ALL THE YOUNG MEN
ALL THE YOUNG MEN
A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South
RUTH COKER BURKS
&
KEVIN CARR O’LEARY
Grove Press
New York
Copyright © 2020 by Ruth Coker Burks
Names and identifying details of some of the people portrayed in this book have been changed.
Jacket design by Becca Fox Design
Jacket photograph by Thomas Jordan © 2018
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FIRST EDITION
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in Canada
This book was designed by Norman E. Tuttle at Alpha Design & Composition
This book was set in 13 pt. Spectrum MT by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: December 2020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-5724-9
eISBN 978-0-8021-5726-3
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
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For Paul & Billy
Part One
Chapter One
I watched the three nurses drawing straws.
The tallest one drew the short straw, which I thought was funny. She was a redhead, wearing a lipstick so purple you knew she didn’t have a good friend to tell her it wasn’t right for her.
I was at the hospital that weekend looking after one of my best girlfriends. Bonnie was stuck at the Med Center in Little Rock, recovering from cancer surgery. She was thirty-one and I was twenty-six —both too young for this stuff. She’d gotten tongue cancer and never smoked a day in her life. For years, Bonnie had worked at the newspaper, typesetting at night, but quit when she got sick.
They had her on a feeding tube in the hospital, and she couldn’t talk, but she was good with a pen, and I was good at translating her scrawl to make sure she got what she needed. Bonnie spent a lot of time sleeping, so I spent a lot of time pacing the halls. I have never been able to sit still.
“Let’s do four out of six,” said Red.
“You said best two out of three,” said the short one. She looked up at an older brunette who seemed to be in charge.
“Well, I am not going in there,” said Red.
All three of them kept glancing down a long hall. At the end was a door covered in a blood-red tarp with a sign I couldn’t quite read. As the nurses argued, I got curious. So I just casually started pacing down the hall, kind of walking on tiptoe so my heels wouldn’t click on the floor. As I got closer to that red door, I saw there were about six Styrofoam food trays on the floor of the hall, left with no care, like they were feeding a dog. And right outside, a cart full of head-to-toe isolation suits and masks. I could read the sign now: BIOHAZARD.
There was the slightest sound coming from the room, and I leaned in closer to hear.
“Help.”
It was so plaintive and small that I pulled the tarp aside to peek in. And there he was, this young man, stretched out on the bed and down to all of about eighty-five pounds. You couldn’t tell him from the sheets. I stood right in the doorway. “What do you need, honey?” I asked.
“I want my mama,” he said. I had a little three-year-old, Allison. She spent the weekends at her daddy’s house. I knew from wanting your mama, and I knew his mother would want to help her sweet child.
“Okay,” I said, stepping farther into the room. “I’m gonna call her. What’s your name, honey?”
“Jimmy.”
“Okay, Jimmy,” I said. “I promise you I’ll call her.”
Well, I marched out to the nurses’ station, this time letting my heels click on that damn floor so they would know I was coming. I had just become a blonde—thanks to bleach and my hairdresser cousin Raymond—and I found that I could get people’s attention quicker than when I was a brunette.
“You didn’t go in that room, did you?” said the older one.
“Well, yeah, I did,” I said. “Listen, that young man, Jimmy, is asking for his mama.”
“Are you crazy?” said the short one. “He’s got that gay disease. They all die.”
I’ll admit, I got scared. This was in the early spring of 1986, and there was plenty of fear to go around about how you really caught AIDS. When I visited my cousin Raymond in Hawaii, I had asked him about it because I was scared for him and his friends. We were all alone in his salon, so he could speak freely. “It’s only hitting the leather guys in San Francisco,” he told me. “God knows what they’re doing to get it.” I didn’t know what the heck a leather guy was, but he wasn’t dressed in leather, so at least it wouldn’t happen to him.
AIDS was spreading, and people were swearing you could get it from gays sitting on toilet seats and using swimming pools, from doorknobs and licked stamps on envelopes in the mail. I lived in Hot Springs, the Sin City of Arkansas, a resort town an hour down the road from Little Rock. It had about a quarter of the population of Little Rock but untold numbers of visitors who came for a good time. Brothels, bathhouses, you name it. So if gays touching doorknobs was gonna kill you, we’d all be dead already.
“I’ll call his mama if I need to,” I said. “Would you please give me the number?”
“She ain’t coming,” said the old one in charge. “He’s been here six weeks. Nobody is coming.”
“Just give me her number,” I said. “If she knew her son was this bad . . .”
“Suit yourself,” she said, as the others smirked. She made a huge production of finding a next-of-kin form and scrawled the number down. Instead of handing it to me, she kinda tossed it, like now she was scared of me.
“Thank you,” I said, all Southern charm and malice. I went to reach for their phone, and she pulled it away quick.
“Unh unh,” she said. “There’s a pay phone right over there.”
