All the Young Men

by Ruth Coker Burks

  “I am so sorry,” I said. I told her that we were having a graveside ceremony at Files.

  “Can I come?” she asked.

  “Well, certainly,” I said. People knew she hadn’t gone to see Misty, and I worried about how they might treat her. Misty’s mother parked across the street from Files Cemetery and came out of the car along with Misty’s sister. I went over to greet them and saw the crosses hanging from their necks. When people saw Misty’s sister, even if they thought the family had something coming to them, it evaporated in an instant—because the sister looked exactly like Misty in drag. Exactly. Everyone was so kind and gracious to them, because it was like Misty was there with them again.

  We buried Misty with a beautiful headstone Norman paid for. Misty may have been a Little Rock queen, but Hot Springs welcomed her with an open heart.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  I drove Angel to Files Cemetery on a beautiful February afternoon. It was strangely warm for being around Valentine’s Day, the temperature up in the sixties. He was calm in the car, not singing to me like usual. He had been sick again, this time with spinal meningitis that would have gone undiagnosed if I hadn’t insisted that he was worth giving a spinal tap to.

  It had taken a lot out of him, and I knew his end was coming. I had found a nursing home that would take him, and I think we both knew that he would not leave there. I wanted him to be able to choose where he would go in Files when it came time to bury him.

  I carried my Spanish dictionary with me as we entered the gate, but we didn’t need words. He walked everywhere, sometimes standing still for a moment and looking around. Then he’d move again. I sometimes told him the names of people as he approached them. Midway through the cemetery he stopped. He swiveled his whole body in place, taking in the view from that exact point.

  “Aquí,” he said.

  “Aquí,” I said. “Okay. Gracias.”

  He took my hand, and we walked to the car. He sighed, and I drove him back to the nursing home. Of all my guys, it was hardest to imagine him staying in one place, even in death. Angel remained my slippery guy, always keeping me guessing. Even in the nursing home, he managed to confound me. One day I didn’t visit him at the usual time—there was always some emergency—and he got angry.

  “He’s up on the roof,” said one of the administrators once he got a hold of me. “Climbed a ladder, and now he’s threatening to jump.”

  “It’s one story,” I said.

  “Well, he’s sayin’ he’s gonna jump,” he said. “Can you get over here?”

  I did, and Angel was up there, yelling at me in Spanish. I found someone who worked at the home who spoke Spanish. I asked him to apologize to Angel for me and to say I got the point, so please come down.

  When Angel refused, I got mad. “Hold on, one second,” I said. I went back in to borrow the phone to call my friend Dub at Hot Springs Funeral Home.

  “Can you do me a big favor and come by the nursing home?”

  “Well, yeah,” he said, and then got formal. “You have someone who needs—”

  “No, nobody’s dead.” I said. “But I need you to drive the hearse, okay?”

  I went back out to Angel and the interpreter. “Okay, Angel, go ahead and jump,” I said. The interpreter looked at me like I was crazy. “No, you say it exactly how I say it, please. Angel, it’s not nice what you’re doing, but sure, jump. One story isn’t gonna kill you.”

  Angel was shocked and looked at the interpreter, who nodded and shrugged, as if to say, “Yeah, that’s what this crazy woman is saying.” This went on for a while, Angel and me bluffing each other, and then Dub pulled in to the parking lot in the empty hearse.

  “Okay, jump now, the hearse is here. I don’t know how long we have it for.” Now Angel and the translator were both shocked. “Or maybe you’ll break your neck and end up in there paralyzed in a bed and not be able to move. I don’t know.”

  Dub got out to look at the scene, and I yelled to him, “Just a second, he’s deciding.” Angel gave me an angry look, then his face dissolved into a grin and then a smile. He laughed, his scattershot cackle, and gave me a look that told me I won.

  He started to come down the ladder, and I gave Dub a wave of thanks before I hugged Angel. Over his shoulder I said to the interpreter, “Please tell him not to try to out-bluff me ever again.”

