There was Marshall, who was Miss Brown Sugar out of drag. When he teased me, I felt anointed, because I could tell everyone liked to talk to Marshall. “Little Miss Muffet over here ears-droppin’,” he said, his voice a dismissive slur that I loved. You had to work to understand him, and Paul explained the cane and slur in his voice were from having had a brain aneurysm.
Consuela told me I could call her Connie. She told me she liked me because I looked just like a Barbie doll. And Twyman, the bar’s owner, would come in to keep an eye on his money. He was old, gray-headed, had a button-down short-sleeved shirt straining at his big potbelly. Even with shorts, he wore white dress shoes and tube socks pulled high, white with a green stripe around the top. Paul warned me he was “an old school, mean-as-hell queen” who’d been married with kids and talked like he was still a sergeant in the service.
Mother Superior was Larry, who ran hot and cold on everyone. He was a fry cook at the bowling alley, and the people loved him there because he had a photographic memory for their orders. Mother came in every night, manic and just off work. He was so big, charging in. “Ohhhh, it’s so fun to be here,” he’d tell Paul, his reedy voice booming. “So glad to be here. Get the music started, girl. Get me a large Dr. Pepper, light on the ice. Biggest one you got.” Mother would dance until he was just dying and sweating all over the place, and Paul would play music to see how long he could keep him on the dance floor.
No matter who you talked to, somehow the person always managed to bring the subject back to Billy, the star of the bar. I collected information almost as a fan would. Marilyn Morell was in tribute to Morrell hot dogs, which they made up in Dardanelle. He turned twenty-one that December, and Paul, who was twenty-eight, got him a cake at the bar. Billy lived with Paul in a two-story house over on Oak Cliff, and Mother was their roommate upstairs. Billy had only been in Hot Springs a few years, stopping in Russellville for a bit on the way here. Russellville was a step up from Dardanelle, what with it having Arkansas Tech University. I pictured Billy walking to Russellville, anything to escape Dardanelle. Walking over that bridge with the Arkansas River flowing beneath him. He’d grown up Pentecostal, so I thought there must have been a lot to escape.
He’d had nothing when he got here, and Paul had felt bad for him. Paul told me that if you’re even halfway decent-looking and you have half a personality when you came to Hot Springs, you’d have every suitor after you. So, of course, the whole town was just ready to date Billy. Not Paul, though. He thought Billy seemed like a lost soul, and he told him that he could use his spare room as long as he got a job. Slowly, they fell in love.
Billy got a job at the Miller’s Outpost clothing store in the Hot Springs Mall, and I pictured all these men and women coming in for jeans and winter coats. Did they know they were in the presence of a star? How could they not?
I learned he was the bridge between the gay men and the lesbians in the bar, beloved by both. There was PJ, who had a wealthy closeted lover who had all the money in the world. Those two women loved Billy and would pick him up at the mall. “Come on, we’re going shopping.” It was nothing to them to buy him hundreds of dollars in looks, just so PJ could sit in the front row and say, “I bought that dress there.” It made her feel like a patron of this great artist.
Mitch and I went back to the Saturday drag shows every two weeks, starting a routine where we would eat over at the Brick House Grill and then walk across the street to Our House. We would each get a ribeye sandwich, because you could get the steak cooked the way you wanted it; then you just took it off the bun and you’d have your steak and potatoes. They’d charge you twice as much for the regular steak. Even if he was paying, I wasn’t going to waste anything.
Paul noticed I kept coming back, and after about five months, in January 1990, I’d hung around enough that I won his trust. He picked up on calling me “Ruthie” after overhearing Mitch do it. One weekday I went in at 5:15, and I caught his smile when I came in. He placed a photo album on the bar, right where I usually sat. I stood, lightly touching the band of gold that ran around the dark red cover. He nodded and I sat to open it.
