Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  But the queen was right about one thing: patients’ virus levels hadn’t plunged and T cells hadn’t skyrocketed until the new drugs—including the protease drugs, those slightly villainous-sounding names that had dominated the past half year, like ritonavir, saquinavir, ­nevirapine—were administered together. Hector felt his heart rate rise and the blood pound in his temples when he thought how, for eight years—eight whole years, how stupid they all had been!—they’d been giving people one perfectly good drug at a time, letting the virus develop resistance to it, killing a perfectly good drug option for the future. So many people now were already failing in their new regimens because they were taking drugs they’d already spoiled for themselves. Who’d still be alive by the end of the year? It was all the more bitter for those who were failing, having to watch others flourish. He thought about the years—1987, ’88, ’89, ’90, ’91, ’92—when he watched so many friends make themselves sick on AZT and ddI, and all they were doing was spoiling their chances for the future! In retrospect, he grudgingly tipped his hat to Ricky, who—granted, like many—knew in his gut that AZT was toxic and not worth taking alone. Those who’d waited were benefiting now. The ones who’d made it this far, that is. Ricky not among them.

  He’d gone off on a tangent in his head. He trained his attention back on the queen.

  “—much more work to be done,” she was saying. “We have winners and losers right now. We must, must”—she pounded a jeweled fist into the palm of her other hand—“work to make sure that everyone around the world who needs these drugs gets them. Because we know the cost of these drugs is exorbitant. But in the meantime”—she raised her glass—“I want you all to toast yourselves, you wonderful people. This is a good year.”

  Chris turned to Hector, his glass raised. “Did you know it’s a good year?” he asked.

  Hector smirked. “I’ve heard that.”

  The amfAR functionary led the queen around the room, introducing her. When he brought her before Hector, Chris, and Maira, her amazing eyebrows flew upward.

  “Good for you,” she said with a conspiratorial satisfaction. “Good for you for disrupting their little game!” She cackled, full of mirth. Then her eyes fixed on Hector. She brought a jeweled hand to his cheek.

  “This one looks like Fernando Lamas,” she decreed, looking him tenderly in the eyes. “Thank you for your work.”

  She sailed on. Hector, Chris, and Maira suppressed flabbergasted titters.

  “Was that the guy on Falcon Crest?” Chris whispered.

  “I think it was his dad,” Maira said.

  “Oh, yes, he was hot,” Hector conceded, putting the name and face together in his head. “You think they fucked?”

  Chris tipped his head in the queen’s direction. “I think that was your invitation to visit her hotel suite tonight.” But even as he said it, his face flushed and new beads of sweat broke out over his upper lip. “And now I’m hitting the toilet,” he said, slipping away.

  “You want me to follow just in case?” Maira asked. Hector knew why she was asking. She was thinking about the incident last week in their tiny office in SoHo, when Chris had not made it all the way to the bathroom and she’d found him in the hallway, crying, before running back inside for a roll of paper towels. The new medications had power far beyond their intended purpose, alas.

  Chris shook his head curtly and stepped away.

  “Wait a minute,” Maira said to Hector, tracing Chris’s steps and peering out the door a few seconds. Shortly, she returned. “He made it,” she reported. “I just wanted to make sure.”

  Hector nodded. “So, dinner?”

  “Where?”

  They found the local activist and made a plan to meet up at eight for Thai food in Davie Village. Chris and Maira stayed behind at the reception but Hector was beat; he wanted a nap before dinner. More to the point, he wanted to cocoon himself in solitude in his hotel room for an hour or two; he couldn’t understand the dull itch of rage he was feeling just underneath every conversation he’d had that day, as though a deeply immersed part of himself wanted to suddenly sigh aloud and say, Oh please, shut the fuck up. He’d managed to quell that inner bitch all day, but he felt that if he didn’t get an hour or two alone, she’d surface and he’d regret it.

  He wended his way through the vast conference center toward the exit, ducking his head down to avoid encounters with anyone he knew.

  “Hector!” he heard a voice behind him. He turned to find David, a fellow Boricua, from the Chicago chapter of the movement, hustling toward him, his lanyard swinging from his neck. David caught up with him and threw an arm around his shoulders.

