“I’m a friend,” I said, and named the psychologist. “He said you wouldn’t mind if we brought you some Christmas.”
He looked at me with the same confusion that the lady at Hallmark did, but then he softened. “That’s so lovely,” he said, his voice lighter than I expected. “Come in, come in.”
The house was spare, like one of the staged apartments at the resort. A blond man sat on the couch with a blanket over him. “Don’t get up for us,” I said, not even sure if he could. A man with hair as short as Bonnie’s came from upstairs, hurrying at the commotion. He had an artist’s brush in his hand. They were all in their twenties.
“I’m Ruth Coker Burks,” I said, shaking everyone’s hand. “This is my friend Bonnie and my daughter Allison. I’ve been helping people with AIDS at the hospitals here in Little Rock and in Hot Springs. And I just wanted to come and meet you all.”
It hung in the air for a moment. “I won’t tell anyone why I was here,” I said. “I mean that.”
We got to setting up the tree, and the lanky one brought a radio from the kitchen to play Christmas music. They watched Allison twirl, and Bonnie laughed. She was so at ease with these men, explaining to them that she had cancer, talking more about her treatments and surgeries than I’d ever see her do with other people. They got each other.
The artist said we needed ornaments and had an idea. “Come,” he said to me and Allison, “we can make some.” Bonnie stayed downstairs with the other two men. Upstairs, the man had turned his bedroom, a sunlit room with just a mattress on the floor, into an artist’s studio, with a beat-up, paint-stained table the only focus. Everywhere you looked, he had Scotch-taped paintings, dreamy suggestions of people and landscapes.
“Would you like to paint something?” he asked Allison. She nodded yes, her hands clasped behind her back. “These are watercolors. I love them,” he said, dipping a one-inch flat brush in water and squeezing it out. “It’s just paint and water and light. Here.” He handed her the brush. “Any color you want, just dip it.”
She chose purple, her favorite color. “Go ahead, he said, and she made a stripe across the white paper. “Gorgeous,” he said, guiding her hand to dip the brush in the water. “Now, see what you can just do with water. Use the brush like a bird splashing.” She dabbed at the purple, bleeding it out in stripes of a lighter pink.
“You’re a natural,” he said, and she beamed. “Now do that with a bunch of colors and see what you get.”
She did three sheets, and we brought them downstairs. He taped them to the windows to dry, and they hung like stained glass. Then he cut them into shapes Allison called out. Circles and icicles, candy canes and stars. We undid paper clips to make little hangers, all of us smiling at such an unexpected gathering.
And then it happened. It was such a small moment, but there was so much in it. The lanky one went into the kitchen and came out with a glass of Coke for Allison. He asked her if she wanted some, and she instinctively looked to me for permission. Then they all did.
The question was plain: Could I let my daughter drink out of a glass that someone with AIDS had drunk from, even if it was washed? I had spent so much time telling nurses and doctors that the virus couldn’t be spread by touching someone with AIDS or drinking from a glass. I could do it, and did so to prove a point. But my baby?
She had the glass in her hands, waiting for me to say yes or no. It was, as we say in Arkansas, when things get down to nut cuttin’.
I nodded yes, and she drank from the glass. I turned to the guys.
“I’m sorry that took me a moment,” I said. “I’m used to it just being me.” I didn’t lie or dismiss it. I had fear, and I had to face it. But a barrier had fallen. We talked about fear and feeling isolated. People not wanting to breathe the same air as you.
One knew the psychologist, and I didn’t ask how. He put them in the nicest house they’d ever lived in and came once a week to talk to them.
“Like a support group,” I said. They had each had friends and lovers die, and now only had each other. I shared what I knew, symptoms I had seen, and what hospitals to avoid. They didn’t ask what their deaths would look like. They already knew.
