Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  We conferred with the doctor again by phone. In consultation with the infectious disease specialist, he was prescribing two more drugs for me to take along with the 566C80. We were to arrange with the pharmacist in L.A. to send them on to Washington by overnight mail. I was still feeling pretty rocky from Tuesday’s chemo dose, and the throb in my head hadn’t abated. But I had the wherewithal to tell him I’d proven allergic to one of those drugs last summer. He told me to go ahead anyway, starting with a quarter capsule, working up to dosage. The missing x-rays had finally been located, but it wasn’t clear if they’d been looked at yet. Dr. Aronow, my neurologist, was on his way to Washington for the March.

  Thursday afternoon we took a cab with Jehan and Dwora and made our way to the Jefferson Memorial. The wind chill off the Tidal Basin was daunting, so that we had to walk with our heads bent. Very few tourists had come this far today, but we waved to several queers we knew from Los Angeles. The city was filling up with us. Yet we had the domed interior practically to ourselves as we made our shivering circuit, reading Jefferson’s words on the walls. The ringing condemnation of slavery, from a man who kept house slaves himself:

  Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the Book of Fate than that these people are to be free.

  The groping toward the future, setting the course for Enlightenment:

  … laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.

  One wondered if gay and lesbian freedom was part of the change he foresaw—a man who probably hadn’t the shred of a clue about the love that dare not speak its name. Did this faith in the constant betterment of the citizenry, the certainty that slavery would collapse of its own guilty weight, did its reach extend to peoples he couldn’t conceive? His friend John Adams used to say that he studied politics and war so his son could study philosophy and his grandson poetry. Did Jefferson trust the poets to conceive a world he wouldn’t even recognize, as long as it held to the first commandment, that All men are created equal?

  What would the mood of the March be? Celebration or dissent—or both in concert? Would we leave no doubt that we were assembling here for patriotism’s sake? Demanding that America honor its own vision of a place for everyone. No more invisibility. “I hold it,” Jefferson wrote to Madison in 1787, “that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” Let us have a little rebellion then. Let the mood be so diverse that not even the most rabid phobes could say we were all the same—not godless deviants, nor a threat to their white-bread kids, but a people newly free, of every kind and stripe imaginable, with earrings to match.

  We left the Jeff and had the taxi let us out at Dupont Circle, the heart of gay and lesbian D.C. Strolling up Connecticut Avenue, we could feel the gathering force-field of people arriving from everywhere. At Lambda Rising, the line to get into a bookstore stretched all the way to the corner. Storefront spaces had been leased up and down the avenue to sell buttons and tee-shirts and programs of the weekend’s events. It was our first encounter with the tee-shirt that read STRAIGHT BUT NOT NARROW, proudly sported by a hetero couple holding hands and beaming at us, their brothers and sisters.

  We ducked into a basement coffee shop to rest because my leg was gimping up. The queer behind the counter promised us the best hot chocolate we’d ever had, a recipe specially made for the March. As we sat with our mugs at the counter, a gaunt man with a knapsack came in, dressed in combat fatigues and sporting a chestful of lift-the-ban buttons over his combat ribbons. He told us he had just driven in from San Diego with a carful of gay vets. He was weak and tired but ready to march. He and his group were camping out in a campground in Maryland, where they froze their nuts off the night before. He’d decided to bunk in a friend’s apartment for the rest of the weekend, because “I don’t want to go home sick.”

  That night we were meant to attend the National Minority AIDS Council dinner in the Great Hall at the Library of Congress. But by six o’clock I was being hammered by a migraine and a general air of malaise, like being seasick in calm waters, and the boat wasn’t even moving. So we made our apologies and only heard later that night, in a flurry of telephone bulletins, that Larry Kramer and a group of ACT UP-pers had disrupted the evening, preventing Donna Shalala from speaking. Our source, a member of the upper-echelon leadership, fretted and clucked that we mustn’t be seen as disrupting free speech and assembly. I bit my tongue, glad that Larry was out there making noise. I was no fan of the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who had not so much as mentioned the A word since taking office three months before.

