Rita Will_Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser

by Rita Mae Brown

  After the church service the small funeral party gathered at a restaurant where Jerry had been a frequent customer. We sat at the long table swapping stories, laughing at his outrageous antics. Once Jerry had dressed up as a waitress and served one of his friends who had a hot date. Jerry intruded on their conversations, spilled ice-cold tea on his friend’s crotch, and finally, as the beleaguered suitor tried to eat dessert, Jerry gave him a pie in the face and revealed himself. That was a performance worthy of Juts.

  We laughed and cried and laughed some more. His DuPont coworkers knew about his life even though he hadn’t told them. They came because they loved him. If nothing else, DuPont hires good people. The job that killed him inside also provided him with the only true straight friends he had.

  I don’t know what would have happened to him at DuPont if he had come out. It might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, given his disgrace in Richmond or even without that disgrace.

  Herb lost his partner of fourteen years. Sad as he was, he was glad the suffering was over. The end was grim. AIDS leaves one little dignity, especially if it gets in the brain.

  Jerry had had an operation to repair a stomach valve. The blood supply wasn’t screened then. Even if he contracted the disease in the hospital he no doubt was exposed to it anyway given his sexual exploits. I hated him. I hated him for screwing everything that moved. I hated him for missing my fortieth birthday party, which was the best party I’ve ever attended. I hated him for how grotesque he looked at the end. I hated him for wearing down Herb and his parents. I hated him for leaving me.

  I hated him because I loved him.

  I drove home the next day. I remember nothing of the drive. I remember very little of the next year. I scribbled a check to the Walker Whitman Clinic in Washington, D.C. I wrote, always my salvation. I enjoyed the hunt club to which I belonged. I lavished affection on Sneaky Pie and Pewter, her gray sidekick. I spent as much time as I could with the horses. The stable is always where I find my deepest peace.

  Finally I forgave him. He didn’t mean to hurt us. He surely never meant to die. He was all too human and he couldn’t face his fears. Half of him despised being gay and the other half reveled in it, albeit in a childishly rebellious way.

  Jerry had promised me since I was twelve that he would take care of me. He didn’t. He left me nothing. I asked for his letter sweater but who knows where that wound up. He always said I’d be the beneficiary of one of his insurance policies. I wasn’t.

  If he had come back from the dead, I would have crowned him with a frying pan. Keep your promises.

  Herb was left quite well off and I think Jerry’s parents received some money. Those three people earned every penny, but no amount of money can make up for heartache.

  Herb bought me a diamond pendant necklace, one small perfect stone. He drove down to give it to me a month after Jerry died. How like Herb, a romantic man. If the shoe had been on the other foot, Jerry would have given me an electric blender.

  Herbert May was about to become one of the biggest surprises of my life.

  72

  West Side Story

  I’d begun research for my novel about Dolley Madison even though the writing itself was years off. While I was roaming around Alderman Library at the University of Virginia and the state library in Richmond, and exploring the path of General Cornwallis’s depredations during the Revolutionary War, I thought about a closer war, the War Between the States. I could dimly remember Great-grandpa Huff, who fought in that war. I continued reading Dolley’s letters, her husband’s papers, her sister’s letters, but I jumped full in on researching the war that nearly took us down and is still felt in obvious and subtle ways to this day. I wanted to write a second volume of High Hearts, a novel I’d written about the War Between the States.

  I’d invite Herb on my forays down the back roads of Virginia, around Richmond, a city I love, back into the Wilderness battleground, Manassas. I crossed and crisscrossed Virginia, trying to visit the sites in the order of battle and during the same time of year that the battles were fought.

  Herb would have none of it.

  An apartment became available in New York on West Eighty-third Street between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue. I was spending a lot of time in the city due to a television project. A couple in Charlottesville, Clare and Bill Leach, agreed to share it with Herb and me. With four of us splitting the cost it was affordable, and we were never there at the same time. We set up house rules, Bill and Clare moved in odds and ends of furniture and we were in business.