  “Fucking crazy day, huh?” he asked. “Can you believe Liz?”

  “We were just at a little reception with her,” Hector said. “She’s fucking amazing.” But he felt suddenly hollow saying it, by rote, as though he were following the standard worshipful script about the queen.

  David beamed. “She fucking slammed Chrétien!”

  “She did.”

  “You got dinner plans?”

  “Thai in Davie Village. You guys wanna come?”

  David nodded. The two walked along in silence for a moment. Hector felt burdened to make conversation but couldn’t bring himself to it.

  “You think you’ll be in Chicago for our conference next month?” David asked him. “We’d love to have you guys.”

  “I think I’m getting out of the AIDS biz,” Hector said, surprising himself. Had he just said that? And then he added: “Before this whole circus falls apart.”

  David stopped. “What do you mean?”

  Hector released a contemptuous snort. “This whole circus! There’s no cure coming. Look at the resistance data so far. Look at the failure rates. All these meds are gonna fall apart in about four months and then we’ll be looking back on today embarrassed at ourselves for partying.”

  David stared at him, then laughed awkwardly. “Are you doing a Larry Kramer to entertain me?”

  “No.”

  “But that’s not what the data is showing. We get the fundamental concept now. We have other agents coming down the pike. Merck’s got a compound. Yeah, sure, cure, maybe not. But suppression.”

  Hector felt himself soften. What had just happened to him? He put an arm around David’s shoulders, continued walking. “Now you know why I gotta get out.”

  “You’re burned out!” David offered. He seemed relieved at Hector’s turnabout. Here was something he could understand. “Everyone’s burned out. It’s been, like, eight fucking years of this. Take some time off, go somewhere warm. Go see your family. But you know you can’t leave.”

  Hector laughed. “Is that, like, you reading my mind or some kind of a threat?”

  “It’s a threat!” David smiled. “You know I need you.”

  Hector glanced sideways at him. “How are you doing? Are you pooping all the time?”

  “Not as bad as I thought it’d be.”

  “Chris is having a fucking hard time.”

  “I know.”

  They parted ways outside with plans to reunite at dinner. Hector went back to his hotel room, closed the drapes, took a melatonin, stripped down to his underwear, tried to sleep and could not. He thought of what a naysaying bitch he’d been the entire conference, thought of his own anhedonia amid the hope and joy, and, deep down inside, finally admitted it was because of Ricky. He was watching lovers who’d lived in agony the past few years, waiting for one or both of them to die, realize they were getting a second shot, waking up to the reality-of-life shit that wasn’t going to go away—bills, mortgages, disability payments, employment prospects. They were cursed with the divine gift of having a messy life to go on living. They would suffer through that debt, that paperwork, that uncertainty, and at the end of a day with all its trials, they would meet in the same bed, they would grasp reassuredly at
each other’s bodies, however thick around the waist or wasted around the limbs or butt; they might even find their way back inside each other again. They would go on, they would have more; they might not even appreciate, amid the stress and fear of putting a life back together and managing dozens of nauseating medications and insurance calls, how lucky they were that they’d won the AIDS lottery, made it to the finish line, run out the clock.

  “You should be here, Ricky,” he said aloud, his mouth mashed into his pillow. He wanted Ricky’s stupid things clustered around him in bed. That’s how he’d slept the year after Ricky died, on pills and crying surrounded by Ricky’s shit. Then there’d been the excitement of the Clintons. He supposed he owed Chris for dragging him into the Drug Movement Coalition; suddenly they, the scrappy, leather-jacket-wearing bad-boy faggots from New York, were surrounded by feds who wanted their input and expertise, flying or Amtrak-ing them down to D.C. twice a month, putting them up in good hotels, conference-calling them.

