Boston, February 1995
“So smile for a while and let's be jolly, love shouldn't be so melancholy, come along and share the good times while we canâ”
It's a dance version of “Rose Garden,” and Chanel is dancing around her living room when Tommy and I enter. Kathryn, her girlfriend, sits on the couch looking embarrassed. Chanel lives on the second floor of an old Victorian in the heart of Jamaica Plain. From her bedroom window you can see the pond: all iced over now, with cold gray skeletons of trees laced around it.
“I can't believe how they're remaking all these old songs of my childhood,” I announce.
“You relate everything to age,” Chanel says, stopping in mid-boogie. “Don't you ever quit?”
Kathryn smiles up at me. “Hi, Lloyd.”
“I'm Jeff,” I tell her. She blushes furiously. I ought to call her Wendy and see what she does. Poor thing. It's hard to penetrate a group as the replacement lover in a couple that's split up. Chanel and Wendy were together for four years. Wendy wanted babies; Chanel wanted a dog and a career. Melissa and Rose sided with Wendy in the breakup. They tolerate Chanel at events like Lloyd's birthday party, but the whole affair has put a little seam down the fabric of our group.
“Don't worry,” Chanel reassures Kathryn. “Everybody gets Lloyd and Jeff mixed up.”
“You look so much alike,” Kathryn offers.
“Oh, sure,” I say. “All men look alike to dykes.”
Chanel raises her hand in a mock threatening gesture. “Watch it,” she says, then laughs. “Actually, Kath, they used to look a lot alike. But then Jeff started getting
old.”
Tommy isn't participating in any of this. He's gone into Chanel's kitchen and helped himself to an orange. He's peeling it over the sink now.
“Just you wait,” I tell Chanel. “You're catching up pretty fast.”
“Do you know I found a gray hair?” she asks suddenly, turning off the music.
“No,” I say, feigning horror.
“Yes, I did. But I'm glad. I think gray hair looks sexy mixed in with black.”
“Sure,” I say. “On Lily Munster.”
Chanel shakes her long straight hair. “Stop it. On Asian women, it looks
striking.”
Chanel was born in the Philippines, whereâshe grudgingly admitsâher father worked for Marcos in some cushy government job. After the revolution, her family fled, and Chanel quickly became Americanized. “That's why my parents think I'm a lesbian,” she says. A lesbian and an Aquino supporter, in factâa one-two punch that prompted her father's ferocious threat that he'd kill her if she ever so much as stepped across the threshold onto the white marble of their home in McLean, Virginia.
“I get asked to serve on all sorts of committees because I'm a woman of color,” Chanel has admitted, “and of course, I do. But it's not like I grew up
oppressed
or anything. In fact, we were the oppress
ors
.” As a girl, she had a chauffeur, a maid, and a cook, and her family is still affluent. Her father found another cushy job under Reagan and Bush, although lately, Chanel suspects, with the coming of Clinton, he must be having a harder time of it. But, then again, maybe not.
She's the fifth of six daughters: hence the name. “Chanel Number Five,” she says to slow-witted friends. “Get it? Hel-
lo
?”
“Guys,” Tommy says from the kitchen.
“What is it, honey?” Chanel asks. She and I have flopped down on the couch opposite Kathryn. She's just pulled out a photo album to show me pictures of the trip she and Kathryn took to Maine last month. I notice that all the photos of Wendy have been trashed or cut in half.
“I want to talk to you about something,” Tommy says.
We both look over at him. There's a quality to his voice that compels our gaze. Kathryn seems to notice it, too, and she stands up, the awkward outsider. “I guess I'll go to the store,” she says. “You said you're out of milk and eggs.”
“You don't have toâ” Chanel stops in mid-sentence, looking back over at Tommy. “Yeah, okay. And a pack of cigarettes, too.”
Kathryn leaves. Tommy stays seated at the kitchen table, talking across the room at us. “So, I just wanted to tell you guys something.”
“What?” Chanel asks. “Stop dragging this out. You've been a mope for days. Just tell us.”
“It'sâlook, I don't want you freaking out....”
“Tommy,” I say. “We won't freak out.”
