The Last Lovers on Earth: Stories from Dark Times

by Charles Ortleb

  Two of the sinners were presently trying to pick out appropriate ties to wear to the party as the right-winger debated the self-declared gay leader. As he stared at the TV screen, Everett’s brow became deeply wrinkled. He didn’t quite know where to begin. Everett was not too fond of the so-called gay leaders who stood between him and God-only-knows-what. He was famous in his dwindling circle of friends for dropping lines like, "How many gay leaders does it take to screw in a light bulb?"

  As Everett listened to the mushy gay spokesperson debate the bloodthirsty right-winger, his face reddened. "They’re gonna get us all killed," he said. "Someone should check these guys for a pulse."

  When they cut back to the man and woman who were anchoring the gay news, the woman read a story about a man with AIDS in prison in Florida who, over a three-day period, had been beaten to death by prison guards. The man had barely survived the initial assaults and was placed in the prison hospital, but the guards eventually found their way to his room and finished him off in the hospital bed.

  Shea winced at the television and then looked out the window. With a forlorn sigh he said, "Do we really have to go to this thing?"

  "No, but let’s at least try," said Everett.

  Neither one of them seemed to be in a party mood, so Shea had made them martinis to sip while they dressed and watched the rest of the gay news.

  The two anchors of the gay news had a peculiar way of mugging a dirty look at the camera after every story to show their displeasure with what they had just read. Everett had never seen anything quite like it before. The woman read an item about a man who had come out to someone in a small southern town. When word spread to some of the man’s neighbors, they had then broken into his house and attacked him with baseball bats. When his mother tried to call the police, they pulled the phone out of the wall and beat her up, too, until the gay man reached for a machete under a bed and scared them off. As the lesbian anchor finished the story she scowled into the camera and the other anchor rolled his eyes.

  "Brokaw and Jennings better watch out," said Shea.

  It was getting a little close in the room, so Everett put on the air conditioner. It was awfully warm outside for an autumn evening.

  "If I had to read news like that every week, I’d probably make faces, too," said Everett.

  "I guess that we’re lucky we can even see news like this at all," replied Shea. There was a note of world weary sarcasm in Shea’s voice. A shivery feeling of failure spent a moment in Everett’s consciousness.

  Everett always wanted to throw himself in front of oncoming reality where Shea was concerned. Not only did Everett feel helpless, but there were times when he thought he made things even worse. Where the epidemic was concerned, Shea had become the lover who knew too much.

  Everett and Shea were always very late for parties, and this was no exception. Not even the fact that they really hadn’t been invited anywhere for a long time seemed to matter. Across town the guests were already arriving. Some showed up fully dressed while others donned their outfits in the host’s bedroom. It was one of the first gay kimono parties anyone had thrown in years. Some gay historians insist that Mae West held the first one and that J. Edgar Hoover may have thrown one or two, but nobody was really sure.

  When the first arrivals asked the host who else was coming, the host nervously spilled the beans that Everett and Shea would be among the guests. That did not go over very well. One of the early guests looked curtly at the host and said, "Oh, it’s going to be one of those kind of evenings. I didn’t know that those two were even still alive. What a waste of good kimonos."

  The host didn’t have the heart to tell them that Everett and Shea would be the only ones there without kimonos. The host tried to fix things up by saying, "Oh, Everett’s promised he won’t say anything to rain on anyone’s parade."

  "I feel so sorry for Shea," said one of the younger guests.

  An older guest contradicted him. "Don’t pity Shea. He’s become as bad as Everett. He eggs him on."

  "Should we take off our red ribbons?" asked a tall man in a black silk kimono that was appointed with a single red ribbon, the universal symbol of AIDS awareness.

  "Don’t be silly," said the host. "You have the right to wear your red ribbons. They haven’t made Everett the gay Fuhrer yet."

  That said, a couple of the guests nonetheless removed the red ribbons from their kimonos. One said, "I’m sorry. I hate scenes. I failed confrontation in high school."

