by Michael Nava
He was ordained, became the youth pastor at a big, unaffiliated evangelical church in Los Angeles called Ekklesia. He thrived in the role, bringing dozens of young families into an aging congregation. He also discovered a gift for raising money that, more than his ministerial skills, brought him to the attention of Max Taggert, Ekklesia’s founding pastor. Taggert’s only child was a daughter, Jessica, who could not, of course, inherit his position, as women were barred from ordination. Taggert, eyeing a successor, began to call Daniel “son.”
••••
A church in San Francisco had invited him to help design its youth ministry. After six years, the city was at once familiar and unrecognizable. The streets were the same, but the feet that trod them belonged to strangers. One afternoon he strolled through the Haight, where no trace of the sixties remained except in fading graffiti and a couple of old hippie businesses. Moved by nostalgia, he stepped into a phone booth, opened the phone book, and looked up Gwen. He didn’t really expect to find her since, as far as he knew, she’d never returned to the city. But there she was: Gwen Baker. Or, a Gwen Baker. Living in the Mission on Fair Oaks Street. Impulsively he called her. She knew him by his voice, even before he said his name, and invited him to dinner.
Daniel had stood at the front door of Gwen’s flat— one half of a tall Victorian on a street of tall Victorians— and peered through the window at a steep flight of stairs. He rang the bell. A moment later the small figure of a boy came hurtling down the stairs and opened the door, breathless. He was seven, Daniel later learned. He had Gwen’s frizzy hair, complexion, and elegant features but his eyes— blue and awash with curiosity— were Daniel’s.
“Hello,” Daniel said. “Is your mother home?”
“She’s cooking,” he said. “She said to let you in. I’m Wyatt.”
“I’m Daniel.”
••••
Their conversation was limited by Wyatt’s presence. Bright, inquisitive and bold, he had interrupted them when they attempted to speak in grown-up code and demanded to know what they were talking about. Eventually, they gave up and restricted themselves to pleasantries as they sipped coffee in Gwen’s comfortable living room while Wyatt sprawled on his belly on the floor with crayons and paper, coloring with one hand and shooing away a plump gray cat with the other.
“What are you drawing?” Daniel asked.
“It’s a stego— stego . . .”
“Saurus,” Gwen said.
“Mom! I was going to say that.”
“I’m sorry, Wyatt.”
“My school went to the natural history museum, and we saw the dinosaur bones. When I grow up, I want to be a paleo— a paleo . . .” Now he glanced at Gwen for help.
“Paleontologist.”
“And dig up dinosaur bones from millions of years ago.”
“You know, Wyatt,” Daniel said, “the Bible tells us God created the world and all the animals in it in seven days and seven nights.”
He gawked at Daniel and exclaimed, “That’s ridiculous!”
“Wyatt, don’t be rude to our guest.”
Wyatt grunted and went back to his drawing. A few minutes later, he got up with his picture and went to Daniel. He held out the drawing and said, “I’m sorry I was rude. You can have my picture.”
Daniel studied the drawing of the lumpy, spiky-backed green blob with Wyatt’s name in the corner. “Thank you, Wyatt. That’s very nice.”
“And now,” Gwen said, “it’s time for you to go to bed.”
While Gwen put Wyatt to bed, Daniel walked around the living room. On the mantel over the fireplace there were framed photographs of Gwen’s family— people Daniel had never met— and Gwen in a graduation robe and mortarboard. A banner on the wall behind her indicated the photograph had been taken at the nursing school of San Francisco State. There were a half-dozen photographs of Wyatt from infancy on, some with Gwen or other family members, some of Wyatt alone. But no men other than those he took to be her father or brothers. No boyfriend. No husband.
She came into the room and said, “I usually have a glass of wine after I get him into bed. You want one?”
He shook his head.
“You mind if I do?”
“Not at all.”
