We are unfit to teach children.
We are unfit to raise families, an oddity like a dog that walks on its hind legs.
We are the death of religion and the albatross around the neck of American politics.
We are the starving children wolfing down as much as we can at the table of American culture.
We are incapable of playing the romantic lead in a Hollywood movie.
We were once the love that dared not speak its name, and still we lay naked and tangled and sweaty, children huddled in the storm, so tender, so kind, so violently in love. Now we blare that love with bullhorns during the second act of Tosca and we have become as heartless as the rest of America, the most heartless country on the planet.
We have been bound with barbed wire and beaten to death, we have killed one another, because for all the marches and the banners and the drag queens on TV, while Holly and Candy and Jackie are forgotten, we are still, as children, taught to loathe the thing that makes us who
we are.
It is 1981. A sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican drag queen who calls herself Putassa walks into a room full of men in evening clothes and I say to a friend standing beside me, “Who is that creature?” so perfect in her loveliness, so graceful and charming and delicate, so unacceptable in every way outside this room, outside of this moment, and he says, “That is the most beautiful boy in New York,” as the lights dim and Holly and Jackie in black sequins and boas descend a staircase singing “Broadway Baby” from Follies. And Putassa gets up the next morning and goes to her day job at Saks, modeling designer clothing for rich women to choose from, including a blue satin ball gown by Oscar de la Renta eventually bought by a slightly heavy woman from London named Alexis Tayloe, who, to this day, wishes she had found more effective ways of cutting me to the quick, after I had expertly fucked her for eleven nights in a row.
But, people will tell you, look how much better things are now than they were then. Equal rights, equal protection under the law. You can GET MARRIED!!! And those same people leave Matthew Shephard to rot in a ditch in Montana, and feel squeamish when two female lawyers with two children move in next door, liberals on the Upper West Side who snicker behind their hands when two men walk by with a Vietnamese baby in a stroller. Two successful young men turning a slant-eyed baby into a queer.
And I, who could find nothing but self-loathing on either side of the Rubicon because what I wanted was both, because I wanted it all, and that is not allowed, despite my voracious appetite for both, because that is not allowed.
You play the violin all your life, does anybody call you a violinist? Suck one cock—BRANDED, that’s how the old joke goes, and I love old jokes and now I am one.
And if you ask me if I pity myself, I will say to you, goddamned right I do.
And if you ask me if I despise myself for the things I’ve done and the men and women I’ve slept with and hurt, inevitably, how could I not, I will tell you.
But if you ask me if I despise you, the answer is, often, yes. Sometimes I despise even the few who are left whom I hold dear in my heart. I despise them and love them at the same time. I think of every person I have loved every day, and every night I keep them in my prayers.
No woman will touch me because I may have known someone who knew someone who slept with someone who had it, and men will not touch me because I am somehow a betrayal of their fucking lifestyle. Because I do not like sitting around the pool at Joshua Tree with an all-male group in white linen, with identical bodies and identical patterns of speech. I stepped outside the logo-strangled tribe once too often and I am not to be trusted and now it’s over, anyway. I am too old to care. Not too old to want, but too old to care. People think that, as you age, the fire of your passions burns down to ash in the grate, but it is not true. It rather quickens and intensifies, like a pasta sauce you have let reduce on the stove to bring out its richest, fullest flavors.
And, after all the funerals, and after 700,000 deaths, starting with those forty-three in 1981, starting with Patient Zero, starting twenty years before that in Africa, still fifty thousand people get it every year in this country, this country where we never even think about it anymore, and all of Africa is dying and who cares, and we go to our jobs and lie in our beds at night and remember one night, one late night at Studio in the balcony with my friend Nancy on one side and some bartender on the other and how can you help but not miss it.
I was there.
I remember.
Who the fuck wouldn’t remember. Nobody does, now, these laughing, ageless boys with their sleek haircuts and their jobs in advertising and their weddings in the Times, but how could they? Forget? How could they affront their fathers, their brothers, the men who fucking invented them? We look through the paper-thin slices of lime you hold in your beautiful teeth and we spit on you. Because you know nothing. Because you forgot. You didn’t know?
The men who survived, only to find their relationships and desires a burning crude-oil wasteland around them—
forever? The men who never got their mojo back, who wake up now in a cold sweat of remorse, survivor’s guilt? Men who cannot look another man in the eye without seeing the shadow of the virus floating there? These people were, are still in some cases, friends of mine, and we are, even to each other, aliens. For so much of what we know there are no words, not one gesture to hold the heart together. Not anymore.
Matthew, are you there? Will you ever be home? I think about this all the time. Rick? Who got the Mercedes? Billy, have you seen Tony? Has anybody seen Billy? He doesn’t answer. And Morgan, where in France are you and will you be gone long? Gone forever? Who will cut my hair?
And I knew, when I first read the article in 1981, July 3rd, the day before Independence day, about the poor forty-three who had been diagnosed with a mysterious “gay cancer,” that I had the disease in me, that I had carried it since I was a child, lying dormant, and that every woman and every man that I had slept with was going to die, just as I was going to die.
