by Pamela Morsi
When we’d been evicted from the house we’d been forced to split the family temporarily. Corrie and Lauren moved in with her parents. That was wonderful for Edna. It was a great diversion for her to be forced to devote more time to the life of a thirteen-year-old who loved shopping and gossip. And it was good for Corrie, too. At least she wasn’t still working two jobs. An opening had come up in the university’s Early Childhood Education Center, and with the excellent references she had from the north-side Head Start, the human resources department was happy to allow her to transfer. She’d become so accustomed to her rigorous schedule that she’d decided she could study full-time taking night classes. She was now more than halfway to graduation. The luxury of having her mother to come home to at night didn’t seem like a bad thing.
Nate moved in with Cherry Dale and Floyd. I was opposed to this. Corrie was opposed to this. I think even Cherry Dale and her kids were opposed to it. But when Nate and his paw-paw decided on something, it was very hard to stand against them. And it made sense in some kind of way. Floyd had gotten a job as the custodian at the high school. Of course, it wasn’t really the high school anymore. When the local school district had consolidated with Tulsa Public Schools, the high school where Corrie and I graduated was turned into a middle school, where the kids attended. A new huge high school complex was being constructed outside of town where Lumkee kids would attend along with teenagers from the nearby suburban housing developments.
With Floyd working at Nate’s school, it was easy for him to see that Nate was there every day and on time.
The fact that Lauren attended the same school and walked to class didn’t seem to enter into the equation.
I was living at Mike’s house. His health had steadily worsened over the last two and a half years. He was no longer able to care for himself. Since I was the one who didn’t have a job, it was reasonable that I was the one who should stay with him.
He still had days when he felt good. Sometimes the doctor would order an IV of what the nurses jokingly called “Immune System in a Bottle.” It would perk him up for a few days and he’d want to see friends, drive down Main Street, visit the drugstore.
The last I tried to discourage. Not because his presence cast a pall upon the Maynards’ loyal customers, which it did. But because I didn’t want him to see how bad business had become.
With big discount stores out near the expressway offering cut-rate prescription service while you shopped for clothes, wastebaskets and power mowers, Maynard Drug, a fixture on Lumkee’s Main Street since 1947, was about to go under.
Even sadder than that was the fact that Doc Maynard didn’t seem to care. This fine, gentle man who was shouldering most of the financial burden for all of us, had lost heart. He had seen the battle before him and was too war-weary to fight it. I think the only reason he didn’t just put a For Sale sign on the front door was that he didn’t want Mike to see it. His son’s death was inevitable. And I was pretty sure that when the business closed for the funeral, it would never reopen again.
But I could only worry about that on Mike’s good days. On his bad days, I only had time and energy to worry about him.
I would help him bathe and dress. He wanted to walk to the living room and eat in the dining room for as long as he could. He knew that his life would most likely end in bed, so he wanted to spend as little time there as possible.
He wasn’t crazy about watching TV. But he loved movies, especially obscure art movies. So I would rent videos, dozens at a time, and he would watch them for hours.
Mike had always been an avid reader. But his sight began to fail. We got him new glasses, but the eyestrain problem was caused by his tear ducts malfunctioning—not keeping his eyes wet enough.
So I read to him.
I had, since being unemployed, discovered the thrill of thrillers. I regularly borrowed the latest from the public library.
But what Mike read was different. He was interested in science and history and philosophy. Subjects I knew almost nothing about. But you don’t have to understand in order to read. And, amazingly, as you read, eventually you begin to understand.
Sometimes we would even discuss the books. One day while I was reading an essay by Emerson, Mike stopped me in midsentence.
“Do you believe that?” he asked.
I glanced down at the page I was on.
“Compensation?”
Mike nodded. “Yes, do you believe that? That somehow over a lifetime all the good things and bad things that happen equal out.”
I looked down at his frail body and pale face, blemished with ugly skin cancers.
“I don’t know,” I told him honestly.
“I think it does,” Mike told me. “Over the whole lifetime, I think it does.”
But what if you don’t get a whole lifetime? I wanted to ask him. Could there ever be any compensation for that?
I guess it could be said that some of Mike’s pain was compensated by the fun he had with his friends. After a lifetime of being a closet homosexual in a small conservative town, Mike had suddenly been “outed,” and now his friends from Tulsa showed up in Lumkee to visit. What the town might have thought of that, I don’t know. But they were an interesting group. I’d never had any dealings with gay men in my life. And my inclination was just to treat them as if they were straight. That mostly worked. But some of them were so…girly…that it just felt more natural to talk to them like women. So I just went with that.
For the most part, I didn’t know what they thought of me. I assumed I stood out as the straight guy. But apparently not. One evening when the house was literally crowded with people, I was fixing drinks in the kitchen when Josh, a big, beefy cowboy type asked me if I was Mike’s partner. I think my jaw must have dropped to the floor, I was too surprised by the question to answer.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, they are not lovers,” Daryl, a close friend of Mike’s, told the guy. “He and Mike are brothers.”
I regained my composure enough that I could have pointed out that Mike was actually my brother-in-law. But somehow I felt no need to make the correction.
