People in Trouble (22 page)

"What are you, some kind of martyr?"

"Good question."

"Well, if that's your trip, Molly, then take it somewhere else."

"Please don't say that.
 
You're going to make me walk away from you and it's not even my stop."

"Don't play that hurt martyr game with me."

The sun was setting later and later, so the afternoons had begun to spread out luxuriously.
 
As they walked along in silence -from the station Kate noticed that it was really warm and people had all the time in the world.
 
Soon it would be so hot that no one would have to wear jackets and people could sit up on the roofs talking about going to the country.

"Do you think I could have AIDS?"

"No," Molly said.
 
"Can I come in?"

They were standing in front of Kate's building.

"Don't do that.
 
You know you can't come in."

Peter was home and conspicuously busy.
 
He was making dinner obviously.

He was silent.
 
He was moping.
 
He was a martyr too but not even a cheerful one.

"Peter, just say what you have to say.
 
This is not `Million Dollar Movie."
 
Just say it."

"You should move in with her for a while."
 
He spat it out.

"Then she'll see how much I put up with."

She knew what he wanted.
 
It was obvious.
 
He wanted her to put her arms around him and console him but she couldn't do that.
 
She was sick and tired of both of them.

"Look, Pete.
 
Get this through your thick skull.
 
I don't want to live with her.
 
I want to live with you.
 
Pete?
 
Pete?"

"What?"

"You think the trouble we're having is because of her, but the truth is that it's about me.
 
Me.
 
I am changing.
 
Do you understand?"

His face was flat.

"I'm changing, and do you know what?
 
I'm glad.
 
Do you want to be the same person with the same opinions and the same -- habits for the rest of your life?
 
Give in, Pete."

"Everything's for you," he said.
 
"You're selfish."

"I'm changing my life.
 
Why don't you stop wishing I - wouldn't and do something about yours?"

She was of two minds about going out of town.
 
Frankly, Kate wanted to get away from her lovers, and she wanted to sit down with the carpenter and work intensively on her project.
 
But there was also some nagging suspicion that this was the kind of moment best not left unattended and anything was capable of happening behind her back.
 
So she had called Pearl the night before to go over their agenda and realized, again, that she really did need to go up there and see the wooden framing structure for herself.
 
She could not risk arriving at the library site on the morning of the installation to find something wrong with the frames.

It was a strange bus ride.
 
Kate exhausted all her normal traveling rituals with a speedy ambivalence.
 
She ate her food before Yankee Stadium, lifelessly leafed through and then dismissed her newspaper and once again carefully considered the pros and cons of owning a Walkman.

It came in handy at times - I like these, but didn't one's sense of humanity demand striking up a conversation with one's neighbor instead of plugging into a square plastic box?
 
Kate looked at the man sitting next to her.

He was listening to his Walkman.
 
When she closed her eyes and pressed back into her seat she could feel vaguely operatic vibrations emanating from his head and passing through the cushions.

- I Again she looked for distractions, but the bumpy road made - I reading or sketching impossible.
 
Besides, there was a large, flat - I calm where her general anxiety really should have been, and then on top of it a tiny, nervous, constant throb.

- I But she did feel instinctively good about Pearl.
 
That was one thing about Molly's friends.
 
They were reliable and very cheap.

Of course, men were helping too.
 
After all it was Spiros who had gotten her the funding and he good-naturedly promised to organize champagne and hors d'oeuvres for the actual opening.

- I "Although I'm not a great believer in installations," he told I her, "I am even more atheistic when it comes to sour grapes."
 
k4 The bus ride had been interesting for the first thirty minutes when they passed through an extended Harlem that was a collection of churches, beauty parlors and liquor stores.
 
It had main drags, it had decimated areas, it had music schools and a liberation bookstore.
 
It had Jamaican meat patties and a good crust ;1t pie between the projects and luxury brownstones.
 
It had every- I thing a poor city had plus certain things that only Harlem had - I and it was black and Latin all over except around the edges and a few pockets of new white people moving in or old white people who had endured or brand-new Korean businesses.

After Harlem there was nothing to look at for hours.

It was Thursday.
 
On Tuesday night Justice had met for the - first time in its new home.
 
The membership had simply grown too large for anybody's basement.
 
Now they gathered in the abandoned Saint Mark's bathhouse, closed down by the mayor right after he closed the Mineshaft.
 
The crowd was huge, especially 4 since Justice had been joined by Fury, the women-with-AIDS group.
 
Now Daisy, an older Puerto Rican woman with long gray hair, co-facilitated the meetings with James.
 
She began every session with a big smile on her face and an announcement.

"If there is anyone here from the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the New York City Police Department, you are required by law to identify yourself now.

Everyone would be silent for a moment and look around, then their faces would open into broad grins and they would get back to work.
 
Defiance was Justice's bread and butter.

The presence of the Furies changed the Justice guys just a bit.
 
It made for a coed institution, one in which, except for a few indiscretions, the sexes rarely mixed intimately.

