People in Trouble

by Sarah Schulman

  34

  KATE

  She was of two minds about going out of town. Frankly, Kate wanted to get away from her lovers, and she wanted to sit down with the carpenter and work intensively on her project. But there was also some nagging suspicion that this was the kind of moment best not left unattended and anything was capable of happening behind her back. So she had called Pearl the night before to go over their agenda and realized, again, that she really did need to go up there and see the wooden framing structure for herself. She could not risk arriving at the library site on the morning of the installation to find something wrong with the frames.

  It was a strange bus ride. Kate exhausted all her normal traveling rituals with a speedy ambivalence. She ate her food before Yankee Stadium, lifelessly leafed through and then dismissed her newspaper and once again carefully considered the pros and cons of owning a Walkman. It came in handy at times like these, but didn’t one’s sense of humanity demand striking up a conversation with one’s neighbor instead of plugging into a square plastic box? Kate looked at the man sitting next to her. He was listening to his Walkman. When she closed her eyes and pressed back into her seat she could feel vaguely operatic vibrations emanating from his head and passing through the cushions.

  Again she looked for distractions, but the bumpy road made reading or sketching impossible. Besides, there was a large, flat calm where her general anxiety really should have been, and then on top of it a tiny, nervous, constant throb.

  But she did feel instinctively good about Pearl. That was one thing about Molly’s friends. They were reliable and very cheap. Of course, men were helping too. After all it was Spiros who had gotten her the funding and he good-naturedly promised to organize champagne and hors d’oeuvres for the actual opening.

  ‘Although I’m not a great believer in installations,’ he told her, ‘I am even more atheistic when it comes to sour grapes.’

  The bus ride had been interesting for the first thirty minutes when they passed through an extended Harlem that was a collection of churches, beauty parlors and liquor stores. It had main drags, it had decimated areas, it had music schools and a liberation bookstore. It had Jamaican meat patties and a good crust pie between the projects and luxury brownstones. It had everything a poor city had plus certain things that only Harlem had and it was black and Latin all over except around the edges and a few pockets of new white people moving in or old white people who had endured or brand-new Korean businesses. After Harlem there was nothing to look at for hours.

  It was Thursday. On Tuesday night Justice had met for the first time in its new home. The membership had simply grown too large for anybody’s basement. Now they gathered in the abandoned Saint Mark’s bathhouse, closed down by the mayor right after he closed the Mineshaft. The crowd was huge, especially since Justice had been joined by Fury, the women-with-AIDS group. Now Daisy, an older Puerto Rican woman with long gray hair, co-facilitated the meetings with James. She began every session with a big smile on her face and an announcement.

  ‘If there is anyone here from the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the New York City Police Department, you are required by law to identify yourself now.’

  Everyone would be silent for a moment and look around, then their faces would open into broad grins and they would get back to work. Defiance was Justice’s bread and butter.

  The presence of the Furies changed the Justice guys just a bit. It made for a coed institution, one in which, except for a few indiscretions, the sexes rarely mixed intimately.

  ‘That puts us in a special category,’ Molly said after one particularly lively meeting, ‘with other famous fag/dyke teams like the Catholic Church, Hollywood and the Olympics.’

  The crowd filled the empty tile pool, sitting around the ledge and on the tasteful steps. The cubicles had been turned into nap rooms, not offices.

  ‘This is a grass-roots movement,’ Daisy said. ‘We don’t need offices. We are employed in offices. Steal Xerox, take White-Out, use postage machines, make phone calls. Your job is a prison of measured time. So make their time work for you.’

  The baths had seemed musty to Kate at first, but the men oohed and aahed, remembering what it was like before, remembering with some nervousness the last time each of them had been there. They were warm and joking with one another, like adults returning to the sandlot.

  ‘I feel like Judas Maccabaeus returning to the trashed-out temple,’ Bob said. He clapped his long, sleek hands together and reached up to the cobwebbed archway. ‘Oh Lord, let those glory days be with us once again. Oh unknown dick, oh joy, oh most angelic thought.’

  Throughout the meeting different people’s wristwatch alarms kept going off with little beeps.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Kate asked. ‘Is everyone schedule-crazy? Whenever I come to these meetings watch alarms keep going off.’

  ‘It’s to remind them to take their AZT,’ Molly told her. ‘Every four hours.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Fabian took up his old spot in the corner and tried out his old pose, an imaginary drink in hand and his left foot flat back against a marble pillar.

  ‘You know what comes to mind right away?’ Fabian said.

  ‘What?’ Kate asked curiously as he twisted the leather thong hanging from his belt.

  ‘The Village People singing “Macho Man.” Remember that one?’

  ‘Not really,’ Kate said. ‘I’ve never listened to the radio much.’

  ‘Disco, disco,’ Bob said. ‘If ever I foresake thee.’

  No one had given them permission to use the old bathhouse. They just took it. Justice was getting very aggressive. They had no ideology except stopping AIDS, and because they had made that their priority, they behaved as though it was the world’s priority.

