Gossip (37 page)

“Boss man!” cried Alec. “You here by your lonesome? Where’s your limo and entourage?”

I’d forgotten other friends might come, less important but people who knew me in a former life. “You guys shouldn’t be here,” I said, hoping to change their minds. “You’ll probably be
the
only straight people in there.”

“Cool,” said Alec.

“We came to do our bit,” said Erica.

“And dance,” Alec added with a jokey swing of his hips. “Dance for your freedom.”

Erica grabbed my arm. “Don’t be shy,” she teased. “Here, we’ll be your entourage.”

Alec took my other arm and they walked me inside, goofing on their familiarity with the artificial martyr.

This is a lie, I thought. I am a lie. If I told everyone that tonight, could I make myself honest?

“We brought your guest of honor,” Alec told the trio of skinheads in the box office. One of them shouted across the lobby. Veronica came over, in Ben Franklin specs rather than sunglasses tonight, and a faded ACT UP T-shirt.

“The man!” he cried. “We been waiting for you. Can’t have a Ralph-a-thon without Ralph. Here, your pals can take care of themselves.” He took me from Alec and Erica, who wished me luck. He steered me into the din with his arm around my waist. “Nobody but Gay Cable News came,” he whispered. “But they can get footage to the biggies later. Not great door but good door. Defense fund should net two thou after costs. Oooh, you’re tense,” he giggled, and began to massage my shoulders. “Relax. They’ll love you.”

The main room was full of bodies in T-shirts and baggy shorts, not packed but dispersed in a loose bundle swaying to a factory pound of bass and short-circuiting snaps like a bug-zapper. It looked no more political than any club on a week-night except that there were a few more women and the only go-go boys were virtual. The video screen over the stage displayed four dancers of various races and underwears stepping back and forth in separate panels; the panels suddenly rearranged themselves like cards in a computerized solitaire game. Once upon a time I had wanted to see my face up there, magnified, public, losing myself on the giant screen. But tonight I needed to regain face.

People noticed us as we passed through, a grim man getting rubbed and psyched like a boxer by his trainer. Nobody rushed over, but there was a constant turning of heads, a curdling along the edge of the crowd.

“Eckhart! Twenty bucks!” someone called out, Ned Wing hanging on an older guy who must be his Chelsea boyfriend. “Steep for a Monday, but we did it for you!”

Maura Morris was suddenly walking alongside me. I hadn’t seen her since the
Voice
appeared. “Hey, Ralph. You like the piece? Front page. Good picture. Hope you don’t mind what I said at the end.”

“Why should I? I’m autistic.”

She laughed. “That was a little harsh,” she admitted. “But I was using you to make my point, like all that stuff at the end. I really do think it’s time we get more ruthless. Break a leg up there.” She dropped back into the crowd.

She had no idea how ruthless “we” could be. I knew more about real life than that radical berry did.

Veronica aimed us toward a purposeful group to the right of the low stage. There was no backstage; everyone was out in the open: a lesbian techie in a headset; a beefy fellow in a battery belt with a large video camera at his feet; the gay cable reporter in incongruous coat and tie. Behind them, a drag queen in a red dress and gold beehive sat in a folding chair as if it were a throne. Squatting at her side, giving last-minute advice from a clipboard, was Nick.

“Ah. Here’s Ralph,” he said, calmly getting up, looking neither surprised nor alarmed to see me. He wore a mask of pure business. “Lady Remington, this is Ralph Eckhart.”

She rose, a slim, snub-nosed man made tall and stately by heels and hair. “You brave, brave boy.” She clutched my upper arms to embrace me at arm’s length, so as not to muss her breasts. “It’s an honor to lend my name to your cause.”

Her dress was a Soviet flag, the hammer and sickle at her shoulder, apparently chosen because tonight was political. If Communism had become camp since the fall of the Soviet Union, it should be no surprise that a murder charge could be camp as well. It was all a bad joke. It reduced me to a joke.

Nick introduced the reporter, who smiled and shook my hand like a politician. “A crime what they’ve done to you, Eckhart. A real crime.”

Nick gestured at the crowd. “Good turnout, Ralph. Yes?”

“Is Peter here?”

“No. He said he wouldn’t come.”

“What a surprise,” I said facetiously. But I was glad Peter didn’t come. I needed to do this alone.

