It was a Sunday night. On the subway, the 2 or 3 train, I remember black women in their church hats coming back to Brooklyn from uptown, Harlem. In the Clark Street station in Brooklyn Heights, a row of grimy homeless men. At home I threw up and did not close my eyes until I fell asleep in my cubicle at work the next day. My boss just let me be, and when I woke up, everyone was gone except him. He was there, at his desk behind the glass, waiting to ride back to Brooklyn with me on the F train. I never outed myself at work, never ever talked about my personal life; I did not think that this was considered appropriate. All around were married men with shiny shoes who talked about women and money, rich young guys from Long Island who did coke and got quiet when I appeared in the doorway. But my supervisors understood who I was and what was going on out there. They were kind, but that confused me. I have always felt immediate reciprocation necessary with every form of giving. Never have I been willing to owe anything to anyone. People being nice made me uncomfortable.
Rapidly, Kevin was transformed into an elderly man with a curved back who always seemed on the verge of tears. He referred to his mode of transportation to and from the hospital as “My Beautiful Ambulette.” When he died, I didn’t have much time to take it in. Steven, who had also moved to the city, had found out he was positive for HIV. If he had it, I thought it inevitable that I did too, but I felt nothing for a while. I was numb. As I had on the football field in high school, I disconnected somehow, put the feelings somewhere they couldn’t get me, ran from the pictures that came into my mind, shoved it all in a box in my head that I tried to keep sealed. But every time I did anything, I asked myself, “Is this the last time I’ll see a movie?” or “Is this the last time I’ll eat roast beef?” I told no one because I could not imagine anyone who wanted to know.
I didn’t want to know. I tried to avoid going home unless it was Christmas. Parents and family were not people I wanted to gaze upon.
Steven’s new boyfriend got him into one of the best doctors in the city, but I still called him every morning, to make sure he knew I was on his side and to make certain that he was still there at his desk, where he should be. He had to stay in place. I could not watch him fall. Things were going so fast, there was no way to take in what was going to happen to Steven or what was going to happen at all. Kevin was down. Tim went down. Bill went down. Jim went down. Richard went down. He was the nicest man I ever knew.
There was nothing to be done. We just watched them disappear. I had heard of the Catholic tradition of lighting candles for the sick and to bless the dying. After work every few weeks or so I went to Saint Patrick’s, paid a dollar for each of the flat round pieces of wax, and lit the candles in the dim light of the huge church. As Betty and I had walked through Madison naming names, so now I walked through Carroll Gardens, and Park Slope, and the Village, and the Upper West Side, asking for help for my friends.
In Missouri, almost every gay man I knew went down: John, who sold me button-fly Levi 501s; John, the hairdresser with an A-frame overlooking the river; Jim, the one everyone wanted. Maybe the biggest shock to some of my friends was the fact that even beauty was no protection.
Before I came to New York, I had taken a summer course in how to get a job in book publishing. The man who ran it was shy, extremely closeted, and eccentric, despite his great desire to be interesting, a quest that took him to many of the world’s less traveled places. Maybe he could be himself only when he was far from home.
Two years or so after we had moved to New York, he came to a party in Carroll Gardens. It went on late and I went to bed before some people left. In the morning, I woke to find him sitting on my bed next to me, his warm hand on my bare back. Not long after that, he disappeared. We asked around, but no one could ever discover what became of him.
. . .
In the spring of my first year in the city, my parents arrived for a visit. I wanted it to be as memorable as I could make it because I didn’t know what the future was going to bring or if I would ever make it home again. For weeks, my mother called to find out our plans so that she could pack the right things. She worried over her outfits, planned to bring her best suits and jewelry. There was discussion of blouses, bracelets. Although my father didn’t seem especially excited, Betty asked me over and over where we would go, whether we could see the Plaza or the place where they did The Today Show, if we would make it to Barneys, which someone was always talking about on television. After I told her that the women in New York tended to wear black, she purchased a chic raincoat in that shade.
At the airport, standing by the baggage claim in that coat, she looked like a New York lady who could hold her own with anyone, a Wall Street woman or someone successful, just back from a business trip. But when we stepped out into the taxi line, the clouds opened and it poured. Betty was frantic. “But you have a raincoat on,” I reminded her.
“I know,” she answered, “but I don’t want it to actually get rained on. You didn’t tell me it was going to rain.”
“I predict the weather now?”
“You knew.”