Wasted Talent

August, 1990.

One morning, towards the end of May, Dave came over to my desk and said, “Well, here’s the scoop of the year: I’ve got AIDS. I’ve given them three months’ notice.” Within a week I was visiting him in the hospital. He had pneumonia. His lungs were so painful he woke up screaming, too weak to get a pill to his mouth. At the hospital he was given morphine. He grinned and wiggled his thumb sideways in the so-so gesture. “As highs ago, I was disappointed. I felt a slight warm tingle around my neck and then I was out.”

Throughout June he was too sick to work. A replacement was hired, a 30-year old Chinese-American woman named Letty. Then, suddenly, Dave seemed better. He was coming to work, staying four hours at a time, training Letty in the complicated accounting procedures on which a giant institution depends. “She’s very sharp” he reported one day. “She’s an MBA and she’s a virgo, which I am. Virgos make fantastic accountants.”

I asked about his own personal accounting.

“Immediately I have short-term disability, 70% of your salary,” he explained, “which lasts for a year. The only taxes taken out is FICA on the first $600. In about six months I have to start picking up my own medical insurance, but that should remain at the rate the company pays for 21 months. Longterm disability kicks in after a year and that’s 50% of my salary. Also, Social Security kicks in after six months of being out. So I’m not terribly worried financially. I don’t expect this to be a long term illness for me.

“As soon as it starts getting really rough I’m going to take things into my own hands. I was ready to do it the day I came home from the hospital, but I took a little snapshot of what it would look like had I gone that day, and it wouldn’t have been right. My papers are really not in order --my life insurance would not have been dispersed the way I want it to. My theory is to leave enough money to people who are never going to have much money so it might make a difference in their life. I have a few friends like that, who have always struggled, who I love dearly, so I want to get that in order…

“After that I kind of feel like I’m ready. Like, I’ve done my bit here and I don’t want to go through another round of losing three friends in four months. December through February I lost this guy who I’d grown up with, Barry, who was my musical director from back in Brooklyn. He was the last to be diagnosed and the first to go. He was not as sick as the other people. I lost Paul, my gym buddy in November, and I went through it with him, I was in the hospital the entire time. In December my friend Jimmy in Texas passed away. That was the hardest one, that’s the one that haunts me, because we were lovers and he was the symbol of me finally getting what I wanted, the relationship I had always waited for and wanted…”

How did it end?

“He got AIDS and didn’t want to be with anybody anymore. So we ended the physical aspect of our relationship. But right through until two days before he died we had the best part of our relationship, which was our communication. We talked incessantly on the phone. We’d always been able to do that. I spent my entire new year’s eve this year on the phone just talking for hours and hours… He held my heart. I miss him the most.

“Music, I’ll miss that. The idea of not hearing the next Pretenders album or the next Rickie Lee Jones seems wierd to me. But who knows, maybe I will hear it.”

At the end of July there was a farewell party for Dave, and when Savannah, his boss wished him many good years in retirement, nobody winced. If love and affection could make it happen… “I’ve never had a party that was about me, ever in my life,” he said.

This week he was telling me about his trip to the Grand Canyon, and how his mom took the news. “I have a sister in Phoenix, my straight sister who married money. She wanted to come meet us at the airport and show me my new niece whom I hadn’t seen, a year old. So I thought it was important that she know I had an AIDS diagnosis, so based on whatever information she had, or whatever understanding she had of the crisis, she could decide whether or not she still wanted to bring the baby. She should be able to decide whether or not she wants me to hold the baby, kiss the baby, et cetera. So I told her on the phone and she basically didn’t get it —by that I mean, she doesn’t understand it in the sense that… I don’t think she equates it with me dying. Anyway, she came to the airport with the baby and I held the baby and kissed the baby and there was no problem with that.

