Our red Prius spins through the narrowed and still narrowing roads along the Pacific Coast Highway. It’s strange to be so close to death yet remain so captivated by its beauty. But is it really such a rare occurrence, I start wondering, to tempt death? Must we be positioned a hundred feet above a hungry sea to recognize it? Maybe not, but I have to admit: death is more naked up here. Probably because you sense the risks more acutely, like a rockslide, a clueless out-of-towner that swerves into you, or a car’s malfunction that makes you careen off the edge, in a graceless tumble.
But this imminent death soon dissolves as I sit in the passenger’s seat, listening to my driver, several decades my senior, recount a different kind of death—during the start of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, before AIDS really even had a name, except, of course, for the “gay cancer.” This is also a naked kind of death, but it’s decidedly different. Here pleasure for the lost object reemerges in the retelling of past events. The way you walk a city hoping for a past that can never be present again. We used to eat at this restaurant in the Haight, he says. Or sometimes I walk by our old apartment and pause, thinking about the moments we spent at night, when I still smoked pot.
The car makes a sudden right turn, as the view of inlet I was ignoring opens up again into a vast expanse of coast, the light grey fog retreating, in the afternoon sun, to the edge of the horizon. A distant somewhere, not here, because here is the spot where a relentless westerly whips sea spray into the cliffs, where gulls with wings outstretched dive down, just to the surface of the sea, hungry as the waves. Here is where we both sit in this red Prius, not rejecting death, but disavowing its hold over us. Here is where we refuse to be lost like those other people and memories we nevertheless keep with us.
The car swerves away from the sea’s expanse again, and it’s as if, when faced with the land, I retreat inward. Something about the size of the boulders around me, or the alien shrubs flattened by the wind, makes me seem so small. Except for the fact that the memory that comes into my mind is never a memory I could have held when I was in that Prius in April 2012. It occurred after the fact of this ride, so consider the fact that I’ve ripped apart my own history and stitched in another panel—this memory—for symbolic purpose. That’s really what this project is about, after all, renaming and reinscribing meaning into queer life and queer history, making a claim for our narrative as an on-going draft of our escape from trauma, violence and loss.
So this new memory I place into 2012 is from the beginning of 2014, from when I was on the opposite coast.
Today in the mail I received a plainly wrapped box from my grandmother back in Wisconsin. Plainly wrapped and on the small size, it seemed ordinary. It seemed as if there was nothing that could hold any power over me. Perhaps a few homemade snacks, some pairs of socks, or another object I didn’t really need. Still, I tore into the wrapping, throwing it the side, that heap of generic brown, as I then cut through layers of thick tape.
When I opened the box, I was a bit taken aback. A thin but insulated winter coat, in a grey color, and a pair of winter boots, nothing stylish, but perfect for those days when New York City snow turns to your worst neighborhood. But what got me is that I remembered why they were sent. My Uncle Jimmy, who was living with AIDS, died in March 2013, and my grandmother had taken over his condo. These items were ones I picked out from a pile when I had stayed with her a few weeks earlier. Items she let me look through before they went to Goodwill because we had been similar in size.
I paused for a moment and then it struck me: These are a dead person’s clothes. A dead gay person’s clothes. My gay uncle who I never talked to about his gayness or his illness. My gay uncle who is lost, forever, except in these few objects that remain to remind me of how I miss him. I remember tearing up then. (Why should clothes make me tear up?) But seeing these objects in front of me was one kind of closure, of closing off his absent body, even as I vowed to keep his ghost alive by selecting these objects. These things no longer belonged to Uncle Jimmy. They were mine.
Another turn in the road, this time a downward turn, where the enormity of the sea seemed lost for a second. Here, though it never happened, I imagine us stopping to park near one of the many beaches. I imagine us getting out, probably shivering a bit as a chilly wind would whip at our skin, but staring out at the sea and thinking Derek Jarman blue. Some immensely deep, impenetrable shade of our future lives, a chance not to be cleansed our sins or deviance, but instead to be cleansed of the forces telling us our relationship to death must be kept silent. We both understand that SILENCE = DEATH, so as I imagine us approaching the beach, two images emerge from my mind.
The first is Gregg Bordowitz in Fast Trip, Long Drop. Here the camera has a full shot of his sick body as he sits on bed, white briefs and a black t-shirt decorated by the same symbol. He’s smoking a cigarette, and he says, “Safer sex is good. Intimacy, that’s the problem.” The second is from A Single Man, 50 years earlier, where a grief stricken man cannot come to terms with the loss of his partner, with the loss of a fulfilling intimate life in a repressive age. He’s dreaming he’s at the sea, this same Pacific but much further south, as he wades deeper and deeper into the waves, to silence this well of grief.
I think of these two images because on one hand, it’s true we’ve progressed so much from this time of self-erasure, that my own life is a testament to the limits of visibility. But I am an anomaly in all of this. There’s a distinct difference between being visible and being present. The former is a way of announcing you’re here, but it’s static and immobile. The latter is a way of saying that you’re here, but you’re liable to vanish—either from others’ will or that of your own—at any moment. I am present, and so challenging the limits of visibility, I cling to moments that call into question how, or even if, I’m being seen.
On this beach, we are not seen.
On this beach, it’s just us, this sand, and this sea.
Just pink flesh, a muted white underfoot, and Derek Jarman blue.
We don’t have to be present now, at least not to anyone but ourselves.
We have to be present to death.
We have to be present to a form of loss that isn’t as naked as the precarious journey in the red Prius to get here.
We have to be cleansed of the shame we feel when we think of these deaths.
We have to be cleansed of the shame we feel when we choose to live and disavow the hold of loss over us.
So, I present myself to the sea with my driving partner. I present myself to sea with his lovers, with my uncle, and our interwoven pleasures. I present myself to let the wind pick up. I present myself to let the seas swell, to seas that generate huge, white crests. I present myself to bring the sea spray right into my nostrils, stinging salt as an initiation, into.
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