Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  Nevertheless, even if all my fears prove true, I have to do this thing. Have to hope. That the custody wars will go the other way, reason winning out over bigotry, so that gay and lesbian families aren’t at risk of being scattered. (Because they aren’t going to stop saving children—not the ones they bring out of failed straight marriages, nor the ones they adopt and truly foster, nor the ones they conceive with a turkey baster, that homeliest of fathers.) That the desperate queer adolescents will survive the suicidal years and rise like the phoenix from the ashes of self-hatred. That the closets will at last disgorge their prisoners into the light. That we as a tribe will come together to heal the earth with a passion equal to the death squads of our fundamentalist foes. And that those who come after never forget those of us who died of AIDS—who took care of one another and, even when our strength had dwindled to a fevered shadow, still fought the implacable agents of our dispensability.

  Not that I can impose that hope. I think my understanding of the values they will need to keep them human in the face of hate—keep them going—will coincide with theirs. But I can’t know for certain. Never perhaps have gay and lesbian people been in such dynamic flux, mercurial in self-definition, tuned to the ethics of survival. For all I know they will have a guerrilla war on their hands, requiring stealth and night attacks, the hiding of one another in attics.

  So it will have to be a hope without any strings attached. Though I can’t deny myself a certain Utopian clairvoyance, imagining a time when gay and straight alike have reached a seamless self-respect, a love of those who are Other that goes way beyond accommodation. Making common cause for the sake of this brief and sinking island we call Earth. Sometimes, in a pitch of frustration over the inroads of our enemies, Winston will announce that we need a country of our own to be free in. Equal rights, of course, would do it, if our legislators would stop feathering their nests with the down of racists and Christian supremacists. And of course Winston knows there aren’t any countries left—no secure frontiers—in a world that wallows in holy wars and ethnic bloodbaths.

  No, we have to take our stand right here. There is no there. As someone who stopped saying the Pledge of Allegiance on the day they added “under God,” who grew up with prayers in school that felt like the brainwash of Maoist thought control, I’ve come to appreciate the smallest gesture of resistance. Even as the Christian covens churn out diplomas to so-called psychologists committed to “reparative therapy” for queers.

  Every act of resistance matters, every dream under the tree. Every Gideon Bible snatched from a hotel drawer and consigned to the nearest trash heap. Dreaming doesn’t come easy to any of us queers, especially the young—who carry their closets and attics with them on their backs, as topheavy as Galapagos tortoises. And every single one of them, of course, has to find his own way to the dream country.

  So, hope for the future wherever it takes us, allowing for all sea-changes on the way. We have only begun to understand how many of our gay and lesbian forebears perished in the fires of the Inquisition, a convenient Final Solution to the problem of the Other. And only begun to tap into the deepest well of our own reserves, the legacy of the shamans and the witches. (Are you a good witch or a bad witch?) No roles required, as long as we’re free. And the gift of Sleep, a shady bower at every turn of Whitman’s open road.

  I’ve been there once or twice, though not in a long long time. But there’s one moment that’s stayed with me, when all the restorative forces conspired to align the sleeping and the dreaming. Roger and I were vacationing at the north end of Kauai, lazing in the limpid aquamarine of Hanalei Bay. By the third or fourth day we’d had a surfeit of sun—in truth, burnt to a cherry-red frazzle. Next morning we drove to the end of the road at Haena and started on foot up the cool and dewy trail that winds its way along the lower slopes of Na Pali, the vertical cliffs that face the northwest wind. No angle of repose between the jagged misty summits and the straight-down plunge to the battering surf. The definition of inaccessible and, with the drench of the trailside ferns, the moss and orchid overhangs, virtually the definition of green.

  We did not know then that the trail had, for eons before the American Empire, been reserved for the feet of Hawaiian royalty. Since it’s something like twelve miles from beginning to end, every step requiring mule-like purchase, it was doubtless the route of a vision-quest. And it ends in fact at an earthly paradise, the Kalalau Valley. No other way to reach it except this narrow trail, single-file—unless you approach it from inland, up Waimea Canyon. Which still leaves you at the summit, no way down into the valley unless you’ve developed wings.

