All the Young Men

by Ruth Coker Burks

  That night I was home in bed when the phone rang at eleven o’clock. If you get a call after ten, it’s probably not a good phone call. I reached for it, resigned to dealing with whatever came my way.

  “Ruth, it’s Bill,” said a voice that was familiar.

  Bill . . . ? I thought. This wasn’t Billy. “What do you need?”

  “Nothing, I just . . . Ruthie it’s Bill.”

  I couldn’t place him and felt awful. I didn’t have a single Bill. Was this the hospital? “I’m sorry, who is this?”

  “Bill.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Ohhhh. Oh. Governor Clinton, yes. Hello.”

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “Well, I’m sorry, but I was going over my mental Rolodex about who would be calling me at this time, and you were not in it. Which is lucky for you, considering the calls I get.”

  He chuckled. “Ruthie, I just wanted you to know that tomorrow I’m announcing that I am going to run for president.”

  “Oh, that’s fabulous,” I said. “We need you.”

  I was mystified that he’d called me. “I’m letting some people know, and I wanted you to be one of them. I’m doing it tomorrow at the Old State House. Will you come?”

  “Of course,” I said, and paused. “Do you remember all those times on the porch at your Uncle Raymond’s house?” I asked.

  “I do,” he said. “I think about that time an awful lot.” He started talking, naming the men of the GI reform movement who gathered at that house on Lake Hamilton to map out how they were going to run Hot Springs now that they’d taken it from the gangsters. All the small details that made them stand out to us kids, me a toddler and Bill a teenager. “I was no bigger than a minute,” I said, “but I remember it all.”

  All of those men were leaving us, and it was almost down to just us now. Raymond was in his eighties and still in Hot Springs, but I knew he couldn’t have much time left.

  “Well, thank you, Governor. Bill.”

  “And thank you for all the work you’ve been doing,” he said. “I want you to know how proud I am of you. I know all the work you’re doing, and I’ve learned a lot from you.”

  I had felt so alone, a nobody, and here he was calling me.

  “Well,” he said, “I have a few more people to call. Good night, Ruthie.”

  “Good night, Bill.”

  The next day, I watched him announce on the steps of the Old State House Museum in Little Rock. I stood over to the side and thought that maybe having a president who cared about AIDS could make a difference. It gave me hope.

  Todd came to visit for a week in mid-October. He stayed with Luke’s family and slept in a chair next to his bed. I gave him a lot of space to be with Luke. Todd cleaned him, and later he told me that while he was cleaning his toenails, Luke had an involuntary reflex, his paralyzed body pulling his foot back.

  “I thought he was coming back,” he said quietly.

  Allison was there, and I told her this was love. Luke was so skinny, his skin tight on his six-five frame. She stared at him, and I worried for the millionth time what this was doing to her. On the way home, she told me she could see his insides moving. I saw it too—the organs of his body working hard to keep him alive.

  Todd went home, and Luke’s mother promised to call him when it was time. I knew she would.

  By late October, the cold was setting in. I arrived one afternoon at the house to find Luke’s father pacing the living room. There was something strange. I found myself holding my breath. Luke’s brother was there, and so were a bunch of Luke’s nephews, ranging in age from three to about twelve.

  “You know, we have a real problem,” Luke’s father said. He had a metal tape measure, and he kept pulling it out and letting it snap back, making a snik sound again and again.

  “Well, what is it?” I said.

  “Luke needs to be baptized, he said. Snik. “His sister . . .”

  Oh, I thought. I’d thought this was about Luke. It was about them. The sister, really.

  He said they were going to immerse Luke in the hot tub. “He says that would have worked.” He pointed to the corner, and I realized I hadn’t even seen their preacher. He was standing in the corner, his back to us, reading a Bible.

  “Hi there,” I said, loudly.

  The preacher flinched, looking like he was going to walk through the wall. He was so afraid of being around a gay person. I knew he didn’t have even a clue about AIDS. The gay was enough. But I figured he had to be nice to these people because he had to be nice to these people’s money. Without them, the church would go out of business.

