Like a Love Story

by Abdi Nazemian

  “There’s a new report out,” a woman says. She’s super tall, her hair is buzz-cut, and she wears overalls and a black bra, which makes me love her already. She looks like the kind of woman who could play Molly Ringwald’s best friend in a prom movie. I pull my camera up from around my neck, where it’s pretty much always dangling, and I snap a photo of her. She speaks with an edge to her voice, a tremble of anger and fear. “It’s hidden in the back of the newspapers, of course. They don’t like putting our stories on the front page. It says teenagers are the plague’s newest victims. Teenagers.”

  The eyes of the room turn to me and Judy. Almost three hundred people are massed in this dingy space, but we’re the only teenagers. And fabulous ones, too. Judy’s wearing a frayed azure-blue top over striped leggings with combat boots. She designed the outfit herself. Like with a sewing machine. She’s brilliant that way. She jokes that the reason she’ll make it as a fashion designer someday is ’cause AIDS is wiping out her competition, but that’s not why. It’s ’cause she’s beyond talented. We keep our eyes on each other. “Oh God,” Judy whispers to me. “Please tell me they’re not going to make us speak.”

  “Our whole culture is in severe denial,” the overalls lady continues. “TEEN. AGERS. They are out there having sex. And nobody is talking to them about the risks. We need to protect them!” When she says the word teenagers, she says it with a level of passion that scares me, like there’s something about being a teenager that’s so intense that the word needs to be spoken like a warning.

  “I guess this is one advantage to the fact that no one wants to sleep with us,” Judy whispers. “We won’t get AIDS.”

  Judy and I haven’t made a celibacy pact or anything, though that’s what our parents and our sex-ed teacher have recommended. It’s just the reality of our situation that there are ZERO romantic prospects in the world for us, which has the benefit of making us each other’s everything. I’m the only out gay kid in our whole school, and Judy isn’t exactly the kind of girl most guys go for, though she has certainly pined for a few. I think she’s gorgeous, of course. She looks like a cross between Cyndi Lauper and a Botero painting. But as she often says, gay guys finding her gorgeous doesn’t do much for her. Also, she’s allowed to make AIDS jokes ’cause her uncle Stephen has AIDS and makes AIDS jokes all the time. He says he’s too close to death NOT to make fun of it.

  “Speak for yourself,” I say. “The whole basketball team wants to sleep with me.” I pause for dramatic effect, and then add, “They just don’t know it yet.”

  Judy smiles and swats my shoulder, which is bare thanks to the tank top I’m wearing, purchased at the merch table at a previous meeting. Judy and I have been coming to these meetings for a few months now. At first, Stephen wouldn’t let us come. But we begged, and we got our way. He still hasn’t let us go to an actual protest, but we’re working on it.

  “Shut up,” Judy says. “We are at a serious gathering of serious people discussing a serious issue about TEEN. AGERS.”

  Judy’s uncle Stephen stands up, adjusts his shawl, and clears his throat. He’s high drama, and we love him for it. Once upon a time, he was also the most handsome, charismatic man I had ever met. Now he looks like a ghost. But at least he’s still alive. His lover, José, is gone, as in not with us anymore, as in deceased. The hospital threw his body in a GARBAGE BAG when he passed. He’s one of the ninety-four friends Stephen has lost to the disease. He keeps a list. He also keeps a pot of jelly beans and adds a jelly bean to the pot every time someone dies. He says that just before he dies, he will eat every one so that his friends will be with him. As he begins to speak, I snap a photo of him. “What about an action at the department of education?” Stephen asks. “We could demand a change in their sex education policies. We could demand condom distribution. We could dress up like librarians. I have the perfect blouse!”

  Another man—thin as a rail with hollow cheeks—stands up. “We don’t have the time or the resources to be distracted,” he says. “We know who the real enemy is. The price of AZT is obscene. We have our plan, and it’s going to need all our attention.”