  No mystic baggage accompanied us as we threaded our way around ribbon streams that fell across the path with the force of cataracts. So many cascading runnels, it was like walking through a continuous downpour. It never stops raining on the heights of the dead volcano at the island’s center—the wettest place on earth, they’ll tell you. Still, we could see the sun on the water far below, a couple of hundred feet down from the trail. We met no one coming the other way, and there was no trail marker to reassure us. Along several stretches the trail was washed out, and we seemed to be scrambling across thin air, swinging by the roots of the upslope ferns, gorilla-fashion.

  Then, somewhere into the third mile, you reach the sign you think you’ve been waiting for, staked into the earth, the inscription overgrown with moss. Reassuring it’s not. It marks the limit of a tidal wave that bore down on Na Pali after an undersea eruption, drowning every creature in its path. Not much of a recommendation—depending on how you feel about lightning striking twice—for the patch of beach that beckoned from a shallow cove directly below. Though the disaster had happened a long time past—fifty years, as I recall—the tremor in the heart remembered.

  But we were nothing if not intrepid then. Since it was laughable to think we were going to make it all the way to Kalalau, traversing at such an inchmeal pace, we decided to take the escalator down to the beach. Like skiing without the skis, or the snow; swinging from root to root amidst an avalanche of mud. We emptied out onto the sand, no clue as to how we’d get up again, but meanwhile we had landed in an anteroom of Eden. Breakers throwing off clouds of foam as they thundered up the beach. The sun directly overhead, hot as magma. And back in the fold of the cliff face, a hollowed out half-dome in the rock, a cave of shade.

  We went for a quick naked swim in the surf, paddling at the edges so as to keep clear of the undertow—whose sucking sound rasped like some leviathan breathing through a blowhole, with an echo of whitest noise that filled the head like a Triton’s horn. We sat cross-legged in the mouth of the cave and split our hiker’s booty, a chocolate bar and two bananas. I remember wondering aloud if it was high tide or low, but we were already half asleep among the ferns, no energy left to contemplate a deluge from the sea.

  Probably no more than a half hour’s snooze, but depth was the issue here. Full fathom five and clear of all sea devils, till the pound of the surf around us had hushed to a whisper that echoed to our own breathing. Too deep for dreams, perhaps, like Wordsworth’s thoughts that “lie too deep for tears.” But just before I stirred awake I dreamed of Koolau—no more than a moment’s embrace, but his face was unmarked and his limbs were whole. He didn’t even have to tell me, for I could see that all was right again with him. The only thing I couldn’t figure was how he seemed to know me.

  We took our waking slowly, Roger and I, nothing much that needed saying as we came alive to a sanctuary that wasn’t a dream after all. Later, when we had trekked back up to the trail and retraced our steps to the car at the end of the road, I told him about my meeting in the dream; wondering how I even knew it was Koolau, never having seen a picture of him. And not sure why it left me feeling so unaccountably happy. But then it’s all a matter of degree, and those were the days when happiness seemed like a birthright.

  Eventually I pieced together his story, more in the years that followed than I knew back then. Koolau the Leper, as he’
s called in every fragmentary reference, and in the title of a long-forgotten South Sea tale by Jack London. I assemble the evidence here by memory alone, doubtless having shaped it over the years into a folk tale of my own. But it happened; he was real. It must be a hundred years now, maybe more, but let’s say twice as long ago as the tidal wave, a truer measuring stick for the boundaries of paradise.

  It was a time when the bloodfire of leprosy was in full night bloom in the islands. Those who knew best—being the entrepreneurial forward line of American Interests—decided the hour had come for quarantine. And they began the systematic rounding up of the disfigured, transporting them to the “colony” on Molokai. But then that’s what colonials do best, making colonies within colonies.

  Yet when the troops arrived on Kauai and began to herd the infected, they encountered a proud resistance. Koolau was the lepers’ spokesman. He swore they would never take him from the primeval home of his fathers. The troops fell back, outnumbered and nonplussed, cabling the Emperor in Washington himself. What to do? Within days it was decided the way it is always decided in the colonies: send the gunboats.

