Like People in History

by Felice Picano

  Dario was arrested the next morning before we woke up. No one said anything about the incident at breakfast or later that day, or in fact until two mornings later, when Cousin Diana suddenly announced, "You'll both have to come down to the courthouse with us for the hearing. Wear your best clothing." I turned to Alistair, but all he said was "The blue-and-maroon tie?" To which his mother nodded assent.

  Alistair and I sat alone in the backseat of the Bentley as we drove to downtown L.A., and I kept trying to get his attention to find out what he intended to do, to say. But he eluded me from this close as he'd evaded me ever since that fateful evening.

  Two men in gray pin-striped suits, with rich leather briefcases, met us in an anteroom.

  "He's got a smart dago lawyer who's claiming entrapment," I heard one of them say, "but he knows it won't work. It's just for honor back in the old country."

  They continued to talk, moving away from us. When Alistair asked where the men's room was, I got up my nerve and followed him.

  I found him combing his hair at the row of sinks; he was being careful, precise.

  "You're not going to let them throw him in jail, are you?" I asked.

  "He's not going to jail. He's going back to Sicily."

  "But... but aren't you going to say anything?"

  "If they ask for details, I'm going to say he fucked me in the ass."

  "That's what you wanted!" I protested.

  He looked at me, then simply said, "I'm a minor."

  "But it was all your doing!"

  "Don't be a sap, Stodge. I don't intend on having any blot on my name or record. And if you're thinking of saying anything... Well, no one will believe you. They'll think you're just doing it to keep Judy to yourself. You understand that, don't you?"

  I understood all too well. What I'd merely thought bribery had turned out to be Alistair's insurance on my silence.

  He left the bathroom and I stood looking at myself: fool!

  What I hadn't understood earlier was that I was to be put on the witness stand. Oh, it wasn't a real trial, only a judge and the lawyers and us and poor Dario—addled-looking and in need of a shave—at the defense table. Even so I was frightened. When Cousin Diana's lawyer called me up and asked me to tell what, exactly, I'd seen looking in the garden room window that night, my shame over my role in Dario's downfall and disgrace filled me so intensely that I blushed and stammered, and after all sorts of dithering, I ended up only answering yes and no— mostly yes—to the lawyer's deadly aimed, totally distorted questions.

  Alistair was far cooler, saying he'd been so upset he'd managed to block most of it out. When he stepped down, I was astonished to see Judy appear. She was also put into the witness box, and the prosecuting attorney told us that allegations about her friend had been made and asked her would she answer them, and she said in a voice bold as brass, "Alistair is a completely normal boy of his age. Even if he is," and here she glared at me, "more of a gentleman than some other boys."

  That was what did it for me. Judy lying like that, all of us turning to protect Alistair, when we all knew it was his fault. Even Alfred was complicit in his silence. I wouldn't look at anyone when we were sent out to the corridor to await a finding.

  Alistair was called in to clarify a point for the judge in camera, as was Judy. I assiduously studied the designs on the marble floor until I thought I'd go cross-eyed. All at once, the lawyers came out of the chamber and it was over, Dario doomed to deportation.

  As we were walking up to the house later that afternoon, I fell back to where Alfred was dawdling.

  "Is that offer still open?" I asked. "You know, to work at Creosote Canyon?"

  "It is," he said. "Anytime you want, lad."

  "Tomorrow?" I asked.

  "Sure." He held me hard around the shoulders as we went inside.

  Alfred woke me up early the next morning, and we drove off in his pickup, and for the next four weeks of my stay, I worked alongside dirty, swearing, uneducated, often quite stupid adolescents and men. I worked well and kept my mouth shut, and I earned enough money that when I returned east, I could move out of my parents' house on the sly and pay my share of rent in an apartment on the Lower East Side with two other guys.

  I never drove the Alfa Romeo or even the station wagon again— although Alfred loaned me the pickup once or twice for solitary weekend drives. I never went to the Slumbergs' or to Jewel's Box again; I never phoned or saw Judy again and barely saw Alistair, which seemed to suit us both fine.

