Destination Unknown, page 13
“Hey.” CJ’s voice was flat.
“Okay,” I said. “Just tell me. Who was that?”
He sighed and the line was quiet.
“CJ?”
“He’s my delivery buddy for God’s Love We Deliver. We deliver meals every Tuesday and Thursday lunchtime to people living with AIDS.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Without giving my embarrassment a chance to take hold, I just spoke up.
“So you know that if this is a lie, this is your worst lie ever, right?”
CJ’s voice was a mixture of annoyance and enjoyment. “It would be. We finished our rounds and we grabbed a meal and were, gasp, talking.”
“You were rubbing his shoulder.”
“Because his lover, Louis, just went into the hospital with pneumocystis pneumonia.”
That term I knew because of Walter. It was the opportunistic infection that killed most people with AIDS. “Shit,” I said. “You swear?”
“Yes, Micah. I swear. I didn’t make up that a man’s lover is in the hospital with AIDS.”
I winced. I had really screwed up. Royally. How could I even come back from this level of wrong? “I’m sorry, CJ. How do I fix this? Or do I? Or do you never talk to me again?”
CJ said “Hmm” in a way that sort of pissed me off, because it wasn’t as if I had no reason for thinking he had been lying. But I knew that if we were to remain friends, I probably had to put that away. Also, I had to put away any stray feelings I had for CJ. Forever. I closed my eyes and pictured the feelings as a piece of paper in my chest, and I visualized it coming out and me crumpling it up and throwing it into the wastepaper basket by my desk.
Finally, he said, “You fix this by coming with us on Thursday.”
“I have school,” I said.
“Skip.”
“I’ve never skipped.”
He paused, then said, “You told me you skipped once because you wanted a day to just watch MTV.”
“I’ve never skipped for a non-television-related reason.”
“You kind of owe me,” CJ said.
“Fine,” I said. “Thursday. Delivering meals to AIDS victims.”
“Oh dear. We have so much to teach you. You don’t say AIDS victims, for one thing.”
“Why not?”
“Because people with AIDS don’t want to feel like victims.”
I didn’t really get it, but I got that it was something I couldn’t really understand. “Okay,” I said. “People with AIDS.”
“Attaboy.”
When I got off the phone, I felt relieved. I had almost lost my friend CJ over something really stupid that was totally my fault. But now I had a second chance, and I could do my best to do better.
And, as I stared at my math textbook, I felt the dread of what was coming in two days.
I would be going into the apartments of people who were dying. I tried to imagine Walter’s apartment. I had a weird fantasy where we delivered a meal for Walter, and then I had the dreaded thought that Walter could get his own meals. No, these people were going to be sicker than Walter, and my blood chilled. Not that AIDS was transmitted through the air; I knew more than that. But who was to say? This was where people lived, and if they were sick, could their fluids be around? What if—
I shook my head and clicked my fingers on my textbook. Clearly this wasn’t a rational fear.
Plus, I had more down-to-earth, immediate fears to focus on.
Those fears were sleeping in the next room.
November 1987
It was so important to me to find the right moment to come out to my parents.
It was after school on Wednesday. I called Felicia to say I wasn’t ushering and I told her I was about to do it.
“It’s gonna go great. I promise,” she said.
In preparation, I played the Missing Persons album on a high volume to hype me up, and I took out of my knapsack On Being Gay, the book of essays I’d bought on my first-ever trip to the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in the Village over the weekend. I’d read the book in one sitting, because I was so amazed to be reading stuff written by a gay person, about people like me. There was this one essay I thought would really help us talk about it, and I thumbed through to the page I wanted to show them.
And then nature called.
I went into the bathroom and sat, thinking about the conversation we would have, and what would happen, and what the world would be like after.
“Micah?” I heard my mom knocking on my door. I was in the bathroom off my bedroom with the door closed, but I could still hear.
“Yeah?”
“What?” she yelled.
“I’m in the bathroom!” I yelled, but the music from my bedroom was too loud.
“What?”
“I’ll come out in a minute!”
“I’m coming in,” I heard her yell. “I can’t hear you over that music.”
My heart sank, thinking about the book on my bed. “Noooo!” I screamed, behind the closed bathroom door.
I heard the door squeak open, and her saying, “Oh, you’re in the bathroom,” despite the blaring music. I closed my eyes, well aware that if she ventured in even a bit more, my “right moment” to come out was going to be exceedingly wrong.
I wanted to open the door, but I couldn’t. There were other things I had to attend to.
“Micah?” my mom yelled.
“Mom. Get out, please. I can’t talk right now.”
“Micah, what is this book?”
“Get out!”
“Is this for your gay friend?”
“Please leave my room!”
“Is it, Micah? It’s for your friend, right?” she yelled. Dale Bozzio sang “Life is so strange” over the opening notes of “Destination Unknown.”
“I’ll be out in a second!”
“Just tell me, Micah. Is this for your friend, or are you … ?”
“I can hardly hear you. Can you please give me a moment?” I shouted.
“Tell me now, Micah Strauss. Please tell me now.”
“Mom!”
