For a moment, Delta let me rest my head on her shoulders while my heaving settled into a quiet sob. But soon the quiet was broken by a loud voice.
“Ready?” Jazz shouted across the pond. “Ready, boy?”
The truck headlights beamed at us. Delta lifted the curtain of her bodice and tucked the white globe into place.
“Ready, punk!” she hollered back at the truck for me.
We locked eyes. It was a lie, the kind told in movies with an ending and credits and people walking out in a daze. I wasn’t ready at all. When Delta stood, she pulled out a compact mirror and a powdered brush to pat my face dry.
“There,” she said in a whisper. “There you are.”
Back in the truck, I looked closely at Jazz’s date for the first time. Delta was right: she was pretty. Sapphire eyes, golden hair, ruby lips. And a carnation-pink dress. Yet her face looked angry, like a girl who figured there’d be more to prom than a bumpy ride to a park in a pick-up. Her face turned away from Jazz toward the window, and for a long time she stared into the night and the passing lights. Jazz said nothing, as usual, but his nothing crackled in the air and turned his knuckles white on the steering wheel. His hands gripped tighter and tighter. Both hands, I noticed. He didn’t hold the cheerleader’s hand and only moved his arms when he had to shift gears. Under a stoplight, his knee shifted, looking for the right position. Then Delta’s sister angled her head back to whisper.
“Birds of a feather,” she said.
When Delta kept her lips pursed, her sister tried again.
“Two of a kind,” she said, louder and looking now at me.
Jazz’s heart beat so fast I could hear it. Delta must’ve heard it too. She cleared her throat as if she was about to sing, but instead she started humming. It was a funny sound strung together with little hiccups of laughter. Yet she wasn’t laughing at Jazz or me, I knew.
“And what kind of bird are you?” she asked her sister. “Canary or crow?”
Then she continued humming, and Jazz threw the truck back into gear. His hands relaxed on the wheel, and his eyes caught mine in the rear view mirror. The cheerleader turned her head and pressed her face to the window, but Delta kept humming and humming. Jazz began humming too, lower and louder than Delta, and I joined along, the three of us humming and hiccupping and howling our way into the wide open night, into the wild and fantastic unknown.
13.
Two-Headed Boy
The blood was drawn into vials by a plasma center on campus, where I went under the needle twice a week. The vials looked like glass bullets, and the blood looked bright at first, almost vermilion, then darkened to cardinal. Yet all I could see was green: cash flowing for the booze and blotters that fueled my first year of college. The donor center paid for each draft of plasma with easy money. The exchange rate ran to my favor until the day I approached the front desk and an orderly gave me a hard stare then gripped my folder with alarm. My black leggings, velvet jacket, and silver rosary glowed in his eyes as if in ultraviolet light, as if radioactive. Between us, a four-letter word sparked like static, my blood stopped, and the air went dead.
“No doubt about it,” the orderly said through tight lips as he walked me to a windowless room at the back of the clinic, “AIDS.” He’d run a second test, but it’d take a month and he’d never seen a false positive. Never. Anyway, I had the symptoms, didn’t I?
“Where there’s smoke…” he started then stopped, one freckled hand covering his mouth. Then he waved at the air and counted the symptoms on his fingers, like a Sunday school teacher listing the Ten Plagues of Egypt.
Fatigue, fever, swollen glands. Dry cough, skin rash, sudden weight loss. Night sweats, nausea, phantom sensations in the feet and hands. I showed every sign of affliction.
What’s more, I was queer, wasn’t I?
The orderly reminded me of my perjury in signing the official weekly donation form. In Louisiana, gay blood was as outlaw as absinthe and presumed just as toxic. Only the green fairy conducted a plague of one, while the lavender virus ushered gay men by the dozens then by the hundreds and thousands out of classrooms, theaters, and studios, out of bars, bathhouses, and discos. I’d lied, it was true, for the money, for the drugs. There was no more relief in the confession than in dropping a letter in a casket. No one would answer it, no one would even hear it fall. Yet at least the clinic wouldn’t press charges. After all, as the orderly put it, I already had the death sentence.
“Six months,” he said while staring into the folder. “Time to make some plans.”
But any plans had long been set in place. After a failed clip of my lisping tongue by a surgeon, a failed cure of my swishing walk by a psychiatrist, and a failed conversion of my wandering eye by a priest, my mother foresaw the diagnosis. No trophy, ribbon, or medal, no string of A’s, tower of awards, or stack of university letters could redeem a degenerate son. She’d warned me I’d be afflicted, warned me of the abomination of mortal sin, of eyes going blind and body parts falling off.
Now that her early prediction was confirmed, she banned me from home. Over the phone, she prophesied my end: stripped to the bone, stripped of every muscle, stripped of all pride. I could nearly see her, testifying to the ceiling with her free hand, appealing to the congregation of furniture to witness the shame of her motherhood. No doubt, even the pale cream covering her cheeks flashed red, and her hair sprang out of its straight wedge into a coil of disgrace. In her voice, I could hear the mask of righteous anger, but then I also could hear the naked sorrow of a woman staring at her son’s empty bedroom like an unoccupied bassinet. My whole head fit in her hands once, both my feet fit against her lips. Yet I grew like a monster to tower over her, to outrun her. I fled home to sleep with other monsters, other two-headed men, and now the virus was God’s thunderbolt of judgment. Man lying with man was as grievous a sin as infidelity or incest in the eyes of the Lord. Man lying with man was as abhorrent as man lying with beast.
