We Are Lost and Found

by Helene Dunbar

  Becky got a summer job selling ice cream at Baskin-Robbins.

  Connor has been working nonstop to get the store ready for a big shipment they’re getting in from some old movie star’s estate.

  I get sick of waiting to hear from B-Sides and go to the store.

  The help wanted sign is off the door, and the owner, Mr. Lowenstein, and this girl Tracey who I’ve seen working there, are hauling empty record bins into the corner of the store.

  What are you doing? I ask.

  Mr. Lowenstein wipes his forehead and says, CDs. Everyone comes in and sifts through the records, and then they put them away and want to buy little bits of plastic, so I’m making room.

  I start to ask about the job, and then Mr. Lowenstein sighs and says, Hopefully the store can stay in business.

  Crap. Maybe Becky can get me in at the ice cream place.

  I miss that Friday at Echo because their whole block has a water main break.

  And I’m not upset. Not really.

  It’s like I left some important part of myself at Pride, and I don’t know how to get it back.

  Uh-huh.

  That’s really all I can say when Gabriel surprises me by calling the next day. He tells me how he can’t wait for us to go to dinner, to sit and talk, to spend time together outside the club.

  Uh-huh.

  We’re meeting in Little Italy, at some pasta place Sinatra likes, so it must be good. Seven o’clock.

  I hang up.

  Who was that? Mom asks.

  Just some kids playing around, I say, and then run to the bathroom to throw up before she can ask more.

  July 1983

  Friday night, Becky comes over to give me an excuse.

  And to play fashion consultant, apparently.

  Blue shirt, she says. It makes the green in your eyes stand out.

  This feels…odd.

  Why? she asks.

  I think about the reasons: I don’t know. Is this a date? I mean…it might be, but Gabriel doesn’t seem like the dating type, and do guys even date? Does Connor even know what his last boyfriend looked like in daylight?

  What I say is, I don’t know how to do this.

  Michael?

  Yeah?

  Shut up and put on the blue shirt.

  I change in the bathroom. Stare at my reflection in the mirror.

  I don’t recognize myself.

  It isn’t the blue shirt, or the fact that my hair isn’t sticking up in all directions.

  It’s that even through the nerves, and the fear, and feeling as though I’m declaring something that can never be taken back, I look happy.

  I have a date. In Little Italy. With a boy. His name is Gabriel, and when I’m with him, I want to stop time because he makes me feel…

  He makes me feel…

  I guess because he makes me feel alive. And he makes me feel like I know who I am.

  That’s what I want to say to my parents when I leave the house.

  James got us free tickets to that National Lampoon movie. I’ll be back by midnight.

  That’s what I do say to my parents, despite the fact that James wouldn’t be caught dead at that movie, and Becky has plans to see Andy, and from the dismissive look on my father’s face, I’m glad I didn’t say more.

  At some point, there is bread. And salad. And pasta.

  At some point, Gabriel orders a jug of wine that comes wrapped in straw, and I somehow don’t get carded.

  At some point, there are candles that have burned down to tiny white mountains and cake that tastes like coffee.

  At some point he looks at me with those dark eyes and says, If I were nicer, I wouldn’t be here with you, but I can’t seem to stay away, and then laughs in a way that turns me to jelly.

  And because of the wine and the candlelight and those eyes, I only hear that he can’t stay away, and I’m undone.

  Gabriel leads me to a café off MacDougal.

  I heard that Jack Kerouac used to hang out here, he says.

  I order a cappuccino while Gabriel gets something made with orange juice and sparkling water.

  Do you read Kerouac? I ask.

  Gabriel smiles in a way that makes his eyes light up. No, he says. But I thought you would.

  I keep trying, I say.

  But underneath, something bubbles up inside me. I am consumed by the idea that Gabriel thought about what I might read, and figured out I’d like to go somewhere the Beat writers hung out.

  Bob Dylan wrote stuff here too, he says, looking over the edge of his glass.

  I glance around at the worn wooden tables and the grooved floors and the high rafters. Dylan’s gravelly voice floats around and around in my head.

  Then Gabriel looks me in the eye and says, Someday, someone is going to take a hot boy to this restaurant and say, Michael Bartolomeo used to hang out here.

  I gulp down the rest of my cappuccino so quickly I burn my throat.

  He is sweet. And sexy. And…everything.

  He is silhouetted against the dark of the sky and the lights of the city.

  He is running his fingers under my shirt, and it feels like they’ve always been there.

  He tastes like oranges and salt, words and music, hope and fear and promise.

  My entire body feels like a balloon, tethered to him by a string, daring to float away.

  Gabriel rides the subway with me and gets off at my stop and walks me to the end of my block.

  I have twelve minutes until curfew.

  We duck into a doorway and make out in the shadows for eleven and a half of them.

  My parents have gone to bed; only I suspect my mother won’t sleep until she knows I’m home.

  I hear her rustle out of the covers and then quietly close the bedroom door behind her.

  Did you have a good time? she asks.

  I think, for this one moment when it’s just the two of us and my father won’t hear, of telling her the truth. Of telling her how full of emotion I feel when I’m with Gabriel, of how complete, somehow. Of how myself.

