Monkey Suits (18 page)

“Yeah, so?”

“So, in the words of the Maharishi Vindulu Kabet, ‘Get over yourself, girlfriend.’”

Brian had been with Ed four months before being invited to attend one of Ed’s healing circle sessions. It was a harmless affair, with about fifteen men and women sitting on pillows and sharing brief talks about their bad feelings, followed by a meditation where everyone held hands. Brian enjoyed the feeling of being in a group and thinking about spreading good feelings to friends and strangers with AIDS or “dis-ease,” as the facilitator pronounced it. Sage was burned in a bowl and ritualistically fanned over the group one at a time. Brian enjoyed the Native American flavor of the smoke, and inhaled deeply, imagining it to have marijuana-like hallucinogenic effects, something that seemed more and more distant in his now-pristine life with Ed.

Brian sat up on the bed and finished putting away their clothes. He had separated them, but sometimes liked to deliberately mix them up. It meant something to him. Usually Ed just made a face.

Ed invited Brian to a large gathering to hear a woman speak that night.

“What is she, a guru?” Brian asked as they walked to subway.

“Not like that, not in the way you think,” Ed explained.

They took the Number Two train to 72nd Street and walked to a church that faced Central Park West. Lee waved to greet them as he stood with several people gathered outside the entrance, despite the cold and the light swirls of snow. A modest sign posted near the door listed the woman’s name, the group, and the time of the service, 7:30 to 10:00.

“Well, am I going to see a miracle?” Lee grinned, his face red.

“Who knows?” Ed led them in as Brian and Lee exchanged silent glances.

About two hundred people milled about the pews and folding chairs that faced the altar. The church was a large open cathedral, with gray stone arches and plaster walls in a state of slight disrepair. A large tile mural on the wall above the altar depicted Christ washing the feet of an apostle. Brian couldn’t remember which one it was, but he figured out which one was Judas.

As the group settled in their seats, Ed introduced Brian and Lee to several young men in their late twenties. Recognizing a few other cater-waiters, Lee was warmed by seeing so many cute guys, as well as a good number of women who seemed like lesbians. It was a pleasant congregation that included a few blacks and Hispanics. An outsider from the Midwest might mistake the group for any churchgoing crowd. Only closer inspection revealed the preponderance of earrings on both genders. It all seemed a marvelous alternative to bars, he realized. He still had a roving eye and warmed up to several men who returned his stare, however their looks were open and peaceful, not at all predatory like in bars. He felt relieved to be in a gay environment without booming dance music and smoke.

A crackle of sharp piercing feedback alerted his attention to the stage. The microphone was being moved for the beginning of the lecture. Without introduction, a beautiful woman in a red dress began speaking.

“If you’ll all find a seat, we can begin.” Her voice echoed crisply around the stone walls. Stragglers quickly stepped to their saved seats, their coats laid over chairs and pews. Ed sat with Brian and held his hand warmly. Brian felt a surge of guilt as Lee sat next to him. He was bracketed by boyfriends past and present and still wasn’t sure where to find love.

The woman began.

“I want to talk a little about the Source, which is our program for self-healing and is actually what we hope you can all use to deal with the problems that you have, undoubtedly, come here to solve,” she said. “I’m going to go very quickly, so I hope those who are more learned in the workings of the Source can help other newcomers with some of the basic thoughts that we’ve collected after our years of research. A lot of people are using the Source to successfully overcome illness, fear and AIDS. If you’ll look at the letter I’ve had handed out, we can start with a silent meditation on the idea that’s written there.”

A soft rustling of about two hundred lavender flyers echoed through the space. Lee took his copy out of his coat pocket, which had been handed to him as he made his ten-dollar “donation” at the door. It hadn’t been mandatory, but he felt an incredible group pressure to pay.

On the photocopied piece of paper was a brief typed message printed in capital letters:

GOD DID NOT CREATE A MEANINGLESS UNIVERSE

AIDS WAS NOT CREATED BY GOD

THEREFORE AIDS DOES NOT EXIST

As the group pondered this meditation, Lee felt a bit numb, as if he had fallen into a well. He knew AIDS existed. Yet he’d never been to a memorial service. How could something be so pervasive yet distant? What about Chet, that guy he met at the movies? What were they getting at? He felt a bit tense in the serene prayerful atmosphere.

The woman interrupted the silence.

“I want us now to meditate on this, that if we do not accept the future of AIDS in our lives, it will not remain.” The group fell silent as the woman repeated the meditation and stepped away from the microphone.

Brian imagined the alternative possibilities of his now gone ten dollars. A good movie and a deli sandwich would have been nice, but he was here to be with Ed, who sat next to him, his head slightly bowed, eyes closed and fingers crossed in mild supplication. Brian closed his eyes and tried to meditate.

He listened to the sounds of the church as the group sat quietly. Every five or ten seconds, the silence was interrupted by a cough, each time from a different area. It seemed as if the cough was travelling, bouncing from one throat to another with the arbitrary pacing of a bad tennis match. Underneath the building came the muffled rumbling of the subway, so deep and low as to sound like the entire church itself were accompanying the bouncing coughs with its own basso profundo “A-hem.”

Someone walked out the back door. In between the squeak and slam, Lee heard the gurglings of a baby in a passing stroller. He found it quite impossible to silently repeat the sentences on the paper. He stole a glance at Brian, who also glanced about. They gave each other a silent look, a conspiratorial shrug of confusion.

