...and yes I do believe that everything that has happened in the past and everything that has lead to this moment and all of the relationships and all of the encounters have prepared us for this and the unity that we feel for one another and the glowing beauty of our connection…
Scott, March 1990 Journal Entry
Scott had promised to “get down to family,” and eagerly did just that throughout the course of the reading. A few minutes after announcing Rob’s visit, Dee asked out of the blue “Did you ever meet anybody of a Danish descent, maybe Finland or a Dane?” Although her words confounded me for a moment, an insight suddenly came to mind. “Well, one of my lovers, his last name was Danese.” I recalled Jeff Danese, the first man I had ever loved. Of Italian-American ancestry, his surname signified in Italian either “Danish” or “the Dane,” depending on context.
“Oh, is that what it is,” Dee said. “What happened to him?,” she then asked, assuming that he too was joining us in spirit. I explained to her that unlike Scott and Rob, Jeff was still here and very much with us, living in Seattle, and that we keep in touch. “Washington State, that’s right,” she exclaimed excitedly. “He’s the one they’re asking about. How is he?” “He’s great,” I responded, filled with wonder at her insight. “You know, Dee, in this session you’ve just named the three people that were my lovers.” Meanwhile, I was thinking to myself with some bemusement “What is this, some kind of romantic ‘This is Your Life!’ from the hereafter?”
Gainesville, FL 1981
“Do you plan on seeing him?,” Dee asked. “I don’t have any firm plans, but I was thinking of maybe traveling out there,” I replied. “I’ve been in touch with him pretty often, you know, through e-mail every now and then and some great conversations over the phone.” “Well they’re happy about that. They’re telling you to see him,” she dictated in no uncertain terms. “He’s quite different than he was. He’s very sincere.”
“You really should go out and see him.” I was to later follow through on her suggestion, and see my life changed as a result.
Jeff and I had experienced a long journey together, both emotionally and geographically, and it was not yet over. As the first man I ever loved and my fellow adventurer in life for more than three years thereafter, we had taught and learned many lessons from one another. We’d met in a bar in Gainesville, Florida during our college years, he a drifting second-year student and me in my final year of law school, and started right up with a genuine conversation. When I told him within the first few minutes that “I don’t think you’re being honest with me,” on some point of discussion now long since forgotten, he was both outraged and intrigued. Neither of us could have known on that night that a dance of love, pain, and growth had begun that would last for years.
An enduring friendship is the greatest of gifts. With Jeff and Alan, 2004
From the very beginning, I sensed a quality in Jeff that drew me toward him. He was young and handsome, extremely aware, and the first man I’d met who found real expression in poetry. Since we lived only a short walk apart under the grand and leafy canopy of the city’s tree-lined student ghetto, it was easy to spend time. Call it romance if you will, but the moments we shared seemed somehow slow and sweet, the sunlight upon us golden. Through that miraculous process of growth known as romantic love, in which we make a gift of ourselves and receive back in return ourselves, transformed, we awakened in one another unknown feelings and a stirring sense of new beginnings.
In my memory, a simple and incandescent moment is forever frozen in time. I am living in Gainesville, much younger and more innocent than today, taking a moment to watch Jeff leave my tiny bungalow home after a short visit. He has just stepped out into the blinding Florida sunlight, his yellow hair shining like gold, wearing flip-flops, shorts, and a T-shirt slightly damp with sweet summer sweat. As the porch door slams shut behind him he quickly glances back my way, a playful smile on his face. Just clowning, clasping his hands together and raising his arms to his forehead in imitation of Annie Lennox on the cover of the Eurythmics album popular at the time, an awareness suddenly and intensely washes over me that “I love him.” In that moment, I understand for the first time that I deeply treasure and need another man in my life as a partner. A door long locked hard and fast within me has now come open, and I know that life will never again be exactly the same.
With love, I experienced a glorious epiphany. Only as we celebrated the simple pleasures of life together in the months that followed did I begin to realize how deeply lonely I had been. Gay role models for successful relationships are even now hard to find, and seemed nonexistent at the time, at least in the college town of Gainesville. Growing up I had always known that I was somehow very “different” from everyone around me, even those closest to me, and could not imagine any possibility of ever really fitting in. Though I greatly enjoyed life, I’d resigned myself to the idea of experiencing its pleasures safe behind a “cover” of isolation, without a special partner or anyone to really love. I’d been able to see no other choices that might ever be open to me.
