Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  “I’ll get you something,” she told him. “You must be hungry.”

  He was ravenous. He hadn’t had a real meal in what seemed like five days. “I’ll pay you back for all of this,” he told her.

  She put a hand on his arm. “Don’t worry about it, just order what you want.”

  He ordered a half-chicken and two sides. They sat down together. He was still crashing; it was hard for him to keep his eyes open. He felt gutted from the inside and far away from the bright, loud, pop-music-playing world around him. The woman gave him a kind, fatigued smile.

  “Did you know Milly’s son in the Christodora?” she asked him. “Mateo?”

  Oh, no, he thought. What was coming? He nodded. “The little Latin kid.”

  “Right,” the woman said. “They adopted him. Well, pardon my weariness, but he actually—he developed a heroin problem a few years ago. And he’d come out here a few months ago for a rehab I recommended. And he was doing really well and staying with me and my partner, my boyfriend, out here, but he disappeared a few days ago and stole our bank cards, stole our money from ATMs, and we haven’t heard from him in two days. So—like I said—pardon my weariness, it’s been a very trying past few days.”

  As the woman recounted this, a fresh wave of self-loathing crept through Hector’s gut. He’d abetted the kid’s downfall.

  “I’m sorry,” he managed to say. “Really, thank you for coming to get me.”

  “I don’t mind. I’ve been there. I’m nearly twenty years sober now, but I was there.”

  “What was your drug?”

  “I was just a drunk and a cokehead. Nothing very hard core. But, well, I mean, I was very young at the time—like twenty-five. And I just couldn’t cope with life. I was freaked out and scared and didn’t know how to live my life.” She looked at him keenly. “Ava told me about all the amazing work you did. Thank you, because I have many friends who are alive today because of the drugs that you helped create.”

  Her words pierced him with discomfort; they felt too admiring. “I didn’t do that much,” he said.

  “I know that you did. Ava told me.”

  Hector stared down into his food, which he’d been attacking, his stomach sucking it into his system faster than he could fork it into his mouth.

  “Do you have a Valium or anything like that?” he asked her.

  She shook her head. “I don’t.”

  “I’m crashing,” he said.

  “Can you come sit in the meeting with me for an hour and if you’re freaking out or feeling suicidal after, I’ll take you to the ER?”

  He nodded his head.

  The meeting was actually around a bunch of picnic tables in a park—Plummer Park. Hector sat there alongside the woman, Kyla, looking at the thirty or so people collected: a mix of women and men, some of the men obviously big queens, one or two trannies in the group—but put-together, employed-looking trannies, dressed more or less like Kyla. About half the people seemed to have brought their little dogs along with them. Everyone was kissing, hugging, seeming so chipper. Kyla introduced him to a few folks, including a sixty-year-old bearded leather bear named Vinny whose cheekbones had the sunken quality of men who had been on a particular, early generation of AIDS medications a decade ago.

  It was hard for Hector to absorb it all, feeling like shit. How the fuck had he ended up here? Whenever he happened to make eye contact with someone, they gave him the same sweet, understanding, crinkle-eyed smile that made him cringe and look away. He picked up stray bits of what people were saying. When it got to the bear, Vinny, he went on mostly about how he was praying and meditating to help him take care of his eighty-five-year-old mother with Alzheimer’s in Pasadena.

  But Hector couldn’t really concentrate. Out of the haze of the past few days, jigsaw pieces of anxiety were floating back into his consciousness: he had left Brisa, the dog, his prize bitch and only constant companion, with a tweaker friend in New York whom he thought would be trustworthy because he claimed he wasn’t doing meth anymore, just some ketamine. Hector took pride in that he never let his partying keep him from feeding, walking, or showering love on Brisa—he’d take her to the vet when he was crashing if he had to, numbed out on Klonopin—but he hadn’t much thought of the wisdom of leaving her with fucking Scooter Rosen, who had twice nearly died from GHB overdoses. Then there was the rental car. He hadn’t even thought to tell this lady—um, this Dreena or Deana? what was her name again?—about the car he’d left parked outside the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

  And the kid. This thought pierced the glue of his brain. Walking out on the kid and the girl and the twink from Palm Springs in that apartment, everybody boinked out of their mind on what had to be about four different drugs. The scene started to take up space there again, as he listened to the AA people babble, growing like a vision in a nightmare that was peaking. He knew that the EMTs came. But still . . .

