Rescuing Robert Drake

HE WAS LEFT FOR DEAD IN IRELAND. IT TOOK DEVOTED SUPPORTERS, AND AN UNLIKELY PARTNERSHIP, TO SAVE HIM.

By Michael Matza

Scott Pretorius was already awake when a transatlantic phone call pierced the quiet of his home at 6 a.m.

That winter morning in Center City, inside the Iseminger Street house he had once shared with Robert Drake, Pretorius was alone, getting ready for work. It was a practiced ritual: Punch the alarm clock, pad to the bathroom, slip on a sports coat and tie. And before walking out the door to begin his rounds as chief resident in radiology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, he always checked his computer for e-mail from Drake, who was in Ireland working on a novel.

A prominent literary figure in Philadelphia's gay community, Drake was living in Sligo, a busy town of 23,000 on a plain below limestone hills on Ireland's shore. Despite their recent separation after six years as housemates, best friends and lovers, and despite the fact that Drake had announced he was in love with another man, he and Pretorius spoke by phone or e-mail almost every day. They shared Drake's impressions of the coal-smoke-scented streets of Sligo, famous for its celebrations of the poet W.B. Yeats, and Pretorius' news and gossip from the City of Brotherly Love.

Rushing to get to work, Pretorius heard the phone ring and decided to let the answering machine get it. He half expected to hear Drake's familiar baritone but instead he heard the frightened words of Ciaran Slevin, Drake's new boyfriend, a man Pretorius had never spoken to before.

"Hello, Scott? This is Ciaran. There's a problem with Robert. . . ." Pretorius dove for the receiver.

Had he heard right? Amid the murk of an early morning, why was Slevin calling? What business did they have together? Pretorius was confused, but this much was clear: The news from Ireland was very bad.

"Ciaran told me he had come back to the apartment and found Robert lying in a pool of blood in the kitchen, that they took him to the hospital, and they were about to do a CT scan," Pretorius, 32, recalled.

Standing in his kitchen, he burst into tears. Slevin, having had some time to absorb the horror, was calmer on his end of the line. At that instant, three lives were changed forever. And an emotional and bittersweet alliance was forged under fire by two men who loved Robert Drake and were determined to save his life.

Tense triangle

In any triangle there is tension: jealousy, conflict and the sting of loss. But this was an emergency. And Pretorius and Slevin, both physicians, were trained to focus on the facts. Drake had been the victim of a vicious attack. His limp body had been found inside a flat so blood-slickened it looked more like a slaughterhouse. In that context, affairs of the heart were the least they would have to deal with.

Using the medical jargon they shared, Slevin told Pretorius that Drake's condition was grave. Shaken and frustrated at being an ocean away, Pretorius gave Slevin his beeper number and told him to call the moment the scan was done. When Slevin phoned back a few hours later, he told Pretorius what the tests had shown: explosive bleeding inside Drake's skull, and a coma-like state of unconsciousness from which he might never emerge. But more than a telephone call, that unnerving conversation was a call to arms. Soon hundreds of people on both sides of the Atlantic would mobilize to rescue a 36-year-old author some knew quite intimately and others knew not at all.

Drake, a gentle soul with dark hair and brown eyes, was a man whose influence rippled through the Quaker community of Philadelphia and the gay-rights communities of Dublin, Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York. He became a man whose medical crisis would rally international cooperation and a virtual movement in his name. A man for whom the kindness of friends and strangers would make all the difference in the world.

Cigars, Sambuca and the assault

Police who responded to Slevin's 91 1 call say that Drake lay bleeding, slipping in and out of consciousness, for more than 12 hours inside his apartment before paramedics rushed him to Sligo General Hospital the morning of Jan. 31. Days later, two Sligo men, Ian Monaghan, 20, and Glen Mahon, 21 approached police to give statements about the attack. Accompanied by their lawyer, they said they had walked past Drake's Holborn Street flat about 4 a.m. on Jan. 31, saw him sitting outside on the steps and asked to bum a cigarette. Drake told Monaghan and Mahon that he didn't smoke cigarettes but he could offer them some fine cigars. The three men went inside. Police say the men drank flaming shots of Sambuca and gin and listened to loud music, apparently enjoying each other's company. Mahon said he felt sick to his stomach and went upstairs to use the bathroom.

