by Tim Murphy
Seven hours later, the phone beside the bed half woke him. An hour later, it woke him fully and he reached over and answered it with a cobwebby hello.
“Hector?” It was a woman’s voice. He grunted an affirmation. “It’s Issy.”
Ysabel. He hadn’t seen her in—what?—four, five months. A veil of shame descended over his semiconsciousness. “What’s up?” he grunted.
“Are you okay?” She sounded timid, small.
“I just woke up.”
“I just wanted to call and say I’m sorry I didn’t come today. I’m not feeling well.”
“I know, Ava told me. Don’t feel bad.”
“Did everything go okay?”
“Yeah, it went fine, thanks. You can ask Ava about it. I took a Valium when I got home and I’m just waking up from it.”
“Oh,” she said, sounding mildly chastised. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It’s okay.” Hector sat up in bed, realizing that, half stoned, he’d surrounded himself with Ricky’s stuff before passing out. The framed photo of Ricky clattered off the bed and he reached down to pick it up. “How are you doing, Issy? You’re not in the hospital still, are you?”
“No,” she said. “I stabilized. I’m with Ava. At Judith House.”
“I’ll come see you this week, okay?”
“No,” she said quickly. “I’m not really up to it just now. I’ll let you know, okay?”
“Okay,” Hector said. “Thanks for calling, Issy.”
He hung up. Even in his haze, he felt that bad feeling he’d felt with Issy the past six months. It would never be the same again after what had happened. This, he thought on some murky, inchoate level, was what happened as people—a network of people—faced the end, as they realized their collective dreams weren’t coming true, that they were running faster but falling behind, that they were losing coherence and morale. They connected in rash, inappropriate ways, because, most of the time, they were unable to connect at all. The survival instinct was to isolate.
He managed to climb over all his Ricky memorabilia on the bed and stumble to the bathroom, piss, then crawl back to bed. He fell back asleep, but the phone rang again. What time was it? Midnight, one? He didn’t care. Was he hungry? Vaguely.
“Hector, it’s Chris.” Chris Condello, the movement’s bedheaded wonder boy, Hector’s partner in data wonkery. Hector had barely been to a movement meeting in six months, but he had to say Chris, despite his baseline brattiness, had been a good friend during Ricky’s sickness, visiting him at St. V’s and calling Hector regularly. He’d been at the memorial service earlier that day.
“You doing okay, Hec?”
“I was sleeping.”
“I’m in your neighborhood. You mind if I drop by?”
“What time is it?”
“It’s a quarter to one. I was at Uncle Charlie’s.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Drunk and on coke. You mind if I stop by? I wanna talk to you about something.”
“Sure, stop by,” Hector said. What did he care?
In five minutes, he buzzed Chris into the building and stood at his open door, scratching at his briefs, while he listened to Chris clatter up the three flights of stairs in his Dr. Martens. Chris came at him, drunk, high, and leering, his jet-black hair sticking up in about three different directions.
“Hot, greeting me in your Calvins like that,” Chris said.
“I’m glad you think it’s hot.”
Chris put his arms around Hector, burying his vodka-reeking face into his neck. “You doing okay after today, Hector?”
“I knocked myself out with Valium. You got a bump for me?”
Chris pulled out his wallet and extracted a little baggie of white powder, popped it open, dipped his house key into it, and held a fat bump to Hector’s left nostril, then another one to his right. Hector sucked up both greedily and reveled in the chemical shock to his senses. Chris did two bumps of his own, then put the baggie down on the table. They looked at each other, bug-eyed, swallowing back the coke in their throats, then started making out.
Chris pulled away. “You know how badly I’ve always wanted you to fuck me raw?” he asked.
“Oh, so you are positive,” Hector said. “That’s what you’re finally telling me?” He pulled his dick out of his briefs and pushed Chris down to his knees by his shoulder.
“Of course I am. Aren’t you?”
“No.”
Chris looked up at him. “Seriously, you’re not? I thought—”
“I’m not. You know it’s tough for tops to get.”
