“So where’s your truck?” he asks, looking around.
“Excuse me?”
He raises an eyebrow and frowns. “They said you were bringing a new cable box. And you’re not holding a new cable box. I’m not feeling enthusiastic about Comcast right now.”
“Oh,” I say. “I’m not … I’m not the cable guy.”
“Good,” he says, sizing me up. “No offense, but you look like someone who would have trouble screwing in a light bulb.”
“None taken,” I say. “True story.”
He grins a bit. “So … can I help you?”
I inhale slowly and prepare myself for rejection. “You wouldn’t happen to be Turk Braverman, would you?”
“I would. Who would be asking?”
“I’m Carson. Carson Smith.”
His eyes go soft and his mouth opens.
“So I’m guessing that means you do know my grandfather, then?” I say, and I feel like I could explode out of my skin. Victory. I’ve found him.
He nods slowly. “Come in,” he says, nearly breathless. “Please.”
He opens the door, and there is a black, furry dog sitting at attention, a pink tongue hanging down. His mouth is in a dog approximation of a smile. When he sees me, his thick tail beats against the floor.
“This is Gomer,” he says.
“Cute,” I say. “What kind?”
“Australian Labradoodle.”
“Does he have an accent?”
Turk laughs. “Of course you’d say that. Just like your grandfather.”
I nod, stunned. This man knows my grandfather. Not like thirty years ago, he knew him for a few minutes. He knows him well enough to know his bad sense of humor. My body feels like it’s going to start shaking.
I want to hear everything all at once. But Turk is taking his time.
“You can say hi to Gomer if you want,” he says. “He’s very friendly.”
To be polite, I tentatively get down on one knee. Gomer jumps up on his hind legs to greet me. His tongue shoots at my face. I duck and tumble backward.
“Oh!” I say. “Wasn’t ready for that.”
Turk laughs. “Range and accuracy, this one’s tongue.” He reaches a hand down to lift me up, but I decline, preferring to push myself up on my own.
“Carson Smith,” he says, turning to walk down the hallway to the living room. I follow. “How on earth did you find me?”
“Long story,” I say.
“Well, let me get you some water,” he says, and he motions to an old, weathered leather couch. I sit and look around. His place is casual and comfortable, like there’s nothing in here that doesn’t have history.
“I like your house,” I say. “It’s cool.”
“This old place? Thanks.”
He brings us water and then sits to my right on a smaller version of the couch I’m on.
“So tell me this long story. How did you find me?”
I take a sip and tell him about finding the letter from Russ to Pastor John. Then I back up, realizing I should just give him the whole story. About my dad and mom splitting when I was three. About my dad being sick with cirrhosis of the liver, about us coming to Billings for the summer, meeting Aisha. His face is very reactive to everything I say, and he just lets me spill. When I mention finding his name in the book that Lois Clancy gave me, he laughs.
“Well, now I understand the phone call.”
“What phone call?”
“This past Sunday. I got a call on my old landline phone that I never use anymore. It was from a woman who asked me if I was Turk B. I said I was, and she said, ‘Good, you’re still alive.’ And then she hung up. It freaked me out. I unplugged the phone.”
Which explains why the phone just rang and rang when I tried to call him, I realize. And it confirms that Lois was trying to tell me something when she said that there were answers in the book! I’d just thought she was a weird old lady. I silently thank her.
“So that’s how I found you. And now I’m here because maybe you can tell me where I can find my grandfather. Because my dad deserves to see him before … you know.”
“You haven’t read all the letters, have you?” he asks. His expression is hard to read, and I desperately want to know what he’s thinking.
“They were waterlogged,” I say. “There was a flood. Why? What don’t I know?”
He blinks twice. “Are you up for a drive?”
That’s not what I expect him to say, and my brain spins. My grandfather. He’s taking me to see my grandfather.
I never really expected this moment. I thought I did, but as soon as Turk says those words, I realize I really didn’t. I picture the apartment where my grandfather will live. I imagine him taking me in his arms, hugging me tight.
I can’t share any of these words or feelings, because I cannot speak. I want Aisha to be here with me, I so want her to be here to see this, but I simply cannot wait another minute.
“Please,” I say, breathless. “Please.”
Turk’s car is a red Mustang convertible with no backseat. I’ve never been in a convertible before, and I simply enjoy the straightaways and allow the chilly breeze to sweep through my hair. We don’t talk much as we drive through town. It’s like we’re on a roller coaster, with so much up and down that my stomach feels queasy even when we’re not taking a sharp turn at a high rate of speed.
We’re on a main thoroughfare, California Street, when he pulls abruptly into a parking spot. The street is on such a steep incline that I’m sure we’ll careen downhill, even after he sets the parking brake. He turns the wheel all the way so that it’s facing the curb.
Tall apartment buildings line both sides of the street. Maybe my grandfather lives in one of them? We walk a couple of blocks up the hill in silence. It’s a silence of anticipation.
I’m surprised when we cross the street in the direction of a hulking structure. It would not have been one of my first two thousand guesses of where he was taking me.
