"Died in 'Nam."
My spirits began to drop. "Kerry? You're kidding."
"Closed coffin. His mother freaked out at the funeral, demanding it be opened. When they did, all she found was dirt and a few charred bones. She went bonkers after that. I lost track of the rest. What about your cousin?" Ron asked. Evidently he was going to insist. "The Ineffable Alistair Dodge? If he wasn't a baby faggot in training, I don't know who was. He knew virtually all of Clifton Webb's lines from The Razor's Edge and Laura."
"He turned out gay," I said, but now my spirits were plummeting. "He's here in town." And since it was Ronny Taskin, I had to add, "He's sick."
Ron's face fell into that set pattern we all knew how to use by now to give and receive bad news. "How's he doing?"
"Not good," I said, using the current euphemism to mean he was about to die. "How about you?"
Ron aped someone taking pills. "Five times a day," he sang.
Meaning AZT. Meaning he was sick too. "Damn!"
"And you?" he asked, concerned.
"Don't tell anyone, but I'm negative."
"You needn't be ashamed," Ron said.
"I don't know how it happened. I did all the wrong things with all the wrong people in all the wrong places at all the wrong times."
"Someone's got to escape."
"I know. But it's, well, embarrassing at times. Not to mention highly uncomfortable in existential terms."
"'Me only cruel immortality/Consumes,'" Ron said, sympathetically.
That was the second time the Tennyson poem had come up.
"Something like that," I admitted.
Another marshal came over looking for Ron. As they stood aside talking, I saw Ron's face darken just the way it used to when he got angry as a kid, and I heard him suddenly burst out with "Shit! I warned him but he insisted!" As the other marshal left, Ron said, "Someone really sick collapsed on the fence. They're giving oxygen, but..."
Two other marshals came up to him. I heard him say, "Tell them he'll die if we don't have an EMS unit now!"
"I'd better see you later," I said.
"Let's get together sometime," Ron said. "I'm in the book. Under Ron Coffee. Tom! Wait! Where is that precinct lieutenant? I'll give her a piece of my mind!"
I was certain Ron would.
"I found them!" Wally said into my ear, then added darkly, "I think someone's in real trouble healthwise."
Junior Obregon, James Niebuhr, and their buddies were on line with the others, waiting to say their special names into the microphone. Two of them were arguing over the name of a friend both had been planning to say. James was trying to calm them down. I saw a solution:
"You want names," I said, "I've got a coupla score."
"You're kidding," Junior said.
"Got a piece of paper? I'll write down the first dozen or so that come to mind."
That sobered them up a little.
The EMS truck arrived with a police escort, which of all places in the city tonight was least needed here. Removing the stricken demonstrator, however, wasn't so simple, since one tenet of chaining demonstrators was that no one would admit to having keys to the locks. As a result, while a beefy guy with a plastic mask was busily blowtorching the chain, the EMS people were attempting to get the ill man stretched out on a gurney and attached to lifesaving equipment. I could see Ron Taskin among the group of ACT UP legal observers, ACT UP doctors, and high-ranking police officers surrounding the poor guy. Leave it to Ronny to become a Mover and Shaker, even with four earrings and highly visible erect nipples.
I wondered again about what he'd said concerning me being brooding and solitary as a child. I thought I'd worked my ass off to be just one of the guys. Serial killer, my foot! Since I'd become a Buddhist, it was all I could do to kill a cockroach. And look at the tailspin Alistair's request for death drugs had thrown me into.
"Do you know what name you're going to say?" James asked.
Just then I was shocked to hear a woman I didn't know at the microphone say the name Cleve Atchinson. Cleve used to be a fuck-buddy of mine back in the seventies, a sweet boy from Kentucky I'd lost track of years before. I remembered Cleve telling me in those ten- or twenty-minute periods between sex and him getting dressed to leave that he was an artist and was trying to get accepted into the School of Visual Arts for more training. Since he hadn't asked, I arranged to have a graphic artist I knew write up a completely bogus recommendation for him. I'd never seen any of Cleve's paintings, and I never found out if he ever was accepted. Hell, I didn't even know if he had any talent—besides his spectacular cocksucking. I'd left the city for a year, then Cleve had gone away, and I never heard from him again. Naturally, I hadn't known Cleve was sick.
