《On The Move》Oliver Sacks

Jerry has been a good friend and, at one level and another, a sort of guide and implicit mentor. There seem no limits to his curiosity and knowledge. He has one of the most spacious, thoughtful minds I have ever encountered, with a vast base of knowledge of every sort, but it is a base under continual questioning and scrutiny. (I have seen him suddenly stop in mid-sentence and say, "I no longer believe what I was about to say.") At ninety-nine, his remarkable powers seems undiminished.

Mel

In fact, Mel and I kept in touch for another fifteen years, although there were always troubling undercurrents beneath the surface - even more so, perhaps, with Mel, for he was not fully at ease with his own sexuality and longed for physical contact with me, where I had, so far as sex was concerned, given up m illusions and hopes about him.

Our last meeting was no less ambiguous. I was visiting San Francisco in 1978, and Mel arranged to come down from Oregon.  He was curiously and uncharacteristically nervous and insisted we go to a bathhouse together. I have never been to a bathhouse; San Francisco's gay bathhouses were not to my taste. When we stripped off, I saw that Mel's skin, so milky and flawless before, was now covered with brownish "cafe au lait" patches. "Yes, it's neurofibromatosis," he said. "My brother has it too. I thought you should see it," he added. I hugged Mel and wept. I thought of Richard Selig showing me his lymphosarcoma - were the men I loved fated to get terrible diseases? We said goodbye, shaking hands rather formally when we left the bathhouse. We never met or wrote to each other again.

I had had dreams, in our "honeymoon" period, that we would spend our lives together, even into a happy old age; I was all of twenty-eight at the time. Now I am eighty, trying to reconstruct an autobiography of sorts. I find myself thinking of Mel, of us together, inthose early, lyrical, innocent days, wondering what happened to him, whether he is still alive (neurofibromatosis, von Recklinghausen's disease, is an unpredictable animal). I wonder if he will read what I have just written and think more kindly of our ardent, young, very confused selves.

Migraine

"We can give you something for the asthma," I suggested.
"No," he replied, "I'll just get something else..."
"Do you think I NEED to be ill on Sundays?"

I was taken aback at his words, but i said, "Let's discuss it."

We then spent two months exploring his putative need to be ill on Sunday. As we did, his migraines got less and less intrusive and finally more or less disappeared. For me, this was an example of how unconscious motives may sometimes ally themselves to physiological propensities, of how one cannot abstract an ailment or its treatment from the whole pattern, the context, the economy of someone's life.

40 years birthday

July 9, 1973, was my fortieth birthday. I was in London, Awakenings had just been published, and I was having a birthday swim in one of the ponds on Hampstead Heath, the pond in which my father had dunked me when I was a few months old.

I swam out to one of the buoys in the pond and was clinging to it, taking in the scene - there are few more beautiful places to swim - when I was groped underwater. I started violently, and the groper surfaced, a handsome young man with an impish smile on his face.

I smiled back, and we got talking. He was a student at Harvard, he told me, and this was his first time in England. He especially loved London, had been "seeing the sights" of the city every day and going to plays and concerts every evening. His nights, he added had been rather lonely. He was due to return to the States in a week. A friend, now out of town, had lent him his flat. Would I care to visit?

I did so, happily, without my usual cargo of inhibitions and fears - happy that he was so nice looking, that he had taken the initiative, that he was so direct and straightforward, happy, too, that it was my birthday and that I could regard him, our meeting, as the perfect birthday present.

We had a joyous week together - the days full, the nights intimate, a happy, festive, loving week - before he had to return to the States. There were no deep or agonized feelings; we liked each other, we enjoyed ourselves, and we parted without pain or promises when our week was up.

It was just as well that I had no foreknowledge of the future, for after that sweet birthday fling I was to have no sex for the next thirty-five years.

Larry

He had no intention of ever getting a job, and this, I thought, took a special sort of integrity. He was determined to avoid a meaningless busyness; he was frugal, and he could live and even save on his modest pension.