Lee tried again to return to the meditation. Tedious newscasts, death charts, statistics, obituaries, mandatory testing. Was he supposed to un-think all this? He smelled Brian’s leather coat on the chair beside him. Was he ever going to make love with Brian again? Was this a test of faith?

He peeked around the cavernous room. Over two hundred heads with eyes closed did not move, except an occasional slight bobbing here and there. Did they actually think that doing absolutely nothing but thinking was going to save them?

Lee felt a twinge of recognition in some of the phrases. He had tried out a variety of faiths as a youth. He’d chanted with Buddhists and sang with Baptists and still felt quite hollow in his heart. He thought of no way to forgive himself for the things he’d done. As he had done in grade school, once again he’d gone to a church just to be with the cute blond boy who’d invited him. He couldn’t block out the messy world and pray. He couldn’t forget them.

“Thank you.” The woman stepped back to the microphone. “I’d like you to slowly open your eyes and we’ll continue.” A light rustling came over the room, as if they had all awakened from a light sleep and had arrived at a destination. Lee felt like he had definitely missed the flight.

She began to discourse on a series of hybrid concepts, from Jungian psychoanalysis to a very cleaned up, hip version of the gospel. She hopped freely from phrases like “cognitive thought processes” to passages of the Bible. Lee began to realize the scope of the Source when, as she summed up her rambling talk, she mentioned the array of books and cassettes available for sale at the back tables, “just to allow us to pay for travel expenses,” she said. Lee wondered if there were T-shirts and coffee mugs as well. Easy Listening Fire and Brimstone.

The speaker opened up the meeting for a question and answer session. A young thin man brought a cordless microphone to people with raised hands. It became a talk show under Gothic arches.

One man asked her how to get beyond the “plastic Jesus on the dashboard” and to the truer nature of Christ. Lee felt confused. Here was a group of people who only a few years ago would have been cruising bars or bookstores or colleges or libraries for companionship or company, who had now returned, it seemed, to the church, in this distilled version, to be informed through a charming amalgamation of ideas that if they prayed for the epidemic to go away, it would.

“I know what you’re fleeing, er, feeling. Sorry, Freudian slip,” said the speaker. Several people lightly chuckled. Her tone was more like a frazzled psychology professor than a preacher. “We are, all of us, I think, trying to get back to something that has been shoving us away for so long, it seems. But let me give you this idea. The two thousand years since Jesus came and did his thing and got murdered for us, which is what he did, an awful thought, two thousand years is not a long time. We are still trying to recover from the enormous simplicity of his message. Jesus makes everybody nervous, Jews and gentiles. My mother, who is Jewish, once said, ’Jesus? He was a very polite man.’”

The entire group rose with laughter, Brian, Lee and Ed included.

“She did say that,” the woman repeated, smiling. “She said that, and it took me a long time to realize more about him and how important he is to our lives and our way of thinking. Because if we persist in believing in the awfulness and the disaster of our lives and not believing in Jesus, then we are truly lost.”

Pausing dramatically for the first time in her speedy monologue, her red dress perfectly matched the upholstery of the big wooden chairs on the altar. Brian wondered if she had planned that.

She continued. “If we place our faith in the TV and the newspapers and the politicians and if we place our faith in disaster and dis-ease, we put our faith in hatred, and that of course is no faith at all. Of course, we cannot shut these things off and believe that it will all go away if everybody becomes a student of the Source. But if we extend our energy, just a little bit at a time, just a little moment of each day when we rise and when we go to sleep, then it cannot but help our situation and that will spread to others around us and it will work. It can work.”

Brian thought of an actor’s exercise he had learned in college. It was about the white bear. Think of anything except the white bear. Was the white bear supposed to be your concentration, your thoughts about the audience, losing character? His instructor never specified. He had only been able to see the white bear. His instructor and the fifteen kids in Acting 103 had sat in silence. What the hell were they thinking about? All Brian could see was the bear, a moping furry Polar type, sitting in a corner trying not to be ignored, occasionally stiff in black and white, then ultra close up, fangs bared, dripping saliva, ready to chew up his neck like a meat sandwich.

Brian felt a glimmer of hope, for the group and himself, but still wondered if Ed, who now held his hand again, would continue to have sex with him if he didn’t buy it.

While Ed’s two guests were trying to sort out this viewpoint being expressed, he felt a bit anxious himself, hoping they might see the sense of peace he’d found. He glanced over at them both a moment.

He’d hoped to use this evening as a sort of pact between the two. They had to come to terms, some sort of resolve. He didn’t like the tension that rose up when the two were together with him. He was also hoping to tell them both something about his own health that affected them both.

For Lee, the only way he felt good and warm and positive was in the arms of a handsome man late at night under clean sheets. He preferred to commune in a group of two and felt secure in the knowledge that the true church, not this generic pop Christian remix, thought of him and his kind as less than whores and worse than lepers. The church would always profess not to despise him, just his sexuality. The church would never enter the same century as the living. To be saved, according to the church, all he had to do was abandon sucking cock and kissing the lips of men, acts Lee considered to be his own holy form of transubstantiation.

Had Lee and Brian discussed such matters of faith in the course of their brief affair, they would have discovered a strong accord in their beliefs. But they didn’t, and Ed, who sat between them, bridged the distance between them, for now.