Hold Tight Gently (49 page)

With 75 percent of his lung capacity gone, no one could have predicted how well Mike would be able to sing. But it quickly became clear that—somehow—he was singing remarkably well. Had they known that at the top, they would have done all the material on
Legacy
from scratch, avoiding many of the additional hassles that stretched over an eight-month period. As it was, the final two-disc album would run the gamut. It would include three songs recorded in the 1980s: “The Healing Power of Love,” “No No” (from a Lowlife recording), and “We’ve Had Enough,” done in the late 1980s for a documentary film produced by the Testing the Limits Collective. Mike’s voice had changed two years earlier; he lost three notes off the top and picked up four at the bottom, which meant that the 1993 songs resonated in a distinctly different way from his earlier recordings. Also the technical quality on the three from the 1980s wasn’t as good as the music and background vocals—though they were able to redo those in 1993 with far better equipment.

Mike was having such a good time and felt so happy during the sessions that Richard let him give free rein to his perfectionism and do a lot of vocal takes. He describes Mike lying on the floor of the recording booth to rest while Richard worked with the musicians on an arrangement. When that was set he’d signal “okay” to Mike, who’d get himself up from the floor and sing an incredible take. Then he’d have a sip of Coke out of a can and lie down again, until it was once more time to sing. “It was,” Richard later said, “one of the most incredibly miraculous things I’ve ever been involved with. It was transformative . . . and it was certainly perceived that way by the many people who were involved in it.” In March Mike reached a different sort of landmark: he became the longest survivor of pulmonary KS in the country.

In April, all hands took a break from working on the album, while Richard fulfilled an earlier commitment to do a monthlong three-band
bus tour of the United States. Before leaving, he arranged with Patrick and Carl Valentino (Richard’s previous lover) to throw a birthday party for Mike in D.C., where he was scheduled to sing, somehow, at the March on Washington. As it turned out, the leader of the band Richard was touring with came down with appendicitis, which allowed him to show up in person in D.C. to hear Mike sing “Love Don’t Need A Reason” at the March—his last big moment in the public eye. Mike told a reporter, “I
had
to be here. The 1987 march was the most amazing day of my life. To see a
million
gay people together . . . We
owned
this town. I need that shot of life again.”

That same week in D.C. Mike rejoined the Flirts for three sold-out concerts, his farewell engagements with the group. At the last of the three engagements, with Richard present, Mike took a moment at the end to announce his retirement, telling the audience that “I decided a long time ago that when I could no longer meet my own impossible standards, I would not do the [Judy] Garland thing, where people are thinking, ‘Oh my God, will he make it through?’ ” After the concert, Mike sat out in the lobby of the theater and people came up to him “like it was an audience with the Pope” (as Richard later put it). People knew they were saying good-bye to him. A few of the faces were familiar, but most of them were people he’d never met who wanted to tell him that he’d influenced or touched them in some way. According to Richard, Mike was really able to accept the compliments, unlike earlier in his life when his perfectionism would have had him obsessing about having flubbed this note or said that “wrong” thing. He stayed in the lobby until everyone who wanted to talk to him had managed to.

During his reunion with the Flirts, Mike picked up some negative vibes; as he put it, “things are strangely tense. There’s resentment underneath the surface, on my part as well as theirs.” It stayed bottled up during the concerts in Washington, but in mid-June 1993, when Mike and Richard were at Sear Sound in midtown Manhattan, for further work on the
Legacy
album, the Flirts made it clear that they resented the limited role assigned them for the recording, and in particular the fact that other singers were doing most of the backups. During his time in L.A. Mike had met some of the best pop backup singers around: David Lasley, Arnold McCuller, and Diane Graselli. Lasley and McCuller had sung on hundreds of records, and toured with James
Taylor for decades, and Lasley, a much-admired songwriter, had written for, among others, Peter Allen, Anita Baker, and Chaka Khan.

It irked Richard that the Flirts chose to air their grievances in a recording studio that was costing $150 an hour. Richard had suggested that they record “Two Men Dance the Tango,” but when they refused, he thought they were being willfully uncooperative and got angry; “it’s Mike’s album,” he thought but didn’t say. “He’s asking you to do this; why would you turn down his last request?” It was finally agreed that the Flirts would do a Henry Mancini song—not a capella, but with a piano—a song they’d had in their repertoire for a while. But when it came time to record, Jon Arterton got busy videotaping the group—while the engineer in the control booth, and Richard, stood by and stewed.

