The Truth is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler? (18 page)

I thought back to the summer, several years after we’d graduated from high school, when I ran into John in a gay bar. The teenaged boy who had played the middle-aged man with an imaginary rabbit and I wound up fucking like bunnies—on a water bed, releasing all the pent-up feelings we’d been avoiding.

Now he was dead, along with too many others. I wish I could have kissed him good-bye. I wish I could have kissed all of them good-bye, everyone whose name was read from the endless lists that I would hear during the next thirty-five years.

Jerker
premiered at Celebration Theater, a dilapidated space that was nonetheless devoted to producing gay work. The play is comprised of twenty phone calls, switching imperceptibly from comedy to tragedy. In the final moments of the play, the character played by Joe doesn’t answer the phone. In our production, we had purchased the perfect blanket to represent the character’s inner life, contrasting with his overt butchness. It was silvery and satin, sensual without being girly. I directed Joe to spread the blanket out, almost like a shroud, when he exited, as the phone calls from David’s character became more desperate and more frequent.

Finally, as David hears that the “number you have called is no longer in service,” confirming the death of his long-distance lover, all that’s left in Joe’s “room” is the silver blanket, shimmering in a pool of light. Slow fade as David convulses in anguish.

As often was the case with my endeavors, we did a live broadcast from KPFK (Pacifica) that included selected excerpts from the play. Little did we realize that we would be responsible for altering the course of radio history.

CHAPTER 33
               

Seems that the Reverend Larry Poland, president of the Orange County Christian right-wing anti-porn media-watch organization called Mastermedia International, tuned into KPFK and was appalled by what he heard. He noted all instances of four-letter words and sent a letter to the FCC, urging action against Pacifica.

The media went berserk. We actually held a press conference at the theater that was attended by the
L.A. Times
, NBC News and innumerable radio stations.

The FCC warned Pacifica that the broadcast had violated the indecency law, resulting in a new set of guidelines and a warning that future violations could result in revocation of Pacifica’s license. The FCC also referred the Pacifica case to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, but they refused to prosecute.

The publicity increased the stakes; we knew we had to deliver a product that deserved all the advance attention.

Jerker
was a blistering hit with audiences and critics, whose praise was orgasmic.

It was, however, the personal that fueled my political consciousness. I would never have assumed the activist stance if I had not experienced the harrowing aspects of homophobia and HIV/AIDS on a profoundly personal level.

David was the only one on the
Jerker
team who had tested positive. Joe, Pickett and I were holdouts; we’d never been tested. Pickett and I were living under the assumption that we would likely be among the army of our infected brothers. I prayed Joe was negative.

“Do you think we all have it?” Pickett asked me, not for the first time.

“I just don’t have a fuckin’ clue,” I said, “why some of us do and some of us don’t. Part of me is certain that I’ve got it and another part of me says I don’t.”

“What do you base it on?”

“Being a slut,” I said.

“Well, in that case, we both qualify.”

We were walking around the lake at Echo Park. Pickett was living in an apartment that overlooked the shimmering water and the lush water lilies. It was also one of the spots that he cruised regularly. After all, it was within walking distance.

“I might have gotten it in there,” he said, pointing to the men’s room that served as a trysting spot for a wide variety of mixed-race boys and their worshippers.

“I’m still not sure how,” I said. “How exactly you get it.” This was and remains one of the conundrums that continues, three decades later, to fuel the ambiguity of transmission. Can you get it from sucking dick? Or kissing if you have an abrasion in your mouth? Surely you can’t get it from receiving a blow job. What about rimming? Is the virus in blood and semen? Saliva?

“Well, getting porked seems to be an obvious way,” Pickett said.

“Yah,” I agreed, “but there are certainly exceptions to that rule. Did you get fucked much?” I asked.

“Well,” he admitted, “I did have my Mrs. Robinson moments.”

A “Mrs. Robinson moment” referred to those unpredictable teamings when a younger man wanted to fuck an older man in the butt.

“And I had a few of those Latin lovers, one of whom fucked my brains out during several afternoon delights.”

