by Paul Lisicky
Birthday
Maybe twenty of us crowd into Mark and Wally’s tiny dining room, before the blinking, tinseled tree. It’s coming on Christmas, but it’s also coming on Wally’s birthday, so two days are celebrated at once. A new dog has entered the household, a golden retriever puppy named Beau, who’s so wound up—all these strange people in his strange new house—that the party ends up being entirely his: he’s always knocking over a lamp or a candlestick, which provokes loud, joyous responses that try to mask alarm—doesn’t Mark have enough to deal with without this wired and panicky animal? But there is genuine cheer in the room, even if the real guest of honor sits with an uncharacteristic quiet in the corner, paler than the Wally I know. Almost still. These are all people he loves to be around, and I’m not even sure he knows who we are. He tries for a smile every so often.
29
Merry Christmas
My parents’ Florida isn’t the Florida of Miami, Naples, or the Keys, whose climates take to aralia and Bismarck palm. I brazenly push the plant hardiness zone, buying plants that need to be tented, protected in burlap when the temperature falls into the high twenties. My plants have all the flamboyance of wet wigs. They are the plants of drag. They’re leafy, spiky. They contrast greenly against the grass outside their lanai, which already looks arid, nipped by a flash freeze, even though the date is December 23. I know what I’m doing is bound to fail. It will take so much attention to maintain and preserve it, and is my mother up to the task of protection when I’m gone? We’ll lose everything, but in the meantime, the yard is a dream space, rich with moisture, growing like crazy when the heat in that sun is on and on and on.
I stab the shovel into the impoverished soil, which has all the nutrients of a Provincetown sand dune. Beneath that, there is the thinnest tablet of limestone. My parents’ house is in the sinkhole capital of Florida, but they don’t know that yet. In a matter of time people will wake up to the sounds of groaning drywall and lumber, and if they’re lucky they’ll make it through the front door before the house is sucked into empty earth. Later, south of Tampa, a grown man won’t make it alive out of his bedroom. That part of the house falls right into the earth, and his body is never found, despite massive and superhuman effort.
Can my mother see that I’m distracted, waiting for the minute when I can steal away to the unfurnished back bedroom and make that phone call? Her pressure fixes on me, even when her eyes are elsewhere. Occasionally she looks at me as if there’s something wrong with me, as if I could be holding a secret inside. That look—it just makes me want to hide even more. I’m worried that if I do get an opportunity to make that call, Noah will be out, and I’ll get the answering machine, leave a things-are-just-fine kind of report in a rapid, distracted voice that will inevitably sound like I’m missing him too much. It will sound as if we’ve been dating just six days rather than a full six months. In truth, my displacement has done something scathing and dangerous to time. It’s tossed me back ten years—more. And it isn’t just my parents’ presence, no—it has something to do with the place: isolation, and the manufactured current of air-conditioning that is all about keeping us apart, making sure we’re comfortable so we forget we have bodies that could get us in a bit of trouble. In terms of life experience I am seventeen all over again, with all the uncertainties of that age. I find myself snapping at the most minor thing (why can’t I take the garbage out in five minutes?), and I can’t stand the way my temper vanishes my dignity—and where is my sense of humor? It’s awful to be reminded that what we’ve made of ourselves is so flimsy. Can be lost in all of two minutes.
Have I told Noah not to call me here? It’s likely I’ve said such a thing, or more likely, implied it, and I can’t imagine that making Noah so happy. Perhaps in his mind he’s holding me at some distance for telling him I’ll be hard to reach for the next ten days. Though I’ve lived in Town for two years now, deep in my muscles I still have the fear that my life is only a mirage. Maybe it’s only something I dreamed up, an act of language. And maybe I can undo it all by leaving for ten days. What if everyone’s dead upon my return? Toxoplasmosis, pneumocystis. The locks broken on my apartment, my books and clothes thrown out, nobody around to speak up for me or protect me or remember my name.
If a person is lucky, he outgrows those kinds of attachments, though that isn’t the same thing as falling out of love.
