by Casey Gerald
Lemme check . . . uh, it’s 12:06.
Cool.
I held the phone, silent, waiting for him to say it. He didn’t say a thing.
We hung up and I went right back to the journal, to write River out of my life, which is what he deserved for failing a test that meant so much to me that I hadn’t even told him about it.
Then he called, sometime before two a.m.
Hey, River.
Oh, yeah. Happy birthday. He laughed.
Ah, thank you.
That’s all I said, in the voice of a man who always says thank you as if someone has just picked up his handkerchief, even if, in fact, someone has just pushed him from in front of a speeding car. River laughed again. I wondered what was so goddamn funny.
You’re crazy. It’s hilarious. You got this nonchalant-ass facade, like nothing bothers you. But I know I do shit that pisses you off sometimes.
Whatever.
Yeah, whatever. I just be playing dumb. That’s probably fucked up, huh. But I’ono. It’s just too much responsibility. You’re too much responsibility. Say we got in a relationship. And that’s it. Or if we broke up . . . we wouldn’t be friends anymore. You know? So . . . I’ono . . . I just ignore it.
It’s all good, River. Appreciate the birthday call.
Mmhmm. Anyway, have a happy birthday, boy.
I sure felt like a fool, though I was skeptical of this whole you’re too much responsibility business. But if I had realized that he could hardly even handle himself, perhaps I would have believed. That became clear enough in the summer of 2006, the first time he let me hold him, the last time I had to wait.
I had gone to Carson in the night, and when I woke up the next morning, River was clinging to me, grasping the back of my tank top. I saw him before he knew I saw him, just watched him for a moment—eyes darting to the corners, the bottom of his comforter, his hand, my face.
Are you okay? I whispered.
Look at my hand.
His hand was shaking.
What’s wrong?
I don’t know, Casey.
He stretched his neck back, clenched his eyelids when the light hit them, tucked his head into my chest. I thought he might die right there in my arms, which was, I admit, an incredible thought—not him dying, but us being part of something big and tragic, like a famine or a real bad storm. You know, one of the reasons the world will never be rid of tragedy is that it keeps half of us employed and the other half entertained, and as sad as we feel when things are going wrong, can you even imagine, my lord, what it would be like if we had nothing to fear or complain about, no animals to rescue, no days to commemorate, no stories to tell for a little sympathy on a night we could use some attention, no one to hold in their time of need after waiting forever to hold them? Here was this boy, helpless, flailing about in his head, unable to set his eyes on one thing, holding me like I was the last mooring post in the world. And his helplessness was the most extraordinary thing I’d ever witnessed of him, if only because it made me important, if only for one morning, if only because he was out of his mind.
I’m so stupid. So fucking stupid.
Huh?
I took some ecstasy yesterday. I don’t even know why. I’ve just been feeling like shit. And it was the last pill I had. So I just took it.
I held his head and rubbed his wooly hair and murmured in his ear It’s okay. You’ll be okay until he fell asleep again. But, as is almost always the case when someone says You’ll be okay, I did not know whether he would. I didn’t know he had taken ecstasy before, or why. I didn’t know that he’d been having a hard time, or why. I look back on that morning and realize there was so much about him that I did not know, that I should have asked, instead of just lulling him back to sleep.
I say that because I met a man—not like that; it was a serious meeting—a few years after this morning with River. A man who had gone to prison for murder, a long time ago. I’ll share more details later, but what matters now is something the man told me that afternoon in his office: There are no excuses for committing a crime, he said. But there are reasons.
I sure do wish I’d met him sooner. It seems that I have always been tied up with folks—not all the people I’ve known, but enough of those I loved or needed or wanted most—who were tied down by the mess of life, by vice and sickness and shady dealings. Not that I cared that any of the things they did were against the law, per se, just that they seemed pretty reckless and caused me a lot of trouble. I spent all that time with them, building up resentments, adding more guilt to their tabs. And justified as my calculations may have been, I never considered that maybe, just maybe, there were reasons behind the things they did. Never took into account what it does to a boy or girl to be abused or neglected, and to carry that all alone, in silence, in the dark. You never know what you need to know when you need to know it, you know?
All I knew is that things changed that morning: we shifted from one foot to the other and it felt like moving forward, into a new chapter where River had the need and I had the power and I called this power love.
Or maybe things changed when I slept with his friend. Well, his ex-friend. I didn’t know, at the time, that they had been friends—that’s my story. River found out, yelled at me, berated that other poor boy. That wasn’t right. It was wonderful to see him angry, though. I especially liked one of the more overwrought parts of the tongue-lashing he gave his ex-friend: Casey is the love of my life. I just had to get myself straight before we were together. I’m good now. Who knew he’d ever fight for me? If I had known this was all it took, I would have slept with someone he hated, years before.
Whatever it was that made things change, three years after it all started, as we approached the winter of 2006—the winter after I had offered my hand as a sacrifice to Yale football—River decided that the wait had been long enough. Tried to rush me, even.
What do you need to think about?
I don’t know, River. I just need some time.
That’s ridiculous, Casey. When somebody offers you real love, you shouldn’t turn that away. You should be grateful.