“The problem came with my mother. Before I went into the hospital I had loaned my mother some money, as I’ve always done throughout my life. So I’m out of the hospital for the second time, I’m in bed and she calls. I tell her I’m just out of the hospital, I had pneumocystis. She immediately starts complaining about her cataract operation, and then telling me about my other sister’s problems. So I figured this is part of the hype because she wants something. And sure enough she says ‘I actually called to ask you something.’ I said, ‘Do you know what pneumocystis is?’ And she said, ‘Well I thought of asking you.’ And I said, “Well basically it means I have AIDS and it’s probably one of the first worst forms of pneumonia. It can kill you.” And she said, ‘What?’ And I said, “What this basically means is that I have AIDS.” And she said, “What did you say?” And I said, ‘I have AIDS.’ And she said, ‘We must have a bad connection. What did you say?’ And I said, ‘We do have a bad connection. I have AIDS. And I am getting off the phone.’

“Didn’t she know you were HIV positive?” I asked.

“I had told her that I was HIV positive and that I was taking medication to prevent me from getting full-blown AIDS. She didn’t really get it…

So the next day she calls up and she’s furious, she says I’m trying to ‘separate the family’ by telling my sister in Phoenix and not telling them.

I said, ‘First of all, I didn’t want to worry you. Secondly, people have different levels of AIDS awareness, and people experience prejudice, big time, because of having AIDS. And third, there was a part of me that thought it was none of your business.’ And of course the only reason I told my sister in Phoenix was because she was going to bring the child.

“So then my little lesbian sister gets on the phone acting hurt and she goes, ‘Dave, I always thought we could talk.’

“I said ‘I can’t believe I’m telling you I have what is probably a terminal illness and you’re accusing me of dividing up the family!’ She gets off the phone and puts my mother on.

“My mother says, ‘She don’t wanna talk to you as long as you’re yelling.’

“I said, ‘I cannot believe this conversation.’

And she says, “ Well, what I really called to find out about is if you could sign a car loan for us.”

“I said, ‘You can forget that.’

“Since then I’m in my remission, I’ve gotten all my papers together, I’ve gotten a durable power of attorney for my health and business affairs…” With his Brooklyn accent it comes out adorable power of attorney. “…And I’ve regained all but seven of the pounds I lost.”

July, 1991

David M. died in late June, surrounded by people who loved him and with everything taken care of. “He was very organized,” as somebody pointed out. He left some money for his friends to have a farewell affair. He helped plan it, in fact, specifying the caterer, the format and the setting — a conference room at the Medical Center (with the Golden Gate in the distance; but in more immediate view, the visitors’ parking lot).

It was in another wing of this building that Dave worked for five years. And for three of those years I worked down the hall from him. He had a ready smile and a lively, mischievous twinkle in his one good eye. He was from Brooklyn, a songwriter, a gossip. Our main topic of conversation was not doing drugs. We also talked about office politics, movies, his latest CD purchases, Higher Powers, New York and San Francisco, women, men, friendship vs. love, the relationship, the possibilities, the exes, the kids, Barbra Streisand, our health… The usual stuff.

We each had a windowless office. He kept his fairly dark and I can still see him in the gray Macintosh light —talk about ghostly glows— as he entered numbers into an Excel “endless spreadsheet.” One time I couldn’t help but ask: “If music is your first love, if you’ve got music in your soul, how can you do this damn bookeeping all day?” He looked at me like I was outa my mind and said, “Are you kidding? They’re the same… Math!” He meant it absolutely. He was one of those people who found a measure of fulfillment in balancing the books. I felt glad for him when he told me; it meant he enjoyed his work.

The party had its factions, naturally —people who had known Dave from different phases of his life. There were the gay male friends (not that many of them left). The straight co-workers. The gay male co-workers. The friends —mostly women, most of them gay, but including a few straight women perfectly happy to be dancing with sisters. And friends from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, class of 1970. The groups overlapped and mingled, noshing on the catered finger foods and looking at some pictures of David over the years.