  "Suit yourself," said the host.

  "Give me your ribbons. I’ll wear several. I’m sick of Everett’s bullshit," said a man in a white silk kimono.

  "They just can’t handle the truth," said the host.

  "They just haven’t met the right AIDS educator," said the man who now had several red ribbons on his white kimono.

  The host was getting very anxious about Everett and Shea arriving without kimonos. Everett was adamant, so the host reluctantly gave him permission, as long as they wore expensive business suits. "You two will be rich Western businessmen, and we’ll all be gold-digging geisha girls," he had said.

  Everett and Shea were now dressed in their very best suits, but they were not making any moves to leave the apartment. They were going to be even later than usual. They were watching the last segment of the gay news, the part where the male anchor named all the celebrities that he thought were gay. This was the part of the show that always made Everett say to Shea, "Something has gone terribly, terribly wrong with the gay world."

  "I can’t believe he just announced that all those people are gay," said Shea.

  "He should work for the National Enquirer," replied Everett.

  "We’d better get going."

  "What if I make us one more drink? Just a small one."

  "Don’t make it too small."

  Everett really didn’t want to go. He knew most of the people at the party hated him. The great network of AIDS activist high society would be there. All the gay muckety-mucks. He wasn’t happy about the reason he thought that they’d been invited. The host had been chilly for years, but Everett’s appointment as the Director of the Hannah Arendt Studies Department at the New School had impressed him. There had even been an article about Everett in the Times. He was now a minor celebrity. The appointment had caused indignation in gay venues all over town. The Times had coronated him as a promising New York intellectual. He knew that until then most of the people coming to the party had written him off. This turn of events had made them all nervous. Somebody they had exiled from the gay zeitgeist was making it.

  His status was not the only thing that was changing. He knew that the gay zeitgeist’s confidence in the government was beginning to be challenged by events. Gay leaders all over the city were beginning to worry that something weird was going on and that the AIDS dissidents were right. Over the years, Everett had loved causing trouble by supporting the dissidents at gay parties. Whenever the subject of AIDS came up and someone mentioned the small group of scientists and journalists who thought the government had gotten everything wrong about the epidemic, or was covering up the truth, Everett had always spoken up for the dissidents.

  "Didn’t you all used to be dissidents?" he would ask his former friends. "Didn’t you used to be a persecuted minority group before you became masters of the AIDS universe?"

  They would look at him dismissively. For the most part they would never openly contradict him. They took him out of their rolodexes; they didn’t invite him to Fire Island or the Hamptons. He and Shea became the butt of private jokes.

  Occasionally, one would work up enough courage to lob a petulant line or two at Everett: "Do you think there’s a conspiracy, Everett? Is the government out to get you and Shea?"

  Everett just didn’t know what to do with gay men. He couldn’t live with or without them.

  As he handed Everett a drink, Shea once again asked, "Are you sure you want to go?"

  "We have to. We’re winning. We have to show those assholes
we’re not afraid of them. It’s all changing, and they know it. Maybe not consciously, but deep down they’re all scared out of their dim little wits."

  "Well, if you change your mind, I still have those two steaks and we still have all those shiitake mushrooms your mother gave us."

  Most of the people were now into their second drink at the gay kimono party. The novelty of the kimonos had now become secondary to the fact that Everett and Shea were coming. An evening of gay fantasy was threatened by the impending arrival of an unpleasant man who’d made everyone in a kimono at the party tense for years.

  "So Miss Hannah Arendt and her dog Toto will soon be here," said one of the outraged gay men in a kimono. "May I hit him up for some money for my AIDS Testing Foundation?" asked a man in a bright pink kimono.

  "Didn’t he once call you an AIDS kapo?" asked a man in a blue kimono.

  "He compared us all to kapos. He said we’re all collaborators," said the man in the pink kimono.

  "Whenever he opens his mouth, I feel like I’m doing a scene from Casablanca,” said the man in the blue kimono.

  "It’s more like Shoah," said the man in the pink kimono.

