The Gil Lopez Buddy Network: A Love Story of Living Big and Dying Great

By Rebecca Rees

The Gil Lopez Buddy Network: A Love Story of Living Big and Dying Great,by Rebecca Rees

"My son asked me if I had made my peace with God. I told him I didn’t know She and I had had a fight!"--Gil Lopez

This is the story of Gil Lopez, an African-American activist and peacemaker, and his last years of spirited living, healing, and dying within a multi-cultural community of friends. Gil died as he lived: with courage and imagination, with moxie and music—and with his buddies. This is a radical musical of a book, political and spiritual, funny and poignant, with a great cast of characters, a great love story, and Gil’s voice singing throughout in his sweet tenor.

This book is for anyone looking for a way to face death with heart, for any community wanting to support a dying friend, and for all those who grieve and hope to give meaning to their suffering. And this is a book about how to face life with heart,how to live big, as Gil lived.

From the introduction:

If you can envision a radical contemporary Jesus, big-bellied and brown, who loved dancing and football, and was surrounded by women instead of men disciples, then you can begin to picture Gil Lopez. Gil was spiritually larger than life, one of the Big Souls who show the way. He was a natural leader, a man who evolved from a black radical defending his people to a wise peacemaker among all peoples, a man with a royal presence and an inherent nobility of character. And yet he was completely earthy and unpretentious, always ready to laugh at himself and the world, always eager to learn from others and to cheer them on in his broad Boston accent. I have never met a man so utterly without personal vanity or a sense of self-importance and yet so filled with self-confidence about his larger mission.

Gil had a saintly quality of selfless dedication, and yet he was also endearingly human. We couldn’t have stood him otherwise. Gil was a big bear of a man, and he could be as cuddly as a teddy or as powerful as a grizzly. He told great dirty jokes. His room was a mess. He danced on the tables! His hugs were Olympian. Both kingly and comforting, he reminded me of the fuzzy purple African violets he raised so tenderly. He was Our Funny Valentine, the most loving and loveable man I have ever known.

Gil wanted to leave a message to the world. It was a message he lived all his life, and especially in his last years of healing and dying.
The message is that with community you can do anything. Being with Gil in community as he lived into dying was a transforming experience for all of us; sorrow and suffering that is consciously shared can become almost a blessing. I think Gil would want me to add that I need to let folks know that if you are with your buddies, you can even have a wonderful time while you’re dying! The experiences of Gil’s last days also gave a clear message to me and others who were close at the bedside that death is merely the doorway to new spiritual adventures.

Gil lived big and he died big, and all our souls got bigger as we made the last journey with our Big Soul Buddy. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Gil was a great man because he made you feel that you were great, and made you want to do great things.

See the Gil Lopez Community Website at gillopez.net for photographs, information about the three documentaries in which Gil was featured, and new stories of the lives and work of Gil’s buddies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 16, 2008
• ISBN: 9781450045889

Rebecca Rees

Rebecca Rees lives in the mountains of Northern California, where she has directed literacy programs and worked in community mental health. She holds an M.A. in Creative Writing and is the author of a memoir about healing in community, The Gil Lopez Buddy Network: A Love Story of Living Big and Dying Great. She is a student of Buddhism, loves to sing gospel, and worships the beauty of Mother Earth.

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Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1: DO YOU HAVE A HAHP ?

Chapter 2: I’M GONNA FIGHT FOR MY LIFE

Chapter 3: I ALWAYS WANTED TO HAVE A GANG OF BUDDIES

Chapter 4: THE RETURN OF THE LONE RANGER

Chapter 5: I SHALL LIVE ON WITHIN EACH OF YOU

Chapter 6: I HAVE NEVER FELT MORE ALIVE

Chapter 7: A FOREVER FRIENDSHIP

Chapter 8: I’M GONNA DEVELOP YOUR LEADERSHIP POTENTIAL

Chapter 9: YOUR BEAR IS BECOMING A BUTTERFLY

Chapter 10: I SAW THE LADY OF THE LAKE

Chapter 11: OUR TRANSFORMATIONAL JOURNEY

Chapter 12: THE COMMUNITY OF HEROES

Chapter 13: I’M GONNA HELP YOU MAKE ALL YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE!

Epilogue

DEDICATION

I dedicate this book to Gil, to Carol, and to all our Buddies, old and new.

