Come Back (15 page)

Anyway, you correct my assertion, saying you don't suspect I am hypnotized by the prospect of re-experiencing some of my past acclaim. Perhaps I have convinced you with my argument that it was only ever the work that mattered. Sometimes I think, however, that you enjoy belittling my theories. Condescension is part of your strategy. I will, I'm sure you believe, come to distrust my own judgements of myself.

Anyway, you quickly and arrogantly sail into analysis of my discussion of June Allyson and Mickey. You assert that I go on about June because there might have been some truth in
her
condescension towards Mickey. This would just be silly if it was not so appalling. June Allyson never had insight into anything: I thought I had made that clear. At the heart of your argument is the
coup de grâce
. That I wish to talk about my love for Mickey alarms you. You also find it ridiculous. Without criticizing Mickey, you suggest that it was a period when I was not myself because of the drugs. This kind of statement indicates an ignorance about taking drugs. I know that you desire so
much
control over your own life that you refuse to self-medicate in any fashion.

But remember. I was with you on that strangely endearing night when you drank nearly a fifth of vodka —
very quickly
. And much to your chagrin and mine, you tried on one of my dresses. Of course, nothing I owned would ever have fit you. (How am I to know now if that still holds true, as I have no image of you today to compare with what you or I once were?) Well, first there was the self-consciousness of your drunkenness. It was a metadrunkenness, a postmodern inebriation. You kept repeating, “I am drunk, I am drunk, look how drunk I am. I'm going crazy, I'm losing my mind. I'm going to do crazy things!” And then you insisted on raiding my closet. “Wow! I am going to try on a dress!” you said. Then you ran up to my room, threw open the closet and chose the most glittering garment with the most dramatic décolletage. When you yanked it on, I thought you might rip it. Praise God for spandex — you didn't. Then you stood in front of the mirrors in my room and pranced around saying, “I'm going to give it a try, wearing a dress. I really want your opinion, how do I look, should I go out to the transgender bar in this?” And then because you were metadrunk you insisted I seriously answer your question.

Obviously you looked more than ridiculous; you had pulled the dress over your own jeans and T-shirt and were making no effort at all to be feminine — although you did model it in a very pointedly clumsy way. I'm pretty sure you pulled on a pair of my high heels. This just exaggerated the ridiculousness of the enterprise. There wasn't much effort on your part, and that was the point. And what was so funny was that finally you made a concerted, sincere attempt to be a femme. You vowed to me, over and over again, that if this adventure with the skirt didn't work out, then it would be your one and only foray into girlishness. Eventually you staggered up to the attic guest room where you were staying, still wearing my dress, threatening to slap on some makeup and depart for a night on the town. You didn't. In fact, many hours later, after I had gone to bed, you woke me up to hand me the dress. “I tried,” you said. “I tried to be feminine, I really did. It just didn't work. The dress didn't look good on me, did it?” This little bit of self-fulfilling prophecy was meant to be comic, and it was.

But this bizarre incident was the one and only time I know of when you attempted — in this rather puerile manner — to lose control. It just served to put quotation marks around the whole notion of you being inebriated or experimenting with drugs. This means you have little or no understanding of what I went through so many years ago, or what drugs meant to me, or anyone else. There is only one sense in which this might be a good background for addiction counselling. It's true, for instance, that you could not possibly enable me, when you have no idea even of the pleasure one might enjoy during a voluntarily induced drug experience. But your lack of relevant experience means there is a serious gap in your understanding of my situation.

This, as I understand it, is your analysis. Here, also, is my prediction. You think that I am talking about Mickey far too much. You think that I am romanticizing my relationship to such a degree that I have forgotten the reality, or have just wilfully abandoned it. You begin talking about this by saying, “Whatever Mickey's merits are . . .” This, as I understand it, is supposed to represent the epitome of generousness. It is your attempt to see things from my point of view.

