Jeff
I
can’t believe how much I miss him.
Good God, Jeff, you’re fucked up,
I scold myself.
You are so fucked up.
I’ve been talking to myself like that for weeks. Every time I come back into this apartment, I start missing him again, and I have to yell at myself.
It’s good that he’s gone! It was a dead-end relationship! You were going to end it anyway!
I sigh and switch on the light. Mr. Tompkins makes a mad dash for his dish, and I shake some food into it. I’ve just gotten back from Connecticut, where I took Jeffy trick-or-treating around my mother’s neighborhood. He went as Batman. Every time someone opened their door, instead of “trick or treat” he’d say “I’m Batman” in a surprisingly good imitation of Michael Keaton. His performance usually earned him an extra Milky Way or roll of Smarties.
My voice-mail light is blinking. As usual, my heart races. Maybe he’s called. Maybe it’s him. Picking up my phone, I press my code for messages.
But it’s just Lloyd. “Jeff,” he says. “If you don’t get in too late, give me a call.”
I hang up, angry with myself.
Just Lloyd
. How fucked up was that? A couple of months ago I was pining for Lloyd. Now we’re in regular contact and I’m missing some mystery man who ran out of my life.
A mystery man whose smile used to melt my heart.
Who once sang me a silly love song on the street.
I look over at the clock. Is 11:30 too late to call Lloyd back? I know he usually goes to sleep early, since he gets up at the crack of dawn to make muffins for the guests. But it’s Halloween, after all, and Henry’s in Provincetown with him. He and Henry do
everything
together these days. How
nice
for them. Maybe Henry got Lloyd to go out to the A House, and now they’re dancing shirtless together, maybe even on X.
I hope they’re having a
fabulous
time.
All I really want to do is go to bed. I’m beat. I’m late getting back because Mom had insisted I stay for supper, Jeffy seconding her with an energetic refrain of “Please, Unca Jeff!” So I gave in. Mom whipped us up some tuna fish heavy with mayonnaise, Campbell’s baked beans, and instant butter-flavored mashed potatoes. We sat around the same kitchen table where, as a kid, I’d consumed many similar nutritiously suspect meals. Still, it tasted yummy.
But her comfort food offered no palliative for what ailed me. If anything, my time around Mom’s kitchen table left me even more depressed, for it pointed up the absence of any real family in my life. As much as I loved Jeffy and Ann Marie, what was missing were people with whom I could be
real.
People with whom I could be
myself
. People who knew my history, my culture, my life—and
understood
it. Driving back to Boston, I cried, for maybe the tenth time that week, thinking about Javitz. Odd, isn’t it? I’ve been crying more about him in the last few months than I did for the entire first three and a half years after his death.
Lloyd says I’d been repressing my grief. Holding it back. Pretending it wasn’t there. I’ll tell you one thing: it sure as hell is a lot easier
not
to cry than to actually do it. Crying takes guts. I’d always heard you felt better after allowing yourself a good, long cry. Well, that’s
bullshit.
Each time I cry I feel worse. The memories, the pain, the guilt. The tears bring the emotions to the surface, where they get all wedged up in the bottleneck between my chest and my throat.
Sometimes I feel as if I’m having a heart attack. Or at least heartburn. Driving back to Boston, I had to pull over on the Mass Pike and buy some Maalox.
But I don’t want you feeling sorry for me. Please don’t go there. I’m very aware that it’s not a pretty picture that I’m painting, and if you’ve figured anything out about me by now, it’s that I have a decided preference for pretty pictures when it comes to myself. Yet there’s not much I can do to beautify the situation. Ever since coming back from San Francisco, I’ve been a mess. My friendship with Henry is over. I’d fucked up with Anthony. And my feelings about Lloyd are all jumbled in my head all over again. You’d think on some level I’d be glad that Anthony’s gone. That sure, I’d feel some compassion for him, and hope that he’s okay, but by bolting out of my life, he’d made things so much simpler, allowing me to concentrate on rebuilding my relationship with Lloyd. After all, that’s what I’d really been wanting all along, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
I think of Lloyd and Henry together at the Russian River. I picture them chest to chest on the dance floor in Provincetown. Is this simply one more episode that demonstrates Lloyd’s long-standing phobia of commitment? Had he, just as we were reconnecting yet again, suddenly made a jump to Henry, just as he’d once jumped to Drake, and then to Eva? And if so, how ironic is that? Lloyd’s presence was certainly as much of an impetus for Anthony’s beeline out of my life as any revelation I’d made about Mrs. Riley.
And, if I’m being honest with myself, how much of Lloyd’s jump to Henry was influenced by my own lingering attachment to Anthony, a reality Lloyd could not have failed to observe?
I walk into the kitchen and flip on the light. On my refrigerator is the little card Anthony had given me months ago. I’d found it in my drawer on my first day back here after getting home from San Francisco.
To Jeff,
the card read.
With thanks for taking me in. Happy V Day. Love, Anthony
.
I close my eyes. I can see him on the sidewalk of New Orleans, singing me that ridiculous song. I can see him at Disney World, his eyes all aglow, shouting “Happy Gay Disney Days!” to every faggot he saw. I can see him asleep next to me in my bed, the sheet rising rhythmically over his chest as he breathed, his full lips slightly parted, a speck of sleep stuck in his lashes....
“Oh, God,” I say, and the grief is physical again. I find the Maalox, gave it a shake, and swallow a generous gulp right from the bottle.
I walk into my office and sit down at my desk. My face is reflected in my dark computer screen.
We’re just links in a chain of sugar daddies, my friend. I’d advise you not to get too attached.
Did I really mean no more to Anthony than Randy Phillips? Than that nameless guy from Albany? Than whoever he’s surely taken up with by now?
