The Last Lovers on Earth: Stories from Dark Times

by Charles Ortleb

  The satire was hitting its mark. All over the room people were howling with laughter. It was getting so loud that the host began to worry about the tenants in the other apartments.

  "Hannah, babe, we hope you are looking down at us tonight, us poor submissive retarded gays who are collaborating in our own demise," screamed a man in a turquoise kimono.

  "Why it seems like just yesterday Hannah was saying to me that a gay man can’t live an honorable life inside the AIDS community," snickered a man in a green kimono.

  A man in a grey flannel kimono tried to top him with "Oh, really? Well, I was talking to her last week and she quoted Ben Gurion to me. Something about the AIDS activist movement leading to the gas chamber and the soap factory. I’m so scared."

  "Go Girl!" said the man in the yellow kimono.

  "Move it, everyone. Let’s board the trains to the AIDS concentration camps. Don’t forget to bring your AZT and your cocktails of death!" howled a man in a checkered kimono.

  "Let’s all go to our deaths like gay lambs to the slaughter so Everett can write learned monographs about us," said a man in a golden kimono.

  The room was a kaleidoscope of laughing, out-of-control men in kimonos. The host thought it was the legendary creativity of the gay community at its best. It was the same energy that had given the world the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Hello, Dolly! and brunch.

  "Come on, everyone, let’s line up for the AIDS authorities and give them our names and addresses so we can show them how willing we are to participate in our own extermination," said a man in a silver kimono.

  And wouldn’t you know it, they did just that. They formed a long conga line that stretched through several rooms of the apartment. To the tune of "Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall," they all began singing, "The AIDS establishment is out of its mind, the AIDS establishment is out of its mind!"—a line that they had all heard more than once from Everett.

  As a veteran party giver, the host knew that this was the precise moment to distribute the tambourines. He signaled to the bartender and fifty tambourines were handed out from behind the bar, and soon the room reached a crescendo of tambourine mayhem. The whole room suddenly erupted into a festive chant, "WORK WILL SET US FREE, BLANCHE! WORK WILL SET US FREE, BLANCHE!"

  If Everett and Shea had walked in at that moment, they would have been mortified. Destroyed.

  One man was lifted by several others in his kimono and was whirled upon muscular arms in the air around the room and resembled the Flying Nun. People were laughing so hard they were crying. It truly had turned into the gayest party of the year.

  For more than a decade of the epidemic, Everett had shown up at gay parties all over Manhattan and spoiled them. Now he was getting his just desserts. The host recognized, that true to form, the best parties are the ones where the unexpected happens. Hannah Arendt might be dead as a door nail, but she had helped to make this a party for the books. The host was grateful that he had invited Everett and Shea. And that they had not arrived.

  As Shea expected, when they were done with their drinks and sandwiches, Everett said they should just skip the party and go home, that he wasn’t up to a confrontation with the gay zeitgeist. As the gay pariahs left the Irish bar, there was a palpable collective sigh of relief in the dark, smoky space behind them. Their absence was welcome at more than one location in town that night.

  Everett was annoyed with himself. He wondered what Hannah Arendt would say about a man who passed up an evening in which he might have turned a doomed people around. If he had argued with Hannah and insisted that there wasn’t a chance, she would have said that until you are dead there is always a chance, that a man is a creature who can always start something new. Perhaps he would have finally found the right words to wake them up that evening. He tried to imagine what the party must have been like. There probably weren’t any serious arguments. Not a single discomforting word would be said about the epidemic. Without Everett’s contentiousness the party might have been a little boring. He wondered if the gay men in their kimonos had gone all the way, even over the top, with their costumes. Were they all there in the complete period detail that gay men were so famous for when it came to costume parties? He could imagine that some might even have gone to the trouble of having their feet bound.

  The Swans

  Every community has its share of evil eyes, and the gay community is no exception. And boy, were they sparkling with envy the night that Brian and Lancelot met in a small club on the east side of Manhattan.

  From a political point of view, they met very, very cute. A single word brought them together, raising serious questions about the hand of destiny worthy of the Russian novelists, for if a particular word did not exist at that time and in that place, the great love which was engendered and the events that followed, might never have come into being. Perhaps it was definitive proof that beauty and grace can burst forth from the most hopeless husks of ugliness and hate, for that word, we are ashamed to say, was "queer."

  If a certain inebriated man at the crowded bar had not loudly referred to himself in conversation as a "queer," Brian and Lance might have gone off into the night and the rest of their lives on unconnected paths to places far less thrilling than the ones that awaited them. In the split second that they both turned in horror and disgust to see from whence the word "queer" emanated, their eyes met and what they saw was something that would last all eternity. Perhaps if these two men had found each other under any other circumstances, they would still have fallen in love, but who knows? Perhaps the mutual scowl directed at the "queer" let them see more deeply into each other’s souls. If looks could kill, the sneer that formed on Brian and Lance’s faces would have taken out a small army. They both hated the word "queer" about as much as a human being can hate a word. It was the transforming magic of seeing the same look on the other’s face that brought Brian and Lance together for all time.

