Rat Bohemia Read online

  When Dave talks about his death, I act as though it is without question. I act almost blasé or at least one hundred percent accepting. I try to be relaxed. I’m used to it. I’ve also noticed that I don’t mind getting closer to a person when they are dying of AIDS than I wouldn’t usually get if they were living normally, men that is. That intimacy is worth a great deal to me.

  By the time we got down to Astor Place, Dave was totally exhausted. He sat right on the sidewalk like it was a fat Persian rug. You could see how badly he wanted to go to sleep. I just let him be but kept one eye out at all times, casually, while focusing primarily on the scene down there. The work crew was trying out this new technique, and it was pretty disgusting. I hadn’t seen a technique so blatantly gross before.

  Two guys in regulation blue uniform jumpsuits had dug holes right around Peter Cooper triangle right in front of Cooper Union art school. Then they filled the holes with some kind of noxious water or poison. As the rats scampered to the surface, the guys hit each one over the head with shovels until their skulls caved in. It was so primitive. Like Fred Flintstone and Bam-Bam go hunting. That’s no way to get a rat population the size of ours, I thought. It’s not efficient. But in five hours, the guys had killed at least one hundred and eighty that way. That’s what they needed the barrel for—to throw away the carcasses. The funniest thing was that all the art students were standing around staring, but none of them took a picture. Not a movie, not a sketch. Too busy being surprised, I guess.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I was reading a book called Leaves of Grass. It was all about the way people felt during the last century when Brooklyn was its own city and you had to take a boat to get there. I guess those Brooklynites stood on deck and watched the green grass of their homeland waving long and luxurious in the sun. Compared to the shit of New York, Brooklyn seemed like a forest.

  Today you have to take the D train to get there. It sails right over one of the most beautiful stretches that America has to offer, that highway between the two boroughs where you fly off the bridge watching both sides through that twisted wire weaving. It’s like the sinew under the skin of a body-builder in Chelsea. There’s the black water and the blue sky and Wall Street where all the rich people of the officially beautiful world sit. On the other side are the projects where the saddest and most dangerous beautiful people of the unofficial world exist despite crime statistics, poverty graphs, and the neglect quotient.

  One night I was walking over to see Killer at her place on Avenue C and Seventh Street. I was crossing Avenue B and a Puerto Rican boy about fourteen, already with a mustache, started talking to me.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  I always say “hi,” believing it is an intermediary to death.

  “The cops are at the brick man’s,” he said, warning me and flirting. Nothing is more attractive than a fourteen-year-old boy who holds the key to your death.

  I ignored him, not knowing what he meant until I got halfway down the block as the police were pulling away from the laundry. It was the only store on the block and was freestanding between two vacant lots. There were three churches—one black, one Latin, and one evangelical white. But commercially, only the drug business can survive on that block.

  When I got to the storefront I could see that the police had raided the Laundromat and were now driving away. Just as they took off, before they got to the end of the block, coincidentally at the same moment that I was passing, all the junkies who had been hurting for their drugs, flocked back to the laundry. They came running back like there was a cracked piñata and candy for all. Then, after years of practice at unemployment, welfare, shelters, methadone, and food stamps, they got in an orderly but panicky line while some guy sold heroin from the top of the stoop. The girls in that line were about fifteen years younger than me. Their hair was still long and black. One wore a stylish red beret. They lined up back to front like refugees in Life magazine waiting for rice. They held out their hands, palms up, waiting to catch their drugs. You can’t see this from the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Later, I was so disappointed that the Puerto Rican man-boy would think I was buying heroin just because I’m white. It means I’ve failed. Is that what white people do in poor neighborhoods? Is that the only thing we do? Guess I don’t look like a social worker, drug dealer, or TV camera crew. I just look like a girl who wants to get high. Why else would I ever be here? Frankly, I’m too embarrassed to even consider being a junkie. I wouldn’t want to ruin my reputation with others. I’d be afraid of what they would think.

  Killer was happy that I finally arrived at her place because she had a psychodrama going on. She had had sex with some girl and now that person wouldn’t call her back.

  “She was really sexy,” Killer said. “She wore those boxer shorts for women that have some man’s name written on them.”

  “You mean Calvin Klein?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “So why won’t she call you back? ”

  “You know, Rita. You know how it is. Some people, you call them and they never call you back. Even if they’ve known you for a long time. I’d like to call those people up and say, Listen Mack, if you ever call me I will call you right away. If I call you, I want you to call me back. Don’t snub me or I’ll kill you. Don’t snub me. Of course you can’t go around saying I’ll kill you to people or they’ll never call you back. Plus, they’ll tell other people you said that and then the others won’t call either. The murderous intention has to be simply but subtly understood.”

  Killer went on and on about that girl, but I was preoccupied. So I just kicked back and had a beer while she rattled ahead. When you’re drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette, there’s no need to look for an ashtray ’cause bottle tops are lying around the table, right near where you put your feet. I wish I could dispose of memories. What good are they? Just a yearning for something that didn’t happen and something sweet that was never said. It is an inventory of voids. Where is my mother? Why did she desert me?

