Koolaids (5 page)

That date changed my life.

…

The Deer Hunter
started a trend in Lebanon. The militia fighters, particularly the Phalange, started playing Russian roulette.

I lost track of Georges when I left Lebanon in 1975. I kept up with news and gossip about him for a while. Apparently he had gotten to the point of being unable to see a picture of Arafat on TV without spitting on the screen. He cut himself once, requiring sixteen stitches in his arm, trying to punch the screen while watching a news clip with the PLO leader. It sounded like he had become deranged.

The boy I knew had died when the war started. Georges had become a killing machine.

The rumors were he became the Phalange's most ruthless killer. They said he took part in the Karantina massacre. That was in January, 1976, so he couldn't have been more than eighteen. It took a while to fit the image I had of Georges with what he had become. A neighborhood friend told me in 1978 that if Georges had seen me on the street, he would have shot me. No doubt about it.

They said Georges died in 1980 while playing Russian roulette. He was twenty-three. I still think it was plain suicide. From what I remember of him, he would not waste time. If he wanted to kill himself, he wouldn't play Russian roulette. He would just blow his head off. Then again, maybe the drugs he took changed him.

…

Ben was a slut. Ben was a delusional slut. His handle on the BBS was Cute Boy, but he was neither cute nor a boy, I assure you. He loved screwing minorities, mostly Asians. He wasn't exclusively a rice queen, but why quibble?

After his diagnosis, he had a lot of free time on his hands so he started visiting masseurs. One day, he told me there was this guy who had fallen madly in love with him. Of course, he was bragging. I knew he had an open relationship with his lover, but I gathered this was a little more serious than the casual fucks he indulged in. I asked him who the suitor was. It turned out he was an East Indian masseur. They had been having great sex regularly, and they even started working out together at the gym.

“Whoa,” I say sarcastically. “Are you sure you are ready for such a commitment? Working out together is a big step.”

“You don't understand, Kurt,” he says. “This is real.”

“What about Alan? What does he think of all of this?”

“He's okay with it. He knows I love him, but this is different. This is special.”

It was so special that Ben started designing the masseur's ads (let's call him Corey, which isn't his real name, but I don't want to get in trouble for using his real name, which was probably fake anyway), which appeared in the weekly gay paper, the
Bay Area Reporter.
I started calling his attempts at designing Corey's ads his pimpish ways. He found that amusing.

Ben's workouts started getting more serious. He would stop by my house after working out, and he could barely move. His muscles ached. He was working out six days a week. They had hired a personal trainer to get them beefed up. I worried about his health, but he insisted he never felt better.

I noticed one day he started carrying a beeper. I sarcastically asked if it was part of his pimpish ways. He brushed me off. I wondered what a guy on disability would want with a beeper. I figured Ben wanted to feel important. A little while after that he got a cellular phone. That was really strange. He now had both a beeper and a cellular.

“Tell me the truth,” I ask. “Are you Corey's pimp? Why the fuck are you carrying a cellular?”

“I'm not anybody's pimp.”

“Then why are you carrying a beeper?” I insist.

“What if someone wanted to get ahold of me right away? I was at the Castro the other day going in to see
The Hunger
and I got beeped. This queen was at the pay phone and he wouldn't stop talking, so I couldn't use it to call whoever paged me. I decided to get a cellular.”

“What's so important? Why are you being beeped?”

He sheepishly asked me if I had the current issue of the
B.A.R.
I gave it to him. He opened it to the escorts section. He showed me an ad with a guy's smooth torso. The headline said Preppy Top. I could not figure out what was going on. I looked at Ben and he was beaming—radiant was more like it, proud as a peacock.

“What the fuck?” I say.

“That's my beeper number you see,” he says boastfully. He is about to burst at the seams, unable to stop smiling.

“Are you telling me you're the Preppy Top?” I ask.

“Yep!”

“People pay you for sex?”

“Yep.” He beams.

