Part 4: Gerald M. Sherman, Contact Me If You Read This
Happy Birthday, Gerry, wherever you are
You can read the first parts of this story here:
As Gerry informed me after he made his big reveal, it was a lot easier for him to have uncommitted sex with no strings when he did it with men instead of women. He filled me in on several abominable ways that sex was performed anonymously in mens' bathrooms that I won't pollute your mind with.
Because of the liberal attitudes of the Netherlands about sexuality and drugs, Gerry later moved to Amsterdam and lived in a houseboat on a canal. One time when he called me I was glad to learn he had begun sculpting, and he soon received some recognition when one of his pieces was accepted at the Stedelijk Museum. Another piece was picked for a public work of art commissioned to be installed in Boston, and he’d gone back there to supervise the work’s installation.
He told me he used blocks of Carrara marble from the same quarry where Michelangelo had gotten the marble for his statues. While I listened to him talk, I could also picture him in my mind’s eye, a dark, curly-haired small man clambering all over the marble and avidly carving out and polishing its humanoid curves.
His piece installed in Boston had been funded by a 1% for Art law, and I thought he told me it was installed outside of a bank.
Then another time when I visited Boston, and he was back for another visit with his parents, he brought me to see it. The large white vaguely Henry Moore-ish sculpture had been moved to another less prestigious location for a reason that I don’t recall. It was called “Human Element,” and although its shapes were suggestive of a human figure lying on its side, it was not representational.
The last time I heard from him was in the mid 1980s. Gerry called me when he was back in the states again visiting his parents. I’d recently written him and told him the distressing news that my ex-husband had committed suicide. After we had two children, we got divorced, and it was 10 years after the divorce when we learned George had killed himself with a shotgun.
I had since then finished my B.A., earned an M.A. After working on a Ph.D. for a few years, I’d left academia in hopes of finding a job in the business world that would pay well enough to support myself and the two kids. I was working as a technical writer, I was now a homeowner, and I was a practicing Catholic again, deeply repentant for the sins of my youth.
When I got his phone call, I was alone in the house. It was dusk, and I remember sitting in the dining room on one of my new ash chairs in a modified Morris style whose spindles curved gracefully in the form of a lyre. I sat at the new ash dining table and talked to him for an hour while I watched the sun go down through the slats of the new brass-toned blinds I’d ordered for the large bay window.
As the room darkened, I noticed that Gerry lightly skipped over almost everything I told him, including George’s death, as if it were trivial gossip.
Then I was shocked to hear he had somehow convinced himself from looking at a photo I had sent him that my son Liberty, was his child—probably because Liberty resembled him somewhat with his abundant dark hair and eyes and handsome face.
Gerry also weirdly told me he couldn't understand why his mother got upset when he told her that he might be a father, and she might have a grandchild that she would never get to hold.
I reminded him how long it had been between when we’d last been together and Liberty had been born. And I guess the impossibility got through to him.
Gerry then admitted he regretted he would never have a child. Even though I was attempting to live by Catholic moral principles, I had a temporary lapse, and I half-joked, “Well it’s not too late.”
He quickly snapped that he’d have to send me a turkey baster. AIDS meant he was never going to have sex again, with anybody.
No, he wasn’t sculpting anymore. He’d hurt his back. Was his father still supporting him? I wondered to myself. Without the sculpting, I had another question. Where was his redeeming social value?
I broke off the call soon after he started musing that he wished he could get a hold of my children to help free them from the sexually repressive Catholic morality he was sure I was imposing on them. By then, all daylight had been extinguished from the sky, and the room where I sat thinking about our long and twisted relationship was totally dark.
Moral (or immoral) of the story: this homosexual friend of mine was made over a lifetime by one bad indulgence after another. He was not “born that way.” One vice, porn, followed by loveless uncommitted heterosexual sin, selfishness, and drug use led to other degradations. And then after he had gone over totally to a promiscuous homosexual lifestyle, he was wishing he could get his hands on children, my children, and bring them over to the same side he was on. That was just too much for me. Did he sense that? Or was he disgusted by what he thought of as my relapse into superstitious religiosity? In any case, he never called again.
I wonder where he is now. On his birthdays I offer up a prayer for him. I loved him. Still do. You know the old saying. Love the sinner hate the sin.
About “Human Element” from the Public Art Boston website, a dead link that is quoted here:
"As its title indicates, this semi-abstract sculpture hints at the human form. The large piece of marble evokes the form of a reclining, twisted torso, although the precise anatomical parts are hard to make out and the body incomplete. In its medium and its subject, Human Element recalls ancient Greek and Roman figurative sculptures, which were also carved from large blocks of marble. Many of these sculptures have been damaged over the centuries and are missing extremities. For this work by contemporary artist Gerald S.[sic] Sherman, the figure’s lack of arms, legs, or a head results in a clean, graceful design that brings out the natural beauty of the marble."