Michael Tolliver, the sweet-spirited Southerner in Armistead Maupin's classic Tales of the City series, is arguably one of the most widely loved characters in contem-porary fiction. Now, almost twenty years after ending his ground-breaking saga of San Francisco life, Maupin revisits his all-too-human hero, letting the fifty-five-year-old gardener tell his story in his own voice.
Having survived the plague that took so many of his friends and lovers, Michael has learned to embrace the random pleasures of life, the tender alliances that sustain him in the hardest of times. Michael Tolliver Lives follows its protagonist as he finds love with a younger man, attends to his dying fundamentalist mother in Florida, and finally reaffirms his allegiance to a wise octogenarian who was once his landlady.
Though this is a stand-alone novel—accessible to fans of Tales of the City and new readers alike—a reassuring number of familiar faces appear along the way. As usual, the author's mordant wit and ear for pitch-perfect dialogue serve every aspect of the story—from the bawdy to the bittersweet. Michael Tolliver Lives is a novel about the act of growing older joyfully and the everyday miracles that somehow make that possible.
Confederacy of Survivors
Not long ago, down on Castro Street, a stranger in a Giants parka gave me a loaded glance as we passed each other in front of Cliff's Hardware. He was close to my age, I guess, not that far past fifty—and not bad-looking either, in a beat-up, Bruce Willis-y sort of way—so I waited a moment before turning to see if he would go for a second look. He knew this old do-si-do as well as I did, and hit his mark perfectly.
"Hey," he called, "you're supposed to be dead."
I gave him an off-kilter smile. "Guess I didn't get the memo."
His face grew redder as he approached. "Sorry, I just meant . . . it's been a really long time and . . . sometimes you just assume . . . you know . . ."
I did know. Here in our beloved Gayberry you can barely turn around without gazing into the strangely familiar features of someone long believed dead. Having lost track of him in darker days, you had all but composed his obituary and scattered his ashes at sea, when he shows up in the housewares aisle at Cala Foods to tell you he's been growing roses in Petaluma for the past decade. This happens to me a lot, these odd little supermarket resurrections, so I figured it could just as easily happen to someone else.
But who the hell was he?
"You're looking good," he said pleasantly.
"Thanks. You too." His face had trenches like mine—the usual wasting from the meds. A fellow cigar store Indian.
"You are Mike Tolliver, right?"
"Michael. Yeah. But I can't quite—"
"Oh . . . sorry." He thrust out his hand. "Ed Lyons. We met at Joe Dimitri's after the second Gay Games."
That was no help at all, and it must have shown.
"You know," the guy offered gamely. "The big house up on Collingwood?"
Still nothing.
"The circle jerk?"
"Ah."
"We went back to my place afterward."
"On Potrero Hill!"
"You remember!"
What I remembered—all I remembered after nineteen years—was his dick. I remembered how its less-than-average length was made irrelevant by its girth. It was one of the thickest I'd ever seen, with a head that flared like a caveman's club. Remembering him was a good deal harder. Nineteen years is too long a time to remember a face.
"We had fun, " I said, hoping that a friendly leer would make up for my phallocentric memory.
"You had something to do with plants, didn't you?"
"Still do." I showed him my dirty cuticles. "I had a nursery back then, but now I garden full time."
That seemed to excite him, because he tugged on the strap of my overalls and uttered a guttural "woof." If he was angling for a nooner, I wasn't up for it. The green-collar job that had stoked his furnace had left me with some nasty twinges in my rotator cuffs, and I still had podocarps to prune in Glen Park. All I really wanted was an easy evening with Ben and the hot tub and a rare bacon cheeseburger from Burgermeister.
Somehow he seemed to pick up on that. "You married these days?"
"Yeah . . . pretty much."
"Married married or just . . . regular?"
"You mean . . . did we go down to City Hall?"
"Yeah."
I told him we did.
"Must've been amazing," he said.
"Well, it was a mob scene, but . . . you know . . . pretty cool." I wasn't especially forthcoming, but I had told the story once too often and had usually failed to convey the oddball magic of that day: all those separate dreams coming true in a gilded, high-domed palace straight out of Beauty and the Beast. You had to have witnessed that long line of middle-aged people standing in the rain, some of them with kids in tow, waiting to affirm what they'd already known for years. And the mayor himself, so young and handsome and . . . neat . . . th