Then, Monaghan, who said he was "groggy and half-steamed," alleged that Drake made a crude pass at him, touching him on the back and trying to put a hand down the back of his pants. They staggered toward the kitchen, Monaghan told police, and he fell flat on his face with Drake atop him. At this point, Mahon returned from the bathroom and dove into the fray. Mahon punched Drake in the face. Then the two men pushed him onto the kitchen floor. They denied kicking him or using any implement to beat him. But before fleeing, Mahon admitted, he grabbed $10 from Drake's wallet and tossed the billfold into a fireplace.

Drake, who lay speechless in a hospital bed, was in no condition to tell his side. But police believed the evidence told a very different story. Blood spatters, forensic experts said, covered the floor and walls, even the ceiling. By the time investigators arrived at the scene, the smell of stale blood infused the flat. A ceramic lamp lay smashed in pieces on the floor. Drake's jeans and shirt were so crusted in coagulated blood that they had to be cut off of him. And whatever happened, doctors quickly surmised, it was extremely violent: the equivalent of smashing Drake's head into a car windshield at 60 miles per hour not once, but twice. One eye socket was fractured, doctors noted, with swelling and bruising that caused "raccoon eyes."

Within days, Monaghan and Mahon were charged with aggravated assault, and word that they would claim they acted in self-defense leaked into the Irish press. "American Writer Left for Dead in Sligo," declared the Irish Voice Online, "Parmer Claims Gay-Bashing was Motivation." Newspapers in the United States, including The Inquirer and the New York Times, carried the story.

"Rural Ireland is quite closeted. There are probably only two people in town I know who would admit to you they are gay," says John McManus, a former Sligo policeman now working in private security. "Serious assaults of this nature are very unusual."

A gay bashing, or just a bloody robbery

In Ireland, a country that decriminalized homosexuality in 1991 after a long campaign by gay-rights activists, the assault on Drake fueled debate. Was this a gay-bashing? Or just a bloody robbery?

In America, news of Drake's assault came on the heels of the gay-bashing attack on University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, 21, who was pistol-whipped in Laramie, lashed to a fence like a scarecrow, and left to die. Perhaps because Drake clung to life, and was assaulted abroad instead of at home, his case received far less media attention. Yet the savaging of Drake half a world away sparked debate here, too. Drake's friends said making a crude pass was simply not in his nature. And they insisted that whatever happened in the apartment that night, the men who beat him clearly overreacted.

"I'm openly gay, but I get asked out all the time by women who don't know that. I don't try to kill them," Pretorius says. Slevin adds: "You don't leave someone in a blood-spattered apartment, facedown in a pool of their own blood, and expect them to get up and dial 9 1 1 .You do that to someone, you expect them not to get up again." A detective who knelt beside Drake in those first moments after he was found said he believed he was recording the final words of a dying man.

Sligo General is a community hospital, adept at basic medical needs, but not major trauma. In the hours after Slevin's first call, Pretorius learned that the hospital lacked neurology and neurosurgery departments or even the capability to measure the dangerously rising pressure inside Drake's brain. "I asked about intracranial pressure monitoring and they said, 'We can't do that.' That's a very 1950s answer," Pretorius says. "That's when I got on the phone to the doctors and said I want him transferred immediately. I asked what the country's best center for brain injury was, and they told me it was Beaumont Hospital in Dublin."

Drake was airlifted to Dublin by helicopter. Pretorius flew to Dublin that night. As he walked into the Beaumont waiting room carrying his bag, he heard a voice say, "That must be Scott." Amid an odd assortment of people in crisis, some dozing from exhaustion, some plainly numb, Pretorius and Slevin met for the first time. The American was slight and balding. The Irishman, towering and thin. But there was little time for first impressions. Together they headed to Drake's bed in neuro-intensive care. His breathing was supported by a ventilator; he was motionless and nonresponsive. Just months earlier, Drake had finished a 400-page manuscript. Now this man of impressive intellect seemed devoid of all cognition.