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dave called me up to see if I wanted to watch a movie. But when I got over there it turned out to be a stack of videos of all our dead friends and then some of his dead friends who I never knew. We watched them say and do very ordinary things. Some of them were alive so long ago that their clothing and haircuts were out of date. One guy, Roger, seemed so far away. Then I realized that we had gotten older, but he never would. Roger would always be young. There were a few scenes of couples who were both dead. Dave and I watched them acting out their sick couple dynamics. What a way to be remembered.

  I almost never think about these guys unless I see someone on the street who looks like one of them. But David wanted to talk about them. He would go on and on about who was in love with who and who said what to who. The thing is, he is going by a very outdated definition of what history is. He was still pretending that history is the passing down of anecdotes from one set of friends to another. When they’re all dead there is no more continuity of the generations. I’m the one who’s going to be left and have to do all the remembering and frankly, I’m never going to tell those anecdotes to anyone.

  Right now, when I think of all my AIDS dead, one of the things they all have in common is about forty conversations just like the one Dave and I had, where each guy talked about death in his own way. Later, they get sick and die in very predictable patterns. Let’s face it, this death itself is no longer extraordinary, emotionally, to me.

  David sat there and told me his most private thoughts about this death. While he was talking, I did exactly what I’d done forty times before, which is to very matter-of-factly refuse to pretend he’s not going to die. In the meantime, what I had to say paled in comparison to his experiences, but I’m the one who’s gonna be left behind. Doesn’t that have a meaning too?

  “When Victor died,” Dave said, “I asked Steve what he remembered of their thirteen years together and he said that all he remembered was piles
of Victor’s shit from changing his diapers for two months. Rita, how do I ensure that my friends don’t remember me like that? ”

  “You could tell us it’s okay to hire a nurse,” I said. I know that is not what I was supposed to say. I was supposed to say “Of course we’ll remember you, Dave. You know that.”

  But I have said it so many times before and it wasn’t always completely true. People fade. They become represented by a feeling. There are men in my life who have died and I can’t remember their last names. Batya something’s brother Jonathan who died in 1982. We went to a performance together once and he was skinny and miserable. He kept saying “But I wasn’t promiscuous.”

  I mean, I will remember Dave, but I don’t know for how long or in what way. I still remember Jonathan, somehow. Besides, sooner or later someone is going to have to hire a nurse and it is better to get that squared away so there is no guilt later.

  One thing I know for sure is that AIDS is not a transforming experience. I know that we tend to romanticize things like death based on some kind of religious model of conversion and redemption. We expect that once people stare down their mortality in the mirror they will understand something profound about death and life that the rest of us have to wait until old age to discover. But that’s not what happens. Actually, people just become themselves. But ever so much more so. If they took care of things before diagnosis, they take care of things afterwards. If they were selfish and nasty, they go down that way.

  The public discourse on AIDS is getting more twisted by the minute. So many want to believe that there is some spiritual message at the core of this disaster—something we can all learn. That makes it more palatable, doesn’t it? That makes it more redemptive. We all know the only good homosexual is a dead one, but if we can prove that we’re getting some kind of benefit out of our own destruction, then maybe straight people will have a little more pity. But facts are facts. There is nothing to be learned by staring death in the face every day of your life. AIDS is just fucking sad. It’s a burden. There’s nothing redeeming about it.

  Transformation is not the only misunderstood idea going on around this plague. Another one is CURE. There is no cure, but everyone is out looking for it. Only, they’ve got a picture in their minds of something that could never be and so long as they cling to that clean concept it will never be found. The cure is not going to be some pill. It’s not going to be one simple object or one simple act that a person just has to follow so that their KS will go away. There is no cure. There are just certain strange combinations of beliefs, acts, and events that help some people feel better under some circumstances for some certain length of time. But there is no way to know why. Even when something comes along that helps some people feel better for some length of time, everyone poo-poos it because it is not THE CURE.

  My friend Ronnie LaVallee said that the reason he felt better when he took some useless drug was because it was his father who found out about it and told him to try it, thereby proving that his father actually loved him. So why didn’t the newspapers announce the next day that parental kindness helps people with AIDS live longer? Because that’s asking for more than people can do. Love our gay children? Impossible! We just want a pill. It’s easier.

  Every fag I’ve ever loved has had extermination hanging around his neck. How can that make for an equal opportunity at fate? Thank God pure mutuality is not my prerequisite for relationships. If it was, I wouldn’t be able to talk to anybody except one or two dykes sitting on park benches watching the rats.

  I love the Viet Cong, because that’s the kind of American I am. I’m an UnAmerican. I believe that ninety percent of the people can be wrong at the same time. Your entire family can be wrong and you might be the only one who is right.

  QUESTION: Is it better off, in that case, to be wrong?

  NO. That’s the patriotic way. Don’t do that.

  BE RIGHT.