I remembered the Christmas cards and asked if they wanted to write to people. They started to write, and the room got quiet except for Allison’s humming along to the Christmas music. The artist went upstairs and came down with something he’d painted. It was a self-portrait, though he looked older now. I watched him fold it into a small rectangle, then slip it into the envelope. “For my brother,” he said.
They were afraid to put the house as the return address. “Use mine,” I said. “I have a P.O. box, so it’ll be nothing to them.” I still had hope that they would get a response. “I’ll bring them to you when they write back.”
As they wrote, the room got darker and darker, and it was Allison who had to tell us to turn on the lights. We hadn’t noticed. I felt at home, yet still at a distance from what these men were going through. When we left, Allison gave them all hugs, and we got back in the truck to drive home. The lanky one waved at the door and then quickly closed it.
He died after New Year’s. The blond on the couch passed a week later, dementia setting in so fast he didn’t know who I was when I happened upon him at the Med Center.
I closed the eyes of the artist in February. I never got any responses to their cards.
Allison asked when we were going back. I called the psychologist to see if he was still helping people with the house. No, he said, he couldn’t go through that again.
Chapter Five
The calls would come either late night or early morning. I’d grown used to hospitals calling me, but these men were on their own. I don’t know how they got my number, but they were told I was someone who might help.
The phone would often ring at first light, like they’d tossed and turned waiting for the sun and couldn’t take it anymore. The calls came so regularly, I had to put a phone by the bed so I wouldn’t wake Allison.
Most of them knew what was coming but didn’t know what to do. They’d been living with a boyfriend who died or just taking care of a friend. Sometimes I would say hello, and all they could do was sob.
“I’m here,” I’d say. And I’d listen to them cry for an hour, because they couldn’t get it out or they didn’t know how. “It’s okay, just go ahead and cry. And if you can talk then you can talk. And if you can’t, well, you know, you let me know when you want to hang up because I won’t.”
There was no medicine, so all I could offer was information. They were usually planning to return to Arkansas from someplace else, and I had to teach myself to stop immediately saying, “Don’t.” But most of them couldn’t get a doctor to see them even where they were. They were literally thrown out of clinics because they were gay. Some didn’t know the most basic information about what was happening to them. They were sleeping on somebody’s couch, maybe somebody they were taking care of. And they went from sofa to sofa until they ran out of friends who were well enough to take care of them. I would meet them at the bus station in Malvern, a thirty-minute ride to Hot Springs. They carried their lives in a ratty suitcase or box. Often they were so sick they needed to go to the hospital right away, and I’d take them the forty-five minutes straight to Little Rock. I would take people to a Hot Springs hospital only if it was an emergency, and even then, I would tell myself that I could make up the fifteen-minute difference from Malvern if I floored it.
So many arrived thinking Mama would take them back. Sometimes I would go to their homes with them, mostly just to save me a trip of driving back out there when she wouldn’t. The mothers were the hardest on them, the fathers off to the side. Most of these young men were raised Pentecostal, and Pentecostals just hated gay people. The churches were so powerful and set where the family stood in life. The women had probably seen an example made of someone else, about some smal
ler defiance. Men can sometimes do the deciding about who is exiled, but it’s women who do the day-to-day work of shunning. They knew they’d lose everything if they showed mercy to their sons.
I went to a home one night with a young man from Mount Ida. Douglas was so terrified of telling his parents that he asked me to come inside with him. He was slight, and his nerves came in these little seizures of all-body shivers. At the door, I saw why. His mother was as short as him, but puffed out. Her whole presence was angry and red like a thumb that got hit by a hammer.
She eyed me up and down. Douglas told her he had something important to tell them and shook so violently I grabbed his arm and moved closer to him.
“Can we come in and sit down?” I asked.
“Of course,” his mother said, turning to move fast, like she wanted to make the place look more presentable. She moved a newspaper off a couch, and as we sat she cleared glasses from side tables and brought them into the kitchen. A toilet flushed, and his dad came out from the hall. She told him their son had something to tell them.