He sighs, as if he's impatient, as if we were the ones hounding him, as if he hadn't been the one to bring this up. Finally he says, “I tested positive.”
“Get out of here,” Chanel says, breathy in disbelief.
“That's what I wanted to tell you.”
I stand up. I hesitate a minute before walking into the kitchen, but I do, and I sit at the kitchen table across from Tommy. Chanel joins me a moment later.
He looks at us hard. “I haven't been fucked without a condom in eight years.”
I feel a terrible coldness well up from my scrotum. I press my legs together fiercely to drive it away. “Then what made you get retested?” I ask. “Five years ago you were negative. Why did you get another test?”
“The guy I'm seeing,” he says, looking at me, almost as if he's accusing me of something. “We went for the test together. It's a big issue for him.”
“But if you've been safe, then how do you think ... ?”
He shakes his head. “I don't know. Oral sex? I know we're supposed to believe it's safe, but ...”
“I just read an article saying it's not,” Chanel offers, as if that helps right now.
“That's the problem,” I say. “Nobody knows anything for sure anymore. Not that they ever did, but we believed they did for a while.”
“But I never swallowed,” Tommy insists. “And no condoms ever broke while I was getting fucked.
You
tell me what it could have been. Did I brush my teeth too hard and irritate my gums? Did some precum get into my bloodstream that way? Did I get some blood on my tongue kissing a guy whose cheeks were nicked from shaving?”
“That's impossible,” I say.
Tommy shakes his head. “At first I wanted to believe it was a false positive, but they checked again.
Twice.”
“Shit,” Chanel says. She stands up, goes back into the living room, begins flipping through the photograph album.
“Once, just once,” Tommy says to me, eyes almost pleading as they stare into mine, “I fucked a guy without using a condom. A year ago. I think he's got AIDS. I've seen him. He's got that hollow look, starting to turn yellow.” He closes his eyes and breathes in. “I didn't even come inside him. I just fucked him for a few minutes. I know it was stupid, but I thought the risk was his, not mine.”
“Hey,” I say, reaching across the table, taking his hand, but he pulls it back. “That's just it. Nobody
knows.”
Least of all me. I think about last summer, about the night at the dick dock, my fear of infection through a nick on my chest. And then later, letting passion overtake me, with Eduardoâ
“Here.” Chanel has suddenly returned. She places the photo album down on the table between Tommy and me. It's open to a page of photos from the Hands Around the Capitol demonstration, several years ago. There we all are: Tommy and Chanel and Javitz and me, all in our leather jackets. In the top photo, our cheeks red and rosy, our mouths open as if in mid-chant, are Tommy and I. Tommy's carrying a sign: “The Government Has Blood on Its Hands.”
“We fought back then,” Chanel says. “We'll keep on fighting.”
“Yeah, well,” Tommy says, “we were all negative then. We were just working off our guilt at not being infected. I don't have to do that anymore.”
I look over at him. For a blinding, stupid second I wonder if this isn't his ultimate activism: getting infected himself to keep up the passion for the fight. But the terror in his eyes is too real.
Back in the days when we marched through the streets, it was easier. It was a way to pilot our grief, our rage, our fear. In a strange and twisted way, it allowed us to be hopefulâand this in the days when Reagan and Bush sat in the Oval Office. It's different now: the government still has blood on its hands, but we no longer march in the streets. It's more than simple complacency lulled by the honeyed words of a deceitful president. It's a sense of holding on, of resisting no more, of finding a little cave and retreating there, hanging on for dear life with whatever is left of one's energy, one's family, and hoping to God to still be there when it's all over.
Last week, walking along Newbury Street, I ran into my former editor from the newspaper. He was with his wife. “Are you still involved in ACT UP?” he asked, trying to be friendly.
“There's not much of an ACT UP to be involved with anymore,” I told him.
“That's too bad,” he said, and his wife nodded in agreement. “They were an important force.”
I hate liberals. I especially hate straight white liberals. If they really thought ACT UP was so important, why didn't they know it had faded from the scene? Why did heâin that pomposity that masquerades as professionalismâmake life miserable for me when I worked for him? “You need to be impartial in your reporting,” he'd scold. “We can't have you parading around with a radical street action group.”
