The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  Gabe Mungo was like the rest in many ways. He was an ashen young man who, under the drag-queen alias of Madame Simonette, had worn sequined gowns, high heels, false eyelashes, and what he boasted was “fifteen pounds of foundation” to belt bawdy songs at some sort of gay burlesque. My ignorance of the culture made such theater difficult to picture, but Gabe described it with aching nostalgia. All that was left of Madame Simonette was a set of nicely plucked eyebrows and a pink feather boa he kept cozied around his neck.

  In one key way, Gabe was different. He’d come to Canyon Diablo in 1981 not to find purpose in pain or to find hope beyond hope, but rather to drive an ailing fellow drag queen (stage name Margherita Petticoat) who did believe I might offer such things. Though Miss Petticoat had died upon arrival, Gabe had yet to vacate. He, too, was stricken with the gay plague, though his case was less advanced. Still, sighed he, he was dying, and if he had to look like a hag, he might as well do it well from the public eye.

  Gabe sashayed into the courtyard for our first meeting not in the ubiquitous white sheet but in a gauzy housecoat he held shut with one hand while shooing away Ruthie with the other. Though not much older than I, Gabe exuded a Hollywood glamour I knew all too well, but that wasn’t what troubled me. One look at those impulsive brown eyes deep inside those hollowed sockets told me that he believed Mother-Father Savage was a scheister. Since that first day with Wailin’ Wendy, I hadn’t engaged with anyone not aready nestled into my pocket.

  “Love the hat,” said he. “Very Marlboro Man.”

  That rather pleased me. But the next five minutes he spent silent, working a chamois across his fingernails.

  “Well, Mr. Mungo,” said I, “I hate to cut it short.”

  “Darling,” drawled he. “From what I hear, there’s nothing down there left to cut.”

  “We believe in the Savage lifestyle,” cautioned I. “Disbelievers should leave.”

  “Disbelieve in a lifestyle? Moi? You’ve got it all wrong. I’ll believe anything. The sky is green? The grass is blue? I’ve just about had it with reality.”

  “You do not seem sick,” accused I.

  Gabe lowered part of his boa. There, a leech-sized sarcoma.

  “Maybe my face isn’t oozing enough pus for your tastes, but don’t worry, sugar, I’ll get there. Right now all I’ve got is, oh, let’s see.” He raised a slender arm—sarcoma, inner elbow—and counted symptoms upon long, beringed fingers. “Headaches. Toothaches. Shingles. Thrush. Night sweats. Saggy skin—I mean, you have got to be kidding. I’m twenty-three. Before I left the Bay, my doctors were hatching so many theories, I couldn’t keep up: toxoplasmosis, encephalitis, cryptosporidiosis, you’re-gonna-die-itis, it’s-curtains-for-you-osis, you name it.”

  Indeed he could keep up, hence the quavering of his bravery.

  “There is no purpose in naming the disease,” said I. “It is Death.”

  “You’re so dramatic. Of course there’s a purpose. If I’m going down, I want it to be from something notable. The Bubonic Plague, crocodile attack, something. If I’m put in my grave by another stupid intestinal parasite, I’m going to be furious.”

  “Intestinal parasite?”

  “You know how homosexuals have sex, right?”

  “I—this is not about—I’m not even—”

  Gabe’s laugh was a throaty drum roll that made me suspect that Madame Simonette’s singing voice was plenty sexy. Egads—what was I thinking? I wondered what Abigail and Bartholomew Finch would think if they knew the reprehensible filth that would one day soil their little boy’s mind.

  “You know what’s going to happen if it’s never named?” asked Gabe.

  “I am sure that you will tell me.”

  “You’re damn straight I will.” Gabe crossed his legs and leaned in, a single pink feather taking flight. “They’ll say the bigots were right all along, that it was Gød throwing thunderbolts at the homos. You think we don’t wonder about that? When we’re throwing up and crapping ourselves, out of our heads with one-hundred-and-five-degree fevers? You think we don’t doubt? If this plague had hit heteros, Ronald Reagan would be on TV right now, revenging us like Pearl Harbor. But of all people, it chose us, and the world doesn’t give one shit.” He shrugged. “We’re doomed, sugar.”

