Mirage

by Perry Brass

  I didn't know how important the Foundation had become to him. It was like a fantasy of Wright's that had come to life. He needed it. Now, he was solving problems for people, and that gave him a deeper sense of importance than deciding how deep to put in a basement.

  He emphasized how much he liked the idea of working with me. "You need an eye kept on you, Alan," he reminded me. After all, I was younger than he was—in both environments, and there was no telling what kind of trouble I could get into on my own. I'm sure he also liked that it was the Smith Foundation. His very own, named by and for himself. It gave him a sense, finally, of being in charge.

  But money worried me. The phone, more ads—and our own time and labor—cost us a lot. There were also payments on the house, which were heavy because of our low down payment, and the daily cost of living. Neither of us was used to scrimping, and I admit I couldn't learn to comparison shop if I'd spent three lifetimes on Earth. Alan had been a salesperson's dream, and so was I. I could be talked into buying anything. For this reason, Wright usually went with me into stores. Otherwise, I stayed away from them. All of this suddenly bothered me, even though by nature Alan wasn't the type to worry about money.

  Our cash was getting pissed away, and I didn't have many ideas about how to make more. I started to have fantasies of my own. After all, If we began to scrape bottom, what was going to keep us from crossing the line of the Straight-And-Narrow? I saw the headlines in the supermarket tabloids:

  GAY DESPERADOS FROM OUTER SPACE.

  Two armed men who claimed they were from the planet Ki, marched into the First National Bank of Commercial Hypocrisy, run by Fundamentalists, and demanded everything in the vaults.

  Okay, I admit, things looked bad here without dollars. In the land where the deer and the antelope played, they were the only ones who could so without money. I was getting anxious. We didn't have to worry about money on planet Home. We didn't even know about money.

  But the anxiety was spreading through me; I had no intention of learning how to sleep on a park bench. Perhaps, money was only a symptom; and my anxiety was about other things. Like time running away from me; or wanting something more than Wright could give me. Or needing to find myself as an adult person through somebody else.

  I thought about all of those things. But money seemed as good of a thing to pick on as any.

  "I think we should just ditch the whole idea," I said that morning. "We don't know anything about running a Foundation. It might be an easy way for someone to discover something about us that we don't want to let out."

  Wright's face darkened. The Foundation had been his idea, and he wasn't going to let it die easily. "That means we go back to being barflies all over Washington. Drifting about till the right person comes along—I'm not sure about that."

  I told him that I thought our ad in the Blade had brought a lot of responses, but none had been particularly promising. And I knew—absolutely knew—that some one was going to come. He might appear the way George Marshall had, in connection with the Foundation, or he might not. But chances were good that his coming would have little to do with it.

  "I think we should call the Foundation a loss," I said. "The best thing we've got out of it so far has been George. As far as I'm concerned, you and George can get closer if that's what you have in mind."

  "Sure!" Wright fired back at me. "So you can have an open field in Washington to screw around, is that it?"

  I told him I didn't mean it that way. "I just think you two have grounds for intimacy. Friendship, if you want to use the word."

  "Some intimacy—George is as cold as ice. And dry as those clay tablets. You've probably figured that out." Wright closed his eyes. He couldn't look at me when he said, "I think he's more interested in you. He sees you as his young Assyrian prince; that curly hair of yours. Maybe he's got the hots for Jewish men himself—they're just Assyrians to him."

  "Thanks," I said. "It's nice to be an Assyrian prince, and not just a Jewish one. But I still don't think he's the type we should bring back to Ki. There's something cold about him. It scares me. I don't think we should tell him who we are."

  Wright looked directly at me. "Okay. But I think he understands a lot already. There's a clear vibration coming from him. Even I can feel it and I'm not nearly as sensitive to these things as you are."

