Third man out dsm-4

by Richard Stevenson

  He said, "Too bad Rutka wasn't bending over kissing his own foot when the shot was fired. He might have died in a characteristic pose that would have pleased those few who would cherish his memory, and the rest of us would be rid of him."

  It was indicative of the effect Rutka often had on people that his misfortune could produce so harsh a response in so rational a soul. Normally a purveyor of Franciscan charity and the very soul of Jesuit restraint, Timmy had often spoken critically of Rutka, especially since Rutka's outing of a friend of Timmy's, a state legislator from one of the Southern Tier counties whose voting record on gay matters was impeccable but who had chosen to remain closeted out of deference to the sensitivities of his father, an Orthodox rabbi. The old cleric had performed his own monumental act of paternal love by refraining from hurling lightning bolts at his fallen son, the feygele, and merely spent his evenings weeping.

  "Nobody deserves to be shot," I said. "Gunshot wounds are always worse than they look even in the movies these days, and they hurt a lot."

  "Good."

  "And if Rutka had been shot dead," I said, "you wouldn't have liked it. You would have hated it."

  "Not him."

  "When you told Eldon that Nicky Mertz died, and Eldon said he didn't want to hear about it-'What's one more?'-you almost punched him, you were so mad. You revere life. You're an authentic papist."

  "St. Augustine," he said. "Fourth century. Killing another human being can be justified to combat a threatening evil."

  "He meant war. The Roman Empire was about to be attacked and the previously pacifistic Augustinians worked out a theory of a just war that would lead to a just peace. They didn't advocate popping off people who were mere pains in the ass."

  He looked at me oddly. "How do you know all that?"

  "You explained it to me fourteen or fifteen years ago. It was soon after we met. It might have been within the first five or ten minutes."

  "You're right. It's starting to come back to me."

  "How is he?" I said.

  "There's no change. He's the same as he was yesterday, and the same as he was the day before, and the same as he was the day before that."

  "Is Mike in there?" I could see the bed nearest the door with its comatose occupant, but not beyond the curtain to the room's second bed, where Stu Meserole lay, also in a "persistent vegetative state," sustained through tubes by machinery that bleeped and ticked dully, not convincing as a life force.

  "They're all in there behind the drape. Mike and Rhoda and Al."

  "Do they leave after Mike leaves, or are they afraid he might sneak back?"

  "No one knows. Rhoda and Al appear to live on another plane of existence from the rest of us that precludes such mundane matters as coming and going. It is beyond our knowing."

  "Nah, we could find out."

  "I don't think so."

  "Rhoda and Al," as Stu Meserole had always referred to his parents, whom he feared and adored despite their coldness toward Stu's lover and friend of twelve years, Mike Sciola, had dedicated their every waking moment to keeping their son breathing even after his brain had been largely eaten away by a ferocious cancer previously found only in kangaroos.

  Stu, like Mike, had been found to be HIV-positive six years earlier. Each had defied the odds by remaining entirely healthy until the previous May. That's when Stu had a headache one day, was blind a month later, lost most bodily functions soon after that, screamed and talked gibberish for a week, then went to sleep. The cancer then inexplicably quit growing and left Stu with just a few critical functions, including respiration.

  Mike wanted to find a way to let his friend, whose mind and soul were gone, go all the way. Rhoda and Al Meserole didn't. They believed in science and they believed in miracles. They believed one or the other would bring their son back to tortured wakefulness. Stu, having neglected before he suddenly fell ill to complete the proper New York State forms designating Mike as his "health care proxy" and the decider of his fate, was now legally under the control of Rhoda and Al, who feared that Mike would "pull the plug," as they put it, an actual plug indeed being down there somewhere to tug out of a wall socket.

  Mike wouldn't have pulled it-he had other means in mind, it soon developed-but the Meseroles knew their man, and he knew they knew him. The three of them spent many hours each day in Stu's room eyeing each other whenever they weren't flipping through TV Guide, or staring at the soaps, or gazing out the window at the June blossoms and then the ripening summer.

