A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life by Pat Conroy
I consider the two years in Beaufort when I taught high school as perhaps the happiest time of my life. My attraction to melodrama and suffering had not yet overwhelmed me, but signs of it were surfacing. No one had warned me that a teacher could fall so completely in love with his students that graduation seemed like the death of a small civilization. It was that same year that I became best friends with Bernie Schein, Mike Jones, George Garbade, and the inimitable Tim Belk.
Tim seemed sophisticated and worldly in a way that made me feel as uncultured as a listless pearl. I would sit on his porch after teaching and he would fix me a martini in a real martini glass. He served wine that was not Ripple or Blue Nun. He served canapés that I thought were coverings for boats and had no idea were wonderful predinner snacks to be served on good china with cloth napkins. In those two years, Tim would introduce me to The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, the novels of Walker Percy, the poetry of James Dickey, and all the great classical music of the Western canon. He played the piano with an almost supernatural ease, and he never forgot a song or piece of music he’d heard. He was one of the most civilized men I’ve ever known and one of the funniest. Our friendship lasted almost fifty years and much of it was spent laughing.
The world was afire in the late sixties. The Tet Offensive and the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy occurred in 1968, and integration was still in its experimental stages at Beaufort High. It seemed to me I was living ten lifetimes that single year, and it was an exhilarating year to be curious and alive. That Tim Belk was gay was whispered about and talked about openly, intimated by some and taken for granted by others. Though my children don’t believe me now and find it hilarious, I didn’t know what being gay was. Though I had heard all the disparaging names from “queer” to “faggot,” no one had ever told me that they actually were gay. At The Citadel, if you were caught in a homosexual embrace, you were beaten to a pulp and expelled from school that day. It was part of the school’s harsh military code and there was no recourse to law. A gay Southerner was an abomination of the species; it was a verminous condition that could not be brought up in polite circles.
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Tim Belk was closeted himself in those early Beaufort days, and dated some of the loveliest women in this town. I double-dated with him on many occasions. Later, he married a beautiful teacher from the academy once he’d packed his bags and lit out for his new life in San Francisco. Tim left several months before I was fired from my teaching job on Daufuskie Island, the year I learned that the “separate but equal” system of the American South was the biggest lie ever told by the part of the world I love the most. I lost teaching, I lost Beaufort, and I lost Tim Belk at the same time.
Before the dissolution of his marriage to Diane (“We divorced because of irreconcilable similarities”), the Ford Foundation rescued me, sending my family and me out to San Francisco. Tim got a job playing the piano at the Curtain Call in the theater district. My wife, Barbara, and Diane would go out on the town once a week, to dinner and the theater. Tim and I went out every Thursday night, and that is when he introduced me to his new life that he found glorious and far from shameful. One night after a show, Marlene Dietrich and Elaine Stritch came into the Curtain Call, and Tim heard Elaine ask the legendary Marlene if she would sing her World War II anthem “Lili Marlene.” Instantly, Tim began playing the haunting theme and heard Marlene say to Elaine Stritch, “It is the wrong key.” In the next movement of his fingers he had changed to her key and Marlene said, “The boy can play.”
With Tim Belk’s elegant accompaniment, Marlene Dietrich sang the song beloved by both Nazi and American soldiers on both sides of the trenches, and brought a screaming crowd roaring to its feet. Later, Tim and I would go barhopping through the city as we always did. The bars of San Francisco had a hundred faces and some were ornate and mysterious, others bizarre, but all welcoming when Tim and I were young, our dream of what the world could be still fresh and quivering with life. At one bar, soon after the “Lili Marlene” night, Tim and I were arguing the merits of some new novel, when a fan of his from the Curtain Call tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to dance. This was not part of my own dream of the world. But it made me study my surroundings with greater awareness. I had often been in bars with only men when I was a cadet, and I had noticed that people were dancing to a band in a room separate from the bar. Before this definitive moment, I had not noticed that they were all men dancing with each other. Tim looked horrified, but I’d become friendly with the man who asked me to dance, and I was raised by a mother who taught her kids never to hurt anyone’s feelings. I said I’d be glad to and I followed the young man to the dance floor. He was from South Carolina, Greer, I believe, and I said, “You want to teach these boys to shag?”
