Читать книгу All The Young Men - Ruth Coker Burks - Страница 11

Chapter Five

The calls would come either late night or early morning. I’d grown used to hospitals calling me, but these men were on their own. I don’t know how they got my number, but they were told I was someone who might help.

The phone would often ring at first light, like they’d tossed and turned waiting for the sun and couldn’t take it anymore. The calls came so regularly, I had to put a phone by the bed so I wouldn’t wake Allison.

Most of them knew what was coming but didn’t know what to do. They’d been living with a boyfriend who died or just taking care of a friend. Sometimes I would say hello, and all they could do was sob.

“I’m here,” I’d say. And I’d listen to them cry for an hour, because they couldn’t get it out or they didn’t know how. “It’s okay, just go ahead and cry. And if you can talk then you can talk. And if you can’t, well, you know, you let me know when you want to hang up because I won’t.”

There was no medicine, so all I could offer was information. They were usually planning to return to Arkansas from someplace else, and I had to teach myself to stop immediately saying, “Don’t.” But most of them couldn’t get a doctor to see them even where they were. They were literally thrown out of clinics because they were gay. Some didn’t know the most basic information about what was happening to them. They were sleeping on somebody’s couch, maybe somebody they were taking care of. And they went from sofa to sofa until they ran out of friends who were well enough to take care of them. I would meet them at the bus station in Malvern, a thirty-minute ride to Hot Springs. They carried their lives in a ratty suitcase or box. Often they were so sick they needed to go to the hospital right away, and I’d take them the forty-five minutes straight to Little Rock. I would take people to a Hot Springs hospital only if it was an emergency, and even then, I would tell myself that I could make up the fifteen-minute difference from Malvern if I floored it.

So many arrived thinking Mama would take them back. Sometimes I would go to their homes with them, mostly just to save me a trip of driving back out there when she wouldn’t. The mothers were the hardest on them, the fathers off to the side. Most of these young men were raised Pentecostal, and Pentecostals just hated gay people. The churches were so powerful and set where the family stood in life. The women had probably seen an example made of someone else, about some smaller defiance. Men can sometimes do the deciding about who is exiled, but it’s women who do the day-to-day work of shunning. They knew they’d lose everything if they showed mercy to their sons.

I went to a home one night with a young man from Mount Ida. Douglas was so terrified of telling his parents that he asked me to come inside with him. He was slight, and his nerves came in these little seizures of all-body shivers. At the door, I saw why. His mother was as short as him, but puffed out. Her whole presence was angry and red like a thumb that got hit by a hammer.

She eyed me up and down. Douglas told her he had something important to tell them and shook so violently I grabbed his arm and moved closer to him.

“Can we come in and sit down?” I asked.

“Of course,” his mother said, turning to move fast, like she wanted to make the place look more presentable. She moved a newspaper off a couch, and as we sat she cleared glasses from side tables and brought them into the kitchen. A toilet flushed, and his dad came out from the hall. She told him their son had something to tell them.

Douglas said nothing, so I did. “You have a lovely home,” I lied. “I see why he wanted to see you.” I didn’t see, but that wasn’t for me to see anyway.

He told them. Blurted it out with a spasm that scared me. I put my hand on Douglas’s shoulder to keep him on the earth. They looked like they’d been whiplashed.

“I thought—” she stopped. She looked at my hand on her son’s shoulder. I had raised her hopes. I was supposed to be the problem. Pregnant. Or just some hussy in her twenties getting her dumb son in trouble. But at least that would have proved he wasn’t gay.

“Why did you do this to us?” she hissed. She stood, and his whole body flinched next to mine. How many times had the gay been beaten out of him? He stood, his shoulders hunched down in self-protection.

“Your soul is rot,” she said. She motioned to her husband, who was shaking his head, his lower lip pulled back to bare his teeth. A coward trying to look tough.

“I always knew it,” she said. “But to come back and—”

“Okay,” I said, walking to the door. “You’ve made yourself clear. Thank you. He wanted you to know.” Douglas didn’t say anything else; he was fading.

