This summer everyone is putting Nair on their chests to remove all the hair. They want to be boys again, pure. Thousands of hairless, gleaming, waxed, bionic men strutting around like a bunch of cars. The whole place felt like a parking lot.
Once a week or so I’ll go over to Crow Bar on Tenth Street where boys flirt with clean-cut scrub-brushed clones of themselves. Everyone looks clean. Short hair, white T-shirt, clean jeans, pierced ear, collegiate. We’re trying out for the Varsity Squad because clean boys don’t have it. Only the dirty ones have it. So, I’ll talk to some wide-eyed young queen who went to Vassar or Brown or some Euro-trash passing in East Village drag. We look into each other’s eyes, feel the heat pass between our pumped-up gym chests. We both know for certain that the other one’s underwear is clean. For that moment I don’t have it and neither does he. AIDS is just a state of mind, sometimes. If you don’t have to have it twenty-four hours a day, why do so?
I have this theory about HIV. I think there is good HIV and bad. Bad is what I’ve got. I can tell because my T-cells are plummeting. What I wouldn’t give for two hundred T-cells. When I first went to the doctor I went to see Dr. Joseph Sonnabend because he is the best-known and most well-loved AIDS doctor. He’s known for thinking that AZT is poison. He gave me a prescription for AZT. Someone explained that he probably wanted to give my T-cells a boost, try to get them back over two hundred, and he would take me off it after three months, which is exactly what happened. Eight months ago.
My kind of HIV is the killer kind. It’s killing me. But there are other guys walking around with HIV who never seem to get sick. Eight years, nine years, no symptoms. They’ve got the good kind. It occurred to me that if one night I can meet the right Mr. Clean and we can keep our minds AIDS free, maybe he will pump me full of the good HIV. Maybe it will neutralize my infection and I’ll never have to worry again.
Chapter Sixteen
The phone has been ringing all day. They keep ringing and hanging up. Ringing and hanging up. I know who it is. It is my mother. My parents are trying to kill me.
They don’t call regularly. They call on a whim. They might be sitting around the house one Sunday afternoon, breakfast is done. The paper is done. Nothing to do for an hour before taking in a movie. Hey, my mother will think to herself. I just remembered that I have a son.
How do I know this? It’s because they never call on a Friday night. They never, never call from nine to five. They never sit down and write a letter. It is just here and there during their occasional free time. So, during the workday I can answer the phone, but between seven and nine on weekend mornings I have to let the machine get it. I couldn’t bear to actually talk to one of them. The casual indifference would shatter me. I can’t take one more act of unlove.
I was listening to the radio the other day and heard a special report about the history of COINTELPRO. This was the counterintelligence program maintained by the FBI in which they infiltrated every group of hopeful people on earth and confused them until they self-destructed and died. The WBAI announcer said that the agency’s harassment of Marcus Garvey began in 1919. He said that the name of the FBI agent in charge of Garvey’s demise was J. Edgar Hoover. In 1919. That’s when I realized that my parents were trying to kill me. In fact, my entire family is in on it. Their plan is to invite me in and throw me out. Invite me in and throw me out, invite me in and throw me out until I have gone completely insane and hang myself in my own bedroom. It is their only possible motive.
Here’s one of their favorite tactics for driving me insane. My mother likes to call me up and leave messages about obscure elderly relatives who have died, asking me to attend their funerals. She usually calls after we haven’t seen each other for a year or two, asking me to show up at a gathering of relatives knowing that it would be the site of our first reunion. Does that sound appropriate? Does that sound like someone who really wants to see me?
My father’s favorite tactic for killing me is to never call. The last time we spoke he made me cry. I said, “Dad, I just want you to be nice to me.”
“You don’t want us to be nice to you,” he said. “You just want to blame us for your shortcomings.”
Then he hung up the phone. My father hung up on me and never called me back. That was a year ago. He must be so relieved. Occasionally my parents go on vacation and I’ll get a postcard signed MOM. Or a birthday card signed MOM. He’s killing me, my dad. He obviously wants me to die.