According to Mike, “voices were raised, temper tantrums were thrown”—and a disgusted Richard decided to shut down the session. He told the Flirts, “Look, I’ll work on something else. Why don’t you guys go in the lounge, and talk about things.” And they did, along with Mike. He opened himself up to them completely: “Look, you may not believe it, but I’m dying . . . and I’m trying to make this record. . . . If you guys want to be a part of it, great, let’s go in and sing this song. If you don’t, fine. But I need to get on with what’s remaining of my life.” The Flirts finally did go in and do the recording, but Mike “never had the feeling of closure. . . . I barely survived that weekend. I felt like I was a not yet quite-dead carcass whose bones were being picked by the crows.” It should be said on the Flirts’ behalf that they weren’t alone in their skepticism that Mike was actually dying. He’d survived eleven years since his diagnosis back in 1982, and many people thought that either he didn’t have AIDS or, if he did and had survived this long, he’d continue to survive. Those who loved him had their own reasons for denying how close to death he actually was.

In New York, Mike suddenly got terribly sick—“I can’t recall ever being more weary—cosmically soul weary and physically weary,” he’d later write—and he had to fly back to L.A. on an emergency basis. Tests showed that he was anemic and had developed “an out of control, painful candida infection of the esophagus and the LARYNX.” He knew that AIDS was “closing in,” that he was “running out of gas.” In the hospital they gave him daily EPO shots and two units of packed
red cells to combat the chemo, his only remaining hope of gaining a little more time.
⁷

When he was able to return to his apartment, Mike wrote a very long letter to the Flirts, in which he tried to resolve the tensions between them. He confessed that he’d “felt ‘guilty’ for some time about not including more of the Flirts, together and/or individually” on
Legacy
. He realized that Cliff Townsend considered the song “Sometimes a Throwaway”—which Mike had asked them to do—to be indeed a “throwaway,” but Mike didn’t agree. He’d sometimes made fun of the song himself, but he still thought it “an exquisite song” that would be a standout on the album, and he wanted to include it.

Mike thought the difficulties that had arisen between them had deep roots, and in his letter he expressed his willingness to talk them through. He spelled out by mail his own understanding of the assorted grievances on both sides. He confessed, first of all, to having felt hurt that the Flirts hadn’t asked him to participate more fully on their recent second album, since he’d been a founding member and at that point hadn’t retired. Additionally, he felt that—as with his biological family—he’d learned it was possible to love someone “and at the same time admit that THEY DRIVE YOU NUTS.” He’d gradually learned to ignore his “best-little-boy-in-the-world” tendencies to placate and avoid unpleasantness at all cost, and had learned in its place “that healthy fighting is part of healthy loving.”
⁸

He felt, too, that all along there’d been some tension and jealousy about his separate identity from the Flirts. Unlike the rest of the group, Mike had never felt that the Flirts was his top priority and commitment. He “LOVED being part of the Flirts,” he wrote them, “and I have loved each of you in my malformed way.” He believed he’d done his best “not to work my divadom—my AIDS notoriety”—and had “RUTHLESSLY fought the tendency,” yet he told them frankly that he believed his renown had helped them in getting gigs and interviews (though feathers
would
get ruffled when interviewers singled Mike out for special attention, as they often did). He acknowledged that one source of tension within the group was his “impossible demands for perfection,” his cynicism, his “trashing every note and every performance,” his inability to relax and enjoy. Richard, he reported, had “always yelled at me to work my individual career more, which I don’t think I did.”

With
Legacy
, though, Mike had finally put the focus on himself, and he’d had to decide how to use his various friends on the album. He’d already gotten considerable flack from one friend for not including her as a backup singer, even though they’d worked together earlier in Mike’s career. In the upshot the Flirts
did
agree to perform “Sometimes Not Often Enough,” as well as “Two Men Dance the Tango” and “Redesign the Family.” But Mike also insisted on including Cris Williamson, Holly Near, and Tret Fure on the album, all of them dear friends as well as musical partners.

