Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  You would’ve thought—I would’ve thought—that this startled waking to the ringless phone was a setup to force my brain to focus on my own dying. Unconsciously perhaps, but that’s not how the scenario plays out; especially the bleak ennui. I stumble into the bathroom for a pee, batting away at the still unfocused dread like a cloud of flies about my head. Trying to stay thoughtless, no matter how rattled I feel. But even as I’m settling back in bed, the latest crazy topic of the night hooks its talons in me.

  And I start dissecting the weather report, for example—not the weather, just the report. In Los Angeles the TV weathermen are a pack of whinnying ghouls, so perky and so upbeat they bring on a curl of bile before they even reach their time-lapse satellite maps. You realize they feel personally responsible for sunshine, as if they constitute the front line of the California good life. No matter if it’s 103 out there in the valleys, a veil of smog the color of sherry, they act as if everyone else is as delirious as they are.

  In other words, a perfect day for the beach—still frozen in time for them like Frankie and Annette, white kids riding the waves, tossing beach balls, cooking wieners, and never of course going further than first base. When in fact nobody but the urban underclass with nothing to lose would venture onto the beach at Venice or Santa Monica anymore, West Side Story in bikinis and jams. The bay itself slicked with the lime-green foam of industrial effluent, storm drains spewing medical waste and PCBs.

  And when on occasion it rains they clearly take it hard, these guys, as if they’ve betrayed our very dreams. They mope over the swirl of clouds on the map, divining a break in the storm as if they could wish it away by positive-think alone. I don’t know anyone anymore, natives especially, who doesn’t welcome winter’s changes, coastal fog and drizzle and torrents down the canyons. But nobody seems to have told the televangelist pep boys, with their Palm Springs Florsheim tans and somewhere, doubtless, the first budding wart of melanoma.

  Now what could this possibly matter, to make it worth an hour’s tossing on a bed of nails? What prodigies of displacement must be at work? Sometimes I think I’m preparing a master list of what I will gladly leave behind when I’m out of here. But it isn’t the weathermen really—it’s that I can’t be out in the heat of the day anymore myself, because I’ll end up feverish and woozy. Meanwhile, the city of golden promise is falling to pieces as surely as my body is: Beirut meets Calcutta. And I am as powerless to stop the civic collapse as I am the corporeal one. You want the world to flourish even as you lose it, if only to give you a context worth the fight to stay above water. Or a certain altruism comes to wrap you like a lap robe, nudging you toward acceptance of your fate as you bequeath the rivers and mountains, the Rembrandts and the Beethoven string quartets, to generations yet unborn. The future of the spirit.

  But it’s not working out that way, because banality has flattened the earth like a series of monster typhoons, and the weathermen haven’t even noticed, blind as they are from staring at the sun. Besides, the weather’s the least of it. I turn on the radio in the car—forced to venture out in the heat because doctors don’t have night hours—and the airwaves fairly crackle with right-wing demagogues and shockmeisters, purveying their white hate with a standup topspin. The old bullies from the schoolyard, becoming Big Brother in front of your eyes—or ears, in this case.

  And the local TV anchorwork no better than the sunshine. Huge segments given over to the separation of Siamese twins—Baby Jennifer having to die to give Baby Melanie all of the heart, with updates by the truckload till Melanie too, alas, buys the ranch. In fact, there’s always some kid languishing at City of Hope, waiting for a liver and kidney. Or mauled by pit bulls (urban division) or a mountain lion (rural division). Have I grown so callous that I’ve ceased to care about these hapless tykes, or their little friends who peer from every milk carton? No, I think it’s the tone of forced sincerity that gets me, the icky tug at the heartstrings, with footage of weeping parents on the hospital steps, thanking us all for our prayers.

  Well, don’t thank me. I’m too busy seeing through the sentimental dreck to the millions of kids they wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole—the kids who are dead inside from daily beatings, the ones incested by Mom and Dad, the starved and the freezing, force-fed God as a sort of Mob enforcer. How it rankles, the cheap-shot pretense of giving a shit about Little Billy’s kidney, exonerating them of all the damaged children who would fill their segments twenty-four hours a day and still not make a dent.

