Rat Bohemia (11 page)

“So I ran the tub and then lifted Gino up into it. Washed him off. Washed myself off. Threw out the sheets and remade the bed. Then I went home and changed and then I came over here.”

“Well I saw a client, just the other day, with cancer,” my father said. “A fifty-year-old man. We see this every day.”

“More and more people come into our agency needing home care,” my mother added.

That's when I started crying and screaming. My parents hate it when I cry and scream because I am a grown man and not supposed to ever act that way. To them it is a sign of how wrong and bad I am. What a bad seed I am. How disturbed.

“What do you want from us?” my mother shouted. “I don't even know the man.”

“Do you want to meet him? ” I asked, pathetically.

And for that moment, like a thousand moments before, I suddenly flashed, foolishly, that my dream would come true. I flashed that my father and mother would come with me to visit Gino and would ask him how he felt. They would ask me questions about myself too. They would come to a gay play and read a gay book and call me up in the morning when there was something vile on the television because
they have a gay child
. And no one is going to hurt their gay child as long as they still have air in their lungs. Because they love their gay son and all parents must love their gay children. They must not treat us like this.

My sister started in on a story about some student of hers with a terminal disease and something she saw on TV. My brother was pacing back and forth making business calls on the telephone and not participating in the conversation at all. Then my sister started talking about her trip to LA.

I've seen so many people die and where the fuck were their families? Our families want us to be destroyed. They sit around talking about the toaster-oven while we are doomed and they don't even mention it. David Wojnarowicz's brother flew in after he had died in order to attend the memorial service. The family “thanked” his lover for taking care of him. Who are they to “thank” us? We are the real family. They are just a bunch of cold-hearted killers.

“You complain about me, but it could be a lot worse,” my father told me during those twenty-five minutes of precious attention I received, that day in his office. “Some parents don't even speak to their homosexual children,” he said. “Some parents won't even let them in the house.”

The night after my breakdown, my brother left a message on my phone machine.

“Dave, this is your brother. I'm sick of this bullshit. You fucking asshole. Fuck off.”

They're so unaware that we are suffering. They've got it all wrong. They think we're pretending and mentioning it repeatedly just to ruin their day. Just to guilt trip them for something they didn't do. How could we do this to them?

Then I took a look in the mirror.

This property is condemned
, I thought.

That was the first night I had the sweats.

Last night was a beautiful night. Yesterday was a beautiful day. Rita called me up out of the blue to go over to Tompkins Square Park because the city had finally reopened it and everyone in the neighborhood was walking around taking their first look.

“God, it's beautiful,” I said.

And it was.

New paths, new drinking fountains that worked, new benches, new chess tables for old men. A dog run, bike paths, three playgrounds, and a basketball court.

“No rats,” Rita noticed right away.

First we walked around oohing and aahing about how peaceful and lovely everything was and then we started noticing past the surface, analyzing the situation. This process—from acceptance to critique—usually takes a New Yorker eight to ten minutes.

“Well, it's not like the three hundred homeless people who used to live in this park now have nice apartments,” Rita said. “But the Parks Department did do a good job with the rodents.”

“Out of sight, out of mind,” I said, thinking of myself.

“I just came back from my first Lesbian Avenger meeting,” she said.

“How did it go?

“Great. I thought up the slogan for the new banner.”

“What is it?”

“S.O.S.,” Rita said. “Suck Our Sisters, Suck Our Selves.”

The homeless were so gone. They were like anthropological relics. They were like me—exterminated. Mayans buried their dead
with water and plates of food. Archaeologists discovered that the plates lasted longer than their bones. Here and there a fragmented skull and piece of spinal chord. The memento outlasts the memory, outlasts the dead, the living.

“Why are you crying? ” she asked.

“It has to do with my parents,” I said.

“What? ”

“It's just that I want my mother to…” I was choked with tears.

“To be interested in you? ” Rita asked, trying to be helpful.

“No,” I said, really sobbing. “I wish that my mother…”

“You wish that she really wanted to know what you were doing? ” she tried again.

“No,” I said, trying desperately to get a grip. “I just wish that she really wanted to see me.”

There were no drug addicts in the park at all, which I attributed to the clusters of policemen at every entrance. Just a few, very demure homeless were sitting in the sun trying not to be noticed. Other, more acceptable residents walked around slightly dazed. They couldn't believe that something so nice could actually be for them.

“Midnight curfew,” Rita pointed out, reading the signs. “That's to make sure no one sleeps over.”

“Too bad,” I said. “The neighborhood is open until four in the morning. I guess we have to scamper back at twelve to our hot little apartments.”

“I wonder if they killed the rats or just chased them into the stores across the street,” Rita asked as we both sat down on a bench.

A monk in New York strode steadily across the park. A blonde girl was reading Turgenev. A dyke came by dressed in black, her
breasts under control. Two black men in white pants, two candles, and a dog. That skinny guy had a red backpack. The couple next to us was starting to coo. The boy whistled the Mister Softee theme song. One young woman had a cane. Another skimmed
Allure
. There was a stunned silence. The park was so clean it was only a dream. The homeless were out of consciousness now. Then I remembered that, actually, they're living on our front stoops now, but the landlords live in Nyack. I wanted a cigarette. We were all dazed. I could see the aesthetic beauty of the world, and I do have the desire to live. But there is not enough anger for everything that makes me angry. And there is not enough grief for my grief. Learning this fact/insight/lesson/inauguration/design is so painful. Because now, at age thirty-four, getting tired, having had my first symptom, I really know what it is I'm going to miss out on.

