I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (25 page)

*   *   *

When I got back to the San Zoilo after dinner I decided to take this journal down to the church that is located in the bowels of the monastery/hotel. I was the only one in there. I had to walk around a lot of construction, since they are doing some renovations—buttressing of columns, et cetera. Not changing things per se. I have to admit I’ve avoided most of the Catholic churches along the Camino since I find the aesthetic too ornate—even tacky—for my austere Protestant tastes. Give me one simple wooden cross to stare at above a simple altar—not all this pornographic violence that passes for religious idolatry, relics, statuary, et cetera. It reminds me of the tacky furniture one could often find in the old New York store Castro Convertibles. I’ve come to think of these churches as “Castro Convertible Cathedrals”—though I keep that to myself. Most of them are downright ugly—filled with guilt and gilt.

This evening, however, I thought I’d give it a try and sit in the ancient church here—it is thankfully much less “decorated” than others I’ve peeked in—and contemplate my trip so far. Meditate. See what moved me as I tried to decipher and sift through my experiences. Maybe do a bit of journal writing. I closed my eyes and drifted off—not to sleep exactly but to a fitful rest.

When I got up to leave—I decided to wait to write in the journal—I saw a door over by the side of the altar (my Catholic friends call it a sacristy, I think, not sure—sacresty?—something like that, not even sure how to spell it), so I thought I’d go have a look inside. When I entered I saw there on the wall the most bloody and bludgeoned Christ-on-the-Cross I have ever seen. His eyes were beaten to a plastered pulp and closed tight—as if the centurions had mugged him first before crucifying him. I kept thinking of Brad Pitt’s face in
Fight Club
. Leave it to me—this Kevin who is not a saint—to make the connection to the Hollywood that is not in Ireland but back in California. The wound on Christ’s rib cage was gaping and gushing blood. The crown of thorns was cutting into his head and dripping blood down on his face. His feet were gnarled in bloody pain beneath the spikes that had nailed them to the cross. His hair was not carved but real human hair that flowed down in front of his anguished face. I hated the awfulness of it all. But I made myself look up into the face. “Brad Pitt,” I whispered.

And then—had the Brad Pitt whisper been a taunt and I was now going to be taught a lesson?—something occurred I cannot explain.

I don’t think I will ever be able to explain it.

In fact, even as I’m about to write about it I am rolling my own eyes at what happened.

But it did happen.

It did.

I was not drunk.

I had not been smoking meth.

I had not been smoking pot.

I was tired, but my utter fatigue could not explain it.

Now that I’m sorting out what happened, the only thing I can come up with is there might have been a young priest working some sort of mechanism behind the wall where the cross was hanging for wary, overly discerning, austere Protestant pilgrims like me who wandered in alone and whose wariness took on a sarcastic edge. All I know is this: The eyes of the Christ figure began slowly to open and a white kind of light began to emerge from them. I don’t know if it really happened. But it was true. It is true. I am telling the truth. The body itself seemed to lift a bit on the cross. The head lifted also slightly as if trying to get a better look at me. The hair moved a bit as the head cocked to one side to get a better look at me. I dropped this very journal and fell to my knees. I began to cry looking up into the white-eyed, shining face of Christ and all I could mumble over and over was, “Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you.…” I am mumbling it again even as I write this. “Thank you thank you thank you thank you.”

I then grabbed my journal there beneath that bloody bludgeoned Christ and quickly scurried out into the courtyard. It had all happened in a matter of seconds—maybe half a minute at the most. I turned the corner and ran into Ethne and Mary walking toward me. They saw the state I was in. It wasn’t as if I were in the eye of a storm, but I were the eye itself. The experience was still whipping about me and yet a calm had overtaken me. “Something just happened in there. I can’t explain it…,” I told them, my voice shaky but sure. “I don’t know what just happened. The crucifix was doing crazy things and I started to cry and I didn’t know what…” The calmness was suddenly skittering from me. I was about to hyperventilate. I felt a “Hallelujah” lodged in my throat, but I was able to suppress it. Is that what a vow of silence at its essence feels like? I wanted to drop to my knees again.

Ethne looked vexed herself now by my demeanor. But her burly sister attempted to calm me. “Shshshhhh … Kevin … shhshhshhsh,” she whispered, and folded me in her big soft arms. “This,” a woman named Mary whispered in my ear as she held me to her breast, “is how a monk feels. Now you know,
me fae
. Now you know. Feel it.”

