“No,” said Kimbo. He lowered his head, his white eyelashes blinking at me. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” I said, managing to just cry one tear before stopping myself with a nod. “They were really special.”
They were special. Family to me, and so I decided to put their obituary in the paper. I listed their names, wrote how they were devoted to each other. I said they were going to be buried at Files, but I didn’t dare write what they died of. I just thought it would open a can of worms.
I put their ashes in the urn Kimbo made for them, commingling them. It felt sacred to me, and I had to fulfill the promise I made to set aside some ashes to scatter around their favorite places. I knew they’d want to be close to Nelly, so we went to the house of the bank teller and stood on a rock to pour some over the side of her back fence. Allison whispered, “Your daddies are here, Nelly.”
When the obituary ran, I got a call from a woman I knew who had family buried at Files too. “I want to know who you’re burying in the cemetery,” she said. “It’s only for our families.”
“One’s my brother,” I said.
“You don’t have a brother.”
“Well, he’s my cousin. I’m sorry.”
“I wanna know what you’re doing.”
“They’re family, what am I supposed to do?”
“They’re not some of them people that you’re dealing with, are they?”
“Yes, they had AIDS.”
“Well, my God, why you gonna bury them in that cemetery?”
“Well, I knew that with your husband being a doctor, and you being so kind and everything,” I said, “I just knew it wouldn’t matter.”
She paused a long time. “Well, just this one time.”
She wasn’t the only one who heard, I guess. The night before we were set to bury them, I awoke to another cross burning on my lawn. It was lumber again, probably the same people who set the first one. Back then, I’d been determined to show they couldn’t get to me, but this time I was really mad.
I could see all the lights on in my neighbors’ houses as I doused the flames with the hose. When it was out, I saw a light go out like the show was over. It wasn’t.
“Fine!” I screamed to the people, all of them watching me, as I felt five years’ worth of rage, yelling at whatever version of the KKK I had burning crosses in my yard. “Fine!” I said again to them, marching to my front door. “You tell me what I am supposed to do!” I grabbed the tall urn containing what was left of sweet Tim and Jim. “Are you going to help me? Y’all come and get them.” I placed the urn on the chair on the porch and turned the porch light on. “You can be in charge of them, if you think what I am doing is wrong. But you’re not gonna scare me. And you’re not gonna do anything to me or my daughter. So you may as well quit wasting your time.”
I left the porch light on all night, Tim and Jim there in their urn for all to see. In the morning, I knew I would find them right where I left them. All the doctors had to see them as they passed by on their way to early rounds at the hospital. I took them inside, cradling them one last time.
We had a small service at Hot Springs Funeral Home. Tim and Jim didn’t have much to do with the guys at Our House, so I didn’t expect many people. I’d left a note on the announcements board in the lobby of their high-rise, just in case anyone wanted to come.
Allison and I were upstairs at the funeral home when the funeral director came in. “The rest of the family is downstairs,” he said.
“Is there another burial here?” I asked. “Another family?”
“No, his family,” he said. “James’s.”
“Jim? There isn’t any family at all.”
“Well, they’re here.”
We walked downstairs to find about eleven people with three teeth between them. Jim’s brothers and sisters. How long had I been caring for Jim, and he had family living thirty minutes away, still in Perryville? It could have been a million miles away.
They’d brought a U-Haul down. “We came to get their stuff,” said one. He hadn’t bothered to bathe, but he did have a clean shirt on. He did do that.
What stuff? I thought. But I was suddenly panicked. I thought I was the only one, figuring he was an orphan. I needed their okay that he was cremated.
“Of course, I can give you the key to his apartment,” I said. “There’s just one thing I need from you.”
I got a signature, but I warned them. “Jim was a simple guy,” I said. “He didn’t have a lot of stuff.”
“You mean to tell me we wasted all that gas to come down here to not get a damn thing he’s got?”
“My condolences on the loss of your brother,” I said, handing them the key.
