Like People in History (26 page)

"How long have you had a heart condition?" he asked.

Once again I attempted to explain. But he merely untied the rubber from around one arm and put it around the other one, and tried testing again.

"You sure you don't know anything about a heart condition?"

"I had oral surgery last night," I explained. "I lost blood. Wouldn't that explain why your blood pressure test shows me close to death?"

He shrugged and marked down some numbers on my file.

At Number Eight, down in the basement, a city block away from Number Seven, I was supposed to give a half pint of blood. By now it was 11:30
A.M
. I'd not eaten or drunk anything since yesterday morning's eighth of a cup of coffee. I'd been on my feet all morning without once sitting down. I'd been shunted around from one place to another, totaling about five miles. I was deeply fatigued, and there wasn't even a wall to lean against! I was waiting along with others on a long line defined by a waist-high, fragile-looking, wooden railing that twisted rectangularly around and around through a huge, otherwise bare room, when someone came up to me and asked me to roll up my other sleeve to get ready to have blood taken out.

"I can't," I explained. "I lost blood last night during my oral surgery." I attempted to thrust my letter at him. He too ignored it.

"Why can't you give blood?" he asked. "Religious reasons?"

"I just told you." I once more tried to hand over the letter.

"Then you don't refuse for religious reasons?"

"It doesn't matter," I said. "My blood is fall of morphine."

"You're a morphine addict?" he asked.

I figured this might get me to a doctor who'd actually read my letter.

"My blood is full of morphine," I said.

"How long have you been a morphine addict?" he asked.

"Years," I said, still expecting to be taken somewhere. "Since birth."

He merely marked my file, gave it back, and moved on to the next person.

At the head of the line, I attempted once more to hand over my letter, and to explain. Again it did no good. When I resisted having any blood taken, two MPs were called over and they held me down while blood was taken out of my arm. I was so weak I offered only token resistance.

"There! That wasn't so scary, was it?" the doctor said, when he'd gotten his half pint of blood out of my arm. "You can get up now."

I sat up and felt distinctly odd.

"I don't know why you'd want to go around saying you're a morphine addict," he continued as I tried to get to my feet. "Anyway, that type of thing can be checked out, you know."

He covered my newest wound with a swab of alcohol and a lozenge of gauze. My elbow was bent back, my file was shoved under my other arm, and I was shoved out beyond the curtain, to walk the maze past those coming in to get their blood taken.

After six steps, the wooden railings seemed to lean in together, then move out again. I thought that a bit odd. After another few steps, I could see guys looking at me carefully, as though they knew me; Strange, I didn't know any of them. Another few steps and the walls seemed to angle in bizarrely and turn into yellow-and-black checkerboard patterns, which twisted around so curiously I began to lose my sense of balance. They crashed together, intermeshing, yellow into black.... I was still tightly gripping Arthur's letter, using it to prop me up... and a great cheer went up as I hit the floor and blacked out.

Alistair was there when I woke up. He was dressed in his best suit and tie and wearing horn-rimmed glasses, and he was talking in a tight little voice to a variety of military doctors who sat across from him looking red-faced and distinctly uncomfortable. Other men were coming and going rapidly from the room: I was lying on a cot, a rough wool blanket tightly wrapped around the mattress, a male nurse in uniform at my side.

"...any long-term effects, naturally, we plan to seek considerable damages, both from those individuals involved, and the board itself...," I heard Alistair saying, and I thought, He's got it well in hand whatever it is. I went to sleep again.

When I awakened, I heard someone protesting, "We can't possibly have an ambulance come to the doors."

"He'll not remain here for your malpractice another minute," Alistair said tightly. "I demand an ambulance."

Phone calls had to be made. Meanwhile he came over to the bed, smiled down at me, said everything would be all right, and explained that once I'd collapsed, Arthur's letter was found gripped in my hand, still unopened and unread, and the entire board staff panicked. They'd phoned Arthur, who'd phoned Alistair, as my next of kin.

After many more phone calls, one of which Alistair took, it was decided that no ambulance would be allowed, but a police van outfitted with a gurney would be waiting outside the side door of the SSS building; with a military nurse to attend me for a minimum of twenty-four hours. Alistair agreed, adding, "This is merely the least amount of humanitarian aid you could offer given the situation was entirely brought about by your medical incompetence. I want to stress that this in no way precludes any future lawsuit," at which the others all got huffy and irritated again.

My cot had wheels, and after a variety of papers were read and discussed and signed by Alistair and the others, I was quickly wheeled through corridors into a section of the building even I'd not been in before.

The minute the doors to the outside opened, I heard the chanting. We were in some sort of back loading area. Even so, I had to be lifted off the cot and into the gurney, which would then be slid into the police van. In the few minutes this required, I heard a familiar voice shout over a megaphone, "There he is! Another victim of the Selective Service's bureaucratic barbarism!" A chant from dozens of people rose, cries of "Stop the War Now!" and references to "Tricky Dicky." Two men with flash cameras jumped up to snap my photo, before MPs knocked them back down off the edge. I heard Cord Shay's voice once more: "You can't run! You can't hide the victims!" Then I was inside the van with the male nurse in uniform. The van doors were shut and locked, and it took off.

I couldn't believe my ears. I had to raise myself and look through the meshed window. Sure enough, there he was, Cord Shay, at the megaphone. And scores of demonstrators. All for little old me! I was touched, moved. It was so... But wait! How could they have all gotten here so quickly? Gotten so organized and...?

Unless... Unless...

Oh, no!

"Now, don't get bent out of shape," Alistair was saying to me defensively a half hour later.

