Destination Unknown, page 19
“You’re negative,” he said, not a question.
“Yeah.”
“Well … good. At least there’s that.”
“Yeah.” I couldn’t say more. If I said more, I’d say the wrong thing. If I opened just a little, everything smothered up in my heart would bleed out.
“Say something,” he said. “Please.”
I opened my mouth. Nothing. Words were not there.
“You can’t do this to me,” he said, and I could hear the panic in his voice.
“I’m not. I just don’t know what to say.”
“Just say something, Micah. Tell me I didn’t just become a walking pariah. Tell me that you’re still my boyfriend. That you love me, because. Right now, I need it. Please.”
“I do, but—” I burst into tears. Ugly, snotty tears. High-pitched, babyish, unrefined. I can’t do this. I can’t. I can’t. This is too much. I couldn’t stop crying. It was like my body had taken over and I couldn’t stop its convulsions. I had to put the receiver down on my parents’ bed. I didn’t want CJ to hear this. I don’t know what to do.
When I finally calmed down enough to breathe, I picked the receiver up again.
“Hello?” I said.
But there wasn’t any response.
He’d hung up.
I grabbed the phone and called him back, tears still falling, my voice still choked.
No answer.
Shit.
I called again. Left a message. “CJ, this is me. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to say. I was overwhelmed. But I’m here, CJ. I’m always here. Please call me.”
I hung up feeling utterly wasted, panic wafting through my veins.
I had to go to him. Right this minute. And also I couldn’t. What would I say? What would I do? I wasn’t strong enough to handle this. This was adult stuff and I wasn’t an adult. Two months ago, I’d never gone anywhere without telling my mother, and now I had a boyfriend with HIV.
Or did I?
I’d failed him. In his worst hour.
I called again. No answer.
I put on my sneakers and my jacket, but then I thought, What if I go down there and he calls and I’m not here? I can’t just go. But I have to. How can you be in two places at once when you absolutely have to be in both?
I called Deena, because at least that way, if he called, I’d hear the beep.
“Hey,” she said, and I realized I was utterly unprepared for this conversation. But that’s what friends were for, right? So I just dove right in.
“CJ has HIV. I don’t. I got tested and I don’t, but he’s positive. I don’t know what to do. Help me know what to do. I just. It’s too much.”
“Oh my God,” she finally said.
“Yeah.”
“Were you … with him?”
“No, yeah. I mean, we fooled around but with a condom, and we kissed yesterday because we both said ‘I love you.’ ”
“Oh my God,” she repeated.
“Yeah.”
“You have to tell Napoleon if you were with him after you were with CJ.”
“Yeah,” I said, because I was used to agreeing with everything Deena said. And then I said, “Wait, what?”
“You have to tell them. You could have infected them.”
I stared in the mirror on my closet door. “No. I told you. I’m negative. I couldn’t give it to someone because I don’t have it.”
“But you were with someone who is positive. That’s like, you have to tell Napoleon if you’ve been with him recently. There are innocent people involved.”
I was silent. I felt splayed open, attacked.
“Micah,” she said. “I didn’t mean—”
“I totally get it. Napoleon is innocent. Not like me. Not like actual gay people, who deserve it.”
“Micah,” she repeated.
“Guilty as charged,” I said, and I hung up.
I lay on the floor, wishing for an earthquake. Stupid New York doesn’t get earthquakes, and I needed one then, something to swallow me up and drag me to the pit of the earth, never to re-emerge.
* * *
I wasn’t sure what I would say to CJ, but I knew I had to say it in person, and that the sooner I did it, the better. On the 1 train downtown, I felt particularly useless in my big blue down jacket, like a puffy infant. Look at me, I imagined telling CJ as I stared at my reflection in the dirty glass. Does this look like someone who can take care of you when you get AIDS? I can barely remember to comb my hair some days. I’m not like you, with your elaborate outfits, and your zest for life, and your fighting spirit. You prick me, I bleed. You, on the other hand, protected us when we were in trouble. By pricking yourself.
The farther south the train went, the more certain I was. I could pledge to be a better friend, no problem. I would and could be around for phone calls and visits, even if it was scary to think about death. If I needed to cry or something, I could do that on my time and not bother him with it. But no, being in a relationship with a person with HIV was too much for Micah Strauss to deal with. This was real life, and I had to know my limits. And yes, maybe Rick’s boyfriend was terrible for leaving him, but he was an adult and that was different. I was seventeen. I deserved more time without having to think every day about the person I loved most in the world dying. So I would make it not so in a calm and friendly and real way, and I would touch him when I told him, so he’d know I wasn’t leaving, because no one should be left. But people were always telling me who I had to be in relation to them, and I kept letting them step all over me, and it was time to put up the stop sign.
I got off at Franklin Street and when I ascended to the street, a frigid gust of air hit me and woke me up to the reality of what it felt like to be vulnerable. And that was okay. It was necessary, in fact, and the icy feeling across my face felt like just punishment for what I was about to say to CJ. But I had to say it. I prayed he was home and would let me see him.