But suddenly my world had been shifted on its axis.
It’s often the simplest, most personal moments that remain the most powerful and persistent in one’s memory: I am sitting in my car waiting at a certain red light, just as I have many times before, but today everything is different. Life is somehow much more grand, for hope has quietly begun to abandon her sad distance and slip in close beside me. The skies above seem higher and more alive with blue, the towering clouds floating their quiet way a dazzling celebration. I’ve sat exactly here many times before, but suddenly now see the world around me as shimmering with possibilities. Only in the power of this new experience do I realize how many doors I have shut tight behind me in desperate self-protection, or unknowingly allowed to be closed upon me, or been afraid to even approach. I am no longer alone, and in the rich promise of the sharing can nearly taste the abundance of tantalizing opportunities for exploration and shared adventure.
As I enthusiastically gave my heart to Jeff without reservation, a tension began to emerge in the relationship that repeated itself as a theme throughout the coming years. Despite the wealth of experiences we came to share as time passed he would sometimes grow distant, abruptly pull back, or treat me shabbily. Though I longed to hear the words, he steadfastly refused to tell me he loved me because “people use those words too loosely.” My longing and desire were complete, but as time passed ecstasy became deeply tinged with desperation. Nevertheless, the depth of my longing left me no apparent choice but to plunge ahead with the experience, to learn the lessons that awaited me.
In retrospect, Jeff was not at that time emotionally able to return my love. Intoxicated by his beauty, his poetry, and his potential, I was blind to the severity of the inner struggle that raged within him. A young man of deep sensitivity, leaning toward love and desperately wanting to please, he had been badly damaged by his experience of growing up gay and resigned himself to a life in emotional exile. Seeing no place set for him at the table of the banquet of life, he had quietly wandered away broken-hearted. During the worst moments, he had seriously pondered the merits of suicide. Though he had flirted with the idea of seeking refuge in the priesthood, like many other gay Catholics, he was ultimately unable to reconcile his feelings for the church that he both adored and loathed. Now, for lack of any other apparent option, he was going through the motions of academia, half-heartedly seeking his footing. I could not then see that he had already given up.
Yet there was a beauty in him, a gentleness in his soul and a longing for elsewhere that thrilled my soul. Relentlessly, following my heart, I sought to open with love and sheer force of will the gifts I sensed within him. Over the course of time he responded, at his own pace, even as he traveled from one place to the next in pursuit of the peace that eluded him. At the end of our first summer together came the first of many separations, as he moved to Bonn, Germany to live as an exchange student for a year. Though I grieved his departure, the space now between us left room for new possibilities in the relationship. Beginning with the first letter, he expressed more freely than ever before the love he had come to recognize. During the months of his absence the chain of communication between us was never broken. A letter was always on its way in either direction.
Though I had always been deeply rooted in the places I lived, never really fascinated by the promise of travel, Jeff pulled me along by the sheer force of his wanderlust. Where he was I wanted to be also, and so joined him when I was able for some of his free-time travels throughout Europe. Although along the course of those journeys we collected precious pearls of shared experience at unexpected moments and in out-of-the way places, and in our youthful freedom lived out many timeless “days of wine and roses,” my instincts began to whisper that something was not quite right.
As time passed that whisper grew louder, more cutting and insistent, for it was becoming increasingly clear that my free-footed partner valued his independence and right to solitude far more than the ideals of “togetherness” I held as precious. It seemed that no matter where Jeff traveled, and how far I wandered to accompany him, he was never really there by the time I arrived. He was present in body, but his mind and heart had often gone on before. And I rarely had any idea where.
Upon Jeff’s return home from Europe we never again lived at the same time in the same city, though the relationship continued. By the time he returned to Gainesville I had moved on to Tallahassee for my first job after law school, serving as a law clerk to Justice James C. Adkins of the Florida Supreme Court. The following year Jeff’s restlessness gave birth to a new thirst to experience Asia, and he informed me of his plans to move to Taipei, Taiwan for a year to study Chinese at the Mandarin Training Institute. He was once again intent on leaving the familiar far behind and setting his hopeful sights on the distant and exotic, his heart thirsty to find at last that elusive something he had sought out so long yet could not name.
