The Truth is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler? (34 page)

While many of the youngsters appeared to be sanguine, there were some that the virus had already marked. One little girl was attached to an oxygen machine; another wore a hearing aid; yet another had virtually no control of her legs and could not walk. After the formal tour, we were taken to our flat, a very comfy dwelling in a neighborhood where one dare not walk around after dark, we were informed repeatedly.

We arrived on a Friday afternoon and some of the kids were being treated to ice-skating. Tia—after two plane rides, more than ten hours each—volunteered to go with them. As it turns out, these were the ten children who lived in the flat below us, all of whom were HIV-positive. I napped until I heard the kids’ exuberant voices downstairs, having returned from ice-skating with histrionic stories about every little bruise and imperceptible wound. When I joined the veterans of the rink, they forgot their injuries and launched into a cacophony of questions. “Where do you live? Is Tia really your daughter? What’s your name? Why do you talk so fast?” One of them decided to call me Ronald McDonald.

We learned the stories of the urchins who lived below us. Happiness (a name that often didn’t ring true) watched her mother die of AIDS. Thirteen years old, approximately one-third the size of my twelve-year-old daughter, she wore a colostomy bag. David witnessed his father being shot by his mother. I studied his face and saw the remnants of horror permanently etched in his features. Since 2003, the Cotlands’ kids have been given antiretrovirals and the death toll has virtually come to a standstill. In the Nineties, Cotlands would bury as many as one child a month. In 2006, only two babies died and none had perished in 2007.

One of our first assignments was baby stimulation, an activity that provided the toddlers with one-on-one attention in an attempt to nurture their awakening sensory responses. Tia and I worked as a team, spending approximately ten minutes with each of the seventeen little ones, trying to get them to stack various vibrantly colored containers. Though he was virtually blind and partially paralyzed, Nathan’s disposition, but not necessarily his coordination, outshined that of his peers.

I tried to teach the children how to differentiate their inside self from their outside self by drawing pictures. What was most striking was that almost all of them insisted on creating group drawings. Only a couple of them seemed to be in ownership of an identity that was separate from their tribal cluster. David’s rendering of his interior self was glorious: an outline of a boy’s body; he has a countenance without features, no discernable clothing, and no feet. He does have one hand, with three fingers pointing upward in the direction of a bird in flight, its wings spread majestically. Along the bottom of the page is a wavy line that seems to indicate water or maybe grass. The boy is saying, “Hey, hey, I saw a big bird,” his words scrawled on the page. The bird is considerably larger than David and is heading directly toward an orangecolored sun; penetrating rays shine from the upper right-hand corner of the drawing, warming the bird and the boy.

I was in the hospice, bottle-feeding a baby in the midst of a gaggle of local female volunteers. Tia walked in and sat beside me. “This is my daughter,” I said to no one in particular.

“Is it a surprise for her to see you giving a baby a bottle?” one of the ladies asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I fed her the bottle.” I asked Tia if she wanted to take over.

“No,” she said, “I like watching you do it.” We sat quietly until it was time to burp the little fellow.

As I watched Tia with the children and babies—holding them, feeding them, soothing them, playing with them, reading to them—I could not help but think of Wendy and the Lost Boys from
Peter Pan
. What she was doing, spectacularly, was mothering. She who was abandoned by her own mother. Even though she was twelve years old on the precipice of turning thirteen, the degree of her maturity, empathy and humanity soared to new levels as each day flew by. She is my hero.

I fell in love, a state of mind that seems easier to swoon into when one is on another continent. The object of my affection was Karabo. We spent a lot of time staring into each other’s eyes; her pitch-black irises pupils were set in a dusky yellow pool (the result of liver damage). Her fleeting smiles and even less frequent laughter were quickly followed by moans as she stiffened her bony torso, resulting in back-and-forth movements of her head as if she was saying, “No, no more.” Her face became a mask of sorrow, anger and pain. Karabo was less than two feet in length and had virtually no muscle tissue. Holding her in my arms was like holding a puppet made of wooden sticks; her flimsy arms and legs hung limp. Although she had a ravenous appetite, she weighed no more than my shoe. Karabo was about to turn three years old.

