Jamie Brickhouse's Blog: Lagniappe - Posts Tagged "dangerous-when-wet"

Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?" opens and closes Mad Men's mid-premiere of its final season, and it's the perfect anthem for the talented but self-destructive alcoholic, 40-something Don Draper. I was ahead of Don. It was the perfect anthem for budding alcoholic me when I was five in 1973.

That's when I saw Miss Lee singing it on some variety show. I stood on the shag carpeting of my family's living room in small-town Texas mesmerized. She stood in a white fog on the Zenith TV screen, like a glamorous ghost in a platinum-blonde Cleopatra wig wearing about 200 yards of white, diaphanous chiffon and blue-tinted sunglasses, lenses the size of my little head. She had a black dot on her right cheek, just like Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke.

The haunting, fatalistic song had me hooked from the first verse. Even though it was a very grown up song, it wasn't that odd that it spoke to my five-year-old gay mind. It was a story song, after all.

In "Is That All There Is?" she assumes a louche, seen-it-all demeanor, and in a whispery purr of a voice as if she is singing only to you in bed, she sings verse after verse about a life of tragedy and disappointments, and when her father takes her to the circus, she describes it with an ironic wink in her voice as "Greatest show on earth."

Her voice rises at the end in a question, so that you can almost hear her ask "Right?" But she doesn't say it, it's implied. Her bored assessment of the spectacle of clowns, and dancing bears, and pretty ladies in pink tights? "I had the feeling that something was missing. I don't know what." Her little girl, pragmatic answer to that disappointment: Let's keep dancing... break out the booze, and have a ball.

Wow! That's my kind of little girl.

Like a gay Don Draper, I escaped the sticks and landed in New York City in 1990 where I chased the Mad Men lifestyle long after the Mad Men era had ended but long before the term had become a beautiful cliché. I wasn't in advertising in the 1960s. I was in the publishing world in the 1990s -- less glamour and less money, but the same amount of sex and liquor. While I broke out the booze and had a ball, Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?" followed me wherever I went like ghostly cigarette smoke in a bar.

On one of those break-out-the-booze nights in 1996 at four a.m. -- when it was all still fun, but the ice was just beginning to melt -- I found myself in my Manhattan brownstone apartment with my best friend, Mr. Parker, playing "Is That All There Is?" over and over and over.

Mr. Parker chimed in with a bray, "My God, that song is brilliant! She's brilliant! You know, most people think of this as the ultimate downer song. I don't. Conversely, I think it's a celebration of the spectacle of life in all its joy and tragedy."

"Well, she does say that she's not ready for that 'final disappointment.'"

"Oh! 'That final disappointment.' What a brilliant line. It's a total alkie song!"

We took gulps of drinks and marinated in the meaning of the song as we let Peggy finish it uninterrupted. In the final verse she says that as fatalistic as her outlook may appear, she's not going to end it all, and when that "final disappointment" comes she'll face it, like she has faced the rest of life. She re-phrases the song's question as a statement that she'll keep dancing and drinking, "If that's all." Pause. "There." Pause "Is." Followed by a final vamp and bump bump of the tuba.

We sat in silence and drank, staring ahead.

Then Mr. Parker looked at me with a spark in his glassy eyes. "You know, I have her number."

"What do you mean you have her number?" I asked incredulously.

"I mean to say that I have her phone number. Right here in my wallet. A friend of mine managed to get it from some hospital she was in. You know she's always in and out of the hospital."

"Oh, I know. I read her autobiography," I said with pride. "She described more ailments and near-death experiences than... than Elizabeth Taylor."

Mr. Parker pulled out her number and waved it at me.

"Give me that!" Fueled with liquor courage I picked up the cordless phone and dialed.

Ring. Ring. Ri--

"Hello," a young-sounding woman answered.

"Hi. May I speak to Peggy."

"Who's calling, please?"

"Jamie."

"Okay. Hold on."

Hold. Hold. I'm hold for Miss Peggy Lee.

And then: "Hello? This is Peggy."

"Hi Peggy. This is Jamie."

"Jamie... Anderson?"

"No. It's Jamie Brickhouse. I'm a huge fan of yours. I met you back stage at one of your New York concerts," I lied. I never was lucky enough to see her perform. "Peggy, I missed you at Carnegie Hall last year and I'm still sick about it. Do you have any upcoming New York dates?"

"No. Ever since the fall I can't even get out of bed..." Her words seemed to sink into what I imagined was a cumulus, king-sized cloud of a bed where she was nestled in a quilted, white satin bed jacket, a princess phone cradled between shoulder and ear. She let her words lie there for a beat. And then with a twinkle in her voice she said, "But I've still got the voice." I could almost feel her breath in my ear.

"Yes, Peggy, you've still got the voice." I mouthed "Oh. My. God," to Mr. Parker. "Am I catching you at a bad time?"

"No? What are you doing?" Her voice was so sexy, the question could have been, "What are you wearing?"

"I'm sitting here in New York with my best friend. Drunk. We've been listening to 'Is That All There Is.' Peggy, I can't tell you how many drunken nights you've gotten me through with that song."

