In the City of Shy Hunters

by Tom Spanbauer

  Gay, he said. He’s gay. We’d better take him in.

  My breath in. My breath out. Mother’s nerves.

  I’m gay too, I said.

  The brown ambulance guy looked up at me. His face was round, and he had a diamond in his queer ear.

  Me too, he said.

  * * *

  ALL THE WAY to Saint Vincent’s, red and yellow lights flashing, siren all around us, speeding light, darkness, speeding light. Rose and I hanging on to each other inside a New York siren.

  Another New Yorker.

  The earthquake started in Rose again. Rose’s arm over my shoulder, my arm around his waist, his wet burgundy T-shirt, FUCK JERRY FALWELL FUCK JERRY FALWELL FUCK JERRY FALWELL. My other arm around in front of him. I held Rose so tight.

  Who knows how long the earthquake passed through Rose.

  Then for a moment the shaking stopped. Rose sat up, tried to wet his lips with his tongue, but it was no use.

  Will? Rose said.

  We’re almost there, Rose, I said.

  Will, Rose said, I’m going to fuck the cardinal.

  Just try and lie back, Rose, I said.

  And the president too, Rose said. And Nancy, Rose said. And Oliver North.

  Rose? I said.

  I’m going to fuck them all, Rose said. Infect them all, Rose said. I’m going to kill them.

  Rose, I said, Just be quiet, I said, We’re almost there.

  Then: Rose, I whispered, You’re not even allowed to say that.

  You mean kill the president? Rose said. Then he yelled it: Kill the president! I can’t even say I’m going to kill the president?

  From the ambulance guys up front: Hey! What’s going on back there! Just four more blocks! Hang on!

  Rose’s eyes were red rings around yellow surrounding black, way gone, not on the premises, the sweat coming off him like a faucet.

  Suddenly Rose’s fist was at my shirt collar in nothing flat and I was spun around, pressed down onto the stretcher. Rose’s grip around my neck; there was no breath. My head up and down, up and down, on the mattress.

  Fuck you, Rose said. Fuck this whole fucking racist patriarchy. I’m going to fuck God, Rose said. Who we think is God.

  Ronald Reagan up his flabby butt, Rose said. I’m going to fuck him.

  Nancy the first lady his wife, Rose said. I’m going to fuck her while I got my foot up his ass.

  Then on down the hierarchy, Rose said. Congress, Jesse Helms, Orrin Hatch. Not just fuck them. I’m going to split them open and make them scream and beg for more. Then I’ll shoot my nasty viral load up their lower intestines.

  The House of Representatives, Rose said. Every sphincter split open, fucked deep.

  Then on to the leather queens in the Pentagon, Rose said. Bend over, guys, spread ’em!

  When I’m done with the politicians and the military, Rose said, I’m starting with religion.

  The pope and I, Rose said, Are going to play Hide My Big Black Polish Sausage.

  Then on down through the Vatican, Rose said. Bishops, cardinals, monsignors. I’m going to fuck them.

  Hasidic Jews—the chosen people—what fucking arrogance! Rose yelled. Dilate those assholes so far, they’ll use their yarmulkes for butt plugs.

  Khomeini and the fundamentalists, Rose said. They’re too used to having cock up their butt, so they are going to chant Praise Allah as they suck me off.

  Then there’s the Mormons, Rose said, And the Baptists, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  Going to fuck them, Rose said, Every fucking thin-lipped dry-skinned tight-assholed honky motherfucker.

  Fuck them, Rose said. I’m going to fuck them.

  My hands were on Rose’s hand that was gathering up my white shirt into a noose.

  Rose! I said. Rose! I can’t breathe.

  When I’m done with this white male Ponzi scheme, Rose said, All that will be left is a huge pile of fucked dead white meat.

  My open palm slapped Rose hard in the face. I was about to return with a backswing but Rose grabbed my hand and let go of my throat.

  I sat up, palm on my throat, breathing up all the air I could get.

  Fuck, Rose! I said. You promised me, I said, I can’t breathe.

  Rose’s eyes opened way up, the breath inside him a rattle. He looked down his arm at his hand, looked up and around, looked at the ceiling, the siren. The charcoal color of Rose’s face was the skeleton poking through.

  Will, Rose said. My God.

  I have AIDS, Rose said.

