On this World AIDS Day...

...I'm remembering my precious cousin, Jack Dennis Adams, one of the finest human beings I've ever known, or will ever know.

Born April 2, 1945 in Portsmouth, Virginia, Dennis (as the family called him) grew up in North Carolina, graduating in 1968 from the University of North Carolina with a BA in Theater and Arts. That was the year he got a job as a window dresser at Saks Fifth Avenue's flagship store...the same year he came out to my parents and me, as fellow artists and the only progressive members of his family.

After less than a year, Dennis (now known to his new friends and colleagues as Jack) moved from New York to San Francisco, and began his career with San Francisco State University, starting out as the Properties Manager for the School of Creative Arts.

When my mother and father moved from Manhattan to the Bay Area in 1975, Jack attended as many of Dad's performances as possible...and one of mine, when I sat in with Dad's group that Christmas. When Dad died suddenly in 1977, Jack, joined by his older brother Gary, was there to support me and Mom through our shock and bereavement.

In 1982, Jack became Assistant Director of the SF State Student Union, a position he held until July of 1992, when his deteriorating health forced him to resign.

Aside from being adored by his family, Jack was a beloved campus figure, well known by hundreds of SF State students, faculty, and staff. He committed much of his time to backing student causes, and worked closely with Associated Students. His co-workers and friends described him as a warm, funny, and passionate man...which is exactly how I think of him.

The last time he and I spoke on the phone, his voice was a mush of sandpaper and gravel; thrush lesions were stealing his speech. I told him I wanted to drive up the coast to see him, to hold his hand, to give him a hug. He was so sweet in his refusal: "Please, Zan. Stay there, and know I love you."

On November 21, 1992, at the age of 47, Jack died of AIDS-related complications. On March 11, 1993, the SF State Student Union Governing Board passed a resolution to rename the Barbary Coast Room Jack Adams Hall, for the warm, funny, passionate man who resolutely championed student interests. And in 2011, the ASI Board of Directors established the Jack Adams Memorial Scholarship to honor his life and legacy.

My cousin Dennis is certainly not the only dear friend I've lost to AIDS...but he is (as far as I know) the only member of my family who was taken by this devastating virus. It's heartening that so much progress has been made to obliterate HIV...but I join the millions of others who've lost loved ones to AIDS in anticipating the day it no longer exists.

[That's Jack doing the work he loved, smiling in tie and shirt sleeves, with a shiny head and impeccable beard, standing on the roof of the hall that he didn't know would one day bear his name.]

My brilliant and glamorous actress mother, Evleena Barrens...

In the late 1940s and early '50s, Mom and Dad had a darkroom in their Chicago penthouse; both of them shot and developed hundreds of photos of their city, their friends, and each other. 

Dad extended the hobby to create little stories from the pictures they took, including this parody of an article (and a print ad for Coca-Cola) in a “fan magazine” he called MoviMag, featuring Mom as a character fashioned from his imagination...

No rest for the weary. Not today.

I'm bone tired, for personal, professional, and political reasons. I’m angry, and not a little afraid. 

But I'm not giving up.

If the Continental Army had taken a negative attitude, we'd all be British. If the Union Army had hopelessly laid down their arms, we'd be living in the Confederate States of America. If the Allies had cowered and thrown up their hands as the Nazis encroached, well, God only knows...but, from the history I've studied, and the stories my Greatest Generation parents told me, going to war was the only option, if we were to destroy Hitler's dream of world domination.

They didn't have social media on which to debate and denigrate and complain with ugly rhetoric and fatuous memes. They weren't bombarded with conflicting, confusing 24-hour cable news commentary designed to manipulate minds and grab ratings rather than inform and educate. My father was drafted, and gladly served as an intercept operator in the U.S. Army, even though it meant putting his lucrative career on hold. My mother, a young and beautiful woman who was just starting to find her way in the world, stepped into coveralls and stuffed shells with gunpowder for the U.S. Navy. They, and millions of other citizens, did their duty as proud and loyal Americans. These people suffered and sacrificed in ways the current culture seems to forget in this Age of Entitlement.