I haven’t outgrown my attachments, not at all, and when Noah answers the phone, it’s clear his head is in a different place—he’s experiencing none of my anxiety. He’s not missing me. He sounds like he’s having the greatest week in Town, where he’s staying in my apartment with Robert, a friend of his from Toronto. Robert is a great guy, funny, tall, and magnetic, with a shock of fiery red hair. They’ve gone to some parties. They’ve had sex in my place—does Noah actually say that? It’s quite possible I conjured this up out of paranoia, but if he did say it, he said it with the detached cheer of one who says he just loaded the gravy, the cranberries, and the stuffing into the Tupperware.
If my brain had a throat it would be caught in itself right now.
Outside the window the surface of the pool sparkles in its screened bronze cage.
Possibly Noah is waiting for me to react. And maybe he’s angry that I’m not reacting, that I haven’t stopped him from listing the mail that’s come for me in our PO box. Maybe he finds me weak for not reacting. But I’d be an idiot not to cover myself with padding right now. And there’s nothing I can change from here.
See? I shouldn’t have come here. Merry Christmas. But if he thinks I’m a weak person? Really? My heart speeds up at the very thought. I am the strongest person on earth. Do you want to talk resilience? I’ll show anybody resilience.
I picture telling him, upon my return, that I had sex in Tampa. I’ll say, Beautiful, dark-haired guy, dark beard, muscular, the biggest, fattest cock in Tampa, always hard and ready to go again. But he’ll see right through my story. He’ll put an arm around me, pull me into his shoulder, as one would a teenager who dropped the football at the high school game, and feel sorry for me for being such a lousy liar.
Uncle John
Uncle John haunts and hovers over me like my mother’s worst possibility for my future. She’ll bring him up from time to time, and at other times I’ll feel her keeping her hypothetical fear trapped inside, but why? She loves Uncle John and calls him up to check on him, calls whenever she’s lonely and needs someone to talk to, but she is clearly repulsed by Uncle John. By his never being married, by his lack of a driver’s license, by his attic one-bedroom apartment in Collingswood, by the electronic keyboard she bought for him (which he’s never taken out of the box), by his elderly girlfriend, Marian, with her stiff frosted wig. By what he says to her about me when she’s worried: that I’m weak and self-deceived. Uncle John = an inability to grow up. Uncle John = too passive to line up inside the expectations of adulthood. Uncle John = his fedora with the light halo of oil in the sweatband. Uncle John = unclean, no matter how many times he takes a bath.
She’ll continue to be repulsed by Uncle John after his other niece, Jean, offers to put him up in her tiny ranch house in Pompano Beach Highlands. She won’t hear the derision in her sympathy when she talks of his disastrous train trip down when he was too stricken to move from his seat, even to go to the bathroom, or when Jean forces him to give her power of attorney, or when she refuses to answer the door when my mother shows up unannounced and knocks and knocks and knocks.
Uncle John, who dies alone in Florida, without companions, but only a niece who turns instantly into a monster once she senses financial opportunity and a chance to strike revenge at her family, her history, and a lifetime of low wages.
Uncle John: is that only another name for my mother, and she needed to foist the drama of that on me?
No wonder I’m relieved to fall into community.
I am no Uncle John, which has been my life’s work.
Hollywood
Noah and I
sit in the left side of the Wellfleet Cinemas, not so far from the front. Though showtime is almost twenty minutes away, the theater is packed. I’ve never seen every seat filled, especially in the dead of winter on the Outer Cape. We’re here to see Philadelphia, the first big-budget movie about AIDS. It has real stars, people whom everyday people like: Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Joanne Woodward, Antonio Banderas. Bruce Springsteen sings its theme song, “Streets of Philadelphia.” I’m skeptical about it as I’m skeptical about all things Big—Big songs, Big novels, Big ideas, Big countries—all things Big have an inborn arrogance to them. As well intended as they might be, they are finally about wealth, accumulating it, and I can smell the machinery that wants to draw people in, that wants them to keep coming back. Big statements aren’t for people like us; they’re for people who see movies just to talk about movies—such as why you’d see a football game. They are for people all too happy to feel pity for people over there, miles away from the epicenter, anyone not them. Big statements hold a wet fingertip out to the wind. Big statements are inflected with a certain kind of self-congratulation, moral superiority. They’ll say: We have cared for you all along, when you know the truth was always more complicated. And how could Hollywood not get it all wrong, turn the dying into saints, engraving in us the predictable cathartic responses?
