All the Young Men

by Ruth Coker Burks

  “I don’t mean to embarrass you, and you don’t have to answer, but would you use these?”

  He felt one and laughed. “I’d just rather dip it in Weatherbeater paint.”

  I grew up in the country, and I knew how thick that paint went on. I had them sent back, and now that I had good kits, I asked all my guys where the big cruising areas were. “What, are you going to go there?” Billy asked. “Just hand out condoms?”

  “Why not?” I said. “Fish where they’re biting.”

  Boyle Park in Little Rock is an idyllic little area, near where I’d spent Christmas with those men who were living together and dying together in that house in the Hillcrest neighborhood. I’d been a couple times now, handing out the kits, so I had it down. I think Billy pictured me standing in the woods where the men met, like some kind of washroom attendant. “Would you like some lube, sir? See you tomorrow night.”

  No, this was a sacred space, and not mine. I wanted people to feel safe, and there were enough trespassers. The previous year, an Arkansas state senator, Vic Snyder, had introduced a bill to repeal the anti-gay law that made consensual sex between men punishable with up to a year in prison. He couldn’t even get it out of committee, and I knew there had been a number of stings with undercover cops at the cruising areas. An arrest could mean loss of employment, custody, and visitation rights—their whole lives.

  I would only allow myself to be in the parking lot. The men would always back their cars in, so they could keep an eye out for who was there and interesting, and also so they could race out if they needed to. They would see each other, one would walk into the wooded area, and one would follow him.

  Today there were a bunch of cars, and just as when you were fishing, you had to know when to get out so you could get the most people. I knew to go to the best-looking guy first, because that’s who most of them were waiting for to get out of the car.

  I click-clacked over on the blacktop in my heels and hose, right to the driver’s side. The guy looked at me. I smiled. “Can you just put the window down a little bit?” I said. I made an inch-measure with my long nails, painted a rose color.

  He did, and I dropped a kit in the window. I didn’t say a word, because I just wanted to be this little invisible person making deliveries, not ruining the mood. He looked at it, probably expecting a Bible verse. He smiled, perplexed, and I was on to the next car and the next and the next. If you pretend to know what you’re doing and that you’re supposed to be there, nobody asks any questions. Then I got back in my car and rolled out. The Lone Ranger. Who was that blond woman anyway?

  I had a sweet guy hanging around Norman’s office at Discovery. He was shocked that I was going to Boyle Park and other cruising areas alone and insisted that I let him go with me. He was sick and knew he was on the slide going down.

  “It doesn’t bother me,” I said.

  “No, I wanna go too,” he said, adjusting the glasses that were becoming too big for his thinning face.

  So, I let him, because I think he was just lonely. We’d meet in the park, and while we waited for prime time, we traded stories about our favorite drag queens, like we were comparing baseball card collections. I mentioned this one I loved, a Little Rock legend. She was wild, and I heard that she once went after a guy who’d superglued her makeup case shut right before a pageant.

  “I heard she shoed him!” I said. “Took her heel and hit him so hard with it that it left something like nail marks on his face.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I wonder what happened to that guy anyway,” I said.

  He lowered his glasses to show little pockmark scars on his temple. “It was me.” He could at least laugh about it now. He loved giving out the kits, so it was odd one twilight when he didn’t show up to meet me at Boyle Park. I figured he got busy.

  The next day Norman told me our friend was dead. He’d picked up two guys the night before at a bar. Big guys, and he took them back to his house. They beat him to death with a hammer, and then said they’d panicked because “this homosexual” picked them up, and they had to beat him off to protect themselves. These giant men, and this sweet, precious guy who said he wanted to protect me. The talk was, “Well, he was a faggot, and they didn’t know. Good Christian men!” Good Christian men indeed.

  A call from St. Joe’s was never good, but at least Allison liked the food there. The head chef, James, was a friend from school, and he would look after her for me. Give her a nice table and make her feel special. I could take her and act like it was a treat.

