Gossip (11 page)

“I am disgusted that the Education Committee can propose we sit and reason with that bastard. About getting safe-sex instruction into their hospitals? He’s not going to meet with us. Even if he did, he’s not going to listen. And if he did listen, it’d mean kissing the devil’s anus.”

“If, if, if,” muttered Nick.

I couldn’t understand why he’d been so insistent on my coming tonight, unless he wanted me to see firsthand what made him so frustrated and ill-tempered. Concentrating on committee work, even Nick often skipped general meetings. Peter had never attended. “I don’t do politics but I will do food,” he’d said, and he’d worked briefly in the God’s Love kitchen when his health was good.

The facilitator in Weimar granny glasses called for a vote. Should the Education Committee approach the cardinal’s office? When a show of hands showed no clear majority, the proposal was returned to committee for further discussion.

“Next, Daniel Carp has asked to speak about the midterm elections in November. Okay, Dan. You have five minutes.”

Carp, a pudgy fellow with shaggy hair, spoke loudly and to the point: The Democrats didn’t give AIDS squat but they took our votes for granted. It was time we broke their complacency by threatening to boycott the election. Without the gay vote, the Democrats would lose their shirts.

That snapped the audience to life. A dozen hands flew up when the floor opened to discussion. An older man accused Carp of proposing political suicide. A young woman supported suicide, declaring that only when the Republicans got what they wanted would people wake up and go socialist.

“I don’t believe this shit!”

Nick’s voice tore into my ear as he jumped to his feet.

“I’ve been sitting here listening! And it’s nothing but—yack yack yack yack yack!” he shouted.

“Someone still has the floor, Nick. If you’ll sit down and raise your hand—”

“Fuck the floor!” Nick strode up the aisle. “I don’t believe you people. You fuss over the same nothing solutions you fussed with a year ago. And you know what I say?” He faced the room. “Just do it!”

“Do what?” someone called out.

“Anything!
If we to have to kiss ass, let’s kiss ass. If we have to kick it, let’s kick it. Why not meet with Cardinal Turd? You won’t get the time of day from him, but it’s something. And go ahead, threaten the Democrats with a boycott. Maybe you’ll find a candidate dumb enough to think we control some votes. But I have to say that idea is one more piece of passive-aggressive horseshit! All our actions are inactions! Our biggest threat is to do nothing!”

He stood up there, a mustached Victorian boxer in a turtleneck, raking the crowd with glinting eyes. He loudly snorted his nose clear of tears. He was crying.

“No,
I’m not rational tonight. I can’t afford to be rational anymore. You people would rather be right than effective. You’d rather do nothing than the wrong thing. But I have a lover, Peter. Who has been my life for fifteen years. Many of you’ve met him. Some of you know him. Unless something radically changes, he’s going to be dead in a year or so. All right. Some of you are as sick and even sicker. To be blunt, I don’t care about you. Not in the way I care about him. But caring makes me crazy enough to try
anything.”

He spoke more wildly than I’d ever heard him before, without detachment. He couldn’t discuss death with Peter but talked about it now with a hundred acquaintances and strangers. His fury, like a public nervous breakdown, shamed me for fretting over my own petty matters.

“All right then. Let’s be pure. Political suicide? That’ll show them. Let’s let the Republicans win. Let them get what they want. The cities gone to hell and health care down the toilet. Hey, why don’t we go all the way and work for the Republicans? Only that would mean getting our hands dirty, wouldn’t it? But this way, when it’s all in ruins, we can feel good about ourselves. Because we will’ve been pure. But Peter’ll be dead. And we will have let him die. Do you think I want to sacrifice my lover so that you assholes can feel moral?”

“So what do
you
think we should do?” somebody shouted.

“I don’t know!” He glared at the man. “I don’t know,” he repeated. “We need a stick of dynamite up the country’s ass. But you’re not the people to do it! I’ve been wasting my time with you. And I say fuck you!”

He stormed up the aisle. He didn’t look at me as he snatched his coat off his chair and headed for the door.

I jumped up and followed, coming into the lobby as he charged through the front door. When I got out to the frigid street, I expected to find him halfway down the block. But no, he stood at the curb, bent over, hands on his hips like a man who’d run a hundred-yard dash.