On the other hand, it’s a relief to be seen—queer people, people with AIDS, survivors, HIV-negative people: all of us. How long have we been erased? And if we haven’t been erased we’ve been represented as depraved, weak. Not that some of those representations aren’t hilarious: Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon, Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer. Enough.
The theater goes dark. I’m watching characters move across the street, but thinking more about Noah holding my hand, rotating the knuckle of my thumb with his own. Is there anything more satisfying than having your significant other holding your hand out in public, at a movie? Straight people take this for granted, but queer people? We can hardly wait for the lights to go down, and once the movie gets going, the real happiness begins: Noah’s hand in mine.
But the film is so determined not to offend, not to get things wrong, it’s managed to situate itself in a weird in-between place. It isn’t exactly bad, but? I’m watching the way I would watch a documentary about dying dolphins. And I say that loving dolphins, but they’re not me. Every time a potentially wrenching exchange happens on the screen, Noah squeezes my hand until it feels like the manual equivalent of Morse code. The movie isn’t afraid to say, This Is the One Story of AIDS (no matter Longtime Companion, no matter Brother to Brother, no matter The Man with Night Sweats, no matter The Body and Its Dangers, no matter People in Trouble), and I’m annoyed that it doesn’t intuit that there are countless stories that will never make it to the screen—stories of black, Asian, Latino people, stories of women. Hollywood has the power to sear a narrative into the collective imagination, and though I resent that power (what about all those film executives still in the closet?), I sit tight and obey. I won’t start muttering complaints while I’m still in the theater.
And then? A man stands up halfway through the film—abruptly. It is a bright scene, as the whole theater is illuminated. He is crying like a baby, a baby boy, and it wouldn’t be so wrenching if he weren’t such a tough-looking guy, leather vest, Levi’s, salt-and-pepper muttonchops. I’ve often seen him around Town, always in his leather bomber jacket and white T-shirt, always too butch to even look in my direction. He can’t stand it—once you represent something it’s real, and up until now AIDS has been only a horrible dream. Now he knows it’s an emergency, and he stands up, weeping. I want to protect him. I want him to stop breaking my heart, I want him to keep crying, as nothing up on the screen feels as powerful as this, or the absolute discomfort of seeing it, listening to it. He walks out, breathless. I don’t know whether he’s crying for someone lost, or for himself, or both. Maybe he’s crying because he thinks he’ll have none of the people once closest to him (his parents, his sisters) when he dies, and he must suffer through this well-intended movie that insists every life is of purpose, every life shaped by logic. He has never known such good fortune. And if he should get sick? His friends? His friends, while well-meaning, might turn out to be flakes when they’re most needed. They have bailed on him before and they’ll bail on him again, and what should he expect when he’s loved them for their spontaneity and quick passion and unreliability? Dependable people, as he knows, are boring people, and he knows what it’s like to abandon others too.
For a while I don’t see the man at the gym, at the A&P, or at the coffeehouse at the Mews. Not that I’m exactly keeping an eye out for him. That’s just how it is when disappearance is as routine as breakfast.
Hayrides
Five thousand miles away, in West Hollywood, Louise Hay, a motivational speaker and writer, holds what she calls Hayrides in an auditorium. Every month nearly a thousand men with AIDS show up, some with their mothers, but never with their fathers, who wouldn’t even think of coming. Louise Hay in a nutshell? You can heal your life if you change your thinking. Much of her vision revolves around statements like: My happy thoughts help create my happy body. Or: My self-esteem is high because I honor who I am. Some of the men hold on to the worn teddy bears of their childhood. The times are so grave and desperate, people are willing to find comfort and support anywhere. And they’re not afraid to appear ridiculous, even if some accuse them of being in thrall to AIDS vampires, crisis junkies.