In the car, Douglas still said nothing. “I’m sorry,” I said, which was about all I could say. He nodded. I told him he could stay the night at my house. It was Friday, and Allison was at her daddy’s. In the morning we’d go to one of the tourist courts in Hot Springs. Tourist courts were like motor lodges, and there were lots of one-room apartments along Ouachita and Park because so many people came to town to take the baths.

I kept turning that phrase she said over in my mind: “Your soul is rot.”

I put out extra sheets for him to make the couch more comfortable. I got up in the night to check on him. The sheets were still in the pile, folded, and he slept in the clothes he was wearing. Even sleeping, he seemed to be keeping his body as small as possible, not taking up any space.

More men called me before they came back, and when they arrived, I brought them to the tourist courts for a cheap place to live as long as they needed it. From working with Bonnie, I knew my way around the housing assistance program. They began to let people with AIDS get disability benefits from social security, so then I started getting them on that too. These were men who’d had jobs where they had lived, entire lives. They had invested in the system that spurned them. The only thing I had to do was get a signed note from a doctor. I mean, a note. It could have been on the back of a matchbox, and all it had to say was, “I’m his doctor, and I think he has AIDS.”

There were two gay men in town who I thought would help me, but they didn’t. They had jobs in social services, and the first few times, I tried to get in their lines, but I made them nervous. They were afraid people would find out they were gay. They were hiding in plain sight. It just went unmentioned because they were fun at galas and the Fine Arts Ball. I went to those parties too, with my best friend Sandy, and whatever guy and his friend she dragged in. Some guy would buy me a three-dollar drink and think he could cop a feel in return. So, with all the time I spent ignoring Sandy’s guys, I had plenty of time to watch these two men as they socialized, perfectly acceptable because they played along. I didn’t expect them to give some secret signal that I could use to get better treatment, but I was surprised at how much they wanted nothing to do with me or the guys I brought in. When I saw them, they started to look past me.

But we kept going. I would coach my guys for each line and each pencil pusher like it was a performance. A game we had to play in order to get things done. We were a team, and I treated them like stars. “Okay, we’re going to the food-stamp office now,” I would say. “The only answers you give them are Yes, No, I don’t know. And if they get funny, I’ll fill in for you.” We’d walk out, reviewing the performance, and I would tell them how proud I was of them.

When I met them sick in the hospital, it was too late. But out there in the world, I seized on every bit of joy I could scrape out of the pan. These men had lived on the margins so long that coming into the light to ask for help scared them to death. I had to walk them through the steps, keeping things fun.

I realized this included death certificates. I had often been asked to fill out information for death certificates in hospitals, when I didn’t know the most basic information about the men. I wanted them to have a death certificate so people would know that they had lived and they had died—they were here. Because they at least deserved that. They couldn’t be “nobody’s nothing” after what they had been through. At one point in early 1987 I had a few guys from all over, and I brought them together. I ordered pizza, and as we ate and laughed, I fired out questions like a game-show host. “What’s your mother’s maiden name?” “Where were you born, anyway?” I was always helping people with forms, so this wasn’t that unusual, and I just said it was for the hospital, “just to have.”

I wanted them to be counted, to have their lives matter, and I wanted them to have control over their destinies, no matter how limited they might seem to others. If I felt they were strong enough, I brought them to Files Cemetery and asked them to tell me where they’d like to be buried. I’d put so many on top of my family’s graves, but those were the hospital patients I barely had a chance to know. And now there were people like Douglas, who were coming to an uneasy acceptance that it would happen someday, even though I knew we both realized it was soon.

John, Danny, Neil. I walked them around and told them who the people were and some history about them. “Or maybe you want to be closer to the road so you know what’s going on.” The storytellers liked that one, and the quiet ones often chose to be under the oak. But after I gave them the lay of the land, I went quiet. “You go out and wherever it feels right, you stand there, and that’s where you’ll be.”

I’d write it down in my journal and honor their wishes. Douglas chose the oak.

Allison and I were at the church potluck, and the unspoken competition was in full swing. Everybody wanted to be the one that just wowed ’em all with a sweet potato casserole. I felt exempt, because I already knew I made the best fried chicken anyone had ever thrown a lip over. It would bring a tear to your mama’s eye, it was so good. I put the flour and the salt and pepper and all of that in a paper bag, and I rolled the chicken in it. And then I dipped the chicken in egg and put it back in, to make that double crust. My mother was a terrible cook but made sure I knew how to cook, because she wanted me to get married to that tire-retread guy. I had to be able to feed him.

