Purple Golf Cart: The Misadventures of a Lesbian Grandma (18 page)

The sun was just setting and the Marina was deserted as I knew it would be. I sat on the end of the dock, the block tied to my feet but still in place on the dock next to me. I stared out at the water, no thoughts or feelings in the way. I looked across the water along the 79
^th
Street causeway in the direction of where my grandma Frances once lived and wondered if I would be with her soon. I wanted to be with her.

Suddenly, arms grabbed me, surrounded me, pulled me away from the edge. Hands untied the rope around my legs. Miley and Barbara had seen me, horrified at what I was about to do. They ran to me, pulled me back, held me, rocked me all through the night. The tears, the sobs, the pain of all the things I refused to allow myself to feel came pouring out of my heart and my body. I shook with the intensity of my sobs, shook with the realization of what I almost did, stunned that I had even gotten to that place of self-destruction. They were still holding me as the sun came up the next morning. They held me as I cried and poured my guts and soul out into the universe. They held me as I grasped the magnitude of my depressed self. And they held me as I began to calm, began to understand, ever so slightly, what I almost did. I went over the edge. I have an edge and I chose to cross it. The next day, still in the arms of two women who cared about me, I made a promise to myself that I would always remember that edge, always remember where it resides, and never, ever, ever go there again. Be vigilant for the edge, and stay away.

Several weeks later, as I was still processing and recovering, my friend David Jones from Jacksonville came to Miami for a visit. He told me about a job in the AIDS office in what was then the Florida Health and Rehabilitative Services, or HRS—the Health Department. David had AIDS and described himself as a “short-timer.” (Sadly, back then, in 1987, almost everyone with AIDS was a short-timer.) The job was as an AIDS Surveillance Officer, an epidemiologist who focuses on how HIV moves through a community.

“We have this position open. We advertised it twice but not one person applied for it. Everybody’s afraid of people with AIDS but I know you’re not. Ronni, the Health Department needs you and you need a job. You’re smart and you know how to read medical records. You’re as qualified as anyone. Come back to Jacksonville and do this work. What do you think?”

What did I think? How about: how on earth does a person with an 18-year old bachelors degree in music get this kind of gig? But David was right. I could read medical records, thanks to IRA, and because I had so many friends with AIDS, I was never afraid. I applied for the job, got hired, and began working for the Health Department in May of 1987. Suddenly, I was the highest ranking open lesbian in Florida government.

My dear friend David Jones died of AIDS later that year.

21. Finding Sarah

May 1987. I sold my boat in Miami and moved back to Jacksonville to become an AIDS surveillance officer, a one-disease epidemiologist. The State of Florida sent me to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta to learn how to pronounce epidemiologist and how to do the work.

Miley and I rented an old Victorian house in the Springfield area just north of downtown Jacksonville, within walking distance to my office in the Health Department. Most of the houses in Springfield were built between 1885 and 1930 There were bungalows, Revivals, Queen Annes, and the stately Victorians. Springfield saw many communities of people come and go over the decades. By the 1980s the area was overrun with crack houses, drugs, and prostitutes of every gender variation. A few homes were being renovated, but full-tilt gentrification had not yet begun. It was a difficult area, perfect for the location of the Health department.

I went home for lunch one day, a Thursday, to find that someone had broken into our back yard and stole our matching motor scooters—the last remaining vestiges from the
Curious Wine
—as well as our barbeque grill and lawn mower. I called the police.

“They’ll be back. This was too easy. Go to the pound NOW and get a couple of big dogs.” Not very encouraging. That night Miley and I were too scared to sleep. We stayed awake as long as we could but by 1 A.M. we couldn’t keep our eyes open. When we awoke at 7 A.M. and went downstairs to the kitchen, to our horror, we saw that most of our belongings were gone. We moved out of there that afternoon and into an apartment complex on the St. Johns River in a more middle class part of town.

