Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle

by Michael Thomas Ford

  "I didn't know if it would go anywhere," said Andy. "Why bring up a trick if he's not going to be around more than a night or two?"

  "He looks like more than a trick to me," I countered. "He seems to think you're his personal property." "That's just Crosley," said Andy. "He gets a little possessive is all."

  "So he is your boyfriend," I said.

  Andy nodded. "I guess you could call him that," he admitted.

  "You could do a lot worse than Peter Crosley," Alan said. "The guy's loaded."

  "Is he?" Andy said, as if this was news to him.

  "Where'd you meet him?" I asked.

  "I forget," Andy answered. "A party, a bar, something like that."

  I could tell he was lying, hoping I would drop the subject. But I was annoyed, both at Andy for playing dumb and at his apparent boyfriend for talking down to me. I decided I wasn't leaving until I knew exactly what was going on between them.

  "Are you guys serious?" I pressed. "I mean, is he the one?"

  "The one?" said Andy. "Christ, you sound like some high school girl. Yeah, I've got my hope chest filled with dish towels and silverware. I'm just waiting for him to pop the question." "Hey, I'm just trying to figure out what the situation is," I said.

  "There's no situation," Andy said, clearly irritated. "We're just dating."

  "I think I'm going to go get some drinks," Alan said. "What do you want?"

  "Scotch and soda," I told him, knowing that he was leaving to give me time alone with Andy. "Andy?" he asked. "Another one?"

  "Thanks," said Andy, handing him the empty glass.

  "Okay," I said when Alan was gone. "I know you. And I know that guy isn't your type. Now what's going on?" "What do you mean ‘my type'?" said Andy. "What's my type?"

  "Not that queen," I answered. "Since when are you into theater?"

  "Since he started paying me," Andy said.

  "Paying you? What, you work for him now? Doing what?"

  "Being his boyfriend," said Andy.

  I looked at him, speechless. "He pays you to be his boyfriend?" I said. "You mean you're an escort?" "No," Andy said. "It's not like that. He doesn't pay me, exactly. It's more like I'm his executor." "You lost me," I told him.

  "He's going to leave everything to me," Andy explained. "Not everything, but a lot. When he dies. Until then, I'm his boyfriend." I was dumbfounded. "He bought you?" I said.

  Andy shook his head. "You don't understand," he said.

  "You're right about that," I told him. "So, enlighten me."

  Andy looked around, as if to make sure no one was listening. "He has AIDS," he said, speaking quietly.

  "Nobody knows. He's not sick yet, but he will be. He knows no one will want to be with him when he is. I will. Then, when he dies, I get some money and his apartment." "You're joking," I said. "You've got to be. Why would anyone do that?"

  "He doesn't want to be alone," said Andy.

  "I can't believe he's buying a boyfriend," I said. "Do you even like him?"

  "He's all right," Andy said. "Like you said, maybe he's not my type. But I'm not fucking him, so who cares?"

  "He's not even getting sex out of this deal?" I said.

  "I jack him off," Andy said. "Sometimes I let him suck my dick. But that's it. He doesn't really like getting fucked anyway, so he doesn't care." I shook my head. "How much are you getting?" I asked.

  Andy shrugged. "A couple of million, I guess."

  I couldn't help but laugh. "This is insane," I told him. "Totally insane."

  "How's it any different from making porn?" Andy asked me. "It's a fantasy. I let him live out his fantasy, he pays me. What's so weird about that? It's not like I know how to do anything else, Ned."

  "No," I said. "I guess you don't."

  Alan reappeared at that point, balancing three glasses in his hands. I took my scotch and Andy retrieved his martini. "So," Alan said. "Are all four of us having dinner soon?"

  "I don't think so," I told him as Andy drained his glass.

  We left soon after that and went home. As we got ready for bed, I told Alan what Andy was doing with Crosley. He was as shocked as I'd been. "He has AIDS?" he said. "You can't even tell."

  "He's not that sick yet," I reminded him, squeezing toothpaste onto my brush.

  "And Andy's getting all his money?" Alan asked.

