Читать книгу Disasterama! - Alvin Orloff - Страница 14

BACK IN CALIFORNIA, MICHAEL AND I spent a rotten year watching my father die, then set about making up for lost fun. That was us teaching everyone at the house party how to dance the Shimmy Shimmy; us tripping on ’shrooms at the Frightwig concert; and us again, squabbling over nothing as we stomped through the supermarket at 3 a.m. looking for Graham crackers. To preserve energy and cash for our nightly revels we worked low-commitment jobs—Michael boxing stuff up in a warehouse, me adding numbers on a calculator in a gray cubicle—and lived rent-free in the cement-floored basement at my parents’ house.

Feckless and discombobulated, yet reasonably content, we paid scant attention to reports that gay men were now contracting pneumonia along with Kaposi’s sarcoma due to something called Gay Related Immune Disorder, or GRID. It seemed unfair that the disease only struck gay men, but not especially worrisome. Only a few hundred gay men out of millions had the disease, a tiny fraction of a single percent. Within a few months the “gay related” in GRID was replaced with “acquired” when the disease started popping up among Haitians, hemophiliacs, and IV drug users, an odd assortment of targets that added mystery to the menace. Still, we didn’t worry. Surely, someone would develop a shot or a pill and the whole mess would be done with and forgotten like polio or Legionnaire’s disease. Right?

Then I ran into an old friend from San Francisco and learned that Juan was dead. Juan would have been my first boyfriend, except I never let him call me that. We’d dated for a few months (in San Francisco before I moved to New York to be with Michael) after meeting at a house party full of guys in their twenties. I, a mere lad of nineteen, found these older men a bit decrepit, but also appealingly sophisticated. They drank fancy cocktails instead of the discount beer I was used to and played the stereo softly enough to allow conversation. I’d been awkwardly pretending to examine the vintage Barbie collection on the mantelpiece when a hefty young man with a shy smile came over and held out a drink of some sort. “Hi. I’m Juan. You looked thirsty.” He wore pointy black boots, black peg-leg slacks, and a modishly striped dress shirt, all of which combined attractively with his floppy, straight black hair, cinnamon skin, and sultry, Mayan features. He reminded me of the guys from Question Mark & the Mysterians, a Mexican-American garage rock band from the 60s whose hit “96 Tears” I considered (and still consider) an achievement on par with Mount Rushmore, penicillin, and the moon landing. Before I knew it, Juan and I were back at his place.

Making whoopee with Juan was . . . nice, I suppose. Adequate. Acceptable. Much as I admired his style, I didn’t find his body sexy. Still, any sex was way better than the absolutely none I was used to in those pre-New York days. In the morning we traded numbers and I left his apartment feeling very much a Man of The World. We went out again a few nights later and again soon after that. Somehow, without my quite noticing, we became an item. Although I wasn’t really into Juan, I did admire his calm, patient demeanor, that he was so clearly un-rattled by the vagaries of existence. He worked as a sales clerk in a downtown department store but didn’t feel discontented by his lowly station in life, probably because he’d grown up dirt poor. He seldom spoke of his early life so I only discovered this because he once made a passing reference to working as a field hand after high school. He was one of the downtrodden farmworkers on whose behalf my liberal family had boycotted grapes in the ’60s. Fascinated, I demanded to know more.

“Were your parents immigrants?”

“Yup. And they took me to Mexico a few times. It was great. You could eat mangoes right off the tree and get all sticky then dive into the river to rinse off.”

“Do you speak Spanish?

“It’s my first language.”

“Why don’t you have an accent?”

“The nuns in Catholic school beat it out of me.”

Despite his flawless Anglo diction, Juan was proud of his heritage and tried to educate me about Mexican culture. Diego Rivera and Pancho Villa! Salsa and serapes! Alas, I had no interest in anything that wasn’t new wave and preferably from London. Racist? Let’s just say ethnocentric. If my brattish indifference hurt Juan’s feelings, he kept it to himself. He did harbor some ethnic resentment, though. At the time, a lot of white people were terrified of so-called “cholos”: tough Mexican guys with crude tattoos, slicked-back hair, pleated pants, and pointy shoes who loitered about on street corners, presumably up to no good. Juan had no tattoos and his pleated pants made him look more like David Bowie as the Thin White Duke than a Barrio Baddie, but apparently he scared white people anyway. “When they see me and flinch I glare at them real mean and they skitter away,” he said in a chipper tone that couldn’t quite hide his hurt feelings. “It’s hilarious.”

Two or three times a week I’d join Juan at his small, tidy apartment in the Polk Gulch, the walls of which he’d decorated with picture sleeves from new wave 45s: The Suburban Lawns, Missing Persons, The Urban Verbs. We’d head out to meet Michael at The Stud or see bands, share a few beers, a few laughs, maybe dance a bit, then go back to his place and tumble into bed. A normal, healthy relationship. And yet, in Juan’s presence I always heard a faint echo of Peggy Lee singing, “Is that all there is?”

After a few months of dating I’d grown restless and told Juan (oh, cruel youth, by telephone!) that we were through. Two weeks later he turned up on my doorstep with pleading eyes. “Can we get back together?” Juan’s eyes naturally looked as if they’d been rimmed with kohl and his long lashes long reminded me of peacock’s tails. Who could say no to eyes like that? I took him back. A month later, out of nothing more than sheer boredom, I dumped him for good.

And now Juan was dead. “How’d it happen?” I asked. “Was it AIDS?”

My friend shook his head. “No, no. It was something else. I’m not sure what, but definitely not that.” It didn’t seem impossible to me Juan had died from one of those rare diseases with a hard-to-remember Latin name, but I couldn’t help wondering if my friend wasn’t covering up the truth. A lot of people who got sick—a word that with the tiniest emphasis suddenly meant dying of AIDS—were lying about it to avoid being shunned by society. Nobody knew how the disease spread and fears were running amok. A friend told me about her out of town relatives refusing to go with her to a bar in San Francisco for fear of catching AIDS from the glasses. Michael once got sent home from his job because a co-worker felt pretty sure the tiny cold sore on his lip meant he had you-know-what. And the newspapers were full of reports about sick people who’d been hounded from schoolrooms, fired from jobs, or disowned by friends and family.

Of course, not everyone believed AIDS was an infectious disease. A radical Gay Libber of my acquaintance insisted AIDS was obviously government-sponsored germ warfare designed to wipe out undesirables. A spiritual friend conjectured that AIDS resulted from the hateful prayers of Christian fundamentalists creating a disturbance in the psychic dimension so powerful it was manifesting on the physical plane. My holistic doctor theorized gay men were expiring from the excessive use of the antibiotics used to treat sexually transmitted disease. I didn’t know what to think, but for the first time in my life, a young person I’d known intimately was gone. Cue tiny alarm bells.

Perhaps because nobody invited me to Juan’s funeral, his death never seemed totally real to me. As a result, I didn’t so much mourn him as miss him the way you would a friend who’s moved abroad. Now and then something would remind me of our time together and I’d feel a twinge of sadness. Mostly, though, his death left me feeling creepy, hollow, and irked with the universe.