I was right that Keith had a day. Phil and Bob were there when he passed, and I was grateful he went easy for them. They didn’t need to see any nasty coming attractions. They wanted to honor him with a funeral, and I thought Hot Springs Funeral Home would help now. My friend Dub Townsend, one of the kindest people I knew, had become the general manager there. I went over and explained it, assuring them they wouldn’t need to embalm the body, because I knew that scared funeral directors. I could help arrange the cremation, but the funeral would be there.
Dub said yes, and I gave him a big hug. I told him I knew I could count on him, which I hoped was true. But good people do sometimes let you down. The thing about being a pariah in my church and town was that when people like Char and Dub were kind, it stood out.
I could help Phil and Bob do Keith’s funeral at a low cost, but I would need an urn. I couldn’t just stop by Dryden Pottery to get a cookie jar and then put Keith up at the funeral home in that. I needed forty dollars for an urn, and I didn’t have it. Phil and Bob were tapped out too. I sat with that a minute, thinking about the elders in town I could go to. If my church was worth a darn, I could go to my fellow parishioners. Do a special collection and have it in a minute. We did that to get the new hymnals to replace the perfectly good ones we had.
I went to Our House that night, to be around some life.
“Water for me,” I told Paul. “I’m here for the company.” I told him about Keith, explaining that Dub was willing to bury him, but I couldn’t afford the actual urn to put him in.
“Well, how much is it?”
“Forty dollars.”
He seemed surprised. “That’s it?”
“Yes,” I said. “I have everything else covered. And I just need to figure this out.”
He paused. “It’s really just forty?”
I felt embarrassed. I didn’t have a spare forty dollars that wasn’t earmarked for a bill or gas to drive people around. It was all spoken for. “Yes,” I said.
“Ruthie,” he said slowly. “I’ll talk to some people, and maybe, if you can stop by tomorrow, we can take care of it.”
“I didn’t mean to ask—”
“I know you didn’t,” he said. “I want to do this.”
The next day I went back, and I was ready to pretend the offer had never been made. But Paul pulled a little tackle box from under the bar. “I told people what you needed,” he said. “And why.”
Inside was a wad of singles and quarters and one five. “We got to forty-seven fifty. I just wanted you to see it all.”
“Thank you so much,” I said. “Thank you so much.” I started to cry, and I didn’t want to. Paul was nice, but he didn’t seem the type to handle big emotions. I grabbed a cocktail napkin and tried to stop the tears, but they wouldn’t stop.
“He was just a really sweet guy, Keith was,” I said. “He even died not wanting to make a fuss. Just got away from me.”
“Ruthie, you’re so thankful, and this is something so small.” Paul put the money in the register, and placed two twenties and the rest in a neat pile in front of me. “It’s something anyone would do for anyone. I would do that for someone’s dog if they died.”
“That’s the thing,” I said. “Nobody has wanted to do that for these guys.” I tilted my head back and blinked to dry the tears.
“Oh, my mascara,” I said.
“It’s on the run,” he said.
“I’ll never catch it at this rate,” I said. I picked up the money, holding it up like the blessed offering from the collection plate. “I cannot thank you enough. You know you and anyone else are welcome to come to Keith’s service. It’s Friday at ten.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t like hospitals or funerals.”
“Me neither,” I said. “I just keep meeting people that way.”
They had passed a hat for me to help Keith. I thought about that for weeks. Even later, when I buried Bob and Phil at Files Cemetery within a few months of each other, that kindness was a balm. It gave me an even greater appreciation of Our House as a place of community. I knew I was hearing only from people who were already diagnosed or suspected they’d been infected. So I asked Paul if I could come some night and just have information available about AIDS. Actively give out condoms and lubricant. I promised not to be a downer.
“I know people come here for fun,” I said.
“It’s such a relief for people to go down to the bar, let your hair down, and let the week go,” he said. “Have a few drinks and tell a few stories. And the occasional spat between queens, and nobody really gets hurt.”
“I know that,” I said. “I can keep it light and fun.” I promised to do it once, and then if they thought I should do it again, then I’d come in. I would wait to be invited. I didn’t ask to be part of an act or get up onstage. I knew well enough that drag queens don’t share a stage.
The first night I went in and just tucked myself in a little vestibule with a lot of condoms and pamphlets I’d picked up from the health department. The response was okay, but my sales pitch tendencies weren’t satisfied. A couple of months later, I asked Paul if I could do it again, this time with props.
“Props?”
“Nothing crazy,” I said. “You’ll see.”
Well, cut to me using a can of spray-air to blow up different-size condoms and pinning them to a pegboard. I had regular ones, plus an extra-large one, but the biggest one was a pony condom, which they use on farms to gather semen from animals. They’re real big, the size of your arm almost. And then I had a little finger cot I blew up with the last of the air in the can and tied off. I had them all up, smallest to largest.
Guys approached, and I acted like a saleslady. So many would see the pony condom and say, “That’s me! That’s me right there.” Just a conversation starter that wasn’t depressing and celebrated sex. I asked true-or-false questions, with the prize being condoms. I tried to keep my language very street, mimicking what I’d overheard here and there at the bar.
