by Paul Lisicky
It’s not like she wouldn’t have wanted to come along if she knew how to give up the things she loves, or the habits anchoring her there.
Roll Call (Fellows)
Tim, Marty, Helen, Nick, Jackie, Andy, Mary, Jordan, Alicia, Brian, Nancy, Dariusz, Deborah, Duane, Jim, Richard, Mary, Bob, Itty, Danella
Danella
Danella and I become good friends right away. Instantly she is my big sister, though she is black and I am white. Like me, she grew up in the Philadelphia area. Like me, she even lived for a time in Cherry Hill, and sometimes we are startled that we ended up here, in a place that resists the bourgeois comforts of our former homes and all their unspoken dedication to security and upward mobility. Her younger brother is gay and maybe our magnetic rapport feels like home to her. She calls us Laurel and Hard-On. We laugh a lot about the most juvenile things. We laugh until we’ve made ourselves almost sick from the laughter, which is its own kind of drug, though we don’t do drugs, except for smoking the occasional joint she rolls. There is a fireplace along one wall, too large for the small, tight space, too grand. Light it, and the burning logs slam heat against the walls. It roasts everything in its patch, the arms of the sofa, the vases, the wood beams overhead, until it’s all too hot to touch. My skin feels as if I’m on the way to getting a fever; my throat’s scratchy, even if I’m sitting on the other side of the room, as far from the hearth as possible. I drink glass after glass of cold water. Danella puts on Inner City, Neneh Cherry, De La Soul, Soul II Soul, Queen Latifah, Naughty by Nature’s “O.P.P.,” “Optimistic,” by the Sounds of Blackness. We spend a lot of time dancing in loose, awkward bursts—half-jokey, half-serious about it, talking with intense interest about the other Fellows or Georgie Woods and Sally Starr, the Philadelphia television personalities of our childhood, which couldn’t possibly be of interest to anyone else within fifty miles. That’s probably why we do it: to seal our bond. At the counter, Danella jams long carrots into a juicer, filling up its tub and collector with an orange almost too vivid to look at. Back in Philadelphia, Danella’s brother has AIDS. He’s been so close to death he could almost drink it.
Polly
Polly and I instantly become younger together—as soon as we meet there’s no doubt she is my other new sibling. She is a painter in Town, her work drawing from elements of folk art to make her own constellation of images. Animals, performing animals, human hearts, doors, some of it tiny, tiny—all of it an indirect response to the crisis in Town, and outside, but never engineered. The work is wonderful in that it isn’t willed. Though the two of us are capable of holding weighty conversations about depression, addiction, art, family, and relationships, we are also capable of cracking each other up. We meet one night at a party at Danella’s place. She’s pretty, vivacious, talky, someone who’d never hold back the naughty thing everyone in the group wants to say but won’t. I love it when she laughs, her laughter reaching a high place as if she’s singing. Then there is her regular spoken voice, tuneful too. I’m not surprised to find out she’s a wonderful singer; she grew up in a family of singers. She instinctively harmonizes with any song playing in the room, a third above the melody, a descant. We entertain ourselves by planning an imaginary convocation called Yawehlu, a Town-wide event in which everyone sings the Catholic folk hymns from the late 1960s, accompanied by a hundred twelve-string guitars, led by a stylish nun with a face out of a Modigliani. But not before coming up with the names for possible theme nights at the A-House, the main gay bar in Town. One is “Creamed Corn,” which we find hysterically disgusting, and neither of us feels the need to explain why.
The Bottom of the List
Within weeks I figure it out: everyday chores are harder here than elsewhere. To get a dimmer switch fixed. To make a copy of a 200-page manuscript. To get a new alternator for my car. To get the lock fixed on my PO box. It can take a whole week of my time, tracing my options, setting aside hours for the appointment when I finally get one. If I complain or ask the wrong question, my name goes to the bottom of the list, or is conveniently forgotten until I ask and ask, until I’ve made a pest of myself, and I feel resentful for not counting enough to be seen. After the job gets done I forget about the stress. Until there’s a reason for it to start all over again.
White Noise
People’s voices are louder in Town. They swell and boom and laugh in a way that is not just for the people in front of them but also for those outside that circle. Sometimes it’s too much, and if I’m stressed, or worried about bills, I might even want to say, Knock it off! Occasionally the laughs are accompanied by hand claps, which sound like they might be about warding off skunks, which have the habit of wandering up the center of Commercial Street. Part of it is that there isn’t a freeway nearby, no city-sized ventilation systems. The air makes a shape for those voices, holds on to them, the way it does cigarette smoke and other dangerous things.
