The Men from the Boys (4 page)

“Every new guy?” I repeat.

“You know what I mean,” he says, and of course, I do. Twenty-two-year-olds need to believe they're no different from what their parents expected them to be. They might be gay, but they're still in search of their parents' lives. Sex is something to be rationalized, even while they're all fucking like little queer bunnies. Sex, Javitz once told me, is the first thing we think of when we come out, and the last. It's hormones that first kick open the closet, and it's our eventual embrace of that primal drive—drive disowned by the hetero hegemony—that allows us to finally slam the door behind us. It's the definitive awareness that we're different from our parents, indeed, from the rest of the world. But it'll take these boys at least until they're thirty to figure this out. It did for me.

So why do I bother? “Do you know how old I am?” I ask, breaking my own rule.

“Twenty-eight,” he says, puzzled.

“No, I said ‘around there.' I'm
thirty-two.”
I don't add that come August I'll be thirty-three.

“No way,” he says, and I imagine he's as shocked to learn he's just tricked with a thirty-two-year-old as he was with a married man.

“Yes way,” I reply, somewhat regretful of my impulsive confession.

Eduardo smiles. “You look great for thirty-two,” he says.

“Thanks. And you look great for twenty-two.” I kiss him, hard and deep, on the mouth, to prove that I'm really not such a bad guy. In seconds, he's ready to go again, boyfriend or not. I could kick myself for reigniting his dick: once a night is usually as much as I can handle these days. Why do I try? Why do I persist? I'm asking myself as he starts nibbling on my sensitive nipples again. I can almost hear Javitz laughing in the other room.

Boston, January 1995

The snow is letting up. I wonder for a moment if it might actually be over, the storm.

“I hate the winter,” I tell Javitz.

He shifts under the thin white sheets. His butt is sore from too much bed time. “That's because you're a summer baby,” he says. “Like me.”

Javitz's birthday is the day before mine: August 6 and August 7. He jokes that he'll admit to being older than I am: by a day.

“Girl,” comes a voice, intruding into our stillness, “you haven't been a baby for a
long
time—summer or any other kind.”

We look up. It's Javitz's friend Ernie, shivering as he steps through the doorway. “But
baby-it's
cold outside.”

“What the
hell
are you doing here?” Javitz asks, his face alive for the first time all week.

They kiss. Ernie wiggles his fingers at me. “I was over at Fenway for a lecture on alternative treatments. Silly me. I thought they'd tell me something I didn't already know.”

Ernie lives in Provincetown year-round. This makes him a special and rare breed, and he has proudly pasted a “Provincetown Year-Rounder” bumper sticker on his car. Trips into Boston for him are infrequent, especially in weather like this. I suspect there was more than just a lecture at Fenway that brought him here. Surely word had reached up the Cape that Javitz was back in Beth Israel.

“I may be going home tomorrow,” Javitz tells him.

“So this isn't the big one, huh?” Ernie smirks.

Javitz sighs. “You know me. Always a pallbearer, never a corpse. How long are you in town?”

“Leaving tomorrow morning. Lots of stuff going on at the Collective. Oh, David, wait till you get back up there. You'll put those patronizing straight white women in their place.” He rolls his eyes. Ernie's the only person I know who calls Javitz by his first name. He works as an outreach educator for the PWA Collective of Provincetown, handing out condoms at the dick dock and in the dunes. He does not suffer gladly condescending AIDS caregivers. “I don't need a mommy, thank you,” he says. “One was quite enough.” He's an artist, too, a painter, tall and lanky, with sand-colored hair and a face with freckles like a Jackson Pollock painting. He started out as a trick of Javitz's, three, maybe four, summers ago. Then he tested positive, got involved with the Collective. Now he and Javitz are inseparable during the summer. “See what can happen with tricks?” Javitz said to me. “Make a note of it.”

Every Tuesday morning from June to August, Ernie comes by to pick Javitz up for their support group; on Wednesday nights they meet for the group's weekly dinner. “Want to come along?” Ernie has asked me a couple of times, but I've always declined.