After a while a black woman, about 60, came forward and said something about Dave “expanding” instead of dying. I wondered whether he had written the text and was making a last sexual joke. Probably not. This woman was a no-nonsense person. She explained how Dave had come into her life: her daughter had met him at Erasmus and brought him home one day. “I was one of those moms who had four children but who actually had 40 children,” she recalled. “And Dave became one of them.”

Then her daughter came forward —Judy C., a large, calm-looking woman approaching 40. She also told the story of the day she first brought Dave to her house: “David never invited anybody to his house. Until one day I invited him to my house. When he got there he just kept walking around staring with this expression on his face (great amazement). Staring all around, just like this (total, complete amazement). Finally he said: ‘You’re poor! You guys are poor!’

“Now I didn’t think we were poor. I knew we didn’t have as much material things as some, but we were better off than some others. But I knew what he meant.

“It was a great relief to him, seeing we were poor, because he’d been ashamed to invite anybody over to his house because they were poor, too.”

Judy described how in recent months she had helped Dave record some of his songs. He rallied nightly and laid down the vocal tracks, with just a guitar accompaniment. Judy intends to make a CD out of the material. She played a few of them on tape for us: “In Buena Vista, striking matches in the wind…” And a haunting tune about believing in ghosts. For sure the popularity of the movie “Ghost” has something to do with this AIDS epidemic. Why are 39-year old men who look like Patrick Swayze dying nowadays? Dave didn’t look like Patrick Swayze, but he was cute. Slight, lithe, sandy-haired and kind of foxy.

Three or four friends came forward and described the role he had played in their life. You could always count on him for honest feedback, whether you wanted it or not….To a young woman he had shown fatherly affection…

Judy and her singing partner, Jacqué, sang two of Dave’s favorites from their reggae repertoire. He had always spoken with great pride about their success on the women’s music circuit. Jacqué played a percussion instrument and moved in an understated, precise way. Then a d.j. played some music and people danced. That was Dave’s last instruction to us: dance!

Wasted talent

Says one who is without

But who made you

The talent scout?

Wasted talent

two women on the floor

movin like the waves

comin into shore

D.C. to Frisco

all across this land

You will find a wasted woman

for every wasted man

Wasted talent

Inside every office door

Every accountant,

Every clerk in every store

David’s Autobiography

I was born the first of nine children on September l, 1951 in Brooklyn, New York. The first four years of my life were unusual. My earliest memories include:

My brother Jeffrey and my sister Carol Ann being given away to strange people in a train station. They were in fact sold.

Two other children born after them were taken away when they didn’t move or cry anymore. They in fact died. I never asked how.

My father had a girlfriend, Rose, who lived in New Jersey on a farm. He would take me to visit her. Once when I was about three years old Rose’s brother took me to the outhouse and pulled out his cock, He raped me while I looked out the outhouse window at the geese and chickens. To this day I am afraid of birds.

My father was in the Marines then and it seemed he would always come home just long enough to discipline us. One particulaly brutal beating my mother called “The Thirteenth Avenue.” It was refered to as a threat and measure of beatings to come. My mother would say stuff to me like “Keep it up and when your father gets home he’s gonna give you a Thirteenth Ave.” and “The only reason we never sold you was because you were the first born.” Even then I hated my legacy.

My father’s mother eventually caught on to what was going on and she sued my parents for custody on grounds of sexual and physical abuse and neglect. The courts first placed me in various shelters and eventually at the age of four granted my grandmother custody. My grandmother, Roslyn Epstein, lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with her second husband, Sam, and her daughter Muriel, who had severe cerebal palsy. Muriel could not walk, talk, or sit up. She stayed in a huge hospital bed in the living room and grew to young womanhood there. My grandfather when left alone with me pretending to be asleep in the bedroom would climb into the hospital bed and molest his stepdaughter. We later found out that he also had been to bed with my mother.

My grandmother always refered to me as her favorite grandchild and my time living with her was comparatively sane. My favorite passtimes were playing with a huge marble collection, watching musicals over and over again on Million Dollar Movie, and making up my own little songs. When company would come over I would sing my songs for them and do a make-believe show and dance. They would throw loose change at me.

