by Tim Murphy
In May, Jared had told her he’d be in New York for a few weeks before going to some program at Cranbrook—she wished her parents would send her to some summer painting program! But no, it was work all summer, and then they’d all go to a family friend’s house on the North Fork of Long Island for a week in August—that was it for her vacation. Jared had said they should hang out. Yeah, she’d said. Then he’d called her last night, from his dad’s office in the East Village where he liked to stay because his dad let him use a whole room as a studio.
Did she want to hang out tomorrow night? he’d asked her. Oh, he was serious, she thought. Well, sure, she’d said. She thought about his head of curly, honey-hued hair, his very straight nose, his honeyed face fuzz. Their shoulders touching in that screening room in the dark for that class back in April, watching “O Superman,” having to soon write about all it signified. Her relative boredom with it; Jared’s fixation, his love of VHS as a medium. What would they do on such a hot night? They could have sushi, then go hear friends play at the Bitter End. Should she change? Put on makeup? It was so very hot.
Two guys came out of the apartment across the street in sleeveless T-shirts, jean shorts rolled up over the knees, and black boots. The dark-featured one put his arm around the blond one. Gay guys were hot, Milly thought idly. They had no issue showing off their bodies. She thought it was empowering. Then: wait! That was Hector, who’d worked with her mom at the Health Department till he’d left and started giving her hell. It had been awful, but he was breaking her down. He’d turned on her, from shy to right up in her face! That image made Milly laugh, her mother confronted by more confrontational, psycho types than herself, including her own former protégé.
The two men were making their way down the street. “Hector!” Milly was surprised to hear herself call out. The pair turned back, and she dropped her cigarette behind her back and strode across the street. Hector was ridiculously good-looking, so her mother had always said, and indeed her mother was right. He had considerable muscles in all the right places. His boyfriend, the blond guy, was good-looking too in that classic blond, blue-eyed, forever-a-boy way. He was a bit smaller, younger, than Hector.
“I’m Milly Heyman,” she said. “I’m Ava’s daughter. We met a few years ago—at an awards . . . thing.” Her mother had received some dry public-service award for something having to do with food-service hygiene and they’d all dressed up and gone.
Hector peered at her. “Oh, riiiight,” he said slowly. He and the blond guy both had canvas bags loaded with flyers and folders. He stepped forward to shake her hand, then stepped in more and gave her a short, slightly awkward kiss hello. He nodded toward the blond guy. “This is Ricky,” he said.
She and Ricky shook hands, swapped hellos. Ricky’s voice was about two octaves higher than Hector’s—he sounded southern or midwestern or something.
They hit that bump of silence. “Well, I saw you,” she said, “and recognized you and just wanted to say hi.”
Hector nodded, smiling—a little patronizing or judging? Milly wondered.
“You’re in college now, right?” he asked.
“Yeah, I just finished my first year. I’m working there this summer.” She gestured back at Reminiscence. “I just got out.”
“Yeah, we saw you smoking that after-work cigarette, you bad girl,” Ricky teased her. They all laughed. Milly blushed and shrugged, a bit delighted to be called a bad girl.
“I know, not a healthy choice,” she said.
“We all have our vices,” Ricky said. They all laughed again before falling into silence.
“Well, okay,” Milly said brightly. “I just wanted to say hi. Hey, you’re not at the Health Department anymore, are you?”
Hector shook his head, seemed to frown. “No, no,” he said. “I’m doing activism full-time now.”
“AIDS activism, right?” Milly had noticed some of the stuff sticking out of their bags, the pink triangle that had become ubiquitous the past few years. “We have a chapter of that in college,” she said.
“That’s good!” the blond one—what was his name again? Billy?—piped up. “Are you in it?”
She shrugged, blushing with guilt. “Uh, I went to a fund-raiser dance?”
Hector and the blond one laughed. “That’s a start,” Hector said. “I also have a grant to help design clinical trials—that’s what’s supporting me right now.”
“Baby, I’m the one that’s supporting you,” the blond guy said, kicking Hector lightly in the thigh. “That grant money is—” He turned to Milly. “I think it pays the phone bill.”
