After the dance is over...

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Douglas Wright has never written a book before. Actually, he has never written very much of anything before.

And now the dancer and choreographer has written a memoir called Ghost Dance and this is the first sentence: "It was after a decade of living with a disease once thought fatal that I began to suspect that somehow, somewhere along the way, without noticing it, I had already died."

Good, isn't it? So good that a mate of mine, who is a very good writer, picked up Wright's book at the pub, read that first sentence and flung it down in disgust. He muttered a charitable something about how annoying it is that some people are so good at everything.

Wright likes this story. He laughs and his eyes light up and this is nice because he is very sad, often, these days. Although he doesn't want to go on and on - and he most certainly doesn't want me to go on and on - about this.

Still, he is, he says, "in a hard time of my life at the moment". We are sitting outside on his deck and he speaks so softly that the wind blows his words away and the cicadas out-chatter him. You worry that he could be blown away, too. He weighs 60kg, the lightest he's ever been.

He sits here and looks out over the wonderful garden he planted: a jungle-like garden of nikau and crab-apple, magnolia and palms. He writes, "I planted a cycad to attract dinosaurs." So I took him a small green wind-up plastic dinosaur for his cycad and he was very happy. He said his cycad had at last attracted its dinosaur. He wound it up and it waddled across his dining room table. If he wasn't so ill he would be capable, at 47, of great playfulness. You can still see that.

He used to dance in the garden with his cat Leo. He doesn't dance now but he finds joy in little things: food, which his friends make; and reading.

Leo died three days before I went to see Wright and his ashes are kept in a little wooden box on a table in Wright's lounge. Behind Leo's box is the urn in the shape of a hawk which holds the ashes of Malcolm Ross, Wright's great love who died six and a half weeks after Wright finished writing his book. Ghost Dance is Ross's story entwined with Wright's story: a tale of two artists. It is a great, tragic, joyous sexy, romance. It was Ross, who having asked Wright the question: "What is it you most want to do?" sent him dancing, which is what took Wright overseas, away from Ross.

The hard time - his psychiatrist says he is "apathetic" - is because "I've lost Malcolm and I've lost Leo, which seems silly [not to me it doesn't]." And "I'm," a long pause, while he rolls the word around in his mouth like a nasty taste before spitting it out, "an invalid".

He really would be unhappy if he felt that people were feeling sorry for him. But you sit and look at him and think that our greatest loss - as much as it is his - is the loss of all that vibrant, brilliant talent. And he says, quietly, "It's sort of like everything's finished for me in a way."

I don't mean to make him sound a tragic figure, but it is impossible to set down the losses without thinking that if Wright's life was a dance it would be a hard one to watch.

But to read about his life is pure delight. Like its author, Ghost Dance is a work of caprice and charm.

There is a lovely passage, for example, about Wright's friendship with Janet Frame. He would visit her and they would have a hot drink and then she would say, "Would you like to see Penny now?" Penny Panty-hose was Frame's cat (like her owner, sadly deceased) and she lived in a room full of cardboard boxes and was very grumpy. She would give Wright "such a look".

I imagine it is much the same sort of look Wright gives when he thinks that he is expected to bewail his bad fortune. He gets irritated when people go on about our most famous choreographer living in state housing - with his paintings and the books that breed in the night and the wonderful Russian carpet that was Ross's - because he loves it. He is living, and he is not complaining about this, on $40 a week because his invalid's benefit has been adjusted to take into account the advance he got for the book.

You think, "Oh for goodness' sake", he should have some money but it wouldn't be any good, really, even if he did. Money wouldn't make him well or bring back anyone.

WRIGHT says he is worried now that everyone he has written about will die. He recites the names: Janet, Malcolm, Leo.

Then he jokes that he's been sent two of Frame's unpublished poems and he's going to sell them for $1 million each. He likes to mock moan and then joke about it. "Artists," he writes, "are such whingers."

He might be forgiven for a little whinge. His career, too, is dead. He has no energy to make a dance; although inside his head the dances are still attempting to make themselves. He dreams of making dance and he tries to block out the dances. The dreams are "frustrating".

He has no romantic or sexual love in his life nor does he think he will again.

His body, he says, belongs not to him but to the disease HIV.

Writing Ghost Dance was like making a dance and he says he had enormous joy from the making. But it is over now and he can't think what he might do next.

But what a life he's had. He's lived it all in fast motion and now he thinks, "I'm having a crash course on what it's like to be human. I'm losing my health and that happens to everyone, except it's happening a little bit earlier to me."

Well, nothing new there. At 12, he "joined this secret ritual ... " of the gay sex scene and "found it took some extraordinarily detailed choreography to convince my adult victims I wasn't police bait before they consented to abuse me".

There is a lot of sex in his story, a chapter about a notorious bath house in New York describes a descent into a sort of hell, like a Bosch painting, says Wright. There is funny sex, and tenderness and many, many parties. Revisiting that past was "exhilarating," he says, "and funny and sad, too, because I had to write a lot about people I love who have since died".

He took drugs, plenty of them, and drank a lot of the alcohol he now speaks about with real anger: "I just hate it. It makes people so ugly and it destroys their lives in such a thorough way."

Wright gave up drinking when he was told he was HIV positive in 1989. It was a relief: "the unconscious knowledge that I no longer had to destroy myself". All the Wright children were wild. His sister had a heroin addiction; his brother died in a motorcycle accident. They went that way, he thinks, because "my father and mother had a quite tempestuous relationship".

"Basically he was a bastard to my mother, so there was a lot of tension at home and I think that kids who come from that get naughty, you know."

He figured that HIV would take over where the drugs and alcohol had failed.

But not quite. Not yet.

Is his a sad life? I ask him. "Well, I think it is. What do you think?"

I think it might be, but it does not make a sad book. Instead he has crafted out of two lives a glorious moving dance of a memoir.