As if death summoned, p.16
As If Death Summoned, page 16
“We are time-locked beings,” Arnold was saying. “It may not be possible for us to even conceive of life without time. I don’t mean like leaving your watch at home when you go on holiday. I mean where there is no sense of past and future, where there is only this eternal present. Only now. Only ever now.”
I brought over their plates with the salad. “Now is time for dinner,” I told them, and served up the spicy, savory bake, slices steaming in the chilly night air.
“Smells wonderful,” said Arnold.
“It’s our own culinary creation,” added Gray proudly.
Arnold took a bite. “Delicious!”
“The secret ingredient is Tabasco sauce,” I said.
“Tabasco sauce?”
I held up the small bottle we’d brought along since Gray always liked to splash it lavishly on his slices. “Gray tasted it the first time he was visiting my family in the States and became addicted. My mother sends us a case at a time. He uses it on everything: on his eggs, meat dishes, vegetarian dishes, breakfast cereal.”
“Well, now I’m addicted, too,” said Arnold.
As we ate by the fire, Gray resumed their discussion. “Do you think we moderns can ever experience the Dreamtime consciousness?”
“Most of us do it every night.”
“You mean our dreams?”
“Yes. Elkins may have mistranslated the aboriginal word, but I think he captured the idea. In our dreams, we are outside of time. Past, present, future can be all happening at once.”
“But what about being consciously aware of such a state?”
“The only way we can do that is by standing outside our ordinary consciousness. Every culture has found ways to induce that state, through chanting, drumming, dancing, sleep and food deprivation, intoxicants, psychotropic plants . . .”
“Have you experienced it?”
“Once, many years ago when I was on a geology expedition in central Mexico. My one experience with peyote.”
“What was it like?” Gray was so intrigued he’d stopped eating.
Arnold paused, staring out into the black night, a smile coming to his lips like remembering a past love. “The universe opened itself up to me. I entered a different dimension. No, that’s not right. I seemed to enter all dimensions at once. I was beyond time, beyond my body and this sense of self. It’s impossible to describe because the experience is beyond words, but it remains the most extraordinary experience of my life.”
“You tried peyote only once?” asked Gray. “That kind of experience, I think I’d want it daily.”
“Only needed the one experience. Unlike other drug highs, you don’t wake up and come out of it sober the next morning. You come out of it . . . changed, and you can’t go back to seeing the world in the old way. Something fundamental has been altered, like the structure of your DNA.”
I’d read accounts of people using peyote, mescaline, LSD, and other psychotropic drugs, and, though I had no personal experience, I remained skeptical. To me, it still seemed ultimately a matter of chemicals and neurons interacting felicitously in one’s brain. Gray and I often had these conversations.
“I just know how the mind can dupe itself,” I once told him, and recited,
“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.”
“Milton. Paradise Lost,” said Gray. “And I’d argue it’s possible to glimpse beyond the veil of this material reality,
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
“William Blake. Auguries of Innocence,” I responded. “To which I would argue: It’s all mental, man.”
He had smiled. “Groovy, man.” Most of our arguments ended in a draw.
“I’ve never tried peyote,” Gray was telling Arnold, “but I think I’ve had such moments. Moments when I realize we’re participating in some grand mystery, vast and far beyond our understanding, and incredibly wonderful.” In the firelight, his eyes and face glowed. Fires brought out the mystic in Gray. “In those moments, it’s as if I were seeing the face of God.” He paused. “And as if God were seeing me.”
The night hung in silence about us, the only sound coming from the crackling and popping of the campfire.
I held out the small bottle. “More Tabasco sauce?”
Gray sighed, turning to Arnold. “He does that on purpose.”
“What? I asked if you’d like more Tabasco sauce.”
“You deliberately break the mood.” He explained to Arnold, “He also does that when I’m feeling romantic.”
Arnold was laughing.
“Okay then, so no Tabasco sauce.” I set the bottle aside and resumed eating.
“You’re just afraid of being thought gullible. But I know you. You aren’t the philistine you pretend to be.”
“I didn’t know I was pretending,” I mumbled.
Arnold was laughing even harder.
“My partner, the agnostic who tries very hard not to believe in God.”
“When God speaks to me, I’ll believe.”
“Have you considered maybe you’re not listening?”
It was my turn to address Arnold. “It’s not easy living with a Melbourne barrister who was captain of his university’s debating team. And for the record, I prefer to think of myself as a rational skeptic rather than an agnostic. Agnostics know nothing, and are usually proud of it.”
Arnold was still grinning at our exchange as he picked up his Fosters. “Myself, I like skeptics. They have to see, touch, and experience for themselves to believe.”
“Please, Arnold, don’t encourage him,” said Gray, returning to his food. “As you see, we have our differences.”
The older man’s grin softened. His voice became wistful, maybe envious. “I wish your kind of relationship was available when I was your age.” Both of us noted the change in tone. “I think you’re very fortunate to have each other.”