Chris considered this for about as long as his coked-out state would allow. “Great, so you can still fuck me raw then.” He put his mouth over Hector’s dick, but Hector pushed it away.
“Let me ask you something,” Hector said. “Is this why you’re always such a dick at meetings? You feel like you can be a cunt to people there who show up for help because you’re in the same boat?”
Chris laughed, taken aback. “I’m just there to get things done. I’m not you, okay? They know I’m in the same boat.”
“I don’t think they all do. How come you never told me?”
“Hector! Of course I told you. I told you when you told me about Ricky.”
“No, you didn’t. You never told me.”
Chris looked up at him and rolled his eyes, impatient. “I think I probably told you, Hector, but if I didn’t, I’m sorry. I just assumed you knew.”
How comically abject Chris looked right now, on his knees, saliva around his mouth, looking up at him, pleading and flustered. Hardly the Chris Condello that people venerated, that the New York Times profiled so breathlessly. “Just suck my dick, you jerk,” Hector said, treating Chris how he wanted to be treated. He shoved his dick back in Chris’s mouth.
Chris pulled it out for a second. “Then you’ll fuck me raw?”
Hector shoved it back in. “We’ll see.”
Over the next forty minutes, they did a lot of coke. Eventually, Chris was naked on Hector’s bed, on his stomach with his head mashed in a pillow and his legs spread wide, moaning away. Hector smeared lube on Chris’s butt and his own dick, but he couldn’t stay hard enough to put it in. In fact, the sight of Chris’s butt, fatter and less pretty than Ricky’s had been, and covered all over with a dark-brown fuzz, just depressed Hector, even through the coke high.
“I can’t do this,” he said, crawling off Chris and squeezing himself into a fetal position, a pillow smashed to his face.
“Just take your time,” Chris said.
“No, you don’t get it, I’m freaking out.” He lunged off the bed and returned with the bottle of Valium, chewing one to hasten its effects.
Chris looked at him, bug-eyed. “What, you’re gonna bring down your high?”
“If you wanna go get high with somebody else and have them fuck you raw, then go!”
Chris looked him, jaw wide open, and laughed. “Okay, fine,” he said. “Give me a Valium, too.”
“Just fucking go! I don’t feel like fucking you, okay?”
“Hey,” Chris said slowly. He put up both hands gently, placatingly. “Give me a Valium, too. I’ll come down with you.” Chris reached for the bottle.
Hector yanked it away. “I’m not wasting my Valium on you.”
Chris rolled his eyes. “I’ll get you more.” He reached for the bottle. Instead, Hector pulled out one pill and handed it to him. Chris put it in his mouth, walked naked into the bathroom, where Hector could see him wiping the lube off his butt with toilet paper, then walked to the kitchen, then back into the bedroom with two glasses of water.
“Drink,” he commanded. Hector drank the water.
“Now, come here.” Chris pulled him back onto the bed, lay him down, pulled the sheet over them, and put his arm
s around him. “No fucking, okay? Just snuggling. Two friends snuggling.”
Hector put his hand over Chris’s arm running across his chest. He was trembling, his heart cannonballing out of his chest from the coke. He lay there, looking straight ahead, terrorized, until the slow, blissful Valium ooze started to leak in. Once it did, he realized that, no longer panicked, he was still coke-horny, an erection growing. He turned around in bed on his side, did the same thing to Chris and fucked him silently, his mouth mashed into the back of Chris’s neck the whole time. He came inside Chris, just what pushy little Chris had wanted, then he stayed inside him and started crying again.
When he finally had settled down, when he was wondering absently how to get rid of Chris but falling asleep at the same time, Chris said, “So now that you’ve made your deposit, can I propose something?”
Hector mumbled his assent.
“Rich and Maira and I want you to leave the movement with us and start a new treatment group. So we can do really close work with the feds and not be held back by all the crazies and the rules of order and the side issues.”