“Delighted,” he said.
“Mind if I lead?” I asked, and he said he’d love it if I did.
We shagged and the kid had great moves. After the dance, I thanked my partner and returned to the bar and sat beside Tim.
“You got something to tell me, pal?” I said.
That night, we stayed up talking ’til dawn and Tim told me his real life story, the one that gay Southern men were not allowed to tell back then. He told me he had realized he was gay as a small boy growing up in Fort Mill, South Carolina, and how the knowledge filled him with terror and self-loathing. He described the soul-killing loneliness it entailed, the nightmare of not only being different, but being something despised, vermin-like, a monstrous creation cut off from both society and God.
When The Lords of Discipline was published in 1980, I came through San Francisco on a book tour and spent the weekend in Tim’s mid-level flat in a classic Victorian home on Union Street. More than anyplace I’ve ever been, Tim’s home shimmered with romance and good taste. It looked like a space where great poetry would seize hold of you and shake the language out of you. When we awoke, Tim and I would drink coffee and eat croissants in a hidden-away garden lush with rosebushes and green climbing vines. We would talk about Beaufort—always Beaufort—then we would walk down and have lunch at the Washington Square Bar & Grill, where I learned about the taste of Dungeness crab and Petrale sole and met some of the grand characters who composed the bohemian life of North Beach.
It was on that trip that I made a huge meal for fifteen of Tim’s gay friends. I started cooking at five and the party didn’t break up until two in the morning. Nothing has ever made me laugh as much as gay humor in its perversity, punning, repartee, and yes, its pure and delightful wickedness. Many of these guys told stories about their childhoods in small towns across America that were heartbreaking and screamingly funny in the retelling. It was like hearing the tales of a leper colony for boys marked forever by the shame of being born the way they were supposed to be. Fifteen years later, Tim showed me a photograph of all of us attending that party and everyone, except Tim and me, had died of AIDS. Tim was dying of it when he showed me the snapshot.
I’d been living with my family in Italy when I read a report in the International Herald Tribune about a mysterious disease that was killing gay men in San Francisco and New York. I ran to the telephone and dialed Tim Belk’s number in San Francisco. When he answered in his refined, cultured Southern accent, I said, “Tim, whatever you are doing in your unspeakable gay life, I want you to stop this minute. No more hanky-panky for you, son.”
“So you’ve heard rumors of the plague as far away as Rome,” Tim answered. “Don’t you worry. You’re talking to Sister Timothy Immaculata at this very moment. I’m in the midst of a life of purity, chastity, and good works. I attract wolf whistles from the cutest boys whenever I go to the Castro district wearing my nun’s habit. But I keep tripping over these damn rosary beads.”
“No jokes, Tim,” I said. “This scares the living hell out of me.”
“It scares you?” Tim said. “I’m so scared by this, I’m thinking of going back to the dark side. I’m
“I’m not suggesting anything that drastic or repulsive to your deviant nature,” I said.
“Pat, you know I’ve always thought you were gay,” Tim teased.
“You told me I wasn’t good-looking enough to be gay,” I said.
Tim said, “Sadly, you’re right. I think your dilemma’s incurable.”
As we were speaking that day, Tim had already contracted the virus and the whole nature of our friendship was about to change. Because of the AIDS epidemic, I know of few American families who were not affected either indirectly or profoundly by the spread of the virus. It tore through the San Francisco area like some biblical plague that rolled across the city with that unearthly fog that stole up the Bay each afternoon. Only two of Tim Belk’s large circle of gay friends did not die from the disease. It cast a hangman’s pall over the entire city and caused unbearable grief in the households that had raised those boys across the American landscape. Over and over again, I encountered friends of Tim’s whose families had renounced them forever when they found out their son or daughter was homosexual. These announcements not only infuriated these parents, but repulsed them to such a degree their sons and daughters arrived in San Francisco abandoned, without any bonds of family to support them. As a result, the gay men I met succeeded in forming themselves into an articulate tribe that was both rowdy and indivisible. San Francisco had freed them to be what they were born to be; AIDS made them political and the whole nation changed in its wake.
