by Dale Peck
“It seems to me I know more about fear than I do pain,” I wrote in 1990, “and I don’t want to add Alan and Byron’s pain to my fear.” This statement strikes me as just as true in 2013 as it did twenty-three years ago, but what it’s taken me all this time to realize is that much of “their” fear was a projection of my own. It was Byron who taught me to yell “ACT UP! Fight back! Fried eggs!” (instead of “ACT UP! Fight back! Fight AIDS!”) to relieve the monotony of two- or three-hour chants at demos: you could shout it right in cops’ faces, in reporters’; they never heard the difference. His biggest gripe: that he and Alan didn’t learn their status sooner. He could’ve died, Byron told me in the hospital, he could’ve been monitoring his T cells, he could’ve been prophylaxing months ago, he could’ve died. The emphasis in his words was on tense, not meaning, as if the threat of death had been removed by mere knowledge that it existed (I would make the same rationalizations a year later, when I dated an HIV-positive man for the first time). But they weren’t deluded—not anymore. I could drop dead tomorrow, Alan told me from his hospital bed, pentamidine dripping into his arm, but I feel myself getting better and I just can’t think every second that I’m dying, I’d go crazy. I remember hoping it would be that simple: that Alan and Byron would only think of their deaths when one of them got sick, and that I, too, would only think of their deaths when one of them got sick. I remember trying to create an elaborate metaphor to explain the difference between my knowledge and theirs—something to the effect that death, embodied in the hospital, was a land I only visited, clutching my green plastic visitor’s card like a passport, but that they inhabited. But the truth was simpler: there were times when I woke sweating from the AIDS nightmare we all had in 1990 and knew it had only been a dream, and there were nights when they woke sweating and didn’t know—they just didn’t know.
I remember this one time … Fuck. That’s how you talk about dead people, isn’t it, after the emotions have dulled and the specifics faded. After twenty-three years have gone by. “I remember this one time,” you say, knowing that at the time it hadn’t been an “experience” or a memory, let alone a symbol. It had been life. Yours. Theirs. You store away the mnemonic thinking it will help you remember, and indeed it does: but the first thing it brings to mind is always itself, and as more and more time goes by you have to work harder and harder to get to the truth that lies beyond the signpost. But even so. I remember this one time. Spring 1990. Byron and I were bicycling down Twenty-second Street between Eleventh and Tenth avenues, which was then a block of derelict warehouses and garages, many shrouded in scaffolding that had itself fallen into disrepair; Alan was home from the hospital, sleeping. Two fast revolutions and we coasted, standing on the pedals, for fifty feet. Sweat dripped down my back, but not from exertion. Some unknown zoning consideration had decreed that traffic should run west to east on this single block, rather than east to west as it did on other even-numbered streets, which meant that cars couldn’t continue on from the block of 22nd between Ninth and Tenth, leaving the block between Tenth and Eleventh virtually devoid of vehicular traffic, and, at night, of pedestrians as well. Gay men had taken advantage of this desolation to transform the block into a cruising strip. Men lined the sidewalks, alone, in pairs, larger groups. Where sex was happening, it was usually just hand-jobs, circle jerks. A couple of men knelt before their partners. One man, still sitting on his bicycle, stared us down as we passed, seemingly ignorant of the man who stroked his penis. When Byron and I reached Tenth Avenue, we kissed good-bye, waited for the light to change. He surprised me then: “The worst thing about being positive,” he said, “is that in the last eight years I’ve only had unsafe sex three times.” This floored me. There was, on the one hand, the idea that it only took three slips to catch him; there was, on the other, the idea that for the previous eight years Byron had known that a single unprotected encounter could leave him infected. I shook my head in silence, we parted. Having tested negative since I’d moved to New York, I never connected his actions to my own unsafe encounter.
But Byron pulled me aside a few days later. “I went back after you left, Dale,” he told me. “I told myself I was just going for a look, but there was this big ol’ Daddy and I couldn’t help myself. He wanted me to go home with him but I wanted it right there on the street.” “What did you do?” “I gave him the ultimate safe-sex blowjob.” “What’s that?” “I made him keep his pants on.” “Did he come?” “Did he come!” “How?” And as he described it to me, a sly smile creeping across his face, told me how he’d licked the man’s pants until they were sopping, I felt a barrier between us similar to the cotton covering that Daddy’s crotch, because I realized that not only was Byron’s tragedy not my tragedy, but neither was it my triumph. I was only listening in, looking on, empathizing perhaps, but not really understanding. And though I’ve never forgotten what he told me, as the years go by I find myself wondering more and more if the words I remember are still his, or if, by now, they belong only to me.
