On Thanksgiving night here in London, I delivered the keynote speech which opened the Advantages of Age Awards at Hoxton Hall. During the interval, many people from the audience came up to tell me how moved they had been by my speech. I have spoken in front of audiences and done readings from my books enough to know that it is not what people say to you afterwards that lets you know if what you said or read mattered to them, but how they look at you when they say what they say. I could tell by the looks in their eyes that I had conveyed what I had hoped to convey.
When I had earlier arrived at the reception, I was afraid I had misread the room to which I was about to speak. It looked like a pagan convention of druids and witches and warlocks, a coven of the unconventional. There was a glorious flamboyance to the attire since the invitation had said to dress in a “festive” manner and some had even arrived sporting plumage that signaled that they were in no mood for platitudes of any sort, but they proved to be … well .. good sports about what I had to say. They listened. I listened to them listening. Those who speak in front of audiences know about that third force - that vibrating stillness - that exists when a connection is being made. I am grateful that it happened for most of my speech since a vibrating stillness is, in its way, what I was talking about trying to engender in my life now lived as a spiritual pilgrim.
Some asked last night - and even more have emailed the hosts this morning asking - if I planned to publish the speech so they could also read it. So here it is. Thank you for reading it. And thank you to those there last night for listening and deeply hearing what I was saying.
This is what I said*:
I want to talk a bit about shame and how we shed it when we learn to shed so much else in our lives. The first thing I can remember being ashamed of was old age - the second was being poor and I’ll get to that. But first and foremost was being old. When I was seven years old in 1963 my father was killed in an automobile accident. When I was eight in 1964 my mother died of esophageal cancer - at least that was the diagnosis and the biological reason given us. I think she died of a broken heart because she and my father were childhood sweethearts ever since they had been in second grade in a tiny town in Mississippi. They had loved each other all their short lives. My father was 32 when he was killed in the car wreck. My mother was 33 when she succumbed to the brokenhearted cancer affixing itself to that part of the throat that sustains us, the gullet that gives us life. But we humans are more than gullets because the guilt which infuses us and is our birthright to be born into this realm can’t be ingested even as it can be embedded before we know how to conceptualize it as such, culturally inculcated into us for a variety of reasons, mostly stemming from not being what others expect of us and thus not fitting in in the way one is supposed to fit. I have never fit in. I indeed felt branded by my not doing so until I figured out that not fitting in could be just that: my brand. But I’ll get to that, too.
My first memoir as you just heard is titled Mississippi Sissy. I think a sense of place is important in any genre of writing - I have been conscious of it even in composing this address to you - and Mississippi certainly gives one a sense of place just in the mention of it, its sibilance conjuring a semblance of both benevolent gentility and benighted bigotry, a place of ignobility and ignorance and yet it is the birthplace of Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner and Pulitzer Prize winners Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams and of Richard Wright whose 1940 novel Native Son was the first book by an African American chosen by the Book of the Month Club in the States which ensured its place and his in the cultural dialogue.
I always say that we might not be able to read in Mississippi but we sure as hell can write. Richard Wright himself said that he left the south not to forget the south but to understand it. I left when I was 19 and am still trying to decipher what being born there in 1956 did to me as a little white sissy which, in its way, was the concave mirror image of a little artistic black boy born there in 1908 - completely different but parallel in our reflections of the different apartheids of otherness. We both wrote our way back there and out of there, a pilgrimage of simultaneity that those of us who mindfully live our lives as narratives understand in our nonlinear ways. Welty said that all serious daring starts from within. But it can’t end there. The unfussy Faulkner whose prose was fustian with contempt and poetry, an incongruous mix of hauteur and old white men talkin’ shit while they’re always huntin’ something to kill that will not die said that we can’t swim for new horizons until we have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
All these writers had a sense of place - the shifting shore of home - and yet my own deeper sense of place when I think back about that time in my now long life was living within my being a sissy and the sibilance of that - I still live in the there and the here of it - the sashaying about until I keep rediscovering my hips in another way. Isn’t that what growing old is finally: rediscovering our hips in new ways? I figured out that the defiance of a little sissy’s or an old one’s akimbo stance was what could stanch the staunchest derogatory whispers and dunderheaded bullying. I’ve never felt shame about being a sissy. I always felt the defiance in my difference. I reveled in it. I revel. I knew it threw people off who had a hard time understanding my, yes, place amongst them because I was often described as “that little creature.” I liked being thought of as something not less than human exactly but something that still doesn’t need to be one in the normative sense to exist in this wider woebegone world. I actually weaponized my otherness not in a deadly way but to defend myself against the traumatic deaths of my parents. I felt its strength when I needed to be strong as an 8-year-old boy. I feel it now in my old coot phase 60 years later.
