Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle (54 page)
Read Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle Online
Authors: Michael Thomas Ford
"Faster, Ned!" Alan screamed in my ear. "It's almost on us!"
"I c-can't go any f-f-f-aster!" I shouted back, the words choking me as I tried to get them out. "You have to," Alan said, his voice filled with terror. "I can feel it coming."
"L-l-let him g-g-go!" I shouted at the invisible monster.
"Ned!" Alan yelled. "Ned! Help me!"
Whatever was behind us gave a terrific pull, and Alan was yanked from the seat. Without his weight, the bicycle lurched forward, and I found myself speeding away. I turned, trying to see over my shoulder. All I saw was darkness, and in it, something huge and shapeless. Alan's voice emerged from the center of the darkness, high and strained as he called my name, and then it was cut off.
I woke up confused, not knowing where I was or what was happening. It took me several minutes to remember that I was in my bed and that Alan was not with me. There was no bike, no Silver to take us away from danger. But there was a monster. Oh, there was a monster. It was very real, and very hungry. And I had been unable to save Alan from its ravenous maw.
Ronald Reagan was laughing at us. His enormous head was rocking back and forth, his mouth open in a mocking grin and his shiny, perfectly-combed hair making him look like a Satanic version of the Bob's Big Boy mascot. As we booed him, he pointed his finger at us, shaking it from side to side, as if we were naughty children in need of a reprimand.
Behind him a phalanx of guards wearing gas masks marched, carrying machine guns in their yellow-latex-glove-covered hands. They surrounded a group of prisoners, men and women who had been cowed into a pen formed from barbed wire. Some of the captured wore black-and-white striped uniforms with pink triangles sewn to the fronts. Others looked as if they'd just been picked from the crowd and forced to join the others.
As the float passed by us, I couldn't stop staring at it. The sight of the people trapped behind the wire, their frightened, angry faces looking out at us as they called for help, made me want to jump on the truck and tear down the fence that held them in. I felt myself shaking as I beheld the grim tableau. When a man wearing a white T-shirt emblazoned with SILENCE =DEATH appeared before me, offering me a button with the same logo on it, for a moment I thought that he had come to drag me into that horrible prison.
It was June of 1987. Gay Pride weekend. Alan had been dead a year, and I was still mourning. I'd planned on skipping Pride altogether, but Jack, Todd, and Andy had insisted that I come. I knew they were tired of the brooding person I'd become. I was tired of myself. But nothing had been able to rid me of the rage and sadness that had planted itself deep within me following Alan's death. It had bloomed and thrived, nourished by a steady stream of alcohol and drugs, which I'd returned to following an absence of several years. Fed by the cocaine and, more recently, Ecstasy that I used to help me get through, my garden of pain had turned into a jungle, its vines and creepers twining themselves around my heart, slowly strangling it.
I looked at the button in my hand. ACT UP. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. I'd never heard of it. Then again, I had run as far away from AIDS as I possibly could. I'd stopped volunteering as a buddy. I no longer read the newspaper articles. I pretended that AIDS was over, that it had all been a hellish nightmare from which I'd now awakened. When Todd and Jack talked about their work, I tuned them out, nodding politely and never asking questions.
Oddly, Andy had been my greatest comfort. Ironically, given how he was making his living, for him it was as if AIDS had never existed. He never spoke of it, despite the fact that it had made him a very wealthy man. He was now on his fourth paid lover, a New York politician whose deep personal homophobia kept him from ever acknowledging his desires for men. He had, in fact, been the driving force behind some of the most virulent anti-gay legislation ever passed in the city, including the decision that shut down the gay bathhouses in 1995 under the guise of protecting the health of the public. Now he was dying, and in an attempt to have the life he'd long resented others having, he was paying Andy handsomely to reprise his role as Brad Majors, whose movies he was obsessed with. Because KS
had ravaged his face, he refused to leave his apartment, and so Andy's time with him consisted primarily of sitting in the man's living room while the two of them watched tapes of the films Andy had starred in and the politician tried to bring himself to orgasm. It was, as Andy said, a part with a limited run, as the man refused treatment for the disease he denied he had and was not expected to live much longer. Because he didn't like to talk about AIDS, Andy made a perfect companion for me. We spent a lot of time together, using the money Andy made to attend whatever events we wanted to. We also spent it on drugs, which we consumed with even greater relish than we did the food we ordered at the city's best restaurants. When Andy discovered Ecstasy, we'd begun to spend our nights at the clubs, dancing into the early morning hours while the tablets we placed under our tongues dissolved their sweet poison into our blood.