“If you’re going to be a fan, you need to know what drag is about,” he said, opening to the first page. “From the beginning of time . . .” he said. There were four square photos from the Fotomat of a man walking a stage in drag, blond curly hair and a blue dress cut just above the knee. A long white kerchief and an eager smile gave her the look of an airline stewardess. “That’s 1979, at the old Our House. I was Miss Dana Marie.” He said it in a sweet, naive-sounding voice, which must have been how Dana talked. “We had a talent show once a year. You got in drag, and if you did good enough, you got in the Saturday shows. If you didn’t, you got to wait another year.” He paused for effect. “Dana got to wait another year.”
“Well, I was pulling for her,” I said.
“Miss Cherry Fontaine was born the next year,” he said, pointing to himself in a red bouffant. “We dropped the blond hair, and she was a big hit. Tuna was the one who really decided if you were in the shows.”
“Tuna?”
“Miss Tuna Starr,” Paul said, pointing to a picture of a sharper-featured Lucille Ball. “She was almost like a Bob Hope, the emcee of every show. She would do a big monologue beforehand, and it was like a recap of everything that happened that month. Town gossip from the bar. The more scotch she had, the dirtier she got.”
He leafed through pages of drag queens, saying each name like a baseball fan, reeling off stats and wins, only this was pageant crowns and trophies. Everything revolved around the pageants. The big one was Miss Gay America, but there were so many preliminaries. Miss Arkansas, Miss Hot Springs, Miss Little Rock.
I had arrived at Our House during a switch in eras. The “old queens,” as Paul called them, were in their late twenties and called themselves drag queens and drag performers. They’d had set gowns for set numbers. But the new ones coming in called themselves “female impersonators.”
“These new, young, 120-pound boys put on a woman’s dress and wear street makeup, as we call it. They come out, and yes, they are gorgeous, but they do a show or two, and people are like. ‘I’ve seen her. All she does is stand there and look pretty.’ Now it’s gotten more into the audience saying, ‘We want a new song and a new dress and a new wig. Every week. We still wanna know it’s you, but we want something new every week.’”
“My favorite is Marilyn,” I said.
“Well, Billy has everything,” he said. “The crowd automatically falls in love with him before he even starts the show. He can please the roughest drag queen who’s been doing it for a hundred years, and the newest queen that just put on a dress that night.”
Another man came in. “Hey, Tish,” Paul said. “Miller Lite?”
I got to the last page on my own, a photo of Tuna in full drag next to an obituary from August, just before I came to the bar the first time. The man in the photo looked so sedate, handsome and smiling. He had just the smallest spark of the flame Tuna showed in the other photos. The obituary read at the bottom: “Memorials can be made to the American Cancer Society and the Leukemia Society of America.”
I looked up to see Paul standing there. “I am so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize.”
“Our history will always be Before Tuna,” he said, “and After Tuna. She was the one who told us about AIDS, but it’s been an outside thing. I remember the first time I met someone with AIDS, it was because of Tuna. She had told us, ‘Someone from Dallas is coming up with AIDS, and they’re gonna be my guest this weekend. I want you to meet ’im, and I want you to talk to ’im, and you might learn some more information. And these are condoms.’”
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” I said. “Tuna gave out condoms?”
“‘Condroms,’ she called them. I remember she had a meeting before the show, which was very bad timing ’cause everybody was waiting for a show, and she
asked for a meeting on safe sex. She’d had too many scotches, and she had ‘condroms’ for everyone. She was very explicit, trying to be technical but using a lot of street words. She had a catchphrase—”
Paul stopped himself. “I’m going on here.”
“I’m pretty unshockable,” I said. “What was the catchphrase?”
“Tuna said: ‘Spit it out, it wasn’t yours to begin with.’ Which is self-explanatory.”
“Self-explanatory.”
“But she was, you know,” he said. “She was Tuna.” Paul changed the subject by taking the book. “Anyway, I just thought you’d like to know about the history.”
“Paul, I’m just wondering, did people take the condoms? The ‘condroms’?”