"That puts us in a special category," Molly said after one particularly lively meeting, "with other famous fag/dyke teams like the Catholic Church, Hollywood and the Olympics."

The crowd filled the empty tile pool, sitting around the ledge and on the tasteful steps.
 
The cubicles had been turned into nap rooms, not offices.

"This is a grass-roots movement," Daisy said.
 
"We don't need offices.

We are employed in offices.
 
Steal Xerox, take WhiteOut, use postage machines, make phone calls.
 
Your job is a prison of measured time.
 
So make their time work for you."

The baths had seemed musty to Kate at first, but the men Ioohed and aahed, remembering what it was like before, remembering with some nervousness the last time each of them had been there.
 
They were warm and joking with one another, like adults returning to the sandlot.

"I feel like Judas Maccabaeus returning to the trashed-out temple," Bob said.
 
He clapped his long, sleek hands together and reached up to the cobwebbed archway."
 
`Oh Lord, let those glory -days be with us once again.
 
Oh unknown dick, oh joy, oh most angelic thought."

Throughout the meeting different people's wristwatch alarms kept going off with little beeps.

"What's going on?"
 
Kate asked.
 
"Is everyone schedulecrazy?
 
Whenever I come to these meetings watch alarms keep going off."

"It's to remind them to take their AZT," Molly told her.

"Every four hours."

"Oh."
 
"I old Fabian took up his old spot in the corner and tried out his -4against "You know what comes to mind right away?"

Fabian said.

-t"What?"
 
Kate asked curiously as he twisted the leather thong hanging from his belt.

"The Village People singing `Macho Man."
 
Remember that -one?"

"Not really," Kate said.
 
"I've never listened to the radio much."

"Disco, disco," Bob said.
 
"If ever I foresake thee."

No one had given them permission to use the old bathhouse.

They just took it.
 
Justice was getting very aggressive.
 
They had no ideology except stopping AIDS, and because they had made that their priority, they behaved as though it was the world's -priority.

"Are you upset about this?"
 
James asked commuters when - - Justice stopped traffic on the George Washington Bridge.
 
"You should be as upset about AIDS."

Attendance at meetings had grown to well over five hundred 4and numbers like that meant all kinds, all kinds.
 
There were the tough street Furies who had all been around the block a couple of times.
 
There were distinguished homosexuals with white-boy jobs, who had forgotten that they were queer until AIDS came along and everyone else reminded them.

At first the white collars had wanted to bring lawsuits and carry out polite picket lines, while the Furies had been willing to bash in a few heads at the expense of getting bashed themselves.
 
But soon the two factions 4were able to unite in anger and a commitment to direct action when the homos found out what a lifetime of anger could create -and the Furies discovered that nothing raises the level of outrage 4as efficiently as the level of expectation.

"Imagining what they deserve and then fighting for it," said Bob, "is something that anyone with nothing to lose can easily -learn, if they have a determined personality."

There was also a contingent of old-time radicals of various stripes who had rioted in the sixties at Stonewall, in Newark, with the Young Lords, with SDS, and hadn't done a goddamn thing since.
 
No straight men showed up at all.

"Straight men don't know how to take care of other people," Daisy explained.
 
"And they don't work well in groups."
 
There was a band of veterans from the now defunct women's liberation movement who were the only ones who had been consistently politically active for the last decade, and so knew better than anyone else how to make flyers, how to do phone trees, the quickest way to wheat-paste, and who weren't afraid of getting arrested.

"Being a woman in Justice means being in leadership," Daisy once said.

"As soon as you walk in the room all the guys turn around and say, `Now what?"" "We like dykes," the guys would chant every once in a while when the women did something really great.
 
And there were lots and lots of handsome young men who intended to live to be handsome old men or even just aging queens.
 
They were the organization's best recruitment force, since Justice's favorite activity after raising hell was the boyfriend parade.

The man sitting next to Kate on the bus finished listening to his cassettes.
 
After one awkward exchanged glance, he took out a copy of the New York Native and opened it directly to the personals.

"I love that part of the paper," she said, peering over his -shoulder.

"Especially all the little codes.
 
Like c/b/t.
 
That means cock and ball torture, right?"

"Excuse me?"

He wasn't embarrassed at all.
 
He was more curious and amused.

"You know what interests me most?"
 
she said.
 
"When they specify uncut.
 
Who would have thought that foreskin was the necessary component to constructing the man of your dreams."

I"Well," he said, looking down his glasses, "the straight ones are far more insidious.
 
Have you checked the back of the New York Review of Books lately?
 
You know, `Distinguished professional gentleman into domination and Schopenhauer, looking for blond female sixteen to eighteen for permanent relationship."

"I'm not defending heterosexuality at all," Kate said, sending her blue eyes directly into his brown ones.
 
She leaned over when she said that and rested her chin on the top of her fist.
 
Then he had to take her seriously because there was something so proper and bizarre about her at the same time.
 
She knew he saw the -suit.
 
He saw the big black shoes with white socks and the thick, black glasses.