  They had called me about a new patient and neglected to tell me that he spoke no English. Angel was a handsome guy who’d done who knows what while making it to Hot Springs from Mexico. There was work here, usually at the racetrack between November and April, or tree planting, which is what Angel was doing.

  They’d diagnosed him with AIDS but couldn’t explain it to him. They had him in this big isolation room, and he looked like he was going to kill somebody, just out of fear. I turned and left, running over to the racetrack to ask my friend Bob Holthus if he had a horse groomer who spoke Spanish and would be willing to come translate. Bob was the all-time winningest trainer at Oaklawn Park, and I knew he’d have somebody. He just pointed to a guy, gestured to me, and said to him, “Go.”

  We went back over to St. Joe’s, and we were able to explain everything to Angel. My interpreter was more upset than Angel was, but he also explained that Angel’s main worry was being deported. Eventually, I was able to take Angel home to the rooming house he shared with a dozen other men. It was a place from back in the 1930s, with one bathroom down a hall. It was designed to have only men staying there, because back then women weren’t supposed to travel, and if they did, they were not considered the kind of women people wanted to help. I would end up with two other men from that house, Carlos and Antonio.

  Angel was so hard to pin down, constantly playing a disappearing act on me. His instinct, whenever he was in danger, was to move. And he didn’t have a car, so he just walked everywhere. I would be driving around, and I’d see him completely drunk, and when I slowed down I would see he was sick. Whenever I picked him up, I would end up rushing him to the ER, and we’d be there waiting for the doctor as he drunkenly sang Spanish love songs to me—“Sabor a Mí,” at the top of his lungs. He would get admitted and then leave as soon as I went home. Later, through a translator, he would say it was my fault for leaving him alone.

  I’d had it, and one time I just took his clothes home with me so he wouldn’t be able to leave the hospital. I planned to wash them for him but also to leave him stranded so he could finish a course of antibiotics. Sure enough, they called.

  “Did you take Angel home?”

  I glanced at his clothes, a neat pile in a bag on the kitchen chair. “No,” I said.

  “Well, he’s not here, and his IV bag is gone too.”

  “Oh Lord,” I said. “Okay, I’ll look.”

  I went to the rooming house, and there he was in his hospital gown, with his IV bag hanging up on a nail above his bed, empty.

  “You are Houdini,” I said. “Nude-ini.”

  He gave me a look. “Loco,” I said. And he smiled. I loved him.

  Angel was in again soon enough, this time with systemic herpes, painful sores like fever blisters all over his body. I was at St. Joe’s visiting him, when we needed to sign some papers. We needed a witness, and God sent First United’s new preacher, walking the halls with his chest puffed out, trying to look important. He was a pompous man who hated me. It wasn’t a suspicion. A friend told me I had been discussed at Rotary. “Boy, the new pastor sure doesn’t like you,” he said.

  Now I saw my chance. “Oh, wonderful,” I said, “can you help me with something?”

  He frowned.

  “Just come in, I need you to witness something.”

  “Can’t a nurse do it?” h
e said, visibly repelled by Angel and all his sores.

  “No, no, we need someone important, like you. This won’t take a second. Just need you to sign something saying you were here when he signed. I promise you won’t have to touch anybody, just stand by the bed here.”

  I paused: this was the moment. “Uh, we just need a pen.” The preacher had this Montblanc pen he was so proud of. He kept it sticking out of a pocket so you could see it. In case you ever wanted to write a check, I guess. “Oh,” I said, pointing to the pen, its black and gold luster shining under the harsh fluorescence of the hospital lights. He reflexively covered it with his hand.

  “Don’t they have pens out there?” he asked, gesturing to the nurses’ station. I gave him a look of confusion. Why ever would we need a pen when he had one for us to borrow? He hesitated and finally handed it to me. I think it was bad enough to him that I was going to touch the Montblanc.