  The day before I was to fly back to New York, I was in the shacklike office of Alfred's construction unit drinking bad coffee out of a paper cup when he got a phone call from Cousin Diana's lawyer. The deportation paperwork had gone through finally, and Dario was to leave the next day. He'd asked for some of the things still left at the house. Alfred reluctantly said, "Yeah, yeah, the poor blighter!" When he hung up, he told me.

  The next day, after work at the construction site, I went with him into the little garden house and collected the few items Alistair had pointed out—the mandolin and photograph and litho Crucifixion. I drove with Alfred down to the L.A. County Jail, where he'd been held all that time.

  "Christ! I don't want to see him," Alfred said, punching the steering wheel. So I said I'd take the stuff in.

  I didn't know what to expect, something out of a Cagney movie, I suppose. But Dario met me in a large, bright visitors' room. We were alone, with a dilatory guard outside chatting with a secretary. Dario wasn't wearing stripes, wasn't even wearing a prison uniform; he was in his own clothes, and he looked well, healthy, clean, perhaps relaxed for the first time since I'd met him, maybe even at peace with himself.

  He opened the cardboard box and took out each item, greeting each like an old friend. It did me good to see him like that—not angry or bitter. He'd picked up some English in jail and spoke a little, saying how he was looking forward to getting back to Enna in September for the harvest. I reached out to shake his hand and wish him luck, but he said, "Please!"

  I couldn't tell what it was he wanted from me. He was angling my body around with his hands, and I had to look over my shoulder at him, to ask what he wanted.

  "Please. Just once!" he begged. "The pants down. No touch. Just— look!" He said that last word so oddly.

  "What?" I asked. But I knew what he wanted. Although I was dusty and filthy from work all day, I was clean underneath. I turned, unbuckled, and dropped my denims and then my underwear, and stood there.

  After what seemed a long time, I looked over my shoulder. Dario remained sitting, staring as though he were trying to remember something for a long time to come.

  "Okay?" I asked.

  He snapped out of it. "Okay!"

  As I left the room, he said, "You see, this way I always remember what it was like to fall into hands of Pericoloso Eroë."

  "Who?"

  "Eroë! He shoots the arrows into the heart." Dario illustrated on himself.

  "Eros! he meant," I explained to Wally, who'd caught up with me and sat me down on a bench facing the East River. "As in Cupid. A few years later when I was working in the bookstore I looked up the phrase in this huge Italian-American Dictionary we had on sale, dangerous Eros' had been glossed by the editor, who wrote, 'So called because the Greeks and Romans considered Eros the most ruthless, the most potent god in the entire pantheon.' Odd, no?"

  "Why would Eros be the most potent, the most ruthless?" Wally asked.

  "You know, Wals, I asked someone that, and he said, 'Because Eros has no goal, only intention, when he shoots. And because his arrows never miss.'"

  "Who told you that?" Wally asked.

  "I don't remember," I lied.

  We were close enough now to Gracie Mansion to hear voices chanting and a sudden burst of applause and cheers. The clouds were breaking up over the river, and the moon was making a debut; it looked full to me.

  "Let's go!" I said.

  "Are you all right?" Wally asked.

  "I don't k
now, Wals."

  "Come. It'll get your mind off him," he reasoned.

  He took my hand and began leading me away. Two joggers followed by a Great Dane shot past us. Otherwise the promenade looked empty. Through the trees of Carl Schurz Park, I could see lights moving about. The media had arrived. Just in time too: someone was testing a microphone. Wally led me down a ramp, telling me that I'd be able to put my anger and frustration to some use down there, among others equally frustrated and angry. Suddenly, he stopped.

  "It was that poet, wasn't it?" Wally asked. Then, "You know, about Eros?"

  Matt. He meant Matt Loguidice. I didn't remember ever talking to Wally about Matt. Who had? Alistair. It had to have been Alistair.

  "I told you, Wals, I don't remember."

  "I'm sure that's who it was," Wally said in a determined tone of voice.

  We'd reached another telephone booth. I stopped, put a coin in, and began to dial.

  "What are you doing?" he asked, but he didn't try to stop me.

