…know that in my eyes you see we
and on my journey I walk with you
hand in hand mind in mind
and feel your smile cross my face
and God smiles too at me
at we
Scott, May 1990 Journal Entry
Only in retrospect can I now begin to grasp the power and absolute precision of the information conveyed in such profusion through Dee in the course of this loaded session celebrating family. Wasting no time, Scott started right in on a note of kind reassurance for his brother, requesting twice that I give him “a big hug,” before promptly turning his attention to Laura, his creative partner and muse, with a message of playful encouragement to persevere with the completion of the play they’d co-authored. At the heart of each message lay a personalized touch tailored to the inner needs of the hearer.
In rapid succession, the session’s strong flow then led Dee to focus directly upon my two most significant relationships prior to Scott: the first (Rob) now on the other side, and the second (Jeff) not. Despite its miraculous quality the session was proving invaluable in its clarity, helping to tie together the numberless loose ends that make up our lives. And now, as Dee’s relentless attention shifted to our planned pilgrimage into the deep South to share time with Scott’s beloved “Mississippi family,” the experience suddenly shifted in depth and dimension. I felt that suddenly the issue at hand had become Scott’s needs and unfulfilled desires rather than our own, and was reminded in vivid terms that an ongoing partnership of the soul must be a “two-way street.”
Into the session, outside of any sequence, Dee asked “Would you have any reason to be going into Louisiana?” A chill ran through me as I answered affirmatively. “Funny you should say that!,” I replied. “I actually have a trip planned with Scott’s brother Bruce and his friend Laura, the people you mentioned earlier, to New Orleans at the end of June. We’re going to meet up with some of Scott’s friends there and then head back with them to spend a few days in Mississippi, where Scott used to live.” “O.K. then,” she said. “That’s what he’s talking about. I see you going there and having a good time.” Suddenly cackling with glee, she said “Scott wants to know if he can go too. That’s so funny! Sure, you can go.”
“Tell me,” she inquired, “are you going up for some kind of spiritual thing?” I explained that in a sense we were. “This is a trip that Scott and I had planned to take before he died. He was so excited about it; he’d been wanting to take me out there for years. We had tickets to fly to New Orleans on Sunday the 9th and were going to head out from there, but Scott died on the first. So we never made it.” I paused, pained by the memory. I now understood more fully how badly Scott had wanted to share with me his history, his precious friends, the places that had been so important to his growth. Wrapped up in the details and demands of life as usual, though, I just hadn’t listened. The best I could do now, it seemed, was carry on with the journey.
“See,” I continued, “when Scott was a senior in high school his parents moved from Florida to Mississippi because his Dad had recently converted to fundamentalist Christianity in a big way, and the family followed him out there as he moved to study at a seminary there. Although Scott hated the idea of the move and had a rough time with it, he eventually found a new family there, a really great group of people that took him in as their own and loved him. It was an important time in his life, a very creative period for him. And these folks were kind of his lifeline.”
Scott had often spoken nostalgically of the wild days and nights he had spent living communally with the gang, writing poetry, drinking and drugging to excess, and goading each other into creativity. Over the years many of the group had moved in and out of a huge, rambling old home almost hidden by trees at the deserted end of Leake Street in the small town of Clinton, Mississippi. The rambling home, lined by a spacious front porch, sat quietly crumbling, overlooking an expansive field now itself wildly overgrown. “safe house” graciously offering its old and solid walls, floors, and windows for the communal sharings of a mercurial and extremely talented group of young people.
I never heard the place spoken of but as a story, a constant circus of creativity, connections, comings, goings, and connections; onging, despair, and huge dreamsshared experience and the youthful pursuit of altered states, romantic intrigue and occasional conflict. They all referred to the place, now vacant and left abandoned to decay, as “Leake Street.” On a level more deep and true, I suppose, the term evoked for each of them a state of mind, a way of life now forever behind them but always to be fondly remembered.
In one of Scott’s journal entries dated February 1982, written only days after his move from Leake Street to take an apartment, he expressed deep longing for the life he’d left behind: “Of course, I regret leaving. I realize now that living at Leake Street gives (gave) me life… Now I don’t seem to have that. I will go back. I will. I must. Life at Leake Street has its ups and downs, but they are leading somewhere. I don’t know exactly where, but somewhere…I realize now that no matter how much sleep I lost at Leake Street, how manic my depression was, how complicated relationships seemed, life is lived at Leake Street. Lived with anticipation for what the next instant holds. People with the fire of life in their eyes. Dreams thrive at Leake Street. Dreamers thrive at Leake Street. I thrive at Leake Street.” Yet he had nevertheless moved on, taking his bittersweet dreams with him. And now we were about to return.