  If the feds had absorbed their tormentors in order to neutralize them, it had worked. He and Chris had gladly sucked up the bureaucratic royal treatment even if they’d paid for it by earning the rejection of (most of) their former comrades. That wasn’t so bad when you were taking meetings with Clinton’s honchos, when David Mixner introduced you to Hillary at a cocktail party—Hillary, who knew who you guys were, who thanked you for “the amazing, courageous work you guys are doing”—when you could see the prospect of a big federal or pharmaceutical job in your future, after the coming protease revolution. Already, Hector could see certain folks from the movement—the more complaisant ones, those who’d always half granted the feds and the drugmakers the benefit of the doubt—going in that direction, into their cushy jobs as community liaisons or marketing consultants in the bright-eyed new landscape of the chronic manageable illness, supposedly no more menacing or stigmatized or weird than high blood pressure or diabetes.

  Lying in the hotel bed, Hector conceded that, all through ’93, ’94, and ’95, an ever-widening river of good data, mixed with a steady ambient wash of self-importance, had anesthetized his grief. He’d needed that. But now a maw of emptiness and rage was opening beneath him. Idly, he rubbed his bare, trimmed chest beneath the sheets. He’d faithfully hit the gym through these past years of high-level consultancy, grunting out his misery over barbells and machines. His chest was broad and he wished beyond anything that the arm caressing it at this moment was Ricky’s, not his own. But that sunny, silly cutie, like a blond sliver of sunshine on the timeline that Hector envisioned as his life, had missed the drawbridge, along with Issy and Korie and a baleful lot of others. It had all happened in the very, very worst years of sickness and death, Clinton’s first term, overwhelming loss mingled confusingly with tidings of the coming respite.

  Hector wished he could cry, but he could not. He wrapped both arms around a giant, nearly human-size pillow and said, again, “I wish you were here.” He lay there in his strange hollowness and emotional muteness for several more minutes, thinking about the queen’s expensive, legendary palm on his face. He hoped Ricky had seen that! Double snap! That would’ve signaled triumph to Ricky—not the data, not the outcomes, not the plunging viral loads and soaring CD4 counts, but the diva idol’s $30,000 hand on Hector’s cheek. Well, Hector thought, we all measure success differently.

  The melatonin made him feel funky, cotton headed, but he forced himself to rise, dress, reapply gel to his hair, and go meet Maira, Chris, and the others in the lobby to catch a cab to Davie Village. There were thirteen of them at dinner—from New York and D.C., some Vancouver locals, David and Ed from Chicago, even Paisan from Thailand—­convivial, some toasting with beer, some with ginger ale, everyone’s bowels holding out through the spicy food, everyone talking about the Internet and AOL. Hector got mildly drunk and, at one point, put his arms around Chris and Maira, on either side of him, smiling goofily.

  “Someone’s cheering up finally?” Maira asked.

  “I’m allowing myself a very small window of self-congratulation,” he replied.

  She leaned in closer to him, kissed him on the cheek—a rare show of tenderness from somewhat-severe Maira. “It’s about time,” she said.

  They had a plane to catch home early the next day. As soon as he was in his room, he plugged the phone cord into his laptop, heard that satisfying dial-up crackle and wheeze. Mentions of AOL at dinner had made his insides flicker delicately; it had become his great pleasure, his balm, his late-night, soft-digital-glow Shangri-la the past eight months. Shortly, Hector—no, make that RicanTopStud57—found the room he’d been setting aside for himself until the end of the conference: “Vancouver M4M4now.”

  CouverPrtyBud: Wassup rican?

  RicanTopStud57: Wassup?

  CouverPrtyBud: You go out tonight?

  RicanTopStud57: Just dinner. In town for work. At the Hyatt.

  CouverPrtyBud: Nice. Want company?

  RicanTopStud57: Swap pics?

  A minute or two later, he got mail. Color pic of a late twentysomething sandy blond, dancer’s body, naked on his stomach on the bed, throwing a smile over his shoulder, a butt Hector knew he could easily make himself at home in for an hour. Certainly, yes, he wanted company. Thirty minutes later, the front desk rang up his company, who stood before him in a Bjork T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, cargo shorts, and flip-flops, backpack hung over one shoulder.

  “I’m Nick,” he said, slipping inside, sliding his backpack onto a chair.