Amid his semi-stupor, Hector was irked. He’d barely been to a meeting the past six months, watching Ricky die. He’d told himself he’d checked out, that he’d done his part, that maybe when this whole thing was over he was going to move back to Puerto Rico and do some kind of public-health work there. He couldn’t take any more of the movement’s bitterness and the bitchiness and the immovable slab of grief and sadness that lay beneath it all, the profound disappointment over the breakthroughs that hadn’t happen and the finger-pointing that the disappointments provoked.
“I think I’m done with treatment work,” he mumbled to Chris.
Chris turned around, propped himself up on his elbow, and faced Hector, who remained with his eyes closed, his head smashed in a pillow. Chris smelled funny, Hector noted—some mix of putty and dirt. Not necessarily a bad smell, but a weird one.
“I think having this to focus on over the next year or two will be really good for you,” Chris said. “We already have a lot of funding promised up front from different private groups. But we also need someone to communicate back to the big movement, and you know you’re the only non-asshole of the four of us to do it. The only one people really like.”
“That’s true,” Hector mumbled.
“Clinton’s probably coming in in January. We need to be on the protease trials all day, every day for the next few years if they’re going to be structured right.”
“Protease,” Hector sneered out the term. “Fucking protease. I hate that word.”
“Oh, Hec,” Chris clucked. He brushed Hector’s hair off his forehead. “I’m so sorry, honey.”
Finally, Hector looked up at Chris. “If only you fucking knew how to say that a little bit more to people,” he said.
Chris smiled coyly. “That’s why we need you, Hector. We’re all major cunts but you.”
“I’ll give you an answer in a few days.”
Chris brushed Hector’s bangs again. “I’ll let you sleep now.”
Chris took a shower, pulled on his clothes, did a bump of coke, and then clattered down the stairwell and stepped out into the cool October quiet of a Greenwich Village side street at 5:30 A.M. He barreled down the street, his fists thrust in the pockets of his denim jacket. He realized he was still high, so instead of going home, he speed-walked toward the East Village, to an unmarked dive between Avenues C and D, where he knew he could find more drugs and probably somebody to fuck him again. Times like this, he could feel himself, almost on a cellular level, masochistically putting more stress on his stressed-out immune system, perversely, pleasurably, pushing it to its limits. How much strain, how much toxicity and decay, could it withstand before his body really turned against him? The guys who got all into the macrobiotic natural juices and the yoga and the Marianne Williamson lectures and the positive visualization—well, how much sadder were they when they finally got sick anyway? At least this way he had some say in the matter. He pulled out a cigarette and sucked on it furiously as he walked.
And yet he only had to think of a term like pathogenesis or prophylaxis or cytokine—or, now most beautiful to him, protease inhibitor, because it contained the same shiny promise of future redemption that the term ddI had contained a few years ago—and some channel would switch in his brain and self-obliteration was the last thing he desired. The complex words, which put him in a circle of conversation populated only by doctors and a few other lay elites, girded him, gave him the comforting feeling that he could find his way out of the microscopic labyrinth of his own disease. And of course that special knowledge came with prestige, earning him respect from the people with medical degrees and a certain amount of awe from everyone else. All this buoyed Chris and made him hungry to see the future. Then he’d vaguely wonder why he wanted to live so badly on one hand yet behaved as though he wanted to die, bingeing on alcohol, cigarettes, and cocaine. He chalked it up to “taking breaks,” rewarding himself by letting off steam between long periods of work—preparing for and then attending a conference, for example—but he had a harder time understanding the visceral and gritty satisfaction he took in his drug runs, how it felt cathartic to tax his body to the point where he could barely get out of bed for three days. When he was finally able to get up, shower, eat, and continue with his important work, he’d feel strangely as though he’d earned back his purpose.
As he walked, he passed a brownstone on East Seventh Street between First Avenue and Avenue A—a building with a discreet plaque near the door reading JUDITH HOUSE. A woman who had not slept well was sitting in the front window on the third floor in a little room she shared with another woman. She looked down and saw him and thought, with an inner giggle because she knew exactly the kind of place he was going to at this hour, sucking on his cigarette, hands thrust into the pockets of his denim jacket, Oh, that’s Chris! She thought about all the boys and how she had barely seen them in months, not going to meetings or rallies, which was how she wanted it, but it didn’t mean that she didn’t miss them.