She disappeared into the kitchen and emerged holding a large wine glass half-filled with dark liquid. Drinking was not proscribed by his church— even his future father-in-law enjoyed his occasional tumbler of Scotch on the rocks— and many of his congregants drank, a few to excess. Daniel chose to set an example of sobriety for the younger people he worked with. Now, looking at her wine, he thought if ever there was a time for alcohol, this was it.
“You know,” he said. “I think I will have a glass.”
“Here,” she said. “Take mine. You probably need it more than I do.”
She sat beside him on the plush couch and handed him the wine.
“Why didn’t you tell me about Wyatt?” Daniel asked, turning the glass in his hand.
She took a deep breath. “I didn’t know until I went home that I couldn’t go through with an abortion. After Wyatt was born, I had enough on my plate without tracking you down and adding that complication. I thought that maybe later I could find you, but by the time I came back to the city that place in the Haight was closed down and I didn’t know where else to look for you.”
“What changed your mind about the abortion?”
She took the glass from him for a sip, then handed it back. “Wyatt may not have been planned, but he was conceived in love. And you were— are— a good person. I’m sure you’re a wonderful father to your other children.”
“I’m not married,” he said.
“Oh,” she exclaimed. “Sorry. I’m surprised.”
“I will have to, eventually,” he said. “We’re not Catholics. Unmarried pastors don’t inspire a lot of confidence.”
“Getting married is like a job requirement?”
“I want a family,” he said and, after a moment, continued. “You aren’t married, either. Why?”
“I didn’t want a man who wasn’t Wyatt’s father to raise him.”
“Will you write to me sometimes and let me know how he is?”
“He can write to you himself.”
“You’ll tell him who I am, then?”
“When he’s a little older. Is that all right?”
“Yes, but, when the time comes, I’d like to be here.”
“Of course. You are his father.”
He gazed at her and thought she didn’t want to marry a man who wasn’t Wyatt’s father and here he was, Wyatt’s father, also unmarried. Shouldn’t they at least consider . . . ? For Wyatt’s sake? He looked at the glass in his hand as he imagined breaking the news to Pastor Taggert, the man who called him “son,” and who had grown up a white man in the Jim Crow South with all the prejudices that implied.
She broke into his thoughts, observing, “We lead very different lives, Daniel. I’m happy with mine. I hope you’re happy with yours.”
“I am,” he said.
“Good,” she said, answering his unspoken question once and for all.
••••
A few days later a letter arrived at the church addressed to him with the word Personal written on the envelope. When he opened it and unfolded the paper, there were four lines in green crayon:
Dear Daniel, today we went to the Golden Gate Park and had a fun time. I liked you. I hope you come back to see me again.
Love, Wyatt
A year later, Daniel married Taggert’s daughter and when Taggert died, took his place as head of Ekklesia.
••••
Daniel stroked Wyatt’s forehead and said, “I’ve kept everything he ever sent me. Every drawing, every photo, every letter. Even the one where he told me about his— that he was gay.”
Gwen said, “It took you weeks to answer him.”
He frowned at her. “What did you expect? It was the last thing in the world I wanted to hear.”
“He thought you hated him.”
“I know,” Daniel said. “He told me. I told him I could never hate him.”
••••
“I could never hate you, Wyatt.” He had stared ahead as he spoke, at the turbid water on a cold, foggy August afternoon at Ocean Beach. Wyatt sat beside him on a blanket spread across the sand, his tension as palpable as an electric current, a cigarette burning between his long, slender fingers. “But I do wish you wouldn’t smoke.”
Wyatt made a noise, half-laugh, half-groan, and crushed the cigarette into the gray sand.
“Come on, Dad, at least it’s not pot.” Then he looked at his father. “I thought you’d be mad because, you know, your religion.”
Daniel chose his words carefully. “I accept your decision, but that doesn’t mean I approve.”
Wyatt’s eyes flared. “I didn’t decide anything. It’s who I am.”
“And I’m who I am,” Daniel replied. “If you want me to respect who you are, you have to respect who I am.”
“That mean we never talk about it again?” Wyatt said sullenly.
