Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle

by Michael Thomas Ford

  Not only the public was angry at us. Noted AIDS activist Randy Shilts published a scathing diatribe against the St. Patrick's action, calling ACT UP irresponsible, morally wrong, and strategically stupid. While Max fumed over the article and vented his frustrations at everything from the Church to "gay conservatives," I couldn't help but think that maybe Shilts was right. Maybe we had gone too far. And maybe I had gone far enough.

  I told Max that I was going to cut back on the amount of time I spent with the group. I had planned on going to visit my mother and Walter for Christmas anyway, and now I looked forward to the trip as a chance to get away from the responsibility of being a professional AIDS warrior. New York had begun to feel like an inescapable island to me, and when Jack (who brought Todd with him) and I boarded an Amtrak train for the trip to Philadelphia, I had the discomforting feeling that I was on a lifeboat leaving a sinking ship.

  I returned a few days before New Year's. The night I arrived back in New York, I had dinner with Max, who picked nervously at his spaghetti carbonara until I demanded to know what was bothering him.

  "I can't see you anymore," he said.

  "Why?" I asked him. "Because I don't want to spend so much time with ACT UP stuff?" "No," Max said. "Because you're not positive."

  I stared at him from across the table. "You're kidding," I said. He shook his head. "It's been

  bothering me for a while now," he said. I put my fork down. "What difference does it make if you're positive and I'm not?" I asked. "We talked about that when we started sleeping together, and I told you that it's not a problem for me."

  "See," he said. "That's it right there. My being HIV-positive is a ‘problem' that you have to accept."

  "I didn't say it was—" I began. "Not you," Max interrupted. "I didn't mean you specifically. Anyone. Us positive guys, we're the ones who have something that negative guys have to deal with. When you sleep with us, it's like you're doing us a favor. Do you know how that feels?"

  "Have I ever made you feel like I was doing you a favor?" I asked him.

  "No," he admitted. "But it's how I feel."

  "Then isn't it something you have to learn to deal with?" I suggested.

  "I shouldn't have to deal with it," said Max. "And if I was with a poz guy, I wouldn't have to. I wouldn't worry that if the condom broke, I might be infecting him. I wouldn't have to worry if we got carried away and he swallowed my cum."

  "So this is about the sex?" I said.

  "Yes and no," Max said. "That's part of it. But it's more about poz guys sticking together."

  "What," I said. "Now you're a club? Are you going to start having bars only for positive guys? No negative guys allowed?" "Some people are talking about that," he told me. "I'm not sure it isn't a good idea." "This is crazy," I said. "You can't divide the world up that way."

  "You don't understand," said Max. "You can't. You don't have to live with this inside of you. You don't know what it's like to think that you might die before they find something to stop it, or that you might make someone else sick."

  "I've lost two lovers and a whole bunch of friends to this disease," I said, getting angry. "Don't tell me that I don't understand."

  "It's not your fault," he said.

  "I know it's not," I said. "I'm not going to apologize for not being sick. I'm not going to apologize for being lucky while a lot of other guys weren't."

  "I didn't ask for an apology," Max said.

  "What if I was positive?" I asked him. "What if I found out tomorrow that I have the virus? Then could you be with me?"

  He nodded. "Then I wouldn't feel so weird about it, yes."

  I laughed. "So take off the rubber and fuck me," I said. "Get it over with. Then we can move on." "I couldn't be responsible for giving it to you," he said.

  "But it would be okay if someone else did?" I said. "Then you wouldn't have to feel guilty? That's fucked up, Max." "I don't want you to be positive," Max replied.

  "But you can't be with me if I'm not," I said.

  He hesitated before answering. "Right," he said.

  I stood up and took some bills out of my wallet. "Here," I said, dropping them on the table. "I'll see you around." I left him sitting at the table and walked home. It had snowed heavily during the week, and the Village was filled with dirty gray drifts. As I made my way through them, I felt as though I was walking through a ruined landscape, a place that had once been beautiful but was now locked in never-ending winter. It felt cursed, hostile, and forbidding. I was a stranger there, looking for companions who had been lost and would never be found, even when spring came to melt away the snow.