  "I’m not butch enough to be a kapo," said the man in the blue kimono.

  "What’s a kapo?" asked a young man standing nearby in a yellow kimono.

  Everett and Shea wished their doorman a good night and Shea asked if he should hail a cab.

  "Let’s walk. I’m not sure I still want to go."

  "I knew it. You always do this."

  "Let me just think about this some more."

  As they headed across town toward the East Side, Everett tried to think of polite ways of reminding the people he knew would be there that protease inhibitors were now obviously a disaster, as the dissidents had predicted. Everett had nearly been asked to leave a party when he had announced that several scientists had said that the therapeutic AIDS cocktail would turn out to be the same kind of Drano that AZT was. Everett had chronically violated AIDS activist etiquette. He was never supposed to suggest that anything was amiss where AIDS was concerned. What Everett had said about protease inhibitors had cost them an entire season of invitations to the Island. He had mischievously suggested that Socrates’ death cup was actually filled with an ancient form of protease inhibitors.

  "Maybe we should just talk to all of them about the weather," said Shea.

  When they reached Park Avenue they still had two blocks to go, but Everett eyed a pub called Shaughnessy O’Toole’s and said "Let’s stop in this place and have a drink and think about this."

  "We’re going to arrive at this party looped. They’ll have us at a disadvantage."

  "Oh, they’ll all be tanked. The kimonos will be half off."

  Everyone at Shaughnessy O’Toole’s looked at them when they walked in. It was a bar full of men who might have once been longshoremen. They were all watching a baseball game and drinking shots of some shiny brown liquor. In their expensive suits, Everett and Shea looked totally out of place. Everyone at the bar seemed to make a disapproving face when Everett ordered a vodka martini straight up with olives. Everett knew what the men were thinking, but he didn’t care.

  They carried their drinks to a table in the back and the men at the bar turned their attention back to the game. The bar had an aggressive cumulus of cigarette smoke that made Shea cough. Everett looked over at the steam table which had serious slabs of ham, pastrami, and corned beef.

  Everett had a feeling that the men at the bar didn’t know what the gay men at the kimono party knew: that gay men are powerful and have nothing to worry about. That they have important friends. That Hollywood stars come to their AIDS benefits. That senators give them billions for their plague. That Broadway producers and gossip columnists come to their funerals. That the real centers of power in America are Cherry Grove and the Pines. That anyone who thinks the government is lying about AIDS is a nut. That when the government orders gay men to do anything medically, it is for their own good. That there will soon be an effective AIDS vaccine (there just has to be), and every gay man will show how much in love he is with his country and its trustworthy scientists by taking it, no matter what the risk, no matter what the allegations of fraud and deceit. If the heterosexual men at the bar only knew how powerful gay men are they would be clamoring to get into the kimono party.

  These testy thoughts made Everett hungry. He eyed the meat on the steam table. It was gross, but he wanted to run over and grab chunks of it and stuff it into his mouth. His mood was ravenous, masculine, angry, and funky, not the kind of mood he could see in the middle of a gay kimono party.

  A couple of the men at the bar stared over at Everett and Shea in a manner that demanded to know what the two of them were doing in their bar.

  Every time the host went to the door to greet new guests, all the kimonos in the room turned to look for Everett and Shea. They were all the partygoers could talk about.

  Most guests at the party had some bitter memory of a confrontation with Everett from the time the epidemic began. Everett constantly made vicious fun of the AIDS activists. Everett called the AIDS benefits (which they were so proud of) "genocide parties." Everett said that the scientists who believed that HIV was not the cause of AIDS would eventually turn out to be heroes. And he was always bringing up that old bag Hannah Arendt. Always throwing her in their faces. It was a shame that he was a Hannah Arendt scholar because he could only see the epidemic through Hannah Arendt glasses. Who cared about her? Wasn’t she a big closet lesbian or something? Why did he insist on turning every gay party into a seminar on that dead woman? He had no respect for any of the leading lights of the gay community who tried to talk reason to him at parties. Everett had abandoned his people at a time when they needed his loyalty and solidarity.

