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Authors: Kevin Sessums

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I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (37 page)

BOOK: I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir

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That line is what I had heard spoken to me in one of my own visions except it was slightly different. I had distinctly heard “The key TO joy is disobedience.” Had I been visited by Lucifer or by the spirit of Aleister Crowley? Did Crowley rewrite himself in death? I laughed. It must have amused Crowley too—or Lucifer—for the book fell off the shelf onto my foot.

* * *

I got to the meeting early and hung around outside talking to new friends and old ones. One of the latter was a woman I had met when I first moved to New York in the mid-1970s. She was part of Henry Geldzahler’s drove and had even married one of Henry’s young boyfriends—with Henry’s blessing—who fell in love with her. I was so happy and surprised to see her on the second floor where the fellowship took place, since I was so apprehensive to be attending new meetings in New York when I first got back to town. We were standing on the corner of 10th and University that day when another of our friends from the meeting came up to talk and asked how we knew each other. We went into our routine about how old we now were and how we’d met at the Ninth Circle gay bar in the 1970s when everybody hung out there and smoked joints in the back garden.

“I hadn’t seen her in ages until I walked into the meeting a month ago,” I said.

“That’s not quite true, Kevin,” she said. “I saw you at Perry Moore’s funeral.”

“You did?”

“Kevin, I sat next to you,” she said, rubbing my shoulder.

“God. Now that you mention it, I sort of remember you being there next to me. I was having one of my out-of-body experiences during that funeral,” I said.

“Yeah. You were sobbing all the way through it. I was concerned for you. You were in rough shape.”

“Do you think he really died from an overdose?” I asked her, still having a hard time believing that he had been a drug addict.

“Kevin,” she said. “How do you think I knew Perry? He was a regular at the meeting we’re about to go to.”

“I never even knew he did drugs, much less went to meetings,” I said.

“He not only went to that meeting, but you know how we all stake out our chairs and sit in the same ones all the time? Well, you’ve been sitting in Perry’s chair ever since you got here.”

I thought of that day a month before when I had put my hand on Perry’s book and asked for him to guide me and help me stay sober. He had led me to his very chair.

“Oh, honey,” said my friend, giving me a hug. “I thought you knew Perry went there and that’s why you were coming. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m not upset,” I said. “I’m just amazed how prayers are answered.”

I was beginning to recognize that not only was my ongoing recovery a spiritually based one, but the intervention, still taking place in my life, was as well. The intervention had not been conducted by family members and friends but by a marshaling of the spirit world.

* * *

By the first of October, still sober, I was back in Provincetown. I picked up Archie and Teddy on my way back up to the Cape to a tiny inexpensive 120-square-foot apartment I’d found for the winter. It was on the bay and had a big picture window, so if I turned my gaze outward I, at least, had a less cramped view. In fact, the view was magnificent. But there was no stove. I kept my clothes in garbage bags in the bathroom. I slept on a tattered twin mattress on the floor. The mattress was so old—its springs so worn out—that some nights I felt as if I was still trying to fall asleep lying atop the rocks back on Mount Kilimanjaro.

I attempted to find work but was having no luck. Again, I was running out of money. I was beginning to become paranoid that everyone in the small world of publishing and magazines knew of my meth addiction and my fall and was scared of offering me a hand up even for old times’ sake. I did get two writing assignments out of the blue. One was for
Country Living
magazine, interviewing actor Corbin Bernsen and his wife, Amanda Pays, about their Studio City home. That one I could do by looking at the research photos and calling them on Skype from my tiny place on the bay.

The other was for
LA Confidential
magazine. Its editor in chief, Spencer Beck, had been the managing editor at Andy Warhol’s
Interview
when I was the executive editor. I had not heard from him in years but got an e-mail from him asking if I’d like to do a cover story for him on Mary J. Blige. For that one, I had to go to New York.

He offered me a bit more money if I’d get myself down there from Provincetown and put myself up. I didn’t let him know how broke I was. Hell, I could barely swing round-trip bus fare. Luckily, a friend down in New York let me stay at his place for a few nights. Spencer told me he thought I’d be a good match with Mary J. because he remembered that I had always said I was a black woman in a former life. “Even though sometimes I think you can pass for one in this one,” he joked. I knew, though, that Mary J. Blige and I had a much deeper connection than that—addiction—and that’s what I wanted to talk to her about.