  “Well, that’s what affinity groups are for,” Stephen says. “And I’m on board with our plan. Like all of you, I’m ready to risk getting arrested . . . again.”

  There’s some laughter in the room, solidarity in the number of times they’ve all been booked and released. That’s the way it usually works. ACT UP members are given civil disobedience training, and they’re usually released without being put through the system. But there have been exceptions, and no one wants to be that exception. I see a man in a leather jacket in the corner of a room eyeing a handsome young dancer type. They cruise each other with heat. For meetings about a deadly sexually transmitted virus, these gatherings are surprising breeding grounds for hookups. I snap a photo of the two men.

  “But we also need to find a way to stop new cases,” Stephen continues. “And what better place to start than by educating young people?” He looks at Judy and me, and he adds affectedly, “Our innocent, pure young people.”

  “If my face isn’t enough to scare young people into having safe sex,” the thin man says, “then I don’t know how protesting outside the department of education will help.”

  He’s right. I look at his face and realize it’s the face I’ve been seeing in all my nightmares since I first understood what sex was, and since I first understood that Judy and I would never get married and have kids like we said we would, because I really do want to sleep with the basketball team. And the football team. And every member of Depeche Mode and the Smiths. I basically want to sleep with everyone with a Y chromosome. But this man’s face—gaunt and covered in caked-on concealer doing a poor job of hiding purple lesions—is the face that stops me from acting on any of my abundant desires. It’s the face my dad and I were looking at five years ago when we were sitting outside one of those awful French bistros where all the men wear identical suits and all the women wear dead animals on their backs. One of those faces walked by us, leading a poodle on a leash, and my dad looked at it—the face, not the poodle—with a grimace of disgust and said, “They deserve it, you know. Maybe when this is all over, we won’t have any more of them in the city. Maybe even in the world. Wouldn’t that be something?” And then the face walked away, leaving me and my father alone, steak frites in front of us and a new barrier in between us.

  How was he supposed to know that only a few months before, I’d had my first wet dream, about Morrissey? How was he supposed to know that I had discovered—after a childhood spent assuming I was just like others—that I was not only different but despised? That he had just suggested the world would be a better place if his own son dropped dead after a few years of lesions, diarrhea, and blindness? I wanted to reach over and strangle him. To exterminate him and anyone with that kind of hate in their hearts. I could see the headlines—Old Money! New Scandal! Greedy Banker Killed by Effeminate Son. Revenge of the Gay: Son Brutally Strangles Father. But I didn’t kill him. I just ate my steak in silence and listened as he told me about his latest trades.

  “We do have two teenagers here with us,” Stephen says, pointing to me and Judy. “My beautiful niece Judy, and her best friend, Art. Not to put them on the spot or anything, but maybe they could tell us something about their experience.”

  “We have no experience!” Judy says, way too boisterously. “Not in that department, I mean. None. Nada. We’re basically Doris Day and Sandra Dee.”

  A man in the corner with fuchsia hair says, “And even if they had experience, do you think they’d want to tell a roomful of grown-ups including their uncle? Have you forgotten what being a teenager is like?”

  “Bite your tongue,” Stephen says. “I only just turned nineteen.” When he says this, he sounds like he’s in one of his melodramas. Stephen loves old black-and-white movies. It’s funny, ’cause he’s the most colorful person I know. He’s brighter than color. He’s Technicolor.

  “I have
something to say.” That’s me talking. My palms are sweaty, and my voice shakes. “I, um, it’s about something that I think is, um, super important. It’s just, well, I think that there’s something that would be missing even if the department of education spoke to teenagers.” I pause for a long time, and Stephen gives me a nod of support. “It’s the parents,” I finally say. This is it, the gist of what I want to say, and once I start, I can’t stop. “It’s the parents who have to change first. Because so long as parents are telling their kids that being gay is a sin, or that this disease is God’s way of killing gay people, or that celibacy is the only way not to die, or that they can get it from sitting on the wrong toilet seat, then nothing else matters. Because teenagers, well, I mean, we don’t tell grown-ups what we do because we already know how they’re going to react. We already know that they’ll either pretend we never said what we said or they’ll ground us or blame us. And you know, most people don’t really have parents like you.”

