I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (32 page)

“That’s where there is,” he said.

When I got to the tree I grabbed its trunk and, when I did, it turned into a wooden Ganesha. I looked up. I was at the foot of a glorious mountain. There was a pathway cut into it that encircled it, and robed priests and priestesses were walking silently along it up and down the mountain’s side. I noticed then that the mountain was slowly beginning to rise above me in the mist and clouds that were enveloping it. At the top of the mountain—as if carved from the peak itself—was a beautiful dark-haired woman whose third eye in the middle of her forehead was staring more lovingly at me than any eye had ever done before. A crescent moon hovered next to her tangled web of hair forming a topknot that was the mountain’s summit. When I met her third eye’s gaze the heavens opened up and bright multicolored petals began to fall from the sky. I seldom remember my dreams in color, but these colors were so vivid I was almost blinded by them. The petals were falling everywhere, but none were touching me until one—only one—fell right in the middle of my chest. I folded my hands atop it and a sense of immense warmth—not fire, but something as fierce as fire—emanated from the spot where it had melded with my flesh. I awoke with a glorious intake of breath. It was the most blissful sensation I had ever felt. No drug had ever equaled it. Nor the cumulative effect of every ejaculation I’d ever had. No hallucination that had ever hovered into my line of vision could match it. It felt, in that moment, what it must feel like to heal. And I knew instantly that was what heaven is: the moment we finally heal. All our life is pointed toward that moment when we do not die but heal. The rest of my life will be spent returning to that instant that petal touched my body and where, next time, it will stay.

*   *   *

The important and vast difference between that dream and the earlier visions that I had encountered was that I was more sober than I’d ever been since I was fifteen and first began to smoke pot. I have been a pothead most of my life but knew that if I got sober I’d have to cut out marijuana as well as liquor even though liquor has never been a problem for me. I think I might have been drunk five times in my whole life. I only liked the occasional vodka when eating smoked salmon and listening to Nina Simone. But I had to make the choice to stop having even an occasional drink if I was to be completely sober. To be honest, I’ve always hated being around drunks. But being around them now in the fellowship I had chosen to join was sustaining me. I always thought that being cut out of the herd was my way to salvation, yet a herd was now saving my life.

My earlier visions had been illuminating and arrived to me through some drug-induced portal, but that dream that night had proved that I could be the portal myself if I remained sober. Yet I wasn’t sure what it all meant. I only knew that not only was this true, but it was also real. That too was a difference between it and the hallucinations. Indeed, the world I had dreamed felt more real than my waking one. Reality and truth began to connect for me for the first time.

I tried to put the dream out of my mind for the rest of the day and go about my daily business but later decided to Google all that I could remember from it. I wrote it out all on one very long line, then hit the “return” button on my computer and an image came up of not only Ganesha but also exactly the woman who had formed the peak of the mountain that had risen above me. She was his mother, Parvati. I had never heard of her before. I never even knew he had a mother. This was the truest of revelations. He was leading me to her. And more deeply to himself.

I began to read about them, since I knew nothing of them. Nothing. My whole worldview up until that afternoon had been a Westernized one. There was a part of me that didn’t want to read anything at all about them but to remain completely pure for their visitations. I was enjoying being the spiritual idiot savant. But I had to make some sense of what was going on—even if it was of the most primitive sort.

I looked up Ganesha on the computer after staring for a long time at all the images of his mother and him I kept pulling up that day that corresponded so startlingly with the dream from the night before. All I could really focus on was the mantra one offers up to him: “Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha.” As suggested, I read it 108 times.

I then looked up his mother, Parvati, on Wikipedia. “Parvata is one of the Sanskrit words for ‘mountain,’” I read. “‘Parvati’ translates to ‘She of the mountains’ and refers to Parvati being born the daughter of Himavat, lord of the mountains and the personification of the Himalayas.”

Was Parvati—not forgiveness—what I left on the mountain? Is that what Ganesha had come to tell me? Had I last night left myself—my true self, my real self—there on the maternal mountain he had revealed to me? Or is the question not what one leaves on the mountain but what the mountain is.