“Well, the whole
town
is wondering if the three of you are coming back this year,” Ernie says, pulling up a chair beside Javitz's bed and tossing me a glance. “What shall I report?”

“We need to start looking for a place,” Javitz says.

“Pronto,” Ernie agrees. “Girl, it's nearly
February!”

“If the town's so
interested,”
I suggest, “maybe they can pitch in and
find
a place for us.”

“Preferably with a deck that has morning sun,” Javitz says, winking.

Ernie smiles. “Faced with the possibility that Provincetown's most infamous threesome might not return, I'm sure they'd do just that.”

Many have wondered about Javitz, Lloyd, and I. “What
do
the three of them
do
together in that house?” the Provincetown gadflies whisper. “Are the two younger ones his slaves? Or is he just their sugar daddy?”

They see us walking together down Commercial Street, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, Javitz usually in the middle, the tallest of the three. “Didn't one of the younger ones date the older one for a while? Which one is which? Do you
know?”

“The older one,” a neighbor once told Ernie, unaware that he was Javitz's friend, “is merely trying to relive his own lost youth.”

“The younger ones,” said another, “are just waiting for the will to be read.”

Another observation came from one of Lloyd's tricks, who woke up the morning after to find Javitz at the kitchen table. “I cannot for the life of me understand how a couple can live with a single,” he said. “Doesn't it drive you
nuts?”
Whether he addressed the question to Lloyd or to Javitz, they were never quite sure.

“How to disentangle the myths of age?” Javitz sighed dramatically, sitting on our deck two summers ago, waving his cigarette.

I responded in kind: “How to explain to a world fixated on the paradigm of two the power of three?”

These are the discussions we have, late into the night. I laugh at our pomposity. We like the sound of our voices in the stillness of a purple night as we solve the problems of the world. I turn these conversations into essays for the queer and alternative press. That's how I make my living these days, as a freelance journalist. I roll the ideas around in my head, like dough in sugar and cinnamon, thinking them through in odd snatches of the day, at the grocery store, at the gym, between tricks or loads of laundry. Then I bring them up again with Javitz and Lloyd: “I was thinking ...” I say, and we pontificate some more.

This is who we are. This is my family-audacious maybe, but constant, a fact that nourishes me. I will not allow what Lloyd said to me that Sunday morning last month to threaten the constancy we've created. I will not grant it the power to do so, no matter how much Javitz might say I'm denying the reality of the situation. I will not lose my family, not again. When my mother turned her back on me, I lost the family into which I was born. But it's what came after that matters: Javitz, Lloyd, and I, a new family, ill served by definition, constantly changing and accommodating itself. Three working-class boys—Javitz from the Bronx, Lloyd from a farm in Iowa, me from a dried-up little factory town in Connecticut—living beyond our means in a succession of summer houses in the rarefied resort of Provincetown, trusting always in the sustaining power of three.

The images are there, at the flick of a switch in my mind. Javitz on the back of a motorcycle, riding sidesaddle, being dropped off at seven a.m. by a trick on his way to work. “Who d'you think you are, worrying us all night?” Lloyd asks, only half-teasing. Javitz shakes his long black hair, the curly ringlets still wet from a shower at the biker's house. He adores the attention: “I've never ridden on the back of a motorcycle before,” he gushes. “I felt like Nancy Sinatra in
The Wild Angels.”

Javitz with a tray of raspberry croissants as we get up in the morning: Lloyd and me, Lloyd with a trick, me with Eduardo or Raphael or the kid I picked up at Spiritus whose name I failed to get. “Good morning,” Javitz says, and the tricks stare in wonder. “Would you like a cup of coffee? Or do you
drink
coffee?” Only
I
get the dig.

“Who is that man?” the tricks ask later, as I kiss them goodbye and send them on their way. I just smile—for how can I tell them?