“Oh, Jesus. You're a fucking whore.”

“And I get paid for it too,” he coos.

…

Viruses are any of various simple submicroscopic parasites of plants, animals, and bacteria that often cause disease and that consist essentially of a core of RNA or DNA surrounded by a protein coat. Unable to replicate without a host cell, viruses are typically not considered living organisms.

Not a living organism? Man, in his arrogance, decides this planet's most tenacious biotype is not a living organism.

Man is nothing more than giant genitalia for viruses.

…

Mohammad went to Dallas to attend the opening reception of his exhibit at the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art. He was to stay there for only a couple of days. One of the trustees put him up at a luxurious apartment of another trustee who was out of town. The woman had left detailed notes of what he could and could not do in the apartment. He was reading the notes when he decided to make himself a strong drink. He opened the icebox to get some ice when he saw another note strategically placed inside. It said:
No national specialties with odors hard to get rid of.

He took his bag and left for the airport.

…

An hour later. Arjuna and his charioteer, Krsna, on the battlefield. They are now joined by Eleanor Roosevelt, Krishnamurti, Julio Cortázar, and Tom Cruise, who looks a little lost.

ARJUNA:
Can you give me a little hint? I am about to embark on the mother of all battles and you still run peripatetic dialectics by me. Could you just tell me what the purpose of life is all about?

KRSNA:
What do you think I have been doing?

ARJUNA:
Well, I don' t get it.

ELEANOR:
The purpose of life is to live it.

ARJUNA:
Oh Eleanor, can you lower your voice an octave when you speak? It is so damn irritating.

KRSNA:
High voice or not, the lesbian is right.

ARJUNA:
Are you suggesting life has no purpose? No unity, nothing to pull all these illogical vignettes into a coherent collage? If that is the case, then how do biographers do what they do? If there is no unity, then how do the biographies of Ava Gardner or Eva Gabor make sense?

JULIO:
But do we have to wait till someone dies before we find his life's unity, the sum of all the actions that define a life? The problem consists in grasping that unity without becoming a hero, without becoming a saint, or a criminal, or a boxing champ, or a statesman, or a shepherd; to grasp unity in the midst of diversity, so that that unity might be the vortex of a whirlwind.

KRSNA:
Why is it you humans constantly search for a deeper meaning?

JULIO:
To sell books.

KRSNA:
What if I told you that life has no unity? It is a series of nonlinear vignettes leading nowhere, a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It makes no sense, enjoy it.

KRISHNAMURTI:
I had a vision once. It is the same vision you had when the mist turned into stormy waters in the hills of Lebanon. I was standing watching a mother washing her infant in the Ganges. She looked angelic as she washed her naked son. When she was done, she bit his head off.

JULIO:
Ah. You are suggesting that life is the struggle between feelings and the intellect.

KRISHNAMURTI:
Not at all, I am suggesting that the purpose of life is to understand it.

ARJUNA:
Explain it to me then. You are closer to God. You are a guru. What is the purpose of life?

KRISHNAMURTI:
I am not a guru. I am not a guru.

KRSNA:
My dear fellow, you have to realize that when you abnegated your guruship, when you gave it all up, you became the greatest guru of them all.

TOM:
I am not a homosexual. I am not a homosexual.

ELEANOR:
Oh, shut up!

ARJUNA:
I wish someone could explain the purpose of life to me.

KRSNA:
There is none. Go out and kill your cousins.

ELEANOR:
Live your life.

KRISHNAMURTI:
And stay away from books by David Leavitt or Deepak Chopra.

JULIO:
Here, here.

…

Solitude is the playfield of Satan. I was having nightmares at night and panic attacks during the day. The various news reports about the mysterious disease striking gay men were having an unsettling effect on me.