  “What do you mean would have worked?” I said. Snik.

  “The heater’s broken,” said Luke’s father.

  Snik.

  “You know,” I said, putting my hand on his arm to stop the tape measure sound. “My God is very forgiving, and He is very nurturing, and He likes to see you think of different ways to serve Him and do things. Why don’t you immerse him under the shower? Stand there and hold him under the showerhead. Whatever sin you think he has will wash off him and down the drain.”

  “We thought that too,” he said. “We ran it by his sister.”

  I sighed. Something was escalating in the room, but I didn’t know what. Luke’s father was moving around faster, like he was wrestling with something. He threw the tape measure down and looked out on the creek. “Well, we’ve got to do something.”

  I realized what was about to happen, and I quietly said, “No.”

  “Boys!” he yelled. “Go on down there and dam up that creek.”

  This was late October. The water would be cold. “You don’t have to do this,” I said. But this was family, and this was their belief.

  They moved quickly, rolling rocks into the creek. His father and his brother carried skeletal Luke down to the water, the preacher and his mother trailing behind. I gave his mother a beseeching look. She closed her eyes and kept walking down to the water. The boys got right in the creek, waist-high in the ice-cold water, to finish the job of damming the flow.

  “I can’t be here,” I said to them. Above us, the Arkansas crows were cawing in the trees. “I can’t.” But I stood, watching. I felt I had to.

  “Luke, because you have repented of your sins,” the preacher said, “and because you now desire to be baptized in Jesus’s name, I now baptize you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of those sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.”

  Luke’s nose was held as he was immersed. I turned away, unable to watch him, alive in the river, with the cold, dark water covering him.

  I had to leave. I turned to go back to the car. Behind me, I heard the preacher shout up to heaven, “In Jesus’s name!”

  These were good people. And good people can sometimes do things we can’t understand. I drove past the mimosa tree. It was completely brown, the leaves all dropped, with nothing left but the gnarled seedpods that would persist all winter.

  I got a call late on the following Sunday that Luke was at the hospital. I walked in and knew it was close. His mother had a bowl of oatmeal, and she was trying to get him to eat, as she had done so many times in the past six weeks.

  “Here, Luke,” she said, “take a bite. Eat, Luke.” I walked around to where she was standing, and she began to get louder: “EAT, LUKE. EAT. EAT.” She was always so stoic, but now she began to cry silent tears that were only for Luke. There are some people who cry for others to see, but these tears were only for her baby. I gently took the spoon and bowl out of her hands and put a gentle hand on her back. She snapped back into my arms.

  She called Todd at four o’clock in the morning to tell him it was time, just as she had promised. He drove up, but Luke died just before he got there. He missed him by such a short amount of time.

  “He was still warm,” he t
old me.

  I had put Luke’s mother in touch with Hot Springs Funeral Home, to replace the one she had talked to. There would be no bleach. Only sweet Dub, the manager, to help the family. When I stopped by the house the day after Luke died, I went straight to his mother, breezing past the women from their church. They were up on ladders, their skirts down to their mid-calves, with aprons and yellow Playtex gloves at the end of their long sleeves. They were wiping down the blades of the ceiling fan with bleached towels. They were a sight, older long-dress ladies exorcising whatever had been there. I didn’t know how much they knew.

  The family didn’t believe in cremation, so this was one of the few times that a funeral would be complete, with a wake and a service, the casket brought to the front. Todd came with his own mother, but he didn’t get to sit with the family. I think it just didn’t occur to them that he should be included.

  He looked so young, only twenty-eight. The seats left were in the front row, to the left, so he and his mother took them. My eye kept falling on him throughout the service. I was not alone. Some of my guys were there, and another gay man happened to be there, Harry. Todd was so handsome, this ballet dancer who seemed so out of place and of a different class than the Hot Springs guys. There were a lot of them cruising the widower, and Harry was especially ready to pack his bags to move to Fort Worth.

