Peter talked with the pale boy inside the door for a while. The kid said he had been at the edge of death with T.B. and Kaposi’s sarcoma which extended all the way down his spine and up into his ass. A couple of months after taking the typhoid treatments he was feeling better, “Just a touch of T.B. and most of the cancer has disappeared.” The front door opened and an elderly gentleman who the boy had been living with in the Hamptons, came over to the desk and laid out a pile of personal checks. He proceeded to fill out and endorse each one to the scientist running the clinic. Check after check after check. After awhile a short seedy guy with lots of white teeth came over and introduced himself to us. He was the brains behind the typhoid treatment. I immediately felt uncomfortable with him. He reminded me of a guy who’d sell you dead chameleons at a circus sideshow. He told us to fill out the forms and sit in the waiting room until called. The waiting room was filled with people who recognized Peter, all former patients of the doctor in upper Manhattan. This cheered Peter up. Anita and I looked at each other in disbelief. Here was an office filled with people who were searching for “the cure.” The grapevine brought them from one end of New York to the other to test out different therapies, sometimes combining them, sometimes improving for short periods of time, sometimes dying from them. What amazed us was that most of the people in this office had found this treatment independent of each other. To me, the idea that this treatment might help out with Kaposi’s made a bit of sense. The introduction of a foreign element to the body sometimes sparks the immune system into momentarily working properly. Outside of New York, I’d read about some people who had done work with certain photo-chemicals, painting them on Kaposi’s lesions which after some time dried up and fell off the skin. But in the few studies done, none of these therapies did much to stop the advancement of the more than three hundred other opportunistic infections.
One guy in his mid-thirties, a sad looking blond, asked Peter if he remembered him from fifteen or so years ago. He used to go by the name of Dorian Gray—apparently they’d had an affair back then. Peter suddenly did recognize him. “Of course I dropped the name some years ago.” Peter asked him if he was on AL7-21 and he said, “No; I just have ARC not AIDS so I’m not worried; I don’t think I’ll need any of that stuff.”
The room was filled with AIDS-speak for the next half hour. One of the guys was a sexy Italian man who’d developed AIDS from intravenous drug use. He and his girlfriend joined the conversation comparing different therapies and how each combined this or that treatment in different ways. Everyone was emphatic about his or her chemical or natural agenda. Talk swung to the typhoid doctor and half the room tried to convince Peter he shouldn’t tell the doctor he was currently taking AZT. “He’ll refuse to treat you; he wants you to give up everything but the typhoid shots; something about his research …” Finally the brains behind the business called us into his personal office. It looked like it had been decorated by Elvis: high lawn-green shag carpets, K-mart paintings and Woolworth lamps. Lots of official medical degrees with someone else’s name on them. Anita had come along to help Peter describe his medical history because lately he was a bit slow; words came in small clusters after much hand movements; he confused easily. The doctor asked him how he knew he had AIDS: “After all, you may not have it.” Peter tried to describe the last year’s medical events. His description was disjointed and unrevealing. Anita tried to step in at some point to help and Peter waved her angrily away. The man said, “Fine, fine. Now you must stop having sex …” Peter said, “I’ve been celibate for two years.” The man rambled on about how he must stop having sex, or if he did, he must use rubbers. Then he suddenly said, “Okay—go in and get your first shot.” He got up to usher us out of the office but pulled me back into the room just as I was passing through the door. “Are you homosexual?” “Yeah,” I said. “Have you been tested for the HIV antibodies?” “Uh, no,” I said, “and I haven’t any plans to.” “Oh,” he said, “but you would be perfect for us—get the test and I’ll start you on the treatments right away …” I cut him short, “Thanks … I’ll think about it.”
While Peter was getting his first shot Anita and I decided to ask the doctor to explain the theories behind his treatments. When we told him we want to discuss the treatment, he brought us back into his office. He immediately launched into some monologue about money: “… if the patient hasn’t any money … well … we can work something out—I’m not in this just for the money … but, if they have money, they will pay. Oh, will they pay!” Anita told him we were just interested in how the typhoid treatments worked. We asked that he not spare us the medical jargon. He started off talking about how all the other doctors were quacks and how the government was trying to stop him from doing these treatments. He said he wasn’t really a doctor but a research scientist with degrees in immunology. He’d hired a certified doctor to administer the shots. He went into a lengthy monologue about the immune system that made very little sense and ended up with talking about the thymus gland—only, when he gestured to his own body to indicate the location of the thymus, he pointed first to his stomach, then to his chest, then to his head saying, “Or wherever it is …” While we were recovering from that disturbing bit of information, he went into his research on various viruses and how he had settled on typhus as the virus that would successfully spark the immune system. When we asked him to elaborate further he took out a piece of paper and drew a series of circles on each side of a dividing line. “Say ya got a hundred army men over here; that’s the T-cells …” We were interrupted by his assistant who told him he had to interview new patients.We left the office and looked around for Peter but he was nowhere to be found. The assistant eventually told us he was outside looking for a ride back to the city. Anita and I then realized that Peter had been in the doctor’s office for merely ten minutes. We grabbed our coats and rushed out to find him standing on the sidewalk in front of the place. He looked confused. “Oh … I thought you went home without me …”
Before heading back to New York City we stopped at a diner along the highway and ordered food. Peter was agitated and demanded to know what we had thought of the scientist and his treatments. I explained what Anita and I had learned from the man in terms of his theories and how unsettling it all was. He looked sad and tired. He barely touched his food, staring out the window and saying, “America is such a beautiful country—don’t you think so?” I was completely exhausted from the day, emotionally and physically and looking out the window at the enormous collage of high-tension wires, blinking stoplights, shredded used-car lot banners, industrial tanks and masses of humanity zipping about in automobiles just depressed me. The food we had in front of us looked like it had been fried in an electric chair. And watching my best friend dying while eating a dead hamburger left me speechless. I couldn’t answer. Anita couldn’t either. He got angry again, “Neither of you would know what I’m talking about …” Finally I said, “Peter, we’re just very tired. Let’s go home.”