Shortly after we moved, Miley, who now worked for Planned Parenthood, was given a tiny gray Himalayan kitten named Sarah by a patient who couldn’t otherwise pay for services. I’ve never been a cat person. Farley was an anomaly for me. We had an understanding: he was a working partner. There was no emotion in it for either of us. Sarah, though, grabbed my heart.

She was still a very young kitten when she went missing for over twelve hours. While she often went outdoors, she rarely left the small area around our apartment patio. I searched for her, first outside and then inside the apartment. Suddenly I heard the teeniest, tiniest sound in the guest bedroom that doubled as my office. I searched, trying to hear the sound again. There! There it was, coming from behind my large teak desk. There was little Sarah, unable to move. I could tell there was something seriously wrong with her legs. I was afraid to move her so I called a veterinarian, a long-time friend, who came right over. In the meantime, I laid on my stomach on the floor, my fingers from one hand resting lightly on Sarah’s front paws while fingers from my other hand fed her. Our eyes locked. There was trust in her eyes, and love, as she kept her gaze on my face. I felt my heart melt into a thousand pools for this little being. I understood that she was in pain, and she understood that I was there to help. The vet arrived. She gently pulled Sarah up from behind the desk as I carefully moved the desk away. Sarah had apparently eaten some poison outdoors that caused her legs to become paralyzed. After a few days of tender loving care, she was fine. She and I knew without a doubt that we were bonded for life, a family, and that we would be there for each other no matter what, for the rest of our lives. I was blessed to have Sarah for another 13 years.

~~~~~~

Farley left. He preferred to spend most of his time outdoors and our apartment was only blocks from the river. When Farley didn’t come home one day, I just knew he had headed back to the water in search of his favorite thing—some derelict old boat. That pirate cat was back in business, I truly believed.

Though Miley and I had not been lovers for the last year of our time together, we had a wonderful friendship. She found a new girlfriend with an apartment on the beach and moved in with her, which was fine with me. I understood that it was the boat and the water that kept the three of us—Miley, Farley, and me—together. With that liquid glue gone, so were they. Miley and I remained friends for many years. Farley is probably on some derelict vessel in the sky after all these years. And my beloved Sarah, whose ashes are in a beautiful little flowered box, sits on the window sill at my house in Palm Desert where there is an abundance of hummingbirds and doves. She would have loved that.

22. AIDS

_________________________________________________________________

1989

U.S. President
: George H. W. Bush

Best film
: Driving Miss Daisy; Born on the Fourth of July, Field of Dreams, Dead Poets Society

Best actors
: Daniel Day-Lewis, Jessica Tandy

Best TV shows
: The Arsenio Hall Show; Coach; COPS; Quantum Leap; Rescue 911; The New Mickey Mouse Club; Tales from the Crypt; Seinfeld; Doogie Howser, MD; Baywatch; Family Matters; The Simpsons

Best songs
: Like a Prayer, Don’t Wanna Lose You, Straight Up, The Living Years, Real Love, Forever Your Girl

Civics
: Beijing’s Tiananmen Square riots; Berlin Wall comes down; Exxon Valdez oil spill; Colin Powell named first Black Chair of Joint Chiefs of Staff; San Francisco 7.1 earthquake

Popular Culture
: World Wide Web server and browser developed; The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan published; Los Angeles, CA and state of Massachusetts prohibit LGBT discrimination; Columbus, Ohio adopts a hate crimes bill that includes sexual orientation.

Deaths
: Jim Baccus, Lucille Ball, Salvador Dali, Bette Davis, Billy Martin, Laurence Olivier, Sugar Ray Robinson

__________________________________________________________________

I. Shira

Shira had AIDS. She was 12 years old. Her tiny body was covered with multiple bruises and sores and bandages, tubes protruding from her bloated abdomen. Her young life was coming to an end after nine painful years of suffering from the disease she contracted at the age of three from her mother’s drug-using customers during one of the many times Shira was sexually assaulted.

Shira was dying that day. People from throughout the AIDS communities were in her room at Wolfson Children’s Hospital in Jacksonville. Her foster parents, those two big-hearted people who considered Shira their own child for the past four years, gave Shira the best possible life under the worst possible circumstances. Shira’s biological mother was in jail. Her biological father, unknown.