“Are you a homosexual?”
I put my head in my hands.
“Are you?” she shouted. “Are you a homosexual?”
“Mom, please give me a minute!”
“I need to know, Micah. It’s not as if we don’t have homosexual friends. But this isn’t … I didn’t think … I’m coming in.”
The door, left unlocked because who enters the occupied bathroom of a person who has thrice shouted get out, opened.
“Oh, Micah,” my mom said, standing over me.
“Mom! Boundaries!”
“Oh please. I changed your diaper for years.”
“Get out!”
“So you’re homosexual. Okay, okay.”
“Mom!”
“I just need to digest this.”
“Mom!”
She scurried off, slamming the bathroom door behind her. And then there I was, stunned and flushed, and in need of flushing. Never to be the same again.
* * *
Later that evening, after curling up into a humiliated ball for what felt like several hours, I sat with my parents on the living room couch and we talked it all out.
“Okay, okay,” my dad said. “Okay.”
“I just don’t understand why you didn’t tell us!” said my mother.
“I tried.”
“Well, you should have tried harder. After all, you know us. We’re reasonable people.”
“Even reasonable people can be unreasonable about gay stuff.”
“Okay, okay,” my dad said, still at step one. “Okay.” He grabbed for a tissue and wiped his eyes, which were rimmed red.
“This is my fault,” my mother said, joining him in tears. “I did this. I’m overbearing.”
“Mom! This isn’t your fault. Nothing is your fault. This is just who I am.”
“Okay, okay,” my dad said. “Okay.”
“Do you think you need counseling? Maybe we should have you see someone.”
“Mom …”
“Macy Gardiner is a therapist. That’s Tara’s mother.”
“Mom, I’m not going to see Tara’s mom.”
“Well, we have to do something,” she said as a tear ran down her cheek.
“Okay, okay,” my dad said. “Okay.”
I felt so guilty for making them cry. I wanted to disappear, back into my bedroom, back into my own little world, which didn’t include crying parents who kept saying the word okay over and over.
November 1987
This story made CJ feel gleeful when I told him the next day. We were standing out in front of his place, waiting for the God’s Love We Deliver van.
“So, it was coming out while you were coming out.”
“Stop.”
“You were both digesting,” he said, giggling.
“Really. Stop.”
“Coming out of the water closet.”
“Ugh. I hate you.”
“What did Deena say when you told her?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I will, probably. But not that version. That one is going in the vault.”
CJ laughed.
My mom hadn’t really fought me much when I told her I was sick that morning. She felt I needed a day off to “process” what happened. I was grateful, but really I thought she was the one who needed to do some processing.
The van arrived. Winston rolled down the window and yelled, “C’mon. We’re running behind.”
We slid into the front seat, me in the middle. The van smelled like cigarette smoke, and there was a cigarette recently put out in the ashtray in front of me. The radio was on a talk station.
“Micah, CJ,” Winston said in his gravelly voice by way of greeting.
I winced, having dreaded this moment. “Hi, Winston. I’m so sorry for the things I said the last time. That was way out of line. Can we start over?”
He started the van. “That’s okay. You weren’t thinking straight. My lover, Louis, brings the same sort of fury out in me sometimes.”
The analogy made my face redden, and I hoped CJ wouldn’t see. He asked Winston for the update on Louis.
“He’s stable for now,” Winston said, sighing.
“I’m really sorry it’s not getting any better,” said CJ.
“Me too,” I said.
“Nothing to be done,” Winston said.
CJ changed the subject. “Micah here came out to his parents yesterday.”
“Oh!” Winston said. “And how did that go?”
“My mom cried because she thinks it’s her fault for being overbearing.”
“Is she?” CJ asked as the van pulled off the West Side Highway.
I pictured her towering above me while I was on the toilet.
“Possibly,” I said.
We parked on a cobblestoned street deep in the West Village, a few blocks south of Christopher. Winston opened the back of the van and handed CJ and me two bags each, and he took two himself. My heart pounded, because I wasn’t sure how this was going to go or what was expected of me. Did we talk to them, or did we just drop off the food and go? I wasn’t sure I would know what to say, or what to do, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself.
We approached a redbrick apartment building on the corner of Barrow and Washington.
“On this first one, why don’t you just let me and CJ do it so you can see how it goes?” Winston said.
I nodded. We took the elevator up to the eighth floor. We were each carrying two plastic bags filled with containers of freshly made meals featuring things like tomato soup, sautéed broccoli, and roasted carrots. CJ had told me a nutritionist consulted with each client, as each client’s needs were different. Somehow, though, broccoli was pretty much something they all needed.
Our first client was named Brian, and though I’d steeled myself, I wasn’t prepared at all in actuality.
Brian sat motionless in the living room, staring at a soap opera on a small television. Two friends, a man and a woman, talked to Winston and gave him an update about how Brian was doing as if he weren’t there. Brian was a tall skeleton with stringy orange hair, an emaciated, sweaty face with eyes so deep in their sockets that he looked barely alive. I couldn’t look away, but I knew I had to. And once I looked away, my heart started to register just how sad this was. Whether he ate the meal we brought or not, Brian wasn’t going to be here in a month, probably. I couldn’t look back. Or blink. Because if I blinked, the tears would start coming. I held my breath and stared at the floor.
