Take Me to Paris, Johnny

by John Foster

  Off the street, though, and in the places where gay men congregated, there was a mood I had not known before. While Juan and I had been in Berlin, the homosexual cancer and the violet spots had acquired a new name. GRID had become AIDS. It still sounded strange and it was clumsy on our lips, and, especially here in New York City, it generated apprehension and confusion. When we discussed the situation with Danny in Hiram’s apartment, it was his anger that impressed me most.

  ‘They want to close the bath houses,’ he told me, ‘and that will be just the beginning of a witch hunt. If they get away with this, next they’ll be burning faggots in the streets.’

  ‘I think so too,’ said Juan, who generally deferred to Danny in political matters, except where Israel was concerned.

  It is tempting to think that the publicity about AIDS contributed to a small domestic drama that was about to break over us, but I am inclined to think that this was not the case, for the woman who provoked the unpleasantness appeared to maintain perfectly peaceable relations with the other gay tenants in the building. It was only to Juan, and by extension to me, that she directed her malevolent attention.

  Presumably she had a name, since that is a requirement of the law. But no one appeared to know it, and she guarded it with the secrecy that other people reserve for their tax affairs or their criminal record, which frequently amount to the same thing. Not that she would have paid much in the way of tax. In the summer she read tarot cards in the Village, in a shop so narrow it was little more than a wall-to-wall wall. In the winter she appeared to hibernate and to retreat into the fastness of her apartment which, unfortunately, was directly below ours.

  On a few occasions we had observed each other frostily in the elevator. Then late one night, she announced herself with a loud thumping on her ceiling. Juan was watching yet another rerun of Dr Who on the television and I was trying to sleep when the thumps came persistently under the mattress on the floor. Juan retaliated, hammering the floor with the heel of his Mexican boot. There was evidently a history to this relationship. For several nights the attacks, as we came to think of them, continued, always around the midnight hour with which, as Juan observed, she seemed to have a particular affinity. But the Mexican boot produced its effect and she subsided, as we hoped, in defeated silence.

  On Christmas Eve she resorted to a new stratagem. We had been shopping at Balducci’s, an extravagant gesture that pleased Juan. I had imagined we might come home with a turkey and an English plum pudding. But turkeys were for Thanksgiving and Juan didn’t care for plums, so we arrived back at 14th Street with a new Christmas menu in place and ingredients to match: shrimps and prawns and clams for a paella and a strawberry shortcake in a box and a bottle of pink champagne. Then, along the length of the doorstep, as I fumbled for my key, we noticed a trail of white powder.

  ‘Salt!’ said Juan.

  ‘But why would we have salt on our doorstep?’

  ‘The bitch,’ he exclaimed. ‘She’s into magic!’

  ‘She’s what?’

  ‘Johnny, I’m sorry. You don’t understand these things. We have to piss it away.’

  It was true that I didn’t understand, but I could see that he was in deadly earnest. There are times when loyalty requires that you do the strangest things. And so, clutching the strawberry shortcake in one hand and directing my penis with the other, I stood beside him pissing away the salt, until it washed down the hallway in a briny stream. But this was, after all, New York, so when the magic was thoroughly dissolved we mopped it up with paper towels and dispatched them down the rubbish chute.

  Later in the evening she was back, snooping outside our door. Juan sensed her, and when he blazed into the corridor shrieking and bellowing and threatening to wring her neck, she fled to the elevator at the end of the hallway. Providentially—or was it rather due to the counter-magical power of our mingled urine?—the elevator door closed before he could make good his threat, and she was gone.

  Against my better judgement, on Christmas Day in the morning we made a start on the strawberry shortcake. Then I slipped out to the corner shop to buy some bay leaves that we needed for the paella. In the ten minutes that I was away, two policemen arrived, and when Juan answered the door they twisted his arm and forced him against the wall and searched him, and told him that they were going to charge him with harassment. Wasn’t it true that he had threatened to kill the nameless woman from downstairs?

  We went up to the sixth floor for a council of war with Danny. Danny said that it was only her word against Juan’s, but she was a middle-aged single woman, even if she was hysterical, and he was a young black Hispanic man, and a faggot, and it was obvious whose word they were going to believe. Hiram, looking slinky in a silk kaftan that might have doubled as a negligee, thought we all needed a caramelo that he had prepared in little porcelain bowls in honour of ‘my’ religious festival. In the end, Danny decided we would have to file a counter-charge of harassment against the woman.

  At the police precinct, when we turned up around lunchtime, they seemed to be having a quiet day. The officer at the desk had his feet up and his jowls down and he was not interested. When we persisted, he turned preachy and gave us a burst about the spirit of Christmas that was the most self-serving sermon I had ever heard. But Danny wouldn’t stand for that nonsense.

  Even with his grey beard and his long plait, he looked tough. He talked tough too; not aggressively, just enough to show that he wasn’t going to budge one inch. And perhaps the officer could see that he was Jewish and that Christmas didn’t cut much ice with him. You are not supposed to notice things like that but people do, the same way we noticed that the cop was Irish. So finally he bestirred himself and produced a form to fill in.

