The Fiddler’s Bill

The Parable, Redacted

A long time ago, a grasshopper was hopping about, chirping and singing. A wretched thing, laboring away in the heat, an ant passed by, hauling a great, miserable ear of corn.

“Why not come and dance with me?” asked the grasshopper. Dance. As if life were a mere costume ball.

“I am collecting food for the winter,” said the ant. “And I recommend you do the same.”

“Why bother about winter? It is summer, and we have plenty of food.”

The ant, of course, went on its way. Continuing. Always continuing.

When the winter came, the ground was a white, hard joke. The grasshopper had no food. So he went to the ant. “What shall I do? I have no food!”

The ant replied. And the ant, always the moralist, always the damned keeper of the ledger, said something unforgivable about frolicking. About toiling. About singing and dancing while others worked.

And the grasshopper, naturally, had to go hungry.

A Charmed Life

Charmed. That was the word, wasn't it? Favored. A darling of the Universe, and didn’t I know it. Felt it, deep down, like a congenital condition. Worked hard, mind you. Started in a hospital the legal minute I could, a full-time gig while still in high school—a kind of fastidious, sober little teen, counting my pennies and my sins. Which were few. Pathetic.

And then… Birmingham. The world got larger, the colors louder. “Life’s a banquet and most poor souls are starving. Learn to live a little.” said my own Mama Rose.  It was an invitation, really. A theatrical staging of possibility. I worked through college—full-time, sometimes a few part-time gigs stitched together.

In 1990, I got the call. My dream job. And a ten-year, corporate and social tour de force began. Entrepreneur. Advocate. Adventurer. It was more than merely living; it was performance. And I danced the dance. Oh, god, I danced. Never keeping in mind, you see, that the fiddler is never an altruist. The fiddler must always be paid.

The rise was meteoric. Upward and onward. No safety net—who needed one? I worked hard, I played harder. Tomorrow was a concept for lesser men. A tedious, distant whisper.

August, 2002: The Curtain Falls

Tuesday. Minnetonka called.

“John—I need to see you. Where can we meet tomorrow around 11a?”

The blood rushed from my face. Where does it go? Does it just… abandon you? 

Me? Severed? The arrogance of it! Don't they know who I am? This is how I'm to be treated? After all I’ve done for them!? 

Two years. Only two years since the diagnosis—two years of silently hiding the wound beneath a Zegna suit. I had a three-bedroom apartment in Midtown Atlanta. A new Volvo, leased. A pied-à-terre in New York City. A casual $5,000 in credit card debt. And thirty-four dollars. $34.00 in the bank.

Denial is a warm, thick blanket. I wrapped myself in it. Severance. Retirement account. I'm nowhere near retirement. It was a liquidity problem, nothing more. A temporary inconvenience.

December. Sold the car. March. The first yard sale. The endless, degrading series of yard sales. The art, the furniture, the china, the crystal—all reduced to price tags and sold for pennies on the dollar. And it was the ants—the careful, prepared friends—who came to collect, buying up my history for their own meager winter stores. They were just following the script. 

The irony, a particularly vicious little joke: my cheap New York rent-control bedroom was my remaining anchor.

To some, my decision seemed counter intuitive, but to me it was clear. Give up the Atlanta apartment. The car. Pay the credit cards with the retirement savings - and move to New York. 

I was such a lemishke.

The Winter

New York. Low cost of living. A little money. But the job search. The applications, the interviews, the sheer, endless zero. Position eliminated. Company bankrupt. Always a twist of the knife.

And then, COBRA ran out. The money followed. And then, the HAART therapy. The medicine. Gone.

After helping so many—why couldn't I seek out help? Pride? Denial? Shame? They are a trinity of poisons.

By the end of 2003, there was only one word left: nothing. I had nothing. No prospects. I was numb. 

Lying in bed for days, the television a constant, mocking static. Staring at a ceiling that didn't care.

Then Mom called. Holidays. Come home.

I told her I couldn't. No money. No job.

She didn't lecture. She didn't moralize. She guided me. Pack a bag. Go to the airport. A ticket back to Birmingham awaited. Grace. A sudden, stunning theatrical lifeline thrown to an actor who’d forgotten his lines.

Home. Gifted a car. Stay. Stay here. The friend, the renovation, the subcontractors. He fed me. A new kind of work: managing the minutiae of someone else's stability.

