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Dedicated to the memory of

Qalbee Cohee

Gary Pensyl

Jose Guadalupe Ramirez

INTRODUCTION

This Many Joes

by Eileen Myles

I can tell you right away that Tramps Like Us by Joe Westmoreland is as large and knowable a book as its title; it’s anybody’s book, or everyone’s. Specifically, it’s the story of a gay boy, Joe, who leaves a dangerous homelife in the heartland to hitch-hike around America, most often with Ali, his one gay friend from home, the two eventually finding their place in the ecstatic party atmosphere of pre-AIDS late seventies, early eighties New Orleans and San Francisco, and then of course everything changed.

Tramps Like Us is also about wanting to live in New York and (indirectly) being a writer, though those things don’t exactly happen in the time of the book. So really Tramps Like Us is an adventure, a classic American adventure, about becoming and living to tell. I’m telling you this right off the bat because I honestly don’t know how to begin writing this introduction to a book I have so many feelings about. I mean I could write about ten introductions and each would be true and would in a way be about a different book. Tramps is a sprawl of suggestions, kind of an all-at-once epic like Robert Altman’s film Nashville or, from a really different clime, Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft. There’s a narrative here for sure, but really the story is something immersive, an event. It’s about enthusiasm and survival and youth, loyalty and the froth and depth of relationships. It’s a love story. About the narrator Joe’s love for his best friend Ali, but also even more so for the whole group of friends, everyone he knows and meets on the way. I think Tramps is undoubtedly one of the finest books of Joe’s generation or era (you choose), whichever the better claim would be.

I don’t want to limit the book you’re holding by describing it as an AIDS book, yet plagues have always spurred masterpieces of all sorts. Look at The Decameron or most of Shakespeare’s work. Both were written at the height of plague times. Yet unlike those two, there’s no retreat in Tramps. No harbor, no getaway. It’s quite the opposite. You can almost imagine a giant psychedelic waterslide that Joe and all his friends are joyously sliding down, but there’s a surprise landing at the end. AIDS was never fully honored like the plague it was. Like it wasn’t everyone’s disease, though of course it was. And the people who got it who were not fags or junkies were routinely described as “innocent.” Tramps puts the “innocent” back in AIDS literature because no one deserves to die of a plague, and definitely not the people you’ll meet here. I’ve read Tramps before—for the first time in 2001—so I already know who’s going to die and I like getting to know them better now. I’m older; they’ve stayed the same.

Okay, I’ve got it. The specialness of Tramps lies mainly in what it isn’t. It’s not really a drug book, though there’s plenty of that here. Joe is a bit like the Thoreau of drug use. He explains his tidy system: “I’d start on Friday night and snort a big line and then do small lines throughout the rest of the weekend until Sunday evening…” All very practical. Sweet Joe lands himself at work on Monday after a gentle crash.

Tramps is also an archive. Whatever in hell that is. He says in passing that his friends “Doug and Elena had worked together on the 1980 Census going door-to-door to find out how many people lived in the Mission District.”

This piqued my interest since I had done the 1980 Census in New York, walking up all those grey-painted staircases with my clipboard, counting whoever answered their doorbell in any of those lofts down Houston Street. What a missed opportunity a census was. How wonderful if they had asked your sexuality, the really important data, so retrospectively Tramps does that. What an enormous crowd of characters. At work, in the street, onstage at clubs. And plenty of refugees too. There are asylum seekers from Cambodia, and a very attractive man Joe meets at a party had spent time in jail (for being gay) in Castro’s Cuba.

The thing about the past is that though you know the songs you don’t really know where and how they were heard, their use, what they meant socially in the ripest way. Tramps puts the dirt back on them. Music, pop music especially, is always best in situ. Cause songs have a youth too. You bounced and swayed to it. You feel that reading this book.

There’s the innocence of the telling and the innocence of the character, Joe; plus the fact that Tramps was first published in relative obscurity (we knew!) in 2001 means that coming upon the fact of it now is like finding the most perfectly unmarked and desirable vintage shirt. Yum.

There are the usual boring questions like is it a novel, a memoir, a collection of stories, a documentary. The Library of Congress already knows because you have to tell your parents something.

In the main I think this book is an accumulation of letters to a friend. When Joe the narrator (and there is the thinnest skin between the two Joes, but it’s there) and his roommates agree to have a quiet night spent off in their rooms, one friend, Felipe, does portraits in colored pencil, the other does his design homework, and Joe writes letters to his friends all over the country about what’s going on. So it’s also a spiritual autobiography, like Paul writing to the Corinthians, something like that. It’s a feminist book too because in the Midwestern childhood where Tramps begins, the upstanding Kiwanis club–type dad is violating yet another of Joe’s sisters when he’s interrupted by his tall, skinny teenage son pounding on the bedroom door screaming stop, stop it, you asshole. The kid swings failed punches at the torso of the big derisive man. Dad.

