Hold Tight Gently (47 page)

Even before the gay movement started its march toward innocuous
centrism, Essex had long since rejected it as irrelevant to the needs of black gays and lesbians. He didn’t feel the movement had ever understood that for black gays “our sexuality doesn’t lessen the chance of us being randomly shot or harassed by the police. Any of the fears black men have, our sexuality doesn’t exclude us from them.” Even had his health been better, Essex wouldn’t have considered joining the vapid 1993 parade. And his health wasn’t better. Like Mike, he was by now receiving periodic blood transfusions, which did increase his energy level, but only for a short period. He didn’t consider himself depressed, but he did “at times feel mentally debilitated.” Never one to zone out on television, he now wasn’t much interested in reading, either.

A kind of stasis had set in, during which he listened to an enormous amount of music, “mostly jazz, some classical, and some classic rhythm and blues and pop.” Music had always been important to him—Nina Simone a special favorite, a “fine inspiration”—but now it consumed much of his time. It was hard for Essex to accept the “slowdown” in his life “simply because I’ve always been so driven and so curious about things.” Fortunately, he was “in love with” his apartment, and once, when out on an infrequent walk, he came across an old oak school desk in a secondhand store in the neighborhood—and was thrilled. The shop owner suggested that he refinish the surface, covered as it was with pen carvings, ink drawings, “and the names of school kids in love.” But Essex chose to clean it with Murphy soap and coat it with polyurethane; he didn’t “want to rob the desk of its history.”

He did start to write just a little, “but it seems to take so much effort at this time.” He slowly got back to revising a long poem that had begun “as a highly internalized poetic narrative,” to which he gave the poignant title “Vital Signs.” It would appear in 1994 in
Life Sentences
, a collection of memoirs, poems, and interviews relating to AIDS and edited by Thomas Avena, the founder of
Bastard Review
, a literary periodical out of San Francisco (Avena himself later died of AIDS). His connection with Essex went back to 1988, when Avena had published and edited the journal
89 Cents
, in which one of Essex’s most powerful poems, “Heavy Breathing,” appeared:

                        
At the end of heavy breathing

                        
the dream deferred

                        
is in a museum

                        
under glass and guard.

                        
it costs five dollars

                        
to see it on display.

                        
We spend the day

                        
viewing artifacts,

                        
breathing heavy

                        
on the glass

                        
to see—

                        
the skeletal remains

                        
of black panthers,

                        
pictures of bushes,

                        
canisters of tears.

Essex had found Avena to be a sympathetic, sensitive editor and subsequently gave him two of his other major poems, “Tomb of Sorrow” and “Civil Servant,” for the
Bastard Review
. In a letter accompanying the poems Essex urged Avena to “please feel free to be very demanding of this work. I have been quite demanding of it myself, but I can demand more from it. I look forward to your commentaries. And, you don’t have to be gentle with the knife.” Essex found Avena’s subsequent edits incisive and decided to entrust him with “Vital Signs,” the longest and among the richest of his poems. The tone throughout is elegiac, a gallant but sorrowful recollection of times past and a future foreshortened:
¹⁰

                        
. . . come stir

                        
the ink blue dusk with me,

                        
come stir it with me

                        
’til it’s thick enough

                        
to rub onto our skins,

                        
massage into our thirsty pores and follicles,

                        
so that distant stars

                        
might see themselves

                        
reflected in our shiny

                        
new blackness,

                        
and the planets, too,

                        
and the galaxies

                        
where our new names await us

                        
in full bloom, their succulence,

                        
the taste of victory will dribble

                        
down the sides of our mouths,

                        
sweet juice that will cause us

                        
to be high with liberation

                        
when we announce our new names.

In the internally subtitled “The Faerie Poem,” Essex recalls his earlier self:

                        
Once upon a time

                        
I was black and fertile,

                        
I was virile, coltish,

                        
straining leashes,

                        
refusing collars.

                        
Once upon a time

                        
balls of energy

                        
exploded from

                        
my fingertips,

                        
rolled out of me

                        
in brilliant flashes

                        
that blinded

                        
even me.