  He’d been staring off, absently watching the dogs in the dog run, when he blinked back and realized everyone was giving him that horrible kind, expectant look. He’d apparently not heard someone say something.

  The rich woman who’d brought him here put a hand lightly on his arm. “Do you have a burning desire to say something?” she asked him softly.

  He felt his face burn scarlet. They were all fucking waiting for him to say something? He shook his head. Everyone held him in their kind, concerned stare for a moment longer, as though they really didn’t believe him, before someone else raised their hand and the focus was blessedly taken off him.

  Then—oh God—the meeting was ending, everyone was clapping, and they were standing and holding hands and saying that fucking prayer. The rich lady slipped her hand into his. Of course he’d come across this prayer in his past rehab stints. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. What the fuck did that mean? He’d acknowledged the last time he was in rehab that he couldn’t change the fact that Ricky and nearly everyone else had died and he hadn’t. Did he have the courage to change the fact that he’d become a meth head? He didn’t see it that way. He personally didn’t have an interest in changing it. He had the benefits that covered his rent, the food stamps, Brisa, and the buddies to party or crash with day and night. He still managed to get to Fire Island or take a plane somewhere now and then. And the way he saw it, the medications had been invented, he’d done his job. Nobody really died of AIDS anymore. He’d done enough.

  As soon as the meeting was over, the rich lady and the AIDS bear Vinny walked over to him. “So what’s your story?” Vinny asked him. “Where do you live?”

  He stared at Vinny blankly. “New York,” he said finally.

  “Hector sort of found himself in L.A.,” the rich lady said.

  Vinny had beautiful watery blue eyes that bore into Hector intensely, a look of empathy and connection that made Hector want to crawl in a hole. “You want to come with us for coffee?” Vinny asked.

  “How are you feeling?” the rich lady asked him.

  He struggled for words, openmouthed. He could walk away again. He could—what? Rudely walk away and go off and try to find the rental car. But he knew he wouldn’t do it. He knew he would kill himself before he got that far—the courage to kill himself, at the moment, was far greater than his courage to clean up the mess he’d made.

  “I need to talk to you for a second,” he said to the rich lady.

  She and Vinny looked at each other. “Just me?” she asked him.

  “Just for a second,” he said. He managed to put a hand on Vinny’s upper arm. “Sorry, just a sec,” he said.

  Vinny and the rich lady glanced at each other again. “No worries,” Vinny said. “We’re hanging out here for a second. Let us know if you want to tag along.” Vinny walked back over to the group at large—the group that was all s
miles and chatter and hugs.

  “What is it?” the rich lady asked. “You want me to take you to the ER?”

  Did he? “I dunno,” he said. “I dunno where to go.”

  Her brows knitted close together, appraising him. “I think we better go to the ER,” she said. “I’m worried about leaving you alone.”

  “I need to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “You know the kid? Your friend’s kid you mentioned who ran off?”

  “You mean Mateo?”

  “Yeah.” Oh God, he thought, this was the point of no return.

  The rich lady’s face darkened. “What about him?” she asked.

  “I was with him out here. We were, um, partying—getting high—together.”

  She stared at him, baffled. “What? You—you guys are friends?”

  “Uh—” He was stammering, shaking. “We would get high together in New York. At my place.”

  “Oh my God,” the rich lady said. She stepped back slowly, her hand over her mouth. “You got him into heroin? In your neighborhood?”