For the next two weeks, the hospital waiting room would be Pretorius and Slevin's home. To wash up, they used a bathroom set aside for families, and they rarely ventured outside. Once, when they did leave Beaumont to visit a McDonald's, men in ski masks carrying shotguns robbed the restaurant. Pretorius and Slevin escaped unharmed, and almost nonchalantly ignored the threat on their own lives as they rushed back to the hospital where Drake was fighting for his. Slevin, who had met Drake through a mutual friend, took an extended leave from his Sligo General residency and devoted himself to coordinating his care. As his new companion lay hooked to a respirator, Slevin, 26, kept a vigil by his side. Pretorius was glad that Drake was in a well-regarded hospital, but he wanted to bring him to Philadelphia for even better care, so he returned to the United States. And now, instead of it being odd for Pretorius to get phone calls from Slevin, it was odd if he didn't.

For nearly a month, Drake couldn't follow even the simplest directions. He couldn't talk. He couldn't walk. His only response was to pain. Then one day on command, he squeezed Slevin's hand. Slevin called Pretorius with the exultant news. "Before that we thought he could be completely brain-dead," Pretorius recalls. Back in Charleston, W.Va., where Drake was raised, his parents, Ken and Rosalie, both in their 70s, were frail and unable to travel. They empowered Pretorius, in consultation with them, to make Drake's pressing medical decisions. Drake's mother is a retired nurse and a Quaker. His father is Jewish and worked as a chemical engineer for Union Carbide. Their adopted son Robert graduated from Charleston Central Catholic High School. In Philadelphia, he attended the Quaker Meeting at Fourth and Arch Streets. In Ireland, Drake, who before the assault used to send birthday cards to at least 100 people a year, was spiraling downward into renal failure, pneumonia, partial blindness and more. The two men who loved him refused to give up. Pretorius raised the profile of the issue with frequent updates to an e-mail list of more than 200 people. "I needed the help of our friends and the powerful people our friends knew," he recalls.

Slevin, more private by nature (he declined to be photographed for this story), supported Drake by remaining by his side. If there was tension between Drake's lovers, old and new, they knew that for the time being they would have to mediate it. "Basically Ciaran and I are adults and we agree on one thing. That we both want Robert to get better," Pretorius says. "I want Robert back. And I want him back intact. But I don't want to be his boyfriend. I'm really impressed by Ciaran's devotion."

The Aer Lingus flight that carried Drake back to Philadelphia at the end of March was a commercial plane adapted for service as an air ambulance. Nine seats were removed to accommodate a stretcher and a privacy curtain. To help ease Drake's labored breathing, doctors administered nebulizer treatments in flight.

The long trip across the Atlantic ocean left plenty of time for worry and contemplation. Plenty of time for his friends to recall what Drake's life had been up until now. A graduate of Marshall College in West Virginia, Drake was attending graduate school at St. John's College in Annapolis when he met Pretorius, who was raised in Ohio and was in medical school at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. They met through a personal ad Drake had placed in the Baltimore City Paper. "He sounded really smart and mentioned a couple of writers that he was interested in," Pretorius recalls. "I was a Rhodes Scholar. My bachelor's degree from Oxford was in English. So we talked on the phone and then we ended up getting together and talking about books and stuff. "If you think the straight dating world is bad, the gay dating world is even worse. Because there are fewer people and you don't know who they are. If I meet a man who is a professional and I'm attracted to him, I can't really ask him out, you know, because nine times out of 1 0 that won't be appreciated. So personal ads have become a big part of our community and the World Wide Web has become a huge source of gay dating."

