A soft rustling of about two hundred lavender flyers echoed through the space. Lee took his copy out of his coat pocket, which had been handed to him as he made his ten-dollar “donation” at the door. It hadn’t been mandatory, but he felt an incredible group pressure to pay.
On the photocopied piece of paper was a brief typed message printed in capital letters:
GOD DID NOT CREATE A MEANINGLESS UNIVERSE
AIDS WAS NOT CREATED BY GOD
THEREFORE AIDS DOES NOT EXIST
As the group pondered this meditation, Lee felt a bit numb, as if he had fallen into a well. He knew AIDS existed. Yet he’d never been to a memorial service. How could something be so pervasive yet distant? What about Chet, that guy he met at the movies? What were they getting at? He felt a bit tense in the serene prayerful atmosphere.
The woman interrupted the silence.
“I want us now to meditate on this, that if we do not accept the future of AIDS in our lives, it will not remain.” The group fell silent as the woman repeated the meditation and stepped away from the microphone.
Brian imagined the alternative possibilities of his now gone ten dollars. A good movie and a deli sandwich would have been nice, but he was here to be with Ed, who sat next to him, his head slightly bowed, eyes closed and fingers crossed in mild supplication. Brian closed his eyes and tried to meditate.
He listened to the sounds of the church as the group sat quietly. Every five or ten seconds, the silence was interrupted by a cough, each time from a different area. It seemed as if the cough was travelling, bouncing from one throat to another with the arbitrary pacing of a bad tennis match. Underneath the building came the muffled rumbling of the subway, so deep and low as to sound like the entire church itself were accompanying the bouncing coughs with its own basso profundo “A-hem.”
Someone walked out the back door. In between the squeak and slam, Lee heard the gurglings of a baby in a passing stroller. He found it quite impossible to silently repeat the sentences on the paper. He stole a glance at Brian, who also glanced about. They gave each other a silent look, a conspiratorial shrug of confusion.
Lee tried again to return to the meditation. Tedious newscasts, death charts, statistics, obituaries, mandatory testing. Was he supposed to un-think all this? He smelled Brian’s leather coat on the chair beside him. Was he ever going to make love with Brian again? Was this a test of faith?
He peeked around the cavernous room. Over two hundred heads with eyes closed did not move, except an occasional slight bobbing here and there. Did they actually think that doing absolutely nothing but thinking was going to save them?
Lee felt a twinge of recognition in some of the phrases. He had tried out a variety of faiths as a youth. He’d chanted with Buddhists and sang with Baptists and still felt quite hollow in his heart. He thought of no way to forgive himself for the things he’d done. As he had done in grade school, once again he’d gone to a church just to be with the cute blond boy who’d invited him. He couldn’t block out the messy world and pray. He couldn’t forget them.
“Thank you.” The woman stepped back to the microphone. “I’d like you to slowly open your eyes and we’ll continue.” A light rustling came over the room, as if they had all awakened from a light sleep and had arrived at a destination. Lee felt like he had definitely missed the flight.
She began to discourse on a series of hybrid concepts, from Jungian psychoanalysis to a very cleaned up, hip version of the gospel. She hopped freely from phrases like “cognitive thought processes” to passages of the Bible. Lee began to realize the scope of the Source when, as she summed up her rambling talk, she mentioned the array of books and cassettes available for sale at the back tables, “just to allow us to pay for travel expenses,” she said. Lee wondered if there were T-shirts and coffee mugs as well. Easy Listening Fire and Brimstone.
The speaker opened up the meeting for a question and answer session. A young thin man brought a cordless microphone to people with raised hands. It became a talk show under Gothic arches.
One man asked her how to get beyond the “plastic Jesus on the dashboard” and to the truer nature of Christ. Lee felt confused. Here was a group of people who only a few years ago would have been cruising bars or bookstores or colleges or libraries for companionship or company, who had now returned, it seemed, to the church, in this distilled version, to be informed through a charming amalgamation of ideas that if they prayed for the epidemic to go away, it would.
“I know what you’re fleeing, er, feeling. Sorry, Freudian slip,” said the speaker. Several people lightly chuckled. Her tone was more like a frazzled psychology professor than a preacher. “We are, all of us, I think, trying to get back to something that has been shoving us away for so long, it seems. But let me give you this idea. The two thousand years since Jesus came and did his thing and got murdered for us, which is what he did, an awful thought, two thousand years is not a long time. We are still trying to recover from the enormous simplicity of his message. Jesus makes everybody nervous, Jews and gentiles. My mother, who is Jewish, once said, ’Jesus? He was a very polite man.’”
The entire group rose with laughter, Brian, Lee and Ed included.
“She did say that,” the woman repeated, smiling. “She said that, and it took me a long time to realize more about him and how important he is to our lives and our way of thinking. Because if we persist in believing in the awfulness and the disaster of our lives and not believing in Jesus, then we are truly lost.”
Pausing dramatically for the first time in her speedy monologue, her red dress perfectly matched the upholstery of the big wooden chairs on the altar. Brian wondered if she had planned that.
