I’m sitting here in the lobby of my hotel in South Beach and trying to process these last few days. As busy as this trip has been, the last few days, coming as they have at the end perhaps, have been physically - and emotionally - exhausting.

An explanation.

Atlanta was in a hectic mode when I was there because of the NCAA Final Four basketball tournament. It is a city of traffic anyway. But when I was there it was even more hectically crowded - as my hotel was - with hopped-up, hoop-loving packs of heterosexual men hoping that their favored proxies of masculinity would prevail on the hardwood. Even I - non-heterosexual, non-hopped up, but loving those proxies of masculinity with equal fervor - have always wanted to be at an NCAA Final Four Basketball tournament. I just didn’t realize that when I finally made it to the same city at the same time as one, it would be for a reading of a book I had written. It was an odd feeling knowing that almost everyone in the city was focused on the final game the Monday night I read at the Borders Buckhead store. There in a corner of that store was a small oasis of gay men and a couple of middle-aged women who had come to hear me read. It dawned on me: I was their proxy, yet we were all on the same team. We all wanted to prevail. That’s what the book has proven to me. My pain, my surviving of it, my ability to observe and laugh at the absurdity in the midst of it all, is specific to the story I have to tell, but there is a commonality I have been witness to from my side of the podium as I read from my book and talk afterwards with those of you who are showing up. These readings - this blog - is a gathering place for those of us who need to gather. One of the gay guys gathered there in Atlanta was sitting on the back row. He was a very cute college kid. Very cute. I noticed he was with one of the middle-aged women. When they came up for me to sign the woman’s book after the reading and discussion period, she told me she was his mother. I signed words to this effect for her inside her book: For someone who knows the power of maternal love. Mississippi Sissy, as much as being about the coming of age of a little gay boy, is also a book about just such power. (In fact, I was just asked to read at Women and Children bookstore in Chicago on May 3rd so watch for me there.) The mother in Atlanta then asked me to pose with her so her child could take a picture of us. When she stood next to me, she unbuttoned her shirt and displayed a PFLAG t-shirt she was wearing. Her son smiled broadly - he was even cuter when he smiled - and brought out a camera and flashed a couple of photos of us. “You really do know something about the power of maternal love, judging by that smile on your son’s face,” I told her. He lowered the camera. His smile broadened. “She sure does,” he said. “I’m so lucky to have her for a mom.” She buttoned her shirt. “I’m luckier to have him for a son,” she said. I watched them walk through the shelves of books at Borders back out into the parking lot and deeply missed my own mother, as I’ve missed her throughout this tour, as I missed her throughout the writing of my book, and wondered if she had lived would she have ever donned a t-shirt with those initials on it. She might not have, I determined, out of a sense of style but not out of a sense of shame. I made it back to the eerily empty hotel after the reading - all the other guests must have been at the game - in time to watch the announcement of the starting line-ups for Florida and Ohio State. Memories of my basketball coach father overtook those of my mother as I lay in the dark and watched dunk after dunk after dunk and drifted off to sleep. When I awoke I saw that the proxies from Florida had won. But it was those proxies of a happy family - that t-shirt wearing PFLAG mom and her fledgling man of a son - who will stay in my memory from my first experience of being in the same city as the championship game of a Final Four, especially when I watched Joakim Noah from the Florida Gators climb through the throngs of rabid fans in the stands after the game to find his own proud mother so he could hug her tightly and bury his crying, happy face on what appeared to be her always ready shoulder. At that moment, I cried a little too.

The next night I read at Outwrite bookstore and cafe in Atlanta. The staff there, headed by owner Phillip Rafshoon, could not have been nicer or supportive of me. Outwrite is an amazing store and I suggest you check it out if you’re ever in Atlanta and give them your business. We packed the place and afterwards I signed lots of books and met lots of nice and interesting people, including a woman, Sarah Jones, who had gone to school with my father and mother in Harperville, Mississippi, and, as happens at almost every reading I’ve done, told me she had seen my father play basketball. There were two other people there who told me the same thing at Outwrite. “To this day,” one older gentleman told me, “your daddy was the best basketball player I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen some great ones. He could put on a show. I once watched a whole team, when playing defense against his dribbling, go and sit on their bench, all of’em just giving up and letting him show off. The crowd went wild.” I guess I come by my showing-off honestly. Anyway, after the event Phillip took me over to E. Lynn Harris’s beautiful home in Buckhead where E. Lynn had, yes, gathereed some of his best friends for a party in my honor E. Lynn is one of the most generous men I’ve encountered in a long time. Thank you, E. Lynn, for opening up your home to me and hosting such a great party. It was interesting to be one of the few Caucasians in the crowd of beautiful African American men and women. It gave me an appreciation of how they must feel when they are in the minority in a crowd. But I have to say, I thought I had died and gone to heaven, as we say in the south - especially when I was talking to the ex-Indiana University football player who now models in Atlanta. E. Lynn knows how to assemble a guest list.