But the one thing I did not like as a child - which made me feel a different kind of different and, yes, ashamed - was that after my parents died their consecutive deaths my little brother and sister and I moved in with our maternal grandparents who were then, like me now, in their 60s. I loved Mom and Pop, as we called them, but I wanted young parents like the other children had. I said I was a defiant little sissy, but I guess I was a shallow one, too. I was ashamed of my grandparents for being so old. I didn’t like the aesthetics of it when my grey-haired grandmother - well, more blue-haired with the rinse she put on it - would show up at elementary school for events and stand in a claque of the mothers of my classmates, mothers who were sleek with youth, mostly slender, a slyness to what can pass for beauty when we are in our 30’s, or more precisely when our thighs are.
Maybe the shame I felt was the shapeshifting of grief. I don’t know. I do know that the traumatic grief has shape-shifted since into my being a drug addict before I went into recovery and maybe even my rapacious unprotected promiscuity that led to me becoming HIV positive years after I should have known better. Or maybe it was the shame itself that shape-shifted into those other things about which I was told to be, yes, ashamed. I only know that my ur-shame was about my grandparents being old. This speech tonight is a public amends to them for that. Seemed like a pretty good place to make it at such a ceremony celebrating the glories of getting older.
And I am discovering it is rather glorious ever since, over a year ago, I donated or sold almost everything I owned in life to set out to live life as a pilgrim in small rooms around the world. I prefer that term “pilgrim” to “elder nomad” so maybe I do attach shame still to old age. I only know I wanted one more chapter in my life and needed to set out to do it in my 60s. And yet I wasn’t rich enough - I am poor in any comparative sense, have been all my life since we moved in with my grandparents on a dirt road out in the country in Mississippi - to do it any other way than to rid myself of possessions. It was an economic decision redefined as a spiritual quest. So much of life - so much of mine - is about redefining realities and living in those redefinitions, exploring them instead of settling for how others choose to define us and then settling into that. Don’t settle.
Faulkner - who even wrote a short story titled “The Old People” which is part of his collection , Go Down, Moses - had a bit of shame about never having gotten his high school diploma. In fact, the first graduation ceremony he ever attended was one for his daughter, Jill, in Oxford, Mississippi, and at which he spoke. He began his own address that day in 1951 with this: “Years ago, before any of you were born, a wise Frenchman said, ‘If youth knew; if age could.’ We all know what he meant: that when you are young, you have the power to do anything, but you don’t know what to do. Then, when you have got old and experience and observation have taught you answers, you are tired, frightened; you don’t care, you want to be left alone as long as you yourself are safe; you no longer have the capacity or the will to grieve over any wrongs but your own.
“So you, young men and women in this room tonight, and in thousands of other rooms like this one about the earth today, have the power to change the world, rid it forever of war and injustice and suffering, provided you know how, know what to do. And so according to the old Frenchman, since you can’t know what to do because you are young, then anyone standing here with a head full white hair should be able to tell you.
“But maybe this one is not as old and wise as his white hairs pretend to claim. Because he can’t give you a glib answer ... But he can tell you this, because he believes this. What threatens us today is fear. Not the atom bomb, nor even fear of it, because if the bomb fell on Oxford tonight, all it could do would be to kill us, which is nothing, since in doing that, it will have robbed itself of its only power over us: which is fear of it, the being afraid of it. Our danger is not that. Our danger is the forces in the world today which are trying to use man’s fear to rob him of his individuality, his soul, trying to reduce him to an unthinking mass by fear and bribery.”
The most fearless woman I have ever known - also to me the coolest woman alive - just turned 80 last week. Her name is Lauren Hutton - a legendary model but also an actress and, most important, an adventurer, a pilgrim. Her father was stationed here in England in WWII when she was born. He too was in his 30s when he died. He was 37 when a heart attack took him in 1956, that year I was born. He himself was born in Mississippi as well and grew up living next to William Faulkner. He is buried in the Oxford, Mississippi, cemetery. Her mother divorced him in 1945 when Lauren was not yet two. Lauren never knew him and only had a letter from him on the day she was born telling her about their Mississippi ancestors. “Never meeting my father is the most painful thing in my life,” she once told me. She has carried that grief with her all her own shape-shifting life.
