THE PRETTIEST STAR
The Prettiest Star
Carter Sickels
HUB CITY PRESS
SPARTANBURG, SC
Copyright © 2020 Carter Sickels
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cover Design: Luke Bird
Interior Book design: Meg Reid
Front cover image © Roberta Lo Schiavo / Millennium Images, UK
Author photograph © Amie LeeKing
Proofreaders: Kalee Lineberger, Ryan Kaune
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sickels, Carter, author.
Title: The prettiest star / Carter Sickels.
Description: Spartanburg, SC : Hub City Press, 2020
Identifiers: LCCN 2019046338
ISBN 9781938235627 (hardback)
ISBN 9781938235634 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: AIDS (Disease)—Patients—United States—Fiction.
GSAFD: Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3619.I27 P74 2020 DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046338
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
Hub City Press gratefully acknowledges support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Amazon Literary Partnership, South Carolina Arts Commission, and Chapman Cultural Center in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition
HUB CITY PRESS
186 W. Main Street
Spartanburg, SC 29306
864.577.9349 | www.hubcity.org
for José
Hello, Mother.
Your son is dying. You knew—no, don’t hang up.
Your son is dying.
—Karen Finley, “A Certain Level of Denial”
Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.
—Robert Frost, “The Death of a Hired Man”
Contents
April 20, 1986 New York City
Life on Mars?
Sharon
Jess
Brian
Sharon
Brian
Jess
Sharon
Brian
Jess
Brian
Jess
Brian
Jess
Sharon
Brian
Jess
Rebel Rebel
Brian
Jess
Sharon
Brian
Jess
Sharon
Brian
Sharon
Jess
Brian
All the Young Dudes
Sharon
Jess
Sharon
Jess
Sharon
Jess
Brian
Sharon
Sorrow
Travis
Starman
Acknowledgements
April 20, 1986 New York City
He went out with his camcorder. The sun was just beginning to rise. He left his place on Fourth Street, between A and B, and walked west, passing the park and empty lots and boarded-up buildings with broken windows and graffiti-sprayed storefront metal gates. Sidewalks were littered with city souvenirs: an empty Coke can, a greasy paper plate, crack vials with balloon-colored tops—red, green, yellow, purple. Hardly anybody was up this early on a Sunday. An old man swept church steps. A wino dug through a trashcan, and a sturdy mule-faced woman with a floral-print kerchief tied over curlers walked her little dog. Crackheads huddled in a doorway. Two pretty guys in jeans and leather jackets and boots crossed the street, chirping like excited birds. Probably still coked up from a night out, bodies exhausted, alive.
Record everything, Shawn told him. Even my death, he said, especially my death.
He saw the city through the eye of his video camera. The new morning light exposed the grime, the gum-stained sidewalks, garbage cans spilling over. But the city was hushed and golden as prayer. As the sky behind him turned pink, he walked toward a silvery blue.
He didn’t know the last time he was up so early. Or walked so far. When he first came to New York, he barely slept, too worried he’d miss something. He walked everywhere then—too scared to ride the subway and too broke for cabs. He wanted to understand how the city was laid out in a way only a real New Yorker could. He wanted to know where he was. To feel like he belonged.
It was 1980 when he arrived. He rode a Greyhound from the hills of Ohio, and all he brought with him were a couple of changes of clothes, a few cassette tapes, and three hundred bucks. He was eighteen. Now he’s twenty-four. In AIDS years, does age even matter? Before New York the only funeral he’d ever been to was his grandfather’s, a man he hardly knew. In the last two years he’s been to nine—all men between twenty-five and forty-five. How many others does he know who are sick? They don’t always tell each other. He doesn’t want to go to any more funerals.
It was a ridiculously long walk, but he didn’t care—he needed to make the journey. The camera was heavy, and a dull pain rippled down his shoulder and spine. He took breaks, stopping along the way to rest his legs and catch his breath, sitting on stoops or leaning against bus stops. A lifetime ago, he played baseball. Shortstop. His body was invincible. All he knew of pain then were aches from pulling a muscle or something equally inconsequential. Now his body was no longer his own, taken over by various ailments: shortness of breath, sudden aches, blisters in his mouth. He shouldn’t complain. He’s been spared, so far, of the Kaposi sarcoma lesions. He’s not going blind. Not losing his mind. He wakes in the mornings and gets out of bed and his legs work and his heart beats. But he knows how things go, how quickly they shift, take you away.
A couple months ago, a fever consumed him, a crackling in his lungs. When Annie took him to the hospital, he thought he wouldn’t come back out. The doctor barely spoke to him—another faggot taking up bed space.
He stopped in Washington Square Park. A few dealers were already lurking around the perimeters. He sat on a bench, looking up at the park’s marble arch, where pigeons perched. Hundreds or thousands of birds. The arch looked grand and beautiful against the brightening blue sky. This was New York. Suddenly, the pigeons lifted into the air at once, a dance of gray and white beating wings. They soared overhead, across the park, and then changed direction and came back, together. They landed on the arch, and stood still again. It was like they’d never left.