Gray turned back to me, now serious. Even in the firelight I could see it in his eyes and steeled myself for what I knew was coming. He was going to embarrass me.
Sure enough, still gazing with those love-struck eyes, he said quietly, “He is my life. It would be no life without him.”
Arnold nodded, also looking at me.
Thusly embarrassed, I murmured, “I guess I kind of feel the same way.”
Apparently, I broke the mood once again. Gray turned to Arnold. “And that’s about the closest he comes to a profession of love. Apparently, it’s considered unmanly for gay men in America to say ‘I love you’ to each other. He can’t say it.”
“Of course, I can say it.”
“You haven’t in all the time we’ve been together.”
“I’m . . . waiting for the right moment.”
Arnold was again laughing.
“I rest my case,” said Gray, whereby he leaned over, throwing an arm around my neck, and gave me a big, sloppy kiss on the cheek. As I pulled away, he informed Arnold, “He also hates PDAs.”
“PDAs?”
“Public Displays of Affection. Another beer?”
“Sure.”
Gray got up, went to the ice chest, and returned.
“Ta,” said Arnold, taking the Fosters.
They began talking about the latest football game, Australian rules rather than American football with its Iron Man armor and thuggery. Aussie “footies” wear only shorts and jerseys and bounce the ball on the ground like an ovoid basketball. As they talked, I again noted Arnold’s legs— strong muscular legs, not as hairy as I would have expected— and hoped I’d be in such good shape when I was his age.
And that’s when I saw it.
One of his thick wool socks had slipped down, clotting around his ankle, and there on the calf, not much bigger than a quarter, was a dark spot. Maybe a shadow? I stared at it in the flickering light as Gray tossed another branch onto the fire. The flames flared, momentarily brightening the sea of darkness around our island of light, and I knew what it was. I had seen such black lesions before.
I returned to eating my curry bake, now without appetite, staring into the fire as the talk of football muted around me.
Chapter Twenty
We Are Compadres
(Or, how team building almost destroyed our staff)
[Portland, Oregon, July 1994]
Following Cal’s death, the board set about searching for a new executive director, and in July they hired Marti Michaelson. Marti had a proven track record as a crisis manager, working with financially precarious organizations like ours. The board had also wanted an executive director who wouldn’t die on them. Cal had been the third. They decided this was a tradition they wished to change. The staff was wary of Marti’s appointment: She had no HIV experience, she was very white, very straight, and very middle class. How would she work with a bunch of queers? they wondered. But at her first meeting with us, she scored points by admitting all of this.
“I still think I can help this organization,” she said, because she had skills, experience, and expertise that could stabilize the agency and benefit the people we cared about. Then, after a pause where we saw her flush and momentarily tear up, she told us her teenage son was gay, and that as a mother she was determined to do everything in her power to protect him and other young gay men from becoming infected. That clinched it for the staff. Marti was in.
She was definitely high energy. It was going to take some time, getting used to this new executive director and her style. Where Cal had been mellow, Marti was wired; where Cal was cerebral, Marti worked from an intuitive gut-instinct; where he had been a calming presence, she was a double shot of caffeine, the kind of person who thrives on crisis. One suspected she needed it, maybe was not above creating it herself. She made quick, snap decisions, and before she completed her first month on the job, she’d decided the staff needed to pull together and become a team. It wasn’t one of her better ideas.
She wangled a small grant for us to participate in a one-day outdoor challenge experience and made it mandatory, announcing there would be no exceptions, no emergencies, no sick leave granted, no deaths of distant relatives allowed. If anyone’s grandmother died, she wanted to see the body.
The staff was not excited about the idea, feeling this was an indirect way of addressing the real problem, which was the dysfunctional relationship between the Finance Director and the Client Services Department, and between the Finance Director and the Prevention Department, and between the Finance Director and— well, I think we’ve identified the problem.
The staff felt they were having to go through this physical hardship simply because Marti couldn’t manage Franklin. She and the board were too scared he’d resign, so it was couched as “team building.” There was also much grumbling that the $5,000 grant could have been put to better use when all of our budgets were so tight. Some suggested it could have purchased fifty hours of intense psychotherapy for Franklin; others, that it could have bought a world cruise ticket for him— one way. Lionel particularly had been aghast at the frivolous expenditure. “Do you realize how many beers we could have bought for $5,000?” he exclaimed.
Steve defended Marti’s decision as he, Sandy, and I were having lunch soon after the memo went out to staff. “She wants us to pull together as a team.”
“I thought we already were a team,” said Sandy.
“Well, she can’t just single out Franklin.”
“Why not? The rest of us do.”
“Oh, he’s not that bad.” Steve preferred seeing the good in everyone.
Sandy did, too, though she was willing to make an exception in Franklin’s case. “Of course he’s that bad! He has absolutely zero people skills.”
“But we all have personality quirks.”
“No. You have quirks. I have quirks. Franklin has psychopathologies.”