Allison and I drove up the hill to Files to the grave site. I didn’t try to get a preacher to come, because I didn’t want Tim and Jim to face one last indignity of being told no. It was just me and Allison, like it had been in so many twilight hours. Only today we were putting these souls to rest in broad daylight.
And then I saw them. Three cars, then four, coming up slowly. They parked. And out came a caravan of little old ladies. The women who lived in Tim and Jim’s building, who had come to care for them in their time together, who had fallen in love with them just like I had.
There was a long line of them, walking slowly on the road to the entrance of Files. At the front was a developmentally disabled boy, about thirteen years old, who I recognized. He lived at the high-rise with his grandmother, and she had grown especially close to Tim and Jim. He walked kind of stooped over, in a white T-shirt and blue jeans. He held a large coffee can reverently, a gallon-size container they had covered in countless scraps of used aluminum foil to make a pretty covering. The shiny vase was filled with tiny little flowers that danced with every unsteady step he took. They were hot pink and yellow and blue—absolutely stunning.
This was the Hot Springs I loved. The one where you never went someplace unless you brought something to offer. They were going to the funeral, and they didn’t have any money. But they knew of a field of wildflowers, and I have always wondered where they found that field, because we don’t have a lot of those in Arkansas. They had gone that morning, and I can see them out in this field, picking flowers and putting them in that coffee can they’d covered in lightly used foil. It was the foil they’d balled up and then put in a cabinet, and when they needed it, they unwrapped it, so it was crinkled. Because you don’t waste new aluminum foil. These women had lived through the Depression, and the Depression had never really ended in Arkansas. They must have had to search for all those scraps, probably gathered from other women at the high-rise. “Do you know those guys? Those two on the eleventh floor?” Gathering enough to make it nice.
I watched those wildflowers dancing around inside that can. They were alive, celebrating Tim and Jim. I took the bouquet I’d brought and quietly put it by my father and Jimmy. I wanted these gifted flowers to stand alone in tribute. Every flower that these people picked to show Tim and Jim how much they were loved and would be missed. They said that they sang gospel hymns while picking the flowers, lifting their souls to heaven. I asked if we could sing one together.
“Do you know ‘It Is Well with My Soul’?” I asked. It was written by a man who lost his entire family except for his wife when he sent them ahead on a trip across the Atlantic. The ship sank, and she sent him a telegram: “Saved alone . . .” The song had brought me comfort these years, and when the music director selected it at First United, I thought it was God placing a hand of reassurance on my shoulder. The hope and duty of survival.
They started to sing, and I joined in. I pulled Allison close to me. It wasn’t a religious moment. It was just a hymn of comfort. Tim and Jim were free now, dancing like those wildflowers in the light, caressing breeze of April.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I walked in to Bil
ly and Paul’s house to find Allison standing in their living room, waving at an imaginary audience. She was wearing one of Billy’s tiaras and holding an imaginary bouquet. I’d let myself in—a habit from taking care of people in a town of unlocked doors—so they didn’t see me at first.
“One long, two short,” said Billy. “One long, two short.”
I watched for a few seconds, my brand-new ten-year-old looking so big.
“That’s it,” said Paul. “You’re doing it.” Allison beamed.
I put my purse down, and the thunk of its weight made them turn. “They’re teaching me the Miss America wave,” said Allison. She did it for me, slower than she had been. “It’s one long wave, then two little ones, over and over.”
“She’s a natural,” said Billy.
“Better than a lot of the new queens coming in,” said Paul.
“Oh, show her the Queen’s wave,” said Billy. “The royal one.”
Allison thought a moment, changed her carriage a bit, then began to wave with smaller movements.
“Elbow, elbow, wrist, wrist,” Billy said.
“Elbow, elbow, wrist, wrist,” she repeated.
I sat down next to Billy to join in admiring the royal procession. “Queen of the fourth grade,” I said.