  I finally connected with Larry by phone on Friday morning. No, he said, they hadn’t prevented Madame Secretary from speaking. They’d simply passed around a bunch of leaflets, and then Larry and a woman of color had stood behind the Secretary at the podium, holding up signs that said DONNA DO-NOTHING. It was painful to think of the clash between the organizers of the dinner—some of whom I knew had fought long and hard to make this event happen—and the more aggressive tactics of the street activists. It was billed as a Congressional Dinner and tided “Our Place at the Table.” But there probably wasn’t a more appropriate place to showcase the tactical poles of the movement, our variety and our political diversity. And if push came to shove in the Great Hall, there was no question which side I was on: “ACT UP, fight back, fight AIDS!”

  There was a documentary crew that had been following Winston and me around for months. To us they seemed to have shot enough footage to remake Birth of a Nation, but they wanted a clip of us marching on Sunday. At this point I was scheduled to ride up front on a trolley bus, provided through the good graces of Marvin Liebman, the conservative movement’s former darling and now bete noire. So the hobbled and the ancient of days were to lead the throng onto the Mall.

  Already, though, I was starting to question the wisdom of my staying out all day Sunday, and to wonder if I’d come this far in order to miss the parade. We told the documentarians that they could accompany us to the Lincoln Memorial on Friday afternoon, in case I had to disappoint them Sunday. The Lincoln was a touchstone where we’d been planning to pay our respects for months. The weather had grown mild during the night, and with the last puffs of the passing storm pillowing the bright blue sky, Washington had recovered its gaudy airs of spring.

  We piled all four into a cab driven by an Indian, who was so friendly and eager to please that he could have been Aziz in A Passage to India, oversolicitous but not without charm. When we got to the Lincoln, I gave him twenty dollars and told him to wait for us, ten minutes at most. My cabmates gave me a look, as if I were throwing money away, at which Aziz drew himself up with dignity and said, “You think I going to steal your twenty dollars? Don’t worry, I be right here.”

  Monte and Lesli hoisted the equipment and followed me and Winston up the steps. I’d been there before, but probably not in twenty-five years. It had never struck me till now that Lincoln’s memorial temple was the size and shape of the Parthenon; not by scientific measure probably, but feelingly at least, a most moving evocation of the daddy of public buildings, and thus of the democratic Age of Pericles that built it. And having made that connection, I further realized as I climbed the steps that the Jefferson echoed in its own way the sanctuary of Athena Pronaia at Delphi. There the most heartstopping ruin is the Tholos, a circular temple with only three columns still in place and a lintel above, but enough to reconstruct a classical heaven on earth—for us nineteenth-century types anyway. It seemed nicely fortuitous that the Parthenon and the Tholos both were temples to Pallas Athena, goddess of war but also wisdom.

  There is nothing to match the Lincoln, in America anyway, for noble proportion and spiritual lif
t. You pass inside the Doric colonnade, and the columns in the entryway change to Ionic, with the ram’s-horn capitals, a subtle shift to a more sophisticated style. Still, nothing quite prepares you for the power of the seated Lincoln—not the hundred cherry-blossom postcards that have passed through your hands over the years, nor even the patriotic swoop shots from helicopters that crop up in every civic documentary across the political spectrum.

  You approach this massive marble pedestal, with the figure by Daniel Chester French looming above you. The toe of Lincoln’s boot is off the pedestal, just above your head—a human touch that suggests a tall and rangy man who’s too restless to sit in one place for long. And it’s true, the eyes are haunted—staring out over the nation’s city with a prophet’s unshifting gaze, melancholy but also rock-solid sure that the nation’s wounds would heal. No wonder it draws so many whose hope is faltering.

