Arkansas (20 page)

Of course, it was worse then. Nurses wore white. Come to think of it, nurses
were
white—and invariably women. In those early days of a stiffer medical establishment, the first sufferers had to endure much more than the disease: they had to endure panic, quarantine, never again seeing a human being who wasn't swathed in masks and booties and rubber gloves. People a generation older than I was all remembered where they'd been when Kennedy was killed: me, I remembered the first time I heard about the disease. I was waiting for the bus that would take me to college. 1979. I bought a newspaper. “Mysterious Cancer Strikes Gay Men in NYC,” the headline read; a few nights after which there was a spot on the news. Only queens, it seemed, had this cancer. Flamers. “I don't know how I got it,” a sister afflicted with purple lesions told the reporter. “I know I have it, but I don't know how I got it.”

Years had passed since then. Today the fear wasn't so much of the unknown as of the overly known: the painful death witnessed a hundred, a thousand times, as if for purposes of preparation, like those puberty movies we'd been shown in junior high school. Of course every effort was made to blunt the edges. The doctors went by first names. Clinics, even hospices, had a tonic atmosphere: so different from that age when nurses wore caps, origami-like, almost mystified in their starched symbolism of folds.

A commotion in the waiting room roused me from this meditation. “I can do it myself!” a familiar voice was declaring, to which the voice of patience responded patiently, “Now just let me help you sit down—”

“I can do it myself, I tell you!”

I looked up. Of course! It was Robert Franklin, clothed now, though still dragging the ornery IV, wearing the orange tennis shoes. The man in the jogging suit turned away. The woman reading
Arizona Highways
turned away. They couldn't help it—and worse, Robert saw that they couldn't help it.

“All right, ladies and gentlemen, just put on your blindfolds. Put the bags over your heads. Forewarned is forearmed. I can do it myself, I tell you!”

Well, in truth there may be no beauty, in truth we're probably all blind telepaths, fooling the world into taking sightlessness for vision. I can't say. I can say only that at that moment, my body felt too small for itself.

I remembered the Medusan; wished, somehow, I could press his words directly into the functional regions of Robert's sorrowing brain.

How lonely we all were. How terribly lonely.

 

The time line of Phil's life began to ink in for me. He had grown up in a suburb of Boulder, I discovered. His father was in the air force. It was from him that Phil had inherited his fondness for science fiction. But Colonel Pete Featherstone died when his only boy was prepubescent, leaving behind an angry widow, a glut of daughters. Phil waited politely until he turned eighteen, then fled. He bought a bus ticket to every gay boy's mecca, San Francisco. He met Stan. Stan was forty-seven and owned a farm near the Russian River. He invited Phil to live with him. But things didn't work out, and after a few months Phil went back to San Francisco. He met George. George was in his late twenties. They moved together to L.A. Then they broke up. For a while he did “this and that,” Phil said; bartended and waitered, clerked in video shops, even got licensed as a masseur—“strictly legit,” he hastened to point out. More recently he'd been a personal trainer, and was just making a go of his carpentry business when he found himself dying.

And that, basically, was it. No career, not even any “interests,” really, except going to the gym and watching the movies on which his father had raised him. He didn't practice Tae Kwon Do. He didn't make his own pasta. He didn't read biographies of ex-presidents. (To judge from the paucity of books in his apartment, he didn't read anything.) And yet if Phil wasn't a “go-getter,” at least he also hadn't wasted his adulthood (as it sometimes seemed to me I had) scrabbling on rat's wheels of ambition and distraction. Instead he lived in the moment, by which I mean that he experienced the moment, he felt the moment on its own terms. Me, if I experienced the moment at all, it was as the anticipated nostalgia of its loss.

Our friendship progressed incrementally. Sex was its asymptote, the arrival it perpetually neared but never reached. At least in my mind. How Phil felt about the matter I couldn't have said for certain. No doubt he must have intuited something of my desire for him. But that desire was part and parcel of its own nullification, namely dread, the ultimate cold shower. It was one of those joke matchsticks that snuffs itself out every time it's lit. It was a self-defeating prophecy. Pulling such mental Rosemarys, I couldn't have seemed a very warm prospect to curl up against in the night. Still, even as I write that sentence, I realize that it presumes something of which I'm not sure: it presumes that Phil might have wanted me in the first place.