The Web would also become the global bulletin board that spread the word about Drake's condition, and the vehicle by which his friends mounted an effort to insure he would get the highest quality care. With Pretorius and Slevin posting electronic mail to literally hundreds of correspondents, an information-sharing network and fund-raising campaign took root. They tapped academic, medical, publishing and other professional circles. A friend who handled public relations for the Sara Lee Corp. in Chicago offered his services as a media contact. Another friend at the Baltimore Alternative, that city's gay and lesbian newspaper, hosted a Web site and kept it up to date with news and photographs. Students at the University of Pennsylvania, where Drake had served as an adviser to the Sigma Nu fraternity, sold "Robert" buttons for $3 each. Giovanni's Room, a Center City gay and lesbian bookstore, in conjunction with the city's gay and alternative press held a fund-raiser attended by prominent gay authors that raised several thousand dollars for the Robert Drake Fund.

Although Independence Blue Cross paid for Drake's $20,000 flight back to the United States, Pretorius put the deductible about $4,000 on his personal credit card. He was eventually reimbursed by the growing Robert Drake Fund. So far, the insurer has covered $50,000 for hospital bills in Ireland and $136,000 at HUP. The Moss Rehabilitation Hospital bill is still being tallied.

"I know that when I look back on this time five years from now, if I didn't do everything in my power to help Robert I would think what could I have possibly had to do that was more important?" Pretorius says.

In April, four months after the assault, the managed-care doctors began to reconsider Drake's prognosis and the kind of treatment he should receive. Worried that Drake could end up warehoused in a nursing home instead of working toward rehabilitation, Pretorius began once again to lobby the insurance company. And, once again, Drake's supporters lit up the Internet. "There is no time to waste," wrote a woman whose husband had suffered a brain injury. "From what I know about brain injury (and believe me, after a while you learn a lot!), Robert sounds like a wonderful candidate for rehab. I belong to a caregiver's list-serve about brain injury, and many folks there report success with getting their local legislative representatives involved. But, in the meantime, PLEASE get Robert into rehab no matter what, even if we all have to sell brownies on the street. I am constantly amazed by the strength of Robert's community, and by all the love radiating toward him."

That community came to include a group from the Arch Street Monthly Meeting, where Drake had worshipped before going overseas. Their goal, says Patricia Torosian, a spokeswoman for the group, is to "stay close to the situation and be helpful wherever needed."

With a lobbying effort that included contacts in the offices of Gov. Ridge, New York Gov. George Pataki, West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Pennsylvania Rep. Bob Brady, the city's deputy health commissioner, Donna Gentile O'Donnell and Mayor Ed Rendell, Drake's troops fanned out, writing letters, placing phone calls, worming their way past assistants and factotums to get to the policy makers. Through connections, Pretorius even reached out to Richard Socarides, President Clinton's liaison to the gay and lesbian community. The message was always the same: Robert Drake is in dire straits. Do you know anybody who can help? And in a more targeted way, people with clout were asked to contact Blue Cross. After weeks of pressure, Drake's initial assessment, for nursing-home-level care, was bumped up two full notches to intermediate-level rehabilitation. A social worker at HUP told Pretorius she hadn't seen that happen in seven years.

On a midsummer afternoon, Drake is seated in his Invacare 2000 wheelchair, on the third floor of MossRehab center in North Philadelphia. A seat belt holds him in because his muscles have contracted and lack control. Flat leg boards are wrapped with white terry cloth towels and secured with adhesive tape. Foot rests are angled sharply to keep Drake from sliding out of the silver, black-wheeled chair. There is a scar at the base of his throat, a permanent reminder of the tracheostomy and respirator that in Ireland kept him alive.

Now, inside the red brick hospital known for top-quality care, Drake is draped in a barber's smock. He is getting a haircut. His black-rimmed glasses are sliding down the bridge of his nose. Wisps of hair land on his cheeks. He lacks the muscle control to reach up and wipe them away. A urine bag peaks out from the bottom of his green cargo shorts. His shirt is white. The soles of his sneakers are unscuffed. Except for his physical therapy exercises, they rarely touch the ground. A dapper, rail-thin barber for the hospital is gently trimming around Drake's ears. The hair on the back of his head wore away from so many months on a pillow. Now it is growing back and can be styled a bit. The barber is pleased with his work and tells Drake not to sign too many autographs. Drake's lips turn up slightly as if to smile. But his gaze is impassive.