Once I realized what was going on I started an in-depth investigation into my parents’ death-squad tactics and strategies. That’s when I understood, for the first time, how skillfully my brother and sister got recruited. It was a cold winter’s Sunday back in 1968. I was ten. My sister was seven and my baby brother was three. My father had rented a car for a drive in the country, but it was late afternoon and we still hadn’t reached our goal. Instead, we drove around and around little country roads surrounded by snowy tree-tops and bushes of ice.
As a child I was always being gender-corrected. I was one of those little boys with a high squeaky voice who waved his hands in the air and got too excited. It made my parents deeply uncomfortable. They tried every way they could think of to convey their disapproval of my basic self, starting at the age of four. There was always an invisible Dave, one that had never existed and could never exist, that they expected to find miraculously each morning at the breakfast table. And when, instead, all they got was little silly-willy me, with limp wrists and a will of steel, little courageous sissy-wissy me, they were deeply angry.
My father and mother and I got into an argument. Something about logic, the beauty of old-fashiondom, the fun of getting lost. I think those were my stated positions. My father, so upset that he wasn’t being worshipped, finally stopped the car by the side of the road and ordered me out into the snow. All of this because I wouldn’t keep from saying what I thought. I stood by the asphalt, just a little boy, as my father pulled away. But he didn’t get far. After crawling about twenty feet ahead, the car stopped with the motor running. Some anonymous hand threw open the back door. The car sat, humming in the winter stillness as its faceless inhabitants waited for me to approach, reproached.
His plan was so obvious. It called for me to be instantaneously shocked into submission by the fear of abandonment. I was supposed to panic and then cry, running towards my parents with gratitude and desire. He expected to dislodge me from my temporary manhood, reduced to a helpless child again. Finally, I was to rush towards the open door and re-enter the car, humiliated, submissive and, most importantly, quiet.
But something else happened instead. I started walking away from the car, in the opposite direction on the one-way street. I didn’t have to look behind me. They had obviously not moved. I kept walking, soberly, with determination instead of any frivolous vengeful emotion. And, finally, after turning the bend, I heard my father’s car frantically pull away, knowing he would now have to negotiate incomprehensible country byways in order to be able to re-approach me in my fashion. A certain period of time passed, long enough for me to get lost in a reverie of understanding, until he finally found his way back along the same route from the beginning and was able to pick me up from the side of the road.
I don’t know what I had imagined I would find inside that car. If I’d had to guess, I would have pictured the four of them rationally dissecting the map, trying to efficiently reach their goal, which was me. But surprisingly, when I plopped back into the seat I was greeted instead by my sister and brother crying uncontrollably, with expressions of sheer terror on their two little faces. What had happened to me was the worst thing either of them could ever imagine. Their fear of my experience was to have a much more profound effect on their lives than the experience they dreaded had actually had on mine. This was the important day in the lives of my brother and sister. It was the day they learned fear, the day they were recruited to learn how to kill.
Chapter Seventeen
We lived in a two-bedroom apartment. My s
ister, brother, and me in one room and my parents in the other. They were looking for a larger place. My mother worked at a social service agency and my father was still in law school. I was a constant source of tension. I was not the way they had intended for me to be. This was increasingly obvious. But I was also undiscussable. My sister, on the other hand, had perfected her role as head snitch. The end result being that I was often in a place of fierce punishment including parental tantrums, spankings, and, finally, banishment to the hallway of our apartment building.
When I imagine myself as a young boy it is a selection of images of privacy. Alone by the side of the road. Alone in the bathroom. Alone at the base of the family closet. And most casually, alone, sitting on the floor of the hallway outside the closed door of my parents’ apartment. Sitting quietly as the neighbors came home from work.
“Are you locked out?” Grace from next door asked quietly.
“No,” I said. “I’m being punished.”