  I’d drive up to Washington to catch the Metroliner, and Herb would board at Wilmington, walking the cars until he found me. I looked forward to our monthly visits in New York.

  We’d read the newspaper to each other aloud between Wilmington and New York. I’d get either The New York Times or The Washington Post. He’d get the Wilmington paper or The Philadelphia Inquirer. We’d compare how stories were featured and how they were written.

  Herb, curious and critical, had a sharp mind. Since Jerry had talked for both of them, actually for anyone, I knew very little about Herb other than that he had been in the navy.

  He enjoyed theater and dance, wasn’t that crazy about museums but he’d go to be a good sport. We’d haunt bookstores. Herb could be tight with the buck. In a bookstore I lose all manner of restraint. What fun it was to walk out of Three Lives or Shakespeare and Co. and Herb would have spent more than I did.

  Indifferent to food, I usually want an ice-cold Co’Cola and a salad or a hamburger. Well, I’d really like greens and fatback but we were in New York, remember. Herb liked food, though. So I’d tag along to his latest culinary discovery, where I’d order a salad and he’d order salmon poached in parchment with a thin orange dribble on the top. His once trim body ballooned with fifty extra pounds.

  I’d get up and hit the gym. I couldn’t blast him out of bed. I slept upstairs, he slept downstairs. No amount of pleading or rattling cups and saucers could dislodge him.

  Exasperated, I finally said, “Herb, you’re fat.”

  “I know. I’ll start my diet today.”

  He never did. I finally realized that he was overweight because in his eyes that was healthy. Jerry had weighed less than one of my big hounds at the end.

  I looked around and saw that many gay men were getting overweight. It was a declaration of not being HIV positive, although you can be fat and still test positive. But the visceral impact is, “Here’s a healthy boy.”

  I finally let it go and he actually dropped a few pounds in gratitude.

  I was working on a movie of the week entitled My Two Loves about a woman who loves a man and loves a woman. ABC plucked up their courage thanks to Alvin Cooperman, who practically invented long-form when he was a vice president at NBC. An independent producer now, Alvin somehow found me. It was a marriage made in heaven. Alvin doesn’t know how to cut a corner, cheat a character or demolish production values. If he’s going to do it, it will be done properly. He’s got a gift for casting, which was often thwarted by the networks. Alvin thinks of the best actor for the role. The networks want whoever is most popular at the moment even if they can’t act their way out of a paper bag—and half of them can’t.

  Since he was based in New York I needed to be there a lot. Sometimes I’d call Herb in Wilmington at the last minute and tell him I needed to go over notes with Alvin. He’d hop on the train and our pleasurable odyssey would begin anew.

  Jerry had picked a good man to love. This isn’t to say Herb wasn’t subject to fits of temper. But the anger subsided as quickly as it arrived, except when Jerry would goad him.

  We talked about Jerry endlessly, as though our memories would keep him alive, and in a way they did. It was 1986 but enough time had passed that I encouraged Herb to date. He didn’t want to. He encouraged me to date, so we were even.

  By the summer he felt strong enough to see a few people. He was in an AIDS support group. Men who had lost partner
s gathered to help one another along. He dated one fellow from the group but wouldn’t go to bed with him.

  When he came home after the fourth date I heard him walking up the stairs to the apartment. From the way his feet distinctly hit each step I knew he was in a bad mood. By the time he opened the door I was downstairs in my old navy blue bathrobe waiting for him.

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Okay, I’ll go to bed”—which I did.

  Just as I snapped off the lights he called up, “After Jerry, everyone is boring.”

  I snapped on the light. “Jerry was a domineering asshole. But you’re right, he was never boring.”

  “Yeah.”

  I snapped off the light. “I’m going to the gym in the morning.”

  “What do you do after you’ve had the best?”

  I snapped on the light again and leaned over the railing. “Do you want to come on up here for girl talk?”

