Rat Bohemia (9 page)

I'm sick of talking to gay men and lesbians about AIDS. I don't want to share one more word. When I talk to a straight person there is my pain and then they can be the sympathetic observer. But with other gay people it just brings out everything they're living with too. Then both of us descend into a frenzy of pain and don't have any way out. It is like two magnificent lions with nothing to talk about but their cage. I'd rather describe it to some straight person who's never been there and really wants to know all the details.

Don's deathbed scene was too huge to be cinematic. If there was a new art form combining nature, opera, and war, that might be sufficient. I'd been sitting by the bed for days and decided, that morning, to go out for a walk. I don't know why. But I put on my overcoat and stepped outside the hospital. New York University Medical Center. Dying young men and Orthodox Jews. Only the best. Co-op care at NYU was like staying at the Marriott. When the
rebbetizins
had chemo you couldn't tell the difference. What hair?

I went outside and thought about buying a pack of cigarettes. I don't smoke, but it was in defiance of all those homosexual pulmonary lesions and Jews on iron lungs. On the way back from the store I passed this old drag queen, trying to find enough change to get on the bus. Her look was Fourteenth Street Puerto Rican bleached-blond toothless junkie. You know those queens all work their chosen looks to perfection. She could hardly count her change. Then, as soon as the bus pulled away, I saw another out-of-place queen. She looked like she was coming back from the night before, lost her wig and just had too much white face makeup from the forehead
down. She was hiding her head behind an umbrella even though it wasn't raining. My people, in such states of decline.

I came back to the hospital and went, as always, to take a look at Don. He opened his eyes and said, “Call my family.”

Of course now it is old news, that when a PWA says to call his family he is just about to die. At that time I didn't yet know the ropes, but fortunately followed my instincts and called.

“Come now,” I said. “Come right now.”

His sisters only had to fly in from Philadelphia, but they made it about five hours later and came bustling into the hospital room. Now Donny was covered in KS—I mean really covered. And he was toothpick thin. You didn't even want to touch him because you thought for sure he'd break. So what did his sisters say when they came into the hospital room?

“You look good,” they said.

Shocked, they stayed and chatted for about fifteen minutes and then announced that they were going to go over to their uncle's house to drop off their stuff and would come back early the next morning. And then they left. I guess they didn't know that he was dying.

Afterwards I sat with him all night until the morning when the doctor offered Don the morphine drip.

“Do you want the drip, Donny?” I asked quietly. “Or do you want to stay a little longer?”

“I want to stay a little longer,” he said.

Those were his last words.

Of course nowadays there is a new technology. The recent death that I attended was sealed by a little patch that the doctor, unofficially, gave us to place on Ross's chest. After whatever it was
went through his skin and he died, we just removed it and threw it away. No one ever had to know.

About twenty minutes after Don died, I stepped out into the hallway to look for a doctor. I saw this guy Manuel, also looking for a doctor. His friend had just died too. Later that day we decided to go coffin hunting together. He took me to this showroom on the Upper West Side where the coffins were laid out like new cars. Manuel was older and had already done this a few times and he knew the salesman pretty well. I was very impressed at the way Manuel resisted all the guilt-tripping they try to do to you. They tried to sell you coffins that were waterproof, or that had velvet interiors just because they know you feel guilty for being alive. But Manuel made sure I bought the cheapest one.

Later on in the week I called him when I realized that Don's burial would cost almost $15,000.

“It's your responsibility,” he said. “If you ask the family for help you'll never forgive yourself.”

And now I know that he was right. Paying for your lover's funeral is the gay version of a bar mitzvah. It is how you know that you have become a man.

It is really hard to be angry at your parents if they didn't rape you or burn you in boiling oil. Thanks to twelve-step programs, the parental discourse is at such a high pitch that if they didn't sell you into white slavery it would be hard to get a compassionate response out of your friends. That old, boring, middle-class despisal of gaydom is just so common.

“Get over it,” my friends say on the twenty-seventh cocktail.

I was talking to Manuel about this the other night. He's the one I finally called at three a.m. He was up late thinking about Dostoyevski per usual.

“One thing my mother always told me,” Manuel said. “You'll meet people in your life whose beliefs you despise but they'll be really nice. And then there will be people whose beliefs you embrace but they'll be awful.”

“Therefore….?”

“Well, Dostoyevski,” Manuel said. “He believed in God and Mother Russia. So reactionary, yet the characters are marvelous.”

Manuel was a famous poet in Cuba, but since he's been living here is might as well be Atlantis. So, he punishes himself for obscurity by wearing striped shirts and plaid jackets, going to twelve-step programs and giving up on sex.

“I was gay in Cuba but is was strange. I was out, living with my lover, but we were bizarre. I felt too alone.”

“What about other gay people? ”

“They're there. The apartments are so small. You'll have some minister or Communist Party functionary living in the same house
with her son and his lover. It requires a lot of coping. A lot of silence and a lot of eye contact.”

“Manuel, I don't understand why you gave up on sex. Don't you think about dick day and night?”

“Yes,” he said. “But the average American penis is five inches, unfortunately. So.…”

“You mean Cuban dick is bigger?”

“No. Smaller. But so much more succulent.”

Don had a beautiful dick. I think. I can't remember. He was a real hero. I watched him going to teach classes in the morning, his face covered in lesions. He went into the hospital the last time on Valentine's Day and rotted there until Memorial Day. When he was dying his body was covered in those lesions. He asked me to massage his shoulders and I did the first time, but then I said that I couldn't do it anymore. He said, “All right.”

His anus was a big, black cavernous hole. It was monstrous. When he was dying I dreamed I worked as a busboy in a coffee shop. I earned fifty dollars and stood on line with my bill to buy coffee. A man came over and started to take my money. A policeman saw him but didn't do anything about it.