Douglas said nothing, so I did. “You have a lovely home,” I lied. “I see why he wanted to see you.” I didn’t see, but that wasn’t for me to see anyway.
He told them. Blurted it out with a spasm that scared me. I put my hand on Douglas’s shoulder to keep him on the earth. They looked like they’d been whiplashed.
“I thought—” she stopped. She looked at my hand on her son’s shoulder. I had raised her hopes. I was supposed to be the problem. Pregnant. Or just some hussy in her twenties getting her dumb son in trouble. But at least that would have proved he wasn’t gay.
“Why did you do this to us?” she hissed. She stood, and his whole body flinched next to mine. How many times had the gay been beaten out of him? He stood, his shoulders hunched down in self-protection.
“Your soul is rot,” she said. She motioned to her husband, who was shaking his head, his lower lip pulled back to bare his teeth. A coward trying to look tough.
“I always knew it,” she said. “But to come back and—”
“Okay,” I said, walking to the door. “You’ve made yourself clear. Thank you. He wanted you to know.” Douglas didn’t say anything else; he was fading.
In the car, Douglas still said nothing. “I’m sorry,” I said, which was about all I could say. He nodded. I told him he could stay the night at my house. It was Friday, and Allison was at her daddy’s. In the morning we’d go to one of the tourist courts in Hot Springs. Tourist courts were like motor lodges, and there were lots of one-room apartments along Ouachita and Park because so many people came to town to take the baths.
I kept turning that phrase she said over in my mind: “Your soul is rot.”
I put out extra sheets for him to make the couch more comfortable. I got up in the night to check on him. The sheets were still in the pile, folded, and he slept in the clothes he was wearing. Even sleeping, he seemed to be keeping his body as small as possible, not taking up any space.
More men called me before they came back, and when they arrived, I brought them to the tourist courts for a cheap place to live as long as they needed it. From working with Bonnie, I knew my way around the housing assistance program. They began to let people with AIDS get disability benefits from social security, so then I started getting them on that too. These were men who’d had jobs where they had lived, entire lives. They had invested in the system that spurned them. The only thing I had to do was get a signed note from a doctor. I mean, a note. It could have been on the back of a matchbox, and all it had to say was, “I’m his doctor, and I think he has AIDS.”
There were two gay men in town who I thought would help me, but they didn’t. They had jobs in social services, and the first few times, I tried to get in their lines, but I made them nervous. They were afraid people would find out they were gay. They were hiding in plain sight. It just went unmentioned because they were fun at galas and the Fine Arts Ball. I went to those parties too, with my best friend Sandy, and whatever guy and his friend she dragged in. Some guy would buy me a three-dollar drink and think he could cop a feel in return. So, with all the time I spent ignoring Sandy’s guys, I had plenty of time to watch these two men as they socialized, perfectly acceptable because they played along. I didn’t expect them to give some secret signal that I could use to get better treatment, but I was surprised at how much they wanted nothing to do with me or the guys I brought in. When I saw them, they started to look past me.
But we kept going. I would coach my guys for each line and each pencil pusher like it was a performance. A game we had to play in order to get things done. We were a team, and I treated them like stars. “Okay, we’re going to the food-stamp office now,” I would say. “The only answers you give them are Yes, No, I don’t know. And if they get funny, I’ll fill in for you.” We’d walk out, reviewing the performance, and I would tell them how proud I was of them.
When I met them sick in the hospital, it was too late. But out there in the world, I seized on every bit of joy I could scrape out of the pan. These men had lived on the margins so long that coming into the light to ask for help scared them to death. I had to walk them through the steps, keeping things fun.