I massaged Karabo’s scrawny limbs, hoping to get some blood moving through her ravaged arms and legs. I remembered massaging Eric, every inch of his withering body, a body that had been prize-worthy, the night before he died.

“They dig up the coffins and reuse them,” our driver, Delton, said of Avalon Cemetery, part of the sweltering Soweto landscape. It felt like it was the size of a small city, with thousands of makeshift crosses sprouting up from the ground like unwanted weeds.

At the magnificent outdoor Lion Park, we witnessed a functional family: Mama Lion was pacing, on constant lookout for danger. The furry cubs were playfully vying for Dad’s attention, clambering all over his muscled back. “The male doesn’t do much,” according to our guide. “It’s the female who keeps the family together.”

During our trip, Tia asked me if she could visit her half brothers when we returned to Los Angeles. “Of course,” I said. “Of course you can.”

CHAPTER 65
               

Robert (the oldest, born in 1987), Joseph and Donovan (the youngest, born the year after Tia): these are my daughter’s half brothers, all of whom were living in L.A.. Robert is the most determined to connect his bloodlines to Tia’s. It was Robert she went to see a movie with, shortly after our return home to Los Angeles.

While they were at the movie, I took a bad fall. Of all the danger that lurked on every street in South Africa, there I was in South Central, flat on the ground with a bloody mouth and what appeared to be an injured elbow. Most disconcerting was the fact that no one stopped to help; in fact, two people sauntered by, as if I was part of the scenery. Performance art, perhaps? I had stumbled on one of the buckles on the sidewalk that protrudes from the ground, daring one to take flight. It was later concluded that it was likely because my feet were numb from neuropathy and I didn’t fully feel the obstacle. A year later—when I finally decided to get X-rays—I was diagnosed with a broken elbow, which had “pretty much healed itself,” according to the doctor.

Instead of bonding them (as I had hoped it would), the visit between Robert and Tia had the opposite effect on Tia. Robert is a lovely young man, devoted to civil rights, a churchgoer, a volunteer with youth and a gregarious, friendly human being. He has never been out of the country, however, and his life and Tia’s life do not organically intersect. She found that their similarities (skin, blood, color) did not automatically make them siblings. Rather, their differences kept them apart. I simply asked that she continue to consider their relationship because of his sincere desire to bring her into the blood family.

“They aren’t my family,” she decided, without meanness but without much compassion. This was no longer a little girl who could be told, “You’re going to spend some time with your brother today.” Tia is strong. She is also empathetic, but her adamancy on this subject is something that I had to accept. We would revisit this (Robert was not going to give up easily), but Tia was pretty certain that she’d made her decision.

Tia was maturing beautifully; as someone said, “The rough edges are getting smoother and smoother.” Tia was softening in her manner (no child on the planet is more polite), but it would be preposterous to imagine that she didn’t have anxiety and pain about her blood relations in spite of how ostensibly well cared for she is.

Where nurture might trump nature, there is also the issue of Tia becoming an actress. How could there not be some part of me that wants her to carry on a tradition that is so vital to my being? And, yes, how could some part of me not want the Kearns name to continue to be linked with the art that has meant so much to me all of my life?

I want Tia to be what Tia wants to be. It was unusual for me, at age nine, to truly know my life’s vocation. I want Tia to explore. I don’t think she’s going to be a scientist; I think she’ll be an artist of some stripe, but those options are limitless.

That said, was I overjoyed when she was cast as Elizabeth Bennett in Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
? You betcha. It happened to coincide with the twenty-third anniversary of Pickett’s
Dream Man
, which would be performed in the L.A. theater where it premiered.

No one knew that I hadn’t set foot in the theater since Pickett died. There were so many memories of us in that theater: working, laughing, ruminating, bitching, celebrating. All I could see was Pickett as I made my way through the lobby, the theater itself, and the backstage area. It was as if he was frozen in that space where we had shared so much history; I could practically smell him. In a place where “sense memory” is taught to acting students on a daily basis, I was awash in it.