“I once hung with her a bit back in my younger days,” I wrote about her recently in my SES/SUMS IT UP column at Substack. “Even sent her an early play of mine called Cadillacs in the Sky in case she might be interested in doing a reading of it. Dropped it off at her loft on the Bowery and wrote my number on it and she called me to talk about it. I wanted her to do the reading but she didn't think she was talented enough to pull off the character I had written for her in mind. This was before I was even at Andy Warhol's Interview as Executive Editor or at Vanity Fair where I framed the kind of fame she had but always found a way of handing back to us framers. We met and talked about the play some more. But she didn't quite think of herself as right for the role.
“Back in the early 1980s I'd eat breakfast at a place called The Bagel on West Fourth and she'd come rolling in with her buddies after a night out wherever the cool coteries hung to feel less harried by those of us who were not so cool, those corners of New York that have always been a part of its lore where the cool go seeking their own lovely and unlovely kind. I'd eavesdrop and dribble a bit of honey on my toasted buttered bagel as I took mental notes about living one's narrative by not giving a shit and wondered if one could eavesdrop as well the effortlessness that Hutton seemed to have about it all. I was already exhausted by the effort it took to be who I wanted to be in such a place. As I look back, she taught me by her example to let go of the effort and turn instead to holding on to your truest self no matter what and trust that: your own damn truth.
“When she had her awful motorcycle accident - she was on a group ride through Nevada with her motor cycle mates Jeremy Irons and Dennis Hopper - I found out which hospital she was in and sent her a note about some of this - what I thought of her, what she meant to me - not expecting to hear anything back. She had a lot of recovering to do. And I didn't hear back.
“We lost touch.
“But a few years later, I was down in Miami where I had a condo in South Beach for a time and one evening at dusk I was feeling that one-evening-at-dusk feeling I can still get and went down to the beach to contemplate my life and how sadness was - still is - the tide that comes and goes in the way that a tide does in being its own gravitational pull and how, high or low, it never ever leaves but dutifully lingers because it defines the shore, all that it's not because it is.
“I was watching the tide's lingering that evening when, emerging from the ocean, a lone figure walked toward me after a solitary sunset swim. It was Lauren. She recognized me. She sat in the sand beside me. I smelled the ocean on her, the dutiful tides that lingered now on her. She thanked me for my note in the hospital a couple of years before. We talked about sadness and surviving and writing and belief in one's self and what a crock of shit being cool is but how fame can help frame a life with the privilege of adventure but you have to be careful that the privilege itself is not the adventure you seek. We talked about that early play of mine. We talked about Mississippi. About how hard it was to recover from her accident, from being so broken. We didn't talk about healing really and all the weight that word can carry. We talked instead about growing older with some fucking dignity. We were so much younger that Miami dusk and not sure what dignity meant in our lives. But that is what I remember we longed for: a life lived with dignity but not with dullness. She also taught me not to confuse those two things, pointed out how different they were. Then she agreed to talk to me on the record for a story I was doing for Travel + Leisure about New Orleans where she went to school at Sophie Newcomb, an all-girls college, and worked for Al Hirt while doing her homework at his bar. She always knew what corners the cool folks found to be cool.
“So here's to honey dribbled on a bagel, recovering from brokenness, not giving a shit what others think, and not worrying about the frame or even what's in it. Walk past the tide from the ocean. Sit on the sand. Talk about sadness with someone who needs to talk about it. Dignity? Dullness? Fuck'em both finally. Being eighty, the dusk of life, is a privilege. That's your newest adventure, arriving yet again where you've never been and exploring it. May your eighties be just that: an exploration. I'll be eavesdropping.”
Before I close I’d like to thank you for eavesdropping on my thoughts tonight and being a part of my own exploration of becoming older in a world we can still redefine for the better if we redefine what being old means. Since I have been in recovery, I have learned to live one day at a time but each one day I become older I have a new comprehension of that tool for living. I once told people that I am amazed that I have manifested this life in London where I live for half of each year since you don’t require a visa to do so. But last week as I was in the midst of my walking mediation around your beautiful city - pardon me, around ours - I realized that I continue to shed more deeply because I no longer have possessions to shed. I shed now each previous moment and I shed even the anticipation of the next. I only manifest two things now: am and is. Today is Thanksgiving back in America. Tonight - this very moment, this one, this one, this one - I am thankful for your being the is in my am. That is what old age is to me now. It is not about continuing to contemplate the past nor is it about worrying that I don’t have enough time to focus really on the future. It is just that: am and is. It is the youngest I have ever felt because it is the youngest I have ever been. Each moment I am born anew, each breath a new beginning.
Begin anew.
Fuck shame.
Thank you.
###
* The speech incorporates the previous SES/SUMS IT UP column about Lauren Hutton
This 69 year old is so grateful to you for this absolutely beautiful piece.
Thank you. I needed that.