Rat Bohemia

by Sarah Schulman

  Immediately I started trying to decide what kind of pants to wear. Should I wear my sexy dick-outlined black jeans which will make my legs swell up like lead balloons—or should I wear those casual, drawstring African pants that all us swollen-legged HIV-POSITIVES wear to show how casual we are? Which one? Which one? Which one?

  PART THREE

  KILLER IN LOVE

  Chapter Twenty-six

  (In which Killer attends a memorial service.)

  Sunday afternoon Rita stopped by, but I was still in bed with my new girlfriend Troy and had forgotten all about everything.

  “How can you forget about a memorial service?” she asked. “Hey, I see you’ve got that new brand of glue trap.”

  “Sorry,” I answered. “I didn’t really forget. I just got vague.”

  We walked over to Fourteenth Street and the river for Robert Garcia’s memorial service which was being held at Meat, where I guess he liked to fuck. I know the area because I have a plant account right down the street. Plus Meat turns into the Clit Club every Friday night. Not that I go there that much now that I’m a little older, but that street has the most used condoms and used streetwalkers per square foot than any other strip of cement west of the Atlantic Ocean—which makes it noticeable.

  “God, I feel so weird, I haven’t talked to David in weeks. He’s the person I first met Robert through. Have you? ”

  “Yeah,” Rita said. “You have to call three or four times to get a response.”

  “I guess he’s in no mood to be the one to reach out.”

  “Whatever,” Rita said. “I think he’s going through that phase. You know, the envy of the dying for the living. If you’re not the type who can brush it off, better not to talk at all.”

  “But what if we get in a fight?” I asked, panicking. Thinking again of my long lost parents. “And he dies?”

  “He will definitely die,” she said.

  “I know,” I answered, exasperated at Rita’s bullheaded position. “But what if we have a fight and he dies and nothing was resolved?”

  “Nothing is ever resolved,” Rita said, tired. “That’s one of those fake concepts. How can you resolve with a man dead at thirty-four? What kind of peace can you make with that? Lately I’ve been thinking that the conflict is for the best. Because then we are not pretending that anything about this can ever be reasonable.”

  Walking into the club in the middle of the day was kind of depressing since, like most dives, it is just an empty room with lots of shadows. There were about thirty people up there, most of whom I recognized from David’s ACT UP circles, including David himself, who was sitting alone in a chair with his arms folded tightly across his chest. People milled around uncomfortably for a few minutes until the service began, and then they just leaned against the bar and ordered beers because most of the women and the men had only been in that room before in association with beer and sex.

  There’s that strange pathology at memorial services where the person had to have been perfect. You’re never allowed to mention any trouble or doubts you might have had about him. Robert was this tireless organizer and generally likable guy who had gone from being a Latin yuppie to a full-fledged radical. They showed television clips of him in a suit saying “Direct action works. It works.” And later pictures of him, sick, standing on a fire escape on Gay Pride Day looking over the passing ACT UP contingent and waving a sign saying, “Audre Lorde is Love.”

  Then they showed all these slides of him doing this and doing that—usually at a demonstration or with his family in California or wearing some T-shirt with a slogan on it. But the unexpected sideline was that many of the slides also included handfuls of our other dead. Peeking over his shoulder or deep in conversation or carrying the other side of the banner was inevitably someone we’d already buried. Someone I’d met through David or at a benefit or rally and who I knew for a fact was dead. Plus all the others that I’d never met, but the silent shifting of feet registered their forgotten absence.

  The end result was that when the slides were finished and it was time for people to come up to the microphone and say what they had to say about Robert, no one had anything to say. What I mean is, no one wanted to talk. They just wanted to get the hell out of there. I saw Assotto Saint, skinny and drawn, saying to a friend, “Well, I’m still here.” Then, when no one had anything to say, he stood up slowly and just left.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  (In which David remembers Don)

  I watched David walk unsteadily down Fourteenth Street and followed him for a bit, leaving Rita to go off to the bookstore. His head hung down below his shoulders like he just couldn’t take it anymore. It was one of those most miserable walks of your life. I had no idea of what was the right thing to do and so ran after him, but slowly. He saw me and stopped to greet hello but was unable to wipe off the terror and misery. Absolutely incapable of hiding it.

  We ended up at his house sitting on the bed and in the artificial light I could see how much damage the last few months had done. His skin was all dry and scaly, his face was ruddy from peeling. He had KS on one of his eyelids and he kept sweating profusely throughout the entire visit. Worse was how skinny he’d gotten. To that point where all their clothes are falling off but have to be loose to avoid swelling. It just hangs on their bodies kind of shapeless and you could tell he’d had hours and hours of diarrhea. Hours of crying on the toilet seat, alone in the middle of the night. Rectum raw and chafed, his guts sore from shitting without any sleep.

  “Last month was my birthday,” he said. “I turned thirty-five.”

  “Happy birthday,” I said.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of writing,” David said. “About my earlier life. I’ve been jotting down little things worth remembering and trying to put them in some kind of order. Some of the most important things that ever happened to me. Some of the things that I want to have represent me when I’m gone.”