Tim Belk’s flat on Union Street turned into a visitors’ center for all of Tim’s South Carolina friends. A generous host, he entertained a traveling circus of his Beaufort friends, and over a hundred of us stayed in his light-filled guest room on an alley that dipped down into the heart of North Beach. He gave a tour of the city that lasted for hours as he drove his car from Potrero Heights through Haight-Ashbury, to the mansions of Pacific Heights, the carnival-like atmosphere of the Castro, to the alleyways of Nob Hill. People would stay a week at a time and sometimes longer. With the city laid out like a white chessboard below him and the blue gleaming Bay in the distance with its regattas, and ship traffic at the Marin Headlands in the distance, he would declare in a prayer-like voice that San Francisco was the most beautiful city in the world. Then, in a tribute to all of our shared past, he would admit that Beaufort was just as lovely in its own lush, indefinable way. Each year he returned to Beaufort and brought great joy with his visits, parties galore, and his singular gift for finding magic in every piano that came his way.
After he was diagnosed as HIV positive, Tim and I used to talk at least once a week. As always, we talked literature, politics, and music, and he would tell me about the famous clubs and restaurants he had played in, from the top of the Mark Hopkins to Ernie’s and notable gay bars the length and breadth of the city. He also became famous for playing at parties for high society in San Francisco, and over the years brought his skills into the peerless mansions of the Gettys and the Aliotos, and would always draw a crowd with his compendious knowledge of song and the virtuosity he brought to requests for Chopin, Schubert, and Mozart. All this was done as Tim sat there in his tuxedo with his bourbon and lit cigarette, and he kept up a charming line of social patter that had the entire room singing with him at the end of the evening. He made the whole American South look good in every room he entered, and his Southernness and handsomeness were all part of the package.
In 1988, Tim visited me in Atlanta and I saw for the first time the price that AIDS had begun to exert on his body. He came to my house having lost over twenty pounds since I’d last seen him, and his face covered with sores I’d once seen on several of his friends.
“My God, Tim,” I gasped. “What’s wrong?”
“Come hug the Elephant Man,” he said, and I did.
“Don’t worry, they can cure this. But soon, I’ll come down with something they can’t cure,” he said. “I think all this happened because I made out with some trashy girl in high school.”
“You wish,” I said.
The next year, my wife, Lenore, and I bought a house on Presidio Drive in San Francisco. Tim had not seemed afraid of dying, but very afraid of how he would die. His family was small and he feared being crippled or demented or incontinent. I heard it as a fear of dying alone. So my family and I moved to San Francisco, and I moved there with the purpose of helping Tim Belk die. In the four years I lived in his city, Tim and I became best friends as the relentlessness of his disease began to exert its undermining power over him.
Each day we spoke by telephone, and several times a week I would visit him on Union Street. On Sundays, we always had lunch at the Washington Square Bar & Grill, and we sat at a place of honor by the window so we could observe the human traffic spilling into the park with its kites and Frisbee-catching dogs. A community developed around us, and Leslie was our sharp-tongued waitress and Michael poured our Bloody Marys and a whole civilization came and went as we sat and talked about the state of the world as fifty Sundays went by and Tim lost more weight. The movie version of The Prince of Tides came out in 1991 and I escorted Tim to every party I could, and he was paid good money to play at several of them. He enjoyed the hoopla of the events far more than I did, but I’d fallen in love with movies when Tim Belk hosted a movie series at the Breeze Theatre back in Beaufort. At the premiere, Tim sat beside me and murmured with pleasure at the sumptuous music that opened the movie, and the stunning shots of the town where we had first met twenty-five years before.
