With so much hate in the world, it made me feel good to know that all these people were out there fishing, not knowing their lures had been made by someone with AIDS.
That June a bunch of us went to the Arlington Hotel to see who would be crowned Miss Arkansas of 1991. This was the straight pageant, and Billy had no use for that, so he stayed home. I was excited, but once I was there, I saw why he skipped it. Once you’ve gone to a drag show, a so-called regular pageant is a letdown.
I sat with Norman and a bunch of the Little Rock queens who came over for it, including Misty McCall. Misty and I were next to each other, and she just picked those poor girls to death. “The earrings don’t go with that dress.” “Oh honey, the first rule of the Talent portion is you’re supposed to have one.” It was miserable watching these poor little country girls, and Misty told me most of them only did it to find a husband. “I like the husband-getting dresses,” she explained. “Like Miss Texarkana, she’s not going anywhere, but that gown was lovely. She’ll be looking to unload it, so maybe I’ll call her.”
“You buy dresses from beauty queens?”
“The losers’ dresses go cheap,” she said, and mimed a call. “‘Meet me at the Wal-Mart.’ They sell them for nothing. The Miss Texas pageant used to be where it was at. We’d bring the U-Haul and sit through the show, and it was like the Paris runway, ‘Okay, Miss Austin, like the shoes. Miss El Paso, where’d you get those earrings?’”
“Pageant shopping.”
“Oh sure,” she said. “Because Daddy was an oilman or cattleman, and he was gonna buy his baby girl that pageant, so these dresses would be thousands of dollars. And in the parking lot, the girl is crying, and they’ll practically pay you to take the dress so they never have to see it again.”
“Well, I know who to go to if I need a dress,” I said.
“My drag closet is open for business.”
During a break, Norman and I talked about a guy named Corbin that we saw in the pageant audience. I knew of his family because they were rich, and he certainly did nothing to hide his wealth. Whenever he clapped during the show, he raised his hands up like he was trying to catch every bit of light in the diamonds on his many bracelets and rings. I said something to Norman about Corbin’s bracelet, and he scoffed. “Cora? Oh honey, those are his summer diamonds.”
“Oh my God, I knew he was rich,” I said. “But he’s rich enough to have seasonal diamonds? What are summer diamonds?”
“Well,” said Norman, “some are diamonds, and some aren’t.”
I laughed, filing it away to use again and again. It was fun to laugh with Norman and Misty, to lose myself in a world of husband-getting dresses and summer diamonds. But I also had an agenda that night with Norman. I had to formally ask him if I could maybe come by and do some of the safer-sex education at Discovery that I was doing at Our House in Hot Springs. I knew there was a mostly friendly rivalry between the bars, but there was also a divide between me and the Little Rock queens. They were sometimes leery of me, like I was the health inspector. Norman agreed to let me do education there, but I know there was a general feeling in Little Rock that I was drawing too much attention to AIDS. Also, I was a straight woman, and they thought this was a family matter. I couldn’t disagree more.
Later in the summer, I was doing my rounds at a hospital in Hot Springs, when there was a commotion at the nurses’ station. A doctor had just been brought in to the ER, dead on arrival of a heart attack. When I realized they were talking about the Doctor, I looked for a place to sit down, fearing I might pass out. I felt as if the person who was holding the other end of the rope had let go, and I was plummeting.
I learned that it had happened on a running path. He’d driven to it alone. I thought about his car and what he might have in there. A little black book, something from Chip, anything.
His wife came to the hospital, and I waited a long time to approach her. I offered my sincere condolences. I said I had seen the Doctor sometimes at hospitals and that I could tell he was a good man who cared about his patients.
She thanked me.
“You know,” I said, “why don’t you let me bring his car over to your house, so you don’t have that burden.”
I knew it was forward, but I was desperate. She looked at me a moment. There was a slight turn to her head. Who was I to him?
“No, thank you,” she said. “It’s taken care of.” The conversation was over.
“Good,” I said. “That’s good to know. Again, I am so sorry for your loss.”
She turned away.
Driving to the next hospital, I remembered something from months back. I had been complaining to the Doctor about all the people lying about the cause of death in obituaries. “Donations can be made to the American Cancer Society,” I said. “Don’t ask any questions.”
“Doctors used to not even tell people they had cancer,” he said. “Doctors have all kinds of secrets.” He told me about the pressure. How so many of them were dealing with addiction. “A much higher rate than other professions,” he told me. “And the suicide rate is likely double that of other professions.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Well, there’s the pressure of being God, right? But also, we know exactly how to do it. We even know how to do it so it doesn’t look like a suicide. Shoot yourself up with enough epinephrine. Then do something strenuous—that’s just a heart attack. Who’s going to check?”
He’d said the last part like a joke, so I dismissed it. “People don’t do that.”
“You’d be surprised what people do,” he said.
I went to his funeral. I tried to be discreet, but I sobbed throughout it, feeling alone. Women looked at me, and I saw them whispering. I knew they thought I slept with everyone’s husband and probably only hung around hospitals trying to marry a doctor. This was just one more on my checklist. “Was she after him too?”