"Well," breath, "I guess my life was worth living."

I don't remember the rest of the conversation. After that, I didn't need to.

"I guess my life was worth living." What did she mean by that? Was it a sarcastic slap in my face that if she got some lush through another drunken night, then perhaps her purpose on earth was fulfilled, or was she truly acknowledging my reverence for her and the song, meaning that if she could move people so profoundly as she had me, then her life had meaning? I suspect she meant a bit of both.

I thought about the life I had been living in the six years I'd been in New York. This was long before I finally got sober or even thought I needed to get sober. I was living the kind of life I'd always fantasized about back in Texas: the charming Brownstone New York apartment, a career working with writers, a boyfriend (with some boys on the side), and a recirculating waterfall of booze and parties and more booze.

Greatest show on earth. Right?

But at the end of all those parties, after the last guest had gone, I'd always stay up for just. One. More. I'd survey the mess of the party and sit there listening to Peggy as I replayed what had become of my life. The people showed up. We broke out the booze. We had a ball. And then it was over.

I felt like Peggy at the circus. Or Don Draper in 1970. I had the feeling that something was missing. And I didn't know what.

This essay is adapted from my memoir Dangerous When Wet.

Mary Karr was kind enough to do a Q&A with me for the Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir Amazon page. Here tis, y'all!

A note from Mary Karr on Jamie Brickhouse:

Jamie Brickhouse is a black-belt Texas charmer whose wit, psychological acuity, and self-awareness sizzle on the page. Dangerous When Wet is stunningly Southern, which is a priori gothic, and like any good memoir, it’s never cartoonish. He grew up in the same stretch of Ringworm Belt where I was born. I didn’t know him then, but I’m glad I know him now. Readers of Brickhouse are lucky to relish his wise and wise-assed conversation about booze, fallen priests, memory, and truth. Required reading.

Mary Karr: Can you talk about the glamour of drinking in your household?

Jamie Brickhouse: I glamourized my parents. They always seemed to be coming from a party or throwing a party. They even had household matches and cocktail napkins printed with their names, “Jean and Earl.” I wanted what they had so I was more interested in hanging around them and their adult friends than my own kind – children, yuck! I regarded parties and alcohol as the fast ticket to the grownup-hood. But I also saw Mama Jean’s displeasure with Daddy Earl’s drinking. She was a social drinker – could take or leave it. He was a fun-loving drinker – the more the merrier. When the merry turned to anger and she ranted and screamed about his drinking, I saw her as a spoilsport. I couldn’t connect the dots between the booze and the fights, the dark side of that glamorous wall.

MK: I know your father recently passed away; can you describe his response to the manuscript?

JB: “Hurry up and finish. I want it to come out before I die!” was his constant refrain as I was writing it. I was drenched in fear and dread about how he’d react to the darkest parts of the book and my sexual shenanigans. I seriously considered not letting him read it until right before publication. But I put on my big girl panties and delivered the manuscript to him in person last Easter. My breath held in the other room, I listened as the manuscript pages fell on the floor around his chair. He guffawed, gasped, cried. He told me he loved the book, that I write beautifully, that he was proud of me. Then he said, “Are you happy with it?” After a beat I answered yes. It wasn’t until that moment that I was happy with it. He died eight months later on New Year’s Eve. I’m eternally grateful that I didn’t take the coward’s road and wait to let him read it.

MK: Is there any part that blamed Mama Jean or your father for getting you drunk in the first place?

JB: No. I used to blame her for getting me drunker because I’d drink at her when she made me angry, but I was an alcoholic before I took that first sip of my daddy’s whiskey. If a parent hooks up two kids to a feeding tube of booze, the alcoholic kid is going to make sure that the supply is well stocked; the nonalcoholic kid is going to rip out the tube first chance he gets.

MK: What’s your relationship with the Catholic Church given your run-in with the derelict priest?

JB: I grew up Catholic but rejected the Church when I left home, using my homosexuality as the excuse. I was already far from the flock (or frock) when I had the fling with the priest. After he dropped me when I told him that I’d become HIV-positive (he didn’t give it to me), I felt like he dumped his vow of charity into the same trashcan as his chastity. But three of the people who helped save my ass – my mother, my father, and my rehab counselor (gay) were devout Catholics. The grace of being alive and sober has brought me closer to God. Mama Jean “brings” me to church every year when I attend a memorial Mass on the anniversary of her death. I don’t know if I’ll ever be a full-blown Catholic again, but the Catholic Church is a part of my – admittedly half-assed – spiritual program today.

MK: How did you think about truth and embellishment as you worked?

