I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (35 page)

*   *   *

Later that day I sent out e-mails to friends back in New York City telling them of my predicament. But I was now a woebegone addict—a kind of “boy who cried wolf.” There was no help to be had that I could find from people I really knew. All that I was receiving was welcome concern and not-so-welcome sermons about going into rehab. I had come full circle from the December before when I was ready to do just that and had done my intake interview when my brother backed out of paying for it. I could not—nor would I—go back to him to ask for the money. I was no longer speaking to him at the suggestion of a person in the fellowship I’d joined to whom I turned for advice. My brother had seemed to make clear to me he didn’t want to be a part of my recovery and I was honoring his wishes. I could have been incorrect about that. I only know how I felt.

Finally a person I barely knew back in New York to whom I’d shown some kindness when I once lived in Paris offered me a room in the loft he shared with his lover. The only caveat was that I could not have my dogs with me. Archie and Teddy were the only things I really had left in my life and now I was faced with not even having them anymore—at least for the time I was back in New York. I had no idea how long that would even be. I was assuming it would at least be for the rest of the summer. Three months perhaps. Archie had been in my life for six years. I had never been away from him for more than that month I walked the Camino. I had only been away from Teddy for a few days since he came into our lives.

But I knew I was going to have to do this. There was no other choice. Once I made the decision, I went on autopilot trying to find them a place to be fostered. That was my first priority. I could not focus on anything else until that was solved. It wasn’t an emotional decision but a practical one. I had done this to myself and to them in the one second it took to stick a needle in my arm. I had to deal with the consequences. I could not find anyone in Provincetown or New York who would take them. I was becoming a bit desperate so put a posting up on Facebook saying I had to go back to New York for a brief period and was looking for someone who would agree to take my dogs for me until I could return. I also posted the cutest photos I could find of them.

I quickly got a response from a man I didn’t know named Jeff Lewis who lived outside Boston with his children and his husband. Lewis’s ex-wife, he informed me, lived down the street. They already had four dogs. “We’re dog people,” he told me when I called him. “And I’ve got a built-in support system. They would love it here.”

“What kind of dogs do you have?” I asked.

“Two Rottweilers and two bullmastiffs,” he said.

I looked over at Archie and Teddy and feared for them in such company. Yet what choice did I have? “Are they okay around small dogs?” I asked.

“Yes. Are yours okay around big ones?” he asked back.

“Only if they’re not puppies,” I said.

“One of the bullmastiffs is, but we can make this work,” he told me.

I was so moved by this sweet man’s generosity and kindness. “Why are you doing this for me?” I asked. “You are a stranger. I can’t even find a friend to be this nice or take on such a responsibility for me.”

“Well, you’re not a stranger to me,” he said. “I read your Facebook postings all the time and I loved your memoir,
Mississippi Sissy
. I feel as if I know you. You can trust us. We’ll give them a good home. We love dogs here. We even show our Rottweilers. We’re dog show people. Look, I want to do this. I just feel it’s the right thing to do.”

I then opened up to him as to exactly why I had to give up Archie and Teddy for a bit. I owed him that. “If this changes things, then I understand,” I said after telling him the saga of my addiction and how I had used the last week.

“No. Of course not. Let me do this for you. I want to even more now.”

I thanked him and we made plans for me to deliver Archie and Teddy to him on Sunday before I headed back to New York on Monday. I hung up the phone and lay on the floor holding them to my chest. I tried not to choke up. I would not cry. I would not. I had too much to do to plan for my trip back to New York.

*   *   *

I woke up Sunday morning and got Archie and Teddy ready for our trip to their new summer home. A friend of mine from the fellowship had borrowed a car from another friend from the fellowship to take me down there, since I don’t drive. More kindness and generosity was being shown to me.

I’d been humming “Bridge over Troubled Water” for a couple of hours to calm my nerves at the prospect of giving up my boys and not seeing them for the next few months. I went on
youtube.com
and linked to Roberta Flack’s version and listened to it a couple of times. I posted it on Facebook, then listened to it one more time before taking Archie and Teddy and their favorite sleeping pillow and their traveling cases and their favorite toy with me to the street to wait for my friend to pick us up in the borrowed car.

