Ode to Lata (8 page)

Maybe after all this was over and Richard had recuperated, he would go back to his same old ways. But not I.  Not anymore.  I would never be able to go back to the way it was. Seeing him there, like that, had invariably changed the course for me.

This is how I would have normally preferred to have him – ailing from some cold or infection so that no one else would have interfered with my devotion to him. So that he would need me to attend to him. Wouldn’t have the strength to fuck every golden-haired boy in West Hollywood. And I would have driven the 405 and battled traffic from Santa Monica to Carson, laden with a freshly baked peach pie from Polly’s and a tub of vanilla ice cream. So much to look forward to.  Richard all to myself.  Helpless.  Unable to get away.  Needing attention.  Mine, especially.  Mummy’s coming.  Don’t you worry, everything will be alright.  I will simply love the illness away. And maybe in the process my own too.  Snuggle time.  Watch a mushy romantic movie for the third time with him. Something with Julia Roberts in it.  He always made me feel like Julia fucking Roberts when I was around him.  Demure.  Pretty.  Martyred.  I had always wanted him to see this one with me but he had been too busy going out to some new hip club or some private party.  Or fucking.  Fucking someone new.  Someone hot.  Someone with a gym-built body and white fucking alabaster skin and golden fucking hair.  And, oh, let’s not forget the blue or green eyes.  But not tonight.  Tonight he was my Richard.  They would all have to wait while he ailed from fucking too much.

I remembered the times I had, much to my own horror, secretly wished that he would be struck with something like this.  Something irrevocable. Something that would last longer than a cold or food poisoning. So that in being cast down from the heights I had helped elevate him to, he would have understood my pain and met my vulnerability with his own.  It was only when he was at the lowest points in his life that he needed me in that way.  When he was sweet to me.  When he baby-talked with me and fluttered his long lashes at me and gobbled up all the pie and ice cream and affection.  Well, there he was again in that same way.  And the thought that what I had wished for might have come true filled me with dread.

You see, this time, although he would wake to need me, I feared that maybe he wouldn’t stay that way.  He would wither in front of my eyes.  The cheeks would sink in and the muscles on his body would disintegrate so that the flesh would hang around his bones like sagging clothes.  Just like those horrifying pictures.  His hollow eyes would look at me, vacant and insipid, and this passionate creature would be reduced to a sack of bones and dwindled spirit.

Is that how much I loved him? To want to possess him at any cost?  Any price?  Any sacrifice? Even his own?

I buried my face in my hands and shook my head. No, this was not how I wanted Richard after all. This was not how I wanted things to end. Not even as punishment for his rampant promiscuity while he remained unavailable to me. Not like this, dear God.

Time for mental bargains with God. That same God that I had hoped at first would help me procure him, I now wished would work in his mysterious ways to free me.

I would walk away from him if he recovered from this.  If the tests came out negative.  No turning back.  Wish him well with whomever he chose and not interfere again.  Just please let him live, God.  Let him come out from this to be the buoyant, energetic boy that I fell in love with.

And in return, I would do my maker proud. Finally live up to my full potential and exploit every talent I had wasted in pursuit of Richard. But he had to live.

Together, we were both doomed. As long as I felt this way about him, this third entity that we had both created, a relationship that eluded a name, would never allow either one of us to feel any intimacy with anyone else. We would remain together, too weak to sever the ties, still punishing each other for the inadequacies of a strangely mismatched relationship.

He had touched parts of me that perhaps no other man would know.  Secret rooms that would have to be barricaded for good.  He had done things I didn’t have a name for, kept me feeling ecstasy, anguish, doing back-flips through my soul. I had loved him the way we love unspeakable perversions, the ones that are unshakable.

But the time had come.

The answer that I had prayed for so fervently had arrived in the disguise of this adversity, and procrastination was suddenly an unaffordable luxury.

Over the years I had given him many gifts. My last gift to him would be my absence.