Juan was next. He lived in a dark room with the shades pulled down, in a three-story walk-up on St. Luke’s Place. While he was less skinny than Brian, his entire face and neck were covered in the purple splotches.
“Oh my God, thank you, thank you,” Juan said. “It’s like the Easter Bunny, or Christmas.”
“I do a fantastic slide down the chimney,” CJ said, and Juan laughed until he coughed. “How are you doing?” CJ asked. “Last week you said you were fighting with your mother.”
Juan groaned. “She’s impossible.”
CJ groaned back. “I hear you. My mother won’t stop badgering me about college stuff. It drives me crazy.”
“Right?” said Juan. “There should be some sort of gays with crazy moms support group.”
“Good-looking gays with crazy moms,” CJ corrected him, tickling his neck.
“Oh, you,” said Juan. “Such a tease.”
I was totally amazed. CJ was such a natural, and it was like he knew how to alter himself to the person to be the most likable version of himself. Sure, he’d lied about his mother, but I could see that really it was a lie with a purpose. Connection.
CJ sat with his arm around Juan while Winston asked some questions for a form he had to fill out. I stared at the floor, feeling useless.
I couldn’t stop thinking the worst thought. That each of these people was dying because of sex. And I couldn’t help it, but I found myself imagining them doing it, and then I felt truly ashamed of myself, because they were just like me, and I liked those kinds of sex, too, so why was I judging? And was I? It was incredibly confusing, and the sadness twisted my gut.
Our third client was a rail-thin Black woman with thinning gray hair. She had huge circles under her eyes, like she hadn’t slept in a while, and she was wearing a tattered nightgown.
“Hi, Anita,” CJ said, and the woman seemed to smile in spite of herself.
“Not hungry,” she said, sitting at the kitchen counter.
“But you have to eat. Here.” CJ started to unload her bag, which included a plastic container filled with what appeared to be beef stew. “Just have this. You don’t have to have the vegetables if you don’t want to.”
“Nooo,” the woman said.
“C’mon. You have to eat something. I’m worried about you. I was thinking about you the other day and wondering if that Rodney was still coming around.”
This got Anita talking, and while she talked, CJ nodded and spoon-fed her occasionally, responding to her while she chewed. Winston put his hand on my shoulder.
“You want to do this intake?” he asked.
My nerves were shot. “Okay, I guess,” I said, and after CJ had finished getting her to eat the stew, he waved to me to come sit with them.
“This here is Micah. He’s my bestest friend in the whole world.”
Anita smiled at me. Her teeth were falling out. “Any friend of CJ’s is a friend of mine,” she said, and though I stammered through the first couple of questions, by the end I was feeling more at ease and able to do the job.
CJ hugged Anita goodbye, and I stood there, not sure if I was supposed to hug her or not, but when she looked at me, something in her eyes pleaded with me for contact, so I opened my arms to her and held her.
I would probably never see this person again, I thought as she held on for dear life, and soon I was holding on, too, not able to let go.
“C’mon, you lovebirds,” CJ finally said, prying us apart. “See you next week, okay?”
“Thanks,” she said. “See you.”
We wandered north, entering arbitrary buildings, and it struck me just how random this disease was, how just like we were skipping certain brownstones and apartment buildings, others we weren’t, and AIDS wasn’t like a bomb going off and taking out an entire structure, but more like a precision attack, decimating one while leaving another totally unscathed, and I wondered whether there was any unscathed apartment building anywhere in the city, if maybe this was just a few people, but most people were okay, because God knows no one at my school was talking about a deadly virus that was leveling Brians and Juans and Anitas throughout the city, but that’s what was happening, and in most apartment buildings there was probably at least one person wasting away in bed, weighing half what they used to. And I thought: They all have families. And it was like a huge, awful tidal wave, and tomorrow I’d go to school and no one would be talking about this thing that was happening. Mass death of mostly gay men. No one. Because the dying were less-than-people to them. I was a less-than-person to them. That’s how it felt.
“You okay?” CJ asked.
I nodded, unable to speak because of the tears behind my eyes and the unuttered sobs climbing up my torso and tensing up my neck.
He lowered his voice and put a hand on my back. “The first time is really hard. It gets easier.”
I didn’t want it to get easier. I wanted it to magically go away.
And I had a terrible feeling that it wasn’t going to go away anytime soon.
December 1987
Thanksgiving flew by, and suddenly the extended Christmas season was here, and every store put up holiday decorations, and Deena started with her daily questions about Chanukah, knowing full well that even though we had a mezuzah by our door, my family didn’t celebrate Chanukah in any real way, and therefore I had no idea when the holiday began and ended each year. I think she just liked admonishing me for things, and every early December this was low-hanging fruit.
“I’m pretty sure you missed Sukkot this year, too,” Deena said to me on the phone one night in early December.
“Suck-ot,” I said.
She ignored me. “You don’t even know which one that is.”
