The Men from the Boys (11 page)

Javitz scoffs. “Maybe that's what saved you.”

I'm about to ask from what, then feel like a fool. Strange how it's always there, floating around, but sometimes you forget it, in the simplest way. In 1980, when Javitz was still getting buttfucked every Friday night at the St. Mark's Baths, I was being a good college freshman: coming back to the dorm after dinner to read Joyce and Fitzgerald, not getting drunk and plowing a girlfriend like the straight boys across the hall. Yet I was only biding my time: I knew about the party going on out there in that great big gay world. And I would join it, just as soon as I was able.

“You,” I said, pointing to Gordon, “are
fucking lucky.”

Gordon grinned. It was Christmastime, freshman year. We were both between semesters, home for the holidays, me from the state university an hour away from the town where we both grew up, and Gordon from NYU, right there in New York, the Village, the gay mecca.

“I got a boyfriend,” he told me. I couldn't imagine it: a
boyfriend.
“An older guy. I met him on Bleecker Street.”

“Just like that?” I gushed. “Just walking down the street?”

“Yeah. He looked at me, I looked at him, and well, like they say ...”

Gordon was
fucking lucky.
Gordon, the first boy I'd ever blown, in the back seat of his mother's car. Gordon, who—with our other buddy Stick—had been my boon companion, my colleague in crime as we survived four years at that all-boy Catholic high school. We'd skip gym class, smoking a few joints behind the janitor's office, talking about Joni Mitchell and Patty Hearst and Squeaky Fromme, our heroines. It wasn't until senior year that we all started fooling around with each other, our clandestine rendezvous suddenly made even more exciting. In college, I became envious of Gordon and his continued adventures, while mine had sunk into relative lethargy on my predictable, working-class campus. “Come visit me in New York,” he urged, and I promised.

Of course I never did. We lost touch. He went on to become an actor, as he'd always dreamed of doing. I remember seeing him on
Guiding Light,
a handsome young intern under the benevolent eye of the good Dr. Ed Bauer. Then he disappeared from the role; someone else took it over, someone less attractive, someone who went on to become a star.

And Gordon came home to our little town, where he died.

Friends. Gordon and I had been inseparable. “I'm going to Gordon's” was a phrase my mother heard every day. “It's Gordon again,” my brother would snarl, throwing the phone to me. Gordon had been the first to know about me, the first to teach me the words “queen” and “buttfuck.” Then he had faded into merely a name, a face on a soap opera to impress my new friends. “I knew him,” I'd tell them. “He was my very best friend in high school.”

My sister called me in Boston. “Do you know who's home?” she asked. “Gordon Guthrie.”

“Is he sick?” Why I should ask, I didn't have a clue. I hadn't heard from him. But, of course, he was.

“Jeff,” he said, a week before he died, “I always knew you'd be here for me.”

“No you didn't,” I said to him. “You forgot all about me until you came home.”

And that was okay. That was the way with friends. They come into your life, they listen to your hopes, your dreams, your fears. You make each other laugh, you piss each other off, you forgive each other, then laugh some more. You spend your time with them, you make plans with them, you think about them when they're not there: “Oh, Francine would
love
this,” I'm sure I said once, many times probably, but what about I no longer know. Then friends go away, replaced by a new batch, who do all the same things.

I called Stick, the third stooge from those long-ago days. “No,” he said. “I can't come see him.” I was angry, but Gordon understood. “Poor old Stick,” he said. “Still the same after all these years.”

Gordon was just thirty when he died. Just a few weeks older than I. I'd known others who had died from the plague, but they'd all been in their forties and fifties. Gordon was my age. I watched as he shriveled into a little old man before my eyes, becoming smaller and smaller in a wheelchair that seemed way too big for him. Finally it seemed that's how he would die: he'd just keep getting smaller and smaller until he simply disappeared. When they cleaned his body after he was dead, I watched as they lifted his bedclothes. I glanced upon his penis, a withered gray thing, the first cock I'd ever sucked.