JB:With a mother like Mama Jean and a drinker like I was, I didn’t need to embellish the truth. I didn’t spend hours at the library with the microfiche scanner, but I did comb through my journals and letters, which were helpful for facts and how I was feeling at the time. My teacher, Phyllis Raphael, introduced me to the “I remember…” writing prompt (you write stream of conscious memories about any subject). I still use it as the front door into any subject because it brings to the surface my most salient memories, the ones that cannot be ignored. I conducted informal interviews with friends and family (sounds like a phone plan), and I circulated the manuscript afterward to them. None of them balked at my version of events, except for my dad who raised the flag on one section. I describe coming out to my parents on a phone call, a pivotal memory for all of us. I remember my mother being on the phone solo and asking if I had homosexual tendencies. My father claimed he was also on the line and was the one who asked the question. I include both versions in the book. Mine shows her as always being ever confrontational. His points to the denial she was in. Whatever the facts, both are true.

Check out the April & May issues of Poz & Vanity Fair.

Poz magazine includes DWW in a round up of "mommies dearest" gay son/mama memoirs. An excerpt: "Brickhouse is an energetic, witty narrator, with a tres gay eye for detail who keeps it fresh..." DWW is in good company with the other two books reviewed, Damage Control by Sergei Bossier and Bettyville by George Hodgman.

Vanity Fair's "Hot Type" column about new books includes DWW and says, "Jamie Brickhouse plunges into his dark days of boozing in Dangerous When Wet."

Only 8 days until publication!

I wrote an essay adapted from Dangerous When Wet for "The End," a NYTimes "Opinionator" column about end of life issues.

Sunday, April 26, 2015
Sunday Review sectionDangerous When Wet: A Memoir

The last time I wished my mother dead, I meant it. I was on the plane home to New York City after visiting her in Beaumont, Tex., where she was in what I now know were the final stages of Lewy body dementia.

In less than a year, Mama Jean, as I called her, had gone from being the big-screen personality I always knew (a self-made star with looks reminiscent of Elizabeth Taylor, the personality of Mama Rose from “Gypsy,” a raven mane done to a tease, makeup camera ready, and almost always in close-up) to a shut-eyed, unresponsive, prematurely old woman slumped in a wheelchair. Her hair was a crushed bouffant, her hands were balled in arthritic fists.

“God, if it can’t get any better than this, please take her.” She died two weeks later. Her death at age 75, in 2009, came a year after another major loss in my life: the death of my love affair with booze.

I had wished Mama Jean dead many times when she was perfectly healthy. I’m not talking about a “my mother is making my life miserable right now” kind of death wish. It was a death wish that came with the realization that I’d never be free to live my life fully until she died.

Mama Jean’s intense love for me was like a cashmere blanket in August; it was like the crack cocaine of mother love. She wanted to keep me her perfect little redheaded Jamie doll forever. “If only I could shrink you back to age 5. That was the perfect age!” She’d been saying that to me since I was … 6? But when I didn’t behave like her idealized image of me, the eruption of her wrath could nearly shatter the cut-crystal vases in our house. So over the years I tried to shove those other versions of me — gay, Democrat, drunk — out of sight to make sure that I’d never lose her love, which was my first addiction. She placed me on a pedestal, and I liked being there.

As much as I hated to admit it, Mama Jean knew me better than I knew myself. She predicted my alcoholic downfall back in high school. “It’s in your blood. On your father’s side. He, and Pawpaw before him, liked it way too much. You have too much going for you to let booze get in the way.” She pooh-poohed my vague notions of performing on the stage. “Acting is a trashy life. You should be a writer.” I ignored her.

When my alcoholism deepened beyond her wildest nightmares, I stopped wishing for her death to release me, and started wishing for my own. The ultimate liberation. I even tried it at age 38. When Mama Jean got the news of my suicide attempt, she slapped on her face, hopped on a plane to New York, and flew to my rescue. Before she shipped me off to rehab, at her expense, she pointed a red fingernail and announced, “Your drinking days are over.” And then: “You know, suicide is a mortal sin. It’s a good thing you didn’t succeed. If you had, you couldn’t spend eternity in heaven with me.”

Mama Jean’s decline gave me the strength to finally become sober. When her mind and body were hijacked by Lewy body dementia — a progressive neurological and muscular disease — and my father had to hospitalize her, it was my turn to come to the rescue. But I had never told her that I’d relapsed a few times.

Her hair wasn’t done. She wore no makeup. And her nightgown needed changing. At one point she smiled and told me that with my pretty red hair I reminded her of … and then she trailed off. Everything she said that day lacked something she had never lacked: conviction.

Until I hugged her goodbye, and she clamped my forearm in a vise grip. Her face was a mix of teeth-baring anger and fear. She kept one hand gripped on my arm and released the other to point her index finger at me in accusation. “You’ve been drinking.” Her red nail polish was chipped.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not.” I wasn’t. I was seven months sober.

I looked her straight in the eye. “You don’t have to worry anymore.”

She stared at me warily. “O.K.” She raised her finger in a warning halt. “But promise me. Promise.”

“I promise.”

If I can’t stay sober for myself, I thought, do it for her.

She froze in that position: eyes narrowed, jaw set, finger raised. Resolute. For one last time — before the illness took complete hostage of her — she was in charge and her love blanketed me.

After that, her decline was swift. Five months later I was making that death-wish prayer on the plane to New York. Less than a week later my father called to say that Mama Jean was going into hospice.

