Like People in History (7 page)

"Tennyson," I said; "'The woods decay, the woods decay and fall.' Don't take them, Alistair!"

"Of course I'm going to take them. And you know what? I found these clever little things." He pulled out a little plastic packet of flesh-colored patches the size of a nickel. "Anti-Lupe Velez Syndrome patches," he said. "I place one on each pulse point on the back of my neck, and these'll keep me from getting nauseated and looking like shit when they find the body."

"Does the White— Does Orkney know about this?"

"He'll go to sleep in his usual sublime ignorance and awaken to what I trust will be only a tiny iota less ignorance tomorrow morning."

"What if something goes wrong? Shouldn't he know?"

"Be real, Cuz. He's one of those Vermont WASPs who cut open their bellies to keep their babies warm in winter. He'd never approve of me escaping from one second of earthly suffering."

"Wally too. We've argued over this all week."

"Really! I'd think he'd want to see me out of the way!"

"He's conflicted," I temporized.

"Neither of them have suffered as you and I have, Cuz. Physically or ethically."

"And neither of them ever had as much fun."

"Or fought as bitterly."

"Or loved as hopelessly."

"Or..."

I hung on Alistair's breath.

"—Saw as many bad movies!" he exploded.

We both laughed till I said, "Or screwed as many pretty boys."

"Or been as badly screwed by as many pretty boys," Alistair completed the list with a chortle. "One of whom was considerate enough to have led us to this very moment."

My high spirits sank.

"Which is about to end as planned. You will give me my forty-fifth birthday present. Then kiss my well-cosmetized cheek, and leave me. Forever."

He was serious now. Exhausted too.

I stood up, dug into my deep pocket, and handed over the little package. It was wrapped in black paper with a narrow black ribbon.

"Happy forty-five," I said. And as he collapsed onto the toilet seat I'd just vacated, I kissed one of the cheeks I'd just made up.

"Thank you, Cuz. These wrappings! Couldn't you find anything with a skull-and-crossbones motif?" He ripped off the paper and held the palm-sized ebony-colored metal Sobranie cigarette box in one skeletal hand, then lifted its lid and said in a voice I'd never before heard out of him, "Ah, my hot-pink-and-electric-blue darlings!"

Alistair looked up at me as though surprised I was still there. "What are you waiting for? Go."

"I'm waiting for you to say something final to me."

"Make sure they play Ravel's
Ma Mère l'oye
at my memorial service. The four-hand piano version."

"Oh, Alistair! That's not what I mean!"

He smiled an odd, crooked smile, doubtless twisted by the same

Parkinson's that had affected his hands. "What's left to say? No, really, Cuz. What haven't we said? What haven't we
done
to each other?"

I left the bathroom. Left the apartment. Got into the elevator and descended.

When it arrived at the third floor, for the blue-haired old woman with the beribboned dachshund to get in, she was treated to the possibly not too daily sight of a grown man soundly and methodically banging his head against the cleverly pre-aged wood paneling.

Wally was in the Chinese restaurant, at the table closest to the kitchen and farthest from the expanse of windows fronting Broadway. It never ceased to amaze me how the lad had a sixth sense for placing himself less than a yard away from wherever the help ate. Since it was nearly nine o'clock, and the restaurant nearly empty of customers, three young waiters and an older man, whom I guessed to be a chef from his food-spattered full apron, were already attacking an enormous bowl of rice noodles with assorted vegetables.

Less surprising than Wally's instinct for getting nitty-gritty with the laboring class was the fact that he wasn't alone. I recognized one companion from the back as I entered—Junior Obregon—the other I didn't know.

I sat down in front of a giant porcelain teapot surrounded by plates of what had recently been General Tso's Chicken and Three Mountain Prawn.

The strange overhead illumination in the restaurant made everyone look slightly green, including Wally, who, being supernaturally handsome, instead of looking seasick like the rest of us, now resembled some superb wild woodland creature just flitting out into light from a deep forested glade.

As he always does in public—whether we're speaking that day or not—Wally made sure to lean over and kiss me full on the lips.

It had its usual effect: the two waiters said something and giggled, allowing Wally to be superior and indifferent.

"You know my Sig Oth," Wally said to Junior Obregon, who grunted out, "How's it hanging, man."

I turned to the third diner. He was slim and pale, with bittersweet-chocolate straight hair. Nice face, even handsome, save for the eyebrows that connected without pause over his nose and shadowed his surprisingly dark blue-black eyes. Oddly, instead of making him look like a Neanderthal, they gave him a sad, even a somewhat tragic cast. I decided with no proof at all that he and Junior were doing it.

"James Niebuhr," he introduced himself, with a strong, large hand thrust out for me to shake across the ravages of noodles in cold sesame sauce. I noticed paper cuts in the thumb and index finger and guessed he worked in design or art directing. "And yes, I'm distantly related to
the
Niebuhr."

"I gotta piss!" was Junior Obregon's loud announcement. He continued to sit there, chewing on a chopstick while glowering at me.

Now Junior and me, we have history. About two years ago, I was walking home from watching a third-rate foreign film at a local cinema when he accosted me at Seventh Avenue and Twelfth Street. Junior is lanky, and handsome in that strange blond-Latin way—you know, hair a little too thick, eyes a little too brown, face a little too pitted. His leather jacket is always open, and a work shirt is open to his navel even when it's so cold out sleeping sparrows are falling like stones out of trees. So I looked, immediately thought, Trouble, and moved on.

Junior Obregon is no fool, and he caught on to what I was thinking. So he followed me all the way home, sometimes behind me, sometimes on the side, a couple of times even in the gutter, all the time talking dirty to me, but in reality challenging me.

When we got to my place, he stopped my hand at the front door and said, "I need it
bad!"