For me this moment is a big cry line and there are plenty of those in here. Who didn’t want their sibling to actually rise up and interrupt the violence, the war, the betrayal that happens in families “in silence” behind bedroom doors. Joe stood up for his sister and the repercussion was that for safety’s sake he had to go, leave home, and thus he began his life on the road.

Joe always had an aim and this is it. To enclose all of this in a book and make it wonderful, truthful, excessive, and safe. I think of something an older, wiser Joe writes towards the end of the book: “Home was something in the future that had yet to be created.” I’ve often felt that coming of age for women and queers and trans people was not losing your “virginity” but the act of sharing it (or finding it) in a book. That’s true of all kinds of utopias. Joe composes pitch-perfect accounts of nights when “as one” crowds were dancing and groping each other—just intoxicated and filled with enough love and glee to know that they had a country. It’s important to understand that all these people dancing together were freaks, the bullied kids, the hidden ones, and now, here in a wig, lip-synching in a club, or boldly making out in the street, they won.

It’s a kind of joy I experience lately at activist events when we bang on the door and say stop or how I was told once that the best way to think about making a decision is that it’s a photograph of a moment. Joe clicks and clicks and clicks. Tramps is a big book. It’s cosmopolitan. And like a city everything you want is in here. Sweetness? Got it. Porn?

One of the delights of Tramps is when Joe leaves his job chauffeuring nuns to begin working instead at a porn warehouse where he meets Kat, a singer, who becomes one of his best friends. I was in the room years later when Joe read a piece where Kat appears. Omigod. The crispness of the writing and the funniness and the dirtiness of the scene were such a marvel when these three friends, Joe, Ali, and the very voluptuous Kat, have a druggy three-way; the title of the chapter Joe read being “How I Got HIV (Version 1, 1981)” had people on the edge of their seats, delightedly confused, like, Am I allowed to laugh at this, and the room was both awed and raucous.

The perfect accident that this writer is named Joe means he is a regular guy. Duh, a regular Joe. He makes the joke himself more than once. Dykes, Ali, everyone else seems to change their names. Joe is loyal. At one point it struck me (thinking of how remarkably observant he is) that what Joe Westmoreland is writing is romantic sociology. At the point in the book when everyone is beginning to die in San Francisco (and the vast majority of Tramps is before the plague, which gives the reader a sturdy sense of the world that soon would be hosting this tragedy), he goes out on his own (“I called going out by myself my ‘Margaret Mead social studies outings’”) to a cavernous sex club—to watch—and he describes the space like it were in Dwell: “There were cans of Crisco for lubricant placed conveniently throughout the warehouse. The place was lit with only a few soft beams of light shining down from the ceiling.”

One of the narrator’s responses to the new situation of AIDS suffusing his world is to avidly see. In the middle of the night, when he can’t sleep, he goes to arcades and watches porn videos and live peep shows; girls his age consensually selling their twats in a look-don’t-touch way was an adequate distraction from trauma. This was before everyone went to sleep with a computer on their belly watching shows. One had to go out and find some stuff to watch. This shift towards the spectacular in Joe’s world is both stunning and plainly described.

I want to dwell on the plainness of Joe’s writing for a sec. I think of the cartoons great Renaissance artists drew and handed over to the artisans to create the woven stories that tapestries are. I feel like Joe’s iteration, his way of embodying all these moments detail by detail, remains open like cartoons for dreams so that each reader can extend their own oomph while Joe is clicking out the facts. And then this other thing seemingly spasmodically or ecstatically occurs, which is that a euphoria arises from the telling so that one is both flipped deeper into the scene by the pure excess of details and then released by an uncannily beautiful gesture. Rarely does he need to remind you he’s writing. It’s more like you’re standing there and suddenly go, Wow. I think it’s because being is really the point and Joe simply wraps reality around us like a beautiful condition. I think of one druggy moment of sex between him and his friend Ali, one of their last familiar intimacies: “His hand traced my hip, then moved down between my thighs like an outward extension of the warm dope that was caressing my veins.”

What I admire is the total ease, between the two friends, the two bodies, and the familiar drug. Another benefit of the sheer grounded-ness of Joe’s writing is that it holds the uncanniness of losing a friend, losing someone young, and just like you always knew what they were thinking; you can even sense the moment when they die. People you’ve loved come to you in your dreams and tell you comforting things, the “normal” makes plenty of room for the paranormal. By constructing a world of matter-of-fact realism the otherworldliness of death finds a home here because that’s what happens in elegiac times.

