Rat Bohemia (10 page)

One night Andrew Barton was forced to come to a meeting to explain why he, as our community representative, had voted against allowing the community to attend meetings of some government committee. The dykes and some guys were really appalled and a few had the balls to say so. But that's the thing about Andrew. He's a real bastard, but he always acts like if some miracle cure around the corner is ever going to be found, he's the one who is going to find out about it first. So, he might know how to keep us alive. That's why we've all got to stay on his good side. All of us who are infected feel that way. It's that Daddy thing. We still hope that some male is going to come along and make it all better. But real daddy never did that, so why the hell should Prince Andrew?

Anyway, he was going on and on in his usual arrogant, snobby way using all kinds of scientific terms that he knew for a fact none of us could understand. That was the whole point of his speech, of course. To prove for the thousandth time that he really can understand things that we can't understand, and so there is no way that we, the non-understanders, have any right to make him
accountable
. He went on and on and people started to get really pissed off.

Finally Rick, a mild-mannered architect, dared to challenge
even one point and Andrew grabbed the microphone like it was someone else's big dick and shouted into it that he wasn't going to put up with this kind of behavior. Then he stormed out, followed by a coterie of dying men, each hoping that Andrew's interrupted, unfinished sentence contained the key to their survival.

Those of us there primarily for dramatic reasons followed them out into the hall, while Bob Rafsky stood there and bellowed at the top of his fatherly lungs.

“Andrew Barton is the only person in this room who can save my life.”

Later that night I saw some dyke go up to Bob and look him straight in the eye. She said, “Bob, I wish that you did not have AIDS. But I do not believe that Andrew Barton is going to save your life. And he might ruin this organization.”

I didn't hear his answer, but that dyke's statement just froze me. How dare she speak to him that way. How dare anyone tell anyone else that they are going to die. It's like a family, I'm telling you. Everyone is too far out of line right in front of each other. I never bring friends to ACT UP. It's like bringing a friend home to dinner when your family is
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
?

I started mentioning AIDS to my parents around the time Don got sick. I waited to see how they would respond. When they didn't respond, I couldn't say anymore. I just mentioned. Mentioned, mentioned, mentioned, mentioned. By 1985 I was mentioning it every time I saw them. I started repeating names of different young men, saying what hospital they were in, that I had gone to visit this one and that one and how they were doing. I'd say their names over and over again.

“I just came from visiting my friend Robert at NYU. You remember Robert? He's the one I mentioned last time who is in Co-op Care? Remember, I mentioned that he was trying out this new drug that was really promising? Well, I gotta go now. I've got to go over and visit Robert and bring him some vitamins. I'll let you know how he's doing next time.”

But the next time I'd wait and wait. I'd wade through all the stories of eighty-year-olds with heart attacks and whose daughter was getting married and I'd wait and wait for one word. I just wanted them to utter that word. That word was
Robert
.

“Remember my friend Robert? Robert? Remember I mentioned him to you last time? He's the one who is in NYU Medical Center. You remember Robert. Robert? That's the one. Right?”

I'd come to seders straight from funerals and have to sit there wrenched with anger and pain as my parents would go on and on about their stupid opinions about this city policy and that city policy and who got fired and hired and whose daughter's husband got his whatever degree.

I went out to San Francisco to spend two months living with Paul, sitting around with him in the house watching Geraldo Rivera from his bed until he was too weak to hold the remote. I called my parents before I went and told them four times I was going to stay with Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul. I wanted them to call me. I cried at night on the mattress on the floor. But they wouldn't call me and say that one word. Paul.

My brother came out there on business with his girlfriend but could never find the time to come by the house to meet Paul. Finally I had to go way over to the other side of town, the straight side, where he was staying, and we went out for dinner. He never asked about Paul. Never mentioned it. He just went on and on about his business connections. Finally I started saying something about what it is like to live with a dying thirty-two-year-old. But my brother didn't … never brought it up.

The boundaries of parental love are so narrow.

My parents have always hated me for being gay. They've always wished I would disappear, but nothing has ever made me so nauseous and vicious as the gulf that AIDS has created between me and them. I came from Beekman visiting Saul with lesions on his lungs to a family dinner for my sister's birthday. She was feeling down because her seventy-year-old graduate school professor had just died and my mother turned to her and said, “You've had more people die in your life than anyone I know.”

I froze, bread halfway to my mouth. My mother caught me as though I had committed a crime.

“You mean the AIDS thing,” she said. “You're always looking for ammunition against us.”

And these reactions are so typical. My friends and I exchange
them like baseball cards. This how America treats us. It's not just AIDS that makes them hate us. They hated us before because they couldn't control us. They could not make us be just like them. Now, they're glad we're dying. They're uncomfortable about how they feel, but really they're relieved. There's nothing on earth that could kill us more efficiently than parental indifference.

Manuel called me too early on a gray Sunday to go see Gregg Araki's film,
The Living End
. I'd missed it the first time around and now some gay film festival stuck with last year's hits was playing it again—one time only. I knew that it was about two HIV-positive guys, so I got there an hour early worrying it would be sold out. Of course, every New Yorker would race to the theater to see a movie about HIV-positive guys. What else would they have to talk about? But the house was half full and Manuel came staggering in only five minutes before showtime, soaked through to the skin because he's too unconscious to ever bring an umbrella.

I was a bit peeved, besides, when it became apparent that he had also invited Tom and Lyle to come along too because I know that they are HIV-positive.

What a fun way to spend the weekend
, I thought.
Oh, YAY!