  Timmy and I dropped by several evenings each week to try to lure Mike away. He didn't have to go to work until close to Labor Day-to his job as a high school social-studies teacher out in Balston Lake-but he was losing weight and his friends feared that his self-neglect would trigger an opportunistic infection and he would fall apart, too. We and a few other friends had become regular standees outside room F-5912, at the end of a corridor not in the AIDS section of the hospital but in a chronic-care unit where Stu and his immediate neighbors were all, as we'd heard one intern put it, "turnip city."

  Stu shared a room with a skeletal, vacant-eyed Hispanic man no one had ever been known to visit. Across the hall lay a truck driver rendered comatose when his semi overturned on the Thruway. Sharing the trucker's room, in an uncharacteristically democratic gesture- and possibly as a cost-saving measure for the not-so-flush-as-it-once-was Albany diocese-was Bishop Mortimer McFee, who'd slipped on a lovingly waxed rectory floor in mid-June and landed on the back of his head, and now lay in medical and presumably spiritual limbo somewhere between the Albany diocese and the seraphim.

  Traffic in and out of the bishop's room was considerable. Priests, mayors, nuns, columnists, restaurateurs, a U.S. senator, the lieutenant governor all came and went with whispers-apparently so as not to disturb anybody's irreversible coma-and heads bowed. One day Timmy himself had even looked in on the bishop to offer a mild novena for the soul of this man who had once told a Catholic gay group they would not be allowed to meet in a church's sub-basement because it wasn't "low enough for the likes of you."

  "I went in and forgave him," Timmy told me when he came out.

  "And did a look of peace spread slowly across his visage?" I asked.

  "You're being sarcastic," Timmy replied, and said no more. On certain topics I never was sure what was going on in his head and knew enough not to try to find out.

  Mike Sciola wandered out of the room now, dazed and bleary-eyed, and radiating the heavy medicinal scent carried by people who spend hours a day in hospitals. His cheeks were gaunt under his graying beard, and his dark hair was matted with sweat.

  "Thanks for coming," Mike said.

  "No change?" I asked.

  "Nah."

  "How are Rhoda and Al?"

  "The same."

  "Can you talk to them at all?"

  "Not about turning off the feeder. If I talk about who's on Oprah today, they're cordial enough. But if I try to talk about Stu, forget it."

  "You might as well quit for the day," Timmy said. "Visiting hours are nearly over anyway. Have you eaten?"

  "I ate something."

  "I haven't eaten at all," I said. "Let's walk over to Lark Street and sink our teeth into something greasy and refreshing."

  "I guess. Maybe in a while."

  "Somebody shot John Rutka," Timmy said. "Did you hear?"

  This got a rise. "Holy shit, is he dead?"

  "I just talked to him down in the parking lot. Whoever it was just clipped him on the foot and he's not too bad off."

  Sciola's red eyes were alert now. "I'm amazed it didn't happen sooner. You can do what that guy's been doing in New York or Hollywood and get away with it, I guess, but Albany's too straight and nineteenth-century. Gay people just aren't used to that radical stuff around here. I've seen guys who are ordinarily levelheaded go absolutely bananas when the subject of John Rutka comes up. I've even heard people say somebody should shut him up permanently, and some people seemed to mean it."

  "Who
did you hear say that?" I said.

  He had to think about this. "Well, Ronnie Linkletter. I heard him say one time Rutka should be boiled in oil. Maybe that sounds as if he was speaking figuratively, but he said he'd love to light the match. And when the other people who were there joked about a John Rutka fondue party with Rutka the thing being fondued, Ronnie said he wasn't kidding, that anybody who set out to ruin people's lives had to be stopped, and if the legal system couldn't do it then it was all right for people to do it on their own. He really seemed serious."

  "Was this before or after Ronnie was outed?" I asked.

  "Well, I think it was actually before, believe it or not."

  "Ronnie must have known he was an easy target," Timmy said, "being a media superstar and all."

  "He's still there doing the weather on Channel Eight, isn't he?" Sciola asked. "I can't stand to watch those shows."

  Timmy said, "They make USA Today look like Le Monde."

