together by Bud Lee, the photographer who took the famous Life magazine cover of the child inadvertently hit by a policeman’s bullet during the Newark, New Jersey, riots in 1967. In Savannah in the 1980s, as photos for a feature I was writing for Mother Jones, Bud, taken by the radiance of my and Zane’s passion, had snapped the pictures.
“Sex and death are the only two things worth writing about,” wrote the great poet William Butler Yeats. And when I was asked to write this essay, I was immersed in the latter. It was 2009, and my adult son, David, had just died at my home after a ten-month illness during which I had held my breath, praying every day for his healing, but also knowing it wasn’t likely to happen. As I held him in my arms just after his breath expired, I placed my hands in his still-warm armpits, seeking to will him back to life, and embracing him in a way he, as an adult man, wouldn’t have permitted. My most recent writing had been the memorial letter I had sent to friends everywhere.
Thus the request felt almost jarring, as though it had come from another planet. At first the idea of thinking—especially at that time—about what had been the best sex of my life seemed foreign. Then, suddenly, it seemed apropos. Hasn’t my love for both of them—from the first moment I looked into my son’s Cherokee-brown eyes, a dimple indenting his olive cheek as he sucked his little thumb, to the instant when Zane’s steel blue eyes met mine across that bar—been undeniably of the visceral, of the flesh? “Skin,” the Spanish call the first time we see one another. And hadn’t I experienced the whole of my relationship with each of them in that moment?
Tonight, almost thirty years after we first laid eyes on each other, Zane and I sit at the Starbucks near my house. He, cigarette in hand, tells me that the only way he can live is not to care about anything—sex included, and even if he lives or dies. “That’s evident,” I say in a conversation we’ve had many times before: “Otherwise you wouldn’t be smoking that cigarette.” Once I would have argued further with him about this. But now, since we don’t live together anymore, I just sit and listen.
Also, there’s what we both accept as fact: to lead the simple, peaceful life he now leads—so different from his years as a paratrooper, then over-the-road trucker, outdoing himself physically every day of his life, he’s had to change, giving up the rage that had fueled him for so long. He now takes Wellbutrin for depression, Depakote and lithium for bipolar, other pills for high blood pressure and for high cholesterol—sixteen each morning and eight at night. Over the past few years, he’s lost his father, his mother, and his brother, so there’s nobody left but me and my two daughters.
This information hangs in the air between us as we sip our lattes, talk about his latest story. Zane is writing now, too, and because he didn’t come out of an MFA program, he has a lot to write about. In a few minutes, he’ll leave for his AA meeting, and I mention my son, David. Because of both of them, I’ve seen suffering beyond what I’ve known myself, and I’ve watched their sheer male bravery in the face of it. In response, Zane quotes the Tao Te Ching—“ ‘just stay at the center of the circle and let all things take their course.’ ” As he speaks, I recall reading that in the Tao, both hedonism and asceticism can lead to enlightenment, and I remember how, at one time, the former had worked for me.
And suddenly, I feel a deep peace. Can it be that this man—the one who once drove me mad with his stubbornness, his need to dominate—the one I once considered the almost unmovable obstacle to my personal freedom—has become my unlikely spiritual guide?
Also, there is our separation of over two years, which has led us to see each other with new eyes. “Don’t think I take any of this for granted,” he said the other night as we
“Sex and death are the only two things worth writing about,” wrote the great poet William Butler Yeats. And when I was asked to write this essay, I was immersed in the latter. It was 2009, and my adult son, David, had just died at my home after a ten-month illness during which I had held my breath, praying every day for his healing, but also knowing it wasn’t likely to happen. As I held him in my arms just after his breath expired, I placed my hands in his still-warm armpits, seeking to will him back to life, and embracing him in a way he, as an adult man, wouldn’t have permitted. My most recent writing had been the memorial letter I had sent to friends everywhere.
Thus the request felt almost jarring, as though it had come from another planet. At first the idea of thinking—especially at that time—about what had been the best sex of my life seemed foreign. Then, suddenly, it seemed apropos. Hasn’t my love for both of them—from the first moment I looked into my son’s Cherokee-brown eyes, a dimple indenting his olive cheek as he sucked his little thumb, to the instant when Zane’s steel blue eyes met mine across that bar—been undeniably of the visceral, of the flesh? “Skin,” the Spanish call the first time we see one another. And hadn’t I experienced the whole of my relationship with each of them in that moment?
Tonight, almost thirty years after we first laid eyes on each other, Zane and I sit at the Starbucks near my house. He, cigarette in hand, tells me that the only way he can live is not to care about anything—sex included, and even if he lives or dies. “That’s evident,” I say in a conversation we’ve had many times before: “Otherwise you wouldn’t be smoking that cigarette.” Once I would have argued further with him about this. But now, since we don’t live together anymore, I just sit and listen.
Also, there’s what we both accept as fact: to lead the simple, peaceful life he now leads—so different from his years as a paratrooper, then over-the-road trucker, outdoing himself physically every day of his life, he’s had to change, giving up the rage that had fueled him for so long. He now takes Wellbutrin for depression, Depakote and lithium for bipolar, other pills for high blood pressure and for high cholesterol—sixteen each morning and eight at night. Over the past few years, he’s lost his father, his mother, and his brother, so there’s nobody left but me and my two daughters.
This information hangs in the air between us as we sip our lattes, talk about his latest story. Zane is writing now, too, and because he didn’t come out of an MFA program, he has a lot to write about. In a few minutes, he’ll leave for his AA meeting, and I mention my son, David. Because of both of them, I’ve seen suffering beyond what I’ve known myself, and I’ve watched their sheer male bravery in the face of it. In response, Zane quotes the Tao Te Ching—“ ‘just stay at the center of the circle and let all things take their course.’ ” As he speaks, I recall reading that in the Tao, both hedonism and asceticism can lead to enlightenment, and I remember how, at one time, the former had worked for me.
And suddenly, I feel a deep peace. Can it be that this man—the one who once drove me mad with his stubbornness, his need to dominate—the one I once considered the almost unmovable obstacle to my personal freedom—has become my unlikely spiritual guide?
Also, there is our separation of over two years, which has led us to see each other with new eyes. “Don’t think I take any of this for granted,” he said the other night as we
Similar Books