“Shira,” her foster dad asked, “what’s your best wish?”

In such a small, small voice, and without hesitation, Shira said, “To be your real child. I want you to be my real parents.”

I heard the words. I choked down the lump in my throat and called my partner Paula.

“Paula, find Father Joe fast!” Father Joe was the minister in the Episcopal Church. Paula was a member of the church and close with Father Joe. “Get him over here to Wolfson NOW. Tell him it’s urgent! It’s Shira…” My voice trailed as the lump rose again.

“Ahm on it, and Ah’ll be there soon mah-self,” her soft Southern drawl even more pronounced whenever something emotional was happening. She dialed Father Joe’s pager number. Father Joe was a wonderful man who was deeply loved by the gay and AIDS communities. He arrived within 30 minutes, Paula on his heels.

“We need an adoption ceremony quick, Joe. Will you do it?” I whispered as soon as he entered the room.

Without hesitation, Father Joe was at Shira’s bedside. He kissed Shira and her foster parents, then took their hands together in his. We listened as Father Joe performed the adoption service from the Episcopal Prayer Book. He pronounced Shira and her foster parents a “real family,” to the sound of our collective sobs, we who were so privileged to be in that place in that moment. We cried, for Shira, for her parents, for all the people we’d lost and were losing to this damned disease. My heart broke for these two parents who would not let go of Shira’s tiny hands. With her deepest wish realized, we witnessed Shira gently slip away, away, silently away. Their beloved daughter was gone.

II. Keith

“Please don’t take me to Jax General again. I want to die in a classy place, like Baptist.”

Keith was so fragile but powerfully insistent about where his last bed must be located. He was terribly ill with multiple complications from AIDS and had spent a great deal of time in Jacksonville General, the hospital where indigents received minimal heath care back then, and where people with AIDS were considered pariahs. In the 1980s, AIDS patients’ soiled gowns were not changed, their rooms not cleaned, their food trays left on the floor by their doors with Florida roaches as sentinels. It was up to us in the community to make sure our gay brothers received the care they needed and deserved. It was an incredibly heartbreaking challenge back then in Northeast Florida.

Keith’s time was running out. He was exhausted. Keith, who was only twenty-two, suffered from severe wasting, one of the many diseases that defined AIDS. Keith called me that day at the AIDS office in the Health Department as he had hundreds of times before, but this time he sounded so much weaker, so fragile.

“It’s time, Ronni. Baptist, this time? Please?”

I grabbed my assistant, a big, almost burley, woman named Bonnie, who was six feet tall and built like a football player. She was wearing her best jeans and a polo shirt that day, a stark contrast to me in my skirted suit, stockings, and heels. We were a formidable team, Bonnie and I, and all of our AIDS patients knew it. We jumped into my car and drove the three bocks to Keith’s rooming house.

Keith looked even worse than when I saw him last, just a week earlier, and that wasn’t good. He was skinny, with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions all over his face and chest, and a raspy cough from the pneumonia. Though African American, his cocoa color skin was now very pale. His room was filthy. It stunk of body waste and decay. Roaches crawled all over the food remnants in the sink. Bonnie and I washed Keith then carried him to the car because he was depleted of anything resembling energy. We took him to the Baptist Medical Center emergency room, in agreement that Keith’s last wish deserved to be granted.

We poured Keith’s limp and nearly lifeless body into a wheel chair though he could barely sit up. The three of us managed to make it to the registration desk. The woman sitting at the desk looked up at Bonnie, then at me, then Keith, and back to Bonnie. I guess she deferred to Bonnie because Bonnie was big, perhaps male-like, so of course she must be in charge.

“Uh, are you related to the patient?” the woman asked Bonnie cautiously.

Bonnie looked back and forth several times, from Keith to me to Keith again. With her eyes fixed on Keith, and with so much love in a voice full of sadness, she said to the woman, “Yeah, we’re his parents.”