NONFICTION      

a theater troupe will perform the final scenes  -  -  -
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Is That All There Is?   
​by  Ed Brownson

​​A. smirked at me. “You don’t think you’re the first gay man wanting that song played at your funeral, do you?”
 
I laughed back. “No, I suppose not.” We gay men thought a lot about our funerals, back in the day. “But at my funeral, Miss Peggy Lee will sing the song during the intermission, not at the end like everyone else is planning.” I’m normally loath to use titles, but the ‘Miss’ always seems necessary when referring to Peggy Lee.
 
A.: “You’re planning a funeral with an intermission?”
 
“Yeah. In the first half, a theater troupe will perform the final scenes of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, wherein the hero finally figures out that ‘hell is other people.’ Then, after Miss Lee sings and dances her way into the ether, the audience will play a game of 20 Questions on the Star Trek topic, ‘Is today a good day to die?’”
 
I can’t remember if A. laughed at my snark, but I know he didn’t take it seriously. And I also know he made zero attempt to ‘analyze’ it, thank the gods. Or thank Miss Peggy Lee. She is definitely up there among them.
 
A. was my shrink. A gay man near my age specializing in couples therapy, he began his career expecting to deal with marital spats and heartaches and breakups and the occasional trauma, only to find himself on the frontlines of a cruel and lethal epidemic bulls-eyed at his exact clientele, triaging the mental and emotional fallout of widespread death and chaos. Instead of holding guy’s hands as they moved on to a new facet of life, he held their hands as they mourned the death of their partner or faced their own impending end. Often both.
 
A. had been recommended by a friend who was having troubles with his own relationship when I was having trouble with mine. You could say A. was really, really good at couples therapy because it took just one session with him for my partner and me to realize that our relationship was beyond salvage.
 
Not long after, however, receiving yet another medical tip advising me to “cancel your subscriptions, you’ll be dead in six months,” I remembered A. I’d liked him, his practicality, his friendly but no-nonsense approach, his avoidance of inane questions like “. . . and how do you feel about that?” I called and asked if he took on single people. He said yes, and yes to working with me. And so began a ten plus year relationship with the person who most helped me survive a constant barrage of body malfunctions and medical death threats.
 
That ‘Peggy Lee singing at my funeral’ conversation took place shortly after I once again learned I had but six months to live, this time from liver cancer. 

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​One of the things I loved most about A. was how he put up with me being silly and stupid and out of left field about what I was coping with, all the while calling me out on my bullshit. He refused to act somber at every single bit of bad news I brought through the door, and I brought in a lot. Oh, he was always ready to do what was needed to keep me pointed forward, into the fight, but he took me on incident by incident, refusing attempts by me or the world to paint some absurd Grand Theory of Signification over the whole sloppy mess that was the epidemic and my life.
 
“‘Is That All There Is?’ is an existential mid-life crisis song,” I explained to A., continuing on about my funeral, “not an end-life one. It’s the realization that comes after we’ve been around a while, after we stumble on those rare moments when the world shows itself exactly for what it is, not for what we pretend it to be. Then we understand. We understand that this—this one solitary life—is exactly all there is. That everything else we put on it is just gossamer.”
 
It’s funny how it goes, working with a shrink. Often, long before our next appointment, desperate to vent about some hideous medical obscenity or pull myself out of my latest pit of despair, I would have conversations in my head with A., arguments with me taking both roles, full of anger and hurt and weariness from dealing with all the crap, raging against the voice of reason and practicality and, yes, absurdity, that kept me going, that insisted I had to continue, to grin, Ed, grin and fucking bear it.
 
And those internal dialogues got me through until I saw A. next. Often I wouldn’t even bother recounting them to him. The mental exercises were enough. Instead I found something else to talk about, often more of that deep rock sense of existential absurdity that is the closest thing I have to a ‘belief.’
 
In fact in some visits I chastised myself for not telling A. the truth about how bad off I really was, afraid if I did, I’d somehow scare him off, hear him tell me ‘your life is too complicated, I can’t see you any more,’ words I’d heard more than once in the previous 20 years.
 
