Rat Bohemia (15 page)

(Red River)

 

 

The next evening Troy and I were sitting around watching TV.

“They hired a new manager today and it was not George,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because of his drinking. I told you. So, guess who got it? ”

“Who? ” I asked.

“Guess.”

“Who? ”

“GUESS!”

“You.”

“No,” she said. “Louise from purchasing. She wants to cut lunch from one hour to forty-five minutes. I told her, that's why it's called a lunch hour and not a lunch forty-five minutes.”

The movie on TV was
Red River
.

“Look at that man ride a horse,” I said.

“Tell me about your day,” she said.

“It was boring. Tell me about yours.”

“Well.…”

“Sounds pretty boring.”

I thought about a bowl of popcorn.

“Carole at the shop is pregnant,” Troy said. “Don't tell anybody.”

“Who am I going to tell?”

“Louise at work filed her nails. I painted my toenails Amethyst Smoke.”

“You did? I looked down at Troy's feet and ripped off her socks. “Oh my God, you painted your toes.”

“Amethyst Smoke. Now he's gonna get it.”

We looked back at the screen.

Then the intercom buzzed and Rita walked in.

“Hi lovebirds,” she said, looking really strange. “I bought a six-pack. It's ten o'clock, time to come out and play. You guys are too much. Mind if I turn down the sound? I knew two girls like you once. They were real cute. One started seeing a boy and the other flipped out and left town. I drove her to the airport.”

“Are you all right? ” I asked.

“Sure,” she said. “What are you two watching here? ”

“John Wayne in
Red River
,” Troy answered.

“That movie is so gay.”

“No, it's not,” Troy said.

“Yes it is,” Rita answered, popping open a beer.

“Where? ”

“When Montgomery Clift looks Big John longingly in the eyes and says ‘I want to hold your gun.' Hey, let's put on a record. When did you stop buying records, Killer? 1963? Frank Sinatra? Goes great with John Wayne. Two famous assholes.”

“No one's making you stay here,” I said.

“Dave died,” she said.

“Oh,” Troy and I both said. And then we were all overcome by that moment for which there is no appropriate response except familiarity. It is shameful, not knowing how to really feel it. Being overprepared for death.

“I'll make some popcorn,” Troy said and went into the kitchen.

“I wish I had a girlfriend,” Rita said.

“Hey,” Troy called in. “There isn't any popcorn.”

“Look,” Rita said, turning the channel. “Now this is a really great movie. This is a Frank Capra film. This is really funny.”

Mrs. Santiago and I sat, anxiously staring at the old clock on the wall. Two minutes to nine. It was so quiet in the office you could hear bottles smashing on the sidewalk seventeen floors below.

At nine o'clock on the nose, the Rat Commissioner would be releasing his new report to the city press corps, and everyone at Pest Control and Food and Hunger had placed bets on which papers would run the story on the front page. Daily Double if you could pick the headline.

“‘A Good Year for Rats,'” predicted Mrs. Santiago. “Five dollars on
Newsday
.”

We all knew the report's contents by heart. The Health Department had found an eighteen percent rise in rat sightings. They were trying to put it off on increased public awareness about vermin. But the facts were that the number of reported rat bites had also gone up and someone was going to have to pay.

From my point of view, the problem has to do, primarily, with the narrow scope of perspective that New Yorkers apply to rats, and occasionally to mice. They think it only happens here. New Yorkers are so myopic. They don't realize that at the exact second that they are watching rodents frolicking on the subway tracks, somewhere off in a faraway ocean, a weather-beaten fishing trawler is about to dock on a tiny island. Stowed away in the locker of that boat is a pair of one-pound Norway rats ready to scoot along the hawser when the sun goes down. At the same moment, deep in the hold of a neighborly grain barge, a family of Polynesian rats are about to come ashore. Once they've invaded the previously pristine spot,
these rats are going to go after large unsuspecting birds by biting the backs of their necks, severing their spines and chewing off their legs. New Yorkers think this only happens to them.

Rats are an essential part of the history of the world. They are more influential than people. The dynamic between vermin and civilians, creators and destroyers, is the relationship most at the center of life. Everything else spins around it, because of it. There are Norway rats, genus
Rattus norvegicus
, which have lived and bred underneath New York City probably as long as humans have done so aboveground. Heaven and hell are just metaphors.

Take me and Killer, for example. We are most comfortable living in neighborhoods where there are so many people walking around who would be locked up in institutions if they lived anywhere else. In relation to them, we feel normal. Same is true for the Norways. They are very partial to the moist underground conditions of lower Manhattan with its high water table and channeled rock and all those substructures dating back to the earliest days in the life of the city. We're all living together in our favorite part of town.

In my world a lot of people die young. They get AIDS or drugs or live dangerously. But some of the most decrepit street people seem to live forever. The most annoying ones live on and on. Like the filthy, emaciated white girl who wears a winter coat in the summer and shuffles along barefoot whining “No one will help me because I'm white.”

This approach doesn't really make you want to help her.

Or the really insane skinny black guy, also filthy, who wears a pair of pants over his head and always has mucus on his shirt. He sits in the middle of the sidewalk and says, “Excuse me, do you have any Grey Poupon? ”

You just can't believe they're still living, but year after year they are.

Sometimes I'll be walking down the street and I'll see a young gay man just moving along, minding his own business. Something in this guy's shirt or stance or facial expression will remind me of another gay man I used to know but haven't seen or heard from or thought about for months or years at a time. Suddenly, I will consider and then assume that he is dead and I will never see him again. Sometimes it will be a gay man whose name I barely knew and so it would be impossible to ask anyone after his whereabouts. At this point, I usually wonder why I am still alive and I worry about how much David must have hated me for outliving him. The envy of the dying for the living. I feel like one of those Super Rats.