Hungry
When I’m riding with my friends down Commercial Street—and it’s inevitably my female friends, but sometimes my straight male friends too—I have the habit of growling quietly at the occasional sexy man whenever we’re passing him in the car. In the aftermath I feel flushed, sheepish, possibly no more grown-up than Scooby-Doo from the head shop. It’s a performance meant to make my friends laugh. It never accomplishes a whole hell of a lot, rarely even a smile or a look of annoyed curiosity from the intended recipient. But deep down the impulse is less about trying to attract anyone than it is about showing my friends I have a sexuality too. They’ve been allowed to have that, all their lives. They’ve been allowed to hold hands in their high school halls; they’ve been expected to bring boyfriends and girlfriends home to meet their parents. They know what it’s like to see themselves in movies, books, and on TV in forms other than pornography or some well-meaning movie of the week, so instructional and tentative it’s cringeworthy. They don’t know what it means to hide, or understand how secrecy goes deep in your blood, so that secrecy and desire are a unit: you don’t get one without getting the other. And HIV is a hungry ghost: it wants to take away our sexuality before our health.
Sometimes I catch my straight friends scrutinizing me as if there’s something to learn in my reactions, and they need it to understand themselves. They’re watching someone grow up when they’ve been grown-up for too long. I don’t exactly mind letting them see that I’m a good ten years behind them, a hormonal teenager in adult skin. And I don’t mind being a teacher, just as long as they remember they’re not in control of the narrative.
Sun City
At this point Town is a haven for the sick. Well, not just the sick, but people about to be sick, people who haven’t shown any sign of illness aside from their positive test result. I assume they’re in Town out of choice. They make a vibrating metropolis of a beach town, with its social services, excellent state health insurance, and the AIDS Support Group, which is the fourth beating heart of Town (the Work Center, the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House, and the head shop being the other three). It’s the East Village drifted north, or the South End drifted east. I assume people have left good jobs, cashing out life insurance policies, living off their credit cards, in order to spend their last years in a place of camaraderie, beauty, and lowered stress. Almost affordable rents (at least in winter). A retirement community. Say, Sun City, Arizona, but for young men in their twenties and thirties.
(Are there actually old people in Town? Yes, but they’re nearly all straight, Portuguese American people. As for gay men: old gay men don’t exist in these times. You’re ancient and rare if you’re forty. The gay component of Town is completely young, but the young people have the physical problems of their grandparents.)
But not everyone has chosen to be here. Lenny Alberts, the Town doctor, talks about men being disowned, pushed out of their homes, fired from their jobs after being diagnosed. They end up here, on a strip of land surrounded on three sides by water, because they have no other place to go. It could be that some of t
he people here hate ocean air, hate the stone quiet of the winter nights, hate the A-House with its buckle-y dance floor, more slope than flatland. They miss city museums, galleries. Noise and clamor, multiple languages, people of all colors, not just white people. A subway into a different part of the city, for example, Flushing or Sheepshead Bay, where they could go to a restaurant and eat a dish with a name they might struggle to pronounce.
Three-Way
I have never been around so many queers in one place before. Some would use that as a reason to stay single—why tether yourself to one person when you could spend successive nights with him and him and him and him? I, however, respond to this plethora of men the way I do when looking at the menu of a Greek diner: I point to the veggie burger, slam the menu shut, and push it across the table so I won’t be psychically overloaded.
Which is another way of saying: I want a boyfriend.
I’m well aware that one of the reasons I want a boyfriend is to signify to others—particularly through the catwalk that is the main street of Town—that I’m lovable. A boyfriend is as much a public pact as a private one. And somehow I have gotten the notion that I need to be with someone else in order to be happy. It didn’t start in Town, but someplace earlier where relationships were presumed to be a duty of growing up, like buying insurance or a first car. Maybe this comes from growing up near Philadelphia, where single people are usually looked at with caution and concern, and family life is all.
So what stance to take on? Or do we not choose our stance, and it is written in our childhoods, or in our DNA, long before we’re in the world? Is a boyfriend someone to love, or someone to be loved by? All couples, straight or queer, position themselves along that fault line, though they rarely talk about it. I know how to do the first, but the second part makes me nervous, like an amateur. It silences me, actually. Dogs know how to be loved, but they are rare like that. For humans it’s easier to turn one’s eyes to someone else than it is to bear another’s eyes on you. Those eyes come with expectation, wanting. Those eyes say, You might leave, so I will grasp on to you and do everything I can to make you feel.
As for the possibility of illness being a third party in a relationship? Well, imagine waking up one day with new sores on your back, tongue creamy with thrush. You can’t even see your way to the bathroom. Your throat hurts. You’ve been feeling like your old self for weeks, staying up late, none of that dizziness when you get up from the chair, and now you’re about to be in a bad patch, which might just be your final stretch. It’s a big enough job to take care of yourself: it’s already ten full-time jobs. How could you bear to catch the pain in your boyfriend’s eyes, his desire to make things better? “Fuck better,” you say aloud one day, just to test him, just to hear how it sounds in the air, and he weeps and stomps and tears a painting off the wall, all the while apologizing for his outburst. You want to tell him to go, but he’s too lost in you to go. Is obligation murder? Too much to go wrong, too many feelings to be hurt. And the immune system—stress of any kind suppresses it. So the two of you tend politeness the way you tend the garden outside the window. The roses thrive, there’s no scale or blight on the leaves, but your relationship? It doesn’t die, though you never asked for a three-way with an illness.