  The two men had emigrated to New York in the early Nineties from culturally distinct parts of the country. Brian had come down from the hills of New England where he had attended a small liberal arts college. He had majored in English and was determined to be a published poet one day. He had moved to New York with very little money and found his way into the kind of job most English majors end up in: He was an editorial assistant at a major publishing house. He made barely enough to support himself, but at least there was always a chance that some important literary event would take place around him.

  Lance was the real butch thing. Raised on a ranch in the Lone Star State by a cowboy father and a cowgirl mother, he had one day decided that Texas was not a closet he wanted to continue living in. He began to feel like the whole state was one big angry prison with cactus and cattle. He headed off to New York City in his cowboy boots and was determined to rustle himself up a lover. Lance left the state with enough money from a grandparent’s bequest to take his chances on making a living off of the stock market. Lance had good luck and it followed him to the New York Stock Exchange.

  Brian and Lancelot had arrived in the city only a few months apart. Like many gay men in their twenties, visually they thought they had found the ultimate gay candy store. They had never seen so many attractive available men in one place before. But something wasn’t right about most of the men. In fact, something seemed out of kilter about the whole New York gay scene. It was intangible but palpable. It had something to do with the epidemic. Everyone seemed to be wearing red ribbons. Everyone seemed to be coming from or going to doctors’ offices. Everyone seemed to be telling lame, nervous jokes about condoms. And perhaps most disturbing of all, a growing number of gay men had taken to calling themselves "queers." This struck both Brian and Lance as being the same as women going around calling themselves "cunts," or blacks calling themselves "niggers," or Jews insisting on being called "kikes." Whenever Brian and Lance complained about the word, they were told that it was "no big deal." Some people told them that it was a youth culture word, and not to adopt it was to s
how one’s age. The word’s repulsiveness made Brian and Lance feel very alone in Manhattan. Neither of them could find anyone who was really disgusted by the word until the fateful night they met each other.

  Like most lovers, they were bound to remember the first words they would say to each other. In this case, it was Lance who made the first move. He leaned over to Brian and whispered seductively, "What the hell is wrong with these people?"

  "A bunch of dickheads," was Brian’s sultry response.

  It was love at first gay political analysis, and subconsciously, the whole bar was painfully aware of what was happening. Envious eyes were flashing like Christmas lights all over the room as Brian and Lance began to talk to each other in that deep intense way that implies a night of the kind of mad passionate love that would elude most of the starving men around them. It was clear that Brian and Lance were spiritually already in bed with each other. As Brian and Lance moved physically closer and closer to each other, the juices that really fuel society were flowing through the circulatory system of the bar: hostility, petulance, jealously, spite, and passive-aggression.

  The denizens of the bars would have been even more distressed if they knew that it was contempt for them and their ribbons and their "queerness" that was drawing Brian and Lance so intensely to each other. Like most lovers, they were reeling from the shock that they had so much in common, but in this case it had nothing to do with the brand of vodka they ordered, the kind of music they liked, or which movies they both had seen several times. Brian and Lance were magically merging because they were both bigots. They both hated stupid people. And as they got to know each other better that night, it was clear that they both thought the gay world around them was stupid to its very core. Furthermore, they both agreed on the source. It was AIDS activism. In New York, AIDS had brought in a rich harvest of fools. Everywhere they looked there were AIDS zombies in red ribbons. In each other, Brian and Lance had found someone from the same planet.

  Nothing brought Brian and Lance closer together than finding out that they both had received letters of warning from the prestigious Council on AIDS Perkiness. Both had been quickly identified by AIDS activists as slackers in the collective fight against AIDS. They had been sighted numerous times without red ribbons and there was no evidence that either of them had ever attended an AIDS dance party benefit or poetry reading. Neither of them had ever taken AIDS education posters home to hang over their beds. No one had ever seen them loading AIDS prevention tapes into their Walkmans. There were even rumors that one of them had flipped the bird at Elizabeth Taylor during one of her important television commercials about AIDS. And both of them had been exceedingly rude to AIDS counselors who had approached them in various bars.

  "I tore the letter of reprimand I got from the Council on AIDS Perkiness as soon as I go it," said Brian.

  "I made a dart board out of mine," said Lance.

  Brian and Lance amused each other by recounting their various experiences with the AIDS Activists. Lance howled with laughter as Brian described asking one of the activists how the AIDS virus was so smart and that it knew who was gay and who wasn’t. The activist was one of the brighter ones and had caught the skepticism and sarcasm of Brian’s question. In response, the AIDS activist started chanting at the top of his lungs into Brian’s face, "ARE YOU SAYING THERE’S NO AIDS EPIDEMIC? ARE YOU SAYING THERE’S NO AIDS EPIDEMIC? ARE YOU SAYING THERE’S NO AIDS EPIDEMIC?"

  Lance told Brian that a similar thing had happened to him when he asked an activist why everyone who had taken AZT was dead.