  Angel hung on, but I knew how close he was to dying because his love song became just a whisper. Angel, my escape artist, became weaker, until he finally slipped away from me in the night. They called me to say he was gone. “It’s just like you to leave when I’m not looking,” I said, when I went to care for his body.

  We buried him where he asked me to. And soon after, Antonio joined him there and then Carlos. They’d asked to be buried with Angel, trusting he would never have settled in one spot if it wasn’t the best choice.

  Billy’s doctor prescribed pulmonary treatments to prevent him from getting pneumocystis pneumonia, but the medical center wouldn’t let him do it on-site. They acted like they were doing him a favor, doing the treatments at his home with a nurse, but it seemed clear they didn’t want someone with AIDS hanging around the office for three hours.

  A breathing therapist came to the house, gloved up in a space suit, like the old days. She made it clear to Paul that she was the supervisor of this whole group that did this, and that none of the other nurses would come. So, as the boss, she had to do this. She sat for three hours on the edge of her seat, afraid to touch anything at all. The treatment was brutal; it involved filling his lungs with medicine and then him coughing his guts up for another two hours afterward.

  She made no conversation while it was going on, offered no words of compassion. It was hard enough for Billy, but to have someone there who treated him like he was toxic made it that much worse.

  Paul, ever the host, greeted her twice a week. “Would you like some coffee?”

  “No.”

  Second week: “Would you like some coffee?”

  “No.”

  Third week: “Would you like some coffee?”

  She paused. “Yeah, yeah, I would. I would like some coffee.”

  Paul reenacted the moment for me at the bar. The way she surprised herself. “You could see it going through her mind like, ‘I probably shouldn’t. I’ll probably get AIDS. But I want some coffee.’”

  Paul said it progressed from there, her care of Billy going from, “Here, stick this in your mouth,” to touching his back and saying, “It’ll be okay.” For me, that should have been the bare minimum, but they were starving for kindness.

  In the springtime, I began to prepare Paul for what was to come. I gave him information as he needed it about what to expect. Billy now needed round-the-clock help, I told him, and it would come from friends, and Paul should accept their help.

  “Now you’ll have these groups of people,” I said, “that will come and help you, and it will be surprising who it is. And you’ll also have sightseers.”

  “Well, what’s sightseers?” he asked.

  “Those are people who just wanna come over and see what’s going on. Then you’ll have the people that you really thought would be by your side and really help you. Well, some of them will be gone. That’s okay, because I know you will be supported.”

  There were some close friends who couldn’t handle it, so I was glad I’d warned Paul. But there were plenty of people who came and stayed nights with Billy while Paul worked at the bar. So many men and women came and helped, but Billy had his favorites. One was Pancho, a Mexican man from El Paso. Paul and Billy hadn’t known him that well, but Pancho and Billy discovered that they both knew a lot of old gospel songs, like “In the Garden.” They would sit for hours, singing softly and reverently.

  Of all the caregivers, Dusty seemed the most dependable. People had been mean to Dusty years before, when he first came to tow
n, but Paul had taken him under his wing and got him started in drag. He had done quite well for himself, but the general consensus was that Dusty was in love with Paul. Paul was the only one who didn’t see it. Paul was tired and just happy someone was coming over to cook that night. When the washer was broken and Dusty took their laundry to have it cleaned, Paul thought it was an act of kindness. Billy thought it was an audition for the coveted role of Mrs. Paul Wineland.

  I often came over to find Dusty there. Billy whispered, “This one is Eve Harrington, mark my words.” He lapsed into the cadence of Bette Davis’s Margo Channing in All about Eve. “Waiting in the wings.”

  I didn’t tell Billy that Dusty had indeed confessed his love for Paul one teary night at the bar. He said that he even wished he had AIDS, so that he could be as loved by Paul as Billy was. I told him that would be a lousy way to get a boyfriend, but I also knew he didn’t have a chance with Paul. That didn’t matter right now, anyway. I had enough drama, being on two tracks: one where my best friend was dying, and the other where I was helping the community prepare for it.