That party and the receptive customers at Outwrite were just what I needed to lift my spirits that night. My Amazon numbers - which I foolishly checked before heading out were not that good (up in the thousands) - and I had gotten a call from the managing editor of Allure magazine, where I am (was now) contributing editor with an offer of a new contract that I was not pleased with. It was odd being on the New York Times Bestseller List for the last two weeks (alas, I fell off this week because of Bill Bradley and Jerome Groopman selling lots of books, but I plan to claw my way back on with your help if you continue to spread the word about the book for I’m counting on the gathering - there’s that word again - force of our numbers out there to get me back on it) and then receiving a professional kick in the teeth like that. I decided on the ride to Outwrite that I wouldn’t accept the contract offer and take a leap of faith and see what unfolded in my life. It scares me to take this leap but I feel this is the universe pushing me forward in some way. The problem I’ve always had is trying to be the successful version of the idea I had about myself when I first moved to New York when I was 19 and a fledgling man myself and seeing my future self as a proxy of the dreams I had back then. I am now no longer a fledgling man, but a full-grown one and it’s time I started owning that. We can none of us be proxies for ourselves or even the idea we have of ourselves. We must BE ourselves. I must BE myself, more specifically, and this is not who I thought I would be at 51. But this is who I am. It is time to be this person and let success be the byproduct of a more evolved acceptance of myself. This tour and all the reaching out from you and to you has taught me that. I really do feel I am a different person after these intense three weeks on this part of my tour. No, I take that back. I feel as if the person who started the tour was the different person. This is now, simply, who I am. Thank you.

But that night in Atlanta, after the party, I couldn’t sleep because of the panic attack I was feeling in the middle of the night when my eyes flew open and I started wondering what if I never worked again and couldn’t pay the rent. I said a prayer. I took deep breaths. I prayed some more. But my heart continued to race. Finally, I got up and retrieved the video tape that my brother had made for me of an old PBS show in which Frank Hains was interviewing Eudora Welty back in the early 1970s when I knew them both. I had been lugging that tape around through the myriad airports I’ve been trudging through on this trip. I’ve kept it in a plastic bag along with my father’s baseball glove my sister gave me back in Vicksburg, the two objects the talismans I tend to touch when I’m waiting for my plane to take off and carry me to yet another city to meet more of you. I put the tape in the VCR in my Atlanta hotel room, the first VCR machine I’ve had in a hotel room so far. I had not seen Frank Hains in this way - alive there on tape, dapper, sweetly erudite - since I found him murdered over 30 years ago. He has only lived in my memory and in the writing in my book. It was oddly soothing to lay in the dark in that hotel room in Atlanta and let his voice and visage and Miss Welty’s lovely lilt wash over me as they discussed the musicality of her written language, their love of the south, the almost physical germination of her fiction, her hatred of electric typewriters. The spectral aspect of their continuing presence in my life was not only heightened by the flickering light of the television screen but also, as I closed my eyes and listened as they soothed me back to sleep, by a kind of lullaby formed by the loveliness of their voices alone, their ever well-chosen words, the comfort they could always give me by keeping my mouth shut and being completely still - stillness is an overlooked accomplishment in this world of ours - and listening to what they had to say, a kind of lullaby circling back to me all these years later to let me know that I would be okay if I continued to listen as they taught me to listen - yet again to them technologically conjured in the darkness in which I found myself and to my calming heart.

