Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (33 page)

I didn’t have to be sober to get that fur, but if I weren’t sober, I probably wouldn’t still have it. I lament the loss of that Persian-lamb coat, but the Crawford Scarf trumps it.

Elizabeth Taylor had died earlier that year, and Christie’s was about to auction her famous jewels. A friend of a friend had invited me to see a preview of the loot before the auction. I thought it was going to be a few well-lit galleries of her most prized jewels. Wrong. This was a blockbuster, ticketed event filled with ten-plus rooms of antiques, paintings, movie memorabilia (including her Oscars), and eye-staggering jewels, as exquisitely curated as an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I wasn’t prepared for the exhibition and the wave of grief that hit me—not for Miss Taylor, but for Mama Jean—because I hadn’t counted on the clothes.

The show opened with two rooms of Miss Taylor’s wardrobe. The second room of clothing was the size of an airplane hangar. One entire wall was lined with dozens of tunic dresses in a riot of colors and patterns, full-length with long, wide sleeves.
What do you call those figure-forgiving tunic dresses? Mama Jean loved them.
The image from my childhood of Mama Jean’s kelly-green knockoff of the Halston version made famous by Miss Taylor unfurled like a bolt of fabric. I was a little boy back in that vast closet of hers that could swallow me whole in sequins and marabou and suede and
ultra
suede and fur and leather as it drowned me with the scent of her Wind Song perfume. Had I met an early death in that closet, I would have perished happy.

Two years after she died, Dad was still trying to unload the warehouse of clothes in her closet. It was a Sisyphean task because the closet seemed to replenish itself like the bottomless salad at the Olive Garden. As I helped him go through the clothes, I discovered her wedding dress. It was as I remembered it from the photo albums I spent hours flipping through as a boy: chiffon, triple-pleated shawl collar, blurry green the shade of a Spanish olive submerged in a martini.

“Look what I found,” I said, presenting it to Dad.

“Oh, look at that. Your mother had taste. She paid money for that dress. She got it at some fancy dress shop over in Houston. Probably Tootsies.”

The label had a woman’s name written in the kind of script that graced 1950s strip-shopping-center signs. “Helen Rose?” I asked Dad, pointing to the name.

“She was a famous designer at the time. She used to make clothes for Hollywood pictures before she got her own line.”

A week after that conversation I was flipping through a coffee-table book on iconic dresses. There was Elizabeth Taylor dressed in the satin slip from
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. The designer? Helen Rose. What a shame that Christie’s didn’t have a satellite gallery in Beaumont to auction off Mama Jean’s wardrobe.

The memory of being sucked back into her closet overwhelmed me with grief as I stood before Miss Taylor’s tunic dresses. I was on the verge of crying when an elderly woman next to me nudged her friend. She pointed to the dresses and said, “She sure did like afghans.”

The gallery walls were decorated with famous quotes of Miss Taylor’s, but my favorite one of hers was missing: “It’s not the having, it’s the getting.”

It could have summed up Mama Jean’s life. As much as she was always in want of something and loved all that she had, she was at her best when she was in pursuit. I was just beginning to appreciate the getting, and not just the having. Although the having of the Crawford Scarf felt pretty damn good—and I knew exactly how I was going to wear it for the first time—the getting part of getting sober was an ongoing way of life, I had finally realized.

But the big “get” that was in the middle of that day? I was finally becoming a writer, something Mama Jean always wanted me to be. I had decided to tell our story. She was right all those times when she said I knew how to tell a story.

Three years sober, the creative ambition that had disappeared—not as quickly as the Persian-lamb coat but drink by drink—was starting to come back. In that first year after Mama Jean died, Mr. Parker kick-started it. He was working for a travel magazine and asked me to contribute an article to a feature about restaurants around the globe that are frozen in time. He wanted me to write about Le Veau d’Or. This Upper East Side restaurant is virtually unchanged since it opened in 1937, a combination Parisian restaurant fantasy and Old New York preserved in aspic. Including the patrons. I used to have boozy summer-Friday lunches there with Mr. Parker. Then, after he moved to Mexico City, alone.

