The Roman Catholic Church was riding roughshod over the Constitution, Nora was railing—that bit about “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Nora was reiterating what had been Mr. Barlow’s mantra—the snowshoer’s way of saying that freedom of religion wasn’t a one-way street. We were free to practice the religion of our choice, but we were also free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us. Nora and the snowshoer sounded like a broken record—the way they never stopped saying that freedom of religion also meant freedom from religion.
Damaged Don, who we didn’t know was listening—Don just kept strumming his guitar—spoke up. “Those Catholics—they’ll beat you up about their freedom of religion, but they don’t give two shits for yours,” the Damaged Man declared.
Well, we know what became of Don. The Damaged Man was gunned down in a parking lot in Montana, after Reagan’s reelection, when the gay boys Don had been singing about were still dying, and Don was still singing his plague song.
Don’t give Ronald Reagan
eight years.
He talks tough to commies,
he kills all the gay boys,
but that does fuck-all
for our fears.
Please don’t give the Gipper
eight years.
No, don’t give the Gipper
eight years.
If there was a Damaged Don box in the snowshoer’s pied-à-terre, I knew it wouldn’t have been easy going for Em. After Don was killed, and for as long as Ronald Reagan was our president, Nora had closed out every performance of Two Dykes, One Who Talks with a Damaged Don song. As Nora said, she couldn’t sing, but neither could Don. Em, crying, hugged Nora while she sang.
In the Denver airport, I decided that singing the Damaged Man would be better than hearing more of The Hand of God. I started with the chorus of Damaged Don’s plague song. Em, crying, sang with me on the phone.
It’s time to head back to
Great Falls.
I’m lackin’ the talent,
I can’t stand the sadness,
I don’t have big enough balls!
It’s time to head back to
Great Falls.
I’m just goin’ back to
Great Falls.
The Damaged Man was with us; he’d managed to make Em and me feel less alone. Later, we sang “No Lucky Star” to each other.
That was when Em told me she’d barely glanced at Elliot Barlow’s notebooks. She had filled two boxes with the notebooks; we would read them together, she told me. All she’d read was a short passage about the snowshoer’s last visit to St. Vincent’s—in the 1990s, after Ronald Reagan was no longer in office. The snowshoer had written about Reagan—just one sentence, after seeing her friends who were dying of AIDS.
“If or when there’s another plague, I hope America has a better plague president than Ronald Reagan,” the little English teacher wrote.
Em still had to get to the bottom of Nora’s box, she told me, but she promised she would be done with it by the time I got to New York. When I boarded my flight in Denver, I felt closer to Em than ever before, but I knew she would keep surprising me.
I began to realize that I’d overlooked Em’s earliest, unspoken seagull imitations—signifying her going back to Canada. Nora had observed I was slow to notice more of the world—she meant politically. “It took you long enough, kiddo,” my older cousin had told me—meaning for me to get out of Exeter, literally and figuratively. In Nora’s opinion, Exeter was not only a cloistered school and a small town; Exeter was a cloistered state of mind.
Zim had died in February 1968. Elliot and I had gone to his memorial service in March. But I was still out of it, politically, two years later, when Nora and Em went to hear Kurt Vonnegut speak at Bennington College’s commencement. I loved Vonnegut’s writing—he’d been my favorite teacher at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City. Kurt and I continued to have a correspondence; when I was in New York, we often had dinner together. But I don’t know where I was, literally and politically, for Kurt’s speech to the graduates at Bennington in 1970—I wasn’t there. It was Nora who told me Vonnegut was a socialist—Nora said she was one, too. Em just did her seagull thing, which didn’t only mean she was thinking about going back to Canada, but sometimes it did.
Of course I remembered when the craven management of the Gallows Lounge had complained about the Canadian, meaning Em. She’d been born in Canada, she had a Canadian father, but her early childhood was the only time Em had lived in Canada; then she’d moved to Massachusetts with her mother. Thereafter, Em visited her father in Toronto only once a year, over the Christmas holiday.
I hadn’t heard Em talk about “social democracy” in Canada—not until I came back from Aspen and the Hotel Jerome the second time. I don’t remember seeing Em do a socialist pantomime at the Gallows, where the cowardly management surely would have blamed the Canadian for anything remotely resembling anti-American politics—even though it was Nora who started calling herself a socialist, and only after Vonnegut’s speech at Bennington. Vogue magazine published the speech, and Nora made me read it. Nowadays, all I remember is the end of Kurt’s speech—the socialist part. But I’m embarrassed that I skimmed over the socialism when I read the speech the first time.
“I suggest that you work for a socialist form of government,” Vonnegut had told the students. (Their parents and grandparents must have shit their pants over that idea, Nora said.) “Free Enterprise is much too hard on the old and the sick and the shy and the poor and the stupid, and on people nobody likes,” Kurt had continued. The speech sounded like Kurt; reading it was just like listening to his voice. “So let’s divide up the wealth more fairly than we have divided it up so far,” he went on. He talked about people having enough to eat, and a decent place to live, and medical help. “It isn’t moonbeams to talk of modest plenty for all. They have it in Sweden. We can have it here,” Kurt said to the students.
Elliot Barlow had voted for Stevenson in 1956; Mr. Barlow liked what Vonnegut said about Eisenhower. “Dwight David Eisenhower once pointed out that Sweden, with its many Utopian programs, had a high rate of alcoholism and suicide and youthful unrest. Even so,” Vonnegut said, “I would like to see America try socialism. If we start drinking heavily and killing ourselves, and if our children start acting crazy, we can go back to good old Free Enterprise again.” I liked the speech because it was funny, but the socialist part slipped away.
Em had been paying attention to Canada, politically—more than I knew. Though the homophobe, her dying father, had left Em the house in midtown Toronto, Em had refused to sell it. Em had even refused to rent out half the house, as her father had. She was a dual citizen, of Canada and the U.S. I knew she wanted to have a place to go if she ever left the United States, but I didn’t know Em had been reading about democratic socialism or socialist democracy—not to mention social democracy in Canada. That part slipped away, too. From my American perspective, Canada was more socialist than the United States—that was all I knew.
In the Denver airport, we didn’t talk about socialism, but before we got off the phone, I asked Em about the title of her novel. I let her know that Grace wouldn’t tell me the title. “Grace hopes I can talk you out of it,” I told Em.
“You can’t—the title was the snowshoer’s idea. You won’t talk the two of us out of it—Elliot Barlow isn’t listening anymore,” Em told me. She was calling her novel Come Hang Yourself, Em said. I would never have tried to talk her out of it, not even if the only hero hadn’t had a hand in it.