Divisadero: Almost Persuaded

By Ian McDuff

This is an entry – which I volunteered for, very late in the game – in the Slash Across America challenge. It seemed to me that if Canada were getting props (after all, they are part of the continent, too, bless their hockey-playing hearts), our friends and neighbors to the South ought also be covered. So welcome to Chihuahua State, Estados Unidos Mexicanos. Enjoy the view.

‘Almost Persuaded’ (Billy Sherrill/Glenn Sutton), which has been covered by many, but is most identified with the immortal Etta James.

It wasn’t merely the loneliness that had hunted him, chivvied him, driven him to wander the earth and fetch up in this place, as he would be driven to fetch up in places past and places yet to come. Nor was it merely the memories that still hung upon the dry and spicy air that wafted from the canyon: these had not sufficed by themselves to draw him here.

It was the synthesis, the synergy, of loneliness, and memory, and the thousand other torments of the soul that attended upon the absence of his love: the careful way in which his friends and brethren approached him, the gingerly, walking-on-eggshells efforts (however well-meaning) of his family to avoid paining him, the disorienting way in which everyone he knew interacted with him as if he were the victim of some tragedy, as if, in fact, his love were not as safe as safe could be, as if his worst nightmares had come upon him in place of the mere pangs of a temporary separation.

He’d had to flee the care and anxious tenderness of others, or he would have gone wholly ’round the bend.

And here he was.

Chris, he recalled, had at once loved and hated this posada – mansion, really. The views of the Barrancas del Cobre had been – still were – breath-taking. The sheer drop from the hotel that overhung the canyon’s rim was some five thousand feet, though, which actually had silenced Chris pretty effectively. Being nine thousand feet above sea level was one thing: Chris hadn’t had to think about that. But the nine-tenths of a mile that separated the balconies of their Divisadero hideaway and coign of vantage from the floor of Copper Canyon … Chris had literally sidled against interior walls as he moved about.

JC wished, right then, that Lance had severe acrophobia.

Not that it would have mattered. Lance was afraid of flying in commercial jetliners, after all, and yet….

Lance had loved to lean on the very balcony wall in the cool, crisp mountain air, redolent with the piney scents of the sierra country, and look out upon the canyon, its scrolls and volutes and fluted stratigraphy, its watercolor and pastel chalk and conte crayon greenery, its scrawl and scrabble of Tarahumara foot-trails far below. They had both fallen immediately in love with Copper Canyon, finding it infinitely more fascinating, dramatic, and heart-lifting than ever was the Grand Canyon of the Arizona. But it had been the barrancas nights that had, tellingly, ominously, so captivated Lance: the peaceful dark of the land, plunged into profoundest slumber, with mysterious yet human and comforting pinpoints of fire-light from the Tarahumara dwellings; and the night sky above, unfathomably far from any light-pollution, a celestial masked ball in which the stars were eyes of angels in the velvet mask of night. Lance and the stars: that was, truly, what it all came down to.

And that is why JC was there, alone, unrecognized, retracing every sharply remembered step of his and Lance’s visit the year before. He felt oddly close to Lance here, and comfortably far away from Justin and Joe and Chris, Tyler and Heather and Jim and Diane and Roy and Karen and all the people who insisted on trying to comfort him – and who merely thrust rough hands against delicate wounds when they reached out to help, who, though he loved them, never failed to profane his mysteries. He had been journeying for some time now, since Lance had departed for Russia, slipping furtively off to remote locations that would in time be overflown by the International Space Station in its ceaseless orbit. Here, though, in this special place, hallowed by his having been here with his Sweet Baby James, here he might stay for a time. A week, a month, a lifetime if … if the unthinkable, that unthinkable thing that was never far from his thoughts, should happen.

Wrapped, rapt, in dreams and imaginings, memories and dreads, he wandered into the dining room and took his usual place. They brought him wine and food, unquestioning, not needing to ask. It was peaceful here. As peaceful perhaps as space itself, the silent heavens, the vast and slow-pulsing cosmos…. Peaceful, and they let him alone.

‘Señor Adams? A thousand pardons, Don Clarencio, but….’

JC blinked, mazed and uncomprehending. Not that he had forgotten his incognito. But – an interruption by the staff? Here, where all were so perfectly trained? Here, where he had found peace?

‘Señor Adams? There is … a countryman of yours, a friend he tells us, who would not intrude but wonders if he might sit here and dine with you?’

JC looked slowly around the dining room, with its prosperous and elderly clients. His gaze fell upon a man of his generation. Warm, dark, liquid eyes met his from across the room, and his contemporary, his countryman, smiled that slow, passing sweet smile that gleamed always upon that bronze countenance crowned by dark tresses. Not even realizing it, JC nodded, solemnly, assenting to the intrusion.