But there are several problems with your approach. First, despite your cleverly disguised denials, you are ultimately dismissing Mickey. You see him at best — and these are your very words — as “an ineffectual person.” Mickey was not ineffectual. He wanted to be an actor and I think he could have been. But then there are some people who are not capable of achieving anything themselves; they are simply better at facilitating brilliance in others. Mickey was very good at this with me. He was an amazing support and a witty and charming companion. He was also, significantly, not afraid to love. It wasn't being taken from him — as it seems to be with so many — instead he gave it freely. It was as if it was his mission in life to do so. I have never met such a kind, loving person.

You say that if I were truly “in love” with Mickey, then I would have kept in touch with him. But you know that this was impossible, that I was in and out of the hospital and on the verge of death for nearly twenty years. You may well remember how unsettling it was for me to watch Elizabeth Taylor go through a similar experience at relatively the same time — the difference being that her illnesses were public. I was, as far as the world was concerned, not alive. So there was not a moment in those twenty years that I could have gathered the emotional energy to make contact with someone who I saw at the time as clearly being a part of my previous life. Nor did I want to do so. At that time, the threat of the past intruding on the present really was much too great.

When I did finally recover from my illness, had assumed my new life and had a liver that actually functioned, I tried to track him down. It was not that I thought anything might continue between us — I was beyond that. It had been too long and, of course, one can never, as they say, recreate the magic. I found him and was unsurprised to learn that he had become an agent. He never acted as my agent, and I was specifically looking for a partner who did
not
do that. I fantasize that this may have been the right career for him because he was both a great supporter and somewhat star-struck. But as I say, at the time when we were involved I was able to accept the fact that he could love
both
me and “the star.”

Anyway, I can't really defend my relationship with him anymore, and I don't want to. He was a sweet, kind boy. But in my life a pattern recurs over and over again. You must be aware of it; I've talked about it so often. Perhaps your knowledge of it explains your reticence to actually openly dismiss my relationship with Mickey. We both know that my evil and manipulative bitch of a mother had, in her arsenal, a unique and powerful weapon: she exercised a sublime and incorrigible skepticism about any and all of my life partners. She ridiculed Vincente to such an extent that I didn't ever want the two of them to be in the same room. Why did she refuse to support her daughter's relationships? Because she was intimidated by my talent and couldn't resist hoping that my life was merely a substandard imitation of her own. I'll never forget when, during my fifties comeback, after much nagging from Sid, I invited her to see my act at the Palace. She told Sid she didn't want to go. When he asked her why, she said, “Because at those concerts all anyone cares about is my daughter. They don't pay any attention to me.” Is there any other mother who acted so consistently
unlike
a mother?

What she did, among other things, was make it virtually impossible for me to have a relationship. When in love I was habitually seized by twin and equally destructive emotions. On the one hand, I felt unworthy of any sort of love — she certainly taught me that. And simultaneously I felt that the person I was in love with was unworthy of me. One might think these contradictory impulses would cancel each other out, but no, it was a perpetual seesaw. Which was it to be? Was I worthless or too worthy?

So when you even glancingly criticize Mickey — or make what in your letter proves to be a pathetic and obvious attempt to cover up your contempt for him and skepticism about our relationship — it touches me in a deep, angry place. It touches me where all my relationships are being ridiculed by my evil bitch of a mother. Shall we just call her the
EBOAM
? That sounds suitably and chillingly biblical, does it not?

Your analysis fails similarly in its attempt to understand the effects of drug addiction. I am not denying that I was a serious addict. I was
the
addict beyond all addicts. I was fully incapacitated, in terms of the ordinary faculties required to commit myself to certain tasks — remembering how to put one foot in front of the other, for instance. People were shocked at my onstage collapses. They had no idea of what transpired during a nightly binge. For even when I was so very wrecked onstage, it was, quite literally, nothing in comparison to my condition when I was off. I do not deny it. And I will not ever forget what it was like to be so seriously physiologically incapacitated by the poison I was pouring into my system.

