Karl Bissinger

A Village Friendship

By Phyllis Eckhaus

THIS PHOTO OF KARL BISSINGER, taken in his Westbeth apartment, was the author photo for his book, The Luminous Years: Portraits at Mid-Century, published in 2003. Photo credit: © Zachary Fechheimer.

Old age laid siege to my friend Karl Bissinger’s conviction of freedom. He was a gay man out since World War II, a once-famous fashion and portrait photographer turned fervent anti-war activist with the Greenwich Village Peace Center—and old age volleyed a never-ending escalation of insults to his deepest sense of self.

Karl and I were friends for the last ten years of his life, and in the last several years before his death in 2008, he declined. He suffered the deterioration of vision, balance, and grace, and then the sudden forbearance and pity of friends and neighbors.

There was the time he was forced to rely on me to fetch him from the hospital after eye surgery—and his fury when I expressed alarm over all the Tylenol he gobbled. During one epically wrenching Gay Pride weekend, I stayed with him after out-patient prostate surgery gone terribly wrong, which resulted first in a blocked catheter and then a stroke.

And then there was the time he was found wandering lost through the West Village and they tried to keep him at St. Vincent’s Hospital. When Karl escaped to go home, the police fetched him back to the hospital and he moaned to me “I’m in prison,” while also asking “Does it hurt very much to watch me lose my mind?

I told him it hurt me only when he appeared to be in mental or physical pain; anything else I could handle.

Weeks in St. Vincent’s captivity went by. Karl was then transferred to Village Care, the nursing home on 12th Street. Ironically, Village Care put out an annual wall calendar as a fundraiser, Legends of the Village, and Karl was their April legend that year.

By the time Karl was released he was so out of it, I was frightened. He actually couldn’t recognize people. Karl’s son David arranged daytime homecare.

Karl was prescribed Aricept, a dementia drug. In the familiarity of home, he slowly regained much of himself. I brought luminous white pansies for his roof garden, and his case manager, after watching Karl tend to them, allowed him to leave home under supervision. We resumed movie-going, though I had to resort to devious tactics to get Karl to let me accompany him home.

Westbeth takes up a city block and there are multiple exits. Once Karl bewildered me by letting me out a back exit; he planned to take a walk around the building by himself. “I’m lost,” I said truthfully as I refused to leave, instead following him. For weeks he mocked me, mewing “I’m lost.” I tried to tell him that two simultaneous things were true—I had been lost and I’d been reluctant to leave him alone. He didn’t believe me.

When we walked to Regal Cinema to see The Last King of Scotland, Karl started weaving diagonally across the sidewalk. Right in front of the theater, he collapsed. A young colleague from my workplace walked by, stepped over Karl, then hustled along as if embarrassed. The police picked Karl up from the sidewalk and he cheerfully insisted on going in to see the film, so we did.

Months later, that young colleague was in my apartment. A photographer, she admired Karl’s 1948 photo of the author Colette. I told her it was shot by the same guy splayed out on the sidewalk whom she’d stepped over. She told me she’d thought he was drunk. “No,” I replied, “he was having a stroke.” It turned out she’d actually studied Karl’s work in art school.

At home, Karl was rigidly insistent that anyone visiting ignore the caregiving aide. The aide’s very presence was a traumatic injury to his dignity. For me to talk to an aide in front of Karl was forbidden.

So the day I ran into Mary, one of Karl’s best aides, on the street, it was an occasion, a rare opportunity to connect. Mary told me that she’d scolded Karl for being nasty to me, that she had described me to him as his only friend (he had methodically dropped everyone else).

Then she casually mentioned Karl’s response: “Phyllis knows I love her.”

This was stunning to me. In fact, I knew nothing of the sort, only that I loved him.

Before his end, Karl chose to go off life-prolonging drugs and into at-home hospice care. Between the dementia and the strokes, he struggled for words.

I read him Muriel Rukeyser’s The Hostages, part of her poem Breaking Open, which praised Karl’s offer to make himself a target of U.S. bombing raids in Vietnam. I described to him the myriad ways in which he’d had a marvelous, accomplished, and honorable life.

Perhaps a week before Karl died, I was visiting. His son David called from San Francisco, and Karl jovially told him I was making lunch. Then Karl asked David to remind him of his bankcard password. Karl wrote the password on a slip of paper. My heart sank, knowing the slip would immediately disappear.

After they hung up, I suggested that Karl tell me the password. He said no.

Then I suggested he tell me where he was putting the slip of paper. He said no again.

I told him I loved him, but that it hurt me he didn’t trust me.

I watched as Karl, with extreme difficulty, gathered the words to respond. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust me, he said, but rather that he couldn’t bear to be reminded of his condition. I recognized that for him to put such effort into articulating something so vulnerable was an act of love.

This concludes the three-part series.
Click here to Read Part I.
Click here to Read Part II.