“Victor?”

“
Si, señor,
” I said. “
Muy caliente
.”

Pickett and I never had a conversation about AIDS that wasn’t irreverent and teeming with dark, foreboding humor.

In real time, I was dealing with two pivotal men in my life who were being overpowered by death’s grip. Al Magee (not his real name) had been my AA sponsor—an intellectual stud of a man in his late forties who insisted that he would not contract AIDS because he was “a total top.” Formerly married, Al was the father of two nearly adult children and clung to his masculinity like a cop clutches his baton.

I had an incomparably volcanic affair with Victor Lopez, a Cuban actor with a considerable presence in the industry (among other things, he appeared in
10
with Bo Derek and Dudley Moore). We embarked on an ill-fated affair, accelerated by the fact that Victor had a live-in lover, resulting in that tired paradigm I seemed to reenact. The heat was practically unbearable and “the other woman” role eventually made me seriously unstable.

Victor not only made me come—fucking him or getting fucked by him—he made me laugh. Sexy and funny is a double jolt.

It turned out to be The Affair That Would Never End, but it did, a year later, in 1983. When I found out that Victor was sick (“I thought you’d want to know,” a friend whispered on my answering machine), I called him immediately.

“Hello?”

It was the heavily accented voice of a woman I immediately assumed was his mother.

“Hi. This is Michael. I’m calling to see how Victor is doing.” My voice was quivering.

“Not so good,” she said. There was a pause. What was I supposed to say then?

“Can I see him?” I asked.

“He’s sleeping now. I’ll ask him when he wakes up,” she said, making it clear that he had guest-list approval. “What is your last name, Michael?”

“Kearns,” I said, hoping he’d consent to see me.

He did and I wound up being a member of the team that assisted his mother as he spiraled into his final days. I won’t describe how he looked, since, in spite of his disintegrating state, he was still, heart and soul, Victor.

I spent six Wednesday nights with him, from sundown to sunup.

“So I finally get to stay over,” I said, referring to the fact that, in spite of spending a lot of time in bed together, not once did we sleep.

Truthfully, we rarely slept during these agonizing yet ecstatic journeys into night.

Once, in the throes of dementia, Victor insisted that the three of us were going to drink champagne and celebrate. His mom poured apple juice in wine glasses. He was so slight that he could barely sit up, but he miraculously did and announced with inflated grandiloquence, “Mother, I’d like you to meet Michael. Michael, I’d like you to meet Mother.”

Like Victor, Al was suffering from the dementia that commonly rendered those early deaths with shocking tragedy. After what had been diagnosed as a stroke, he was temporarily placed in a home, not unlike the state hospital where my father had done time. Confined to a wheelchair, Al was partially paralyzed and unable to speak coherently, robbed of his greatest gift.

As Al bid farewell to his prized verbosity, Victor lost his winning beauty. Even though trying to impose poetic meaning on these deaths could become tiresome, one couldn’t avoid noting certain patterns, oxymorons all, that emerged: the babbling intellectual, the inconsequential VIP, the paralyzed athlete.

Yet the essence of each individual remained intact—and often more pronounced. Al’s denial of having AIDS was dependent on his belief that he had never sexually played a passive role, something he casually mentioned to anyone who’d listen.

By the third or fourth night with Victor, he had gone totally blind. While he was trying to sleep, his mother was engaging in a rather boisterous conversation in the adjoining room. “Quiet in there,” Victor yelled. “I may be blind, but I’m not deaf.” He lost none of his humor. Or his no-nonsense convictions. “You brought me into this world,” he’d yell at his mother, “now you can take me out of it.” He was serious; he wanted his mother to kill him.

“I just can’t,” she told me. “He’s still my baby.”

This small but incredibly durable woman needed help, especially when her “baby” had a bout of diarrhea that his diaper couldn’t contain. She had choreographed the routine, teaching me how to roll his body over on his tummy, clean him thoroughly and replace the shit-splattered sheet with a fresh new one, and then roll him back to his original position on his back. There were times when he seemed to sleep through the entire ritual. Or was he pretending to sleep because it was so humiliating?