The nineteenth century was full of séances and Ouija boards and magic. The late twentieth century was full of imagination and intuition, cults and miracles and swaying crowds because life needs these channels. When Joe’s beloved friend, Ali, dies it’s commonly explained: “While his body had completely deteriorated, his soul had gotten bigger and bigger. It couldn’t be contained in his body anymore. It filled up the entire room.” It just makes sense. By the time you get to the end of the book it seems like the virus was just another thing that friends shared and passed around; even though one person died or many people died, the ones who lived, even like this narrator, still hold it, perversely or openly discovering that even a virus can be a friend.

I wanted to ask Joe when exactly he began this book and when he ended it, but I haven’t gotten a clear answer yet. But it’s more my question, or my feeling. This is the kind of book that makes you notice when the reading is done. I wrote it down. It’s 12:45 p.m. on January 15, 2024. I love this book most of all because it is so mortal.

FIRST LOVE

THE SPANKING

I ran away from home the first time when I was four years old. My family lived in a small town in the middle of Missouri, the Heart of America. It was 1960. My older sister, Lucy, got to go to school during the day. Dad went to work. I wanted to be able to go somewhere, too, but I didn’t know where. One warm September day I took off for the school to see what my sister was doing. It was just a few blocks away but it seemed like miles to me. When I got there someone found me wandering around the halls and took me to Lucy. She told me to turn around and get home before I got a spanking. Instead of going home I walked about five more blocks to the small downtown square. I went into the drugstore and looked at their children’s books. I asked the man behind the counter if I could have the Pinocchio book. He said I’d have to buy it. Instead he gave me a little notepad. I left the store and was standing outside on the sidewalk when my father’s secretary came driving up. She jumped out of the car and ran up to me. There you are! Do you realize the whole town is looking for you?

She drove me home and my mother called my father to tell him I was okay. When he came home from work that night he pulled down my pants, pulled off his belt, and whipped me with it on my butt. He spanked me in front of Lucy, our little brother, Jerry, and little sister, Nina, so we would all know not to ever run away again. I didn’t even realize I’d run away. As far as I was concerned, I’d gone out for a walk.

My family moved around a lot. When I was in grade school we never stayed in the same house for longer than two years. No matter where we lived, I always managed to find a place to get away from my parents, sisters, and brother. I loved to walk along the railroad tracks or in nearby woods. I took my little black half-dachshund, Sneezy, on hikes as my constant companion. I found places where no one could see me, where I could be alone to explore and daydream.

The next time I ran away from home was ten years later. I was fourteen and a freshman in high school. My dad had been promoted to the district manager of the public utilities company. We moved from a small Missouri college town into a modern ranch-style home in the last subdivision of the farthest suburb east of Kansas City. We were half an hour’s drive to the middle of the city and ten minutes from rolling farmland covered with wheat, corn, and grazing cattle. Dad became very active with the chamber of commerce and the Kiwanis club. He did a lot of work towards bettering our community, and soon became well respected. His picture was in the weekly newspaper a lot. Adults were always telling me how lucky I was to have him for a father.

In the summer I went barefoot as much as possible. I prided myself on having tough, leathery skin on the bottoms of my feet. When Dad was around he wouldn’t let me go barefoot. He said as hard as he worked, he didn’t want people to think he couldn’t afford shoes for his kids.

I was mad at my parents because they made me go to bed at 9:30 p.m. when my friend Steve Holley could stay out all night if he wanted to. Most of my friends got to stay up until at least 11:00. Summertime was the hardest because Jerry, Nina, and I had to be in bed before the sun had gone completely down. It was still light out and we could hear the other neighborhood kids playing. If we weren’t in bed on time we were in big trouble.

My little brother, Jerry, and I shared a bedroom. Even though we slept next to each other in identical Early American–style twin beds, we hardly spoke. Our beds were like islands, miles apart. Late at night I would tune my transistor radio to a Little Rock station that only came in at night. There was a show called Beaker Street that played underground music like David Bowie, Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks, and Joni Mitchell. I heard “Walk on the Wild Side” by Lou Reed for the first time on that station and was sure he was singing to me. I also had a lamp above my bed and would read until Mom or Dad came by our closed door and yelled for me to turn the light off.

I hated my dad most of the time. I hated him with more than just an adolescent’s hatred of his parents. He treated his kids like we were slaves, using all of us as workhorses. He used my sisters for sex as well. We had to constantly be working around the house or out in our enormous backyard. When he wasn’t home Mom would lighten up on the workload, but we all knew there were certain jobs that had to be done by the time Dad got back, or else.