A few girls from the movement—the dykes and the handful of straight ones—she’d let come see her. Esther Hurwitz, whose frowning bluntness had terrified her initially, but who then became one of her best friends, came by faithfully nearly every day, usually with some wheatgrass or wheat-germ or lemongrass—what was it?—drink she’d make for her at her own apartment a few blocks away. Esther sat with her in the sitting room downstairs, or, when the other ladies got too loud and crazy in there, they’d walk around the neighborhood, and Esther would unload on Issy every single story of stress and contention from the movement, from the last meeting or affinity group. The through line was always that people—the boys, mostly, but some women, too—were trying to “undermine” and “marginalize” Esther because they were annoyed by her message of radical change and social justice, one that went far beyond the epidemic.
“Oh, Esther” was all Issy could think to say. Actually, Issy appreciated the updates. They cheered her up and let her know that work was still going on. Prior to Issy’s disappearance, the big issue for the women had been getting the government to change the official definition of AIDS to include things that only women got, like pelvic inflammatory disorder or menstrual irregularities, which Issy had endured, and Issy had played quite a role in that effort, surprising herself with how much information she was able to both take in and explain back to other, newer people.
Then, about six months ago, she’d gotten sicker than she’d ever been—and then she was barely over that harsh episode when she got that other news. Then her heart just sort of went out of the whole activist thing, and it was too weird to see a certain someone at the meetings, and her new level of sickness qualified her for a place at Judith House. Here, she helped out Ava quite a bit with grant writing and any number of administrative things.
“When are you coming back to meetings
, Issy?” Esther asked her. “You’re well enough now to come back, and we need you.”
Issy shrugged, kicked some orange leaves on the pathway in the park. “I feel weird going back right now.”
“Nobody’s going to judge you because you’re having a baby. You’re on meds—you’re not passing it to the baby. Everybody in the meetings knows that.”
Issy felt super-squirmy. “I just wanna break, Esther!” She felt pinned down. “I showed up one day three years ago because I thought I was gonna die and I didn’t know where else to go. I didn’t show up looking for an activist career.” All these were excuses, Issy knew; she’d stopped going to meetings because she didn’t want the boys, especially him, knowing she was pregnant; Esther and some of the other women had promised her they’d keep it to themselves.
Esther smiled slyly. “But you became an activist there. And you’re pretty damn good at it. You showed those boys.”
Esther put her arm through Issy’s, and Issy smiled in spite of herself. Esther was right. The past three years had been unexpectedly exhilarating. Had Issy ever thought she would stand up at a microphone in Washington Square Park and say to a crowd of a thousand people, “I am a New York City Latina living with HIV/AIDS and I am a citizen, and I want my rights!” And that everyone would cheer wildly for her and that she’d be in the papers and on the local news? Had she thought that, when her father saw her on the news and called her, furious, demanding that she stop shaming him, she’d find the courage amid her hurt to tell him to go to hell? Did she think she’d be part of committees going down to Washington, D.C., to tell her story to government officials and ask that funding be created specifically for women with AIDS?
Is this really happening? she’d thought while sitting in an office in the National Institutes of Health across from a dough-faced, middle-aged white Republican deputy from the South who oversaw a committee that continually refused to earmark more money for AIDS research and treatment. She’d made this visit with two policy people from GMHC, which the movement scorned as too accommodationist, but GMHC had told her she was one of the few HIV-positive Latinas in New York City who could talk about these issues fluently with congressional staffers and they desperately needed her to come along, so how could she say no? And now here she was sitting across from this man, who seemed to be listening to her, his doughy hands folded in his lap and his eyes narrowed in concentration and trained relentlessly on her, but his knee bobbing, bobbing, while she looked him in the eye and explained cervical dysplasia to him.