“I didn’t watch, but I think so,” he said. “We actually had a basket over the cigarette machine. Not a big thing, just a little one. Someone came down and made the comment that they had been in the bar and ‘You just wouldn’t believe it. They’re down there having sex all the time. You can’t even walk in there, there’s condoms sittin’ all over the place. It’s like a big orgy house.’”
“Oh dear,” was all I could say.
“Any time someone from the outside comes in, a lot of times it’s, ‘Let me see what’s going on in here so I can close this place down.’ There’s a lot of people who would like to see us gone.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant the bar or all gay people. Both, probably.
“Like when you came in, I knew you had a good story and you looked nice, but I was looking for my name in the newspaper for days. ‘This is the ringleader, Paul Wineland. He’s the main bartender, and the one everybody looks to . . .’”
“Oh, never.” I said. “Never, never, never.”
“You can’t be too careful.”
“Paul, if I got you a lot of condoms, would you put them out?”
He paused.
“I know you said nobody here is sick, but they might get sick. But the main thing is that you have people coming in here from all over. You’re across from the Hilton, and guys from out of town come right from the Convention Center auditorium. I’m not saying people have to stop doing what they’re doing, no. Lord, no. I just want everyone to be able to keep doing it. So let’s give them something to keep in their pocket for later.”
He thought about it for a minute. “Okay.”
The next morning, I drove to Little Rock to the health department and went in through the back like usual. Everyone was used to me by then.
“I need condoms,” I said. “To give out.”
“Well, who signed off on it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I need a name,” she said. “Someone who ordered it.”
“Uh, he’s on the third floor, I think. What’s his name . . . ?”
“Okay, third floor,” she said, typing it in. “Got it.”
“Yes,” I said. “Third floor.”
People don’t care. Just long as somebody gives them a name that they don’t have to come up with so they can pass it on, they don’t care. And that’s how you get stuff done.
The condoms were a breakthrough. If anyone asked who brought them, the answer was “Ruth.” Since I talked to everyone, it wasn’t a sign if someone said to me, “Can I call you next week?”
“Yeah, give me a call. Great show tonight, wasn’t it?”
If I’d have come in and had a special meeting before a show, that would never have worked. “Hello, I’m Ruth Coker Burks. Everyone that has AIDS and needs help, please come to the front of the stage, and I’ll help you.”
I did more and more testing with the Doctor, and I broke more and more bad news. But at least they knew. Or they would tell me about a friend that needed help, and soon I’d be driving out to take them to a doctor’s appointment. And I helped people all over the state plan their funerals. I learned that some people had suddenly left Hot Springs with no explanation, and then someone at Our House would hear they passed. “Cancer or something.” Maybe they had returned to their hometowns, just like so many of the men I saw coming home to their families in Hot Springs. Only to find there was only me.
As the circle of people I needed to care for expanded, I needed medicine. It took time to get people onto Medicaid, and they wanted to get medication right away. I often had a small share of AZT or other meds left over from people who died. Dave, Wally, Steve . . . As people got closer, they would give me their keys, and I would go get it. I learned that we all have treasures, usually kept in a sock drawer or on top of a dresser where it could be seen. So along with the medicines, they would tell me to mail a note to someone, with an old school ID or a family photo. Something to leave to their people, even the ones that rejected them.
I stockpiled medicines that otherwise would have cost thousands and thousands of dollars a year. Sulfamethoxazole for pneumonia, clarithromycin to prevent tuberculosis, acyclovir for herpes outbreaks, inhalers of pentamidine for pneumocystis carinii, ganciclovir and the fancy foscarnet for CMV retinitis . . . My kitchen pantry began to look like a pharmacy, because I would take anything just to store. What if Arkansas just plain decided they weren’t going to let people distribute AIDS medication? Nothing was off the table.
When someone needed AZT and couldn’t get it because of money or access, I would go around to my guys, spare-changing for pills to get people started. There were guys that I knew had six weeks to live and they had eight weeks’ worth of pills. But I would never say that. If I took away those two weeks, they would know. They’d think, She doesn’t think I’m gonna live.