In the words of Sean Connery’s Jim Malone, when Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness was charged with taking down Robert De Niro’s Al Capone, “What are you prepared to do?”

We are facing (no, we're smack in the middle of) a terrifying Trumpublican coup, orchestrated by the likes of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, delivered by a lying, cheating, narcissistic reality show host, and bolstered by a sycophantic Congress filled with old white Republican men and righteously indignant Democrats. There are good, decent, hardworking humans in the U.S. Capitol right now...but in this climate, even the best of them are looking like neutered buffoons.

Like our forefathers and foremothers, it's up to us to fight in whatever ways are available to us to preserve, protect and defend our country. I'm not advocating the bearing and discharging of arms, mind you. I'm saying we show up in the real world with our real voices however we can: protest, march, call, write, and (most important of all) gather our friends and neighbors of all stripes to VOTE OUT THE EVIL MEN AND WOMEN WHO PRETEND TO REPRESENT US, in favor of those who represent the best interests of ALL Americans. We must reject the wealthy, xenophobic, homophobic, racist misogynists who currently occupy our White House and every state house and city hall in our country, every one of them who feeds garbage to the masses in a perverse, and deadly, power play.

As President Obama first said at the 2016 Democratic National Convention (and repeated many times after), "Don't boo. Vote." To those who didn’t listen to him, and are complaining now: you helped get us where we are.

Are you listening now?

Don’t whine. VOTE.

My Valiant Mom

She screams herself out of her sleep. Sometimes, it’s pain from the phantom limb, sometimes it’s pain in the existing limb; sometimes, it’s both.

And sometimes, it’s from the nightmares. She’s in pure terror. I don’t know if it’s the memory of being beaten by her mother when she was a girl, or the memory of being raped by two men when she was 91, and I don’t ask. But she’s clearly trying to get away, and she’s screaming.

I run to her every time, in the middle of the day, or the middle of the night. I find her leaping out of bed in her sleep, and I get there just in time to keep her from falling. I bring her a heating pad to calm the nerves in her leg, I talk her down from the physical pain, or the psychological disturbance, or both. Mostly, I just say, "You're okay, Mom. You're here." And she sleeps.

She has started to thank me profusely. She says, “I don’t know how you got to be such a good person,” or “You do so many nice things for me,” or "You're so sweet." Things she's rarely, if ever, said to me in my lifetime. I think it has taken her this long to learn how to express her love, to realize that she is loved, that she deserves love. I think her defenses have been stripped bare.

Her mind is still active and relatively clear, but she’s barely eaten in months. Chocolate Ensure and whole milk, and maybe a bite or two of food a day, have kept her alive all this time. We can still talk and laugh, we can still discuss our memories of Dad and our remarkable life with him. But her hearing is less than half of what it was, so she can't listen to his recordings, the music that has sustained her for over 70 years.

She is quite literally skin and bones. She barely bumps her leg on her wheelchair and bleeds, and I dress the wounds on her limb that used to have a twin, that ran after me when I was little, that walked every inch of Manhattan and Paris, that climbed tree branches, and played golf. When I change her pajama top, I see her protruding spine, looking like that of a starving child in a third world country, or the cautionary photos of anorexic women here in the first world. Her body is failing, and she mentions it occasionally. New for a woman who, as many times as she's faced it, really doesn't like to talk about death.

“I’m drying up,” she says softly. “Am I floating away?” She’s never before expressed this, and I don’t have the words to respond. I just hug her gently, tell her I love her, roll her to the bathroom because she’s becoming too weak to do it on her own. I replace the pee pads on her bed, and give her fresh protective underwear (“Don’t call them diapers!” she warns) when she doesn’t make it. She’s embarrassed, she apologizes to me, and I say she doesn’t need to. This is life, this is love, this is sacred service. “You did this for me when I was little,” I say. “It’s my turn to do it for you.” And she thanks me, like a shy child.