  I said, "They're trying to push Ronnie out. They've got him on at some godawful hour in the morning, instead of at six and eleven, but he's got a contract. I've heard he's looking around though, in places like Yuma and Winnemucca. He's been hurt and I'm sure he's very, very angry at Rutka. Who else have you heard say anything threatening?"

  Sciola mentioned three other people: a closeted Albany cop he knew; a Schenectady dentist whom Rutka, to my knowledge, had not gotten around to outing; and a married Lesbian vice president of an Albany-based bank. Their remarks, as Sciola recalled them, were vaguer than Ronnie Linkletter's, and less menacing. They were not, in fact, much different from comments I'd been hearing directed at Rutka at gatherings for the past six months. I told Sciola this and said I could probably compile a list of twenty-five people who'd been pretty nearly unhinged by Rutka's crusade and had shown it in public.

  "So half the gay people in Albany are logical suspects," Timmy said. "Maybe they all did it. It's like Murder on the Orient Express. Everybody had a motive and everybody had a hand in doing it."

  "In shooting a man in the foot?"

  "That would explain why they only got him in the foot. It sounds like an assassination attempt by a publicly appointed commission."

  Sciola managed a wan smile and said, "I'm tired. Let's get out of here and eat something. Someplace with cold beer."

  "I'm for that," Timmy said.

  "Let me just check on Stu," Sciola said, looking suddenly apprehensive. He turned and strode back into room F-5912. Ten minutes later, when he hadn't come out, I waited while Timmy went downstairs to find a vending machine. He came back with two Snickers bars and a foam cup of watery coffee.

  "He hasn't come out yet?"

  "He says we should go ahead. He's not hungry."

  We left the candy bars and the coffee on the floor outside the room and went out into the semitropical Albany night. We weren't so hungry ourselves anymore and rode over to the house on Crow Street in Timmy's car.

  The eleven o'clock news on Channel Eight led with "an attempt on the life tonight of a controversial gay activist in a residential neighborhood in Handbag." Rutka, who must have phoned the TV stations just after I left him in the hospital parking lot, was seen on his front steps grimacing and condemning homophobic murderers.

  The report was brief and the interview heavily edited. It did include Rutka's comments that "internalized homophobia" was gay people's biggest problem and that from then on "no gay hypocrite in Albany will be safe" from Rutka. A spokesman for the Handbag Police Department said only that the incident was being investigated. end user

  3

  Rutka phoned the first thing next morning. "I need your help," he said.

  "I don't think so."

  "It's the Keystone Kops out here-the Keystone Kops on Quaaludes. They're useless."

  "It's too early to tell."

  "No, it can't be too early, it can only be too late. If they don't catch whoever shot me and arrest him, he could try it again. Or somebody else who'd like to get rid of me might see how vulnerable I am and come after me. I have to know somebody's working on this who knows what he's doing if I want to feel secure enough to go on with my work."

  On with his work-Albert Schweitzer at Lambarene. I said, "I'm not sure how I feel about your work. No, that's wrong. I disapprove of a lot of it. When you crossed the line from the Roy Cohn types to the merely well-known, you lost me. That's not fair."

  Timmy looked up from his Cream of Wheat and mouthed, "Rutka?" I nodded. He looked down again.

  "No, it's fair," Rutka said. "Until this heterosexist society knows that we are everywhere, that a high percentage of the most popular and respected people from every area of American life are gay, gay people who are ordinary can never begin to be accepted and feel safe. It's the moral responsibility of every gay man and woman to act as a role model and to…"

  He gave me his stump speech. I listened and watched Timmy trying to read my reaction across the cereal. I consumed most of three eggs, up, and an English muffin while Rutka orated.

  When he wound down, I said, "I'm pretty much with you on the social analysis but not on the tactics. Doing unto ourselves as others would do unto us can't be the answer. Anyway, whether I agree with you or not is academic. The shooting is a police matter and you should give them a chance and see what they come up with. Maybe they'll surprise you."

  "Are you tied up with anything else?"

  "As a matter of cold, hard fact, at the moment I am at liberty. But that's beside the point. Also, I do this for a living. I cost money."

