“Happy birthday,” I said.
They all kind of perked up for a second, and I could tell there was news. Billy and Allison spoke over each other.
“Ms. Ingersoll . . .”
“Allie’s teacher . . .”
Allison grinned and let Billy take the spotlight.
“I have been asked to come speak to Allie’s class.”
“About HIV?”
“Well, I think I have other things to talk about, but yes. Life.”
She wanted him to come in the following Monday. It gave Billy a recharge for the week. His actions had been erratic, but he cared about two things: Allison and being the center of attention. This was a performance, and any time he got to do one he could perform on cue.
I checked with Ms. Ingersoll to make sure this wasn’t just something Allison had cooked up. I really liked her as a teacher. She was new to the school, high energy, and eager to talk about the whole world with Allison’s class, not just the one outside their window. She was the only person of color at St. John the Baptist Catholic School. She confirmed that she had asked Allison if Billy could come in and talk to the kids about AIDS.
“Gosh, I can’t believe you’re so open to talking about this,” I said.
“Fifth grade,” she said, trailing off. “This message is crucial.” Talking to her gave me hope. The deal was that they would talk about HIV on a fifth-grade level the kids could understand but without getting into any kind of sex talk.
The day of, Billy was already in performance mode as we entered the school, like it was a theater. There was an energy coming off of him that I had missed lately. He wore a collared shirt and sweater, one that Paul had just bought him for his birthday. He sat in a chair in the front of the room, while I stood in back with Ms. Ingersoll. There were a few empty desks. Some of the kids’ parents didn’t want him in the classroom, so they’d held their sons and daughters out that day.
“Does anyone here know someone with HIV?” Billy asked.
Allison’s hand shot up. I smiled and had to shake my head in wonder.
“Well, now you all do,” he said. “My name is Billy, and I have HIV. HIV is the virus that causes AIDS, which can make you really, really sick. So, show of hands, who here knows someone with HIV?”
The kids all raised their hands, some slower than others. Everyone looked around. Billy looked right at Allison and smiled. This was for her.
“Okay, so I’m going to leave it to the grown-ups to talk to you about how you get HIV, but I can tell how you can’t get HIV. You can’t get HIV by breathing the air around someone. And you can’t get it by giving someone a hug. We all need hugs.” He talked about how you can’t tell if someone has HIV just by looking at them, so the main thing was to be nice to everyone.
A boy in the back raised his hand. “Are you going to die?”
I remembered again why I am so selective in liking kids. I liked mine. That was it. But Billy smiled as if he’d been waiting for the question. The dying don’t mind talking about dying; it’s the living that can’t stand it.
“There is a song I love called ‘I Will Survive,’” he said. “Y’all know that song? I sing it, and I change the words to ‘We Will Survive,’” he said. “As long as we know how to love, we know we’re still alive. Love is really important for living. Now, how old are y’all? Thirty-six? Fifteen? What?”
Laughter and screams of “No” and “Ten!” filled the air. He was working that crowd.
“Oh, ten!” said Billy. “Good age. I remember ten. It was fun, but sometimes I felt lonely. Does anyone here ever feel lonely?”
No one said anything, but I sure nodded.
“I want you to remember,” said Billy, “that no matter how lonely you feel, there is always someone who wants to help. Sometimes it’s a stranger.”
He looked up and smiled at me. I wanted to look away, because I knew I was about to cry. But this time I allowed the tears to fall.
“Sometimes it’s just you,” he said. And he looked right at Allison. “If you’re ever lonely, you can be a friend to yourself and take care of yourself, just like you take care of a friend. You need to be as good to yourself as you would be to a friend. A best friend.”
I tried to picture a time when Billy wouldn’t be here, and I couldn’t.
Billy thanked the class for having him, and Ms. Ingersoll wiped her eyes before stepping to the front of the room to put an arm around him. “Let’s thank Allison’s friend Billy for coming in,” she said. The kids clapped, and Billy closed his eyes, drinking in the applause like Tinkerbell.
At pickup the next day, Allison had a huge bundle of construction-paper cards her classmates had made for Billy. We brought them right over to his house and sat down on either side of him.
“The reviews are in,” I joked, as Allison placed the pile on his lap. Kids had cut out Christmas trees and wreaths, pasted them onto the cards, and written personal messages inside. He opened each one, and we took turns reading them aloud.
“Dear Billy, I hope you don’t get sicker.” He paused, his voice catching just for a second. “And I hope you have a happy New Year. I like football, especially the 49ers and the quarterback Joe Montana. Love, Leonardo.”
“My name is Chris,” I read. “How are you feeling? I hope you feel better, I might come see you soon. Your friend, Chris.”
Two dozen messages of love like that. A girl had made a small envelope packet and glued it in the card. “Open this pouch for lots of joy,” she wrote. She’d cut out a dozen little red and white paper snowflakes. Billy gathered them in one hand, raised it high, and sprinkled joy down on the three of us.