At the mention of school, I could see Allison deflate. It was June, so it would be over soon. When I asked her about friends or who she sat with at lunch, she changed the subject. There had been an opening on the school board, so I ran and got on. I hoped it would help me keep an eye on bullying, but it became an extension of my AIDS work as well. There was this awful woman on there whose daughter got diabetes, so we had to teach the kids what to do if her daughter passed out on the playground, though that had never actually happened.
I said, “Well, we also have to start teaching them about how you do and don’t get HIV,” I said. It was a Catholic school, so I guess she felt she had the right to jump all over me and say that what I proposed was filthy and nasty.
“You don’t know,” I said, “how many of these kids are gonna be gay when they grow up.” That didn’t go over well, no matter how true it was. The parents accused me of pushing an agenda, but the nuns at the school loved me. Maybe it was because I helped them make their fundraising goals at the annual bazaar, but also the principal, Sister Noeline Banks, was just a good person. She, along with a third grade teacher, Sister Cheryl, appreciated what I was doing for people with HIV and listened to my concerns about what Allison was going through at school. Yes, I was the only single mother at that school, and I had gay men and lesbians picking up my kid, like today, when Billy showed up. But Sister Noeline and Sister Cheryl waved at every one of them.
Paul got up to go to work, and I told Billy I had to drive up to Mount Ida to drop off my mortgage check. I liked to bring it right to the lady I bought the house from instead of mailing it, because I could visit with her and also take along someone who looked like they needed an airing. There is something about being in a car with the world hurtling by that helped people open up. I could always drive as fast as I wanted and not worry about cops, at least around Hot Springs. They figured if I was speeding I had someone with AIDS, and they wanted no part of that.
“I’m just going up to Mount Ida,” I would say to my guys. “Going out on the loop.” Billy called the trips, “Going up the country.” With him, I’d play the radio full volume, and we all sang along or talked about whatever late-night movie he’d watched that week.
That time it was High Noon, and he had a lot to say about hiding the light of Grace Kelly’s blond hair under the bushel of a bonnet. But he serenaded us with the movie’s theme. “Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’, on this our wedding day,” he sang. On a long stretch of two-way, I closed my eyes just for a second, so I would remember the moment.
Maybe I knew things were about to change. My ability to predict the time of death had somehow lengthened to another kind of mourning. Not long after that ride, Billy drove up to my house to visit me.
“When I look, I see spots everywhere,” he said. “They’re black.”
I knew what it was. Cytomegalovirus retinitis. The CMV that would slowly take his vision like a curtain closing across his eyes. I got him an appointment in Little Rock right away. They prescribed a medication and told him he could never drive again. It was one more thing he was losing.
And then, slowly, it was his mind. Billy regressed once he started the eye medicine, but it was unclear to us whether it was a side effect or just the beginning of AIDS-related dementia. He became childlike quickly, talking as if he were a little boy. He had always been one to express wonder and excitement about things, so it was hard to tell at first.
I would take him out with Allison, and she bonded with Billy even more as she got used to him having the mindset of someone her age. I adapted, taking them to zoos and kid-focused performances. Places we could leave if he got restless.
At home he lived in a blue bathrobe, worn and soft, somebody’s grandfather’s robe. And striped pajamas with brown corduroy house slippers. He let the robe billow as he walked, ever the performer. He woke up one morning and announced to Paul that he had to have a cowboy outfit. “I’m a cowboy,” he told him. “I need my cowboy boots.” It was irrational, but Paul was already used to doing anything for Billy. So, if he wanted to wear a cowboy costume, let him.
Then it was very apparent something was wrong. One day Allison and I went over and we couldn’t find him. We knew he was home, because he had just called us. We finally found him in a closet with the door closed, a bare light bulb on over his head. He was wearing a beautiful pair of sunglasses. “I’m getting a suntan,” he said. Another time he decided their dog, Pepper, had fleas and tried to put her in the washing machine. He was stopped just as he emptied an entire bottle of shampoo over her and before he closed the lid to turn it on.
