All the Young Men

by Ruth Coker Burks

  “No, it’s just for families.”

  “Well, what are we?”

  “You’re not a family,” he said. “You don’t have a husband.”

  I’d had it with him. “You know what? We are a family. And if we’re not a family because my daughter doesn’t have a father, it’s because he just died. Remember? You were at the house—well, on the porch—when he died? So we would like to light a candle this season.”

  I wanted joy, but I settled for hope. I still had it, at least.

  For Christmas, I asked Allison’s daddy’s parents if she could please go to their house, just to give her a sense of normalcy. “I will drop her off,” I assured them.

  Imogene said she could come for exactly two hours on Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day. “Fine,” I said. Imogene was crying when I arrived with Allison, so I let myself in to make sure things were on the up and up in there. Pat Robertson was on, like always in their house, swearing God was speaking through him like some ventriloquist’s dummy. He said God’s hatred of homosexuality caused hurricanes, tornadoes, and fires—so of course it caused AIDS.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked Imogene. I had never known her to show any emotion, much less to cry in front of me. She preferred to not see me, a living embodiment of her son’s sin of divorce.

  She gave a dramatic pause, then looked up in absolute grief. “I was just thinking of him,” she said, naming her accursed son. “I was just thinking that he’s in hell.”

  I thought, Well, you’re right. He was a mean, terrible person, and she knew he was. But I just looked down because Allison deserved to think well of her father. I drove home and used the time alone to work on cooking, starting with peeling a ten-pound bag of potatoes. There’d be a dumpster Christmas feast for all my guys, because the people at Kroger and Piggly Wiggly seemed to leave out more for me before the holidays. I had a giant free turkey from Piggly Wiggly, green beans, and sweet potato casserole to make from scratch. All the things I would want. For dessert, I’d saved a magazine recipe for Cuisinart’s competition for best cheesecake, even though I only had a hand mixer. I made it thanks to my milk-truck friend. I wanted the men to have the best.

  The next day I drove everything around with Allison, everyone assuming we were just stopping in on our way to our real family holiday. They didn’t invite us to stay and share the day with them, not knowing that all I wanted was to be asked. It felt wrong to invite myself and my daughter to stay. But the truth was we didn’t have anywhere else to be. Nobody wanted us at their table either.

  The Arlington always did a big thing for New Year’s Eve, so of course Sandy wanted to be at the dance. Bonnie had no use for what she called amateur night and said she was happy to watch Allison so I could go.

  I wore my hair down but big, with a curl to it, and put on a black silk evening dress with a bow on the back. I walked in and saw Sandy, who nodded in approval when she saw me. I did a little half spin for her benefit.

  “You look like a bottle of champagne,” she said.

  “Whatever you’re drinking, keep at it,” I said. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

  “This old thing?” she said, looking down at her red dress. “Well, actually, it’s brand-new.”

  “So new it still has the tags, right?”

  “Like a Mercedes,” she said. We laughed and I watched her eyes scan the scene. She swiped two flutes of champagne off a tray, smiling at the steward. I had missed this. The shorthand of our friendship. I had no time to go canoeing with her anymore.

  She motioned to two seats at a small table out in the open. “Starting point?” she said.

  “Perfect.” We sat down. I had missed just being with her.

  “This year has to be better than 1988,” I said.

  “Lord knows it can’t get worse,” she said. I wasn’t so sure.

  “How’s Allison doing?”

  “It’s hard,” I said. “She misses him something terrible. She’s mad he’s gone, and so am I. But we have different reasons.”

  “You gettin’ the money straightened?”

  “I just finally got the social security,” I said. “Allison needs it. I think they may have been holding it up on purpose because I am always bringing my guys around for help.”

  “Your guys?”

  “I’ve been doing a lot of . . . I have been helping people. People with AIDS.”

  There was no pause. It was a look of disgust. “Ruthie, I may not be smart, but I am not dumb either. I have heard things, and every time I see you, you mention some funny thing some guy said. Some queer, I can tell, and then you clam up like you’re in some secret club.”

  “Well, we’re taking members.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t know what kind of blinders you have on that you think no one knows what you’re doing.”

  “Well, they need help,” I said. “And they’re good people.”

  “You’re good people,” she said. “You need to stay away from those people. They are ruining everything. I can’t open a bill from Dillard’s without worrying some faggot licked it.”

  “Sandy, please don’t talk like that.”

  She leaned in to whisper. “And then I have you telling me I have to use condoms because these people are everywhere.”

  “Well, are you?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “The first time, yeah.” She tipped her champagne glass to empty it.

  “What if it works out and you—”

  “If it works out it’s enough that I made him wear it once.”

  “Sandy, that makes no sense,” I said. “You have to use one every time. Every act.”

  “Oh, listen to you. You see? ‘Every act,’ like animals. Ruthie, you have had less sex than anybody I have ever known. And now you’re some sort of expert because of these perverts. Ruthie, you need to quit going around those people. End of story.” She got up to get more champagne from a tray as the waiter passed. She only took one this time, taking a big gulp. She looked back at me, and for a moment I wasn’t certain whether my best friend was going to sit with me again. But she did.

