. . .
There was a song we loved on Fire Island, a song they played when the crowds on the dance floor thinned and the breeze from the ocean blew in. Morning music, they call these soft, late-night songs. This one meant something to us. When it played, we came together and did not let go. It was called “I’ll Be Your Soldier” and was about standing with, staying with your friend or lover through whatever happened, whatever trouble. It seemed to sum up our days and for years I have tried, unsuccessfully, to find it, though I don’t think I really want to. Hearing it would be too bittersweet. None of us who danced together ever speak anymore. Several in our house on the island were HIV positive, and this lent an undercurrent to every moment. So we danced together. You didn’t ever have to speak. I learned to love to dance, for that reason specifically. Late at night, we guided one another’s trips to abandon. When someone flew too high or low, another was there to scoop him up. If you found yourself, in the middle of everything, lonely or afraid, a friend would appear to sit beside you until it was all a little better. But nothing lasts forever; the breakup of our camp was inevitable. There were tensions festering. Men compete.
I really did not want to feel this. I had gotten a taste of closeness and wanted more. But as more members of our group tested positive, a division between the haves and have-nots became more apparent. And then there were the drugs—at the beginning a diversion for all, but gradually a danger that some could draw away from while others grew more and more attracted. I was in the latter party. I could not stop if I started. I never wanted to go back to feeling merely ordinary.
At High Tea one weekend, I recognized a familiar face—Eric’s. There he was, standing on the deck in Topsiders, leaning against an older man who did not rate as likely boyfriend material. The man’s hair was gray and it seemed as though he was looking after my old friend. I sensed the situation immediately. He was older and I knew that he was Eric’s soldier, the one who had hoped to love him but had settled for steering him through everything we had never imagined happening. Eric didn’t look sick yet, just drawn, tired, and older than he was.
When we began to talk, Eric apologized for being so quiet on the day we visited the quilt, but he had just a few days before tested positive for HIV. He said he had hoped we would run into each other. He actually said he always thought we might wind up together. I looked at him. He had sensed my little dream of our getting together all along. And here he was, dishing up the fantasy I had come up with and serving it to me for his own benefit. He was just as bad as that man who threw me out. He was just the same, I thought, feeling that he was trying to use me. He wanted me to come back to the place where he was staying, said that it would be all right, that I wouldn’t get sick, that I didn’t have to worry, but I didn’t want to be manipulated. I was dubious, having been through a few confusing battles. I didn’t want to find myself walking back home along the beach feeling bad about what I had or had not done.
I think I wanted, this time, to be the one with the power, the one to decide.
The man with the gray hair, who had been looking bereft, seemed relieved when I disappeared.
Later, I wanted to go back, change it, the way it turned out—my coldness, his disappointment, the look on his face as I hurried across the room after just a few minutes. But I could not.
. . .
When I left our house on Fire Island, when it all fell apart and everyone was harboring little grudges and telling tales, I was a full-blown addict. It took a lot of drugs for some of us to feel free. I boarded the ferry back to the city, carrying my carpenter’s bag from the lumberyard with cocaine tucked into the inner pocket and little sense that my departure was regretted by anyone. I started to go out on my own. I didn’t ask for much, didn’t want it. No longer drawn to the college-boy type, I was not interested in anything like a relationship. “Would you just go?” I had learned to say, even to those who might have been willing to linger. My love was drugs.
. . .
After my father collapsed after a coronary, the doctor discovered that he had suffered two silent heart attacks. No one had known, though I suspected one had occurred that day we arrived in St. Louis to see The Music Man when, angry and put out, he had carried all the bags up by himself and collapsed on a chair.
His heart had been so badly damaged that there was no operation possible to repair it. The diagnosis was congestive heart failure.