It was only going to be me and Billy, because Paul couldn’t come. I knew Paul well enough that I believed he meant it when he said he didn’t do hospitals, but he was also working two jobs already, and I could see him calculating how he was going to cover Billy if he could no longer work. Billy understood, knowing Paul was a provider first.
Billy sat on the couch, and he leaned in to me as he cried. I had no words for him, except the promise I would be there, no matter what. Once we were in the car, we reverted to our lunchtime selves as a sort of defense mechanism to get through this. We talked the whole way on the hour drive out to Little Rock, nervous chatter to fill the space—what drag queen did this or who stole whose act. As we got closer to Doctors Hospital, I talked Billy through what would happen at the appointment and why an actual diagnosis would help him get services and care. I was reading everything I could, I assured him, and people were working on a medication, maybe even a cure, right at that moment. Someone we would never meet was going to save us all.
Dr. Rhein came in, dismissive as ever. As he talked, I stopped him. “Can you slow down and explain things a little bit more?”
“Well, you’ve been through this before,” he said, already exasperated with me. “Haven’t you?”
Had I? “Yes, I’ve been through this before, but you need to tell Billy. He’s your patient.” I tried so hard to be nice, but I always hated when doctors spoke past their patients. And he hated that I kept bringing him patients.
We drove back to Hot Springs on a long stretch of four-lane blacktop. On the road, I drove by a sign that had been up all my life, reading “PREPARE TO MEET GOD.” I sped up to get by it quickly. Billy was silent on the passenger side, staring out the window. How many times had I been in this exact space, helping someone in the minutes after they were told they were going to die? All those rehearsals and here we were, with me forgetting all my lines.
We passed a place with a giant billboard advertising elephant rides, a big tourist thing. Billy suddenly put his hand up to his beautiful face.
“I had always wanted to ride an elephant,” he said.
I pursed my lips, nodding. I checked my rearview for cops. “Well, Billy. Guess what?”
I jerked the wheel hard to the left, doing a complete one-eighty on the road. Billy screamed, half in shock and half in delight. I roared into the parking lot. A sign said the elephant ride was five dollars, and we had barely any money between us. I fished in the ashtray for pennies and the hope of quarters. When we got to five dollars, Billy jumped out of the car and ran to the elephant, yelling that he was coming, as I ran behind him. The attendant on the raised platform saw this wild-eyed duo coming for him. God knows what he thought.
I handed him our pile of singles and change for a ticket. They let two people on the elephant at a time, and Billy took my hand.
“We’re doing this,” he said.
“Yes, we are,” I said.
I was wearing these fancy culottes and tall heels in the hopes they’d convince Dr. Rhein to take me seriously. I looked a sight getting up on the blanket on top of the elephant, but I hurried because Billy was so excited. It was like he was rushing through a door about to slam shut.
Billy sat in front of me, and when the elephant started to walk, he reached back to grab my hand and gave me a huge smile.
“Whatever you want to do from here on out, Billy,” I said. “If you want to ride an elephant, we’ll ride the elephant together.”
The attendant held up a Polaroid camera. “Say ‘Dumbo’!”
“Dumbo!” Billy and I shouted in unison, real smiles on our faces.
Once we were back on the road, we quickly returned to our new reality. As we drove past a bean field, the tension had built up so much that I had to crack a window to get the pressure out of the car, just so we were able to breathe.
“Billy?” I said. “What are you in such a deep thought about over there?”
“Well, I’m thinking I want you to have my red Victor Costa dress.”
I knew the one. It was the kind of red dress Rhett makes Scarlett wear in Gone with the Wind so people would know what she’s done. “Nothing modest or matronly will do for this occasion,” Rhett tells Scarlett. One of those dresses.
“Billy, that’s so sweet,” I said. “But tell me the truth. Do you want me to have your red Victor Costa because you want me to have it or because you don’t want your mother to find it when she comes to clean out your stuff?”
“No, because I want you to have it.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m not sure I can pull that off.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“I’m not sure I have the balls for it.”
We laughed. We had to.
When we got back to his house, Billy paused at the threshold and placed his hand on the doorknob. He took a breath, an actor preparing to go onstage. Paul was waiting, and it felt like the whole bar was there. Everyone knew Billy, and he was the first person at Our House to get diagnosed and let people know.
Billy’s T-cell count was so low it was dangerous for him even to keep working at the mall, with all these people coming in with their germs. We agreed that he would need to give his notice at Miller’s Outpost. I went with him, because he wanted to tell them why, and I was grateful. More people needed to know that HIV was here in Hot Springs. He told his manager. She cried, and so did he. The staff loved him, and they didn’t have the hope I had to have in order to keep going. To them, this was a death sentence.
We walked out of the store, holding hands and looking down at the drab floor. The carpet muffled the sound of our steps, so there wasn’t even that to drown out our thoughts. Billy squeezed my left hand so tight my skin went white, and when he suddenly stopped walking I felt the pull all the way up to my shoulder. I turned to look at him as he broke down, and I put my arms around him as he shook.