His friend, his unexpected, miraculous apparition of a friend, slid quietly into the seat across from him, the servers quickly bringing his plate and his glass and vanishing on cat-like feet to give the men their privacy. JC’s dining companion smiled gratefully at the waiters as they dissolved, dislimned like a dream vanishing: ‘Gracias, mi pariente,’ he said, and a server murmured softly, ‘Don Antonio,’ and another ghosted a bow with a quiet, ‘Señor Donetti.’

And there they were, facing each other over dinner, ‘Clarence Adams’ and ‘Tony Donetti,’ two norteamericano tourists in the heart of Chihuahua: and each read in the other’s face a pain that had spurred him to revisit this place and a quiet delight in having found the only friend each had who might understand.

‘Hi, C,’ Howie said quietly.

‘Hey, D,’ JC whispered. ‘I hadn’t thought there was anyone I could want to see, be glad to see, just now. And here you are.’ And he blushed, knowing that what he had said had but the faintest relation to what he’d meant, and how he’d wanted to say it.

But Howie understood, as he always did. ‘I feel exactly the same.’

Three hours later, they sat quietly – as quietly as the comfortable silence that had blanketed their lengthy, formal dinner – on JC’s balcony, drinking brandy, D gazing up at the fatal, damnable stars and C looking resolutely into the void of the nighttime canyon.

‘So,’ JC said.

‘Racing. I’m a speedboat widow.’

‘You could –.’

‘My suegra would pitch a fit. You know Jane.’

‘Still, though.’

‘Caution. If nothing else, there’s Aaron to protect from any backlash.’

‘Closets suck.’

‘Verdad. Even so. James … I doubt the new Russians think any better of what the Soviets called “golden boys” than the old Soviets did. And James’s dreams … well.’

‘I know.’

‘Josh.’

‘I can hardly bear it, D.’

‘I know.’

‘And Ha- um, Nick….’

‘We agreed this was the way to handle it. Discretion, still. For a while, yet. It’s not the great adventure, the final frontier, the dream that was born in Camelot, but it matters to him. And even that – it’s not the “messing about with boats.”’

JC smiled, briefly. He and D connected on some very deep levels. Lance – no, not Lance, not the star of stage and screen, the mogul-astronaut: no: James, the real and precious man behind the role, his James – James would have caught the Wind in the Willows reference. In all honesty, so would Joe have done. But the rest? No, he and Howie had a special connection.

‘It’s not the racing. It’s not the fans or Backstreet or our future in the industry anymore. It’s … discretion, for real reasons, for causes more important than any of that. It’s about protecting AC, a little, but mainly it’s about my Foundation, and his, and the good we do that would be besmirched.’

JC nodded, slowly. His eyes filled: he and Lance did their part to give back to the world, they did, but they didn’t have the excuses – no: be fair: reasons – that D and Hamhock did for not coming out. Set aside the space trip. Call it ‘even’ on the professional considerations, which had become more and more unimportant to Josh and James as they clearly had to D and Nicky. A backlash could, true, affect CFTC, and the Angel Ball, but when he and James did good by stealth, they mostly did so in supporting AIDS charities and resources for gay and lesbian teens and all the desperately needy charities of their community. Support that could only be enhanced if they would but take a stand.

He stifled a sob, and suddenly he was in D’s strong and gentle arms, so superficially different and so fundamentally like his James’s sweet, tender, steel-muscled embrace.

‘Josh. It’s okay. Or it will be. We both came here wounded, trying to recapture the missing halves of ourselves, at least in memory. But we will be whole again, and healed. We will. You have to believe that.’

And D kissed him.

Gently.

Tenderly.

Fraternally.

On the forehead.

In that instant, a surge of feeling washed through Josh. He had forgotten, he had not realized, how he missed, hungered, thirsted, bled for a simple touch. For so long, he and James had been all in all for and to one another. The old days of innocent snuggling between all of them had, naturally, unthinkingly, faded away when he and James had found their other halves in one another; and with James gone, he had been unbearably, if unwittingly, deprived of the simple tactile comforts for too long.

His blued-steel eyes met and locked with the peat-stream pools of limpidity that were D’s eyes. And in that moment, the world shifted. Wordlessly, each saw the other in full. Each saw a choice, a possibility; and each saw a principle and an honor that rendered that choice long since made, that possibility forever foreclosed. If we weren’t who we are, D’s tender gaze conveyed. If they weren’t who they are, JC replied, his eyes nakedly honest.

They smiled: the two sweetest smiles all who knew them knew of and would ever know, and hugged each other tightly, their brown locks mingling. ‘Thank you,’ each breathed at the same time.

And D smiled, remembering that breathy quality when it sounded in Nicky’s voice, and feeling in Josh’s chaste embrace a pure memory of Nick’s arms and solidity. And C grinned, shyly, relishing the way in which Howie’s openness and raw honesty and fundamental sweetness gave him back a sense of what he had with his James, the way in which Howie’s level gaze and solid sense recalled to him the tenderness and iron character of the man he loved and would never betray.

And for them both, a chasm closed, a wound re-knit, a sundering came once more together, and their blindness was healed and their sight restored: even there, in a place named Divisadero.

END