About Richard- About Mercy

About Richard- About Mercy



I need to admit that my heart did a little dance of joy when the news first broke. “Another hypocrite bites the dust”, I chortled (yes, chortled!).



Then I started to think about all the self-hate and guilt that the Rev. Haggard must have endured for years. I started to think about the collateral damage done to his wife and children. I thought about all the married men in my past that cheated on their wives, with me, and how fearful they were that our trysts would be discovered.



I thought of Richard, my first adult love.



I met Richard in 1966. We were living in the same converted motel. He was tall, with dark hair and darker brooding eyes. It was love. We had a confused, but loving and frequently interrupted relationship for ten years.



Dick wanted to be straight. It confused him that he loved me, loved having sex with me.



“I can’t do this. I’m not gay”. He said that to me the first time he told me he was leaving. We were living together in a Redondo Beach apartment, at the time. We had been sharing hearth, life, and bed for over a year. “I want to get married, have children, live normal.”



I let him leave; I had no choice. He left some of his things with me until he could get settled. He kept a key.



Six months later, I walked into the apartment after a rehearsal to find him in the kitchen making eggs.



“I missed you. I guess I love you.” He kissed me with the old fire. Christmas would be wonderful that year.



He told me about his time away. He’d met a girl named Donna at a bar and two days later moved in with her. It seemed fine, to him. It seemed normal. Still, he kept putting off collecting the rest of his things. He didn’t know why he did, but it hurt him (he said) to even think about it.



“And then this morning, I woke up and knew I wanted to be here. I packed everything in the car, told Donna it was over and came here. I was hoping you hadn’t moved. Before I opened the door, I looked through the window and saw your Buddhist altar was still in place, so I knew you were. I don’t know what I would have done, if you weren’t.”



We almost made two years. One night we were walking on the strand, laughing, talking, and enjoying the sight and sound of the ocean. Out of nowhere, it came.



“Faggots!”



The word was tossed as suddenly as a grenade. I happened to be looking at him when it exploded in our ears. The laughter in his eyes metamorphosed into panic, anger. Over his shoulder, I saw who had tossed the epitaph. He was a wannabe tough teenager amusing his two, three friends.



Before he could charge, I stepped around him so I was between him and the small crew.



“C’mon. It’s not worth it,” I said, my hands on his chest pushing him back, away. I could feel him trembling with rage. “C’mon, let’s go.” I kept pushing him, As I pushed him away, the group moved away, quickly. Maybe the look on his face was a warning to them.



He broke from me and ran. I watched as he ran in the general direction of our apartment. I followed him, not running, but at a faster pace than we had been walking. He reached the apartment a good ten minutes before I did. The door was open; I could see him packing. Tears of rage? shame? a waterfall on his cheeks.



“I love you, Dick”. I didn’t know what else to say.



“What the fuck does that matter. You’re queer, what we do is queer.” I can’t be queer; I can’t be a faggot. I just can’t.” He continued throwing things into a suitcase.



I sat watching him, my own unexpressed anger at those kids burning under my quiet, placid poise, choking any words I might have said to calm him, keep him.



I spoke, finally, as he closed the suitcase. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to keep the apartment. It’s too expensive for just me.” I scribbled the number of a friend on a scrap of paper and held out the scrap to him. .



“If you need me, she’ll always know how to reach me.”



“He took the scrap and turned away, suitcase in hand. When he reached the door of the bedroom, he paused, turned. His free arm started to rise, to reach out to me, and then dropped.



“I’m sorry, Ray. I can’t.” He was gone. A week later, I found an apartment in Lennox, a county strip between Inglewood and Hawthorne, not far from where we’d met. It was smaller; it was cheaper; it was affordable. I moved my stuff, and the stuff he’d left with me, and started life over.



Six months later, I got a letter, forwarded from the old address. He’d gone home to San Diego, re-connected with an old girl friend and had gotten married. There was no return address on the envelope.



Two years later, my friend Ruth called.



“Your friend, Dick called. He wanted to know where he could reach you. I gave him your phone number. Hope that was o.k.”



It was. It was a week before he called.



“Ray?’ The voice, anxious, timid, sounded in my waiting ear.



“Yes.”



“Can I come home?”



“Oh God yes.” I was. We were being given another chance.



He was there the next day. It was still there, that yearning, that need, that communion.



Something had changed, though. He’d had a son with his wife, but there was even a bigger change. He’d begun drinking. It had started, he said, a few months after his marriage. His wife was a good lady, a nice lady, but after that few months, he felt alone, cut off. If they had a baby, “he’d thought, it would be all right. He would have what he thought he wanted.



But it hadn’t helped. He continued drinking. He could only be drunk, with her. He began thinking of us.



He fought with himself for a while before he called. He wasn’t sure if I still wanted him, still loved him. What would he do if he couldn’t find me, or if I didn’t.



The coming back, for a while, and then leaving again, happened two more times. Once I came home and found a note: “I’m going to try to make it work with my wife”



I don’t know if she knew about me, but she must have been as co-dependent as I. She kept taking him back..



The last time he told me he was leaving, I sat him down.



“This is it, Richard. I love you, but I can’t do this any more. Take everything and don’t come back.



He didn‘t. A long time after, remembering him, I wrote the following poem.





<i>I did not weep the day you left;

There was no time for tears.

I turned the mattress on our bed

Before it’s time was near.



I scrubbed your footprints from the floor,

Your touch from every wall;

I cleaned the bathroom drains of hair

And scoured the shower stall.



I swept your shadow from every space;

I worked at it till dawn.

Then I became as a willow tree,

For then you were truly gone.</i>



Much later, I gave it the title it now bears: Divorce.



I never saw or heard from Richard, again. Now and then I think about him and wonder if he ever made peace with who he was, or if ?,… but suddenly I understand why the movie “Brokeback Mountain touched me so deeply. Now I understand the feeling of mercy with which I’m filled for the Rev. Haggard.



What damage the need to deny self, to lie, to cheat, and to hide whom you are, even from yourself, inflicts on gay people, on all people who are discouraged to be the best of who we are and coerced into following the limited dreams offered by the “normal.”



May mercy, may peace, be gifted to all, the oppressed and the oppressor.