  I don’t believe the desert had ever been so still. When Ruthie came to give Gabe the boot, he dropped me a wink and rose of his own power, then took off down the sidewalk as if it were a fashion runway, housecoat fluttering like one of Madame Simonette’s signature gowns. Ruthie hurried behind to lock the gate. I’d given her white mask and latex gloves little consideration before, but now I found them off-putting, even embarrassing.

  Two weeks later, instead of the customary nine months later, I invited Gabe Mungo back. No doubt the Savages noticed and were consternated, but I couldn’t cleanse my ear canals of Gabe’s acerbic laughs. His lack of adulation had been as brisk as ice water, and his pugnaciousness had stabbed my torpid brain with sharp memories of verbal jousts with people I’d liked, if not loved: Wilma Sue, Mother Mash, Bridey Valentine, Allen Rigby, Harvey Scheinberg. Gabe yoo-hooed from the back gate and entered as I imagined he entered everywhere: nonchalant about his popularity, but with fondness beneath his simper. I asked him for stories, and he, a playhouse pro, supplied them.

  “It’s not just that everyone’s sick,” said he. “It’s that we’re sick of being sick. Sick of needles. Sick of centrifuges. Sick of nurses who’d rather quit than go into our rooms. Sick of debating what does or doesn’t fall under ‘bodily fluids’—that’s all the doctors talk about, bodily fluids. I mean, ick. Sick of weighing this method of suicide against that. Sick of reading the obituary section first. You can’t imagine how boring the Castro is now. No one talks about art anymore. We play Death Bingo, see whose card fills in first.”

  “What do they say about this place?”

  “Frankly, reviews are mixed. Some say the marble countertops don’t match the bath towels, while others suspect there’s something fishy about the continental breakfast.”

  I laughed. Dear Gød—how long had it been since I’d laughed? Gabe peaked an eyebrow.

  “Ah-ah, careful. Cult leaders aren’t supposed to giggle.”

  “You don’t take the name Savage. You don’t partake in the meals. You don’t believe in any of it. So why don’t you turn us in? Take photographs of what happens here, show them to the police. They might be able to shut us down if they had proof from someone on the inside.”

  Gabe gave an exaggerated shrug. Two new lesions peeked from beneath the pink boa.

  “Do you have any idea how many clubs the law’s shutting down in San Francisco? I’m not shutting down a thing, sugar. If I even hear the word ‘no’ again, I’m going to scream. No, you can’t go to bathhouses; no, you can’t have sex; no, you can’t even kiss someone you—”

  Gabe’s voice broke. He pressed his knuckles against his lips as if punching himself for letting genuine emotion break through his persona. Tears gathered at his lower lids, magnifying his black pupils. When he spoke again, he did so softly, as if anything louder would send those tears streaking.

  “That’s what they say about this place, if you want the truth. That if you click your heels three times, you’ll go somewhere over the rainbow, not Oz but Arizona, a place where, before you die, you can be a real person one more time, where you can touch other people again, where you can do that thing the doctors said you could never, ever do—exchange bodily fluids. Honestly, the boys in the Castro have no idea how far things have gone down here. I may find what you’re doing grotesque—I’m a little old-fashioned that way—but do I understand the appeal? To revel in the flesh, one last farewell bash before bon voyage? You’re darn tooting I do.”

  He pointed a thin finger toward the front of the compound.

  “Just don’t be fooled by all this,” said he. “I might have dolled up as Madame Simonette, but all these people you’ve got out here, they’re dolled up too. You’re the direc
tor of some invisible play, and they’re playing the roles you gave them, but I’m the one who knows how it ends. I know it better than anyone, sugar. The curtain comes down, the show’s over, they strike the set, and poof! All of it, the whole phony affair, gets packed away in trunks. Good show, sure, but to the rest of the world? It doesn’t mean a cotton-picking thing.”

  It was as if Gabe had read In Our Image, only he was giving it a bad review. No one had ever before spoken sensibly about Savage Ranch, and the words dug into the crack struck by Ruthie’s Jonestown articles. Bricks began to loosen from the castle-sized facade I’d literally built, until the underlying madness of the construction began to show. This cross-dressing freak, as I would have dubbed Gabe one year earlier, was the sane one. It was I who was the freak, I who’d gone crazy. The scales began to tip, faster and faster, the smell of sun-baked blood no longer smelling so sweet, the calm serenity of being a Mother-Father curdling into a slow-dawning horror.