The walls of Drake's room are plastered with get-well cards and half a dozen snapshots. A mobile made of small bald eagles sways from the ceiling track that holds a privacy curtain. A note to the night nurse, taped above Drake's bed, asks how well he tolerates his splint at night. A dozen white roses sent by Slevin sit in a ceramic vase. Even in this setting, there is abundant evidence of how important books are in Drake's world. The windowsill is brimming with copies of His 3 and Hers 3, the recently released anthologies of gay-themed literature that Drake coedited with Terry Wolverton. For a man whose writing includes the novel The Man: A Hero For Our Time, about a gay man's response to his partner's hate-crime murder, the irony is abundant.

For the longest time, Drake's circle of concerned caregivers wondered if he was aware of his surroundings. He spoke not a word for five months after the attack. Then one night at Moss, Pretorius was watching The Simpsons with Drake and something happened: Drake was laughing at all the right moments even though the show had no laugh track. "He still couldn't talk and we had no idea how much was getting through," says Pretorius, remembering the joy of that moment.

Slevin moved to Philadelphia to be with Drake full time. He found accommodations with the help of Quaker friends. Every day he rode a borrowed bicycle or took a bus and the subway from Society Hill to North Philadelphia to support Drake through his regimen of speech, occupational and physical therapies. On the day of the haircut, Pretorius is visiting Drake, too, making small talk about the pets they shared. His tone is upbeat as he watches carefully to see how much of the conversation Drake absorbs. Drake nods a lot and gives one-word answers. On a visit a week before, Pretorius had brought along their cat, Zac (short for Prozac), a stray they'd found and bottle-fed as a kitten. And in the days in between, Slevin and Ed Hermance, the proprietor of Giovanni's Room, took Drake to the Riverview Cinema to see StarWars: Episode I The Phantom Menace. Pretorius asks if Yoda was in the movie. "A little, says Drake, working hard to pronounce each syllable. Pretorius smiles. Later, he says he's pleased that Drake's short-term memory is improving. Until recently, his long-term memory had been the better of the two. He could remember incidents from 1993, but couldn't recall what happened two minutes ago. They speak of Pudsey, a bull terrier that Drake once owned. Suddenly, Drake breaks into tears deep, mournful, wailing sobs. Visitors are told to be prepared for uncontrollable crying it's common in severe head injury. But witnessing Drake's cri de coeur is painful. "Yeh-zedey. Yeh-zedey. Yeh-zedey," a panicky Drake repeats again and again. Slevin and Pretorius catch on simultaneously. "Yesterday? Is that it? Yesterday? What is it, hon?" Pretorius says, gently stroking Drake's arm. "Yeh-zedey I gut urt." "Yesterday, he got hurt," Slevin translates, reaching in affectionately to rub Drake's shoulders. Drake has a forehead abrasion from where he fell forward in his chair and hit the edge of a picnic table in a garden on the hospital grounds. The painful thought finally expressed, Drake is able to calm down. Pretorius asks how his speech therapy is going. "Are you saying the alphabet?" Drake nods. "Can you say pop?" Drake struggles with it and succeeds. That's an important sound, Pretorius says, because hard consonants can be difficult to say. "Can you say fox? Can you say Zac?" Pretorius asks, referring to the cat. "Za," Drake says, and a smile lights his face.

Heading outside to the patio, Slevin pushes Drake's wheelchair down the hospital's beige corridors. The attractive young mother of Drake's hospital roommate is passing by in the opposite direction. She tells Drake that his new haircut looks good. "Anku," Drake replies. Slevin steers Drake's wheelchair outside to an area surrounded by a narrow strip of soil planted with zucchinis. Other patients are on the patio, too. An obese man in a wheelchair. A thin man, whose arms, both of them, have been amputated at the shoulder. Drake says that he feels "weh." His urine bag is full. With a practiced hand, Slevin takes a plastic liter bottle and taps off the bag, then goes inside to empty it. Drake's doctors say he is slowly regaining control of his bowel and bladder, an important improvement, because in Ireland he was in complete renal failure.

