Like People in History

by Felice Picano

  After many more phone calls, one of which Alistair took, it was decided that no ambulance would be allowed, but a police van outfitted with a gurney would be waiting outside the side door of the SSS building; with a military nurse to attend me for a minimum of twenty-four hours. Alistair agreed, adding, "This is merely the least amount of humanitarian aid you could offer given the situation was entirely brought about by your medical incompetence. I want to stress that this in no way precludes any future lawsuit," at which the others all got huffy and irritated again.

  My cot had wheels, and after a variety of papers were read and discussed and signed by Alistair and the others, I was quickly wheeled through corridors into a section of the building even I'd not been in before.

  The minute the doors to the outside opened, I heard the chanting. We were in some sort of back loading area. Even so, I had to be lifted off the cot and into the gurney, which would then be slid into the police van. In the few minutes this required, I heard a familiar voice shout over a megaphone, "There he is! Another victim of the Selective Service's bureaucratic barbarism!" A chant from dozens of people rose, cries of "Stop the War Now!" and references to "Tricky Dicky." Two men with flash cameras jumped up to snap my photo, before MPs knocked them back down off the edge. I heard Cord Shay's voice once more: "You can't run! You can't hide the victims!" Then I was inside the van with the male nurse in uniform. The van doors were shut and locked, and it took off.

  I couldn't believe my ears. I had to raise myself and look through the meshed window. Sure enough, there he was, Cord Shay, at the megaphone. And scores of demonstrators. All for little old me! I was touched, moved. It was so... But wait! How could they have all gotten here so quickly? Gotten so organized and...?

  Unless... Unless...

  Oh, no!

  "Now, don't get bent out of shape," Alistair was saying to me defensively a half hour later.

  He was already there at my apartment when I was brought in. The nurse had gone into the living room and was on the phone, confirming his arrival.

  "It was merely a matter of there being an opportunity," Alistair was saying. "It wasn't in the least bit personal. Anyway, this is bigger than you or me or any single one of us. An entire chain of these actions is occurring across the nation. So many at once are bound to cause a stink and to force change in the system. Do you understand?"

  I understood, all right.

  I also understood that Arthur should have operated last week and not waited. And that Cord Shay had not a shred of personal interest in me but had moved in and allowed me to... humiliate myself—he was probably not even gay—just to carry out their plan. Lastly, most devastatingly, I understood that Cord and Alistair had planned this weeks ago, and that it had been set into motion that night in his kitchen. I'd suffered intolerable pain and might have really been injured. But it made no difference to them. I was merely a pawn in their— No wonder I'd hallucinated chessboards!

  "I understand everything," I told Alistair in the calmest voice I could summon. "Everything and all of its ramifications. I want you to leave. Now!"

  "I'll check up on you," he said.

  "Don't bother!"

  I recovered, my mouth none the worse for it, after all.

  The score of nationwide actions of which mine was merely a part were heavily reported in the media and had their intended effect: within months, the U.S. Congress had changed the law to approve a lottery for draftees, thus eliminating the worst abuses of the Selective Service.

  Naturally I never sued them. But I did receive a new draft status: 4-F. "Cardiac Condition," it read. I laughed all day.

  I never saw Arthur or Cord Shay again. By the time I was ready to forgive Alistair, he'd moved out of Manhattan and back to the Coast.

  They didn't bring us to the nearest precinct house, but instead downtown, to the Tombs, which was both annoying and frightening. We did have an ACT UP legal counsel present, an anorectic-looking lesbian in a Bogart trench coat named Therry (short for Theresa) Villagro, who seemed to know her way around the system, and who arrived about ten minutes after we did, chain-smoking perfumed cigarettes, sipping coffee out of the largest Styrofoam cup I'd ever seen (a pint? a quart?), and yelling to no one in particular I could see that she was going to get everyone from the ACLU to the Helsinki Convention to come monitor what they were doing to us.

  To us she said: "I didn't need this shit! I've already got a hemorrhoid flare-up and my roommate's cat just went into labor."