Another page in my life erased, I thought, a page, an entire relationship, I'd probably never told a soul about. Without the young Kentuckian around anymore, did that mean my relationship with Cleve was now, in some twisted Lockean manner, relegated to the purely empirical—just one man's experience, forever uncheckable, doomed to unreliability? And didn't that make it tantamount to it not ever having happened? What about all those paragraphs and chapters others had filled in my life—Alistair most notably—would all that soon cease to exist? Was that what had made the past decade's losses so increasingly horrendous: the knowledge that my life was being reduced before my eyes from the richly detailed Victorian triple-decker we all supposedly carry, to a mere chapbook, a pamphlet of few pages, with wider white margins, spelling out a single, unclear thesis, accompanied by a single sheet of footnotes?
I had to tell someone about Cleve—find something trenchant and important about him and tell someone. What about Cleve had stood out? What had made him special? And who could I tell? Wally? Would he understand what I meant? What I feared?
"Well, do you know what name you're saying?" Wally repeated James's question into my ear.
"Give me a break, will you?"
"You'd better. 'Cause you're up next!" Wally said.
He slid up to the microphone, took it in his hand, and with those large, sad brown eyes, said the name of a graduate student who'd tutored him, added a few words about the man, and added his year of birth and death.
I was next. Jostled from behind by Junior Obregon, I went to the mike, gave my suddenly downcast lover a discreet pat on his ass—and froze.
Well, I didn't freeze so much as not know what to say. In front of me, several of the chained-together kneelers and sitters had somehow or other recognized me. I heard my name being said by several to others, "Sssanssssarc!" I was wondering how in the hell they knew me—the book hadn't sold that many copies or been that widely reviewed—when Junior prodded me from behind, urgently whispering, "Say the name, will ya!"
So I said the first name that came into my mind, "Matt Loguidice. Poet. Nineteen fifty to nineteen eighty-five."
And then I allowed Junior to shove me aside.
The look on Wally's face told me what I'd just done. As it registered and I began to move toward him, Wally turned away and vanished into the crowd. In my efforts to get past the bunch of them to Wally, I almost knocked over Reinhold's distant relation, who'd just gotten to the microphone.
I spent the next fifteen minutes looking for Wally, thinking if I could just lay hands on him, stop him, I'd be able to explain that it was his own doing—he'd brought up Matt earlier—that I'd said Matt's name.
This was nonsense and I knew it. As I'd stood on line awaiting my turn and hearing all those names and dates, I'd begun to feel that this was in some weird way like the children's religious instruction legend about appearing before St. Peter at the Gates of Heaven and saying the one word, remembering the single good deed, that would force those pearly gates to swing open. The truth had to be told: if saying one name, remembering and honoring one person in my life, could bring me celestial peace never ending, Matt's was the name.
At last I gave up my search and wandered over to where Junior, Niebuhr, and someone new had taken a break from their o
wn search.
"Did you find him?"
"He's not here anywhere!" James assured me.
"What did you do to him?" Junior Obregon asked.
"Nothing."
"You must have said or done something," he argued.
Evidently, Junior's was that type of personality, not uncommon among homosexuals, called "an injustice collector"; except that, altruistically, he seemed to collect injustices for others as well as for himself.
"It's none of your business," I said, the "fuck yourself' silent.
Ever-fickle Fate chose that moment of my desperation for a reporter from one of the networks to decide that I and only I could possibly be his on-air spokesman for the event.
"Excuse me, Dr. Sansarc." The newscaster pushed Junior and the others aside with blond aplomb and shoved a microphone at me.
"I'm not a doctor," I retorted, surprised by his sudden appearance with two cameramen, light meter people, and a sound woman, who asked me to repeat myself.