Local people dropped by from time to time as well. The pastor, some of Mom’s friends, occasionally somebody Mike knew from the Chamber of Commerce or the Optimists Club.
Surprisingly the most faithful visitor was Cherry Dale. They had been friends for years. She would come and talk to him. Tell him the stupidest jokes and entertain him with all the gossip from the gym. It was on one of those days when I heard more things than I expected.
I’d been in and out of the house doing the lawn. I’d come in the kitchen door and had sat down at the breakfast nook. I hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, it just happened.
Mike was saying, “So I want you to know that the money I’ve loaned you all gets wiped out in the will. You’ll own the gym free and clear and nobody will be able to touch it.”
“Mike, I don’t know why you’ve always been so good to me,” Cherry Dale answered.
He laughed. “You’re the only girl who ever volunteered to cure me.”
She laughed. “I’m so embarrassed. What an idiot you must have thought I was.”
“I didn’t think you were an idiot,” Mike said. “I thought you were a nice person who was attracted to me and didn’t understand why I wasn’t attracted back. You know, you’re the only person in this town that knew I was gay. I never trusted anyone else.”
“I can’t believe you trusted me,” Cherry Dale said.
“Well, I was right. You never told anyone.”
“I told Floyd,” she said. “Probably the worst person in town. That’s who I told.”
“I don’t blame you for that,” Mike said. “Floyd…well Floyd is like your personal brand of AIDS. He’s a painful, sickening source of misery in your life. A plague that you never wanted but can’t blame anyone else for.”
“And something I’ll probably die of,” she added.
She said it as a joke. There were always lots of jokes
. But there was nothing funny about Mike’s battle with AIDS.
He took more medication than we had room for on the kitchen counter. He counted them once.
“One hundred and fourteen per month,” Mike told me. “As a pharmacist, I expected to count a building full of pills in a lifetime. I just didn’t think I’d be expected to swallow them.”
Some days, swallowing was the biggest challenge he could face.
It was easy to tell why the Africans called AIDS Slim Disease. Mike’s weight went down to 134 pounds. On his wide-shouldered, six-foot-two frame, he was like a walking skeleton.
I was determined to feed him to try to keep up his strength. He never felt much like eating. Part of that was fatigue, he was just too tired to make the effort. The medicines altered his ability to taste anything. And his mouth was full of thrush, a yeast infection that actually made eating painful.
I had never been all that spectacular in the kitchen. I wasn’t even one of those guys who liked to throw steaks on the grill. But when you can see the flesh falling off another person’s body, well, you just know that you’ve to do more than heat up a can of soup and grill a cheese sandwich in the toaster.
I began trying to fix healthy, tasty meals. I talked to Edna and Corrie. I tried to recall some of the special things that Gram had sometimes cooked for me. I borrowed recipe books from the library.
Mike cheered my efforts, though often he didn’t eat much of them. I knew I was getting better when everybody seemed to be interested in my leftovers. Even Nate, on his compulsory one-afternoon-a-week visit, spent most of his time raiding the fridge.
On a cold autumn day I stood in the kitchen surrounded by cookbooks, trying to think of something special. It needed to be fairly soft, Mike could hardly chew. Meat loaf? No, that was too bland. It needed to be a little bit spicy, so he could taste it. Spaghetti? Too messy. He’d never be able to feed himself that and it was so demeaning when I fed him. Then, from far in the back of my brain, I remembered a warm spring day, a beautiful wife and a hotel on the move.
Tamales? Tamales.
My mouth watered as I thought of the taste that I remembered.
I went through all the cookbooks looking for a recipe. I couldn’t find one. Finally I called Miss Pruitt at the library.
“I’ll see what I can find,” she told me, and, true to her nature, she called me back in twenty minutes.
There were lots of different recipes. I went by and got copies of them all and sort of scrambled them together in a workable way. Several of the ingredients were not in my cabinets. Masa flour. Hojas. Anchos.
I didn’t try to fix them that day. But the idea was born. I called around to specialized groceries until I found one that had masa flour and anchos and that promised to get me some hojas. The next time I took Mike to the doctor we stopped by and got the stuff.
“You’re going to have to help me with this,” I warned him. “Tamales are not a one-person creation.”
He agreed to help. I made up the tamale filling by itself a day early. Then I helped Mike get comfortable in the breakfast nook. I mixed the masa flour and spices with the lard. I used warm beef broth to keep it all from gumming together in a big glob. It had to be cohesive enough to hold together without being so sticky it stayed on our hands.
We’d just started experimenting with the masa paste, smearing it on the corn-shuck hojas. Corrie, Edna and Lauren showed up to help us. We all sat around the table together trying to do it. When all else failed, I read the directions aloud.
“Tear down a wet hoja to the width of your hand. Place it in your palm making sure the smooth side is facing up and the tapered end is pointing in the same direction as your fingertip.”
Everybody looked down at their hands, trying to get the corn shuck going in the right direction.
The spoonful of masa paste had to cover the hoja completely with no holes, but still be spread thinly enough not to overwhelm the filling.
The giggling and finger-pointing almost got out of hand before it was decided that Edna and Lauren were not up to the challenge and were promoted to being filling fillers.