  And I handed it to Angel.

  “Here, Angel, just sign here,” I said. The preacher stared at this modern-day leper touching his precious pen. He took it back, though he looked like he didn’t want to. The pen was too valuable to him to sacrifice. He looked at me, hatred in his eyes.

  He left, and thinking of lepers made me remember the one Jesus meets in Mark’s Gospel. Jesus helps him but is chicken about it. He sends the guy off, saying, “See that you tell no one.” Well, the leper tells everyone he sees. Soon Jesus is no longer welcome in any towns, “but stayed outside in lonely places. Yet the people still came to him from everywhere.”

  Angel and I smiled at each other, together in our lonely place.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I sat with Tim and Jim in their high-rise. Allison was on the floor in front of Tim. He was absently running his fingers through her long red hair. It was late March, and Tim and Jim had each been sick again with lung stuff. The last time he was in the hospital, Jim said he didn’t want to do it anymore. He got me to help him sign a DNR, a “do not resuscitate” order. “I don’t want any heroic measures,” he said, using a phrase he’d probably learned on TV.

  “I understand,” I’d said then, knowing this was an escalation for Tim and Jim. Neither wanted to be the one left to grieve the other. They had a dream that they would die together, as close in death as they were in life.

  “We’ll be cremated,” said Jim, “and then you can put us up in the urn together.”

  Tim piped up. “But you can also sprinkle us here and there. Take us to the park.”

  “Where you pick up people,” I said.

  “Exactly,” said Tim.

  “That’d be amazing,” agreed Jim.

  There was something I had to bring up, and I had to do it in front of Allison so it was real. “You know, when Allison’s daddy died, we were able to get social security. It’s what’s saved us.” I looked right at Tim but with gentle eyes.

  I pictured his daughter and knew he was doing the same as he finger-combed Allison’s hair. She was about Allison’s age, close to nine. I pictured her blond like her daddy.

  Tim shook his head, no.

  “Would you ever let me talk to her mother?” I asked. “Just to let her know when she needs to know.”

  “She’s better off poor and not knowing what her daddy died of,” Tim said.

  “I don’t think that’s true,” I said.

  “No,” he said, flinty and final. “End of story.”

  I nodded. But I admit I tried again in the next couple of weeks. They were getting frailer, shedding weight and hair as the horse race toward death intensified. He refused to tell me how to reach out to them.

  Tim went in to the hospital at the end of the first week of April, and I knew he wasn’t coming out. It was in his dark eyes. They always stood out against the lightness of his hair, but now they seemed darker. In his hospital bed, he continually bent his wrists and elbows inward, his limbs a collection of hinges as he curled himself into new positions to try to get comfortable. I began to see death coming to call.

  Jim was home and talked about coming to see Tim, but he was too weak. Not sick enough to get admitted but too sick to visit.

  I felt torn about who to be with, but come April 10, it was clear Tim had hours. He was three days shy of turning thirty-two, and I knew he wouldn’t make it. His jaw was becoming slack, his breathing slowing. We were downstairs at the hospital in a quiet room. I left only to call Jim, who cried but understood he couldn’t make it to AMI hospital to say goodbye.

  “We’ll be with him,” I assured Jim. “I promise you.” Allison and I sat with Tim as the sun went down, and we talked to him with a light hand on his forehead or on his arm.

  Meanwhile, over at the eleventh floor of Mountain View Heights, Jim Kelly, the beloved of Tim Gentry, made a decision. He swallowed every painkiller he and Tim had stored up, washing them down with gulps of whiskey. I see him standing at the window, taking one last look at the view they had come to love. The moon, full but for a small slice of shadow, cast light across the mountain.

  As his body succumbed to the overdose, Jim fell backwards into the glass table we had picked up one afternoon at a dumpster when they were making the apartment a home. The force of him falling shattered the glass of the table. The shards cut into him.

