I remember in junior high telling a friend that I didn't believe in regrets. Life was too short to have regrets. To me, a regret is something that I would do differently if I could go back in time and make a different decision. I've made plenty of bad decisions in life, but I only have 2 regrets.
I arrived home from work yesterday morning, and with good intentions had planned on having lots of coffee and making my way to Jo'burg Pride. But I made the fatal mistake of lying down "for a minute" and woke up 3 hours later. And I woke up with the strangest dream. I had a dream that I was at a party. I was not the host. And the party was only men I had dated, or men with whom there had been some kind of connection. Kind of a messed up dream, but it was interesting to see how well they all got along. It was spooky. Very spooky.
And on that background, I headed off to the Pride Rally. It was a perfect Saturday afternoon yesterday. Walking around the rally, I could have been in any city in the world. The crowd watching was superb, and the party seemed to still be going pretty strong at 3pm. I walked around with flashbacks to Denver and Dublin Prides, thinking of how great it was to show up in one place and run into so many friends, in such a festive, loving environment. I half expected to run into one of the guys from the party in my dreams. Though, I did run into 2 people I knew, which was a surprise given that I've been in Jo'burg for such a short time.
I went over to S&S's and showed up to a patio crowd sipping wine as dusk began, and hearing tales of the parade and talking of plans for going out last night. The wine was finished, and the group split up to head out for the night, with likely plans to rendezvous randomly at some point. Siza and I (Scott is out of town) headed to meet up with David in Parkhurst. We sat outside and had dinner for over 2 hours, enjoying the people watching and talking. We headed out to a club to see RuPaul perform, managed to get VIP access, and after the show ended (past midnight) we then went bar/club hopping. At 6am this morning, we walked out into the crisp air of dawn, a nice change from the smoky staleness of the club we had been in. After a couple hours of sleep, we went for breakfast, and were eating brekky at the same spot we had had dinner, less than 12 hours before.
Arriving home in a mental fog, having gotten 6 hours of sleep since Thursday, I should have gone directly to bed. But curiosity got the best of me and I googled the web for a coffee shop I heard about last night. And then I had a fleeting thought back to my party dream, and googled a name.
I either still talk to, or hear about many of the guys from that dream. But there was one I hadn't heard from in a while, so I googled him. Why google, it's complicated.
In the summer of 2002, I stayed in Dublin during break from medical school. One day I received an email from a stranger saying he was coming to Dublin to write a portion of a travel book (Frommers Gay and Lesbian Europe) and would I show him around. We swapped emails, turned out he had lived in Colorado for a while as well. So a month or so later, on a Wednesday night we met up at the Front Lounge in Dublin. And in he walked, with a baseball cap and cargo pants, and a t-shirt. Very American looking. We made a desperate gay pub crawl through Dublin, hitting many establishments which are likely now closed, and parted ways hours later at one of the bridges going over the Liffey. We agreed to keep in contact. He would be leaving Dublin Friday morning.
Walking home that night, I was in awe. Haas was smart. Funny. A world traveler. A foodie. Genuine. Athletic. And lived in Port Townsend. Thinking of him that night, I realized that he was who I thought I would become in the years after I finish residency.
The next morning while I was at the hospital (doing an extra summer elective), I missed a call and then got a message form him. I wish I still had that message. The genuine context, and honesty endeared me to him even more. He said what he felt, something that isn't done often enough. There was no "between the line message," not that day in the phone message, or the years that followed.
He called to also ask if I would join him for dinner. He had heard of a restaurant that he wanted to check out. And so that night, we ate at what became my favorite restaurant in Dublin. The restaurant where I went for brunch on my 29th birthday, and where I had my final post-graduation dinner meal before moving back to America in 2005. That was the night I got tipped over into realizing that paying for a good meal was worth it in more ways than just satiety. The pleasure of sitting down for a nice meal, in an enjoyable environment, with meaningful conversation was worth the expense; a concept which was foreign to me as pricey meals had never really been in my budget. What stands out from that night is a mixture of excitement and confusion. I couldn't recall ever having hit it off that well so quick, but confused because he was leaving the following morning, and there was no certainty our paths would cross again.
As it happened, our paths did cross; not coincidentally, but out of his travels for work and also his frequent trips/stops to London. My few days spent with him in Paris, the following spring, were remarkable. He was writing Frommer's Paris on $95 a Day, and ducking in and out of museums, restaurants, hotels, neighborhoods, and enjoying many great meals are cherished memories. I still remember the conversation we had one night where I tried to convince him that, while Port Townsend was great (I had been there in 1993), there were no residency programs for me in that part of the US. He was settled, I wasn't. When the book was written, he sent me a copy, with a note to check out the first few pages, and there was my name, in the acknowledgements. Before I left Dublin, we'd met up in London and Dublin a few more times.
So, this morning, with my laptop open out of nowhere he popped into my mind. So I put his name into Google, and with complete disbelief I couldn't believe I came across his obituary
Already in a sleep-deprived mental daze, I couldn't fucking believe that he had died. How could Haas die? Of a heart attack? The man who told me 3 years ago in Dublin, how he had just decided to run one day and ran 8 miles! The man who was so knowledge about eating healthy and being healthy? He had died, of a heart attack? The disbelief. Dead. Heart Attack. I can rationalize the heart attack, my medical knowledge gives me insight into that, but I absolutely have no way to process the information that he is dead. Dead. And the profuse embarrassment that the anniversary of his death is a year from tomorrow. He has been dead a year from tomorrow. And here I am sitting in Johannesburg, having spent last night out clubbing-thinking about men and relationships, and this amazing man is dead? You've GOT to be fucking kidding me.
And closure. There had been a silence between us before he died. I had the feeling that he was giving me space and time. I had always felt like I had met him too early, that I needed a few more years to age and mature to his level. I had always assumed that in time, we would re-connect. That at some point we would find ourselves in a great restaurant (in some completely random city), enjoying catching up as if no time had passed, and picking up our friendship, (or more?) where we left off. I think back to the times when I thought about him, and made a mental note to drop him an email, but never did. I remember packing up my photos back in April, sitting on the floor of my apartment, and looking at a picture of us taken with the Eiffel tower in the background, and wondering how he was. But he was already gone.
Regret #3. Rereading the emails we swapped over the years makes me realize how much I didn't appreciate what a great guy Haas was, and how I assumed that time was on our side, and that gave me liberty to postpone crossing the bridge... I regret many things about this situation. And given the chance to go back in life, I would make different decisions, and I would have reciprocated the level of honest communication which had made him stand out that day in Dublin.
This is my definition of regret.
Rest in Peace Haas,
and thanks,
and sorry.
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