“Is Crisco a safe lubricant?” I’d ask.
“How do you know about Crisco?” a guy asked me.
“Well, is it?”
“Yes?” he answered, tentatively.
“No! Oil-based lubricants like Crisco, Vaseline, and baby oil break down condoms! And so does suntan lotion so be careful on the beach.” I’d hand him two condoms. “Thanks for playing!”
They were laughing, but they were learning. I had to be careful and not turn the crowd off to what I was saying. Walk a very fine line and switch it up at a moment’s notice so I wouldn’t offend people. It reminded me of selling the time-shares, saying whatever I needed to in order to put people at ease so they’d listen. I surprised myself, getting more used to listing off sex acts that were safe or at least safer. I wanted them to reduce their chances of getting infected, not tell them to stop having sex. But I was still shocked by how little people knew. These were the people most at risk, and they’d been left to die.
When I came back, it got to be a fun thing for people to do, watch other guys guess and get the wrong answers. And they would know about the pony condom before anyone else did. There were people bringing friends over to learn about it. Everybody was trying to save everybody else’s life.
I also saw tourists, their wedding rings tucked in their pockets. I don’t know what the guys at the bar thought of them, but as a woman, you’re trained to look for the “waistline” a ring leaves. If some guy is coming on to you, and you see that waistline, he’ll probably lie and tell you a sob story about his wife just dying. But at least you’ll know what you’re getting into. I had a drunk guy stagger over, and when I offered a condom, he said he didn’t need it.
“I’m not gay,” he said, keeping one eye closed so there would only be one of me.
“That’s nice. You ever have sex with men?”
“Well, sure.�
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“There you go,” I said, handing him a condom. “Here, take another.”
It was those guys, the tourists who kept what they did in Hot Springs secret, that I worried about. People take risks when they’re afraid of being found out. They weren’t going to learn about safe sex because they thought that didn’t apply to them.
Billy never came over, but one night he walked by as I told everyone to tell their friends to come to me if they wanted to get tested.
“It’s anonymous,” I said. “It’s Mickey or Minnie Mouse. Your pick.”
“I got tested,” he said, loud, so people could hear. “I’m good.”
I was so relieved. Both that he’d said he knew his status so people could hear him, since he was such a role model, and also, of course, that he was negative.
Billy always told me he’d been tested. Nobody needed to worry.
Chapter Seventeen
The Pancake Shop on Central is right across from the Arlington Hotel, and even on weekday mornings it was smart to get there right when it opened at six thirty or a little after. Otherwise you’d have to wait in line forever.
I took Allison as a treat before school, smiling at the owner, Ruth Ardman, as we walked in. She was there every day behind that register, an old Southern woman who liked me okay. She ran that place like a machine, watching the whole show, arms crossed, shoulders back. It was a cash business, so she didn’t want to let any money walk out that door unattended.
I ordered ham, which you had to have there, because it would be a sin to miss out on it. I was surprised to see Clay Farrar in the back at the business table. The table was a square, one corner set against the wall, and you knew not to go up and bother anybody sitting at that table. Clay was a true Southern gentleman lawyer in town, a couple of years older than me, and we shared a real love of Hot Springs.
Whatever it was ended with a handshake, and we nodded at each other as he passed. He paid the bill, and I was surprised when he came back to my table.
“Good morning, Ruth.”
“Hello, Clay.”
“I was wondering,” he said. “I read about what you’ve been doing.”
“I hope it wasn’t in the police blotter.”
“No, no,” he said. “But listen, we need a speaker at Rotary. Would you be interested in coming in and talking about, uh—”
“My AIDS work?”
He nodded, looking around quickly. I jumped on it before the offer was rescinded. “Clay, I would be truly honored. That would mean the world to me.”
“Wednesday.”
“It’s a date.”
As he walked out, I sat up a little straighter, hoping someone overheard me. “Allison, I was just asked to speak at Rotary.”
My eye went over to Ruth Ardman, who was looking at me a little differently now. The Rotary Club of Hot Springs was the old guard. They met every Wednesday, upstairs at the Arlington’s grand ballroom. It was all men, and it’s where all the bigwigs in town were. The Rotarians were all the people who could help me help people. If I sound the alarm, I again thought, the cavalry will come.
Clay was a former president of the club, so him inviting me was him vouching for me. I prepared statistics about HIV in Arkansas and figured I had to do the most basic information about how you get it. Other than that, I wanted to wing it. I had to be able to read the crowd to make sure they weren’t turning on me at any point, just like at Our House. To know just how far I could take it. To sugarcoat some of it, but they would know I was sugarcoating it. Mainly because I was a lady presenting it to men.
I got there early, wanting to shake everyone’s hand as they came in. Smile a lot and let them know they weren’t going to be lectured at. The room just looked important, with gilded wallpaper and chandeliers. I sat at a long table at the front, right next to the Arkansas flag.