  CHAPTER 55

  "Happy birthday, dear Jeffrey, happy birthday to you!" As the subject of our congratulations leaned over to blow out the candles on the cake set before him, I resisted an urge to reach over and push his face into the rose-tinted frosting. Instead, I turned to Jack and said, "I need more champagne if I'm going to keep this up. Want to come with me?"

  He followed me to the table where nine bottles of Veuve Clicquot 1985, three bowls of caviar, and several dozen oysters nestled in beds of crushed ice were tastefully arranged for our enjoyment and, more important, appreciation. It was a display of wealth more than it was of edibles, and the message was clear: Our host could afford to indulge himself.

  I poured champagne into two of the flutes arranged like armies on either side of the bottles, handing one to Jack and keeping the other for myself. As I sipped from it, I eyed the caviar warily. The tiny black roe glistened wetly, and although I knew it was a delicacy, I couldn't bring myself to take a spoonful. Instead, I selected one of the oysters and tipped it into my mouth, enjoying the way the brininess contrasted with the smooth ripeness of the Veuve Clicquot.

  "I'll say this for him," I told Jack. "He knows how to throw a party."

  "What do you think this is?" asked Jack, poking one of the bowls of caviar with the tiny spoon that had been tucked into it. "Fish eggs," I said.

  "I know that," he said. "But why's it white?"

  "It's albino Osetra," said a voice behind us. "You almost never find it. I paid a fortune for it at this shop on Madison." Jeffrey Benton-Jones, the birthday boy and latest boyfriend to Andy, proudly scooped some of the pale roe onto a cracker and popped it into his mouth. As he chewed, he closed his eyes and held his hand over his heart, as if savoring the pulse-quickening properties of the eggs in his mouth. Jack and I exchanged glances and fought back the laughter that threatened to erupt from our throats.

  "Heaven," Jeffrey said, swallowing and opening his eyes. "Absolute heaven. And this one," he added, indicating a bowl of impossibly small, golden roe, "is the rarest. Sterlet. It used to be reserved for the czars of Russia and the shahs of Iran. The fish are practically extinct now. You can only get this through, shall we say, underground channels." He gave us a knowing smile, as if we'd been let in on a secret the sharing of which would result in our deaths.

  "We'll have to try it," I said.

  Jeffrey looked past me to elsewhere in the room. "Excuse me," he said. "I need to go speak to the quartet. I distinctly asked them not to play any Mendelssohn. He's so dreary." "How does Andy put up with him?" I asked as Jeffrey walked away.

  "How has he put up with any of them?" replied Jack. "He just looks at his bank statement." "What do you think he's worth now?"

  Jack piled a large mound of the sterlet caviar on a cracker and took a bite. He chewed tentatively, once, then brought his napkin to his mouth and spit into it, making a retching noise. Then he balled up the napkin and looked around for somewhere to put it. Finding nowhere suitable, he stuffed it into his pocket.

  "I can't believe people eat that," he said, taking a long swallow of champagne. "You're not a czar or a shah," I reminded him. "You have plebeian taste buds. And you didn't answer my question. How much do you think Andy's made off of this little business of his?" "Well, he's had how many of them now?" said Jack. "Seven?"

  "Six and a half," I said. "There was the one wh
ose ex-wife sued. He had to split it with her."

  "Then I'd say he's got a cool five or six million stashed away," said Jack. "Plus the two apartments and the Fire Island house."

  "But he keeps doing it," I pointed out. "And you've got to admit, even for Andy, this latest one's a real pill." "I don't think it's about the money anymore," Jack said. "I think he gets off on it. It's like people who get a new car every year. They do it because they're bored. They need excitement. I think Andy sees this as a game."

  "More like the lottery," I said. "And he keeps winning."

  "Yeah, well, he's good at it," said Jack. "Look at him."