I wanted to stand up and tell everyone what the Doctor had done—the risks he had taken to help me these three years. He allowed so many people to have the last months or years of their lives to sort out what had happened to them and what they were going to do now.
He was a hero, and no one would ever know. I hoped he was not in pain when he died. But I knew he was.
Chapter Twenty-Five
In September, KARK-TV had me in the news studio in Little Rock at five o’clock in the morning talking about my AIDS work. Once I got back to Hot Springs, my plan was to maybe take a nap with Allison in the hour we had before I had to take her to school. I didn’t think many people would be up that early to see it, but my phone was ringing when I walked in the door. The caller was a soft-voiced woman, and I don’t know how many times she called and didn’t leave a message, because she sounded surprised when I picked up.
“I’m calling for the cousin of a cousin—”
“Of a cousin,” I said. “It’s okay, I understand. What can I help you with?” She tried to explain, something about someone being in Texas, and then she finally ended up asking if her sister could call me. “It’s her son.”
“Of course,” I said.
“She’s very upset,” she said.
“Tell her to call me,” I said. “See if I can help.” I hung up, lay back, and closed my eyes.
The phone rang five minutes later. “My son Luke is at Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth,” she said. “He has AIDS and a brain tumor. He’s thirty-seven. They can’t, or won’t, operate, and he is almost completely paralyzed. He can eat . . .”—she paused—“. . . if I spoon-feed him. He can’t talk anymore.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“We live in Hot Springs, and we’d like to take him back home to take care of him.”
“That’s a wonderful thing,” I said. “I can’t tell you how rare that is.”
“We just don’t know how to get him home,” she said. “They’re saying we need to
fly him, because, uh, the ambulance ride could kill him.”
“Right, they call that an air ambulance.”
“Okay,” she said. “We have money, but they said it’s very expensive. They’re making it seem so complicated, and I just don’t know how to get him home.”
I thought about powerful people who get things done. “Do you mind me asking who you bank with in Hot Springs?”
She said the name of the bank. The president was one of the town elders who helped me from time to time.
“Let me see if he can give us some guidance,” I said. “He’s a good man.”
I promised to call her back either way. I put on my nicest outfit, a flowing beige A-line skirt with a beige top, and brought Allison to school before heading straight to the bank. I knew the president would be there first thing in the morning. His blond hair was now all white; he was at least sixty-five but showed no interest in retiring.
“Well,” I told him, “I have a family that banks at your bank, and they have for a long time, and this is the situation . . .” I reeled off the facts I knew, expressing their wish to bring Luke home from Fort Worth.
He paused for just a few seconds. “There’ll be one waiting at the airport,” he said.
“Well, listen for a second, they need an air ambulance, not just a helicopter.”
“I understand you,” he said. “It will be at the airport.”
“I cannot thank you enough,” I said.
He just had to pick up a phone. He was so certain this was a done deal, he didn’t even have to make the call in front of me. I wondered what having that kind of power must be like. To have so many favors everywhere that the cost of this wasn’t even something to consider. What I could do with that power.
I called Luke’s mother right from the bank. “Tell them it’s a go,” I said. I figured it was an hour-and-a-half flight to Fort Worth, and I’d ride over in the air ambulance and meet the family and help out. I could be there and back and still get Allison after school. While I was in the air, Luke’s mother arranged to have a hospital bed and the supplies brought to her house in Hot Springs, to set up a care facility in their living room. Again, I marveled at what money could do.
They were waiting for us when the air ambulance landed at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth. I stepped right out, the wind of the propellers lifting my hair and making my skirt billow. Luke’s mother later told me I looked like an angel coming to take her son home. Luke’s father was there, a burly but gentle man. And there was Luke, six foot five and so skinny, looking almost completely paralyzed, and unable to speak. He was curled on the stretcher, probably down to ninety pounds. From his eyes, I could tell he understood everything. There was a man there too, saying goodbye to Luke. Todd was twenty-eight and blond, and moved so gracefully, like an actor in a movie. He looked haunted. I gave him my number and told him he could call me anytime.
Luke’s parents were deeply religious and belonged to this Pentecostal church. I knew the one—the church elders supposedly once walked a dead preacher around inside the church for three days because he was supposed to come back to life. I might have assumed Luke’s family was backwards, but they weren’t. They just didn’t have words to talk about their son being gay. So they didn’t.
Todd called me that first night. They’d been together five years, and Todd was a principal dancer at the Fort Worth Ballet. He’d met Luke while he was studying at the School of American Ballet in New York City. “I’d just done an audition for Twyla Tharp, and I was in Union Square,” Todd told me. “This six-foot-five guy goes by on a bike and just kind of stopped. We looked at each other and I said, ‘Nice day for a ride.’ After that, we were together.” Luke worked construction, and in the summers, he got Todd jobs working on buildings too. “If we were doing a building in the Village, we’d take our lunch breaks outside.”
The nine-year age difference didn’t matter, Todd said, because Luke was just a giant kid. They had a friend, a pianist. He was the first of the three to be diagnosed with HIV, in 1986. Then they both were. They traveled around. Florida. Dallas. Landlords would rent a one-bedroom apartment to two guys, unclear about what was going on. “I guess they realized we were gay, but we didn’t talk about it,” Todd said. “It’s a nonissue for us, so it should be a nonissue for other people too.”