  “No!” he said, startled.

  “You came out here and found him?”

  “No! I didn’t even know he was out here. He texted me and told me to come over.”

  “What? Come over where?”

  “To a—to a girl’s house.”

  “When?”

  “Like, two days ago.”

  “That’s when he disappeared. Well, where, where? Where is the house?” She was panicking now.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know! It was near the church.”

  “What church?” Her voice was rising now, attracting the attention of the others. At the edges of his vision, Hector saw the bear Vinny walking back toward them.

  “The big modern church.”

  She threw up her hands, as if to say, That’s a big help. “Was he okay?” she asked. Vinny stepped up to her side, put an arm around her.

  “We were all high. I called the ambulance.”

  “Did they come? What happened?”

  He felt like she was going to hit him. He stepped back a pace or two. “I saw the ambulance pull up and I drove away.”

  Her hands flew to her mouth again. “Oh my God!” she cried, walking away from him, aghast.

  “Sh-sh-sh, it’s gonna be okay,” Vinny said, taking her in closer. Hector shrank before him—a shame he’d tamped down for years rose up from his chest and seared him in the face.

  “Just explain to me what’s going on,” Vinny said, looked from the rich lady to Hector and back again.

  The rich lady gasped in a long breath, took Vinny by the elbows. “A friend’s son who was staying with me,” she managed to say. “I have to make calls to see what happened to him.” She was already rifling through her big expensive leather bag, pulling out her iPhone, a little notebook, a pen. She turned abruptly to Hector. “How could you not have said something when I first told you about Mateo?” she pleaded.

  She walked away toward the picnic tables where the meeting had been. Hector felt like his head was on fire with shame. He began weeping.

  Vinny put a hand on his shoulder. “I think you better let me take you to the ER,” he said. “What’s your name again?”

  Hector managed to say his first name.

  Vinny stared at him a bit funny. “Are you Hector Villanueva?”

  Hector looked at him, startled.

  “I was an activist, too,” Vinny said. “In San Fran. I remember we met at a conference, like, twenty-two years ago. In New York.”

  Hector looked at him blankly. “We did?” he asked. This was the last thing he needed right now. Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts!

  “Look,” Vinny continued. “It happened to me, too. It’s just trauma, that’s all. Don’t hate yourself—it’s not worth it. We went through enough already.”

  Hector looked at Vinny dead level in the face. “Sweetie, I have had enough of this life. I’m ready to wrap it up.”

  Vinny gripped his arm around Hector’s shoulders and steered him about, walking him toward the rich lady. “You need to go to rehab and get sober,” Vinny said. “Everything else works itself out.”

  “I’m not going over to her,” Hector said.

  “You don’t have to,” Vinny said. “Wait here and I’ll talk to her.”

  Hector turned away while they talked. Should he run? He didn’t have the energy to run. Anyway, they’d just call the police, reporting a man who’d said he was suicidal. In a moment, Vinny returned and introduced him to some Asian dude from the meeting, a middle-aged guy named Foster wearing a Black Flag T-shirt. Foster at least spared Hector the treacly smile and merely whopped him lightly on the back by means of hello.

  “Come on,” Vinny said. “We’ll take you to the ER at Cedars.”

  He walked with them toward the parking lot. And what—what the fuck was this? Two LAPD cops were charging straight toward them across the lawn. They’re coming for me, Hector immediately thought, then he thought, No, they’re not, then he thought, Yes, they are. And they were. One of them asked him if he was indeed Hector Villanueva. He nodded his head.

  “You’re under arrest for possession of drugs,” one said, cuffing him. “We also need to talk to you about the death of Carrie Janacek.” They started walking him toward their cop car, Vinny and Foster following behind.

  “I don’t know that name,” he said, but he felt his stomach plunge.

  “It’s the girl you fed with drugs two nights ago in Westlake,” one of the cops said. “After you left, she OD’d.”