I always thought if I became a famous artist, I would be less lonely. It proved to be the complete opposite. The response to my first show at Heller was surprisingly sensational. At twenty-one, I was called the voice of a new generation. The review in the
San Francisco Chronicle
had the headline, Great Debut for Gay Artist. I could not sleep that night. I was terror-stricken. I called home, but the maid relayed a message from my father saying I was never to call back. How they had heard so quickly, I was never to find out.

I was alone. A piece of my heart was forcibly taken out. Eradicated. Expurgated. Obliterated. Emasculated.

I called Scott and asked him to move in. He packed his belongings and moved out of his apartment in less than twenty-four hours. We became even more inseparable. We became one word, Mohammad and Scott, Scott and Mohammad. One person. One life. One love.

…

In America, I fit, but I do not belong.

In Lebanon, I belong, but I do not fit.

…

It is Thanksgiving. The year is 1996. James sits alone. The first year he is completely alone. In 1982 he decided not to go back home for Thanksgiving. A group of friends formed the We Are Family group. There were seven of them that year. They came over for a Thanksgiving dinner at his house. When dinner was over, they played Sister Sledge's disco hit full blast. They played that song at every Thanksgiving since. Through the years the group got bigger with lovers joining in. Through the years the group got smaller with friends dying. This was supposed to be the fifteenth Thanksgiving. Not a single member of the group, not one person who had had Thanksgiving dinner at his house is left alive. Not a single member of the group ever reached his fortieth birthday.

James is thirty-nine. James sits alone.

…

Of all the nicknames I have been called, Mo is the one name I completely abhorred.

…

For your perusing pleasure, I submit, translated and unedited, a brief editorial from the Swiss
Tages-Anzeiger
newspaper:

QUOTE

Why Beirut and not Damascus?

Shimon Peres attacks Lebanon and bombs Beirut claiming he is aiming at Hizballah bases. He hopes, thereby, to brighten his image and strengthen his position in view of the upcoming elections. All his victims will leave cold an Assad who does not himself hesitate to sacrifice anyone to keep his power. Why didn't the Prime Minister of Israel attack Damascus or Teheran directly? Lebanon is an easy target: it cannot respond. The Nobel Peace Prize winner Peres has innocent defenseless civilians killed. He pursues a political goal by hitting people who are completely powerless in this entire affair. When Assad, when the Iranians, when the Islamic groups, when the Palestinians, act with the same methods, we call this terrorism.

UNQUOTE

Well, guess who won the election after all?

…

Tim wanted to drive. He had been cooped up in his studio apartment for two weeks. He picked Kurt up at his flat.

“You're looking good,” Kurt said.

“Thanks. I feel better.”

“So what are we going to see?” Kurt asked.

“I wanted to see
Dead Man Walking,
but I don't think I'm up for a serious movie. We're going to see
Babe.”

“That's a good idea. I wouldn't mind seeing it again. We don't have to watch the whole thing, okay? If you get tired we can leave.”

“I'll be fine.”

“You look like you put on some more weight since last week.”

“Three pounds. The Megace is really working. I'm eating normally again.”

“That's great.”

“I probably have to stop taking it soon.”

“Why?”

“I don't want to gain too much weight.”

“Jesus. You're not serious?”

“Look, just because you don't care about your weight, doesn't mean I don't have to.”

“Reality check! Reality check! Let's see. You have no T-cells. You've lost over twenty pounds in the last three months. But now you're worried about being fat?”

“You're fucking grumpy tonight. Gee, Tim, we haven't gone out to a movie in a while. Let's do that so I can insult you tonight, Tim. What's the matter, Tim? Can't I—”

“If you stop taking Megace, I will kill you myself.”

“Okay. Okay, Mr. Grumpy.”

“I swear you're crazy.”

“And you're fat.”

…

My sister is massaging my feet. It feels really good. They swell quite a bit these days.

“Are you going to dry my feet with your hair?” I ask.

“Probably not, but I am sure Maria would love to,” she replies. I smile.

“He hasn't completely lost his sense of humor, I see.” She smiles.