  "Not all of it," I said through a mouthful of suds as I scrubbed. "But enough. And the apartment."

  "I guess I should be nice to him," said Alan from the other room, where he was taking off his clothes.

  "He might be producing my next show."

  I spit into the sink. "I just don't get it," I said as I rinsed my toothbrush. "Why would a guy like Peter Crosley need to pay someone to be his boyfriend?" "Well, I sort of understand it," Alan said. "If he just had a normal boyfriend, I mean one who wasn't like Andy, he might not know if the guy was sticking around because he loved him or because he wanted his money. With Andy, he knows, so he doesn't have to worry about it."

  "That's totally fucked up," I said, turning out the bathroom light and coming into the bedroom. "Maybe," Alan said. "But it kind of makes sense. You've seen how these guys look when it gets bad. How many boyfriends do you think would stick around if they weren't getting something for it?"

  "They should stick around because they love them," I argued. "They should, yes," Alan agreed. "But you know a lot of them don't. They can't handle it and they leave. With Andy, Crosley has insurance. Andy won't leave because he won't get anything if he does."

  I pulled back the comforter on the bed. "But Andy doesn't love him!" I said.

  "Sometimes pretend love is enough," said Alan. "What do you think theater is anyway?"

  "But he could do so many other things with all that money," I said as I slipped between the sheets.

  "Right," said Alan. "He could give it all to the Met, like John did. Who also gave you something for coming around twice a week, I might add."

  "A box of opera records is a little different than a couple million dollars," I said. "It's the same thing," said Alan as he squirted hand lotion onto his palm and began rubbing it into his skin. "My great aunt Charlotte left my mother a diamond necklace when she died, all because when my mother was twelve she told her that she made the best lemon cake in the world. John left you opera records. Crosley is leaving Andy a couple million dollars and an apartment."

  "It's more sad than anything else," I said. "What does it say about us as people that we abandon each other when things get hard?" I looked at Alan. "What would you do if I got sick?" Alan put the lotion away and got into bed. "You're not going to get sick," he said. "That's not an answer," I told him. "What if I did?"

  "I'd bring you chicken noodle soup and read you bedtime stories," he said, kissing me. "You're avoiding talking about it," I said.

  "Because we don't need to talk about it."

  "Would you leave me?" I asked him.

  "Are you going to give me a million dollars?" he asked.

  "Alan, I'm serious. Would it scare you away if I was sick?"

  "I don't think so," he said after a moment. "I hope it wouldn't."

  "That wasn't the answer I wanted to hear," I told him.

  "I love you, Ned," he said. "And I want to believe that I wouldn't be the kind of person who would run away if you got sick. But we're not talking about regular sick here. We're talking about sick sick. You know what happens. Shit, I freak out when I have to pop a zit."

  I nodded. "I do know what happens," I said. "I know what happened to John, and I know what's happening now to Ike and Bart and the other guys I take food to. And I know that if it ever happened to me and you couldn't handle it, I'd probably die."

  "Then you understand why Crosley's willing to give Andy everything he has for not leaving him," he said.

  "We're not talking about Crosley and Andy," I told him. "We're talking about you and me." He took my hand, running his thumb along mine as we sat for a while in silence. "I'm not leaving," he said finally.r />
  "Even if I lose my hair and end up covered in purple spots?" I asked. "Like Mad Madam Mim inThe Sword in the Stone ?" "Even then," he said. "Disney queen."

  "Promise?"

  "I promise," he said. "Now can we go to sleep?"

  I nodded. Alan reached over and turned off the light. Then he turned onto his side and put his arm around me, pulling me close. "You worry too much," he said.

  "And you don't worry enough," I answered.

  "Which is why we're perfect for each other," he said. "Between the two of us, we're a normal person." I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but my brain was still wide awake, unwilling to settle down and go to bed. It jumped up and down like an unruly child, demanding attention and ignoring my pleas to stop. I couldn't stop thinking about Andy and Crosley. I did see Alan's point. But I also couldn't ignore the fact that Andy was taking advantage of the situation, like a vulture hovering a few feet above a cowboy slowly dying of thirst. I knew there were men in apartments and hospital rooms all over the city who were dying alone, with only people like me and other volunteers to hold their hands and care what happened to them. Why should men like Peter Crosley be using their money to buy an illusion when it could be used for so many better things? And why should a man like Andy be getting it?