The Fiddler Is Paid

Atlanta again. Another attempt. But the meds—gone for over a year—the body, it protests. It remembers. It begins to falter.

Another friend. Another reprieve. But the universe demands its dramatic tension. He finds the man of his dreams. I must move out.

The morning he told me—the same morning I woke to find the IRS had frozen my bank account. The retirement savings. The taxes I hadn't paid.

Like a biblical plague, and I was a modern, pathetic Job. 

Three years severed. Two years off the meds. 

But I was still moving. Stalking the hiring manager for a national pharmacy company.

I drove overnight. Florida. Slept in the car. Washed up in a gas station men’s room—the final, humiliating ablution of the fallen god.

She met me for breakfast. I made my case. She said, “You had me at hello.”

The job is yours.

Miami. An apartment. The first provider visit. The meds. The healing. Physical. Emotional. Spiritual.

I was back. But this time… this time, I was the ant. The consummate planner. Saving for tomorrow. 

Hoping for the best. Planning - with a fierce, quiet vengeance - for the worst. This trial by fire forged a new me. Taught me humility. Taught me gratitude. And most importantly: to never take the gifts of today and the promise of tomorrow for granted. The curtain closes. The house lights come up. And the fiddler, at long last, has been paid.

On Being Well-dressed and Erudite

 

Part I: A Caring Brotherhood

The Road to New Orleans

Hospice—the word itself carried a clean, clinical finality. In Birmingham, my work was a volunteer role in private homes, a relentless, solitary march against the inevitable. But I had seen the structure of necessity take hold in other cities: the group home. These weren't mere medical facilities; they were built as a direct answer to injustice. Too often, the residents were men who had been abandoned—rejected by partners, cast out by family. They were there because they had nowhere else to fall.

It was this heartbreaking, yet righteous, resistance that fueled us. The development of AIDS hospices seemed almost coincidental across various U.S. metro areas, but the first with which I became directly involved was Lazarus House in the Faubourg Marigny. The name itself—Lazarus—carried a terrible irony. The biblical figure was raised from the dead, restored to life. We, on the other hand, were building homes for men who were already marked for death. But perhaps the effort was not for the restoration of life, but in the restoration of dignity when life had been stripped away.

This heartbreaking necessity drove us. We were not isolated; our struggle was a shared map drawn across the entire South, city by city.

At AIDS Service Organization (ASO) fundraisers in other cities across the South, we became known as the Men of Birmingham—or MOB. Groups of friends from across the South recognized our attendance, contributions and our distinct group dynamic with these names—like the New Orleans Boys (or NOB), and the Boys of Atlanta (BOA). Most all of us were just scraping by, working shifts for gasoline and cocktail money, but groups of us traveled to support the charitable efforts of the others.

This particular year, my blue, 1976 4-door Volvo station wagon, a hearse-like vessel, became my chariot of righteous absurdity. New Orleans, French Quarter; seven men, one hotel room, trading the floor for the walk-in closet, just to be present at Halloween New Orleans to benefit Project Lazarus.

Our hand-made Trojan soldier costumes took us weeks to make - cutting vinyl, burning fingers with hot glue guns. They were extravagant, not because they were beautiful, but because they were so well-coordinated – and witty. This year's double entendre, "Play It Safe—Take a Trojan to Bed!", pinned onto our breastplates, was our offering—a plea, a joke, and a challenge all at once.

Friends and I were not just raising money for the cause in Birmingham; we were investing in the brotherhood. A tireless commitment to the broader development of the ASO’s around the South. The success of Halloween New Orleans—now over four decades strong and still supporting men and women living with HIV/AIDS—was our collective, yearly proof that the effort, the sacrifice, was valid. It was our crusade.

The Warehouse Costume Party

I was now twenty-something, a kid who had fled to Birmingham years before at 19, just to learn the rudimentary mechanics of being a gay man. But New Orleans, with its intoxicating blend of European decay and decadent lifestyle, was all at once a shock to the system, and fascinating! The scale of the Saturday night costume party, held in the massive, echoing warehouse on the Mississippi, was the physical manifestation of a world I only faintly grasped. It was a mass of humanity, yes, but a mass with a singular mission—to meet, to remember, and to fund the necessary structures of survival.