  “Oh, man, I have got to get that number,” Harry said.

  “The love of his life just died,” I said.

  “I could come out to the house, help him get everything arranged,” he said. “Now, what’s his name?”

  “Harry, no,” I said. “This is a funeral.” I successfully blocked Harry from cornering Todd, and later I asked Todd how Luke’s family had treated him.

  “Cordial,” he said. I nodded. I wished that wasn’t the height of what we could expect. But he loved Luke’s family deeply and was grateful that he’d died surrounded by love. I couldn’t bear to tell him about the baptism. I only wanted him to remember the warmth of Luke’s body.

  Todd called me a few weeks later. He’d hosted a memorial at the home he’d bought with Luke, still unfinished. “I’d put in floors and some Sheetrock,” he said. He’d gathered some carpet remnants and arranged them to make the place look closer to the home he and Luke would have made. “We had an early freeze, and that day it was so cold. Down to the teens, with no heat in the house. People were holding each other to stay warm.”

  Todd told me he gave a speech and promised Luke that he would always be there in his heart. I wanted to tell him what I had learned: that love doesn’t go away, and neither does grief. You just keep going, living with both of them. And maybe you get to hold someone to stay warm.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “Oh, thank God, you’re here.”

  Tim opened the door wide to his apartment, wearing just blue jeans and waving a cigarette to say “come in.” It was January, so I hopped in to keep the heat inside. I had just thought to stop by and say hi.

  “Jimmy ran off and took her!” he said, his eyes red-rimmed from crying.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Furball!”

  “Furball . . .” I said. “Your hamster.”

  “Yes, she’s the mama,” he said. “She’s got six kids who need milk, and he’s run off with her to Little Rock.”

  “I see,” I said, walking to the cage he was pointing to. “They’re, what, like three weeks old?”

  “Four.”

  I looked at Tim. He was looking so skinny, his tight jeans getting looser. I should have thought to bring food for them. The FDA had just allowed the second AIDS medicine onto the market, DDI. I’d finally gotten it for Tim and Jim and the other people who needed a Hail Mary pass. Tim called it a horse pill because it was so big, and made a neigh sound whenever I asked him how it was making him feel.

  I sat down. “It’s gonna be okay,” I said. “We’ll figure something out.” Their brown and white cocker spaniel, Nelly, came to sit by me, and I stroked the fur on her head. “At least Daddy didn’t run off with you, pretty thing.”

  Tim and Jim were always having these harmless little crises. Any kind of diversion to get their minds off of dying. Sometimes they were both getting so sick that I wasn’t sure who would go first. I don’t think they knew either. They were in and out of hospitals, and I know they would stockpile painkillers when they could and then steal them from each other and sometimes end up at the hospital sleeping off a pill high. The hospital would call me to wake them up, but as long as their coloring was good, I wasn’t that concerned. I’d caution them against this routine, but I didn’t want to be a jerk about it. “Oh, no, I’m not taking Timmy’s medicine,” Jim would tell me. “I’m trying to be a good example for Allison.” And then “Oh, no, I’m not taking Jimmy’s pills,” Tim would tell me. “I’m trying to give Allison a good example.” They were the sweetest trouble sometimes. At times, it felt like I was juggling chainsaws and kittens, but if you’d told me in April 1987 that I would be refereeing a fight between Jim Kelly and Tim Gentry over hamsters in January 1991 . . . Well, I knew when to count my blessings. They were here. Squabbling and still crazy but here.

  “You know where Jim goes in Little Rock?” I said.

  “Oh, do I,” he said, stubbing out the cigarette.

  “Well, call him and explain,” I said. “This is about the children. I’m gonna call the vet, okay?” It was funny to call the veterinarian instead of a hospital, and I knew Tim was listening, so I spoke like it was a matter of grave concern. “Thank you, doctor,” I said.