  He climbed up the iron staircase and plopped on the end of my bed. “I never thought I’d be alone.”

  “You aren’t. You have your family and you have me. Alone romantically, yes. Fourteen years is a big chunk of your life.”

  “I don’t know where the fourteen years went.”

  “Are you gonna cry?”

  “No.” He laughed at me.

  “I’m not either.” I handed him the box of Kleenex and we both cried.

  Bill and Clare, after a year’s lease, gave up their half of the apartment. Herb and I decided it was too expensive for just the two of us, and of course I kick myself in the butt each time I think about it because I wish I still had that apartment, even though I’m at heart an East Side girl, not a West Sider. I learned to like the West Side, especially Riverside Park.

  Without the apartment our visits were less structured. He’d drive down to visit me more than I drove to Wilmington, mostly because I had stock to care for, a farm to run and I was between farm managers. He wired overhead lights, stripped furniture, gardened with me. He was heaven. He even took out the garbage before I could get to it.

  Herb was HIV positive, too, but everything seemed all right. Then the disease hit him suddenly. He’d suffer bouts of fatigue and night sweats. He stayed in Wilmington more but we’d still visit. He was losing a little weight. He looked really good but he couldn’t motivate himself to do anything.

  “I need a job. I need to keep my mind active.”

  “Here’s a newspaper.” I’d toss him the classifieds.

  He’d circle ads. “I’ll go back into construction.”

  “Good idea.”

  He’d never make the call.

  One day stands out in my mind because I was boarding a mare who jumped like a pogo stick. She’d jumped out of her paddock again. She should have been a real-estate appraiser, she covered so much territory. I finally caught her, walking her miles back to the house. As I passed the kitchen I heard the phone ring.

  Thinking it was Alvin, I tied the mare to the old walnut in the back and sprinted into the house.

  “Rita Mae,” the familiar voice said, “I can’t get out of bed.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t get out of bed.” Herb started laughing. “My legs don’t want to go”

  “Herb, I didn’t think you were that sick.”

  “I’m not sick. My legs are.”

  He was funny. His mind was perfectly clear, clear enough to complain about his parents, who had moved down to care for him. Yet he insisted he wasn’t that sick—he was touched that his folks were there but he wanted to do things for himself.

  I asked him if I could come up that weekend. He said he’d come down to me, that he was really fine—he just had no direction in life. He had to snap out of it.

  Like a fool I believed him and told him I’d come up in a few weeks.

  By then he was dead.

  Herb’s death certificate, which I have never seen, may say “cause of death, AIDS,” but he died of a broken heart.

  I used to say anyone who died of a broken heart deserved it. Of course, I was being smart and commenting on drama queens weeping about the smashed-up love of the moment.

  Jerry put the gas in Herb’s engine. Without him the car finally glided to a stop.

  I hope they’re together again. And they’d better watch out for Juts.

  73

  Rack On

  Lest you think I will wallow in laments for those I have lost, let me hasten to remind you of what Mother always said to me: “Worse things have happened to nicer people.”

  I’d lost Fannie, Martina, Baby Jesus, Mother, Jerry and Herb between 1979 and 1987. Bad as it was, it wasn’t the firebombing of Dresden, a V-2 raid on London or the San Francisco earthquake.

  If there is an upside to the above war and disaster horrors, it is that they were shared.

  If I’d had a grain of sense, I would have sat down hard, but I simply ran faster. Not that I could run away from pain. I knew that. But I felt as though I had to live for everyone I’d lost. Therefore I had to be more successful in the outside world to justify their existence and to justify their faith in me. The books sold well, and Hollyweird kept me busy. These triumphs, large and small, brought no one back. Sometimes in the middle of the night I’d get up, accompanied by Sneaky Pie and Pewter, and sit in the garden. I’d listen to the owls, watch possums and other night animals. I strained for an echo of Mother’s voice, Jerry and Herb’s laughter.

