Beyond the Blues

Sharonmarie Fisher says she was ready to die.

Eight years ago she learned she was HIV-positive. By last summer, she was hospitalized with AIDS-induced spinal meningitis, and the 46-year-old country and blues singer had already made her final plans.

Fisher gave away her jewelry to friends and relatives. She even wrote her final song, “Take Me to the Mountain,” and asked them to bury her under a big oak tree.

Fisher had given up hope, but in August she was referred to AIDS specialist Michael Gottlieb in Los Angeles, who put her on Crixivan--one of the new drugs that stop the human immunodeficiency virus from reproducing.

Fisher went from an advanced stage of AIDS to having no detectable HIV in her blood. “She’s had an incredible turnaround,” her neurologist, Aaron Aronow, said last week. “Now you wouldn’t know she was sick.”

It wasn’t just the medicine that prompted her miraculous recovery, said Fisher, who became a Christian 11 years ago. She describes a dreamlike vision she had about angels one day while in Midway Hospital in Los Angeles.

“They lifted my pillow and were lifting my shoulders up and I felt like I was being pushed [out of bed],” she said. “There was a group of angels talking to each other. I was getting to where I didn’t want to come back [to life], and they were mad at me.

“That’s when I said, ‘The hell with this. I’ve got to get out of the hospital again.’ ”

After just two weeks, Fisher returned to her Moorpark home to be with her husband, Dennis Laughery, a 46-year-old vinyl salesman, and her basset hound, named Muddy Waters. The entryway of her home is lined with photos showing Fisher with celebrities-- Little Richard, blues artists Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, and former President Ronald Reagan.

Within weeks, Fisher picked up her electronic keyboard and her old, cracked guitar--which is autographed by Bonnie Raitt--and returned to the Southland nightclub circuit, where she has been a well-known figure since a promoter brought her from Alaska in 1986.

“Everybody in the music business knows Sharonmarie, and we all love her,” said promoter Tina Mayfield. “She was pretty sick and she said she wasn’t going to pull through, but I knew she was going to make it.”

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Now Fisher is busy putting together her sixth annual AIDS benefit concert, to be held Sunday from 1 p.m. to midnight at Jack’s Sugar Shack, 1707 Vine St., in Hollywood. Once again, she has invited all kinds of bands--rock, country blues, even zydeco--to raise money for pediatric AIDS patients.

Fisher believes God kept her alive to continue helping children--a mission she embraced soon after she learned she was HIV-positive, just two weeks before her wedding to Laughery. She has a child from a previous marriage, 26-year-old Phillip John Maldonado Jr., but had hoped for more. “What I did was find all the organizations that dealt with children, because now I knew I couldn’t have any kids from Dennis,” she said.

Last year’s concert raised $7,800 for Caring for Babies With AIDS, which operates two Los Angeles-are foster homes for children 8 and younger. Development director Harriet Baron said Fisher also performed at the organization’s Nov. 10 Stroll-a-Thon AIDS walk and regularly visits the group homes. “She hangs out with the kids, plays with them, reads to them,” Baron said.

“It’s important for me to be around kids,” Fisher said during an interview in her family room, which opens to a garden of roses and cactuses and the rolling, grassy Campus Hills Park beyond.

If she wants it, Fisher has a job teaching children to sing in musical productions at the Magnificent Moorpark Melodrama and Vaudeville Co.

“She’s the best children’s director I’ve had,” said owner-producer Linda Bredemann, who hired Fisher off and on for seven years until the entertainer’s health failed, and now wants her back. “The kids like her a lot. She’s down-to-earth, patient. She teaches kids who couldn’t carry a note in a basket.

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“When she first came to work she came to me and said she had HIV,” Bredemann said. “I said it’s fine with me as long as the rest of the cast knows. So we put it to them. Well, the parents didn’t mind . . . and the kids said it was fine.”

The theater families’ acceptance is important to Fisher. She has been greeted warmly by high school and college students who have sent her more than 600 fan letters in the past three years after hearing her no-nonsense talk about acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

“I tell them everything. I tell them how I got infected, and that deceit and deception are the worst things that can happen in a relationship,” said Fisher, who had unprotected sex with her boyfriend at the time, who was infected.