  By which time Koolau had led his hobbled band, perhaps fifty strong, along the Na Pali trail all the way to Kalalau. The valley, a sort of oval crater that might have been the nest of the gibbous moon—a mile in breadth at the ocean end, three miles back to the sheer cliff walls—is completely defensible from any attack by land. Nothing more than a sentry force is required to guard the end of the royal trail where it enters the valley. The rim of the surrounding cliffs is too far up for an accurate shot, even if the people were visible below. Which they weren’t, taking cover in the rain-forest shade and the natural caves in the mountain walls.

  Even along the ocean flank, the valley ends in a line of cliffs, a steep descent to the tidal edge. So the gunboats couldn’t land troops, because the lepers would have picked them off like ducks in a shooting gallery. The Navy blasted away, firing cannonballs that didn’t quite make it past the valley’s natural ramparts. A standoff, then, for several days. The lepers had water and breadfruit and taro in abundance, enough to last them forever. There are always bigger guns in the arsenals of Empire, but that would have meant bringing in ships from far away. If a real war erupted elsewhere, the Emperor might be caught with his pants down.

  So the cannon stopped firing and a treaty was proposed by megaphone. If the lepers promised to stay and never come out, they could live in the valley unmolested—a leper colony by default. Agreed. Some say Koolau lived there thirty or forty years; an outpost of Eden and a tribe at peace. No one to make them pariahs anymore, and no one to recoil in horror from the breakdown of their bodies. A victory for dignity, it goes without saying, and maybe even a small payback for the wholesale rape of the islands, one of which had been sold to the entrepreneurs for a jug of rum.

  I couldn’t really say when the dream in the cave came to stand for me as a vision of hope, since it wasn’t even a conscious quest. Three years later the sky turned black when the plague came down, and the blackness hasn’t lifted by one candle flame since. The redneck preachers pelt our very funerals with rotten eggs, and we are just a hairsbreadth short of the escalation of hostilities to a shooting war. So far the cauldron of bigotry, with its Morning-in-America shock troops, has contented itself with bashing us to within an inch of our lives. The lynching comes next, and after that the extermination. I’m not going to be sleeping any better than I am right now—sentry unto Death, reading the moil of the night sky like a queer Cassandra, mad by definition.

  So the memory of the dream encounter is that much more of a touchstone, blessed in slumber by the shining face of Koolau’s act of resistance. You need only to have glimpsed it once to know there’s a window out of all this black and sleepless night. Then you must use it to hope on. Key to the dream country where all your people are whole again, and the gunboats can’t reach you, and the Empire of Hate is rubble; You and your secret dream of freedom are the tidal wave. Keep watch, every night if you have to. As for sleeping, you can sleep when you’re dead.

  1. All of this was cribbed, I gather, from The Culture of Disbelief by Stephen L. Carter, New York: Basic Books, 1993. The Presidential book report.

  MORTAL THINGS

  MY LAST ENCOUNTER with feeling unworthy of worldly possessions—traveling light, as it were—took place on the occasion of my second Christmas, or perhaps it was my third. I toddled into the living room in my footed pajamas, my mother and dad waiting excitedly—Brownie box camera in hand, I suppose—to catch my glee at the sight of all those toys heaped under the tree. Apparently I walked right past the whole gleaming cache, made a bead for the end table by the sofa and grabbed a cheap glass ashtray, which I proudly clutched to my breast as I exited the toyshop.

  I can’t say I remember this. Or that the shifting tectonic plates of family history haven’t ascribed the scene to my brother and various cousins instead. It’s become a kind of all-purpose exemplar of a state of earthly innocence, a bare footfall behind The Little Drummer Boy in the family’s psychic creche. All I know is, we’d reached a whole different plateau by the time I was ten. Sharing a room with my brother under the eaves, I leapt from my sleepless bed at the first gray rose of dawn and beat it downstairs to check the Christmas haul. Upon executing a speed read of the To/From tags, I raced back up to tell Bob, who couldn’t get up himself till he’d put his braces on. Breathlessly I gave him the bulletin from the North Pole: “I got fifteen, you got thirteen.” I’d like to think there wasn’t a brag in that announcement, but of course there was. The one-upmanship of sibling life, factoring parental love to the decimal point.

