Rat Bohemia (6 page)

Sure, Killer had a great imagination all right, except when it came to finding a place to live. She couldn't imagine her way out of that slum. Killer's house is a good example of urban blight. To get there I first have to walk past a rat-infested vacant lot where some homeless people have shanties. Day or night the rats gallivant freely. They've never known fear. These are rats who think that the world loves them that way, that this world is
for
them. People bring them garbage like it was TV dinners on a tray. Then they scamper, do aerobics, and whine.

When I approach that corner I get really tense, like a foot soldier on the banks of the Mekong Delta. I scan the sidewalk thoroughly and then try to race past as quickly as possible. If a piece of paper or a plastic bag should suddenly blow out of the sea of rats, I'll jump ten feet and scream. Later on I'll be clammy and pale, as though the actual monster ran across my bedsheets. And when the real ones do surface they are huge and deformed with tumors and other disfigurations. They get out in the middle of the sidewalk slowly and then lumber over to the garbage cans. Everyone's out there scrambling. When a car turns down that street its headlights illuminate them,
swarming like larvae on old cat food. But they don't fear headlights. They just keep on. Then you get to Killer's house.

David is one of those mild-mannered, balding kind of young men who only get creepy looks on their faces when talking about someone's big dick. Then he smiles devilishly and his voice cracks. Otherwise he's the kind of guy I would have married if I had married a fag. Now he's down below two hundred T-cells, so I'm starting to worry. I love him and I hate him.

When I start to separate those feelings it is a real truth-teller about me, about what a cold person I can be. When I really face how I feel about David I see myself in a very unpleasant light. I see things unpleasant to convey. Like how angry I am that he never thinks about me. How angry I am that he's dying and so has a good excuse. How afraid I am that if he wasn't dying things might be exactly the same way. How ashamed I am that he is dying and I am only thinking of myself.

“Hey, Dave? ”

“Tired,” he said. “Can't sleep. Stayed up late last night trying to read Muriel Starr's new book.”

“
Good and Bad
?”

“Yeah, everyone's reading it. Couldn't get past the first few chapters. Too closety. I just lay awake in bed for hours twiddling my thumbs.”

“Where're you just back from this time?” I asked him as we walked down Eighth Avenue.

“San Francisco,” he said.

“And…?”

“No rats,” he said.

I already knew that.

“It's so different,” he said. “You walk out the door and there are three different kinds of trees, each with flowers of a different color. Yellow, red, white. Then there's another tree with little hanging plants that look like a string of bells. But actually, they're petals. No rats, drug dealers, or urine-soaked sidewalks in every neighborhood. It's all confined to a few, so just by walking you can actually get away from it and have time to have feelings and other emotions. You know, Rita, living daily in very hostile circumstances isn't good for us.”

“Makes sense.”

David is very concerned about being remembered. I'm concerned about remembering because, after all, I'm going to be left behind. People we know die all the time and there is really no way to react. What can you do? Freak out every day? David brings memory up all the time. I can see how appalled he is at how little any of us react to AIDS deaths. He's focused a lot of worry on being forgotten. That's one of his greatest motivations for going on trips and writing us letters. Continuing to make new friends and building relationships is one way to ensure his legacy.

We went half-time down the avenue. Dave was beginning to walk slow. I knew that the trip was hard for him physically, but whatever the cost was made up for spiritually when he realized he was going to make it the whole way. I could see he was starting to get that peripheral neuropathy where the nerve endings in your legs swell up. It's called “tendonitis.”

“The Castro in San Francisco is the Valley of Death,” he said. “There are sick people everywhere. Some are in their last moments and are being rolled around in wheelchairs. Others are just
minimally decrepit, thin with ruddy medicinal complexions. The word AIDS is everywhere—on signs in newspapers. There is no pretense that it does not exist. That's what I noticed most, the lack of denial. I don't believe in denial. I think I'm joking. Everything I know to be true in my secret homosexual world is acknowledged publicly there. It's frightening, disorienting. Freedom is so unfamiliar.

“Here in New York AIDS is still a secret. When people get really sick they're embarrassed and so crawl into their apartments and die. They feel defeated and no one is there to help them get down the stairs. Only the drug addicts are out there on their canes. The formerly beautiful homos just lie in bed waiting for God's Love We Deliver to bring a hot meal and then spend the rest of the evening throwing up.”

When Dave talks about his death, I act as though it is without question. I act almost blasé or at least one hundred percent accepting. I try to be relaxed. I'm used to it. I've also noticed that I don't mind getting closer to a person when they are dying of AIDS than I wouldn't usually get if they were living normally, men that is. That intimacy is worth a great deal to me.

By the time we got down to Astor Place, Dave was totally exhausted. He sat right on the sidewalk like it was a fat Persian rug. You could see how badly he wanted to go to sleep. I just let him be but kept one eye out at all times, casually, while focusing primarily on the scene down there. The work crew was trying out this new technique, and it was pretty disgusting. I hadn't seen a technique so blatantly gross before.

Two guys in regulation blue uniform jumpsuits had dug holes right around Peter Cooper triangle right in front of Cooper Union
art school. Then they filled the holes with some kind of noxious water or poison. As the rats scampered to the surface, the guys hit each one over the head with shovels until their skulls caved in. It was so primitive. Like Fred Flintstone and Bam-Bam go hunting.
That's no way to get a rat population the size of ours,
I thought.
It's not efficient.
But in five hours, the guys had killed at least one hundred and eighty that way. That's what they needed the barrel for—to throw away the carcasses. The funniest thing was that all the art students were standing around staring, but none of them took a picture. Not a movie, not a sketch. Too busy being surprised, I guess.