“Nick? You okay?” I timidly touched him.

“Yeah. Oh yeah.” He was catching his plumed breath.

“What set you off in there? I’ve never seen you like that.” Only then did it hit me. “Did Peter get bad news today?”

“No. Peter’s the same. The same fucking same.” He faced me, the damp streaks on his cheeks already freezing white. “So did I make my point? Do you think I got through?”

“Through to—?”

“Go back in. Listen and tell me what they’re saying.”

“Sure,” I said. “If that’s what you want.”

“I’ll wait for you out of the wind.”

I crept back inside and stood at the entrance to the assembly room while the truth finished sinking in: Nick’s breakdown had been deliberate, a rhetorical stunt similar to what Larry Kramer used to pull, but more raw, less transparent, less expected.

“Order! Quiet! Shush!” cried the facilitator in granny glasses. “The man is upset and we understand why. If anyone wants to respond, we’ll discuss it under new business. But we have not yet finished with Dan Carp’s proposal….”

I listened for five minutes, as disgusted by their retreat into procedure as Nick was, but without losing my unease over Nick’s use of Peter.

I went back out to the street and found him huddled in a doorway. “You did nothing,” I told him. “They’ve gone back to discussing the boycott.”

“Shit! Won’t anything knock those people off their butts?” He kicked the building.

“What did you hope to get?”

“Something. Shake the fuckers up. They just go round and round, like they had all the time in the world.”

“But that’s why you wanted me here tonight? So you could have a friendly observer for your performance?”

He glared at me. “That wasn’t an act. You think I was faking emotion in there?”

“No. I assume it was real. I just can’t get over that you could use Peter to make your point.”

He bared his teeth at me in a scornful grin. “You think I was playing the sick-boyfriend card? That I don’t really care about Peter?” he sneered. “I care about him so much I’ll use anything, even soppy talk of love for him.”

I didn’t know how to answer. He already had words for what I’d been thinking. He was right, but I didn’t feel I was completely wrong.

He looked at the front door. “Shit. Can’t go back in now without looking like a drama queen. Might as well go home. You going or staying?”

“I’ll walk with you.”

I had no business being surprised by Nick’s calculation or lack of guilt. His freedom from doubt had once been enormously attractive. A hairy man with a hairy ass, he did not split hairs.

He didn’t attempt to justify himself as we walked down Seventh Avenue, but jumped ahead to the real issues. “Tragedy has become cozy,” he declared. “Everyone accepts it. What’s maddening is that I don’t know what to do either. We need something new to shock people awake.”

“Literal sticks of dynamite?”

He thought I was serious. “No. Terrorism would make it look like
we
were the problem. But something to get AIDS back on the front page and force people to feel it again. Not another celebrity victim. They’ve seen that. But a desperate act. Like the Buddhist monks who torched themselves in Vietnam. Only that’s just victim writ large.”

“So you’re not planning to show up outside the White House with a can of gasoline?”

“Not me. But if the right person stepped forward, someone who was good copy, I’d call the networks and be there with the matches.” He gave me a disdainful, damning look. “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no TV camera present, does it make a sound? Don’t waste your ends-don’t-justify-the-means tone on me, Ralph. There’s more to life than old books and new love affairs.”

“I’m not judging,” I claimed. “Just sharing doubts. I don’t know anything anymore. And it’s been ages since my last affair.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said uncomfortably. Had Peter told him?

“That guy last month?” Nick shook his head—I kept forgetting he’d met Bill. “Washington twinkie. Cute in their twenties, pudgy in their thirties, fat old men by the time they’re forty.”

“He was only a trick. Someone I met in a bar that night.”

“Too bad. I figured it was romance distracting you lately. Which is at least a pleasant way of doing nothing.”

I relaxed. He didn’t know and didn’t care. “I remember when you weren’t above an occasional affair yourself.”

“It was fun to let off steam. When we had steam to spare. I never let it distract me from the work at hand.”

“No, you didn’t.”

We stood by the canopy and ice-candied shrubs outside their apartment building, an oversized redbrick tower off Seventh Avenue. Nick looked at me, remembering something, although not necessarily what I remembered. “Good night, Ralph.”

