The Truth is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler? (35 page)

I’d packed a lot of activity into the long weekend in St. Louis—in addition to spending time with Martha at her house (now my official “home” in St. Louis), Tia, Brian and I took the trip to visit my brother.

I remember making trips to visit my brother when he was in prison during his first stint at the tail end of the Seventies. Our mother and I would make the trip from St. Louis to Jefferson City and spend the night at the Holiday Inn so that we could visit two days in a row.

The visits became ritualistic: we’d go through the ironclad security, wait to see him approach us in a large room, get something to drink and eat from the vending machines, and have a conversation. My brother is funny. It’s truly a Kearns characteristic that I cherish. My father, no matter how severe the diagnosis of his depression, could make jokes—even while institutionalized.

And here was my brother institutionalized and making jokes. I remember telling him Tallulah Bankhead stories and he loved them. We’d laugh so loudly that he’d joke, facetiously, “Michael, you’re gonna get me in trouble.” He was finally calling me the preferred version of my name (“Michael”) after three decades of nothing but “Mike.” I interpreted it as yet another sign of his acceptance of my more lyrical demeanor.

Somewhere during the undertaking, there was the imperative photo session, when the prisoner and his visitor(s) would stand in front of a maudlin hand-painted backdrop and smile for the camera. They were Polaroids in those days: you could immediately analyze how abstruse the situation was.

I love my brother, but it has not always been easy. I do believe that it takes two to look beyond what you disagree with in another human being: somehow the landscape of those prison visits created a common ground for my brother and me. It’s a bit inexplicable and seems at odds with my narrative, but here you have it: it surprises me, too.

Things were different when I began my own family and no one was more supportive than Joe; he has nightmarish recriminations about his negligent parenting and he invested hope in my being a dad. Contrary to the myth that looms over family histories, I never believed we were the Good Brother and the Bad Brother. The results of our parental neglect were acted out in our individual ways, often more similarly than differently.

I, however, was never indicted for murder. All I can say is that I don’t believe my brother is a bad person. He clearly made some grim mistakes in his life and he is dealing with that with a certain degree of equanimity.

By the time we visited in 2008, Joe and I were tighter than ever. Bringing Brian felt good for many reasons—his unshakable affability chief among them. It also felt like the three members of the Kearns family could benefit from playing off of a fourth.

Unfettered by the environment, Tia was her usual poised self, focusing on Joe. And her uncle was clearly smitten with her warmth and openness. Brian was curious and presented Joe with a wide range of questions, which he answered candidly. It’s difficult to say “a good time was had by all” when you’re visiting a maximum-security prison, but life is often grayer than it is black-and-white (no cutesiness intended).

After Joe and I had our private time, in which we shared intimacies that confirmed or contradicted the imbroglios with our parents, there was the photo: Joe, Tia, Brian and me, trying to look like we were at a picnic in the park.

Christmas Eve at the Kearns apartment in Los Feliz had become a regular annual celebratory ritual. The faces changed but the open-house atmosphere engendered a real sense of the place Tia and I had called home for a dozen years. The festivities became less Tia-centric and more enveloping to the adults; that was the subtler shift over the years.

On this particular holiday, it felt like we were looking at a year of change. Perhaps the most significant would be that Tia would be leaving the school that had helped mold her after nine tumultuous yet consistently edifying years. Where she would go had not yet been decided.

It also felt like I was making some life shifts. My health had stabilized, even though the stress from neuropathy was unstopping, but I felt like it was time for me to (once again) consider my mortality. Tia was becoming a young adult as I was becoming—dare I say it?—elderly. My bucket list runneth over as her dream catcher was being put to limitless use.

CHAPTER 67
               

I celebrated the beginning of the year, coinciding with my fifty-ninth year on the planet, by enrolling in my first college course: African American Studies. One of my running jokes with Tia is, “I’m blacker than you are.” The class was invigorating, taught by a formidable man who—and I say this with reverence—conjured an intellectual Redd Foxx.

This quest for knowledge seemed to come late, but it was so clear to me; when I walked on that campus (the local L.A. City College), I had a feeling of being precisely where I should be. It helped that the school is comprised of a wild conglomeration of interesting types and I was not even the only oldster in the constellation. I probably was the elder of my class—about the same age as the professor, I figured—but that imbued me with a certain sense of dignity.

Inching toward sixty was significant on many levels. It felt like all of those decade markers carry a certain power. In truth, I loathe all that “bucket list” intercourse (I’ve been making bucket lists since I was in my early thirties), but reassessing seems unavoidable. In addition to attending college, I decided to reinvent myself as an older character actor, even if the playing field was student films and independents.

I was cast, more often than not, as the father of a young daughter (never a son—not once). On-screen, I had graduated from the comic gay guy of the Seventies to the tragic gay guy with HIV in the Eighties and now, after the turn of the century, I reemerged, often typed as the dad with the female child. These celluloid outings captured my many incarnations; that’s for sure.

Tia’s acting career seems predetermined. The complicatedness of acting that has taken me a half a century to fully grasp, Tia seems to absorb instinctively. She has presence, timing and charisma. She is also the great pundit of filmic performances, absolutely correct in her assessments.

Knowing that she had been accepted to LACHSA (Los Angeles County High School for the Arts), Tia had the formidable challenge of playing Dogberry in
Much Ado About Nothing
. She did not disappoint. Once again, I was so proud of how she navigated the stage. “I don’t like it,” she said. “I’m so nervous. It makes me so nervous to go onstage.” I heard something in her that was greater than what is commonly written off as stage fright. What I believe she doesn’t like is the lack of control that is inherent in live theater.

Every platitude you can imagine is employed when other parents praise her theatrical acumen (“Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, blah, blah, blah”) and I glow in her accomplishments. However, I am less and less interested in her becoming an actress and more and more interested in her finding out who she is.