I was reading a book called
Leaves of Grass
. It was all about the way people felt during the last century when Brooklyn was its own city and you had to take a boat to get there. I guess those Brooklynites stood on deck and watched the green grass of their homeland waving long and luxurious in the sun. Compared to the shit of New York, Brooklyn seemed like a forest.

Today you have to take the D train to get there. It sails right over one of the most beautiful stretches that America has to offer, that highway between the two boroughs where you fly off the bridge watching both sides through that twisted wire weaving. It's like the sinew under the skin of a body-builder in Chelsea. There's the black water and the blue sky and Wall Street where all the rich people of the officially beautiful world sit. On the other side are the projects where the saddest and most dangerous beautiful people of the unofficial world exist despite crime statistics, poverty graphs, and the neglect quotient.

One night I was walking over to see Killer at her place on Avenue C and Seventh Street. I was crossing Avenue B and a Puerto Rican boy about fourteen, already with a mustache, started talking to me.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

I always say “hi,” believing it is an intermediary to death.

“The cops are at the brick man's,” he said, warning me and flirting. Nothing is more attractive than a fourteen-year-old boy who holds the key to your death.

I ignored him, not knowing what he meant until I got halfway down the block as the police were pulling away from the laundry. It was the only store on the block and was freestanding between two vacant lots. There were three churches—one black, one Latin, and one evangelical white. But commercially, only the drug business can survive on that block.

When I got to the storefront I could see that the police had raided the Laundromat and were now driving away. Just as they took off, before they got to the end of the block, coincidentally at the same moment that I was passing, all the junkies who had been hurting for their drugs, flocked back to the laundry. They came running back like there was a cracked piñata and candy for all. Then, after years of practice at unemployment, welfare, shelters, methadone, and food stamps, they got in an orderly but panicky line while some guy sold heroin from the top of the stoop. The girls in that line were about fifteen years younger than me. Their hair was still long and black. One wore a stylish red beret. They lined up back to front like refugees in
Life
magazine waiting for rice. They held out their hands, palms up, waiting to catch their drugs. You can't see this from the Brooklyn Bridge.

Later, I was so disappointed that the Puerto Rican man-boy would think I was buying heroin just because I'm white. It means I've failed. Is that what white people do in poor neighborhoods? Is that the only thing we do? Guess I don't look like a social worker, drug dealer, or TV camera crew. I just look like a girl who wants to get high. Why else would I ever be here? Frankly, I'm too embarrassed to even consider being a junkie. I wouldn't want to ruin my reputation with others. I'd be afraid of what they would think.

Killer was happy that I finally arrived at her place because she
had a psychodrama going on. She had had sex with some girl and now that person wouldn't call her back.

“She was really sexy,” Killer said. “She wore those boxer shorts for women that have some man's name written on them.”

“You mean Calvin Klein?”

“Yeah, that's it.”

“So why won't she call you back? ”

“You know, Rita. You know how it is. Some people, you call them and they never call you back. Even if they've known you for a long time. I'd like to call those people up and say,
Listen Mack, if you ever call me I will call you right away. If I call you, I want you to call me back. Don't snub me or I'll kill you. Don't snub me.
Of course you can't go around saying
I'll kill you
to people or they'll never call you back. Plus, they'll tell other people you said that and then the others won't call either. The murderous intention has to be simply but subtly understood.”

Killer went on and on about that girl, but I was preoccupied. So I just kicked back and had a beer while she rattled ahead. When you're drinking a beer
and
smoking a cigarette, there's no need to look for an ashtray 'cause bottle tops are lying around the table, right near where you put your feet. I wish I could dispose of memories. What good are they? Just a yearning for something that didn't happen and something sweet that was never said. It is an inventory of voids. Where is my mother? Why did she desert me?

Dave called me up to see if I wanted to watch a movie. But when I got over there it turned out to be a stack of videos of all our dead friends and then some of his dead friends who I never knew. We watched them say and do very ordinary things. Some of them were alive so long ago that their clothing and haircuts were out of date. One guy, Roger, seemed so far away. Then I realized that we had gotten older, but he never would. Roger would always be young. There were a few scenes of couples who were both dead. Dave and I watched them acting out their sick couple dynamics. What a way to be remembered.

I almost never think about these guys unless I see someone on the street who looks like one of them. But David wanted to talk about them. He would go on and on about who was in love with who and who said what to who. The thing is, he is going by a very outdated definition of what history is. He was still pretending that history is the passing down of anecdotes from one set of friends to another. When they're all dead there is no more continuity of the generations. I'm the one who's going to be left and have to do all the remembering and frankly, I'm never going to tell those anecdotes to anyone.

Right now, when I think of all my AIDS dead, one of the things they all have in common is about forty conversations just like the one Dave and I had, where each guy talked about death in his own way. Later, they get sick and die in very predictable patterns. Let's face it, this death itself is no longer extraordinary, emotionally, to me.

David sat there and told me his most private thoughts about this death. While he was talking, I did exactly what I'd done forty times before, which is to very matter-of-factly refuse to pretend he's not going to die. In the meantime, what I had to say paled in comparison to his experiences, but I'm the one who's gonna be left behind. Doesn't that have a meaning too?

“When Victor died,” Dave said, “I asked Steve what he remembered of their thirteen years together and he said that all he remembered was piles of Victor's shit from changing his diapers for two months. Rita, how do I ensure that my friends don't remember me like that? ”

“You could tell us it's okay to hire a nurse,” I said. I know that is not what I was supposed to say. I was supposed to say “Of course we'll remember you, Dave. You know that.”