Dad used to search through my room when I wasn’t around. I had a pen pal that I met on a weekend church retreat. She lived in St. Louis. I kept her letters in a shoebox next to my bed. One afternoon I noticed that the box had been moved and the letters were out of order. I realized that Dad had gone through and read them. He knew my personal secrets with my pen pal. That scared me.

I used to sneak into Mom and Dad’s room and steal Playboy and Penthouse magazines from a stack on the top shelf of Dad’s closet. I’d hide them under my mattress and late at night would scour every page looking for dirty stories and, hopefully if I was lucky, pictures of naked men. The magazines would obviously be missing but no one ever said anything to me about it. After I’d jacked off enough and was tired of them I would creep into my parents’ room when the coast was clear and put them back.

Sometimes, when Dad was taking a nap, I’d sneak up to his bedroom door just to look at him. He always kept the door open about six inches unless he’d called one of my sisters in there. Then he was sure to keep the door shut. I had to be sure the rest of the family was either preoccupied or out of the house when I did this. As soon as I heard him snoring and was certain he was sound asleep, I would tiptoe down the hardwood floor hallway. I knew which boards squeaked and was careful not to step on them. The bathroom was right next to my parents’ room, so if anyone did come by I could act like I was going in there. I lurked near the bedroom door and leaned forward just barely enough to peek in. My heart beat fast. I was ready to run like a deer at the drop of a hat, but I stood there frozen, looking at his body for as long as I could. In his wedding picture I always thought Dad looked like a cross between Elvis and Rock Hudson. Mom looked like Lauren Bacall. Now he looked like fat Elvis minus the sideburns. I stared, mesmerized at his body. He slept in his underwear and was big and hairy. I was terrified of him catching me, but deep down inside part of me hoped that he would. I wanted Dad to call me into his room and have me shut the door the way he did with my sisters. I wanted him to do to me what he did with them. I don’t think I would have minded it as much as they did.

Many nights after dinner Dad made Lucy or my little sister, Nina, sit on his lap while the family watched TV. He would do this right in front of me like I wasn’t even there. He’d whisper in their ears and rub their thighs and was always trying to feel them up. They’d push his hand away and say, “Daddy!” and try to be cheery because if they were mad about it he’d turn mean. We had to walk on eggshells around him. We always had to be in a good mood.

Dad was in love with my older sister, Lucy. I don’t even know what all that was about. So much of it happened for years behind closed doors. Once I heard him tell her, “If I could marry you, I would.” I don’t know how far he got with her. I can only assume all the way. He rarely let Lucy go out with her friends. But then he would take her everywhere. To movies, for drives, out to eat in restaurants. I think Mom started to get jealous. Lucy was mad at Mom. I could never figure out how Lucy could be mad at her. Dad was the maniac. Now, I think she was angry because Mom wouldn’t stop Dad. At the time I didn’t think Mom was doing anything wrong. I thought she had it worse than anyone because all this shit was happening to her and her kids and she had no way to stop it.

For fun I used to shoplift things that I knew my parents would never buy me: dirty books, candy, and especially cans of Pam, the nonstick vegetable coating spray. You could get high from inhaling Pam, and I did. I hid the cans in a box in my bedroom closet. Late at night when Jerry was asleep I’d get it out and spray it in a paper bag and inhale it over and over until I was completely stoned out of my mind. It had a warm metallic smell. All around my mouth would get covered with a humid slime of vegetable coating. I could “hear” a flashing brown dot up to the right of my head, just behind me a little and out of sight. I had tried sniffing model-car glue before, but it didn’t work as well. Sometimes I thought I’d hear someone outside my bedroom door, or maybe see shadows of feet. I could never tell if I was being paranoid or if there really was someone out there. I’m surprised my parents didn’t hear the paper bag rattling as I inhaled in and out, in and out. In his searches through my room Dad must have found the cans. But no one ever came in to see what I was doing. At least when I was sniffing Pam I didn’t have to hear the bedsprings squeaking through my sisters’ bedroom wall from one of Dad’s visits.

When Lucy was a senior, one evening a month or so before graduating from high school, she went to a shopping mall with some friends. Dad came home early from work and was extremely pissed at Mom for letting her go. Lucy was seventeen years old. He stomped back and forth, cursing, swearing, looking at his watch. He was accusing Mom of letting Lucy go shopping like it was such a big crime. Lucy got home around 8:30 or 9:00. Dad was so angry that he took her into his room and pulled down her pants, put her over his lap, and started spanking her.

