Art that Saves.

FREEMAN, CHRIS

Firebird: A Memoir

by Mark Dot

HarperCollins, 1999. 200 pages, $25.

Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast (1996) is one of the most powerful memoirs we have of the AIDS crisis and of love between men. His follow-up, Firebird: A Memoir, is a much different book, one that tells the story of a chaotic childhood and develops as a coming-of-age narrative ripe with elements of Southern Gothic, dislocation, teenage rebellion, and the salvific power of art, of creating.

Near the end of the book, Doty writes, "I believe that art saved my life. How is it that making sustains?" "Making" aptly describes the process Doty engages in. Primarily known for his well wrought, opulently designed poetry, Doty's creativity in structure is his genius. Firebird is a structural tour de force, and even when the tale itself is not at its most captivating, the telling never wavers.

Memory's machinations and distortions are part of any memoir. Doty's memories of his past, his family, and their many houses recede even as he tries to draw them closer. The process he's working through is perhaps best illustrated by a story from his years in Tucson. There was a family in their neighborhood in which the father came home from work one day and shot his wife, his children, and himself. Doty's father tells him it was the mother who pulled the trigger. Doty writes, "I wasn't paying attention, exactly, to the facts of the story; I was revising it into something I could bear." What makes his father's version of the story unbearable is that his mother, drunk, once pointed his father's luger at him:

She holds the gun out, and she waits; I stand in the line of fire, and I wait. ... What I don't know is: does she pull the trigger? Does she hesitate, does her hand refuse the task she's set it? ... I don't know because I'm not there. I'm closed, gone away, already dead behind the eyes, no longer at home, halfway to the next life already and good riddance to this one. ... Maybe I'm thinking I won't miss it, this sorry stubborn queer flesh, maybe I'm thinking I'm nothing at all, merely empty, ready to receive what my mother offers.

Firebird is a recognizable story of a gay boy growing up, a boy whose "education in beauty" makes it so very hard to be the kind of boy the world expects him to be. An elementary school teacher tells his parents, "Mark relates well to girls." No deciphering necessary to get the message there, but there's more, of course. Like the time that the ten-year-old Mark and his friend Werner decide to put on a revue. Mark's "vehicle" is Judy Garland's "Get Happy," and his rendition involves a cane and a red chiffon scarf: "I am amphetamine bright and glittering ... I am entirely a Judy, right down to the prescriptions, in tight black stockings." Inevitably, his mother comes in and catches him in the act.

This incident, frozen in Doty's memory, is a queer epiphany, one that many readers will recognize: "I know, all the way through, that she isn't going to love me the same way now." She says, "Son, you're a boy." That line says it all: "Nothing else to say. It's a stopping place." The meditation continues: "You're a boy. I am stunned and silent, caught in a shame that seems to have no place to come to rest. I have been initiated--whether because my mother wanted to punish or to protect me--into an adult world of limit and sorrow."

"Fanfare & Finale," the final section of the book, is comprised of short, anecdotal passages. Doty poses the question that's at the heart of the popularity of the memoir as a genre: "Why tell a story like this, who wants to read it?" Like any good writer, he answers his own question, and he does so in various ways. One way, of course, is to write an artful and compelling narrative. Doty succeeds because of his aesthetic vision, and his poetic understanding of language. One answer: "What matters is what we learn to make of what happens to us. ... And we learn to make, I think, by telling." That answer leads to the next question: what does the telling do? Doty's reply: "To tell a story is to take power over it. Now they-we--are part of a tale, a made thing. ... The stubborn past is not to be dissolved by any act of will, and perhaps we ought at last to be glad for that. What happened defines us, always; erase the darkness in you at your own peril, since it's inextricable from who you are."