She lay flat on her back, a morphine drip next to the bed. She turned her head to me. Her eyes were open. “Hi, Mama. I’m here.” She blinked and smiled at me in the way a baby does, and you want to believe that the baby knows and understands you. Mama Jean had understood me for most of my life.

Four days later my family and I gathered around her bed. For us, the wait was as slow and steady as the morphine drip, but without any pain relief. Her heave-sigh breaths dominated and hushed me. I held my breath as her breaths started coming farther apart. Each long pause fooled me into thinking that every breath was her last. I’d start to let go of my breath, let go of my tears, let go. But then she’d breathe again. Tears would start, and then another long exhale filled the room. Not yet! “She’s still here. She’s still here.”

Finally, she took her last breath. The room was silent and airless. She was gone. So was my drinking. I had kept my promise and stayed sober for her.

Today, I do it for me.

I was wrong about her death. It didn’t set me free. I’ll never be free of her love, nor do I want to be. But her death did liberate me. It gave me license to write about our relationship. A year after she died, I enrolled in a writing workshop and started to become who she wanted me to be — not her perfect little 5-year-old boy, but a sober man pursuing a writing career.

The first pieces I wrote were about Mama Jean. Then I began to write about my alcoholism. I soon found that I couldn’t write about one without the other, and I couldn’t write about either until both were gone. The booze I rarely miss. But if I could choose between my book or a healthy Mama Jean, I’d choose Mama Jean.

Dangerous When Wet is officially on sale and published today, April 28, 2015.

I'll give a reading, talk and signing at Barnes & Noble in New York City, 2289 Broadway @ 82nd St. tonight at 7pm.

I'll give a reading, talk and signing at BookCourt in Brooklyn tomorrow night, Wednesday, April 29 at 7pm, 163 Court St., Brooklyn, 11201.

Hope to see y'all there!

Alumnus finally pens the story he’s been burning to tell
by Carlos Anchondo '14
Jamie Brickhouse '90: B.A. Communication

If his mother had her way, Jamie Brickhouse would permanently be five-years old.

For Mama Jean, as she’s nicknamed, five years was the perfect blend of cuteness, obedience, and maternal admiration. Brickhouse was her constant companion and grew to weigh the majority of life’s decisions against the approval or disapproval of Mama Jean.

Of course, no person can stay one age forever.

Brickhouse grew up in the coastal city of Beaumont, Texas, surrounded by a wide breadth of true Southern characters. Most notable was Mama Jean, the city’s very own Elizabeth Taylor. A local real estate maven, Mama Jean was simultaneously Brickhouse’s harshest critic and most ardent supporter.

During the fall of his first year at Trinity University, Brickhouse came out to his parents as gay. In his memoir, Dangerous When Wet, Brickhouse describes Mama Jean as “protective” and purposefully “blind” to his homosexuality, viewing his sexual orientation as a flaw. It became a source of tension between the two.
In the following summer of 1987, Brickhouse was back home in Beaumont. He recalls leaving for a date and, in a moment of honesty, sharing with Mama Jean that he was going out with a man. Exploding, Mama Jean rattled off about AIDS and types of intercourse. After the date, she laid into him for worrying her, for drinking alcohol, and not knowing “what love is.”

Living up to Mama Jean’s idealized version of him would be something that Brickhouse would struggle with for the remainder of her life, but Brickhouse always knew that Mama Jean was in his corner.
“Love her, hate her, or disagree with her, you could never argue that no one loved as fiercely and completely as she did,” Brickhouse says.

In writing his memoir, Brickhouse says that the “revelation is in the writing.” Looking back on that particular story, Brickhouse acknowledges that Mama Jean reacted that way because she was afraid, afraid of the AIDS crisis raging at the time, afraid of the lack of medication, afraid for the safety of her son.

At Trinity, Brickhouse majored in communication with a focus in journalism and minored in art history. Sacrificing a flair for theater in lieu of a major he considered more practical, he still regrets not adding theater as a second major. Of Trinity, however, he has no regrets.

“It was a great university for me,” Brickhouse says. “I absolutely loved Trinity and I still feel as though I got a great education despite not completely going with my passion.”

After graduation, Brickhouse fulfilled his lifelong dream of moving to New York City and took the Radcliffe Publishing Course, a postgraduate course in book and magazine publishing. This would be the start of a more than 20-year career in the book publishing industry.

In his time within the publishing arena, Brickhouse would work with Molly Ringwald, Sidney Poitier, Gloria Estefan, Mary Karr, and more. Prior to founding his own speaker’s agency in 2012, redBrick Agency, where he now serves as CEO, Brickhouse was vice president and director at the HarperCollins Speakers Bureau, the first publishing house lecture agency.

Yet Brickhouse’s 1990 move to New York City also marked his gradual descent into alcoholism. What began as a way to enhance life’s pleasures slowly morphed into sneaking alcohol before and during work, a use of hard drugs, a loss of employment, contracting HIV, and ultimately, a failed attempt at suicide.