  Even Mother Superior, who tried so hard to make everyone think he was an ogre, was wonderful. There were things you could never say to him, but Billy could say anything. When Billy regressed, it was like he’d taken truth serum. Mother, so big as Billy got frailer and frailer, would hold him in his arms like a baby. One time, Billy looked in Mother’s eyes and said, “Girl, you’re really good, you know. If you had lost a hundred . . .”—he paused—“. . . a hundred fifty pounds in your day, you could have been Miss America.” It was something the healthy Billy never would have said, and if anybody else had said that, Mother would have thrown them in the lake.

  “Girl, you are so hateful,” Mother said, in a soft voice suffused with love and kindness. “I can’t believe you talk to your mother like that.”

  I was right that there would be sightseers. Mother brought over a friend, Scott, a big guy who had a whiny voice. He hadn’t seen Billy since he got sick, and when he saw how thin he’d become, Scott went, “Eww.”

  Billy made a matching face, “Eww.”

  And Scott said it again. That was it for Mother, who literally dragged him out and threw him off the porch. “I knew I should never have let you in here, making an ass of yourself. Get off this porch and get in the car.”

  Allison was right there, holding Billy’s hand. She was family now to him and all the queens who loved Billy. They mentored her, offering her advice on how to hold her head up high when she was being bullied. She repeated one piece of wisdom over and over: “Be smart, be brave, tell the truth, and don’t take any shit.” Billy recalled a line he’d heard that he wanted her to commit to memory. We later traced it back to Elsie de Wolfe, the first American interior designer, but then it was pure Billy: “Be pretty if you can, witty if you must, and gracious if it kills you.”

  Billy was preparing to go. He began to ask Paul to take him home. “Call my mother,” he’d say. “I want to go home. I want to go home.”

  Paul didn’t think Billy’s family was equipped to care for him, even if they wanted to, but he always did as Billy wished. Paul thought maybe Billy could spend a weekend there. Billy would have that time, and that’s all he felt they could handle. But there was always a reason he couldn’t come, Paul told me. “His mother says, ‘Well, I’ve got this thing,’ and ‘I’ve got that.’ And ‘It’s not a good weekend.’”

  He finally went one time. They came down to pick Billy up on Friday, and Paul loaded him into their car.

  His mother called Paul first thing Saturday morning. Paul had to drive back and pick him up. “She had him waiting at the front door with his bag. There waiting for me.” When Paul asked if they wanted to try again, she just said, “You know, I’ve got other kids, and I just can’t handle him up here.”

  Billy’s mother would sometimes call me to check up on things. “Just how much longer is this going to go on?” she asked me. “We have a life we have to live. How much longer do we have to put up with this?”

  Not much longer, I thought but did not tell her.

  Billy would gather up the strength to perform at the drag nights, and he would wear a red ribbon pinned to whatever he was wearing. One night he wanted to wear the red strapless Victor Costa dress he’d promised me. We added invisible straps, and it was still falling off of him. So he made do, wearing smaller and smaller dress sizes but becoming transcendent as soon as he hit the stage.

  Someone confronted Paul after a show. “Why do you let him do shows?”

  “Because he wants to do a show,” said Paul.

  “But why would you let him come down here when he looks like that?”

  Paul never showed anger, but he did then, slamming his fist down on the bar. “He has x amount of days left. If he wants to do a show, let him do a show. His fans don’t care, his friends don’t care. Who is it hurting?”

  When it came time for Billy’s last show, I don’t know if he knew it was the final one. Paul and I knew it had to be. His health was declining so fast, there was just no way he could keep performing. There would be no way he could even leave the house.

  When Billy came out that night, the applause wouldn’t stop. The music hadn’t even started, and people leapt to their feet, trying to outdo each other to show their love. He didn’t smile, just stood there taking it in. He wore a black dress that looked so expensive, the long hair of his wig falling on his thin shoulders. Finally, someone placed the needle on the record. As soon as people heard the first notes of Whitney Houston’s voice, the room fell into a reverent hush. “If . . . I . . . should stay . . .” People sat down, like we were at church. I stopped breathing and didn’t start again until I had to take a huge gasp.