  "What about the Foundation?" I asked. "Seriously, I think we should ditch it. Maybe leave Washington; travel more. Something will come up." Wright shook his head. "Alan, those are just more blind alleys, and I think they're dangerous ones." He didn't want to leave Washington. We were establishing ourselves there. "The more we spread out, the easier it is to pick us off. Somebody in some God-forsaken-place is to going to start investigating us. Here, we're just two more men in an army of faceless researchers and bureaucrats. I think the Smith Foundation makes an excellent front for our operation. And when we do find someone, we will have this excuse to bring him into the house and keep him here."

  The Foundation phone rang.

  "Maybe you should answer that," he said. I picked it up, and he broke into a large smile, while I momentarily kept my palm over the mouth.

  "What is it?" I asked him.

  "Just a thought."

  "What?" I whispered.

  "That," he looked at me like a kid getting away with something, "we might actually be able to help somebody."

  I realized then that there was no point arguing further. The smartest thing to do was to become more serious about the Foundation.

  I made another appointment for the man who called, and an hour later we went to the bank and drew out a thousand dollars. Then we bought a used IBM clone at a stationary store on Pennsylvania Avenue. Wright started to set up a data base of all the AIDS service organizations in the area. We began with the Washington phone book, the Gay Yellow Pages, and a large Government directory of Washington.

  I got on the phone and began calling people, finding out exactly what they did for the men we wanted to help. "This is the Smith Foundation," I said matter-of-factly, as if they couldn't possibly not know who we were. The gay groups were the most helpful, almost naively so. "We saw your ad in the Blade," a cheery counselor with a deep Southern accent at the Whitman Walker Clinic on S Street said. "You guys have just been the talk of the town. We'd love to get together with you and talk about funding. By the way, where do you get yours?"

  "We're a private trust," I said, with so much earnestness he dropped the subject.

  "It sounds like you're doin' real important work!"

  I closed my eyes, and thanked him. I asked him for all the services they did, and a list of other organizations for our data bank. He graciously gave it to me. The hardest place was the VA. They made me feel that if you were a veteran with AIDS, you'd have an easier time skydiving through hell than getting help at a Veterans Administration hospital. The putz I got on the phone, who sounded about as straight as a safety pin, wanted credentials from me, on letterhead, with a copy of our license. "If you send the material, our Information Officer might help you. You can use our fax number."

  I took it down, then threw it away. We put another ad in the Blade. We got more calls, and did interviews with twenty more men. The interviews started to become fascinating in themselves. After a while I started to see a pattern running through them. It was upsetting. Distressing. AIDS, like a war, was something you only deal with on a certain level. You make up games and lies, you try to hope, try to hold back hopelessness as if it were the enemy itself. But at a certain point, these men stopped fooling themselves, and maybe that was the worst part of it all. It was when they stopped feeling that they had a future, that the future ran out for them.

  My own involvement deepened. It was like I had grown from being approximately eighteen years old to thirty-four and then to about a hundred—all in basically a few months.

  Men came to us who'd been on the streets, who'd been thrown out by families, roommates, girlfriends, boyfriends. I wanted to touch them. Hold them.
Tell them things would get better. I would be their friend, be there for them. I wanted that all to be very true: Yes, they would mean something to me, even if we'd only met a few minutes earlier.

  It was something I couldn't do on Ki. Because there we weren't allowed to lie.

  We began calling some of our men back. We started looking for them in the small parks behind the big office buildings that ran Washington. They sat alone on benches, pretending to read the same newspapers over and over. Wright visited them in flop house hotels off Capitol Hill, where they were dying in filthy rooms. This was a life he'd never seen, anywhere. Sometimes we ran into them in the bars. Usually, they came in at happy hour, when cheap booze was cheaper. They weren't in the young disco bars, where the cute young things went, but in the leather bars and the drag bars, where the street kids went in to hustle. They talked among themselves. They were embarrassed when they saw me or Wright. I guess they felt that a smoky dirty bar wasn't the right place for a sick man down on his luck. But I knew what loneliness was. I could smell it and listen to it. The men usually tried not to be noticed, just to blend into the walls.

