Rat Bohemia

by Sarah Schulman

  My brother came out there on business with his girlfriend but could never find the time to come by the house to meet Paul. Finally I had to go way over to the other side of town, the straight side, where he was staying, and we went out for dinner. He never asked about Paul. Never mentioned it. He just went on and on about his business connections. Finally I started saying something about what it is like to live with a dying thirty-two-year-old. But my brother didn’t … never brought it up.

  The boundaries of parental love are so narrow.

  My parents have always hated me for being gay. They’ve always wished I would disappear, but nothing has ever made me so nauseous and vicious as the gulf that AIDS has created between me and them. I came from Beekman visiting Saul with lesions on his lungs to a family dinner for my sister’s birthday. She was feeling down because her seventy-year-old graduate school professor had just died and my mother turned to her and said, “You’ve had more people die in your life than anyone I know.”

  I froze, bread halfway to my mouth. My mother caught me as though I had committed a crime.

  “You mean the AIDS thing,” she said. “You’re always looking for ammunition against us.”

  And these reactions are so typical. My friends and I exchange them like baseball cards. This how America treats us. It’s not just AIDS that makes them hate us. They hated us before because they couldn’t control us. They could not make us be just like them. Now, they’re glad we’re dying. They’re uncomfortable about how they feel, but really they’re relieved. There’s nothing on earth that could kill us more efficiently than parental indifference.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Manuel called me too early on a gray Sunday to go see Gregg Araki’s film, The Living End. I’d missed it the first time around and now some gay film festival stuck with last year’s hits was playing it again—one time only. I knew that it was about two HIV-positive guys, so I got there an hour early worrying it would be sold out. Of course, every New Yorker would race to the theater to see a movie about HIV-positive guys. What else would they have to talk about? But the house was half full and Manuel came staggering in only five minutes before showtime, soaked through to the skin because he’s too unconscious to ever bring an umbrella.

  I was a bit peeved, besides, when it became apparent that he had also invited Tom and Lyle to come along too because I know that they are HIV-positive.

  What a fun way to spend the weekend, I thought. Oh, YAY!

  Tom and Lyle brought some dyke along to round out the whole scenario. We looked like an ad for National Brotherhood Week. Lyle and I were the only ones in our little crowd that resembled the rest of the guys in the audience. Clean-shaven little white guys. One big living Gap ad.

  Araki’s film was about two cute boys who fall in love and have HIV. The stud has decided that HIV made him free—so now he can ride around America having sex and beating people up, killing them and not worrying about a thing. He won’t have a real life anymore. He’ll only have a glamorous one. The other guy, equally sexy but too skinny, goes along with it because he wants to get laid, and somewhere in the back of his mind he thinks this might be the way out. Of course the inevitable rub is that instead of being freed by HIV, Stud’s whole life is now entirely run by HIV because he can’t let himself live normally again. And, ultimately, that’s what we diseased pariahs want more than anything else on earth—NORMALCY.

  The final message of the movie is that you can’t get out from under the grip of HIV. You can’t do anything about it. That’s the thing we all know about AIDS. You have to accept it.

  But there was one really beautiful moment that ran through my mind repeatedly as we all stepped out of the theater in that predictable, boring silence. I was thinking about how wonderful it would be to have a boyfriend to love me and hold me and we could have cinematic HIV together and die happily ever after. That’s romance.

  “Cocktails or coffee?” the dyke said and we all screamed, “Cocktails.”

  What followed was a maniacally single-minded journey to find a place with food and drink that we could afford, and so, after dismissing a number of tasteless, overpriced endroits for heterosexuals, we returned to the dyke-owned Pharmacy on Avenue A and Ninth Street, which was as bourgeois as any of us ever really got unless someone else was picking up the tab.

  We ordered our eggs Benedict, Bloody Marys, et cetera, et cetera. Then Manuel starts rambling on and on about something about AIDS, but, of course, only in the abstract. The three of us squeezed our limes and looked at the tablecloth and the saltshaker.

