How Long Has This Been Going On (73 page)

Eddie indicated the kitchen counter, a school of pill bottles.

"It didn't," Eddie concluded.

He had been transformed from a merry Viking into a gloomy wraith, and the conversation did not flow. Like many men no longer fighting the affliction but rather helplessly succumbing to it, Eddie could focus on nothing other than his death, yet refused to talk about it. Blue spoke of Walt, the Kid's play, movies, the Raiders—anything to redeem the misery of this visit. All the while, he kept thinking of the Eddie he had known, of his energy and power and sense of fun. He recalled the time the two of them performed a sixty-nine scene in some video and had gotten so aroused that after the shooting stopped they went down the hall to fuck in private.

Blue hadn't been taking strong notice of the epidemic, for while he knew of many men who had been swallowed up in it, he didn't really know them. They were people in passing, friends of friends, those one bumped into but never sought out. Even Frank, a good friend if not a close one, usually sounded chipper on the phone and could be seen strolling the town with that notorious take-no-prisoners blaze in his eyes. To Blue, plague was something one heard tell of, no more. Now, at last, in Eddie's room, Blue was made to feel sorrow for an impending personal loss, and had to conceive of his own mortality.

"They tell me guys still go out," Eddie said. "Guys who have it. Not as bad as me, because who wouldn't run from them in terror? is my guess. But the new ones. They go out and give it to others. They say, If I have it, you should have it. Or they say, There won't be a cure till everybody has it. But then, why don't they fuck Reagan? They say they can't use condoms because they don't want to offend their new boy friend. Or condoms interfere with the fuckness. Remember when Frank made us wear rubbers on the set, no matter what? Pete Verlaine made a film for that HardPack outfit in San Diego, and he says they won't let you wear one even if you want to. Did you get fucked a lot, Blue?"

Blue shook his head.

"Did you do a lot of blowing, all-the-way style?"

"Not so much."

Eddie nodded. "You're probably okay, then."

Blue went over to Eddie and put his arms around him.

"I won't cry," said Eddie, holding on real tight. "No matter what they do to me. I promised myself I wouldn't break down for them."

Blue wondered who "them" referred to.

Outside, on Mission Street, a million lights greeted Blue: a candlelit AIDS march. Blue was never a one for religious exercises, and that's what this looked like, a great Mass of flickering light weaving through the darkness. Still, Blue stood and watched the long line of men and women as they passed him, and after a while he walked along, not joining the parade but keeping pace with it, watching it. The calm, the people. Such serenity in the face of such humiliation and loss. The patience. It was what Blue's people down home called "prayerful." Blue thought back to his youth, when he would complain to his mother that he had prayed to God and gotten no answer.

"Well, sure, you was answered," Blue's mother relished saying. "God said no."

Blue came home just as the Kid was helping Walt, dressed as a schoolgirl, down the front stairs. The Kid saw Blue and froze, and drunken Walt mumbled something; Blue advanced with a set look on his face, took hold of Walt, and asked the Kid, "How could you do this to him?"

"We're just—"

"I thought you were made a better stuff," Blue added, helping Walt to their room.

"It's a joke!"

"It's a mean thing that you did to hurt him and hurt me. Someday a guy should set you in front of a mirror so you could see how stupid you look in those lady clothes."

"Oh, grow up! We've all got a streak of girl somewhere in us, my he-man Blue!"

Still supporting the fuddled Walt, Blue turned to the Kid and said, "He-men are dyin' all over the place," a remark the Kid was not able to fathom.

Safe in their room, Blue tore the costume off Walt, put him into bed, got some aspirin, and made him down it.

"To save you from a headache tomorrow."

Walt was barely conscious, and he raved a bit about Real Men and what Real Men do. Then he dropped off, and Blue did, too; sometime later, both were awake again, Walt confused and spent and Blue soothing.

"Did you really see me like that?" Walt asked. "What did you think?"

"You were Johnny's puppet, is all. I'm surprised at him."

"It was a fantasy. Like the one I have of fucking you all tied up."

"You wouldn't get much fuckin' done if yer all roped like that, though."

"Not me,
you."

"You want me tied? You really do, slick?"

"Or you would be clinging to a fence and I would whip your bottom."