I not only had the plague, ran my thinking, I was the plague. I had pawned my moral compass for a pair of shoes and a gold Rolex, and the devil had me by the balls, brass though they may be.
But I didn’t die. My lovers didn’t die. I, in fact, thrived.
My years of apprenticeship were over, and as people died all around me, as we crossed the street when we passed St. Vincent’s Hospital, the money just started to pour in. Like a septic system that gets stopped up, the shit was everywhere, covering everything with green. Nobody ever mentions it, but there is no color more beautiful.
It was the year the match struck, and the flame burned brighter and hotter than it ever had before or ever would again. The Firm was inventing, every day, new instruments, as they called them, for duping and doping the rich, betting against their own bets, knowing that the house never loses. To be a client of The Firm, to allow them to move your money from square to square on the invisible chess board with lightning speed, with the speed of a con artist hiding a pea under a thimble, you had to have $20 million in your account at all times. That’s a lot of toys to play with. And nobody played harder than me. I could guarantee investors 10 or 12 percent on their capital, knowing that The Firm could make at least twice that, just from keeping the money moving at lightning speed, and that a frightening chunk of that change would find its way into my pocket by the end of the year, on the day the bonuses were handed out. A yard, two yards. A fucking touchdown.
This is the way we live now. It is how our lives tick. Once there was freedom of desire, a sweetness in the skin. These are gone. Gone also is the invitation to the dance; the music has stopped. Gone also is the blue sky, the crystal water. Gone is Harbour Island, and Pink Sands, where the serving woman asked, in your cottage in the palm grove, what you would like for breakfast as she left for the night with a wave. Gone is Max’s Kansas City, and sitting in the back room with Anna and Sharon, gin and tonics and cocaine and tarot. Things diffuse, some nights we just can’t hold
on anymore, grip any harder, fight any more savagely.
Every minor cut is watched to see if it will heal. Every cough is a death rattle.
Gone is the beauty and insatiability of fucking a stranger. Nights with women. Nights with men. The heartbeat of a decade dead in your chest. Now every touch, each kiss, is fused with a disaster that whispers in your ear and pulls you out of the sea of flesh. It is the death of pleasure, and there is not one person who is not infected.
Suddenly, everybody is carrying condoms, something you haven’t done since high school, and sex is only the prelude to the dread you know you are going to feel.
You should call your doctor, schedule a test. You do nothing. In these early days, the test takes a week for the results to come back, a week during which there is no other thought in your brain except the virus floating in your blood on a slide under a microscope.
First your hair cutter dies, Benjamin Moss, a scrappy little English guy, and that’s a bummer, because he cut your hair just right, and also because, in New York, changing your hairdresser is harder than changing your religion. And then everybody else dies. They die and then they stay dead.
Gone is your heart, the hopes of your youth. You tell yourself you are not a homosexual. This is not happening to you. And then Shirts, your favorite bartender, husband to three, father to seven, dies after having pneumonia eight times in six months, and you go to your first memorial in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, with bagpipers playing “Amazing Grace,” all of it paid for by his friends, ten thousand dollars is the rumor, as seven tough Irish American children sob uncontrollably at the loss of their father, and you think well, maybe. Maybe that one time. Maybe that other time. Who can remember all the times?
Outside, on the steps of the church, Steven says, “Who knew Shirts was a queer?” and you wonder whether any of the seven children he fathered carries the disease.
The papers say the virus can live in a teardrop. A sneeze, and you know you should be tested but you don’t go. You have wept, and sneezed, and exchanged bodily fluids with perfect strangers, men and women, and there is a cold spike in your heart that you do not pull out.
Suddenly, love is fatal. How are we to live? You work out harder at the gym. You avoid crowds. Something is broken in you and it will never be made whole again. You have the rest of your life to live, years and years, and they stretch out in front of you, barren.
Then my friend Adrienne gets it, one night with the wrong man she swears, and she dies over and over, only to be dragged back to the living every time. She is spared the blisters and blossoms of Kaposi’s sarcoma, but here she is, twenty-five and she is both dying and a hypochondriac, and our blithe friendship is strained.
It’s two in the morning. The phone by the bed in the Hovel rings.
“My veins are too blue.”
“Adrienne, it’s two o’clock in the morning. I’m sure you’re fine.”
“I’ve been watching them for two hours and they just keep getting bigger and bluer. Can you come over? I’m scared.” This from a spoiled, aggressive girl who isn’t afraid to make the same hairdresser “fix” her hair color four and five times in a week.
“You’ve been looking at your veins for how long?”
“Two hours.”
“Where are you, exactly, in your apartment?”
“The bathroom.”
“What kind of light is in the bathroom?”
“I don’t know. Fluorescent. I guess.”
“Do me a favor. Walk into your sitting room and look at them under a normal light.”
A pause while Adrienne scoops up the tiny dog that never leaves her side and moves to her other phone in the sitting room. The click of a lamp and then, “Oh. Oh. They look fine.”
“It was the light, Adrienne. The fluorescent light. Now go to sleep.”
“Thank you for being there.”
“Good night. Angels on your pillow.”