  “I just finally read And the Band Played On,” Manuel starts blathering. “I avoided it for years because of its horrible reputation.”

  Then he starts in with this statistic and that one. Reciting all these tired theories. I really wanted to scream at this point. That’s all guys ever talk about: DDI, DDC, DDI, DDC.

  Or else it’s Morgue Geography: “Did you hear that Gary died just six days after his lover Danny?”

  “But I thought Danny died in June.”

  “No, that was Danny Schapiro who died a month ago, this is Danny Rich who died last week. Then Steve died ahead of schedule .”

  “Again? I thought he died last month.”

  “That was Steven. This is Steve.”

  Follow the bouncing corpse.

  Anyway, Manuel kept up his verbal stupor, but Tom and Lyle and I didn’t say a word. Finally we all started talking about how the film was shot and what kind of lens he had blah, blah, blah. Conveniently it reminded Manuel of a Joan Crawford movie, at last. So we got into that and ordered a second round of Marys.

  “When I was a kid,” the dyke says, “I used to listen to Jimi Hendrix and think he was saying ‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy.’ So I thought he was gay. When the radio played ‘And the wind cried Mary,’ I knew it was true.”

  That broke the ice. So without missing a beat she said, “How did you feel about the movie, personally? ”

  Are all dykes social workers or what? They’ve got this delivery that lets you say what you want to say but it is so fucking perfect it is astonishing. It is devastating. Still Tom heroically tried to resist by speaking instead as an African-American and not as a diseased pariah.

  “Well, I was really troubled by his insistence on using an all-white cast. He is Japanese, after all.”

  “His parents were in internment camps,” she said.

  Just the kind of facts dykes keep at their fingertips.

  “It bothered me that he had to pretend that the world was white,” Tom replied.

  “No,” she said, not to be disobeyed. “I mean, how did you feel about what he was saying about HIV?”

  Immediately a very jumpy conversation ensued between Tom and me and Lyle about how much we hated those pretty guys who played the leads. And how much we hated the romanticism. We really got going, but even that couldn’t thaw poor Manuel. He kept looking at his plate and making comments about the Hollandaise sauce being rotten. I felt sorry for that schmuck. He was surrounded by the faces of his future ghosts.

  “Those guys were too spoiled,” Lyle said on Mary number three.

  “Spoiled? ”

  That was the dyke talking again. They like to repeat your words back to you to show that they’re listening.

  “Yeah, guys like that pretend that they’re tough. They home boys. They rebels who ain’t got no cause. But when it comes down to it they’ll never do anything bad unless it’s with their dicks. That’s why we can’t get anywhere with this fucking disease. Gay boys are too well behaved. Chelsea is never going up in flames like South Central LA.”

  Lyle was the white one, but he dipped occasionally into overdone black slang. Tom, the black one, never did it in front of me.

  “What do you mean spoiled? ” I asked.

  “Well,” he said. “You know how they had these stolen credit cards in the movies and could therefore go anywhere and do anything? ”

  “Yeah? ”

  “Well,
is that really as far as a fag can imagine when it comes to disorderly conduct? When we’re bad we don’t rob banks. We go to banks.”

  “Yeah,” said Tom. “In real life we don’t have that credit card. So what are we supposed to do? ”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The last time I saw my parents was Mother’s Day. I had just come from relieving the guy in Gino’s care group and walked into the apartment just in time to find that Gino had shit all over himself.

  “I just came from Gino’s apartment,” I said to my parents as we sat around the kitchen table drinking mimosas.

  “Gino shit all over himself and the other guy didn’t know what to do. He was so busy retching every time he got near the bed that he’d let Gino lie in his own shit for almost half an hour trying to get up the guts to deal with it.

  “I’ve been through this twice before,” I said casually to my disgusted parents as I speared a canned asparagus. “Of course.”

