Like People in History (63 page)

"We all ready?" he asked. Given the phony sound, he must have been using a connecting mike.

"All ready!" Clarabelle spoke through the window, then hammered on the connecting wall.

The van took off, headed west. The siren began, despite the early-morning hour and the probably thin traffic. I calculated our route: we'd turn left at Columbus Avenue, zip into Broadway at 68th Street, then down Ninth Avenue and into the Roosevelt emergency room at 58th. It would take ten, maybe twelve minutes.

And so it seemed, at first, though I couldn't see where we were going, with Clarabelle's big head blocking the tiny window view. The van turned left sharply, picked up speed on the avenue, swerved a bit left to right, obviously getting out of the way of slowpoke drivers, slowed down for cross traffic—some idiot not quite awake—sailed past the complex of lights where Broadway entered, sped on—and came to a screeching halt.

At the same time, I heard what sounded like two skyscrapers collapsing against each other. One—or both—hit the ground with a tremendous, an explosive, a scarifying thud, not far in front of the van.

"Jesús! María! Y su amor Her-man!"

Nestor wasn't through with his imprecation when we heard another thud.

Clarabelle got up and began shouting through the window, asking what the hell was going on. Just then the van was battered on the left side, then even more soundly battered on the right.

"Nestor! What the hell is going on?"

"Oh, my God! The crane fell down. What a disaster!" Nestor was shouting through the microphone. "The whole thing tipped over! Sixty, seventy feet!"

"Can't you get around it?"

"It's blocking Ninth Avenue."

"Backup. Back up!"

"I can't. There's cars everywhere."

"Put on the siren and back up!"

Nestor did as he was told. We felt the van move a few feet back before it hit something. In a second, Clarabelle was past me, to fling open the door.

We were some twenty feet in from the corners where Columbus became Ninth Avenue and crossed Broadway. I could make out most of Avery Fisher Hall to our left in the paling darkness. Behind us was a sea of headlights—not only directly behind us and at odd angles to us and to one another, but farther behind, lined up all the way back for a mile.

Clarabelle jumped off the back of the van and began going to the cars, shouting, trying to direct them to back off. But the crane, in falling upon some cars ahead of us, had evidently led to an immovable three-lane pileup all around, with minor accidents. One middle-aged man got out of his car, holding his head, and almost collapsed onto the hood of the Caprice next to him. Nobody was paying attention to the EMS van, our siren, or Clarabelle's shouting.

A minute later, the siren slewed to silence. Nestor emerged.

"He okay?" he asked about Alistair, shoving me deeper inside as he hunted through the inside fender lockers.

"I guess."

"You stay with him. Watch that monitor. You see? If anything happens to his breathing, turn it up. You see there? If anything happens to the machine, hit the red button. It restarts the motor. Got it?"

"Where...?"

He'd already pulled out a thick blanket; now he grabbed a metal valise, then another, which he thrust out of the van's back door.

"We got two men hurt at the crane," he shouted, explaining to both me and Clarabelle. "It's bad. I phoned them into ER. They'll get us out of here."

And they were gone.

I stepped out of the van door, edged along the back bumper to the side, surrounded by a knee-high blanket of headlights. People were yelling, horns blowing. Not thirty feet ahead in the dark blue morning, I could make out the shadow of a giant openwork metal structure fallen at what looked like a sickeningly wrong angle. What a mess!

After a few minutes, I was chilled by the morning air and got back into the van. When I closed the door, it damped the noise considerably. I shivered upon the front pull-out seat, where I could stare down directly on Alistair's face—that terrible tube!

"Well, Cuz!" I said aloud, hearing trembling in my voice. "I wouldn't have guessed it possible. But we seem to be alone. Now what?"

I looked at the compressor. Clearly, if something were to be done, that was where it would have to be initiated. Where? How?