But that time, he knows, is past. Now, with apparent transparency and acceptance, he quietly laments his changed self:

                                    
With twenty-odd T cells

                        
I am nearly defenseless

                        
and counting. I have to learn

                        
multiplication tables, after all,

                        
and put them to wise use.

                        
I am not the wand waver

                        
you may be quick to recall.

                        
I cannot make another thing

                        
disappear. The illusionist tricks

                        
all fail me now,

                        
they draw on my strength

                        
in ways that endanger me.

With deliberate artlessness, Essex gravely considers his remaining options:

                                    
In the cluttered afternoons

                        
I rearrange little bits

                        
of my person.

                        
I carefully excavate

                        
those memories

                        
that are most delicate

                        
And for that reason

                        
could still cause

                        
harm and injury.

                        
and I thought

                        
these would be my tasks

                        
when I became an old man,

                        
but I am clearly

                        
not a prophet or a seer.

At the close of “Vital Signs,” Essex returns to prose, as if it was the more appropriate form for expressing the factual:

Some of the T cells I am without are not here through my own fault. I didn’t lose all of them foolishly, and I didn’t lose all of them erotically. Some of the missing T cells were lost to racism, a well-known transmittable disease. Some were lost to poverty because there was no money to do something about the plumbing before the pipes burst and the room flooded. Homophobia killed quite a few, but so did my rage and my pointed furies, so did the wars at home and the wars within, so did the drugs I took to remain calm, cool, collected. . . . Actually, there are T cells scattered all about me at doorways where I was denied entrance because I was a faggot or a nigga or too poor or too black. There are T cells spilling out of my ashtrays from the cigarettes I have anxiously smoked. There are T cells all over the floors of several bathhouses, coast to coast, and halfway around the world, and in numerous parks, and in countless bars, and in places I am forgetting to make
room for other memories. My T cells are strewn about like the leaves of a mighty tree, like the fallen hair of an old man, like the stars of a collapsing universe.

In a real sense, Essex had written his own obituary.

He still hoped to revise “Standing in the Gap,” the novel that hadn’t found any takers on a first go-round, and he hoped, too, to get on with the anthology he’d contracted for of short fiction by black gay writers. At the margins he entertained the notion of a third project as well: “The Evidence of Being,” narratives of older black gay men, but there’s no indication that he ever started on a series of interviews. There were still a number of days during 1994 when he felt energized and clearheaded enough not only to write, but also to plan on attending and presenting work at this or that event, and he even gave thought to applying for a Guggenheim fellowship. He did manage one trip from Philadelphia to New York City and one to Washington, D.C., to see his mother and his siblings. In the closing section of “Vital Signs” he’d written about “the love and anger my mother and I hold for one another,” and the visit to her was “exhausting” for him but made his mother “very happy.”
¹¹

Essex had long felt especially close to his middle sister, Lois Holmes. When growing up he’d helped her with her handwriting and taught her how to play baseball. As an adult he’d always send her some money, when he had any to spare, to help raise her son, and was “always there for her when she needs to talk or get something off her chest.” In a poem entitled “Thanksgiving 1993,” which he probably wrote after his trip home, he may well have been referring not to his generic “black sisters” but specifically to his own family members:

                        
I feel sorrow for my heterosexual sisters

                        
who made the mistake of marrying men

                        
beyond redemption, men beyond

                        
the learning of new tricks.

                        
I feel dread for what hell

                        
their married lives must be like, sordid

                        
in how many unimaginable ways?

                        
their barking, brutish, bullish husbands

                        
are dense to change and insecure

                        
I would wish such misery

                        
upon none that I know,

                        
the curse of having a dullard,

                        
loud-mouthed husband in tow.

                        
I feel sorry for my heterosexual sisters

                        
who have staked their loyalties

                        
in men who fear not the fall of night,

                        
but the start of each new day.
¹²

Essex continued to write sporadically, and he even managed a new romance with someone named Roger—though it was soon over (“it is the best decision”). He began, though, to withdraw increasingly “to deal with my stuff”; to Barbara Smith he wrote vaguely of “some interior issue” he had to resolve. As always, he tried hard to stress the positive: “I just remember to say ‘thank you’ for every day I am able to have. I don’t really desire too many things other than the chance to keep creating.”