“Blood shall be upon the sinner,” she said, with a firm click of her tongue. “Forget plans. Time to make penance.”
Instead, I made haste. And a trip to the mall. There, I picked up a black tuxedo shirt, a high collar trench coat, and a crucifix earring. I was only nineteen, but I knew how to dress for a funeral, especially one where I’d be the guest of honor. And I knew how to deliver a valediction from a stage.
When I dared to make plans of my own, they were mapped out in my dorm room before bed. I’d smuggle onboard a plane to Paris, where I’d throw my skinny body down on grave after grave in Père Lachaise cemetery. I’d lie in a glass coffin in the middle of the Vatican, my corpse incorruptible. I’d emerge one night on a stage in New York with flowers in my back pocket singing a song I’d written only hours before. I’d chew every book in the library by day and swallow every shot in the bar by night. I’d marry the DJ, the doorman, the professor. It would all happen fast in flash after flash and turn after turn. Then I’d wake to a set of shadow eyes on the sheets and a silhouette of sweat.
Soon, the follow-up test would punctuate my sentence, but I had no patience and wanted to see the end. If I dosed before the diagnosis, then I double-dosed now. If I set the weekend on fire before, now I burned each day. Vials of my blood sat in a fluorescent clinic, awaiting analysis, but I danced under strobe lights, awaiting only the next high. Black beauties, white crosses, angel dust, the drugs were not just holy medicine but a sacred arsenal. Little bullets to kill the time. Little arrows to quell the mind. My mother couldn’t be right. The orderly couldn’t be wrong. And lying with men couldn’t be both.
“God don’t like selfish,” my mother had said about homo sex.
But she was wrong, wasn’t she? Almost always, I had slipped out of myself during sex, had shed my skin, shaken off my body. There was no self left, no getting and no giving either. No grace and no curse. There was only a hum, a kind of music two men made. The jagged clash o
f a punk song, the velvet push of a ballad. Sex with older men, with a den of priests, teachers, and jocks. Sex in public places, in a den of tents, showers, and locker rooms. Sex on bunk beds, in the hush of confessionals and sugar cane fields. No, I tried to convince myself. Sex with other men hadn’t shown me a mirror but a diamond, a turntable, and a groove. The exit music from home.
Yet the exit carried a toll. And at party after party, disco after disco, I paid until my credit ran out.
At the climax of one house party, nearly a month after my diagnosis, club kids filled the living room with neon platform shoes, candy-colored vinyl, and towering hats. A leggy drag queen in a black lace bustier and white pearls longer than my rosary rolled her eyes, declared she was “over the rainbow, girl” then waved me into a bedroom with a flickering red bulb and a hovering cloud of incense. There, I forgot about home, every prediction and prophecy, forgot about college, every essay and exam. Forgot the name of the host, the name of the queen shaking a bottle in my hand, the name of the day. I forgot numbers too. How many hands on the clock, how many fingers in the air, how many pills. Only one thought pulsed: How long is now? Six months, the orderly had said. No doubt about it, AIDS. In less than a week, the proof would arrive. I chased the thought with black beauties and chased the beauties with blue devils and chased myself into a speedball. With the rush of speed and the drag of downers, I dropped to the floor in a fit of convulsions. My eyes froze open and the party ran in a reverse loop with cue marks as the queen split, the club kids bailed, and two ambulances and a fire truck beamed red light into the house. Men in uniform surrounded me when I heard the party host speak in a clipped voice.
“No, officer, I haven’t the faintest idea what happened,” he said over my head, as my chest wracked in spasms on the floor. “We were just sitting here chatting away when he rolled over and started choking on his tongue.”
In the hollow of my ears, it sounded like the description of a glass shaken off the counter by a mysterious vibration. A small loss of no real concern. Until the shattering sound rang into an endless echo, a deafening, deadening siren tearing right through the night.
The next morning, I awoke to a voice reading from the final passage of a story. The writer told of an aging professor seated on a beach, hair painted black, cheeks dusted with carmine, and lips rouged into the dark red of strawberries. The very picture of a corpse. Yet the old man’s alert eyes traveled the shoreline in search of a young boy, a tourist who flitted in and out of view, with a glowing head of hair. He called out the boy’s name in a whisper as his makeup melted in the killing heat of the sun. A plague had driven nearly everyone else off the beach. A camera tripod stood abandoned, umbrellas and huts vacant, no attendant in sight. Behind the professor, the walls of the town were washed white with a pungent disinfectant. Yet the boy stood oblivious, contrapposto, with the crests of waves at his feet, before another boy tugged him down into the sand. They wrestled with such a fury the professor thought they both might drown until the golden-haired boy rose up, and he rose to meet him, arms outstretched and stiff as a cadaver. The story ended there, with the old man dead, but the voice added a moral: “When you grow up, honey lamb, don’t chase little boys or they’ll break open your brain and fry it like an egg in the sun.”
