Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle (51 page)

 

"Having AIDS is news now?" I said, leaning against the counter and drinking my coffee. "Where would that fall, in between who's dating Heather Locklear and which supermodel is in rehab?" "Don't be a jerk," Alan said. "If this is true, it could really change the way people in America look at the disease."

"Sure," I replied. "Now they'll think that gay actors get it."
"Why are you being such a prick?" asked Alan.

"Because," I answered. "People aren't going to start caring about AIDS just because Rock Hudson has it. If he even does. They won't start caring until someone they really like gets it." "Like who?" Alan asked.

 

"I don't know," I said. "Mary Tyler Moore. Michael Jackson. Jane Pauley.

 

Someone…wholesome."

 

"What's more wholesome than Rock Hudson?" said Alan. "He and Doris Day are the poster children for wholesome."

 

"Not if he got it by taking it up the butt," I said. "People will turn against him like that." I snapped my fingers to emphasize my point.

"We'll see," Alan said.
"Twenty bucks says he denies it," I suggested.
"You're on," answered Alan.
I looked at my watch. "I've got to go," I said. "I'm meeting Jack and Andy in ten minutes."

"I'm glad Jack moved here," said Alan. "Especially now that you're done with school. He gives you something to do when I'm working."

"Hopefully I'll have a job myself in September," I said. "I've had three interviews at Stuyvesant and two at Bergtraum. One of them better hire me. Leave it to the New York City public school system to let you know at the last minute."

"You're a brand-new baby teacher," Alan reminded me. "All those grizzled old spinster schoolmarms have to say no to the jobs first."

"That makes me feel so much better," I told him.
"You'll hear next week," said Alan. "I'll bet you another twenty. Now go have fun at dinner."

"You have fun at rehearsal," I countered. "Tell Bernadette hello for me. I'll see you when you get home."

 

"I might be late," said Alan. "So don't wait up."

I kissed him good-bye and headed a few blocks over to Christopher Street and David's Pot Belly, a narrow sliver of a restaurant that had been there for ages and which served, as far as I'm concerned, the best hamburgers on the planet. On a summer night, it was the perfect place to eat and watch the constant parade down what might be, with the possible exception of San Francisco's Castro Street, the gayest thoroughfare in the world. Jack was already there when I arrived, seated right up front by the big picture window.

"How'd you score such a prime spot?" I asked him as I sat down.

"I had to wrestle a dyke bowling team for it," he said, indicating a table of four very large, mulleted women wearing jerseys with their team name—The Split Lickers—stitched in pink across the backs.

"I see Andy's late as usual," I remarked, opening the enormous menu and flipping through it. "He's in the bathroom," said Jack.
"Alone?" I asked.
"Be nice," said Jack. "You promised me you wouldn't give him a hard time."

I shut the menu. "Come on," I said. "Crosley died last August. It was what, Labor Day, when he had the next one?"

Jack held up his hands in mock surrender. "Don't get mad at me," he said. "I'm not his pimp." "How's Luke doing, anyway?" I asked him.
"Ask Andy," said Jack. "Here he comes."

When Andy joined us, I greeted him as warmly as I could make myself. He patted me on the back.

"How's tricks?" he said.
"I was just about to ask you that," I answered as Jack scowled at me over his menu.

"Things are good," he said. "They're still working on the apartment, so it's kind of a mess, but it should be great when it's all done. I'll have a party so everyone can see it."

I concentrated on my menu to avoid saying anything bitchy. Since Peter Crosley's death, Andy had moved into the spacious Central Park West apartment that had been one of his consolation prizes as the AIDS widow. He was currently spending a substantial portion of the money he'd gotten fixing it up, which to Andy meant tearing out all of the original fixtures and woodwork and turning the place into a showroom of modern design. Many of his neighbors, not to mention Crosley's friends, were horrified, but there was nothing they could do about it.

"I was talking about Luke," I said finally.

 

"Oh," said Andy. "He's okay. He got into this test for a new drug. AZT, I think it's called. I guess they originally made it to fight cancer, and they think it might work on AIDS." "One of my patients told me about that," Jack said. "Apparently the trials are almost impossible to get into."

 

"Yeah, well, he got in," said Andy, shutting his menu. "You guys want to get some buffalo wings?"