  “Thank God—I’d be Daddy Dearest,” one man in the back cracks, but Stephen quiets him with a flick of his wrist.

  “I don’t know what I’m saying,” I say. Stephen gives me another nod. Here’s what I think I’m saying: that Stephen is the dad I wish I had, the dad I was supposed to have, the man I consider my spiritual father. And that life for gay people is inherently unfair, because most gay people are born into families that just don’t get them at all. And that’s the best-case scenario. The worst cases . . . being abused, kicked out of the house, thrown into the streets. I guess I’m lucky my own case is somewhere in between. I mean, I know my parents think I’m a pervert, but they also haven’t disowned me or anything. But that’s probably because if they did that, then their whole social circle would inevitably find out why. And they’re saving face as long as they can. They just care how things look to their bridge club. When I told them what they should have already known from the Boy George posters on my wall, my dad just walked out of the room, like this was a business meeting he was cutting short. And my mom . . . she looked at me with disappointment, like I’d gotten a B-minus in math or something. Then she told me that it would all be okay, so long as I didn’t tell anyone or do anything.

  They never mention that conversation, not even when I wear eyeliner or tank tops or dye my hair or blast Madonna so loud that our place sounds like a pride parade. They’ve basically chosen to ignore me, and I’ve chosen to make that hard for them. “I guess I’m just saying that I think someone should protest parents. Or maybe not, like, all parents. But someone should protest my parents.”

  I finally shut up. And then the man with the fuchsia hair turns to me and says, “Gimme their address, and we’ll handle them.”

  I sit down, my face hot and my hands shaky. I’ve been to a few of these meetings with Judy, but this is the first time I’ve spoken. Thankfully, the conversation is steered back to their next action. Six men are going to dress as traders, use fake badges, and infiltrate the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to protest the pharmaceutical company that is making AZT prohibitively expensive. As I listen, it suddenly hits me how hard being eloquent is, how angry I am, and how I have no idea how to be an activist. That’s when I raise my hand and stand up again. All I say is “I want to help.”

  Stephen glares at me, but I stare him down. This is when it comes in handy that he’s not really my dad. I don’t need his permission. And nothing’s more important to me than ending AIDS. Yeah, it’s because I want to help people, and I don’t want to die before my time, and I’m filled with love for Stephen, and I’m inspired and swept up in the electric energy of this room. But it’s more. I don’t know how I’ll ever begin to live while this disease is raging. Who will love me when all they’ll see when they look at me is the possibility that I may kill them? Judy will meet someone eventually. She’ll probably have kids, be a famous designer, live in a fancy Upper West Side condo overlooking the park with her hot architect husband. And me . . . I’ll either die or be eternally single because guys are too scared of me. So what choice do I have but to do something about this?

  “Art,” Judy whispers to me. “These things are dangerous. There are always cops . . .”

  I ignore her. “Yeah, I want to help,” I say, more firmly this time. “Just tell me where to be.”

  I don’t know how, but I know that this decision will change my life. I’m a little psychic sometimes. I see colors. I can’t describe it, but I know that in this moment, it’s like a bright-pink light shines around me, and it just feels right. I hand my camera to Judy. “Hey, take a picture of me,” I whisper.

  “Why?” she asks.

  “Just because,” I say. “I want to remember this moment.”