  "Not always. I've heard about that. But that doesn't matter. I can pay you. I have income from the hardware store. Dad left the business to me and Ann. She runs it and draws a salary, but we split the profits. I have a decent income. What do you charge?"

  Timmy was seated behind a container of the clotted sweet tea he had become addicted to in his Peace Corps days in India back at the end of the Pat Boone era, and as he sipped the roily substance, he watched me with growing apprehension.

  I said, "I wear red suspenders, drive a week-old BMW, and charge ten thousand dollars a day." Timmy gave a little nod of approval.

  Rutka said, "Seriously."

  "Seriously, my pants are held up by a disintegrating belt I picked up at an after-Christmas sale at Penney's in 1974, I drive an old Mitsubishi with rust spots on the doors, and my rate is two hundred dollars a day plus expenses."

  "That's reasonable. I'd like to hire you."

  "To do what?"

  "To find out who shot me and have him arrested."

  "I'm telling you, John, that's the Handbag Police Department's job. That's how they'll see it and they'll be right. Police departments solve crimes."

  "They can't do it."

  "You don't know that," I said. "You insist on fairness but you're not being fair."

  "I've never insisted on fairness. If you believe that, you don't understand me at all. It's too late for fairness. I want change. I want people to confront their own bigotry, and I want this society to confront its own ignorance and stupidity, and I want bigotry and stupidity to wither under the harsh glare of the sunlight of truth."

  "Oh, well. I stand corrected."

  A silence, then a long sigh. "Look, Strachey, just put yourself in my place, will you do that? Think how you'd feel and how you'd react if somebody shot a gun at you. Have you ever been shot? I'll bet you have."

  "No, just at. They missed."

  "But still, you know. You were very frightened."

  "Yes."

  "And you wanted the person who did it caught and locked up immediately."

  "I sure did."

  "Then you can begin to understand what I'm going through. How would you feel if your life depended on the level of competence at the Handbag Police Department?"

  He had me there. "I guess I'd feel the way you do. Endangered."

  "Whatever you think of me, should I be shot and killed?"

  "I'm one of those who don't think so, no."

  "And what about
those who do think so? Can the Handbag Police Department protect me from them?"

  "Maybe." When I said "maybe," Timmy's look of apprehension deepened.

  "When it's your life, the only one you'll ever have, 'maybe' isn't good enough. Am I right about this?"

  "Sure." I looked away from Timmy, out the kitchen window at the box of pink petunias Timmy's Aunt Moira had hauled up from Poughkeepsie on the front seat of her Dodge. The thunderstorm the night before had bent them low, but in the morning sunshine they were starting to perk up nicely. With my well-practiced peripheral vision I could make out Timmy's mouth hanging open lightly. If I'd put a square of glass in front of it, I'd have gotten a little moisture.

  "Don't you sometimes do security work?" Rutka said. "Protect people and property for a fee?"

  I said I'd done it from time to time.

  "Well, how about protecting me? The fact is-" There was a tremulous pause. "The fact of the matter is, Strachey, I'm scared to death. I really am. This time I really put my foot in it. I went after somebody who must be totally wacko. Whoever it is wants me dead and there isn't a fucking thing I can do about it. I'm vulnerable and I don't know what to do. For God's sake, can't you help me just because I'm fucking scared and I want help? I'll pay you, for God's sake, but I really need help."

  He waited. "I could talk to you," I finally said to the petunias.

  "Will you?"

  "It would be a security thing."

  "That's what I mean."

  "Did you ask the police for protection?"

  A half-laugh, half-sob. "They're going to drive by the house once an hour. A fucking lot of good that will do as soon as the killer sees them leave for the next fifty-nine minutes. Or if I leave the house to go anywhere."

  "This is true. You're not as well protected as you might be."

  "Bub Bailey said they were short-staffed, it being August and vacation time for some of the officers."

  "I couldn't stay with you twenty-four hours a day," I said. "If you wanted bodyguards I'd have to hire them and that could become expensive. Is that what you think you want?"

  "I'll have to think about that."