“Okay, fine, you’re supporting me right now,” Hector conceded, putting his arm around the blond guy.
Milly laughed. She was charmed and touched. She knew a handful of gay guys and lesbians in college—she’d had her own inner (and at least one outer) flirtation with that in the past year—but she didn’t know any gay couples who actually lived together and schlepped bags around and bickered about the bills like her parents did.
Again, a moment of silence passed until Hector nudged the blond one. “We should go.” He pulled out a flyer with the pink triangle on it and waggled it toward Milly. “We’re off to a meeting right now.”
“Okay,” she said. “Oh! I think my mother’s going to that meeting.”
Hector’s eyes widened. He and the blond one looked at each other. “Your mother?” Hector asked. “Are you serious?”
“This morning I remember her saying she wanted to go to a meeting tonight for that.” Milly pointed at the triangle. “She was reading the Times and pointed to an article about it and a photo with you guys with your signs. Like, at a demonstration I think?”
“Montreal,” the blond one said. “We just did big demos at a big conference in Montreal.”
“I guess that’s what it was,” said Milly. “Anyway, yeah, I remember her saying something like, ‘That’s it, tonight I’m finally going,’ or something like that.”
Hector broke into a grin. “That should be very interesting to see,” he said.
“In-deed,” said the blond one.
“She—” Milly began. She had to choose her words carefully. “I think she’s frustrated with—”
“What she can do at Health?” Hector asked.
Milly sighed. “You said it, not me.”
“Maybe she can be an inside-outside,” the blond one said to Hector.
Milly wasn’t sure what that meant. “I guess you’ll have to see if she comes!”
They walked together a few blocks, making bits of small talk. Were they sick? Milly wondered. They certainly didn’t look sick. But she knew that years could go by before people got sick. They were arm in arm, and at a certain point, on a crowded sidewalk, they had to sidle ahead of her, leaving her trailing them a bit like an urchin. At a café, she announced she was going in.
“Come to the meeting with us and see if your mom shows up,” the blond one said.
Milly laughed. “Me? No, no, I—maybe I would, but I have plans. And I know better than to bother my mom when she’s working.”
The blond one laughed. “If she shows up, you won’t be the only one bothering her, believe me.”
Milly had no idea what to say to that. Hector leaned in and gave her a little hug good-bye. He smelled good, she noticed, something like nutmeg. “I’ll protect your mom if she shows up,” he said. “I know she’s on the right side of this.”
Then Hector slung his arm around Ricky again and left Ava’s clueless Ivy League daughter behind. He thought maybe he should wait until they turned a corner away from her, but he didn’t care—something about the conversation had been tiresome and oppressive and, leaving it, he felt a surge of tenderness, lust, and heartbreak toward Ricky, and he dropped his bag and held Ricky intensely by the nape of his neck with his left hand and by Ricky’s pert, taut right buttcheek with his righ
t hand and thrust his tongue into Ricky’s mouth. When Hector kissed Ricky in public—okay, granted, it was the Village, but still—he felt like he was falling back, back, back, crashing backward through years of self-denial and self-containment, making up for lost time like a starving dog. He was thirty-two! How many years had he wasted?
An overweight middle-aged man, perspiring in a shirt and tie, sidled by them. “Jesus Christ, right out on the street?” he muttered, clearly just loud enough to be heard.
“That’s right,” Hector called back. “Right out on the street. Sorry to offend you.”
“And look at her,” said Ricky, his arms still around Hector. Ricky jerked his head leftward and Hector turned. Ava’s daughter was watching them, mesmerized, from the doorway of the café she’d stopped at, but when she saw them both turn back to her, she ducked inside, mortified. Hector and Ricky laughed. “How’s that for college?” Ricky said.