Soon after that premiere, one of Tim’s friends dropped by when we were having lunch and said, “There’s a gay kid from South Carolina who’s dying of AIDS. His family won’t have anything to do with him and his friends don’t know where he is. They’re frantic to find him.”
“Hey Tim,” I said, after his friend left. “I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let some kid from South Carolina die of AIDS alone.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Tim answered. “Let’s find him.”
So Tim Belk and I began to search a part of San Francisco we knew nothing about. I described this in South of Broad, when a gay man named Trevor Poe disappears from sight in San Francisco and straight friends go looking for him to bring him back to Charleston. Trevor Poe, of course, was the fictional counterpart of Tim Belk. Tim and I delivered lunch and dinner to dying men who were staying at last-stand hotels in the Tenderloin, a god-awful place on few tourist maps. We would bring meals to men who would be dead within the week or month. We made phone calls to their families, gave them money, bought them groceries. I always asked them if they had met any young man from South Carolina. After weeks of searching, we found the man in a hospital less than four blocks from my house. His name was Jay Truluck and he was from the town of Turbeville, South Carolina.
Tim and I found him in a garden, sitting in a wheelchair, completely blind. He was twenty years old.
“It could be worse, Jay,” I said. “You could be in Turbeville, South Carolina.”
Jay Truluck almost fell out of his wheelchair laughing.
“I’m from Fort Mill,” Tim said. “It couldn’t be that small.”
“Trust me,” Jay said. “It is.”
So we became good friends with Jay Truluck and his suite mate, Jimmy Love, and Jimmy’s exquisite mother and the golden-limbed Charlie Gallie, who was taking great care of both young men and dozens of other stricken patients around the city. Charlie became one of our best friends from that day onward. Those years were terrible, but a strange aura of charity and goodness came together during that time of epidemic. All of us were having dinner at my house on Presidio when Mrs. Love received a phone call that both Jimmy and Jay had died, just minutes apart. Tim and I met Jay Truluck’s mother and sister at the airport and drove them to the funeral home for the final viewing.
In a country Southern accent, Mrs. Truluck said to me as I led her by the arm up to her son’s casket, “Wasn’t my Jay a beautiful boy?”
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When she saw her son’s AIDS-ravaged face, she collapsed into my arms. Tim and I left her and Jay’s devastated sister weeping openly over his casket as we retreated to the rear of the chapel.
Tim was furious and said, “I’d like to slap the hell out of both of them. They should’ve been here with Jay.”
“Tim, they’re Southern just like you and me. They were just being true to how they were raised. Surely, we can understand that,” I said.
“I hate when you go all sentimental and Christian on me,” Tim said. “That’s exactly what’s wrong with your writing.”
Tim never liked anything I wrote. As an English teacher, he insisted the prose be spare, unadorned, unflashy, but hard-hitting and severe. From the beginning of my career in Beaufort, Tim found my writing overcaffeinated, pretentious, and blowsy.
“Have you never heard of the eloquence of simplicity, Pat?” Tim Belk would say.
I would answer, “I’m after something else, Belk. The elegance of grotesque overwriting and egregious excess.”
“But you’re making me a character in all your overblown novels,” Tim said. “I’m a man of Shakespearean depth, but I get a hack like you to tell my story.”
“Therein lies your tragedy, Belk,” I would say.
“You’d be a much better writer had you only been born gay,” Tim said.
“Therein lies my tragedy.” We could always make each other laugh.
In 1996, Tim began to die in earnest. On my book tour for Beach Music we met at the Washington Square Bar & Grill and openly discussed his death for the first time. He now weighed less than a hundred pounds and had assumed that haunted, skeletal look of all AIDS patients at the very end. He held my hand as we talked, and his grip was shaky. A resignation to the inevitable had entered his voice, when I had an idea.