I knew Mary J. Blige had also had a hardscrabble life. And I admired how she bore her own emotional scars with such dignity. This was more than a professional gig for me. It was a personal one. We met at a loft in lower Manhattan and curled up on a sofa together. As she sank into the cushions—giving the brim of the newsboy cap she was wearing a jauntier tilt as she did so—we dug into just how hard-won her dignity had been for her. We talked about a lot of things that day—her childhood, her upbringing in the church, her career, her molestation, her marriage, her mother, and, yes, her own struggle with drugs.

“There seems to be a lot of forgiveness in your story, Mary J. Have you finally forgiven yourself?” I asked.

“Yes. I have. Just lately I have been saying that to myself a lot. ‘I forgive you, Mary. I forgive you.’ I’ve been saying that a lot to myself. Out loud. And I’ve been praying to God to show me how to forgive myself. Because maybe that’s the thing I’ve been searching for.”

* * *

I did that interview with Mary J. Blige in November of 2012 and turned it in that December. But as of New Year’s Eve I had still not been paid. That night I had $1.23 in my bank account and a five-dollar bill in my pocket. That was all the money I had in the world, and yet I felt blessed to have a little more than six months of sobriety. It was the longest I’d been sober since I started smoking pot when I was fifteen years old. I walked down to the beach beneath my tiny apartment on the bay in Provincetown and looked up into the star-filled sky that New Year’s Eve. I waited for midnight. When it came, I got down on my knees and said a prayer of gratitude as 2013 arrived.

My checks for the stories arrived the next week to tide me over. On February 23, I had almost eight months of sobriety. It was also the date of John Keats’s death. To commemorate it I went to the tattoo parlor in town and had a tattoo written onto my left forearm so that I would now have a matching pair. I had a line from John Keats’s letter on “The Vale of Soul-Making” already picked out.

I went back to my tiny apartment and began to clean it a bit. Since I had already been inked once that day, I took a Bic pen I found on the floor and headed for the bathroom mirror. I stood atop one of the garbage bags that contained my clothes. Balancing myself, I carefully pointed the Bic (my Honey West ritual) beneath my lower lip, inking on a beauty mark as perfect as a period, the punctuation on the two sentences—one by Keats, one by Dickinson—now written on my flesh.

I went and stood at the window gazing outward. Archie and Teddy lay curled up next to each other on a pair of sweatpants. I hummed “The Church’s One Foundation” to them as they watched me rearrange the objects on the windowsill. I lined up the lone rock I brought home from Mount Kilimanjaro with the two I had carried in my pocket all the way across the Camino. Ganesha’s mantra, “Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha,” alighted in my mind and replaced the refrain I could no longer recall from the Cokesbury hymnal. I stood my armless altarpiece of Christ in a corner of the windowsill. I looked for any sign of Lucifer in the light streaming all about me.

I touched my arms.

I read the Dickinson tattoo:

HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS THAT PERCHES IN THE SOUL.

I then read my new one by Keats:

EVEN A PROVERB IS NO PROVERB TO YOU TILL YOUR LIFE HAS ILLUSTRATED IT.

Now, I am stirring like a seed in China.

Sobriety is my empyrean.

This.

“I forgive you, Kevin,” I said out loud.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I could not have finished this book without the encouragement, belief, talent, and friendship of my remarkable editor, Michael Flamini. His presence in my life is a blessing. He has not only made me a better writer, but also—dare I say it?—a better man.

I would also like to thank others at St. Martin’s Press whose help has been invaluable: Steve Snider, John Murphy, John Karle, and Vicki Lame. Thank you also to my agent, Robert Guinsler, photographer Bill Miles, copyeditor Barbara Wild, and lawyer, Samuel Bayard.

And thank you to my fellows who, when I found you where you were waiting for me in those rooms, helped me to find myself.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kevin Sessums
is editor in chief of
FourTwoNine
magazine and
dot429.com.
He was previously a contributing editor at
Vanity Fair, Allure,
and
Parade
. His work has appeared in
Elle, Travel
+
Leisure, Out, Playboy,
and
Marie Claire,
as well as on the Web site
The Daily Beast
. He lives in San Francisco, California. Sign up for email updates
here
.