AS TURK LEADS me up the thirty or so steps to the entrance of this massive church, I figure it out. My grandfather is the music director here at Grace Cathedral.
Suddenly it all makes sense, all this stuff about religion we’ve been coming across. It all leads here. My grandfather, the man of God. It just fits. I’ve found him. I’m going to meet him. And I’m going to be able to reunite him with my dad. My heart pounds from the excitement.
Inside it’s ornate. There are crazy murals and stained-glass windows all over. Blue light streams in from slats in the incredibly high ceiling, and a few parishioners sit in the front pews. It’s a Monday morning, so no service is going on. People mill around, looking at an artistic display.
The display is a collection of rugs hung on the walls. Huge rugs, each with eight randomly colored panels that appear to be about six feet long and maybe half as tall, in two columns of four rows. Each panel is separate, but they’re stitched together to make a tapestry of sorts. They’re pretty to look at, but Turk grabs my hand and pulls me along so I can’t really examine them in detail. He’s walking with purpose, and I have to hurry to keep up.
We arrive at a rug at the end of the right aisle. He takes me to the left edge and points up.
“Second from the top,” he says, his voice husky.
I look up. The panel is black with white edges and a silver star in the upper right corner. In the lower left corner, someone has embroidered a brown grand piano with white musical notes emanating from it. In the lower right corner is a photo of a man whom I immediately recognize as my grandfather, because he looks like a weird version of my dad. Or me. His eyes are rolling left while his tongue sticks out to the right.
Underneath it reads, “If laughter is the best medicine, why am I dead?”
And in the center, embroidered in elegant script, it says,
Turk puts a hand on my shoulder and whispers, “Let it out, dear. Let it out.”
My grandfather is dead.
My grandfather, w
ho was so much like me, who was supposed to have all the answers for me, whom I was sure I was about to meet. I’ll never get to look in his eyes. I’ll never get to make him laugh. He won’t come back to Billings with me, and reunite with my father.
Dead.
I howl. I just howl. I close my eyes and double over, and I scream the feelings onto the floor of the church until there’s no more air in me. My hands are on my knees like I’ve just been punched in the stomach. I stay down there for a while.
He died in some way that made it noteworthy enough to memorialize, and as soon as I think that thought, I know what he died of. I open my eyes, and I stand up. All the other panels in his tapestry have men’s names. The dates of birth are mostly the 1950s and 1960s. The dates of death are all in the 1980s and early 1990s.
My grandfather died of AIDS.
My grandfather was gay.
I close my eyes again and feel my brain spin. My grandfather, who must have felt he had to keep a secret all his life. Suddenly the pain in his journals makes perfect sense to me. He lived his life ashamed of who he was.
My grandmother, who must have felt so much agony when he told her. Who learned, more than twenty years into their relationship, that her husband wasn’t who she thought he was. Who was living in a lie and didn’t even know it.
My father, who has no clue why his dad left, and who must have felt his dad’s pain and shame all his life. And who passed that on to me in his own way.
And for what?
Then I cry for my father, who is also dying. One day soon he will cease to be alive and I will run out of time with him and we will never throw a ball around and we will never go to the movies or watch a football game, and my father, my poor, poor father, whose father left him. Who missed out on these same things and never knew why, who doesn’t know his father had AIDS, who all this time thought — I don’t even know what he thought, but it wasn’t good for him. Not knowing wasn’t good.
My focus widens from Grandpa’s panel to all the panels around his. Next to my grandfather is a panel for a man named Gordon Todd Jenkins, who was born on May 3, 1955. There’s a palm tree and the sun shining down on it. He must have loved the beach. He died on January 15, 1987. He was thirty-one.
Next to Gordon is Liam Holmes, who must have liked fishing and his country, based on the fishing pole and American flag. He was born on August 17, 1966. He died on December 25, 1989. Christmas Day of his twenty-third year.
All these people. I look farther and see panels for women too. Little babies. All their lights, snuffed out. All their families, like mine. Broken up too soon. It’s a tapestry of lives lost. It’s hundreds upon hundreds of souls expressed in fabric.
I cry for generations of pain. Not just for my family, but for all the families. I’m like a faucet, dry for years, and in the last week it’s been turned on slowly, and now it’s gushing. It’s ugly and snotty and loud and totally not embarrassing at all. I don’t care who sees me.
This is the most intense thing I’ve ever witnessed, and my legs start to shake. Turk seems to understand. He grasps my shoulder and holds me upright. I keep looking at panel after panel. Eugenia Lopez and her horn-rimmed glasses. Micah “Brandy” Washington and his hammer and wrench. Trina Goodman, age six, with tiny pajamas and a teddy bear. When I look down because I can’t see even one more memorial, he takes me by the shoulder and leads me toward the exit.
I turn back one last time to say good-bye to my grandfather.
TURK HANDS ME a wad of Kleenexes.
“How much do you know about AIDS?” he asks as we stand in the entrance hall. I look up at the sign above the door to the room we were in. The exhibit we’ve just seen is called “The NAMES Project.”
“Not much,” I say, embarrassed. AIDS has never felt real to me, pertinent to my life as a dorky heterosexual virgin. “I know it’s a disease, and I know people used to die of it and that now there’s medicine for it. That’s about all.”
