by Michael Nava
Table of Contents
TItlepage
Dedication
Proposition 54
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
About the Author
Copyright
About Amble Press
For Mike Lyons and Alan Heppel.
If a man lies with another man as with a woman,
both of them have committed an abomination.
They shall surely be put to death.
Their blood guilt shall be upon them.
Leviticus 20:13 (Modern English Version)
There is no fear in love,
but perfect love casts out fear.
1 John 4:18 (English Standard Version)
PROPOSITION 54
For the California Ballot, November 1986
I. Text
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) is an infectious, contagious and communicable disease and the condition of being a carrier of the HTLV-III virus is an infectious, contagious and communicable condition and both shall be placed and maintained by the director of the Department of Health Services on the list of reportable diseases and conditions mandated by Health and Safety Code Section 3123, and all personnel of the Department of Health Services and all health officers shall fulfill all of the duties and obligations specified in each and all of the sections of said statutory division in a manner consistent with the intent of this Act, as shall all other persons identified in said provisions.
II. Analysis
Declares that AIDS is an infectious, contagious and communicable disease and that the condition of being a carrier of the HTLV-III virus is an infectious, contagious and communicable condition. Requires both be placed on the list of reportable diseases and conditions maintained by the director of the Department of Health Services. Provides that both are subject to quarantine and isolation statutes and regulations. Provides that Department of Health Services personnel and all health officers shall fulfill the duties and obligations set forth in specified statutory provisions to preserve the public health from AIDS.
ONE
The boy’s eyelids fluttered like butterfly wings as if restlessly scanning the dreamscape into which sleep had transported him. Keeping vigil beside the bed, Daniel thought people were wrong to describe death as sleeping; sleep was an activity of the living, filled, like Wyatt’s, with squirms and fidgets, groans and sighs, frowns and smiles. He was pinned to the narrow bed by IVs and monitoring devices emitting beeps and buzzes above the rasp of his troubled breathing. Daniel drew a deep breath and slowly exhaled as if, by example, he could encourage Wyatt to clear the sickness from his lungs. He entwined his fingers with the boy’s— the warm hand was limp and unresponsive to Daniel’s touch. He should pray, he thought, but what more could he say to God that God had not already heard? Still, he whispered, Father, please . . .
The faint pressure of a hand on his shoulder silenced him. Gwen held out a foam cup of milky coffee to him. He took it, gratefully. She resumed her watch on the other side of the bed. Behind her, the windy San Francisco night growled faintly against the window. The brisk, jarring, urgent noises of the ward had subsided to a thrum, creating a peculiar intimacy in the small room, as if they were the only three people in the world.
“Did he wake up at all?”
He shook his head. “I think he’s out for the night.”
She smiled wanly. “He hasn’t slept through the night since he was admitted, and he wakes up confused and scared.”
Her shift had ended, but she was still in her nurse’s scrubs. He wondered when she’d last slept.
“He’s lucky he’s here where you work instead of with strangers,” Daniel said. “Your nurse friends have been dropping in all night to check on him.”
“Everyone’s rooting for him.”
“It’s hard to believe this is where we ended up,” he said.
She lifted Wyatt’s hand delicately and rubbed her thumb along his palm as if imparting her life force into him. The gesture sparked an old memory, and Daniel asked, “Did you ever read his fortune?”
She glanced at him in bewilderment.
“Don’t you remember? The first time we met, you read my palm.”
She smiled, and for a moment he saw in her tired face the beautiful Black girl who had taken his hand, turned it palm up, and studied it intently on a chilly day in Golden Gate Park almost twenty years earlier in the Summer of Love.
••••
“This is your wisdom line,” Gwen had told him, gravely, tracing a line in his palm. “You’re a seeker.”
The sun was a white disc in the gray sky, and a cold wind crackled through the tops of the eucalyptus trees, but the park was still crowded with the young. The swirling shapes of dancers, cacophony of drums, clouds of marijuana surrounded Daniel and Gwen on the poncho she’d spread on the ground with a handwritten sign on it that advertised “Free Palm Readings.”
He closed his hand around hers and said with mock seriousness, “Seek and you shall find.”
She laughed, stood up, playfully pulled him to his feet, and took him to her squat where they spent the rest of the afternoon on a mattress on the floor.
••••
“You said I was a seeker,” he reminded her now.
“I was right, wasn’t I?”
“At the time I thought I’d found what I was looking for.”
“We all did back then,” she said with a trace of a smile.
••••
At first, living in Haight-Asbury had been like living inside a kaleidoscope, all mirrors and flashing colors. The old Victorians had been reclaimed as communes and painted outrageous colors, purple and orange, red and yellow, pink and blue, and their doors left unlocked to welcome young refugees from what neighborhood graffiti called AmeriKKKa. AmeriKKA was the death machine from which the young had escaped, following the directive spray-painted on the wall of the free clinic: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.