  I searched the room for Andy, and found him standing beside Jeffrey, his arm around his waist as the two of them chatted with an arts critic from the Times and his portly lover. In his dark blue Armani suit and Italian leather shoes, Andy looked nothing like the soldier in worn fatigues and muddy combat boots who remained in my memory. He was still beautiful, and watching him, I knew he would always be beautiful. He had one of those faces that only gets better with time, like Paul Newman's or Lauren Bacall's. The gray that had crept into his hair only heightened his beauty, and even the extra weight he'd put on in recent years suited him, making him look fuller and more robust.

  "Do you think he's happy?" I asked Jack.

  "I think he's happy the way a little kid is when you give him candy," Jack said. "He's happy until it's gone. Then he wants more." "Tell me again why we're friends with him?" I said.

  "Because he has the best caviar," said Jack.

  "Seriously," I said. "Why are we friends with him?"

  It took Jack a moment to answer. "I guess because he changed our lives," he said. I couldn't argue with that. Andy had changed our lives completely. Because of him, I'd gone to Vietnam. Because of him, Jack and I had broken up. Because of him, at least in big part, we had become who we were. It was hard to believe that someone so self-centered and so thoughtless had wrought the kind of changes Andy had in our lives, but he had.

  "Do you think he even cares about us?" I said.

  "In his way, I think he does," said Jack. "I don't expect he thinks much about it." "What are you two so engrossed in?" asked Todd, walking up with a piece of birthday cake. "We're dissecting our friendship with Andy," Jack said. "How's the cake?"

  "Try it," Todd told him, holding out the plate. "It's vanilla with some kind of caramel-cream filling."

  Jack accepted the cake, taking a forkful and sampling it.

  "Why try to figure out why you're friends with him?" said Todd as Jack took another bite. "Either you like him or you don't."

  "Andy's a little more complicated than that," I said.

  "Only if you make him more complicated," said Todd. "It's not like you have to be friends with him, right?" He looked from me to Jack. "Or is he paying you guys to do it?" he joked.

  "I never thought of that," said Jack. "Maybe we should start charging him."

  Todd and Jack continued to talk about the cake, Andy, and the other people at the party. I only half listened. Todd's comment had made me think. He was right, we didn't have to be friends with Andy. But we kept him in our lives. Why? Was it out of habit? Was it out of some weird sentimentality? I tried to come up with an answer, and I couldn't.

  "Hey, Todd, take a picture of the three of us."

  Andy had come over. He handed Todd a camera, then stood between Jack and me. I was turning my head when the flash went off. "I don't think I got it," Todd said. "But that was the last shot."

  "Don't worry about it," Andy said, taking the camera from him. "I just wanted to use up the roll."

  Andy rejoined the party, and shortly afterward I excused myself and left. Jeffrey's apartment was on 76th Street, near Central Park. It was a warm spring evening, one of the first after the harshness of winter, and still light, so I decided to walk home rather than endure a ride in the noisy, stuffy subway. At the corner of 72nd Street I stopped in front of the Dakota. Following the death of John Lennon, a portion of Central Park had been renamed Strawberry Fields in his honor (despite disapproving Republican members of the City Council arguing that it should be named after Bing Crosby instead). Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, had further inflamed the situation by taking out a newspaper ad requesting that all the countries of the world send plants and rocks to be used in the creation of the garden. Many wonderful items were delivered to New York, including such lavish gifts as a totem pole from the Aleutian Indians and an enormous amethyst from the government of Paraguay, but ultimately the Landmarks Preservation Commission told Ono that she could include only one of them in the final design. She'd chosen a mosaic, a round, black-and-white sunburst design created by the Italians after a similar one at Pompeii. In the center of the circle was one word: IMAGINE. The mosaic was placed at the entrance to the park at 72nd Street, just across the street from where Lennon had lain dying from the four bullets in his back. Since its installation, the mosaic had been the site of yearly memorials on the anniversary of the assassination. Throughout the year, flowers, notes, candles, and gifts were routinely left there by fans and mourners of the late Beatle.