By that time I’d become somewhat resigned to Jeff’s dreamy wanderlust, simply shrugging my shoulders and recognizing “that’s just him.” Even still, few destinations seemed more foreign or otherworldly than the Far East, and this place just a name to me seemed God knows how many oceans and how many endless miles away. It would be scarcely possible to travel further yet stay on the planet, it seemed. Perhaps if I’d given more thought to the real extent of the distances involved in this journey, geographic and cultural and personal and otherwise, I might have begun to understand more clearly the intensity of his desperation to put as much space as possible between himself and his life. In his “life” he’d somehow been accidentally cast as the key player, placed by right in the game’s center, armed by the hope always held close to his chest and free to call the shots accordingly.
Something deeper within him just didn’t buy it, and he’d felt more a distant stranger to this game set up according to rules he had never understood. The distance left him numb, but in no way dulled the cutting pain. From his perspective he’d seen no obvious choice but to seek salvation somewhere else, probably the further away the better. A scant basis for real hope, perhaps, but the only one he could then imagine. This was the boy inside the man to whom I gave my heart, and I loved them both.
And I was to pay the price.
When the time came Jeff once again flew far off into the blue and proceeded to set down tentative roots in a bizarre new world, diligently studying the language and culture, collecting a global variety of fellow-traveler friends, and generally indulging freely in the mystery of Jeff being, uncramped by the history he’d never really chosen and on the loose in a very foreign land. At the end of his scheduled one-year stay, he planned to move on to travel the “wild worlds” of Southeast Asia, perhaps parts of India and probably Africa, and God knows where else. A few weeks beforehand, he called and seductively implored me to join him. I had not yet committed to any “real jobs” in the law after finishing my clerkship, and Jeff’s romantic siren call was difficult to resist. “Come on,” he urged, “I hate to think of you just sitting there shuffling paper when you’re still so young. Let’s go do the world!” After hanging up the phone, mind racing and somewhat breathless, I dared ask myself “Could I really do that?” His words and the promise of rare opportunity for exotic adventure resonating in my mind, I leaned back in my chair, smiled, and answered simply “yes!” And I began to make plans accordingly.
So when the time finally arrived I had made the seemingly endless flight to Taiwan, tearfully seen to the plane in Atlanta by Rob, then proceeding onward through Seattle and Tokyo. At that long journey’s end, I was met with a weak hug and a reception from Jeff that never felt quite right. In the chilly and surreal setting of Taipei in February, fireworks exploding in the night in celebration of the Chinese New Year and dishes full of fruit and paper money set out for the spirits of departed ancestors on tables lining the sidewalks, I found myself unexpectedly alone. Severely hung over with jet lag after crossing the globe, lost in culture shock, I seemed an imposition to Jeff. Within a short time, he curtly dropped the bombshell that he had fallen in love with another man.
Years later we realized that was not the case, but that Jeff had used each of us against the other to find the freedom he craved. In that strange city he became deeply withdrawn in his own mind, as if working out some inner puzzle, and wounded me time and again with a sense of distance and hostility. Though I was broken-hearted, my dreams of romance laying splintered in shards around me, it was clear that this world journey would have to be made on my own. After a couple of months in Taipei, during which I temporarily obtained a comfortable living teaching English, we split up to take the separate journeys that awaited us. Neither knowing nor particularly caring where I was heading, I flew to Bangkok to begin traveling overland south through Thailand, proceeding into Malaysia, Singapore, and Bali. Simply to avoid crossing paths, Jeff began his travels in the Philippines. Though a big part of me felt like returning home with my tail between my legs, I wouldn’t give him the pleasure. Prior to parting we made tentative plans to meet up again in Bangkok in June, since we both planned to visit Africa to see a mutual friend living in the depths of Zambia and preferred not to tackle that difficult travel alone.
The months that followed are a story unto themselves. In a sense the person I had been, tied up so intimately with my romantic hopes and aspirations for Jeff, was now forever gone. As I wandered solo through Southeast Asia and Indonesia, meeting fellow travelers and locals along the way, many special connections were made. Feeling vulnerable and exposed in that procession of foreign lands and cultures, traveling without the safety net of a constant companion, I experienced difficult and lonely times but also found that spiritual support and assistance were always made available precisely as most needed. Stripped of familiar surroundings and my cultural assumptions laid bare, I grew to understand myself in a new way. Surprisingly, I liked what I saw. In those months, I learned great lessons that I carry with me still.
