Early Graves (14 page)

The worst thing about being gay is it is risky to try to find somebody to love. Straights have it easy. Any idiot can tell the difference between a man and a woman. You don’t have to go circling around some stranger you find attractive, trying to guess if they’re gay, scared you’ll give yourself away to someone who’ll spit on you if you’re wrong about them, or will tell everybody you’re queer. No wonder gays give up after a while. They settle for sex where it’s easy to find. Nobody in the streets, parks, baths, bars has the patience or the courage after a while to risk getting beaten up. They go where they know everybody else is like them. I have to go out now, while the rain has stopped, and cadge quarters for the bus. I had diarrhea for three days, and I couldn’t go use my knife. It seems better today. The trick is to drink lots of sugar water with a little salt in it.

Feb. 10—I passed out on the Walk and ended up on County General, very sick, out of my head. I was too weak to leave the hospital for ten whole days, and then I walked out when their backs were turned. I was worried sick somebody would find my stuff here and steal it, or move in themself. But they didn’t. I don’t need medication yet. Now I have to catch the bus. I kept my quarters. I could take their money after I kill them, but its bad enough stealing from the supermarket. I am not a thief. I am killing them to make a statement. I want that clear.

Eddie looked so different I hardly knew him when I ran into him in that alley back of the stores on Santa Monica near Croft. He is living with a rich movie director high up in the Monte Verde, and he had great clothes, a nifty haircut, a very expensive watch. He couldn’t stop bragging, and I had to interrupt to ask him what time it was, and I was going to miss the last bus to Venice if I stood there any longer, so I stopped his bragging with my knife. He claimed he wasn’t sick, but I felt under his armpits, and he had swellings there. Sores in his mouth too. So it could have been him. I need a watch. I used to own one that cost just as much as his, but I didn’t take it. I couldn’t wear it. Some policeman might see me looking at it.

Walking to the bus stop, I passed Louie Catlett. We looked at each other, like you do, but it was too bright there from the shop signs for me to kill him. Anyway, I had to rush to catch the bus. That was too bad in another way, because there were darling puppies playing in a pet-shop window, and I felt happy looking at them. It’s how you get when you know you’re going to die soon. You like to look at anything young, like puppies, kittens, babies. Old people get that way—I’ve noticed that. It’s the same with them. They know they’re dying too. You get old fast with AIDS. It collapses time, a whole life into a few months.

I feel awful. I can’t put off getting medication any longer. But I keep having to go farther and farther away to get it now. Because I won’t steal money and I can’t beg enough. I used to try going to agencies for money, but when you finally get to see somebody, they get all worked up about how you’re living and try to put you someplace where you’ll get care, and I don’t want that because I have my list to take care of, don’t I. So I stopped going to agencies. I found a black preacher who gives me cash when he has it, but it’s hard for him to get it too. He’s really there to help blacks with AIDS, all right? Because the big AIDS projects think minorities should look after their own. So
…
when I get prescriptions from clinics and hospitals, here is what I do because I don’t have any other choice.

I wait and watch the pharmacist make up the prescription through the glass they have, you know, and then I yell there’s somebody shoplifting at the front of the store, and they hurry to stop it, and I dodge the counter and grab the pills and run. But of course it means I can never go back. I usually try to get the prescription slip too. They lay it next to the typewriter when they type up the label, and afterwards they file it, but if I can snatch it when I snatch the medication, then I can use it again, and not have to risk getting hospitalized to get a new one. So yesterday I went over into LA to a drugstore I was never in before.

The reason to get the medication was how awful I felt. I almost let it go too long. I couldn’t hardly drag myself out of here. I tried in the morning and kept falling down. It was after three in the afternoon when I finally managed. Raining again by then. I worked my trick on the druggist in Jahrl’s across from Chandler Park. As soon as I was in the park I took a pill and laid down on a bench under a tree that kept most of the rain off. It was dark by the time I was able to sit up. The lights came on along the paths. And in maybe half an hour, I headed for my bus stop. And here was Billy Bumbry, looking terrible, black skin stretched over a skeleton. He said he was just out of the hospital, and feeling better, alive again. I led him into the same bushes we had sex in last July, and now he isn’t feeling alive anymore, but I am.