My previous existence had been mostly defined by the borders of Alabama. My mind, my empathy, my self-awareness—it was all localized. But here, shoulder-to-shoulder with thousands of men from Atlanta, Houston, Miami, New York – and places I’d never heard of – the map of my life abruptly, profoundly, broadened. This was where the brotherhood lived. The shared experience, the dark humor, the tireless commitment that transcended our state lines. It was a baptism in a new, necessary kind of belonging. It changed me; it forced the realization that I had a place in the world far beyond the confines I had known.

And then, in the midst of this overwhelming, collective roar, our eyes connected.

He stood in clean linen, a stark, quiet contrast to my ludicrous helmet and vinyl skirt. The noise of the three thousand men and women, the music, the laughter—it all receded, becoming a distant hum. Charlie. 

It began with a look, a small, knowing upturn of a lip, in a costume-filled warehouse. He simply said with a twinkle in his eyes - "A Trojan. I like the branding."

The challenge was delivered. My world was broadening. The personal work begins. The narrative of doing was over; the narrative of becoming had started.

Part II: Prince Charlie

The flowers arrived on a Tuesday. A dozen roses. They sat on my desk, bright red, an offense to the neutral institutional palette of my office. My colleagues, my friends, were as shocked as I was. I had never, in my life, received flowers. Not for anything. From anyone.

For years, I was the sort of man other men simply re-noticed. One hundred and thirty-five pounds, still torturing that same mouse-colored hair that defied all attempts at discipline. Not a compelling package. I was a year into my studies—MBA and Public Health—and had already survived four on-again, off-again years with my first significant other.  So, I knew the mechanics of love and relationships, but I had never been pursued. Certainly not by anyone like Charlie.

Charlie was the live embodiment of Prince Eric from Disney’s Little Mermaid - and in many ways, the gay ideal. I start my description with this, because Charlie was a so striking. Everyone immediately loved and adored him. 

Who could resist that smile, those sparkling blue eyes? 

I chose the metaphor of Prince for Charlie because that was the role closest to the one he occupied in New Orleans gay society. The community there had developed almost as a dark mirror image of the city’s high society—formal, hierarchical, and seemingly ancient, a Gilded Age microcosm. With his youth, charm and good looks, Charlie had become its favored son, adored by all its social arbiters.

It only helps explain why I was so gobsmacked to be pursued by him. At the time, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast seemed a more fitting metaphor for our pairing - this seemingly absurd match. But maybe, given the transformation I would soon undertake, it’s a perfect one.

The first night—before we became intimate—he took a quiet moment to tell me he was positive. It was an act of profound, terrifying honesty. It was his condition, but it became my choice. We dated long-distance for thirteen months, Birmingham to New Orleans, missing only two weekends.

I held my own against the upper crust of his society friends. I grew to be accepted, befriended. But probably because of the sheer, unlikely audacity of our match—my distinct lack of equal appearance and charm—many of his closest friends offered me their pity disguised as sympathy: “How tough it must be,” they’d voice, “to be the ‘other’... the one cursed to live in the shadow of the shining light that is Charlie.”

After over a year, Charlie asked me to move in with him in New Orleans. He had never lasted more than a few months with anyone. He had never lived with anyone. He had certainly never presented anyone for approval by the courts of New Orleans gay society. The acceptance felt like victory. Coincidentally, I had been recruited by Caremark for a job there, so the move was on.

I left Birmingham on December 6th, 1990. I left the deepest friendships I had ever known. I left my academic and professional careers. I left my volunteer work at BAO. I left it all to become “Charlie’s boyfriend.”

The challenge was accepted, but the reality was a sudden, icy shock. I hadn't fully considered the duties and responsibilities of this new role—and the profound loss of my own agency. I was meant to be an appendage, a mere extension of someone else, cast as a supporting character in Charlie's story. My world was indeed broadening, yet I was utterly miserable. Then, a clarity broke through the darkness: a single, decisive question. Could I possibly become the ideal myself, rather than simply being with the ideal? The choice became clear, and I made it almost overnight. I would map out my own journey, a transformation on my own terms.

So, on December 28th, 1990, I abruptly broke it off with Charlie. I’m certain he thought, It must just be a case of cold feet. Who could imagine that the partner he’d chosen—the one blessed to be with him—would ever leave? Never.