I'd stopped having sex, except with myself, and even that was done more out of routine than desire. Jacking off was about as exciting to me as brushing my teeth or spraying antiperspirant beneath my arms. When I did do it, I didn't fantasize about having sex with another man. I didn't really think about anything. I just kept applying friction, relying on my body's mechanics to do their job and eventually set the process of ejaculation in motion.
Surprisingly, my work had not suffered. Teaching was an escape, eight or nine hours a day when I didn't have to be with myself. The facts and stories I shared with my students crowded out anything I didn't care to think about. I distracted myself with elaborate lesson plans and dreaming up novel ways to get the kids interested in history. And it worked. I had quickly become one of the most popular teachers at Stuyvesant. My reviews were exceptional, and having just completed my second full year in the classroom, I'd been assured that tenure was forthcoming.
"There's Taffy!" Jack exclaimed, jarring me from my focus on the ACT UP button. I stuffed it into my pocket and looked at the float headed our way. It was sponsored by Wigstock, the annual drag extravaganza that had begun two years before as an impromptu performance in the East Village's Tompkins Square Park, and was now a Labor Day tradition for the city's fairest and freakiest faux femmes.
The float looked like some kind of crazed birthday cake, with three tiers draped in yellow silk and flowers everywhere. Drag queens decorated it like candles, dancing and lip syncing to Ohio Express's
"Yummy, Yummy, Yummy." Taffy was on the second tier, wearing high heels, a hot-pink beaded dress, and a wig so high it swayed as she shook her hips. Her impossibly long eyelashes fluttered madly as she pouted and threw handfuls of SweeTarts to the spectators.
"Taffy!" I called out, getting her attention. She beamed and waved, then held her hand up with the thumb pointed toward her ear and the pinky touching her lips, the universal sign for "Call me."
I nodded, knowing full well I probably wouldn't. I loved Taffy, and she'd been a great help to me after Alan died, but seeing her made me think too much about him. The two of them had performed at the first Wigstock, dueting on "These Boots are Made for Walking," and they'd been planning a big production number for the 1986 show. It was to be Taffy's first public appearance following her long-awaited sex change surgery, and they were going to perform "I Enjoy Being a Girl" from Flower Drum Song . Alan's death had also been the death of Bitta Honey, but Taffy had gone on with the show alone, dedicating her performance to Alan's memory and holding a minute of silence in his honor. I'd left halfway through the song, overcome with sadness, and had spoken with Taffy only a few times since. Suddenly it felt like the entire parade was a parade of memories. I turned to Andy, Jack, and Todd. "I think I'm going to go," I said.
"And then there's the pier dance," Jack said. "We got you a ticket."
"Thanks," I told them. "Not this year."
"You're sure?" Jack asked.
I nodded. "I'm just a little gayed out," I said.
"Okay," he said. "I'll call you later, though."
I left them and started to walk home. As I did, I stuck my hands into my pockets and felt something prick my palm. I'd forgotten all about the button I'd stashed there. I took it out and was about to toss it into a nearby garbage can. Then I stopped and looked at it. SILENCE =DEATH . The words struck me with their simplicity and truthfulness. I looked at the tiny hole the pin on the back of the button had made on my hand. A little drop of blood was welling up from the center of my palm, like a miniature stigmata. I returned the button to my pocket and continued home, thinking about the ACT UP float and how I'd felt seeing it. I thought about the clown like Ronald Reagan jeering at me, and about how he represented the feelings of so many Americans. It angered me, the indifference and blame. It angered me that so many people were dying for nothing, while instead of looking for answers, politicians and pundits were looking for someone to blame.