Marie was hosting, so she had to put on chi-chi fa-fa airs, having just had her kitchen remodeled. The women all had to take turns oohing and aahing at it, but I got that out of the way quick. The men sat around, all full bellies and small talk about Rotary business.

Near the end of the evening, I was in the living room with Allison when I heard a god-awful noise in the kitchen. I went in to find Marie standing at the sink shoveling food down the drain.

“It just gets rid of everything for you,” she said, trying to scream pretty over the noise. It was a garbage disposal. People acted like they’d never seen such a wonder.

“Well, that’s not garbage,” I said. The women turned to look at me, half-smiles cocked so I’d have a chance to clarify my position in a more pleasing manner. I tried. “I mean, we can plate that up . . . not waste it.”

Marie paused and turned off the disposal. “Of course, Ruth,” she said, her show interrupted. She looked at Allison. “If you all didn’t get enough to eat—”

“No, we did,” I said. “Everything was just lovely. And you have to give me the recipe for those Swedish meatballs, because Allison just loved them.”

“I did not,” Allison said, insulted. “I said they were—”

“Oh yes, you did. And, Mabel, this good coffee cake. I just mean we can share all this.”

I’d done this before for Bonnie and some of the elders in the town after big parties. Like Miss Ann and old Miss McKissek. And Melba, of course, who always seemed so prim, just a sweet little old Lutheran lady, until you learned she’d learned all those manners running a St. Louis brothel in the 1950s.

Like after the Fine Arts Ball, I’d go in the kitchen and chat up whoever catered it, box things up, and take it around so people stuck at home could be part of the big night. I’d tell them where I’d been and who I saw. “Here’s the food, and try this, it’s really good.” Melba and I would sit in her kitchen, and she’d read my fortune with regular playing cards, laying out my future on the tiny yellow checks of her plastic tablecloth.

I knew how much sharing that food meant to people, so why not do it here too? I started packing things up before she could say no. “Marie, you have all these paper plates,” I said. “The good kind, of course, nice and sturdy. I would expect nothing less! Doris, will you pass me that foil?” I got them all enlisted in helping me, whether they wanted to or not.

Then I saw my fried chicken. Practically untouched. “I guess nobody liked the chicken,” I said. I’d only had a little so that there would be plenty for everyone. I knew it was good.

“There was just so much food,” Marie said quickly.

“Well, I’ll find a home for it,” I said, just as quick, putting the foil top right back over the big pan. Allison and I started a relay team to my car, and the men began helping because anything that was going to get them home quicker was fine with them. Soon my back seat was full, and we drove off.

“Hold on,” I said to Allison. I stopped by the post office and reached over to the glove compartment. I’d started keeping thank-you notes in there with stamps and a blue pen after getting those donations at Christmas. I’d even sent one to that awful woman at Hallmark.

“A Southern lady knows the power of a thank-you note,” I said to Allison. “Whoever Marie gets in the mail first gets invited back.” If you did it right, you also had a detail that would make them think of you every time they saw it. “From the minute I stepped on your beautiful lawn, I was just stunned by the home you keep,” I said aloud, writing against the steering wheel. Marie needed to be better than all her neighbors, so that would be good.

I went to lick the stamp and Allison stopped me. “No, me,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “But put it on the envelope. It’s not a sticker for you, okay?”

“Ta dah,” she said, proud of her work.

“Good job,” I said. “Now run it to the mailbox so we can go bring this food to people.”

We spent an hour driving around, stopping in on my guys who were living at the tourist courts and also at the homes of old Miss Ann and Melba. Lonely people tend to be night owls, so I knew they’d be up. We were like reverse trick-or-treaters, ringing the bell to give them something good. “You don’t even have to heat up the chicken,” I told everyone. “Those meatballs need all the help they can get, but that cake will forgive any sin.”

I’d watched all these men just waste away, and I thought that if I could keep weight on them, they’d have a head start and maybe stay ahead of it. I was tired of waiting for them to die. I was actually trying to help them live instead.