  I crossed my legs like a nelly Gene Kelly.

  “So I ran the tub and then lifted Gino up into it. Washed him off. Washed myself off. Threw out the sheets and remade the bed. Then I went home and changed and then I came over here.”

  “Well I saw a client, just the other day, with cancer,” my father said. “A fifty-year-old man. We see this every day.”

  “More and more people come into our agency needing home care,” my mother added.

  That’s when I started crying and screaming. My parents hate it when I cry and scream because I am a grown man and not supposed to ever act that way. To them it is a sign of how wrong and bad I am. What a bad seed I am. How disturbed.

  “What do you want from us?” my mother shouted. “I don’t even know the man.”

  “Do you want to meet him? ” I asked, pathetically.

  And for that moment, like a thousand moments before, I suddenly flashed, foolishly, that my dream would come true. I flashed that my father and mother would come with me to visit Gino and would ask him how he felt. They would ask me questions about myself too. They would come to a gay play and read a gay book and call me up in the morning when there was something vile on the television because they have a gay child. And no one is going to hurt their gay child as long as they still have air in their lungs. Because they love their gay son and all parents must love their gay children. They must not treat us like this.

  My sister started in on a story about some student of hers with a terminal disease and something she saw on TV. My brother was pacing back and forth making business calls on the telephone and not participating in the conversation at all. Then my sister started talking about her trip to LA.

  I’ve seen so many people die and where the fuck were their families? Our families want us to be destroyed. They sit around talking about the toaster-oven while we are doomed and they don’t even mention it. David Wojnarowicz’s brother flew in after he had died in order to attend the memorial service. The family “thanked” his lover for taking care of him. Who are they to “thank” us? We are the real family. They are just a bunch of cold-hearted killers.

  “You complain about me, but it could be a lot worse,” my father told me during those twenty-five minutes of precious attention I received, that day in his office. “Some parents don’t even speak to their homosexual children,” he said. “Some parents won’t even let them in the house.”

  A man’s enemies will be those in his own household.

  —MATTHEW 10

  The night after my breakdown, my brother left a message on my phone machine.

  “Dave, this is your brother. I’m sick of this bullshit. You fucking asshole. Fuck off.”

  They’re so unaware that we are suffering. They’ve got it all wrong. They think we’re pretending and mentioning it repeatedly just to ruin their day. Just to guilt trip them for something they didn’t do. How could we do this to them?

  Then I took a look in the mirror.

  This property is condemned, I thought.

  That was the first night I had the sweats.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Last night was a beautiful night. Yesterday was a beautiful day. Rita called me up out of the blue to go over to Tompkins Square Park because the city had finally reopened it and everyone in the neighborhood was walking around taking their first look.

  “God, it’s beautiful,” I said.

  And it was.

  New paths, new drinking fountains that worked, new benches, new chess tables for old men. A dog run, bike paths, three playgrounds, and a basketball court.

  “No rats,” Rita noticed right away.

  First we walked around oohing and aahing about how peaceful and lovely everything was and then we started noticing past the surface, analyzing the situation. This process—from acceptance to critique—usually takes a New Yorker eight to ten minutes.

  “Well, it’s not like the three hundred homeless people who used to live in this park now have nice apartments,” Rita said. “But the Parks Department did do a good job with the rodents.”

  “Out of sight, out of mind,” I said, thinking of myself.

  “I just came back from my first Lesbian Avenger meeting,” she said.

  “How did it go?

  “Great. I thought up the slogan for the new banner.”

  “What is it?”

  “S.O.S.,” Rita said. “Suck Our Sisters, Suck Our Selves.”

  The homeless were so gone. They were like anthropological relics. They were like me—exterminated. Mayans buried their dead with water and plates of food. Archaeologists discovered that the plates lasted longer than their bones. Here and there a fragmented skull and piece of spinal chord. The memento outlasts the memory, outlasts the dead, the living.

  “Why are you crying? ” she asked.