On the ride back you could cut the tension in the car with a buzzsaw. Fighting late afternoon traffic, we finally arrived back on Second Avenue and just about had to carry him up the stairs. “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me.” He staggered over to the bed and crawled in with all his clothes on, lying there with two eyes peeping from beneath the covers. “Is there anything you need? Anything we can do for you, Peter?” An angry “NO!” So we left. Later, talking on the telephone with Vince, I heard that Peter had talked with him minutes after Anita and I had left his house and Peter said, “I don’t understand it, they just put me in bed and rushed out.”
Dream. Night before Peter died. In this sleep I end up on a late-night street near a building awning like a garage port or hotel overhang and there are two thugs, street guys, tight white t-shirts, sexy thick arms and faces of possible violence: jail faces. There’s a small glass box. I look through its lid and see a short fat snake with desert or jungle markings. The two guys tell me it’s a pygmy rattler but ther
e is no rattle on its tail. I lift the lid or they lift the lid and the snake jumps and fastens its teeth to the side of my nose. There is no real pain but it’s there for a long time, each guy trying to pull its shiny jaws apart to free me. I’m bending over in a semicrouch waiting patiently, thinking of its poison flowing into me but no real fear of dying or anything. I’m amazed at how patient I am.
Standing in the street next to the curb, water runs like from some hydrant in the summer. There’s a small blue-and-white boat like a ferry, a child’s toy bobbing in the water. I crouch down to look into its tiny front windows. A voice (like from a P.A. system) says, “One of the passengers died before the ferry arrived this morning … none of the other passengers were aware …” The ferry suddenly becomes an enormous boat, a life-sized ferry, and it is bobbing on the ocean or river and I’m staring through the windows at what looks like a scene from an E.C. comic. The first person, alone in the front seat, stares straight ahead unmoving—obviously dead by the look in his eyes and by the shape of his skull pushing against the flesh and the almost gray-green pallor of his skin. The other passengers sit like stick dolls, some with missing teeth or hair. They’re alive but not moving, staring at the back of the dead passenger’s head.
I can’t form words these past few days, sometimes thinking I’ve been drained of emotional content from weeping or fear. I keep doing these impulsive things like trying to make a film that records the rituals in an attempt to give grief form. It’s almost winter and I drive west of New York to film myself bathing in a lake in some of the only virgin forest left on the eastern seaboard. I hold a super-8 camera in my hands and spin around and around in the woods thinking of dervishes; thinking of the intoxication of freedom witnessed in death.
Now I’ve driven north of New York City to the gravesite on a gray day filled with random spots of rain on a dirty windshield. All those birds’ nests high in the winter trees. Everything rich and black and wet and brown, the serious rich darkness of his photographs. I’m kicking around the cemetery mud among huge lifeless tractors and the ravines they’ve made strewn with boulders and wet earth, talking to him; first walking around trying to find him was so difficult I started laughing nervously, “Maybe I can’t find you, Peter.” And these erratic pacings back and forth from his ground soil back to the car, cigarettes lit, camera retrieved from the backseat and brought back to the unmarked gravesite for a picture of Neal’s flowers, “He loved flowers; loved them …” Months and months of illness and the house was always filled with flowers; some so big and wild they didn’t even look like flowers; more like beings from some lunar slopes. All these erratic movements till finally I stopped myself, forced myself to contain my movements. Walking backward and forward at the same time, I realized how rattled I was. I was talking to him again. I get so amazingly self-conscious talking to him a thousand thoughts at once. The eye hovers in space inches from the back of my head; seeing myself seeing him, or, the surface extension of him—the wet tossed earth—and further seeing his spirit; his curled body rising invisible just above the ground; his eyes full and seeing; him behind me looking over my shoulder at himself rising over my shoulder, watching me looking at the fresh turned earth where he lies buried.
