Hold Tight Gently

by Duberman, Martin

  Essex had long felt especially close to his middle sister, Lois Holmes. When growing up he’d helped her with her handwriting and taught her how to play baseball. As an adult he’d always send her some money, when he had any to spare, to help raise her son, and was “always there for her when she needs to talk or get something off her chest.” In a poem entitled “Thanksgiving 1993,” which he probably wrote after his trip home, he may well have been referring not to his generic “black sisters” but specifically to his own family members:

  I feel sorrow for my heterosexual sisters

  who made the mistake of marrying men

  beyond redemption, men beyond

  the learning of new tricks.

  I feel dread for what hell

  their married lives must be like, sordid

  in how many unimaginable ways?

  their barking, brutish, bullish husbands

  are dense to change and insecure

  I would wish such misery

  upon none that I know,

  the curse of having a dullard,

  loud-mouthed husband in tow.

  I feel sorry for my heterosexual sisters

  who have staked their loyalties

  in men who fear not the fall of night,

  but the start of each new day.12

  Essex continued to write sporadically, and he even managed a new romance with someone named Roger—though it was soon over (“it is the best decision”). He began, though, to withdraw increasingly “to deal with my stuff”; to Barbara Smith he wrote vaguely of “some interior issue” he had to resolve. As always, he tried hard to stress the positive: “I just remember to say ‘thank you’ for every day I am able to have. I don’t really desire too many things other than the chance to keep creating.”

  9

  Wartime

  There were piles of papers everywhere in Mike’s tiny apartment—bills to pay, letters to answer, catalogues, books—“There’s so much still to do!” Mike lamented. He worried about his legacy. “It’s begun to dawn on me that some people misinterpret my message of hope to mean that everyone with full-blown AIDS won’t necessarily die of it. I have never said any such thing! Instead, what I’ve wracked up 180,000 air miles trying to explain is that no one diagnosed with AIDS needs to die on cue! That’s a very different message. Long-term survival is possible; my own life proves it.”1

  Unexpectedly, he thought for a time that he might even beat KS of the lungs. He put out an all-points bulletin on the PWA grapevine asking if anyone out there had survived pulmonary KS for more than two years. No one replied yes. The sole response he got—both from PWAs and from his doctors—was that chemotherapy was his only option. But he was already doing chemo, and he hated the way it made him feel. After a long internal debate, he decided that quality of life was what he valued most, and he made the decision to stop additional chemo treatments. No sooner had he done so than he worried that the decision was “inconsistent with my AIDS philosophy” to keep fighting. From that, he began to think about exploring some long-shot treatments, though for a decade he’d been advising PWAs against trying every touted drug that came along.2

  As if on cue, he got a phone call from Dr. Joan Priestly, the most famous holistic doctor in L.A. For three months he’d been doing her megavitamin regimen, largely to silence his many New Age friends. She was calling to tell Mike that she’d heard through the grapevine about his pulmonary KS and had managed to get him a free month’s supply of aloe vera juice, and had also pulled some strings to get him into the Search Alliance shark-cartilage (the latest “miracle” cure) protocol.3

  Mike decided that both sounded harmless enough to be worth a try; they met his long-standing condition for experimental treatments—that (unlike AZT) “they couldn’t hurt” and might help. He gave the aloe vera juice only a halfhearted try, now and then taking a gulp but usually “forgetting” to. The shark cartilage was another matter. The taste and smell were vile—in Mike’s words, “dead fish left out in the sun to rot for, oh, say, two weeks, then powdered.” He was told to swallow a tablespoon in V8 juice three times a day, but after a week he knew he couldn’t continue. He called the doctor running the protocol, who suggested that rather than quit, he should try retention enemas. Mike joked (not to the doctor) that since he “hadn’t had sex in eons,” he’d give the enemas a try.

  Simultaneously, he tried to persuade the radiologist who’d been treating the KS lesions on his leg to irradiate his lungs. After consulting with other radiologists, she gave him a definitive no—a word not in Mike’s vocabulary. He kept tenaciously after her and she ultimately consented, against her better judgment, to irradiate one of his lungs, and only at a low dosage—and told him frankly that the treatment wouldn’t work.