I signed a lease on a fourth-floor walk-up in the newly gentrified warehouse district. I lived there for eight months before accepting a transfer to Atlanta. I moved on to continue my adventure: another geographical and professional shift, another push of the reset button, a continuation to strive to become the gay ideal.

Of course, I soon heard Charlie was furious. He was embarrassed. Mortified. How could I have done this? How could anyone deny Charlie, turn their back and walk away, with all of New Orleans gay society watching? It was unforgivable.

Charlie was my number two. My second significant other, and my first sero-discordant relationship—a distinction that had surprisingly little to do with the flowering or demise of our relationship.

My personal and professional adventures carried me back through Atlanta and eventually to South Beach. By this time, I had acquired my third partner—and my second consecutive partner who was positive.

But I had become a study in conscious, desperate design. I was spending up to two hours daily building and finely tuning a physical appearance that, by most external metrics, was the very ideal of the gay man. This ideal was confirmed during our travels to major social and fundraising events, a circuit that spanned the country, even internationally. Like in the Disney film, the ‘beast’ was now transforming into a prince, himself.

Then one evening my phone rang. Charlie's best friend was calling.

“John - I’m calling about Charlie. He’s in intensive care. Doctors don’t expect him to live through the weekend. He’s asking for you, John. He’s in and out of consciousness, but when he’s lucid he asks to see you - before it’s too late. Can you come?”

How could I not. I called the airline, booked a ticket and flew to New Orleans the next morning.

There I sat at his bedside. He was gaunt. One could hardly reconcile that the man in front of me was Prince Charlie. He looked so frail and vulnerable. There I sat for maybe an hour, holding his hand, before he woke and turned to look at me.

His voice was a whisper. He said, “John”... “John, I’m so glad you’re here.” “John - I don’t have long, you know.” “John - I just wanted to say - needed for you to know…”

He paused.

“John…” and then with a much clearer voice, he squeezed my hand and said, “I want you to know that I’ll never, ever forgive you for what you’ve done to me.”

I was shocked, even breathless for a second. Shaking my hand from his grip, I turned, left the room, went back to the airport and flew back to Miami. I was disappointed - and certainly angry, but maybe I also felt it was fair vengeance. The twist, of course, is that he didn’t die that weekend! His condition improved, and he went back to live at home.

And me? I was back in South Beach, enjoying my daily grind for another beautiful winter season on the beach. 

In August, the phone rang - Charlie’s best friend again.

“John - I’m calling about Charlie. He’s in intensive care again. Doctors don’t expect him to live through the weekend. He’s asking for you, John. Can you come before it’s too late?”

I replied: “Call me when he dies. I’ll come to the funeral.”

Charlie died August 14, 1996.  

I attended his funeral - and met his parents for the first time.

A Full Life's Circle Drawn

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” T.S. Eliot, of course. A tidy little package for a complicated journey.

1982. The move. I arrived in Birmingham for UAB, attempting the tentative role of ‘young gay man,’ and by the gravitational pull of the inevitable, settled into The Clairidge in what was then simply Southside. The building had once been grand; by the time I took up residence, it was merely old—a comfortable, aging repository for retired women, but also a rising tide of gay men and artists. A fitting stage, perhaps, for that first, dizzying exploration.

Now, at 63, I am back. Diagonal across the street from that first perch, a full life's circle drawn. The district now prefers the grander title of Highland Park, better reflecting its historic roots.

The avenue itself, Highland Avenue, built to endure, wears its history with a crumbling dignity. Its canopy of trees—proud veterans of the closing years of the 19th century—are aflame now in the Fall of the year. Shimmering yellow, golden, and red, they catch the pink and orange exhale of the sunset, a spectacle thrown back at the mountain by the low setting sun. And in comparison, it is the Autumn of my life, as well.

I am settling now into the curated quietude of my new iteration, the well-dressed, somewhat erudite older gay man. My residence is a beautiful, if stark, Brutalist tower, a sharp vertical contrast to the aged boulevard. Yet, its community is a soft landing. It's filled with lovely, caring, and interesting retirees—many of them gay men I’ve known lo these many years, now rich with shared adventures and travels.

The sidewalks here—wide, once grand—are cracked and buckled. And my joints, too, are making their objections known. We are both showing the signs of age, Highland Park and I. But there is a beautiful patina to it, a rich wear that speaks not of defeat, but of having endured, of having seen things.