“What's going on? ” she asked.

“My foot hurts so much, I feel like my body weight is crushing it. I feel like it will never get better. My bones hurt. I can't breathe—there's too much pollution. My poor legs. Am I going to have to hobble like this from now on? I know you always bounce back for the first few years, but maybe I'll be the exception. I'll go on tour of the Bahamas as
America's shortest-living survivor
. Last night I had the sweats again.”

“What are they like? ”

“Well,” I said, trying to isolate it. “Right before I went to bed I felt really tired and sore. My bones hurt. And then in the middle of the night I work up freezing and then totally sweating, my bones hurting and the sheets wet. Just like in all the books. At least they got that right.”

“How about today? ”

“No sweats at all since then.”

“That's good,” Rita said. “What a relief.”

I would just rather that she told me that she didn't know what to say instead of searching around the universe for the one possible positive—the absence of pain at any given moment.

“Do you want to come to a party tonight?”

“Where?” I asked because I had been thinking about going to Eastside Sauna.

“In Brooklyn, in Dyke Slope. It's that girl Margaret. You know, she's a dark-skinned black girl, she works for the
New York Times
? Her lover is that blonde thing Killer fucked last year.”

“What's in it for me?” I asked.

“Some nice boys.”

“Black ones? ” I asked, just to annoy her.

“Seems like it, doesn't it? Or were you thinking about going to that sex club for HIV-positives only? ”

Eternity is a hooded skeleton, a human tiger with a butterfly on his scalp. A bespectacled burro waving a death's-head flag. Dried bread. A one-armed Inca with tattooed knees, his sister plays the mandolin with artificial fingernails. A uniformed pig holds his hand down a wood pile. The scarecrow is bleeding. My tongue is too big. There a swastika in red, white, and blue. A bag of gold. A blank, open book.

“No, I wasn't,” I said. It had never even occurred to me. Sex camp for the pariahs, please. “I'll come to the party early. Then I'm going to go out.”

Immediately I started trying to decide what kind of pants to wear. Should I wear my sexy dick-outlined black jeans which will make my legs swell up like lead balloons—or should I wear those
casual, drawstring African pants that all us swollen-legged HIV-POSITIVES wear to show how casual we are? Which one? Which one? Which one?

(In which Killer attends a memorial service.)

 

 

Sunday afternoon Rita stopped by, but I was still in bed with my new girlfriend Troy and had forgotten all about everything.

“How can you forget about a memorial service?” she asked. “Hey, I see you've got that new brand of glue trap.”

“Sorry,” I answered. “I didn't really forget. I just got vague.”

We walked over to Fourteenth Street and the river for Robert Garcia's memorial service which was being held at Meat, where I guess he liked to fuck. I know the area because I have a plant account right down the street. Plus Meat turns into the Clit Club every Friday night. Not that I go there that much now that I'm a little older, but that street has the most used condoms and used streetwalkers per square foot than any other strip of cement west of the Atlantic Ocean—which makes it noticeable.

“God, I feel so weird, I haven't talked to David in weeks. He's the person I first met Robert through. Have you? ”

“Yeah,” Rita said. “You have to call three or four times to get a response.”

“I guess he's in no mood to be the one to reach out.”

“Whatever,” Rita said. “I think he's going through that phase. You know, the envy of the dying for the living. If you're not the type who can brush it off, better not to talk at all.”

“But what if we get in a fight?” I asked, panicking. Thinking again of my long lost parents. “And he dies?”

“He will definitely die,” she said.

“I know,” I answered, exasperated at Rita's bullheaded position. “But what if we have a fight and he dies and nothing was resolved?”

“Nothing is ever resolved,” Rita said, tired. “That's one of those fake concepts. How can you resolve with a man dead at thirty-four? What kind of peace can you make with that? Lately I've been thinking that the conflict is for the best. Because then we are not pretending that anything about this can ever be reasonable.”

Walking into the club in the middle of the day was kind of depressing since, like most dives, it is just an empty room with lots of shadows. There were about thirty people up there, most of whom I recognized from David's ACT UP circles, including David himself, who was sitting alone in a chair with his arms folded tightly across his chest. People milled around uncomfortably for a few minutes until the service began, and then they just leaned against the bar and ordered beers because most of the women and the men had only been in that room before in association with beer and sex.

There's that strange pathology at memorial services where the person had to have been perfect. You're never allowed to mention any trouble or doubts you might have had about him. Robert was this tireless organizer and generally likable guy who had gone from being a Latin yuppie to a full-fledged radical. They showed television clips of him in a suit saying “Direct action works. It works.” And later pictures of him, sick, standing on a fire escape on Gay Pride Day looking over the passing ACT UP contingent and waving a sign saying, “Audre Lorde is Love.”

Then they showed all these slides of him doing this and doing that—usually at a demonstration or with his family in California or wearing some T-shirt with a slogan on it. But the unexpected
sideline was that many of the slides also included handfuls of our other dead. Peeking over his shoulder or deep in conversation or carrying the other side of the banner was inevitably someone we'd already buried. Someone I'd met through David or at a benefit or rally and who I knew for a fact was dead. Plus all the others that I'd never met, but the silent shifting of feet registered their forgotten absence.

The end result was that when the slides were finished and it was time for people to come up to the microphone and say what they had to say about Robert, no one had anything to say. What I mean is, no one wanted to talk. They just wanted to get the hell out of there. I saw Assotto Saint, skinny and drawn, saying to a friend, “Well, I'm still here.” Then, when no one had anything to say, he stood up slowly and just left.