  The ground seemed to slant forty-five degrees as they were walking. In years of partying, nobody had ever died at a scene with him. He could barely even remember that girl except for those final moments when the four of them had been fucking on a couch.

  “Is the kid okay?” Hector asked.

  “Which one?” asked one of the cops, the woman.

  Oh, that’s right, he remembered. That twink from Palm Springs had been there, too. “The, uh—the Latino one.”

  “He’s where you’re going, along with the other kid,” said the cop. “MCJ.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The jail.”

  They arrived at the cop car, and he was pushed gently down in the backseat. He looked back up at Vinny and Foster.

  “I’ll tell Kyla,” Vinny said. “We’ll work on getting you out. Try to get some rest, okay, Hector?”

  The cop car drove off. Hector closed his eyes, went to lie down in the backseat.

  “Sit up, sir,” the woman cop said from the front seat. “We need to see you.”

  He sat back up. He couldn’t even care about what would happen to him. The only thing he wanted was to curl up into a fetal position as soon as possible and go to sleep and hopefully never wake up.

  THIRTEEN

  Darkest Hours

  (1992)

  Hector walked back into the apartment, fully a widower. He took off his suit and tie in the living room, then stumbled into the bedroom, pulled a flannel shirt of Ricky’s from the dresser and wrapped it around his neck to deeply inhale its scent, got under the duvet, curled up in a ball, and wept. The worst part of the day had been all that time right alongside Ricky’s parents. To have never even met them until earlier that year, when they came to visit Ricky in New York City for the first time because they knew that the end was nearing, to have only really known them as these Catholic Republicans from Reading, Pennsylvania, who, Ricky told him, were responsible for certain intractable elements of Ricky’s own personality—Jim and Cathy, Jim and Cathy—to not particularly like them because of what he knew was the stone silence on the other end of the line whenever Ricky, so bravely and brazenly and effortfully nonchalant, ever mentioned to them his being gay, having a boyfriend, fighting the epidemic.

 
Then to suddenly have to be right beside them for hours, days at a time. Then the moment during the service when Cathy finally broke down—when she began to quietly weep and turned, imperceptibly, timidly, to her husband, who either truly didn’t notice or frigidly pretended not to notice. Hector couldn’t take it. He put an arm around this small, inconsequential woman, this narrow, Hummel-collecting woman who’d never been anywhere or known anything but who nonetheless had produced Ricky for him—how could he not be grateful, owe her something? He put his muscular arm around her and she crumpled into it, turned in to his chest like it was the soft, understanding place she’d been searching for for the past several months and soaked his suit front with tears, while he brought her into his other arm and freely indulged, crying with her, full of a white-hot rage at Jim, who stood there stoically and pretended not to notice.

  After the service, the three of them and the siblings and Ricky’s closest friends had lunch at a midtown restaurant. Hector was so grateful whenever one of the siblings or the friends would make a lame joke about how Ricky, with his white-trash sweet tooth, would insist they all get the chocolate-marshmallow-goo-covered dessert. After, Hector had walked Cathy and Jim and the siblings to their hotel, then taken the subway back to the Bleecker Street apartment. He had lived there virtually alone on and off for most of the past year, with Ricky at St. Vincent’s.

  Eventually, he determined that he couldn’t weep anymore or continue on in such a state of acute grief and agitation. He took a Valium, chasing it with a glass of white wine from a bottle that had been in the fridge, half empty, for several months. It tasted sour, but he sat with it at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, waiting for the Valium to kick in. When he felt blurry, he took the bottle back to the bedroom with him and walked around the room, gathering up more stuff of Ricky’s—a pilly sleeveless T-shirt from an old Whitney Houston concert, a pair of white gym socks, a photo from Fire Island, a red jockstrap, Ricky’s astrology book, Ricky’s ironic Strawberry Shortcake snuggle doll—and brought them all into bed with him and held them in his arms until he passed out.