  White all around Rose, white ambulance, white stretcher, white sheets, white white white. Rose ashen black. His eyes with a ring of red, yellow, the black serpent coiled up in there. Rose’s beautiful lips, cracked, burnt.

  My finger on the inside color of Rose’s lips.

  Rose, everything’s going to be all right, I said. Everything’s going to be all right.

  But it was not the truth.

  THE AMBULANCE STOPPED and the back doors opened. Both the blond guy and the brown guy held out their hands. Rose didn’t get up, kept sitting and sitting.

  Then: Please! Everyone! Move to the side, Rose said, bracelets clack-clack. I need some room.

  I got out first, helped Rose get his leather-tooled studio flats onto the back step, then to the asphalt.

  Rose’s arm over my shoulder, my arm around his waist, Rose and I walked through the flashing lights. Above the double doors: EMERGENCY ENTRANCE. When the doors closed behind us, just inside, before Rose could get to the wheelchair, the earthquake hit Rose again and I couldn’t hold on.

  Rose, a mountain tumbling down, a tree in the forest falling, the world crumbling in, a dark heap on the shiny green-and-brown tiled floor, unrelenting white hospital light above us, all around us. The little scream that gives it all away. The fluorescent insect sound. A shit-spray sound and running brown shit on the back of Rose’s navy blue sweatpants. Drops of shit spray on the shiny green and brown tile. Nurses and doctors running all over the place, yelling things.

  In nothing flat, Rose had an oxygen mask on. It took four men to lift him on a stretcher. A nurse stuck a needle in his arm hooked to an IV, and I stood in the bright shine alone, the urine ammonia medicine smell all around me, as they wheeled Rose down the hallway, down and down and down through the swinging doors.

  Rose’s shit spray on the shiny tiles.

  Frozen moments in time. If we could unfreeze them.

  A nurse or an orderly or some kind of hospital guy came up and stood next to me with a clipboard. His left wing tip was right next to Rose’s shit spray. He looked like Dr. Kildare.

  Insurance? he said.

  Four drops of yellow brown, then a smudge.

  Do you have a napkin? I said, and pointed.

  Dr. Kildare looked down at Rose’s yellow-brown shit spray on the shiny green and brown tiles.

  Dr. Kildare pulled his wing tip away fast.

  Nurse! Dr. Kildare yelled. Nurse!

  THE CLOCK ON the wall was round white with black numbers and black hands. Four-twenty-eight. Above a bank of tan leatherette chairs, a painting of a river and a sunrise. Industrial beige carpeting. I sat down in one of the chairs. Put my arms on the chair’s wood arms. Foam was coming out along one edge of the cushion. A real fat woman in a stained white blouse was reading Field and Stream. A TV showed an infomercial about black people’s hair. I thought I’d get up and go out and roll a cigarette, but my butt stayed stuck to the seat, my red tennis shoes did not move on the industrial beige carpet, my fingers stayed holding on to the edge of the wood arms. Not on the premises.

  Who knows how long I sat there.

  I am still sitting there.

  THE WHITE AND black clock said ten after five. My body was still in the chair, my red Converse tennis shoes still on the industrial beige carpeting, in the unrelenting bright in the waiting room.

  The crowd on Seventh Avenue was men, smelling just shaved, women coiffed. Power suits, men and women, everybody with eyes looking at the ne
w day. The man on the corner was about the size of Rose. I squinted my eyes, squeezed my hands together palm to palm, tried to make it so that Rose was standing there, extra lovely, bracelets clack-clack, just ordinary, on the street corner.

  But I’ll tell you something. So you’ll know.

  It was not the truth.

  No Rose.

  No Charlie 2Moons.

  THE NEXT SEVEN months were for shit.

  As an actor, Rose was a member of Screen Actors Guild, so he got to stay in the hospital. Room 335. He had the new kind of pneumonia: Pneumocystis.

  On the way to Room 335, you had to pass all the other rooms on Rose’s floor, in each room a young man, skeleton poking through, lying on his bed, the bed slowly swallowing him up. Room after room after room, hundreds of young men with green tubes up their noses, IVs in their wrists, wandering through the hallways looking like Auschwitz, an IV bag on a skinny pole trailing behind them. Sometimes there were screams. And the smell. More than the ordinary urine ammonia medicine smell. Another smell.

  The first week, I went to see Rose every day.