  The echo reverberated inside. The wind carried fragrance and insects. I had to learn to live with my losses.

  I was also bored to the point of dementia with being America’s leading lesbian. How ironic to be known for something I considered superficial in terms of my character and which, furthermore, was not entirely accurate.

  That was another great sadness. I finally had to accept the full damage of being an outsider. Like most Americans, I believed that if you worked hard and stayed reasonably personable, you’d break through these barriers. Not only did I not break through, I was reviled or celebrated for lesbianism, depending on one’s point of view.

  Past forty, I could no longer believe I would be part of the greater national community or even part of my town. I could no longer believe that if people got to know me they’d see that I was a worthy citizen, not a perfect one but a worthy one.

  To further tighten the noose, the country was veering toward the right and not without some justification. The easy money of the Kennedy and Johnson days transformed, in the early 1980s, into a nasty little rollback. No one dared use the word depression but farmland plummeted in value and I was a farmer.

  Ronald Reagan put together a coalition, in its own way as interesting and powerful as the coalition that FDR created. For Reagan this was a meld of solid, middle-of-the-road Republicans, a smattering of disaffected Democrats and the well-organized, well-funded right wing, including some real wing nuts. But Reagan could hold them together with the force of his personality, with that marvelous Irish charm, which had also helped Jack Kennedy. The Irish do not compel so much as they beguile. Having a strong streak of black Irish in my blood, I think I can say that without being accused of trading in stereotypes.

  One of the tenets of this coalition was, we had to return America to its senses. So instead of pot in every chicken it was a chicken in every pot, women back in the kitchen, blacks to the back of the bus, Hispanics in the lettuce patch. Gays should pretend to be straight or conveniently die.

  A few silly Republicans were dumb enough to express these sentiments directly. Most spoke in a code that meant the above.

  Along with this virulent virus of intolerance came a promotion of business interests and an astonishing understanding of the weakness of the Soviet state. To get the latter you had to swallow the former. I just couldn’t do it, much as I believed, like Reagan, that it came down to guns and butter and that the Soviet Union and its satellites were tiring of guns and couldn’t pay for them anymore anyway. We drove them into the ground in an arms race that destroyed them economi
cally. It hurt us, too, but we could better absorb it. We are the richest nation on earth. Squandering resources, bad as it is, hasn’t destroyed us as it did the Communists. If we keep it up it will though.

  The audacity of Reagan’s program was interesting to me and, I’m sure, to other political people. The fact that this program involved the bludgeoning and submission of out-groups sickened me.

  At this point in our history the Democrats lost their center or maybe their nerve. The energy was with the Republicans, who cleverly tapped into the anger of white men—not all white men but enough white men. For the first time in America’s history the average white man had to contend with those of us rising from the lower orders, as Mother was wont to say. They wimped out. Rather than improve their skills, they pushed us back down again.

  The tone of political debate shifted. If you spoke of equal rights, of racial justice, of gender parity, you were accused of special pleading, of being divisive. Every program designed to lift up the downtrodden was raked over the coals. That alone may not be a bad thing. It never hurts to review whether your programs are effective, but the nastiness attending this had nothing to do with effectiveness, it had to do with fear.

  Any concept that worked toward the betterment of all was dubbed liberal. That word became a slap in the face. It meant a glut of government spending and interference. It meant unreasonable demands on the community, like the abolition of prayer in schools.

  The average white man could no longer assume he’d bump along making enough to pay for a house and two cars and to send his children to college. Note his children. Who the hell cared what happened to everybody else’s children?

  Gloria Steinem once said that women will not truly be equal until an average woman can rise to the same level of incompetence as an average man. Bull’s-eye, Gloria.

  Many of us who had made gains and were therefore contributing to the tax rolls were stymied. Downsizing, a neutral word, meant women lost their jobs along with men. Usually the women lost their jobs first: last hired, first fired.