The Secret Life of This Life Now #11
11th in a series of brief essays about the life cycle of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems
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In each Secret Life, I share a bit of my poetry/life journey and give you a peek at the sequentially next poem in This Life Now. It’s a belated tenth-anniversary gift to the book that put me on some tiny corner of the poetry map. It’s also the story of how we can suffer as much when we succeed as when we fail.
This is post #11 in the series, and the eleventh poem in the book is “Another Tony Poem.” There are two poems in the book with that title. The first you can learn about in TSLTLN #9. This second one is the only poem I will post in its entirety, since it is a two-line, one-sentence poem:
I’m glad there was a moment in my life
when I was foolish enough to love the likes of you.Tony was the only intimate partner in my life who loved me the way I wanted to be loved. I wish I had been kinder to him about his alcoholism. Tony often called me “Yeah, but” and would exclaim, “Mikey’s Rules” at appropriate moments. He usually had a big grin on his face when he said those things. He called me out on my bullshit frankly but never aggressively and certainly not passive-aggressively. I learned about myself from Tony. And he cared about my writing—He told me to leave my computer booted up (a term from the paleodigital IBM-PC past) at all times so that when an idea or a thought or a phrase popped into my head, I could run right over and get it on the WordPerfect page. Tony repeatedly told me to “Just do it” before it was quite the ubiquitous Nike tagline that it soon became. The world got a little darker when Tony died in 1994 at the age of 38.
“Another Tony Poem” actually coincides perfectly with where I was in the previous edition of TSLTLN, when I was recounting the early days of my medical communications career. So I told you about how I met a cute and sexy young newly minted MSW at a gay sex club in San Francisco in March of 1994, where (San Francisco, not Club Eros) I was working on an educational video for pharmacists about the recently approved crop of four AIDS drugs. The budding young social worker—a Texas native of mixed “anglo” and “Hispanic” parentage (the terms he and his community preferred at the time)—turned out to be an NYU alum who lived near me in the East Village. When we got back to New York, we started dating.
Meanwhile, while I was in San Francisco, Tony had stayed at my apartment in the East Village. I don’t even remember why, but he wanted to, and I was happy to let him. Mind you, we were not intimately involved at that point. When I got home from San Francisco, the metal door to my tenement apartment seemed to be battered and bruised. Huh, I thought, turning the key in the lock. Inside, everything was fine. But I later learned—a combination of reportage from my landlady and from Tony, as I recall only hazily—that the door and been battered in by the police when they got a call from Tony’s mother, Martha Salinas, who had tried to call Tony at my apartment for days to no avail, or perhaps she had gotten a hold of him and he sounded like shit. Again, I don’t remember the details. Anyway, in her completely justified panic, Martha called the police and gave them my address. The cops came, pounded on the door, got no answer, broke in the door, and found Tony blacked out in my bed.
So to bring it full circle—Newly-minted-social-worker and I were in my bed together early one morning in April 1994 when I got a phone call from Martha Salinas, who said simply, in her Cuban-accented English, “Tony died.”
Back at work—I guess I have left out the part where, after I got back from the AIDS conference in Berlin in June 1993, the folks at World Health Communications asked me to come into the office 20 hours a week as a freelance project editor. I accepted. The whole thing was pretty cool. I got to do things like go to San Francisco to shoot educational videos about AIDS drugs for pharmacists. I got to go to an international herpesvirus workshop at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver the first week in August 1994, and headed straight from there to Yokohama for the tenth annual international AIDS conference.
While in Vancouver I read the “Best American Poetry” volumes from 1989 to 1992 (Simic, Strand, Graham, Hall) from cover to cover (that was my crash independent study course in poetry, which I had started writing only a few year earlier without ever having taken a creative writing course in school). After the AIDS conference in Yokohama, my colleague Tony Picard and I spent a week in Kyoto at his friend’s house, sleep on tatami mats, visiting shrines, and spending a day in Tokyo, including a Sumida River boat ride.
The AIDS conference in Yokohama was incredibly sad and disappointing from a treatment perspective, as had been the conference in Berlin the year before. After AZT monotherapy (treatment with a single drug) proved to be a bust, the early 1990s were marked by numerous trials of dual-therapy regimens using various combinations of AZT, ddC, ddI, and an even newer entrant to the field, 3TC (generic name lamivudine, eventual brand name Epivir). Results from all of these trials, some presented in Berlin in 1993, others presented in Yokohama in 1994, were disheartening at best. They suggested some short-term gains—improvement for those with AIDS, delays in progression to AIDS among those with HIV infection—but our old nemesis viral resistance ultimately prevailed in every case. Frankly, hope was just about lost. But that was going to change in the coming years.
And the poems that ultimately became This Life Now—with their loves and their losses and their memories of childhood and their glimpses of a different future—would continue to be written.
Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes SHIPPING in the US.
Scheduling Note: I am going to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:45am eastern time. Other new sections of Beachcomber Mike may be starting soon. I’ll keep you posted.
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Such a great book!