On the other hand, it's important to note something that you could never know — because of your lack of experience — but can hopefully grow to understand. The drug addict does not, in the grip of his or her intoxication, become another person. Instead, they ultimately become more like themselves. It's like dying. June Allyson was a perfect example. I, of course, had no communication with her during her final years, but I did quietly observe her appearances on television.

I noted, for example, that she had become a success as a salesperson for urine-soaked underpants. This was the ultimate irony, that a person whose life had been devoted to jealously criticizing others had found a career as a spokesperson for a garment whose sole purpose was to collect human waste decorously, in a socially acceptable way.
FYI
: nowhere in those Depends ads did you ever see the words
adult diaper
. I shouldn't talk; indeed, I have worn many a diaper in my time. I have become, in effect, a piece of human waste in my old age. But nevertheless the irony of her terminal gig, as it were, was not lost on me. One of her final statements to the press contained a veiled reference to me. You may say I am sensitive to the point of paranoia, but be that as it may . . . The Allyson leopard — she never changed her spots — talked of “the many tragic victims of show business.” Apparently she was not one of them. In other words, the old cunt remained a prime bitch to the end.

The moral? People don't change when they die. They don't suddenly become kind and loving before the end. A bitch in life? A bitch she will remain. And in death, perhaps even more so. It is the same with drugs. Their effect is not to change us into better or worse people. Of course, we may stumble, stagger and even momentarily forget who and where we are. But if a person has no self-esteem, then a good old-fashioned booze binge, for instance — though it may lend the drinker a momentary dash of bravado — will ultimately lead her into a bottomless pit of self-doubt. For some this may even end in suicide.

And the same is true of all drugs. Their physiological effects may differ, but you don't become a different person. You simply become more of what you are. Sometimes the drug takes the infinitesimal seeds of some tendency and exaggerates them. This is why some people perceive that a drug has changed someone into another person. But the seed must be an integral part of the person if the drug is going to find it and exaggerate its effect.

I could not have fallen in love with Mickey because I was high. This simply doesn't happen. It could not have been that my clouded vision caused me to spend the last six months of my previous life as another person. I would have wished to find Mickey — on or off the drugs. On the drugs I happened, happily, to find him. And that is that. If all this is not enough to convince you that my reaction to a small comment from a woman with a cantilevered face is not a signal of an impending dire situation — and certainly these days it seems like nothing will do the trick — then let's try something else.

I think discussing your response to my analysis of Dash's papers might support my argument. What you seem to be hanging on to, and worrying over — the way a dog worries about an old bone — are the dangerous similarities between myself and Dash. I have given you scholarly justifications for my interest in his work. I'm not suggesting they are necessarily good arguments — and certainly far from the quality of what might be put in any academic paper — but they are nevertheless my considered thoughts. I took a lot of time thinking them through; they are sincere. In other words, I care about Dash because of the implications of his tragic life for twentieth-century theory.

Let's face it, most of the significant post-structuralists were homosexuals. Barthes, Foucault — importantly also Deleuze and Guattari. True, not Derrida — but every rule has its exception. It is interesting, and often ignored, that the collapse of homosexuality and the discreditation of theory (the rise of post-theory) occurred simultaneously, near the beginning of this century. Could the two have been connected? As I attempted to theorize in my last email, albeit ineptly, was there perhaps an association between the tragic arc of Dash King's life and the decline of post-structuralism? They may have both died of the same affliction: a fantastical irrelation to reality.

What I don't need from you now is a categorical dismissal of my ideas. Why have you not even addressed them? It is not that I am hurt. We don't have that kind of relationship and hopefully never will. Why ruin everything with scholarly etiquette? But it does disturb me that you don't engage with the extensive arguments I have made. Do they not seem, increasingly, to be relevant? This is what concerns me — along with your mentioning again that it's important that I'm
prepared
. (For what?) These elliptical remarks frighten me, of course. But what frightens me most is that it is very unlike you
not
to engage in what could prove to be a significant ideological discussion.