  I think of asking her if she ever felt like this for my father because I can’t believe that anyone could. Then she breaks the silence and says my father thinks I’m spending too much time with James, and it isn’t that she necessarily agrees, but she feels like she should tell me because, of course, we don’t want to upset my father, and I stare at her until she says good night and goes back to her room.

  James is on my fire escape.

  That’s kind of creepy. You know that, right? I ask.

  Well, it’s not like I let myself in.

  He’s right. Besides, I’m glad he’s here. I climb out and sit next to him. He’s wearing a billowy white shirt that he’s managed to keep immaculate, even though he’s climbed up a flight of dirty iron stairs. There is no way I’m going to tell him about my mother’s warning.

  Did you have a fabulous time? he asks, handing me a joint. I’m feeling glum, and I was hoping to live vicariously through your torrid love affair.

  It’s not exactly torrid, I tell him and take a hit, trying not to cough. Although I’m getting to the point that I wish it were.

  Why isn’t it, then?

  Because…I mean, where would we go?

  James points to the sky, to the city, lit up like a Christmas tree. He says, Out there. The world is your oyster.

  I have a ritual. At the end of every school year, I go through my papers and throw out most of them. Chem tests and history lessons. I keep some of the English papers that don’t suck too much, and the occasional art project, even though I draw like a fifth grader. And my report cards.

  But I haven’t been sure what to do with my results from the career assessment. It seems like the kind of thing that would be cool to find in a box twenty or thirty year
s from now.

  The stack of papers is on my desk as I’m getting ready for bed. The paper clipped to the top is the list I doodled in the margins on.

  • Fall in love

  • Figure out who the hell I am

  • Have sex without catching something

  • Repair my family

  • Escape

  I think I’ve done the first.

  Probably have work to do on the second.

  Definitely have work to do on the third.

  But, repair my family? Is that even possible? I’m starting to wonder if we’re broken, or things were hopeless from the beginning.

  And escape? Sure, as soon as I find a place where I can hold Gabriel’s hand in the street without worrying about someone threatening to kick the shit out of me.

  Do you think there’s any chance of fixing things with Mom and Dad? I ask Connor when I see him next. I mean, not as if we were ever the Waltons or anything, but this feels…

  Like we’re the spawn of a homophobic jackass? Connor fills in.

  Really, have you totally given up hope?

  Wake up, Michael, he says. If I ever had hope, I gave it up when Dad threw my suitcase off the fire escape.

  It’s the Fourth of July and I’m pissed because I wanted to go watch the fireworks over the East River, but it’s in the mid-nineties again, and it’s too hot to breathe much less stand for four hours, crushed up against hundreds of people.

  My father is pissed because someone from work promised him Yankees tickets and then reneged, and now Dave Righetti is pitching a no-hitter against the Red Sox.

  My mother is probably pissed about something too, only she’s too polite or too afraid of my dad to say so.

  When my father finally gets around to looking at Saturday’s mail, he launches his own fireworks, big enough to rival Macy’s.

  That’s what you get, my father says, throwing my mom’s Time magazine down on the table. “Disease Detectives,” the headline reads. Under that, proving its own point is the only part my father is paying attention to: “AIDS Hysteria.”

  I pick up the magazine when my father goes back to watching the game. Flip through it. Predictions are that a cure will be found in a couple of years. I wonder if that means we’re all safe. Or if the fear that lives inside my father is like a cancer, and that will kill us if nothing else does.

  Before I go to bed, the sound of fireworks ringing through the air, I examine my skin, pink and unmarked, and wonder what I need to give up to keep it that way.

  There’s a brownout and the voice on Dad’s battery-operated transistor radio tells us to ration power.

  Outside, the kids from the building across the street have opened some sprinklers and are running through the spray to keep cool. The cops sail by without doing anything; they get that no one wants to run their air conditioner and be the cause of a neighborhood power failure, and it’s seriously a furnace inside.

  I’m antsy to get out of the apartment and away from my parents, who are bickering about the heat (It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity, my mom says. I don’t give a shit what it is, it’s fucking uncomfortable, my dad replies) and the electric bill and some pots and pans that my mom wants to give to Connor, but that my dad wants to throw out.

  I tell my mom I’m going to get a Good Humor bar from the bodega and then slip out the door before she can make me a list of things to bring back.

  I grab a Coke instead and walk to Riverside Park, and then keep going all the way to the Joan of Arc statue at 93rd, and up to Grant’s tomb on 122nd, which is covered in garbage and graffiti and stuff I don’t want to examine closely enough to identify.

  Two women are standing off to the side, passing a bottle back and forth. One walks over to me. She’s wearing…not much, and not, I don’t think, because of the heat.

  Hey, she calls, You know who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?

  Yeah, I answer. No one.

  When Connor was little, this was his favorite joke because the answer seems obvious, but the remains of Grant and his wife, Julie, are actually in an aboveground building next to the tomb.

  Smart boy, she says and moves closer. I like smart boys.

  I wonder if I should feel something. Anything.