  The paella never got made, and when we came home to the apartment a new generation of chemically immune cockroaches was deeply into the cake. We bought a pizza and polished it off with the pink champagne.

  Two weeks later the case came up at the community conciliation board. A nice black woman heard their stories. I’m sure Juan didn’t tell her about the magic. Or about his lover who was here from Berlin. He was too shaken up to explain how hard he had worked to persuade Danny to let us have the apartment, and how he had looked forward to being the perfect host. And then that woman had needled and provoked him and fired him up and sent the police after him as if he were some mean street kid. That was what he hated most.

  The conciliator listened to what they had to say. Then she pronounced the verdict that in future the woman was never to speak to Juan, nor he to her. Of course, the justice of this ruling could be disputed, because it was the woman, after all, who had started the affair. But Juan could live with it. And besides, in a couple of days I would be leaving for Melbourne and Danny would be resuming his apartment. And Juan?

  ‘Don’t worry about me, Johnny. I’ll be OK.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  But miles and miles away

  Suffers another man.

  He was young, open-hearted,

  Strong in mind and body

  When all these things began.

  —Anthony Hecht,

  ‘Three Prompters from the Wings’

  For the next three years we lived our lives on a kind of instalment plan. We had times together, and times apart. In Juan’s case, you could say that the pattern of his life resembled an airline schedule, or the indicator board at an airport with the destinations flipping over as the planes arrived and departed: JFK-LAX-SYD (was this stopover really necessary?) -MEL. Four times he came, and then a fifth. And because the efficient operation of international travel presumes a tidy predictability that was quite alien to the forces that governed Juan’s life, there was always drama.

  The problems began, once again, with the visa. In the laminated offices of the Australian Consulate-General in New York, they received his application for a two-month visitor’s permit graciously enough. But unlike the Dutch, who had issued him with a travel permit in the previous year as though h
e were a normal person, or even the Germans, who had required only four weeks to investigate his suitability to visit Berlin, the Australian authorities would not be hurried in the meticulous execution of their duties. After several weeks they were still unable to inform him when his case might be decided, and when he pleaded that the departure date for his non-refundable ‘Apex’ flight to Melbourne was fast approaching, they reminded him that he ought not to have presumed on receiving a visa in the first place. He phoned me from the lobby in the Rockefeller Building in despair. It seemed that he would not be coming.

  It is a formidable thing to tangle with the Department of Immigration. Naively, I expected a well-mannered call to their local office would resolve the problem. They referred me to Canberra, and when I spoke to the people there, they vaguely referred me to New York, as though it were so remote as to have passed beyond the bounds of all accountability. Undaunted, I contacted New York, where they informed me that personal representations at the Embassy in Washington might be necessary: and in Washington they referred me to Canberra. The due investigative processes appropriate to the granting of a visa must run their course, they said, though what that course might be, or why the running was so slow, or to what end the investigative processes were directed, they were unable to say, because that was the responsibility of their officers in New York.

  Their system was perfect, their defences impenetrable; except that they failed to anticipate the intervention of my friend Paul, the most bureaucratically insightful person ever to be unemployed by the Public Service. He read and marked their regulations, including the smallest print and the most subordinate paragraphs, as fast as they could produce them, and he devoured the contents and relished the plots of pamphlets on civil rights with the enthusiasm that other people reserve for detective novels. He was a model citizen, a tireless advocate of rights—civil rights, gay rights, workers’ rights, tenants’ rights, the rights of pedestrians and the rights of the unborn. This, he agreed, was a difficult case. ‘Nevertheless,’ he said, ‘you must phone the Ombudsman, and insist on your rights.’

  Did I have a right to be visited? I had no idea: but the Ombudsperson agreed that I certainly had a right to be angry. She was sure, she said, that there was no prejudice at work in the case, but she would take up the issue as a matter of urgency. Within hours she produced results, and there was a reverse-charge call from Juan in the Rockefeller lobby on Fifth Avenue to confirm it. They had called him in to collect his visa, and in eight hours he would be on his way.

  As we discovered when we went through this farce for a second time six months later, his mysterious difficulties had to do with the fact that his ‘claimed nationality’ was Cuban. He was therefore, according to the logic of the Department, possibly a Communist, and as a Communist he was a possible threat to the national security. It is not easy to prove that one is not a Communist, and it is even more difficult if one is never asked. And unlike the Americans, who were very good at asking this question of their intending visitors, the Australians, being a polite people, preferred to avoid such a confrontational approach and to conduct their enquiries more discreetly. No evidence of Juan’s subversive inclinations came to light, but in its researches the Department did acquire an important piece of information—presumably from the FBI—that led them to doubt his integrity. Did he stand by the declaration he had made routinely to the effect that he had no criminal record? Of course he did. Then why, they wanted to know, had he concealed his encounter with the police on a certain evening in February 1972? They had lighted upon the saga of the cockroaches in the Greenwich Village restaurant!