Trucks go through Creon, but not much else happens. The movie house tried showing porno stuff, but the churches closed it down, and so that ended even movies there. The porn brought in crowds. The owner could afford to show Disney movies on weekends that way. Everybody in this country wants porn. I read it’s an eight-billion-dollar business. But when a pollster calls up an American and says are you in favor of porn, the American says no, he hates it. He says he hates gays too and the stuff they do with each other, but it’s just envy and fear the neighbors will think he isn’t like them
—
which is not how he thinks they are.

I am trying to write about the trucks and what they meant. It is hard for me to keep my thinking straight. I guess my mind is going. I could write the best essays in my high school English classes in Creon. But I keep going off the subject here. The highway is the only exciting thing about Creon, and that is because whiffs of the world blow through on the roaring exhaust of the eighteen-wheelers. I used to lie awake at night listening to them changing gears out on the highway. Was I the only child in Creon that heard the trucks passing in the night and dreamed of going where they go? I doubt it. But I went in a truck, which is not how the rest went, if they ever did. I just had to put out my teenage thumb by the highway. The driver of the rig that helped me climb up beside him liked the bulge in my pants. That was why he stopped. I wish he’d been going east instead of west. If I’d gone to New York, I might have become a famous pianist. You can’t do that in LA.

It’s easy to collect thrown-away newspaper along the Walk, and I read about the stabbings each morning after they happen. An old queen in a hotdog stand on the pier at Santa Monica gave me hot coffee this morning, and a donut. I don’t know where he came from, but if he keeps giving food away he won’t last long. He gave me two dollars out of the cash register too. “You look so sick,” he said. “God, I was lucky to get all that sex stuff behind me before AIDS came along.” He leaned across the counter and whispered to me, bad teeth, bad breath, red nose, “Do you know, I never even had clap? I mean, I had sex everyplace, darling, anyplace, with anybody, and I never even got clap. Your generation
—
they really ran out of luck.” If I find him out at night, I’ll kill him too. Under the pier.

All right, now, get yourself together. What you are trying to write here is that Blackie Rose’s body was never found. They don’t know he’s dead. They found Frank Prohaska. He was so neat, like a store-window dummy, not a hair out of place. But his ears stuck out. That was what was cute about him. They found Art Lopez. He was blind. I could tell. “Who’s that?” he said. “Lynn Church,” I said, so he would know. “This is for what you did to me.” They found him and Sean and Frank and Billy and Eddie. They never found Blackie. Maybe I should write and tell them where he is up there off Mulholland. I had to lie down beside him afterwards to rest. It was the first time I ever laid outdoors in the dark with a dead man.

So when the papers say I have killed five, they are wrong. I have killed six. Then today the paper says a man named Dodge was stabbed and it was my work. He was young like the rest, and he had AIDS. At first I thought I was losing my memory. They told me in the hospital my brain is shrinking. That happens with AIDS. So I got out my list, but didn’t find any Drew Dodge on it. I didn’t think so. Anyway, last night it was raining, and I didn’t go out. The next time it doesn’t rain, I will go to the Tiberius Baths. I am coughing too much. Sometimes I cough so hard, I pass out. I can’t risk the rain.

I need a fat suit to disguise myself, don’t I? I am so thin now, anybody can tell I’m dying. The old auntie at the hotdog stand knew right off. I mean, if you’re male and young, then what’s killing you these days is AIDS, isn’t it? They may not let me in at Tiberius. But so much happened to me there, so many. There’s the bars, too. The Beejay, the. I was not born to die this way. I was given a perfect body by God. I was never once sick a day in my whole life. Look what they have done to me. I will find one of them when I go to the Tiberius Baths. I don’t know who it will be. He doesn’t know, either. We will both get a surprise, won’t we?

I
N LEPPARD’S OFFICE, WITH
its metal desk and file cabinets, the rattle of rain on the vertical metal slats outside the windows made a gentle background for Leppard’s ungentle speech. “He’ll never accept it, and you know that. Sure, we can cut out the part about how Church didn’t kill Dodge. Hell, we can suppress the whole damn thing.” He lifted and let fall back to the desk Leonard Lynn Church’s pitiful try at writing out his life story in ballpoint ink on twenty-one pages of blue-lined school notebook paper. “The press and TV will call us dirty names, but it won’t last forever.”