The laugh that ripped from my lips tore out of the reader’s mouth too, and I found myself face to face with Mercy, the reigning queen of the state psych ward, where the ODs, self-harmers, and convulsives were lumped with the lunatics, maniacs, and all but the criminally insane. She’d smuggled the book out of a haphazard hospital library and read it to me like medicine, with passages spooned out and coated in her molasses voice. She liked to add her own twist, she said, because writers always let her down at the end.
“They kill the homo or lock him up in the asylum, so I play Lady Jesus and perform a miracle. Cure, exorcism, resurrection, you name it.”
“What about the force of nature?” I asked.
“What about it?” she answered, with a snap of her tongue. “Look at me. I am divine. What do I have to do with nature?”
Then she lifted her hands up in the shape of a square, like a viewfinder on a camera, and pointed the lens at me.
“A bit of a fixer-upper,” she declared, “but you’ll do fine.”
“Do what?” I asked, but she just wagged her finger in the motion of a metronome, waiting for me to follow the beat.
Even seated, I could tell she was tall, basketball player tall. She wore the same prison-gray gown as the rest of the ward but with one side tied into a knot, as if she were at the port of New Orleans drinking daiquiris with a sailor. With paper clips, she had fashioned finger curls and let one long tail of hair rest on her shoulder. Her cheeks flushed light pink, with a perpetual look of astonishment, and her eyes glowed, even with no mascara, liner, or shadow. For all her height, she sat poised as a starlet in a soda shop, legs crossed twice, at the knee and the ankle, making the folding chair look like a bar stool.
“How long have you done drag?” I asked.
“Honey, I don’t do drag. I am a woman…”
“…born in the wrong body?”
“Born in the wrong century! And what is this obsession with ‘do’? You’ve got your verbs all screwed up, little mister. The verb you want is ‘be.’ ‘Do’ for others but ‘be’ for yourself. Get it?”
When I asked why she’d read the story of the professor to me, she puckered her pink lips, arched her plucked brow, and proclaimed, “Trust! Takes one to know one.”
With a wink, she rose out of her chair and strutted out the room, while the book balanced like a feather on her head. And I was left to wonder: what exactly did she know? Had she seen my diagnosis?
Even more: what exactly did my mother know? Had she been right? Had she prophesied my end—alone, with bad blood and a ghostly body?
Over the long weekend, Mercy read half a dozen books to me, sometimes while I dozed, slipping in and out of awareness. The stories mostly were queer, with a hunchback dwarf, a giant woman, a pair of deaf mutes, and a girl whose crutch moved like a third leg. There was an execution, a crucifixion, and more than one star-crossed boy in a three-way love affair. Everyone wound up alone or dead, so Mercy improvised a new ending or transitioned abruptly from the final words of a tragic story to a punch line from Mad Magazine or sunny news from The Hollywood Reporter about a budding romance amid co-stars.
Once, I stopped Mercy in the middle of an improvised resurrection.
“Just desserts,” I said about the doomed man. Thinking: Selfish. Thinking: Degenerate. Thinking: Let the homo die. He’d been a lusty sailor, a druggy thief, an unruly prisoner. A poisonous flower of a man. He’d seduced a cop, a judge, a guard, yet loved only his own slick palm. Wasn’t there logic in a story? Live by the sword, die by the sword. Fuck with abandon, die with abandon.
“Nothing sweet in that dessert,” Mercy said. “Besides, fuck is not the opposite of death any more than life is the opposite of fuck.”
“Is this the lesson?” I asked, cranky from the buzzing lights and flashing machines and flaming voices, cranky from the comedown of a towering disco high. “Is this what I’m here to learn? A riddle? A nursery rhyme? That one and one is not two, that the opposite of lie is not true?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, little story killer, you are strapped to a bed, plugged to an IV, and walled off by a curtain. There’s no seat on the toilet, no lock on the door, and no sharp object on the desk. Class was dismissed as soon as you opened your mouth and swallowed a fistful of rage.”
“OD,” I said. “I just OD’d.”
“Just?” Mercy asked as she turned toward the door. “As in ‘just desserts’?”
This time, I bit my tongue. What did I know? I didn’t even know my own blood test. Live, die, fuck, love were odd words that rattled in my mouth. “Trust,” Mercy had said. Another word I didn’t know.
Every few hours, nurses padded in and out of the room and doctors prodded me with needles. One broad-backed orderly walked spine-straight with a military buzz cut and patent leather shoes. His shoulders, chest, jaw, even his hair, all if it a perfect square, an architect’s sketch of a man. He almost never spoke in my direction, except to give a command. Open wide, shut, roll over. Yet I recognized his solid voice, the steady sound of a man who fit his skin. Maybe he drew my blood upon admittance. Maybe he knew the proof of the second test. But he kept his mouth sealed and his eyes on the chart in his hands. When he turned on his heels, a cloud of tobacco and turpentine followed, while a phantom musk surrounded my bed. Did he ever shift his eyes? Did he sway his walk? Did he open his mouth or unzip in the hush of another room?
Black Sheep Boy Page 12