  It rang twice. Then: "You have to get off the line, whoever you are," Alistair's voice said firmly, bubbling over with laughter. "I'm calling out."

  "Stairs?" I asked, amazed and a little offended hearing him be so cheerful. Almost immediately, I regretted using our old nicknames.

  "Stodge?" he asked back. "What are you doing calling? You've got to get off the line. I'm calling out."

  A moment of panic, despite his obviously unpanicky tone of voice.

  "We've run out of liquor. Can you believe it? The hostess's doom. But we simply undercounted the number of people who decided to come see the old thing! Place is packed. Stop that, you animal!" he added to someone in the room. "Stodge? You forget something?"

  "What?" I was dumbfounded taking this all in. It seemed so utterly apart from how I was perceiving Alistair.

  "I asked, did you forget something?"

  "No. No. I..."

  Wally was now making faces at me of total tedium and watch-checking ennui.

  "Never mind," I said with fake enthusiasm. "Happy a hundred and three."

  "Thank you, Twat!" he answered and hung up.

  "Sounds like the party won't be over for a while," Wally commented.

  "It's the party of the night," I admitted. "A social triumph!"

  "Exactly what Alistair would want."

  "I'm still going to stop him from taking those pills," I said.

  "Fine," Wally said. "Let's do this event first. Then we'll come back."

  "Together? You'll come back with me?"

  "Don't read too much into it," he said.

  "Will you come back with me?"

  "I said I would, didn't I? Now, move. We're missing all the action!"

  The demonstration turned out to be impressive.

  By the time Wally and I had dropped down the ramp and around to the front of Gracie Mansion, it was in fall swing. Camera trucks from three networks, two local stations, and a cable station with pretensions had taken up positions as close to the action as possible—it was some of their brights we'd seen from the promenade. Their sight and sound crews, their equipment, their endless coiling snakes of heavy wire filled the gutters, swathed fire hydrants, and threatened to trip up those senior police officers assigned to the first line. Behind them, across the street, several squads of riot police had been lined up, complete with helmets and shields and who-knew-what-else that constituted their fullest gear, but it appeared that—especially with all the media present and all the dignitaries inside with the mayor—no one had decided whether they'd be used; behind their Fascist-newsreel drag, the men seemed relaxed, talking among themselves, fallen out of phalanx. The street they'd commandeered—only after the demonstrators and TV stations had arrived—was closed, all traffic diverted, except, as it turned out, official cars from within the mansion's parking lot, which were allowed to come and go.

  To our amazement, somehow or other, this demonstration had remained a secret. Amazing really, given how many hundreds of us had known about it for days. The first wave of demonstrators had arrived, exactly as planned, at the front gates just after the sixteen Mayors of World Capitals had gone in to have their never-to-be-forgotten dinner with our own city's mayor.

  Exactly as planned, seventy-nine of the demonstrators had then proceeded to disrobe until they were wearing only some sort of loincloths (with matching top pieces for the women à la Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.), then allowed themselves to be chained by cohorts all along the fence around the mansion, in positions meant to be reminiscent of the Crucifixion.

  In the intense glare of the television lights, they looked pretty awful. I later found out that more than two-thirds of these volunteer martyrs were truly ill: the rest were the thinnest, scrawniest men and women to be found, with body and face makeup liberally applied to make them look really bad. All seventy-nine were covered with hundreds of KS lesions on their faces, arms, legs, and chests, some of which as one got closer appeared to have been painted on. Most of them had blood bags hung from the fence and attached to their wrists—each plastic bag marked "Contaminated!" And each of them wore a sign around his or her neck reading "Infected—Dying." Every once in a while, by some signal I never managed to catch, one of them would moan even louder then usual, or shriek suddenly, and slump. Other demonstrators patrolling the fence in full medical drag would then go up to them, check their pulses, and turn the signs around their necks to read "Dead— of Neglect!"

  Several hundred more demonstrators had formed a human chain and were marching with the usual Silence = Death and Ignorance = Fear signs, being led in their chants by men and a few women who I knew from their yellow armbands were the demonstration marshals, trained in civil disobedience to keep order and to interact with police if necessary and media if so fortunate.