*   *   *

John Keats to Percy Bysshe Shelley: “My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.”

5/15/09

On my walk this morning, Toby, surprising me, came up behind me and hit me on my butt. It was so good to see him. I’ve missed him and Lucas, who is several towns ahead of us now on the path. It’s even Lucas’s birthday today, Toby told me. Toby was with two beautiful German girls—Teresa and Aurelia—he’d met since last time I saw him. They have formed a little Austrian/German troika.

A stray dog came up and nuzzled me as I sat by the side of the road later. Made me miss Archie so much. I know my sister is taking good care of him, but I do miss cuddling with him under the covers when I go to sleep at night.

5/16/09

John Keats from October 27, 1818: “I feel assured I should write from the yearning and fondness I have for the Beautiful even if my night’s labours should be burnt every morning and no eye shine upon them. But even now I am perhaps not speaking from myself but some character in whose soul I now live.”

5/17/09

I ran into Mary and Ethne this morning as the sun was rising. They were taking a break in a field on the side of the Camino and eating a bit of fruit for energy. Mary said last night at dinner that she had pulled her back out a bit and I asked if she was okay. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Just be careful,
me cara
. If you see some handsome Brazilians, don’t turn too quickly to get a second look. That’s what happened to this old girl.” Laughing, she went to retrieve another piece of fruit from her bag and when she did she also retrieved a funeral card with a picture on it. I had asked who it was and she said, “That be
mo dheartháir
. That’s me Danny boy.” He looks a lot like Mary. Same round, full cheeks. Same bulbous nose. No mistaking they are family.

“We stop every morning at sunrise before we really start our walk for the day,” said Ethne. “And we sing for dear Danny. Would you like to join us this morning, Saint Kevin?”

“I’d be honored,” I said.

With that, they softly began to sing “Danny Boy.” Mary went to hit the high note but choked up. Ethne and I finished the song for her. We all had tears in our eyes. We sat in silence for a few moments. Their faces, already ruddy and redolent with sorrow, were reddened even more by the rising sun.

*   *   *

I don’t like the ugly town where I’ve ended up for the night. I checked into an awful little hotel and feel as if I’m in a dive hotel around Times Square circa 1977. The walls are cardboard thin and I can hear a heterosexual couple fucking next door. Pilgrims? I am now leaning against the wall to listen to their moans as I write these very words. More moaning. My own bed creaks as I move closer to the wall to hear as much as I can in the next room. I want to masturbate to the sounds. I grab at my pubic hair and think of Kurt Cobain’s when Courtney Love caught me sniffing a handful of it. I think of that Buddhist altar in her house. I think of my Buddhist dream. I think of those two old Jews who are walking the Camino for their “one heart.” I think of Colin and his stitched-up one. I think of Keats and his poems and his letters. I think of a Banat Swabian émigré’s ululating yell. I think of whores. I think of bridges from Prague. I think of Warhol’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I think of Christ on his Catholic cross who invaded my Protestant imagination and conjured my tears. I long for company of any kind right now. Any kind, I think, keeping time to the rhythm I can feel through the wall as I hear the thud of the man pounding his body into the woman. Any kind. I think of my father. Any kind. My mother. I hear the couple coming together in the next room. I can’t. I can’t come. I listen to their silence. I press my ear to the wall. I pretend my breathing is timed with theirs. I wonder what they look like. My own breath is all that I can hear now. I just took this pen and drew a tiny flattened
M
on the wall beside me. I wonder what the next person who rents this filthy room will make of it, that
M
. Will they think it an initial or the wings it is meant to be? Will they think it a bird? An angel? “Move over,” I hear the man in the next room say. American. They must be pilgrims. “Move,” he says again. I hear the woman moan and move. I hate being HIV positive. I hate it. I carefully point the pen (my Honey West ritual) beneath my lower lip, inking on a beauty mark as perfect as a period, the punctuation on a sentence my flesh still keeps trying to write.

5/18/09

I got up early from the horrible hotel today and had a leisurely four-hour walk into León, where I now am having lunch at a sidewalk café in this lovely city full of college students. There is a kind of pedestrian thoroughfare here in the middle of the place where all the kids seem to promenade and preen for one another. It’s the first real city I’ve been in since Burgos.

