The Truth is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler? (29 page)

“That’s my girl,” I heard someone say. Oh, fuck, I couldn’t help myself. I flashed back to a day in the summer of 1967 when I was in New York, attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. My friend Caroline and I were roaming around the city and we suddenly heard drumming from a rehearsal hall, several stories aboveground, that reminded us of the number Joey Luft performed with Judy during her stint at the Palace. Sure enough, we looked up and there was Joey, fumbling with his drumsticks as Judy was helping him keep time, using her scrawny arm as a metronome.

“Concentrate, honey,” I advised Tia. She gave me a look.

She was a fabulous Elvis cat. After the performance, I asked her, “What role do you think your Daddy would play in
Cats
?”

She rolled those huge brown eyes. “The same as me,” she said, like it wasn’t even worth mentioning.

A few days later—offstage—from her bathroom, I heard the announcement.

“Daddy, I’m bleeding.”

CHAPTER 55
               

Oh my God, I thought to myself as I sprinted from the kitchen (where I was washing dishes) to the loo, she’s starting her period and I haven’t explained it yet. The book (titled
Period
) was in a pile on my desk, along with the one about the Daddy who is HIV-positive.

She was standing at the mirror, pointing to the gum area where she had just lost a tooth (one of her few remaining temporaries). It was true; there was a spec or two of blood. “It’s okay, pumpkin,” I said. “That amount of blood is completely natural.”

I hugged her close, feeling her head, sprouting long braided extensions, nuzzle right below my chest—another reminder that my little girl was growing up.

“You don’t have to put anything under my pillow,” she said, playing the precocious nine-year-old. “If there’s no Santa, there’s no such thing as a Tooth Fairy.” In the middle of the night, I very gently lifted her head and stuck a couple of bucks under her pillow, anyway.

In addition to telling Tia that she would probably have her first period in the near future, I had recently realized that I could no longer put off talking to her about my HIV status. These would be conversations about blood—her blood, my blood.

Since she’s adopted, blood is probably the only thing that we don’t share. Our connection runs as deep as any bloodlines. I have been Tia’s father since she was five months old, after her precarious entrance into the world. Born weighing less than three pounds, she was abandoned at the hospital by her crack-addicted mother. She spent her first month hooked up to an incubator, fighting for her life.

Tia was thriving—physically and emotionally as well as artistically and spiritually. Like most girls her age, she seemed to be growing up at an accelerated rate. With each word she added to her considerable vocabulary and each outlandish idea to redecorate her room, I was reminded that not only was she getting older, but I was closer to facing the inevitable.

“The inevitable” had shifted, of course, but few of us who have lived through the horrors of the plague deaths that darkened the Eighties actually believed that the protease inhibitors were the “miracle” drugs they had been hyped to be.

When I looked back at my decision to adopt in 1993, all I can say is that it seemed like my life depended upon becoming a dad.

Moms and dads everywhere stumble from day to day, navigating shifting emotional eruptions, but almost always feel like a pink slip is forthcoming. No one articulated Tia’s life challenge better than Tia at seven years old: “You can be everything to me, Daddy, but you can’t be my mom.”

Since menstruating is not something I had experienced (even though, when in a cranky mood, I had been the recipient of those sexist insults that indicate I have), my friend Rose introduced the subject, mothering Tia through the first purchase of sanitary napkins.

“It won’t happen for two years,” Tia said, laughing, “and I’ve seen those things on TV and in restaurant bathrooms.”

Perhaps she’d adopt the same nonchalance upon hearing that I had a terminal illness. Imagine how disappointed I’d be. Naw, she’d already told me, “If you die, I want to die with you.”

I had been putting off telling her for more than a year.

You might be saying to yourself, “What did he think was going to happen?”

Didn’t I realize that this conversation was inescapable?

I was probably denying the harsh realities, something that almost anyone who decides to be a parent does in order to take on the monumental commitment. Even if you’ve read every how-to book on the art of parenting, nothing prepares you for the frustration or the fear, the ecstasy or the intimacy. And let’s put this story into context. I had lived far longer than anyone would have anticipated, so I could rejoice even though the future of our two-person family would ineluctably encompass challenges and heartaches.

