5
If it
hadn’t been for Pete, a born-again slut with an Appalachian accent and an
enduring taste for ritual and over-the-top gestures, there’d have been no tribe
to gather like this.
In college he
and I lived in adjacent dorm rooms. Music seeping from one undersized cubicle
into the next brought us together. Only closeted nineteen-year-olds can get
that excited to find their tastes mirrored in someone else’s, or that eager to
avoid the evening’s work with a few hours of rambling conversation, the words
bearing all the longing frightened boys can’t yet own up to. One moonlit night,
listening to Mendelssohn with a single candle and a bottle of wine, we found
ourselves sprawled across the room in separate chairs, then later on the same
bed, intermittently releasing the embrace long enough to shed one layer of
clothes and then another. Well into the night, we squirted the first orgasms we
ever shared with another man into the heaving crevice between our bellies. It’d
be years before either of us could put a name to what we’d meant to each other.
After college
we kept up mostly with letters and later with e-mail. On the odd visit, we took
up where we’d last left off as though we’d parted the day before. Imagine
Ichabod Crane as a German coal-miner’s grandson with thinning curly hair and a
sweetly geeky, open face. Pete stood literally head and shoulders above the
crowd in a bar. A Lutheran minister for nearly twenty years, he wasn’t the sort
of guy men flock to pick up on Saturday night. The ones who gave it a shot were
often scared off by his intensity before the second beer. He had an easier time
finding sex in back rooms or at the baths after a joint, his height not an
issue when he was on his knees, and conversation not expected. “The sex was
great,” he’d report to me on the phone. “I just wish someone would let my head
and my heart keep my dick company once in a while.” Then the cancer diagnosis
came three years after he’d finally come out to his bishop and left the
ministry.
He brought
the whole group of us together with a dying man’s dream. The cancer had come
raging back only a few months after he’d started to regain his energy from the
chemo. “It’s gone straight through me. Best case scenario is I’ve got a few
good months, before end game,” he’d told us the night he gathered us for
dinner, flying those of us to California for his birthday who couldn’t afford
the tickets ourselves. Some of us had never met one another before, lived
hundreds of miles apart, had only Pete and the love of men in common. “I won’t
see another summer. Before I die, I want to be drenched in life. I’m asking you
all to give me a weekend and help make it happen.”
His fantasy demanded open minds, bound up as it
was with the immanent prospect of his death. Those of us who’d been up the
mountain road in Napa with him were the first to get it. As the sexy kink of it
took root in our imaginations, and the wine and a couple of joints loosened us
up, the rest of us came around. By the time he served coffee, all of us were charged
up enough that we stopped ignoring the bulges in each other’s pants and started
joking about them.
He rented a
vintage cabin for the weekend nearest the summer Solstice, in the mountains of
his beloved native eastern Tennessee, with a deck looking out over forest that
hadn’t changed much in generations. The ribbon of waterfall to the left of the
cabin roared down the slope, in spate from a storm that had swept through the
day before we arrived that first time, a year ago.
In the warm
glow of sunset out on the deck, he lay on the table in the midst of us, eight men
crowding in to massage him, three or four at a time, then standing away and
massaging the masseurs while someone else took a turn in the inner circle. From
a speaker by the door, the Bach violin partitas traced arcs of longing upwards
into the air, beseeching some unknown Lover for release. And then all of us at
the end oiled each other neck to thighs. Getting hard together, if we hadn’t
been before, we splashed eight pent-up loads onto Pete’s prone body–his own
made it nine--stoned on a whole weekend’s stockpiled energy, moaning, weeping,
or laughing to high heaven while we pumped ourselves and each other for the
last precious drops of our gift to the friend we were going to lose. Pete
beamed up at us with a grin as wide as his face, semen glistening in his hair,
running down his cheek, pooling thick on what illness had left of his poor, wasted
chest, his eyes shining, like a man who’d just seen God.
When we’d
come down off the high, when we’d all embraced around the table, we leaned down
one by one to take Pete in our arms, plastering ourselves with a film of the
mingled seed he lay so blissfullly awash in. Jake took up the volume of Wallace
Stevens Pete had chosen for the moment, found the passage he’d marked, and
read:
Shall chant
in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous
devotion to the sun,
Not as a
god, but as a god might be,
Naked among
them, like a savage source.
Their chant
shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of
their blood, returning to the sky;
And in
their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy
lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees,
like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among
themselves long afterward.
They shall
know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that
perish and of summer morn.
And whence
they came and whither they shall go
The dew
upon their feet shall manifest.”
Pete was
gone before the end of July. When he returned to California from our weekend, a
veterinarian friend coached him on how to inject enough phenobarbitol to stop
his heart quickly and painlessly, when the cancer progressed as far as he chose
to cope with it. He’d left the drug and syringe on the counter for Pete to
“steal” while he left the office. Pete chose to die alone. I felt sick
imagining his despair till I heard that he’d left a note scrawled on a scrap of
paper. “No regrets. Only gratitude.” He’d used it to mark Psalm 139 in his
Bible.
The wake in
San Jose was the first time we were all reunited since that weekend in the
Tennessee mountains. Maybe two hundred people crowded into the auditorium of the
community center where Pete had run music programs for poor kids the wealth
piling up around them in Silicon Valley had passed by, in the years after his bishop
advised him to pack up at church before he was turfed out. Half the mourners
came from Pete’s old church. Another fifty were kids from the center and their
parents. I connected with a couple of old college friends I had in common with
Pete. Besides the eight of us from the Solstice, our radar picked out a few
other gay men, but not as many as you might have thought. A few members of
Pete’s family stood around looking a little bewildered in the crowd. Over and
over as the afternoon went on, the eight of us gravitated toward each other,
then finally found our way together to the parking lot and adjourned to the patio
of a gay bar a mile down the street.
“I’ve never
experienced anything like that weekend in my life,” Jake said.
“You mean
you’ve never jacked off all over a guy with late-stage cancer?” Hank blurted
out, toward the end of an unfortunate second margarita.
“You
asshole,” I said. “You were bawling like a baby along with the rest of us when
we packed up to leave. Pete had the courage to reach out for one of the big
dreams of his life before it was over. He gave us back ten times over what we
gave him. I’ve been floating on the memory of it for two months.” With the last
words my voice started to crack.
“I always
thought it was kind of pathetic that Pete couldn’t do better,” said Hank. “Now
I think he just refused to settle for second best.”
“Wouldn’t
let us settle either, it turned out. And now I don’t want to go on settling for
it,” said Jim. “Maybe we don’t have to go on settling for it.”
Everyone
turned toward him. Suddenly he went stage-shy. “Why can’t it happen again?” The
question came out half as challenge, half wistful plea.
“My mom can
sew the costumes,” Hank mouthed off again. Rajiv smacked him with the program
from the memorial.
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