By this point the humiliation was gone. I had survived basic training and was now a full-time warrior. I informed neighbors of my punishment with complete nonchalance. It meant nothing to me. I took my blows, survived my trial by fire. And now, even punishment couldn’t stop me. Nothing would make me ashamed.
For thirty-four years, which will soon be the totality of my life on earth, my family has been trying to kill me. Each one of them has their own personal motive for plotting my death.
My father’s pathetic excuse was revealed only last summer as we sat sweating in his office. I had asked for an appointment and he scheduled me in between his 10:15 and his 11:05. Of course I was twenty-five minutes early. Since his entire emotional life travels in segments of forty-five minutes, mine, behavioristically, does the same. His first client had canceled, so I approached that place only to find him standing anxiously in the doorway. Without clients to engage with, the poor guy had nothing to do.
“You blame me for everything,” he said. “But it all actually has to do with you. You have always been a difficult child. You would never co-operate. Why, I remember when you were just born. Your mother loved you so much. She could never have imagined that you would grow up into this.”
He leaned back into his chair and buried his chin into his neck.
“I would come home from the office and you would be lying in your crib, crying and crying. You must have been three months old. You were so agitated. Something was troubling you even then. There I was, a young law student, and I patted you on the back but you wouldn’t be comforted. You’ve been a problem ever since.”
My mother’s complaints are a bit more complex.
“We were always so close,” she has said. “Maybe you don’t remember this, but you told me everything.”
I have flashed this sentence through my mind a thousand times. I do remember my mother standing up for me in a conflict with another child in grade school. Johnny Goodman. Fuck him. I was about seven and making what was then known as “phony phone calls.” I dialed whatever numbers popped into my head and said things like “Hey Mack, we know you’ve got the jewels. Bring them over to Ninth Street or you’re a goner.”
Things like that.
Unfortunately, one of the numbers that popped into my mind was not as arbitrary as I might have wished, but rather belonged to Johnny. His mother had the bad judgment to press charges by calling my mother and informing her that I had anonymously threatened Mrs. Goodman’s life. Technically, this was true, but in terms of intention, culpability, and context, it was utterly false. Of course, being prepubescent and having not yet read any great books, I was unable to fully explain the extenuating circumstances and so was forced, through lack of resources, to deny the crime.
My mother promptly got on the phone with Mrs. Goodman and defended my honor. I think that somewhere it was obvious to her that Mrs. Goodman’s precision of accusation was virtually impossible to match with my psychic state—with what kind of person I have always been. And armed with this correct hunk of instinctual information, for the first and final time she did the right thing. She defended me.
Unfortunately, after she hung up the phone with Mrs. Goodman, I fled, crying into the bottom of our closet and sat there shaking with grief. I did not know how to articulate the truth, but could not live with a distortion. It was not an issue of honesty, but rather that the real truth was acceptable to me and I wanted it to be acceptable to her. So, unable to survive with either option, I confessed to my mother that I had indeed committed the crime as defined by Mrs. Goodman’s language, even though it was unrecognizable in comparison with the actual event. My mother never defended me again.
Chapter Eighteen
Last Monday night in the restaurant there was an unexpected discomfort. I walked in with Fabio, Robert’s new Italian boyfriend and there was Kurt, suddenly, with some ugly short white man who could not be his lover. They were standing ahead of us on line waiting for a table. I said hello, awkwardly, and remembered suddenly how much taller he is. His hair is shaved at the base but has a crown of hanging dreads that fall gamely on his neck, like a black version of Veronica Lake. Suddenly he was so much taller than me that eye level was directly into his razor burn.
As always he was cool, very poised and dignified. I managed to listen to Fabio’s yapping politely without ever once turning to look at Kurt’s lithe back. But finally I did have to pass by on the way to the urinals and managed to touch him gently, but possessively, on the shoulder. It was a natural, open touch designed expressly to feel the shape of his slender back. I waited in the stall for him to follow, hoping we could fuck on the stairs, but he never came around.