Daniel, a recent dropout from San Francisco State College, embraced the creed. If he panhandled tourists, he wasn’t begging, he was giving them an opportunity to support a free life; if he dropped acid, it wasn’t to escape his grubby circumstances, but to expand his consciousness; if he grabbed food from the supermarket without paying, he wasn’t stealing it, he was liberating it. Every act that defied the laws and conventions of the squares was an act of revolution.
Gwen was as much a believer as he, but while his political ideas were a grab bag of voguish platitudes, hers were the fruit of a studious and methodical mind. She was not playing at revolution; she really wanted to dismantle the machinery of oppression, and her first step was to understand it. While he threw Frisbees in the park, she hunkered down with The Wretched of the Earth, The Autobiography of Malcom X, and The Second Sex.
Daniel spouted slogans; Gwen advanced arguments. Her clarity about the mechanism of oppression helped him convince himself that simply by being with her, a Black girl, he was engaged in the struggle against it. When, however, her studies took her into women’s consciousness-raising groups, and the oppression under discussion was male, her critical gaze fixed him in her sights. Their life together became a series of confrontations for which he was ill-prepared. He saw the logic of her arguments against male domination but protested, “Not me, Gwen,” which only infuriated her. At the same time, the Summer of Love came to a chilly end. Darker colors seeped into his kale
idoscope. Lured by tales of the free-loving, drug-taking hippie Utopia in San Francisco, a more desperate crowd descended on the neighborhood: wounded kids, kids addicted to stronger drugs than pot and acid, kids with mental troubles, and ordinary criminals looking for easy marks.
When Gwen left him to live in a women’s commune, he wandered the Haight without plan or purpose, hedged by anxiety, lost in fear. One day, hungry and tired, he went to a storefront coffeehouse he’d heard was serving free meals. In the window was a painting of an oxbow with the words “For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” in psychedelic script.
••••
Remembering those days now, he said, “I was drowning without you.”
She’d had no time for his self-pity then, when her feminist analysis of his behavior hurt his feelings, and she had no time for it now. “Is that why you jumped on the Jesus lifeboat? If you’d waited, a better one would have come for you. White boys aren’t allowed to drown, not then or now.”
“We both knew plenty of white boys who did,” he replied brusquely. “The one who ended up on drugs. That could have been me, shooting up and overdosing in an alley. It wasn’t an accident I found the Living Room. I was led there.”
••••
He had pushed open the door and was greeted by familiar smells— patchouli, pot, tobacco— but it was the aromas of coffee and soup that drew him and his rumbling stomach farther into the big, shabbily furnished room. Another quotation painted on the wall brought back a childhood memory of sitting in church: “For God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son so whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
A boy with curling hair that fell to his back, wearing a beat-up, fringed leather jacket, approached Daniel with a wide smile and gripped his hand in a soul shake.
“Hey man, I’m Ronnie; who are you?”
“I’m Daniel.”
“You hungry, Daniel? The girls made chicken soup, and there’s doughnuts and coffee. Come and help yourself.”
Daniel was studying another quotation on the wall: “I am the way and the truth and the light. No one comes to the father except through me.”
He looked at Ronnie and asked, “What’s your trip, man?”
Ronnie’s big smile got even bigger. “Jesus is my trip.”
••••
Jesus is my trip. Ronnie Carson, the wild-haired urchin who had brought him to Jesus, was still out there somewhere preaching in the streets. He would have been nineteen, the same age then as Wyatt was now. So young, both of them; Daniel himself only twenty-one when he had stumbled into the Living Room, as the coffeehouse was known. He returned day after day to eat soup and drink coffee and listen as Ronnie or one of the other men who ran the place read scripture and talked about Jesus.
Daniel was indifferent to Christianity. In his Lutheran family, religion was something reserved for the starchy hour they spent in church on Sunday, which otherwise did not impinge on their lives. What drew Daniel to the Jesus people wasn’t their beliefs but their joy and their generosity which recaptured for him the original spirit of the Haight.
Almost without knowing it, Daniel had become part of the community, scrubbing the toilet in the Living Room’s squalid little bathroom or going out on the daily dumpster-dives for food behind supermarkets or to negotiate with local bakeries for day-old bread and pastries. He faithfully read the little New Testament they gave him, donated by a local church and originally intended for missionaries in India, and joined in the Bible studies. The Jesus they believed in was nothing like the remote, ghostly presence he remembered from Sunday school. This Jesus was an earthy, long-haired, street-wise preacher who consorted with the lowly and took the powerful to task. Daniel loved this Jesus. But was he God? That was the precipice where Daniel found himself stalled.
One morning, as he was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the Living Room, Ronnie approached him with a sly smile. “Let’s hitch to Ocean Beach and drop a tab of this fantastic acid I just scored.”