"This isn't my Walt boy talkin'."

"Yes, I am."

"You want to control me? Like Johnny tried to control you just now?"

"Is that what it was?"

"It's somebody always tryin' to get a leg up on somebody else, and I don't know why that should be," said Blue. "You want to hear a joke?"

Walt hugged Blue close and said, "I feel so safe with you. I want to be always like this."

"I'd kiss you, except you got makeup all over."

"I was controlled."

"This Jewish guy meets this Catholic guy. The Jewish guy says, 'My father's the president of the Amalgamated Matzoh Biscuit Company. You don't get no higher than that in this man's world. What's yer father do?'

"The Catholic guy says, 'My father's a priest.'"

Acting the parts, turning his head now this way, now that. "'A priest? That's all?'

"'Well, if he works real hard, he could become a bishop.'

"'Huh, a bishop.'" Waving this away.

"'Or even a cardinal!'

"'You'd compare this to the president of Amalgamated Matzoh?'

"'Well, shit, what do you want, Jesus Christ?'

"'Why not?'" says Blue, smooth and confident. "'One of
our
boys made it.'"

This was a test, because Walt often chided Blue for his apparently limitless repertory of ethnic jokes, his "A Polack, a Chinaman, and a Jew" scenarios that treated offensive stereotypes. Blue wanted to see how far he could go tonight—but he also wanted to offer Walt a touch of compromise, dropping the word "Jew," which for some reason Walt held to be anti-Semitic, in favor of "Jewish," which was the term they used back in Gotburg: a Jewish family, a Jewish synagogue, a Jewish person.

So Blue got away with it. Walt laughed a little, then gently asked Blue how a Catholic priest could have a son.

"What, do they only have daughters?" asked Blue, stroking Walt's hair.

"They're bachelors. They can't marry or procreate. It's Protestants who have the family ministers."

"Live and learn," said Blue.

"Yet you were aware that Our Lord was Jewish, because the whole—"

"Got to admit, that had to be explained to me when I first heard the joke. Bet you think ol' Blue is one dumb guy, huh?"

"I think you're a wonderful man."

"Yeah? Well, so are you."

"No. I'm always this little boy, and I know it. I'm just never in charge."

"You were in charge a Blue not long ago, topped him clean and fair—and the first to do so since I was a teenager back home. Besides, that's not what a man is. You got all that lovin'ness in you, and fairness fer others. Those are a man's qualities."

"You would just cheer me up, no matter what."

"Ain't I always been honest with you?"

"Yes, Blue."

"Bein' honest now, too," said Blue, pulling Walt close to him so Walt could rest his head on Blue's chest. "There, now. I like to lay with you like this."

Upstairs, the Kid slept fitfully, tossing as he dreamed: of being young and desired by acclamation at Thriller Jill's. Joan Crawford was in the audience, and suddenly the Kid was Joan, calling some sailor "you gorgeous lug" as he slapped him. Then they were in bed, then flying, then they were both sailors, breaking the rules with a jukebox romance. They were having science-fiction sex, as aliens with bodies made entirely of holes and genitalia. Walt was watching. He said, "How could I have a faggot for a son?" Chris was the Kid's mother, worried and ineffectual. Except she looked like Lois. No, she
was
Lois, in Claire Trevor fuck-me-soon-I-beg-of-you wedgies, slapping a whole line of sailors. Some of them started stripping, in a late-night club with a back room. Walt was somewhere around, crying for help, and Derek Archer did his number in panties and Linda Darnell pump-me-till-I-pop heels; but everyone rushed the stage to get to the sailors. Walt said, "I want to go home," but one of the sailors had gotten hold of him. They were kissing. It was true love. The Kid kept saying, "We have to go home," but now Walt was a sailor, too, utterly regulation but for his footgear, David Manners now-I-lay-me-down-to-ream slippers. Everyone was chasing Walt, and the Kid was fifty-three years old. The past is coming at us.

We can measure the passage of time by vacations and Sundays, like kids mindful of a School Night. Or by the progress of the seasons, or our advancement in the workplace. Parents can mark the developments in a teenage son's romances, as the dubiously libertarian Philip and Neville did, hoping that Lonnie's fascination with Dana of Daly City would dwindle just as autumn falls before winter. "I'm not a snob," said Neville one night in her bright, bustling manner. "I just don't quite understand her attitude."