Brilliant with numbers, he was lousy with people. He tended to hold his head high, nose in the air, with a certain aristocratic tilt. This gave him the appearance of being condescending, which he generally was, making no effort to hide his disdain for lower life forms like our staff.
But he had performed miracles with the agency’s finances, leveraging funds to maximize their impact, renegotiating loans, stretching every dime to its limit. As much as people disliked him, everyone admitted he was holding the agency together.
Like most of us at the chronically understaffed organization, he had double duty, also serving as the human resources director, and he was famous for his terse rejection letters to job applicants:
Dear Applicant:
Thank you for your interest in the position of _______.
We have selected a candidate.
You are not he.
Cordially,
“Franklin believes courtesy is inefficient,” Sandy explained. “At least he’s an equal opportunity snob. He despises everyone.”
So, it came as a surprise to me, as well as others, that Franklin made an effort to become friends soon after I arrived. I wondered why.
“Probably your graduate degree,” suggested Sandy. “Franklin doesn’t deign to speak to anyone with less than a master’s. That puts you at least one step above the rest of us, who he considers barely potty-trained.”
“He must be very lonely,” I offered.
“I certainly hope so,” said Sandy.
Now, after being with CAP for six months, I thought maybe I could be a bridge between Franklin and the rest of the staff, helping to create a better working relationship. This team-building day could be a good opportunity.
Some doubted Franklin would even show up, though Marti had communicated to him in no uncertain terms that he was required to attend. He was clearly the non-team player on our team and she was determined to forge us into a cohesive and coordinated unit. Eventually, the staff got into the spirit, starting an office pool, placing ten-dollar bets on whether Franklin would even show, and if he did, how many hours he would stay. By the time the big day arrived, the pool was up to $350.
• • •
It was a Wednesday in late July when we gathered at Camp Harmony, one hundred acres of wooded area, thirty minutes outside of Portland. We stood around in a circle, shivering from the early morning chill and drinking our lattes, except Lionel, who had gotten off work from his moonlighting job as a bar bouncer a few hours earlier and was secretly drinking beer from his Starbucks cup.
I had greeted Franklin as soon as he arrived, wanting to make him feel welcome, and was now standing with him on one side of me and Sandy on the other, already assuming my “bridge” role. Each spoke to me, ignoring the presence of the other. Still, it was a start. Marti was going around, high-spirited, high-fiving and joking with everyone, and discovering that a majority of her staff were not morning people. Indeed, a number were irrepressibly glum— it was too early, it was too physical, and some had already lost their chance at winning the pool because Franklin had shown up after all.
Our “event coordinator” was a bright-eyed, bubbly, and very earnest young woman who looked to be about thirteen. Her face beamed— she was clearly a morning person— as she welcomed us, introducing herself as Shanti, which she explained means “peace” in Hindi. She was a student at the University of Oregon, majoring in Peace Studies. Camp Harmony was owned and operated by a co-op of people, probably all named peace in different languages, who were committed to the peaceful resolution of conflict. They had created this space, she told us, as an oasis of tranquility and love and understanding in a hostile and violent world. The staff stared at her. No one cared.
We would be divided into six teams of approximately five staff members each, with a mix of people from the three departments: Client Services, Prevention, and Administration. As Shanti read off the names, I hoped to be on Franklin’s team. Something told me he was going to need a friend; but I was assigned to a team with Sandy, Carla and Jeremy from Client Services, and Elspeth, our bookkeeper, from Administration. Franklin was assigned to a team made up primarily with prevention people: Lionel, Chad, and Leo, and Annie from Client Services. Since I knew he considered Lionel and Chad to be over-age juvenile delinquents, I had a bad feeling already.
After the teams were announced, Shanti laid out the challenge. “Today you are going to become more than mere employees to each other. More than just people working in the same building. You are going to become companions on a grand adventure. Teammates on a glorious quest. Partners in peace.” Her eyes turned misty. “Today you are going to become compadres.” Thirty-some sleepy-eyed, shivering people glanced at each other. Compadres? What was Little Miss Sunshine on?
“Look around you. Your life will depend upon the other members of your team. Together, you’re going to cross crocodile-infested rivers. You’re going to walk over deep gorges. You’re going to climb dangerous mountain peaks— ”
Sandy murmured to me, “I think I saw that movie. They all died.”
Then Shanti went over the basic rules. First: No one leaves before the end of the day. Second: No one leaves with anger in his or her heart. Third . . .
After that, she led us into the woods and around the twelve “challenge stations” that made up the course. We would be required to walk across a deep gorge (narrow plank), swing on a rope across a treacherous river (mud puddle), and scale steep mountainsides (a concrete wall). Each team would start at one of the stations and then progress to the next when they’d accomplished the task— assuming they survived the crocodiles and hadn’t plunged into the deep gorges. Without a doubt, the most challenging station was going to be The Wall. The upright slab of concrete was twelve feet high and covered with a net of thick, knotted ropes.
