Thoughts of Scottie

I've been thinking a great deal about my old friend Scott Maitland. It's close to the fifteenth anniversary of my first meeting with Scott. You probably thought I would write something like, "but it seems like yesterday." No. Actually, it seems longer than that. So much has happened since then .... Still, I owe him so much.

In early fall of 1991 I became my own man. It happened as I held the hand of Scott Maitland, the grandest queen I ever knew, as he passed away due to AIDS related pneumonia and other complications. I didn’t know it at the time, but it changed my life.

I met Scott at the P & H, a bar in Memphis frequented by the theatre crowd of that fair city. I was enjoying a patty melt and some cheap beer when we were introduced by a mutual friend. Scott was directing a play called Eastern Standard for the upcoming season at The Circuit Playhouse. This was the summer of 1990, and Allanah Myles was singing on the Jukebox at the P & H.

Scott had seen my work as an actor. I was considered a somewhat mysterious and hot commodity, an image I tried hard to cultivate at the time. I was actually a little full of myself. I had won a best supporting actor award a couple of months before for a mysterious and hot role in Blue Window. Scott told me about the play he was doing and the role he wanted me to audition for.

“Well, Jimmy, I’ve got this gay character, but I want him very macho, very butch. I’m looking for someone that is so blatantly heterosexual he drips testosterone,” Scott said.

I’ve never been accused of dripping with testosterone and I’ve actually been hit on quite a few times by men, but I wasn’t going to argue. I thought I was mysterious and hot, remember.

“So this guy at the beginning of the play has just found out he snagged the HIV. His journey is how he deals with it and how he reveals it,” said Scott.

I was intrigued. The role sounded rich. Plus I was flattered that I was being asked to audition by a prominent member of the theater community. I auditioned, got the part and got to work.
I don’t know if it was my best work, but it was my best experience in the process. My fellow actors were talented and giving, especially the man who played my lover, Kevin Jones.

About two weeks into the rehearsals I found out that Scott was HIV positive. So was Kevin. I was young and naïve. My whole world had been a rather sheltered, easy life, and here I was playing a homosexual man dealing with the reality of AIDS, lost loves and the fear of dying alone, basically telling the story of these two wonderful men.

The play was well received. I got a few good reviews, but mainly I got good friends out of the show. I kept in touch with Kevin and Scott. They both had wonderful stories to tell of glamorous worlds that I knew nothing about. Scott lived in Manhattan in the late ‘70s and early ’80s. Scott had lovers and sugar daddies and one-night-stands. He had beautiful fashion sense and the quickest bitch-wit on Houston Street, he said.

He told one story of living with a well-to-do lawyer in a high-rise apartment in Manhattan. He did the cooking and cleaning, always dressed in matching pajamas and an antique kimono robe, according to him. Every night before he would go to bed, he would open the doors to the balcony, step outside and at the top of his lungs shout “Goodnight New York!” in his best Marlene Dietrich impersonation.

A couple of weeks after the play closed, Scott started to get sick. He still had the same cynical sense of humor, but his body started to betray him. He lost weight, started breaking out with cankers and lost more and more energy. Finally after going below a hundred pounds, he checked into the hospital wheezy and sallow.

The shittiest thing about AIDS is that the people who really need to be there at the end, the lovers and life-partners, stayed at home for fear of going full-blown, as they used to say, by being exposed to the various viruses and sickness. It’s a cruel beast of a disease that denies a dying man the comfort of holding his truelove’s hand or looking in to the eyes of his longtime companion. For that reason if nothing else, AIDS deserves to be at the top of the please-don’t-let-me-die-of-this list.

So Scott was stuck with me, usually me only. I did my best to comfort him and distract him. He had recently told his mother the news, both his disease and the equally devastating surprise that he was gay. We were waiting to see if she was going to come say goodbye to him. It had been close to a week since he told her and she still hadn’t shown. Unfortunately, Scott was fading fast.

AIDS attacks the body, but it also devastates the mind. Scott’s once clear eyes were shrouded with dementia the last couple of days he was alive. He didn’t know me, the nurse or even himself. He would just cry, scream and drool, sometimes begging for “mommy, mommy, mommy.” It was heart wrenching, but I visited as much as I could. I’m not sure why other than wanting him to not be alone.

Scott’s mom finally came after about ten days or so. I was there when she arrived. She asked me if I was his “boyfriend.” I can still hear the confused and somewhat disgusted tone in her voice. I told her that I wasn’t, just a friend and left to get a cup of coffee and a smoke.

When I came back a short while later she was gone. Scott was still in his own gaunt, frightened world. I don’t know if he knew she came or if she even stayed to say anything to him. I doubt there was any sort of reconciliation, but I do believe that he was waiting to see her. Not very long later, he took his last breath while I held his hand.

I can’t really describe all the things that changed in me during the last six weeks of Scott’s life, nor do I want to. I do know that it was the first time in my life that I felt like my own man, and that it laid a foundation for all the future decisions I would make in my life till now.

Years later while in New York on the trip when I proposed to my future wife, I took a little time out from sightseeing, eating and planning the proposal to walk out on the roof of our hotel, raise my arms to the city and shout in my best Marlene Dietrich impersonation, “Good night, New York!”

I hope Scott was listening.


Thoughts of Scottie