God knows, I was still in that process and it was taking me places I’d not anticipated. Admittedly, I began to factor in my growing list of challenges (I’m avoiding the word “disabilities” as long as I can), the duet of depression and neuropathy being the most pervasive. Acting on film was one thing, but did I have another tour in me? Could I go out on the road again? Tia was becoming more self-sufficient as each day went by, but I wasn’t sure I had the stamina to fly around the country and perform.

So I quenched my desire to keep stimulating myself by taking another college course: Philosophy. The professor was as smart as hell; also swarthy, funny and sexy. Yes, I fell in love with him, summoning an octogenarian
To Sir, with Love
motif. But it was star-crossed since he was also clearly heterosexual, sometimes referencing his children in order to make a certain philosophical statement. But he was also pro-gay in his discerning observations and I’m sure he knew I thought he was hot.

We learned of Plato and Locke and Descartes, but he liked to tease us when someone asked a particularly tantalizing question. “We’ll get to that in Chapter 10,” he was fond of saying.

My age, clearly at least twice that of the majority of students, set me apart and he could not help himself when referencing something from before 1975; he would look in my direction, consciously or not. He would wink without even coming near the acting of winking.

When we finally got to Chapter 10, we were pumped and the professor was on fire.

Mysticism preceded Buddhism and I had no idea that this subject would be my shining contribution to our Philosophy class. He began by explaining the five identifying characteristics of philosophical mysticism: transcendent (beyond space and time), ineffable (not completely expressible), noetic (illuminate), ecstatic (blissful and peaceful) and unitive (soul and reality integrated).

He briefly spoke about Aldous Huxley, the English intellectual who experimented with psychedelic drugs in order to achieve the heightened sensory experience that one would refer to as mysticism. “I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescaline or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: enlightenment, the beatific vision,” Huxley wrote. “All I am suggesting is that the mescaline experience is what Catholic theologians call a ‘gratuitous grace,’ not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available.”

Our professor challenged the class, “Perhaps someone in this classroom has had an experience with hallucinogenic drugs that they would consider an out-of-body experience?” I don’t know if I nervously laughed and that led him to look in my direction or he looked in my direction and I nervously laughed. In any event, I raised my hand.

“Would you care to share those experiences?” he asked me, not appearing the least bit surprised.

“Sure,” I said. “It was in the very early Seventies, maybe 1971. I was with two of my closest friends, both named John. We were really high, really connected to each other, really full of love and all that. I can’t believe I’m telling this story; I’ve only told it to a few people.”

By now, almost everyone in the class had shifted their positions so that they were physically pointed in my direction. The prof was sitting on the edge of his desk, with his sinewy body leaning toward me.

“I guess you could say that we were playing. Two of us went into the bathroom and locked the other one out. I was inside the bathroom. Looking into the mirror was another story. I was wearing a hot-pink long-sleeved shirt that was glowing; it was as if the shirt was alive, dripping. The pink of the shirt was electric, fluid.

“On the outside, John was begging us to let him in and we were laughing hysterically. So was he. There was nothing mean about it—it was just being completely silly. He kept knocking, we kept laughing and saying, ‘You can’t come in here, you can‘t come in here.’ He was jiggling the doorknob and banging on the door. Much hysteria.

“Finally, he said, ‘Okay, I’m coming in.’ At that very instant, it was like the sound went off in a movie. It was dead silent and there John Two was, standing inside the bathroom with the locked door! We freaked, checked the door, which was still locked. We were all entangled in each other, hugging and beginning to laugh again. He came through the door of his own volition. It was amazing.”

The classroom was silent. One kid shouted out, “I believe you, dude.” Another said, “Right on, man. It could happen.” Others shifted in their seats, returning to their customary positions, facing front.

The teacher pressed on. “And how did that feel?”

“We were ecstatic. It was as if we’d shared a miracle. These were very loving times. I guess we were kinda hippies. It was all about love and feeling free; free of anger or judgment or any of the world’s bullshit. No one was judging us or telling us how to behave. We were present with each other. And there was something greater at play. Some force. I can’t describe it.”

“Ineffable,” one of the smarter students said.

“Anything else you want to say?” the professor asked, never using my name but certainly being more intimate than he ever had been.

“Well, we didn’t just play hide-and-seek. We had very complicated discussions, went for walks to appreciate nature. We went out dancing. There was a lot of sensuality in every second while on the drug.”

He seemed satisfied. He pointed to the characteristics of mysticism, all of which I had unconsciously described. We were ready to move on to Buddhism.

The class led me to explore Buddhism more fully and I tried to incorporate much of it into my life: love and kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity. Religion was a hot topic in our household, as was politics, and I began to devote much of my energies to reading as much as I could on both subjects. I had to keep up with my soon-to-be ninth grader.

As Tia was set to travel into the new terrain of high school, I had boldly decided to undertake one more tour of
intimacies
, packing in as many cities as I could before leading up to World AIDS Day ’09.

What else did I want to do before I turned sixty? A tattoo, maybe?

CHAPTER 68
               

Before embarking on my last tour (like Cher, I know), I decided to emblazon my chest, right above my heart, with the word “intimacies”—all in lowercase, with the final “s” extending under the title of the play to represent the red scarf unfurling. I never imagined that this would be an empowering moment for me; when the tattoo artist said that it “would get the adrenaline going,” I was sold, but the adrenaline morphed into a sense of ownership of my body: this is mine and I can mark it accordingly.

I wanted a visual manifestation of what was embedded so deeply in my consciousness;
intimacies
represented one-third of my life. While making my living primarily by teaching and directing, I spent months blueprinting the tour: it was simpler than my touring had been in the past but nonetheless ambitious, especially considering my age and—let’s be real—my health qualms.