As I walked past the various booths that lined the streets offering everything from overpriced bottles of water to Pride stickers, I saw a young woman with an ACT UP T-shirt handing out flyers. I took one from her and read it as I walked. It was a call for volunteers. "Don't wait for someone else to do something!" it said in bold letters. "ACT UP! FIGHT AIDS!"
The following Tuesday, I arrived at the Lesbian and Gay Community Center on 13th Street to find the main meeting hall packed with people there for the ACT UP meeting. Taking a seat in the back, I looked around at the other faces. Most of them were young, white, and male. They were the faces I saw in the clubs and on the streets, handsome and untouchable. They seemed to me too young even to know who they were, let alone to be interested in political action, but they seemed determined to do something. The meeting began when a young man with a body built by hours in the gym stood up to speak. "I'm guessing that for a lot of you, this is your first ACT UP meeting," he said. "Can I have a show of hands from the first-timers?"
"Great," the young man said. "We want to thank you for coming out tonight. My name is Max, and as our name says, we're the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. We're fighting in the streets to get people to give a fuck about this disease."
His remark was met with applause and clapping. He continued. "We're fighting because nobody is fighting for us. The government doesn't give a shit. The churches don't give a shit. Well, we're going to make them give a shit!"
The passion behind Max's words reminded me of Harvey Milk. I hadn't heard such intense dedication to a cause in many years, and I found myself believing what the young man said, that we could change things by taking action. When he asked us to break into smaller groups for more discussion, I gravitated toward the group of which he was the facilitator.
"What we're looking for," Max said once we were gathered around, "is people who are willing to hit the streets to protest. This isn't an organization that writes letters. We put ourselves right in the middle of things. You might have heard about our Wall Street protest in March, where we demanded that the pharmaceutical companies stop making such huge profits from AIDS drugs. That was our very first action. Seventeen of us were arrested at that. We've also protested at the White House and the International Conference on AIDS, and we got Northwest Orient to reverse their policy on banning people with AIDS from their flights. Two weeks ago, we held a four-day, nonstop protest at Sloan-Kettering to demand clinical tests on more AIDS drugs. Those are the kinds of things we need to do more of. But this isn't easy. You could get arrested. You'll probably get arrested. So make sure this is something you're willing to get involved with, because we only need people who are really committed."
Max spent an hour with us, answering questions about what ACT UP was planning and how we could help. At the end of the meeting, I signed up to be part of the next action. I half hoped nobody would actually call me, and when the phone rang a few nights later, I was surprised to hear Max's voice.
"Hey, Ned," he said, as if we were old friends. "We're planning a protest for Friday in front of the Health Department. We want to snarl traffic at rush hour and get maximum exposure. Can you come?"
"School gets out at three-fifteen," I said. "I could be there by four."
"That's perfect," said Max. "Do you have an ACT UP shirt?"
"Not yet," I told him.
On Friday afternoon, I rode the subway downtown, my ACT UP T-shirt hidden beneath my button-down blue Oxford. When I arrived at the protest site, I removed the outer shirt and stuffed it into my backpack. Max was there, along with five or six other volunteers, stapling posters to wooden handles to make our signs. When he saw me, he shook my hand. "Thanks for coming," he said.
"What do we do?" I asked him.
"Take a sign and get ready to block traffic," he answered. "That's all there is to it."
I chose a sign at random. It was the generic ACT UP logo printed over a large pink triangle. I considered exchanging it for an image of Reagan with devil horns added to his head, but a part of me still felt kindly toward him for his work defeating the Briggs Initiative, so I stuck with the one I had. As more and more people showed up, our group swelled, until there were almost eighty of us. Right at five, Max shouted for our attention. When we quieted down, he said, "Just walk into the streets. Stop traffic. Don't move, even when they start blasting their horns. I give us about twenty minutes before the police show up. Let's go!"