  Gabe Mungo’s wish came true in 1982. After stints under such industrial acronyms as GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency) and ACIDS (Acquired Community Immune Deficiency Syndrome), scientist-types settled upon the far more sprightly AIDS. The disease, after all, had finally done what was necessary to attract attention—afflict straight people. Urban junkies who shared needles were getting AIDS. Small-town hemophiliacs who got blood transfusions were getting AIDS. Newborn babies were getting AIDS. And so, albeit for a regrettably short while right near the end, Savage Ranch became a sanctuary for anyone weak—straight, gay, whoever—in search of a strong exit.

  Ruthie’s anxiety levels reached the brim and poured over. As she saw it, her excess of caution had been substantiated; she purchased high-grade surgical scrubs and elastic footies to go along with gloves suitable for handling plutonium, and upgraded medical masks with hydrophilic plastic coatings. No longer would she get close to anyone. The back gate became the only route to the courtyard, and if a Savage couldn’t make it unassisted, she or he would miss her or his meeting, simple as that.

  Doubt, the disease I’d caught from Gabe, crept hot through my cold veins. During one-on-ones, I let Savages gush about cannibalistic tit-for-tats while I murmured compliments I no longer believed. To fill my silence, Wailin’ Wendy Savage and fellow die-hards began pushing positions they believed consistent with the Savage doctrine. They’d partake in the poisoned flesh of the sick and pray that it would be the sickness that dragged their stump-riddled, flesh-mangled, bloodlet bodies over the finish line.

  The timetable became second nature: infection, eighteen to twenty-four months of suffering, death. That the afflicted knew this gave them gravitas. They wished only to live before they died, and I could write another thousand pages on their valorous attempts. Only attempts, though; through the crack in the balcony door I listened to hundreds of hours of semi-coherent jabber about how thankful they were to die without being plugged into that fucking ventilator, thankful to do it under open fucking skies, thankful to be surrounded by friends instead of that fucking janitor who over-bleached his fucking mop. (They cursed a lot at the end.)

  Because why recount every agonized expiration when Gabe Mungo’s death sums it up so neatly? Right on schedule, on July 20, 1983, he slumped into a pneumonia he hadn’t the white blood cells to thwart. The Savages by then had a cat’s sixth sense for death, and knowing how I liked Gabe best of all, they risked Miss Ness’s wrath that night by wading into the shrubbery alongside the compound—quite the gauntlet for multiple-amputees—banging on the windows and shouting that Gabe was about to die. I was awake, as ever, reclined beneath the fish tank. Unexpected grief squeezed my dead heart.

  “Bring him in!” cried I “Now, now!”

  I toppled downstairs and hit the front vestibule concurrent with Ruthie. In all of our years together, I’d never seen her hair in any array but tied tight, but it was four in the morning, and pillows had made a nest of it. Her pajamas were wadded and her temples scored from a sleep mask. A ruckus rose up from outside the front door. I reached for the bolt, but Ruthie braced her elbow against the door.

  “You cahn’t let them in.”

  Brief wakefulness had allowed no time to hide her accent.

  “Remove yourself,” growled I.

  “Everyone in the whole yahd has it. You want them to just traipse in heah? Bleeding everywheah? I don’t have my masks or gloves!”

  “Remove yourself or I will be forced to take action.”

  She snarled, spit popping from her sleep-crusted lips. “When have you evah taken an action I didn’t tell you to take?”

  Reader, I struck her, and with force. My right arm, the only one I had, swung in a sideways arc, delivering to her left ear not a slap but a punch. Her forehead struck the door with a thud, and her knees buckled. She caught herself in a crouch and pressed both hands to her ear, then checked her fingers for blood. She blinked. She seemed not only to wake up but, more hideously, to wake up, and the look of respect she’d worn for so long sharpened to a hatred more savage than any invoked by a so-called Savage. Here came the blood from her ear; that she didn’t notice it made me ice-cold. Her lips twisted to such disfigurement that it was a wonder that words could thresh through them.

  “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  A crow flapped its wings inside me, caught under my ribs like Rigby’s Smith & Wesson. But the Savages were hollering, so I tore my attention from this altered Miss Ness and slid the bolt. I heard Ruthie dart away, but my attention was taken by the inward explosion of Savages who carried in their half-limbs and fingerless palms the limp Gabe Mungo. I pointed toward the courtyard and told them to lay Gabe by the reflecting pool. I rushed after, only dimly aware of the distinctive sound of the Ford Fairlane coughing to life and its rubber tires gristling over desert dirt.

