There is no way to kill them. They are immune to everything except being hit over the head or shot. Once it became evident that no poison was ever going to get them, the guys at the lab came up with the most diabolical tactic ever attempted in the history of Rat vs. Human warfare. Warfarin. It is this odorless, tasteless, anticoagulant that produces massive internal hemorrhaging. Basically everything inside their bodies that holds and channels blood falls apart and the rats turn into one big, red, sloppy mess. Their bodies no longer have systems and just become containers for sloshy, directionless blood.
At first I wondered about the mind of the man who invented Warfarin. It seemed so treacherous. I wondered how he got the idea. But then it turned out that even this was not evil enough because the Super Rats were immune to that too. The Bureau instructed us to try zinc phosphide next. A quick-acting poison that smells like garlic. But the rats detected it in the bodies of their dead friends and figured out pretty quickly how to stay away. Finally, they sent us out into the field with packages of Lorexa. This odorless overdose of vitamin D was exactly the recipe that sent the Super Rats to the gas chamber. The jig was up. But then the budget cuts came along.
The cold clock laboriously reached nine.
“New York Post,” I called out. “Five bucks.”
Mrs. Santiago glared over her eyeglasses. “I’ll stay with Newsday .”
When the phone rang, we all jumped. But when I picked it up it was Manuel on the other end, worked up into a frenzy over the food for the memorial service.
“Grapes will be fine,” I said. “Something pure.”
At Pest Control we can take off time for funerals, but when they come at the rate of one or two a week, Mrs. Santiago starts noticing disapprovingly. Her nephew got murdered in Bushwick last February and her brother got shot in the head in Puerto Rico in March. So she tends to accept regular death in the lives of her employees. Her other sister’s boyfriend died of AIDS in April, but she didn’t say much about that. I just think that sick days should be for when I am sick. I need separate leave days for everyone else. Plus one day a month for menstrual cramps.
“How are you doing? ” I asked Manuel quickly.
“I am very very angry at those PWLOPWAs.”
“What’s that? ”
“People Who Live Off People With AIDS. If this epidemic ever ends, everyone who is still alive will be suddenly unemployed.”
“More histrionics?” I asked.
“I think they should change the name of this disease,” he said. “From AIDS to AIDA. Only Leontyne Price can do it justice.”
Even before David actually died, there was a fight over the body. Some people in ACT UP wanted to have a political funeral, but Manuel didn’t think that was dignified. He wanted something quiet. But there were more ACT UPers in David’s care group than there were people like Manuel. So they ended up with a weird and uncomfortable compromise of a public funeral, but a demure one. Manuel was so racked with guilt that he became obsessed with the funeral catering and called me three times the day before with a wide range of bizarre suggestions like portable hummus and Portabello mushrooms. I think he just wanted attention.
At times like this you have to sit down and ask yourself all kinds of questions:
What would David have wanted?
and
Is this for the living or for the dead?
Let’s face it, David was a Liza Minnelli fag. This was the guy who used to find out where famous people went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings so he could hold their hands during the serenity prayer. He would have wanted something fabulous.
David was cheated out of his life. That’s one of the few items he had in common with his peers. He would have wanted something angry and hyperbolic. A fire or explosion. Something destructive. He would have really like that.
David was a postmodern aesthete. He would have wanted something formally inventive but timeless.
Natural Beauty? Kitsch classic? How do you choose?
Chapter Forty-one
The official stepping-off spot for the funeral was at Houston Street and First Avenue at five o’clock. But the organizers forgot that about twenty-five homeless people sold their stuff on that very spot every day. There is no more public space in urban life. The people with no private space live in it. Then the city tells them that that is their private problem. So we all had to kind of stand around them, step over them, and refuse them nonchalantly while crying and comforting each other at the same time.
No one knew what to say really because, apparently, there had been three other people from ACT UP who had died in the previous two weeks. So the habitual mourners were sick of making cooing comforting sounds to each other. The endearments stuck in their throats. Besides, there is that special brand of communication that gay people utilize at AIDS funerals. The standing-around-in-sorrow-state-of-silent-acknowledgment method. We raise our eyebrows and nod. David told me once it was perfected in sex clubs. Like when he used to run into that uptown editor at some dive on the upper West Side. The guy would be yelling, “Suck that dick. Suck that big dick.” And when he would catch David’s eye, up went those acknowledging eyebrows.
David’s closest friends had accepted his death long ago. In fact, most had buried him emotionally while he was still registering a pulse. Those who came by word of mouth had their own reasons. They knew him or his writing vaguely. They had their own multitudes of dead that still needed to be mourned and so haunted other people’s funerals as excuses to further grieve. Some were total fans of his writing and felt themselves to be in an underground historical moment that would surely have some latter-day significance when his reputation was exhumed from the mass grave into which it was now tossed. It was a cortege of reasons.