8
Amebiasis first.
Then hepatitis.
NSU—nonspecific urethritis. That was kind of a bitch. When my doctor’s office took a swab, the Q-tip in my urethra was less uncomfortable than the effort to avoid an erection while the hot nurse practitioner “milked” my penis to push what little discharge there was toward the tip. He sent the sample to the lab but went ahead and prescribed the treatment for gonorrhea, which cleared up the symptoms for a week. But then the symptoms came back and I had to go through a second round of antibiotics, whose effect on my gastroenterological system was significantly more unpleasant than the burn when I took a piss.
Anal warts. I protested to my doctor that I had only ever had a bare dick up my ass the one time, and that had been three years earlier, so how could I have suddenly contracted warts? My doctor couldn’t quite keep the smirk off his face. Have you had a finger up there? he asked. “Asked.” Lesson learned.
I discovered I was immune to hep B when I went for my vaccination—i.e., I’d already been exposed.
Another UTI. This from a new boyfriend who didn’t realize he was harboring an infection. He didn’t realize he was HIV-positive either, but awkwardly enough I did, when he told me that the results of his test (his first) had been “delayed” for a week, which those of us who knew the drill understood as code for a positive result that had been sent out for confirmation. Man, that was a long week. The next three years were a breeze by comparison.
Genital warts welcomed me back to single life.
When I got crabs when I was thirty-five I was like, I can’t believe you waited so long! They made quite an entrance though—I discovered them on the plane back from Barcelona. Sorry, Delta!
Scabies was the last of them, which felt like appropriate closure, since I’d also had it as a kid. My slutty days were over by the time syphilis came back in fashion, though how I missed herpes I’ll never know.
For a few years after that a wart would show up like a birthday card from a forgetful aunt. I won’t say it was fun having them frozen off, but, you know, it could have been worse. Safe sex works!
(N.B. potential critics: you are not allowed to use the headline “Warts and All” in reviews of this book.)
9
The Townhouse is an old man’s restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The Townhouse is, more specifically, an old gay man’s restaurant, one that has survived epochal shifts in government, epidemiology, and fashion for going on thirty years. Also, the food is not good. In 1993, when I visited it for the first and only time, the place was frequented by white-haired gentlemen who favored pleated khakis and double-breasted navy blazers brass-buttoned loosely over large stomachs, and, judging by the pictures on its website, it still is. The Townhouse, in other words, was not (and, to the best of my knowledge, is not) a particularly remarkable place, save that, discounting the ATM where Thomas Mulcahy withdrew money at 11:30 P.M. on July 7, 1992, it was the last place he was known to have been
alive, and so I went there a year and six weeks after Mulcahy died, dragging my friend Bruce with me because I wanted the company, and because we were eating on the Voice’s dime.
We were the only patrons in the dining room who were under thirty. Just inside the door of the restaurant was a vestibule with a small bar where a couple of younger men sat nursing cocktails. Bruce and I were given a curious glance by the bartender when we walked past these men to the dining room; were scrutinized again by a waiter, who went to fetch the maître d’; were given the once-over and then virtually dismissed by the maître d’ as he led us to a table. The dining room was busy but not crowded. The lights were tastefully, one wants to say mercifully, dim, the walls the color of parched earth and hung with several brightly colored paintings of flowers by someone called Russ Elliott—paintings that, Bruce remarked, looked like they ought to have been posters. A pair of women we took to be a lesbian couple sat at one table and, at two others, an apparently gay man dined with an apparently straight woman. The other eight or nine occupied tables were exclusively gay, including three at which only one man sat. All three of these single men ate slowly. None of them seemed to have brought anything to occupy himself while he ate, and instead looked around the room with the docile patience of a cow at the cud. One of these men sat next to Bruce on the banquette that ran the length of one wall. This man was in his fifties, plump, carefully manicured, and wearing a navy blue blazer over a navy blue polo with cardinal red stripes, and he had a matching navy and cardinal handkerchief tucked in the breast pocket of his navy blue jacket. (Did I already say his jacket was navy blue? He was wearing a lot of blue.) Bruce and I were discussing the book Bruce had been reading on the subway when, with the flourish of a magic trick, the man beside him produced a clothbound dustjacketless copy of The Art of Ernest Hemingway. The man held the book in front of him at the unnatural angle that people in commercials hold boxes of tampons or packages of breath mints, which is to say, so that we could see it better than he could. He looked at the front cover of the book, which was blank, and he looked at the back cover of the book, which was also blank, and then he looked, randomly, at three or four pages inside the book (which could have been blank for all the interest he showed them), and then, when neither Bruce nor I had said anything to him about his book, he put it down on the bench beside him, almost under Bruce’s hip, and ate his meal without looking at it, or us, again. To this day, I don’t know if the book was by Ernest Hemingway, or about him.
