(note to lit agents: taking inquiries for the following excerpt of a nonfiction in progress, and a completed ecofiction MS: dearteza@gmail.com and see tezalord.com for my 4 other published books. gracias)
I patted Pogo’s head, and whispered to him “I guess this is it, old buddy. I may not see you for a while. Maybe not forever.”
I didn’t know then that I would never see my precious mutt, whose doggy dad I’d rescued and loved before the present iteration of this Pogo before me. Whom, just a few years earlier, in our breakup, I had entrusted to my loyal ex-boyfriend. After we split up, I decided to set out on a life of Caribbean adventures, sailing, exploring wild jungles, and helping organize and ship the harvests of roots and fruits of primitive farmers. Rightly, I knew the West Indies would be no place for a four-footed creature to be dragged around, island-hopping.
My ex, a respected fellow at the Botanical Museum of Harvard University, had been back a season or two from a South American expedition, when I dropped in on him and Pogo on my way back to my Caribbean home. Another friend was also visiting Tim. It was he whom Tim had journeyed with on an overland expedition, which had ended the year before. Months before the two ethnobotanists had taken off on their expedition, I had already left my country, my man who broke my heart, and my beloved dog, who would accompany the explorers as mascot on their university- and government-funded mission.
The two were to be botanizing for fifteen months, exploring plants used for mind-body-spirit purposes by native people, from one end of the vast continent to the other. Topping their list of this 1974–75 journey documenting divination plants of the indigenous, were today’s popular psychotropic ayahuasca, the mind-bending borracheros (the tree form of datura), and the pair’s main focus of study, coca. The main task before the two scientists was to map the geographical distribution of the genus erythroxylum, of which only two species were known to contain the alkaloid cocaine, the potent drug that’s distilled from the leaves of the plant considered to be sacred by many tribes, and used with reverence to this day.
For years before the expedition’s departure, Tim and I had been a couple dedicated to doing plant-y things all over North America, the Bahamas, and the Caribbean. I drew detailed botanical studies for him and other PhD candidates while Tim located, identified, and in several cases, saved plant specimens from extinction before industry’s bulldozers could destroy another last-remaining organism.
Surrounded by friends back then, our pothead dentist, a coked-out lawyer, dedicated naturalists and gardeners of all ilk — anyone had to be secretly closeted if they were gay. In the sixties, all of us were searching for freedom, and finding our next supersonic high through mind-altering substances such as hash or grass, a vomiting-dose of cactus, concoctions from toads or bananas, or brain-rocketing trips on acid or magic mushrooms. Tim and I had been the go-to aficionados of our mind-expanding circle. All of us clearly knew, even then, how seriously Earth’s ecosystem was endangered, and how that took precedence over someone’s sexual freedom, personal gender-choice, or that of their lover’s. We guardians of Nature were fighting hard to make the rest of the world wake-up before it was too late.
Tim and I did all this back in the Dark Ages. I say “Dark” because unlike today’s more enlightened culture, a homosexual or gender-fluid person was forced to play games back then, even with what was natural to them. Tim’s and my years together weren’t dark, however, until I noticed … he was gradually becoming … different. Distant. No longer turned on by me, as he had in the past when we enjoyed a yin-yang, man-woman, completely natural and satisfying union. When we first discovered each other, it was like finding a rare orchid growing amongst a ghetto heap of garbage. Our lovemaking was as sensuous, as satisfying as our deep connection with the natural world. We shared our Nature-loving lives as tightly as twins in opposite sex bodies
Ironically, I was the last of our outspoken crowd to know that Tim was bi — and, after me, totally homosexual. That’s just the way the secret game was played in those sexually repressed, subversive times.
Back then, nobody talked about the pain of a woman losing her lover to a man, or vice versa. It just wasn’t supposed to happen. Except in novels. When it did happen, to me, I had nowhere to turn. So I ran away in shock and shame. As far away, as opposite from the norms of my home turf as I could.
First, I crossed the States and created complex botanical illustrations in New Mexico’s desert while trying to heal myself, taking peyote, letting its spirit guide, Mescalito into my ache. That trippy stuff didn’t help much; drugs just delay the inevitable work of self-healing. Then I flew to St. Thomas and hopped on a sailboat. Speeding to the other end of the universe, I set up camp at an abandoned lighthouse on nearby Culebrita. Where no one could see me or the pain in my soul. I dared to go where no one before me (in our Earth-loving crowd) had gone before. Alone, I let my pain show me who I really was … in a totally foreign setting.