She continued. “If we place our faith in the TV and the newspapers and the politicians and if we place our faith in disaster and dis-ease, we put our faith in hatred, and that of course is no faith at all. Of course, we cannot shut these things off and believe that it will all go away if everybody becomes a student of the Source. But if we extend our energy, just a little bit at a time, just a little moment of each day when we rise and when we go to sleep, then it cannot but help our situation and that will spread to others around us and it will work. It can work.”
Brian thought of an actor’s exercise he had learned in college. It was about the white bear. Think of anything except the white bear. Was the white bear supposed to be your concentration, your thoughts about the audience, losing character? His instructor never specified. He had only been able to see the white bear. His instructor and the fifteen kids in Acting 103 had sat in silence. What the hell were they thinking about? All Brian could see was the bear, a moping furry Polar type, sitting in a corner trying not to be ignored, occasionally stiff in black and white, then ultra close up, fangs bared, dripping saliva, ready to chew up his neck like a meat sandwich.
Brian felt a glimmer of hope, for the group and himself, but still wondered if Ed, who now held his hand again, would continue to have sex with him if he didn’t buy it.
While Ed’s two guests were trying to sort out this viewpoint being expressed, he felt a bit anxious himself, hoping they might see the sense of peace he’d found. He glanced over at them both a moment.
He’d hoped to use this evening as a sort of pact between the two. They had to come to terms, some sort of resolve. He didn’t like the tension that rose up when the two were together with him. He was also hoping to tell them both something about his own health that affected them both.
For Lee, the only way he felt good and warm and positive was in the arms of a handsome man late at night under clean sheets. He preferred to commune in a group of two and felt secure in the knowledge that the true church, not this generic pop Christian remix, thought of him and his kind as less than whores and worse than lepers. The church would always profess not to despise him, just his sexuality. The church would never enter the same century as the living. To be saved, according to the church, all he had to do was abandon sucking cock and kissing the lips of men
, acts Lee considered to be his own holy form of transubstantiation.
Had Lee and Brian discussed such matters of faith in the course of their brief affair, they would have discovered a strong accord in their beliefs. But they didn’t, and Ed, who sat between them, bridged the distance between them, for now.
As he sat beside his boyfriend, Brian knew that he was a bit lost, and would never become a member of this or any flock. But he would go to these meetings and hear these words, if only for the assurance of being with Ed, whose beauty struck him to be as fine any altar or books or cassettes or do-it-yourself soul-affirming courses. Who was he to criticize? He got the same feeling from watching strippers.
If he had the virus creeping around in his veins, so be it. He would not spill it into Ed and hoped he hadn’t done so to Lee. If he had to go to these meetings, and see the world fall apart outside their very doors, so be it. He would not take it out on Ed.
Maybe he would see the light. Maybe he would someday honestly be able to feel faith, or passion other than for a body, or hope for more than love and money. Maybe that day would come. Maybe someday he would actually feel it.
But until then, as long as he could end the day in the arms of someone like Ed, he would fake it.
A light snow had begun to fall as the young men walked down Central Park West toward Columbus Circle, slowly following the other attendees, who dispersed out into the night.
“I don’t know about that stuff, Ed.” Lee said as he slipped on his gloves. He tried to enjoy the white snowfall, but it reminded him of his Indiana home and only made him feel sad.
“What don’t you know?”
“Whether to believe any of it.”
“It takes time. Just take a bit of it as you go. It’s a learning process.”
“Sounds like unlearning to me.” Brian remained silent as Lee continued. “I mean if we really want to fight it, we should be doing things that don’t hurt our immune systems, changing our lives.”
“I believe that,” Ed agreed.
“Then why are we working for the people that are killing us? Why are we feeding them?”
“I think you’ve been hanging around with Kevin Rook too much.” Brian commented.
Lee blushed, as if Brian had read through his intentions and seen his quiet lust for Kevin. His idealistic claims sounded a bit naive, even to himself. “Never mind about him,” he defended. “Remember the dinner at the World Financial Center last week?”
“Yeah,” Brian said. They had each worked at the affair, a massive dinner for Amerinet, a large telecommunications corporation whose main activity was gobbling up smaller telecommunications corporations.
“Do you remember who was at your table?”
“That senator, uh, what’s his name.”
“Aside from being indicted for taking bribes from the construction company that’s building the offices of that corporation whose party we were helping serve, he also voted for the mandatory AIDS testing bill.”
“So?” Brian shrugged it off.
“So, he also voted in favor of the Helms Amendment, and voted against the Bias Crimes bill.”
“Whoa, the newly politicized Lee Wyndam.” Brian said. “Who appointed you PC Patrol?”
“You asshole. You don’t even get it.”
“Look, what am I supposed to do?” Brian snapped. “Not serve someone food because I don’t like their politics? Because he’s a Republican? I have to make money. ‘Excuse me sir, but before I serve the appetizers, could you offer your stance on cocksucking?’”
“Bri, these are the people who are killing us and we’re waiting on them hand and foot!” Lee stopped himself, realizing he was practically yelling. Passing strangers glared at him in surprise. He lowered his voice. “Maybe you’d think about it differently if you were HIV-positive.”
