Rat Bohemia (7 page)

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.

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.

This summer everyone is putting Nair on their chests to remove all the hair. They want to be boys again, pure. Thousands of hairless, gleaming, waxed, bionic men strutting around like a bunch of cars. The whole place felt like a parking lot.

Once a week or so I'll go over to Crow Bar on Tenth Street where boys flirt with clean-cut scrub-brushed clones of themselves. Everyone looks clean. Short hair, white T-shirt, clean jeans, pierced ear, collegiate. We're trying out for the Varsity Squad because clean boys don't have it. Only the dirty ones have it. So, I'll talk to some wide-eyed young queen who went to Vassar or Brown or some Euro-trash passing in East Village drag. We look into each other's eyes, feel the heat pass between our pumped-up gym chests. We both know for certain that the other one's underwear is clean. For that moment I don't have it and neither does he. AIDS is just a state of mind, sometimes. If you don't have to have it twenty-four hours a day, why do so?

I have this theory about HIV. I think there is good HIV and bad. Bad is what I've got. I can tell because my T-cells are plummeting. What I wouldn't give for two hundred T-cells. When I first went to the doctor I went to see Dr. Joseph Sonnabend because he is the best-known and most well-loved AIDS doctor. He's known for thinking that AZT is poison. He gave me a prescription for AZT. Someone explained that he probably wanted to give my T-cells a
boost, try to get them back over two hundred, and he would take me off it after three months, which is exactly what happened. Eight months ago.

My kind of HIV is the killer kind. It's killing me. But there are other guys walking around with HIV who never seem to get sick. Eight years, nine years, no symptoms. They've got the good kind. It occurred to me that if one night I can meet the right Mr. Clean and we can keep our minds AIDS free, maybe he will pump me full of the good HIV. Maybe it will neutralize my infection and I'll never have to worry again.

The phone has been ringing all day. They keep ringing and hanging up. Ringing and hanging up. I know who it is. It is my mother. My parents are trying to kill me.

They don't call regularly. They call on a whim. They might be sitting around the house one Sunday afternoon, breakfast is done. The paper is done. Nothing to do for an hour before taking in a movie.
Hey
, my mother will think to herself.
I just remembered that I have a son
.

How do I know this? It's because they never call on a Friday night. They never, never call from nine to five. They never sit down and write a letter. It is just here and there during their occasional free time. So, during the workday I can answer the phone, but between seven and nine on weekend mornings I have to let the machine get it. I couldn't bear to actually talk to one of them. The casual indifference would shatter me. I can't take one more act of unlove.

I was listening to the radio the other day and heard a special report about the history of COINTELPRO. This was the counterintelligence program maintained by the FBI in which they infiltrated every group of hopeful people on earth and confused them until they self-destructed and died. The WBAI announcer said that the agency's harassment of Marcus Garvey began in 1919. He said that the name of the FBI agent in charge of Garvey's demise was J. Edgar Hoover. In 1919. That's when I realized that my parents were trying to kill me. In fact, my entire family is in on it. Their plan is to invite me in and throw me out. Invite me in and throw me out, invite me in and throw me out until I have gone completely insane
and hang myself in my own bedroom. It is their only possible motive.

Here's one of their favorite tactics for driving me insane. My mother likes to call me up and leave messages about obscure elderly relatives who have died, asking me to attend their funerals. She usually calls after we haven't seen each other for a year or two, asking me to show up at a gathering of relatives knowing that it would be the site of our first reunion. Does that sound appropriate? Does that sound like someone who really wants to see me?

My father's favorite tactic for killing me is to never call. The last time we spoke he made me cry. I said, “Dad, I just want you to be nice to me.”