  Usually I just sat in the green Naugahyde chair and Rose lay in bed, either asleep or staring at the ceiling. The ceiling was that kind of ceiling tiles, horizontals and verticals, that made rectangles, and the rectangles had swirly holes in them that you could make figures out of. Faces. Dancers. Horses running. Dogs and cats. Inside two of the rectangles, instead of ceiling tiles with swirly holes there was a piece of plastic covering two fluorescent tubes, the unrelenting light, a muffled insect sound, and then in the corner near the bathroom door was another rectangle that had a screen over it and beneath the screen was a vent of some kind, to let air in or take air out, or something, but whatever the vent was for, it didn’t work, because inside Rose’s room it was hot and stuffy, and the urine ammonia medicine smell—and the other smell—hung on you.

  The shiny floor, the cranked-up bed, the food tray that swung back and forth, the nightstand, the TV hanging from a ceiling tile, dirty New York City light coming through the dirty window.

  The way Rose lay sunk in the bed, the bed was quicksand and Rose was going down. Sometimes I wondered if it even was Rose there, lying so still.

  One afternoon, the sun came out for a moment, and I went over close to Rose, put my hand on the horizontal lines. Rose’s forehead was so hot. Rose smiled a little.

  Lips at his ear: Rose? I said. You OK, Rose?

  The green tubes up Rose’s nose. Sweat on Rose’s forehead onto the palm of my hand, sweat dripping down the verticals. Rose’s beautiful lips cracks in a sidewalk. Inside his lips, a pale blue.

  The horrific whisper: Just a touch of the AIDS, Rose whispered.

  Rose laughed a little, but I didn’t laugh.

  THE SECOND WEEK, Rose was sitting up in his bed, but still Rose didn’t say much. The black serpent in him was not coiled up, was not ready to spit, wasn’t even there. Sometimes Rose and I watched TV, but one day, the second day of the second week, Rose said, Daytime TV makes you want to slit your wrists.

  So I turned the TV off and it was just Rose and me in a hospital room: Rose cranked up in bed, his head back, his eyes staring up at the ceiling tiles, me in the green Naugahyde chair. Rose with AIDS, me not a clue.

  How about that Antigone? I said. Then: What was her brother’s name again?

  Rose just stared ahead, didn’t even blink.

  Then: This fucking hospital’s full of White Paranoid Patriarchs, I said. Did you see all these white doctors?

  Rose stared at the ceiling tiles, green tubes up his nose.

  Vicious Totalitarian Assholes, I said, Every damn one of them, I said. There better not be, I said, Any fucking Catholic priests walking though that door.

  Then I got up, walked to the bed, and sat my butt cheek on the side of the bed. I took hold of his hand, the hand on the arm with the IV in it, turned over his hand, spread out his fingers, and with my index traced the life line on his Sahara palm.

  Jesus, Rose! I said. Where’s your lucid compulsion to act polemically?

  Rose turned his head away, closed his eyes.

  The hospital bracelet on his wrist, no clack-clack.

  At the dirty window, I looked out at the dirty world, leaned my hands on the sill.

  Where the fuck is Liz? I said, When you need her?

  Still Rose didn’t move.

  One day, on the TV hanging from the ceiling tile, Oprah was talking about toilet paper and whether to attach toilet paper to the roller so the paper comes from underneath or the paper comes from above. The audience was divided.

  The figures in the ceiling tiles were all running, trying to get away from the swirling werewolf in the ceiling tile above the window.

  Ripples through the water in the glass on Rose’s bedside tray.

  NIGHTS SITTING IN the dark in the green Naugahyde chair, the blue and amber lights of the dials and the bells and whistles by Rose’s bed were tiny illuminations in the dark. Above my chair, the floor lamp shined down a circle onto my open palms. When I looked at the window, there was me in the circle of light, and the blue and amber dials and bells and whistles, a hologram on the window, and, beyond, a hologram floating above the lights of Manhattan.

  That same week, at night. It was Saturday, and I could hear Saturday Night Live on the other televisions on the floor. Rose’s TV was off. The lights were off. Rose had taken his trazodone, and he and I were floating in the hologram.