  This time we knew the routine. I poured out the story to the astonished Ombudsperson and explained how Juan, though still technically Cuban, had long since embraced the attractions of bourgeois individualism to which in any event he had been predisposed ever since his grandmother had pressed him fresh guava juice in Guantánamo, and how, if you thought about it, this was perfectly consistent with his determination to eat a cockroach-free dinner in the restaurant with the priest. The Ombudsperson agreed and, drawing on the remarkable plenitude of her powers, once more she intervened, and once again the officers in the Rockefeller Building were required to reach reluctantly for their visa stamp.

  ‘It’s time, Juancho,’ I said to him when he arrived for the summer and we were lying on the beach at Wilsons Promontory undermining national security, ‘it’s time that you got yourself a proper passport.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to become an American.’

  Between our hard-won holiday reunions, we kept in touch by phone. And there were letters. He didn’t normally write letters. I never saw him write one, not in all the time we spent together. He called people up, and if they were out of town and not at home, they might as well have ceased to exist. But to me he wrote. It was never a regular flow, the kind of exchange you could describe as a correspondence. The letters came helter-skelter, sometimes two or three a week and sometimes none for a whole month, but they were always rich with his moods and his voice—like this one that he wrote after his first visit.

  New York City

  9.17.83

  My dear Johnny,

  How are you? I mess you very much. My impretion with Australia are really marvellous. Beside been sick for so long, I am still bother by this terrible ‘itch’. It have not going away yet and is driving me crazy.

  Things are just exactly as I left them, not much change. They all envy me. For New Year Hiram have a dinner for some friends from his church plus Betty and her husband. After they all got drunk Betty said that she can’t stand it that I have been all over and plus I’m going to have a degree from college and who do I think I am. By that time I was making believe I was sleeping, so they continue and I stay on my own thinking about you and Australia. Papy, how I feel I could just quit everything and disapere. I did not mess New York one bit when I was there with you.

  In later years we wondered sometimes why it was that Australia seemed to make him sick. On that first trip it was Bell’s palsy. We had been to see a movie in Carlton and then dropped into Genevieve’s for coffee. As we came out he stopped on the corner of Dorrit St and complained that the left side of his face was frozen. By the next morning it had subsided into a kind of mongoloid droop and the doctor, who valued an open relationship with his patients, thought it appropriate to warn him that in 25 per cent of cases the treatment for his condition would not succeed. This time it did, though agonisingly slowly, and then it was followed by an outbreak of shingles that raised little pustules of concentrated itchiness across the small of his back. The medical dictionary we consulted concluded its brief entry on herpes zoster with the comment: ‘Has been known to drive people to suicide.’ So it was small wonder that in his next letter he confessed to having been depressed.

  9.28.83 My dear Johnny,

  Your letter arrived just on time to cure me of my acute depression.

  You are very correct my dear. To me the best time we have ever spend have been in Melbourne. Everytime I hear something or see something from Australia I feel some kind of knot on my chest and I feel home sick.

  By now you have seen the newspaper clipping from the much talk about victory in 132 years. I’m very happy for Australia. But for a moment it was 3–1 America and after that the rest is history. The media have gone crazy because they could not believe after 3–1 they could lose and they lost. The beauty of.

  The completed sentence, I suspect, would have read: ‘The beauty of it is that these crazy Cubans, who always put me down and tell me that Australia is unsophisticated but are really intensely jealous, are taking the Bond victory as a personal affront. On the other hand, thanks to Mr Bond and his punching kangaroo, my stocks have never been higher!’

  There was good news, too, on the job front. He had been interviewed for a part-time job as a booking clerk with the People’s Express Airline.

  There is only one catch: I must have a ‘suit’…So I am depress for a suit because I want that job, so p
lease I’m ask you to send me some money to buy me a suit right of way. I am very excited about the job. It was $5 per hour with benefit of free travel anytime anywhere but it does not go to Australia.

  Papy, I feel O.K. now because I won’t be any more walking the street. I may rent a furnish room in a cheap place so I can save some money for my trip to Australia in Dec–Juany. Right now I don’t have a cent, and I need that suit before class starts in 3 weeks. The rule says: ‘Business ataire’ (suit, shirt and tie).

  Fortunately he was able to beg or borrow a brown reefer jacket with gold buttons from a friend, which apparently satisfied the sartorial expectations of People’s Express. They took him into their training programme almost immediately.

  Every time that I walk into the centre, I feel nervous and a beat ashame for not having some good clothes. The training is for two weeks and with one week pay if the test is pass or no pay if the test is not pass and of course NO JOB. I’m scare of not passing the test.

  He passed the test, gratefully pocketed the one week’s pay for two week’s work, and settled into a routine that was arranged for the days when he was free from college classes. At the end of the year, before his second trip to Melbourne, they assured him they would hold his position until his return, but when he returned their circumstances had changed and his services were not required. And so, when their circumstances changed still further later in 1984, he reported the matter with some feeling:

  10.11.84

  Ah, a big scandal just happen with ‘People Express’. Well it was in the news for almost ‘slave driver’. 527 people quit their jobs. All students. Because with students and no union those people were exploited and if you complain you were fire on the ‘spot’. I was shock when I saw the news. They too were guilty for no hiring disable or fat people, so is good that the city got in their ‘case’. How about that?