I put aside a weekend to spend at our cabin in Idyllwild. I packed up our new cat, Miu Miu, and her litter box (Tia insisted and I figured she’d provide feline comfort), a videotape of John Waters’
Hairspray
(camp always comes in handy) and, secreted in the suitcase wrapped in a pair of jeans, a copy of
My Dad Has HIV
.

We spent the first night and following morning acclimating to the altitude and just hanging out. I occasionally found myself going into my fevered Joan Crawford impersonation, my cleaning-everything-in-sight act, in order to delay the main event. But even domestic diversion reminded me that I was procrastinating. As I scanned the instructions on the new washing machine, the word “blood” jumped out at me, like it was a goddamned cue card. Never in my life did I remember reading, printed on the inside of a washing machine: “How to Get Rid of Blood.”

It was time. We turned off the Disney channel and sat on the dilapidated couch, facing each other. “I need to tell you something kinda important,” I said. “I feel like you’re smart enough and sensitive enough to know something about Daddy that I haven’t told you yet.”

I reminded myself that it was necessary to answer only the questions that she asked. Of course, there was a part of me that wanted to describe the disease’s dramatic trajectory from the early Eighties to the present, year by year, and perform a few monologues while I was at it. Instead, I forced myself to breathe.

She was completely present. I began by going over a few vocabulary words: “virus,” “white blood cells,” and “immune system.” She was not unfamiliar with these words but needed a bit of clarification. Then I asked her if she’d ever heard of HIV.

“No,” she answered.

“It’s a virus that affects a person’s white blood cells, which can throw the immune system off.” She was clearly with me. “About fifteen years ago, I found out I have HIV, but I have never been sick.”

There was a long pause. “Did my mom have HIV?”

“No,” I told her, “and neither do you. It’s not easy to catch. You were tested when you were a baby. And you are not going to get HIV from me.”

Then I tried to explain that this new information about her dad was something she could share or keep private. “I have chosen to be open, but that doesn’t mean that you have to be. If you need to talk to someone about it, most of our friends and even some people at school know.”

She then began asking me who among our extended family had HIV and who didn’t.

“I have a book I’d like to read to you later,” I said.

“Okay. Let’s go,” she said and jumped up, ready to take our midday jaunt into town.

Later that night, we watched Divine in
Hairspray
. Tia pointed out that Sonny Bono was dead—and then began asking which cast members in the film were still alive. I reassured her that Ricki Lake was alive; Pia Zadora was alive; Debbie Harry was alive.

“What about the mom?” she wanted to know.

“She’s dead. I mean,
he’s
dead,” I said.

“HIV?” she asked.

“Very good question, Tia. No, Divine died of a heart attack, I think.”

“Like John Ritter,” she said, processing every detail. When Ritter died, she compared our ages (he was fifty-four; I was fifty-three) but didn’t reveal her “findings” regarding the heart’s fragility in men over five-oh.

Perhaps to prove my virility and demonstrate the vitality of my heart, I offered to show her that I could still do the mashed potato—just like those hyperkinetic teenagers were doing in the movie. “Okay,” she said, rolling those eyes.

I mashed, working up a sweat. Miu Miu made a hissing sound and sought refuge under the couch. Tia was not impressed with my spastic homage, in spite of the fact I got a splinter in my foot.

After the movie, we snuggled in bed. Since it was a special occasion, she was allowed to sleep with me, but not before we read The Book:
My Dad Has HIV
. As we often did, she read a page and then I read a page.

The thin book is written in the first-person voice of Lindsey, an upbeat second grader, and features deliberately bright illustrations that determinedly serve as counterpoint to the somewhat grim text. Lindsey, in fact, resembles Ricki Lake, only less hair and not as chunky as she appears in
Hairspray.

Tia read, “When the number of your white blood cells goes down, your body can’t fight other illnesses.”

My turn: “You can become very sick,” I read. The dad depicted in the book looks a bit like Julia Sweeney’s Pat character—lumpy and limp, asexual and androgynous. He doesn’t look like an aging glamour-puss who could still do the mashed potato.

The book ends hopefully. “Doctors and scientists around the world are working together to discover a cure for HIV,” I read. You could practically hear the string section swelling in the background.