  In books, sixteen-year-old boys are turned on by everything.

  Maybe this is a test. Maybe I can avoid the secrets and the dark corners, the fear and the lies. Maybe this is the way to keep my skin unmarked.

  But I feel nothing. Nothing at all, except for the weight of the four days and three hours until I have a chance of seeing Gabriel again.

  And so I walk away.

  I give up on getting a real summer job. Connor’s boss pays me to help clean out their storeroom. James asks me to help hang some lights in the theater and even gets approval to pay me for the music I did for the show.

  The days move too slowly.

  James and Becky and I take turns in front of the oscillating fan in my room, trying to combat the heat.

  All art is surrender, James says, as if he’s relaying the Yankees score.

  Surrender to what? Becky asks.

  James pulls on his damp bangs and holds them while he thinks and then answers, Words. Notes. Brush strokes. Anything, really. You have to give up yourself to embrace whatever you’re creating, he says, Otherwise, it’s just you trying to be artsy.

  I like the city best like this, James says. Empty.

  I don’t understand where everyone goes, Becky replies.

  It’s easy to see why they leave, though. Summer temperatures and steam-filled subways that, on a good day, make everything smell like wet dog.

  They go to Europe, James explains. Or the Hamptons. Or Fire Island.

  His fingers flutter in front of him. My mother is home and doesn’t allow smoking in the house, and he doesn’t know what to do with his empty hands. When it gets bad enough, Becky dips into her bag and pulls out a pack of sweet, red-tipped, candy cigarettes. He smirks, but takes them nonetheless, rolling one between his fingers until the paper comes off.

  You realize that not everyone can afford to pick up and leave, right? I ask.

  James gives me a cocky smile. Of course. Isn’t that why we’re still here?

  August 1983

  Klaus Nomi is dead.

  James is sprawled on my floor in the semidarkness.

  I never got to meet him, he says. I heard he was playing the Mudd Club last year and waited outside, but the info must have been wrong. Lucy from the theater knew a friend of his and kept saying she was going to try to get him to come to rehearsals, but it never happened.

  James sits up and grabs my guitar. He can’t play, but silhouetted like this, he looks like a god when he holds it; a young rock star ready to take over the world.

  James lucks into a minor G and says, I heard Nomi wore those huge lovely collars to hide the sores. I heard he had it.

  It?

  AIDS.

  But they don’t know? I ask.

  James glares at me and puts the guitar down gently. Then, in a voice that’s anything but gentle, he says, Normal, everyday people are being fired from their jobs, Michael. Do you know how many funeral homes in the city will bury someone who died from AIDS? Guess. No, wait. I’ll tell you. Precisely one. I heard Steven’s parents wouldn’t even visit the hospital to say goodbye because they were afraid of catching something. And of course they didn’t tell me, so one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, died alone.

  He takes a deep breath and fights back tears. Then he says, If you were Klaus Nomi, would you tell anyone?

  James hadn’t told me Steven had died.

  I feel like the shittiest friend in the world.

  People stop at the newsstand and stare, expressions ranging from disgust, to fascination, to awe.

  The Newsweek cover is the f
irst national publication to show two men together, without hiding the fact that they’re a couple, according to the news. It’s definitely the first I’ve ever seen, and I have to shake my head to make sure I’m not imagining it.

  But I’m not.

  The cover shows two men leaning into each other under letters almost as big as the type in the magazine’s name, spelling out GAY AMERICA.

  It shows two men looking into the camera and daring the person looking at the magazine to dismiss them.

  And yeah, under that is SEX, POLITICS AND THE IMPACT OF AIDS so they’re going there, but when I look at the other people milling around to catch a glimpse, there’s a kid I’ve seen at school, who is a couple years younger than me, and he’s smiling like he’s seeing the most beautiful thing in the world.

  Maybe he is.

  Later that week, James comes over when my dad is working late and my mom is playing bridge with the women at church. He doesn’t want to talk. He won’t eat the food Mom left on the counter for me, not even the lasagna.

  He stays silent when I suggest hanging out to watch the guys play ball over on West 4th.

  He stays silent when I tell him I’m thinking of checking out open mic night.

  He stays silent when I tell him about the orthodox Jews I saw coming out of the Adonis movie theater on 8th Avenue, long black coats, long dark sideburns curling into spirals.

  Come dancing with me, I suggest and finally get his attention.

  I thought you liked to go alone, he says, but his eyes are hopeful.

  He’s right. I love going downtown and downstairs, and getting lost in the music and the smoke and the smell of sweat and cologne and dry ice. I love—for the length of a song at least—having no name, no history, no fears, no dreams. No reason to want to forget them all.

  I like turning to smoke and fading into the room, but can’t when James is there. James is a beacon, always drawing me to him.

  I do, I say. But this time, I want to go with you. It just has to be somewhere that isn’t The Echo, I add, hoping that I don’t have to explain.

  James looks at me, a complicated response on his lips. But all he says is, Leave it to me. I’ll figure something out.

  Most of Midtown is dark, thanks to a power line fire, so we go to a party in Battery Park thrown by someone James knows from the theater.