*
Now, of course, sexual liberty has become as accepted as, back then, we passed a J and whooped it up watching episodes of the groovy new TV show, Star Trek. Back when Tim couldn’t admit to anyone, not to himself, and certainly never to me, his best friend and lover, that he had those kinds of feelings for men — hardly anyone dared being (because it was, after all, taboo) openly gay. So while I sank slowly into pain-fed addiction, Tim was finally free to be who he really was.
Call me naive, but Tim’s preference shocked my unprepared 27-year-old world. My chest hurts now, thinking what pain I know he must have felt then, himself. Before he came out. But when I walked in on him with one of our male friends, I felt betrayed, bludgeoned beyond measure.
Instead of comforting words, Tim’s lips and feelings were sealed by a society that condemned him long before he could understand the soul-quake he was experiencing, trying so hard to love me as a man was expected to love a woman. We fit together so well that I barely noticed when our vivacious lovemaking began to … fizzle. Even after he told me he’d been seduced by an older man when he’d been an adolescent. But I understood, because I too had been sexually misused by an adult when I was a child.
I’m sure he would have helped me if he could. Right then though, he was preoccupied, enjoying exploring who he truly, naturally was. He certainly couldn’t bear the burden of my soul’s fallout. Tim was too busy, finally, being honest with himself.
When I ran away to the islands I entrusted him with Pogo, who had been our son. Beckoning to me were faraway seas, tropical sun, and exotic new cultures I would immerse myself in for the next decade. I wouldn’t return to the States until after back-to-back killer-hurricanes wiped out the two islands I had been doing agricultural business on, Dominica and the Dominican Republic. See? Even names of places can be as confusing as what some of us have to deal with, figuring out the true nature of our soul’s yearnings.
*
It was a full moon night back in Cambridge when I got to rendezvous with Pogo and Tim after not seeing them for five years. His former expedition companion also happened to be passing through town just then. The two men hadn’t seen each other for some months.
At Tim’s backyard reunion, the three of us were smoking grass, snorting plant medicines, doing what some people are drawn to do since Earth evolved hominids — getting out of our natural minds. Tim went back into the house to replenish the drinkipoos, his euphemism for alcohol. With our host gone, the full moon did its magic.
The gentle wind rustled, and … next thing we knew — we two visiting wanderers, both of us court jesters, unattached to anyone or anything but following our bliss, we casual friends who had never felt the slightest stirring of romance between us — now we followed the often offbeat script of Nature. Without any forewarning or signals of mutual attraction, the magic of the night’s effects orchestrated us to draw together like two strong magnets. In quick time we were locked in a moon-kissed passionate embrace when … Tim returned carrying a full tray of drinks.
Crash, the tray dropped as Tim screamed obscenities at me. We two jesters dis-embraced, reacting in bug-eyed mortification.
“Get out of my sight!” Tim screeched, pointing a dagger finger directly at me. “I always knew you were that kind of woman, you whore! He’s mine!”
Pogo whimpered and hid behind my legs. My son. Our son.
Shock shivered my spine and shoulders. Muttering a quick goodbye, I readied to flee again. Tim’s eyes had the crazed look that makes talk impossible. The smoke, the snorts, the booze — the moon — right?
I knelt down and nuzzled Pogo’s head into my face, sucking up his scent. I needed his adorable mine-ness right then. He was part of my true being. My neck, his fur. In deep inhales I smelled his birth, his father before him, his puppyness. I pulled back and looked deeply in my son’s eyes and said, “This is it, Pogo. Tim’s lost it. I’ll see you … when I see you. I wish I could take you with me, man.” He sensed I couldn’t. I was returning to my far-distant island home the next day.
Flinging pack over shoulder, I rushed out without a backward glance. The empty streets were cold and dark. I returned to Dominica to look for my own answers: about who I was, and what I had to do to get that comfort that still eluded me, back then.
A dozen years later, Tim was gone. I got the call that again tore my heart out of my chest. It was AIDS, I was told.
Today, I can thank Tim instead of cry over Nature’s so wickedly tricking just me. I realize the whole world is less without him and praise the courage it took to be truly himself. Sadly, I never got to nuzzle Pogo again. Somehow, Tim would abandon Pogo on a New Hampshire farm for reasons I’ll never understand.
And me? I married the love of my life thirty years ago.
