I met James Broughton right after The Man Who Fell In Love With the Moon was published. I’m not sure if it was the hard cover book tour or the paperback tour.
I’d heard of James. I’d seen his movies This is Itand The Bed somewhere down off Canal Street when I lived in Manhattan. But I didn’t really know him. Hadn’t read his poetry, not yet. Then one day I get a letter from him, James Broughton. He’s invited me and my partner to his home in Port Townsend. This is almost twenty years ago.
It’s not really until I meet James that day that I understand who he is. Really such a big bright sexy man he was. Physically beautiful and a powerful man. Quite overwhelming really.
Even though he was getting old.
Old the way I’m getting.
And it’s only now that I am getting old that I can really appreciate what James Broughton did for me that day.
He opened up his house, he gathered friends and family together and threw me a feast for Kings. What’s most important though is that day that I visited him and stayed with him that night in his house—it was in the afternoon in his garden, how he touched me. He took my hand in his and he held my hand and those bright sparkly eyes of his looked into mine and he told me what a wonderful writer I was.
Of course, I was very flattered. Pretty much overwhelmed, but still I didn’t get it. Lots of people were telling me how great I was after that book came out. It’s only been the past couple of years, now that I am getting old, that I know what it is to see a young talent, and the energy and the humility it takes to go to him, to throw a feast for him, to take his hand and look him in the eye.
And tell him that his work is full of spirit.What an incredible gift that is for an elder to honor a younger man like that.
After the day was over, after the feast, James was tired. He told us all to go out to the hot tub and love our bodies and love each other—he was going to bed. It wasn’t that easy a thing for me to get naked and to get in the hot tub. I was raised Catholic. Joel Singer, James’ life mate, was in the tub. Joel saw how I was awkward and took me by the arm. It was one of the first times I’d ever felt I belonged somewhere.
After my next novel, In The City Of Shy Hunters, came out, I got a letter from Joel. He told me that James had made a vow that he would not die until the next Tom Spanbauer novel came out.
James had died in 1999, two years before Shy Hunters was published.
I can’t tell you how much I wish he’d have lived long enough to read it.
And it’s really only not until now that I can fully understand the gift of joy that he gave me.
(read by Tom Spanbauer at the Big Joy Fundraising event in Portland, OR, 28 March 2010)