I feel caught in a sticky web that connects two separate worlds: the boom and the X generations, pre- and post-Stonewall, positive and negative, old and young. But what am I then, if not either? Javitz once said it was my role to bridge the gap, to connect with the children and tell them about what came before. This strange link that I provide, this tenuous grip on history: what good will it do when we too—those nebulous in-betweeners—are gone? Once. I thought only Javitz's generation would disappear, but I was wrong. The boys I knew when I was a boy, the ones who first invited me onto the dance floor, back in those heady quixotic days when nobody believed it would last this long—they're disappearing too. Sometimes I think I see them, standing there among the children. I'll spot someone on the other side of the dance floor, and my breath will catch, thinking it's Gordon, or Stick, my high-school buddies, the ones I came out with, the kids with feathered-back hair and wide ties whose faces, even now, stare eternally in black and white from the glossy pages of our yearbooks. But I'm wrong: it's never them. I wonder if they're waiting for me to join them, if that's why I've seen them.

Yet that's not what I fear anymore, not really. I don't know if I have the virus. Last time I was tested I didn't—but that was five years ago. Neither Lloyd nor I plan on being retested. If Lloyd were to get sick, I imagine, that would be that, the end of the line for me. What was it that the Wicked Witch of the West said: “The last to go will see the first three go before her”? That's the horror of it all, right there: not that I too may die, but that I may go on living, by myself.

Ernie and Javitz laugh, bandying about names I don't know, names of the infected. I withdraw a little, watching the icy rain splatter against the window. The snow is turning into sleet. I wonder if Lloyd is home yet, if whatever crisis he was summoned to defuse is over, if yet another life has been saved because of my lover's quick actions. I think of Lloyd and grab hold of the thought, trying to keep it there, in my mind. I wonder what tonight might have been like if Javitz and I hadn't split up, if Lloyd had never come into my life, if I were still standing here tonight as Javitz's lover and not as Lloyd's. It is unbearable to comprehend: Lloyd is the last tether to the boat, the last rope that feels secure, and I will not admit that there are frays on that rope, right at the very top, no matter how much Javitz encourages me to talk about it. It's my fault, really, for sharing with him the conversation Lloyd and I had that Sunday morning not long ago, a conversation that now feels absurd and unreal, especially standing here in Javitz's hospital room listening to the rain.

“David—you are
bad
!”

Ernie and Javitz laugh outrageously at some ribald joke, the punchline of which escapes me. It's the first time Javitz has laughed like that in weeks, yet their laughter is alienating. I retreat farther into the windowsill, my nose nearly against the cold glass.

“Well, Jeff, it's been a pleasure, as ever,” Ernie says suddenly, and I jump a little before I turn, face-to-face with his sincerity. “I've got to head back, before they close the roads.” I shake his hand. He's a good man.

“Call Howard when you get back,” Javitz instructs. “Tell him to find us something.
Anything.”
Howard's our real-estate agent, a buddy of Ernie's.

“Even a place with no morning sun?” Ernie asks.

“Oh,” Javitz sighs, “I suppose we'd survive.”

“You got it, girl.” Ernie blows a kiss and then he's gone.

I turn to Javitz. “How you doing?”

“Tired.”

I take his hand. He's quiet again, as he has often been with me of late. Laughter for Ernie, questions about dead tricks for me. I realize the nurse must think we're lovers.

He falls asleep within minutes. His breathing is so much easier than it's been for the last few nights, the infection in his lungs apparently beaten. Maybe tomorrow Lloyd and I
will
come to pick him up, and maybe next week we all
will
pile into the car and head up the Cape, searching for another house and another year, grateful but also fatigued by yet another chance, another summer, always wondering how many more, how many more. But this summer, none of us will be young.

Me least of all.

Provincetown, June 1994

Eduardo sleeps like an angel, a child actor in a Nativity play. My heart is breaking, as I knew it would. Tomorrow he'll be gone, and I'll miss him terribly, as if he were the greatest love of my life. And maybe he is. Maybe all of them are. Raphael, from last summer, became an ideal only after he'd returned home to Montreal. Javitz remembers that while Raphael was still here in Provincetown, I'd twice not wanted to take his calls. But once he was gone, he became the boy who got away, the boy who stole my heart, the boy I never was.