I shook my head. I tried to grapple with all this but decided I needed to clear my mind—or muddle it—with diversions more earthly at that point and signed on to
Towleroad.com
to read about some gay pop culture or politics or gaze at some hot shirtless guys. Instead, the first posting there that popped up on my computer screen was not an earthly image at all but an otherworldly one sent back from Mars by NASA’s Rover. NASA had sent it out because it looked as if someone in the tradition of Buddhist monk sand paintings had drawn the image of an elephant’s head on the planet’s red dusty surface.

I slammed my computer shut as fast as I could. I closed my eyes. I heard Hugh Jackman from our lunch a few years before. “I realized anew what a gift meditation is,” he had told me. “I’d never thought of it that way. It is a practice of dying—what it’s like to get rid of the ideas, the desires, the body even. There is a part of meditation that is a feeling of bodilessness.”

Is not sobriety, at its essence, the freeing of oneself of the body’s addictive needs and, hence, the body? Is not sobriety a form of meditation? Is not sobriety, when truly attained, a bodilessness? All my drug use and all the hallucinations it engendered—all the body’s sensations—was the whole time a blessing from Shiva so I could then know what it was like continually to shed it all and to die and to die and to die and, thus, to heal and to heal and to heal. That—and not the battle between good and evil—was the new continuum in my life.

*   *   *

I came up with another idea for a tattoo. Ganesha would have to stay tucked into my subconscious where he felt comfortable for the time being. You’d think with my history with needles that getting a tattoo would have been an easy procedure to endure—maybe even a pleasurable one. But my use of needles involved one tiny prick and then the world would change. Getting a tattoo is much more painful than that and the world remains boringly the same as you lie there on the table.

I was nervous when I arrived at the parlor but was careful to write out exactly what I wanted the young artist to tattoo on my right forearm. I even Googled “Emily Dickinson” and pulled the quote up on the computer screen at the reception desk for him to look at:

HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS THAT PERCHES IN THE SOUL.

I then lay on the table and turned my head away from him and gritted my teeth as he made her words flesh. After about forty minutes he let me look at his cursive handiwork. I gave it a cursory satisfied glance, still a bit shocked I had actually gone through with getting tattooed since I had often sworn to friends that tattoos were too trendy for me ever to get one. I was much too old, I’d sarcastically scowl at such a thought, to attempt to be a hipster. But I decided that since my staying sober for three months was giving me a semblance of hope in my life I’d put some signage of it on my arm. It was also my birthday present to myself. I’d be fifty-six in a few days. Yep, my hipster days were over.

The young artist placed a bandage over his handiwork and told me I could take it off that night. He also gave me a little tin of Tattoo Goo to rub onto the inscription.

Several hours later I did as I was told, but as I was rubbing the goo into my forearm I really focused on the quote for the first time that had been indelibly inked there:

HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS THAT PERCHES THE SOUL.

“What the fuck?” I said much too loudly. Archie hid under a chair at the tone of my voice. Teddy turned his head to me. “That kid fucked this up!” I shouted to them. I held up my arm toward them as if they could read. “Look at this! He left out the word ‘IN’! Motherfucker!” Archie scooted more deeply under the chair. If Teddy could have shrugged he would have. Me? I stared in horror at the two lines inked into my flesh. One does not misquote Emily Dickinson when the whole point was to have an Emily Dickinson quote on one’s body. I called the tattoo parlor and left an enraged message.

“What the fuck?” I said again, and lay on my bed. I tried to calm down.

I stared some more at the botched tattoo.

I closed my eyes.

I took deep breaths.

And then, as Ganesha’s feathery giggles lifted and fell inside of me, I focused not on the error but on the absurdity of it. The word “FEATHERS” floated like a feather itself into my thoughts and alighted there. Ganesha’s giggles grew at his own handiwork. Yes, that was the solution. I’d have the artist the next day ink a feather beneath the words “PERCHES” and “THE” with the calamus of the quill pointing between them as if the feather were falling from the crevice as I saw it falling at that very moment in my mind’s eye from an angel’s wing. I’d then have him perch the word “IN” atop the feather.