THE SILVER FLASK

For a while, Adrian dated someone called Jeremy, who was positive.  These were the years that we both refer to as the “Jeremy” or “Richard” years, a time we were both mostly out of touch.  An unfortunate reality of gay life.  When single, friends become a replacement for the absent mate.  And Adrian was the kind of friend I had spend Saturday nights with, dancing in the clubs and pounding down drink specials.  The one I’d call late Sunday afternoon with a dreadful hangover and who always remembered a little bit more than I would and didn’t hesitate to recap my escapades. The one I’d call on Valentine’s Day and on public holidays because being with family was either unendurable or geographically impossible.  And Mr. Last Night – well, he had zipped his pants up and driven home to the “open relationship” he had clocked a few hours out from.  Adrian was the friend that I’d distance myself from when the eligible one came along.  I’d claim exhaustion and the inability to sustain any more late nights, disinclined to return any calls.  Until, much to my chagrin, the relationship would miscarry and I’d resurface to the barstool I had previously disowned, the loyal friend having reserved it for me, his hand patting it gently, a wry smile masking the relief of my prodigal return, confirming that I was indeed doomed to cruise clubs and parks and sex clubs for the rest of my gradually enervating existence.

While Adrian acquired both sexual and emotional skills in conducting a relationship with someone who had to suddenly base his life on a count of T-Cells, I grappled with my obsession of Richard.  And once in a while, in the spirit of those who kept a lifeboat handy in case of disaster, Adrian and I would call each other and quite superficially inquire about one another’s lives.  Most of the important details got lost under the knowledge that, since we weren’t intimate enough to talk regularly, it would be a waste of time to reveal too much.

By the time Jeremy’s health began to show its first distressing signs of the disease, he and Adrian had already split up.  At first, Adrian had me believe that their separation had been for many reasons, the most important of them being that Adrian had felt stifled in such a committed and routine relationship with a man fifteen years his senior.  After quite some time, when Adrian and I had resumed our closeness, when the barstools had been reclaimed, he told me the truth.  He had witnessed the ravages of this disease and was terrified of losing yet another person he cared about to it.  Flipping through his uncle’s record collection of seventies disco, Adrian still felt the horror of acknowledging his family’s paralysis against AIDS while his thirty-year-old uncle languished in a hospital room.  He never wanted to feel so vulnerable, so helpless, again.  He didn’t have the strength to endure the putrescence that was inevitable for Jeremy.

“It’s just a matter of time, Ali,” he said between swigs of the rum that was helping him loosen up.  “Another breakthrough, another promising cure and then all of a sudden – whoosh!  Nobody hears about it again.  The promise vanishes as quickly as it was publicized.  Meanwhile, Jeremy is dying.  And I just don’t have the courage to hold his hand and watch him go through this.  I don’t!”

“Adrian, we’re all dying everyday,” I consoled.

“But not like
this
,” he objected.  “Not like
this
.  In his case, he’s almost certainly going to go through… hell.  I don’t know, sometimes I think maybe, maybe they don’t want there to be a cure, you know?  I mean, there’s people out there that stand to lose a lot if a cure’s found, don’t you think?  My God, just imagine!  What the hell would the AIDS industry do if a cure’s found?  They’d all be out of a job!”

Adrian had decided to leave before it got too late.  His fear had made it impossible to love the man any longer.  By the time Jeremy had started to lose sight in his left eye, their relationship had been reduced to an occasional phone call.  From practically “living together” to practically “acquaintances.”  From the beneficiary of Jeremy’s will to the deserter of his affections.

Deeper still lay other phobias.  In sabotaging his relationship and having grieving over the loss of his openly promiscuous uncle, Adrian couldn’t help but feel paranoid that he hadn’t succeeded completely in vanquishing this disease from his fate.  It was bound to find him or someone he loved.  Somewhere.  Somehow.