  “It has to do with my parents,” I said.

  “What? ”

  “It’s just that I want my mother to…” I was choked with tears.

  “To be interested in you? ” Rita asked, trying to be helpful.

  “No,” I said, really sobbing. “I wish that my mother…”

  “You wish that she really wanted to know what you were doing? ” she tried again.

  “No,” I said, trying desperately to get a grip. “I just wish that she really wanted to see me.”

  There were no drug addicts in the park at all, which I attributed to the clusters of policemen at every entrance. Just a few, very demure homeless were sitting in the sun trying not to be noticed. Other, more acceptable residents walked around slightly dazed. They couldn’t believe that something so nice could actually be for them.

  “Midnight curfew,” Rita pointed out, reading the signs. “That’s to make sure no one sleeps over.”

  “Too bad,” I said. “The neighborhood is open until four in the morning. I guess we have to scamper back at twelve to our hot little apartments.”

  “I wonder if they killed the rats or just chased them into the stores across the street,” Rita asked as we both sat down on a bench.

  A monk in New York strode steadily across the park. A blonde girl was reading Turgenev. A dyke came by dressed in black, her breasts under control. Two black men in white pants, two candles, and a dog. That skinny guy had a red backpack. The couple next to us was starting to coo. The boy whistled the Mister Softee theme song. One young woman had a cane. Another skimmed Allure. There was a stunned silence. The park was so clean it was only a dream. The homeless were out of consciousness now. Then I remembered that, actually, they’re living on our front stoops now, but the landlords live in Nyack. I wanted a cigarette. We were all dazed. I could see the aesthetic beauty of the world, and I do have the desire to live. But there is not enough anger for everything that makes me angry. And there is not enough grief for my grief. Learning this fact/insight/lesson/inauguration/design is so painful. Because now, at age thirty-four, getting tired, having had my first symptom, I really know what it is I’m going to miss out on.

  “What’s going on? ” she asked.

 
“My foot hurts so much, I feel like my body weight is crushing it. I feel like it will never get better. My bones hurt. I can’t breathe—there’s too much pollution. My poor legs. Am I going to have to hobble like this from now on? I know you always bounce back for the first few years, but maybe I’ll be the exception. I’ll go on tour of the Bahamas as America’s shortest-living survivor. Last night I had the sweats again.”

  “What are they like? ”

  “Well,” I said, trying to isolate it. “Right before I went to bed I felt really tired and sore. My bones hurt. And then in the middle of the night I work up freezing and then totally sweating, my bones hurting and the sheets wet. Just like in all the books. At least they got that right.”

  “How about today? ”

  “No sweats at all since then.”

  “That’s good,” Rita said. “What a relief.”

  I would just rather that she told me that she didn’t know what to say instead of searching around the universe for the one possible positive—the absence of pain at any given moment.

  “Do you want to come to a party tonight?”

  “Where?” I asked because I had been thinking about going to Eastside Sauna.

  “In Brooklyn, in Dyke Slope. It’s that girl Margaret. You know, she’s a dark-skinned black girl, she works for the New York Times? Her lover is that blonde thing Killer fucked last year.”

  “What’s in it for me?” I asked.

  “Some nice boys.”

  “Black ones? ” I asked, just to annoy her.

  “Seems like it, doesn’t it? Or were you thinking about going to that sex club for HIV-positives only? ”

  Eternity is a hooded skeleton, a human tiger with a butterfly on his scalp. A bespectacled burro waving a death’s-head flag. Dried bread. A one-armed Inca with tattooed knees, his sister plays the mandolin with artificial fingernails. A uniformed pig holds his hand down a wood pile. The scarecrow is bleeding. My tongue is too big. There a swastika in red, white, and blue. A bag of gold. A blank, open book.

  “No, I wasn’t,” I said. It had never even occurred to me. Sex camp for the pariahs, please. “I’ll come to the party early. Then I’m going to go out.”