Aaron Shurin
from Unbound: A book of AIDS
Ten years later of unnamed terrors and specific losses, AIDS
comes closer into my life in waves, "waves of nearness," raising
its shark fin in my direction, then circling farther. The
blood-scented waters could make one past out....
Some, of course, do past out -- right out of the circle. But if
anything besides rage is clear in these drowning surroundings,
it's the clarity of those few who seem to quicken in their
sickness and dying, those gifted few who stay awake as they fall
away, and offer to us attendant comrades instructions from the
beyond, or the going-beyond.
It may be my own voracious sentimentality and romantic yearning
that seek to transform these bitter passages into something more
informed. Yes, well, but I've had at least serious
co-conspirators who've given me my figures, phrases, mantras,
mudras, holy dish....
Leland was well into ten years of ardent Tibetan Buddhist studies
when his first KS lesions appeared, and had already weathered
crises in his new ancient faith. He'd left a live-in ashram in an
attempt to localize, individualize the mind-stilling Buddhism he
craved (as he'd sought even before AIDS to still a sex-crave that
kept him ever hungry, in Buddhist terms a "hungry ghost"). But
abstinence of flesh wasn't for him; he had a more modest -- and
grander -- goal of achieving flesly pleasure wihout gnawing the
bone, of finding a serene balance right here in his quirky gay
life of theater, theatricality, drama, and drama queens. So when
AIDS announced its way through his body he was already troubling
himself into a distinctly American -- one might say San
Franciscan -- Buddhism.
As he began to sicken and die, he kept his eye hard on the
process, informed by ritual precepts I can't repeat for being
uninformed. He watched his body as if it were a body -- The body
-- and tracked in his agitated mind the one purposeful Mind. If
it sounds high-minded it sounded so to Leland too: he was
constantly failing. He was constantly succeeding and failing.
In between hospital visits, over a home-cooked meal, he detailed
the problem to me. He was using mantras and other self-awareness
exercises to quiet his thinking. "But every time I get to a
certain place -- a level -- and think I'll be able to relax into
stillness," he complained agitatedly, "I start to hear the theme
from 'Bonanza' -- Bonanza! -- and can't concentrate!" He looked
more than frustrated: tried, tested, chagrined. "There it is, so
ridiculous. I try to dismiss it and can't relax." He saw the
irony in his dilemma, but was nevertheless exasperated, stopped
at the threshold -- and he was trying to die well -- by this
paradigm of idiot chatter. He couldn't break through.
It seemed to me that as long as you had an idea of
"breaking-through" you weren't being, or accepting, where you
were. But young John, cleaning Leland's kitchen, put it to him
more gracefully. "If I got to that place," he shrugged, "and I
heard the theme from 'Bonanza,' I'd just start singing it." His
Buddhist lesson was simple: Go with it. Sing 'Bonanza!' This
natural comprehension charmed Leland completely. He was humbled
and thrilled and knew John was right. Was he even a little shaken
such direct understanding came from someone unschooled in the
lore, cracking an already shaky belief in the doctrinaire forms
he'd been studying? I don't know if he actually took to singing
the theme song, but that mundane media riff lodged in his mind
opened a door. He began to gain the courage to transform Buddhism
to his own specifics of a mid-life Hollywood-bred theater-tenured
brilliant quirky awkwardly frustrated subtly flamboyant queen
dying of AIDS in 1990 San Francisco.
Nesting comforably in his last hospital bed, he told me of the
new trouble he was having with one of his former ashram mates,
who felt him straying from the Way, and was raising alarms,
making him feel like a Bad Boy. Having struggled through 30 years
of homo sex-guilt to find some measure of peace-of-mind-in-body,
Leland found bad-Buddhism death-guilt not very attractive.
Tibetan was beginning to turn him off. The ornate, symbolic Tanka
paintings he'd actually helped print in America were starting to
seem alien, exo-cultural. Who was Shiva to him in California;
what in Sanskrit spoke to his idiosyncratic world? He wanted to
die, he explained to me, governed by the things that already
mattered to him, that came directly out of his life, ritualized
by early investment and repetition, then fixed in the firmament
for guidance. Could these even be his own theatrical cons, long
ago installed: Elizabeth Taylor, the Trembling Bountiful, or
Barbra Streisand, the swan-voiced Yearning Duck?
As he spoke his mood was growing more excited and defiant. He was
coming to a vision of "grace," informed by the sublimely silly
creatures of the gay quotidian, suffered, nurtured, transcended,
and adored. "Barbra Steisand songs are my mantras," he squealed
heretically. "They're what I know by heart, what I already repeat
and repeat." This was too good. I glanced at the photo of Liz
he'd tacked on the hospital wall. Fresh from the bath in her
ripe-skinned middle period, she gazed serenely -- unabashedly --
from beneath a pink towel done up as a turban. All she lacked for
true diva status was a jewel in her forehead. "Here's your
goddess, you Kali," I said -- Liz didn't blink -- and we howled.
