In 1984, I was a junior at Haverford College when my then boyfriend (let's call him MTB) decided to sublet a house for the year with a couple of guys I'd seen around campus but didn't know at all: Ray Gish and someone named Tom. I wasn't yet 20 years old, unsettled both socially and academically--overwhelmed by the institutional wealth that seemed to permeate the other students, uneasy about my blue-collar roots, my unremarkable education, my non-academic obsession with books (e.g., I was absorbed in a private project to finish all of Charles Dickens's novels before I graduated from college--one that had absolutely nothing to do with the college reading I was supposed to be focusing on). I had made a few women friends--one, in particular, Jilline, who was gradually opening my eyes to the fact that I was an artist. But I was also completely distracted by being in love--an intense volatile affair with MTB that fed on melodrama. I was self-conscious, awkward, badly dressed, romantic, and way too full of feelings.
So when MTB signed a lease with these unknown guys, I was nonplussed. What would they think of me? Would they be more of the same--jovial private-school dudes outfitting themselves for law school or med school while playing a little lacrosse on the side? To a degree, MTB himself fit into that mold, though he was more of a mess than most.
But then I met the new roommates, and my life opened.
Ray Gish was tall with a mop of curly hair. He wore big boots and band T-shirts and thrift-store trenchcoats. He drank beer like water and smoked incessantly. As soon as he woke up, a record would drop onto the turntable--classic country, hardcore punk, early folk, the blues . . . his record collection was massive and detailed and music played constantly in that house. Going to class was not important to him, yet he was brilliantly well informed. He was from Appalachian Kentucky, where his parents ran the Mountain Eagle, one of the most famous small newspapers in the nation. They chronicled coal mining, union busting, poverty, local corruption. All of the kids in the family worked on the paper. All of the kids knew how dangerous that job was. Ray, the youngest, recounted many scary moments--not least when the county sheriff set their office on fire.
Ray's quiet friend, Tom . . . it took me longer to get to know him, But I fell hard for Ray: a version of a love affair, but one that was new to me--because Ray was the first gay man I had ever met . . . or so I thought, until I began to realize what I hadn't been seeing all of my life. The two of us were romantically involved with other people, but we also became entwined with one another. Sometimes we stayed on the phone together all night, whispering syllables of nothing, back and forth, little hums of comfort. Sometimes we quarreled, and had huge dramatic arguments, and flounced and carried on. The feelings were all; they were the centerpiece.
Well, of course things couldn't last like this. Ray failed out of school and went home to Kentucky. MTB started carrying on with other women. Quiet Tom and I took the train into Philadelphia in the midst of Hurricane Gloria and returned to campus sopping wet and euphoric.
The brief college idyll had morphed into our adult lives. But Ray never left us. In 1991 he was the best man at our wedding. He moved around a bit, eventually settling in Brooklyn, opening Commonwealth Bar in Park Slope, meeting the magnificent Stephen, becoming a version of steadiness--but only a version. When our children entered the picture, he and Stephen assumed yet another role: they became uncles, devoted, adoring. Nearly every summer we traveled from the Maine woods to Brooklyn, and the boys threw themselves with delight into the joys of the city, the charms of Ray and Steve. As did Tom and I. Without those trips to Brooklyn, I don't know how we would have maintained our sanity in the isolations of Harmony.
As the boys grew into men, Ray and Steve continued to be huge parts of their lives--helping with apartments, welcoming their partners, buying a few meals . . . behaving exactly like generous and loving uncles, though there is no blood link, only our long and goofy trajectory of devotion. Every time I came to Brooklyn, I stayed with them--all I had to do is text, "I'm coming!" No invitation necessary. No need to pretend that we were anything other than family.
Monday, October 28, was my son Paul's 27th birthday. He stopped by Commonwealth that night and Ray gave him a big hug. On Thursday, Halloween, he stopped by again. The bar was hopping with its usual Halloween party, but Ray and Steve were nowhere to be seen. Everyone thought this was odd: Steve, they knew, had gone on a trip to Iceland, but where was Ray? He wasn't answering his phone.
I don't know exactly how the next events transpired, but by Friday someone got a key to the apartment and let themselves in and found Ray dead, apparently in his sleep. The next events are a blur to me: I know the medical examiner was called; I know someone called Steve in Iceland and broke the news that his husband was dead.
What I do know is that on Friday evening, as Tom and I sat on the porch of this little cottage on Mount Desert Island, listening to the slow swish of the tide in the cove, Tom's phone rang, and Steve was stammering out, "He's dead, he died in his sleep, I'm in Iceland."
***
Our youth. Suddenly it's been kneecapped. With Ray dead, Tom and I have lost the one person who knew us at our messiest, our most melodramatic; who knew our sloppy eagerness, our stay-up-all-night feeling-everything-there-is-to-feel past, our silly quarreling, all that music we listened to, and the conversations, the love affairs: our need, so raw and sloppy.
And my sons' childhood: also kneecapped. They are in deep mourning for the joie-de-vivre, the city opening its arms to them, these two beloved caretakers, now suddenly amputated to a single loneliness.
We all knew that Ray would not live to old age. He was a severe alcoholic, a heavy smoker. He never exercised or watched his diet. He lived recklessly. This death is far better than the slow tortures of lung cancer and cirrhosis. But it was so sudden. And Steve was so far away. And Ray was only 59. And we loved him so.