The staff grew noticeably more friendly when we ordered a bottle of wine, and when we ordered appetizers before our main course, and when, by chance, we ordered some of the higher-priced items on the menu, and by the time Bruce ordered dessert we were being treated just like the other men who were there for dinner, which, I assume, we were not at first taken to be. The Townhouse, as I mentioned before, is generally regarded as a hustler bar. A friend of mine who worked there as a waiter in the early nineties (and who, as chance would have it, later became a call boy, claiming Richard Simmons and Gianni Versace among his clients) told me this wasn’t true; what was true, he told me, was that unaccompanied young men would sometimes sit at the bar for four or five hours, nursing drinks and chatting in a very pleasant manner with just about anyone who tried to speak with them, as long as that person was not another unaccompanied young man. The men eating alone in the dining room were apparently unaware of this, or the men eating alone in the dining room were not interested in the unaccompanied young men drinking at the bar, or the men eating alone in the dining room wanted to fill themselves with food before they filled themselves with the unaccompanied young men at the bar—or, perhaps, the men eating alone simply enjoyed eating alone, and the unaccompanied young men were simply very friendly, as long as you were not another unaccompanied young man.
The only reason I went to the Townhouse, of course, was to see where Thomas Mulcahy met his killer. Like any aspiring journalist, I believed it was necessary to place the two of them in situ in order to understand them better, or at least better (read: more vividly) describe what had happened to them. But being in the Townhouse only reinforced how little I knew about Mulcahy, let alone his killer, and the best I could do was to place the former in the body of the man who didn’t read The Art of Ernest Hemingway, which led to the epistemologically uncomfortable position of placing the killer in Bruce’s body, or my own. It was the same sense of dislocation I’d felt in the Phoenix in Milwaukee, when the Latino hustler’s hate-filled stare made me realize that my skin color marked me out as john rather than prostitute and at the same time rendered that transaction invisible to official scrutiny. And however repulsive the feeling might have been, it was also intoxicating, especially in the wake of Jeffrey Dahmer’s successful exploitation of the overlapping prejudices of the straight and gay and black and white milieux he moved through, not invisibly, no, but with the mirrored camouflage of someone adept at hiding behind other people’s projections of normality. (It’s worth remembering that Dahmer wasn’t apprehended until Tracy Edwards, a black man who’d escaped from Dahmer’s apartment, returned with two cops, who accompanied Edwards because their keys couldn’t open the handcuffs attached to Edwards’s wrist; even then, Dahmer was only taken into custody after one of the cops went into the bedroom to look for the knife Edwards said Dahmer had threatened him with and found Polaroids of Dahmer’s victims.) In the Townhouse, the equation was flipped. Here, it was my youth rather than my race that had been made strange to me, given additional or at any rate previously unrealized power. Unlike the boys who frequented the East Village bars where I normally looked for sex, the man who didn’t read The Art of Ernest Hemingway would be no effort at all to pick up: all I had to do was acknowledge him. It didn’t matter what I looked like. It mattered only that I was young. The man was the same age as Thomas Mulcahy, the same build, he gave off the same air of, if not wealth, then unctuous, avuncular material satisfaction, and he managed, without looking at either me or Bruce, to convey the impression that he was annoyed with us, as if simply by being twenty-six and thirty and being in the Townhouse but not responding to the overtures of the older men who dined with us we were guilty of false advertising—which, of course, we were, and from which, moreover, we derived an increasingly erotic satisfaction as the evening wore on. We were twenty-six and thirty, after all: closer in age to the men in the front room, but not so far from the age of the man who didn’t read The Art of Ernest Hemingway as we liked to think—not so far from a time when the wallet in our back pocket might be more attractive to men in their twenties than the ass it rested against, although by then we would probably carry our wallets in the breast pockets of our (navy blue? kill me now!) blazers, generously cut to conceal the sag of pectorals that had once been full and firm.