Something had been transformed. The daily world one lived in had
sprouted its own golden feathers. Leland had found his rhythm,
and started to relax.
The next day I brought him a homemade tape of Streisand's second
and third albums -- the songs we both knew well -- had, in fact,
grown up together singing -- and on which Streisand's voice still
maintains jazz inflections, a girlish purity of sexual longing,
and a mature woman's saturation of sexual fulfillment and loss.
This time, though, the clear plastic box read, "Barbra Streisand
Sings Tibetan Buddhist Chants," while on the tape itself was
printed, modestly, "Babs sings Buddhism."
I'm a reporter, I see now, rereading this tale. Ten years of AIDS
has altered my poetic gift, narrowed my eye, humbled my language.
What do I know about death except what my friends have shown me
-- I let them speak -- for what did I know before, a virgin,
uninitiated, unendured? Death's literalness is what I've been
given, and the poetics of struggle have forged from it not
transcendence but enactment. That fact of acceptance -- the
acceptance of that fact! -- lies before me like a series of
steps, rigorous, unsentimental, hilarious, florid but precise....
After Leland returned home from the hospital -- which he
desperately wanted to do -- sat on his bed and welcomed him back.
"Well, you're home, now." "Yes," he replied, "I'm home and I'm
going somewhere." That process, surrounded by a vigilant circle
of friends and family, brought him in and out of lucidity and
strength, though never at the price of clarity. After a dip that
seemed almost certainly final, he rebounded. Thin and frail and
blemished, he dished through some photos with J and me. Then, in
what was the last detailed conversation we had (aside from my
explaining to joyous him that the life-support system was being
withdrawn) Leland, with the exactly eye of a critic, and the
forgiving eye of a fan, and the third overarching eye of a born
director, explained to us, barely audible, rasping and gulping
the words, the precise differences between Angela Lansbury's and
Tyne Daley's interpretations of Rose in "Gypsy." No more fear now
of having Inappropriate Mind. If "Rose's Turn" was the theme-song
at hand, it would be embraced. Did he perform it? -- I can't
remember -- it seems to me he sang all the songs. And it seemed
to me that this being-who-he-was to the end was validation for
all he'd been before, indicated the peace and accpetance he'd
rigorously struggled to achieve.
He died quietly the next morning. When I arrived at his house a
few hours later, I peeked into his room, saw the flattened covers
where I expected a mound, and was surprised that his body had
already been whisked away. It seemed too soon. I talked with
gathering friends. One asked if I'd gone to sit with body. "But
it isn't there: I looked: they already took it away." In fact, I
was told -- "But I looked!" -- his body was still there: I
glanced back through the door -- where? Then I noticed, collapsed
beneath the blankets as if air alone had sustained it, now
exhaled, deflated, one-tenth of its former size, a few barely
noticeable bumps raising the covers, the suggestion of Leland's
body. The rest had vanished, puff of smoke. It was hard to
believe someone had been there; it was hard to believe something
was there now.
I didn't look.
The little decisions people make create the one AIDS narrative
that keeps me sane. I'm made to understand the meticulous
dimension of life lived thoroughly by those in the process of
losing it. Ken, gaunt and bruised, whose dying radiated power,
who shared a very purposeful half-hour with me two days before he
died (though I was really his lover's friend and hadn't known him
intimately); sharing just enough time, I think he thought, to
educate me, to let me feel his acute mind and sharp will issuing
frrom utterly ravaged body. Ken, who thanked me for coming, and
when I answered, on exit, "No, thank you," threw back in a clear
voice, instantaneous and unaffected, accepting my acknowlegment
without vanity, "You're welcome." Ken's body -- which I did look
at -- hands bent backwards touching beneath his chin in a death
mudra laid out by his lover impossibly unnatural in life, winged
articulate in death, his tightened face eyes wide open -- having
seen the virgin Mary come to take him, flaming sword and heart --
gazing up and out, open gazing, open gazing....
Or young John, desperately thinning, in a burst of exuberance
donning a pink and turquoise sun dress, blond curly wig,
sunglasses, and blue kerchief, vamping on my couch and rug like
the skeleton of Nancy Reagan (but Nancy Reagan is the skeleton of
Nancy Reagan!), utilizing both his body and his loss-of-body,
exhibiting outrageously what I might call not joie de vivre but
joie de mourir.
Or Ken again, emaciated in bed, booming a voice from what hidden
reservoir?, in a chamber of tropical plants, chants from an
unseen tape recorder wafting like smoke through the room, like
wind at the door, with a clear luscious photo on the nightstand
of a hidden beach, long and curvacious. "Is that in Hawaii?" I
asked. "No, it's in New Zealand, near my friends' house." I knew
he loved the talismanic sea. "Have you been there?" "No," he
answered carefully, "Not yet...."
Copyright © 1991 Aaron Shurin
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