  Another group had chained themselves together to the front gates— which had been closed by the mansion's guards in a predicted panic when the place was first invaded—and they were mostly sitting or kneeling around the gates, upon which a large cloth banner had been hung reading "Release The Funds And Save Lives!" The microphone I'd heard being set up was located here, and scores of demonstrators waited in line to stand in front of it and say a name very solemnly—presumably of a relative or friend who'd died.

  As Wally and I pushed through the wooden horses set up everywhere willy-nilly, someone in riot gear actually made an attempt to stop us. But another cop dressed in blues waved us through, saying to the other in true New York cynicism, "Two more! What's the difference?"

  In my growing excitement, I felt Wally hug me. "Isn't this great?" he shouted into my ear so as to be heard over all the noise.

  "Terrif! Where do we go?"

  "We've got to find Junior and the others."

  Someone laid a hand on me. I expected another cop. Instead it was a tall, balding gay man my age with nice tits prominently displayed in an ACT UP black T-shirt, four rings in his left ear, and a yellow armband— a marshal.

  "Do you belong to an affinity group?" the marshal asked, and I knew from his tone of voice and self-important air that he was that type of homosexual Bob Herron had first and forever defined as A Very Efficient Queen.

  "We're looking for them!" Wally shouted into the VEQ's ear.

  I thought the VEQ looked familiar.

  "You'd better stick with me. Lilly Law was taken quite by surprise by all this, and she's getting a little nervous," the marshal yelled. He turned to me. "Don't I know you?" he shouted in my ear.

  I shrugged and thought just what I needed in all this tumult was to play what Alistair always used to call Fag Genealogy: comparing lovers, boyfriends, tricks, jobs held, neighborhoods lived in, college, high school, junior high, and other schools attended right back to kindergarten and sometimes earlier.

  "You do look familiar," I admitted.

  After all, how many gay men in their forties still remained in the city? Not a hell of a lot. Only a few weeks before, I'd been walking around the Upper West Side with a frien
d from my days as a textbook editor who'd gone off to northern Michigan to teach Chaucer and had remained there for the last several decades. He suddenly stopped at Seventy-second and Amsterdam and said, "I've been here for a week. Where are all the men of our generation?"

  "Dead!" I said.

  "Come on!"

  "They're dead. It's a fact. There's about six of us left."

  That being so, I ought to know who this one was.

  "What's your name?" I shouted into the marshal's ear.

  "Ron Taskin."

  "Not Ronny Taskin from Vanderveer Street?" I asked.

  "Now I know who you are," he said, and swept me up in a hug. "I told Coffee I used to know you when your book came out. Where is he? He'd love to meet you. Coffee's my lover. Thurston's his real name. You know that old joke: like my men—black and strong and very sweet!"

  Ronny Taskin! I couldn't believe it.

  "Are you still using Indian clubs?" I asked.

  His mouth flew open in surprise at my memory. "Not after the last one had to be surgically removed from my behind in the emergency ward!" He wiggled his rear end in emphasis, and we both laughed at his joke. Then I grabbed Wally and introduced him to Ron and tried to explain who he was. But Wally was distracted, looking for Junior and the others.

  "There's hundreds of people here," I told Wally. "We could join any affinity group."

  "We've got to find Junior and the others! I promised!"

  He moved away into the crowd, and Ron found a slightly quieter spot among the wires of a CBS truck for us to talk.

  "They're so intense at that age," Ron said. "You carry Pampers?"

  "I can't believe you're gay," I said.

  "As the nineties. Or you! As a boy you were so butch it hurt. Bike racing champ, marble wizard. Solitary and brooding. I thought you'd end up becoming a serial killer."

  That was an odd thing to say. I'd always assumed I'd lived and died for social acceptance. "Me? You're kidding."

  "Well, maybe until that incident with your cousin."

  A subject I didn't feel like talking about. I deftly turned the conversation: "Do you ever see any of the others? Guy? What was the little prick's name? Kerry White?"