  On the wall to the left is the Gettysburg Address; on the right the Second Inaugural. With malice toward none, with charity for all. I suddenly needed to stand on the spot where Marian Anderson sang her Easter concert, barred from Independence Hall by the D.A.R. I needed to honor Eleanor Roosevelt, who resigned from the organization and pestered Franklin to approve the Lincoln Memorial site. In the end Eleanor herself didn’t attend, fearing to politicize the event even further. But there’s a lovely detail in Joseph Lash’s Eleanor and Franklin: Eleanor sitting quietly in the White House, the balcony doors thrown open, hearing the great contralto’s voice as it floated over Washington.

  All under the eyes of Lincoln, eighty years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Another quarter century later, and the tempered gaze of Lincoln—warrior and wise man—bore witness to the passion of Dr. King. I didn’t think the Lincoln of my understanding would have had any trouble equating the Civil Rights struggle of people of color with the latter-day dreams of the gay and lesbian movement. There’s too much compelling evidence in his own life—the bed he shared for four years with Joshua Speed above the general store in Springfield; the breakdown he suffered when family duties sent them apart—of the “dear love of comrades.”3

  In any case, I was choked with tears and in awe to be there, blubbering into my clip-on mike as the visit was recorded, a sort of super-video souvenir of a family trip to Washington. Standing in the shadow of the man who saved his country, it wasn’t hard to see the religious right as a sort of Confederate belligerence. Only now they were hiding behind fundamentalist morality instead of States’ Rights. And oh, how we needed a Lincoln to stand for equal justice and bind us all together again.

  It was time to move on, because we’d promised Lesli and Monte a photo op in front of the White House. We trundled into the parking lot looking for Aziz, but he’d taken off with my twenty after all. I craned my neck to try and spot him, sure he was just circling the monument and would be back momentarily. Winston and Lesli and Monte rolled their eyes at my naivete, biting their tongues to keep from saying I told you so.

  As we were coming up the street toward Pennsylvania Avenue, passing the Old Executive Office Building, we suddenly saw Larry Kramer, about to duck into a taxi directly in front of us. We raised a cry to stop him, and I clambered over to embrace him. Lesli and Monte, delirious at their luck, were already shooting. Larry introduced himself to Winston, and then we were off like a band of rebels, strolling past the Executive Mansion, Larry and I arm in arm. Though we talked by phone with a certain regularity, this was the first time I’d seen my friend in over two years.

  We gossiped first, of course. The private Larry is a total mensch, warm and loving, the definition of decency. Those who were only familiar with his heroic public stance in the fight against AIDS, his Jeremiah role, often missed the heart’s core of him. More than once during the weekend just beginning, I would hear his name taken in vain: Larry goes too far. That’s not the image we want to project. And I’d reply what I always said: What would things be like if we didn’t have at least one like this? More than a witness, more than a leader, in his own way like the Elie Wiesel who stood on the heath tearing his hair. With a constitutional inability to abide fools, was it any wonder that he shrieked and raged in this Swiftian Capitol of Fools?

  It was a wonder to me that Larry could still fight like a full-blooded warrior. Perhaps it was my own diminished capacity, fighting a pitched battle against the predations of the virus, that made me value Larry so. A stand-in for thousands of us teetering on the brink, someone who knew in his gut that a quarter of a million of us were going to die on Clinton’s watch, even if the President proved to be a visionary leader in the epidemic.

  Hearing us jabber and laugh, Winston was immediately reminded of Lincoln and Whitman. In the evening light the poet would be returning this way from the hospital, from his work as a wound-dresser. An aide would alert the President, and Lincoln would rush to the window to watch the passage of the country’s premier bard. A poet who’d freed his own soul in the process of extolling the incalculable beauty of his country and its workers. No one has ever recorded an actual meeting of the two, though Whitman was as much in awe of Lincoln as the President was of the poet. But the well-thumbed copy of Leaves of Grass in the White House stood in moving counterpoint to the great funeral ode the poet would write on the death of his hero.