  They were all there that night in kimonos. It was truly a powerful gay party. The man in the magenta kimono had started the biggest AIDS organization on the East Coast. The man in the gray kimono had lobbied for millions of dollars in AIDS prevention funds, money that had ended up in the coffers of hundreds of blossoming AIDS organizations. The man in the tangerine kimono had written the most important AIDS ballad, one that now tearfully closed every cabaret act in town. Beneath the other colorful kimonos in the room lay the entire infrastructure of what was referred to as "the AIDS community." At one time or another nearly every man at the party had listened in horror as Everett referred to the AIDS activist movement as "the Occupation." Everyone was asking why their beloved host had stooped to inviting Everett and Shea to the gay kimono party.

  The host was frantically trying to get the party back on track. He ran around the sea of kimonos with a tray of imported caviar-topped sushi. He pressed more drinks on people and ordered the bartender to start opening the champagne. He now knew that he had made a terrible mistake by inviting Everett and Shea. He was terrified to think of what might happen when they arrived in their suits. There might be a gay auto-da-fé.

  At O’Toole’s, Everett stood up, walked over to the bar and ordered two more martinis. The bartender was polite, but a number of men at the bar skulked in his direction. He took the drinks back to the table, this time slightly spilling them. He sat down and gazed over at the old man making sandwiches behind the hot table. This was not the kind of place at which they would normally find themselves dining.

  He looked at Shea and then back over at the sweating carcasses of meat and said, "Well, we’re here. Let’s just do it. We won’t have to risk getting cheese dip all over the suits at the party if we eat first."

  He walked over to the old man and asked for two corned beef sandwiches on rye. The old man was friendlier than anyone else in the place. Everett thought that it was even possible that the old man was gay.

  Shea sat alone thinking it was the strangest thing that they were in this Irish bar. It was another world. Living with Everett, Shea was never sure where he was going to end up. Sometimes he felt like a refugee in his own city. The drinks had made him feel a l
ittle testy. He might just let some of the nasty queens have it between the eyes at the party if they went after Everett. He knew they thought he was some kind of yes-lover. He knew that they liked to isolate Everett and make him sound like he was the only person in the world who thought about the epidemic the way he did. They all assumed that Shea must secretly disagree with Everett, but that he was under some spell. He was thinking about his desire to move out of New York as Everett brought the working-class sized sandwiches back to the table.

  "Are you man enough to eat this, Shea?"

  "Are we going to arrive at the kimono party with corned beef between our teeth?" asked Shea.

  The party had become a lost cause, and the host just let it go. Some people were doing impressions of Everett talking about Hannah Arendt, and some were going even further, trying to do Hannah Arendt herself.

  Everywhere the host looked, people were lambasting Everett and Shea. It was as though someone had said, "Hey kids, let’s put on a show for Everett and Shea about how we’re building an AIDS paradigm that will get us all liquidated!"

  Some of the men in kimonos were doing impressions of Hannah Arendt that sounded suspiciously like Tallulah Bankhead. There are some gay men whose every impression, even Liza Minnelli, sounds like Tallulah Bankhead.

  One couldn’t escape it. All around the room the satire and sarcasm were crackling. Everyone was making vicious fun of Everett’s analysis of the AIDS epidemic.

  "We’re prepared to round everyone up, if necessary," said a gay man in an orange kimono.

  A pink kimono upped the ante with, "We refuse to go outside the community for help. We demand the right to have our own gay doctors kill gay men with experimental treatments. We believe in genocide with dignity."

  "I am life unworthy of life," quipped a gay man in a mummy-colored kimono.

  There was one gentleman who hadn’t had time to rent an authentic kimono, so he wore a large aquamarine muumuu with a belt from a bathrobe. At least he was trying to be a team player. In the spirit of the evening, he shouted out, "We’re all just gay functionaries of death. We’re all just gay functionaries of death."