PREFACE

This is the story of Gil Lopez, an African-American activist, and his last years of spirited living and vibrant dying within a juicy multi-colorful circle of friends and family. This is the love story of a community.

This is also a personal love story. Gil Lopez was my companion of fifteen years, my dearest and most beloved friend. The feeling I had on first meeting him was of a recognition that was soul-deep, and now that he has crossed over to the other side, the word that best describes our connection is soul-mate.

I am writing this book for Gil, because as a teacher, peacemaker, and community organizer, he wanted to leave a message to the world. It was a message he lived all his life, and especially in his last years of healing and dying.

The message is that with community you can do anything. Being with Gil in community as he lived into dying was a transforming experience for all of us; sorrow and suffering that is consciously shared can become almost a blessing. I think Gil would want me to add that I need to let folks know that if you are with your buddies, you can even have a wonderful time while you’re dying! The experiences of Gil’s last days also gave a clear message to me and others who were close at the bedside that death is merely the doorway to new spiritual adventures.

I am writing this book because I needed it. I needed to read a book like this when Gil was sick, and I didn’t find one, so now I am writing it for others. I am writing for anyone looking for a way to face death with heart, for any community wanting to support a dying friend, for all those who grieve and hope to give meaning to their suffering.

I am writing especially for those who are close to someone who is very ill, as I was soul-close to Gil. You too need support and healing, although you are not the identified patient. You may be questioning the purpose of your own life, the validity of your relationships, the value of existence itself in a universe where death eventually swallows everyone we love. You may find the role of hero or caretaker thrust upon you at a time when you wished to be taking care of your own business. You may be weary of being kind and caring. You may be horrified at the demons inside you and others that emerge at this time of crisis. You may rise to new heights, or let yourself and others down. You may wish someone would take care of you, and listen to you.

Finally, I am writing this book because I am a writer, and I must turn my experiences into stories, something I can give back to the world. If you have picked up this book in a hard time, I hope I can give something to you.

INTRODUCTION

My son asked me if I had made my peace with God. I told him I didn’t know She and I had had a fight!

—Gil Lopez

If you can envision a radical contemporary Jesus, big-bellied and brown, who loved dancing and football, and was surrounded by women instead of men disciples, then you can begin to picture Gil Lopez.

It’s hard to write about Gil without sounding sacrilegious. He was spiritually larger than life, one of the Big Souls who show the way. He was a natural leader, a man who evolved from a black radical defending his people to a wise peacemaker among all peoples, a man with a royal presence and an inherent nobility of character. And yet he was completely earthy and unpretentious, always ready to laugh at himself and the world, always eager to learn from others and to cheer them on in his broad Boston accent. I have never met a man so utterly without personal vanity or a sense of self-importance and yet so filled with self-confidence about his larger mission.

Gil had a saintly quality of selfless dedication, and yet he was also endearingly human. We couldn’t have stood him otherwise. Gil was a big bear of a man, and he could be as cuddly as a teddy or as powerful as a grizzly. He was given to long periods of melancholy. He told great dirty jokes. His room was a mess. He ate and drank and smoked too much. (And he later gave up smoking and drinking, overnight, with absolutely no fuss.) He danced on the tables! His hugs were Olympian. Both kingly and comforting, he reminded me of the fuzzy purple African violets he raised so tenderly. He was Our Funny Valentine, the most loving and loveable man I have ever known.

I met Gil when he was almost fifty years old. I write this portrait of the young Gil based mostly on fragmentary memories of what he told me over the years, stories filtered through the limitations of my white woman’s perception of a black man’s world.

I see Gil as a chubby little boy, the protector of his little sister Margo, in a family struggling to make it in the whiteman’s world. Gil grew up and spent most of his life in Boston’s black ghetto, his community. His parents were children of Cape Verdean immigrants, a people of African and Portuguese descent who were the first Africans to come to America voluntarily. Gil’s father, a man whose strongly-accented English was hard for his son to understand, was a numbers runner who died of tuberculosis and left his little boy with a legacy of guilt that he hadn’t taken care of him well enough when he was sick. He said his mother was sometimes driven to prostitution to make money to hold the family together. Keep on pitching till you win! she told young Gil on the baseball team, and when he was a teenager she asked a friend to initiate him into the ways of love.