“There’s nothing we can’t talk about, even the hard stuff, but that doesn’t mean we won’t disagree. That’s what adults do.”
Wyatt stared out at the ocean, thoughtfully. “Okay, Dad,” he said, at last. “I guess I can live with that.”
••••
“We think there are different kinds of love,” Daniel had once preached to his congregation, “and some are greater than others, but that’s not true for Christians. For Christians, there is only one kind of love because there is only one God and John tells us God is love. Now, it’s true that we have different obligations to the different people we love and some of those obligations are greater than others, but the love, that’s the same. Don’t forget that because once you go down the road of, oh I don’t love this person as much as that person, it’s not that much of a jump to start treating people you say you love differently, some better and some worse. When that happens, you’ve stopped loving.”
••••
Four times a year, his congregants knew Daniel went on a silent retreat at a Jesuit order house outside of San Francisco. He arrived on Friday and spent the first night and the following morning at the retreat house, but then he drove to San Francisco where he remained until Monday with Gwen and Wyatt. Wyatt grew from a cheerful child into a mostly cheerful teen who got C’s in math and science and A’s in English and art, played point guard on his high school basketball team, had been busted by his mother for smoking pot, was proud of his driver’s license, and wrote monthly letters to Daniel that Daniel kept in a locked desk drawer in his office at the church. The love Daniel felt for his son was as unfiltered and uncomplicated as if it had traveled like a beam of light directly from God into Daniel’s heart.
But then came the terrible call from Gwen. “Wyatt’s sick,” she said. “It’s AIDS.”
“You let him have sex with another man!”
“I didn’t let him do anything. He’s eighteen, Daniel. He made his own decision. It was a mistake, but kids make mistakes. Like we did when you got me pregnant.”
“You can’t possibly compare that with what he did. Oh my God. Wyatt,” he had sobbed. “My boy.”
••••
“You should go back to the apartment, get some sleep,” Gwen was saying. “You have an early flight.”
“I can’t go without saying good-bye to him.”
Slowly, insistently, Gwen said, “He’s going to recover from this, Daniel. There will be other times.”
“This kind of pneumonia, though, isn’t a sign that he’ll get worse?”
“Not necessarily.”
“I wish I could believe you.”
Gwen started to reply but before she could, Wyatt’s eyes flew open, confused and unfocused. He looked at his mother and then at Daniel, peering at him as if seeing him for the first time. Then he smiled and said, “Dad, you’re here.”
Daniel answered, “Where else would I be?”
TWO
The vehicle blocking the driveway as I backed out of my garage was so conspicuously nondescript it could only be a plainclothes cop car. I rolled down the window, cut the engine, and waited. A short-haired woman in a pantsuit the same dull, dark gray as her car got out of the driver’s seat, followed a moment later by a buff young guy in a suit almost indistinguishable from hers. She approached my window. He stood a step behind her. The sunglasses hiding his eyes were a kid’s idea of intimidation.
“Henry Rios,” she not quite questioned.
“Who’s asking?”
“Doris Whitcombe. Special agent, FBI. My partner, John Colby.”
I glanced at him. “Trainee?” When neither responded, I asked, “What do you want?”
“The man who owns this house, Larry Ross, was involved in drug smuggling. We have reason to believe there are still drugs on the premises. We’d like to look around.”
Doris Whitcombe looked less like a cop than a high school science teacher— the sensible haircut; utilitarian clothes; plain, intelligent face; unthreatening voice. The feds didn’t go in for the stormtrooper bluster of LAPD, but behind their blankness was the same implied threat of menace.
“Larry Ross died six months ago. The drugs he allegedly smuggled were over-the-counter medications from Mexico to relieve the suffering of men infected with HIV. That’s not a violation of any federal statute I’m aware of.”
She replied, crisply. “Those drugs are not approved by the Federal Drug Administration for HIV.”
“That’s a regulatory issue, not a criminal offense. Doctors routinely prescribe off-label uses for drugs. Are you going to bust them?”
“These drugs were not prescribed by doctors.”