  A half hour later, after we'd been duly fingerprinted and photographed from two angles, Therry told us we'd be put in our own holding cell, "in a somewhat nicer section of this hellhole."

  Nicer and more isolated. It took the turnkey five minutes to locate it, another five to find the key to the corridor we were to be placed on, and once we did get inside, he looked around as though he'd never seen it before.

  "Should I know who you guys are?" he asked.

  "Just Your Everyday Urban Terrorist," Junior Obregon said. "Why?"

  "This is our VIP lounge," the cop said, awed.

  Not quite my idea of heaven, but the lounge was orderly and newish, with a not-too-battered sofa, coffee table, and TV, and in one corner, candy, cigarette, and coffee machines that, it turned out, actually worked. The three cells that opened onto the lounge looked comfortable, if not clean.

  "Better than some motels I've stayed in," James Niebuhr summed it up, leaping up to the top bunk in the closest cell. "If I had to, I could hack this for a night."

  "So could I," Junior said, and leapt up next to James. They began to make out while I fiddled with the TV, seeing if I could find a station. All I managed was voices, and most of those were cable. No remote control, wouldn't you know. Naturally there was nothing to read but some aging People magazines and one newish Sports Illustrated with a longish story on, but not a single underwear photo of, my favorite sports personality, quarterback Joe Montana. I kept fooling with the TV channels until I was bored, then I flattened out on the sofa and stared up at the stained tiles of the ceiling, trying not to be too anxious, and at the same time trying not to listen to the sounds of lust from the cell. Don't know how they could do it: sex was the last thing I needed to think about now.

  We'd been there scarcely ten minutes when the door was unlocked and my attorney, Anatole Lamarr, entered. He was dressed in his idea of casual: a sea-green Ralph Lauren polo (with the collar kept up) under an overdecorated Italian soccer team sweatshirt, preppie tan slacks baggy enough for his thickish middle, penny loafers, no socks. With him, his attaché case.

  Now my lawyer was no relation to Hedy, of course, except that the actress was indeed responsible for Anatole's last name. Seems as though Anatole's father emigrated to this country during the early thirties from some German-speaking enclave in Mitteleuropa, arriving with little baggage but an almost endlessly long and unpronounceable surname, which happened to begin with the letters L-a-m. Someone suggested he shorten and Americanize his name and handed him a copy of the New York Telegraph, where he found his future identification in the movie pages.

  His scion, Anatole, now looked around the place we'd been put, waited till the cop on duty exited and until. Junior and James stopped necking long enough to look up and see who he was, then dropped the attaché onto the coffee table and said, "Not bad! You been sucking off the deputy mayor?"

  "We thought it was you!" 1 replied. "We were going to thank you."

  "Not me." Anatole sat down. "Must have been your dyke counselor. Some of those ladies have real pull," he said admiringly. "As for you," sitting down next to me on the sofa and lightly slapping my face, "what's all this? You decide you've only got one life to live and you might as well do it as a revolutionary?"

  Before I could answer, Anatole said, "Tucker saw you on 'The Eleven O'Clock News' and warned me I'd be hearing from you."

  Tucker was Anatole's lover of the past few years: a sweet guy a few years younger, not even beautiful really but with the substantial attraction
s of a swimmer's body, big blue eyes, and pitted facial skin. Tucker came from Arkansas and still liked to pretend he was White Trash, an increasingly difficult pose now that Southern Discomfort—his soul food catering company—was edging into Fortune 500 territory.

  Junior Obregon had dropped off the side of the bunk and come over to us. He was standing there staring as though Anatole were a celebrity.

  I ignored Junior. "To answer your questions in their order of importance... First, the as yet unasked question," I said to Anatole. "The newscaster is cuter in person than on the tube. And shorter. And too butch to breathe."

  "That's what Tucker thought," Anatole said. Then, to Junior, "You expecting an autograph?"

  "No, I... we... You wouldn't happen to have a condom on you, would you? They took our wallets and we couldn't, you know, ask!"

  Anatole looked from Junior to me with those hooded eyes of his and said, "Where do you find them? Do you advertise? Or what?"