Somewhere in The Dyer’s Hand W.H. Auden confesses that he often finds himself, in bed, contentedly rubbing his potbelly, which he interprets as a sign from his subconscious that he has given up on sex, or at least the hunt for sex: the lure, the chase, the catch. I could imagine the man who didn’t read The Art of Ernest Hemingway rubbing his belly too, not because he’d renounced the hunt, but because he understood that cash trumped the primacy of bodies in the sexual hierarchy, at least in the milieu in which he’d chosen to troll. And yes, I realize I’ve reversed my position: have recast myself from predator to victim, ceded my connection with Jeffrey Dahmer to the man who didn’t read The Art of Ernest Hemingway or, who knows (Richard Rogers was still unknown at the time I was reporting this story, after all, still at large), to the very man who had killed Thomas Mulcahy. This epistemological uncertainty—arbitrariness really—stayed with me after I left the Townhouse, made me uncomfortable as I attempted to write up what had happened for my Voice article. I’d always understood that journalism and memoir entailed a certain amount of projection, but I’d never realized how much role-playing is involved. How much the whole enterprise resembles a game. I suppose the tendency is more universal—we all make snap judgments, after al
l, or pretend to be a little better or worse than we really are—but journalism exacerbates these tendencies, if it doesn’t simply rely on them. Give us more color, my editor said when I turned in my piece. Give us more atmosphere. Let the reader know who these people really are. But of course I had no idea who these people really were, and, what’s more, I didn’t care: not about the man who didn’t read The Art of Ernest Hemingway, nor, for that matter, about Thomas Mulcahy. Not because they were unimportant or uninteresting, but because it was none of my business. They were random individuals who had been thrust into the public eye by chance, and if there was any tragedy in their lives, any triumph or surprise or secret, it belonged to them and to the people who’d known them, and any truncated representation I might attempt would be its own species of assassination, what Janet Malcolm refers to in The Journalist and the Murderer as “soul murder”: a crime not against the flesh but against the immaterial being of anyone whose life is subjected to the journalist’s guillotine. Because although the Townhouse in 1993 was undoubtedly the kind of restaurant frequented by men for whom being gay was secondary to being white and well-off, and although Thomas Mulcahy and the man who didn’t read The Art of Ernest Hemingway were both undoubtedly of that number, that still didn’t mean either of them deserved to be killed, or to be reduced to a set of clichés and assumptions for public consumption, whether those clichés and assumptions be the New York Times’s or my own.
I HAD MUCH the same experience when I went to the Five Oaks, the piano bar where Michael Sakara was last seen—I brought my agent this time, thinking it would be nice to buy dinner for her for a change—and I even skulked around Port Authority, poked my head into two or three bathrooms, saw many people who looked like drug addicts but no one who looked like either a hustler or a john. London was a different story, however. In London Colin Ireland had picked up his victims in bars that I spent a fair bit of time in, not because I was reporting the story (I wouldn’t be contacted by the Voice until I returned to New York in August) but because I liked spending time in bars like the ones in which Colin Ireland was said to have found his victims. Bars like the Coleherne, the Anvil, the Backstreet, the Block, the Shipwrights Arms—bars that in New York would be called leather bars but in London are more commonly referred to as dress-code bars because they insist on appropriate attire, be it bleachers and braces or chaps, harness, and dog collar, with the same prudent zeal with which 1950s country clubs insisted on jackets and ties. Unlike the New York murders, there was, for me, a sexual ambiguity in the London murders that wasn’t based on race or youth but instead on a straightforward erotic affinity with both the killer and his real and potential victims, and this ambiguity, this affinity, checked my pen whenever I tried writing about what had happened. Exposing men who concealed themselves in a costume of leather or rubber or military uniform or skin regalia to set themselves apart not just from the average straight person or the average gay person but, if only for a few hours, their average, everyday selves in order to engage in a stylized pick-up and sexual ritual that might involve blindfolds, gags, bondage, role-playing, pissing, shitting, bloodletting, fistfucking, asphyxiation, and no small amount of pain—open palms, closed fists, boots, belts, crops, whips, clamps, needles, brands—meant writing about things that I had done or might do, and that I did to distinguish myself from “average” straight people and “average” gay people and my “average” everyday self. It meant taking a special-because-secret activity and exposing it, thus robbing it, at least temporarily, of secrecy and distinction. It meant admitting to reporters from the Sunday Times that there are in fact many things gay men who “practice sadomasochism” do in bed that leave them open to attack, if the person they have gone home with happens to be a murderer. And in the process of trying to explain in rational terms an irrational activity, it meant feeling more than a little silly.