There is no way to kill them. They are immune to everything except being hit over the head or shot. Once it became evident that no poison was ever going to get them, the guys at the lab came up with the most diabolical tactic ever attempted in the history of Rat vs. Human warfare. Warfarin. It is this odorless, tasteless, anticoagulant that produces massive internal hemorrhaging. Basically everything inside their bodies that holds and channels blood falls apart and the rats turn into one big, red, sloppy mess. Their bodies no longer have systems and just become containers for sloshy, directionless blood.

At first I wondered about the mind of the man who invented Warfarin. It seemed so treacherous. I wondered how he got the idea. But then it turned out that even this was not evil enough because the Super Rats were immune to that too. The Bureau instructed us to try zinc phosphide next. A quick-acting poison that smells like garlic. But the rats detected it in the bodies of their dead
friends and figured out pretty quickly how to stay away. Finally, they sent us out into the field with packages of Lorexa. This odorless overdose of vitamin D was exactly the recipe that sent the Super Rats to the gas chamber. The jig was up. But then the budget cuts came along.

The cold clock laboriously reached nine.

“
New York Post
,” I called out. “Five bucks.”

Mrs. Santiago glared over her eyeglasses. “I'll stay with
Newsday
.”

When the phone rang, we all jumped. But when I picked it up it was Manuel on the other end, worked up into a frenzy over the food for the memorial service.

“Grapes will be fine,” I said. “Something pure.”

At Pest Control we can take off time for funerals, but when they come at the rate of one or two a week, Mrs. Santiago starts noticing disapprovingly. Her nephew got murdered in Bushwick last February and her brother got shot in the head in Puerto Rico in March. So she tends to accept regular death in the lives of her employees. Her other sister's boyfriend died of AIDS in April, but she didn't say much about that. I just think that sick days should be for when
I
am sick. I need separate leave days for everyone else. Plus one day a month for menstrual cramps.

“How are you doing? ” I asked Manuel quickly.

“I am very very angry at those PWLOPWAs.”

“What's that? ”

“People Who Live Off People With AIDS. If this epidemic ever ends, everyone who is still alive will be suddenly unemployed.”

“More histrionics?” I asked.

“I think they should change the name of this disease,” he said.
“From AIDS to AIDA. Only Leontyne Price can do it justice.”

Even before David actually died, there was a fight over the body. Some people in ACT UP wanted to have a political funeral, but Manuel didn't think that was dignified. He wanted something quiet. But there were more ACT UPers in David's care group than there were people like Manuel. So they ended up with a weird and uncomfortable compromise of a public funeral, but a demure one. Manuel was so racked with guilt that he became obsessed with the funeral catering and called me three times the day before with a wide range of bizarre suggestions like portable hummus and Portabello mushrooms. I think he just wanted attention.

At times like this you have to sit down and ask yourself all kinds of questions:

and

Let's face it, David was a Liza Minnelli fag. This was the guy who used to find out where famous people went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings so he could hold their hands during the serenity prayer. He would have wanted something fabulous.

David was cheated out of his life. That's one of the few items he had in common with his peers. He would have wanted something angry and hyperbolic. A fire or explosion. Something destructive. He would have really like that.

David was a postmodern aesthete. He would have wanted something formally inventive but timeless.

Natural Beauty? Kitsch classic? How do you choose?

The official stepping-off spot for the funeral was at Houston Street and First Avenue at five o'clock. But the organizers forgot that about twenty-five homeless people sold their stuff on that very spot every day. There is no more public space in urban life. The people with no private space live in it. Then the city tells them that that is their private problem. So we all had to kind of stand around them, step over them, and refuse them nonchalantly while crying and comforting each other at the same time.

No one knew what to say really because, apparently, there had been three other people from ACT UP who had died in the previous two weeks. So the habitual mourners were sick of making cooing comforting sounds to each other. The endearments stuck in their throats. Besides, there is that special brand of communication that gay people utilize at AIDS funerals. The standing-around-in-sorrow-state-of-silent-acknowledgment method. We raise our eyebrows and nod. David told me once it was perfected in sex clubs. Like when he used to run into that uptown editor at some dive on the upper West Side. The guy would be yelling, “Suck that dick. Suck that big dick.” And when he would catch David's eye, up went those acknowledging eyebrows.

David's closest friends had accepted his death long ago. In fact, most had buried him emotionally while he was still registering a pulse. Those who came by word of mouth had their own reasons. They knew him or his writing vaguely. They had their own multitudes of dead that still needed to be mourned and so haunted other people's funerals as excuses to further grieve. Some were total
fans of his writing and felt themselves to be in an underground historical moment that would surely have some latter-day significance when his reputation was exhumed from the mass grave into which it was now tossed. It was a cortege of reasons.

Lyle looked absolutely terrible. He earnestly handed out these horribly tacky bodega candles. Instead of pictures of Chango, the glass containers had pictures of David like he was some saint. I guess Lyle wishes
he
was a saint and really wants some bodega candles with his own face on them when it is time for his funeral. I'll have to remember that. His boyfriend has been dead for two months and funerals like David's were just more practice until the day it was Lyle's turn to fall down in the next round of musical caskets.

I stopped to talk to this black guy, Kurt, that David and I had run into at a party in Dyke Slope last year.

“What can you say? ” I said.