  “Do you want to read one to me?” I asked.

  “This one is about my dead boyfriend Don,” he said, going slowly through piles of disheveled papers, sweat cascading from his face, literally pouring all over himself and the paper. I watched it dripping and was utterly repulsed. I didn’t want to be, but honestly, I was. I felt like I was going to throw up—the way you want to vomit at the smell of homeless people even while having nothing against them and a great deal of pity.

  “One day Don and I went to the country and made love on the grass. I lay there looking up at the sun, and when I glanced over, Don was standing, nude and silent. I looked admiringly and saw a tree in Donny’s ass. That is to say, I saw Don as a tree and then I looked at a real tree for comparison and saw it, suddenly, as a curvy, softy thing, like my beloved’s joyful buttocks. Then I saw that thought in an objective way and saw the tree literally in Don’s ass—protruding brightly from his rectum while he stood like a tree himself and then the sun got caught in my line of vision and it was over. One of those loving flashes of moment that become memories and that disappear from the collective unconscious when its rememberer dies too young because fate has frowned on all us young trees and God has taken our playmates away from us.”

  And all I kept thinking was that I wanted Troy to love me enough that I would never have to speak to my family again.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  (In which Killer introduces Troy Ruby who then describes how she became an American artist)

  “The dynamics of gravity,” was all Troy said when I told her what had happened. Only I withheld the part about her and my family in case it didn’t work out that way. I didn’t want to have to be embarrassed. That was about six months ago when I still wasn’t sure.

  Troy was born in Cincinnati, Pennsylvania, in 1958 when Dwight David Eisenhower was president, and remains unresolved, just like the fifties. America jumped from World War II right into Vietnam and never made peace with those twenty years of betrayal. Our own Cultural Revolution. You look at the names of those who squealed on their
friends—they became America’s favorite heroes. The squealed-upon rode off into nowhere and died in oblivion, never having been publicly redeemed. No punishment for the evil. No honor for the defiled. A model for the new age.

  Her father, Joe-Jack Ruby, was night manager of the Queen of the Nile Café in downtown Cincinnati, PA. Her mother was the resident songstress, Princessa De Barge. They picked her up at the age of two, grabbed all the cash in the till, and came up to New York City on December 12, 1960—five weeks before the inauguration of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  The whole family watched his coronation from a tavern in Queens before settling into a small apartment in Greenwich Village sometime soon after.

  Can’t you see why I’m so taken by her?

  Her story is so full of what was once considered romantic. And she told it to me the first time we fell in love.

  “Robert Frost, crusty old codger,” she said, leaning up naked against the dusty brick wall. “He stood hatless in front of friendly television cameras that freezing afternoon and read his poetry, outside, to the nation. Then, in public schools from coast to coast, boys and girls like you and me, Killer, we had to memorize his words. For Frost, though an artist, was a classy one. A classy American. Not some homo like Allen Ginsberg chanting Sunflower Sutra with little faggie pinkie cymbals.”

  At this point she assumed an imitative pose, stared off into the eye of an imaginary television camera, and began recreating the gestures of Robert Frost fumbling with his scarf and notes at the 1960 presidential inauguration.

  My little horse must think it queer,

  To stop without a farmhouse near …

  “Now, this couplet,” she said, “must have made a fierce impression, toddler that I was. Because years later I would suddenly, as though channeling the spirit of the Creator, leap from my chair in a packed meeting hall and yell out, ‘We’re queer. We’re near.’ To which someone, I believe it was Maxine, responded, ‘We’re here, we’re queer. Get used to it.’”

  She lit a cigarette, held it posed up in the air, like a proper lady used to dirty work. Ashtray balancing precariously on the bed.

  “See Killer, see how American culture is born. From Bob Frost to my lips. One long wagon train full of cottonmouth. Two hundred and eighteen years of collective unconsciousness. Next thing you can guess, some little fairy from Aimes, Iowa, will be jumping up and down rhyming Seven years ago and homo without any idea of how that free association was made. But the rhyme will sit comfortable, soothingly, in the psyche of its proprietors. Four score, I mean, for sure.”

  When comparing lovers there are subtle differences. One caresses me with more confidence, but what does that really mean? Could it just be because her hands are bigger? Or is she really less fearful? Women have so many reasons to hesitate. One presses her lips to mine longer. She holds my thighs. Won’t let me sleep. Lovemaking isn’t my responsibility with one of them. It will come to me without worry.

  “So, that was my role in the growth of Queer Nation,” Troy Ruby told me, chomping on her cigarette. “One minor character in a minor moment. Queer did get old very fast, nowadays only academics take it seriously. But Nation managed to live on in many fond conversions. Transgender Nation, Alien Nation, Reincar Nation. And all along the line no one noticed how much that word echoed with the secret store of nostalgic desire for normalcy, normalcy, normalcy. Those apple pie, warm kitchens, and American flags that are trapped somewhere back there between the hypothalamus and the frontal lobe. Someplace in the Central Drawer where One Nation Under God, Indivisible, With Liberty and Justice For All resonates eternally. And that is why Nation is ultimately such a comforting word. And that is how I became an American poet.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  (In which Troy Ruby writes and recites a love poem to Killer)

  It is a very strange thing, but the lesbian community is a community of liars. Liars and believers, tops and bottoms, butches and femmes, doers and wannabes, yuppies and deadbeats, mommies and daddies, enemies and friends. It is all so dynamic.