Lyle looked absolutely terrible. He earnestly handed out these horribly tacky bodega candles. Instead of pictures of Chango, the glass containers had pictures of David like he was some saint. I guess Lyle wishes he was a saint and really wants some bodega candles with his own face on them when it is time for his funeral. I’ll have to remember that. His boyfriend has been dead for two months and funerals like David’s were just more practice until the day it was Lyle’s turn to fall down in the next round of musical caskets.
I stopped to talk to this black guy, Kurt, that David and I had run into at a party in Dyke Slope last year.
“What can you say? ” I said.
“I’m so tired of this,” he said.
Then we each moved on and said the same thing to someone else.
A couple of hundred people showed up which seemed like a lot, but actually it was very little. Especially when you consider the scope of David’s reputation. There should have been more, at least. I know that he wanted his funeral to be the catalyst for the revolution. Who doesn’t? And with each AIDS funeral that possibility always lingers. But you can tell within the first ten minutes that it is not going to go that way. People were not furious. Just exhausted.
Finally, Ira drove up with a van and Manuel and some others lifted out the coffin. It was white, like cake frosting, with light blue trim. That really surprised me because I knew that David was Jewish, so I had expected a plain pine coffin like the one my mother had. But then I realized that Manuel had done the shopping and that tradition is something he just couldn’t be expected to know. For the first time, I felt guilty. Maybe I should have done the shopping. Isn’t that my responsibility, as a Jew?
A bunch of big, strong gym queens in tiny cutoffs lifted the coffin onto their shoulders and all two hundred of us walked behind it up First Avenue. There were some Radical Faeries with bells on their toes, but most people just held those awful candles. Some people were carrying his books. Then I thought for the first time that his sales would probably go up dramatically for one day, now that the Times obituary had come out. Too bad they never reviewed him while he was alive.
There were not many observers on that strip of First Avenue as we walked past some funeral homes and into Tompkins Square Park.
We ended up in the void where the bandshell used to be and everyone stood around while the event’s organizers laid out a metal frame. They placed David’s casket on it, right under a tree. Then they opened up the casket.
First he looked very familiar and it felt good to see him. I wondered if death was just getting too easy for me, or if seeing him dead was actually the peaceful thing. But then there was this wafting of embalming fluid and it was horrible. It didn’t smell like dead, rotting animals. It smelled like chemistry, or the inside of the Xerox store. It smelled like something really awful for your lungs that just made everyone want to run away. But we all stayed and got infected by it and kept staring at him, lying there.
Chapter Forty-two
It didn’t take long for the junkies and homeless who hang out in the park to come over and check out what was going on. There were young guys and girls with beers in paper bags looking at his body. You could see them wondering about themselves since a lot of them have HIV too, or other things like poverty and confusion, which also guarantees a short life.
A bunch of Latin kids on bikes started riding around the body and they acted like they’d stared death in the face before because there was no awe in their curiosity. I noticed that the embalmer had covered up David’s KS with makeup and somehow this was the most upsetting part of the whole scenario. It brought him back to the state before he was splattered by it, which reminded me, suddenly, of how he looked before he was really dying. The makeup made it all so palatable, peaceful. Cinematic.
Manuel stood up and read a poem that was pretty rambling and, frankly, a little boring. Later he sent me a copy without a note.
DAVID
David’s body is a sweet, emaciated profile
against the twenty-first century. If a tree
is that century, his shadow barely cools the bark.
If his memory is a cake, it lies, dusty in
a bakery window on Fourteenth Street.
Young girls, ex-virgins, imagine its dried, crusty frame
through new eyes, imagine new life.
We who remain shuffle slowly to the subway.
We make time for death between life and rest.
We make time for three vignettes, or two well
cared for photographs, one reduced phrase,
one gesture, and one sound. One memento, one tomato,
one joke retold too often. One association, one pathetic
moment, one exciting sentence, one melody, one moon.
We suddenly recall, we forget, suddenly.
Manuel was crying so uncontrollably that between his sobs and his accent, I couldn’t hear most of the piece anyway. I just watched him, like a spectacle. Next on the program were three people reading selections from David’s books—all of which were somber. I always thought that his books were funny. But I guess you can’t do that at a funeral. Following that, a guy from ACT UP made a political speech. Then a couple of friends said good-bye in different ways.
I was thinking over what I wanted to say. I had been trying to come up with something since before Dave was even dead. But nothing ever popped into my mind. It wasn’t until I was standing there, with toxic lungs, that I realized that I had nothing to say. I realized that I was very, very angry at David when he died. Our relationship was so one-sided. He never thought about me until I was right in front of his face. Is that awful? To want mutuality from a dead man? I did not want to get up there in front of all that authentic, if convoluted, feeling and pretend things had been different than they were. I too have grief.
So, I passed.
Killer did get up though and said some sentimental things that actually moved me. So I had my catharsis. By proxy.
“I remember a story David once told me about his childhood,” she said. “He was always telling stories, especially toward the end of his life. And I guess that, as a writer, that was the best way for him to convey his feelings. Anyway, once when he was about eight and his sister was about ten, they went to their aunt’s house on Long Island and spent the night in a tent in her backyard. Being city kids, there was some anxiety and concern about sleeping ‘outside’ and David was particularly concerned about spiders.