  Because the way I figure it is that if I make my contribution to truth, some Rat Bohemian down the line will notice and appreciate it. She’ll be sitting down in a city strewn with rats and rat carcasses and will come across my petite observation. That’s the most amazing relationship in the universe. The girl on rat bones who knows that she is not alone. She is not American.

  PART TWO

  1984

  Chapter Fifteen

  If you sound one note over and over again it becomes a note of alarm. Up until this moment two things were absolutely certain about my life. I’m broke and I have my own way of looking at things. That combination adds up to a life that is simply worth it. But now, being infected is really lonely. You’re just alone. And I’m one of the few who is open about it.

  If I’m gonna have sex, sometimes I’ll tell them. But if I think he’s the kind who will reject me, I won’t say anything. Or, if I’m the one getting fucked, which I usually am, I figure it really doesn’t matter. Some people say only the humpy guys have it. The ones who couldn’t get sex are running around fine. Only the ugly will survive. But when I get ready, over my first beer, I look around the room and wonder who else among the guys standing there is like me.

  The bartender at the Tunnel Bar is one of my best friends. If I see some cute guy I’ll say “He’s nice.”

  “She’s got it,” he’ll say.

  That means I’m supposed to immediately lose interest.

  My friends, the men I know from going out, they pretend they haven’t got it, but I know that many of them do. I’m not angry at them. I’m angry at myself. I got it in 1984 when I should have known better. But I guess I’ve always had an ambivalent relationship to living. Those of us who kept unabashedly fucking after the siren went off, those of us still alive and willing to talk, say it was so exciting.

  “I wouldn’t have taken one less dick,” a dear friend once said.

  Of course it is just a virus and science isn’t worth feeling guilty about. But I can’t stop recalling those costumed gents getting off to the danger of fucking when you know you could die. What a turn-on. In a way it makes sex more than it really is, which is just a part of life, like a shower and a meal. Is having an orgasm in a dark room in a deserted part of town the principle most worth constructing your life around?

  Yes.

  No one can deny that, after all, there is something about desire that makes men treat each other like meat and love it. Goodness and badness have nothing to do with it. Desire can’t be decided. But there is also that strange combination of camaraderie in nelly machismo. It is what the literary critics would call fabulous realism if they weren’t too stupid to notice.

  I know who gave it to me. It wasn’t some leather-clad fireman stepping out of a tub of warm shit at the Mineshaft only to be fisted by a CPA called “Daddy” before sticking his dick up my ass. It was just this forty-year-old Italian guy I met on the street in 1984. He took me home to his apartment in Chelsea and right after he shot I thought, I bet I just got AIDS.

  First, Sex Positive was the movement. Now, it’s a sex movement. Sex, sex, sex. There’s a lot of copulating going on out there. It’s all come full circle back to 1984. Apocalypse Now! Paradise Now! Apocalypse Now! Paradise Now! It’s either complete denial of the virus or complete acceptance. No one does safe sex all the time. No one outside of New York or San Francisco and even in those meccas it is easy to avoid. You can see it in the eyes of the young. They’re sick of us being sick and just want us to die off already so they can have sex. But they won’t wait that long. So the new wave of sex can eliminate that middle ground of decision where some guy’s expectation of a future is revealed. He doesn’t even know what it would look like. What does a fifty-five-year-old gay man look like? A handsome one I mean. I look around the clubs at all those guys I’ve never met and know I won’t be there to say, Remember when. I won’t be there to say, Didn’t you used to go to Sound Factory about fifteen years ago? I won’t be around to finally fall in love.

  The other guys I know must be thinking these same thoughts. They must
be. But whenever it does come up it’s always clichés about positive thinking or else some stockbroker bragging about his imported pharmaceutical like it was rock cocaine. It’s a man thing. We don’t like intimacy. We’d rather talk to our shrinks or brush it off. Dykes have the reverse problem. They’re so intimate they go to the bathroom together. Straight people are the most pathetic of all. I’ve never known such a miserable group of people in my life. They don’t know anything about themselves.

  Is getting fucked an act of heroism? It is if you’re in the closet, if it’s illegal, if your family will treat you worse than they do their houseplants. It is if you have HIV and they’re telling you to just roll over and wait to die. But is prowling by night with the scent of sweat on your dick enough to make a fag into a hero? Last night I saw two old leather queens strolling down the street. You bastards, I thought. You never loved men enough to let them fuck you. That’s why you’re alive today. I think there is something stupid about men who have never been penetrated. You can see it in their eyes like glaucoma.

  But cock and balls are easy to talk about. C’est facile. The real Achilles’ heel of every Achilles is LOVE. That’s the hugest unspoken fag issue of the day. Last summer I went to Fire Island, smoked a joint, and walked down along the beach. Waves of perfect, white gym bodies kept coming at me like organic vegetables at the farmers’ market. Only the best. Each one climbs up the Stairmaster every day because if his body isn’t perfect no one will love him. Then what do all these queens cry about over their fifth martini? The fact that no one loves them.