  I introduced them. James joined us and attempted to explain how he usually didn't get sodomized, but the excitement of the demonstration and the protest and the banner and the arrest and the handcuffs, what with the built-in fantasy potential of being in a jail cell and all... until Anatole put up a hand to stop him and promised he'd try to locate a condom if the two of them went away right now and stayed away while he and I talked... if they could manage to contain themselves that long.

  "Now what is all this?" Anatole asked me. "You were arrested on criminal trespass. It remains open to question whether or not your statements on TV were slanderous. They're certainly not going to endear you to the municipal government. Or make it easier for me to get the charges dropped."

  "Is criminal trespass a felony?"

  "Misdemeanor."

  "Find a judge who hates the mayor and get him to drop the charges."

  "Perhaps," Anatole said, probably knowing full well that was exactly what he intended to do and already lining up potential candidates. "The real question is: What are you doing, Rog? This awning leaping isn't like you. It's behavior I'd expect from Wally. Not you. Where is Wally, anyway?"

  "He was at the demonstration. I lost him. That's why I did this," I said and went on to explain what had happened.

  Halfway through my explanation, I could see Anatole's eyes begin to glaze over. He'd already heard more than enough.

  "...so," I moved toward summation, "I joined them on the roof."

  Anatole shook his head slowly. "Then I'm to take it this is an isolated incident and not early Alzheimer's or some manifestation of dementia?"

  "Come on, Anny! It's politics! There was no self-aggrandizement in it."

  "Maybe."

  "We did it for all those poor queens dying out in the gutter. For all your yuppishness, that must mean something to you too."

  "I said, maybe!" he said so strenuously he might as well have said no.

  Now, I've known Anatole for close to a decade, and I know he can't be bullied. I also know that he carries some deep-seated resentment about being gay. Nothing personal or even psychological, mind you, and most of the time he'll deny it. It exists on a simple, practical level: Anatole believes that being gay has held him back, kept him from reaching his fullest social potential among the rich and powerful of this world. That, Anatole will be the first to admit, is all he ever really desired. He'll also admit that it's a silly, superficial desire, but desires being what they are, that makes no difference at all. Anatole's belief is, of course, true: his gayness has held him back. What he hasn't recognized is that it's also protected him from getting too close to that great source of American decadence and—worse—dullness: the upper crust. To Anatole, however, it's all particularly irritating, in that he sees being gay as the only thing holding him back, when in fact being Jewish with a made-up last name is at least as crucial a factor. However; as a result, at times—one can never predict exactly when—Anatole's resentment will suddenly settle in deeply and he'll take on some case, pro bono or not, almost invariably against someone in power or position who's been recently weakened. And Anatole will attack—with great strength and accuracy and persistence, until his opponent is left eviscerated on the sidewalk. It was this very potential in Anatole I was now counting on.

  "Anyway," I asked, "when's the last time you had to bail me out?"

  "You've made your point."

  "You can bail me out, can't you?" I asked.

  "It'll take an hour or two."

  "Good. Because I've got to get out tonight."

  Anatole looked suspicious.

  "I'm not going back to the demonstration. Cross my scrotum and hope to get crotch rot if I'm lying. What time is it?" I checked my $29.95 Radio Shack black rubber special against Anatole's thousand-dollar diamond-studded Tourneau Special. "After midnight. The demonstration'll be over in a half hour."

  "So what's the hurry?" Anatole asked.

  "It's nothing."

  "Ro-ger!" Anatole suddenly sounded like my Great Aunt Lillian.

  "Okay, okay! It's my cousin, Alistair. You remember him?"

  Anatole remembered. In fact the way he looked made me suddenly wonder if I were on shaky ground. "Did you guys have a thing?" It was unlikely that I'd not know about it. Or was it?

  "Not a 'thing.' Anyway it was a century ago. What about Alistair?"

  Now I really wondered. Should I tell Anatole? Maybe not. He was already pondering how flaky I'd become.

  "It's his birthday tonight. A big party. I promised I'd go."

  Anatole relaxed. "I'll see what I can do."