  It was an unfair question, and I knew it. Crosley had just as much right to buy Andy's affection as someone else had to buy drugs, or chocolate, or a pet to sit on his lap and provide comfort. That Crosley's need required an obscene amount of money to meet was simply a measure of its enormity. If anything, it was Andy who should be considering using some of the wealth he would acquire to help those who had less. Would he? I was afraid that I knew the answer to that question all too well. Behind me I felt and heard Alan breathing. Would he, I wondered, really stay if I discovered spots on my skin or found it difficult to draw air into my lungs? He became a baby when he had so much as a stubbed toe or a sore throat. Could he handle a wasting body and everything that came with it? I hoped he was right, and that we would never have to find out. For now, I could only trust in his promise.

  CHAPTER 49

  "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." So wrote George Orwell in 1949, when his novel1984 looked ahead to a time when life was dictated by the will of the authoritarian Party and individuality was a crime. And certainly history, both prior to and following the publication of Orwell's most famous work, has proven him correct. What we know as history has been written and rewritten so many times that what is really true has been lost in a thicket of conjecture, mistake, and deliberate lie. Following his rise to power, for example, Josef Stalin employed what Trotsky referred to as his "School of Falsification" to cover up his bloody crimes and erase all mention of his enemies' contributions to the rise of the Bolsheviks and the success of the October Revolution. More recently, after assuming power from the secularist government in 1998, India's Hindu Nationalist Party rewrote the country's history books, removing, among other things, all references to the assassination of Gandhi by a Hindu fanatic.

  This is what we do. We revise history, whether personal, familial, or global, to our advantage. Is it surprising that Henry VII would want to wipe the name Plantagenet from the record books? Is it shocking that the people of Japan don't want to acknowledge the massacre of an estimated 300,000 Chinese by Japanese soldiers during the Rape of Nanking? Does anyone really question why, time and again, criminals declare themselves innocent in the face of overwhelming proof, or why juries often do likewise?

  Vladimir Lenin famously asserted that "a lie, told often enough, becomes truth." It's not that easy, of course. The transition from falsehood to fact requires active participation on the part of those being deceived, either a failure to question the "truth" in question, or a willful disregard of any evidence that contradicts the so-called facts as they are presented. Fortunately for those who would seek to rewrite history, the human mind seems to have a limitless capacity for rearranging events to render them more satisfying or less wounding, as befits the situation.

  In 1984—the year, not the novel—things were not quite as bad off as Orwell supposed they might be. They were, however, not good, especially for gay men in America. We'd hoped that AIDS would be a temporary inconvenience, a frightening but curable one that scientists would quickly corner and subdue. But things hadn't worked out that way. The plague continued to spread, and like the residents of 14th century Europe, we examined ourselves and one another for the telltale signs of infection. (In a grotesque homage to the red-ringed "roseys" that indicated the bite of the Black Death, the first signs that AIDS

  had taken hold were the purplish-red spots of Kaposi's sarcoma.) On Sunday, April 22, I walked to the corner bodega for coffee and the New York Times , bringing both back to Alan, who was still asleep but woke up as soon as he smelled the cup of French roast I set on his bedside table. Never a morning person, he struggled to accept the arrival of a new day while I settled in next to him to see what was going on in the world. Removing the circulars, magazines, and TV guide that were the paper's innards, I opened the first section to see, on the front page, an article announcing that the head of the Centers for Disease Control was confident that the cause of AIDS had been found by a team of French researchers.

  "Listen to this," I said to Alan, reading him the first part of the article.

  "It's about time," he said. "What's it been, three years? Maybe we'll finally get a vaccine and life can get back to normal."

  "Not for a while," I told him, reading further. "They say it will take at least a year to manufacture one. But they should have a test for it soon."

  Alan yawned and stretched. "Fantastic," he said. "So you can know sooner that you're going to die. No thanks. I'd rather not know."