Now, I'd seen this character before. In fact, Wally and I used to speculate on the sexual proclivities of this young semi-Adonis while watching "The Eleven O'Clock News," making up outrageous perversions that only someone so straight-looking could get away with—bestial anilingus, forced infant fellatio, etc. From this close, he was smaller, better looking, blonder, and altogether so ineffably clean-cut I now doubted whether he'd ever touched himself while urinating, never mind done anything as gross and vulgar as masturbating.
Undaunted by my unfriendly tone of voice, he told someone on his staff, "We can erase that." He blocked me, faced the camera, and said in an announcerish voice, "We're at the huge AIDS demonstration which erupted at Gracie Mansion. We're speaking to the noted author and social historian Roger Sansarc, who's a participant." As I wondered where he'd gotten all that from (Ron? An uncharacteristically spiteful Wally?), the newscaster spun toward me, shoving the microphone under my chin. "Tell us, Professor Sansarc, what set off this extraordinary outburst on a night calculated to embarrass the mayor?"
With all these faggots, why me? I thought. Behind me I heard Junior Obregon whisper, "Go, man! You're empowered!" So I figured, why the hell not?
This is what I said: "Two million six hundred thousand dollars of money specifically earmarked this past year for nondenominational hospice and hostel care units for AIDS patients has not been used by the city. We're here demanding to know why not, where those funds have gone to, and if and when those funds will be released so our sick and dying can receive adequate care."
That was it. He thanked me, still calling me Professor, which was a Fig Newton of his imagination, and took off at a trot toward his truck, yelling orders and questions simultaneously to his sight and sound crew. I took it I'd been successful and would be used later on the news.
Where I got that particular money figure from I'll never know. I guess I'd heard it bandied about during the Monday night meeting at the Community Center, as well as the various rumors about it. Even then, at the moment I'd been saying it, I had the queasy feeling that— like naming Matt Loguidice—this would come back to haunt me.
Not immediately, however.
"You were abso-fucking-lutely great!" Junior was jumping up and down, hugging me. Reinhold's distant relation stood there agape, then seemed to come to and said, "You know, I thought you were bullshitting about having done all this before."
Even Ron Taskin arrived to pat my shoulder and thank me for the good job—he'd been outside the truck's open door when I'd suddenly appeared on their video monitors being taped.
Sure I was pleased. But this was light shit. I still had to find Wally and attempt to explain what I would never in a million years be able to explain. I still had to get to Alistair's and stop him from taking those sixty-four Tuinals. And somehow or other I had to tell someone about Cleve Atchinson. Why me? I was thinking as the group around me continued its congratulations.
I was vaguely aware that Junior was trying to persuade the others to do something. He must have succeeded, because I was suddenly pulled out of the crowd to a less populous section of the fence, where two chained martyrs were being spoon-fed what looked like shrimp ramen by a volunteer.
"I told them we don't need Wally. You'll help us do it," Junior said very soberly indeed. "Now don't say you won't."
"Do what?"
Junior moved aside to reveal what the third guy was also covering. It looked like another banner.
"This is Paul Sonderling," Junior introduced us.
"Sure, I'll help. Where do you want to hang it?"
"There." Junior pointed to Gracie Mansion. "On the roof, hanging down."
"Why not hang it from the mayor's dick?" I asked
"No, really!" Junior said. "We've got it all planned out. Except that Wally was supposed to help."
"Was he?" Funny, I'd heard nothing about it.
"Paul here knows someone who already set it up for us," Junior said.
"This guy I met at the Jacks," Paul said, naming a noted club for mutual masturbators that met once a week, "has been working for the company that's been redoing the roof here. When I told him what we wanted to do, he said he'd help,"
"The Homintern," I mumbled.
"What?" Junior and Paul asked.
"Homintern!" I repeated. "International Conspiracy of Homos. That's what Auden called us because we are everywhere and anywhere and only reveal ourselves when we choose to."
"Right on!" Junior enthused.