I turned on my heel like I wouldn’t want to use theirs anyway and went over to the pay phone. I picked up the phone, all bravado, but then I lost my nerve, thinking about telling the poor woman her son was dying. I turned back, and I could see those nurses eyeing me. I put the coin in and dialed.
“Hello,” this sweet voice answered.
“Good afternoon, my name is Ruth Coker Burks, and I am trying to reach the mother of Jimmy—”
Click. She hung up. Now, I had a mean mom. And I’d had a meaner ex-husband. I’d stopped letting things slide. I put in another coin, cursing her as I dialed again.
“You hang up on me again, and I swear to Almighty God I will ask your Jimmy where he’s from and put his obituary in your town paper with his cause
of death.” I knew I had her complete attention.
“My son is already dead,” she said, not a touch of sweetness to her now. “My son died when he went gay.”
“No, he is alive, just barely, and he is here begging for you.”
“I don’t know what sinner you’ve got in that hospital, but that thing is not my son.”
“Well, listen to me,” I said, turning to see those damn nurses hanging on every word I was saying. “If you change your mind, he is at the Med Center, fourth floor. And you better come soon.”
“I will do no such thing,” she said. “I won’t claim that body either, so don’t even think about calling me again. Burn it.”
She hung up again. Now I had to figure out how to tell Jimmy his mama wasn’t coming. I walked right by the nurses’ station and refused to look at them for fear of giving them the satisfaction of being right. I click-clacked my heels past them and turned down the hall to his room, walking in before I changed my mind or they stopped me.
I went in, farther this time, walking almost to his bed but still keeping my distance. The room was dim, lit mostly by sunlight from outside. Jimmy looked even frailer up close, and so skinny. With such effort, he turned his head toward me.
“Oh, Mama, I knew you’d come,” he said, in that small, reaching voice. I was so confused I just stood there, my feet glued to the floor. Then he started to cry. He was so dehydrated he could muster only one little tear, but his body was heaving in sobs, and it was so sad that I began to cry for him. Tears rolling right down my face as I just stood there, dumb. But then he tried to reach his hand out to me. I couldn’t not take his hand in mine.
“Mama,” he said again.
“Yes,” I said, squeezing his hand gently. “I’m here.” I don’t know if his vision was going or if he was just so close to dying his mind was seeing what he wanted most in life and death. This was probably the first time someone had touched him in six weeks without two pairs of gloves on. His face was grimy from sweat and drool. You could see the tear marks from the last time he was able to really cry.
“Let me clean you, honey,” I said, in my softest voice. I filled a small basin with warm water, and the smallest amount of soap. I washed his face the way I did my Allison’s when she was just a baby, smoothing a cloth slowly and softly over his skin.
“Mama, I’m sorry,” he said. “I missed you so much.”
“Hush,” I said. “Do you remember what I used to call you when you were just a little thing?”
He paused a long time. “Your angel.”
“That’s right,” I said, brushing back the hair they’d let get greasy and making it as nice as I could. “My angel. Don’t you worry about nothing.”
I pulled a chair over, and I sat with him, holding his hand for about an hour, until he fell asleep. I started to get nervous about abandoning Bonnie, so I gingerly got up and tiptoed out the door. The brighter light of the hallway shocked me into a realization of what I was doing. I’d gone down some kind of rabbit hole, but this was real life. I went right to a bathroom, turning the handle with my elbow and backing in like I’d seen surgeons do on doctor shows.
I grabbed a paper towel without touching anything and used it to turn the hot water on. There I was, scrubbing my hands and arms till they were red raw with about as much soap as they had, then rubbing soap on my face, paying special attention to my mouth and nostrils. I was so scared I’d breathed in something. I swished soapy water in my mouth to be sure, spitting it out, then looking up at my face in the mirror. I stared at that scared blond girl, dressed so nice so people would listen to her if Bonnie needed anything. I took a huge breath. Then another. Big heaving breaths to flush out the air in my body. “Okay,” I said aloud. “Okay.”
Bonnie made smiley eyes at me when I walked in, then furrowed her brow at my face.
“There’s this young man who’s real sick,” I said. “Well, he’s close to my age, but he doesn’t have anyone coming, and I swear to God he thinks I’m his mama. Bonnie, I think he’s gonna die really quick.”
Bonnie took a pen to her pad. HE NEEDS YOU, she wrote. I’M FINE.
“You don’t mind?” I think maybe I wanted her to need me so that I could stay in good conscience.
She shook her head, pointing again to her pad. HE NEEDS YOU.
So I went back to that hallway with the red door. Before I went back in, I stood there and had a little conversation with God. I knew that was Him working through Bonnie telling me I had to go back to Jimmy. “Lord, I’ll take care of this young man if this is what You want,” I said. “But don’t let me get it, okay? I’ve got a daughter I have to raise.” I looked up, waiting for a sign. That’s the thing about God: He keeps you guessing.