“Do you want to hear a story?” Turk asks.
I nod, and we walk in silence out of the cathedral. It’s nice to be outside. The exhibit was beautiful and awful, and it took all the air from my lungs. I need to just breathe a little.
Turk takes me across the street to a place called Huntington Park, which is sunny but windy. There’s a huge fountain in the middle — angels dancing on the heads of gargoyles who spit streams of water into stone seashells. We find a bench, and it takes him awhile to maneuver his wiry-thick frame down next to me.
Once he’s seated and comfortable, he turns to me.
“So once upon a time, there was a village,” he says. “It was hilly and sun-filled and all the interesting kids went there when they came of age. Through a confluence of many events — the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution — it just so happened that in the 1970s, these kids started to create a real community. A neighborhood formed called the Castro. In every way possible, they let their hair hang down. Men lived with men and women lived with women. They loved and danced and screwed and laughed and sang. It wasn’t just sex and drugs either. It was softball and square dancing and gardening and fixing up houses. They did it in ones or twos or sometimes even threes and fours. Never before in modern history had this been done, so there were no rules.
“And they were free — mostly — from the judgment of the outside world. The people who would have told them that they were going to hell for loving the wrong person were shut out of this party. They thrived on the outskirts, but they were not allowed in. The Castro was beautiful because it was pure. All these people, who had been alone in Iowa City and Spokane, here they were not alone. They celebrated their newfound freedom, and it was a joyous place.”
He turns away and I take in his profile. The weathered skin on his face looks like it’s been through a war.
“Then, one nippy day in the center of the neighborhood where they lived, a bunch of men stood in front of the pharmacy window, looking at photographs of a young man. These photos showed the purple blotches he had inside his mouth and on his chest. In Magic Marker he had written, ‘Careful, guys, there’s something out there.’
“Nobody thought much about it. Nobody knew what to think. Besides, only a few people were sick.
“But then, more young men began to come down with incredibly rare maladies. The florist took ill with a bird parasite in his brain that no medicine could touch. The first baseman for a softball team couldn’t keep food down and was told he had a cow parasite that normally would have required just a small course of antibiotics, but now was untreatable. The chef for a popular upscale eatery came down with a rare pneumonia that killed him within a week. A well-loved community theater actor contracted a typically benign cancer that invaded his organs. Soon, purple splotches covered his entire face. Then he died.
“Panic spread throughout the city where once there had been so much joy. How was it possible that so many healthy, beautiful men could age in appearance fifty years in two months, and die looking like concentration camp victims?”
I look at Turk’s face, and I realize he has it too. Something about his sunken cheekbones and those minus signs under his eyes. I saw it right away, but I didn’t know what it was. He’s probably had it a long time.
“Some people moved away, hoping to escape it. Some of those people died anyway. Others dug in and took care of the ill. The women, some of whom were friends with the men and others who felt excluded by them, came together and nursed their brothers.
“At first some of us decided it was only the most promiscuous who got it. That was just denial. A banker moved in with a painter in 1980, not knowing that one random night in 1978, the painter had enjoyed a perfectly delightful evening with an accountant and came home with a silent virus in his blood. The banker and the painter, monogamous and faithful, would perish within months of each other in 1986, and no one could make it stop.
“It tore us apart. The disease. The way people reacted to it. Nationally, there was no reaction. Only fear that it would cros
s over and start killing straights. Otherwise, it was barely mentioned in the media, and the president didn’t mention it at all. Six years went by and twenty thousand died before he said the word AIDS.
“Some claimed that AIDS was God’s punishment for being gay. That was particularly harsh, because many of the dying had been told all their lives that they were evil. They finally got past that only to be told, on their deathbeds, that God had decreed their deaths. Very cruel.”
“That’s horrible,” I say.
“Of course, other religious people came through and cared for the dying. It seems like the disease brought out the best and worst in people, and I sometimes wonder if that would be the case today, or if the world has changed. Do you think it would be different today?”
“Probably,” I say.
He smiles weakly. “Well, good. Progress. Can you handle another story?”
I nod.
“This one is about a man from Billings, Montana.”
“Right,” I say, looking back at the cathedral as if he’s still in there.
“His name was Russ Smith, and he was a tall, goofy man. Looked a lot like you, actually.”
I blush.
He smiles. “Russ was a religious man. He was also a man of music. He could hear a melody, and an hour later he would still be able to remember it and could create four or five different harmonies to it. And he knew scripture. Tons of scripture.
“But ever since he was a kid, he felt like a freak. Because it was the fifties, and he knew that other boys, not girls, interested him. And he lived in Montana, where those things were definitely not discussed.
“So he got married to a woman named Phyllis, and he had a son, and like many, many other men at the time, he coped with living the wrong life by drinking. A lot. Living the right life was impossible.”
I close my eyes and try to imagine a world in which I’m made to marry a guy. The idea is hard to fathom. I don’t think of guys the way I think of girls. Their bodies are just — not what I want to touch. What if I had to? Could I do it?
The Porcupine of Truth Page 20