“Because they’re nonprescription drugs.”
“In Mexico, not here. You could be charged with conspiracy to distribute illegal drugs.”
I’d had it. “Go to hell. You and your boy should be ashamed of working for a government that would rather let my friends die than have access to drugs that might save their lives. If you have probable cause I’ve broken any law, arrest me. As for searching my house without a warrant, fuck you. Now move your goddamn car. I have to get to court. Or didn’t you know I’m a criminal defense lawyer?”
Her face had gone red, but she maintained her bureaucratic monotone and said, “We will be back, sir.”
I wanted to shout at her something about it being 1986 and not 1984, but I figured the George Orwell allusion would be wasted on her. I started the car. She and her partner walked down the driveway to their own car, got in, and drove away.
As soon as they were gone, I cut the engine again and pressed my forehead against the steering wheel. Grief and fury surged through my body like electrical shocks. It was moments like this that I most missed Larry Ross, my friend and AA sponsor.
It was a clear, mild day in May. The sun warmed my face. Birds chirped in the trees. A vine of deep red bougainvillea crept up the wall that enclosed the back yard of Larry’s hillside house. Well, my house, technically. Without telling me Larry had put the place into joint tenancy with me. When six months earlier an aneurysm had burst in his brain in a hotel room in Mexico City, I became the owner of his fifteen-room, 1925 Spanish mission residence in a canyon above Franklin Avenue, at the edge of Griffith Park. Far too much house for me, and I couldn’t enter a room without expecting to find him there, but I couldn’t bear to leave it yet, either. It was my last physical connection to him.
In his late forties, Larry’d been a hugely successful partner at the most successful entertainment law firm in LA. He was also an alcoholic, a coke addict, and a closeted gay man. Forced from the closet when a trick he’d picked up at a bathhouse tried to blackmail him, he’d come out to his law partners who had had no problem with his homosexuality but forced him into rehab. When he emerged, he had poured the same energy and tough-talking empathy that had made him a preeminent entertainment l
awyer into helping other people get and stay sober. Two years earlier, he’d found me in a halfway house in San Francisco with three months of shaky sobriety, feeling hopeless and desperate, and had steered me back to sanity and a new life in Los Angeles where I was slowly rebuilding my criminal law practice.
He invited me to stay at his house until I got on my feet, but even after I could have found my own place, I stayed on. We got along as roommates and, by then, Larry had been diagnosed as HIV positive. He’d suffered a bout of PCP, the virulent strand of pneumonia that was often the first of the opportunistic diseases that attacked the compromised immune systems of people with the virus. After that, there was no question of my moving out.
The near-death experience of PCP changed his priorities. He had cashed out of his law practice and thrown himself into the battle against AIDS. He took as his motto Mother Jones’s axiom: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.” Not content to be a checkbook activist, he looked for a way to fight on the front lines. He heard about two drugs that, when used together, had bolstered the immune system of some people with HIV. The catch: the drugs weren’t authorized for HIV treatment in the United States, and the Federal Drug Administration had rejected requests to begin trial of them for that purpose. They were, however, available over the counter in Mexico.
An underground already existed of people crossing the border, smuggling the drugs in bulk and distributing them at cost to anyone who wanted to try the regimen. But it wasn’t enough to keep up with demand. Larry bought a Cessna, hired a gay pilot, and began flying all over Mexico to scour pharmacies for the drugs. I had once helped him unload the boxes in the big storage facility where he stored the drugs but only that one time.
“You need to keep your hands clean,” he said, rejecting my further offer to help with the operation. “Because if I’m arrested, I’ll need you to represent me.”
So I knew little about the Mexican operation and nothing about the mysterious activities that had him flying to Israel, France and Japan except that he was pursuing leads about drugs and treatments that might be effective against the virus but which the FDA refused to consider. I worried that he was pushing himself too hard and would get sick. In the end, the brain aneurysm that killed him was a completely unexpected and yet, maybe merciful end considering the death he might otherwise have suffered from AIDS.