I wondered if his mother had considered that I’d previously covered every inch of his body with my tongue and my fingertips, when every part of him—toes, balls, asshole, nipples, lips, ears—was aflame, not with fever but with desire.

Al was taken back to his apartment. The prognosis was delivered and his son came to take care of him, a full-time role-reversal job that included changing his diapers. Al’s son was also subjected to dementia-induced diatribes in which Al demanded in a feral voice, “I want to be fucked. Somebody fuck me! Fuuuuuuuck. Meeeeeee.”

When I got the news of Al’s death, I was doing a play (
I Wish I Had Never Met You and Was Meeting You Now
) with Joe Fraser at the Fifth Estate, located a few blocks from where Al’s inert body was finally at rest.

I stopped by before the performance to console his son and his boyfriend, George. When I put my arms around George, his knees buckled and we both nearly collapsed, gone limp from shared sorrow.

Less than an hour later, I was onstage, making out passionately with Joe, my lover in the play, exploring his muscular back and ass with my hands as he simulated fucking me without a rubber. The play (1987) depicted the complications involved in negotiating safe sex between lovers in a highly volatile relationship.

I visited Victor on the Wednesday after Al died. Knowing that Victor’s demise was approaching, I told him about Al, hoping that it might give him some kind of permission.

Victor died one week after Al and I went on in the play, ever the trouper, almost unable to distinguish between real life and make-believe. The feel of Joe’s body slamming up against mine in front of an audience was crazy, ridiculous, appropriate and beautiful.

Shortly after the run of
I Wish…
, Joe asked me to meet with him—just the two of us. I figured he wanted to talk about David’s health, not his own.

Even before he delivered the words, I spotted a speck of purple on his bare shoulder. The lesion spoke for him.

CHAPTER 34
               

“I’m going to go back to school and get my teaching credentials so that I can substitute teach,” he said. “I’m not going to do any more plays.”

“That’s an amazing decision to make,” I said, trying to mean it. “You’ll be the best teacher in the world.”

“I have something else to tell you. Only David knows. I haven’t even told my parents yet,” he said.

I would let him take as long as he needed to avoid saying the words out loud, the three dreaded words that were now part of the gay lexicon.

“I trust you, Michael,” he said.

“I love you, Joe,” I answered, meaning it.

A pause.

Then those words: “I tested positive,” he said, sounding defeated for the first time. I said all the things one had learned to say.

“You’re so strong. You have David. You’ll be around for years. I’ll die of old age first.” Hearing myself say these words seemed to carry a hint of unintentional melodrama.

We hugged in a way that was more intimate than all those staged embraces.

I spent more and more time on the road and on the stage, holding my grief at bay in the land of make-believe. I did an episode of
Murder She Wrote
, playing a cub reporter doing an interview with a lecherous Capote-like writer, played by Robert Reed. In this particular instance, the casting director hired me without so much as an audition since he was familiar with my theater work.

In other cases, I was not as lucky. After the fact, I learned that a television director, in a producer’s session involving a Movie of the Week, suggested that the casting director, a closeted lesbian, bring me in for a gay role. “A straight actor would be better,” she said, offering no explanation and causing no dissension in the room. This is an example of the internalized homophobia in Hollywood that remains widespread; by distancing herself from gay men, she hoped everyone would infer her heterosexuality.

Pickett and I decided to take
Dream Man
to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh—my first European trip—produced by Kerry Slattery. The break from L.A. provided sustenance for my ailing heart. I performed nightly and took in as many shows as I could during the day. Then there was the postshow pub life, celebrating with the butch boys on the tech team. I was the only one who remained sober, as the randy crew drank until the sun came up.

Pickett’s play stood out among hundreds (literally) of offerings and even led to a one-nighter in London, a prestigious honor that every show coveted.

We made it an AIDS benefit for an organization that counted Ian McKellen among its benefactors. It was difficult for me to believe that the genius actor had agreed to see the performance and join me for an intimate dinner afterward. My crew would have to hit the pubs without their sober dream man in tow.