  As I stood in the circle, I looked back at the Dakota and thought about the night nine years before when I'd met Alan. I'd had almost six years with him. Already he'd been gone nearly three. It hardly seemed possible. I could still remember as if it were yesterday the sadness in his eyes on that winter night when his hero had died. I remembered, too, the emptiness of those eyes when he himself died, his sight stolen by a virus too small to see. A gulf as wide as the sea seemed to separate those two Alans, a space so impossibly wide I couldn't fathom how he'd gotten from one side to the other. But somehow, he'd crossed over, and now he was gone.

  I kept walking, cutting over to Columbus Avenue, then Amsterdam. I passed Lincoln Center, site of the AIDS Walk, and the Metropolitan Opera House, where Ileana Cotrubas had broken my heart. Somewhere in the 50s I reversed direction and went east, toward the Avenue of the Americas, which I followed to Rockefeller Center. Alan and I had come there one year for the lighting of the enormous Christmas tree, gazing in childlike wonder as it burst into color. Afterward, we had gone skating, fumbling and laughing as we circled the rink on unsteady legs. A few blocks away, the spires of St. Patrick's Cathedral pierced the sky, a reminder of my last ACT UP demonstration. I thought of Max, defiant and achingly beautiful in his anger, being dragged from the steps by police. Continuing toward home, I once again headed west, to Broadway, and walked diagonally across Manhattan as I descended south. When I came to Times Square, the memories seeped from every storefront. There was the theater where I'd had my first real date with Alan, and others where, later, I'd watched him perform. There was Don't Tell Mama, where we'd spent so many hours with friends. And there was the Adonis, where Alan had unknowingly invited AIDS into our world. It was boarded up now, the latest casualty in the city's campaign to rid the tourist area of the sex merchants who were bringing down the property values. Its marquee was dark, the men who had frequented the theater driven elsewhere.

  Everywhere there were remnants of the past nine years. I could walk only a few blocks before I was reminded of someone or something. Grand Central Station and the taste of Max's mouth. Jack's apartment on 24th Street. The Center on 13th. Restaurants. Movie theaters. Bookstores. They all held memories, like a living scrapbook I could wander through, touching, seeing, remembering. That's what New York had become, a place of memories.

  I'd hoped that the passing of winter would lift my black mood. Now I saw that it was with me for good. Too much had been taken from me, and what remained was no longer enough. Only Jack was left. Jack, my first friend and lover. As everything else was torn away, he stayed. I thought once again of the dream I'd had of Jack's death. He'd been dying from love. I hadn't understood the angel's words then. Now, I thought, I might. How many times had I seen that dream played out in my life with other men? Brian. John. Alan. My AIDS buddies. My friends. Most likely Max. They had all died from love, and thousan
ds more besides. Was Jack next? Was that the angel's message, delivered years before we even knew AIDS was coming for us? Had she been telling me to keep vigilant, to keep Jack out of harm's way? Suddenly, it made sense. Everything made sense. Andy. Vietnam. Brian. Alan. Max. AIDS. Everything. My strength renewed by my revelation, I walked the rest of the way to my apartment buoyed by a rising sense of hope. Everything was going to be okay. It was going to be okay.

  CHAPTER 56

  "Where are we going?" Jack asked as we walked up the stairs from the subway at 81st Street. "Just come with me," I said, walking toward Central Park.

  "I don't know why you can't just tell me what's going on," he said.

  "It's a surprise," I told him. "Just trust me."

  When we came to the monumental building at Central Park West, Jack stopped. "The Natural History Museum?" he said.

  "Come on," I said, starting up the wide front steps to the doors. Jack followed me as I entered the museum and purchased two tickets. I handed him one and we passed into the huge front hall. "Are you going to tell what's going on now?" Jack asked. I ignored him, looking for the elevator to the upper floors. Finding it, I pressed the button and waited for the doors to open. When they did, I got in. Jack stood outside, looking in at me. I reached out and pulled him in.

  "I've been to the museum," Jack said testily as the doors closed.

  "Remember when we were kids?" I said as we rose.

  "What does that have to do with this?" he asked.

  "We used to love looking at the stars," I said. "Remember? We'd lie outside in the summer and try to find the different constellations. We even got our Scout badges for astronomy." The elevator doors opened on the third floor and we got out. The entrance to the Hayden Planetarium was ahead of us.