PAUL
Paul was a powerful pagan poet priest (with a paddle).
Born in Greensboro, NC, Paul faced an existence of morbid obesity since he was a child. This formed his stance on life, who he was, and who he would become. I know from my experiences as a husky sissy in the south (say that three times real fast) how difficult it was to navigate those waters, and can only imagine the pain that Paul endured during his formative years, his youth, and throughout his life. Paul was gay. And being fat was a curse in the urban gay-world of the 80s. He was the first person who I told that I was queer. The first time I saw him, I was with my friend Nan on a visit to her hometown in Rome, Georgia. She was applying for a scholarship in theater at nearby Berry College, so I decided since I was there that I would also audition. After the auditions the theater director, Dr. Clarke invited us to see the musical Celebration written by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt the same lyricist/ composer team who had written The Fantastiks –the longest running play ever! I was mesmerized by the production and by Paul’s performance as Mr. Edgar Alan Big. Ironically the story had the world on the brink of destruction and the narrator Mr. Potemkin (another fabulous performer) wanted to seize the day and celebrate being alive. At intermission I decided if I got the scholarship to Berry College (we always called it Barely College) is where I wanted to get my degree in theater. As fate would have it I got the scholarship and the next year, played the psychologist in Equus and Paul played Mr. Dysart, the boy’s father. That summer we ended up in a college study program based in Madrid, Spain led by our Spanish professor. That’s when I told Paul that I was queer. It was just after a horrible bout of requisite ‘first time traveling’ food poisoning. The trauma of food poisoning and the freedom of being out of the constrictions of familiar surroundings, must have given me the chutzpah to be myself. I can’t remember if Paul also came out or waited until later. But it didn’t matter; we knew. We were freshly anointed queens in Europe that would remain friends for a lifetime.
In February 1979, I moved to Chapel Hill, NC to be with my lover Dean who was a music professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Paul was there getting his Master’s degree in theater. When Dean left for the summer to be the musical director for a Summer Stock theater Charlotte, NC, I stayed behind in Chapel Hill and worked at the counter of Glenn Lenox Pharmacy. Paul and I lived together for that summer in a huge apartment complex with a pool. Dean and I had a plan to move to NYC at the end of August. I remember one day the pharmacist told me to empty the back room of all the sample drugs and throw them into the dumpster. Instead of throwing all the samples into the garbage, I put them into the trunk of my car and took them to our apartment. Paul bought a pharmaceutical guide at the bookstore and we went through the hundreds of samples methodically deciding which pills did what and when we would take them. Those tablets were the thread that ran through ‘the summer of meds’ — at the pool, in the evenings, on the weekends at the gay club in Durham. I remember dosing to create a mixed tape for a Robert Patrick one-act that Paul directed at UNC-CH. It was a halcyon romp through the pharmaceutical supermarket of samples — one week up, next week down (and repeat).
Flash forward to 1980, maybe 1981; Paul came to visit me in NYC, New Years Eve for the ball drop in Times Square. Paul and I, a fifth of Jack Daniels, and two squares of acid. Hardly anyone was there. We passed around the fifth of JD with strangers nearby as the acid slowly kicked in. After the ball drop, we jumped on the A train to 14th Street headed to the Mineshaft in the Meatpacking District of the West Village. Paul had never been and I was a regular. We separated after a few drinks and I didn’t see him again until the next day. I guess I’d given him a key to my digs in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn — the sofa bed in the front parlor of Peter’s apartment on Warren Street. He told me his account of feeling like he was in the depths of hell as his acid kicked in full throttle at the Mineshaft. I remember saying, “Yeah, and that’s a bad thing?” He recounted the story of Times Square, a fifth of Jack, acid, and the Mineshaft for years afterwards. Legendary.
That incident certainly didn’t deter Paul from moving to NYC a few months later after his graduation from UNC-CH. In fact I’d wager it accelerated the prospect! He landed in a loft in DUMBO long before it was cool. And later we were roommates on Clinton and Lafayette Streets in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn — when my boyfriend Michael and I went separate ways. In that place you had to walk through the owners home to get to our apartment. It was right across the street from the Masonic Lodge and we had an amazing roof top terrace that we’d entertain friends almost every evening. Soon Samba, an old college friend of ours, and my old high school friend Donna joined us — both running away from different situations in their respective southern hometowns. The four of us found a new apartment only a few blocks away on Adelphi Street but the neighborhood was dangerous and we were held up at gunpoint numerous times. AIDS rushed in and ran rampant through the NYC gay community killing almost everyone I knew. Donna and Samba fell in love and left, I wanted out of the city so ran back to Atlanta, and Paul was left alone to deal with what was left — a city full of fear and death.
A few years later he came to visit me in Atlanta when I lived at 907 Marietta Street across from Central Metals Junkyard. For some unknown reason during his visit, Paul took the front stairs to leave one day (I never took the front staircase) and fell down twenty stairs. Because of that fall, he had to leave NYC and move to live with his mom in Greensboro. For years they lived together, and eventually she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. During the time just before his mom’s unfortunate diagnosis, he fortuitously met Erica aka Paul through a fluke — a personal dating ad he’d seen in a newspaper. He’d thrown out the newspaper but just before it was gone forever, he serendipitously retrieved it from the trash because he’d remembered the words in the ad. Together for 23 years they built a loving life with ten cats in Norfolk, Virginia until his death.
Paul saw the poetry in life. The poetry was a place for his pain, his anger, his desires, his caring, his insights, his disappointments, his dreams, and his love. His poetic perspective was a lifeline to a gentler loving place to be at peace with how things were.
We ended up in different camps of beliefs, Paul and I. Yet, our stored and protected love endured the changes. We acknowledged and held honor to the commonality of our mutual lifetime experiences rather than our differences.
I bow to the greatness of his soul. Of course I couldn’t walk in his shoes, yet I watched respectively from where I stood — his unbridled passion and his unique understanding of this world. So long dear friend. You are cherished in my memories as you ride with the wind and the sun.