“Give my love to Peter.” We parted without embrace or handshake. Nick was not a touchy-huggy guy in clothes.

His faults did not make Bill look virtuous, but they changed the equation, made my affair less criminal. Walking home in the cold, I tried to sort out my sympathy and unease, respect and disapproval, collating the Nick I knew now with the capable, intimidating figure whom I’d courted three and a half years ago.

I’d noticed Nick Rosi at the first meetings I attended. An intense, self-possessed man of few words, his remarks carried more weight than the showboating of others. Even his silence had authority. He was handsome, but what attracted me was his cool air of knowing something the rest of us didn’t.

Nick didn’t notice me until the mammoth protest at City Hall that April. Two thousand chanting people circled the muddy green park while hundreds of cops stood by and troops of mounted police guarded the approaches to Brooklyn Bridge; a helicopter played a prolonged organ chord overhead. A friend and I had taken civil-disobedience training with Nick’s squad, but Jonathan could not get off work that day. Alone in the crowd, I felt like an outsider, too old to be one of the led, too shy and tongue-tied to ever lead. I wanted to get inside the thing. I hung close to Nick, vaguely hoping for a chance to help him.

He blew his whistle. We ducked under the barricade and into the street. We sat chanting while police and television crews gathered along the curb, Nick stepping over us in his gray Wall Street suit, our cheerleader and scoutmaster. As the beeping paddy wagons backed around us and the police prepared to charge, he was still standing. “I’ve saved you a place,” I called up to him. He saw me, looked around, saw nobody else to sit with and squeezed in with me. He called out a final command. We all went flat on the cold asphalt, the budding trees leaping against the sky at a startling new angle, and Nick Rosi lay beside me. “We got to stop meeting like this,” I said. He turned his face into mine—as if we were already in bed. Mistaking my excitement for fear, he grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze. I startled us both by lifting his hand and kissing the black-bristled knuckles.

All at once, the cops rushed the carpet of bodies. There was a chorus of disco whistles and a string of cries like the delighted shrieks at a horror movie—we called our government fascist yet trusted our police. I had no difficulty in playing cool for Nick’s eyes. When they hoisted me off the pavement, it was like being lifted by a gentle blue surf of history.

We were rushed into separate paddy wagons and different jails and I didn’t see Nick again until the next meeting. He sought
me
out to ask how I’d been treated. He’d learned my name. I flirtatiously asked if he’d been strip-searched. He asked where I lived. I seemed like a bright guy and could we talk at my place? “I’d like that,” I replied, although I’d heard he was attached.

The affair lasted two months. Meetings were an aphrodisiac for Nick, and I lived within a five-minute walk of Cooper Union. He went home with me almost every Monday night, sharing his analysis of who said what as we climbed the stairs, listening to my comments while we undressed, resuming discussion when he knelt in my bathtub and sponged off at the spigot—a wet head after a shower would announce too brazenly why he was late. He and his lover had an understanding, he said, which included the agreement to be discreet. Peter later confirmed this. When Nick began to include occasional complaints about Peter in our talks, I wondered if he was signaling something more serious for us. But no, Nick assumed he and Peter were for life, even before Peter got sick. He could criticize his other half without ever feeling that he injured their shared reality.

Three and a half years ago, I was a younger, more hopeful, careless person. I got inside the thing, only to find that there was no inside. The excitement of making politics erotic and sex political now seemed as foreign as my love of theory in college. My sexiest memory was from our first night, when a cool, capable authority figure suddenly lay before me in nothing but a frayed body stocking of curly black hair, giddily grinning as I plucked his green plaid boxer shorts off his feet. Then he swallowed his grin, shook his head and said, “God but you’re sweet. Maybe too damn sweet for this world.”

A few months after the affair ended and Nick had introduced me to Peter, I was on a chartered bus coming back from an action at Burroughs Wellcome when I overheard two expensive haircuts badmouthing Nick Rosi for being such a control freak, especially in the sack. I was not jealous, only indignant for Nick’s sake, and alarmed that we sansculottes could judge our leaders by how they performed sans pants.