At home that night I played a Minnie Ripperton album a couple of times. What a star. If she had been called to opera instead of to schlock she would have been a coloratura—that firm, thin, high soprano. More dear.
Minnie reminds me of the threat of impending banality that I have to live with daily. I see it creeping everywhere. How to keep jazz from becoming dinner music. How to keep love poems off of greeting cards. How to keep AIDS from being pathetic.
I read in Herve Guilbert’s book that Foucault died, not knowing exactly what had hit him. His lover found his handcuffs and whips and couches full of leftover manuscripts on such trifles as the history of socialism. Charles Ludlam was the most profound loss. America doesn’t even know what she’s missing. I saw him and his lover Everett in Irma Vep and sat sobbing at his funeral. It was the first time I cried after my boyfriend’s death in ’82. But what do we do with all the mediocrities who never created anything worth remembering and never would have even if they had lived to be eighty-five? It drives me crazy how quickly the great ones get canonized. Blah-blah-blah is such a terrible loss. Does that mean that the death of one mediocre slob is not as terrible? Do fags have to be geniuses to justify living?
There is almost nothing left to be said about my dead boyfriend Don at this late date. We’d only been going out for a few months before he suddenly called me from the hospital. I’d never been in one before, not since I was born. It was so unbelievable. Most of my memories of Don are in bed, plastic tubes up his nose and arms, lying there, infusing. Where the fuck were his parents? Why did they abandon us?
I remember one afternoon I was sitting next to his bed. He was lying there, wan, very anxious, plastic in his orifices. I looked down at the pillow and he looked up at me and waved his eyes in one of those high camp queenie gestures that means completely giving up and saying fuck you to the world at the same time. It was so absurd. I still don’t believe it.
For a while I tried really hard to remember his chest the way it was at first in my hands. Like the side of a mountain. But the real memory is tired and sad with silvery worms of plastic coming out of his nose. That is how I will always picture my love.
By two a.m. I was going through my phone book wondering who I could possibly call. Could I call Kurt? It really was too late. What about all those people in San Francisco? Amy is in Berlin. Bob isn’t agitated enoug
h for late night phone calls. John is dead. Mark is dead. Sam is dead. The other Bob is waiting for his boyfriend to die. Maybe I’ll call Kurt. I called Bob.
“Hi Bob, how’s kicks? ”
“Oh, Fred seems to be doing a lot better.”
“That’s great,” I said.
“Yeah, today he went outside on his own.”
“How are you doing? ”
“Fine. Let’s see. This morning I took Fred to the herbalist. Those Chinese herbs are really miracle drugs. Then I took him into the clinic for a spinal tap and it really made him feel a lot better. He’s not so disoriented as he was last week.”
“Great. How are you doing?”
“Fine. Tomorrow I’m taking Fred to a neurologist and we’re doing exercises every day.”
“Do you get out at all? ”
“Oh yeah, I get out. We have plenty of friends who come by. Thursday I take Fred too massage and we’ve been trying this vitamin B for neuropathy. Assotto Saint recommended it. It coats your nerve endings apparently.”
“Whatever.”
“Ooops, gotta go. Fred needs to eat. Thanks for calling.”
“Bye Bob.”
But he had already hung up.
Then I called Kurt, let the phone ring three times and hung up. I never leave messages. I know they’re there screening the calls, staring at the machine as the little cassette tape clicks into place. I do it too. If they don’t pick up they don’t want to talk, and then if you leave a message you’re at their mercy. I could call José in Phoenix. He’ll remember me. But what would we talk about? If I wanted phone sex I’d dial 1-900. I could call David in LA, but he’ll think something’s up and ask me four thousand times if I’m all right. Joe is dead. I could call Linda except she’s so annoying. Phil Zwickler is dead. Bo Houston is dead. John Bernd is dead. Martin Worman is dead. Jon Greenberg is dead. Robert Garcia is dead. I already talked to Carl last week. Don is dead. Would Don and I be boyfriends now if he was still alive? Would he be taking care of me?
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