  I turned to Tim. “Baby formula does in a pinch for hamster milk,” I said. “You wanna go with me? Your food stamps will cover it.”

  He raced to get his coat, a shearling sheepskin Mitch had stopped wearing because he got grease on one of the cuffs. “Aren’t you going to wear a shirt?”

  “I like how it feels,” he said, gathering the collar to his chin like it was a fine mink.

  Walking to my car, we passed a few of the elderly residents who lived in the building. They all smiled at Tim, and he greeted them by name. There was a real fondness for him around here, and I was happy to see it.

  Once we were in the car, I asked what the fight was about this time. “I don’t know,” he said. “I know he was drunk, and maybe I picked on him a bit about God knows what. But you don’t just run off with our hamster.”

  “No, no, you don’t,” I said stopping at a light. I looked over at Tim, so tall and lanky in my car. “You know, Helping People with AIDS is working on something, and maybe you can give me some advice.”

  I reached to the back seat to grab my enormous purse, pulled out my journal, and opened to a page where I’d taken notes.

  “We’re coming up with guidelines for safer sex,” I said, as I kept driving. “We want to make little cards, business cards, that list things that are ‘Safest, Safer, Not Safe’—not just ‘Safe,’ because I think that turns people off. We want to give them real information.”

  “‘Safest,’” he read. “‘Massage, beating off together . . .’”

  “Yes,” I said. “Check out ‘Safer.’”

  “Whoa,” he said, with a laugh. The words were what gay friends said to each other when they could be themselves, talking about what they did and liked.

  “I want the language to be really real, so people pay attention,” I said, “I got the money from the Department of Health, but this is an HPWA thing, so we can make something that actually helps people. The language seems right?”

  “I’ll say,” he said.

  “Good,” I said. “That’s settled, so let’s get your babies some formula.”

  Jim came back with Furball, the mama hamster, as soon as he sobered up the next day. And our safer sex campaign was a huge success. We called it “Challenge ’92, a Helping People with AIDS initiative.” I had two thousand business cards made. On the fr
ont they read: “As part of the Challenge ’92 campaign, I agree to follow the guidelines for safer sex.” There was a little place to sign, and we gave the toll-free HPWA number for more information. On the back, the card had the current guidelines, written in a way that showed the reader that the people who came up with them were either gay or at least cared about them. It talked about oral sex in a frank way, how to use sex toys safely, fetishes, mutual masturbation . . . It wasn’t some straight person holding up a sign saying, “Use a condom, whatever it is that you guys actually do together.”

  I numbered each card by hand, so we could keep track of how many people we were reaching. I also had T-shirts made, white ones, with the words “I DO. DO YOU?” printed on them. They were a conversation piece at the bars, Our House and Discovery. I’d give them away, but they had to sign their card to get the shirt. People love free stuff, especially when the hot guys are wearing the shirts. Guys would ask me what the shirt meant. “Well, it could be, ‘I believe in Jesus. Do you?’ But between us, it’s really ‘I practice safer sex. Do you?’”

  Then I’d pause. “Do you?”

  “Well, I think I do,” was the usual answer.

  “Let’s talk about what you think that means then,” I’d say.

  The whole point was not to limit pleasure but to help people decide what risks were worth taking for them. If you made sex taboo and equated pleasure with punishment, then congratulations, people were just gonna throw up their hands and say, “Forget it.” I had to meet people where they were.

  I got money to make safer-sex kits, which were baggies I filled with the guidelines, two condoms, a mint dental dam, and an alcohol prep pad. The alcohol was for putting on your hands—if something stung, it meant you could get the virus in your body through that point. I didn’t think many people would really use the alcohol before they had sex, but it was there to give them an option. Or maybe give them a second to think about risk in general. I think the kits worked, because they were put together to be of real use. The health department was always doing things like ordering types of condoms nobody would use. One time they gave me these dark green ones, extra-thick. I opened the box and showed it to one of the workers by the loading zone I used as an entrance.