  We didn’t talk about it again that night. At midnight, Sandy and I clinked our glasses with strangers, all of them drunk on the possibility a new year brings. As we sang “Auld Lang Syne,” I looked over at my friend, my old acquaintance, and worried I was losing her.

  Those first minutes of 1989, I was haunted by something she had said. What kind of blinders did I have on that I thought nobody knew what I was doing? God must have put them on me. I couldn’t have done all this if He hadn’t.

  Allison’s daddy was dead. Nobody was going to take her from me if people found out what I was doing. Certainly not her grandparents. And now I had social security. If someone fired me, they fired me.

  I realized I had nothing to lose.

  Except time. People were dying. I’d been too quiet. If I told the papers about this, the news maybe, then everyone would know what I knew. They’d say, “We gotta get to Hot Springs.”

  If I sound the alarm, I thought, the cavalry will come.

  Part Two

  Chapter Eleven

  In the South, a lady had her name in the paper only three times: her birth, her marriage, and her death. You were otherwise never mentioned in the newspaper, and if you were, it wasn’t good. If you were on TV news, it better be so people can pray for your safe return from whoever it was that kidnapped you.

  KARK-TV filmed me outside because it was warmish for February. I am not someone who calls ahead, so I just went down to the station in Little Rock, and they agreed to do a story. I gave them some basic facts, not about me and what I was doing but just about the presence of HIV in Arkansas and how important it was that people had basic information.

  There was some discussion as to when the segment would go on, the morning or the evening. I let them figure that out. I was just
relieved it was done. I didn’t know what would come of it, but I knew how alone I felt out there and how I would react if I saw someone on TV talking about AIDS.

  They showed it on the morning broadcast, and calls to my house started about ten minutes after it aired. They were different than the midnight calls from men afraid of dying. These people were tentative, feeling me out to see if I was a Holy Roller or a heathen, depending on who was calling. If they were calling for a friend, I knew “the friend” was the very person I was talking to. If it was for “a friend of a friend,” I probably had a boyfriend or friend on the line. I’d sometimes purposely slip up and say “you” to show that would be fine too. People sometimes needed to be told.

  I waited for someone in charge to call me. Someone from the governor’s office or the CDC or the FDA—any of those abbreviations­—­just to say, “We had no idea. We’ll be there tomorrow. We’ll take care of this.” I waited and waited.

  I dressed extra nice for church that Sunday and got there a little bit before Sunday school. I was completely convinced that I would be approached by people who wanted to help, and I wanted them to be able to be discreet about it if they needed to be. But the people who were there milled about, each finding polite ways to avoid eye contact. I busied myself making the coffee for all of us to have.

  The place started filling up with more and more people, most pouring themselves coffee.

  “Ruth made the coffee,” someone said as the Bible study began. I didn’t see who. But I looked around and realized everybody had set their cup down. Every last one of them. The Bible study continued, and while there was all this talk about what Jesus would want you to do, I thought about all the times something like that had happened and I just hadn’t understood. The potlucks I left with my food untouched, the birthdays Allison spent alone. All the times I picked her up from the church nursery, playing alone.

  I always knew I was different because I was a single woman. You couldn’t stay single in church, because then there must be something wrong with you or you’re too busy sleeping with married men to settle on one. Sandy told me I was foolish to think nobody knew. They did know. How long had we been shunned while I was just too naive to realize it? How long had our church home wanted us to leave?

  “Allison, sweetie,” I said later. “Do you get teased at school?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “What do kids say?”

  She paused a long time, and when she spoke, there was a hardness to her voice. “People say not to play with me,” she said. “They say I’ll give them AIDS.”

  “Kids say that?”

  “No, grown-ups tell kids that.”

  “Who?”

  “Everybody,” she said. “It’s been my always. Everybody knows.”

  “I am so sorry—”

  “It’s not your fault,” she said, almost dismissively. Like it was something she had come to terms with long ago on her own. “It’s what we do.”

  It’s what we do, I thought.

  For some reason, it wasn’t until I was in the local paper that I started to see the real backlash. Maybe because if AIDS was in the Sentinel-Record, it was in Hot Springs. The editor wasn’t fond of me, I don’t think, but she did a story. The paper’s photographer took a photo of me, and as the flashbulb went off, I knew that was different than just talking on TV. This was something you can tear out, hold up, and show to your husband. “Look at this degenerate.”

  I opened the paper, and there I was, above the fold. I would be in homes all over Hot Springs. I dropped Allison off at school, like always, then bought a second paper, so I could send the article to Governor Clinton, not knowing he got the newspaper right off the press. Maybe it would give him cover to do something big.

  I got home, and the phone was ringing. You think crank callers just do the night shift, but when they hate you enough they’ll make time in the business day. This one came at nine thirty or so.

  “This is Ruth.” I had started saying that when I answered, because people were scared enough to call for help, and I wanted them to get to it, knowing, yeah, it’s me.