Brickhouse’s unsuccessful suicide led him to rehab in California and, at last, allowed him to right the ship. He became serious about becoming a writer, something he had always wanted to pursue after being surrounded by authors for all his working career.

Although he has written sporadically for various publications, including The New York Times and The Huffington Post, Brickhouse knew it was time for a book.

So he wrote honestly about what he knew: his sexuality, his alcoholism, and yes, Mama Jean.
“It was important for me to express myself artistically,” Brickhouse says. “This was a story that I was burning to tell. Writing, for me, has been so gratifying because I’ve never worked harder at anything in my life. There is a high which cannot be equal to any high that you would get from alcohol or sex or any other mind-altering substance.”

Today, Brickhouse is oddly liberated from Mama Jean. When he began work on Dangerous When Wet, Mama Jean had been dead two years and his alcoholism dead for one. And although he can now make life choices more freely without the rebuke of Mama Jean, he would still give anything to have her with him again.

I always dreamed that when I finally gave birth and held my first baby, the moment would be divinely special. I'm not a new mother, nor even a father, but a first-time author who delivered a book. It's no coincidence that Dangerous When Wet, my first born, has just been published in time for Mother's Day. It's about my relationship with my Texas tornado of a mother, Mama Jean, who always wanted me to be a writer. She recognized the talent early in me, because it was a talent I'd inherited from my father.

She also recognized early the other talent I inherited from my father: drinking. The memoir is about that too. With the same dauntless and determined drive that made her a financial success in the good ole boys' club of the Southern small-town where I grew up, she loved me fiercely and tried unsuccessfully to grab my hand from the bottle and shove it onto the writing keyboard. I tried to outrun her love, which cast a shadow as big and wide as her Texas-sized hairdo. "No mother could love a son as much as I do," she often told me.

Meanwhile, I fell deep in love with alcohol, which I may have loved as much as Mama Jean loved me. Thousands of miles away from her, Mama Jean was always with me no matter how deep in booze I swam. I couldn't escape the thought - especially when I was doing something of which she wouldn't approve or just making stupid decisions - WWMJT? (What Would Mama Jean Think?). Near the end of my drinking, her voice in my head was just about the only thing left of my conscience. When my love affair with booze died in 2006 in a big way (my suicide attempt) she rushed to my side to foot the bill for rehab.

Three years later, on December 14, 2009, just as I was rebuilding my sober life, hers ended after a rapid decline from Lewy body dementia, a progressive neurological and muscular disease. I helped my father plan every detail of her funeral down to her burial dress (her red St. John Knits gown), the red roses on her casket, and the music. At the wake a vocalist sang her namesake song, "Jean," from the Maggie Smith movie, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Jean, Jean, roses are red
All of the leaves have gone green

Ironically, a year after she died I started to become a writer, what she always wanted me to be. I had to overcome the fear that by writing about her, I was betraying her, and the only way I could do that was by writing about her. It wasn't a betrayal but an honest portrayal and a love letter to her.

The shadow that Mama Jean cast while alive stayed with me as I wrote the book over the next three years, which was the second hardest thing I've done after getting sober. I usually write in the living room of my high-rise New York apartment at the head of my dining room table with my "old person" online radio station from Jacksonville, Florida streaming a mix of Muzak-y instrumentals and American popular standards. Behind my chair Mama Jean, in a black-and-white glossy from 1965, stares down upon me from a high shelf in an Art Deco vitrine. She is in a pose you rarely see anymore: she gazes over her shoulder, which is in the middle of the frame, perpendicular to the viewer. Her hair is one solid bouffant flip, a "Cat Five" - as in it could withstand a category five hurricane.

I pulled an all-nighter when I finished the first draft of the manuscript. I was not elated. I didn't scream, "I did it!" I was too exhausted to feel joy. I felt like what I imagine it must be like after giving birth. I was simply spent from a task that nearly killed me. I lay my head down on my outstretched arm for a while on the table. Then I looked over my shoulder at Mama Jean who was looking over her shoulder in that penetrating gaze of hers.

I looked at the time. It was 12:48 A.M., December 14, 2013. I finished the manuscript on the third anniversary of Mama Jean's death.

The work wasn't done. Over the next year, I worked with my editor at St. Martin's Press, writing and revising the manuscript, finalizing the book jacket, asking famous authors to gold-dust it with their endorsements, copy editing, proof reading, legal reading until I signed off on the final manuscript. I had a few more months to wait for the finished hard cover, the newborn.

I was determined that I would have a special solitary and sacred moment when the book arrived. Would I make a cup of tea, take off all my clothes, slip into a bubble bath surrounded by candles and read the book cover-to-cover? Would I wait to open the book until I was seated alone in a fancy restaurant, order an extravagant meal and toast myself with something bubbly and non-alcoholic? Would I just throw it up in the air à la Mary Tyler Moore in the opening credits of her TV show?

