The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me: Two Plays (14 page)

A big empty room, which will be the organization’s new offices.
BRUCE
is walking around by himself
.
NED
comes in from upstairs.

NED:
This is perfect for our new offices. The room upstairs is just as big. And it’s cheap.

BRUCE:
How come, do you think?

NED:
Didn’t Tommy tell you? After he found it, he ran into the owner in a gay bar who confessed, after a few beers, his best friend is sick. Did you see us on TV picketing the mayor yesterday in all that rain?

BRUCE:
Yes.

NED:
How’d we look?

BRUCE:
All wet.

NED:
He’s got four more hours to go. Our letter threatened if he didn’t meet with us by the end of the day we’d escalate the civil disobedience. Mel found this huge straight black guy who trained with Martin Luther King. He’s teaching us how to tie up the bridge and tunnel traffic. Don’t worry—a bunch of us are doing this on our own.

BRUCE:
Tommy got the call.

NED:
Tommy? Why didn’t you tell me? When did they call?

BRUCE:
This morning.

NED:
When’s the meeting?

BRUCE:
Tomorrow.

NED:
You see. It works! What time?

BRUCE:
Eight
A.M
.

NED:
For the mayor I’ll get up early.

BRUCE:
We can only bring ten people. Hiram’s orders.

NED:
Who’s going?

BRUCE:
The Community Council sends two, the Network sends two, the Task Force sends two, we send two, and two patients.

NED:
I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty and we can share a cab.

BRUCE:
You remember we elected Tommy executive director.

NED:
I’m going.

BRUCE:
We can only bring two.

NED:
You just call Hiram and tell him we’re bringing three.

BRUCE:
The list of names has already been phoned in. It’s too late.

NED:
So I’ll just go. What are they going to do? Kick me out? Already phoned in? Too late? Why is everything so final? Why is all this being done behind my back? How dare you make this decision without consulting me?

BRUCE:
Ned . . .

NED:
I wrote that letter, I got sixty gay organizations to sign it, I organized the picketing when the mayor wouldn’t respond, that meeting is mine! It’s happening because of me! It took me twenty-one months to arrange it and, God damn it, I’m going to go!

BRUCE:
You’re not the whole organization.

NED:
What does that mean? Why didn’t Tommy tell me?

BRUCE:
I told him not to.

NED:
You what?

BRUCE:
I wanted to poll the board.

NED:
Behind my back—what kind of betrayal is going on behind my back? I’m on the board, you didn’t poll me. I am going to that meeting representing this organization that I have spent every minute of my life fighting for and that was started in my living room, or I quit!

BRUCE:
I told them I didn’t think you’d accept their decision.

NED:
(
As it sinks in.
) You would let me quit? You didn’t have to poll the board. If you wanted to take me, you’d take me. I embarrass you.

BRUCE:
Yes, you do. The mayor’s finally meeting with us and we all feel we now have a chance to—

NED:
A chance to kiss his ass?

BRUCE:
We want to work from the inside now that we have the contact.

NED:
It won’t work. Did you get this meeting by kissing his ass? He’s the one person most responsible for letting this epidemic get so out of control. If he’d responded with one ounce of compassion when we first tried to reach him, we’d have saved two years. You’ll see . . . We have over half a million dollars. The
Times
is finally writing about us. Why are you willing to let me go when I’ve been so effective? When you need me most?

BRUCE:
You. . . you’re a bully. If the board doesn’t agree with you, you always threaten to leave. You never listen to us. I can’t work with you anymore.

NED:
And you’re strangling this organization with your fear and your conservatism. The organization I promised everyone would fight for them isn’t fighting at all. It’s become the gay est.

BRUCE:
Maybe that’s what it wanted to become. Maybe that’s all it could become. You can’t turn something into something it doesn’t want to become. We just feel you can’t tell people how to live.

NED:
Drop that! Just drop it! The cases are still doubling every six months. Of course we have to tell people how to live. Or else there won’t be any people left! Did you ever consider it could get so bad they’ll quarantine us or put us in camps?

BRUCE:
Oh, they will not.

NED:
It’s happened before. It’s all happened before. History is worth shit. I swear to God I now understand . . . Is this how so many people just walked into gas chambers? But at least they identified themselves to each other and to the world.

BRUCE:
You can’t call people gay who don’t want to be.

NED:
Bruce—after you’re dead, it doesn’t make any difference.

BRUCE:
(
Takes a letter out of his pocket.
) The board wanted me to read you this letter. “We are circulating this letter widely among people of judgment and good sense in our community. We take this action to try to combat your damage, wrought, so far as we can see, by your having no scruples whatever. You are on a colossal ego trip we must curtail. To manipulate fear, as you have done repeatedly in your ‘merchandising’ of this epidemic, is to us the gesture of barbarism. To exploit the deaths
of gay men, as you have done in publications all over America, is to us an act of inexcusable vandalism. And to attempt to justify your bursts of outrageous temper as ‘part of what it means to be Jewish’ is past our comprehending. And, after years of liberation, you have helped make sex dirty again for us—terrible and forbidden. We are more angry at you than ever in our lives toward anyone. We think you want to lead us all. Well, we do not want you to. In accordance with our by-laws as drawn up by Weeks, Frankel, Levinstein, Mr. Ned Weeks is hereby removed as a director. We beg that you leave us quietly and not destroy us and what good work we manage despite your disapproval. In closing, please know we always welcome your input, advice, and help.”