  He stood up, tucked in his shirt, and picked up his attaché case. "What about them?" referring to James and Junior, still madly necking.

  "They'll be okay."

  As Anatole knocked on the door to be let out, Junior reminded him to get the condom.

  They went back to their necking, and I went back to trying to get the TV to work, then settled for the sound from MTV, which I turned on low. The lights suddenly dimmed, although they didn't go out completely.

  I lay back on the sofa and pondered: when did Anatole and Alistair have an affair? They did have one: that was obvious now. But it had to have been before Tucker arrived on the scene.

  Let me think. It must have been... By 1976 I was back here in New York, working at the magazine. Could they have met that summer at the Pines? No, Alistair was still in Europe with Doriot. Yet it had to have been earlier than '79, because after then it was years before Alistair and I spoke again. When had I first met Anatole? Fall of '78! Up at the Cape! Of course! Alistair had left his wife in Italy and had visited there briefly at the time and...

  "Bake, broil, or boil?" Patrick asked.

  "Why ask me?" I asked, helping to chop the crudités.

  "You're the seafood maven," Luis explained.

  "Give me a break!" I said, and moved along the counter to reach for more ice cubes. Patrick's Bloody Marys were superb, but strong. We didn't have too far to drive to get home from here later tonight, but the night was still young, and Truro can get totally fogged in mid-September; I didn't trust the others behind the wheel trying to locate the place we'd rented.

  "Lu said you were into biology," Patrick said.

  "I know something about animals. Biology sounds... well, like paramecia and all that."

  "Animals then. So you'd know which way kills the lobsters fastest. With the least pain and thus the least release of bad chemicals."

  "Lobsters don't have brains," I explained. "They have four clumps of neural retia. Here, here and... along this axis." I illustrated with the knife point on the cutting board, then saw Patrick and Luis's nearly blank looks in response and tried again. "Have they been in the freezer?"

  "Four hours."

  "Boil 'em!"

  "Don't they kick against the sides of the pot and scream in high-pitched voices?" Patrick asked.

  "Sometimes. It may be a reflex. You did ask for the quickest way."

  Patrick opened the freezer compartment and poked at the bags filled
with several unmoving four-pound crustaceans. He chomped down hard on a carrot stick and did his best Bogie imitation: "You're gonna take the fall, angel!"

  Luis pulled me halfway out of the huge kitchen, to where Patrick couldn't hear us. A little stairway rose from this side deck to the wraparound deck. Unlike up there, from here the sunset view was at best sketchy.

  "Well? What do you think?" Luis asked.

  "As I said before, freeze 'em and boil 'em!"

  He slapped my face lightly. "Queen! I meant about Patrick!"

  "He's divinity fudge."

  "You're just saying that to be nice."

  "Okay! He's Quasimodo in a Speedo. Happy now?"

  "What do you really think?" Luis insisted.

  "Luis,„ puss, I'm sunned out, I'm fucked out, I'm grassed out, I'm Bloody-Mary-ed out. Truth is, I'm far too fagged out to be able to evaluate anyone!" But since Luis was unhappy with this, I added, "I think he's handsome and nice and smart."

  "That's all I wanted to hear."

  "Sis-ters!" I moaned.

  "Speaking of which," Luis said, "I just heard from our very own Sister of the Eternal Suntan. A long, detailed, and extremely dishy letter."

  "From Miss Ritchie? No! I want to read it too."

  "Later. It's all about getting down in the Jaguar Bookshop and Mike Muletta's weekend parties on the Embarcadero. Those West Coast girls are getting it together, you know."

  "About time. The last time I was there—"

  "Yes?" Luis interrupted me to speak in a semiprofessional tone of

  voice as he simultaneously moved aside to allow two guests to pass down the stairs and toward the kitchen. "Need a refill, kids?"

  One held up his glass. "I'll marry whoever's making those Bloody Marys!"

  "Too late, Roy-Jean," Luis beamed. "He's already taken! Tell you what, though, why not go back up to the deck and I'll try to convince him to make another pitcher."