  We stopped in front of the iron fence; beyond it was the great lawn sweeping up to the mansion. Larry pointed across Lafayette Park, where he used to stand as a boy in his father’s office, watching the inaugurals. We became aware of a couple of corn-fed college kids, drawn by the documentary crew and unabashedly gaping at us. One of them got up the courage to approach Larry. “I think I recognize you,” he said haltingly.

  “Well, of course you do,” I declared with a kind of avuncular pride. “This is Larry Kramer.”

  Larry squeezed my arm, adding, “And this is Paul Mo-nette. You’ve struck gold.”

  The boys were from Lacrosse, Wisconsin—this was their first march, indeed their first trip to Washington. We asked them if they were the sum of the out queers of Lacrosse, and they shrugged their agreement. “There’s another one,” hazarded the taller of the boys. “But we’re not sure if she made it.”

  It was the story of a thousand towns across the nation. Some of us making the trek to swell our ranks, ambassadors for the ones who could not come, who perhaps weren’t out of the closet yet, even to themselves. Many among us coming out to family and friends by way of announcing they were on their way to the March, using this historic moment as a goad, as a diving board if you will. And so many others blowing their savings to get here, convinced that this watershed event would serve as a measure of their own freedom and self-regard, perhaps for the rest of their lives. Something to take home to Lacrosse, Wisconsin.

  By the time we got back to the hotel I was reeling from exhaustion, the woodpecker still knocking at my head, my bum leg swollen to bursting. The overnight package had arrived from the pharmacy in L.A. I took out the three new medicines—Zithromax, Daraprim, Leucovorin, sounding like a trio of intergalactic villains out of Star Trek. I lined them up on the dresser across from the bed, staring at them. I was meant to start popping them right away, but I needed to somehow get used to them first. I was already taking thirty pills a day, not including the IV drip for CMV retinitis. How much medication could the body tolerate before the liver collapsed, or the kidneys? Not that I had any intention of rebelling, as I’d watched so many friends do—stopping all their medications cold, enough was enough, they’d rather be dead. And for a while at least they’d feel quite well, freed of the toxins and side effects of this sewer of drugs. And then they’d die.

  I rested for two or three hours, husbanding my energy, readying myself for the evening ahead. A dinner party in Georgetown had been arranged to honor me, by straight friends who were tireless allies in the gay and lesbian cause. Ties and jackets in place, Winston and Victor and I made our way to a flouncing Victorian row house off N Street. Our hosts, Bob Shrum and Marylouise Oates, greeted us with a fanf
are of enthusiasm. The guest list was still in flux, but the Speaker of the House was definitely coming. Michael Kinsley would be right over as soon as he finished shooting Crossfire. And Tom Stoddard, head of the campaign to lift the military ban, would be a little later still because he was doing Larry King Live.

  A rich mix of power politics, and to us outlanders a rare taste of being “off the record.” It was implicit in the rough-and-tumble conversation over cocktails, this quick and brainy gathering of the sawiest men and women, that the house off N Street was a journalistic safe house, no Mont Blancs and notebooks allowed. The talk was dizzyingly frank, about the filibuster and campaign reform and “how the President’s doing.” As a news junkie I could just keep up, and Winston murmured to Victor how refreshing it was that no one talked about movies. I thought of the Abolitionists, their heated meetings in parlors just like this one. (Lincoln, on being introduced to Harriet Beecher Stowe: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!”) Or the Transcendental gatherings at Mr. Emerson’s house in Concord. Philosophical politics.

  At dinner I was seated across from Tom Foley, a witty and forthright man, appealingly modest and human, who came across altogether differently than he did on the Capitol steps, speaking ex cathedra into a thicket of network mikes. I couldn’t bring myself to call him Tom, mostly because I preferred the rolling cadence of “Mr. Speaker.” There was considerable conversation about the upcoming March and its potential effect on the hearings to lift the ban. (The consensus: no effect at all.) I shifted the ground of inquiry to AIDS, and the best and brightest of the journalists, on my left, reacted with genuine puzzlement.