They walked on. Hector kept his arm close around Ricky’s waist. Hector was almost addicted to that gesture, squeezing Ricky around the waist until he felt his head growing like it was going to explode. Then Hector’s ravenous, mad hunger kicked in and Ricky would say, “Oh God, no, here we go again, el voraz!” And it was true: when it came to Ricky, Hector was voracious. He marveled at how it never got old; just put that butt between his hands for a few seconds and he would be groaning and marveling, “Holy shit, holy shit!” Ricky laughing with delight at his powers of assitude, a colorist who’d become a potentate. Sometimes Hector would nearly cry; it was too much for him to bear: a full, complex effusion of feelings that encompassed past, present, and future all at once. Past: How had he gone so long without this? All those nights in the office, boxed away. Present: Was this really happening? Could he possibly be so happy? He was exploding! Future: What if he lost this? He would surely die. Get more now! He plunged himself back into the assitude with a renewed burst of psychotic joy, a mix of gratitude and terror, making Ricky cry, “You’re crazy, you terrify me!”
Walking down Bleecker now, Hector crept his hand down lower, lower.
“Stop it!” Ricky hissed, yanking up Hector’s arm. “Have some decency.”
Hector glanced at him and smiled a silent, wicked smile. Then, the wires of lust and fear crossing in his head, he asked, “You went this week, right?”
Ricky dropped his self-satisfied grin. “Went where?” he asked.
Hector knew Ricky was thinking: Oh God, here we go again. “Come on, you know what I mean,” he said. “Went for a test.”
Ricky straightened, almost imperceptibly picked up his pace, jerked his bag up more securely on his shoulder. “I’ll go next week,” he said. “This week was crazy. Work and all this shit.” He jerked his head at the bag full of flyers and folders.
“Wednesday I said I’d meet you there and I called you at the salon and you didn’t call me back.”
“We got crazy. Ivana came in.”
Hector snorted a laugh. “Oh, Ivana comes first.”
“Well, she kind of does,” Ricky said in his duh voice. “She’s brought in, like, a hundred friends.”
There was no point, Hector knew, in doing the whole spiel: everything they were working out at these meetings to get drugs faster; this whole miracle of parallel tracking they were working on, where you could get the new, experimental drugs even if you didn’t qualify for the actual clinical trial because this or that picky lab test of yours wasn’t quite right and you weren’t their perfect trial specimen. They were going to get thousands of people access to a drug in the baby phase, the drug ddI, and when you took it along with AZT it was very likely going to do what AZT alone couldn’t do. Well, Hector amended himself, maybe not very likely, but likely. But Hector knew that Ricky knew all that. So instead, he just said: “Can we go this coming week, please?”
“Oh!” Ricky exclaimed, infuriated. He stopped dead on the sidewalk, making Hector stop, too. “I’ve told you a hundred times, Hector. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know.” He was saying it in a nasty singsong. “I don’t see the point. La-la-la, la-la!” He walked on a few more paces, then stopped again. “And if you’re so concerned, then use a fucking condom when you fuck me. Okay?” He kept walking.
“You’re fucking pissing me off,” Hector called to him. “You know it’s you I’m concerned about, not me.”
They stood there, about twelve feet apart, an awkward standoff. Finally Hector caught up to Ricky. “Let’s just go to the meeting,” he said. They walked on but they didn’t touch. A car went by blasting “Cherish,” Madonna’s new song. In the video, Madonna played in the waves with the hot merman and the cute, curly-haired little black girl.
Half a block from the meeting, they ran into Chris Condello, one of Hector’s fellow science wonks in the movement, with his unkempt shock of jet-black hair, tote bag, Bronski Beat T-shirt sweaty and worn down to crepe over his modest spare tire. They exchanged hello kisses. Hector noticed Ricky hang back ever so slightly, the way Ricky always did, a bit insecure about his non-braininess when Hector encountered another data geek.
“You ready to present with me tonight?” Chris asked Hector. “You do background and I’ll do prospectus?”