“I love my dad very much and I want him to be there for me as I grow up,” Tia read, with only a hint of emotion, as she closed the book.

She fell asleep first. The sound of her breathing lulled me even though I wrestled with residual angst.

I woke up in the middle of the night and had to pee. It was pitch black; I’d forgotten that the light that seemed to perpetually emanate from the living room was on a timer. I swear I couldn’t see a fucking thing. I got up, bound for the bathroom.

Bam!
I slammed into a half-opened door, banged my head into it—my face, to be more precise—right below my eyebrow. For a second, I couldn’t breathe, but when I did, I involuntarily emitted a cry—a cry that quickly turned into a sob.

I checked to see if I was bleeding. Didn’t think so.

“Daddy, are you okay?” she asked, clearly panicked.

“Yeah, honey, I’ll be okay,” I said, groping for the goddamn light switch.

Light on and Tia offered to get me ice.

“I’ll get it,” I said, stumbling into the kitchen, trying to stop crying. I realized that these tears had been accumulating and, although the physical pain was real, the stored up tears refused to stop because of so much more.

“Are you bleeding, Dad?” I heard her ask from the bedroom.

“No, honey,” I said, “no blood.”

“Come snuggle,” my daughter said in her nighttime raspy voice. I crawled back under the sheets. The ice felt good. Her hand, rubbing the top of my head, felt even better. The warm tears subsided—at least for that moment.

Other parents often described something that initially seemed a bit mysterious to me: “Your child will present you with everything you haven’t dealt with,” they’d say. After a few years, it became painfully, shockingly true.

Parenthood also provides a deeper understanding of one’s own parents and their particular neuroses. My father was seriously depressed if not slightly off his rocker. My mother was never responsibly mothered; she was, in fact, physically and perhaps sexually abused. I knew that my process as a parent must eventually encompass forgiveness, but first I chose denial.

CHAPTER 56
               

Zo Harris “had just finished a jazz class,” she says, on the night we informally met. “You might have been leaving Studio A after a rehearsal of some sort,” she reminds me. “I recall crossing St. George in the dark and heading to my car, parked around the corner on Griffith Park Boulevard. The endorphin rush was subsiding and I looked up at the starless sky thinking of my best friend, Terrance, who was dying. And from nowhere I heard your voice. ‘It’s a beautiful night, huh?’ I could make out your shadow strolling lanky and loose, down the short hill. ‘Yes, it is,’ I answered.

“For a week or two or three I thought about taking your acting class, not exactly because I wanted to learn to act. I wanted to get to know you. A conversation that lasted less time than it takes to start a car had moved me.”

Indeed, Zo did take my class and we became friends, and eventually Zo was part of our creative family.

“The first time that you, Tia and I went out together,” Zo says, “we went to a park in West Hollywood for a Martin Luther King Day celebration. But we arrived late and it was cold and windy so we left. At a diner on Santa Monica Boulevard, Tia got bored and when I got up to go to the bathroom, I discovered her making crank calls from the pay phone. ‘
No habla Espanola!
’ she was indignantly saying into the receiver. We exchanged knowing glances and I did not rat her out.”

One often speaks of the sense of family that emerges from being involved in the production of a play; classic paradigms are played out. One of those is director-actor, which, not surprisingly, takes on the emotional baggage of parent-child. I could cite several daddy directors in my career, including Ewald in high school and, to a lesser degree, Tom Eyen in Hollywood.

Even though Jenny Sullivan and I were close in age, our relationship during the creation of her play,
J for J
, couldn’t escape some of the dynamics inherent in father-daughter relationships. Intensified by the play’s theme, addressing a daughter’s need to be more visible to her father, and my newfound role as the father of a daughter who needed copious attention, the match of actress-playwright and director was one made in theatrical heaven.

I suppose it was no accident that Precious Chong came to me through Jenny. Another father-daughter scenario in which the writer-performer felt overshadowed by her father’s iconic status in Hollywood,
The Porcelain Penelope Show
was again an instance in which the parent-child entanglement was played out on and off the stage. The situation was even more intimate and complex since Precious and I began working together a year before her show evolved into what she presented Off-Broadway in New York.