  ‘Are you upset about this?’ James asked commuters when Justice stopped traffic on the George Washington Bridge. ‘You should be as upset about AIDS.’

  Attendance at meetings had grown to well over five hundred and numbers like that meant all kinds, all kinds. There were the tough street Furies who had all been around the block a couple of times. There were distinguished homosexuals with white-boy jobs, who had forgotten that they were queer until AIDS came along and everyone else reminded them. At first the white collars had wanted to bring lawsuits and carry out polite picket lines, while the Furies had been willing to bash in a few heads at the expense of getting bashed themselves. But soon the two factions were able to unite in anger and a commitment to direct action when the homos found out what a lifetime of anger could create and the Furies discovered that nothing raises the level of outrage as efficiently as the level of expectation.

  ‘Imagining what they deserve and then fighting for it,’ said Bob, ‘is something that anyone with nothing to lose can easily learn, if they have a determined personality.’

  There was also a contingent of old-time radicals of various stripes who had rioted in the sixties at Stonewall, in Newark, with the Young Lords, with SDS, and hadn’t done a goddamn thing since. No straight men showed up at all.

  ‘Straight men don’t know how to take care of other people,’ Daisy explained. ‘And they don’t work well in groups.’

  There was a band of veterans from the now defunct women’s liberation movement who were the only ones who had been consistently politically active for the last decade, and so knew better than anyone else how to make flyers, how to do phone trees, the quickest way to wheat-paste, and who weren’t afraid of getting arrested.

  ‘Being a woman in Justice means being in leadership,’ Daisy once said. ‘As soon as you walk in the room all the guys turn around and say, “Now what?” ’

  ‘We like dykes,’ the guys would chant every once in a while when the women did something really great. And there were lots and lots of handsome young men who intended to live to be handsome old men or even just aging queens. They were the organization’s best recruitment force, since Justice’s favorite activity after raising hell was the boyfriend parade.r />
  The man sitting next to Kate on the bus finished listening to his cassettes. After one awkward exchanged glance, he took out a copy of the New York Native and opened it directly to the personals.

  ‘I love that part of the paper,’ she said, peering over his shoulder. ‘Especially all the little codes. Like c/b/t. That means cock and ball torture, right?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  He wasn’t embarrassed at all. He was more curious and amused.

  ‘You know what interests me most?’ she said. ‘When they specify uncut. Who would have thought that foreskin was the necessary component to constructing the man of your dreams.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, looking down his glasses, ‘the straight ones are far more insidious. Have you checked the back of the New York Review of Books lately? You know, “Distinguished professional gentleman into domination and Schopenhauer, looking for blond female sixteen to eighteen for permanent relationship.” ’

  ‘I’m not defending heterosexuality at all,’ Kate said, sending her blue eyes directly into his brown ones. She leaned over when she said that and rested her chin on the top of her fist. Then he had to take her seriously because there was something so proper and bizarre about her at the same time. She knew he saw the suit. He saw the big black shoes with white socks and the thick, black glasses.

  ‘Are you gay?’ he asked smiling.

  She didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, playing along. ‘Have you ever been gay?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘By the way, is gay something you are or does it depend on who you’re in bed with at that precise moment?’

  ‘It depends on whose love helps you grow the most and is most comforting to you given a state of nature.’

  ‘This isn’t that social-construction-versus-essentialist argument that I’ve heard so much about, is it?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It means, try thinking back to a woman you loved and never touched and then figure out why not.’

  ‘What are you, a therapist?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m just one of those people you meet on a bus ride somewhere who you will never see again, but who asks you memorable questions.’

  They laughed together and then each looked away at something else for a while. Then they both turned back.

  ‘I fell in love with an actress in the last play I worked on, before I left the theater. The Blacks by Jean Genet. Do you know it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The bus rolled on. What had been jolting only minutes before was suddenly a smooth and comforting lull.

  ‘I was ready to quit the whole scene, but as one last gesture I jumped at the chance to be Sandra’s dresser for the first few weeks of the run. You have to be calm to be the dresser. You catch the actress in her most vulnerable moment, coming off one emotion and preparing for the other. You have to be so smooth and silent that you are one with her or just air. You undress her. You see her nude. You cover her up again. She doesn’t look at you. She is deep in thought. One second later she belongs to everyone but right then she belongs only to you.’

  Kate could smell Sandra King’s body right there on the bus, just the way she used to do every night zipping her dress up over those soft, brown breasts.

  ‘One night we kissed. I’d actually forgotten until this very moment that we had kissed. But we did. Thinking back on it she was probably gay. It was harder to tell in those days. In fact, I’m sure of it. She was married but that never means anything. Peter put the make on her, she told me. But she wasn’t interested. She brushed him off over coffee.’

  ‘Who’s Peter?’

  ‘My husband.’

  ‘Oh, now I see.’

  He smiled again, very warmly.

  ‘Peter always wants to be close to the women I’m attracted to. It’s a way of appropriating my experiences. But she wasn’t interested in him at all. Not at all.’