I buzzed and stood out far enough into the street so he could see me if he looked out. I didn’t see anyone approach the fourth-floor window, and my heart sank. I needed to find CJ now. I needed to tell him that I would be there for him always. As a friend. I needed him to know that not everything was about me, and I could handle the tough stuff, if he’d just let me try one more time.
When it became clear he wasn’t answering the buzzer and was probably not home, I ran down the icy street toward a pay phone. I fumbled my freezing hands into my pockets, looking for a quarter, and I found one just as the freeze began to seep into my bones. I dialed his number and waited. When the machine picked up, I tried to unchatter my teeth in order to leave him a message.
“Hey, CJ, I’m on your corner. I need to see you. Please let me see you. I’m gonna go back to your building now. Okay?”
I hurried back down the street, and my feet caught a patch of black ice and I went sailing backward. My butt and back hit the pavement with a smack, and then my elbows, and my hands got scraped, and the pain in my bones was like injury to insult, and I sat there in my humiliation as New Yorkers raced past me like I didn’t exist.
Maybe that was the lesson here. Being an adult means closing your heart. I wasn’t sure I loved that idea, yet I wasn’t sure how to change it.
I dusted myself off and walked my sore body down the block.
And there was CJ, standing with one leg on the street, one leg still in the elevator. I felt my body lighten at the sight of him.
“You’re bleeding,” he said, and as I approached, we both laughed because of course the day I went to see my HIV-positive boyfriend, I’d be bleeding, an open wound.
The heat of the elevator brought me slightly out of my stupor.
“So many questions,” he said, and I could tell he wasn’t okay, not by a long shot, by the softness of his voice. He’d been punctured and I’d done some of the puncturing, and it took me everything I had to not embrace him right then and there.
“A few answers,” I said.
The elevator stopped, he opened the chain-link gate, and we were in the warmth of his apartment. Wordlessly, he took me into the bathroom and handed me gauze and a clean washcloth, and I doused it with warm water and tended to my scraped hands. The sight of my own blood made me wince, and the fact that I was hanging out in the bathroom of a person with a transmissible disease with an open pathway to my bloodstream was loud in my head. I realized that being afraid of a virus didn’t make me a bad person; it just made me a human one, and that wasn’t all good or all bad.
I bandaged my palms and soon I was gash free and standing with CJ in his small bathroom, and I looked in his eyes, and it was all my heart could take.
I still loved him. There was no virus in the world that could make me love CJ less, because that was some brain-over-heart bullshit that didn’t have to be part of being an adult. And in an instant, it became clear to me: There was no Let’s just be friends speech in me. I didn’t want that.
I wanted CJ. In sickness and in health.
I grabbed him and embraced him tightly, and he let me, he let me take him in my arms and he made a sound that was a mix of grief and pleasure as I held his face in the crick of my neck, and I rubbed his neck, and I enveloped his thin body in my thick one.
“I’m always gonna have this. Even if I don’t get sick.”
“Shh,” I said.
“You can’t come and go from my life every time you get scared.”
“I know.”
“I’m so scared.”
“Me too. We can be scared together.”
“This won’t end well.”
“Shh.”
I pulled my head back so I could gaze deeply into his eyes, and I saw the fullness of his lips, and, petrified but aware that I needn’t be, I planted a kiss on his lips, one as tender as everything I felt for CJ poured into one impulse.
He took me by the hand and led me to the bed, and, still clothed and shoed, we lay down facing each other.
There was nothing that needed to be said, because our eyes said it to each other. I didn’t need to tell him that I was sorry for not being able to contain my own emotions in order to let his in. He didn’t need to tell me how much that had hurt, because I saw it in his eyes, which I kissed gently. His eyelids were soft, innocent.
There are so many songs that say I want to hold you forever. It’s an impossibility. And yet that afternoon, we did just that.
February 1988
CJ ascribed to me life-saving words that I was pretty sure I’d never said.
“That thing you said on the phone about taking one affirmative action,” he told me when we met in front of the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center after school on a Monday. “Just do one thing. That’s what I’m gonna do.”
I had said that part, but the affirmative action thing wasn’t me, because that meant something totally different. Nonetheless it was good news. CJ had been in an understandable funk for the past month, sometimes holing up in his apartment for days at a time. Our phone calls had become mostly diatribes about Reagan and the New York Times, and how neither had almost anything to say about dying faggots. A few times he’d gone apartment hunting, as Jack was giving him a wide berth and the silent treatment at home. (He’d refused to tell Jack his results, so Jack didn’t know what to think.) I’d gone with him to see one particularly cool studio on Perry Street, a second-floor walk-up that stunned me by how small it was. He’d applied, but the landlord turned him down because of his place of employment. The Gaiety, apparently, set off some red flags for potential landlords.
These were not problems I had anticipated when the school year had started back in September.
Anyway, it was a frigid February afternoon, the sun was going down, and I was being hugged tight under a rainbow flag by the guy I loved, who was finally ready to take some “affirmative action,” in front of a redbrick building on Thirteenth Street, around the corner from St. Vincent’s Hospital, where hundreds of gay men were currently dying of the very virus that lived in CJ’s bloodstream.