Idealistic young Gil was a Catholic altar boy with a tenor so sweet some thought he was destined for the opera. Gil wanted to be a doctor, but was instead steered by a school counselor to vocations the counselor thought more appropriate for a black boy. Gil went to baking school, became a janitor, drove cab, joined the army, worked two and three jobs to support his growing family.

But Gil was a Big Dreamer, despite all the messages to live small that the white world was giving him. He didn’t take two of the limited pathways allowed for success to a black male: sports and crime. He did excel in music. His sister Margo wrote the song Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby and Gil and Margo recorded it together. When the song hit the top of the charts, they took their show on the road with the Tune Weavers. They sang with James Brown in the Apollo Theater in Harlem and met many of the greats of Rhythm and Blues music.

And along the way, almost inevitably, Gil became a political activist, a by-any-means-necessary black radical. Always a pioneer, he organized the Malcolm X Foundation in Boston and the Topographical Research Foundation, which researched and analyzed statistical information relevant to the political situation of black people. He was also involved in some political activities he discreetly told me very little about.

Gil’s success in music and in politics made him an outstanding man, but not a great man. A great man is not an exemplar of his time, but a visionary ahead of his time. A great man thinks not only of his people, but of all people. Gil began to manifest his greatness when he came to San Francisco in his late forties to educate himself to be not just a political activist, but a peacemaker. He had seen enough liberators become oppressors to begin to realize that effective change had to be internal as well as external. He studied and worked with many community organizations and finally set up his own organizational training and dispute resolution business. Always a fighter for the rights of psychiatric patients, he also became an advocate for elders and a supporter of feminists and gay people, and he formed alliances with other people of color. And some of his best friends were straight white men!

Gil was a tribal man whose community was Planet Earth. He loved people. And people loved him. Faces would light up at the mention of his name. I have never met anybody who had so many friends, and so many different kinds of friends, of all colors, cultures, ages, sexualities. And he kept making new friends and new community until the day he died.

One of the amazing things about Gil was that he was always involved in some kind of political struggle, and yet everyone grew to love him, even the people whose ideas and policies he was opposing. He always approached problems through the heart, and assumed that it was the problems that needed to be fixed—not the people. The problem was miscommunication or isolation or meetings that put people to sleep, but the people were good people. Gil’s warmth and humor helped people work through difficult situations. And when he did get mad, folks paid attention!

Gil was not only a Big Lover, he was a Big Changer. He combined the two definitions, and facilitated change in a loving way, so that it became not just a power shift with somebody new on top, but a true transformation. Gil was a man who demonstrated the power of Creative Love; he showed us that peace-making was a lively process of engagement and intimacy, as active and joyful as home-making or love-making. He made it fun! Gil had the vision, he walked the talk, and he passed on to others the tools to change our world in a loving way.

Gil gave me hope for humankind, hope we could solve our most urgent dilemma as a species: how to resolve conflicts peacefully and creatively. I see Gil Lopez as a radical peacemaker in the lineage of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Cesar Chavez. And I believe that many of the great radical peacemakers are unsung heroines, and that part of Gil’s greatness was that he recognized the long tradition and hidden power of women as non-violent activists.

In almost all my pictures of Gil, he is hugging someone, usually a woman, sometimes several women. Women loved Gil. We felt safe with him, respected by him, honored by him. As a woman, a feminist, and a soulmate of Gil’s, I want to honor another side of this Big-Soul man: Gil Lopez, a man who respected and supported women, a man who truly loved us. Gil’s love of women was not sentimental and paternalistic. He recognized women as one of the oppressed peoples of the earth, and he was our supporter in a way that was deeply heartfelt and rare even among men with a political consciousness. For these qualities alone, he will always be my hero.

To me, the clearest indication of Gil’s respect for women’s capabilities is the large number of women with whom he worked as mentors and students, co-facilitators and comrades. Gil was my collaborator in many creative projects, and I am gladdened by a feeling of ongoing creative inspiration from him. He once made a tape for me of Virginia Woolf’s feminist essay, A Room Of One’s Own. This gift was a demonstration of his support for me as a feminist and a writer, and I continue to feel his influence as I write.

Your bear is becoming a butterfly, Gil said to me as he grew sicker. The butterfly was Gil’s symbol for transformation. All his life he had demonstrated an amazing ability to transcend and transform himself, and his death was his last great act of loving change. Gil lived big and he died big, as I hope this story will show, and all our souls got bigger as we made the last journey with our Big Soul Buddy. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Gil was a great man because he made you feel that you were great, and made you want to do great things.