I also flashed back to Justin Smith’s memorial, which I’d put together at the Skylight, during the run of
AIDS/US
. Perhaps the most eerie segment of Justin’s “celebration of life” (an overused phrase these many years later) was a recording of the deceased role model singing “September Song.” Smith’s voice haunted me as I began, once again, to bring
Dream Man
to life.

I must admit that the intoxication didn’t stop there. I tried to remember when I first met Justin, perhaps a decade prior to our reconnecting so intensely at the end of his life. Whether or not we actually formally met remains unclear, as do many of the details surrounding that Saturday night in the Hollywood Hills. Justin had a fabulous house with a fabulous view and threw fabulous parties for fabulous gay boys and I was invited. Fabulous.

But all the fabulousness erupted in a tsunami of suffering, confusion and relentless grief. It’s difficult, yet not impossible, to reconcile myself to the sexual decathlon we were engaged in. Justin created a special area at his rambling home, replete with buckets of lube (hold the condoms—it was the Seventies, remember?); the smell of poppers and the sound of grunting lured you in to the piles of sweaty bodies, reeking of sex smells.

I remember seeing Leonard Frey (not in the designated sex area) and comparing the party we were at to the one that he, as Harold, and his tribe helped immortalize in
The Boys in the Band
. Frey seemed shy and uncomfortable, the polar opposite of the strident and imposing Harold—perhaps aware that beauty trumped fame or talent at this particular gathering. Sex ruled the proceedings, augmented by drugs and booze of all varieties. Who took me? Can’t remember; damn, is there anyone alive to confirm that the party I am remembering was real?

“Why am I alive?” remains a question that floats above my head, like a bubble in a cartoon strip, irreversible and inerasable. While survivor’s guilt seems like a less histrionic diagnosis than post-traumatic stress disorder, there’s no question in my mind that I was suffering from something, resulting from the twenty-three years of cumulative losses that I’d experienced between the two renditions of
Dream Man
.

But what provided the sublime antidote was seeing my ravishingly beautiful thirteen-year-old fully embody the role of Elizabeth Bennett—from head to toe—infusing me with a sense of pride and humility that extends far beyond the stage lights and into an area of my being that I never could have accessed twenty-three years prior.

The process with Jimmy was not without upheavals. This would be the most lavish version of
Dream Man
produced to date, thanks to producer Gary Grossman, and I took advantage of a design team and a rather outlandish “playground,” which comprised a set that was abstract and required the stamina of an athlete. Success, as I’d desired it (and known it, to a degree), paled in comparison to the rewards of parenthood.

And yet, as I made plans to attend my fortieth high school reunion, some demonic voices in my head began delivering their crazy-making monologues. Would any of my former tormentors be there?

“You’ll look the best,” Tia said.

I hope to fuck so
, I thought, swimming in the shallow end of my consciousness.

CHAPTER 66
               

“Weren’t you on that
Waltons
show ages ago?”

“My wife and I saw you on the Tom Snyder show—you were promotin’ some porno book, as I recall.”

“Are you still tryin’ to be an actor?”

So much for having wooed Normandy’s class of ‘68 with my dizzying artistic éclat; they had frozen me in the mid-Seventies—long before I’d reinvented myself as a grande dame of the theater. A couple of “the girls” were aware of my résumé and even a few knew I had adopted (even though many of my peers were grandparents of kids who were Tia’s age).

As for “the boys,” I didn’t recognize any of the bullies, but I was not the only man in the room who had learned the value of a good haircut and a trendy shirt. I checked out the guys in the crowd, attempting to identify—like an animal in the wild—who was friend and who was foe.

Considering my grandiose expectations, the entire event was somewhat flat and proved to be a learning moment for
moi
. Here I was, forty years later, still trying to be popular, still wanting everyone to be impressed and to love me. The handful of people with whom I’d really connected had kept in touch—those are the ones who matter.

And my closest male friend from high school, Brian Clarke, remained my rock. He defended me in high school when some of his buddies derided me. He has been steadfast for four decades.