The next morning I got up and caught the Southern Crescent, a train that Miss Welty always liked to take to New York City when visiting her publisher and friends up north. I was taking it to Birmingham, however, for my next reading. On the train, for the four hours it took to get there, I was sitting in front of a woman and her small son. Again, a lullaby-like voice lulled me. The child was a talkative one and ended almost every sentence in a low, almost whispered word: Mama. “Look at me, Mama,” he would say. “See the pretty trees, Mama,” he said, pointing out the window at the spring greenery rushing by. Then, at one point, this: “Read to me, Mama.” Softly, she read aloud, as my own mama would read to me so long ago, from the grown-up book she had been silently reading while all his mama-entreaties had been aimed her way. It was from Anne Lamott’s new book Grace (Eventually). It was the essay titled Chirren. “What’s chirren?” asked the child. His mother explained as he cuddled next to her behind me and I heard the adult words “abortion” and “breeder” read aloud amidst all the innocent love that was in that essay about Lamott having her first child in her late 30s. I also heard a line about holding that child which was like holding a part of her soul. I heard the book close behind me when the woman finished that particular essay. “Can I hold it, Mama?” came her own child’s voice. At first I thought he meant a part of her soul, but then realized he was talking about Lamott’s book. “What’s this say, Mama?” he asked. His mother read aloud once more: “‘Where is the Life we lost when living?’ T. S. Eliot,’” which I later discovered at my reading that night when I picked up Grace (Eventually) to more closely peruse it, is the quote Lamott uses to open the book. Mother and child fell asleep on the train. As did I.

When I awoke, I was in Birmingham and an old college buddy of mine, Jan Dickson Hunter, picked me up and we had lunch at a barbecue place. Later than night I read at Books a Million at a tony mall outside Birmingham and had a great crowd. I don’t know if it was my exhaustion or my worry about my job situation or the emotional remnants of overhearing the mother-and-son intimacy behind me on the Southern Crescent, but by the end of my reading about going dressed as a witch for the Halloween carnival a couple of weeks before my own mother’s death when I was a little boy not much older than the one on the train earlier in the day affected me more deeply than usual. But I recovered at the Mexican restaurant later with Jan and a bunch of her gay friends and my first cousin’s gorgeous twenty-something lesbian daughter who goes to school in Birmingham. It was great to spend some time with such a lovely second-cousin. It’s the first time we had ever met. She’s a great kid and I hope she stays in my life. I guess it was my own maternal side making itself known.

I woke up at 4:30 a.m. to catch a very early flight to Miami through Orlando yesterday. When I got here I walked around to some of my old haunts. (I owned a condo here for two years about five years ago.) I ate lunch at my favorite restaurant, Ice Box, on Michigan off Lincoln Road. Go in and say hello to its handsome owner Robert if you’re ever down here. Great food and great desserts. Even Oprah featured his cakes on her show. Dropped by Basics new furniture store back in the alleyway by Books and Books, the bookstore where I’m reading tonight at 8 p.m., to say hi to Steven and his boyfriend, Brian, who own that store, one of the hippest in town. Basics original store is still there, its a clothing boutique on the other side Books and Books. They were also my neighbors when I lived here. Their house has one of the most beautiful bogenvillia trees out in front of it and I used to love to sit in my living room and look out my front window at it. I also dropped by to see my old real estate agent who now has his own firm on Jefferson off Lincoln, Gary Hennes. And next to his office is Galerie, the chicest store in South Beach owned by the chicest woman, the gloriously German Regina. It was great to see all these old friends.

After sitting in Regina’s store and catching up with her I walked down to my old condo on Espanola and Meridian. I thought it would be fun to see what shape the building was in. I didn’t realize when I got there that the one memory that would surface the moment I stood there was the morning I got my HIV diagnosis. I was living in that condo when I got it. I rode my bike back to that corner from my doctor’s office, locked it up, and held myself together the whole ride until I got through the door. I then sat dazed for a few moments on my sofa. When I got up to go get a drink of water I felt my knees buckling and grabbed a wall in a corner and slid down on the floor and ended up in a ball where I sobbed for a long time. Back then, I honestly didn’t know how such a diagnosis would affect me - physically or mentally or emotionally or spiritually. In every one of those ways it has strengthened me. I didn’t know that though back then when I was balled up on the floor. I really thought I had received a death sentence. But isn’t that what we all receive the moment we are born and we are held, like parts of their souls, in our mothers’ waiting arms. I didn’t know back then that this, five years on, would be the Life I’ve found while I am living. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for this life on this tour in this city at this moment I am typing these words about that memory. I looked away from that old condo of mine that held that long-ago corner where I was literally a ball of fear. The bogenvillia tree, beautifully in bloom, was once more in my line of vision. I stood - completely still - and fearlessly turned my back on that frightened proxy of myself five years ago whose fear - of happiness, of success, of my true self - had infected me long before any virus had. Some viruses may never be cured. But fear can be. The bogenvillia has always been beautiful.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 4:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.