I didn’t say much on the way there. Archie and Teddy seemed to sense something was up. When we arrived we were greeted warmly by Lewis, who was strapping and handsome, and his husband, Johnny, who was a bit older than he. Thinner. White haired. Their home was off a country lane and on several lovely landscaped acres. The huge backyard was fenced in so their dogs and now Archie and Teddy could romp about without being tempted to run away. We all sat on the flagstone patio and watched my boys check it all out.

“Where are your four dogs?” I inquired.

“We thought it best if we let them meet yours one at a time,” said Lewis, who got up to retrieve the first Rottweiler. He was a handsome beast named Baron, who seemed friendly enough. But he also seemed to be looking hungrily at Archie and Teddy, as if they might be the first two courses of his Sunday brunch. I sensed—I hoped—he was only being protective of them finally. Archie and Teddy weren’t so sure and both jumped up onto my lap to get away from Baron. “He’s sweet,” I reassured them.

Baron was put back into the house and a second Rottweiler was released who was even larger. His name was Rocky. He lunged playfully for Archie, who growled to keep him away from us all. Teddy began to shake. I looked over at my friend who had brought me there. She could see I was getting a bit worried and reached out to give Teddy a reassuring pet atop his shaking head.

I was becoming nervous about leaving them there, but what could I do? I had no choice. This was the plan I had put into effect. And these gentlemen had been so kind to offer to foster them, although Lewis’s husband seemed not to have been fully informed of the situation. He kept eyeing me as if he had a few questions to put to me that were still unanswered.

Rocky was returned to his lair inside and the first bullmastiff—Rocket—was set free. He and Archie and Teddy, all barking at the same time, went bounding into the backyard. Archie, tiring of their play, came sprinting back up to the patio and jumped again up into my lap. Teddy, thinking he was as tall as his new friend, kept taking the bullmastiff’s measure. Maybe this was going to work out after all.

Lewis led Rocket back inside and came back with the adorable bullmastiff pup. Archie took an instant dislike to him, because he dislikes all dogs younger than he. Teddy just took it as another challenge and the two of them chased each other around the yard. “That’s Jackson,” said Lewis. “Rocket is his father. He sired him,” Lewis said, speaking the language of the dog show aficionado.

As we all watched Jackson and Teddy run about in the backyard—Archie stayed in my lap, not liking what we all were watching—Johnny began his barrage of questions about who I was exactly and how his younger husband had allowed all this to transpire. Johnny seemed a bit suspicious of it all. Did he think I was some secret boyfriend? I explained to him about the Facebook posting about seeking someone to foster my dogs and that his husband had been so kind as to volunteer to keep them. Johnny looked over at Lewis as if he now had some questions for him. Before Johnny could start in on him, however, I turned the tables on him and began to ask him my own questions. I knew that Lewis was an executive with the Stop and Shop grocery chain. What did his husband do?

“I’m the comptroller for a charity that assists women and children who are victims of abuse or violence,” he told me. “We provide social services for them and a range of emergency services. Shelter mostly. Many of them find themselves homeless.”

“What’s the name of it, the charity?” I asked.

Archie, jumping down from my lap, now surprised Johnny by jumping onto Johnny’s lap. Teddy, back up on the patio now with his new buddy Jackson, sniffed at his ankles. “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” he said.

I gasped and started to laugh and explained about the Roberta Flack video from earlier that day. “Ask Jeff to sign on to Facebook. He reads my postings. He can prove to you I’m telling the truth,” I said.

“Is there any reason I should think you wouldn’t be?” asked his husband.

I knew if I waited much longer to leave it was going to get harder and harder to do so. But first I took Archie and Teddy down to the lower part of the backyard and tried to make them understand that I was leaving them there but I would be back for them as soon as I could. I told them I loved them with all my heart. I felt like that little boy back in Mississippi confiding in Chico and Coco all those years ago. “I am so sorry I have done this to us all,” I told Archie and Teddy, blinking back my tears. “Daddy is so sorry,” I said, kissing them all over their little heads and using the term I used for myself when we were out of earshot of the rest of the world. Archie rolled over on his back for me to scratch his stomach. Teddy pawed at my face and licked it. He put his face next to mine, which was his insistent way of telling me to kiss him on his cheek. I breathed in their distinctive smells as deeply as I could. Teddy’s was a bit muskier. Archie’s sweatier, sweeter. “I’m so sorry,” I kept telling them. “I’m so sorry. Daddy’s so sorry.”