Alistair's lips were bruised where the tube had been pushed in, and I could make out yellow-and-black marks on his neck where we—the White Woman or Wally and I—had manhandled him tonight. I couldn't stop myself from crying.

To stop, I checked the connections and located what seemed to be a simple electrical plug. Once that came out, the compressor would simply stop.

Aloud I said, "I should have suspected you'd have this much clout with the Powers That Be!"

What I was thinking was, It's your decision now: his life or his death. It's in your hands, yours alone, now.

"Why is this happening again? Didn't I do it right the first time?"

"I've had just about enough of this shit! We've
all
had enough of this shit!" Sal said.

The others assented, shifting their poses for more menace.

"Good. Good," Blaise quietly urged them on.

"This is
our
bar!
Our
space!" Sal half pleaded. Then, harder, "You've no business being here. Ever heard of the Constitution?"

"Ever hear of this, faggot?" Sherman pushed his nightstick into Sal's abdomen, just under where his falsies would jut out. "Suck on this, fairy!" he added, poking harder. He turned to Andy and Big Janet. "Okay, men, let's round up these swishes. What are we waiting for?"

As they moved to surround the others, grabbing at them with
open
handcuffs, Sal stood very stiffly where he was. He clicked together his high heels. Then whirled his large purse at Sherman's head, catching him a good cuff, surprising even Sherman, who was poised for it.

Everyone froze, then the other three clicked their heels together, turned, and slapped Andy and Big Janet upside their heads. Even readier than Sherman, they also fell to the stage.

"What have we done?" Eric imitated Bambi's hoarse voice.

"What we're doing," Sal said, beating at the now stumbling Sherman again and again with his purse, "is getting ours, finally!"

The melee worsened. David M. jumped over the bar and deftly mimicked karate kicking the rising Andy back down to the floor. Big Janet crawled downstage to the left, then aped opening and closing a door. Again everyone froze, this time longer.

"One of the cops made it to the men's room," Carolyn began, as she moved in front of the
tableau vivant,
"where he radioed for help. Another cruiser in the area responded, but its occupants were pulled inside the bar and stomped. The cop in the john called for backup, saying he had four men down. By then, a crowd had gathered outside, and some of the drag warriors were leading an assault on the parked cop cars, breaking windows, turning the cars over, as the sirens of more cruisers screamed closer. The event that would change the world for lesbians and gays forever had begun at the Stonewall Inn."

"And... curtain!" Blaise Bergenfeld announced, standing.

Those onstage relaxed. Blaise turned to me. "Naturally, Cynthia's sound effects will be top-notch."

"Naturally."

"You have a problem?" And when I didn't answer: "You don't like something? I know! The speech at the end is too long."

I was afraid to say a word. Fear gripped my trachea, stomach, tongue.

"We'll cut it a little," Blaise agreed. "But it's okay."

"Blaise," I managed to spit out, "it's not the scene. It's the whole thing. It's... awful!"

Those onstage caught my words.

"Not you guys!" I quickly shouted. "You were fine." Dropping my voice, "But, Blaise, the whole play, it's going to be a disaster!"

"What could possibly be a disaster?" Blaise lighted one of those overly sweet Egyptian cigarettes. "I know. My staging?"

"Your staging's fine." I used an old program to fan off the stench. "I wish you'd smoke tana leaves somewhere else. It's not your direction, not the acting, Blaise. It's the writing."

"You
wrote it!" Blaise reminded me, unnecessarily.

"I wrote it and it stinks! I said it would when you first asked me to do the adaptation. Stinks worse than the mummy rags you smoke."

Blaise raised an eyebrow and a shoulder. "You're just depressed. You'll get over it." He spun around. "Okay, kids, take ten. We reassemble for the Casement trial scene. Sal, you were divine and we think it's sheer perfection that a solidly built hetero like yourself wants to act in drag for the company, but try to control your enthusiasm. You clobbered Sherm!"

"I'm sorry. Really I am," Sal said. "I apologized twice."