“Fuck you,” I should have said to him then, and “Fuck you,” I should have said to him that day on Newbury Street. But I rarely say “Fuck you” to anyone anymore. I'm proud that I left that job, proud that I can now write whatever I want, take any viewpoint I choose. But what good has it done, really? Everything I've written âall my angry diatribes, all my calls to action? Tommy just seroconverted.
“We thought we knew it all,” he says bitterly, running his forefinger over the photos in the album. He traces the outline of the U.S. Capitol. “Follow these guidelines. Hot, horny, and healthy. This is how it's done.”
I look down at the photos. There's one of me, the quintessential activist clone: sideburns nearly to my jaw, three earrings, an “Earn Your Attitude” T-shirt, cut-off denim shorts, white socks rolled up over shiny black Doc Martens. How young I looked, how involved with everything going on around me.
Then I see a picture of Javitz. How much weight he's lost between then and now. How full his face looks in this old photo, how round his cheeks.
Kathryn comes back inside. Nobody says a word. She puts the milk and the eggs in the refrigerator, then hands the cigarettes to Chanel, who immediately opens the pack and lights one. Then Kathryn reaches into the brown paper bag. It crinkles as she pulls out a chocolate-covered donut for Tommy.
“Had a feeling you might appreciate this,” she says, and he smiles.
He does.
En Route to Provincetown, July 1994
I pulled over to pee. Really, that's why I stopped. Sure, I was curious, and still am, particularly about the man sitting in the car in front of me. But that's not why I pulled over at the rest stop. I really had to pee; my bladder was going to burst.
Okay, so it wouldn't have burst. I could've waited and gone at the McDonald's at the rotary before the Sagamore Bridge. But ever since I left my parents' house I've been in the queerest mood.
I reach into my pocket with some difficulty. There: I feel it. The perennial twenty dollars my father slips me whenever I leave. Why does he do it? To assuage his guilt? To make me feel like a child because I don't have a real job? I'm tight, tense: four hours at my parents' house is too long.
“Come see us again, soon,” my father had said, shaking my hand as I left, the sweaty twenty slipping from his palm to mine.
“Dad, I don't want thisâ”
He raised his hand to silence me. “Just don't stay away so long.”
My mother offered me her cheek.
“Thanks for dinner, Ma, and the cake.”
She just smiled.
“Wait a minute, Jeffy,” my father said, rushing back into the house. My mother lifted her eyebrows as if to signal she didn't know what he was after. When he returned he had something in his hand. “I almost forgot,” he said.
It was his school ring. The one the nuns gave him when he finished eighth grade. It was the highest level of education he ever achieved. He held it out to me now in his open palm.
“Dad, why are you giving this to me?”
“Just because I want you to have it.”
It's an ugly thing. I open the ashtray, where I dropped it after getting into the car. No one smokes in our car. I keep change for the tolls in the ashtray. My father's ring glares up at me in the dull orange light of the setting sun. An ugly thing. A big fake amethyst. The initials of his Catholic grammar school: SJB. St. John the Baptist. What will I ever do with such a thing?
The guy in the car in front of me steps on his brakes, sending out a flash of red. Yeah, yeah, I think, I know.
I fully intended to drive away after taking my leakâalthough I didn't. I'm still sitting here, and the guy in front is looking at me through his rearview mirror. I'm being crazy. I'm sure he's hardly my type. I can't see him very well, but I'm positive he's older than I am, by a decade at least. Except that doesn't seem to matter much right now. I'm suddenly hornier than I have been in a long time.
“Thanks, Dad,” I had said, hugging him quickly. My mother said nothing.
I walked out to the backyard to kiss the nieces and nephews. Poor old Junebug had been shooed off the couch, and now he sat there on the back step looking forlorn. “Hey, Bug,” I said, kissing the top of his old head, his mangy fur smelling dry and dusty. He looked up at me, with those old yellow eyes that had seen so much. “Pose pretty for the photographer, you hear?” I said. “I'd take you home with me, but I think Mr. Tompkins would, make a meal out of you.”