The piece I wrote was good, and the gratification of having worked hard to produce a sharp, clever, and witty article had me hooked. It was my calling card to get into a private writing workshop. That’s when the fun really began. I showed up almost every week with new work, work that I had labored on, worried about, agonized over. Some pieces that I wrote with little effort turned out decent. I used to believe that if something didn’t come easily and automatically to me, I was incompetent, a failure, and I’d stop trying. I didn’t have faith in myself, the blind faith that Mama Jean always seemed to have and I never trusted.
Another martini, please, waiter.

But the pieces over which I struggled and fought to get right? The “getting” of those pieces produced a high that was way beyond the best high I ever had drunk or the most mind-blowingest orgasm.
Well, let’s not get carried away.

For me to become a writer and push aside, rather than drink away, the fear of doing something I believed in couldn’t happen until I got sober. Before I got sober, if anyone had asked me what I was afraid of, I would have told them snakes, being drafted into the army, team sports, and water. Those are fears of tangible things. Everything else I labeled anxiety, anger, discomfort, hate. But they were all fear wearing different outfits. My fear of water, I’ve come to realize, is fear itself. Specifically fear of the unknown, which is where the bulk of fear resides. My alcoholism is the sea, always rushing toward me—sometimes with enchanting whitecaps that shimmer in the moonlight, sometimes with terrifying black waves ten stories high—but always ready to wash away whatever I’ve created.

Between the Crawford auction and the Taylor preview, I had lunch at Le Veau d’Or with Lisa, a former colleague turned literary agent. She had read some of my workshop pieces about Mama Jean and wanted to represent me. In one day I had acquired the Crawford Scarf, seen Elizabeth Taylor’s closet, and found a literary agent. To have actually had sex after that day would have been superfluous. What a bitter irony that Mama Jean was gone and I was finally sober and becoming what she’d always wanted me to be. And I finally
wanted
what she wanted for me.

*   *   *

By five o’clock I was back on the street. Night had fallen, the drizzle had stopped, and the city glowed with the usual red, yellow, and green blur of traffic and taxi lights, but with the added twinkle of Christmas cheer in every window. Even in my darkest days, I’d never fallen out of love with New York. It still had the magic of that first visit with Mama Jean and Dad at Christmastime twenty-nine years ago. My party line to friends had always been that ever since that visit, I knew I
had
to be in New York.

The truth: Mama Jean pushed me to go to New York. At the beginning of my senior year of college in San Antonio, I told her that I might stay there for a year until I figured out what I wanted to do.

“Stay in San Antonio?! Uh-uh!” She handed me a brochure for the Radcliffe Publishing Course with its promise of launching pupils into the publishing world. “New York is where you need to be … especially with your lifestyle.” Had she truly been selfish in her love, she could easily have manipulated me with golden handcuffs to stay close to her in Texas, say eighty miles away in Houston.

I had recently asked Michahaze about the night he called Mama Jean after he found me. When he told her that I had tried to kill myself, she asked dumbfounded, “Huh?” as if she hadn’t heard him, but it was because she didn’t believe him. He repeated himself, and she went into action. “Earrrul! Pick up the phone!”

I asked Michahaze, “Why did you tell her then? Why didn’t you wait until you got me to the hospital and knew I was okay?”

“Because. She needed to know.”

Did she need to know I’m HIV-positive? I still don’t know the answer. I know that she always feared it, that she suspected it. While I was in detox, she asked Jeffrey if I was positive and if that’s why I tried to kill myself. (It wasn’t.) He knew I was positive, but he told her I wasn’t to protect her. She even asked me more than a couple of times, “You’d tell me if you were, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” I lied to protect us both.

I didn’t tell her because I was afraid of her reaction. “God
damn
it! I warned you.” I am lucky. I take my Atripla pill once a day and have never been sick. Dr. Connolly was right: it is a manageable disease, physically. Managing the shame and stigma of it is another story.

The excuse I gave myself for not telling her was that I thought it would kill her. That’s bullshit. Mama Jean could handle anything. Besides, she already knew that I was an alcoholic sodomite
and
voted Democratic. HIV would have been the copper-red cherry on top.