He was already there at my apartment when I was brought in. The nurse had gone into the living room and was on the phone, confirming his arrival.

"It was merely a matter of there being an opportunity," Alistair was saying. "It wasn't in the least bit personal. Anyway, this is bigger than you or me or any single one of us. An entire chain of these actions is occurring across the nation. So many at once are bound to cause a stink and to force change in the system. Do you understand?"

I understood, all right.

I also understood that Arthur should have operated last week and not waited. And that Cord Shay had not a shred of personal interest in me but had moved in and allowed me to... humiliate myself—he was probably not even gay—just to carry out their plan. Lastly, most devastatingly, I understood that Cord and Alistair had planned this weeks ago, and that it had been set into motion that night in his kitchen. I'd suffered intolerable pain and might have really been injured. But it made no difference to them. I was merely a pawn in their— No wonder I'd hallucinated chessboards!

"I understand everything," I told Alistair in the calmest voice I could summon. "Everything and all of its ramifications. I want you to leave. Now!"

"I'll check up on you," he said.

"Don't bother!"

I recovered, my mouth none the worse for it, after all.

The score of nationwide actions of which mine was merely a part were heavily reported in the media and had their intended effect: within months, the U.S. Congress had changed the law to approve a lottery for draftees, thus eliminating the worst abuses of the Selective Service.

Naturally I never sued them. But I did receive a new draft status: 4-F. "Cardiac Condition," it read. I laughed all day.

I never saw Arthur or Cord Shay again. By the time I was ready to forgive Alistair, he'd moved out of Manhattan and back to the Coast.

They didn't bring us to the nearest precinct house, but instead downtown, to the Tombs, which was both annoying and frightening. We did have an ACT UP legal counsel present, an anorectic-looking lesbian in a Bogart trench coat named Therry (short for Theresa) Villagro, who seemed to know her way around the system, and who arrived about ten minutes after we did, chain-smoking perfumed cigarettes, sipping coffee out of the largest Styrofoam cup I'd ever seen (a pint? a quart?), and yelling to no one in particular I could see that she was going to get everyone from the ACLU to the Helsinki Convention to come monitor what they were doing to us.

To us she said: "I didn't need this shit! I've already got a hemorrhoid flare-up and my roommate's cat just went into labor."

A half hour later, after we'd been duly fingerprinted and photographed from two angles, Therry told us we'd be put in our own holding cell, "in a somewhat nicer section of this hellhole."

Nicer and more isolated. It took the turnkey five minutes to locate it, another five to find the key to the corridor we were to be placed on, and once we did get inside, he looked around as though he'd never seen it before.

"Should I know who you guys are?" he asked.

"Just Your Everyday Urban Terrorist," Junior Obregon said. "Why?"

"This is our VIP lounge," the cop said, awed.

Not quite my idea of heaven, but the lounge was orderly and newish, with a not-too-battered sofa, coffee table, and TV, and in one corner, candy, cigarette, and coffee machines that, it turned out, actually worked. The three cells that opened onto the lounge looked comfortable, if not clean.

"Better than some motels I've stayed in," James Niebuhr summed it up, leaping up to the top bunk in the closest cell. "If I had to, I could hack this for a night."

"So could I," Junior said, and leapt up next to James. They began to make out while I fiddled with the TV, seeing if I could find a station. All I managed was voices, and most of those were cable. No remote control, wouldn't you know. Naturally there was nothing to read but some aging
People
magazines and one newish
Sports Illustrated
with a longish story on, but not a single underwear photo of, my favorite sports personality, quarterback Joe Montana. I kept fooling with the TV channels until I was bored, then I flattened out on the sofa and stared up at the stained tiles of the ceiling, trying not to be too anxious, and at the same time trying not to listen to the sounds of lust from the cell. Don't know how they could do it: sex was the last thing I needed to think about now.

We'd been there scarcely ten minutes when the door was unlocked and my attorney, Anatole Lamarr, entered. He was dressed in his idea of casual: a sea-green Ralph Lauren polo (with the collar kept up) under an overdecorated Italian soccer team sweatshirt, preppie tan slacks baggy enough for his thickish middle, penny loafers, no socks. With him, his attaché case.

Now my lawyer was no relation to Hedy, of course, except that the actress was indeed responsible for Anatole's last name. Seems as though Anatole's father emigrated to this country during the early thirties from some German-speaking enclave in
Mitteleuropa,
arriving with little baggage but an almost endlessly long and unpronounceable surname, which happened to begin with the letters
L-a-m
. Someone suggested he shorten and Americanize his name and handed him a copy of the
New York Telegraph,
where he found his future identification in the movie pages.

His scion, Anatole, now looked around the place we'd been put, waited till the cop on duty exited and until. Junior and James stopped necking long enough to look up and see who he was, then dropped the attaché onto the coffee table and said, "Not bad! You been sucking off the deputy mayor?"

"We thought it was you!" 1 replied. "We were going to thank you."

"Not me." Anatole sat down. "Must have been your dyke counselor. Some of those ladies have real pull," he said admiringly. "As for you," sitting down next to me on the sofa and lightly slapping my face, "what's all this? You decide you've only got one life to live and you might as well do it as a revolutionary?"

Before I could answer, Anatole said, "Tucker saw you on 'The Eleven O'Clock News' and warned me I'd be hearing from you."

Tucker was Anatole's lover of the past few years: a sweet guy a few years younger, not even beautiful really but with the substantial attractions of a swimmer's body, big blue eyes, and pitted facial skin. Tucker came from Arkansas and still liked to pretend he was White Trash, an increasingly difficult pose now that Southern Discomfort—his soul food catering company—was edging into
Fortune
500 territory.