He crossed Sixth Avenue and headed into the winding web of the West Village, where they’d lived together. The last of the darkness had lifted and the city was awake, awash in sunlight. The sidewalks squirmed with people. Taxis and graffiti-bombed delivery trucks rumbled by. A woman wearing too many coats talked on a pay phone and gestured wildly, holding an urgent conversation—but was there anyone else on the line?
He wandered the crooked streets like a tourist, walking by brownstones and shops—a hat shop, a frame shop, a pet shop with puppies in the window. He recorded all of it. He stopped outside their old apartment building on Charles Street. He never felt like he belonged in the Village, where the gays with money lived. Shawn didn’t have money either, but he’d landed in a rent-control apartment a do
zen years ago. They were together two and a half years. They lived on the second floor, a corner apartment. Their bright pink curtains had been replaced by industrial beige Venetian blinds blocking the windows like prison bars. Everything in this city reminded him of Shawn. It was too much.
The West Village used to be where you went to see manicured, muscular, moneyed men. Now, it was turning into a hospital, a graveyard. Ghosts glided beside him. He passed one ghost pushing another ghost in a wheelchair, probably neither over forty, but their sunken faces and shriveled bodies were that of very sick, ancient octogenarians. The one in the wheelchair had glassy, sightless eyes, his head tilted toward the treetops, and his companion, who was pushing the wheelchair, looked out from a face ravaged by a hideous map of purple-black lesions. Another emaciated ghost-man leaned on a cane. Two others held hands, their eyes big and dull and resigned. City of ashes, city of bones.
Record everything.
When he reached the West Side piers, he sat on a ledge, and gave his shoulder a break from the camera. A pigeon flapped its wings but didn’t fly away. It stood its ground and stared at him with unsettling orange eyes. His first couple of years in New York, this was a different landscape—crowded with men sunbathing, shaking their hips to Donna Summer, writing poetry, checking each other out, finding dates and lovers and quick fucks down by the decaying edges of the docks. Not many guys came here now. Too afraid. A couple of boys turning tricks planted themselves and waited; others headed up to Eleventh Avenue. The sunlight reflected on the water, and the current lapped against the piers and over the wooden posts sticking up like submerged trees, reminders of another time.
The last two weeks of Shawn’s life were a blur, but also creaked by painfully. He’d lapsed into demented babbling. He had a tube shoved down his throat. He died in the hospital, alone. At the moment of Shawn’s death, instead of being at his boyfriend’s side, he was standing in the hallway staring at a vending machine, waiting for a paper cup to fill with thin bitter coffee.
He no longer went out, not even for work. He’d lost his job. Nobody would hire him now; they’d see his sickness; they’d know. Annie, his roommate and best friend, said she would help with rent and take care of him, but he didn’t want that. He wanted…to leave.
For a long time, he sat there watching young guys, many of them already infected, hustling for johns, as tugboats and barges moved like giant fish across the Hudson. He thought about Shawn and the other men he’d loved. The morning gave way to early afternoon, and the cool air warmed until the sun felt hot on his face. The video camera sat on his lap, turned off. Nobody knew he was here. Nobody glanced his way. He was already turning into one of the thousands of ghosts. It wouldn’t have been so hard to finish things off.
He’d heard about others going this way, taking control before the virus did. He read the headlines, heard the whispers. They leaped off the Brooklyn Bridge, or swallowed pills, or used a rope. If you waited too late, like Shawn, then nothing could be done—you suffer in a hospital bed, die alone.
But now the urgency wasn’t there, or, a different kind of urgency had taken hold. The drop off the pier wasn’t going to kill him, although who knew what sharp objects lay beneath the surface. Maybe the current would sweep him under. The contaminated, filthy water might kill him, but that would take too long. Anyway, he was already contaminated. He could swim along the river, floating, buoyant. Or dive down and force himself to hold his breath. But he knew how the body would fight, do everything it could to survive.
The water looked frozen. Seagulls screamed and circled. Behind him the constant hum of traffic. A couple of kids walked by, one carrying a boombox on his skinny shoulders, and the beats rippled out across the afternoon. He was thinking of the place he left behind. His grandmother, his little sister. He was thinking of green hills and the clean smell of baseball fields and the light-filled woods on a summer day. His mother. His father, who he had not spoken to in years. For the first time in a long time, he wasn’t afraid. He walked to the edge of the piers and looked to where the tiny green lady rose from the water like Jesus, holding up her flame, welcoming the poor and the tired. He couldn’t jump. He couldn’t let go.
Life on Mars?
Sharon
On Sunday we go to church, like we do every Sunday. Like every Sunday, my husband sits beside me. We’re in our usual spot—five rows back, center aisle. Our daughter Jess sits in the row behind us next to my mother-in-law Lettie, who never misses a service.