Phil worked me up sub rosa. In his presence I never got a hard-on, or experienced a conscious sense of sexual arousal. And yet when I left his apartment I always drove to the Circus of Books with more impatience than usual; and when I went back to my hotel room afterward, I always found wet patches on the fly of my boxer shorts, as if lust could literally leak out of the body.

I wish I could say I gave up all the bad stuff after I met him, stopped cruising the parking lot and working the phone sex lines and renting the videos. But in fact, in Phil's company my appetite for fast-food sex only increased. I was more on the edge than ever, at the constant mercy of that horniness that crawls on the surface of the skin, never burrowing deep down: all itch.

Julian would have understood this.
Notgeil,
he called what I was enduring: a German word.
Notgeil
was lust with insomnia. It was lust in a hurry. It was waiting room lust, born of anxiety and boredom. And Julian, even more than I, lived in its grip. I used to think he suffered from too many talents. As a teenager he'd played the viola well enough to have a shot at an orchestra post. He painted, oils and watercolors. He sang. He'd had a brief career as an actor, had written plays and newspaper articles. Somehow the very abundance of his gifts panicked him. One by one he unwrapped them, abandoned them. They became simply more toys in that already overcrowded attic where the air was so stuffy, where he found it so difficult to breathe. Soon, from that attic, the only fruition seemed to be
Notgeil.

I was luckier. I never had to make a choice. In retrospect it occurs to me that Julian, had he decided to, could have out-written me in a second. But Julian didn't decide to—and my will took me further than his talent. This caused screaming fights on several occasions.

The attic kept getting more crowded. “Everything started never finished,” Julian sang from it. Still he wouldn't throw things away. He was a mental pack rat. He lived in a swell of documents, ideas, possibilities; joked that like Leonard Bast, like Alkan, he'd end up being murdered by a bookshelf. Which, more or less, he was.

Nothing started ever finished. But in the end Julian did finish something. The attic burned. Down fell his soul, the madwoman, with hair aflame.

 

Phil's blood work came back ambiguous. T-cell count down, but just a little. Antibodies up. Such waffly results sounded like good news, to the extent that with AIDS there is ever good news. To “celebrate,” I took him out for brunch that Sunday. I made a reservation at a little restaurant on Third Street that the
Weekly
recommended. Phil seemed dubious: egg and bacon places with bossy waitresses were more his speed. Still, he put on his bougainvillea shirt and met me on the curb at the appointed hour.

The restaurant, when we got there, turned out to be a mob scene. There was a reservations desk and an executive chef. The customers were mostly hairless West Hollywood types in muscle shirts. In such a body-waxed atmosphere, hirsute Phil felt his bearishness as an onus, I could tell. Forgoing all the variously sauced complications on offer, he ordered a turkey burger.

Despite the noisiness of the surroundings, I felt tranquil. Usually in restaurants I didn't feel tranquil. I waited impatiently for the food, then when it arrived, ate it fast so I could start waiting impatiently for the bill. In restaurants I shook my leg. I glanced over my shoulder compulsively, as if I were expecting someone. But Phil calmed this frantic impulse. Unlike me, he was never in a hurry except when he needed to be.

Of course, I often asked myself where it had started, this tendency of mine to focus so hard on horizons that I lost sight of the earth rolling away under my feet. The usual suspects appeared in the lineup: Mother, telling me I could be anything I wanted to be, do anything I wanted to do; Father, full of assurances that for such as we, there was no situation that could not be alleviated by pulling strings. Well, Dad learned he was wrong the hard way, when after his second heart attack even the best surgeon in the country couldn't save him; even getting himself bumped up on the transplant list couldn't save him. That someone will always be there to catch you, to bend a rule for you, to finesse you through—it must be the most pernicious of all the pernicious lies that the privileged, meaning only the best, tell their children.