The day the book was expected to arrive, I worked that morning, as I usually do, at the dining room table with my old person radio station playing and Mama Jean's photo over my shoulder. I left at noon to go to the gym and run errands. In the lobby I saw that there was a package waiting for me. I was certain it was the book, because my editor's assistant had told me that she'd overnighted it to me. "It's here," I said to myself. "But not yet. Get it when you come back."

I returned an hour and half later with shopping bags of groceries and some new clothes. "I believe there's a package waiting for me," I told the doorman. He opened the cabinet behind his desk and searched for probably fifteen seconds, but it seemed like an hour. He pulled out a rectangular, padded envelope, about the size of one hardcover book. He set it down on the credenza. I looked at the label, which had the return address of St. Martin's Press, but I didn't touch the package. First I had to sign for it in the doorman's log. The doorman handed me the package, which seemed as heavy as a boulder and as delicate as an infant.

"Not yet," I told myself. "Wait until you get upstairs. Damn! I never decided how this super-sacred, solo moment I'm finally about to have should play out."

On the elevator ride to the tenth floor of my apartment, I was weighed down with my gym bag and shopping packages, but the package that held my book was the one that tipped the scales.

I walked into the empty apartment with both sunlight and my old person music streaming in. I went straight to my bedroom. I placed on the bed my gym bag and shopping packages, and then the book. "Not yet," I said. "It's got to be right." I put away the gym bag. I put away the groceries. I ripped off and threw away the price tags of the new clothes. I put away the clothes. The bed was clear, save for one, rectangular, padded envelope.

I opened it. I certainly knew what the cover, looked like since I'd approved it, but I was worried that the finished version might not be just right. I pulled the book out of the package and actually gasped as I gazed at it. It was beautiful. It was better than I imagined it could be. Between its hard covers was something I'd created, born of pain, suffering and love. It was my baby.

I carried the book into the living room. I held Dangerous When Wet in both hands and stared at it with the gaze of a mother's love. I caressed the glossy finish of the cover photo of three-year-old me sitting by a pool bar at a table with two cocktails in front of me and Mama Jean's purse beside me.

I stood there in a fog for I don't know how long before I pricked up my ears. My heart raced when I heard the song emanating from my old person station. It was "Jean."

I walked to the dining room table and held the book up to Mama Jean's photo as her song played: Jean, Jean . . . come out of your half-dreamed dream

Instantly, I knew that I was having my super-sacred, special moment, a moment far beyond anything I could have dreamed. But it wasn't solo. Mama Jean was there to share it with me.

Jamie Brickhouse is the author of Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (St. Martin's Press).

The only book club I’ve ever been in had a mere two members: myself and my mother, Mama Jean. This was in my middle-school years in the early 1980s. We didn’t call it a club, but in the way that my nascent homosexual self still wanted to imitate everything she did because she made it all seem glamorous, I wanted to read everything she read.

Mama Jean read books like she did everything else: emotionally. That is to say, her reactions to what she was reading were on display to anyone observing. She could have had a great career in silent pictures. Anyone peering through a window into our house would have known instantly what she was feeling watching her histrionic gestures, which were as broad and iconic as her favorite soap opera stars. As she read, she would gasp, cry and even chastise the characters for making stupid decisions the way she talked back to her soap opera characters on the TV screen.

I remember her lying on our striped velvet sofa in her maroon and pink, zip-up velour robe shrieking in terror as she read Stephen King’s THE SHINING. She’d lay the mass market paperback with its silver cover below her breasts after a particularly harrowing scene, stare at the ceiling and say out loud, “I don’t know if I can keep reading this. It’s scaring the feces out of me.” (She used a more colloquial word to illustrate her fear.) Then she’d catch her breath and start reading again.

Mama Jean’s visceral reactions to books left me practically salivating with desire to read what she was devouring. And I did. Novels: THE SHINING, SCRUPLES by Judith Krantz, THE OTHER SIDE OF MIDNIGHT by Sidney Sheldon; memoirs: PENTIMENTO by Lillian Hellman, CHANGE LOBSTERS - AND DANCE by Lilli Palmer; even the self-help and pop-psychology books: THE CINDERELLA COMPLEX by Colette Dowling, PASSAGES by Gail Sheehy, and YOUR EROGENOUS ZONES by Wayne W. Dyer.

After we’d both read them, we’d compare notes and talk about our favorite characters, the villains we loved to hate, and the chapters we couldn’t get out of our minds. The woman in the bathtub in Room 237 of THE SHINING scared the feces out of us both. The scene in THE OTHER SIDE OF MIDNIGHT when a woman says, “I’ll take it on rye, lettuce tomato and mustard, hold the pickles,” in reaction to a salami-sized penis had us both laughing hysterically.

In those days, I did do what she told me to do and read what she read. From the time I was a boy and told her that I wanted to be on the stage, she’d shoot back, “Unh-uh! Acting is a trashy life. You’re going to be a writer. You get that from your father.” It took me until middle age to finally listen to her on that count. And she was right: My talent for writing came from my father. However, my excitement for reading and a good story that I still have today is pure Mama Jean.Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir

Feature from San Antonio's Rivard Report by Thomas Payton

When I lived in Atlanta I was spoiled. Every week – usually several days a week – a cavalcade of the nation’s best LGBTQ authors would pass through, reading their new books at the famed but now-defunct OutWrite Books in Midtown or other stores. There is no doubt that San Antonio is barely a blip on the national LGBTQ literary radar and that has been a disappointment.