Clay introduced me, and I started out thanking them for letting me speak to them about this important issue. I told them the men in this room had the power to keep our community safe. It was buttering them up, but I was sincere.
I think I was about a minute into talking about the people with AIDS that I had cared for in Hot Springs when it happened. A man stood up, this real blowhard who owned a housecleaning business.
“We don’t want that here!” he yelled.
A shock went through the room. You just did not do that at Rotary. The men next to him touched his arm to get him to stop, but I wasn’t about to be rescued.
“None of us want it, but it’s here. Or I wouldn’t be up here.” I waited a beat. “Heckled at Rotary, can you imagine?” I smiled, and the men laughed. Now I had them.
I explained why they didn’t need to be afraid of people with HIV, laying out the basics about how it was not contagious through the air or skin to skin contact. It was spread through the sharing of bodily fluids, mainly through sexual contact and the sharing of needles. The only way it was like the flu was that whoever got it hadn’t done something to deserve it, they were just exposed to it.
A guy I knew from church, a landscaper, shook his head, rolling his eyes.
I stopped. “Did you have a question?”
He looked down. I noticed Roger Giddings, superintendent of Hot Springs National Park, giving me an encouraging nod. I talked about the people with AIDS in town, how they needed food and access to care, but what we mainly needed was education. We couldn’t ignore that it was here, and we had a duty to help each other.
There was a man who sneered the whole time. He went to my church, and he was one of the older men who gave me the dirtiest looks every Sunday since I had asked Dr. Hays for a room for a support group before the finance committee meeting. Not long after I spoke at Rotary, I saw him as I was crossing the railroad tracks in my car. He was right there, picking up a little black boy. From where I was stopped, I watched him help the child, a young teenager, put his bicycle in the back of a van. The old man seemed nervous but excited, smiling like a clown at this young man he’d clearly just met.
The car behind me tooted the horn, a polite, “Get moving.”
The old man turned at the sound of the horn and looked right at me. We didn’t wave. I showed no sign of recognition. He looked caught.
At church the next Sunday, he made a beeline for me. Like it was all he had thought about since he saw me.
“Where I was picking up that boy,” he stammered. “He does my yard work.” For the last year, this man wouldn’t have said “excuse me” to me if he’d knocked me down the stairs. Not a word until now.
“Uh, I didn’t ask you why you were down there picking up that little black boy.”
“I was giving him a ride,” he said.
“I do know that young people need to be safe and looked after.”
“I wanted us to be clear,” he said. It was poker. Would I ruin him? Could I? Of course, I wouldn’t. But guilty people think everyone else is too.
If being on TV and in the paper hadn’t made me the AIDS lady, talking about it at Rotary did. The Rotary Club in Arkadelphia heard about me and invited me, then the Lions Club. After I started doing those talks, word got around, and I got calls from married men who felt they could confide their concerns about their own exposure. It turned out people were so busy having affairs and getting blow jobs from strippers that it was amazing any work was getting done in town.
About a month after speaking at Rotary, I got a call from someone I’d known almost my whole life. He’d done real well for himself, but there was panic in his voice.
“Oh my God, what are you doing right now?” went the call. “You’ve gotta come up to my office. Something horrible’s happened.”
“Ryan, what are you . . . I’ve gotta be in Arkadelphia at the Rotary Club. I can’t just come up there right now, but I can stop by on the way back.”
“No, no, no. You’ve gotta come here right now. This is awful
. This is just terrible.”
I got up there to his office, and all the ladies in the secretarial pool stared at me. Apparently, Ryan had been making calls in the conference room, not realizing the secretaries could hear everything through a grate. They were so weird that when I walked in to see Ryan, I asked him, “What’s up with them?”
“I don’t know, but shut the door. I think I gave Sara AIDS! I think I gave her AIDS!”
“Ryan! What’s wrong?” He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He clearly hadn’t shaved, and from the looks of his suit, I think there was a good chance he’d spent the night at the office.
“I’m gonna have her tested.”
“Why don’t you start with you?”
“Oh God, that would mean I have it.”
“Well, that would be how it works, if you think you gave it to her.”
“Well, last month I went to a conference in Michigan,” he said.
“Yeah, so what’s wrong with Michigan?”
“I got a hooker. I am just connecting the dots here and—oh shit.”
“Ryan, you gotta tell me what you did with that hooker so I can tell you if you’re at risk or not. Just come on, you can tell me anything.”
Ryan closed his eyes and yelled, in the most plaintive, confessional voice he could muster, “We did the Jimmy Swaggart thing.”
Oh. “You got a blow job?” I asked, deadpan.
He looked shocked. “Yes, yes, I did.”
“Oh my God, Ryan, you’re infected all right,” I said.
“I knew it! I knew it!”
“You’re infected with the Guilts, is what you got. You got a massive case of the Guilts,” I said. “Ryan, there’s no way you got AIDS from a blow job.”
He looked like I’d freed him. “I can come back and test you, and what you tell her is your business,” I said. “But if you go to any more conferences, just remember you need to use a new condom for every sex act, okay? Now, I have to go.”
All the Young Men Page 18