  Two weeks later, after completing ten treatments of 100 rads each on his right lung, he went in for an X-ray to see the results. He heard a scream from the control booth, followed by both the technician and the radiologist rushing into the room to tell him, “It’s gone! All the KS is gone! Your right lung is whistle clean!” No one, including Mike, could believe it. To check if the results were a fluke, Mike did a repeat X-ray two weeks later. The result was the same: the KS in his right lung had completely regressed. Everyone was nonplussed—except for the doctor running the shark-cartilage protocol. He claimed to have seen the same miraculous results in seven of the ten people in his trial who were taking the cartilage while doing low-dose radiation. His theory was that the combination selectively inhibited the formation of cancerous blood vessels, and he promptly started lobbying the manufacturer of the cartilage to provide funds for additional protocols. Mike’s advice to all concerned, and especially to himself, was: “PLEASE remain skeptical!”

  Cruelly, his advice proved altogether accurate. Within a short period, KS in his right lung reappeared, and the initial shark-cartilage/radiation sensation could never be replicated. Nor did any plausible explanation for its stunning initial effect ever emerge. Too many people saw Mike’s X-rays for the temporary disappearance of KS in his right lung to have been merely the hallucinatory product of wishful thinking. The desperate hope for amelioration from the horrors of AIDS had long produced a series of drugs that had been initially heralded but had failed to live up to the claims in their behalf—from suramin and Peptide T to ddI and ddC. Even Mike, who’d long fought against the promiscuous practice of “drugs into bodies,” had briefly succumbed to its siren song—and with the same empty result as from all the preceding “miracles.” As it was, he was continuing to take thirty-five to fifty pills a day, mostly preventive medications for MAI (a form of tuberculosis), pneumonia, herpes, antifungal and antiparasitic infections, and the like. He also installed an oxygen tank in his apartment.

  Mike, unlike so many, was not easily crushed. Faced yet again with the hard-nosed fact that in all likelihood he had only about a year to live, he started taking imipramine to ward off incapacitating depression and turned all his energy to leaving behind some legacy in music. He was down to 25 percent lung capacity—“I feel like a bicycle tire with a slow leak,” he’d say—but remained intent, somehow, on being productively and artistically fulfilled. He was determined—and Mike’s determination was no trifle—to leave behind “some semblance of the art I might have made over a normal lifetime.” And he wanted to go out “resplendently, redundantly, relentlessly gay-celebratory.” He told a group of friends that “before I die I want to see a film that even remotely reflects the sexual reality of my life”—that is, one that would show a man with AIDS continuing to have sex responsibly. He also claimed that he’d be leaving $1,000 in his will “for throwing a memorial orgy” and even had what he called the “demented” idea of placing an urn with his ashes in the middle of it.

  But then, out of the blue, friends in New York City told him about yet another new drug, DaunoXome, and Mike made any number of failed attempts to secure it. Just as he was about to give up, he got a call from a friend, the philanthropist Judy Peabody—a doyenne of New
York society long active on behalf of people with AIDS—imploring him to pursue Doxil (liposomal-coated Adriamycin), another experimental chemo drug. She’d heard that Doxil was working in trials—at least in the sense of gaining additional time—in 65 percent of patients with ovarian or KS cancers.

  Mike agreed to try it, and contacted the company that manufactured Doxil. Unlike his previous experience with drug companies, Liposome Technology of Menlo Park reacted with courtesy and kindness. Doxil’s principal investigator, Melody Anderson, recognized Mike’s name, and when he suggested L.A.—many of his friends, like him, were out of options—as one of the sites for the trial of Doxil, she flew there in person, and within a remarkably short time Mike was one of the first three patients being infused with the drug. He was, as usual, skeptical, since Adriamycin had a bad reputation among PWAs who’d tried various chemical options.