Tom and Lyle brought some dyke along to round out the whole scenario. We looked like an ad for National Brotherhood Week. Lyle and I were the only ones in our little crowd that resembled the rest of the guys in the audience. Clean-shaven little white guys. One big living Gap ad.

Araki's film was about two cute boys who fall in love and have HIV. The stud has decided that HIV made him free—so now he can ride around America having sex and beating people up, killing them and not worrying about a thing. He won't have a real life anymore. He'll only have a glamorous one. The other guy, equally sexy but too skinny, goes along with it because he wants to get laid, and somewhere in the back of his mind he thinks
this
might be the way out
. Of course the inevitable rub is that instead of being freed by HIV, Stud's whole life is now entirely run by HIV because he can't let himself live normally again. And, ultimately, that's what we diseased pariahs want more than anything else on earth—NORMALCY.

The final message of the movie is that you can't get out from under the grip of HIV. You can't do anything about it. That's the thing we all know about AIDS. You have to accept it.

But there was one really beautiful moment that ran through my mind repeatedly as we all stepped out of the theater in that predictable, boring silence. I was thinking about how wonderful it would be to have a boyfriend to love me and hold me and we could have cinematic HIV together and die happily ever after. That's romance.

“Cocktails or coffee?” the dyke said and we all screamed, “Cocktails.”

What followed was a maniacally single-minded journey to find a place with food and drink that we could afford, and so, after dismissing a number of tasteless, overpriced
endroits
for heterosexuals, we returned to the dyke-owned Pharmacy on Avenue A and Ninth Street, which was as bourgeois as any of us ever really got unless someone else was picking up the tab.

We ordered our eggs Benedict, Bloody Marys, et cetera, et cetera. Then Manuel starts rambling on and on about something about AIDS, but, of course, only in the abstract. The three of us squeezed our limes and looked at the tablecloth and the saltshaker.

“I just finally read
And the Band Played On
,” Manuel starts blathering. “I avoided it for years because of its horrible reputation.”

Then he starts in with this statistic and that one. Reciting all these tired theories. I really wanted to scream at this point. That's all guys ever talk about: DDI, DDC, DDI, DDC.

Or else it's Morgue Geography: “
Did you hear that Gary died just six days after his lover Danny?
”

“
But I thought Danny died in June
.”

“
No, that was Danny Schapiro who died a month ago, this is Danny Rich who died last week. Then Steve died ahead of schedule
.”

“
Again? I thought he died last month
.”

“
That was Steven. This is Steve
.”

Follow the bouncing corpse.

Anyway, Manuel kept up his verbal stupor, but Tom and Lyle and I didn't say a word. Finally we all started talking about how the film was shot and what kind of lens he had blah, blah, blah. Conveniently it reminded Manuel of a Joan Crawford movie, at last. So we got into that and ordered a second round of Marys.

“When I was a kid,” the dyke says, “I used to listen to Jimi Hendrix and think he was saying ‘
Scuse me while I kiss this guy
.' So I thought he was gay. When the radio played ‘
And the wind cried Mary
,' I knew it was true.”

That broke the ice. So without missing a beat she said, “How did you feel about the movie, personally? ”

Are all dykes social workers or what? They've got this delivery that lets you say what you want to say but it is so fucking perfect it is astonishing. It is devastating. Still Tom heroically tried to resist by speaking instead as an African-American and not as a diseased pariah.

“Well, I was really troubled by his insistence on using an all-white
cast. He is Japanese, after all.”

“His parents were in internment camps,” she said.

Just the kind of facts dykes keep at their fingertips.

“It bothered me that he had to pretend that the world was white,” Tom replied.

“No,” she said, not to be disobeyed. “I mean, how did you feel about what he was saying about HIV?”

Immediately a very jumpy conversation ensued between Tom and me and Lyle about how much we hated those pretty guys who played the leads. And how much we hated the romanticism. We really got going, but even that couldn't thaw poor Manuel. He kept looking at his plate and making comments about the Hollandaise sauce being rotten. I felt sorry for that schmuck. He was surrounded by the faces of his future ghosts.

“Those guys were too spoiled,” Lyle said on Mary number three.

“Spoiled? ”

That was the dyke talking again. They like to repeat your words back to you to show that they're listening.

“Yeah, guys like that pretend that they're tough. They
home boys
. They
rebels who ain't got no cause
. But when it comes down to it they'll never do anything bad unless it's with their dicks. That's why we can't get anywhere with this fucking disease. Gay boys are too well behaved. Chelsea is never going up in flames like South Central LA.”

Lyle was the white one, but he dipped occasionally into overdone black slang. Tom, the black one, never did it in front of me.

“What do you mean
spoiled
? ” I asked.

“Well,” he said. “You know how they had these stolen credit
cards in the movies and could therefore go anywhere and do anything? ”

“Yeah? ”

“Well, is that really as far as a fag can imagine when it comes to disorderly conduct? When we're bad we don't rob banks. We go to banks.”

“Yeah,” said Tom. “In real life we don't have that credit card. So what are
we
supposed to do? ”

The last time I saw my parents was Mother's Day. I had just come from relieving the guy in Gino's care group and walked into the apartment just in time to find that Gino had shit all over himself.

“I just came from Gino's apartment,” I said to my parents as we sat around the kitchen table drinking mimosas.

“Gino shit all over himself and the other guy didn't know what to do. He was so busy retching every time he got near the bed that he'd let Gino lie in his own shit for almost half an hour trying to get up the guts to deal with it.

“I've been through this twice before,” I said casually to my disgusted parents as I speared a canned asparagus. “Of course.”

I crossed my legs like a nelly Gene Kelly.