  Sometime in there, sometime in the staring at my palms, in the laugh-track Saturday Night Live hologram, all at once, the guy they put in the bed next to Rose—just like that, shit happens—the guy sat up. Like he’d been stuck with a cattle prod, this guy sat up. He was young, maybe twenty, but he had no hair and his skin was yellow and covered with purple bumps. He just sat there, his eyes staring straight ahead at the green wall. First, he pulled the tube from his nose, then looked at the tube and threw it to the side. Then he reached around and pulled a tube out of his ass. Pulled the IV from his wrist.

  He pulled his stick legs around off the side of the bed. His back was a ladder of bones. When his feet hit the floor, he looked down, then around the room. He was smiling like a child who’d taken his first step.

  He walked little steps to the end of Rose’s bed, stood there, and stared at us. He was white, crew-cut. Tattoos of snakes on his arms.

  Rose stared back at him; I couldn’t. What was in the guy’s eyes, I couldn’t look at, so I put my eyes on Rose. Rose smiled a little bit, just enough to move the cracks in the cement of his lips.

  It’s the birds, the guy said, The fucking birds in the tree. The fucking chirping fucking birds. I’m sorry, the guy said, I just can’t take it anymore. It’s just too hard.

  The guy pulled something off his pinkie finger, held it out to me. I stuck out my hand. On the palm of my hand, the guy laid a gold ring.

  Inside the ring it said: TO ERIC WITH LOVE, TOM.

  Then, just like that, out of the blue, the guy picked up the other green Naugahyde chair, turned with the chair in his hands, and threw the chair through the window. The loud crash of breaking glass. Shiny night on the pieces of glass.

  As I looked, the green Naugahyde chair, for a moment, was a still point in the black New York sky, and then the chair was gone.

  Nowhere.

  Quiet only New York can get that fast.

  Then the guy ripped off his nightgown. There was a tattoo snake on his penis. His hip bones stuck out, all his ribs, the skeleton of his head poking through.

  He turned. Three giant steps, bare feet onto glass, one step, two steps, three, and with one leap, one long uninterrupted muscle, the guy dived through the window.

  Just as I looked, the naked guy in the air—his arms Evita don’t cry for me, his cock pointing up—for a moment, the guy was a still point in the black New York sky, waving at Rose and me, smiling, and then he was gone.

  Nowhere.

  Death is only a window.

  Rose lifted hi
mself up in his bed, threw the covers back, pulled the IV off his wrist.

  That’s when I dived, dived onto Rose, a full body press against him, grabbed the bedposts with my fists, tangled my feet in the bedposts at the bottom end of the bed, used every fucking ounce of strength I had to keep Rose down.

  Rose went ghetto on me, calling me a motherfucker, a dumb white honky son-of-a-bitch dog, slamming his fists against my kidneys, in the back of my head.

  Rose under me was a bucking bull, a bronco, a panther, a black serpent squeezing the life out of me. My face was in his neck, my body pushing down hard onto him, my feet hooked into the bars, my hands pressing his hands down.

  Beneath me, just under my shirt and my khakis, the earthquake of Rose, the monster’s huge footfall.

  My lips at Rose’s ear: Rose, no! Please, Rose, no!

  After a while, who knows how long, Rose sank down into the quicksand mattress.

  My heavy breath in and out was the same as Rose’s breath. I raised my head up, looked into Rose’s face, into his eyes.

  The whole world was in Rose’s eyes, every pain and joy, every betrayal, every first date, every jerk-off, every giddy moment, every death, was staring right back at me.

  Rose’s lips, his cracked sidewalk lips: Let me jump, let me go; please, Will, please, just let me go!

  The horrific whisper.

  The way I shut Rose up was I laid a big old wet lots-of-tongue-and-heavy-breathing Hollywood kiss onto him.

  All daring and courage, all iron endurance of misfortune.

  No way was I going to wave at Rose out the window out there, the still point for a moment in the black New York sky.

  No fucking way.

  * * *

  THE FOURTH WEEK, things started looking up. They’d moved Rose into a nicer room. He was alone and the room was yellow instead of green, and the window faced west, so there was sometimes a nice color in the room when the sun went down. The inside of Rose’s lips wasn’t blue, was getting back the sunset color. His skin wasn’t so charcoal. No sweat on the horizontal lines of his forehead, no sweat dripping down the verticals.

  One day, an old Cary Grant movie was on the TV, the one with him and Randolph Scott, and that day was the first good day. Rose laughed out loud. Cats fucking. Rose’s laugh up and down the hallway of Saint Vincent’s, like cats fucking.