  Judy

  At first, I see only his eyes. They’re staring at me from above his long blue locker door. Brown doesn’t do justice to the color of these eyes. My eyes are brown. His are something else entirely. Other eye colors conjure up so many beautiful images. Blue eyes bring to mind deep oceans and endless skies. Green eyes bring to mind rolling fields of grass or ancient emerald stones. But brown doesn’t conjure much, does it? Mud. Dirt. Excrement. Pretty much describes my eyes. But his, they are more like the richest caramel ever created. They look like a vast desert, endless, beautiful, romantic, like some gorgeous Saharan desert, not that I’ve ever seen those places outside of some old Marlene Dietrich movie my uncle chose as one of our Sunday-night films.

  Once my dull brown eyes manage to glance away from his caramel ones, I look down and see his bare feet, also caramel colored, with a few stray black hairs on each toe. So basically, I see the top of his eyes, one long locker, and bare feet, and I can’t help but think that maybe this mystery man is naked, and that behind that locker, he’s mooning our whole high school. His index toe is bigger than his big toe. I notice that right away because Art once told me that guys with an index toe longer than the big toe are supposed to be phenomenal in bed, or are going to be really rich. I don’t remember anymore. Art has a lot of theories and superstitions, like people with gaps between their front teeth are supposed to be geniuses, which he obviously thinks is true because he and Madonna have huge gaps between their front teeth. If I were Art, I would start spreading a theory that fat girls with avant-garde fashion sense and severe black bangs are the chosen people.

  “You’re Judy, right?” the mystery man asks in a shaky voice, his mouth still hidden by the locker.

  Wait, he knows your name, Judy. Maybe he traveled from a distant land to find you. But what will you wear for your wedding? Not some boring wedding dress. Maybe like a slip with an absurdly long veil.

  I look up to his eyes (still perfect) and down to his feet (still perfect). Eyes. Feet. Eyes. Feet. Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned his hair: black, thick, wavy. I let my mind wander, imagining he really is naked behind that locker, and that soon he will reveal himself to me: body, heart, and soul. Art always says I’ll be the first to meet my soul mate, and I always say he’s totally wrong. But maybe he’s not. Art says he sees auras around people and things. I think he makes that up to seem interesting, but maybe not.

  “Um, yeah, I’m Judy,” I say. “And who are you, naked man?”

  Shut up, Judy. That wasn’t an internal monologue. He can hear you.

  “I’m sorry?” he asks with a laugh, and now I notice his sexy accent.

  “Oh God, I’m the one who’s sorry,” I say. “It’s just that you’re not wearing any shoes, so from where I’m standing, it kind of looks like you might be naked behind there.”

  I sound like an idiot, but what else is new? This is why I limit my conversation partners mostly to Art and Uncle Stephen. I know they’re not going to judge me no matter what lunacy comes out of my mouth. And yeah, I have parents. And yeah, they judge me, usually silently or through annoyingly supportive suggestions about how I could slim down. For the record, my parents have female baldness and cancer all over their family trees, so a little extra weight is the least of my problems.

 
He closes the locker door and reveals he’s very much not naked. Oh well, that fantasy is over. But he’s also definitely not wearing our school uniform. His khaki shorts and white polo shirt are appropriate for the September heat wave, but most definitely inappropriate for this prisonlike school my parents choose to send me to, even though it’s killing them financially.

  “My stepbrother told me this was the uniform,” he says. “Luckily, I brought tennis shoes for gym class, so I was just putting my sandals away.”

  That’s when I notice that in addition to the aforementioned, and very hot, Middle Eastern accent, he also has a weird choice of words. “We call sandals flip-flops here,” I say. “And we call tennis shoes sneakers.”

  He nods as he ties the laces of his white sneakers. “Thank you, Judy.”

  I let myself imagine bending over and tying his shoelaces for him, massaging his legs in the process. God, I’m a perv. Art always says that straight people are ultimately much pervier than gay people, and if we were the only variables in the sample set, he’d probably be right. Art has a dirtier mouth, but I have dirtier thoughts. I have to—there’s no way other people’s brains are this gross. I mean, I’m seriously picturing myself rubbing this guy’s thighs right now.