“What will last forever,” Dave said, “is police officers guarding me around the clock, following me wherever I go. I appreciate the thought, but—”

“The kid is going to keep trying to kill you,” Leppard said. “He won’t believe for a minute we’ve settle on Church as the one who stabbed Dodge and attacked you. We released his description, Dave. Remember?”

“I missed that. In the hospital. It was a mistake.”

“We wanted the public’s help,” Leppard said. “We had every reason to think he was the one.”

“Then you shouldn’t have let Church’s picture out.”

“You saw that street,” Leppard said. “Every reporter in town, including your friend Harris. Cameras had Church on film the minute he came out that window. The alley was all lit up. Telephoto lenses. What the hell could I do? They had a clear sight line from the top of their trucks.”

“Right.” Dave nodded. “Sorry.” He sighed, rose, went for his trenchcoat by the office door. “Why don’t we leave it this way—if he doesn’t take a crack at me in the next few days, you call your people off.”

Leppard got to his feet back of the desk, stretched, yawned. “I’ve got a better idea. Take a vacation. You ever been to the Virgin Islands? Beautiful. And cheap this time of year.”

“No doubt.” Dave had shed the sling. If he was careful not to reach too far or too high, his shoulder gave him almost no pain. Flapping into the trenchcoat involved some discomfort, but he only winced a little. He put on the Irish hat, damp on the outside, dry within, the woolfat still in the yarn. He took hold of the doorknob. “But I want to be here when you catch baby,” he said. He frowned again at the pages on the desk. “It doesn’t explain much, really, does it? The thought must have gone through the heads of hundreds of youngsters dying of AIDS like Church that the men they’d had sex with were to blame. But only he went around stabbing them to death.”

“Yeah, well,” Leppard said with a sour smile, “it doesn’t give the reason he left Creon, North Dakota, very suddenly one hot September night in 1976, either, does it?”

“He didn’t like working in the café.” Dave said.

“He didn’t like it so much,” Leppard said, “that after closing time that night, he picked up a butcher knife in the kitchen and stabbed his father in the chest, and left him for dead on the greasy linoleum.”

“He didn’t die,” Dave said. “You told me you talked to him long distance, that he’s coming to pick up the body and take it back to Dakota for burial.”

“He didn’t die,” Leppard said. “Little Leonard had things to learn about stabbing people in those days. He got better at it later, right?”

“It was his way of solving problems,” Dave said.

“You think about going down there to the Caribbean,” Leppard said. “White beaches, clear blue ocean, warm tropic sun. And best of all, the kid can’t follow you there. Jet travel is expensive. And he wears rags—didn’t you say he wears rags?”

“He had money for a gun,” Dave said, and left.

The car that followed him up Laurel Canyon was a black-and-white. It parked half in the ditch, water running fast and hub deep around its tires. The idea was to spook the kid, not catch him. Tonight they’d assign an unmarked car again and hope he’d appear with murder on his mind. Dave tapped the Jaguar’s horn and lifted a hand to the uniforms inside the car, as he swung into his bricked and puddled yard. The young officer behind the wheel of the black-and-white gave him a poker-faced nod. Dave parked the Jaguar, left the key in the ignition, got out, made a conspicuous gesture of looking at his watch, then walked out to the patrol car. The driver rolled the window down.

“My mechanic will be coming to pick up my car,” Dave told him. “Any time now. Don’t worry about it.”

“Thanks for telling us,” the youngster said.

“Thanks for being here,” Dave said.

Inside the rear building, which smelled, as it always did in wet weather, of the horses that had been stabled in it long ago, he didn’t take off hat or trenchcoat. He sat at the desk and pushed buttons on the telephone. The number was Kevin Nakamura’s at his service station down the canyon. It took a minute to get past the woman who answered. It took less to tell Nakamura what he wanted.

He moved to the bar under the overhang of the new sleeping loft, found a squat bottle, sloshed brandy into a snifter. He lit a cigarette. Brandy was less than it could be without smoke to go with it. He leaned on the bar, listened to the rain patter on the shingles high overhead, and savored the brandy and smoke. He took his time. But when he heard Nakamura’s wrecker arrive and depart out front, the door of the Jaguar slam, its engine rumble to life, he snuffed his cigarette, finished the brandy, walked briskly down the room and outside, shutting the door behind him.