Burly Irish Mary spotted me a few moments ago and strode over through all the preening kids. She told me that according to her guidebook the walk tomorrow is through some industrial sections and not a very pretty one. She then tried to convince me to take the bus with her to our next destination on the Camino. I told her since I had been checking into hotels along the way that I have to walk every inch of the Camino so I won’t feel guilty about purposefully skipping so much of the hostel experience.

“Oh, now, you’re being too rigid, Saint Kevin,” said Mary before striding away. “Sometimes life is about being carried.”

My grilled fish has arrived.

5/19/09

There was no hotel in the small village where I am now. But I was lucky to get the last bed in one of the hostels when I came hobbling into town. I am now at the computer terminal where I just checked my e-mails for any news from home. I did, sadly, get a shocking bit just now. An old friend, Rodger McFarlane, who was one of the founders of Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York, committed suicide. He also worked for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and Bailey House and had moved to Colorado to work for gay multimillionaire Tim Gill in his philanthropic enterprises at the Gill Foundation. Rodger was a Southern sissy like me, but he grew up next door from Mississippi in Alabama. He was six feet seven inches tall and took up even more space than that in the world with his larger-than-life humor and social activism. He was a hero of mine. Rodger is the last person I would have thought would kill himself. He did it—this is so Rodger—in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. I know, like Perry, Rodger had chronic back pain. Maybe that was the root of his despair. Maybe it was more physical pain than he could finally bear. I said a prayer for him. And for Perry.

*   *   *

Reading about Rodger just now made me stop writing and take a walk around the village to collect my thoughts. Calm down. I’m back in the computer room now sitting in a dirty old chair. On my walk I thought about the big, handsome German I met today. He was almost as tall as Rodger, come to think of it. Even kind of looked like him. His name was Kirk and he asked me if I had read the Kerkeling book about the Camino. I told him I had not, but neither my having not read it nor our language barrier deterred our conversation. He told me it was nice to meet strangers and talk and pass the time as he walked. He was from Berlin. The one subject, to my surprise, he was not keen on discussing was anything to do with spirituality. He was much more focused on the physical aspect of the walk. What moved him, he said, was walking in the footsteps of all those who have walked before us and connecting to the earth itself where they had once trod. “Ambled” is the English word he used. “Where they have before ambled.” He seemed to be paraphrasing Jessica Lange and her own love of walking for the sake of walking. “Nothing really changes,” he said. “That’s what I keep thinking about as I walk this path that people have walked for two thousand years. What’s new? Nothing’s new. New? Nothing. Nichts. Nothing. Nothing.” I tried to keep up with the long strides of this man named Kirk from Berlin as I thought of that needle-loving woman named Berlin from New York who told me the same thing when we talked about Andy Warhol after his death. “And he’d say again, ‘What’s new?’” said Brigid. “I’d say, ‘Nothing’s new.’” “Nothing’s new,” repeated the German, gesturing toward the horizon, the heavens, which we keep waiting to gesture back to us.

5/20/09

Each day here on the Camino I try to move on from moment to moment to moment. As the sun once again rose before me and once again the birds began their morning songs, I thought of another passage from my reading the other night of Keats’s letters. It was in one he had written to his friend Benjamin Bailey on November 22, 1817, and it is how the Camino itself is schooling me. “Nothing startles me beyond the Moment,” Keats wrote. “The setting sun will always put me to rights, or if a Sparrow comes before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.”

I got up early and was the first one out of the hostel this morning to pick about the gravel after having a wild dream in which I was trying to fall asleep in another hostel. A group of pilgrims arrived late in the dream and began to party in the courtyard. I woke myself talking in my sleep, which is something I never used to do. I think it’s one of the side effects of my HIV medication. Lots of people who are on it have nightmares. I sometimes do as well. But usually my dreams just become more vivid and I’ve begun to talk aloud while having them. I always know it’s happening because I have a hard time talking in the dream itself as I vocally begin to straddle the conscious and unconscious worlds. I first shouted, “God forgive you!” at the partying pilgrims; then when they wouldn’t quiet down I shouted, “Fuck you!” That’s when I woke myself. Those two admonitions pretty much sum up all of life, I guess—or, at least, mine so far. An overly friendly Swiss guy in the next bunk was staring at me when I startled myself awake. I guess I had woken him as well. “Which is it?” he whispered to me when I saw him staring at me in the moonlight. “Do you want God to forgive me or do you want to fuck me?” he asked. I ignored him. I went back to sleep.