Philip replied, "She has no manners, she dresses like Dracula's daughter, and she is an idiot. It isn't snobbish to resent that. It's sensible."

Storytellers can chart time entirely by the yeses and nos of a touchy relationship—the triangle plotted by Evan, Alice, and Fay, for instance. This week, Evan and Alice are smooth and close; next week, they're at war; by Wednesday, Alice is back to living with Fay; two Sundays later, the three are branching in a neutral part of town.

These many several choices. Nevertheless, to write of gay life in the mid-1980s is to navigate mainly from one medical crisis to the next, to note the onset of symptoms, the diagnosis, the treatments, the decline, the funeral. One man wanes as another remains provisionally intact. There is news of holistic tranquilization, clarified diets, restorative drugs that are banned at home bought over the counter in Mexico and France. A close friend dies; at the memorial service, another friend confides that he, too, is of the doomed brotherhood. Or, for example: Frank is doing fine and Danny is rapidly sinking.

In fact, Frank made his friends give up their watches and let him carry on with his life; he had Larken to look after him, when he needed it. Frank had sold his video business—backlog, equipment, studio lease, and all—to a rising young porn entrepreneur, and Larken persuaded Frank to put a little money into his lifestyle for a change. "You're always so Spartan and everything," said Larken. "A bed, a table, a chair, and the bottles of Beck's Dark in the fridge—that's your whole apartment!" Under Larken's supervision, Frank bought a CD player and some discs (weird things that Larken selected, plus
Victory at Sea,
which Frank said was the only classical music he really liked), and they instituted Listening Hours, stretched out together on the bed, resting and dreamy.

One rule Frank laid down: no talking about the disease. No clipping of articles from the
Chronicle
or
The Advocate.
"Just let it be," Frank ordered. "I don't want to get gnarled up about a hundred breakthroughs that won't change a thing in the end. Let me go peacefully, in my own way."

There came a day, however, when Frank wanted to talk about it. He knew that many gay men, both ill and hale, had taken up a spiritual viewpoint, considering reincarnation, meditation, and such ontological questions as Why me? Frank thought this ridiculous. "What keeps beating at me," Frank said, "is, How did it happen? I never got fucked, so—"

"Why did you never get fucked, Frank?"

"Are you reproaching me?"

"I'm just curious. You never tried it even once?"

Frank shook his head.

"Why? Some of the most virile guys I've known—big, rough mothers, I mean. Even
they
tried it from time to time. Maybe they were reticent about owning up to it, but at least they... No, I don't mean
at least,
because that's a value judgment. But you
are
the only guy who never, ever."

Frank shrugged.

"No, Frank. Say why."

"Because I couldn't give another man that kind of control over me."

"Control?"

"Yeah."

"Boy, I never felt that way about it. All that time ago, when you were on top of me, I just gloried in how turned on you got in getting down with me. I didn't feel controlled, I felt flattered."

"It's funny where we end up. Some guy goes from log cabin to president. Another is a cowboy one day, a movie star the next. Then there's a guy who starts as a cop and ends... how?"

"I don't know if this is a compliment or what, Frank. But never, in the thirty-odd years I've known you, did you not seem like a cop to me for a single second. It's always there in you, somehow."

The dog on the quicksand.

For Walt, the age set its rhythm in Danny's letters, coming more frequently now, and sometimes written out by Danny's mother to his dictation, because he had retinitis. It was odd to have to adjust to the alien strokes bearing the familiar voice—and annoying that Luke and Tom refused to forward the letters to Walt at the Kid's address.

"The only time we see you is when you pick up your mail," Luke explained. "Can't you look on it as a free dinner?"

"I don't like going where I can't take Blue," Walt replied. "I'd be glad to see him. It's Tom who makes the rules." "You let him boss you around, I see."

"Walt, one day you'll meet someone very special to you, and you'll learn that a few rules are—"

"I
have
met someone special, and his name is Blue, so
you
can just get
used
to it!"

"Okay, Walt, I got it. I'll make that meat loaf you love and you'll come get your letter. Peace?"