"If you're looking for money, forget it," I said, hard as ice.

"No, man!" with that accent. "Just a little action."

I still thought he was trouble, but I've been gay long enough to know even the worst men can be quite amenable when they're suffering from a case of blue balls and you're the one designated to help them.

As I let him in, I continued calculating: I was big enough to take him without a weapon if he got itsy. But if he were armed... Before he could think, I spun Junior around, pushed him against the corridor wall, and frisked him. He didn't complain. He did not breathe a word. I didn't find a weapon, and all the while I was saying to myself, "Honey! You are one hard queen!" thinking what a great story this would make when I told Alistair the next day on the phone.

Inside the apartment he stripped off his pants and dropped onto my sofa, working up his dick. I blew him and he left. The entire encounter took at most ten minutes. I never asked his name and he never offered it.

He appeared a year later, stepping out of Tisch Hall in company with Wally and some of his cohorts. At which point it became clear he wasn't the Puerto Rican ex-con with the hots he'd pretended to be, but merely another NYU film school student, son of successful and well-off parents who lived in semirural New Jersey.

I didn't care. But evidently Norberto Juan Maria Obregon the Third— that was Junior's full name—did care, especially because he'd been found out playing a most unenlightened role of Latino trade. He'd silently resented me for it ever since, even though I never told Wally or anyone else.

"So Wally said you do... What is it?" Niebuhr asked.

"Drug pushing!" Wally said.

"I'm an axe murderer," I readily agreed and poked through their dishes searching for something edible.

"No," James said. "You're like a writer or something."

I turned to Wally. "To answer your question: yes, I gave Alistair the pills. All sixty-four."

"You'll burn in Hell," Wally said with no emotion. He'd located a prawn and fed it to me with his chopsticks.

Junior Obregon got up to piss.

"You wrote a book, didn't you?" Niebuhr asked. "
The Sexual Underclass
. Junior's Soc professor has it on his reading list."

"He's losing his memory," I said to Wally, referring to Alistair. "The virus has already reached his brain. I've seen what it's like when they become demented. You haven't."

"Why not just wait outside his building and knife him?" Wally asked.

"He barely gets out anymore. Too exhausted to walk."

Niebuhr continued to ignore our conversation. "Junior said that his prof said it was the best study of the rise of the gay political minority after Stonewall."

Wally was bored by the conversation. He stood up and began distributing "Silence=Death" leaflets onto the restaurant tables.

"You joining us at Gracie Mansion, James?" I suddenly asked.

The caterpillar across his brow lifted up twice, registering surprise.

"You mean you're comin' too?"

"Think I'm too old?"

He shrugged.

"I was demonstrating before you were born," I said, regretting it the minute I said it. "I'm an old hand at this shit."

"Oh, yeah?" he asked.

"Chicago. '68. D.C. against the war in Vietnam in '64. On the SNCC busses down south a few years earlier." Even I was getting tired of hearing myself recall it, like some old anarchist giving a liturgy of the assassinations he'd flubbed, the riots he'd almost provoked.

"No wonder...," James said. Then he explained, "I could never figure out why a great-looking guy like Wally would get involved in a trans-gen thing."

Read trans-generational. Read I'm old enough to be his father but neither look it nor act like it. Read eternal Peter Pan. Read refusing to grow up and accept that life stinks and people are worthless. Read I'll be ninety and in a wheelchair and still picketing the White House. Read...

"You ready, Bluebeard?" Wally was at my shoulder, all his leaflets having been distributed.

"Aren't we waiting for Junior?"

Wally pointed. Junior was outside on the street already. With him were four other guys I recognized from the two chaotic Monday night sessions I'd attended at the group's new headquarters.

When we got out, Junior counted off bodies for taxis, Gracie Mansion being unattainable from here by public transport except with bus transfers and other old-lady stuff like that. Wally and I were left alone for a cab.

"You lose," I said, as he pushed me into the taxi.

Our cabby was a fat-faced, young but very nervous Indian Muslim, who seemed visibly relieved when Wally told him to head east toward Gracie Mansion instead of to a Hundred and Thirty-eighth Street or the abandoned wharves at Jersey City. Wally and I settled into the backseat and sat with our knees close together. I was looking out the window, trying not to think about Alistair staring at those Tuinals and stroking them like a lover's scrotum when we reached Central Park West and Wally tapped my knee.

"Look at him staring at us in the mirror every few seconds. Bet he's scared shitless to have two genuine perverts in the car."

Wally's love of provoking straights should by now be apparent.

"Let's get there without incident, okay?"

Wally's response was to put an arm around my shoulder and hug me. This didn't in the least bit reassure me that I could count on his good behavior. I could see the driver's large brown eyes widen in the rearview mirror.

"What cross street you taking?" Wally asked loudly.

"Excuse, please?" the driver asked.

"Because if you're thinking of taking Eighty-sixth Street, you're going to run into heavy traffic. I suggest Eighty-fourth or Eighty-eighth."

Wally was rewarded by the expected response: "I am driving this car."

"In fact," Wally said, not about to stop now that he'd begun, "I happen to
know
you're going to run into traffic by Second Avenue at the latest."

The large, unstable brown eyes shifted in and out of the rearview mirror. "You think I haven't driven to this place before?" he asked. "I know this place and on Tuesday night at ten-thirty
P.M
. is quite vacant."

"Tonight is not going to be vacant," Wally shouted. Then, to me, "Is it, Sugar?"

"Is always vacant on Tuesday night at ten-thirty
P.M
.," the cabby insisted.

We'd pulled out of the park and onto Eighty-sixth Street at Fifth. Traffic ahead looked sparse.

"You're seeing?" the driver asked.

Wally turned to me and began to nibble my ear. The large eyes in the rearview mirror looked away.