  "Really?" I said. "You wouldn't want to know if you were sick?" "Why would I?" he replied. "There's not much I could do about it. It's not like they've found anything to fight it with or really know how to prevent spreading it, so, personally, I'd rather not be all freaked out about it." He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "Besides, we're both fine."

  "How do we know that?" I said. "We could be infected and not know it."

  "We've been through this a hundred times," he said, drinking his coffee. "We're not sick . Now, give me the arts and entertainment section. I want to read about something I actually care about." As Alan turned his attention to less depressing topics, I read the rest of the article. Looking back on it more than twenty years later, when AIDS has claimed a reported 25 million lives (the same, incidentally, as the Black Plague took between 1347 and 1352), I'm struck by how hopeful we were then. We really did believe that once the culprit was discovered, a cure would be close behind. Although AIDS had first been called "gay cancer," none of us, I think, thought that it would turn out to be a disease whose eradication would, like its nominal sibling breast cancer, be a battle seemingly without end. But we needed that hope. If we'd known then that decades would pass without either a vaccine or a cure, I think maybe we would have given up. We were already scared; the idea that our entire way of life might need to change was something we were not ready to face.

  If, like Stalin, I were to rewrite the history of that time, specifically my own history, I would make myself less certain that "the government" or any other faceless entity actually cared about my personal well-being. Again, though, to even begin to believe that we might survive the virus, I had to believe that someone was looking out for me other than myself. Like the responsibility for ensuring the safety of air travel, the purity of my drinking water, and the worth of the currency in my wallet, I placed in the hands of the United States government the duty of making sure that I and all of my friends made it through alive. The first sign that this might not be the case came the day after I read Alan the Times article. Apparently annoyed that the U.S. had been beaten to the punch by rival France, Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler called a news conference to announce that an Ameri
can team at the National Cancer Institute had discovered their own virus, which they believed would be proven to be the cause of AIDS. A beaming Heckler told reporters, "Today we add another miracle to the long honor roll of American medicine and science."

  Ultimately the two viruses would turn out to be the same one, but the scuffle over who deserved credit for the "miracle" of its discovery, and even which name would be used to describe it, would rage for some time. In the meantime, we continued to sicken and die. Ronald Reagan, the man who had helped us defeat the Briggs Initiative six years before, had not even uttered the word AIDS in public, and public health officials were treating the disease as something affecting primarily homosexuals. Still, we continued to believe that they would help us.

  Alan was right about one thing, though. We were both fine. Neither of us had experienced so much as a cold in months, which was something of a miracle considering how busy we were. La Cage was a smash hit, and despite having a small role, Alan was getting all kinds of offers for new productions. I was finishing my junior year at NYU and spending all of my time studying and writing. We were constantly on the go, sometimes seeing each other only for an hour or two between Alan's return from the theater and my departure for my first class. It was a crazy life, but we were both doing what we loved, and so we were happy.

  Since learning of Andy's relationship with Crosley, I'd seen him only a handful of times, mostly at theater community events. I'd tried to make peace with what he was doing, and had largely succeeded, mainly by reminding myself repeatedly that Peter Crosley had as much right to be happy as anyone else did, and that my judging him for how he chose to live his life was just as bad as someone judging me for how I chose to live mine. Which a lot of people were, by the way. Not me personally, but gay men in general. Since AIDS was still largely thought of as a gay disease, our popularity among other segments of society had plummeted. Like the mice and rats who were discovered to be the primary carriers of the plague and were summarily dispatched, we were viewed with suspicion, as if every last one of us housed within us the seeds of death. A poll taken at the time showed that 15% of the American public believed that people with AIDS should be visibly tattooed for the protection of everyone else. And so I tried not to judge Crosley too harshly, particularly as his health declined precipitously during the spring. Each time I saw him, it was as if he had faded a little more. He lost weight, and his eyes took on the haunted look of someone who saw his own ghost when he peered in the mirror. Word quickly spread that he was the latest to be stricken, and a deathwatch commenced as people gossiped about what would become of his fortune and worried producers wondered if they should look elsewhere for funding.