It worked.

And when it worked I realized that, like my tattoo, I am singular. I am imperfect. I am fixable.

*   *   *

Things continued to go well for my sobriety, though not my bank account. I was going broke. I had gotten a couple of interview assignments from The Daily Beast, which were tiding me over, but I did not have the money to rent a place for the summer and my lease at my off-season place was expiring on May 1. I called my old landlord at the summer place I’d rented for the last several summers in Provincetown and thought I had worked out a deal with her to pay a bit of the rent upfront, do the yard work for her instead of her hiring someone to do it, so I could have a decrease in my rent and then pay her the rest of the rent at the end of the summer. But then she called me and told me that she had rented the place out from under me and I had to have my things out of there in three days or she’d put it all out in the yard. In a month or so I’d have no place to live and no money with which to rent one. I trusted things were going to work out, but yet again I was feeling as I did back when my brother backed out of paying for my rehab. I would just have to trust that, like that occurrence, this problem would be a blessing in disguise and part of the universe’s plan for my life. But this journey toward recovery was becoming exhausting.

A friend arrived in town to look at some work that was being done at his beach cottage and I told him of my predicament and he graciously and generously offered to pay for a rental on the wharf next door to where he also had a place he kept for guests. We agreed that I’d pay him back at the end of the summer after I found a way to earn some money. I was embarrassed to have to depend on his generosity, but I accepted it with much gratitude. Again: Somehow things were working out.

Then another blessing occurred. I got a call from the State Department asking if I would make the keynote address at the first LGBT human rights conference to be sponsored by the U.S. government on foreign soil. It was to be held in Tirana, Albania, in June and to focus on the Balkans and Eastern Europe. People there were fans of my earlier book,
Mississippi Sissy
, and were also aware of the political nature of my many Facebook postings—which sort of gave me pause. But I was flattered and for the first time I felt my life getting back on track with such an invitation. I even scheduled a few days in Rome on my way back home because I had never been there before and knew it would be as much of a pilgrimage as the Camino had been.

*   *   *

When I moved onto the wharf a whole new drama erupted because of condo rules about renters not being able to have dogs. Archie and Teddy were the only things I really had left in my life at that point—I barely had a career and was quickly running out of the little money I still had, and my sobriety was still tenuous. It was out of the question for me even to consider giving them up for the summer. I hated that I was causing my friend who had rented the place such tsuris. At one point, I thought I was going to have to move out and just get a tent and pitch it in the woods and eat out of cans and shit in a hole in the ground. It really was looking as if it were coming to that. But I still hadn’t used meth. I was coming up on six months sober.

My friend thought he’d come up with a solution, however, by asking me to move into his apartment on the wharf, which he used as a place for guests, and move his stuff into the apartment next door to his, which I’d already moved into. If I was in his place, then maybe the condo board would overlook my being in someone else’s unit with dogs. I would be more officially his guest. So I did what I was told even though I was behind on writing my speech for the State Department. That’s how odd my life had become—I was flat broke, moving for the third time in three months, trying to stay sober, and getting ready to represent America by delivering a keynote address for the State Department in Albania.

I opened the door to the apartment on the wharf. The smell of marijuana almost knocked me down. I turned around and walked outside and said a prayer. As I’ve written, I’ve been a pothead myself as well since I was fifteen. And I missed it more than any other substance during my road to recovery. But I knew that if someone had smoked marijuana in the apartment, these might still be some there to tempt me. I had to go back inside the place and remove every vestige of it if I were to stay sober. I headed back inside and went through every drawer in the place, looking for every stash of pot and bit of paraphernalia. I looked through the bookshelves. I combed every corner for seeds and stems. I cleaned the place of every last bit of pot and put it in the place next door.