  Throughout the rest of the evening, Brian and Lance made the bar patrons very edgy when they amused each other by saying mockingly, perhaps too loudly, "ARE YOU SAYING THAT THERE’S NO AIDS EPIDEMIC?" They seemed to the horrified onlookers not to know that early on in the epidemic one of the leading gay writers had said that nothing funny could be said or written about AIDS. They were being very bad.

  When Brian and Lance finally left the bar that evening, the gay men they left behind were sending out inaudible signals from their souls that reached the four quarters of the gay world. It was a concise kind of gay Morse code. Dash-dash-dot. Two alpha males had met. Dot-dot-dash. They had instantly fallen in love. Dot-dot-dot-dash. Their love looked like a threat to Queer theorists everywhere.

  Like most nights when two people have found the perfect partner, time turned romantically surreal as they arrived at Brian’s apartment on upper Broadway. They both lost their chronological bearings as they began to enter each other’s mysterious time zone.

  The windows of Brian’s bedroom suddenly opened by themselves and the curtains flung themselves back. A great wind and a blinding light filled the bedroom and both of their bodies began to writhe in an ecstasy that was so powerful and overwhelming that when they opened their eyes they were no longer human. The awesome love they had found that night had totally transformed them, for they had turned into magnificent swans.

  The wind that had filled the room lifted the two swans up and before they knew it, they were swept out through the open windows and were flapping their wings side by side high above upper Broadway. Trailing streams of light the two swans began flying down Broadway. People staring out of windows in tall buildings that they passed looked on in amazement. Some people immediately surmised that this was more proof that the quality of life had improved so much in Manhattan that swans felt safe enough to return to the city.

  The swans moved at such a rapid clip that they arrived at Times Square in no time at all. People who had stayed at the bars till closing hour thought that this was an indication that they had had far too much to drink. As the swans crossed 42nd Street, some late night party people looked up and wondered if this was some new promotion from the Disney folks who seemed bent on taking over the whole city, the sky included. It wasn’t just the unexpected sight of swans that struck onlookers as magical but also the amazing light that surrounded them. This was a city known for its extraordinary lighting techniques, but the quality of light around the swans was a kind that no one had ever seen before.

  When the swans reached 34th Street, they took the time to circle the Empire State Building several times. At the top of the structure, they left several rings of multi-colored light. People working the late shift in some of the offices thought they were seeing things. As the swans headed further downtown, they could see into the windows where people were asleep or making love. Young lovers in the act who could see the swans passing must have thought that this was some kind of divine sign that they had finally found the right person.

  When the swans reached the World Trade Center, they were spotted by a freelance cameraman who worked for a local New York television news show. He immediately recognized that there was a story here. In his entire professional career he had never seen a single swan in the air over Manhattan. He started rolling his video camera as he called the station from his cell phone. The swans moved with such synchronicity and grace that he was sure that they were a couple. He knew this one would tug at heartstrings of his editor at the station. It was a good thing too, because not much else was happening in the city that night.

  When Brian and Lance woke up the next morning they each had living proof in their arms that the body can satisfy the soul. Somehow in the dark and treacherous forest of AIDS activists and Queer Theorists, they had finally found happiness. Now their lives could take flight.

  Everyone at Channel One News was crowing that they had been the first channel to get the swan couple. As expected, when he was interviewed about the incident, the mayor didn’t know what swans the reporters were talking about, but he promptly took credit for the appearance of the swans, citing the fact that crime was down in the city, and crime was not good for swans, either. The Post and the News cheated by lifting a photo from the Channel One video for their covers. "Swan Love Couple" was the first edition headline of the Post. The editorial writers at the News jumped on the swans as a symbol of the city’s rebirth. They said that this was a
sign that people would soon be able to swim in the Hudson River again. The mayor had made the city safe for every living creature.

  When Brian and Lance passed the newsstands on their way to work and saw the covers of all the papers, they were captivated by the images of the swans soaring above the metropolis. And they both had a sense of déjà vu which they traced to dreams they each had about swans the night before.

  They didn’t need the images of swans for inspiration at this moment in their lives, for they were both in the middle of the long swoon that all great lovers know so well. Brian and Lance, even as they negotiated the minutia of their day, were in an altered state. They traveled through time on great waves of inner music. They were now being orchestrated by something larger than the two of them.

  Lance saw Brian’s face all day long at the brokerage firm. The Dow Jones turned into Brian. The Fed turned into Brian. When Bill Gates was interviewed on Bloomberg News, it was Brian sitting there talking about Windows 98.

  Uptown in the publishing district, every character in whatever manuscript Brian was reading was competing against thoughts of Lance. When he sat in on an editorial meeting, Brian had to fight to pay attention to the various pitches the senior editors were making to the editor-in-chief. Brian knew that his chances of becoming a senior editor with a serious salary were dependent upon him looking smart at these meetings. Brian kept trying to think of some precocious, edgy, in-your-face, really cool literary wisecrack to say to the older editors to make them think that he spoke for a generation, and that the house’s commercial future depended upon his taste, but all he could think about was the nature of love and the mysterious magnetism of rugged male beauty.

  When one of the editors waved the Post with the swan cover story and started shouting, "We’ve got to get this first," Brian woke up from his romantic trance.