I was not grateful, but afraid. A bit power hungry, too. I can’t tell you how lucky the world is that I have not gotten many chances to give some tits for all my tats. Oohwee. It felt so good to be the oppressor for a change. But I couldn’t hold out long, if only because River sat on my damn hand when I visited him that winter break, with all those pins still holding my bones together. Then, something strange, he grabbed my hand and kissed the cast and said I’m sorry, baby. No one had ever apologized to me before, that I can recall. My advice: Apologize today, for everything.
I surrendered. And so began our 259 days, perhaps the most important days of my life. Definitely the most important that no one knew about.
We eloped to Austin, to a small hotel—not a Motel 6 but something nicer, with a comfortable couch we both could fit on, my back to the cushions, his back to my belly, my arm around him, reaching for pizza. We’d gone to Austin to . . . eat pizza and watch cartoons. That’s all we did, if I remember correctly.
We had decided not to do anything else until we’d seen a doctor. Well, I had imposed this rule because I assumed that he had been a whore before me and I did not want to suffer the consequences of his happy days. Even went so far as to stop at the little hospital at which he was purportedly tested so that he could show me the papers. I sat in the waiting room while he tried to retrieve them, but he came back empty-handed with that Will you drop this? look on his face and so I dropped it, for many reasons or none at all aside from feeling it was time to get on with things, which we did.
By the time I made it back to Dallas the next day, I had a fever. And by that evening, when I tried to swallow, it felt like a tiny cactus was being forced down my throat. I lay in bed and my jaw clattered from the chills. My sheets were damp from sweat. A few doom-tears r
olled down my cheek. Can you bring me some orange juice? I called out to Tashia. I also wanted to tell her to pick out a nice dress for the service, and to remember me in my better days.
Baby, I’m clean. I’m telling you. Excruciatingly honest.
I think that was the first time River used that phrase—excruciatingly honest—which became the slogan of our relationship. Regular honesty was not enough. His phone records were not enough. Excommunicating my friends was not enough. We needed excruciating honesty. And on this first trial, he was right. I just had strep throat.
I do regret overreacting, but I had my reasons.
I had been just a boy, seven years old, the night Daddy drove us all the way from Columbus to Dallas, trying to make it to St. Paul Hospital in time for Easter Sunday, in time for his brother to die. I did not yet know my daddy’s people well, so I sat in the ICU waiting room minding my business, until Tashia stood up and said C’mon Casey like I had asked her to take me somewhere. I had not asked her a thing and I did not move, so she grabbed my wrist and pulled me from my seat and c’moned me down that fluorescent death-way—You gotta see Uncle M. I didn’t need to see nobody, didn’t need to see an uncle I hardly knew, didn’t need to see a man a few hours away from death. And Tashia, at eleven, was just a girl herself—why was she so adamant? Why me?
I won’t paint a picture of what I saw. We should all have somebody’s image in our mind, if not someone we knew—our blood, our child lover friend—then someone we read about, heard about, somebody, for Christ’s sake, who died in the plague.
At Uncle M’s home-going service the following week, there were times when I was the loudest one crying, which makes no sense since I hardly even knew the man, and dramatic as I am, I’ve never been that dramatic, not even at seven years old, even though there was a plague that my sister seemed to believe I needed to know about. 32,329 other people, that we know of, died of AIDS in America the year my uncle died, I read.
Twenty-one years later, I had a scare. Not the monthly persistent-cough, random-fever, swollen-gland kind of scare but the kind that comes with a long and serious conversation, that punches you in your spleen and says I told you so and puts that zombie stare in your eyes. Twenty-one years had passed and we were still dying, still walking around with the specter of doom, sleeping with it, sharing it with our friends. But now there had also arrived, I’d heard, some medicine that I could take to prevent the virus from taking hold, as long as I started within three days, like my own private resurrection.
I’d heard this on the night of the second day. The next morning, I taxied to a sketchy emergency clinic, where I told the nurses of my situation—a situation that, based on their damning eyes (perhaps I was imagining this), I deserved. With a prescription for two medications that could possibly save my life, I rushed to a pharmacy an hour or so before it closed. The pharmacist called my name from the counter a few minutes later, looked at me like he’d just found out my mother was dead.
Sir, are you sure you want to fill these? This one is, uhh, twelve hundred dollars. And the other is, let’s see, thirteen hundred.
Twenty-five hundred dollars to possibly save my life, not even a guarantee. With all my great fortune and health insurance and credit cards, those two prescriptions wiped me out, and I’m amongst the lucky ones. I got the first dose in right at the seventy-two-hour mark, the beginning of a month of all those side effects, and then two more months of waiting, wondering whether my life had been saved.
I learned a lot in those three months. Not only that the plague is still with us. Not only that somebody in charge of health in this country has got some real explaining to do. I also learned—just by stewing in my situation—that either all the queers of the world are going to have to become John D. Rockefellers, or some pharmaceutical magnate is going to have to become Jesus H. Christ, or a day will have to come, and soon, when we realize that we gain nothing from carrying this shroud of death, that living in fear of ourselves and the people we’re trying to love will destroy our hearts and minds as surely as the virus, unchecked, may destroy our bodies.
