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     “I was illogical, fevered, but my mind still moved as if it were a rational mind––the mind, everyone’s   mind, is forever unstill, is a continuous restlessness like light, even in sleep, when the light is inside and not outside the skull.”
            ––Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness
 

“My plan is to start a new column called The Hard Stuff. And that’s what it’s going to be about, the hard stuff in life, those things we prefer not to deal with but often have no choice but to deal with one way or another.”
 

Such was the heart and soul of Bill Bagwell, refusing to concede his future to the AIDS which he knew eventually would, one unsuspicious morning or incautious night, open death’s door and call him inside. And so it did early June 22, 2000, bringing to its end a life journey begun August 10, 1940. As the sun began it heated climb toward its heavenly zenith, so did Bill Bagwell.

“The Hard Stuff” had comprised much of his life. He wrote about it with humored irony and biting honesty. In features for Savannah’s former Creative Loafing, the weekly entertainment newsmagazine; in his completed but as yet unpublished novel, Cypress Hills; in pioneering plays for radical gay theater; in a mammoth 700-page memoir with which he enjoyed wrestling as if it were his huge old Doberman pincer, Muggs; and in the tangy bittersweetness of his life, he dared to go one on one with “the hard stuff.”

Sometimes this meant recalling a youth in which sexual ambivalence generated confusions he was allowed to suffer but not articulate. Sometimes it meant taking pride in the garden of a marriage and family that blossomed for its season and provided him with two adored sons.  On many days the hard stuff was a matter of taming the dragon of literary enterprise: steering one’s focus away from the telephone or the painful numbness in one’s legs and vowing obedience to the muse of genius until clarity, beauty, and imagination relinquished their prized gifts. Or it might entail the seemingly apparent incongruency of being a white man whose best friend was a black woman––that cosmic joke of the paradox of assigned race and gender which made him smile while causing so many of his countrymen to cringe with terror.
  

“It just seems to me that unless we make it a point to deal with difficult issues, then we miss out on the opportunity to make it to the good things, the parts of life we can all enjoy despite things like racism or disease or homophobia. Don’t you think so ‘Berzh?”
 

 
“Yes I do,” I answered, respecting his need to conserve energy and breath by reducing the ungainly four syllables of my name to the less taxing “Berzh.”  

Clearly one of the more challenging exchanges in Bill’s life should have centered around the cause of his death. Oddly enough, for him it wasn’t. For those who loved him, yes, but for the man himself, no. Armed with Paul Monette’s memoirs of his battle with AIDS, with publications devoted to people living with HIV and a number of chat-room connections that expanded his web of support well beyond the city in which he lived, Savannah, the disease became for him just one more of what all writers must confront to do what writers do: it became an obstacle. An obstacle which first had to be recognized as such, then measured, then dealt with and allotted as minimal a portion of consideration as possible in order to keep the words flowing.  In order to maintain a crucial image of oneself.

Among the principle tenets of literary journalism is immersion within a given subject. Toward that end, Bill Bagwell was blood-deep in the subject of HIV/AIDS. Who would have blamed him had he chosen to spend his final energies ranting protests at the injustice of glib reports celebrating economic growth (one of the undeniable triumphs of the Clinton administration) and ever-intriguing adventures in cyberspace while he and millions of others watched their lives fading like slow-motion frames in a foreign movie with untranslatable subtitles? 

Who could not have understood if he’d hammered his disease-thinned chest in downtown Savannah in the middle of Broughton Street and screamed to ask why are there so many reports on groups with the fastest growing rate of AIDS cases and so few reports on attempts to stop the plague. Such reactions would have been understandable to all except Bill because to him they would have meant time subtracted from the pursuit of literary excellence and from the art of living as well as one could whatever life remained under whatever circumstances.

His determination to claim rather than waste his final days yielded rich and surprising results, including our friendship. Unlike such long-term pals as novelist Pearl Cleage, the late writer and carpenter John Paul Lee, poet Rebecca Herdmann, and author Miriam K. Center––some of the anchors on his stormier days––I came to know Bill Bagwell late. We met in 1996 when he was directing Native Voices, a somewhat ambitious play profiling the lives of two deceased Savannah writers and two living Savannah writers: the honored ancestor scribes were Conrad Aiken and Flannery O’Connor; the honored living icons were Rosemary Daniell and Ja Jahannes. 

As a member of the Savannah Writers Workshop, then headed by Robert Keber, I was one of those who had helped sponsor the production.  Bill’s vitality, wit, easy smile, and precision of artistic vision made it difficult to comprehend the casual allusion he made one day to his positive HIV status.  He mentioned it as if the universe thought it had played a sly trick on him and he was simply too polite to point out that the joke was not on him at all, but on the threat of death that thought it could break up his love affair with life.  Sadness would not become part of our friendship bargain. Writing and spirituality would.

By Aberjhani
from THE AMERICAN POET WHO WENT HOME AGAIN