As one woman said at his wake, What this planet needs is more Gil Lopezes!

This book is part of my living legacy of Gilbert John Lopez. I hope I have captured some of Gil’s spirit in this book, to share with all readers, both those who knew and loved Gil, and those who meet him for the first time in these pages.

Chapter 1

DO YOU HAVE A HAHP ?

I fell in love with Gil before I met him.

My friend Sandi was always talking about her wonderful friend Gil, the most feminist-supportive man she had ever known—and wonderfully huggable.

Gil isn’t like other people, Sandi said. Gil is a special being. He’s from another planet.

I am a seeker, and at the end of my college years in the late sixties I had come to San Francisco looking for big adventure, a big mission, and big love. I put meeting this special being on my life-list of experiences to be sought, along with touching a baby whale, joining a spiritual community, and living in a log cabin in the mountains and writing great books.

All my life I had been looking for a noble warrior to be my heart’s companion. My adolescent fantasies—in the then-racially-segregated South where as an outspoken white girl I was a political and social outcast—were not of Elvis and the Beatles, but of Albert Schweitzer and Martin Luther King. As an idealistic college girl I read everything I could about Gandhi, that great non-violent warrior, and was deeply moved by the story of the young Englishwoman who joined him and devoted her life to his cause. By the time I reached my thirties, my idealism had eroded, especially in the arena of male-dominated politics, where I had heard many silly roosters crowing on political podiums. But I was still hopeful, and Sandi’s stories of Gil woke up my heart.

I finally met Gil at a meeting he was facilitating. For me it was love at first sight. He was a big black man with a big chest and a big belly meant for hugging, a fuzzy halo of grey hair and beard, and soft brown eyes in a nest of curly lashes. His voice was rich and sweet, his Boston accent thick.

It was a meeting of mental health workers who wanted to defend the rights of psychiatric patients. We sat on uncomfortable folding chairs, in one of the dingy rooms in which political meetings always seem to be held. Gil opened the meeting by sharing his own experiences with mental illness in his family, and his decision to become an orderly at Boston State Mental Hospital to ensure that his manic-depressive son was not being mistreated there. He went on to organize the first union of hospital workers at Boston State, and eventually to sue the hospital for genocide because of its abuse of black patients. Then he went a step further, to become a comrade of the Director of Psychiatry and to institute a training program for the hospital orderlies.

In Gil’s face you could see the father suffering for his sick child, the warrior fighting to protect him, and the social activist facilitating creative change in the system. After he told his story, Gil went on to elicit from other members of the group their own stories of struggle and triumph, and their own dreams of creative solutions. The energy in the room was charged with caring, intelligence, and hope.

I remember Gil wearing a red shirt in that meeting, as if his warm heart were radiating out to all of us. He was a combination of masculine and feminine, soft and strong, comfortable and delicate. I wanted to hug him and sit on his lap. He was a gentle bear of a hero, and he made you feel you could be a hero too.

I knew I wanted Gil in my life. I knew it as I had never known it about anybody before in my thirty-odd years. He didn’t pursue me or surprise me or grow on me. I chose him. And not even especially as a lover. I just wanted to be with him, his companion, his friend. And somehow I knew that I could be his friend, sensed that he was a man that many people admired, but few really understood. I knew intuitively that although much beloved, he was often sad, and felt deeply lonely.

Soon after that meeting Sandi told me that Gil’s household, who were all friends from her People of Color Support group, had an opening for a roommate.

Sandi was one of my oldest friends in San Francisco, my comrade in feminism and girl-talk. She was a tall pretty woman who looked classy even in a sweatshirt, a doctor’s daughter and half-Filipina, at once both one of the privileged class and an ethnic outsider in white America. As a bridge person, moving back and forth across cultures, she had the sense of humor and the broad sophistication that bridge people often do. Over the years Sandi and I had grown to know each other’s faults so well we were like family, and sometimes we fought like sisters. One of my faults was that I was jealous of her because she came from money, but she was so smart and funny that I forgave her for her good fortune. It also helped that Sandi seemed to think I was potentially great, though flawed. Our deepest bond was that we both secretly felt we had a mission, but we couldn’t quite figure out what it was. I think it was that bond that drew us both to Gil.