"Well, anyway," Paul went on, "my buddy installed hooks up there. Eight of them for us to hang the banner from. See!" He showed me how metal rings had been sewn into the top of the cloth. "So all we have to do is get it up there."
"All?"
"He also left a rope coiled for us to climb."
"Ninja Faggot Activists," I said with a sneer.
They took that in a better way than I'd intended it. Junior and Paul slapped hands high in the air, saying, "That's what we'll call ourselves."
"'Did he tell you how we get in?" I asked.
"He left a company truck parked around the corner." Paul showed me the keys. "The security guards here are used to seeing company trucks come and go. Once we've hung the banner, we'll drive it out."
"If we're not shot first."
"I told you he wouldn't go for it," James said.
"Was Wally really supposed to do it?" I had to know.
"You kidding? He helped plan it. And we need four people!"
"Four dedicated, committed people who won't rat on each other," Junior said, but I dismissed that as claptrap. I was beginning to think something far more dangerous.
"We'll be off the roof by the time it's unfurled," Paul said. "We'll be back in the truck by the time anyone notices it."
What I was thinking was that by joining them, helping them, stepping in for Wally, I would be reaffirming his commitment—and our commitment to each other. I knew this was false reasoning, specious logic, yet I also knew I owed Wally for saying Matt's name. Maybe, just maybe, doing this semi-sophomoric deed would blast that away before it took hold in his mind and really imperiled what we had together.
As though reading my mind, Reinhold's distant relation said, "Wally'll be pissed off if this doesn't come off. He was the brains behind it."
The brains, huh?
But the idea of draping an entire side of Gracie Mansion with our banner, and having all these self-important politicians come out and see it, did have its attractions. It would certainly cheer up this crowd and give everyone something to talk about for the next week. And since I'd already usurped the position of spokesperson for the TV camera, why shouldn't that false position be solidified by action?
"I'm in," I said, and raised my hand for a high slap.
The truck was where Paul had said it would be. Even better, it had one of those double-seat cabs for James and Junior to hide down in. Naturally, we were halted as we turned into the closed street, but Paul handled it easily.
"Jeez! Look at all the fags!
" he said cheekily to the cop on duty.
The policeman attempted a wan smile. But it was evident that something at the demonstration—maybe the guy being driven off in an EMS unit—had reached him. "Keep that talk to yourself, okay?" Then he added as though his statement required an explanation, "Captain don't want any trouble here."
"Okay! Okay," Paul defended himself. "We just gotta drop off this crap." He nodded back to the truck's partly laden flatbed. "Boss wants it before he arrives tomorrow. Otherwise I gotta get up at three A.M."
For a half a minute, it looked as though the cop on duty was going to have to go higher up for permission.
"We'll be in and out in ten minutes!" Paul tried. "Fifteen tops!"
"Okay! Go!" the harassed policeman said.
As Paul had said, the mayoral security knew the truck and waved us in. We swung around the parking lot filled with stretch Mercedes and Lincolns, the mostly Third World chauffeurs of the various mayors sleeping at the wheel or reading in dimly lighted front seats. Three were standing atop the roof of one limo, trying to get a better look at the demonstration.
"We're in!" Paul cried exultantly to Junior and James, huddled in back.
He parked as close to the building as he could get, then turned so as to keep one side blind to any observers among the chauffeurs. We all slid out of the car, Junior holding the banner, all of us trying to remain cool. I recalled something Goethe had written in Dichtung und Wahrheit about seeing three men talking hurriedly and moving furtively at night and how that always meant some mischief was about to be done. As usual Goethe was right.
No one stopped us as we approached the building. I was surprised by how large it was. I'd hoped to hear the multilingual sounds of the sixteen mayors chatting inside, but everything in the immediate area was silent. The names being read by demonstrators were clear enough from here, as was the more generalized mass chanting of various slogans. But I was sure no one inside could hear them, since every window appeared to be locked. Only when the mayors had finished dinner and begun to drive out would they know the size and extent of the demonstration.
Like People in History Page 11