Rat Bohemia (16 page)

“I'm so tired of this,” he said.

Then we each moved on and said the same thing to someone else.

A couple of hundred people showed up which seemed like a lot, but actually it was very little. Especially when you consider the scope of David's reputation. There should have been more, at least. I know that he wanted his funeral to be the catalyst for the revolution. Who doesn't? And with each AIDS funeral that possibility always lingers. But you can tell within the first ten minutes that it is not going to go that way. People were not furious. Just exhausted.

Finally, Ira drove up with a van and Manuel and some others lifted out the coffin. It was white, like cake frosting, with light blue trim. That really surprised me because I knew that David was Jewish, so I had expected a plain pine coffin like the one my mother
had. But then I realized that Manuel had done the shopping and that tradition is something he just couldn't be expected to know. For the first time, I felt guilty. Maybe I should have done the shopping. Isn't that my responsibility, as a Jew?

A bunch of big, strong gym queens in tiny cutoffs lifted the coffin onto their shoulders and all two hundred of us walked behind it up First Avenue. There were some Radical Faeries with bells on their toes, but most people just held those awful candles. Some people were carrying his books. Then I thought for the first time that his sales would probably go up dramatically for one day, now that the
Times
obituary had come out. Too bad they never reviewed him while he was alive.

There were not many observers on that strip of First Avenue as we walked past some funeral homes and into Tompkins Square Park. We ended up in the void where the bandshell used to be and everyone stood around while the event's organizers laid out a metal frame. They placed David's casket on it, right under a tree. Then they opened up the casket.

First he looked very familiar and it felt good to see him. I wondered if death was just getting too easy for me, or if seeing him dead was actually the peaceful thing. But then there was this wafting of embalming fluid and it was horrible. It didn't smell like dead, rotting animals. It smelled like chemistry, or the inside of the Xerox store. It smelled like something really awful for your lungs that just made everyone want to run away. But we all stayed and got infected by it and kept staring at him, lying there.

It didn't take long for the junkies and homeless who hang out in the park to come over and check out what was going on. There were young guys and girls with beers in paper bags looking at his body. You could see them wondering about themselves since a lot of them have HIV too, or other things like poverty and confusion, which also guarantees a short life.

A bunch of Latin kids on bikes started riding around the body and they acted like they'd stared death in the face before because there was no awe in their curiosity. I noticed that the embalmer had covered up David's KS with makeup and somehow this was the most upsetting part of the whole scenario. It brought him back to the state before he was splattered by it, which reminded me, suddenly, of how he looked before he was really dying. The makeup made it all so palatable, peaceful. Cinematic.

Manuel stood up and read a poem that was pretty rambling and, frankly, a little boring. Later he sent me a copy without a note.

Manuel was crying so uncontrollably that between his sobs and his accent, I couldn't hear most of the piece anyway. I just watched him, like a spectacle. Next on the program were three people reading selections from David's books—all of which were somber. I always thought that his books were funny. But I guess you can't do that at a funeral. Following that, a guy from ACT UP made a political speech. Then a couple of friends said good-bye in different ways.

I was thinking over what I wanted to say. I had been trying to come up with something since before Dave was even dead. But nothing ever popped into my mind. It wasn't until I was standing there, with toxic lungs, that I realized that I had nothing to say. I realized that I was very, very angry at David when he died. Our relationship was so one-sided. He never thought about me until I was right in front of his face. Is that awful? To want mutuality from a dead man? I did not want to get up there in front of all that authentic, if convoluted, feeling and pretend things had been different than they were. I too have grief.

So, I passed.

Killer did get up though and said some sentimental things that actually moved me. So I had my catharsis. By proxy.

“I remember a story David once told me about his childhood,” she said. “He was always telling stories, especially toward the end of his life. And I guess that, as a writer, that was the best way for him to convey his feelings. Anyway, once when he was about eight and his sister was about ten, they went to their aunt's house on Long Island and spent the night in a tent in her backyard. Being city kids, there was some anxiety and concern about sleeping ‘outside' and David was particularly concerned about spiders.

“After they pitched the tent, he decided that the best way to protect himself and his sister from these spiders would be to build some kind of obstruction. So he went back in the house and got a broom and swept a foot and a half area all around it. Then they collected stones and bricks and pieces of wood and built a little fence around the swept area. But, still not convinced that this was protection enough, David and his sister jumped up and down, up and down singing, ‘Out spiders out. Out. Out. Out.' And then he finally felt safe enough to go to sleep.

“I keep thinking,” she said, “about how he equated health with going to sex clubs. So that even when he had real problems with his legs, he would go and let everyone know that he had gone. Make a big deal out of it. I guess that ever since he was a little boy, David needed rituals. He needed magical thinking and mutual experiences. He very much wanted to live and he needed to feel that he had done everything he could to take care of a situation, even if it was unmanageable.”

The sunlight whispered through the petals of rickety old survivor trees. The park looked really beautiful.

The next act was a flute, followed by the requisite recording of Nina Simone played off of someone's boom box. By this time in the proceedings, people started to look at their watches because they had places to be and death is not enough of an anomaly.