Forty-Nine Degrees and Sunny with a Light Wind from the Southwest
I can’t go to the post office or the A&P without running into someone with an appearance some call AIDSy—a little dark humor. He might be by himself, struggling harder than usual to get down the street with his cane. He might be twenty-nine years old. He might be in a group with others, whose apparent health only sets off his facial wasting, his sallow skin, his dry hair, which refuses to respond to any hot oil treatment. He’s a skeleton with a layer of skin stretched over it. He might not have looked this way last month when he was doing dead lifts at the gym, so I make sure not to let shock show on my face. Or sympathy either—that would be degrading, condescending, a belief that there is a hierarchy of conditions, or simply two states: health and illness. I don’t say, How are you? I never say that unless the person wants to talk about being sick, which is hardly ever the case. He’d rather talk about the weather, so I do, enthusiastically, perhaps too much so. I tell him all about the cold front and the possibility of tides three feet above normal by the end of the week. I say good-bye as if I’ll see him tomorrow, locking his bike to the rack outside Town Hall, and I’m required to believe that as much for him as for myself. I must pretend that exchanges of this sort are absolutely routine, or I’ll simply turn into a stressed-out mess, or become so numb that not a single sensation will pass through the membrane of me.
California, I’m Coming Home
But we might wonder if AIDS, in addition to transforming gay men into infinitely fascinating taboos, has also made it less dangerous to look. For, our projects and our energies notwithstanding, others may think of themselves as watching us disappear.
LEO BERSANI, Homos
My friend Nancy tells a story about Key West, a place she visits once a year. In some ways it’s Provincetown’s sibling, but its gay community is dissolving without being replenished. The living have had enough. They’re cashing out or breaking their leases, settling north on South Beach or in Fort Lauderdale, where they’re buying and renovating two-bedroom concrete-block homes once intended for retirees. When a certain server doesn’t appear at the beginning of the tourist season, it’s said that that person went to California as no one can stand to say one more person died. Have you seen Ray? Ray went to California. Where’s Ivan? Ivan? California—he went to California. Richard, Steve, Jamal, Kenny, Toro, Juany—they went to California.
4
Paul
I wonder if my mother knew she was setting me up for trouble by naming me after her twin. Paul, who instantly dispersed into myth while she was left with none of the qualities you could put a name to. Paul, the perfected, the sweet, the funny, the gifted, the athletic, the effortlessly social—so rare no living human could ever measure up to him. To me, the name meant death, the one so good he was expected to be crushed and taken. I suppose my mother wanted to conjure him up by speaking his name once again. I suppose, too, she couldn’t speak that name without putting me in danger somehow. Could she have cultivated that endangerment? It’s always easier to love the departed one, the love purer, of a higher octane. It is an elixir when so much else is tasteless and weak, tea when it hasn’t steeped long enough. Certainly she couldn’t ever have said good-bye without imagining that being the last time, and certainly I must have done what I could to minimize the good-byes. Not just for her but for me too—who needed anxiety? Imagining a warm, calm bath filling around me, though I was always a nervous boy. To be nervous was to be her, or else to draw it out of her. I could be the dead one for a while.
She was afraid of my being the dead one.
The two of us were so close, death was all we could see in each other.
Vanishing Twin
When my mother is many months pregnant with my brother, an accident happens when she and my father are on their way to the lawyer to talk about her mother’s will. They’re in a nearby parking garage; water gushes down her legs as if it’s vinegar, into her shoes, running down the ramp in a clear stream. Instantly they speed to the hospital—could it be possible to have a fourth miscarriage? My brother is delivered, but she knows that there is more baby inside her. She is convinced there is a twin in there, a dead twin, which Doctor Litz, her obstetrician, doesn’t deny, but doesn’t actually agree with either. Nevertheless, he describes for her the phenomenon of the vanishing twin, which dies to be absorbed into the uterus’s walls. Sometimes that vanishing twin will be compressed into a flattened piece of parchment. She doesn’t say if parchment comes out of her, but she knows, in spite of my brother’s birth, that the story isn’t finished. Story equals parchment. My mother will keep looking for twins, whether they’re inside or out, and every possible twin, me included, is bound to hide, love, merge, separate, disap
pointing her.
Failure
Maybe my mother walks down her Florida street thinking others are saying, There’s that woman, mother of a son she’s ashamed of. What did she do wrong? And is that what it’s like to live with head hung low, too lonesome to socialize with women her own age, who instantly pull out pictures of daughters-in-law and grandchildren, as if there’s no other way to give each other value, currency. If she worries about that, maybe it’s a way to stay close to her mother, who lost friends after her divorce trial got picked up by national newspapers. (“She could sell a dead horse to a mounted cop.” My grandfather on my grandmother.) Funny in the context of the newspaper, but not when you have kids who can see it in print, hear it spoken. And a lot less funny after your husband’s suicide. (Girl pointing to another girl outside the family house: “See that window? That’s where the man who killed himself lived.”) It makes sense that my mother craves boredom more than anyone else I know, to the point where it stops her from searching, from finding new interests. What’s boredom but invisibility, power, the freedom to move among strangers without anyone making a target of you?
Isn’t that what I want too?