••••
It was a glittering December day; the surface of the ocean was like plates of glass slowly sliding one over the other. Gulls dipped and soared in the blue air. The sky was cloudless. They sat on a tree trunk someone had dragged onto the sand. The air was filled with the decaying smell of the kelp scattered on the beach. Ronnie put the tab of acid on Daniel’s tongue as if it were a communion wafer and placed the other on his own. They swallowed and sat, waiting for the drug to kick in.
Daniel remembered how he had stared at the sand where, it seemed to him, he could see simultaneously the golden glint of each individual grain and the golden carpet of the entire beach. He remembered he had raised his eyes to the sky, and the dip and soar of the gulls was transformed from flight into script. The words they wrote across the sky he repeated aloud: “I come from the Father and have come into the world and now I am leaving the world and going to the Father.”
Beside him, Ronnie said, “John sixteen twenty-five.”
“What?”
“It’s what Jesus said to the disciples before he left them to go home to his Father.”
Daniel began to sob. “He’s abandoned us,” he stuttered.” “He’s left us here alone.”
Ronnie put his arm around Daniel and said in a warm, urgent, intimate whisper, “No, Danny, listen to the rest of the verse. The disciples say, now we understand that we know all things and there’s no need to question you. From this we can believe that you came from God. And then Jesus goes, do you now believe? He’s asking, do you believe I’m God? That’s the question every Christian has to answer, Danny. He’s asking you. Do you believe Jesus is God? Do you accept him as your Lord and Savior so he can be with you always?”
Daniel wiped tears and snot on his shirtsleeve, and when he looked back at the sky the script had faded, and everything was light.
“Yes!” he shouted. “Yes!”
Ronnie had jumped up, hauled Daniel into the freezing ocean, and baptized him.
••••
“Remember that moment,” he told Gwen. “That Jesus boat wasn’t just something to grab onto because you left me.”
She relented. “I’m sorry I was disrespectful, Daniel. In my family Jesus was the strap they used to keep me in line whenever I did anything my mom didn’t think was ladylike.” She sipped her coffee. “That’s what Jesus meant to me when you told me you were saved. I should have asked what it meant to you.”
He remembered the glittering ocean, the pang of salt in the air, the cries of the gulls in the dizziness of blue above him, and how he had felt filled with light.
“It meant,” he said, “for a moment, I was blinded by love and when that passed, nothing looked the same again.”
••••
But at the time, when she had come to see him at the Living Room, his conversion was still too fresh for him to have words for it. She looked around the room, read the scripture on the wall, listened to his story about how he’d been struck by the glory of the Lord, and said dismissively, “The Lord? You mean that old white man in the sky who told women to bow down to the men?”
“Paul said in God there is no male and female and all are one in Jesus Christ.”
“Tell that to the girls washing dishes in the kitchen while you guys sit around out here smoking and drinking coffee and rapping.” She got up. “This trip isn’t for me and maybe, when the acid high wears off, it won’t be for you, either.”
He grabbed her hand. “Gwennie, don’t go. I love you.”
She pulled her hand away, looked at him and said, “I’m pregnant.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry, Danny, I’m going to take care of it.”
“What do you mean, take care of it?” he asked in horror. “You don’t mean an abortion.”
“That’s for me to decide,” she said flatly.
“It’s my child, too,” Daniel protested. “You can’t just kill it.”
“You don’t tell m
e what to do with my body.”
“Marry me,” he exclaimed.
Her eyes which had been angry, filled with sadness. “You don’t mean that.”
He drew in a breath. “I’m serious. Marry me. I’ll do whatever you want me to do, even if it means leaving my friends here. Leaving the city, getting a straight job, starting over somewhere else.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want you to change your life for me anymore than I want to change my life for you. I won’t marry you, Danny. Our thing is over. You go your way, and I’ll go mine.” And with that she had left.
••••
Now, he said, “I went to the commune where you were living. A redheaded girl told me you’d gone hone and slammed the door in my face.”
Gwen chuckled softly. “That would have been Alice.”
He continued, “I realized I didn’t even know where your family lived. I had no way to reach you.” He shook his head. “I stood there and cried until another girl came up the steps and saw me and told me I should leave.” He shrugged. “At least she was nice about it.”
The quiet of the hospital room was broken by the splash of rain against the window. They both looked over as water began to streak the glass. He remembered how he had wiped his eyes and nose on the sleeve of his dirty cowhide jacket and gone heavily down the stairs.
••••
Six years later the Living Room had been shuttered, its people scattered, but Daniel’s conversion stuck. He returned to school, a small Christian college in Orange County. There, the free-wheeling faith he had learned on the streets of San Francisco was tempered by the corollary tenets of man’s inherent sinfulness and the requirement of repentance. Daniel, having watched with dismay as what was left of the idealism of the sixties soured into consumption, materialism and licentiousness, accepted those teachings. If other principles, like the inerrancy of the Bible and the exclusivity of Christianity, gave him pause, he hammered out his doubts with his teachers until he arrived at a place of, if not blind, then working acceptance. As the years passed, the distinction evaporated.