  Even in our office, most of them wouldn't talk about what they had. Some of the more obviously gay men would, like they had dropped their masks a long time ago. Mostly, they called it "this thing," like, "I've got this thing. It's making life real hard, know what I mean?"

  The blacks tried to be cool. But you could feel their double humiliation and hurt: race and disease. The only people they had, their own, avoided them. The whites were haunted by poverty, and stories they thought once belonged to other men. But now they were a part of these stories. Stories about families that turned their backs on them, or waited for them to die. Stories about not being able to go to jobs, or trying to keep their illness unknown at work. Vomiting in a locked men's room two floors below their offices. Secretly taking prescription drugs. Trying to hide visits to their doctor on insurance forms. Trying to hide—period.

  Under their rage and anger and depression, they allowed us to help them. They had a lot more to give us than we had to give them. And it made them happier knowing we wanted to help—with no strings attached. At least for now.

  "This is mind-boggling," Wright said to me one evening, when three men were waiting outside the office to see us. "They're our friends, aren't they? God, I wish we could take them all back." Basically, we were only matching men with the services around that they needed. Sometimes we gave them emergency money out of our own pockets, or fed them. I even stopped worrying about money. It wasn't difficult to stop when I saw so many men around us who were so close to the edge.

  At first, all this seemed simple. We asked ourselves why hadn't they gone to other agencies when they had problems, or why hadn't others rushed to help them. But later we realized that the hardest thing to do when you're drowning fast—and you just don't want people to know how quickly you're going down—is to pick up your head and scream.

  Word about us traveled quickly. Soon I got a call from a Ms. Lucille Benson, with a high-pitched, irritating voice. DC Department of Social Services. "Young man, somebody showed me a copy of the Blade and I caught your ad. I wanna know, are you licensed by the Department?"

  To do what? I asked.

  "You should know, to offer help you must have a license."

  The word license reminded me of the VA. I told her we weren't helping anyone. "We're simply a research organization."

  "Fine, sugar, you're out of the woods. Research doesn't harm one single soul. The only problem is, now you need a Research License from the Department of Education."

  I told her not to worry, I'd look into it myself and hung up. When I told Wright, busy at the computer about the call, he was furious. "Isn't it ridiculous? You can't even help people on this planet without them sticking a noose around your neck."

  I decided I had to do something about this. I went around the block to a small copy shop that made cheap business cards and had one printed up that said:

  The Smith Foundation

  A Private Research Foundation

  No Affiliations with Any Cause,

  Group, Race, or Cult.

  I concluded the card simply with the telephone number we had installed for the Foundation. I tacked a copy of the card to the sign that Reggy had given us. This was certainly enough to confuse anyone: Holy Resurrection and the Smith Foundation all at once. But it made sense to me. After all, Wright and I weren't exactly what we appeared to be, either.

  Setting up the Foundation, in retrospect, was easy. It gave us an instant and fairly legitimate identity. In Washington, a city where people moved in and out, you needed such a thing. Washington, in other words, was not a town where it was enough simply to be a "resident genius." Your genuine resident geniuses either worked for the Government, or a Foundation.

  We also realized that secret was the worst thing we could get a reputation for. Washington disliked secrets; unless they were packaged by the Government. Those secrets were respectable. It was common in the bars to meet men and not have them tell you what they did. You weren't even supposed to ask. Sometimes they'd just grunt:

  "Uh, Navy...."

  "Defense."

  "CIA."

  Then they shut up and you shut up. It must have made sex more interesting, without going through a lot of bullshit about occupations. But even if you worked on a formula to blow up half the world, you weren't suppose to look diabolical. You were supposed to look normal. Regular. Guy-next-door-type. You could be a bomb-sucking dork, but you weren't supposed to stand out. That was part, Wright told me, of the Washington game—gay, straight, or indifferent.