  Again, what earthly use are such opinions from Paul Monette’s Overnight News? Not a very popular attitude, recoiling coldly from plucky Billy and Baby Melanie. But the surge of insomniac madness doesn’t care a whit for the niceties. It’s stuck like a bad witch who can’t stop picking the scab off every spell, rooting the pus ever deeper. It’s Rumpelstiltskin stamping in glee around his fire in the woods, waiting to snatch a baby from its mother’s arms. You don’t even want to know what goes through my head when a Christian school bus full of campers misses a turn and lands belly-up in a ditch.

  Feelings I wouldn’t dream of entertaining by daylight, or admit to anyway. Blowing off the rage, perhaps, after watching everyone I loved die without a whisper of notice from anchor-dom. Not to mention the Stepford Christians, who’d like to burn us heathen at the stake. Note how they didn’t proclaim the Great Midwest Flood of ’93 as a mark of God’s wrath, punishment for sin—or Hurricane Andrew in Florida; no smugness about God having had a hand in that. No Christian Supremacist suggesting that living on a flood plain or a lowland swamp was after all a “lifestyle choice,” so it served the whole lot of them right to be wiped off the map.

  In the dead center of the night I stoop to their level of slime, heaving it back at them curse for curse—inoperable tumors and financial ruin, their children fallen into deep ravines where no one will hear their cries. The morning-after hangover is enough to make me keep such things to myself, but there’s something dwindled in the soul from yielding to such nastiness at all.

  My own fault, surely, for channel-surfing the local news from eleven to midnight, when The New York Times is tossed on the front steps, Puck going down to retrieve it and dropping it at my feet. So my head is fairly teeming with bad news by one A.M., the up-to-the-minute stuff that assures fresh fester for nightmares. The self-anointed saints of the New Age, with their chipper dictum that AIDS can be fun, eschew the reading of anything too real at any time, but especially last thing at night. All well and good unless you were born with a congenital bad case of reality to begin with, indelible as your thumb-print.

  You may wonder why I don’t just hang it up and go heat a saucepan of milk and browse through something neutral, Horticulture perhaps. In fact, I already do a glass of Ovaltine at one A.M. and again at seven. The drug to keep my brain in the ballgame requires dosage four times a day, to be taken with fats; and the doctors all concur that milk’s not fat enough. I need to dump in a scoop or two of Haagen-Dazs, and a doughnut on the side wouldn’t hurt. All of which tastes in the deeps of the night like the jar of old bacon grease my French grandmother used to keep on a shelf above the stove.

  And you don’t understand the addiction of insomnia if you think it responds to a walk out-of-doors to contemplate Orion and the Bear, or a dose of P. G. Wodehouse for merriment’s sake. No, you stay in your bed in the dark and wait, forlornly of course, to snatch at sleep if it so much as hovers within your grasp. The only other action officially sanctioned and by the book is a check of the luminous dial on the bedside clock. But the rules are strict. You may check the time every couple of minutes, but you may not fixate on the sweep of the second hand lest it mesmerize you and get in the way of the night’s agenda of cursing and minutiae. It goes without saying that you’ve long since rid yourself of any clock that ticks, as being certain to drive you right over the edge—Poe country again, the hammer of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

  Keeping current with your enemies, of course, is standard thread in the warp and woof
of nightwork. Not much to add when it comes to the latter-day Nazi All-Stars, Falwell and Robertson and Sheldon on first, second and third, the whole American Family Association cheering from the dugout, Gary Bauer as the nubile batboy. By way of National Anthem, they cover their hearts with their caps and sing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” from Cabaret. You can run through that whole gang like rosary beads, at breakneck speed. They have long since been elevated to the Hall of Fame of bigotry—a Cooperstown of hate—so they don’t require an insomniac waste of breath unless they’ve surfaced on the news that day with an especially loathsome slur. Hitting one out of the park, so to speak.

  But there’s always, always someone new to add to the roster. Arsenio’s guest tonight is … President Clinton on sax! A rookie to be sure, but one who has attained to enemy status fast, after only a couple of times at bat. First there was his toadying to the Toad Queen of Congress, Senator Nunn of the indefatigable tongue—up the collective butt of the Joint Chiefs, his own mini-Tailhook Convention.