At one point he spent three days with Williamson and Fure at their house in Oregon, recorded backups on several songs for their forthcoming album, and sang with them—along with Holly Near and her accompanist John Bucchino—at the twentieth-anniversary concert for the feminist Olivia Records. Mike had regarded that day as “perhaps the best day of his life,” and to celebrate, Patrick hired a stretch limo and the whole group dined in style at Alice Waters’ famed restaurant Chez Panisse. The next day they insisted Mike ride on the Olivia float in the San Francisco gay pride parade: “No-one knew,” he later wrote, “what to make of this cadaverous man in a FLIRT jacket, but everyone was lovely to me and I nearly swooned with pleasure to be in such august company.” On the whole, Mike felt he’d done the best he could and had included on the
Legacy
album as many artist friends as he was able.

By the end of June 1993, nearly all the basic tracks were done, and Mike completed his own lead vocals by August 19. In sum, he’d recorded fifty-two songs—“3 hours, 20 minutes and 7 seconds worth,” as he put it. Mike had composed about half of them; the other half he’d been singing for years or were songs “by friends I love.” He felt “the only common theme is a celebration of a love of life and a celebration of diversity, especially sexual.” He was “immensely satisfied with what’s been done so far. I think it’s the best singing I’ve ever done in my life. . . . I’m happier than I’ve ever been and more artistically fulfilled.”
⁹

A large amount of additional work was still left to do on
Legacy
—backups, replacing instrumental tracks, artwork, printing, mixing, mastering, pressing, distribution, and so on. And they were almost entirely out of money. The pressure was intense, with Mike having a series of anxiety attacks, one of which landed him in the emergency
room. He was lucky, though, with his friends. He and Richard had known the performing artist Tim Miller and his lover Doug Sadownick, the writer (and later therapist), when they all still lived in New York. Tim and Doug had moved to the West Coast before Mike, and when he first arrived in L.A. they’d done a lot to help him get settled. And they stuck with him after his health began to slide. Though Tim sometimes found Mike a little “unforgiving of fools,” Doug became one of his closest friends and, as it would turn out, also his chief caregiver in L.A.

As Mike’s health began to deteriorate rapidly in early fall 1993, Richard got to L.A. as often as he could manage, but he was also contending with the simultaneous decline of Patrick’s health in New York. For lack of a better word, Mike had again taken to referring to Richard as his “lover”; though they essentially lived on separate coasts, he felt that the love between them had deepened, and Richard felt the same, though he also cared deeply for Patrick. Mike had himself come to like Patrick enormously, and the two of them began fantasizing about buying an apartment in L.A. for the three of them. Patrick had cashed in his life insurance policy and suddenly had a considerable sum of money at hand, and he and Mike actually began apartment hunting when Patrick came out to visit in late September. But it was of course a pipe dream. Mike was soon in the hospital more than he was out of it.

By September 1993, he’d lost more than 10 percent of his body weight, was sleeping badly, and was constantly nauseated and cramping, alternating between the runs and severe constipation. He also developed acute anemia; at one point he lay for twenty-four hours on the floor, literally unable to move. He became so sick to his stomach that he—the ultimate chatterbox—was unable to stay on the phone with friends for more than ten minutes at a time before abruptly “having to go.” The doctors insisted that he try THC (marijuana) pills to improve his appetite, and when he did, he promptly got the munchies. But though he was on the lowest dosage (2.5 mg.), he got high and paranoid, which he hated; and anyway, no sooner did the THC wear off than he was back to feeling exhausted and crampy. The doctors decided to do a colonoscopy and tried to prepare him for a diagnosis of CMV ulcers or KS of the gut—but to everyone’s surprise he turned out to be “whistle clean up there.”

While Richard was busy putting together odds and ends for
Legacy
, Patrick kept Mike company in the hospital. At one point, after the nurse had taken Mike’s temperature, Patrick casually asked her to take his as well. It was 101.3. Patrick knew he was sick; he’d been developing KS lesions, including some on his penis. But he seemed unfazed and preferred talking about his up-and-coming scuba-diving trip with Diving For Life, an organization he’d put together to raise money for AIDS-related causes. When Richard dropped by the hospital room, Patrick was taking a break in the corridor and Mike used the opportunity to tell Richard about Patrick’s temperature reading, to say that he was really worried about him and thought he had TB, or possibly PCP.