“After they pitched the tent, he decided that the best way to protect himself and his sister from these spiders would be to build some kind of obstruction. So he went back in the house and got a broom and swept a foot and a half area all around it. Then they collected stones and bricks and pieces of wood and built a little fence around the swept area. But, still not convinced that this was protection enough, David and his sister jumped up and down, up and down singing, ‘Out spiders out. Out. Out. Out.’ And then he finally felt safe enough to go to sleep.
“I keep thinking,” she said, “about how he equated health with going to sex clubs. So that even when he had real problems with his legs, he would go and let everyone know that he had gone. Make a big deal out of it. I guess that ever since he was a little boy, David needed rituals. He needed magical thinking and mutual experiences. He very much wanted to live and he needed to feel that he had done everything he could to take care of a situation, even if it was unmanageable.”
The sunlight whispered through the petals of rickety old survivor trees. The park looked really beautiful.
The next act was a flute, followed by the requisite recording of Nina Simone played off of someone’s boom box. By this time in the proceedings, people started to look at their watches because they had places to be and death is not enough of an anomaly.
Then someone announced that David’s father was there. This made his few real friends turn around in surprise because everyone knew how much his father had hurt him. He turned out to be this graying Jewish lawyer in his mid-sixties. Kind of upper-middle-class. He was wearing a summer suit and a tie and really he was the only person in the park wearing formal dress. He was totally out of place. I was kind of surprised that the old man would show up at something like this. Show his face at this late date. But that thought was quickly replaced with the realization that he had no understanding of what we knew or felt about him. He did not believe that we existed. He did not know his son had relationships.
Dave’s dad walked up to the front of the crowd and stood between us and the coffin. He didn’t look at Dave while we were all watching, but he did stand next to his son’s body. Quiet shapes, under the tree. Then he took this folded piece of paper out of his breast pocket and adjusted his glasses.
“My son, David Gabriel Berman, was born on February twenty-second, 1958. George Washington’s birthday. We promised him that all his life, his birthday would be celebrated as a national holiday. But then they changed the law and George Washington’s birthday was no longer celebrated on February twenty-second. David accepted this without complaint, just as he later accepted having AIDS without complaint. David graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Columbia University and lived for a year in Portugal and for a year in Rome, Italy. I am sorry and will always be sorry that David is no longer with us. So long, Dave.”
There are rarely any parents whenever we all meet. And their sudden appearance immediately deprives us of our collective adulthood. We know they are against us and it is so hard to maintain stature in the presence of your fiercest opposition. Even when we are so beautiful and strong.
In the silence that followed, nobody even gasped. Some people looked at each other and raised those eyebrows, but most of us were not surprised. We’re so used to it. We’re so used to parents who show up at the last minute and never took the time to know their child. Who have no idea of who they are talking about. We suffer them silently.
We took Dave’s father personally because most of us know our families would do the same. The most common link between all gay people is that at some time in our lives, often extended, our families have treated us shabbily because of our homosexuality. They punish us, but we did not do anything wrong. We tell each other about this all the time, but we never tell the big world. It is the one secret not
for public consumption.
We’ll stand up proudly on television in slave collars and penis tucks, but we will never speak out publicly about what our families have done to us. It is too true.
After Dad, a gay guy, a real queen who had gone to Columbia with Dave, read the Kaddish and all the Jews started to cry. What a switch from Dad to hear this quiet, gay Jew in hot pants and a tallis, whine our friend’s dark death in a five-thousand-year-old tongue. We are old. We do exist. We can mourn. We do have language. We still have that. Finally, I was able to be afraid.
Chapter Forty-three
Post-funeral is one of those still undefined moments. Sometimes you rush off to another appointment and the whole thing only hits you that night, in bed, or during a vaguely familiar feeling at the next funeral. Sometimes, though, we all go off for drinks.
The day of Dave’s funeral was, weatherwise, a great one, so I decided to take a stroll downtown looking for a comfortable spot in the beachfront cottage called my erotic imagination. And, after all, that night did become a balmy night. Everywhere I turned, people were chattering with pleasure through open windows and there was a clatter of forks against plates. Beer bottles against glasses.
I walked over to this specialty cinema on the other side of town because I had vaguely heard that there were some gay movies from Cuba playing there. I thought that maybe a certain Cuban might be waiting in front.
Having an hour to kill, I took a seat in the rear garden of an old-fashioned West Village restaurant and sat alone at a round, green table, ordering a green alcoholic drink. The place was totally empty and I was feeling strangely elated, perforated. So, feeling very private, I decided, on a whim, to forgo the margarita and order a Coors beer instead. Now, the Coors boycott had been on for so long, due to their support of right-wing causes, that I never in my life actually tasted one. I was looking forward to the experience, but still felt a little strange when the bartender served it up in the can. I felt a little ashamed, sitting there drinking a can of Coors.
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