The church is small and old. Behind the pulpit and on either side of the building, stained glass windows fracture the morning sun into shards across the dark walnut pews and the maroon carpet, reflecting in the gold plates where we drop checks and dollar bills.
“Look around! God’s light shines.” Reverend Clay reads his part from the bulletin. He stands in the same place where my father used to.
We dutifully respond: “The darkness disappears and gives way to light.”
The congregation is sparse, glaring gaps of emptiness. This is how it will be through spring and summer. Now that Easter’s over, people have absorbed enough religion to carry them through to Christmas. Birth, death, resurrection. Those are the days people remember.
Reverend Clay lifts his arms and we rise as one. The old widow Anita Brewer plays the opening chords to “How Great Thou Art” with great passion, her eyes squeezed shut like she’s in pain. It’s one of Lettie’s favorite hymns, and I hear her from behind us, drowning out everyone within a three-row radius. She is off-key, practically shouting, Then sings my soul, my Savior God to thee. Travis glances over, the edges of his bristled mustache curling up, his eyes saying, That’s just how my mother is, what can you do? I try returning his smile, but my mouth feels stiff, like my jaw is wired shut. A son’s first love is always for his mother, that’s what they say isn’t it?
Travis rests his hand in the middle of my back. He smells clean and minty like mouthwash. Sundays are the only days I see him dressed up. For him, this is just like any other Sunday. He doesn’t know about the letter from our son. Back at the house, folded up in my jewelry box, it is my secret, my cross to bear.
When the hymn ends we stay standing, except for Anita, who remains seated at the organ, her twiggy fingers now still. Someone coughs, then the crinkling of a wrapper. The reverend holds out his cupped hands in supplication and looks up: Let us go forth in peace, may God be with you. He sounds muffled and far away, like I’m sinking underwater. The letter came on Friday. After I read it, I wept. I prayed to God to give me an answer.
We bow our heads. I keep my eyes open. The faded, thinning carpet. My navy flats, Travis’s dress shoes with the tassels. His hand still on my back. He stands close to me, breathes easily. A soft, sad silence thumps in my head. I will have to tell him. When? There will never be a right time. Reverend Clay says, Amen.
Unlike most of the congregation, I’m not a native to Chester or even to Boone County. I grew up in Columbus, the state capital. After it seemed like the last of the cancer had been removed from my mother’s body, my father asked the Methodist bishop for a new appointment, some place away from the city, some place rural, small, quaint, and when a position opened up in Chester, my father moved us, believing southeast Ohio was close enough to the Appalachian mountains, where my mother grew up, that she would finally be happy. I was fifteen.
On the way to our new home, Father had to pull over for me twice. Embarrassed, I hunched like a dog by the trees and vomited, not used to the winding roads and lurching hills. As we got closer, there were fewer and fewer houses. No more blocks of apartment buildings or clusters of stores. Instead: stretches of cornfields and hilly green pastures where rust-colored cows stood and watched us drive by. I felt displaced but not uneasy. I was eager for change, for a new start. My father drove with both hands on the wheel, and looked freer and more at ease than I’d ever seen him. He wore sunglasses, tan slacks, and a canary yellow short-sleeve shirt with blue diamonds across the front linked like paper
dolls, and he pointed out a river that ran alongside the road, a hawk soaring over a barn, trees spangled with pink and white flowers. My mother looked out the window and did not speak.
Chester United Methodist Church welcomed us with open arms. My father, a kind but aloof man, delivered positive, uncontroversial sermons. He did not preach fire-and-brimstone or talk politics from the pulpit. Small town ways of life were new to him, and he enjoyed them. We lived in a house owned by the church, and my father built birdfeeders and took up gardening. And, like the lilies and hyacinth he planted, his child also blossomed. Back in Columbus, I’d been timid, easily lost among the many hundreds of students, a lonely child, but at Chester High, I was the new kid, the minister’s daughter, a city girl. I quickly found a place. Cheerleader, choir, yearbook staff, prom committee. I did it all, and I was happy.
My mother did not find happiness as my father had hoped, and a year after we moved to Chester, the cancer returned. When members of the church found out, they descended upon us, kindly but with purpose, the women especially, an army of angels. My mother had not befriended these women, though, Lord knows, they had tried. Now she was too weak to shoo them away: they fluttered in to clean, do our laundry, and feed us, especially to feed us.
I was not there for her last breath or for much of her dying, which at first was slow. The cancer had been hiding in her for months, years, then returned suddenly, ferociously. Church members attended the funeral, and for a long time after, the church ladies continued to bring us casseroles and homemade bread, pies and cakes. Leading the army of angels was Lettie. She often sent food over with Travis, her youngest son. From the beginning, Lettie showed me the kind of love my own mother couldn’t, or wouldn’t.
After I graduated from high school, Father moved back to Columbus. For him, Chester was just a few years of his life, a time overshadowed by pain and loss. For me, Chester is my home—a home built out of family, friends, church, community. I believed for so long it could not be broken.
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