I slipped a volume of Sappho’s poems into my carry-on bag, and we headed out.

  Late at night, never asleep before three, I’d taken to reading the fragments of her poems to settle myself—a respite from the brain-and-cancer obstacle course. It was Winston who’d come across one of the lyrics in his reading:

  Without warning

  As a whirlwind

  swoops on an oak

  Love shakes my heart.

  I dug out my Mary Barnard translation so he could see the full range, finding myself captivated all over again. One night I looked Sappho up in the Oxford Companion, reading aloud the citation, Winston beside me in bed. I read the part about her being “the leading personality among a circle of women and girls who must have comprised her audience.” The great poet of Lesbos, who made the island synonymous with women loving women. The entry ends with a judgment, almost casual in its certainty:

  Sappho created a form of subjective lyric never equaled in the ancient world in its immediacy and intensity.1

  Dazzling, that. I turned to Winston and said, Do you know how good you have to be to be called unequaled after twenty-six hundred years? I felt just then an enormous pride of ancestry, and a vivid sense of linkage with the language of the heart.

  Some say a cavalry corps

  some infantry, some, again,

  will maintain that the swift oars

  of our fleet are the finest

  sight on dark earth; but I say

  that whatever one loves, is.

  On the plane to D.C., fully half the passengers queer, I leafed through Vanity Fair and The Advocate and the L.A. Times, but turned again to Sappho. Caught up in her unequaled feeling, I was overcome with a great relief. Even if all the books are burned, I thought, somehow the emotions survive. Twenty-six hundred years from now, someone will still be struggling to set it all down—perhaps without any sense of ancestry, but that won’t really matter. The grope for immediacy and intensity continues.

  I understand that this is a somewhat discredited view of the classics, too romantic by half, the appropriation of classical sources and the certainty that we moderns feel just like they did, or they like us. A distinctly nineteenth-century notion, akin to the sloppy idea that we experience Democracy on a sort of continuum with Athens in the Golden Age, ignoring their slaves and the general powerlessness of women. Add to this the headache-making rift in gay and lesbian studies, where the “social constructionists” (also called “new-inventionists”) argue that there was no such thing as a gay or lesbian person until late in the nineteenth century, when “homosexual” was coined. Plato would never have thought of himself as gay, nor would Sappho or anyone else, because the world was perceived entirely differently. The post-structural theorists define wh
at “knowing” is, and it doesn’t include self-knowledge about sexual orientation.

  Doesn’t make any sense to me, but then my own limited expertise is the history of the heart, and there are no breaks in its utterance through all written time. What else do you do with a lyric like this:

  Afraid of losing you

  I ran fluttering

  like a little girl

  after her mother.2

  Self-awareness so deep it takes the breath away, whether or not the poet would ever have said she was a lesbian. (As opposed to Lesbian, which she surely was, as a resident of that deep-harbored island off the coast of Asia Minor.) I guess I have to accept that I read with a nineteenth-century eye, while secretly hoping for the passing of new-inventionism.

  In addition to which, there had just been published in the previous week a study which averred that gay people are only one percent of the population, thus starting a new firestorm of marginalization among the Christian right. A study that turned out to be checkered from beginning to end. Only men were interviewed, for one thing, and some of us were beginning to feel that queer didn’t parse that way, separating by gender. We were gender-variant if anything. And if not yet a fully unified tribe, then at least groping toward it. In addition, as Dr. Betty Berzon remarked, all the questions in the study were about sexual activity. “If you never had sex again for the next forty years,” she told me, “you’d still be gay.” But perhaps most tellingly, thirty percent of the men contacted by the researchers refused to take part in a sexual survey. The interviews were face to face, the interviewer always a woman, and there was no perception that closeted men would lie despite the assurance of “confidentiality.”

  Yet no red flags were raised in the mainstream press, which reported the study as gospel only a week before the March on Washington, with no follow-up questioning of any sort. It was left to the gay press to query the study’s methods, especially the reach for geographical balance, when clearly it was the cities that had drawn gay men and women of the postwar generations. And the coincidence of the study’s release on the eve of the high-water event of the gay and lesbian struggle was surely something short of innocent.

  Winston and I had already been in Washington in late January, 1993, when I delivered the National Book Award speech at the Library of Congress. Then, only a week after the inauguration of the new administration, there was a quickness of spirit and an optimism that were palpable in the winter air, a sense that the nation had somehow survived the tyranny and arrogance of Reagan/Bush. Twelve years in the wilderness, and a legacy so bankrupt, so indifferent to human suffering, that one wondered if anyone could jigsaw the country back together.

  The lifting of the ban on gay and lesbian personnel in the military had thrown us off-base a little. Most of our leaders in the community would never have called it the top priority. We all thought the President was going to announce an AIDS czar first thing. How could he not? We’d been waiting twelve years for some leadership in the epidemic—any leadership. What no one could have predicted was the tidal wave of homophobia unleashed by the military proposal: the pathological obtuseness of top brass, drunk on their misogynist prerogatives, coupled with the din of the Christian right.

  One shrugged the usual shrug. Better that all their sewage and paranoia were aired in public, and not kept festering in churches and locker rooms and paramilitary boys’ clubs. Decent people would surely see how crazy was the phobes’ agenda. The head of the Texas Republican Party said that homosexuality should be a capital crime, punishable by death. And yet the country as a whole remained singularly ignorant when it came to fundamentalism. No one seemed to want to draw the circle that connected the World Trade Center bombing, the killing of a doctor at an abortion clinic in Florida, the standoff in Waco. No one in America was interested in the rise of worldwide fundamentalism, the politics of retreat from the modern world. Meanwhile, the Constitutional protection offered by freedom of religion had been used to obliterate the line between Church and State. The Christian supremacists wanted a Christian nation, thank you. Freedom of religion only if the free religion was their religion.