“Why didn't you help me? ” I asked the policeman.

“He might have had a gun,” he said.

When Don first started to get sick we barely knew each other. He asked me to make sure that if it ever got critical I wouldn't let him be reduced to infancy. That I would put him out of his pain. But then the time came and it was too late. I realized too late what was involved. I couldn't take Donny's life. He had to do it. If he didn't want to end up in diapers, then he had to choose death before he was too weak to make that choice. He couldn't leave that up
to me. What did I know about death? I was only twenty-four. Now I know more than there is to know. If I ever started mourning I'd be mourning all my days. The tears would never stop.

One night I got blown at Sperm Bank and was coming home late, kind of staggering after five or six beers. There was Manuel, standing on the street corner buying the next day's
New York Times
. He was illuminated, in his clown suit, under the bare streetlight, and all around him the sidewalk was covered in litter. It was a carpet of junk.

“David,” he said in that booming oak voice, his pudgy face flat against a bad haircut and a large earring badly placed in his soft earlobe.

“Manuel, I was thinking about Donny.”

I didn't even know that I was thinking about Donny. Something had flashed into the back of my mind when I was having sex. Some kind of shape.

“What about him? ”

“Why did he have to die? ”

Manuel folded the
Times
under his arm and shoved his hands into his pockets.

“Have to?”

“But he died for no reason and no one would help me.”

“I know,” Manuel said.

“But Donny, Don, Don, Don…Don…Don…Don, Don, Don.”

“Shut up,” he said. “Stop talking about Don. Every time I see you that's all you have to say. Life is short now. Time has a different meaning. Don has been dead for a millennium. His name should be invoked once a year at a religious ritual and then conveniently
forgotten, for my sake if no one else's.”

“But, Don.”

“Shut up,” he said. “Or never talk to me again.”

“There's Kurt,” I said and we both looked across the street. What a specimen. He wore sparkling white jeans pulled high around the waist and a loose white shirt in which he shone like the goddess of masculine beauty. Like Sir Venus.

“Who's that?” Manuel asked, getting sidetracked by a twenty-four-hour newsstand with a better selection than the one we'd left behind.

“If that man would fuck me I would live,” I said.

“Look,” Manuel said gleefully. “They have all the new gay magazines here. They have
Fags and Fag Hags
. They have
CQ
.”

“What's that stand for? ”

“Control Queens.”

“Don't you ever read pornography?” I asked, exasperated.

“Of course,” Manuel said. “I read it day and night.”

I still go to ACT UP every week. I never do anything. I rarely go to demonstrations and I have never belonged to a committee. I used to sleep with this guy from Needle Exchange, but when he found out I was positive he wouldn't even talk to me. Now he's got a big shot PWA boyfriend from Treatment and Data Committee and wears him on his arm like a sign of liberal pride. But when our eyes meet he looks away.

Basically I go to ACT UP for the floor show. I bring my walk-man and a couple of magazines for the boring parts, but when it is really cooking I love the drama. It is the true story of
One Life to Live
. One of the regular elements of the ACT UP saga is that there is always some wildly talented, articulate, dying one who is everyone's emotional and spiritual leader for a few months until he actually does die. Then a new one emerges from the ashes. For example, my hero one year was Bob Rafsky. He was a former closeted advertising executive who said the most amazing things at just the right occasions. I loved him because his passion was so out front.

Here is an example of Bob's legendary greatness. When Charlie died in July after thirty hospitalizations in two years, the family organized the memorial service. It was one of those situations where the family was really okay and really loved him, so everyone kind of stepped back and let them deal with it and then, of course, they fucked up on the whole thing. The family were some kind of upper-class Unitarians and they constructed a starched white-collar funeral complete with excerpts from Benjamin Britten and readings of poems with the word “Byzantium” in them. They even
produced the requisite nerdy ex-boyfriend who stood up there earnestly and made matters worse by singing a Joni Mitchell song.

The Charlie that was sexy and a dancer and angry because men shunned him when they knew his diagnosis, was nowhere to be seen in this service. Some dyke stood up and said that in his will he'd donated his computer and printer to the Lesbian Herstory Archives. But that was about as gay as it got. Finally, at the end they invited anyone in the room to get up and speak. This was followed by a barrage of straight girls who had known him from prep school. All just
sooo
emotional over his death, unlike the war-weary ACT UPers seething in the pews.

Each girl came up in her flowered dress and sang some stupid song or broke down into tears about Charlie being gone. All I could think was
Where the hell were you, asshole? I never saw you at any demonstration. I never saw you trying to get the price of Foscarnet reduced as Charlie was going blind
. I felt like those girls were killing me. Just killing me. I looked around and caught Walter's eye. He was crying out of frustration and being overwhelmed, not something so bourgeois as grief. That's reserved for straight people on their fourth or fifth death. Grief doesn't exist for us.

Right then, Rafsky got up. He was covered in Kaposi's from head to toe and had taken to wearing tiny cut-off jean shorts and spaghetti strap T-shirts so that every person he passed on the subway would have to deal with it. As he walked up to the platform, Walter and I smiled at each other like Victoria's messenger finally did come riding.

“The least we can do,” Bob said carefully into the microphone, “is not take false comfort.”

And then he sat down. It was so beautiful. He told them that
they were not even doing the minimum. Then we all retired downstairs for cookies and iced tea.

There's something beautiful about the way Bob showed his pain at ACT UP meetings. He's dead now, but then it just reinforced how we are really a family. That we, the couple of hundred people who are still alive and still willing to come together in that room every Monday night after five years. We are so intimate that we can act out all of our pain in front of each other. We can tell each other the truth.