  The night was seventy degrees and black, with blacker peaks rising in the distance as if our world were sinking. I dropped to my knees beside Gabe and shouted, rather ungratefully, for everyone to get the hell out of there and leave us alone. They reeled back in alarm and hobbled away, and then it was just the two of us beneath a torrent of splendiferous summer stars. I dipped my hand into the pool and dappled Gabe’s face with water.

  Puffy white fungus had sprouted along his fingernails. Half of his head was swallowed in a coarse red rash. His skin looked like putty melted across knobby white bone, and his eyes were fierce yellow dots flickering from inkwell pits. When water hit his swollen lips, they opened, and from his yeast-striped tongue pealed a rush of words, as if he’d been speaking all along and I’d just cranked the volume.

  “—got these gadgets in the bars, they called them ionizers, they stuck them up high above the bars, said they’re supposed to help with cigarette smoke, well that’s what they said, but you ask me, they were suspicious, weren’t they, those little devices with their blinking lights, so what I’m saying is no one got sick before the ionizers, if you really sit down and think about it—”

  “Gabe,” said I.

  “—so what if those ionizers were radiating something, you know, something toxic, and it was these gadgets that spread the disease, gadgets that the city council made them put in, maybe only in the gay bars, because I don’t want to sound paranoid, but if you ask me, it sounds like a Watergate-style conspiracy—”

  “Gabe.”

  I shook him by a shoulder that felt like a wooden coat rack upon which a ratty housecoat and half-plucked feather boa had been draped. Sweat popped from his every pore at once and ran down sallow skin like grease, and for a moment he shut up and his pinprick eyes stabbed mine, and I leaned down, desperate for him to recognize me and become the Gabe I’d first met, that hip-swinging prima donna who’d driven audiences wild, and who could blame them? He’d been the epitome of the fiery, stubborn, lustful life I’d once enjoyed. I got close enough that our noses touched so that his eyes couldn’t miss mine, in hopes that he’d return, just for a moment, to deliver some cutting remark to help me believe that his death wasn’t pointless
, that none of the deaths I’d shepherded here were pointless.

  His yellow eyes slid from mine and his tongue jerked.

  “—which makes sense, as conspiracies go, when you think what they did with the health supplements, and everyone bought the health supplements, they called them HIM, Health and Immunity for Men, and they sold as fast as poppers, the floor of the bar went clink, clink, clink with all the jars, and it said right on the label how it maximized immunity, and this is America, this isn’t some third-world country, they can’t put words on labels that aren’t true—”

  Having once known a potion peddler called Dr. Whistler, I could have protested, but Gabe wasn’t hearing me, nor would he ever again. On strange impulse I dipped my face the final two inches and pressed my cold, dry lips against his swollen, sweltering ones, and gave him the kiss doctors had told him he could never have. Yes, Dearest Reader, I kissed a man, and what’s more, I made it a good one, urgent because there was no time for dally, hungry because I did still starve in certain ways, and though Gabe’s mind was gone, his muscles had memories, and he kissed back, each push of our lips damming his tide of turbid conspiracy, of which I could bear no more.

  By the time the sky was burnished by a coming dawn, his tirade had become babble. I straightened his robe. I arranged his boa to best showcase the remaining feathers. I wished that somewhere in my sprawling compound was a tube of hot-pink lipstick, long plastic eyelashes, a Marilyn Monroe wig, a gown with a million sequins. When the sun shot over the crest of Barringer’s crater, I had left Gabe’s side to search for a tool with which I might snip off his seven rings, for his hands and fingers had ballooned with fluid. The best I could find was a crowbar. How that might work, I didn’t know, but at least it felt powerful in my hand.

  When I returned, Gabe Mungo was dead.

  I sat beside his body. Having failed to find costuming, he looked like roadkill left too long on a freeway shoulder. His chest was thrust too high, his back too arched, his arms akimbo and fingers taloned. I stared at the corpse for hours until I was very certain of what I was seeing. There was no beauty in this death, no perfection, nothing that we Savages had sought for so long. The sun rose, evaporating the last of the clouds shadowing my brain. I took the cowboy hat Gabe had always loved, secured it upon his head, and stood up. For Gabe Mungo—not Gabe Savage, for he knew better than that—I had to end this, all of it.