I’ve been in the book business for more than 25 years, and in moving to Texas I’ve been surprised to see such a shortage of books about LGBTQ life and history in the Lone Star State. For a state so large, anchored by cities like San Antonio, Austin, Houston, and Dallas, LGBTQ history is profoundly unreported – and, as a result, certainly misunderstood in many circles – when compared to other parts of the nation including the Deep South from Mississippi to Virginia.

We have an opportunity to help fix that this Thursday at The Twig Book Shop. Acclaimed debut author, and Trinity University alumnus, Jaime Brickhouse returns to his native Texas to read from his new memoir, “Dangerous When Wet” at the book shop located in the Pearl on Thursday, May 14 at 5:30 p.m.

The memoir is ultimately a testimony to his adoring mother, Mama Jean – a matriarchal Texas woman with the flair of Elizabeth Taylor and bluster of Auntie Mame. She was strong, flamboyant and outlandish, and she adored her son and wanted him to remain her little boy forever. From a young age, however, he longed for the drink she held in her hand and to discover his own path to recreate her fabulousness, or discover his own. That path led to New York and a star-studded career in the publishing and entertainment industries. The journey was laden with challenges also, and he struggled to overcome alcoholism while coping with an HIV diagnosis.

Brickhouse wrestles about reconciling a life lived fast and brazenly but at a distance with moving past the barriers to open disclosure to family members. From coming out while a freshman at Trinity to sharing his addiction and HIV status with his mother who held her son on a pedestal, he navigates familiar terrain with great finesse poignantly laced with a mix of camp and hometown humor.

Storytelling in the South has a distinct flavor, and one can spot Brickhouse’s Deep South roots as he spins tales that hit as simultaneously outrageous and thoroughly authentic. Equal parts “Steel Magnolias” and an evening with David Sedaris, it is not a surprise to find reviewers nationally making writerly comparisons of Brickhouse to Mary Karr and Augusten Burroughs.Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir

Salon.com Personal Essay

The first person I told about my HIV status was a complete stranger. Despite that initial confession, I spent the next years mostly in the HIV closet, like a bird in a cuckoo clock that only comes out every third hour.

I met the stranger at the bar in New York, where I live. It was a scant 30 minutes after my doctor had delivered my test results over the phone: “The good news is you don’t have gonorrhea. The bad news is you’re HIV positive. But these days it’s a manageable condition.” That was 2002 and I was 34. I came of age sexually in the mid-1980s, when AIDS was a deadly epidemic and safe sex was protocol for gay men. I had a domineering and fiercely protective mother, Mama Jean, who warned me that “a moment’s pleasure isn’t worth a lifetime of regret.”

Feeling as if I’d been hit by a two-by-four, I did what I did best in times of crisis: I headed to a bar near my apartment in New York. I felt someone watching me as I downed my second martini. My face must have looked like a Picasso, all the features in a tortured jumble. The stranger asked me what was the matter, and I told him. Through sobs that would put Lucille Ball to shame, I melodramatically cried, “And the worst part: No one will ever have sex with me again!”

“That’s not true,” he said with a smile. “I will.”

He took me around the corner to a porno bookstore and proved he was a man of his word. I understood then what Blanche Dubois meant when she said, “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

Afterward, drunk and shell-shocked, I went home and waited for Michael, my longtime boyfriend and partner. (Like many gay male couples, we have an open relationship.) As soon as he saw my Picasso face he asked, “What’s wrong?” My lips curled inside my mouth as the tears started to flow again. He maintained his unflappable poker face. “What is it?”

“I had an HIV test. I’m positive.” The dam broke again.

“Oh no.” His face cracked – a hairline fracture – but it cracked.

I guttural cried as he held me and caressed my head. Michael, who remains negative, has stood by my side ever since.

A week later I told Mr. Parker, my best friend since college. I told him at Marie’s Crisis piano bar, the site of many heart-to-hearts for us. We got stinking drunk and belted show tunes – “What I Did for Love,” “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” The songs felt painfully prescient or woefully ironic. I made him promise not to tell anyone else. “Of course,” he said. “There’d be some clucking.” The implication was that friends would judge me for my promiscuity. I silently promised myself to never tell my parents.

After that I kept the news in the figurative bottle for the next four years until my problems with the literal bottle forced me into rehab and a step farther out of the HIV closet.

At rehab, everyone was required to testify before the group their 10 consequences of drinking. I rattled mine off in ascending order of importance: biting my assistant on the neck at a party; shouting “I piss on my inner child!” in a crowded restaurant; getting rolled by handsome strangers; losing my job; attempting suicide. When I got to No. 1 on the list, I needed the drum roll from “The Late Show With David Letterman.” “And No. 1 of the Top Ten Consequences of Jamie’s Drinking … Becoming HIV-positive!”