“You going to speak?” said Nick, still playing dumb.

“I’ll speak. You bet I’ll speak.”

“Good. I hoped you would.”

Was he bluffing? Did he think that little of me? “You trust me up there? You don’t think I’ll blow it all away?”

He showed no trace of fear. He cocked his head and weighed me with his eyes, cooler now than he’d been on the terrace. He studied me like a road map.

“Can we start?” said the woman in the headset.

“Ten minutes,” Nick told her. “In case Channel Five sends someone. Do you need to take a quick leak first?” he asked me.

I did—anger did not block the anxiety in my bladder—but I suspected Nick had another motive. “Where’s the nearest toilet?”

“There’s one up here,” said Nick. “I’ll show you.”

He hopped up on stage. I stepped up and followed him along the Sheetrock wall. Of course. Here is where Nick will beg or cajole or threaten. He opened a door without a knob and followed me into a dank brown room like a deep closet. He stood at the sink while I went to the toilet in the rear.

“Okay,” he said. “It’s not everything we hoped for tonight. But it’s something, Ralph. It
is
something.”

The music throbbed outside. I stared into the rusty bowl with one hand propped against the wall.

“Bread and circuses,” I told him. “Without the bread. You once said that, Nick. You threw me to the wolves just to get yourself another damn circus.”

“I know,” he muttered. “But it’s all circuses now. You saw this crowd. It’s just another party to them. And they’re the ones who care. They don’t believe in politics. Politics is a bummer.” He cleared his throat. “So go ahead, Ralph. Tell them the truth. It’ll be what I deserve. You’ll only be telling them what they want to hear. That it’s all tricks and fakery. But you can’t deny that we’re in trouble and need to do something to fight back.”

I couldn’t piss; I couldn’t even think with my dick hanging from my fly. I zipped up and came out, shouldering my way between Nick and the sink to wash my hands. In the tarnished mirror, I saw his calm dark eyes, the mustache like a guiltless frown.

“An FBI snitch, Nick? Jesus. What’ll people think when I tell them that?”

“It’s not like it sounds. If Lovelace didn’t have me, he’d plant someone else, a foe instead of a friend. This way I put my spin on everything they know.”

I rubbed my hands more furiously. “‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’”

“No, Ralph. I’m full of conviction. I might use it badly, but I have conviction.”

“Then maybe you’re one of the worst.”

“I’m not. And you know I’m not. What I did was bad. But you have to learn to tell the bad from the worse from the worst.”

I shook my head at him. I quickly dried my hands.

Hurrying out on stage, I walked toward the muddy tremble of people dancing in the murk. I am here tonight to tell you how a friend threw me to the wolves. By which I mean the FBI, the media, and you.

Nick stepped down behind me. “Let’s do it.”

The techie spoke into her headset. The cameraman hoisted his machine and settled it on his shoulder.

The house music gave way to a pompous arrangement of “God Save the Queen.” The jiggling crowd subsided and tightened and faced the stage. I assumed the tune was Lady Remington’s intro, until the four video panels were filled with one large image. A clip of news footage: my arrest at the airport.

I’d never seen it before. I was stunned to see myself in handcuffs, my shaved head bowed, two glum detectives herding me into the flashes that were dampened on tape to a flicker of fireflies. The lines dividing the panels formed a set of crosshairs over my face. A classic image of modern life, I was mocked yet glorified by the tune that was also “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Twenty seconds long, the clip was on a loop, so I approached and passed, approached and passed, repeating like a spastic video game. The crowd watched without laughing.

It was a joke, I was a joke. But under the joke were genuine pity and fear. I glanced at the man who’d thrown me into that. He didn’t look at me or the screen, but worriedly scanned the crowd.

I was sorry Peter wasn’t here. Nancy too. In spite of all our harsh words,
because
of our harsh words, they were the only people in the world I trusted. Their presence might enable me to think more clearly.

Lady Remington climbed the steps and strutted serenely across the stage.

The screen behind her blipped to a new channel. The electric billboard was suddenly full of Lady Remington, caught by a closed-circuit camera in the deejay booth facing the stage.

“We must march, darlings!” She thrust her fist in the air, a Black Power gesture in quotes, ironic about its irony, a double negative that read as sincere for anyone who wanted sincerity.