So I’d ask them to spare three or four doses here and there. Whoever needed the most hope, I’d ask for the fewest pills from. From the trials I read about in the medical journals, I didn’t think AZT did much. It still wasn’t proven to even postpone the onset of AIDS, and there was already talk in the journals about viral resistance. HIV could maybe mutate in your body to outwit AZT. The only real benefit I saw myself was that taking medicine gave them hope. And that was what they needed, because that was all they had.
I hadn’t forgotten Marc, my New York Yankee, showing me that first bottle. He died—yet another person I buried in Files—but I remember the label on that bottle had power, like a talisman. So when I would go to people who were doing well, like Tim and Jim, I would say, “Here, you keep the rest of the pills, but I need the bottle too.” I had to give the person getting the pills proof. Proof that I was giving them something that might help them save their own lives.
My guys craved information and wanted to know what the end might look like. “When people die . . .” They never said, “When I die . . .” Nobody said out loud that they thought they were gonna die. Because the day after tomorrow the vaccine would come out. Maybe tomorrow, but more likely the day after. And that’s how they lived months and, sometimes, years. It was hope.
Chapter Sixteen
I had a new patient who was dying on me, and I couldn’t shake my surprise. Keith was a friend of a couple who had called me for help, Bob and Phil. They had come down together from New York and were the first mixed-race couple, gay or straight, I’d ever met. Hot Springs was still very segregated, from the cradle to the grave. Even the cemeteries were kept separate. When Bob called me, he made it clear that if I had a problem with Phil being black, then they wouldn’t be needing my help. It took me a minute to understand, because I was so used to being on the side of the underdog. People were hated because they were gay, but I forgot people were capable of hating people for other stupid reasons.
Bob was bald, and his face was just a blank canvas colored with the purple and red lesions of Kaposi’s sarcoma, one large one on his right side and a spray of them on the other. It was the first time I’d seen the lesions, because my guys never had them. But that was the face of AIDS on TV and in magazines. Phil was very handsome, his hair cut short and his smile bigger for his becoming gau
nt. They had picked up Keith on the way from New York. He was a little guy with a mop of sandy, curly hair. He had AIDS too but seemed healthier than Bob and Phil. He was smiley and always pushing his mop of curly hair back from his eyes as he took a deep breath.
So when Phil called me from a hospital pay phone, I assumed it was to tell me that Bob was sick. I started pulling his file from my mind when Phil said it was Keith.
It was a fever. Keith had been in his room alone, and Bob had checked on him when he didn’t get up in the morning and found him unresponsive. They rushed him to AMI hospital. He was in the intensive-care unit.
One look at Keith, and I knew he had about a day. Phil and Bob looked stunned. Bob’s health had been starting to decline further, and I think they had rehearsed for him to be in that bed. “Do you guys want to take a break?” I asked. They looked at each other, neither wanting to be the one who said yes. I told them I thought Keith had time but not much, so this would be a good moment to rest themselves. “Go for a walk.”
They did, leaving me alone with Keith. I sat down and held his hand. “You snuck up on me,” I said. “You have to watch the quiet ones.” Char, a new nurse at AMI, saw me through the glass and came in. She had quickly become my favorite nurse at any of the hospitals. We nodded at each other, and I could tell she also knew Keith didn’t have much time, but she had the decency not to say it in front of him.
She was older than me, her brown hair lightened to hide the gray. She accepted all the patients as they were, and she was also kind to me. If I was with someone all night, she would bring me a coffee. We had bonded when we were checking in on this Serbian gentleman who had shown up out of nowhere. He was beyond talking when he got dumped at the ER, but his ID said he was fifty-five, when almost everyone else I dealt with was in his twenties. Char and I were checking his vitals and taking his rings off. She was telling me this beautiful story about when her husband died and all the trouble she had gone through to take his wedding ring off herself. We were deep in conversation, and then this man just died right in front of us. And we didn’t realize it at first. It was like he’d pulled something on us.
All the Young Men Page 17