By the time we reconnoitered in Bangkok according to plan, I had grown quite a bit. So had Jeff. Though his cruel behavior in Taipei had left me deeply angry and I’d spent large amounts of free time in exquisite revenge fantasy, I found a new man before me. He had spent time in a Buddhist retreat working on meditation practices, he told me, and arrived at a new and greatly healing perspective on his behavior in Taipei. While on a noisy bus in Bangkok, I vented my anger toward him and he apologized. Though our romantic relationship was definitely over, we’d reached a comfortable truce and could once again begin to enjoy each other’s company. So we headed together to Africa, and then finally to Europe.
It is there that a peaceful image of Jeff is forever frozen in mind. It’s a quiet Sunday afternoon in Germany, and we’ve been up almost all the night before. After an endless and magical evening and a morning spent wandering the museums, we are exhausted and trying to get back “home,” miles away. We’ve made it to a deserted suburban train station, but are unsure whether any trains will be going our way that day. In that moment of uncertainty, that quiet gentle moment, clouds above the only motion, we both sprawl out along the two sides of a bench atop the train platform. Glancing over at Jeff within a few minutes, I see that he’s drifted into sleep. I am filled with a deep tenderness for this man, my fellow traveler. It’s been a long journey, I think to myself. We may not know where we’re going, but at least we have each other. Despite it all, we’re going there together.
In the years that followed our friendship continued as we moved to different parts of the country and each found new love. Jeff moved to Washington State to continue his education, finally finding his heart in the study of therapy and counseling. Among other projects, he helped facilitate a nationwide telephone support group for men feeling isolated and frightened by an addiction to sex in the age of AIDS. His thirst for spiritual knowledge never quenched, he continued to explore Buddhism and other disciplines new to him along the way. As I watched with pride, Jeff finally moved to Seattle to complete his education, and found true love.
We’d kept in touch through correspondence and over the phone, sharing the great news and the horrible. Now, later in the second session with Dee, she was repeating herself as if for emphasis as she prepared to close. “About this man in Washington. You are going up there to see him. It’s almost as though he [Jeff] is secretly waiting for you to say this. He’s not brought it up, but he does think about it. He’s very busy but he’d have time for you. Scott says he’s a good person. He’s changed now.”
A living seed had once again been planted. I had never been to Seattle and very much liked the idea of seeing both Jeff and the city, so I made arrangements to go at the end of the next month as part of a summer vacation. Events were unfolding according to plan. Though I had no way of understanding Dee’s words as she spoke, unanchored as they were to physical geography or a calendar, Scott promised to meet me there. “He said he’s coming back, but to look for him around 10 o’clock in the evening,” she said. “That’s the one thing I don’t understand, why they choose certain hours to come. It’s almost like it has something to do with our atmosphere, when they can penetrate it.”
Though I wasn’t consciously searching for Scott during my time in Seattle he quickly found me anyway, making his involvement known clearly and often. And, precisely as Dee had foreseen, he did indeed drop in to join us one evening, in an encounter that even in the context of this book can only be called extraordinary. At just around 10 o’clock in the evening. We’ll return to that story, all in good time.
Before that trip was to be made, though, and its richness of experience to unfold, another journey of the spirit previously planned was to be taken first. Bruce, Laura and I were bound for Mississippi, for a family visit of sorts.
In living honor of Scott’s memory, and also for fun, we were to embark shortly for the far-away and somewhat mysterious realm of Mississippi, signifying a time and place that had been critical to Scott’s growth and history and remained forever close to his soul. At journey’s end our part of the family would join together with the Mississippi kin we knew only slightly, sharing a good time and celebrating the sole bond that had drawn us together: our deep love for Scott and his for each of us. Our only connecting link, perhaps, but one bestowed and secured by grace, immeasurably stronger and somehow more flexible and alive than anything ever conceived by or created at the hand of man.
We were on our way, and amidst such a bounty of love Scott was not about to miss out on the action.
To: http://deathisanimpostor.com/2008/12/10/1-a-pilgrimage…to-mississippi/
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