Phil had a different history. He'd grown up with no sense of entitlement whatsoever. To him living in the world was essentially a hostile business, a hot wind you had to fight against. If Phil was stoic in the face of adversity, it was not because he possessed some saintly capacity for patience; it was because his childhood had taught him the essential futility of complaint. He understood that being Hiram Roth's son didn't guarantee you preferential treatment from God.

Acceptance: that was his gift. Not that it was easy for him; indeed, I don't doubt that acceptance takes as much of a toll on the psyche as scrabbling on rat's wheels. Yet at least it is a journey that has an end.

I asked him about his friends. He mentioned Roxy, with whom he worked out at his gym. When he'd first gotten out of the hospital, he said, Roxy had visited him on the average twice a week, but now she was pregnant, and her lover, Dora, didn't want her seeing Phil until the baby was born.“Risk of infection and all that,” he added. “I suppose it's understandable.”

“Maybe. Anyone else been by?”

“George came last week. He lives in Laguna these days, so he doesn't get into town too often. And Justin, of course.” At the mention of Justin's name, he smiled. “Oh, and you, Jerry.”

“How about your family?”

“Haven't heard from them lately.”

“Do your sisters write?”

He shook his head.

“Yes, but Phil, everyone needs company.”

“Company!” He laughed. “That I've had too much of! More company than all the boys in this room combined, I'll bet.” He leaned closer. “You know, when I was in the hospital, they asked me if I'd fill out this survey? So I said sure. And I had to answer questions like, How many people did you have sex with in 1981? How many people did you have sex with in 1982? Was your primary sexual activity a) oral, b) anal passive, c) anal active. And I thought about it, and the number of guys I'd had sex with in my life—it was close to three thousand! Three thousand! And I'm thirty-nine. So now George, he's really into these twelve step groups? He calls up one day, and he says, ‘Phil, when we were younger, we were classic sexual compulsives. All the symptoms.' Like it's news. And I say, ‘Sure, George, but isn't sexual compulsive just a new way of saying we had a good time?' He didn't laugh, though. He takes these things too seriously, George does.”

Our food arrived. Looking down at my plate of shredded duck breast, cactus relish, and spaetzle, I envied Phil his turkey burger.

“Does George have a lover now?”

“Oh, sure. Carlos. But they don't have sex. They haven't had sex in like five years, which these days seems to be the definition of lover. So now every couple of weeks George comes into L.A. and picks up a hustler, after which he feels so guilty he calls me up, and goes, ‘What am I going to tell Carlos, what am I going to tell Carlos?' And I say, ‘Nothing, George. You're going to tell him nothing.' But of course he does tell him, and Carlos goes ballistic, and they have these screaming fights so that the neighbors call the police. Their therapy bills must be through the roof. Anyway, last week George comes by and tells me he's sworn off sex. He says for the sake of his relationship he's moved beyond the need for sex. I mean, maybe I'm crazy, but I just don't get that, Jerry. Because all the relationships I had with lovers, including George, they were
for
sex. Sex was what they were about.”

“Oscar Wilde said conversation had to be the basis for any marriage.”

“Conversation! I had this one lover from Italy? He could barely speak English! We did great for a year and a half.”

“But only a year and a half.”

“Well, better a good year and a half than a miserable two decades, if you ask me.” Phil played with his french fries. “You probably disagree.”

“No! I've just had a different history.”

“Yeah? What is your history, Jerry? You know, you've never told me.”

He put down his fork, crossed his arms, looked me in the eye. In his steadying gaze he had me cornered. He was right: I'd never mentioned Julian's name in his presence. And why not? Maybe it was all part of my effort to dress in Angel drag, to be the selfless caregiver who didn't impose his own worries. Maybe I was scared that he'd blame me, as Julian's mother had. Maybe I just didn't want to implicate myself. Another test.

Still, I had to tell him something.

“My history?” I said finally. “Well, I lived with someone nine and a half years. Then he died.” I didn't specify how he died.

Conversation halted. Not a comfortable silence this time. I felt that cheap relief you feel when you've gotten away with something devious; and yet the old dread lingered. Having cheated, the fear of being caught lingered. Phil, not Julian, was now the proctor in the exam room of the examined life.