Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [72]
So much for coming out. His father put his arms around him and said, “It’ll be okay, son.” Wally was eighteen or so then, and his openness (as well as the lack of parental thunder) led the way for three of his siblings.
(I wish I’d known Wally’s father. In photographs, he shares the same twin white forks in his beard that Wally sported, a dashing blaze that would always motivate Wally to shave off whatever facial hair he grew. At a family reunion once in a legion hall decked in streamers and balloons, where lots of Wally Senior’s brothers and sisters had gathered, the old relatives kept staring at Wally. He’d grown out his beard and curled his hair, and every now and then an old man or woman would walk up to us, trembling, as if unsure whether to weep or be glad of the likeness.)
Jim had settled in Boston, moving from the suburbs into the city, as Wally had before him, in search of gay life and a wider world. He studied drawing and painting and graphic arts, and worked as a waiter in a large hotel. Between them a genuine fondness coexisted with a certain level of competition. Their pleasure in seeing one another—which was real—would give way, in a while, to a certain kind of exasperation. Wally viewed Jim as something of a know-it-all, so sure of the rightness of his own opinions as to be sometimes unbearable; I think Jim probably saw Wally as too passive, too easily led, though I find it hard to be certain what he felt or thought, finally, since he always seemed a bit of a cipher—not quite available to be known. I think they were closer before I came into Wally’s life; we had, like many couples, a sense of completeness together, as we became involved with and satisfied with one another’s company. Wally liked who he was with me, and I am not so sure this was true of how he felt about himself with some of his old friends, or with his brother. His relationships changed as we came together, as our life together solidified.
Jim tested positive early, in 1985, during an experimental trial of the test. His health has remained good, and he’s maintained a high T-cell count, a condition he attributes to attitude, and a regime of meditation and visualization. He says, in fact, that he is no longer HIV-positive, that he’s gotten the virus out of his system. Once we went along with him, to see a healer visiting Boston; he was a Native American man from the Pacific Northwest, and he had made appointments for hands-on healing in the Brookline apartment of a woman who led a small group of psychic healers. They worked with pairs of small metal rods, L-shaped, with the smaller end of the rod held in each fist. Pointed at the subject, the rods would move when various questions were asked. “Does Wally have the HIV virus in his system?” The rods would open, to indicate yes. After the healing session—in which the handsome, raven-haired healer touched Wally, prayed over him, guided him into a kind of combat stance and encouraged him to find the warrior in himself—the rods were pointed at Wally again. They still opened to indicate the presence of the virus, but more weakly so. I want to believe, am willing to give, in fact, considerable credence to the possibility that