  “I’m Hector.”

  Nick wasted no time, pulled off his tank top and dropped to his knees in front of Hector’s fly, which he quickly unzipped. “Where are you visiting from?”

  “New York. I’m here for the big conference.”

  “What conference?” Nick was caressing Hector’s briefs now.

  “The big world AIDS conference.”

  “Mmm,” went Nick, as though he’d hardly heard.

  Okay, thought Hector as Nick got busy on him. He’s focused on one thing. Okay, no problem. Hector, by rote, started saying the usual bullying, encouraging things he’d said to the endless succession of boys who’d knelt before him like this, all too eager to service RicanTopStud57. Hector obliged him with the reacharound, the digital probing that elicited bass-deep moans of expectation from CouverPrtyBud . . .

  . . . who looked up for a minute. “You wanna smoke?”

  “I don’t smoke,” Hector said. “This is a nonsmoking room, too.”

  “I don’t mean cigarettes.” Nick walked on all fours to his backpack and pulled out a red velvet box, which he carried to the bedside and opened, revealing a scarred, clouded glass pipe with a small globe head.

  “You’re gonna smoke crack?” Hector exclaimed. He’d once hooked up with a guy who’d pulled out a crack pipe, disgusting Hector, who’d left immediately in a huff.

  “Ew,” said Nick, reaching into the box for a glassine baggie. “I don’t do crack. It’s chrissy.”

  “What?” Hector had never heard of that.

  Nick looked up at him, sighed slightly as though such pedagoguery was beneath him. “It’s crystal meth,” he said. “You don’t have it in New York?”

  They did, of course. Hector had done a bump or two at dance clubs, astonished and a bit frightened by the searing burn in his nose and throat, enlivened but alarmed by the jagged, jaw-grinding high it provided, which had been great for dancing till seven A.M. but not so great for trying to get to sleep later, which had necessitated a Klonopin.

  “You do bumps of that,” Hector said feebly, feeling as though he’d quickly lost all his RicanTopStud authority.

  Nick smiled at him affectionately. “Come here.” He patted the bed. “This is much better and much more mellow. It’s almost like smoking pot.”

  “How can crystal meth be like pot?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Will it l
ast long? I have a flight in the morning.”

  Nick shook his head. “You’ll be fine.” He’d lightly tapped a few tiny white rocks into the glass globe. He pulled a small lighter from the box, clicking it to produce a fierce blue flame, like a tiny blowtorch.

  “Come closer,” Nick instructed Hector.

  Hector sidled closer, curious, and Nick put the pipe end between his lips. “Hold it here,” Nick said. “Now wait until you see smoke coming out of the hole in the globe, then inhale, but lightly, not like a bong.”

  Hector did as he was told. As he inhaled, he felt every hair on his body stand on end and tiny electric currents rush to the tip of his penis and nipples, his scrotum and his rectum. His belly crumpled inside into a gorgeous velvety rosebud, and the dim room seemed to become three shades brighter.

  “Now come here,” instructed Nick, pulling Hector close. “Blow it to me, then we go back and forth. Hold it, then blow it back, and don’t pull away.”

  Again, Hector complied. It felt immensely freeing to take orders. As they blew the smoke back and forth, Hector’s arms found their way around Nick. This is it, Hector’s deep-down voice said. This is how it felt. This was his memory of holding Ricky, the I-need-nothing-else-ever perfection of that moment, or the fetish his memory had made of that moment. How strange to feel it again after four years!

  Nick sparked the pipe for a few more rounds. Finally, when he put the pipe down, Hector looked at him with large, happy eyes. “Oh, papi,” Hector said, breathless, one hand tugging madly at his shrunken dick. “This is fucking amazing.”

  “I told you it was better than bumps.”

  “Thank you,” said Hector, pushing Nick up onto the bed, toward the luxurious bank of pillows. “Thank you so much.”

  Nick giggled. “It’s just some hits of chrissy.”

  But Hector wanted to tell CouverPrtyBud that it was so much more than that. He wanted to say, You just helped me figure out how I’m going to cope with the rest of my life.