With more than our share of stupid mistakes, we finally got the tamales rolled up and into the pressure cooker.
“No wonder we buy these in cans,” Edna said. “By the time they’re cooked it will be nearly midnight.”
“Then we’ll eat them tomorrow,” Mike said.
And we did. For breakfast. He and I couldn’t wait and I dished them up in lieu of scrambled eggs or oatmeal.
“Sam, these are great,” Mike told me. “I think this is the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my life.”
“Once I week,” I vowed. “I don’t care how time-consuming and complicated these are. I’m going to make a batch once a week.”
I kept my word on that.
Thursday became tamale day. I devoted the entire waking hours of Thursday to the project. Mike began to look forward to it. People dropped in to help out. We made bigger and bigger batches to share.
When Mike’s friend Daryl tasted them, he was very complimentary.
“I’ve got to take some of these back to the city,” he told me. “They are simply awesome.”
Like the ladies from the San Antonio church, I wrapped them by the dozen in aluminum foil and put them in brown paper bags for delivery. I took them to the pastor, both mine and the Maynards’. I dropped some off at the firehouse and to the ladies at the library. I’d leave several bags at the Maynard home. They not only ate them, but Edna served them at her parties. I even took some by Cherry Dale’s place, since I knew how much Nate loved them.
When I stopped by with my ration for the drugstore, Doc thanked me and then motioned me to come to the back.
“I need a favor from you,” he said.
Once we got into the harsh light of the back room I could see his expression was very grave.
“What’s happened?” I asked him.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing has happened.” He handed me a wide-mouthed, plastic-topped brown medicine bottle. The familiar Maynard Drugstore label was blank except for the name Mike.
“What are these?”
“Pills. Mike asked me for them,” Doc said. He hesitated as if reluctant to say anything more.
“The doctor didn’t order anything new,” I told him, confused.
“They’re schedule-two drugs, not one of his prescriptions.”
I looked for dosage directions on the label. It was blank.
“Mike asked me for these,” Doc repeated. “I’ve had them here in this bottle for almost a month and haven’t been able to give them to him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He said that he wanted something…” Doc’s lower lip began to tremble. He bit down on it, but that didn’t help much. “Mike said that if it got too bad, he wanted something to be able to end it. That if it came to that, he wanted…”
The trembling shuddered into a sob. Doc Maynard suddenly looked a thousand years old. I took the bottle out of his hand and embraced him.
“Don’t think about it again,” I said. “I’ll see that Mike gets these. That will be his choice, one way or another. Just let it go, Doc. We love him and we’ve done all we can. Now we do what we think is right and not ever look back on it again.”
Corrie
1992
As Mike lingered painfully on through spring, his condition grew more and more grave. He developed endocarditis and the doctors told us he’d never be able to fight off the infection. Somehow he did. He suffered a bout with pneumocystis pneumonia, they warned us that it was highly unlikely that he would recover, but he did.
All through those first months of the year, we lived in daily expectation of my brother’s last breath. We were ready for it. He was ready for it. But his life dragged on and on in obvious suffering.
I was sitting the final exam of Russian History: 1917 to the Present when my pager began to vibrate. I glanced down and saw Mike’s home number. Sam knew I was i
n the middle of a test. He would only call if it was an emergency. I knew my brother was dead. My beloved brother, who had been my closest buddy, my hero. I’d wanted to be with him when he died. I’d wanted to be holding his hand when he stepped into the next world. But, as always, I’d been out doing my own thing, pursuing my own goals, seeking my own life. My brother was dead. I’d missed his last moment and there was nothing I could do about it.
Guilty, grieving, I wanted to just sign the test paper and hand it in. But I got a grip on myself. Nobody would be helped by me wasting time and money failing a class. Mike had been proud of me. He was proud of my determination to take control of my own life, to go after what I wanted. I gathered my composure, took a deep breath and finished the exam.
As soon as I handed it in I hurried to the block of pay phones out in the commons. I was crying now, thinking of Mike, as I dialed his number.
“He’s gone,” Sam said simply.
“I’ll be right there” was my only reply.
The next two days remain a blur in my mind. Friends and family filled Mike’s house. There seemed not to be any place to retreat to from the noise and the conversation. Arrangements for the funeral had already been made by Mike himself. He’d picked the order of service, the music, the friends to speak. He told the Reverend Shue that it was one of the few perks of knowing you’re going to die young—getting a hip send-off.
I don’t know if hip would have been the correct word to describe the funeral. It certainly had its hip moments.
The pallbearers were all in tuxes with matching cummerbunds. There was original music, some of it strange, almost free form. A black woman with dread-locks played a medley of Broadway hits on the xylophone. An old fashioned barbershop quartet sang a very unique rendition of “I’ll Be a Sunbeam for Jesus.”
For the scripture reading, instead of the comfort of the Psalms or the hopefulness of the New Testament, Mike had chosen a passage from Job.
In lieu of eulogies, there were poetry readings. Most of the poems were about Mike. Others were about AIDS. Some of the verses were brimming with good humor. Others welling with sadness.