“It can’t be,” I say aloud. Anthony
loved
me. He said so, many times. He wasn’t pretending. There was never anything insincere about Anthony.
Never
.
I open the file on my desk. From my pocket I withdraw a piece of paper that I plan to add to it. Something I discovered today in Connecticut, at the end of a frustrating day. Yes, I’ve kept up the search. Something’s compelled me to do so. Anthony might be gone, but my obsession to find the truth is not. So I took advantage of being in Connecticut for the day, making my first stop at probate court. But Robert Riley’s will had proved of no help; he’d left everything to his mother, not naming Anthony as any beneficiary.
So next I called the state’s gay advocacy organization, hoping somebody there could tell me something about the Riley case. But the young kid who answered the phone said he had been five in 1986; he knew nothing. He did give me the name of a veteran gay activist, and I’d left a message on her machine. But she’d never called back.
It was at the State Department of Public Health that I finally found something, and looking at it again now, I’m still not sure how it fits. Anthony had said his father was dead. I’d already written to Lake Bluff, Illinois, which he’d claimed as his hometown, and found no death of any man there with the last name of Sabe from 1969 to the present. I paid quite generously for that search, too. Of course, his father’s last name didn’t have to be Sabe, but it was all I had to go on.
Combing through the Connecticut indexes myself saved me some cash, but almost cost me too much time. The office was getting ready to close for the day when the entry finally jumped out at me:
SABE, ANTHONY, died 1-5-95.
I quickly paid for a copy of the record without really looking at it. I didn’t want to be late meeting Jeffy for trick-or-treating.
It wasn’t until later, as Mom was whipping up her instant potatoes, that I had time to look at the document fully. And what I saw made me exclaim out loud.
“What is it?” Ann Marie asked.
I couldn’t answer right away. “Just something . . . I’m working on for a story.”
“I’m glad you’re writing again, Jeff,” she said.
I looked again at the words written in the space for cause of death.
Pneumocystis, as a result of HIV infection
.
If this was Anthony’s father, he had died of AIDS.
My eyes glanced up to the top of the document.
Anthony Sabe.
PLACE OF BIRTH:
Lebanon
. Hadn’t Anthony said he thought the name was of Middle Eastern extraction?
But was it his father? The age worked: the guy was born in 1946, but he was also listed as “Never Married.” Was
this
Anthony Sabe gay, too? My Anthony had nothing good to say about his father. Was it because he was gay? How did all of this
fit?
A thought strikes me as I sit here. What if it’s
this
Anthony Sabe who lived with Robert Riley, and not
my
Anthony? Allowing for that possibility suddenly makes all the other pieces of the puzzle fit more logically. It explains better the relationship between the “roommates,” given that they were roughly the same age. It would explain Mrs. Riley’s apparent memory of the Anthony who lived with her son.
But if it was his
father
who lived with Robert Riley, why did
Anthony
carry around Riley’s picture? There must have been
some
connection between the two. Had Anthony known his father was gay, and known Riley, too?
And why was Anthony so fair if his father was from Lebanon? Perhaps his mother had been of northern European stock, or maybe he’d been adopted, or maybe . . .
I’m moving too fast here. A good reporter acts on hunches, but mere speculation can’t be used without absolute proof. I have no evidence that the guy in this death certificate has any connection whatsoever with my Anthony. What I need is a newspaper obituary. Hopefully, it will list this guy’s survivors. Maybe it’d lead me to Anthony’s mother. . . .
“What am I doing?”
I sit back in my chair.
“Jeff O”Brien,” I say out loud, “you have become a man possessed.”
I stand up, walking back out into the living room. Mr. Tompkins has reclaimed his spot on the couch since Anthony left, pleased as punch that the intruder has left our midst. I sit down beside him and stroke him behind his ears the way he loves. He starts to purr.
Why am I still pursuing this mystery? What would I say to Anthony’s mother if I
did
find her? What did it
matter
? I’m being crazy. Anthony’s
gone
. Out of my life. Finding out who he was and what his story had been is really moot now.
But there’s no denying that the story has seized hold of my heart and mind. Is that what I really miss—the
story?
Not the man? Already I’ve banged out twenty or so pages, recounting our meeting, our friendship, and the mounting mystery of his life. I have no idea if or where I’ll ever sell it; it’s merely a way to return to my craft, a way through the terrifying blankness of my creative soul. I am indeed writing again, for the first time in a long, long while. Maybe there’s some connection to my tears. Maybe bottling up my grief also bottled up everything else.
I pace back into my office, just as the clock chimes midnight. I open the file on my desk and withdraw a stapled set of papers, taking them with me as I settle into my rocking chair.
They’re the newspaper articles on Riley’s murder and its aftermath, arranged chronologically. I’ve gone over them so many times, trying to find something. Trying to understand . . .
Most fascinating to me is the account Brian Murphy gave of the night of the murder. He confessed to police, a sworn statement that eventually got him a lighter sentence than Frankie Ortiz. In his confession, Brian comes across as more of a follower than a leader, part of the reason he’ll be up for a parole in a few more years.
I read Murphy’s account for probably the twentieth time. The quarterback of the football team at South Catholic High School, Brian was a popular kid, with girlfriends galore. They were all “good kids”—all of the “Reformers”—their goodness attested to in glowing reports from their principal, their parish priests, their coaches, and their teachers. Sure, Brian Murphy’s father had served time in prison for gambling and extortion, and Ortiz’s older brother had a long history of drug arrests, but these kids, their supporters insisted, were
good
boys. Solid
achievers.
All they had been doing was working off a little aggression, having a little
fun.
Some priest was actually quoted as saying, “Boys will be boys, after all.”
“Yes,” I murmur, reading through the papers. “That they will be.”