  To his surprise, the infusions produced no negative side effects. Better still, he stopped losing hair, his lung capacity slowly began to return, the external KS lesions on his legs seemed to shrink in size, and the swelling in his right leg went down dramatically—though the doctors had told him it never would. “Before I got this drug,” Mike wrote a friend, “each day I grew weaker and thinner and something inside my body said quite distinctly: ‘Prepare.’ ” He began to urge others to enlist in Doxil trials, yet always with the caution that long-term toxicities might well develop further down the line. But for the moment at least, he felt “Doxil has given me my life back—in the sense of both length and quality.” Yet there was no change in the X-rays of his lungs. Alas, just as Mike had warned, the effectiveness of the drug proved strictly short-term, and in January 1993 he was back in the hospital.

  The doctors told him flat out that because he’d already had one remission, when lung cancer returned it would be typically more difficult to treat and he had a 70 percent chance of being dead in two months. Yet when the two months had elapsed, Mike was still alive; once again, he’d beaten the odds. He decided to go back on chemo every two weeks, and it was soon “kicking the SHIT” out of him. He was released from the hospital, but his apartment took on the look of a ward—three large machines to produce oxygen, pills, needles, and needle disposals stacked high, and an IV pole for IV antinausea medication. He endured a week of incapacitating panic attacks, and having earlier decided to go back into therapy, he now activated the decision. His therapist prescribed a high dose of Xanax and he started sleeping twelve to fourteen hours a day, which wasn’t at all like him. In his own estimate, he had only enough energy to accomplish about 10 percent of what he used to be able to do on a given day. His white cell count was also dangerously low, and he had to give himself daily injections.

  Despite it all, he refused to give up and wait for death to overtake him. Crucially, he decided to put in a call to Richard and simply said, “Look—I really want to do another album. I don’t know if I can do it, but I want to try. Will you help me?” Richard had long been unhappy about their separation and the unresolved anger between them, yet given Patrick’s poor health, he told Mike that he’d need a little time to think it over. Patrick cut through Richard’s doubts: “Look: Michael loves you; you love Michael; you need to go there and do this. If it involves making music, great. But you guys need to go and hang out. This is a way for you guys to be together at the end of Mike’s life. . . . If you don’t patch it up with him, you’re gonna regret it the rest of your life.”4

  Richard agreed. He flew to L.A. early in 1993 and within a few days he and Mike (who Richard thought looked “deathly”) went into a tiny project studio at Trax Recording. They wheeled the oxygen tank into the studio and made a list of songs to work on, starting with the easiest, “Better in the Moonlight,” the silliest song Mike ever wrote. Richard sat in the small control room with an engineer he’d never met, and they started. It wasn’t a promising beginning, but rather “very fragile, very tenuous.” Yet it proved three necessary things: that despite pulmonary KS, Mike could still sing, that it made him “really happy” to be in a studio, and that the two of them “really did love each other and really did want to do this together.”

  The remaining big question was how to finance the project. It turned out that Patrick, though a nurse by profession, somehow had a knack for fund-raising. He volunteered to write a solicitation letter and sent it out to Mike’s huge mailing list; it included most of the people who’d bought Purple Heart or The Flirtations, supported the PWA Coalition, or simply knew Mike from his years spent on the AIDS front lines. Patrick and Richard also arranged a fund-raiser in New York City at the Perry Street Theatre. In the end hundreds of people contributed—including Mike’s good friends womyn’s music singers Holly Near, Cris Wiliamson, and Tret Fure. The gay porn star Scott O’Hara gave $1,000. In all, nearly two hundred people gave time or money to the project. And Mike’s mother, bucking his father, contributed $4,000 to the effort and enclosed a sweet, short note saying how proud she was to be contributing to the album. It deeply touched Mike.5

  With the money raised, Richard was able to find three first-rate studios, one each in L.A. and San Francisco, and the famed Sear Sound in Manhattan (Walter Sear’s AKG C-12 microphones and the Neve board were fantastic and his clientele included, among others, Paul McCartney, Phish, David Bowie, Steely Dan, Wynton Marsalis, and Norah Jones). Besides raising money, the process of producing a record involved the usual time-consuming tasks of choosing material, finding arrangers, booking musicians and engineers, and scheduling rehearsal sessions. Thanks to technological advances, musicians no longer had to be in the same room on the same day in order to eventually be heard playing together. So Mike, say, might go to Trax in L.A. and record his vocals on one day, and then weeks or months later, musicians at Sear Sound in New York might come in and play along with his recordings, all of it later mixed together into stereo tracks that were then mastered, sequenced, and released.6

  The process was long. The very first day in a studio, Mike (in his words) “sang the tits off three songs,” and Richard said it was some of his best singing ever. With three completed recordings that hadn’t made it onto his first album, Purple Heart, they already had six songs practically completed “vocally.” By the end of March 1993, Mike had recorded no less than thirty-four songs toward what he hoped would be a two-CD album, to which he gave the tentative title Legacy. He felt deeply certain that the massiveness of the project was helping to keep him alive.