“Are you?”
“No. That’s not–”
“I still wouldn’t agree with you.”
“I do.” Ed popped in.
Lee and Brian looked at him.
“It wouldn’t disagree with your holistic stuff?” Brian teased.
“No, I agree with him,” Ed repeated. “I wouldn’t quit working, but I’d think differently if I were positive.”
“Why?” Brain asked.
“Because I am.”
They were all silent, until a bus roared by, its fumes visibly clouding their path.
Brian stuttered a response. “You’re joking, right? This is just some kind of skills test for your meditation.”
“No, I’m positive. Got the results a few days ago.” Brian stopped walking. Lee and Ed turned back to him. Ed had been waiting for the right moment to say it, but at the moment, it just came out. He’d tried to figure out the transmission point, using a few specific men as potential vectors; only a few unsafe times, except the last Senior year shaving party he threw for the swim team the night before a National meet. But trying to pin it down was useless, even within the fifty or so guys he’d ever slept with. His potential of having infected Brian concerned him. He didn’t think that it might have been Brian that might have infected him.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Brian asked.
“You didn’t seem ready,” Ed said.
“Look, uh,” Lee was feeling quite awkward. “This is something you two oughtta talk about in private.” He began to think up a reason for leaving.
“Why?” Ed seemed completely clear-minded about it. “You two were boyfriends. I know you were still seeing each other before Bri and I got close. You should know, Lee. I don’t want to keep secrets.”
“Well, you better not tell anybody at Fabulous,” Brian warned. “Who knows what they’d do.”
“I don’t think so. There’s people in the company who are dealing with the same thing.”
“Bullshit,” Brian huffed.
“He’s right,” Lee added.
“Who?”
“You just told me not to tell anyone and you want gossip?” Ed cried.
“Well, if Lee knows ...”
“Philipe,” Lee said.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Is it true?” Brian asked Ed.
“I don’t know. It’s not some club you join, you know. Everybody who’s positive doesn’t know everybody else.” They all were able to laugh then, for a moment, before letting what Ed had told them really sink in.
“Have either of you been tested?” Ed asked. Brian looked down at his feet, nearly tripping over a Chihuahua on a leash as it peed against a mailbox. He looked up the length of the leash to see the flirting eyes of a debonair man in his fifties who resembled a client from his escort days. They waited until the man walked on.
“Have you been tested?” Ed repeated.
“Yeah, I’m negative,” Lee turned away. “Look, um, I gotta go catch my train before they roll up the sidewalks.” He reached to Ed, who hugged him. “I’m real sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.”
“I mean, I know you’re gonna fight it ... and, well ... just keep ...” He choked a moment. “... You know.” Tears sprang from his eyes.
“Ohh. It’ll be okay, Lee boy!” Ed hugged Lee again.
Brian tossed him a silent nod, his hands dug in his pockets. The two watched as Lee walked down toward Columbus Circle, then, as they figured, he turned back and waved.
Snow fell deeper and slower, in that mysterious quieting way.
“Hey, sailor. When was the last time you walked through Central Park in the snow with your boyfriend? ”
They rushed across the street. A cab swerved on the street, its wheels roaring a moment over the fresh snow.
“You know, you could have waited until we were alone.”
Ed followed Brian. “Why? Lee should know. He’s a friend. I’m not planning on keeping this a secret.”
“Fine. C’mon, let’s walk.” Brian said.
He heard him, but didn’t move.
“Edward. What are you doing? ”
As soon as
they’d crossed into a quiet corner of the park, already lightly dusted with snow, Ed had tilted his head back, counting flakes as they touched his eyelashes or melted on his face. He stayed that way, until he felt Brian’s arms around him, Brian’s cold lips kissing his colder ears, whispering, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry...”
“Service requires a reservoir of adequately obedient or servile individuals. The drying up of this reservoir, no less than the loss of wealth itself, can rob wealth of its prerogatives.”
– John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society
“I figure I’m living in dog years. I really don’t have all the time in the world.”
– David B. Feinberg, Spontaneous Combustion
18 Marcos had achieved “maximum buzz frequency.” Quite zippy from a single yet strong hit of X, also sold to Lee and Cal by his club friend Gustavo, he watched the swirling crowd of men, a few drag queens and women chat loudly into each others’ ears, cruise and dance.
He sipped the free beer handed to him by the ebullient club promoter Chuck Dukat, whose immediately successful gay nights at the new Club Anubiz ruled the meatpacking district since its New Year’s opening. Despite the fifteen-degree February chill outside, the club’s four-storied dance floors and lounges approached steam bath conditions.
Marcos scanned the crowd with Lee and eyed cute boys as they passed; a tall lanky blond, a bit too skinny, but with cute eyes; a shirtless, freshly chest-shaven muscle man with brooding eyes; two nearly identical sultry Latinos in black fishnet shirts and Gautier shorts. In spite of the fact that he knew such joy was chemically-induced , he felt connected to them all. Here, none were only as good as their jobs or apartments. Beauty, hip-swaying abandon, and attitude overruled.
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