“We know why we’re here tonight. Because one of us, a boy named Ralph, has been hit with a murder rap.
They
say he killed a right-wing closet case. Imagine. Well, I met him and he
is
butch. But murder? Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Although something else might.”

Laughter. Jokes did not need to be funny here; they only had to sound like jokes.

“But we know what it’s really about, don’t we? They—you know who I mean, and I think you do—
they
say we’re just a tribe of evil queens who run around killing each other. With guns or disease, they don’t care, so long as they can make us look bad. Tonight would drive them cra-zeeee. A roomful of queens pulling together to help one of our own?”

This is a lie, I thought. I am a lie. But with the lie and the jokes were the myths—we are a community, we have enemies—and in the myths were grains of truth.

Lady Remington continued to joke while she read the earnest letters of support sent by gay or gay-friendly politicos. Borough President Ruth Messinger called for justice—such an odd, forgotten word. Urvashi Vaid denounced the far right for using a gay man to attack gay women and then blaming his murder on another gay man, so that homosexuality was its own punishment. “Right on, Urvashi, like we’re a self-cleaning oven,” Lady Remington quipped. Council member Tom Duane declared that at a time like this, when our rights were besieged in Colorado and elsewhere, when we fought for the most basic medical funding, when our very lives were at risk, how tragic, truly tragic, it was that a homophobic culture set us against each other, first in misogynistic attacks, then on trumped-up charges of murder.

Flat political rhetoric, yet it had some truth. I was caught in a lie, but the lie contained a large truth: We were in trouble. I did not know how to kill the lie without harming the truth.

“I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “I won’t speak.”

“Chill,” said Veronica. “All you got to do is stand there and look injured. They’ll love you.”

“Nick,” I said. “You shouldn’t want me to speak.”

He gave me a surprised, sharp, worried glance. Then his fear dissolved in a grim smile, a do-what-you-will nod.

It was too late. Lady Remington was already describing me.

“Butch but not too butch. Caring but fun. Sweet but not sappy. One of us. Come out here, Ralph. Say a few words.”

Veronica gave me a push and I stepped up. A sound of wind in dead leaves blew me across the stage. I raced toward Lady Remington and seized her. Startled by my embrace, she let me hide in her silk and hairspray and muscular arms for a moment. I heard the applause. Not wild applause, but concerned, even sympathetic clapping. Can one hear sarcasm in beating palms? Lady Remington gently released me and stepped back.

I stood alone with only a mike stand in front of me. My hands went into my pockets, afraid to touch anything.

A sea of heads, a lake of people. Not just the idea of people reading newspapers or the sample of pseudonyms in Gayworld, but a massed fact of actual faces. They were silent. I couldn’t tell what they felt beyond courtesy and curiosity. Seeing foreheads lift toward something above my head, I turned around and saw it, a living billboard turning around to look at itself. I faced forward, yet continued to feel the electronic magnifying glass at my back.

It was a bad joke, but the joke included real emotions. It was a lie, but the lie contained a truth. The people who came to party tonight were also here for what I represented. Not for me, but for
something
I represented.

I fell back on what I’d originally intended to say:

“Words fail me. But thank you for your help. It’s good to know that I am not alone.”

I was not alone, and it was terrifying. To be the focus of so many eyes was like a blow to the head. It shook up more words and I automatically said them.

“I am innocent. In more ways than one. People keep talking about my innocence. But innocence is another word for stupidity, isn’t it? Okay. I was stupid. I slept with a Republican.”

People laughed, thinking I’d made a joke.

“But that was the least of my stupidities. The very least.”

I looked for Nick, blaming their laughter on him, but I couldn’t see him in my druglike rush of self-consciousness.

“But Bill O’Connor. He was the stupidest of us all.”

I rode a runaway horse of nerves and panic. I held on tight and said whatever came into my head.

“He wrote a shitty book. He could be a shit himself. But he was young. Maybe he would’ve gotten wise as he got older. Maybe not. We’ll never know. First he got flattered by the wrong people, made to feel important in ways it would take a stronger man to ignore. And then he got killed. I don’t know who did it. My lawyer tells me we might never know. His getting killed doesn’t mean we should forgive him. But it does change things, doesn’t it?”