Remembering Hilton Nye
In late October 1994, in a borrowed van, we were returning from a U-pick pumpkin farm with four children in tow. We were headed south on a divided highway that went through the city. Whiter Share of Pale came on the radio, and I reached down to turn up the volume. At that precise moment, there was a violent cathunk-cathunk as the diver side tires ran over something in the road. I had seen nothing ahead before looking down and could see nothing in the side view. As soon as I could, I pulled over to check the tires. They were fine. A few kilometers later, as I took the ramp at our exit, I heard the telltale buthump, buthump, buthump of a flat tire. At the traffic lights, I discover that the front-left tire was completely flat. I limped the van around the corner and considered options.
Although I could locate the spare, I could not find the jack. My CAA card was in our car and there was no mechanic on duty at the service station at the top of the hill. With the kids running around on an expanse of grass beside us, I searched for, and eventually found, the user’s manual which led me to the jack. As it was going to be dangerous to change the tire in the road, I turned into the parking lot of what I just then noticed was a convent of the Sisters of Providence.
After changing the tire, I went in to wash my hands. Driving off, I considered the events: Whiter Shade of Pale (a song I have often associated with significant events in my life), an invisible object on the road causing a flat but not until I had reached the Sisters of Providence. It seemed clear that something had happened in my universe, but I did not discover what until several months later.
* * * * *
In 1973, I travelled the length of Africa, spending 6 weeks in South Africa before returning home. I stayed at the Johannesburg YMCA which operated both as a boarding house for single working men and a hostel for travellers. While there I meet a white South African named Hilton Nye.
Several months before, he had dropped out of pre-med at Witwatersrand, spent some time acting in Cape Town, and had recently begun work as a computer operator in Jo’berg. We hit it off pretty well. He took me around. We went to dinner at the homes of his friends and visited his mother in the hospital after some surgery she had had. I remember helping him out in a sound studio where he was recording audiobooks for the blind.
After I returned to Canada, Hilton and I continued our relationship through letters. We bitched, bragged, philosophised, lectured, and wondered about stuff. We were a couple of twenty-somethings trying to figure things out. The distance and the time between these long rambling letters gave each of us a chance to think about what we were going to say and how we would respond to what the other had written. I have, on occasion, re-read some of his (mine are gone). The letters have little meaning now, but they were important to us then.
I spent the next five years knocking about, working in the Arctic, earning a teaching certificate at Simon Fraser University, and teaching in Vancouver. Hilton continued in computers, becoming a programmer. Eventually, he returned to university in Pietermaritzburg. He was in his final year when I visited S.A. for three months in early 1978.
I flew to Jo’berg, where Hilton was spending the school break working on a project for a software company. Being determined to see more of the country than I had on my first visit, after a few days, I caught a ride to Cape Town where I ran into a guy who remembered me from the Jo’berg “Y” five years before. Weird. After a few weeks, I hitched back to Jo’berg and Hilton and I drove down to ‘Maritzberg passing through the Orange Free State where his parents were managing a farm for their son-in-law. We stayed a few days and I came to know his family.
During my eight weeks in ‘Maritzberg, I seemed to spend as much time hanging out with Hilton’s housemates as I did with him. He and I would talk, but not with the intimacy that characterised our letters.
After returning to Canada, I completed a Master’s in Education, while Hilton entered Med School in Cape Town. We continued our correspondence much as we had in the past. Then, he suddenly stopped writing. For nine or ten months, I sent several letters but received nothing in reply. I was concerned.
Finally, he wrote telling me that he had dropped out of Med School and come out as gay. He had sent me the letter with some trepidation, uncertain as to how I would react. I wrote him back, greatly relieved that he was OK, and our relationship continued as before.
As we grew, we wrote less frequently. I married and, since my wife worked for Air Canada, we visited him in South Africa as part of an around-the-world honeymoon. A few years later, he moved to the States. He claimed he could not visit us due to his immigration status as an illegal alien. We saw him on a trip to L.A. when we were living in British Columbia. By this time, our contact was down to about once a year. I would write at Christmas; he would reply with a phone call.
In 1993, he did not call. In 1994, my letter was returned as undeliverable. I called to find his phone had been cancelled. I rummaged through his letters to find his parents’ old address. I wrote asking them about Hilton and enclosed it in a letter to the postmaster of the small town where they had lived asking him if he could forward the note to wherever they might be.
Several weeks later, coming home from work, I saw the mail included a light blue airmail envelope with red and blue striped borders and a South African postmark. It was the letter from Hilton’s mother that I had been waiting for with a combination of hope and dread. As soon as I touched it, my heart sank. I knew instantly that there was no more rationalising, no more hopeful hypothesising of positive outcomes. The news was going to be bad, really bad.
Hilton, his mother informed me, had been HIV positive for several years, a fact he had kept from many of his old friends – including me. In 1993, he had developed full-blown AIDS and in October of 1994, he had developed a fatal brain tumour. His LA friends had scraped together enough money to send him back to South Africa where, on December 30, he died at home with his parents at his side.
I cried for the rest of the day and was weepy for several more. Even now, almost 30 years later, I feel a deep and lonely sadness. I will never forgive him for not telling me.