I started cooking for them, and on a day off I would make enough meals for the next week. It wasn’t easy on my budget, but I could cook anything, and I was inventive. My next-door neighbor had a huge backyard garden, as much as his front yard with the house on it. In the summertime, he was always looking for takers for his extra vegetables. I would cook them on their own or use them to stretch meatloaf as far as your eye could see. In winter, he had plenty of collard greens and turnips to spare. I wasn’t fond of turnips myself, but a lot of the guys I looked after were from the country, so that was a taste of home. I also didn’t mind stopping if I saw a tree that was heavy with peaches and grabbing a bunch to make a peach cobbler for everybody. I can’t even guess how many blackberries I picked, or apples, which were everywhere from August until the edge of winter.

Or I’d go up the country to Collier Springs, because the old-timers swore by the nutrition in the watercress that grew wild in shallow streams. You needed to find it growing within a few feet of a fresh spring, so you’d know it wasn’t contaminated, and you had to watch out for snakes. They loved to make a home curled up in the watercress, so the trick was to bring a rake and lift the plants out of the water first. Give the snake a chance to move out and find a new home before you stuck your hand right in.

My cousin out on Amity Road had cattle, and he’d call me when he sold a cow. “Come out, girl,” he’d say. “I got something for you.” After breaking it down for his customer, he’d have all kinds of hamburger left over, and the cuts of meat nobody else wanted. I could also do that at McClard’s—the most famous barbecue restaurant in Hot Springs—asking politely if they had any ham bones or scrap meat to make a big pot of greens or, even better, beans. White beans cooked with a big old ham bone from McClard’s just needed a bay leaf thrown in to be magic for my guys. Sometimes they gave me enough scrap meat that I could make people pork sandwiches, delivering them the same barbecue that people paid the big bucks to eat. “Here it is,” I’d say. “You don’t even have to wait in line for a table. It’s delivered right to you with a pot of beans.”

In the fall and winter of deer season, people were excited to show off their kill, and I’d be there with a hand out. “Could I just have a little bit of what you’re not going to use?” I would take the neck bones of anything, because there was always a lot of meat there. But the gold was the marrow that I could draw out to make the bone broth for the ones that were too sick to eat. I’d take a hammer to break up the bones, add one capful of vinegar to really draw out the good stuff, then put it on simmer and let it go all day and night. They could just have that in a mug, and when they weren’t strong enough to hold up a mug, I’d hold it for them. And when even that became too hard, I’d feed them by spoon.

But there were still groceries and things I needed to buy for them. Bonnie and I were at Kroger getting groceries, and she asked me what army I was feeding.

“I’m bringing food ’round to my guys,” I said. “It’s really making a difference. I can just tell.”

“Well, let me help,” she said.

“Bonnie, you are many things, but you are not a cook.”

“I mean my food stamps,” she said. A woman looked over when she heard that and primly nodded, like Bonnie deserved food stamps on account of how she looked.

“Really?” I said.

“Eating’s an aberration for me anyway,” she said; we blended her food for the feeding tube. Bonnie started giving me half her food stamps, and we’d get groceries together.

But they still kept dying. I learned that if hospital patients needed something, I could advocate best during the graveyard shift and weekends. The night shift didn’t care if you hung around or what you did, just don’t get them in trouble: “Burn the place down but have it back together by shift change in the morning.”

Unless it was an emergency, I’d drive my guys to Little Rock. AMI was our backup in Hot Springs. “If AMI burns to the ground, go to Little Rock if I’m not here,” I’d tell them. “Do not go to St. Joe’s.” I had more fights at St. Joe’s than at any other hospital. These doctors, men who I respected from town, would shove a finger in my chest and tell me that I was going to die. That was bad enough, but they told me I was bringing in people who put everyone’s life at risk. Dr. Porter, a cancer doctor who was furious to be stuck with AIDS patients on his oncology floor, thought I was disgusting because I went in the room while he stood at the door. He became enraged with me once because I took a chart into a patient’s isolation room. He was screaming at me so much he was spitting.

“Doctor, there are sick people here,” I said, trying to calm him down.