"You're certain unconscious homophobia isn't emerging?"

"Jeez, I hope not." Sal raised his hands like an Italian matron witnessing a statue of the Madonna suddenly bleed. "I'll bring it up with my therapist next session."

As he exited, Blaise said in a voice only I could hear, "One would give a goodly sum of one's teeny paycheck to be a fly on the wallpaper at one of those therapy sessions. To hear how it came about that doctor and patient have managed to arrange it so that ladies' man supreme, Sal Torelli, of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, is not only working for the only openly homo theater company in town, but plans to wear full drag in a major role in the gayest theater spectacle of the decade." He sighed. "Rog! Go home!"

"You really intend to continue this torture?" I asked in a panic.

"You've been here all day. The theater wasn't meant for authors to sit inside of all day. Go home to your desk and write or jerk off or something!"

"Why can't you admit it's tacky and melodramatic and it's going to be a disaster?" I was desperate now. "Is that so difficult to admit?"

"The play's fine. You'll see. The scene's okay. Listen, the last play I directed... we put in this absolutely stupid, if somewhat funny, line a week before opening. During the play's run, no matter what else happened night after night in the audience, that one tacky funny line got a laugh. Moral: never underestimate the audience's intelligence. What may seem tacky ami melodramatic to you is 'moving' to them. Take my word for it." Blaise turned around completely, as though modeling the cigarette-ash-dusted blouson and loose black pants he affected—designed to hide his waistline, I suspected, but actually making him look like a Japanese art student living in Paris. "Thanks, Cyn. Those new blues work just as you said they would. Go home, Rog. Sleep. Get laid. Don't come back until you're in a better mood."

He pushed me up the aisle of the tiny theater, past the curtain into the minuscule lobby.

The sudden brightness reminded me that it must still be afternoon. I checked the clock over the ratty sofa. Only 3
P.M
.? Couldn't be. I felt I'd been inside the theater for days, weeks!

Someone stepped down and out of the hole in the wall off the lobby that held lighting controls. A statuesque black man dressed in what looked like a hippie version of buskins. Very statuesque, indeed, with—I saw as he turned toward me—the face of a Xhosa prince. Next out of the booth came the broadly pink-corduroyed bottom of Cynthia Lomax, coming out of her demesne, the control room. She jumped to the floor, grabbed Mr. Africa by his wide shoulders, and her cloud of carrot hair shook as she said, "Deal?"

"It's a deal," he agreed in a honeyed basso.

They rubbed noses.

Cynthia approached me and perched on a sofa arm. "Blasé's right, you know," she said, using the entire company's joke name instead of the real, if pretentious, one our director sported. She spoke in an eternally surprising little-girl voice. "Authors always get jitters." Her almost featureless face looked as though it had been hastily copied off a Raggedy Ann doll: button eyes dragonfly blue, mere pinch of a nose, cartoon-tiny mouth, apple-tinted cheeks. "This
is
your first play?"

"And my last! I should never have listened to him when he came to me with that outline. I should have shut the door."

"Blasé would have gotten it on the stage one way or another. He's had his heart set on turning your book into theater since the day he read it. If you hadn't agreed, he would have stolen the material and written it himself.
Then
we'd have had a real disaster."

"You've stage-managed a lot of shows?"

"My share."

"And you
don't
think this one's going to go under?"

"Nah! It's fun!" Cynthia said, merrily. "It's always interesting. The next scene they're rehearsing?... The trial scene... I knew nothing about Casement before, and now... well, I adore it! I tell everyone about the show. My girlfriend even read the script."

I didn't know Cynthia had a girlfriend. The way she seemed to be constantly surrounded by a pickup-truckful of handsome little lesbians clad in overalls, with tool kits on their belts, certainly showed how popular she was. I wondered which baby dyke was her inamorata.

"I wish I had your faith," I said, but I felt a bit better. Cynthia had that effect on everyone, everything she came into contact with.