At age nine after years of court battles the Judge placed me first in the Bronx Hebrew Children’s home and then gave me back to my parents. For the next 10 years my father, a Jew in denial of his heritage, subjected my mother, my three sisters, my brother and I to Nazi-inspired, sex games, abuse and torture. These hellish rituals would occur frequently, at any time of the day or night. They were precipitated without provocation, or by something trivial like a hamburger not being cooked well done enough, or by losing or failing to perform some contrived bizzare sexual game or task. One such task he devised was what he would call, “doing his back.” My father would lay face down on the bed, naked from the waist up and my mother and each child in turn would run their fingertips a predetermined number of times very lightly back and forth and up and down his back. The goal was not to have any moisture or sweat on your fingers so that the motion would be slick and titillating. The slightest deviation in finger pressure or failure to go all the way down beyond the waistline would result in rounds of punishment for all. On the more formal nights each of us received a prescribed number of lashes with either a black garrison belt, or about 10 feet of wide antenna wire wrapped in black friction tape called “the whip.” Crying or resisting would result in further and more intense punishments. I used to think that if my parents both drank that would at least explain all this weirdness. Bottles of liquor however would remain in the cabinets for years barely touched or unopened.

My escape during these times were school and work. I worked first as a delivery boy for a drugstore and then for many years as the youngest and only white counselor and teacher at St. Barnabus House; a home for orphaned, abused, and autistic children. I began teaching myself to play the guitar and started writing songs about what was going on in my life.

Another skill I learned in my adolescence was how to lie. I was ashamed and embarrassed that I was different than my Jewish middle-class neighbors. By making up stories I believed that I could hide that we were poor and on welfare, that we lived on top of a store, that we didn’t have a phone, and that my mother weighed over 400 pounds. My circumstances became all too obvious, though, when at school my free-lunch card was handed out to me in front of all the other kids. It was also pretty evident that I didn’t know how to “act right” or behave socially. Then there were those days when I would show up at school with bruises, and hickies on my neck. I would have to invent some ridiculous story to explain them. On other occasions I would have to lie about why I didn’t have the school books my father had torn up the night before or the eyeglasses he had stomped on in a rage.

The turning point for me socially came at Erasmus Hall High School when for four years in a row I wrote, directed, and acted in a yearly musical competition called “Sing.” During my first year doing Sing I met the group of friends who I would have to this day and who would change my life forever. Among them were the now prominent black lesbian reggae recording artists Judy Casselberry and Jacqué Dupree. The three of us and a handful of other extraodinarily gifted kids became inseparable and a driving political and musical force for the next four years in school. We taught each other songs on guitar, and piano, went to concerts, got high on pot, acid and mescaline, and sang together on the subways and in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. We did everything together but have sex.

My senior year in high school I was elected Student Body President and was riding the crest of popularity. I was 19 years old. These were the times of Vietnam, The Black Panther Party, Attica, Kent State, Nina Simone, Phil Ochs, Laura Nyro and Richie Havens. My father was still up to no good. One day after a riot had broken out at school my father called the principal and told him that I had started the riot by calling in my outside black agitator friends from Bedford Stuyvesant. Fortunately by then I had enough faculty friends at school who knew what was going on in the Merbaum household. They were also aware of the time my father sued the Board of Education for a half million dollars on the basis of a story he made up that a teacher had kicked me in the groin. The case was thrown out of court and my parents were thrown into the Elmhurst pyschiatric facility for evaluation. I called my father at work and went off on him for the first time in my life. I told him that I hated him for ruining my life and for everything he had done to the family. He said if I was still there in 20 minutes when he got home he would kill me. I packed whatever I could and David Weinberg, a teacher friend of mine came and got me. I never went back. David and his wife, Susan, let me live with them before and after I went away to college.

I was accepted into Marlboro College, a small progressive rich kids’ school in Vermont. I was awarded the one scholarship they offered yearly. I studied theater and violin, and continued to play the guitar and write songs.