  And yet that was mostly Presidential guilt by association. His own first foray into bigotry took place in the White House Rose Garden, in a colloquy with the People. Nudged by a Baptist preacher deeply troubled by the lifting of the military ban, Clinton frowned sympathetically. This Bill-who-will-promise-anything-to-anybody replied as to how the issue was all still up in the air, but that however the debate fell out, we mustn’t be seen as condoning a lifestyle. The code phrase to end all code phrases, to us embattled queers the exact equivalent of shrinking from condoning kikes and nips and woolly-heads. The roses in the garden did not noticeably wither in shame, but then they are painted anew every night by a crew straight out of Alice in Wonderland.

  And then there was his Neville Chamberlain impersonation on the tarmac in Denver, kissing the hem of Her Holiness himself, Uberstormführer John Paul II. In Denver, mind you, in rank defiance of our tribe’s ban, Bitburg-in-the-Rockies.

  But again, it’s mostly guilt by association. Clinton waited till after his summer vacation to issue his own encyclical, Religio Politico. His first official appearance was at one of those Christian prayer breakfasts—never been asked to one myself, but I gather they eat of the transubstantiated sausages of Christ. Anyway, Keynote Bill allowed as how the worst of our problems sprang from our having become too secular a society. There was far too much intolerance of the religious view of things, and especially of the practice of making political choices by way of the tenets of faith—voting the soul, as it were. Of course there was strict separation in the Constitution, a wall between Church and State, but surely (here a near seizure of ingratiation) there was room in the wall for a few doors.1

  Not in my Constitution there wasn’t any room, not for so much as a rathole. It takes a certain genius, I suppose, to get such an issue utterly backward—the most ominous development all over the world being the rise of religious fundamentalism, determined to eliminate all infidels and non-believers. The New Inquisition already upon us, mandating schools of cretinism for all good Christian children—where you unlearn the geology of the world but don’t miss a day of praying for Little Billy’s kidney and Baby Melanie’s mortal soul. And the President’s one of them, just another yahoo Baptist moron. Or so the sleepless night would have it. The bitter irony is that, given the chance to vote in ’96 (don’t hold your breath), I’d probably vote for him again. But then I’d vote for Donald Duck before allowing First Caddy Dan Quayle to occupy the Oval Office. Or waste a vote that might give any leverage to the Wal-Mart candidacy of Ross Perot, billionaire hayseed.

  But heck, even we of the twenty-four-hour club have bought the conventional wisdom wherein all politics is local. Did anyone really suppose we were going to secure our rights by way of enlightenment from the top? That a good Bill Clinton would override the sodomy laws still extant in twenty-two states, or indeed take a stand on so much entrenched intolerance simply because it was the right thing to do? Not when tyranny is maintained—as it always has been—by the officers in the field and the prison guards with the cattle prods. Maintained by the likes of the Virginia judge who took custody away from a lesbian mother because her lifestyle was against state law. Rumpelstiltskin in black robes. Or the rabid used-car sales force that put over Proposition 2 in Colorado. We’ve come to understand that queers can’t live in certain states anymore, the brownshirts growing in power every day. It’s already a new brand of civil war in the making, except the Confederacy of Intolerance doesn’t adhere this time to a North/South axis. It’s splintered everywhere, the smithereens in every upstate village, every border town, the house on the corner of every street—blinds drawn, no room in the garage for the car anymore because of the weapons stacked there. Not a country at all, really, but just a limping ad campaign for a past that never was.

  So what has all this to do with sleeping under a tree? Benign, undrugged, unvisited by nightmares. Free of curses. It’s a motif that seems to recur in culture after culture: the prince in jeweled brocade in a Persian miniature, pillowed on a tuft of moss beneath a cedar. Or a Hindu god, dozing on the banks of the Ganges while a snow of cherry blossoms sifts about him. Or a silver-wash figure on a Japanese screen shaded by bamboo, the seventeenth syllable in a haiku of dreams. For that is what they always seem to be doing, whatever the local iconography: dreaming the world.

  Or as Roger once said, the week he died, when I woke him from an all-day nap to take a doctor’s call: “I’m sleeping for everyone now.”

  Which was proof enough for the doctor that we were well on our way to “serious brain involvement.” Whereas I had found the exchange piercingly wise and tender, and right on the mark besides. Sleeping le sommeil du juste—the sleep of the just—for all the rest of us, pursued day and night by our compromises with nightmares.