I realized this included death certificates. I had often been asked to fill out information for death certificates in hospitals, when I didn’t know the most basic information about the men. I wanted them to have a death certificate so people would know that they had lived and they had died—they were here. Because they at least deserved that. They couldn’t be “nobody’s nothing” after what they had been through. At one point in early 1987 I had a few guys from all over, and I brought them together. I ordered pizza, and as we ate and laughed, I fired out questions like a game-show host. “What’s your mother’s maiden name?” “Where were you born, anyway?” I was always helping people with forms, so this wasn’t that unusual, and I just said it was for the hospital, “just to have.”
I wanted them to be counted, to have their lives matter, and I wanted them to have control over their destinies, no matter how limited they might seem to others. If I felt they were strong enough, I brought them to Files Cemetery and asked them to tell me where they’d like to be buried. I’d put so many on top of my family’s graves, but those were the hospital patients I barely had a chance to know. And now there were people like Douglas, who were coming to an uneasy acceptance that it would happen someday, even though I knew we both realized it was soon.
John, Danny, Neil. I walked them around and told them who the people were and some history about them. “Or maybe you want to be closer to the road so you know what’s going on.” The storytellers liked that one, and the quiet ones often chose to be under the oak. But after I gave them the lay of the land, I went quiet. “You go out and wherever it feels right, you stand there, and that’s where you’ll be.”
I’d write it down in my journal and honor their wishes. Douglas chose the oak.
Allison and I were at the church potluck, and the unspoken competition was in full swing. Everybody wanted to be the one that just wowed ’em all with a sweet potato casserole. I felt exempt, because I already knew I made the best fried chicken anyone had ever thrown a lip over. It would bring a tear to your mama’s eye, it was so good. I put the flour and the salt and pepper and all of that in a paper bag, and I rolled the chicken in it. And then I dipped the chicken in egg and put it back in, to make that double crust. My mother was a terrible cook but made sure I knew how to cook, because she wanted me to get married to that tire-retread guy. I had to be able to feed him.
Marie was hosting, so she had to put on chi-chi fa-fa airs, having just had her kitchen remodeled. The women all had to take turns oohing and aahing at it, but I got that out of the way quick. The men sat around, all full bellies and small talk about Rotary business.
Near the end of the evening, I was in the living room with Allison when I heard a god-awful noise
in the kitchen. I went in to find Marie standing at the sink shoveling food down the drain.
“It just gets rid of everything for you,” she said, trying to scream pretty over the noise. It was a garbage disposal. People acted like they’d never seen such a wonder.
“Well, that’s not garbage,” I said. The women turned to look at me, half-smiles cocked so I’d have a chance to clarify my position in a more pleasing manner. I tried. “I mean, we can plate that up . . . not waste it.”
Marie paused and turned off the disposal. “Of course, Ruth,” she said, her show interrupted. She looked at Allison. “If you all didn’t get enough to eat—”
“No, we did,” I said. “Everything was just lovely. And you have to give me the recipe for those Swedish meatballs, because Allison just loved them.”
“I did not,” Allison said, insulted. “I said they were—”
“Oh yes, you did. And, Mabel, this good coffee cake. I just mean we can share all this.”
I’d done this before for Bonnie and some of the elders in the town after big parties. Like Miss Ann and old Miss McKissek. And Melba, of course, who always seemed so prim, just a sweet little old Lutheran lady, until you learned she’d learned all those manners running a St. Louis brothel in the 1950s.
Like after the Fine Arts Ball, I’d go in the kitchen and chat up whoever catered it, box things up, and take it around so people stuck at home could be part of the big night. I’d tell them where I’d been and who I saw. “Here’s the food, and try this, it’s really good.” Melba and I would sit in her kitchen, and she’d read my fortune with regular playing cards, laying out my future on the tiny yellow checks of her plastic tablecloth.
I knew how much sharing that food meant to people, so why not do it here too? I started packing things up before she could say no. “Marie, you have all these paper plates,” I said. “The good kind, of course, nice and sturdy. I would expect nothing less! Doris, will you pass me that foil?” I got them all enlisted in helping me, whether they wanted to or not.
All the Young Men Page 6