I did not understand that when River and I were together, though, so I still needed that excruciatingly honest as we began our 259 days together in December.
By Valentine’s Day (day 75), we had not given each other disease and we also agreed not to give each other gifts. But River kept asking me to check my mail and, being generally ornery and particularly busy that day, I kept refusing, until finally I went and found that he’d sent a whole case of my favorite Starburst candy, a flavor they’ve since stopped making. On top of the rows of Starburst was a plastic bag with a pair of his boxers, the ones with The Jetsons printed on them. I had asked River to give them to me, off his body, when I’d seen him last.
Casey, that’s gross. I’ve been wearing them all day.
So.
Here they were at last, crumpled and unwashed.
I didn’t send anything, per our agreement. River was my first valentine, how was I supposed to know he wasn’t serious about the gift thing? Now I had all this candy and his boxers and my shame. So in a panic before midnight, I went into my dorm room closet and closed the door to record a song for him, by Musiq Soulchild, who guided me so well in the days of Red.
The way we are is how it’s gonna be
just as long as your love don’t change
I hoped he could hear me clearly on that recording, not only because I went through the trouble of switching the pronouns, and sang louder than I wanted to (Daniel still lived across the hall), but because I meant the words I sang, even though I did not understand how impossible the lyrics were—how, in fact, our love had to change; how we had to change for our love to exist at all.
We were changing. I just didn’t notice.
Day 100 arrived along with spring break. While my classmates went to Cancun or Miami, I flew to Carson. River stood in the lobby of the small plane depot, waiting for me with a du-rag on his head. He never wore du-rags, so that was weird. Not as weird (at least to me) as the Cheshire grin I had on my face in the middle of the airport, so I looked down at the floor and handed him my bag.
Hey, boy. He chuckled.
In the car, he explained the situation on his head: He had grown his hair out, the crinkly chestnut hair that came from some mix of his Mississippian father and his Dutch mother. When it got too unruly to deal with every day, he had let a friend braid it—well, that’s what they’d called themselves doing—and here, hiding under the du-rag, was the disappointing result, which he showed me once we reached his parents’ house.
Oh, babe. Want me to help you take it down?
We sat up on the altar in his room for an hour or so—me in a wooden chair, him on the floor between my legs. I had never taken anybody’s hair down before, but I had seen Granny and Shon do it many times. Used the same kind of rattail comb they used to untangle the strands, tried my best not to bruise his scalp. Just as I was feeling accomplished, he mumbled You notice anything? in a way that made me instantly know that I had not. He turned around and forced a smile.
Wait . . . you got braces?
We had been together for at least three hours, in the light of the plane depot, of the grocery store, of his room. I had stared at him the way I always stared; had kissed him, even. Somehow, I had not noticed all that metal in the boy’s mouth. He turned back around, said nothing else about the braces or my blindness, but I knew—now I know—that this was a hard blow, that even or especially the most beautiful among us need someone to notice them, to truly see them as they are and as they change. I could only, hardly, see myself.
At Yale, the clothes that had helped me win a best-dressed award in high school only helped lose me the respect of my classmates. So on the second day of my visit, River drove me to the tired mall one town over to buy new jeans. We walked past the stores like distant cousins, accidentally brushing each other’s arms. In Macy’s,
I tried on a size 34 pair of Levi’s, which felt like Spandex, since my usual jeans were size 38, even though my waist was just a 31. I called out from the dressing room.
River . . . these jeans make me look gay.
He stood a few feet away, tilted his head, looked at my smothered legs. Laughed.
Hmm. Yeah. Gone and get ’em, though. They’re on sale.
This exchange still cracks me up, but it marked an evolution, one I can best describe via this exchange I had in an Atlanta gay club, a year after River and I bought my new jeans.
I was leaning against the club’s mirrored wall when my friend Kenny, who had been a track star in college and had become a star of another sort in the clubs of Atlanta, rushed over to me.
Say, Casey. C’mere. Act like you’re my boyfriend.
Huh? Why, Kenny?
Man, some fucking faggot over there tryna be messy.
Oh dang, aight.
I haven’t talked to Kenny in years, but I hear that he’s gone on to have a nice career as an escort, so perhaps he has changed since that night in Atlanta. All I know is that I was changing that day at Macy’s, and River must have been, too, since he supported me wearing those jeans even though they seemed so gay to us both—just as some of my friends’ voices seemed too femme, just as going to the clubs seemed only for queens, just as we sometimes went to a park to throw the football back and forth as hard as we could, not because it was fun but because it was proof that we were real boys. And so with me and River, as it has always been in this country, jeans were a symbol of progress.
But I didn’t notice this, that afternoon at Macy’s. I blame River’s mother: on our way back from the mall, he remembered that his family was going to dinner that night in honor of her birthday.
And you’re just gonna leave me at the house all that time?
Casey. It’s my mom’s birthday. I have to go to the dinner.
I was silent.
Do you wanna come?
Do I wanna come?! I thought.
Gone, River, I said.