A straightforward presentation, such as those given by Fisher, is an approach endorsed by health experts.

“It’s better to hear that from the patients who can tell people not to make the same mistakes,” said Tessie Pijuan, a Ventura County Public Health Department nurse who helped book Fisher into an AIDS education forum Oct. 16 at Oxnard College. “Young adults think they can’t get this disease.”

Fisher was born in the Northern California town of Martinez, one of seven children of an Oklahoma-born truck driver and his Boston-born wife. When she was 10, somebody gave the family an old upright piano with 15 broken keys. Before long, Fisher was making her stage debut.

“I sang with my sister’s boyfriend, Larry,” she recalls. “I had my big white boots on and my little white skirt and my hair up, and Mom showed me how to use the microphone. I made $10, and that was the start of my career.”

By age 14, she was performing regularly with a local rock band, and she continued to sing during high school and later at Yuba College and at Cal State Chico.

After a brief marriage to her high school sweetheart ended, she headed north to Alaska with her toddler son.

“I played clubs, coffeehouses, concerts, festivals--I went for all of it,” she said. “In Alaska, I started doing cocaine. I was doing it because I was working 22 hours a day. Trying to raise my son, and pay Alaska bills [and] trying to go to college.”

She said she had a religious conversion one morning in 1985 after she woke up to discover she had lost her truck in the snow. That, she said, meant “getting out of drugs and drinking and rock and roll bands. . . . Everybody was doing drugs. . . . It was the rock scene.”

When she shifted her music to concentrate on country and blues, her career took off. The next year a Los Angeles club owner booked her for a gig and she ended up staying in Southern California. Soon she was playing behind headliners including Bonnie Raitt and Buddy Guy and opening for folk-blues legend Taj Mahal.

In the spring of 1987, she met Laughery, a Long Beach native who was living in Reseda, when he came to watch her perform one night at the Ban-Dar nightclub in Ventura. They married the following year.

You could say HIV brought Fisher and her husband to Moorpark in 1989. They hoped that the clean air and less-stressful surroundings would be beneficial for her.

But four years ago, the virus caused what neurologist Aronow described as recurrent aseptic meningitis, which in Fisher’s description, is like “drinking tequila and waking up . . . knowing you drank the whole bottle. The lining of your brain is so inflamed you can’t touch any part of your head. You can’t move. You just lay there.”

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But Fisher’s daily doses of Crixivan have increased her T-cell count above 360--normal is about 550--and eased the symptoms of meningitis enough to allow her to perform.

While grateful for the recovery of her health, she finds her brush with death has made her mindful of two friends she lost in recent months: blues harmonica player William Clarke, who died in Fresno on Nov. 2, and a 5-year-old girl who was living in one of the Babies With AIDS homes.

“She was pulling her little wagon and she had all her little stuffed animals in there and she on her heart monitor,” Fisher said, describing one encounter with the frail tot.

“She was a little blond--so beautiful. I was depressed and sad, and she looked up at me and said, ‘Do you see my wagon?’ and I said, ‘I do, it’s so beautiful.’ And she goes, ‘Well, you’re supposed to smile, because the sun is out today!’

“When I look at me with this disease and watching these kids and they don’t know what’s going on, that’s when I know my work is for them. . . . It’s just overwhelming, it makes you become so unselfish, and you become very humble.

She wiped her eyes and went over to her shiny black Steinway upright and sang a bit of the song she had written to her friends:

“I only have to say that I’ll never be alone / He gave me so much love to share it all with you.”

And looking outside at the roses, she added with a giggle: “Looks like I’ll have to write another song: ‘Darn it, I’m Not Leaving After All.’ ”

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FYI

Sharonmarie Fisher’s sixth annual Send Down An Angel Christmas benefit will be held Sunday from 1 p.m. to midnight at Jack’s Sugar Shack, 1707 Vine St., in Hollywood. Tickets cost $20. For information, call (213) 466-7005.