Billy’s family came to visit him at Christmas. They had never met Paul or been to their home in the whole time they had been together. I popped in just for a second to bring some food by, but I left quickly. Billy’s mother was strong, someone who was used to being the most beautiful woman in the room. She looked like an aged Elizabeth Taylor: dark hair, with red lipstick, impeccable makeup, and no need to ever share a stage. She and her husband were educated, and she was very aware that she needed to present a certain prestige to the world by always looking expensive and keeping an immaculate home. I could see Billy learning the power of glamour at her knee. His sweetness came from his father, a meek, quiet man who was used to finding a corner to stand in, holding his white cowboy hat down in front of him. Billy had a younger brother he was devoted to and missed dearly, plus two sisters, one nice and one wicked.
Paul said Billy’s mother couldn’t hide her surprise at how nice their home was. Craning her head around to take everything in. “This is a regular house,” she said, meaning a house like hers. Nice dishes in the cabinet; no chains hanging from the ceiling.
The visit devolved quickly. As Billy sat, a shadow of who he had been, the family was loose in the house. Paul, a collector of beautiful things, could see the look of people shopping an estate sale. They got to picking things up to see the label beneath. “Oh, whose was this?” they asked. “And this. Who bought this?”
“Where’s his clothes?” the wicked sister asked. Billy had that full walk-in closet of expensive gowns and clothes that were luxurious even just for the aura he left on them. She walked in, seeming like a thief in the temple, as if clutching a golden key taken from the hand of her dying brother. That was too far for Paul, who politely cut the visit short.
“There was just no compassion at all,” said Paul, genuinely surprised.
I admired Paul’s ability to still be shocked.
Chapter Thirty-One
“Misty, I need a dress,” I said.
It was after a Saturday night show, and Miss Misty McCall was still in her beaded gown. She had done Cher’s “Save Up All Your Tears,” and I was glad she had gotten so many dollars. It’s always good to have someone in a good mood when you need a favor.
“What’s t
he occasion?”
“The Inaugural Ball,” I said, and we laughed together, the brown bangs of her wig shaking. Bill Clinton had invited me to attend the January 20, 1993, Arkansas ball at the DC Convention Center. “I was wondering if I could buy a gown from your drag closet. I have to pass with all these fancy people. And people who think they’re fancy.”
“I can help you,” she said. “Can you come by on Monday?”
“With bells on,” I said.
Misty lived out in the woods in a double-wide mobile home, and she had taken the wall out between two bedrooms to make her drag closet. All those loser dresses bought cheap from the fed-up dads of Miss Texas and Miss Arkansas hopefuls filled it. The place was like a showroom, with a top row devoted to wigs and hairpieces, tiaras set out on velvet cloth like crown jewels. Then there were all these dresses, separated not by color but by feel and theme. There was a gorgeous scent, one you couldn’t place, because it was a mix of all the perfumes worn with the gowns. I had walked into beauty.
“That’s the Cher wing,” I said, seeing a mix of Bob Mackie peekaboo gowns segueing into the leather and dark straps of her recent body of work.
“Yes,” she said, “and here are some showstoppers. What’s the look you’re going for?”
“Oh,” I said. “Sophisticated. Smart.” I thought this would be an opportunity to connect with other people involved in AIDS. “A high neck. Sleeves—I know it’ll be cold.”
“Hmm,” she said. She had me try on different looks, and I felt like Cinderella with her fairy godmother. Bippity, boppity, boo. Then I saw all these beaded gowns in neat piles on the floor.
“Why are they all on the floor?” I asked.
“You never hang a beaded gown,” Misty said, ever so proper. “Because it rips at the seams.” The weight of its beauty will tear it apart.
I was drawn to those, and she helped me into a beaded dress of such a pale salmon it was almost cream. It had a jewel neckline, and golden beaded designs that I first mistook for stars, then realized they were stargazer lilies. It was elegant and that perfect Southern word: appropriate.
“That’s it,” said Misty.
“It is, isn’t it?” I said, turning in the spotless three-way mirror. We hugged.
“How much would it be?” I asked.
She paused. I saw her doing the math of discounting it down for me. “Two hundred dollars?”
“That’s very generous, Misty.” This had to be a six-thousand-dollar gown.
“You’re very generous, Ruth.”
“I will make you proud, I swear.”
“Is Mitch taking you?”
“No,” I said, trying to hide my real disappointment with a joke. “I think he thinks if he puts on a tuxedo it’ll turn into a wedding.”
“I can’t believe that,” she said. “What a fool.”
“I know,” I said. “But I love him, so who’s the fool?”
President Clinton mentioned AIDS in his inaugural address, calling it a world crisis. It was a shot in the arm for me. I was proud that I had invested so much time in my letters to him through the years. How many men did he know only through the pages of my desperate letters. Now, I hoped, we would see change.
When I entered the ball that night, I immediately got flagged by a reporter. All the networks were doing live setups, trying to get a feel for the change in the air.
“Oh, oh, your dress,” said a newscaster about my age. “Here, turn around. Where did you get this dress?”
“I bought it from a drag queen for two hundred dollars. Miss Misty McCall—”
“Wait a minute, I don’t think we can say ‘drag queen’ on the air.”
She listened on her earpiece. “No, sorry, we can’t say ‘drag queen’ on the air, but can we get you live? Just go ahead and turn around for us.”