  It’s the height of self-importance to see myself in the obverse role, but I do sometimes. I think, I’m having insomnia for everyone now. Making the best of a bad situation, because the wise and tender thing seems so far beyond my reach.

  So there you have a night in Paul’s room. A one-way harangue without benefit of context, railing at the sheer quotidian hairball of the day-to-day, the suffering of fools. Like an extended tour in solitary, positioned just under the drip of a Chinese water-torture. But not the whole night. Here I have to cop to the paradox of Tante Leonie, turning for a moment to the dreams that manage to track me down. Not the same as deep-sleep dreams, because these of mine inhabit the edges of an exhausted slumber, a morning jolt or two. Earplugs firmly in place and blackout curtains on the terrace doors, no ray of light to mock me for the new day I’m already missing.

  They are more like seizures than dreams, actually, more immediate and jarring, -with no narrative to speak of. Roger so close I could reach out and touch him, only he stares past my shoulder as if I’m not there. Or a panicky maze of rooms with too many doors, and though I don’t know what I’m meant to do, I feel this desperate sense of unfairness that they don’t seem to understand I have AIDS. I don’t know who “they” are, but I have this burning urge to face them with my illness, being a sort of blanket excuse for why I can’t keep up with them in the labyrinth.

  Dreams of waiting—for doctors’ appointments, for test results, for x-rays—all with the overriding feeling of suffocation from the mummy’s tomb of an MRI. Sometimes just watching my mother, or Winston or Stevie, as they putter about the room. And they seem happy enough, or neutral enough, that I wonder if they’ve lost me yet. I am just the observer here, like Scrooge on the arm of Christmas Past. But it makes me feel such a pitch of melancholy that I can’t go back and live there anymore. Not in the kitchen on Stratford Road, or the sunporch off it. Not in the Kings Road house as it was before the war. Not anywhere.

  Dreams that seem to last split seconds, hardly the languorous undersea suspension that would allow me the scope to dream the world, as they do in the miniatures. And yet no less committed—in my mind, anyway—to finding the portal somehow into that oceanic ether, where I can project
a future for my people. Dreams as wish fulfillment. But that isn’t even possible without a more profound engagement with the night—which would also require me to give up the cursing and seething and political junk mail that keep me awake in the first place. I have a certain reluctance to part with the easy targets of my wrath, because they sustain me. But if I really mean it about the deeper dream of the world to come—my brothers’ and sisters’ legacy—then I know exactly what I have to do. To turn the tide of bile, I have to choose to hope.

  A word that all but chokes in my throat. The practice of which is a rusty business, hardly even a memory now. As a commodity of the spirit, after all, hope has been most notable by its absence in the plague years—or at best discounted by so many false alarms of a medical breakthrough. Of course it’s meant to be the posture of last resort, as in All we can do is hope and Hope for the best and, my personal favorite, You have to have hope or you can’t go on. Well, no I don’t. Not in an age that’s up to its tits in blood, where genocide is anything but the casual outcome of aggression and stony indifference.

  I’ve never really understood this business of Pandora. In the chronicles of myth she is sent by Zeus to the brother of Prometheus, who is far too wary to accept a gift from the gods. She brings with her as a kind of dowry a jar (not a box at all, a repackaging error of a later age) •which holds a universe of evils and mortal pain thus far withheld from man. Fashioned out of clay herself, a Stepford wife if there ever was one, Pandora unscrews the lid of her jar because she is fated to. No moment of hesitation or any other feeling. And the evils escape like a flight of birds, a cloud of migration that dims the very sky. But as we were taught in the moral kindergarten of youth, Hope remained inside the jar, hiding under the lid, as a sort of consolation prize to the generations of humankind.

  It is not reported what Hope was doing there, or whether Pandora herself had exercised a human urge to compassion—not unlike Prometheus himself, who stole a spark from heaven to restore the gift of fire to man. Was it altruism that sought to mitigate so much pain and suffering by the ministrations of Hope, saving the best for last? And whose altruism, Pandora’s or the gods’? Personally I might’ve preferred her to hold Sleep in the jar as a balm for man’s estate. Perhaps I think that Hope is as cruel as anything else she released to the four winds. Or as Dr. Barbara put it in a recent letter, the last honor let out of Pandora’s Box was hope.