Billy let out a sob, a sharp, loud noise he’d held in who knows how long. People turned to look, then to watch, as I held him. One woman was staring so intently, I spoke to her as you would a child or a dog. “Just move along,” I said. “Go on.” Billy could not hear me; he was somewhere else in space or in time. Caught in this now, he couldn’t escape, but the details of the “before” were still so fresh in his mind that if he could only catch his breath for a moment he could go back there.
He shook like the patients I’d had with end-stage pneumonia, shivering from an internal chill no blanket or hug could get close to warming. But I couldn’t let him go. Until he turned loose, I wouldn’t turn him loose. I didn’t care if he needed me forever.
There were tangible things I could do, and I seized upon them. Instead of Billy having to wait for his prescription to kick in. I supplied AZT from my pantry in the set dosage. I assured Paul that I could get housing assistance to help them, at least with Billy’s part of the rent. Plus, I would get them social security disability benefits. “I will get them this month,” I said, a promise I kept.
Paul wasn’t used to being helped. He had been an outsider so long that he assumed he would have a life of making do. He wanted to do something in return for me, and I couldn’t imagine what.
“Well, what if I helped you organize your house?” he asked. “I like that sort of thing.”
I took him up on it, more to ease his conscience than to get my house in order, though I did need it. He walked in, and his eyes went everywhere.
“Should we start in the kitchen?” he asked.
“You’re driving,” I said.
Paul went in, looking at the cereal boxes left out. I had a lot of stuff on the counters, and when he opened the doors of the long walk-in pantry, he saw why.
“Oh my God, it’s like a pharmacy in here,” he said, overwhelmed.
“Well, it’s not for me, so don’t worry,” I said.
“What would you ever need all this for?”
“Honey, there’s people everywhere,” I said. “I’m getting calls from the whole state. Men, women. I’m all that people have.”
It shocked him. He was the first to say his world revolved around Our House and his home. He couldn’t fathom how many people I was helping. “Let me make us some coffee,” I said. We sat down, and I explained that people died and left me things, so I could have medication for others who needed it. “Remember how I had it for Billy right away? So he could start that night?”
We talked for an hour about what I’d seen and how many pharmacists had chased me out. I explained just a touch of what Billy would need to know, because I didn’t want to further overwhelm Paul. The importance of staying on his medication schedule and not living in denial about symptoms. Any infection, we had to get in front of it.
I wanted Paul to get tested, but I also knew not to push it. I made it clear that he should, and people don’t need to hear that more than once. But Billy coming forward had encouraged other people—some who only I knew had tested positive—to share their status. It created a small community, the one I had hoped I could create at church. As it formed, Paul said he wanted to introduce me to Norman Jones, who was a legend in the area’s gay community. He was in Little Rock but a native of Hot Springs. Norman started Norma Kristie’s, Hot Springs’ first gay bar, giving it his drag name. He owned Discovery, the big gay bar in Little Rock, and basically ran what we knew of as the drag pageant circuit. He had started an organization, Helping People with AIDS, a few years before, and seemed like someone I needed to meet. Immediately.
Soon after, I went to Discovery. It was a giant box of sheet metal and yellow-beige stucco with a rock fascia on it to make it pretty. It was in the middle of nowhere in Little Rock, and Norman ran it with a velvet glove that covered a steel fist. When I went to meet him the first time, this slight but formidable man—with a perfectly tight face and painted-on eyebrows—eyed me suspiciously. He sat behind a desk in his corporate office, and I felt like I was at a job interview. The bar’s doorman, Ken Brown, was in and out, as well as drag queens in their boy drag. Some knew me from Hot Springs and said hi. Norman looked at me like I was a puzzle.
As I talked about my work, he softened and began to share what he had been doing. He had quietly paid for funerals and medicines out of his own pocket, holding yearly drag fundraisers and events as needed to create a fund. They’d twirl up a drag show on a Friday night, and here would come the money. One hundred percent of the proceeds went direct to people. “That’s how we buy their medicine, that’s how we pay their rent.”
So, we trusted each other. Norman began giving me a small monthly stipend to help with gas, and he eventually agreed to give me a title in the organization, even if it was just to give me the clout to scare doctors into doing stuff. The fact was that Norman was tremendously powerful in the gay world but not in the straight world. He told me he had trouble getting people to come to Discovery to fix an air conditioner. Nobody wanted to be around gay people. So here I was, not fully welcome in both worlds but not a stranger to either. When I had to press it with people, out came, “I am the Executive Director of Helping People with AIDS.”
I would use the title in the endless letters I sent to people, trying to get my guys help, and Bonnie would chuckle at “Executive Director” when she proofread them. But I could tell she was proud of me. She knew I was still diving in dumpsters to get food for people, but these folks didn’t need to know that.
In the letters I would offer to do training and information programs at hospitals and clinics, all the stuff I was doing on a day-to-day, person-to-person level. Some said yes, if only to get me to stop writing, and while I was there I would always make a pitch for my dream: starting a hospice in Hot Springs or Little Rock. We had a hospice in Hot Springs, but it wouldn’t take AIDS patients. We also had a medical facility that was going broke, and this initiative would have saved it, with all that Medicaid.