  The sound scared his next-door neighbor, an elderly woman who adored Tim and Jim. She went out, and a male older neighbor on their other side came out, to see what the fuss was. From the shared balcony, they could see in. She screamed, and he called 911.

  The ambulance came and took Jim, resuscitating him and keeping him alive. Any DNR he had on file at the hospital didn’t matter.

  A nurse came to Tim’s door. “They sent me down here,” she said. “Uh, the other guy is here. ICU. Bad.”

  “Jim?” I said. “How?” I didn’t even think of an ambulance. I had been the ambulance for so many people that it didn’t occur to me there was another way that Jim could get here. Allison and I got in the elevator to the second floor. We could see Jim through the glass, in the small ICU, skeletal and bloody. He was just feet from us, passed out, with the tube still down his throat from his stomach being pumped.

  And then he woke up.

  Jim was a demon, furious that he was still here on this earth. He tried to sit up, then pulled at the tube down his throat, ripping it out and tearing one of his vocal cords in the process. Choking on blood, he tried to yell but could make only guttural, slurry screams of desolation.

  I grabbed Allison and pulled her face to my chest to hide her. She pulled away. “I’m going back to Tim,” she said, already taking off for the elevator.

  I looked back at Jim, who met my eye briefly in hysteria. I never saw anything like that pain. I think they sedated him, or the fury left his body spent. He collapsed. I stayed for some time, then worried Tim would die while Allison was alone with him. It was too much. I went back downstairs, and we each held Tim’s hands.

  Tim died that night, April 10.

  I visited Jim upstairs. His body was breaking down now that his spirit was gone. He remained angry, and I knew his soul would not rest until he left us. They wanted to go together but not like this. I couldn’t be mad at the old neighbors who had saved him. They loved them so much, and they didn’t understand he was ready.

  It was too late for Jim anyway. He died two days after Tim, on April 12. Allison was heartbroken but tried not to show it. Even at her age, she just kept moving. Their pain was over, and if it meant hers had begun, then at least she knew they were at peace.

  The work of caring for the living switched over to the obligations I felt to them in death. I found homes for Furball and her hamster babies, but Nelly, their cocker spaniel, was harder. She wasn’t a puppy. I was at the bank, and something told me to tell a lady who worked there as a teller. I just knew I could drop little hints. “Oh, I’ve got to give away the dog,” I said. “It’s heartbreaking.”
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  “Well,” she said slowly, “what kind is it?”

  “A cocker spaniel,” I said. “A girl. Most beautiful dog I’ve ever seen.”

  She asked a bunch of questions about the dog’s health and her temperament, but I knew she was stalling. Then she got to it.

  “Is there any possible way to get AIDS from a dog?”

  “No,” I said. “That one I know. No.”

  “Did the dog lick them?” she asked. “What if the dog licks me?”

  I assured her, but what really sold it was me bringing Nelly by the bank at closing time. She came out, and Nelly nuzzled her. I looked up at what I was sure was Tim and Jim directing her. “You look like a Nelly,” she said.

  “I think it’s meant to be,” I said. I had the dog bed in the trunk, along with all the food and treats she had—just in case this worked out. When she saw me get Tim and Jim’s stuff out, she hesitated. She remembered they had AIDS, and I think she worried about what she was doing. There was a line in her mind, and she wondered if she could cross it. But she did, and I was so relieved.

  I had all of Tim and Jim’s forms ready, so arranging for the cremation procedure was fine. I went to Kimbo at Dryden Pottery, and asked if he could make me a special urn. By then he, of all people, knew what I was doing, this man who had given me chipped cookie jars for years.

  “I would need a tall one,” I said, and explained that Tim and Jim wanted to be commingled and know that they were going to be completely together for eternity. I offered to pay at least something, but Kimbo said it would be an honor. I started to tear up.

  His father came out, “Don’t you do that,” he yelled at Kimbo. “You give her a broken one.”