  Like Queenie the rat terrier in A Christmas Memory, fixated on the butcher’s bone that Buddy hung high in the tree, “staring up in a trance of greed.”

  Not that I hadn’t paid my dues in the court of bitter disappointment. Eating my share of that fat reality hoagie whose very bread and rancid butter insists that, as the Stones would have it, you can’t always get what you want. I must’ve been about eight when we had a flier from the milkman, delivered at crack of day to the milkbox by the garage—two quarts every other morning, clear glass bottles with the cream at the top, sealed with a cardboard stopper. The announcement was collared around the bottle’s neck: Glennie’s Dairy was going to hold an auction the next summer, with prizes like skis and English bikes and season passes to Canobie Lake, the local amusement park.

  But money would not be the currency. The bidding was rather to be done with those cardboard stoppers, so, Kids, start saving them now! It’s a wonder I didn’t succumb to lactic poisoning, given the gallons that I glugged down in the months that followed. My cardboard coin of the realm accumulated in a shopping bag behind the cellar door, augmented by donations from my Grandmother Lamb—who consumed one puny quart a week, but you took what you could get. On sub-zero mornings in the dead of winter the milk would sometimes freeze in the box, blowing its stopper with a geyser of white slush. The milk would then have to be dumped, but the stopper was still worth its weight in gold.

  By summer I’m sure that shopping bag gave off a smell like baby vomit, but I never did count my lucre till the week of the auction. Dad and I dumped it out on the kitchen table, tallying up 155 (157 counting the two in the fridge). The auction was set for Friday evening at the dairy. You have to understand that Glennie’s was a purely local operation. (No match for Hood’s, with its statewide distribution and regular mooing ads that sponsored the weather report on Channel 4.) Glennie’s was the place we went for grade-school field trips, cheery and twee as Old Macdonald’s farm, despite its row of tin-sided barns filled with cows attached to the automated milker, untouched by human hands.

  It was a sultry August evening, slow to give up the daylight. We arrived and were herded to park in a fresh-cut field, and I tried not to feel deflated by the sight of those acres of cars. We made our inching way with the crowd through the pasture gate, gathering toward the wide circle of onlookers surrounding t
he makeshift auction stage, lit by strings of Christmas lights. Presumably the booty was piled behind the stage, but I had to take that on faith, given the fact that I couldn’t see a thing over the wall of grownups who’d arrived there early. Too big to be hoisted on my father’s shoulders, I had to hear second-hand what item was on the block. The auctioneer, used to selling pork bellies and the detritus of bankrupt farms, was talking so fast that I could hardly follow.

  The first lot cried was a picnic basket, with a fine fitted interior, plates and linen and cutlery included, as well as a nest of Tupperware. Nothing that I particularly coveted. And I thought I must’ve heard him wrong when he bawled, “Who’ll start the bidding at five hundred?”

  I cannot convey the crushing weight of the next thirty seconds, hearing the bidding rocketing up to two thousand, three, then four. Only now, as my eyes adjusted to the dusk, did I see the resources we were up against. Trash barrels full of stoppers, burlap sacks and cardboard cartons that once held washers and dryers. The items that followed were all a blur—a doll that wet her diapers, going going gone for four hundred. A deluxe Erector Set, complete with wrenches—eight hundred once, eight hundred twice, sold to the man in the Red Sox cap. Who as it turned out was our milkman.

  There was no point in prolonging the agony, waiting for the three-speed Raleigh and the jungle gym. My dad shrugged it all off with a rueful laugh, and I did my best not to cry, though the lump in my throat was the size of a golf ball. As we threaded our way out of the crowd, I couldn’t hear what treasure was next, but I hollered as loud as I could, “A hundred and fifty-seven!”