  Billy moved around the stage, sometimes a step or two behind the music. Two or three times he tripped a bit, but somebody would steady him and give him twenty dollars. It just made us more determined to show our adoration, like we were willing him to make it. Even if we weren’t near him, we would all lean forward if he started to stumble, each of us ready to jump across the room so we could be the one to catch him. The one to save him as he fell into our arms.

  At the point where Whitney really belts it, the audience got up and started bringing their tributes of dollars directly to him. When his hands were too full, people simply threw wads of money onto the stage. The other queens had come from backstage to watch him, and some helped gather the money from the ground for him. Everyone was crying, except for Billy.

  The song ended, but people wouldn’t let him go. It was a blur after that; he had to do four more songs before they let him leave the stage. Two lines of people formed on either side of the stage, so he wouldn’t have to move around. We all knew this was goodbye, and we were giving him his flowers now, while he could see how much he meant to all of us.

  Finally, we let him leave. As the queens escorted him backstage, he turned and smiled. Every person in there thought that smile was just for them.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  I brought Allison with me to see Billy after school on the first Monday of May. He was down to sixty-five pounds, and you could see every bone of his body. He was conscious but slept much of the time. A nurse was there with him. I had gotten him home care, the first nurses I found who would willingly take care of an AIDS patient in his home, so they were a godsend. And even though they were frightened, they listened to me. They had asked me a few questions, and I told them the truth. “You’re gonna be scared the first few times, and then you’ll realize there’s nothing to be afraid of.” They took turns with him during the day, administering medicine and keeping him comfortable. They were wonderful, and they of course fell in love with Billy.

  Paul went into the kitchen to make coffee, and I joined him, leaving Allison with Billy. She held his hand and told him about her day. Allison never talked to me about her school day, but at ten she had learned from her mother ho
w important it is for the dying to hear about the world beyond the room they are in.

  “How are you doing?” I asked Paul.

  He paused, as if the question had not occurred to him.

  “Last night, I couldn’t get Billy to take a bath,” he said, quietly, so it was just us who could hear. “He didn’t want to, so I said I would just, uh, rinse him in the shower. I carried him, and he felt so fragile I was afraid I was going to break his bones. I was afraid he was gonna fall apart in my hands. I just took him in my arms and took him into the shower . . .”

  Paul’s eyes began to well up. I had never seen him cry. He froze for probably five seconds, but it felt like an eternity. “I tried to wash him off, and about halfway through he went completely limp. I thought . . . I thought he died in my arms.”

  I walked over to lightly touch Paul’s arm. “I just rinsed him off as good as I could and brought him to bed. And I saw he was breathing.”

  “Paul,” I said, “you don’t have to bathe him like that anymore. He can do sponge baths, okay? The nurses will do a wonderful job.”

  He nodded. I took a breath. “It’s getting close,” I said. “You know it’s getting close.”

  We went back in, and the nurse said it was time for his CMV medicine. He was taking it by IV at that point. She quietly searched his arms for a vein but gave up. She moved to his legs and found one down by his ankle. She started to prep the area, when I spoke up.

  “Stop,” I said to her quietly. “Just one second.” I raised my voice just a little. “Billy, honey, how long do you think you’re gonna live?”

  “Not long,” he said.

  “Then we’re not going to go through this anymore,” I said. “We’re not going to do it. If you go blind, you go blind.”

  He nodded. The nurse started to cry. She had fallen for him like all of us.

  Once he was off that medicine, Billy slowly emerged from being so childlike and started to come back to being the man we had known. It happened around the time Paul stopped shaving him, because it was too much to put him through even that, and Billy didn’t care. His beard grew in dark, and it was amazing to have some of the old Billy back, if so much weaker. He was able to have conversations with people again, quiet and slow but meaningful.