And then Adrienne is in the intensive care unit at St. Vincent’s, tiny, no bigger than a pencil, and I am alone and Carmela is irrevocably gone, and I don’t know what to do. Not about anything.
I look at my own veins. They’re blue. They carry the blood to my heart. I have no heart. Not anymore. I have no job and no future. I am thirty-six years old and I have a $300,000 car and a wardrobe that would fill a museum and I haven’t the faintest idea of what to do, become, be, love.
The days are racing by, and with every day, more money gone. In New York, if you’re not working, you’re spending. I imagine the moment there is nothing. Terror. I get drunk in the morning and stay drunk, driving my car through the jammed streets of a hostile city, miraculously unscathed. There is a certain excitement at the thought of the vast nothingness the future holds.
I have dinner with friends, paying for everybody over their weak protests. I want disaster. I want death, a finiteness to this agony.
And, every day, more die, die hideous deaths, more often than not alone. It started with a look, a tightness of the skin across the cheekbones, and suddenly the virus was visible, and then we all had the look, and there was no touch that was not suspect, no gesture that did not cause suspicion.
Kurt Cobain sang, “Everybody’s gay,” In Utero, 1993, but by that time it was too late, and we could only hear, “Everybody’s dying.”
Nobody remembers it now. An entire generation of men walking in a wasteland. The young men now, they are so smug, so self-satisfied. Their skin will never be covered with running sores. They have unsafe sex, playing the odds, knowing that the result, even if they get the virus, is no more than a chronic condition, like diabetes.
Adrienne lay in her bed at St. Vincent’s, hooked up to an array of tubes, and I sent her a flat of tulips to cheer her up. She didn’t like the color. She ripped out her IV tube, screaming. She sent them back. Demanded new ones, and of course she got them.
These are not my people, I told myself again and again, memory selecting what to keep and what to discard.
But, in the dark, in the dead of night in my narrow bed in the apartment I said I would never live in again, I hear their voices. I hear them talk to me. They say: they die, and then they stay dead.
Wish me luck, the same to you.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Table Hopping
It started very badly and it went on for a very long time. The end was kind of fun, in a career-wrecker kind of way, but traveling the distance from two hostile men sitting at a conference table over espresso to the throwing up in the street part just took fucking forever.
First of all, my Hermès scarf tie was just all wrong. Dick
Morris, my client, had made his fortune by owning the most Laundromats of anybody in the world, he lived in Beanstalk, Idaho, or somewhere, and was a wildly alcoholic man of simple tastes. The scarf tie was a show of ostentation that was bound to raise his hackles, even if he didn’t exactly know its provenance. It just looked too expensive, and, in Dick’s eyes, had been bought with his money, a useless, foppish waste by a city slicker, the man who was supposed to be making his money grow to even more gargantuan size. Then there was the Brioni suit I wore, the shoes polished to a lacquered gloss, wrong, all of it, all wrong. Dick Morris,
with his shapeless hopsack suit and his Florsheim shoes, found my attire inappropriate for a heart-to-heart chat, even if he had flown to New York on his own jet, landing at Teterboro in a fog, both meteorological and alcoholic.
We sat in a conference room high up into that fog, and went through his handsomely extended portfolio line by line. At about line 200, Dick Morris put down his retractable pencil and said, “Scotch.” A glass of eighteen-year-old on a silver tray was put in front of him by a white-coated waiter. “Fuck the ice and leave the bottle” was all he said. It was ten thirty in the morning.
I was dying for a drink, even though I was still a tad tipsy from the night before, which had ended about five. I could feel the sweat pool at my sacroiliac, my carefully fitted shirt wilting, even in the chill of the conf
erence room. Dick Morris was a strong, rich man, affable enough, fun, even, at times. His theory was: How can you stay drunk all day unless you start drinking in the morning?
The conference lasted seven hours, during which he consumed the entire bottle of Scotch. We got to the end and began a discussion of the tax implications of the buying and selling and rearranging we had been doing for the past lifetime, me sober as a Wheatie, Dick drunker and more irascible by the hour. I tried to explain them, but he cut me short.
He spoke with the overly accurate diction of a man who has been drinking for seven hours. “Taxation is robbery. How much are they going to rob me of this year?”
“It’s the price we pay for living in a free society,” I said.
“I will go to my grave without ever giving a penny to those goddamned people in Washington. I don’t believe in government. Blood-sucking bastards, every one of them. I haven’t voted in twenty years. Are you a child? Make it go away, or I’m taking my marbles across the street. I give you a gift, a fucking bull’s-eye, and you expect me to pay taxes? Taxes? Taxes are for fools.”
He drained his glass for maybe the three-dozenth time.
“So where are we eating? I hate the food in New York. I hate New York.”
I suggested several places. Places it was impossible to get into, unless you knew the number that was the real number, not the one in the phone book, the line that never got answered.
“We’re going, son, to the Russian Tea Room. Now that’s a restaurant.”
It was five o’clock. My stomach churned at the thought of food, but brightened at the sound of a single word—
cocktails. Dick Morris was one of those clients you didn’t have to worry about getting drunk around; he would do nothing more than welcome the company. He drank with a thirst that was gargantuan.