(
BRUCE
tries to hand
NED
the letter.
NED
won’t take it.
BRUCE
tries to put it in
NED’
s breast pocket.
NED
deflects
BRUCE’
s hand.
)

NED:
I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E. M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, john Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjöld . . . These are not invisible men. Poor Bruce. Poor frightened Bruce. Once upon a time you wanted to be a soldier. Bruce, did you know that it was an openly gay Englishman who was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans’ Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do—and when the war was over he committed suicide he was so hounded for being gay. Why don’t they teach any of this in the schools? If they
did, maybe he wouldn’t have killed himself and maybe you wouldn’t be so terrified of who you are. The only way we’ll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn’t just sexual. It’s all there—all through history we’ve been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what’s in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organize ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we’re doomed. That’s how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war. Being defined by our cocks is literally killing us. Must we all be reduced to becoming our own murderers? Why couldn’t you and I, Bruce Niles and Ned Weeks, have been leaders in creating a new definition of what it means to be gay? I blame myself as much as you. Bruce, I know I’m an asshole. But, please, I beg you, don’t shut me out.

(
BRUCE
starts to leave, then stops and comes to
NED
.
He puts his hand on his cheek, perhaps kisses him, and then leaves him standing alone.
)

NED’
s apartment.
FELIX
is sitting on the floor. He has been eating junk food.
NED
comes in carrying a bag of groceries.

NED:
Why are you sitting on the floor?

FELIX:
I fell down trying to get from there to here.

NED:
Let’s put you to bed.

FELIX:
Don’t touch me! I’m so ugly. I cannot stand it when you look at my body.

NED:
Did you go to chemo today?

FELIX:
Yes. I threw it all up. You don’t have to let me stay here with you. This is horrible for you.

NED:
(
Touching
felix’s
hair.
) No fallout yet. Phil looks cute shaved. I’m hungry. How about you? Can you eat a little? Please. You’ve got to eat. Soup . . . something light. . . I’ve bought dinner.

FELIX:
Emma says a cure won’t come until the next century. Emma says it’s years till a vaccine, which won’t do me any good anyway. Emma says the incubation period might be up to three, ten, twenty years.

NED:
Emma says you’ve got to eat.

FELIX:
I looked at all my datebooks and no one else I slept with is sick. That I know of. Maybe it was you. Maybe you’ve been a carrier for twenty years. Or maybe now you only have three years to go.

NED:
Felix, we don’t need to do this again to each other.

FELIX:
Whoever thought you’d die from having sex?

NED:
Did Emma also tell you that research at the NIH has finally started. That something is now possible. We have to hope.

FELIX:
Oh, do we?

NED:
Yes, we do.

FELIX:
And how am I supposed to do that? You Jewish boys who think you can always make everything right—that the world can always be a better place. Did I tell you the
Times
is running
an editorial this Sunday entitled “The Slow Response”? And you’re right: I didn’t have anything to do with it.

NED:
Why are you doing this? Why are you eating this shit? Twinkies, potato chips. . . You know how important it is to watch your nutrition. You’re supposed to eat right.

FELIX:
I have a life expectancy of ten more minutes I’m going to eat what I want to eat. Ned, it’s going to get messier any day now and I don’t want to make you see it.

NED:
Nobody makes me do anything; you should know that better than anybody else by now. What are you going to do? Sit on the floor for the rest of your life? We have a bed in the other room. You could listen to those relaxation tapes we bought you three months ago. You haven’t used them at all. Do you hear me?

FELIX:
Yes, I hear you. That guy David who sold you the pig on Bleecker Street finally died. He took forever. They say he looked like someone out of Auschwitz. Do you hear me?

NED:
No. Are you ready to get up yet? And eat something?

FELIX:
No!—I’ve had over forty treatments. No!—I’ve had three, no four different types of chemo. No!—I’ve had interferon, a couple kinds. I’ve had two different experimentals. Emma has spent more time on me than anyone else. None of it has done a thing. I’ve had to go into the hospital four times—and please God don’t make me go back into the hospital until I die. My illness has cost my—no! the
New Yorks Times’
insurance company over $300,000. Eighty-five percent of us are dead after two years, Alexander; it gets higher after three. Emma has lost
so many patients they call her Dr. Death. You cannot force the goddamn sun to come out.

NED:
Felix, I am so sick of statistics, and numbers, and body counts, and howmanys, and Emma; and every day, Felix, there are only more numbers, and fights—I am so sick of fighting, and bragging about fighting, and everybody’s stupidity, and blindness, and intransigence, and guilt trips. You can’t eat the food? Don’t eat the food. Take your poison. I don’t care. You can’t get up off the floor—fine, stay there. I don’t care. Fish—fish is good for you; we don’t want any of that, do we? (
Item by item, he throws the food on the floor.
) No green salad. No broccoli; we don’t want any of that, no, sir. No bread with seven grains. Who would ever want any milk? You might get some calcium in your bones. (
The carton of milk explodes when it hits the floor.
) You want to die, Felix? Die!

(
NED
retreats to a far corner. After a moment,
FELIX
crawls through the milk, takes an item of food, which he pulls along with his hand, and with extreme effort makes his way across to
NED
.
They fall into each other’s arms.
)