"I don't feel old. Do I seem old?"
"Well, Mom, your body is 94. But your mind isn't old."
"Oh, well, that's all that counts."
We smile at each other, knowing.

Bit by bit, moment by moment, I’m losing my brilliant, witty, proud, fiercely independent mother, my best friend, my chief confidante, the person with whom I’ve experienced and endured so much, the one person in my life who knows the most about me, who’s known me the longest. And it feels like I’m losing part of myself.

I don't cry in front of her. I save it for others, for later.

I'm in pain, too, physically and emotionally, and I'm exhausted; but I move through it. I depend on the Eastern philosophies that have gotten me this far. I'm grateful to have many years of sobriety. My closest friends know I'll need them to draw me a little closer after Mom departs. They also know I'll need space and time.

I hope I'll have at least as much time as Mom has had, and at least half her incredible will. I don't have a child to care for me, so it would be best if my elder years were easier than hers. But there's no way of knowing. There's only this moment, in which I'm too busy to think about how much I'll miss her when she's no longer here.

Sometimes, when Mom’s abandoned Southern Baptist teachings surface, she says philosophically, “It’s the Plan.” I like to think that comforts her somewhere deep, where no one but God can see.

Anything that comforts her, comforts me.

“It seems to me that television is exactly like a gun. Your enjoyment of it is determined by which end of it you're on.” –Alfred Hitchcock

Nine days ago, flyers were distributed in our building that a production would be shooting on the penthouse floors, just three stories above our loft. We were told there'd be "special effects, including statues shattering and gunplay." These notices are never surprising to me; I set it aside and went on with my day.

There Will Be (No) Blood

I moved into this beautiful historic building 13 years ago, knowing that it had long been, and would continue to be, available for location shoots. Because I'm in the business, and have an intimate understanding of what film and television production entails, I've never been cranky (as many of my neighbors have been over the years) about the temporary inconvenience production can cause for residents. I've even arranged for productions to shoot here, and used several locations in the building for my documentary. None of them included "gunplay." 

I have never found anything "playful" about guns.

Back in 2002, a wealthy friend took me to the Los Angeles Gun Club after dinner at the Water Grill. When she was a younger woman, her father had been threatened with her kidnapping, and he'd hired a retired FBI agent to teach her how to defend herself: evasive driving techniques, a little hand-to-hand defense, and how to handle a firearm. She knew I hated and feared guns, and thought it would be good for me to have a direct experience of firearms, if only to get a handle on my feelings about them. It only took one session for me to get good with a 9mm Glock; I was shocked. I was especially surprised that I instinctively applied my years of meditation practice, yoga study, and Hindu-Buddhist philosophy to the process of loading, aiming, and shooting a gun. How could something so deadly be so...Zen?

 

We returned every week, in a ritual that we whimsically called "Thursday Night Eat 'n' Shoot." I tried many types of handguns (the Kimber .45 became my favorite), and came to understand the satisfaction of knowing how to handle a weapon, to feel the strange peace of hitting a target exactly where I'd aimed the gun, and to realize there was no way in Hell I'd ever own one. But I was now more knowledgeable; I felt an odd sense of preparation, which had an unexpectedly comforting effect.

 

 My last time at the range, September 2005

Yesterday, I was sitting by my window, laptop in lap, and suddenly heard several rounds of automatic gunfire in my lightwell. I immediately ducked, shouted to Mom to stay down, grabbed my phone, and crouched my way to Mom's bedroom...all in the five seconds before I remembered they were shooting blanks above my head. Two seconds after that, I got a terrified text from a neighbor who lives across the lightwell from me; she's a veteran unit still photographer, but she'd also forgotten production was in the building.

Today, there have been many more rounds of automatic and single-shot gunfire discharged above me (ironically, while I'm watching MSNBC's coverage of the students' walk-out in protest of our government's inaction regarding gun control). I've barely flinched each time. And this has reminded me that I am now calibrated to respond to, and even accept, the sound of violence...not only on a shooting range, or in my besieged DTLA neighborhood, but in my own home.

It does not comfort me to be so prepared.