That's the image of Gordon that stays with me: a dead husk, his dick exposed like a rosebud torn from its stem, wilted under the sun. When Stick died, a little more than a year later, I visited him too, but Stick couldn't talk to me. Drugged with morphine, he could only buzz, as if an angry swarm of bees had gotten caught in his throat.

Of course, other friends have died, too: a couple of college chums, a grad-school professor, a host of boys from the gay bar where I first came out. But it's not just the plague: AIDS has just horribly exaggerated for queers what is, after all, the nature of friendship. They come, and then they go. Yet each time, we expect this will be it: this is the group we'll grow old with, Mary and Rhoda and Murray and Phyllis in the nursing home.

“They're here,” Lloyd suddenly announces, bounding from his chair and throwing his arms around Chanel.

Our friends file in.
“Pasta?”
Melissa cries. “You know I don't like tomato sauce.”

“Don't worry,” I tell her. “It's pesto.”

She pouts. “I thought you were my
friend.
You should know I don't like pesto either.”

I shrug. “Okay. So you get some buttah and Romano cheese?” I do a good Jewish mama from the Bronx. Javitz has taught me well. Melissa smiles.

Later, as the fireworks snap, crackle, and fizz in the purple sky, a shower of reds and silvers and spiraling blues, we sit and eat our dinner on paper plates, balanced on our laps. Lloyd and me, Chanel and Wendy, Melissa and Rose, Javitz and his cigarette. Our little band, our little club: and how many clubs have I had? More important: how many more are still to come?

Boston, February 1995

“It feels so good to get up in the morning and put
clothes
on,” Javitz says.

Lloyd cocks his head. “Never expected to hear
you
say that.”

Javitz has been out of the hospital for a week now. We're at his place in Cambridge, right off Harvard Square, getting him settled in. Javitz is so happy to be back in his own space, playing his Billie Holiday and Nina Simone records. He's sorting through his mail as he sits on his ratty old couch with the foam showing around the edges. Lloyd is standing behind him, giving him a shoulder massage.

“I don't understand the blues,” I say. “Here you are, supposedly feeling good about being home, moving out of your depression, and these women are whining, ‘Ooooh, I'm so miserable ... My life is horrible ... I think I wanta die....' ”

Javitz arches that damn eyebrow. “You know, Jeff, it is really a shame the only records your mother ever played while you were growing up were Perry Como and Dean Martin.”

Of course he's smoking. It's his house; we can't complain here. We call Javitz “Dragon” because of the cigarettes, although it's not as official as “Cat” or “Dog.” Both Lloyd and I are virulent anti-smokers. It's funny how we've changed: there was a time, and not so long ago, when we never left for a club without passing around a joint. Now we hardly even go out to clubs, let alone smoke pot—at least, not together.

Up in Provincetown, where we share a space, Javitz never smokes in the house. We can't understand why he continues: it's making everything else about his health worse. That's what landed him in the hospital these last two times, we're convinced: all that shit in his lungs. Yet no amount of cajoling from us or his doctors has convinced him to even
try
to quit.

We've just come back from grocery shopping. I'm stocking his near-empty cupboard. Campbell's tomato soup. Six boxes of A&P- BRAND elbow pasta. Sardines. And of course his chocolate syrup for the morning.

They don't know I can hear their conversation from the other room. Javitz is talking to Lloyd in a hushed voice. “So,” he says, “what's going on between you and this Drake?”

My ears perk. Lloyd is too quick with his answer. “We're friends. He's a great guy, a social worker at the hospital. We go to the same meditation group.”

“So the two of you share
many
interests.” I can hear Javitz's smirk even from in here.

I decide eavesdropping makes me too nervous. I walk in on them. “You'd like him, Javitz,” I say. “He's around your age.” That's a dig.

“Really?” Javitz looks at me hard, then back at Lloyd. “Is he single?”

Lloyd grins. “Is there relevancy in that question?”

“Maybe not to us,” Javitz says, leaning back into the cushions of the couch, “but to the goddamn rest of the world ...”