Luke—if I may intrude upon the story for a moment—was Luke Matthias. Unlike Peter Crosley, Luke was not well known in New York society. In fact, he was not well known at all. He was not handsome or powerful, did not occupy a fashionable address, and was possessed of neither a sculpted body nor a large penis. What he was was a mid-level accountant at Macy's, a man whose job consisted primarily of auditing payments made to foreign suppliers of women's wear. While earning his business degree at Fordham University he had, on a whim, enrolled in a course in Mandarin, and to the surprise of everyone involved had turned out to be very good at it. He'd stuck with it, and by graduation was fluent not only in Mandarin, but also in Cantonese.

This had gotten him his job with the fine firm founded by Rowland Hussey Macy, where he spent most of his time arguing with other accountants in Beijing and Taipei. Because of the time difference between New York and these cities, Luke worked from three in the afternoon 'til eleven at night. When he got off, he went straight to the Anvil, one of the city's more notorious gay watering holes, where he unwound by letting men insert their Crisco-slicked fists into his rectum and urinate on his face, often while forcing him to look up at them by pulling on his Geoffrey Beene tie.

Luke's willingness to accommodate some of the more rarified sexual proclivities of his partners ensured that he never wanted for erotic fulfillment. But at finding someone he could have dinner and take in a movie with, he had been less fortunate. The passivity that served him so well in his nighttime pursuits manifested itself as pathological shyness during daylight hours, and the men in whom he was interested seldom even knew he was there. Coupled with his overall averageness, this was not a recipe for romantic success in the competitive world of gay New York.

The upside was that Luke had, during his seventeen years at Macy's, managed to amass an impressive amount of both stock and savings. And because he was afraid of having nothing when he retired, he had managed to hang on to most of it. His expenses were few, and the rent on his one-bedroom apartment on East 78th Street was impossibly low due to his having taken over the lease from an elderly aunt who had lived there for some fifty-two years before her death.

In August of 1984, while trying on a pair of loafers in the Macy's men's department and considering whether his employee discount made the $135 shoes an acceptable purchase, he noticed a small spot on his ankle. Unable to rub it away or pick it off, he had at first thought it a bruise, possibly sustained the previous evening during an encounter with a gentleman who had traveled to the Anvil from the Bronx solely for the purpose of forcing someone to lick his scuffed motorcycle boots while he spat on them from above. But when it did not vanish after a few days, and in fact seemed to divide and multiply into a tiny cluster of spots, Luke had gone to his doctor and sought his opinion on the matter.

The diagnosis, when it came, had changed his life in unexpected ways. Understandably believing that he'd been handed a death sentence, he had decided that since fate hadn't seen fit to provide him with the life that he wanted, he would now purchase it for himself. With the determination of someone who has long been deprived, he undertook a campaign of retail therapy, the culmination of which was a two-week stay at a beach house on Fire Island. He stocked the house with every vice that might appeal to the handsome men he hoped to attract: drugs, alcohol, food, music, and several well-appointed bedrooms that he put at their disposal. He then opened his doors to all who would come. The results were glorious. For two weeks he was the center of attention, getting anyone he wanted simply by setting out a bowl mounded with powder or uncorking a bottle of Krug 1976. He danced all night to the Communards, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Baltimora, taking breaks every half hour to get fucked in the hot tub by yet another big-dicked boy who wouldn't have given him a second glance back in New York.

The party climaxed on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend with an all-out orgy that would end with the house trashed and a young man from Hackensack dead on the beach from an overdose of some unnamed drug. In the midst of it, while snorting a line of cocaine that he'd sprinkled the length of the erection belonging to a porn star who called himself Jet Rocket, Luke had looked up to see Andy standing in the doorway of his house. With the lights from the deck limning Andy's body in gold, Luke for a moment believed that an angel had come to carry him to heaven. He'd stood and walked toward Andy with his hands outstretched, only to trip on the living room's shag carpeting and fall, landing at Andy's feet.