He wanted me to go with him to a meeting that night, this group called ACT UP that had been formed by a guy CJ called Larry. CJ always talked about people I’d never heard of and that he barely knew on a first-name basis. It was cute and kind of annoying.
We took shelter from the cold inside, in a big and colorful front room with high ceilings. The walls were covered in rainbow graffiti. CJ took my hand and led me to a small room behind it that served as a library. Wordlessly he grabbed a New York Native that had on the cover in big letters, Good News! Fusidic Acid: Another Promising Antibiotic.
“This was a few months ago,” he said, pointing at the headline. “Another dud. Rest in peace, fusidic acid. Now the big thing is AZT, which could extend my life but is super expensive. The company that makes it charges eight thousand a year for it just because they can, and no one gives a shit because it’s mostly gay people who are getting screwed over.”
A couple weeks back, CJ had gone to the Gay Men’s Health Crisis for an intake interview. His counselor got him connected to a doctor who treated people with HIV, and talked to him about getting counseling, which he refused. “If I start being sad all the time, I’ll do it,” he’d told me after. When I’d pushed him on it, he’d shut the conversation down.
Now he flipped the page on a newer edition of the Native and showed me a chart of AIDS cases by state.
“Forty-four thousand cases and counting,” he said. I glanced at it. Apparently North and South Dakota each had five cases. I wondered what that would possibly feel like, to be one of five cases of AIDS in an entire state. The idea made me shiver.
At the bottom of the chart it read, Of these, 25,363 (approximately 57 percent) are dead.
“Larry says the real numbers are much higher.”
“Ah, your best friend Larry.”
He smirked. “At the last meeting, he told me I was cute and to go find a boyfriend.”
“I hope you told him that job was taken.”
He shrugged, and I slapped him lightly on the shoulder.
The whole boyfriend thing felt really tenuous. Like we used the term and we held hands and we made out at his apartment when Jack wasn’t there, but we hadn’t done more than that, physically. The idea of having sex was the furthest thing from my mind. I just wanted to hold him. Forever. As for CJ, he said he wanted to wait until he had his own place and he could “relax.” But truthfully, I think he was still freaked out about his diagnosis. Which was why I wished he’d talk to someone.
I knew I would like to. I was still way jittery, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was being there with him, for him. The fact that I was a junior in high school was immaterial.
For me, having no one to talk to about it was a big part of the problem. Deena and I now avoided the topics of CJ and HIV, ever since our phone call. We seemed to be drifting apart, and there seemed to be no way of closing the growing divide. I talked to Rick once in a while by phone, but he was going through his own thing, and talking to him about sex things seemed super weird. And I hadn’t seen Felicia in person since the day she’d cried about Walter.
CJ then got started on his affirmative action for the day, paging through the classifieds, hoping against hope he’d find an affordable apartment in Manhattan, with a landlord who was cool enough to rent to an exotic dancer.
“It’s kind of hard. As a newly recovering flirt, I can no longer use my masculine wiles to get men to do things for me.”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Hey,” he said. “You know who I am. I’m trying, okay?”
While he went through classifieds, I looked at the schedule on the information desk. The Center was the place for all sorts of groups, from ACT UP to Gay Men of African Descent to Queer Scrabble to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Teens. I made a mental note to come for one of their Saturday meetings sometime.
Soon people started arriving for ACT UP and my heart fluttered. I’d never been in a group of all gay and lesbian and trans people before. What if I stood out as the least fashionable? The chubbiest? The youngest?
We moved into a big auditorium, maybe a hundred of us, and we started listening to speakers.
“We need to disrupt,” said this muscular lesbian wearing a bandana and a cool cartoon shirt that read IGNORANCE = FEAR, SILENCE = DEATH, with an image of three people covering their eyes, ears, and mouth. People cheered loudly. “Last time we did Wall Street, we didn’t disrupt the market nearly enough. A bunch of pictures of angry homos isn’t enough. This time? We stop trading! Assholes cannot get rich while people with AIDS who can’t afford Burroughs Wellcome’s prices die!”
Cheers from all around. I couldn’t stop peering around at all the people, representing so many races and identities. Men and women and everything in between and beyond, in suits, dresses, jeans, leather. All coexisting. I didn’t really stand out, except maybe for my age. I could see some of the men looking at me, and that felt weird and made me want to shrink into myself.
They were all looking at CJ, that’s for sure. It was his height, his nonchalant grandiosity.
One of the most obvious things was that this meeting was run as a true democracy. Everyone had a voice, and we’d be sitting there for hours if it came to it, because everyone would be heard. Points of order were called out, and men were told to let women speak, and white people were told to cede to people of color, and it felt like I’d finally found a family that I’d actually choose. One where fairness at all costs mattered.
People got up randomly to speak, and the topics ranged from a slight a man felt when an action group didn’t call him like they said they would, to someone who wanted a moment of prayer for a man named Bobby who was at St. Vincent’s. The affirmative grunts made it sound like people knew him, and that made me wonder how it could be that in a city as big as New York, some semblance of community existed, as if this were a small village.
Like The Village, maybe. I wasn’t sure, but I wanted to be part of it.