“I got to see her!” I told A., excited as a five-year-old to share the memory. “I got to see Miss Peggy Lee in the flesh!” 
 
A. stared at me, surprised. He hadn’t seen that one coming.
 
“John, my partner long dead, and I saw her in one of her last performances in San Francisco somewhere around 1985,” I explained. “It wasn’t a big concert. She sang in a cabaret lounge at one of the hotels up on Nob Hill, only a couple dozen tables scattered around. We couldn’t get into the evening show, so we were there for a late matinee.
 
“Miss Peggy Lee came out wearing a voluminous, flowing patterned caftan and a huge blonde wig with deep bangs covering her forehead and shoulder length hair obscuring most of her neck. Only her hands and a triangle of face were exposed. She covered most of that triangle with massively oversized sunglasses. ‘Anyone could be under all that,’ John or I whispered to the other, both giggling. Until she started singing. Then we knew it was her and only her.”
 
The truth is, I never really wanted a memorial. I still don’t. Funerals and remembrances, public displays of grief and loss, those are for the living, not the dead. If someone decides they have to organize one for me when I at last head off to that final disappointment, well that is on them, not me. I won’t be attending.

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​​Life, as existentialists figure out from their—our?—first nascent thought, is by definition absurd. Ridiculous, a folly, a chemical accident impervious to all attempts by us panicked, overthinking humans to figure out or give ‘meaning’ to it. Mine was—is –existential proof of that existential definition. “Deal,” life says to you when you are beaten down. “Deal with whatever the crap is. It’s not like you have a choice.”
 
And with A.’s help, I did just that, long enough to emerge into yet another facet of existence, one with a shade more hope.
 
Somewhere around 2015, A. decided to retire. If anyone deserved to he did. I saw the guys in his waiting room before and after my appointments. I saw the sadness, the tears, the wrecked men he had to deal with every day, hour after hour. I don’t know how he did it. Hell, I don’t know how we, his clients, did it either. But we did. We all did, because what else is there?
 
People like A. were a safe harbor for many, but there was for him a toll. Professional to the end, he hid it well, though you could see it if you looked. I did. I saw the expression he’d rush to put away as I followed another into the room. I noticed the extra minute he sometimes took before we started.
 
His leaving was for me another loss in a life full of losses.
 
He arranged for someone to take over, saw to it I was ‘grandfathered’ in with them, but I decided not to pursue it. I was in respite between diseases and thought it would be good for me to go forward on my own. He moved away, to Chicago I think, with his partner turned husband. He made sure I had his email in case I needed help, promising he’d do what he could. I’ve never used it, though I’ve been tempted more than once.
 
As to Miss Peggy Lee, I don’t listen to her as much these days, but every now and then I hear her voice on a jazz station or in a passing car or in the background of something on TV and it always sends me back to the albums, waiting on my shelf, sends me back to the great existential question of our species, “Is That All There Is?”
 
And I remember once again the answer to that question is, still, as always, yes.
 
And so we, the living, are left with two choices. Either we do as the song instructs, “. . . keep dancing, break out the booze and have a ball, that’s all . . .” or we opt for that “final disappointment.”
 
I’m with Miss Lee. I’m not ready to end it all. Not a bit. Because that, this, this! is all there is. 

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​Ed Brownson’s plays have been performed in California, New York and Italy, with many developmental and staged readings along the way. His latest, Tap, Tap Tap, about a woman confronting a horrible past, was selected for production as part of the Playwright Center of San Francisco’s Fall 2021 ‘Best of…’ series. He has studied playwriting at American Conservatory Theatre, Central Works Theater Company, Theater Artists’ Conspiracy and many informal venues. Recently, he has been working on essays and long and short fiction, ‘attending’ numerous pandemic-inspired Zoom classes and groups to help him along the way.

Other works in this issue:
Fiction:
Ms Noir and the Night Caller
Nonfiction:  
​Ghost City  
In Praise of the Anthropomorph

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