When I went in, I took Jimmy’s hand again. He seemed even weaker. I sat there with him all night. Thirteen hours in total. At one point, he got a really frightened look.
“What’s gonna happen?”
“Oh angel, I’m not letting go of this hand here until Jesus takes the other one. I’m gonna stay right here until He says He is ready for you.”
His face softened. People just want to be sure of things sometimes. I spent the next hours holding his hand, singing songs to him, as his breathing grew slower and slower. I had an ache in my belly from not eating, but I didn’t want to leave him, for fear he would die alone. The nurses didn’t visit one single time. No doctor, nothing.
It was just before midnight when Jimmy took his last breath. There was no big moment. He was just here on this earth and then he wasn’t. The room seemed empty. I sat with him for a while after he died. And I cried.
I went out to the nurses’ station and told them Jimmy was dead. It was a new shift of nurses, but they brought the same indifference to him. They seemed relieved, to be honest. Now they just needed to get rid of his body.
“What funeral home?” one asked. Like, let’s move this along and get that thing out of here.
“Well, darned if I know,” I said. “What do you usually do?”
“There is nothing usual about this,” she said. “We need to think of our patients.”
“That young man was your patient too,” I said, but I was too tired to have a fight. “I’ll call someone in the morning.”
I checked in on Bonnie before I left. She was asleep, so I left a note on her pad. “The young man passed,” I wrote. “See you tomorrow.”
As I made the hour’s drive home to Hot Springs, I thought about how cruel people can be. I imagined me in some hospital, lying there unloved and then unclaimed. When I got home, FooFoo greeted me at the door, slinking through my legs looking for dinner. My little house seemed empty with Allison at her daddy’s, and before I went to bed I instinctively checked her room. The moonlight was flowing in, and I went in and sat on her bed. And I cried. I cried more than I did in Jimmy’s room. I just couldn’t imagine not caring what happened to my child. Allison got away from me once at the Arkansas fairgrounds, and the only one more scared than me was her. It was three minutes, and I couldn’t breathe right until I found her and held her. It doesn’t matter if your child’s two or twenty-two. That’s your baby. I couldn’t imagine anyone deserting a child for any reason.
The next morning, I got out the Yellow Pages, and I proceeded to call just about every funeral home in the state of Arkansas. I started close to the hospital, but I had to expand my reach. Every call, as soon as they asked the cause of death, they refused to take him. This was the bubonic plague and leprosy all in one. Finally, I called a black mortuary over in Pine Bluff.
“We’ll do it,” the man said after a very long pause. “But we’ll only cremate him. No viewing. And nothing in the paper.”
I didn’t have the money to spend on a cremation, so when I got to the hospital I told those nurses they needed to figure out a way for the hospital to pay for it, if they wanted him out so bad. This was the first set of n
urses again, and when I walked up they all backed away. All of a sudden, they had a fund they used to pay for indigent cremation. There was just one catch: I needed to call his mother one more time to secure permission to cremate. So it was back to the pay phone.
“Jimmy passed, and I have one question,” I said, not giving her a chance to hang up. I actually had a lot of questions, but right then I needed the answer to just one. “Are you okay with him being cremated?”
“Do whatever you want,” she said.
“What about his ashes?” I said.
“They’re yours now,” she said. I heard the receiver click.
The funeral directors said they would only come after hours. I arranged to be there for Jimmy. They came late, wearing these horrible moon suits like they were from outer space. They shoved him in a bag and carried him off without one shred of dignity. I followed them as they hurried out the back door, keeping even this mercy a secret.
Bonnie stayed in the Med Center about a week longer, so when I visited, I saw that Jimmy’s room was closed up for many days, biohazard tape all around the door so no air or germs could escape and catch someone by surprise. No one wanted to even go in there. In the meantime, Bonnie continued to get better and then went home. In Hot Springs, I had plenty to keep my mind off Jimmy. For one, the big drama was that Bonnie’s fiancé, Les, who I think visited her once in the hospital, could not deal with the facts that she’d just had her tongue ripped out and she was bald from chemo and had radiation marks on her face. So he packed up and left her. And there was always sweet Allison to tend to and bills that needed worrying over. This was normal life.
Then Jimmy’s ashes came in the mail. They’d just thrown them in a cardboard box. And I realized his mother was right. They were all mine now. And there was only one place I knew of to put them: Files Cemetery.
When I was ten, my grandmother died in an automobile accident and was buried, like all of our kin since the late 1880s, in Files Cemetery, a quarter-acre lot on top of a hill in Hot Springs. My mother had a big family fight with her brother, my uncle Fred, pretty soon after. At the wake, to be exact. Uncle Fred was standing at my grandmother’s casket on the raised platform at Gross Funeral Home. He’d done something with family land. “Oh Mama, oh Mama, forgive me,” he said, so loud we could all hear him. He was sobbing and rocking the casket. “The greed got in me, and I wanted that property. The devil got in me—”
All the Young Men Page 1