I felt ashamed that I got it, because I should have known better. I felt ashamed that people would know how I got it. I felt ashamed of my self-pity when so many before me who were not lucky enough to be alive when anti-viral drugs became available and died miserable deaths, lived angst-ridden lives in fear of miserable deaths, or suffered the hellish side effects of early drug regimens.

The shame turned to fear. Am I crazy? I thought. It’s one thing to tell a roomful of other alcoholics the exploits of my drinking since many of these strangers had done the same things or worse. But why tell them that I’m positive? They might judge me.

I shut up about HIV for another six years. I told people with whom I hooked up, but even then I thought, I’m telling a complete stranger what I won’t tell my mother. But then again the first person I told was a complete stranger. HIV makes strange bedfellows.

When friends would mention they were positive as casually as I might say, “I’m a Capricorn. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a Joan Crawford nut,” I felt like a fraud and a coward, a liar by omission. When other recovering alcoholics mentioned their HIV status while sharing at a sober meeting, I never raised my hand to say that I identified. I remained silent, sitting not in judgment of the person who shared, but in harsh judgment of myself.

Two years sober and a year after Mama Jean died, I started writing my way out of the closet. I joined an intimate writing workshop where I felt safe to lay the foundation for a memoir. I wrote about Mama Jean. I wrote about my alcoholism. I wrote about my suicide attempt. The act of writing about them brought acceptance until I was ready to go public about these aspects of my life. The last thing I wrote about was my HIV status, but I was undecided about sharing that semi-secret with the world.

Mama Jean went to her grave without knowing. I thought the news would kill her and I couldn’t bear to hear her say, “I told you so.” I regret my decision. It robbed us both of our fundamental roles: me admitting I needed her and she loving me unconditionally.

As I debated whether or not to disclose my status in the memoir, I knew it was time to belly up to the bar and tell my father. All the come-to-Jesus talks had been with Mama Jean. Dad and I talked about movies, my job and the latest gossip in the small Texas town where I grew up and he still lived. Like many men, he was uncomfortable talking about the uncomfortable.

But even then I couldn’t do it until forced. A family member had accidentally found out and threatened to tell him, if I didn’t. It was time to come to Jesus.

I decided to tell him over one of our daily morning phone calls. I ran my fingers through my hair and walked around my apartment in circles for several minutes before I could hit send on the phone.

He answered. “I see on ‘Regis and Kelly’ that y’all are having some pretty weather up there. So what’s happening with—”

I cut off his small talk. My words came like an avalanche. “I never wanted to tell you this, but I need you to know since I may be writing about it in my book.” He already knew the book was about my alcoholism. “I’ll just blurt it out. I’m HIV-positive. I have been for 10 years. I never told you and Mom because I didn’t want y’all to worry.” I spoke so quickly I was almost talking over myself. I didn’t want to give either of us room to react. “And you don’t have to worry. I’ve never been sick. I take one pill a day. I don’t have any side effects. You know these days it’s a manageable disease.” I quoted my doctor whose same words were infuriating when I first heard them 10 years prior. “It’s a chronic condition like diabetes, but not even as bad as diabetes.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. And then. “But you’re OK. You’re going to be OK?”

“That’s what I’m telling you, Dad. It’s not like it was. I’ll die some day, but probably not from this. It’s just a chronic condition.”

He cleared his throat. “Yeah. Yeah. That’s what I’ve been hearing about it. That it’s not even anything big anymore. Nowadays they have some good medicine for it, don’t they?” While Mama Jean would have shrieked melodramatically and fired a barrage of questions – what, when, how, and who gave this to you? – he glossed over the virus and jumped to the good news part.

Then we moved on to the celebrities “Regis and Kelly” interviewed that morning. We both ended the call with a “Love you.” Done. A month after that call, he sent me an article from the Houston Chronicle about the progress in AIDS treatment and the different kinds of HIV meds. His Post-it note read, “Which one of these are you taking?” In one of our phone chats he told me he was going to the annual “Paint the Town Red” gala AIDS fundraiser. It was a casual mention, but it was loud enough for me to hear.

Until I told Dad I was not only in the closet, but still in denial. However, I give myself a pass for that time. We all need doses of benign denial. If we thought of every possible disaster that could visit us – another Republican president, an entire chain of gluten-free restaurants, one more “Real Housewives” spinoff – we’d never get out of bed.

Telling Dad freed me. I wasn’t going to be a liar by omission anymore. I started openly sharing about it at sober meetings. I even joined an HIV-positive sober meeting. The longer I’ve been open about my HIV status, the more people I meet who are positive. Many are in the semi-closet: haven’t told their parents, keep it from their co-workers, only tell select friends. If more positive people are open about it, the more people will see it for what it is in this country (a chronic condition) and the less HIV will be weighed down by shame and stigma.

I’m relieved that my HIV status is no longer a secret I have to manage. Not something to be pitied or celebrated. It’s simply a part of who I am.Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir