‘I think so. Scott?’
‘Yes?’
‘Sometimes a person has to stop talking about art for a moment and take a look around.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know exactly what you mean.’
36
PETER
There was a man on Second Avenue wearing a sign that said I Hate Jesus Christ. Whenever someone walked by he would tell them, ‘I accept Jesus Christ as my personal enemy. I have been badly hurt by Christianity this year. This has not been a good year for me and the Christians.’
Then there were the guys on the corner selling raffles to ‘help stop drug abuse.’ Peter wanted to stop drug abuse but he couldn’t be sure that this was the most effective way. So he had to say no. Then the kids selling got really frustrated and screamed out after him, ‘What’s the matter, you like drug abuse?’ So he knew immediately that he had made the right decision.
Peter was glad that Kate was out of his hair for a few days. She was really annoying him. If she wanted more independence, let her have it. He felt like having a few days in Manhattan on his own. He felt like a sailor. He could go anywhere he wanted and do anything he wanted and no one would know that he had done it.
The first thing that happened was that he talked much less. Whenever he was in the house he had no one to talk to, so he tried to think about intellectual things, about art matters, but there was no one to talk them over with, so he ended up thinking about what he was feeling because there was no way to avoid it. There was no distraction. That’s when he started feeling like he wanted revenge.
He ate in restaurants because it was easier and that way nothing had to be planned. During meals he would talk to the waiter or the guy sitting next to him at the counter. He watched TV. He made phone calls to old friends and to his brother, who was teaching math in Ann Arbor. He went running for hours.
Initially Peter’s goal was Central Park, but something led him off the track. Officially it may have been the late-June hordes of tourists lining the avenues or the heat or too much car exhaust. But when he found himself deciding to take a rest, just about the time he arrived in front of Ronald Horne’s Castle, he had returned to the scene of the crime. This is where Kate had really betrayed him. This was the lobby where she joined the other side. He sat down on an alligator-skin sofa. This is where she had humiliated him on television by pretending to be gay.
He slid in behind the rhino-skin bar and read over the menu. Each drink was called the colonial name of a contemporary country. There was the Ceylon Sling, the Indochina Surprise, the Rhodesia Twist. He ordered a Gold Coast: banana, pineapple, rum and oil decorated with a replica of a sacred religious icon on the end of a toothpick. He was about to order a Bay of Pigs Pâté when right in front of him, crossing the room like he owned it, which he did, was Ronald Horne, head landlord of the world. He had that look that celebrities have, like they’re on television even when they’re standing in front of you because their makeup is always perfect and they always seem to be correctly lit, not to mention well fed.
He still has all his hair, Peter noticed with a slight twinge of admiration. Horne was headed straight for the door marked Bwana.
I’ve got to follow him, Peter thought, leaping from his seat with the determination of a man on a mission. I’ve got to see what his dick looks like.
‘Wait a minute, buddy,’ said a huge goon in a loincloth and war paint. ‘The boss is in there.’
‘I know,’ Peter said clutching his drink. ‘But I’ve got to go too.’
‘No one watches Horne piss,’ said the faithful savage in his South Brooklyn accent. ‘Those balls are worth their weight in gold. In fact, they’re worth a hundred times their weight in gold.’
‘But urine is urine,’ said Peter.
‘Look, fella, I got my orders. Now why don’t you let a slave girl fan you with a peacock feather for a few minutes and wait your turn.’
Peter was mad. This was where his wife stabbed him in the back. He wasn’t going to be pushed around by some strong-arm in a gold lamé jockstrap.
‘You listen to me,’ he said, waving around the toothpick so that its replica shrunken head kept just missing the guard’s oft broken nose. ‘You’ve got a morally dubious job here, do you realize that? Why don’t you go into something more fun like repossessing family farms?’
That made him feel good. That made him feel real good.
‘Get the fuck out of here, right now,’ Goliath said, and before Peter had a chance to think it over, he was back on the hot sidewalk feeling better, better and stronger than he had in a long time. He had made his stand. He’d shown Kate and he’d shown that little bitch too.
Peter jogged home triumphant. He worked out at the gym. He ran errands. He went to the hardware store. He went to the shoe repair. He went to the Xerox store across the street from the bowling alley.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Do I know you?’
‘We met bowling. Remember? I had a copy of Mourning Becomes Electra.’
Oh thank God, thought Peter. He could have gotten down on his knees and reached up from his heart to heaven. Thank you for bringing this woman to me.
When Shelley agreed to go have a cup of coffee after work, he knew how much he really needed this. And he knew that he could really like her too. She was beautiful and New York sexy, ethnic. He could learn to love her. She would grow up soon. She’d be terrific at thirty.
‘Do you want to go to heaven?’ he asked, sitting across the table.
‘No,’ she said.
‘You mean to tell me that when you die you don’t want to go to heaven?’
‘Oh, when I die, yeah. I thought you were going now.’
She’s smart, he thought. She’s funny.
When they made love for the first time that day it wasn’t passionate love. It was cool. But he knew the passion would come. There was already an immediate tenderness and easy familiarity. Shelley pulled at his penis like it was a fun new toy. He loved when women played with his dick. Engagement or absentmindedness were both sexy in their own ways.
‘It always surprises me how big balls are,’ she said. ‘The way that everyone talks about pricks all the time you’d never know that balls were anything in this world. Except for gay men. They like balls. They call them “baskets” or maybe that’s with a dick too, but they like them “low-slung.”’
‘How do you know?’ he said, worried for a minute. ‘You’re not gay, are you? You’re not bi or unsure or in transition? You’re heterosexual, right? You choose cock.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, a little unnerved. ‘My brother is gay. We talk about that stuff all the time.’
‘Well, I need a break from it,’ he said, taking her in his arms. ‘So let’s not talk about it when we’re together, okay?’
‘Sure,’ she said and then she thought it over a bit. ‘Sure, why not?’
She had just dropped out of her senior year at NYU which made her plenty young. Young enough that Peter didn’t even ask.
Later she asked him, ‘What makes a man a good lover?’
And he said, ‘Take your time. Make sure she gets enough clit. Touch everything.’
Who was the person he had become that afternoon? Peter had never seen himself so romantic and funny. Well, not never, of course, but seriously not for a long, long time.
They walked out together that night, along the edge of Chinatown where they could smell the bok choy cooking out of every window. They could smell the leftover fish in the garbage and see people taking an easy smoke for the first time all day. Peter had a new woman’s hand in his and it was softer, warmer and a completely different shape.
There was a cop car parked on Canal and Mott. There’s always a lot more crime in the summer, people get sweaty and crowded together. They get bored and want new things in their lives. They get angry very fast.
‘Let’s check it out,’ Shelley said, so they joined the pack watching from stoops and street corners, l
eaning on doorframes and the trunk of the patrol car.
‘If you look at the light,’ he told her, ‘you can’t see the light. You have to look at its effect on objects. The whirling white and red on top of a police car is meaningless without the faces it stripes. Without them it is only an appliance. We have to explore each object beyond its functional identity.’
She hooked her fingers in the back belt loop of his pants.
‘You know, Peter,’ she said, rubbing her palm against his stomach as they stood watching, ‘it must be very lonely for you because you think you’re the only one watching. But that’s not true. I’m watching you, Peter. I see you.’
Has any man ever been that happy?
37
MOLLY
Thursday night after work Molly stopped by Daisy’s place with a six-pack plus a couple of extra beers. The double feature that day had been Persona and Cries and Whispers, two proto-lesbian classics, but one really had to be in the mood.
On the way over, she ran into Charlie who was, as usual, looking hungry and wanting to get high. Usually getting high was the priority, but every once in a while he had to take time out from selling nickel bags on the corner so that he could quickly eat.
‘I don’t mind feeding him,’ Molly had told Kate once. ‘Because everyone needs to eat.’
But that did not erase the fact that he brought in three times as much money a week as she did, but still managed to be homeless because it all went to drugs. That’s why she got pissed off when, once in a blue moon, he would try to guilt-trip her for having a home when he didn’t. She also knew that while drug addicts are real people in that they get hungry and cold and sick and die, there is a big hunk missing from them somehow. And for that reason, they couldn’t be treated as fully human because they would just rip you off and exploit you every chance they got. But this time Charlie was hungry enough to want to eat, so Molly sat down with him at the counter at Jeanette’s Polish Home Cooking. She felt like talking for a minute anyway, and could not trust him to not pocket the waitress’s tip.
The fact was after all these apprehensions that Charlie was really okay and if drugs hadn’t taken over his entire life, they could have stayed friends.
‘I’m telling you, Molly,’ he said, wolfing down a chicken cutlet with two vegetables, ‘this country is filled with wasted potential. You got those white boys running everything and it’s so built-in they don’t even know that they’re running it. I don’t mean the big boys I mean your regular white man on the street. Let’s face it, I could sit in the White House smoking coke all day long and I would still be a better vice president than you-know-who. But there are revolutionary possibilities out there. As soon as people get their priorities together then we’ll see some radical action.’
Molly hated when Charlie ran this rap. He’d be an armchair radical if he had an armchair.
‘Charlie, your only priority is cocaine. Don’t give me this revolutionary bullshit.’
She felt bad the minute she’d said it, though, because he looked humiliated, which made her acknowledge that they weren’t equals since he was dependent on her for food. Therefore he couldn’t tell her to go fuck herself because he wanted to eat. So she just paid the check and split.
At Daisy’s everyone was sitting around the table doing a mailing of the People with AIDS newsletter. They were humming and chatting. The radio was blasting pretty loud from the salsa station, so feet were tapping and bodies were alternately moving and tightly bent over piles of envelopes. They folded, stuffed and stamped sheets of newsprint that might save some lives and would definitely increase the quality of others.
First there was Daisy, a combination aging Latin hippie and librarian. She was one of those people who always had really interesting information and had a hard time letting other people have interesting information too. Still, she was great in front of a room where it was a one-way thing. Daisy wore bifocals on a black string around her neck and had gray hair that had never been cut. She was what is known as a ‘neighborhood person.’ She knew every single face on the block, what they needed and whether she could help them find it or not.