  ‘Or in you.’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘My favorite thing about being gay,’ said the man on the bus, ‘is that there is something so starkly honest about it and so involved with people’s secret lives. I can be what straight people only imagine.’ He played with the gold band on his right hand. ‘My lover is waiting for me in Kingston. Is that where you’re going? Maybe we can give you a lift.’

  ‘I have to change for another bus. But, thank you.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, folding the paper under his arm. ‘We are, after all, members of the same church. Very few heterosexual women know about c/b/t. If I’d thought you were really straight I would have said that my roommate is meeting me in Kingston.’

  ‘I love men too,’ she said, feeling much older than him.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, shifting his body away from hers, still smiling, but with less conviction. From then on it was pure artifice. They chatted a bit about books, then movies, but the moment between them had dissolved.

  It was our gayness that connected us, she realized later. Not our love of men. It is the danger that brings you together, makes you need each other and feel so close.

  35

  KATE

  Kate leaned against the wall of the small bus station next to the water fountain. She could see everything from that spot: who went into the bathroom and how long it took them to come out. She could tell who was smoking cigarettes and who was smoking pot. She could hear every telephone conversation.

  Kate picked the chocolate coating off a candy bar with her teeth. It suddenly flashed in her mind that her relationship with Peter might not last forever. Her response was a tiny terror. She lost her cool. It had snuck up on her like a shadow, without any premeditation, and then passed with no imaginable picture.

  One drizzling night she and Peter had come out of the subway and she’d spotted Molly walking ahead of them on the other side of the street.

  ‘I think he meant space-aged in the Baudrillard sense of the word,’ Peter was saying. ‘As generically modern and technological, not exclusively pertaining to rocket ships, although not completely independent of it either.’

  Molly had looked so solid. Her shoulders were squared and she looked tough, completely in charge. It was late and dark but she didn’t rush with fear, just kept on steadily from an internal power that compensated for size and caste. Kate had watched herself with Peter. They were loud and obvious. They moved all over the sidewalk and said anything they liked. At the same time Molly was aware of every presence and event in her path and made herself invisible to all of it. She was quiet, like one of the buildings. She was a shadow on a wet street.

  ‘Operator,’ said a balding man in a light blue suit, ‘I’d like to charge this to my company’s calling card.’

  Kate took a sip of water.

  ‘I’d like to charge this to calling card 212–555-9814–3051.’ Kate said it again to herself: ‘212–555-9814–3051.’

  She said it one more time as she walked slowly into the ladies’ room and scrawled it on a piece of toilet tissue.

  It was at a recent meeting that James and Daisy had asked for credit card numbers. Justice divided up into search committees to make the collection more systematic. There was a whole caucus of waiters working in expensive restaurants who could save the carbons from processed charge card forms. There were lovers of the dead and dying and the dying themselves who hadn’t gotten around to canceling their plastic. There were the sick but still surviving who promised to fill out all the forms being passed around the room. And there was a battalion of travelers who volunteered to hang out around pay phones in airports with open ears.

  ‘Let AT&T pay for the phone revolution,’ Daisy said.

  ‘Transatlantic phone sex?’ asked Fabian, who considered it his personal responsibility to ensure that every Justice project was sex-affirmative.

  Kate waited for the guy in the blue suit to disappear, then she dialed the operator.

  ‘I’d like to charge this to my company’s calling card,’ she said. Her skin
was tingling. She had never done anything like this before. Peter and Kate had often prided themselves on how radical they were. They were artists, after all, and not stockbrokers. They’d never been rich, although they weren’t working shit jobs either, but they’d never had children or bought a coop. Their lifestyle was their politics in action. But, standing in a sea-foam-green bus station in rural New York, that all seemed rather superficial. She realized, waiting for the operator to complete the call, that there was something repulsive at the base of this kind of thinking.

  ‘We have fundamentally different values,’ Molly had told her one day.

  ‘Because you hate men and I see their humanity?’ Kate answered.

  ‘That’s not exactly how I would put it.’

  ‘Well,’ Kate said sometime later in that conversation, ‘I don’t think we’re as far apart as you say. I mean, when the shit comes down, we’ll both be on the same side of the barricades.’

  ‘The shit is already down.’

  ‘I mean when people are dying in the streets.’

  ‘Kate, people are dying in the streets. It’s not the movies, where the world divides into freedom fighters and brownshirts. Here in New York City there are people who take action and people who do nothing. Doing nothing is a position. It means giving approval without having to actively say so.’

  ‘212,’ Kate said into the phone: ‘212–555-9814–3051.’

  It took only a minute, it was so easy.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello, Scottie? This is Kate. I didn’t expect you to answer the phone.’

  ‘Yeah, I got out early.’

  It was the third time Scott had been in Sinai since the beginning of spring. It wasn’t his skin this month. This month it was pneumocystis. She had been prepared that time, walking into the hospital room to see silvery blue oxygen tubes going into his nose.

  ‘Scott?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘212–555-9814–3051.’

  ‘Great,’ he said. ‘That’s the seventieth number we’ve gotten in. The phone codes are beating out Diners Club four to one. Will you be back on Monday? That’s credit card mobilization day.’