Dreams and Nightmares 11: Paul

Paul

            It was hard to tell who could make me laugh longer or harder, Paul or Jimmy. Jimmy had been one of my best friends since first grade. We had shared a similar interests in pet chickens and pigeons, and eventually men. Paul and I, although we were first cousins, were also best friends, seeking out each other at family gatherings. Paul’s family had a farm where I often stayed as a child. We did gardening, cared for animals, and took long walks exploring the woods and creeks nearby. It was no surprise that the three of us became friends as young men, haunting gay bars in Cincinnati and howling at each other’s jokes. Once, during their visit to my home in California, we were so busy laughing that we burned a wooden spatula resting across a skillet. The spatula is still in the drawer to the left of the stove.

            Then Jimmy got sick with AIDS. After Kenny, Steven, Carter, and Christopher. Before Kevin, Jonathan, William, and Eric. And before Paul. 

“It won’t be long now,” Aunt Mildred said. On the other end of the phone line I could hear the fatigue in her voice and could imagine the darkened living room where they had set up Paul’s hospital bed. She didn’t sound very sad, only resigned. When I had asked to talk to Paul, she had told me that he hadn’t been speaking for days, or even opened his eyes. I had seen that same look on many friends in their last moments. Mildred had been criticized for taking in her son to die, her friends saying that she would get AIDS too. I told her that I would pray for Paul and for her and hung up. A few days later in September, 1992, Paul died. Within a couple months his family sold his beauty shop and his lovely home to pay for the mounting expenses.

Across the road from St. Joseph's Church in Saint Leon, Indiana, is a graveyard filled with the dead from many of the families I grew up with. Great aunts and uncles, many long cold and never known by the current living, rest here. It’s a late winter day with bright sun, but cold. The grass is green and short and the trees have yet to bud. I walked over to my cousin Paul’s grave and didn't know what feel. There had already been so much grief. True, he was another man in the long line of AIDS deaths, but he was more than that. Paul had been my best friend during our childhood and a model of what it meant to be a free spirit. When we were teenagers he would tell me stories after he had gone to conferences for hairdressers about what the other gay men were doing. This was in the 70s, before Stonewall and Gay Liberation, so the details of those stories both excited and scared me. I stared at his tombstone, a pathetic attempt at trying to make him seem butch: a brawny lumberjack shouldering a huge ax, standing next to a hunting dog. I doubt if the responsible parties realized what a gay icon they had chosen. Not only was it insulting that his grave was marked by an unsuccessful attempt to cover his flamboyancy, it hurt that has family had him buried far away from their grouping. I said goodbye and walked back to the car, the gravel crunching under my feet, cracking the cemetery’s silence.

The grey skies didn’t part to permit pleasant sunbeams. Clouds remained, threatened, and eventually delivered. Cold, relentless, winter rain. From my seat in the car I stared for long minutes at the church, the bare trees, and empty fields. “It’s over,” I thought aloud, and turning the car around, I drove out of St. Leon, taking my own memories of Paul home.

That January trip to Cincinnati was meant to provide me some closure with losing my cousin. I had not been able to attend his funeral or to visit his home in Osgood. My sisters and my mother shared late night whispered conversations with me about how strangers and extended family had gone through Paul’s house holding handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths as they considered what they would buy from his estate. I found it ridiculously ironic that these people thought little piece of cloth would protect them from imaginary AIDS germs flying through the air, yet were willing to purchase furnishings or bric a brac to take home. When I saw where Paul was buried and forever separated from his family, I wondered what would happen if I became sick. I’d like to think that my mother and sisters would avoid the use of their handkerchiefs. 

I flew home to Oakland, California, to my partner and young son, comforted by the distance and by the fact that I was building a family. Vince and I were one of the first couples to adopt an infant from Alameda County, in 1990. He had been abandoned by his homeless mother and rejected by a straight couple who wanted an immediate guarantee that he was HIV negative, a test that wasn’t going to be available for years. This was in the midst of the gay community being ravaged by AIDS. We were lucky, that as we saw our friends dying around us, we were able to grasp on to a new life and believe in something positive. Ian was by then two-and-a-half, a typical whirl of energy, opposition, and curiosity. He kept our minds off the many tragic deaths; it’s hard to stay focused on grief when a little boy is asking questions, needing a bath, or making another mess. 

In the late spring I started feeling another presence in our family. There is no other way to describe it. I would be making dinner, or doing the laundry, and suddenly it was if someone was hovering, invisible, beside me. I talked to my psychologist partner Vince at the risk of having him think I was a little bit crazy. Instead he suggested it might be time for us to expand our family again.

We contacted the county social services department to seek out another adoption. In June, 1993, we met our second infant son, born crack-addicted. Vince and I waited in a tiny office and could hear him screaming as a social worker carried him to us. I will never forget how when I help him, he became quiet and stared deep into my eyes, so steadily it made me a bit uncomfortable. 

“What will you name him?” our social worker asked.

“Paul,” I replied. “It means Hero of God.”