There is no Provincetown equivalent to the Hayrides—maybe there’s just too much New England skepticism in the air, and besides, the AIDS Support Group sponsors dinners that people—positive or not—come to for camaraderie. But that’s not to say that AIDS, the proximity to so much dying, can’t make the best-intentioned therapist nuts. It gives some of them outsize presences, like cult figures. One draws closer than she should to her clients, visiting their houses, socializing with them, having dinner with their partners—what could professional boundaries mean in the free-for-all of this blasted world? She’s never been closer to other human beings in her life. Her hair, her gauzy violet scarves—they all get bigger as she feels the old bonds blurring, her spirit swelling and opening up. The heat and intensity of being near the dying, the beautiful and young dying—the salve of bearing them through their passage. How could it not stir up the appetites?
The Giant’s House
Disease has developed a taste for the bodies of the young and its hunger cannot be stopped.
Fee fi fo fum.
Death Notice
When I pick up the Advocate, the Town paper, I hesitate, then tear it open to the obituaries. Every news story, from the ads to the articles about visiting artists, is subordinate to the obituaries—that’s where the real interest in Town lies. I approach them with darkest anticipation, the way I might feel upon approaching the cooling towers of a nuclear power plant. On some level I must want to come across a name I know—as much as I don’t, I really don’t. It’s like recognizing in myself the secret desire to find out I lost my wallet, so all my energy, my life force, can concentrate to a single point. And when I find a name, I read that person’s story, the details of where he went to elementary school and college, what his favorite songs were—who were his dogs? There is the fresh pang of being alive in remembering that person. Oh—that guy! That guy with the orange streak in his hair, the blue bandanna carefully displayed in his right back pocket. He bagged my groceries at the A&P. Inevitably, there isn’t a picture of him. All I have are the basics. It’s like assembling a puzzle out of eyelashes and a scab and torn-off fingernails. When he looked at me last week I looked back at him, and we were both citizens of Town.
Scout
Not everyone who dies is a gay man. There is Scout, who washes the windows of several of the businesses in Town. She is booming and warm and in her body—dark blond and sexy in a soft, butch kind of way, with a magnetic mixture of feminine and masculine energy. She’s probably about my age
. She always looks at me like she enjoys seeing me, she approves of me in a way that goes beyond the mere biographical facts. Our social circles overlap. She’s close to a number of artists and writers. And even though we have different expectations of our lives, we have plenty in common. She grew up outside Trenton, thirty miles north of where I grew up—and of course that’s how I know that cadence, those wide-open vowels: “wooder” for water. One day she is parking her station wagon in Town, and then the next—pneumonia? No one ever uses the A-word in relationship to Scout but speculations are passed from person to person. Was she ever an IV drug user? Did she ever get seen by a primary care physician? If that beast could get Scout, sweet, sexy, strong.
Death after Death
… it starts to feel like life.
Or you’ve stopped being able to tell the difference. And in that way it doesn’t feel like anyone ever goes away.
30
Cumberland Farms
Sometime after nine every night, Noah and I button up our coats and strike out for the Cumberland Farms on Shank Painter Road. We walk up Winthrop Street, by the cemetery, the oldest existing burial ground in Town, established in 1742. Its inhabitants aren’t the newly dead but the old dead, who know there’s been lots of activity in Town. Nevertheless they say: Don’t forget us, those of us who lived long lives, long enough to lose our looks, our usefulness, our power. Not a car or another human in sight. Constellations appear: the Big Dipper, Orion. Darkness behind and ahead of us. Fox dashing into the brush. Once we’re inside the store, which feels overlit after all that darkness, we go right to the Pepperidge Farm display and pick up a bag of cookies, cookies named Montauk, Chesapeake, Nantucket. They’re likely spiked with preservatives, but it would be absurd to worry about preservatives at the end of the world. We’re barely out of the store before we’ve torn into the bag, devouring them until there are just crumbs in the bag and in the whiskers around our mouths. We laugh about winter weight, but have six months to firm up before Noah is back on the go-go box. The night gets darker on our walk. We reach for each other’s frozen hands and rub them warm. And this is why people couple up with each other.