“Sure,” Hector said. Why don’t you do background and I do prospectus? he thought flickeringly. But for the most part, he avoided those stupid ego wars in the group. He brought the same clinical, businesslike calm to the group that he’d provided in his closeted days at Health, and he knew people respected him for it and respected that he had a real clinical background. The difference between working with multiple-degree Health bureaucrats and working with people desperate for their lives, and their friends’ and lovers’ lives, stunned him. When he wanted to go off on people at the meetings for being stupid, impetuous, angry, or uninformed, he reminded himself that he was taking what he’d been expensively educated to do and was using it to help save the lives of his own people—and he got to have fun and flirt and plan major disruptions and then go dancing along the way—instead of shuffling papers in a closet in a city agency.
They arrived at the meeting. “Holy shit, it’s packed tonight,” Ricky said. And it was, noted Hector, slightly in awe, as he always was when he showed up to a full house. These meetings: such a mix of righteous anger and complicated lust, social energy, bitterness, and hurt that preceded AIDS and went back into childhoods, adolescences. Such a sea of white boys in sleeveless T-shirts, jean shorts, and combat boots! Then his other fellow members of what they all called Brown Town, maybe about thirty of them in all. There was Ithke Larcy, the social worker with his massive head of locks, and Ithke’s white boyfriend, Karl Cheling, the wild-eyed left-wing evangelical minister. The two of them were trying to force the city to let homeless people with AIDS live in real apartments and not the chaotic cesspools of the shelter system. Then there were all the lesbians. That novelist Esther Hurwitz, the kingpin of the downtown arty dyke rat pack, was here, Hector noticed; she’d been coming around and getting all vocal, but some people suspected she was just collecting material for a novel she’d write about them all someday. You couldn’t hear yourself think in here, it was so loud.
Hector and Ricky found some boys Ricky called friends, boys in their twenties who worked in fashion or at salons and came here because they knew on some level it was the right thing to do—but also because, the past few years, there was no cooler place to be. Here you could be angry but sexy at the same time, all riled up about a plague, which made for great carnal energy that you could take out of the meeting, then dance or fuck it off at Boy Bar or Meat, Dusty Springfield singing, Since you went away, I’ve been hanging around, I’ve been wondering why I’m feeling down, over a hand-clap backbeat. The boys were there with Micki, a five-foot-four magenta-haired dyke who said she’d come to the meeting when she heard that the federal definition of AIDS, which drove benefits and funding and research, didn’t include symptoms that showed up only in women, like
the early lesions of cervical cancer. “That fucking pissed me off,” Micki had said. “Dykes get AIDS!” In fact, this is exactly what Micki had screamed at Barbara Bush at an event in D.C. Micki had managed to infiltrate, posing as a young congressional page, looking hilariously straight in pumps and a skirt and a blond bob wig with a headband.
Hector felt a hand at his elbow. It was Chris. “Let’s get this party started,” Chris said.
They wove their way through the crowd. Halfway through, Korie Wright, just three years ago a skyrocketing thirty-one-year-old graphic designer, stopped them. Oh God, he looked frail, his chest virtually concave underneath his tank top.
“I have to ask you guys something,” Korie said.
“You’ll probably hear your answer in the presentation,” Chris said, pushing forward.
“Chris, Jesus!” Hector said. Sometimes Chris’s callousness stunned him. He and Chris exchanged a quick, nasty look. Was Chris even HIV-positive? Hector wondered. Was that the source of the callousness? Or was it that he wasn’t? It was strange to him that, even here, people could be coy about their own HIV status. Of course, there were plenty of people like Ricky who were simply too scared to get tested or didn’t see the point of knowing. Some of them saw not knowing as a political choice; if nobody knew their status, then they were all on a level playing field, everyone compelled to have safe sex with one another, nobody branded a pariah.
Hector, with Korie’s arm on his, took Korie’s other arm. “What is it, Korie?”
“Marty Delaney in San Francisco called me back about Compound Q. He’s doing an illegal trial.”
Hector nodded. “I know.”
“You think I should fly out and do it?”
Hector caught Chris rolling his eyes. Hector knew Chris thought Compound Q, the Chinese cancer drug, was a dead-end path for AIDS—Hector pretty much thought so, too—but he couldn’t believe Chris’s insensitivity. “We should talk about it later,” he told Korie. “It’s a complicated decision.”