I sit now, where I began, filled with gratitude, really seeing and knowing Highland Park for the first time.

Meditation on Contempt and Indifference

Here I sit - nursing a scotch, looking out at the pink and orange reflection of the sunset on the mountain—pondering my solitary act of civil disobedience.

At lunch, I asked a friend, "Do you believe there's a link between what's been described as The Great Acceleration and the current state of western societal discourse?"  So we pondered and pontificated.

But you can see it, can't you? The hideous, sweeping line. Not just the hockey stick curve of the Great Acceleration—the GDP, the progress - and costs - the sheer, staggering, insane climb of every measurable metric since 1950. That part is the easy science. That’s the graph one hangs in the university hall to impress the new arrivals with the scope of our own, magnificent, self-destruction.

No. I’m speaking of the parallel line. The ghost twin. The terrifying ascent of contempt.

They told us the internet would shrink the world, make us all villagers, quaintly linked. That was the lie. It was a lie spun in the ether, a chemical mist from the exhaust pipe of progress. What it actually gave us was the perfect mechanism for self-sorting. We didn't form a village; we built a billion tiny, soundproofed bunkers, armed with algorithms that do nothing but feed us back the shape of our own faces, only angrier, more righteous. Tribalism, they call it. A polite, academic word for: I loathe your existence because your newsfeed differs from mine.

And the source? Oh, the source is clear. The Acceleration didn't just boost output; it vaporized context. It introduced a rate of change—economic, social, technological—that outpaced the fragile, analog capacity of the human heart to process it. We were thrust into a world of hyper-complexity, massive inequality, and existential threats we can’t even properly name, much less solve.

And what is the natural, ugly, little-understood response to overwhelming complexity? A retreat to simplicity. A feverish, desperate clawing back to the black-and-white. Us and Them. The tribe. A clearly defined enemy. It's a marvelous trick, isn't it? To take the anxiety born of global, systemic failures—climate, finance, technology—and channel it into the cheap, satisfying hatred of your neighbor. They're the ones to blame. Always Them.

And here is my small, useless contribution to the geometry of it all. My Defiance.

Charles Kuralt as host of CBS Sunday Morning was always my trusted, if not droll source of information of the day.  And when I started on MySpace, it was quaint—a bulletin board of bad poems. But somewhere between Diana's death and Katrina, I had been snagged in the gin mill. Caught up in the increasing minute-by-minute chumming for sensation and outrage. Now? Mainstream and social media do not converse; they merely provoke. It is the theatre of the Pavlovian response: A flicker of outrage, a spasm of fear, and the machine has earned its next impression. I look at the screen and the world screams: "Look what he's done now! THE STORM IS COMING! Fix the interest rate! Stop the genocide!"

But I just couldn't. Can you? Of course not. You can’t solve the crushing Acceleration from your armchair, and you certainly can’t un-thread the cable of collective digital rage.

So, I chose to unplug. Or rather, I re-tuned. On social media, the algorithms now offer me only two things: the utterly trivial and the perfectly pleasant. Cat videos. Friends’ vacation pictures—a lovely, sun-drenched proof that somewhere, sanity persists. And I no longer tune into commercial mainstream media.

This isn't cowardice, understand. This is a cold, calculated act of Indifference as Defiance. I refuse to be rendered impotent by the impossible scale of their issues. I refuse to add my voice—my precious attention—to the collective roar of performative digital rage.

Instead, I choose the microscopic. The solvable. The immediate geometry of connection. My friends. My family. The community I can touch. I can offer attention. I can offer caring. I can solve the little, crucial issue of a single person’s loneliness today.

They are welcome to their contempt and outrage. I’ll be here, in the small, sunlit patch of the garden, deliberately, defiantly, tending to the things I can actually keep alive. It may be a momentary defense, a retreat.  Or it might be my best hope for peaceful longevity. But for now, it's the only honest posture left against the terrifying momentum of our own making. And perhaps... perhaps it is the only way to retain a small, vital piece of the human spirit they are so frantically trying to erase.

Appointment with Death

There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and

in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just

now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I

turned I saw it was Death that had jostled me. She looked at me and made a

threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and

avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant

lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as

fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the

marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why

did you make a threating getsture to my servant when you saw him this morning?

That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was

astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in

Samarra.

"The Appointment in Samarra" (as retold by W. Somerset Maugham [1933])