“Don’t tell me there’s sick people here!” he yelled. I think he truly believed the chart was infected. I know Dr. Porter is why the nurses thought it was okay to leave the trays outside patients’ doors again. It was so upsetting, because now I knew these dying men. I’d fed them, from chicken sandwiches to broth in a mug. And now they were trapped in these places that did the very least for them. I thought I could shame Dr. Porter into doing more.

“Have you heard about the pizza and pancake diet for AIDS patients?” I asked him.

“What are you talking about?”

“Pizza and pancakes—you just slide ’em under the door,” I said. “It’s more than your staff is doing.”

“Well, I don’t want ’em in the hospital.”

“They don’t want to be here.”

“Well, if I get an infection from one of them—”

“Wear a condom when you go in.”

He stalked off. I had these small moments of release, because otherwise the anger was too painful. There were people in the hospital I could do that with, but mostly I tried to act as professional as possible. I called it my doctor costume. “If I have to get the doctor involved . . .” I’d say to nurses.

“Oh, no, you don’t need to get the doctor involved.” Anything but a doctor on their ass. Even an imaginary doctor. And I felt like I was becoming that doctor. I read everything I could, and I was so proud that I was getting the glossary: the cytomegalovirus retinitis that would make some of them blind if they lived long enough; the pneumocystis pneumonia that would fill their lungs and always get them. I kept notes on everything in my planner, noting that the only people I ever saw with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions had been on the coasts. Those were the purple and red blotches that the national news showed people having, in the rare times they talked about AIDS.

I wrote all this down, thinking knowing the names would help them, or at least I would have information when the cavalry or the federal government showed up to take over. It was a way to tame the chaos. To at least feel the power that comes with naming something. But saying “this is pneumocystis” did not help when a guy was shaking so hard because it was impossible to keep him warm, no matter how many blankets you grabbed from other rooms. The only thing you could do sometimes was wrap yourself inside with him just to give him some heat.

Saying “this is cytomegalovirus retinitis” didn’t help the men whose vision had started to go, first in a light fog they could deny and then in a closing curtain that left them blind. To block out the beeps and the chatter of the nurses, I closed the door and read to them. At first, it was the Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts books that gave me comfort and distraction. On my own, I would read three at a time and flip between them like TV channels. But they seemed too superficial, and it seemed cruel to read a cliffhanger to people next to a cliff. I understood why people read the Bible to people who are dying. There’s a sureness to it, a sense that this journey had been done before. But I never wanted to bring the Bible in, because these guys had been hit in the head with it enough.

I started carrying an old tour book for the Florida Keys in my bag with me at all times. I’d had it since I was a kid, and after my daddy died, I read it to escape back to memories of him taking me there. As I read it to my guys, we’d leave whatever hospital we were in, and go somewhere beautiful, away from trouble and worry. They’d all come home to Arkansas, a place that had birthed them but wouldn’t claim them. So we left.

The first stop was always Key Largo. I would read the description and tell them about the times when I was a kid visiting with my dad. Then I’d take them on down to Islamorada, where we swam with dolphins and dived down into the water, which changed from a clear turquoise to cooler blue as we swam through angelfish, darting around us in streaks of electric yellow, purple, and blue, seeming to be lit from within. We’d put our hands on the coral reefs that had grown over shipwrecks, riots of green and purple covering the skeletons of abandoned cargo ships and freighters. We’d dry ourselves on the beaches, which are made from coquina, disintegrated shells that turn to stone after eons and eons.

At the end of the guidebook, we’d made it to Key West. I would skip sections to get there sometimes, if we needed to, pressing the gas on the Seven Mile Bridge on the Overseas Highway to make better time. For us, Key West was a gay mecca we lined with as many gorgeous men as there were lavender and pink flowers. By the time we got there, we had an understanding that there was no judgment. We’d smile or just sigh, and they might point out a guy in short shorts riding by on a bike or a swimmer who looked just like the first guy they ever kissed.

We went someplace else, where they were safe and warm. Where there was nothing to be hidden and nothing wrong with admiring the way the sun shone down on the beauty of men. As if it existed for that very reason—to be admired and loved.