“Yes,” Lloyd says, “he is.”

There's a silence now that I don't like. Lloyd has come around to sit on the couch, resting his head on Javitz's shoulder. Javitz closes his eyes.

“Maybe we should talk about Provincetown,” I say, surprising even myself with my suddenness.

Javitz opens his eyes. “Oh?”

Lloyd nods. “We should go up soon to check out the place that Ernie found.”

“No,” I say, and somehow that one syllable conveys the significance of what I am about to reveal. “I'm not sure I want to do it again.”

Lloyd looks at me with suspicion. “Since when?” he asks.

“I just don't know if I want the whole
scene
again. Provincetown is very tiring. I'd rather go up to the mountains in Vermont or something.”

Javitz looks at me intently. “Vermont,” he says.

“Or something.”

“There's no tea dance in Vermont,” he informs me.

“I know,” I say, snottily. “Precisely.”

“Oh, Cat, you're being melodramatic,” Lloyd says. He gets up and goes to the kitchen. I hear the air spit out of a twist-off bottle of Coke.

“Maybe I am,” I say. “Point is, I don't want to do Provincetown again.”

“That's final?” Javitz asks. “Last week you seemed up for it.”

“Look. There are other housing issues to worry about. Do we try to buy the place we're in now, or look for someplace else?” I pause, gathering my argument. “Besides, I just can't afford it. I can't see coming up with two or three grand and just plopping it down for a summer place....”

“ ‘Just plopping it down for a summer place ...' ” Javitz repeats.

Immediately I feel horrible, as if I've trivialized our last five summers together. “You know what I mean,” I say, weakly.

“No,” Javitz says. “I don't.”

“I'm sorry,” I say. “But if I can come up with that kind of money, why not use it for a down payment on our own place?”

“Because that still wouldn't be enough,” Lloyd says, coming back into the room.

Javitz sighs. “I understand about the money.”

And of course he does. He's just gone on
disability,
for God's sake. This past semester was his last as a teacher. It seemed to outsiders to be a rash decision, but he'd thought about it for a long time. He finally talked it through with us last summer, although by then he'd already made up his mind. In long, meandering walks visiting Ernie in Provincetown during the winter, he'd made the decision, quite on his own. That's also when he stopped the AZT. His loss of muscle tone, he's convinced, isn't due to HIV. It's from the antivirals they pushed at him for so long. He's undecided whether to even take the drugs prescribed for him since his last bout of pneumonia. “You were lucky,” his doctor said. “You don't want to get PCP.”

Yet stopping the drugs hasn't made much of a difference in his health, except perhaps making him more conscious of the present. Giving up his identity as a teacher was far more difficult, but he's determined to do other things while he still has the energy and the will. “I've never been to South America,” he said simply, as if he'd give it all up and head for Peru. “I'm still on my feet. I don't want to be carried out of the classroom on a stretcher.”

Yet landing in the hospital twice since his decision has taken some of the wind out of his sails, some of the bluster out of his words. “That's what I get,” he said. “Apply for disability and become disabled.”

So
of course
Javitz understands about the money. But it's not
him
backing out. It's me.

“Can't we just say we'll think about it for a few days?” Lloyd suggests.

Thank you, Dr. Griffith. Sometimes avoidance is the best defense. I look at Javitz. He seems to be considering something; his eyes are averted. “All right,” I concede. And no one brings it up for the rest of the day.

Later, after Javitz has gone into his room for a nap and Lloyd has fallen asleep on the couch, I sit in front of the TV set watching a rerun of
Bewitched.
It's the episode where Sam conjures up a dodo bird and it gets loose all over town. It makes me feel even worse, so I turn it off before I see how it ends.

What kind of friend am I? I'm thinking. What is it that makes everything so
hard
these days? Why can't it be the way it was at the beginning of last summer, when I first met Eduardo, when the script still made sense, or at least still left us a little time?

Provincetown, July 1994

“I
like
older men,” Eduardo says. “Always have. Always will.”