I figured that friends of Sandi’s could probably be friends of mine, and probably good roommates. I had never been the only white person in a household before, but I was hopeful that everything would be all cheerfully multi-cultural. After all, 369 Haight Street was known in radical circles as a center of social activism and great parties, a place where differences were appreciated and problems worked out in house meetings based on mediation principles.

And anyway, I thought secretly, living in that household would give me a chance to get to know Gil better. I presented myself as a candidate with a sense of my destiny unfolding.

Gil called to invite me to the interview—with a warning.

We are all people of color, he said, And if you live in our household you must have respect for diversity.

Of course, I said meekly.

Gil sounded gruff on the phone. He would have scared me away if I hadn’t already seen what a teddy bear he was.

For the interview we gathered in the big living room of the sprawling apartment that took up the top floor of a building on the inner-city end of Haight Street, far from burnt-out addicts disguising themselves as hippies, and across the street from the welfare projects. From the living room window there was a sweeping view of the hills of the city. A huge poster covered one wall of the room, a blown-up black and white photograph of a union picket line, the faces of the strikers fierce with determination. The furniture was old, mismatched, and comfortable. Big green plants took most of the space on the end tables and shelves. From the kitchen wafted the homey aroma of gravy and potatoes.

I met the two other members of the household: tall, lean, handsome, sly-witted Roy and spicy little East-Indian/West-Indian Althea, the belly-dancing sculptor. Althea was spunky-friendly and I felt I could forge an artistic bond with her, but Roy seemed a little wicked, and deliberately provocative. He talked alot about sex, more than seemed necessary in a roommate interview. I wondered if his earring was a signal to the in-crowd that he was gay, or maybe straight and available for something kinky, and I kept thinking of a Joni Mitchell song about someone who stood out like a ruby in a black man’s ear. Later I learned, to my surprise, that wicked Roy was the one with the green thumb who kept all the plants happy.

Gil took the lead in interrogating me. One of his questions seemed a little strange.

Do you have a lot of furniture? Do you have a hahp?

A hop? His strong Boston accent was throwing me off.

He made a strumming motion across the air.

Because I’m not sure we have enough space for a hahp in the living room.

I tried to keep a straight face.

No, I don’t have a harp.

With my fair hair, snub nose, and earnest expression, I’d been told before that I had a Pollyanna face, a Sunday School face, but nobody had ever asked me if I had a harp. I wondered if Gil didn’t have angelic fantasies about me, just as I had heroic fantasies about him. I felt, with a confidence unusual for me, that all we needed was some slow time getting to know each other, and he would see me as a kindred spirit as clearly as I saw him.

Part of the interview was partaking of the community dinner, made by Gil. Meat loaf and mashed potatoes and gravy, an old-fashioned dinner like my mom would make. I ate enthusiastically. Perhaps my appetite got me into the household. I never asked.

The sun woke me early on my first morning in my new home. I followed the sounds of singing to the door of the living room.

Gil was sitting in the chair by the bay window, strumming on his guitar and singing softly.

‘I’ve grown accustomed to her face/She almost makes the day begin . . . .’

I tiptoed away from the door. I was touched by this secret glimpse of Gil’s tenderness. I assumed he was singing about his girlfriend Gena, who had just moved out—the woman whose bedroom I had taken.

You didn’t tell me how sweet Gil was! I exclaimed to Sandi later.

She gave me the knowing look a friend gives a friend.

I had a feeling you would really like him, she said.

I was accepted as a roommate, but I felt I didn’t really fit into the household.

Regular meetings of the People of Color Support Group—many of whom later became my friends—were held in the living room. I sat in the kitchen sipping a cup of tea and eyeing the incoming group members discreetly for signs of shock at seeing a white person in the household. Then I would retire to my room, imagining that on the other side of the closed door accumulated centuries of justifiable rage were being unleashed on my kind.

I need a Colorless People’s Support Group, I joked to Sandi privately.

The other members of the group looked far too stern and politically-correct for my silly jokes. I was especially intimidated by Phyllis, a Japanese-American social worker with a very serious demeanor that I imagined concealed a Japanesely-politely-modulated disapproval of me.

Phyllis appeared to be above all a sensible, practical woman, but she had a touch of the wild that at first was only revealed in her earthy chuckle. Years later, touring my ethnic homeland of Wales, Phyllis and I would discover each other’s true nature in an extended giggling fit following my suggestion about