I then walked with them back up toward the patio where my friend and I said our good-byes to Lewis and his husband. We all started for the house and the front door. Archie and Teddy followed excitedly after me, thinking they were leaving with me. When I got to the glass door, I bent down to hug them and kiss them one more time. They tried to get through the opened door with me, but Lewis picked them up. Archie began to bark. Teddy cried. They both scratched frantically at the glass trying to get through it to me. I turned to look at them one more time and their little faces were full of confusion. They kept scratching. Barking. Crying.

“Go. Please. Get out of here,” I told my friend when we got into the car. My throat was tightening. My heart was racing. As we drove down the drive I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I began to sob. “This is killing me,” I told my friend, and buried my face in my hands. “It’s killing me.”

She reached out and touched my shoulder. “This is what surrender feels like,” she said.

*   *   *

When I got back to my place on the wharf for my final night in Provincetown I packed up a bit more stuff, having already mailed some boxes of summer clothes and shoes to myself at the loft where I’d been offered a place to stay. The woman who owned the apartment on the wharf that my friend had rented before he threw me out gave me permission to leave the rest of my stuff—art and a few pieces of furniture—there even as she acquiesced to his wish that I move out.

My phone rang. It was the person who had offered me the room in his loft. He told me that his lover had decided that it wasn’t going to work and that he had to rescind the offer at the last minute. He deeply regretted having to make the call, but they had to back out. I was in shock at first. I was leaving at 10:00
A.M
on the first ferry out of Provincetown to head to Boston to catch the train to New York. My friend had told me I could not stay a moment longer. I had no choice. I had to leave even though I now had nowhere to go. Oddly, I was in such shock that I was truly about to be homeless heading to New York in a matter of hours that I couldn’t even feel panic. I was numb. I sat out on the wharf contemplating the last two weeks. I had gone from delivering the keynote address at a human rights conference in Albania at the behest of the State Department and standing before all those brave young LGBT activists as a symbol of some sort of strength and rectitude, to being on my knees in gratitude in Rome in John Keats’s bedroom, a place I had longed to visit all my life, to, in a matter of hours, being a homeless person in New York City. Would I be in a men’s shelter at that same time tomorrow, all because I had stuck a needle in my arm a few days before?

I found the will to finish packing. And even fell asleep that night for six or seven hours. I prepared some breakfast the next morning before catching the ferry and sent out an e-mail as a last resort, trying to find a place to stay. I couldn’t believe I was heading to New York in a matter of minutes with no idea where I was going once I stepped off the train at Penn Station. I sent one e-mail to an old friend, Michael Smith, who lived around the corner from my old apartment in New York. He had owned the Depression Modern furniture store on Sullivan Street in Soho for years and had a new store called Adelaide on Greenwich Street in the West Village. When I did have money and even a loft of my own down in Tribeca I bought lots of furniture from him. We had become friendly over the years and bonded over our shared aesthetics. I knew he had a huge apartment and just might have space for me for a while. It was worth a try.

There was, however, one blessing on that otherwise bleak morning. A few days before, I had stopped off at an old boyfriend’s place in Provincetown to see if he and his husband could take Archie and Teddy in, but they had just adopted a cat and couldn’t do it. I had sat out on my friend’s beautiful screened veranda and told him the saga of my addiction. When we had met thirty years ago when he was a hip young East Village boy with multiple piercings in his ears and a winged tattoo across the magnificent expanse of his broad shoulders he had confided to me that he had been trying to kick a drug habit. I had stood by him way back then even with that knowledge. And he confided that he and his husband had also had a bit of a problem with drugs themselves at one point. “But our fellowship is each other,” he’d said when I asked him if he had joined the one I was in, since I’d never seen them there. “Do you need any money?” he asked.