“I’m not gonna make this an AIDS hospital,” an administrator at the facility told me. “I don’t want them here.”
“I worry you’re saying you’d rather throw your hospital off a cliff than help someone with AIDS,” I said.
“Watch me,” he said.
“I will,” I said.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I was in bed, so I didn’t see the flames. It was only when Dr. Biel, my neighbor across the street, called me at four o’clock in the morning that I went to the front window. Someone had burned a cross in my front yard. It was about four feet high. A lazy man’s cross burning.
“Did you know?” he asked. “Oh my God.” I could see him parked outside, talking to me on his car phone. He was one of the doctors who lived on the well-to-do side of the street. When he saw me at the front door, that was his cue. “I’m just on my way home from the hospital,” he said. “An emergency.”
He wanted me to know the cross was burning, but he didn’t want to help me. I’d woken Allison up when I ran to the front door. I saw fear in her eyes, but I was just mad.
“It’s okay, honey,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” I went out to get the hose, and it occurred to me that maybe the cross was so small because it was a diversion. Something to draw me out so they could get me. But it was a fleeting thought—whoever did this was just a coward. I took the hose and held the nozzle with one hand like a gun. They’d used treated lumber, hoping it would burn a long time, I guess. Or maybe it’s just what they had handy.
It was probably someone who’d made hate calls, and they weren’t that smart. “Hi, this is Larry with the Klan,” one said, before saying, “Oh shoot,” and hanging up. Another time someone didn’t realize I had caller ID. “Harold, does your wife know you’re calling me at midnight?” It had become easy to laugh off the hate calls. I was relieved I could just stay in bed and not race to some hospital.
Enough water from the hose finally put out the flames, and I doused the area around the fire in case I missed a spark and then kicked the cross over with my foot. Without the fire, I was alone in the dark, the sun not yet peeping out. I looked up and saw Allison watching, a silhouette with the light behind her. I loved this house, but I knew the neighbors didn’t exactly love me, on this street where all the doctors lived, making calls on their car phones. A doctor at the hospital had hit on me, offering to come over for a cup of coffee some time.
“That’d be fine,” I said. “But I think all the doctors who live across the street will recognize you, and they’re going to start a rumor you have AIDS. That might cause a problem for you around town.”
I was sure the neighbors were all watching the early morning show in my front yard, and maybe the person who burned the cross was still watching too. What’s the fun in setting a fire if you don’t watch it burn?
When I saw Mitch that weekend, I told him about it, maybe thinking he would, oh, I don’t know, care. “They used lumber?” he asked, leaning back on the bed.
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s just weird,” he said. He seemed more annoyed they were wasting good processed wood than that they set it afire on his girlfriend’s lawn.
“Maybe the cross store was sold out,” I said. “Anyways . . .”
“Oh, hey,” he said, “Cotton Cordell is looking for people to make fishing lures.” Cotton had an office next to Mitch’s. “I was wondering if any of your guys would need some cash. They can just do it at home if they—”
“Uh, yes,” I said, sitting up. My guys couldn’t find work anyplace else. “Yes. Tell him yes.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, laughing at my enthusiasm. “I mean, if I knew I’d get this reaction, I’d have ’em work for me too.” Mitch had people putting together lamps for Wal-Mart. At his office, every person had a job: the putting-it-together part, the getting-it-in-boxes part, and the getting-it-out-the-door part. He also had people who drove trucks to Little Rock to deliver them. All those jobs . . .
“Mitch,” I said quietly. “Don’t say that if you don’t mean that.”
“I don’t say stuff I don’t mean,” he said. “I just need people that are gonna show up.”
“I will pick them up and drive them there if I have to.”
Mitch put a lot of my guys to work, paying them cash each and every day, because he knew they needed it. He always made it clear to them he didn’t give them work because they were sick, he just needed people who’d come back and know how to assemble, pack, and ship. If they needed a little extra money and asked for an advance, Mitch would always give it to them. They worked it off every time, right alongside the rough guys he also had at the office. These men, the ones who might have beat the hell out of my guys at the 7-11, became friends with them. Mitch told me they would bring stuff in to eat, and they would share it.
I brought Cotton’s parts for fishing lures around to the people who had a hard time leaving their homes. They were able to sit and put the little BB in each one, and glue it together. Sometimes I would bring someone to the house to divide up the job and spread the wealth. Neuropathy was a big side effect of the medicines, so someone who had lost feeling in their fingers couldn’t grip a BB, but they could glue. It was a short assembly line, but it was also a way to get them out of their loneliness. There were all kinds of lures, and some people hadn’t really fished, so I got to explain what each one was, so they’d have pride in it. A lure is a lure, if you ask me, but Cotton had a business, so he convinced a legion of customers that they needed all kinds. What lure you chose depended on the time of year, water clarity, and of course who you were fishing for. Were you after crappie or bass? The lures would be different colors, and the ball bearing was inside to rattle, because you want it to make a little noise. Make it say to the fish you were after, “Hey, come over here. Look, my fin’s broken. I’m not swimming like a normal fish, and I’m making noise so something’s wrong. Come eat me, come eat me.” It was just like dating.
All the Young Men Page 24