I try talking to him wondering if he knows I’m there, if he sees me. I know he sees me, he’s in the wind, in the air around me. He covers the fields in a fine mist. He’s in his home in the city. He’s behind me. It’s wet and cold but I like it like that. Like the way it numbs my fingers, makes them white and red at the knuckles. Strangers pat the earth before various stones around me; cars idle at the roadsides and long valleys and ridges on into the distance and everything is torn up and uprooted in this section—all the wet markings of the earth and the tractors, all these graves freshly developed and those birds’ nests giant and wet-leaved as if they’ve been dropped by unseen hands into the crooks of tree limbs. I talk to him, so conscious of being alive and talking to my impressions, my memories of him, suspending all disbelief. I know he’s there and I see him. I sense him in the hole down there under the surface of that earth. I see him without the covering of the plain pine box. The box no longer exists in my head, there’s just a huge wide earth and grass and fields and crowfeet trees and me, my shape in the wet air and clouds like gauze like gray overlapping in fog and I tell him I’m scared and confused and I’m crying and I tell him how much I love him and how much he means to me and I tell him everything in my head, all the contradictions all fear and all love and all alone.
And his death is now as if it’s printed on celluloid on the backs of my eyes. That last day when friends came to speak reassurances to him or to read letters from other friends to him or touch his hands or feet or to simply sit by his bed—there were people arriving and departing all day long—there was some point when I was sitting at the far corner of the bed in a chair thinking about leaving when I looked toward his face and his eyes moved slightly and I put two fingers up like rabbit ears behind the back of my head, a gesture, a high sign we had that we’d discreetly give when we bumped into each other at a crowded gathering in the past. I flashed him the sign and then turned away embarrassed and moments later Ethyl said, “David … look at Peter.” We all turned to the bed and his body was completely still; and then there was a very strong and slow intake of breath and then stillness and then one more intake of breath and he was gone.
I surprised myself: I barely cried. When everyone left the room I closed the door and pulled the super-8 camera out of my bag and did a sweep of his bed: his open eye, his open mouth, that beautiful hand with the hint of gauze at the wrist that held the i.v. needle, the color of his hand like marble, the full sense of the flesh of it. Then the still camera: portraits of his amazing feet, his head, that open eye again—I kept trying to get the light I saw in that eye—and then the door flew open and a nun rushed in babbling about how he’d accepted the church and I look at this guy on the bed with his outstretched arm and I think: but he’s beyond that. He’s more there than the words coming from her containing these images of spirituality—I mean just the essence of death; the whole taboo structure in this culture the mystery of it the fears and joys of it the flight it contains this body of my friend on the bed this body of my brother my father my emotional link to the world this body I don’t know this pure and cutting air just all the thoughts and sensations this death this event produces in bystanders contains more spirituality than any words we can manufacture.
So I asked her to leave and after closing the door again I tried to say something to him staring into that enormous eye. If in death the body’s energy disperses and merges with everything around us, can it immediately know my thoughts? But I try and speak anyway and try and say something in case he’s afraid or confused by his own death and maybe needs some reassurance or tool to pick up, but nothing comes from my mouth. This is the most important event of my life and my mouth can’t form words and maybe I’m the one who needs words, maybe I’m the one who needs reassurance and all I can do is raise my hands from my sides in helplessness and say, “All I want is some sort of grace.” And then the water comes from my eyes.
I go into these rages periodically that can find no real form where I end up hitting the backs of my hands against the television set instead of giving in to my real urge which is to rip the thing out of the wall and toss it blaring out the window into the traffic. Or I wake up from daydreams of tipping amazonian blowdarts in “infected blood” and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians or nazi-preachers or government health-care officials or the rabid strangers parading against AIDS clinics in the nightly news suburbs. I carry this rage in moments like some kind of panic and yes I am horrified that I feel this desire for murder but it all starts with a revolving screen of memories that mixes past and present. It contains the faces and bodies of people I loved struggling for life, people I loved and people who I thought made a real difference in the world, or at least who lent some kind of balance to those whose images and
intents we get served daily through the media. It begins with the earliest memories, when sexuality first stirs beneath one’s skin in an organized social structure that would kill you spiritually or physically every chance it has.
I remember when I was eight and a half, some nineteen-year-old kid brought me up the elevator to the rooftop. Under the summer night sky he placed my face against his dick and I almost lost consciousness because of the power of the unconscious desires suddenly surfacing and how for a week afterward this eight-year-old plotted murder because of fears that the guy would tell someone and I’d be locked up or institutionalized and given electroshock and how I studied my face in the mirror day after day to see if what I’d experienced was written there and the confusion I felt wondering if I’d become this hateful thing, and yet my face remained the same. For months afterward I searched the public library for information on my “condition” and found only sections of novels or manuals that described me as either a speedfreak sitting on a child’s swing in a playground at dusk inventing new words for faggot—“… butterfly, wisp …”—or that people like me spoke with lisps and put bottles up their asses and wore dresses and had limp wrists and every novel I read that had references to queers described them as people who killed or destroyed themselves for no other reason than their realization of how terrible they were for desiring men and I felt I had no choice but to grow up and assume these shapes and characteristics. And I grew up living a schizophrenic existence in the family and in a social structure where every ad in every newspaper, tv and magazine was a promotion for heterosexual coupling sunlit muscleheads and beach bunnies. And in every playground, invariably, there’s a kid who screamed, FAGGOT!, in frustration at some other kid and the sound of it resonated in my shoes, that instant solitude, that breathing glass wall no one else saw.
Close to the Knives Page 9