Then, a couple of years after Jeremy, by which time he was mentioned to us only through mutual acquaintances, Adrian started to date Steve.  Steve, who gave Adrian a venereal disease.  They’d been the model gay couple that had somehow seeped through the strainer of doomed, transient relationships; Adrian and Steve (our own little Adam and Eve), had hoped to buy a house together and live in domestic bliss.  It turned out that between planning futures together and driving the rest of their single friends envious, Steve – unlike Jeremy, who had courageously and rather gallantly revealed his HIV status on the first night – had decided to keep his gonorrhea a secret.

Adrian told me all about the nightmarish Q-tip insertion and, more painfully, his feelings of filthiness about being infected.  The fear that something much more formidable was lurking in his fate lanced forth after his brush with gonorrhea.  “It was a warning,” Adrian said, “of what could have been.” 

So we both drank.  One to assuage the guilt and paranoia; the other to blur the jagged edges of unrequited love, hoping to open up to other men.

Were we alcoholics, Adrian and I?  I don’t know.  We seemed to have our own personal definition of what we considered alcoholics to be.  My grandfather had been an alcoholic.  One of my spinster aunts, Leila – the one who admonished me for speaking nasally and not like a “proper” man, the one we all suspected had been a lesbian because she wore
kaunda
suits – had been an alcoholic.  My last memory of her is of spooning her holy water on her deathbed at the Aga Khan Hospital, a task made difficult for me because she kept turning her head from side to side in a state of dementia.  Her flesh had turned pale and urinous, and her eyes had melted into impenetrable orbs of blood, shockingly beyond recognition.  If a person was too drunk to go to work the next morning, craved a cocktail every waking day, screwed up his priorities, then it had gone too far.  Then he was an alcoholic.  I’m sure this isn’t necessarily true; in technical terms, we were both alcoholics – weekend ones though we may have been – and anyone who could have witnessed just how much elation we culled from our booze would have sponsored us to a twelve-step program immediately.   

It didn’t bother us much.  Not then, anyway.  The emotionally wounded find their balm in various mitigators.  A sex club where the flesh can quell the thirst to be touched.  Or a convenient little silver flask brimming with spirits to palliate the emptiness and arouse passions that, in the absence of
the
one man, would paralyze the heart forever.

It was on nights in the parked car up on Dick Street, drinking from my little flask and listening to a music score fill the air and heart, that the world finally started to make a little bit of sense.  At those moments, reality lost its garishness and cushioned the falls of weeks past and the anxiety of those lying ahead.

The night seemed to douse herself with a mystical perfume that the senses could suddenly register.  Like a fickle mistress, she began to reveal passions and secrets that she wouldn’t have shared with those that had chosen the path of sobriety.  The seduction in everything around us became exclusively apparent.  And age, time, discrimination and responsibilities came to form the ethos of an alien race.

Friends had often suggested that we cut down on the rituals. That, impeccable ironing and long showers with exotic soaps aside, if we were to cut down on the compulsion to listen to what they called sad, depressing music, we just might get into a club in time to find someone and not go home alone.

But that was unthinkable.  That was the part that we both looked forward to most each week.  As the weekdays dragged and Saturday approached with all its promise, both Adrian and I anxiously anticipated these ceremonies that would purge us emotionally and physically.  There were times when we would just laugh hysterically, remembering moments like Adrian urging our catch of the night to be gentle because it was my “first time.”  And sometimes we would sit and cry because the drinking had sensitized us to the music and we were so moved.  We’d offer each other support, tell each other that we were good enough and that someone out there would be very lucky to have us.  An entire hour would fleet by as we sifted through our emotions before tearing from the car to make our way down the boulevard and into a club before it closed.

Long after we had left a drained sipper bottle and the car behind, the music would continue to play in our minds.  We would still hear it.  Somewhere on a deeper level within.  Resonating within the walls of our hearts.  Melancholy.  Sensual.  Heartbreaking.  We became as light as air.  Our step barely feeling the ground beneath.  Ethereal.  Wafting through the night like Apsaras, from fables told to me long ago.