When he's not in formal rehab classes, Drake tries to read a little bit, but he can't hold a book. He is trying to type the alphabet on his laptop, but the keys are too small. Pretorius hopes to have something engineered to put over the keys. When Slevin or Pretorius have trouble understanding Drake, they ask him to spell the word. It is a slow and laborious process three beats for a single syllable and it's hard work for his friends. But they tolerate it gladly, even if the conversation inevitably drifts away, picks up speed, and leaves Drake behind. As the discussion turns to the marvelous way Ireland has exported its culture around the world, and how its influence is out of proportion to its small size and 3.5 million population, Pretorius and Slevin are animatedly talking when suddenly from his wheelchair Drake pipes up. "Nu amp ur," he struggles to say. And this time Pretorius translates: "He says Ireland is about as big as New Hampshire."

It's evening rush hour at Broad and Walnut Streets. Ten stories above the hustle, inside his new apartment, Drake is curled into the corner of a sofa covered in a floral pattern. The song "Mambo No. 5" is pouring out at low volume from a tabletop boom box. On this Friday in November, Drake is wearing a blue-striped dress shirt, khakis and white high-top sneakers. His hips are askew, his knees together, pulling to the left because of spasticity in his hamstrings. His right wrist is cocked at an angle that looks painful. His black-and-silver wheelchair is only three feet away. The one-bedroom apartment that he shares with Slevin has an open floor plan the kitchen, dining room and living room are one. A mahogany console is blanketed with get-well and housewarming cards. The most prominent piece of art on the walls is a 10-by-20-inch, framed, sepia-tone photograph of Rupert Brooke, a devastatingly handsome English poet who died in World War I. It has literary significance for Drake and he bought it through a catalog.

Slevin explains that Drake receives two hours of occupational, speech or physical therapy at the apartment each day. The rest of the time he is attended by an aide. He is still dependent on a wheelchair, which he has learned to push himself, but just barely.

It was in the middle of one of those long speech therapy sessions on Oct. 20 when he got word that a Sligo jury had found Monaghan and Mahon guilty of assault. Among more than 40 witnesses for the prosecution and the defense were DNA experts from England and a team of specialists from the Irish national police. Given the frailty of Drake's condition, there was never any serious thought that he would testify. After the verdict, with Slevin acting as his spokesman, Drake said he was pleased, "but not surprised." The men are to be sentenced in early January. But Drake isn't dwelling on revenge. He has so much more to think about. He may never again be able to live independently. He may never again write long manuscripts, but he might be able to read them. He's still working on learning to walk.

“Til do it. I'll do it. I'll do it,” he says. What would he like to do professionally when all the therapy stops? "All I know how to do is write," he says in a voice still thick with impediments, but clearly improving. Slevin reminds him that he will probably want to get back to the novel he was researching in Ireland, a story about conjoined twins with the working tide Two-fer. "I think you've got three chapters on your PowerBook," Slevin says, causing Drake to brighten. But when he's asked about the novel's basic plot, Drake answers, "I don't know."

His speech is delivered in staccato bursts. He reaches deep into his diaphragm for every word. Each short sentence starts slowly, crests in the middle, then picks up speed as if running downhill. Despite his travails, there are glimmers of his old sense of humor. He was disappointed in the outcome of the Philadelphia mayoral election. He favored Sam Katz over John Street, because Street had opposed domestic-partnership benefits as president of City Council. "Well, maybe he will change," Slevin says. "Maybe . . . he . . . will," says Drake, "but-donholdyourbreath!" When he thinks about all the people who have rallied around to be a force for his recovery, Drake says he is "amazed that they could all get along." As the central focus of so many people's good wishes, Drake thinks of himself as "the hub." Then his voice rumbles up from deep inside. "I feel lucky," he says. "Yeah. I do."

To reach the Robert Drake Fund, and for information about a Valentine's Day benefit on his behalf, call 215-629-0257.

—The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine, Dec. 5, 1999