I'm in a casual, student-y restaurant in August: which means it's fairly empty. The big, friendly black cook looks at me inquiringly – I'll stick with this cider (yes, it's fruit-flavored, shut up you) and won't have dinner for another half hour or so.
I'm finally working on that proposal for the shorter of the AIDS books, the one on the politics-of-the-psychology-of. Glad I noticed that Routledge did indeed send me instructions, I've been dithering for two months about the format... this is of course, as usual with these things, simpler than I have made it.
***
I pull out a few documents, the CV, etc.; that folder also includes an ongoing journal, the one that is extremely intermittent, but typed into the computer. (This is in contrast to handwritten journals, which I love but don't write in often enough; and the handwritten and typed dream journals that I've kept since 2009.)
(As for dream journals: it's frustrating that I remember so few dreams in the past three years – medications and night aches and itches tend to wake me and pull me away from dreams roughly enough that I rarely remember them these days. Though I was thinking as I woke this morning: at least I know that I am dreaming. I'll have to trust to the unconscious to do the work it needs to do – which is probably easier without the 'help' of my admittedly congenitally arrogant, heavy-handed ego.)
After I correct the title of the journal to bring it up to today, I realize that its first entry, typed in on an old Mac SE, was written in August 1989... thirty years ago. I was thirty-two, two years diagnosed HIV+, living in Los Angeles....
I read the first entry:
***
August 10, 1989
Laura [Kuhn] called me to tell me she’d had a dream: she bumped into me in the street, I was radiant with health – I told her, I’m cured... it’s kind of a surprise that she would have the dream, and even more that she would tell me. She says such dreams are always prophetic for her.
This is at the same time as I’ve been reading Siegel’s book on healing... I feel for the first time as though I actually can do something, myself, about my skin, about illness, my digestion, and about, of course, my life–span...
A little later, as I dither around the house trying to avoid writing the grant for [Steve] Schulte, I’m listening to the Sondheim songs from Merrily about the past, the future, hope, etc... the same things Mary Jo [McConnell] and I sang in San Francisco at the cabarets: it’s our time... And once again I’m stuck in the same place: to hope or to give up? I can never decide. Frozen here, hesitating between being a strong, healthy person in control of my life on the one hand and, on the other, retreating, despairing...
I’m singing in a few days at Ted’s, and I don’t sound too bad; Ted said I sounded great last night, and he’s usually so difficult to please. It feels good to get back to something I really enjoy and can get excited about. The dream the other night, about the old, unused theater... can I recondition it?
***
Laura is now head of the Cage Foundation, having worked as his last assistant.
Steve Schulte had a stroke and couldn't bear for people to see him with his face slack and out of control – he was always such a beautiful man! I thought he was still quite beautiful after the stroke, but he has avoided the public eye for years.
Mary Jo is still performing, and has been planning a move with her husband John from Brooklyn back to San Francisco.
Ted has been dead since the early 90s; I wrote about our last performance for him, when he was dying, in an article a few years ago.
Was that dream theater ever reconditioned? Could I go into it now?....
***
I am, of course, still here, in August 2019.... in a café, with young people laughing at the next table.
Trying to collect my thoughts....