  How could he have possibly made those recordings, given the increasingly desperate state of his health—not to mention the dismal state of his personal finances? The answer surely centers on his astonishing willpower, but at least as essential was the commitment of Richard—along with selfless assistance from Patrick. In the early months of 1993, Mike was still doing chemotherapy every few weeks, and for a week or so after each round of treatment, he’d be knocked out and unavailable, necessitating a rejuggling of schedules all around. Richard, too, had to travel back and forth regularly to New York to keep both his personal and professional lives intact.

  With 75 percent of his lung capacity gone, no one could have predicted how well Mike would be able to sing. But it quickly became clear that—somehow—he was singing remarkably well. Had they known that at the top, they would have done all the material on Legacy from scratch, avoiding many of the additional hassles that stretched over an eight-month period. As it was, the final two-disc album would run the gamut. It would include three songs recorded in the 1980s: “The Healing Power of Love,” “No No” (from a Lowlife recording), and “We’ve Had Enough,” done in the late 1980s for a documentary film produced by the Testing the Limits Collective. Mike’s voice had changed two years earlier; he lost three notes off the top and picked up four at the bottom, which meant that the 1993 songs resonated in a distinctly different way from his earlier recordings. Also the technical quality on the three from the 1980s wasn’t as good as the music and background vocals—though they were able to redo those in 1993 with far better equi
pment.

  Mike was having such a good time and felt so happy during the sessions that Richard let him give free rein to his perfectionism and do a lot of vocal takes. He describes Mike lying on the floor of the recording booth to rest while Richard worked with the musicians on an arrangement. When that was set he’d signal “okay” to Mike, who’d get himself up from the floor and sing an incredible take. Then he’d have a sip of Coke out of a can and lie down again, until it was once more time to sing. “It was,” Richard later said, “one of the most incredibly miraculous things I’ve ever been involved with. It was transformative . . . and it was certainly perceived that way by the many people who were involved in it.” In March Mike reached a different sort of landmark: he became the longest survivor of pulmonary KS in the country.

  In April, all hands took a break from working on the album, while Richard fulfilled an earlier commitment to do a monthlong three-band bus tour of the United States. Before leaving, he arranged with Patrick and Carl Valentino (Richard’s previous lover) to throw a birthday party for Mike in D.C., where he was scheduled to sing, somehow, at the March on Washington. As it turned out, the leader of the band Richard was touring with came down with appendicitis, which allowed him to show up in person in D.C. to hear Mike sing “Love Don’t Need A Reason” at the March—his last big moment in the public eye. Mike told a reporter, “I had to be here. The 1987 march was the most amazing day of my life. To see a million gay people together . . . We owned this town. I need that shot of life again.”

  That same week in D.C. Mike rejoined the Flirts for three sold-out concerts, his farewell engagements with the group. At the last of the three engagements, with Richard present, Mike took a moment at the end to announce his retirement, telling the audience that “I decided a long time ago that when I could no longer meet my own impossible standards, I would not do the [Judy] Garland thing, where people are thinking, ‘Oh my God, will he make it through?’ ” After the concert, Mike sat out in the lobby of the theater and people came up to him “like it was an audience with the Pope” (as Richard later put it). People knew they were saying good-bye to him. A few of the faces were familiar, but most of them were people he’d never met who wanted to tell him that he’d influenced or touched them in some way. According to Richard, Mike was really able to accept the compliments, unlike earlier in his life when his perfectionism would have had him obsessing about having flubbed this note or said that “wrong” thing. He stayed in the lobby until everyone who wanted to talk to him had managed to.