How can I begin to describe the cast of characters making up Scott’s Mississippi “family?” I first met Scott’s “soul sister,” Beth Wilson, during her visit to Miami a couple of years before, and felt a strong and immediate bond. She was easy to love, kind, spiritual, and equipped with a keen appreciation of life’s absurdity, but I first loved her because she had loved Scott so well. Though their paths had led them in different directions they’d kept in close touch over the years, and always carried with them the rich history of the Mississippi years, culminating in the Leake Street experience.
Drawn together from the very beginning by a shared sense of playfulness and random creativity, the younger Scott found in her a strong woman and devoted friend. In a poem penned during the slow days of a Leake Street summer, Scott had written in celebration Praise the Lord for Beth/ A cosmic sis to the max/ I mean really groovy.
Though I hadn’t yet made it out to Mississippi, I met some of the other key players when they’d driven the distance down to Miami for the memorial gathering. The connection between us was immediate; we recognized in one another a family of the heart bound by our common adoration of Scott. I felt a deep gratitude to these people, who had provided Scott safe harbor during his years in forced exile and shared with him great lessons of friendship and love. I shuddered to think of the young Scott suddenly displaced and new to Mississippi, an obviously gay youth of deep sensitivity, and how difficult it must have sometimes been for him. They, on the other hand, acknowledged and appreciated me for the quality of love we had shared and the and care I had shown him in his last years.
Bill Cranford, a member of the group who’d perhaps been Scott’s closest male friend, confided in me that for whatever reason he’d been somewhat skeptical that his friend had truly found in Miami the partner and soul mate of which he sang. “But now, I have to say,” he told me, looking into my eyes and smiling, “I can tell right away just by looking at you that you were the perfect man for Scott. The two of you definitely belonged together.” I was honored, yet knew he was right. If I had enriched the life of the man I’d so loved, I was blessed beyond measure.
Bill paused, drifting away just for a moment as he looked back into his memory, then spoke softly as he drew me in for a tight hug. “Yeah,” he said gently, “he found you, all right.” When I then tried to express to Beth how much I’d loved Scott, how I would frequently call him at home in the afternoon just to hear the sound of his voice, she smiled and said in her rich Southern accent “Now see, Scott found just what he wanted. He would have never admitted that he wanted a lover who’d call him up just to hear the sound of his voice, but that was exactly what he wanted. He always dreamed of a romance like that.” To dare dream of the unreachable was to indeed court heartbreak, but Scott’s soul had nevertheless called him forward. And even in my despair I found deep comfort in the knowledge that together we had created the wondrous sanctuary of his dreams.
Then there was John Hicks, a gentle traveling poet/ musician/ seeker following his own path through life. He and Scott continued to correspond over the years, pulling one another ever forward in hot pursuit of the very edge of creativity. The heart of their letters back and forth, despite the occasional punctuation of despairing sighs and helpless railings against the existential angst too cowardly to show its face, spoke most truly of words, their joyfulness, slippery quality, and ultimate meaninglessness, and yet celebrated the limits of expression in poetry and literature and pen on paper. They challenged one another, with no assumptions sacred or safe, and helped one another grow.
Bill was accompanied on the trip to Miami by his then-wife Bonnie, another strong and playful woman always ready to live life with gusto. Later, in Mississippi, I finally met Bob Hudson, who had also played an important role. I’d heard much of him, for Scott’s feelings of deep friendship for him years before had become interwoven with romantic love, even though his affections were unlikely to be returned by this gentle man who loved women. Bob’s former wife, Marnie, whom I also met there, was the last key player in the cast. She was to play a special role. Though I did not realize it at the time of my arrival in Mississippi, Scott had spoken of her through Dee.
“Now,” I explained to Dee, “I plan to follow through on the trip with Bruce and Laura.” This trip was indeed all about family traveling to meet family, and I awaited the experience with anticipation. In the wake of Scott’s passing it felt important to honor his memory by doing what I could to keep his family intact, and to help shoulder the burden carried by those most shattered by his loss. Poor Bruce, a good man, a really fine person, had been torn apart by the death of his older brother, his rock. We were both lost. During a visit to my home only a few days after the death, a look of anguish on his face and his voice breaking as he moved forward to hug me, he’d said heartbreakingly “I was just looking at the house, and wondering whether I would ever be coming back here.” That broke my heart. I pulled him to me and hugged him hard, telling him “You dummy! Don’t even say that! Of course you’ll be coming here, and you will always be welcome here.”
Though I could never replace Scott’s key role in his younger brother’s life, or even try, I vowed to always be there for him as best I could. And Laura, an ebullient and creative soul, had lost her muse. Scott’s death had left impoverished a large number, but outside of his parents and sister we were probably the three most severe casualties of his loss. We had each lost something unique and precious, a tangible piece of our own souls. Consciously seeking to help gently point us all back in the direction of life, to share a new adventure together, I invited them to take with me the journey Scott and I had never been able to complete. Along the way a strong bond developed between Laura and Bruce, and they have since become good friends, important in each other’s lives. And, I can hear Scott saying, that’s exactly as it should be.
The story was about to unfold.
To: Chapter 27
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