Then someone announced that David's father was there. This made his few real friends turn around in surprise because everyone knew how much his father had hurt him. He turned out to be this graying Jewish lawyer in his mid-sixties. Kind of upper-middle-class. He was wearing a summer suit and a tie and really he was the only person in the park wearing formal dress. He was totally out of place. I was kind of surprised that the old man would show up at something like this. Show his face at this late date. But that thought was quickly replaced with the realization that he had no understanding of what we knew or felt about him. He did not believe that we existed. He did not know his son had relationships.

Dave's dad walked up to the front of the crowd and stood between us and the coffin. He didn't look at Dave while we were all watching, but he did stand next to his son's body. Quiet shapes, under the tree. Then he took this folded piece of paper out of his breast pocket and adjusted his glasses.

“My son, David Gabriel Berman, was born on February twenty-second, 1958. George Washington's birthday. We promised him that all his life, his birthday would be celebrated as a national holiday. But then they changed the law and George Washington's birthday was no longer celebrated on February twenty-second. David accepted this without complaint, just as he later accepted having AIDS without complaint. David graduated
magna cum laude
, Phi Beta Kappa, from Columbia University and lived for a year in Portugal and for a year in Rome, Italy. I am sorry and will always be
sorry that David is no longer with us. So long, Dave.”

There are rarely any parents whenever we all meet. And their sudden appearance immediately deprives us of our collective adulthood. We know they are against us and it is so hard to maintain stature in the presence of your fiercest opposition. Even when we are so beautiful and strong.

In the silence that followed, nobody even gasped. Some people looked at each other and raised those eyebrows, but most of us were not surprised. We're so used to it. We're so used to parents who show up at the last minute and never took the time to know their child. Who have no idea of who they are talking about. We suffer them silently.

We took Dave's father personally because most of us know our families would do the same. The most common link between all gay people is that at some time in our lives, often extended, our families have treated us shabbily because of our homosexuality. They punish us, but we did not do anything wrong. We tell each other about this all the time, but we never tell the big world. It is the one secret not for public consumption.

We'll stand up proudly on television in slave collars and penis tucks, but we will never speak out publicly about what our families have done to us. It is too true.

After Dad, a gay guy, a real queen who had gone to Columbia with Dave, read the Kaddish and all the Jews started to cry. What a switch from Dad to hear this quiet, gay Jew in hot pants and a tallis, whine our friend's dark death in a five-thousand-year-old tongue. We are old. We do exist. We can mourn. We do have language. We still have that. Finally, I was able to be afraid.

Post-funeral is one of those still undefined moments. Sometimes you rush off to another appointment and the whole thing only hits you that night, in bed, or during a vaguely familiar feeling at the next funeral. Sometimes, though, we all go off for drinks.

The day of Dave's funeral was, weatherwise, a great one, so I decided to take a stroll downtown looking for a comfortable spot in the beachfront cottage called my erotic imagination. And, after all, that night did become a balmy night. Everywhere I turned, people were chattering with pleasure through open windows and there was a clatter of forks against plates. Beer bottles against glasses.

I walked over to this specialty cinema on the other side of town because I had vaguely heard that there were some gay movies from Cuba playing there. I thought that maybe a certain Cuban might be waiting in front.

Having an hour to kill, I took a seat in the rear garden of an old-fashioned West Village restaurant and sat alone at a round, green table, ordering a green alcoholic drink. The place was totally empty and I was feeling strangely elated, perforated. So, feeling very private, I decided, on a whim, to forgo the margarita and order a Coors beer instead. Now, the Coors boycott had been on for so long, due to their support of right-wing causes, that I never in my life actually tasted one. I was looking forward to the experience, but still felt a little strange when the bartender served it up in the can. I felt a little ashamed, sitting there drinking a can of Coors.

As the drink progressed the novelty wore off and I began to feel weird. I got up from my chair and chased down the bartender, who
was reading a newspaper in the cool inside, to ask him to put it in a glass. By the time I walked back, glass of safely anonymous beer in hand, I noticed Muriel Kay Starr seating herself at the next table,
New York
magazine in one fist and planter's punch in the other.

I hadn't seen her in person in years—only photos in magazines of all stripes. At some point in the early eighties she had been the girlfriend of Lila Futuransky, a dyke about town who was later charged with murder but had the charges dropped under mysterious circumstances. Muriel had gone off to the ashram, and that was the last any of us had seen of her until her pictures started popping up in those magazines. David hated her. He was very, very angry about something having to do with something in her books. I just never paid attention when he started to rant and rail. If he hated her so much, why did he follow her so closely?

“This is a community,” he used to say. “A community of enemies, and we have to pay very close attention to each other if we want to stay alive.”

When she first noticed me she was visibly nervous. She'd gotten pudgy and middle-aged, but she still knew how to dress. Her wardrobe revealed hidden wealth. Something nice and simple that fits well and that I've never seen in any store that I can afford to shop in. After an awkward realization of no way out, Muriel accepted that she had to talk to me and we fell into that false intimacy that comes up when you're drinking in a bar. It turned out she was just there by accident having come from a condolence call, so we did start to talk and I told her David had died.

She was stunned.

“I can't believe nobody called me,” she said. “I can't believe Amy never called me.”

“Who's Amy?” I asked.

“His publicist. I can't believe no one told me.”