  The more you hide, the safer you are, especially if you’re out. When you’re out, you’re huge because this just can’t be. I’m so big, I’m enormous. How can I ever be happy with little things? Sitting in someone else’s backyard or on a rooftop or fire escape, watching my lover, tanned, stretched out on the chaise longue from Lamston’s, gin and tonic, cigarette. Her arms are my greatest pleasure. Her legs are so shapely. I love them.

  “Killer,” she said on the sixth night. “You know I have a girlfriend named Anita. You know that we have been together for seven years. I’ve told you that, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “She’s a loving person. I admire her. She accepts me. She’s fun. I like sharing things with her. She’s easy to get along with.”

  “Sounds doomed,” I said.

  “Why? ”

  “She’ll never be able to break down your isolation.”

  She leaned back in the bed and opened her legs a little. “Troy?” I whimpered.

  “Yeah? ”

  “Honey, could you hurt me? Rough me up a little?”

  “What do you want? ”

  “I don’t know, choke me, slap me, tell me off, make me cry. I really need to cry.”

  That night both of us were ashamed. Not only showing our masochism but even worse, not being able to really do it well. We made love again in the bathtub and her half hearted thrashing became a faded memory.

  “Hey,” she said, disengaging from my orgasm. “Let me get a cigarette, a cup of coffee, and then I’ll return to worship at the altar.”

  An hour later she recited a poem.

  For Killer

  by Troy Ruby

  Your head is a silk factory. Your forehead is a plum. Your eyes are ladles. Your mouth is a lamp. Your throat is a tortoise. Your theater is a snapping one. Your shoulders are a bowl of rum. Your chest is a radio. Your belly is mellow. Your pubic hair is tender. Your vagina is familiar. Your legs are red. Your feet are a mind.

  Your ears are posies. Your nose is Kamchatka. Your cheeks are bonanzas. Your neck is a steam table. Your breasts are amusing. Your navel is paprika. Your timing is three-quarters. Your spaciness is ninety. Your ass is a cream stone. Your back lives in Manhattan. Your thighs can sing opera. Your knees are blue kanten. Your ankles are imported. Your toes are like string.

  Your follicles are tremendous. Your scalp grows six feet. Your cerebrum came from Macy’s. Your molars took a shine. Your gum bleeds like my salary. Your tongue stings of K-Y. Your chin sat on a platter. Your armpit is a springboard. Your waist told a secret. Your soft lips give me pleasure. Your clitoris winked in Technicolor. Your calves ate only vegetables.

  “That’s great,” I said.

  “You probably think it’s a little long.”

  “Well,” I said. “You could cut it down to just two stanzas.”

  “True.”

  “Troy? ” I asked. “Do you think you can make it as a poet?”

  “Never,” she said. “I have other plans.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ve been doing research,” Troy said. “I just started reading this new popular novel, Good and Bad, by Muriel Kay Starr.”

  “Not you too,” I answered, bored. “Everywhere I go I see that fucking book.”

  “Well, excuse me.”

  “It’s just that, we all know Muriel Starr,” I tried to explain calmly. “She used to know Rita about ten years ago. Then she went out with this girl Lila Futuransky—who ended up involved in a scandal, but Muriel, of course, escaped unscathed. She moved to another neighborhood and got closer to power. Now she’s got this novel out everyone is reading, but I hear it is really closeted.”

  “I read the first four chapters,” Troy said. “And it made a lot of things very clear.”

  “About?”

  “About the key to success.”

  “What are you going to do, Troy? ” I asked.

  “Well,” she sai
d, in her pinstriped and fedora tone of voice. “I’m writing a self-help book.”

  “I need self-help,” I said.

  “Well, then,” she answered softly. “You’ll be the first recipient.”

  Chapter Thirty

  (In which Troy Ruby attempts to write a bestseller, after reading four chapters of Good and Bad, by Muriel Kay Starr)

  The Millennial Moment:

  Facing the Coming Millennia with Joy

  by Troy Ruby

  Americans are spiritually exhausted. We have undergone a stressful millennia. Stresses of all kinds have plagued the people of the earth. Too many to list here.

  There have been famines, plagues, wars and strife of all kinds. Unfettered strife, dominating the planet. In order to avoid more strife of this nature, we must seize the Millennial Moment.

  It is time for Americans to rest. The Millennial Moment is one in which you can both seize and rest. Why have these two activities been separated in the public imagination for so long?

  Many of you face turning to your most productive midlife years at the Millennial Moment. What does it mean? Regular anxiety is bad enough, do we need to have Millennial Angst now too? The answer lies in the Eight Leaps of Faith. Just memorize them and you will have accomplished at least one thing. A mere glance of the Eight Leaps of Faith might even do a little something.

  The Eight Leaps of Faith

  The First Leap: The Past is Prologue

  Everything that is behind you should be equally behind.