Andy, who had gone to Fire Island to mourn the recent loss of Crosley, had rented a house some distance from Luke's. Attracted by the noise (and the rumors of free drugs), he'd taken a walk over there to meet the man he'd heard so many stories about. Seeing him in person, he'd recognized a potential partner in his new enterprise, and had stayed around long enough to get a fairly good estimate of Luke's net worth, which, even after the expenses of his Fire Island binge were deducted, was not insignificant. Even more attractive was the substantial life insurance policy he'd taken out some years earlier on the advice of his father, who at the time had been thinking ahead to the welfare of his unborn grandchildren.

A deal was quickly struck, and the two men returned to New York on Monday afternoon with the understanding that until Luke's death, Andy would treat him in almost every way as he would an actual lover. This included moving Luke into Andy's apartment, which was nicer, although they maintained separate bedrooms. The sex, when it took place, occurred in Luke's room, so that Andy always went to sleep in clean sheets.

On the night that I met Jack and Andy at David's, Luke and Andy were approaching their one-year anniversary. The engagement had gone on longer than Andy had expected, which I knew was irritating to him. I, however, was pleased, and not just because it gave me some small measure of satisfaction to see Andy uncomfortable. I liked Luke. Unlike Crosley, he was someone I felt deserved better. His only sin was being not quite marketable enough, and since I'd felt that way myself many times in my life, I sympathized. The several times I'd met him (on one of which he'd told me the story I've just related), Luke had struck me as someone who had much to offer the right man. In choosing Andy for that position, I suppose he had gotten what he wanted, but I had a feeling he sometimes regretted the Faustian pact he'd made that night.

Hearing that Luke might be going on a new medication, I couldn't help but press Andy for more details.

"When does he start taking the drug?" I asked him.
"I don't know," he said irritably. "He just found out this week that he got into the trial."
"That's great," I said. "Maybe he'll beat the virus then."
"I guess he could," said Andy. "Where's the waiter?"
"Stop it," Jack mouthed at me from across the table.

I reluctantly dropped the subject as Andy located our waiter and we ordered. As we waited for the food to come, Jack prevented any further goading of Andy on my part by turning the conversation to me.

"What's the name of the show Alan's in now?" he asked.

 

"Song & Dance," I said. "Bernadette Peters remembered him fromLa Cage and suggested him for the role."

"That's the one by the guy who did Cats , right?" Andy said.
"Andrew Lloyd Webber," I said. "Right."
"I remember Crosley saying he heard some of it and it was terrible," said Andy.

"Alan says it's fantastic," I said, ignoring him and speaking to Jack. "You've got front row seats when it opens in September." I looked over at Andy. "I'll get some for you and Luke, too. He loves musicals, as I recall."

"Did I tell you guys about the nut job who was assigned to me this week?" asked Jack as the waiter appeared with our buffalo wings.

 

"I thought you weren't supposed to call them nut jobs," said Andy.

 

"Yeah, well, there's no other word for this one," Jack replied. "He thinks the ghost of Judy Garland gave him AIDS."

 

"How'd she give it to him?" I said. "In a box?"

Jack stripped a chicken wing of its meat. "She appeared to him," he said. "He was at the St. Mark's Baths, giving some guy a blow job, and he looked up and it was Judy Garland's face looking down at him."

"He was blowing Judy Garland?" said Andy, licking blue cheese dressing from his fingers. "I told you," Jack said. "Nut job. Anyway, he says she just smiled at him and he felt something inside of him change."

 

"Why would Judy Garland give him AIDS?" Andy said.

 

"Revenge?" I suggested. "Maybe she hates all gay men because we made her sing ‘Over the Rainbow'

 

so many times."

 

"Judy Garland is the cause of AIDS," said Jack. "What a great theory. We should send that to the Times

."
"Was it old Judy or Judy from The Wizard of Oz ?" asked Andy.
"Good question," Jack said. "I'll ask him when I see him next week."
"So," I said, "was it worth moving to New York?"

Jack nodded. "I like working for the hospice," he said. "It feels like I'm really helping instead of just watching or reading about what's going on."

Much to my delight, Jack had decided to come to New York in March, when he was offered a job as a counselor at Hope House, a hospice for people with AIDS. The move allowed him to escape what he said felt like a ghost town back in San Francisco, as well as put him nearer to his parents, whom he missed. Now that he was in the city, our strange little family was back together, which made me happy. Despite my feelings about Andy's recent behavior, I still cared about him, and it was nice to have Jack around as a buffer on the occasions when we butted heads.