Playing tourist offers clear view of ourselves
To quote a fellow (but fictional) San Francisco peace officer, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
Amanda and Ann visited. Amanda’s one of the few people on the planet who know what I was like before I met my husband, Brian.
She knew me as a single man. We met at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, volunteer night, back in 1982. The first few months we knew each other, she thought of me as a sweater queen, and I thought of her as overly serious with sensible shoes.
But we went to David Norrie’s holiday party and happened to sit together at his kitchen table. David had just been diagnosed with AIDS. We didn’t know that he would pass away within a month. It was as if he had bequeathed us to each other.
Amanda was the kind of woman I could spend the night with on Fire
Island waiting for the Harmonic Convergence. We drove to Quebec on a dare. We worked on the first National AIDS Hotline together. We patrolled Greenwich Village as Pink Panthers.
She is Jewish and Italian, and when Brian and I adopted our sons, she was the first person we invited to the baptism. Not quite as a fairy godmother, but more like a Jewish/Wiccan godmother. Someone who would always be able to put questions of faith into perspective.
Forty-two years is a long time to know anyone.
Her mother had died of cancer the year before I met her, so when I was diagnosed this year, I had to tell her right after my own family. “It’s long past time that I visited,” she responded.
This part might not make any sense, but I wanted her to think I hadn’t changed much. That despite the pesky business with my kidney, I was still the same boy she knew.
The immunotherapy is doing its job. I’m exhausted for a week afterward, but after that I feel pretty good. I don’t cough much. The rib feels better. The damn thing on my kidney refuses to give up, but I won’t, either. When we discussed the lesions on my hip, the oncology nurse said, “The architecture of your body is forever changed. Only you know what you can and cannot do.”
Amanda is a poet and
Ann is an artist, so of course they wanted to go to the American Bookbinders Museum and Chez Panisse. Amanda wanted to visit City Lights bookstore, and so we walked around North Beach. Ann worked as a scene painter for television shows and theater in the Big Apple, so what she most wanted to see was Coit Tower and its murals.
We drove up Telegraph Hill on a Sunday morning to Coit Tower, the 210-foot concrete structure in Pioneer Park. It was built in 1932-33, financed mostly by the estate of Lillian Hitchcock Coit, a socialite who loved chasing firetrucks. Contrary to urban myth, it was not designed to look like a firehose nozzle.
As we walked through the doors, a guide announced: “The elevator is out. The only way to the top is by way of the stairs. Thirteen stories.”
The Kevin whom Amanda knew in 1982 could run up to the crown of the Statue of Liberty. With a sigh, I purchased four tickets and walked to the bottom of the winding stairwell.
The Kevin who had always taken the elevator to the top of Coit Tower discovered the murals along the staircase walls. The largest, by Lucien Labaudt, was a portrait of the streets of San Francisco in the 1930s, but there were also works by female artists of the period, Edith Hamlin and Jane Berlandina. The murals stop at the third floor, and yet we pressed on, spiraling up the stairs.
By the time we got to the 10th floor, my hip ached, and I gasped for breath. We paused, asked ourselves why the murals did not go all the way to the top, and pressed on. Fifteen minutes later we reached the best view possible of the San Francisco Bay Area. Took me a minute to recover, and then I turned. The sun burned brightly over Frank, making the Golden Gate look truly golden.
No, I’m not the Kevin of my youth, for whom this trip to the top would present no problem. Now I am Kevin the survivor, and there is a victory in climbing 210 feet. Had the elevator not been broken I would not have seen the inner murals. I would not have known “what I can and cannot do.”
Like Dirty Harry, this man knows his limitations, and it is not a 13story mountain.
Kevin Fisher-Paulson’s book, “Secrets of the Blue Bungalow” (Fearless Books, $25), is available at fearless books.com and area bookstores. He will speak on Sunday, Oct. 29, at 9:30 a.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley (https:// uucb.org).