  What was needed more than anything just then was leadership at the top: the President simply had to address the hatred. Using the bully pulpit, he could plead for tolerance and unity. Instead he held a news conference in which he seemed to suggest that gay and lesbian soldiers might be segregated, thus starting his own bonfire. He pushed the wrong button on civil rights. And though I didn’t feel personally betrayed by the printed transcript of his remarks, the silence of the White House over the next several days was deafening. No clarifications, no bully pulpit. Little did the White House staff know that in our world silence had come to equal death.

  I had been balking for several weeks about my own participation in the March, because there seemed a conscious wish among the organizers that AIDS be relegated to the background. It became increasingly clear that people with AIDS would not be on the rostrum—“because that’s not what this March is about,” as an organizer put it bluntly to a high-placed official with AIDS who wanted to speak. I couldn’t get over my own sense of disjunction. I kept envisioning a joyous parade of celebration, a giddy triumphal love-in where I did not belong. I bore no animus toward the organizers for wanting their March to be an arrival—no apologies for “lifestyle” anymore, but full participation in our rights as free citizens. I would doubtless applaud that kind of March but didn’t especially want to be there, relegated to the status of “a downer.”

  But the call went out with greater and greater urgency that all of us had to be there, if for nothing else than to prove we could rally the whole “one percent” of us to petition for equal rights. Besides, the mood had changed since the hearings had begun on the lifting of the military ban, under the chairmanship of Sister Nunn, a pufFed-up Chicken Little who thought the world would collapse if we let queers in. When we heard that the President planned not to attend, not to address the March at all, the simmering impatience made it plain that we weren’t gathering for a love-in for President Clinton.

  Not to put too fine a point on it, one began to realize that the question being raised—beyond equal rights, beyond a cure—was, what did it mean to be gay and lesbian now? We couldn’t leave it to the scholars and the pollsters, that was for damn sure. All those fights over the very name of the March, which had flared up during the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force conference in November. Bisexuals were clamoring for inclusion. By the end of the conference it was being called The March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Transsexual Rights, or some such agglomeration. Perhaps one had to go to Washington simply to discover if one still existed.

  I weathered the flight pretty well. By mid-evening on Wednesday we were in our rooms at the Park Hyatt, rooms we’d booked in November. The message light was flashing as we entered. My doctor had called from L.A. to say that the results of the MRI on my brain seemed to indicate further activity in the cerebellum. Unhappily the hospital appeared to have lost the x-rays from the previous scan six weeks ago, so there was nothing to compare the current pictures with. As if on cue, my head began to throb again. Tylenol barely made a dent.

  We decided not to get up next morning for the dedication of the Holocaust Memorial, though that was why we’d come early. In January we’d toured the exhibit models prior to installation, and the staff had invited us to be present for the public unveiling. I was rattled by what I saw, even in miniature, and impressed by its defiant challenge of historical truth. The drumbeat of the Memorial was the constant question why: Why was this allowed to happen?

  We gave our tickets to Jehan and Dwora, our lesbian friends from L.A. who were staying just down the hall. Dwora’s mother had been in the camps and still bore the tattoo on her forearm. A couple of months before, in fact, she’d been hospitalized in Florida with heart problems. The doctor who examined her blanched when he saw the blurred numbers. “That’s not what I think it is, is it?” he said, poi
nting at her arm. “No, I’m a fashion model,” Dwora’s mother replied with fine Viennese hauteur. “Didn’t you know, this is the latest thing.”

  I woke up Thursday very slowly, glad we’d decided to skip the ceremony because it was cold and rainy out. Winston returned invigorated from an ACT UP action at the White House—three hundred people strong, a third of them women, demanding increased funding for AIDS. They had gathered in Lafayette Park, but the D.C. police wouldn’t let them cross the street to the sidewalk in front of the Executive Mansion. As the cops grew more truculent and confrontive, Winston had shaken a finger at one of them. “You better behave,” he warned, “’cause there’s going to be a million of us here this weekend!”

  Already there was TV coverage of the ceremony at the Holocaust Memorial. Outdoors in the blustery chill, Elie Wiesel stood at the podium, hair so askew he appeared to have been tearing at it for days. Which he had been, actually, because another poll had been released that week, indicating that one in five Americans was ready to believe the Holocaust never happened. Wiesel had gone speechless in an accompanying interview, as if this knowledge was too much even for him, mocking as it did a half century of “witnessing.”

  But today he had reinvigorated his moral fire, gesticulating from the podium as he listed all the departments in Washington that knew. The decision not to bomb the rail lines to the camps in Poland, just miles from the military targets we did hit—all this he placed at Roosevelt’s door. And he turned like an Old Testament prophet and pointed a quivering finger at the President. Now what are you going to do about Bosnia? he trumpeted, the connection clear to any child. He’d been there himself, seen all the madness and slaughter, seen it again. The question hung in the air that blasted him about like Lear on the heath. The President cast his eyes down, waiting his turn to speak.

  A not bad speech, as it turned out, but fireless. One wondered what the world would be like if leaden had the passion of Elie Wiesel. Personally I’d rather have a leader tearing his hair out, than all the dulcet tones of a briefing with the National Security Council. Meanwhile there was little doubt, in my mind anyway, that the one in five who disbelieved the Holocaust was a real good Christian. Larry Kramer had remarked about the polls supporting the military ban, that no one would ever ask Should Jews be allowed in the military? But if such a poll were conducted, added Larry with laser precision, the Jews would probably lose.