  It didn't hurt for us to socialize. We had to get out there and look legal, and now that we had the Foundation, I began to like it again. I was used to being a party boy. I'd done it in New York long enough—at least as far back as my New York memory went. I could be amazingly good with strangers, sometimes even better than with people I knew. Certainly, people must have thought I was another pushy New Yorker, even if they didn't know I'd arrived in New York via a much more distant situation.

  The Smithsonian white-wine-spritzer party circuit helped a great deal. Cocktails themselves were pretty much out now in Washington, especially at cultural affairs. Wright, still having connections to the Smithsonian, got invitations. We went, and discretely gave out our cards. Usually, I was vague about what sort of research we did. The ingratiating-New-York-Jew part, that wanted to be liked, did not want to let people down. Wright though was usually more honest. If their faces fell, fuck 'em was his attitude. At a Sackler Gallery opening, I saw a group of very friendly-looking men in nicely cut blazers quickly dash away from him. A similar event happened at the opening of a Francis Bacon show at the Hirshhorn. It became apparent that even if the pictures on the walls were—one way or another—all about cock, that didn't mean that one single word for the "subject" could get into the air.

  The Corcoran Gallery was even stranger. After the famous "affaire Mapplethorpe," no one was going to rock any boats. I found several of our cards in a tall ashtray set up just before the exit.

  Usually, though, the young career women who seemed born in beige suits and pumps, and who came to the Capital to work in the job trenches, were willing to say, "Hmmm . . . interesting."

  Until I told them we did AIDS research: "Of a social nature. Not scientific. Just social."

  I was abandoned quickly after that.

  Had I'd said we investigated headhunting dogfuckers in the Upper Amazon, they might have stopped for a chat. But AIDS was sticky. It was a party stopper, if ever there was one. The Washington bureaucrats whose places remained eternal as the Pyramids weren't going to stick their necks out for it. I heard the story over and over. "Sorry, we don't touch that." Or, "Pardon the pun, Sweetie, but AIDS is the kiss of death here in Washington."

  It was half-fog, half-rain, late Friday night, mid-September—when we met Robert. A night that transformed Washington, made the city velvety, mysterious: a waving
ripple of crying street lamps as Wright drove the Honda up Massachusetts Avenue, past the majestic beaux arts facade of Union Station, then onto New York Avenue.

  For the first time in a long time, we'd been together in the evening—and bored. Wright suggested a movie. One of the revival houses was playing Deliverance, and he had a hankering to see it. "It's all about Burt Reynolds with his shirt off," he said. Suddenly on a whim, I thought why not go to the Eagle? Usually we took a taxi, easier than trying to park the car; but the city looked half deserted with people away, trying to squeeze in another weekend, before getting serious about fall.

  We approached the bar and saw groups of leather-clad guys milling around outside. Bikes and cars were jammed into every available space. Wright said, "Damn, we should have taken a taxi."

  I suggested a side street. They weren't the safest places. But with the two of us walking together, we figured we'd be alright. We circled several blocks a few times. Finally, we found a single space, just big enough for us in front of a dark building that looked like a warehouse. "How's this?" Wright asked.

  "Hope and pray," I said. We made sure that nothing in sight looked vaguely stealable, and locked the doors. We'd left our jackets back at the house. It was still warm enough. I got out and felt a desperate chill in the air.

  Fear?

  Sometimes, you can smell a bad situation. When you're gay, you learn to develop that sense. You smell fear the way animals can: the fear on others, and your own fear. And you hope—more than anything—that others can't smell your own fear on you.

  We started moving quickly towards the bar. I felt conscious of my feet on the slick pavement. They were vibrating, like they'd lost some connection to my hips or legs. It was almost midnight, and suddenly—despite the whim I'd had—I wondered why we bothered to come out. I looked up. A section of the moon like a thin, warning face in profile, was trying to peak through the dark haze. But the moon only managed for a moment; then the fog took over again. Three young guys approached us.