In Texas, Todd joined the Fort Worth Ballet. “I did Apollo,” he said. “Luke got to see that.” His voice trailed off. “We just . . . uh, we just bought a house. We were going to renovate it together. We had a lot of plans.”
Their pianist friend had died at the end of May. On June 25, Luke had had a seizure. Todd took him to Dallas to get an MRI. Within a week, he’d had another one. “And then he couldn’t move. He was paralyzed, starting on his left side, then spreading to everything but his eyes.”
Luke’s mother moved from Hot Springs to Forth Worth to help care for him in the hospital. When he was discharged, they arranged to have a hospital bed in the living room of their one-bedroom apartment. Luke’s mother stayed with them, insisting on sleeping on the couch by her son, though Todd offered to let her have the bedroom. Todd worked six days a week at the ballet, and she cared for Luke while he was away.
“His mother is wonderful,” he said. They didn’t discuss the relationship. It was something that never came up. “There isn’t much to talk about,” he said. “It just is what it is, and I think that’s beyond their understanding.”
Luke had a great doctor, Patti Wetzel, who had finally leveled with Todd that he was taking on too much and couldn’t give Luke everything that he needed on his own. Their current system wasn’t sustainable. She advised him that if Luke’s family was willing to take him, then at least he could have a network of support in his family and church.
“So, this wasn’t a kidnapping?” I said.
“No,” he said. “Well, yes and no. Luke has been taken from me, but it’s not the family’s fault.”
I breathed easier. The next day I told Luke I’d talked to Todd, and his pupils dilated from pinpoints. “I promised to keep him updated, so he can be close to you.”
I squeezed his hand. “I’m giving you this hug from Todd, okay?”
He blinked twice.
“Okay,” I said.
Todd was going to try to get time off to come visit. I promised to keep him updated, and I did. Allison and I were there every day, and they were kind to her. Luke’s father would always make sure there were cookies for Allison. He was successful in his business, and he wore that well. He had a huge parcel of land, complete with a big house and a hot tub. But he didn’t lord his wealth over you. Luke’s mother was smart but presented a meekness that made her big husband seem even bigger.
Luke’s brother was a looker, just gorgeous, and I imagined that Luke must have looked like him. He was very accepting of his brother, but there was a sister who was a zealot. She ran roughshod over all of her other family members, her faith stronger than theirs. She made it clear that because Luke was gay, he was in danger of going to hell. But she lived in Texas and came by only occasionally, so I didn’t think I’d have to deal with her too often. Still, his sister’s presence was felt even miles away. This is something I had learned: the boss is never who you think it is—never who they say or who they pretend it to be. In this family, his sister was the boss.
His mother spoon-fed Luke to keep him alive, and he was her baby again. A couple of weeks into our time together, Luke’s mother told me she had been in touch with a funeral home. We have time, I thought, but I was glad that she was able to do that. She was a planner, and seeing to things helped her.
“They said that they could take him,” she said, “but they have to soak the body in bleach.”
I bit my lower lip to keep from yelling.
She continued, “I just . . . I’m just afraid it will bleach his hair.”
I touched her arm. “They told y
ou something that is not true,” I said, almost shaking. “What they told you is wrong, and they are wrong to say it. Can you just tell me who told you that?”
She named the funeral home and the owner she’d spoken to. I knew him. If you were anybody in Hot Springs, he did your funeral.
I grabbed my purse.
“I’m just going to go have a chat with him,” I said. “Clear this up.”
I drove up to the funeral home, a huge place made to look like a Southern plantation at the end of tree-lined driveway. I marched into that place and noted its grand foyer, with a staircase built to look just like a smaller version of the one at the Arlington Hotel. I saw him.
“Hi,” I said politely. “There aren’t any funerals going on right now, are there?”
“No,” he said.
“Good,” I said. And then I yelled, “How dare you?”
I told him who I had just spoken to. “Bleach? You told a mother that you had to soak her dead son in bleach? Do you know what she is going through?”
“It would be a precaution,” he said.
“You know what? You’ve had AIDS patients before. A car wreck, and you’re picking glass out of his face? He could have AIDS. HIV isn’t gonna walk in and say, ‘Hi!’”
“Well—”
“If you are going to be in business, then you better change your way of thinking and of talking. This is bigger than anybody knows, so you better get ready for it.”
I turned to walk out but realized I wasn’t done. “And if you don’t do better by people, I will be your public relations nightmare. Do you know how much an ad on the front page of the Sentinel-Record would cost you? Well, I can get you an article about your funeral home on the front page for free. But you won’t like it one bit.”
I drove back to the house and for the first time really looked at the mimosa tree in their yard. It stood alone among all those oak trees. Now that it was October, there were so many pods hanging off it. Six-inch seedpods that look like brown desiccated beans. A tree never looked sadder, but in June it must have been the most beautiful sight. Draped in beautiful, soft flowers, the pink powder puffs of summer.
All the Young Men Page 25