It was clear Billy could not be left alone, for fear that he would hurt himself or wander off, disappear like a wisp. Paul had taken additional work to care for Billy, so Paul and I arranged that Billy always have at least one person, preferably two, around. That wasn’t hard, what with Billy being so popular and all the people Paul had helped out at one time or another anxious to return a favor. Billy’s lesbian fans came over, and it was funny because they were the most anxious about his pill schedule. They were these cool girls in their twenties who’d never taken medicine and didn’t have parents old enough to be giving them medicine. No matter how many times I explained it, they were scared they would give him the wrong dose, and they worried that, if Billy took his AZT five minutes earlier than he was supposed to, he would die.
These women and I got a better sense of each other as we cared for Billy. The lesbians who went to Discovery in Little Rock had always been a little standoffish with me. Norman had set aside a bar that was just for them, and it was the first space that they didn’t have to share with men. And then a straight girl shows up talking about AIDS and dental dams.
“We thought you were a fag hag,” said one. “Looking for a gay guy to do your hair and be your friend and dress you up like a doll. You know, all that garbage.”
“They’re giving out makeovers?” I said with a laugh. “Man, have I been missing out.”
We learned from each other as we kept a watch on Billy. The lesbians taught me about the start of deer season in November, and how the society women who were “straight” in daylight rushed to the gay bar in Little Rock as soon as their husbands went off to deer camp. “The women come over, and they are just rabid,” said one. “Rabid!”
In return, I taught them how to care for their brothers who were dying. These women stepped up to take care of Billy and all the others who were becoming sick. Billy was just the beginning at Our House.
The queens of course came around, and being with Billy seemed to give everybody a chance to work out their sorrows over people they had let slip away—t
he ones who’d left Hot Springs and hid as they died alone. Holding Billy’s hand couldn’t undo that loss, but it was a way for them to be present. To be a witness.
Despite his regression, Billy enjoyed his life. He never missed a drag performance, and when he was onstage he was his old self. He could play the “character” of Billy again, and people adored it. To his fans at Our House, he was a symbol that having HIV or AIDS did not mean that you had to go hide in exile. You could stay in the game, be social, snatch trophies and live. The literature about HIV that I read and shared, by gay men for gay men, emphasized a focus on living with HIV, rather than on dying. But that was all theoretical, just words, until they could see it in practice.
Paul talked to Billy’s family, but they would not come down to see him. Paul’s own mother, Georgeanna, would visit on random Sundays.
The first time she saw Billy in his new state, Paul told her, “His mother won’t come down.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “I’ll hug him. I’ll love on him.”
She would sit with Billy on the couch, and he would be calm in her arms. His nervous energy quieted. She was not an overbearing person, and I saw so much of Paul in her. Never one to ask, “What do you need? Are you okay today?” Just simply there. Steadfast.
As he got weaker, Billy began to spout more of the lines he’d memorized from the old movies he loved, those with his favorite, Bette Davis. He would pick a role and just be that for the day. Bette saying, “Cuuute,” just like she did in The Cabin in the Cotton. “I’d like to kiss you, but I just washed my hair.” Paul told me how he’d taken Billy in to Our House when Twyman was sitting there, scowling. Billy took a few puffs on his cigarette and looked around. “What a dump,” he said. Twyman had just stared at him, probably not knowing he was looking at Bette Davis in Beyond the Forest.
As the summer began to fade to autumn, Billy’s episodes changed and became dangerous. He was afraid of hurting himself or someone else, and we learned that he could feel these episodes coming on. Doctors Hospital in Little Rock was a good hospital that had a lockdown unit. It was suggested as an option to him, and he took it. He said they were kind, and when he felt the violence coming, either against himself or others, he would ask to be taken there. It was an hour’s drive, and he was scared to even be in the car with me alone, fearful that he would do something to drive us off the road or hurt me. He asked me to restrain him, tying his hands behind his back, and it broke my heart to do it. I began carrying silk medical tape in my purse to tie his hands. Then that too became routine. He would call me over, frantic, and meet me with his hands behind his back. “I need to go to Little Rock.”
All the Young Men Page 28