It was a magical night, and I came home with pictures to develop to show Misty. “I passed with all of them,” I told her. “W magazine asked me to pose for them! I was the best dressed there, thanks to you.”
Allison and I sent the president peony bulbs to remind him of Hot Springs. He wrote back a note, thanking us. “I’ve asked the gardener to plant them right outside the Oval Office. They bring back such good memories.”
I knew he had a photo of Ricky Ray in his office. Ricky was fifteen and was supposed to go to the inauguration but had died in December. He and his two younger brothers had hemophilia and contracted HIV from blood products before they were eight years old. Life magazine did an article on them, and it rang true for me, because it showed that these kids’ biggest problem wasn’t a disease, it was dealing with awful people. In 1986, their school in Arcadia, Florida, kicked them out. A group formed, Citizens Against AIDS—which sounds promising, but its sole goal was preventing the Ray boys from attending school.
The Ray family got a court order after a year of homeschooling, forcing the school to let the kids back in. Ricky was ten that first day back, and he got beat up by two kids at recess. He couldn’t fight back because it would violate the court order. By the end of the week, it got better, so the Ray kids were going to tough it out. So someone burned their house down. They fled to another town, and Citizens Against AIDS showed up to do an “informational session” on their first day at that school—about what a danger these children were.
Now, Ricky Ray was dead. He faced the same hate my guys did. If President Clinton saw him in a photo every day, I also wanted him to look out on those peonies and remember my guys too.
Later, when Misty was dying, Norman called me for help. “You’ve gotta come up here and see her,” he said. “We’ve gotta get some things figured out for her.” One of the sad truths was that Norman was a kingpin in the gay community, able to make miracles happen, but as a gay man, he had little power at a hospital. It astonished me that someone so powerful could be dismissed by a doctor or nurse.
I went up to Little Rock, and I knocked on the door of Misty’s room. Two men answered the door, but they wouldn’t let me in. I guess I looked like a church lady, and they didn’t know me. I knocked again. “Norman sent me,” I said.
Saying “Norman” worked like “open sesame.” They let me in but said I was wasting my time. “He hasn’t talked to anybody in five days.”
I went to Misty’s bed and saw that edema had made her arms and legs horribly swollen. “Rick, Rick, I’m here,” I said, using Misty’s given name. “It’s me.” The guys hovered, a look of “I told you so” all over their faces.
Then I said, “Misty, darling, it’s me. It’s Ruthie.”
Misty opened her eyes and started sobbing, but she didn’t have any tears because they were all collected in her arms and legs—that’s where the fluid was. She was gurgling because her lungs had filled up with fluid. I lifted one of her arms to put it around my neck, so she could hug me and I could hug her.
“I’m here now,” I said. “We’re going to get you more comfortable.”
I went out to the nurses’ station. “Your patient is smothering to death. Can you come in and suction?”
“We’re not gonna suction him,” said the nurse. “He’s dying. We’re not gonna touch him.”
“You’re not gonna let your patient drown to death, are you?”
“Well, we’re not gonna suction him. He has AIDS. It’s a waste of time.”
“I tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t you call the Suction Fairy and have her leave a suction kit laying around, and I’ll do the suction.” A nurse in the background heard me, and she left a kit out, right by Misty’s door.
I told Misty that I was going to suction her. “It’s going to be uncomfortable, but it will make it easier to breathe,” I said, draping a towel below her neck. I sent the two guys out, because I knew this would be too much for them to witness.
As I inserted the suction tube, I had a flashback to doing this for Daddy when I
was a little girl. I couldn’t believe how much I had to do at such a young age. The smell now was horrible, and I began to gag. The kind of gagging where you have tears in your eyes and you can’t talk because you’re going to throw up.
We took a break, and I hurried out of the room and into the hall to breathe. Misty’s friends saw me, and they burst into tears.
“Oh my God,” one said, “he’s dead.” I couldn’t talk for fear of vomiting, and I tried to wave him off, like, “No, he’s not dead.” I finally got where I was able to talk. “No, he’s not dead. I’m gagging from doing this.”
“Oh,” the other one said, so nonchalant. “Okay.”
I went back in to finish suctioning Misty, and when it was over, I did the same thing again, excusing myself to gag outside. And they did the same thing, shrieking he was dead. And I gave them this look with attitude, shaking my head.
“Oh,” said the nonchalant one. “Good.”
Now Misty could talk, though she still sounded like she was gurgling. But she wanted to talk to her mother. We called her and got the answering machine, and I left a message. And we called again later, and I left a message. And we called again later. And I thought, Well here’s the deal. She needs to know.
This time I put the phone up to Misty so she could leave the message. She begged her mother to come see her. She told her she was going to die.
I knew she was right. Misty died the next day. I called her mother again, knowing the number by heart from dialing it so much. I needed to get permission to cremate her. “You’ve got to call me back,” I said. “You don’t have to do anything, but you’ve got to sign the papers.”
When she finally called me back, she said she’d had to wait until her husband, Misty’s stepfather, had left. They had been home when her son called, and he wouldn’t let her pick up the phone. They both had to sit there listening to Misty beg on the answering machine.
All the Young Men Page 30