Then there was her lover, Trudy, who used to be a cop. Trudy knew all the laws to the letter and so, whenever there was a demonstration planned, she was in charge of ‘cop-duty.’ That meant keeping an eye on the boys and girls in blue at all times and recording all the infractions they couldn’t keep themselves from committing.
‘Give me a break, sweetheart,’ some cop would inevitably say. ‘That’s the fourth time you’ve written down my badge number in the last half hour.’
‘I have to write it down every time you do something illegal,’ she would answer. ‘If you don’t want it written down then don’t move.’
She drove them crazy every chance she got. They couldn’t get away with the male cops searching female arrestees. They couldn’t get away with stopping picket lines.
‘Picket lines are legal as long as they keep moving,’ she’d yell out, opening her little blue memo pad. ‘And you know it.’
‘Cops,’ she’d sigh every now and then. ‘What a bunch of punks.’
Then there was a really quiet girl with black black hair and a devilish grin. That was Sam, Trudy’s sister, who had just hitchhiked back from Oklahoma. She wore a powder blue cowboy shirt and one of those string ties with a silver Navaho tie clip. They called her Sam because she looked exactly like Sam Shepard. Her real name was Dorothy. Sam didn’t say much, she drank slow and folded and stuffed and sealed envelopes all night long. Trudy didn’t drink anything but seltzer but she didn’t mind being around the more indulgent.
‘I like the smell of beer,’ she said. ‘I’ll never deny that.’
The house was small and comfortable with a lot of plastic plus old-fashioned things. There was a big old-time TV that sat in a wooden box with legs and on top was a rosary that was clearly in use. There were two big Santeria candles and a photograph of Lolita Lebrón.
‘I’ve got all the angles covered,’ she said.
Daisy had shot drugs for a couple of years, quit for ten and then went back after a bad breakup. It was only for a few months the second time around but she’d picked the wrong months. When all the reports started coming into the library where she worked, Daisy ran out and got tested first thing, so she knew she was positive and started watching the symptoms appear. Trudy had heard through some gay friends that doctors at a couple of hospitals were testing experimental drugs on AIDS patients. Daisy was reading everything she could get her hands on and got interested in a drug called Ampligen which seemed to work as well as the AZT but didn’t have the side effects. It didn’t make you nauseated and it didn’t give you diarrhea. But the hospital turned her down on a formality: she was a woman.
‘I demanded an explanation,’ she said, telling the story for the fourteen hundredth time. ‘I went after the doctors. I called them at work. I called them at home. I started going out and sitting on their front lawns in Great Neck. Why weren’t women allowed to take Ampligen? Finally, one guy, maybe from Saint Luke’s, got so sick of me that he shouted out of the window of the commuter train, “It’s the company. Blame the company.” So, I started going after them. As we say in Justice, What did I have to lose?’
Sam decided to go out for more beer, since she’d already heard that story once that day. Each woman put two dollars into her white Stetson hat.
‘By that time I’d found the other women who wanted to try Ampligen too. But believe me, pharmaceutical companies are harder to get through to than doctors. But I haven’t been a librarian on the Lower East Side for fifteen years for nothing. I know how to get information despite their iron bitch receptionists and their bosses with Aqua Velva accents who sound like they’re standing on a golf course no matter what lies they’re spouting. You can just picture the plaid slacks. So, we got on the Amtrak and went down to meet them in person.’
Trudy got up to turn down the radio and then stood behind Daisy with her arms around
her neck, pressing her breasts against Daisy’s back.
‘The cops tried to haul us away of course, but fortunately Trudy was there with her rule book.’
Daisy reached out lovingly behind and brought Trudy’s face to hers so they were cheek to cheek.
‘Finally we got the official explanation. Birth defects. They won’t give dying women treatment because they’re afraid of being brought to court on birth defects. I mean, I understand protecting a fetus, I was raised Catholic after all, but a woman has to live too. So, I told the guy that first of all, two of us were gay and secondly the other one had no intention of getting pregnant. She has AIDS, for God’s sake.’
‘What did he say?’ Molly asked, noticing Sam sliding back into the apartment with a six-pack in a brown bag and some kind of pint in a smaller one.
‘He says, “Who’s going to protect my company against lawsuits? That’s what I want to know.” So I got in touch with Justice. James helped me set up a contact sheet of a hundred and fifty women with AIDS around the country who are interested in Ampligen and don’t plan on getting pregnant, or who are willing to have an abortion in case they do get pregnant, which can happen, after all.’
‘So, are you taking Ampligen?’
Sam opened a beer for Daisy and Molly and one beer for herself and a seltzer for Trudy. Then she took a taste out of a small bottle of Wild Turkey and left it open on the table for anyone else who desired.
‘Not yet. They claim they’re going to start a protocol for women soon, but they say they’re going to run it in Pittsburgh. There are at least four thousand women with AIDS in this country and most of them are right here in New York City and most are too poor or too disorganized to get down to fucking Pittsburgh so there’s still a lot of work to do on this, but we’ll do it,’ she said.
People in Trouble Page 16