After she died I found an old birthday card she’d sent me with the message “I may have tried at times to change you, but I love you just the way you are.” She always told me that she admired me for always knowing who I am. I think she meant being openly gay, which from her generational and geographical perspective was a brave and bold move. No matter how old I was, she never stopped saying to me, “I wish I could shrink you back to age five.
That
was the perfect age!” I think it’s because she believed that at that age she still had my unconditional love and devotion. Did she ever know that Lord Randall, her son—no matter how far from her I strayed—never stopped loving and idolizing her? Did she know that she would always be a bigger star to me than Joan Crawford or Elizabeth Taylor?

She was right all those years ago when she told me, “You don’t know what love is.” I didn’t. Her love was complicated. It was possessive, generous, narcissistic, selfless, smothering, and liberating. To outrun her love, I was always trying to match it, to even the score. I was a fool to think that the perfect gift or the right number of days visiting her or the number of times I decorated that damn tree could put us on the same level playing field.

I never could “out–Mama Jean” Mama Jean because her love was love in its purest form, and it saved me. Now, twenty years later—after Mama Jean helped me get into publishing in New York City, after Michahaze and I spent countless family holidays with her, after I became an alcoholic and she funded my rehabilitation, after I became HIV-positive and never told her—if she declared, “You don’t know what love is,” I’d answer, “I didn’t then, but I do now.”

When Dad and I were cleaning out Mama Jean’s closet, I asked him if I could have her full-length lynx fur, which I could just fit into. She’d bought it in the eighties when she was hitting her stride as a stockbroker, but hadn’t worn it in years. Candice Bergen wears one just like it in the 1981 movie
Rich and Famous
after her character hits it big. Knowing Mama Jean, I wouldn’t be surprised if she had been inspired to get her lynx after seeing that movie.
Or maybe after seeing Rip Taylor in his lynx at the Russian Tea Room on my first New York visit. Or both.
Dad said I could have her fur. If the Crawford Scarf trumps the Persian lamb, Mama Jean’s lynx coat trumps the Crawford Scarf. And my love for Mama Jean? Hers trumps mine.

*   *   *

I continued to walk through the Christmas-bedazzled sidewalks until I found myself in front of ‘21.’ The second-floor balcony of lantern-carrying horse jockeys was festooned with an evergreen garland. Through the picture window below I could see glasses being raised and drained, lit by the glow of a fire. I was still high from both the day I’d had and the thrill about the new direction my life was headed.
Wouldn’t it be nice to go inside? Wouldn’t it be nice to have one drink while sitting in a wingback chair in front of the fireplace? Wouldn’t it be nice to get blotto?

I saw ghosts: Joan Crawford at her table at the top of the stairs; Mama Jean and Dad blowing a hundred bucks on lunch; Mr. Parker and me sailing through a blizzard of drinks.
Wouldn’t it be nice?

I continued to stare through the window at the silhouette of sophisticates as they laughed and clinked glasses. I watched myself as I entered the restaurant, and walked straight to the dimly lit bar to place my order.
“Beefeater-gin martini, dry, up, with a twist.” No. It’s winter. “Make that a dry Manhattan.” No. I’m at ‘21.’ “Make it a Joan Crawford, one-hundred-proof Smirnoff on the rocks, please.”

I could see myself in the bar mirror waiting for the drink. Then I snapped out of it. The person I saw wasn’t me. It was a ghost of me, like my doppelg
ä
nger at Mesa de Espa
ñ
a. And I wasn’t looking in a mirror. I was still on the sidewalk, looking through the window. The shopping bag with the Crawford Scarf was safe in my clutches. I didn’t have a need for a drink then. It wasn’t even desire I had. It was nostalgia. There’s a difference.

All those times—moments like this—when I was on a natural high and thought I needed booze to make the high higher, I didn’t. It was superfluous. I was drowning the moment rather than savoring it. I didn’t need or want that drink at ‘21’ because I had at least two more highs left waiting for me that day.

I had a new piece to present at my writing workshop that evening, but first I was going to run home, where Michahaze and the orange-and-black, Czechoslovakian glass rehab bowl were waiting. I’d have him take my photo next to our Christmas tree wearing the Crawford Scarf. And nothing else.

I turned my back on ‘21’ and kept walking west. As I walked, I smiled. In her later years, Mama Jean would make her usual declaration—“You should be writing!
That’s
what you should be doing!”—then she’d leave the room. Five seconds later she’d return with a finger pointed at me like a butter knife. “But
don’t
write about me … until
after
I’m gone.”