  “The sooner those faggots die, the better off they are.” They’d practiced that one, I could tell. Said it over and over in their minds for who knows how long, waiting for a reason to say it, and here I was in the paper.

  “That’s not true,” I said, like I was in customer service. I wasn’t giving them the excitement of hanging up just so they could call back.

  “They are ruining our kids and recruiting.” The voice was clumsy now, off-script. “Our kids are gonna be that way? No.”

  “No one can make anyone gay, any more than they can make them straight.”

  That was like a math problem, and it kept him busy just long enough for me to cut this off. “Look, you called me. So, if you need some education, I can help you, but otherwise I am busy.”

  They hung up, and then I did have one big body shiver. Like I’d successfully caught a moth and let it loose outside, shaking off the feeling of an insect fluttering in my hands. I stared at the phone, waiting for it to ring again. It didn’t. “That’s right,” I said to the phone.

  I needed a manicure, because people treat you better when you have a little armor on you. I stopped by the nail salon on the way to doing rounds at the hospitals. They sat me next to this nice-looking brown-haired girl I’d never seen before, with a chunky baby boy next to her in a pram. She looked at me like she was dying to talk. She was just getting started, and her nails already looked fine, but I remembered the loneliness of my first year with Allison. Finding excuses to leave the house.

  “That’s some child you’ve got there.”

  “Thank you,” she said, like he was the last thing she wanted to talk about. “I love your dress.” Her accent had the flat a’s of Mississippi. She was a recent transplant for sure. No tourist brings a baby to Hot Springs.

  “Oh, thank you,” I said. “It’s actually two separates, but that’s our secret.”

  She laughed. “I took a shower today for the first time this week,” she said. “That’s my secret.” We talked about parenthood, and I was right she was from Mississippi, from an old-money family from Ocean Springs. I thought, Oh good, a friend. One of the nail techs followed her out. I assumed she’d forgotten her card or hadn’t signed the check right.

  Whatever was said, she looked through the window at me. She looked disgusted and raced off to her car. The next time I saw her was at Kroger, struggling with the cart and the pram right at the produce section where you enter.

  “You gotta push one and pull the other behind you,” I said.

  She turned, and her smile contorted to a scowl. She didn’t say anything, just went to the register to check out. I stood behind her in line.

  “Can you tell me what you heard?” I asked.

  “Enough,” she said. “They said, ‘Don’t you let her ’round that baby.’”

  “I—” I stopped myself. I nodded and decided I’d shop tomorrow. I put my cart back neatly, went to my car, and burst into tears. I didn’t want to be a pariah. I had dreams. I had even hung some corkboard on a wall in my kitchen and pinned pictures torn from magazines. They were scenes of how I wanted my life to be—vacations, a family with their back to the camera at the beach, a pretty but modest home. I’d picture myself in those scenes. I wanted a man who would love me and take up for me—to say, “You can’t talk about my wife that way. You can’t say that.” I just wanted a normal life. I didn’t want everyone in the whole town to think I was trash and hate me.

  I tried to get used to feeling so hated, to develop a callus where things got to me, but things still did. Not long after that new mother was turned against me, I went to my P.O. box, where I received ashes sent to me from funeral homes. When I opened my box, I saw there was a bright blue Hallmark envelope inside. There was something about getting a card in the mail t
hat was exciting to me, a holdover from when my aunt in Florida would send me a birthday card every year. I opened it right there. There was a bass on the front, leaping out of the water, just begging to be caught. “To the Best Uncle on His Birthday.”

  I opened it. Someone had written in an angry scrawl: “You are the scum of the earth.”

  That was just the first card I got. The cards were always something that had nothing to do with me. Everybody seemed to have the same idea: A christening card. For Grandpa on Father’s Day. Happy First Birthday! People had cards lying around and would send them to me. I guess Hallmark didn’t make a Screw You card.

  I told myself these were strangers, people who’d seen me on TV or in the paper. But I knew better. I’d listed my P.O. box in the church directory. These were people I knew, who smiled at me on Sunday, took Communion behind me.

  I went on TV again and then again, as I was now the local station’s AIDS expert. They would have me come over and settle things when people were in an uproar. Some politician wanted to “send all those AIDS people to Guantanamo” or “quarantine ’em on an island.” I’d be that one voice saying, “That’s not right.” Jesse Helms, the senator from North Carolina, had said, “We have got to call a spade a spade, and a perverted human being a perverted human being.” My response was, “Well, at least now he’s acknowledging we’re talking about human beings. Now, about that other part . . .” I gave them sound bites, I showed up on time with my hair done. I wasn’t going on to be a TV star. I mean, when I was younger I’d dreamed of being the weather girl. But I wasn’t planning on being the AIDS girl. I just wanted to get the word out.

  I talked about funeral homes, trying to get people to care about the stigma. I thought that if people understood that even in death these men faced hate, maybe they’d care about them in life. I made an offhand comment: “I’ve sometimes had to bury them myself.”