I flipped out. It was so fucking humiliating. I was in my bedroom. I think I’d been told to go there. But I heard everything. When I heard the slaps against her butt and her squeal I lost it completely. I started screaming, “STOP IT! STOP IT! YOU’RE CRAZY!! STOP IT!!” Dad rushed into my room to see what was going on with me. I was sitting up on my bed screaming at him, out of my mind. I was fourteen. He was a two-hundred-twenty-pound, forty-five-year-old ex–army sergeant. He came at me from around my brother’s bed and slapped me across the side of the face so hard that my head went up in the air and then down on my bed. I blacked out for a moment. Lucy yelped at the impact. I saw her standing in the doorway wide-eyed with a hand over her mouth. Her hair that usually flipped perfectly at her shoulders was all messed up. I got back up and started at him. I hit him in the chest, which made him laugh. I swung again. He grabbed me by the wrists and held on to me while I was struggling to get at him. He was too strong. I kept screaming “YOU’RE CRAZY! YOU’RE CRAZY!” and he said for me to “Shut up, you barefoot boy.” He kept calling me “Barefoot Boy” over and over and laughing at me. He smelled like cigars and Old Spice aftershave lotion. Finally he left and went out in the hall or the living room or his bedroom. I just lay on my bed sobbing. Jerry started to cry, too. He usually didn’t seem to notice anything, but this time he couldn’t help it.

Mom came in a little while later and stood by my bed. She rubbed my back as I shook all over and said, “Now, Joey, your father is NOT crazy. He is not crazy.” Like she was trying to convince herself. I muttered angrily, “He is too!” She couldn’t console me.

The next morning I didn’t have to go to school because there was a big red handprint on the side of my face. When Dad came home from work for lunch he was in a perky mood and tried to cheer me up. The following day I went back to school and Karen Porter was shocked when she asked me what happened to my face and I told her Dad slapped me. She couldn’t believe anyone’s father would slap them that hard.

I had seen made-for-TV movies about runaways so I knew there were crash pads in cities where teenagers could go if they left home. The movie Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring, starring Sally Field, was my inspiration. Sally Field ran away from her upper-middle-class suburban home and fell in love with a hippy guy. She realized her mistake and returned home, but her boyfriend followed her. She was torn between her life on the street and her parents’ love for her. She sadly decided to stay home and sent him away. These movies were supposed to scare kids from leaving home, but to me they were signs that if I left I would be okay. The movies told me there was a better life out there somewhere. I wasn’t alone.

After Lucy’s spanking I decided it was time for me to go. It was the middle of May. School was almost out. I was finishing ninth grade. After dinner, I went to the pool hall in our small downtown to look for Steve Holley. He would know where I could stay. He wasn’t there. I walked all the way across town, through strange subdivisions filled with split-level homes and over dirt fields that were soon to be more subdivisions, to Pappy’s Pizza Parlour. He wasn’t there either. I only had a jean jacket on to keep me warm and it was getting chilly out. I shivered, half from the cold and half from nerves. My friend Jerry McDaniels drove me back to the pool hall to see if Steve had shown up. He hadn’t and I didn’t know what to do next. I was sitting in the back watching some guys shoot a game of pool when I saw my dad drive by in the family station wagon. Lucy was with him. They slowed down as Dad searched the pool hall for me with angry eyes. He spotted me. We had eye contact. In the time it took them to find a parking place I ran out the back door and down a couple of side streets into an old residential neighborhood. I hid in some bushes until I was sure it was safe. My friend Sherry lived nearby so I went to her house. She said I couldn’t stay there but maybe I could stay with her friend Jacquie Smithson. Jacquie lived three blocks from my parents. We went over there and she said I couldn’t stay with her either but she’d ask her next-door neighbor David, who was a grade ahead of us. We used to play kickball together in the bowling alley parking lot. He asked his mom if it was okay and she said yes.

I was scared. I wanted to walk up the street to 50 Highway and stick out my thumb and catch a ride into Kansas City to get as far away as I could. But I had no idea where I would go once I got there. Plus, I was afraid my dad would drive by again. I decided to wait until the morning before going into the city. I slept in David’s room in his family’s refinished basement lined with light brown wood paneling. That night I had a dream where a voice, loud and clear, told me to go back home. It was my mother. When I woke up I felt sick to my stomach and didn’t want to get out of bed. The song “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo” was playing on the radio in the kitchen. It was about hitch-hiking. It was about being free. It was my call. Only there was no “you” and no “Boo.” Just me. I thought about Sally Field. I went back home. I was grounded for a month, which meant I couldn’t go anywhere, not even leave our yard, unless I was with my parents. I wasn’t allowed to see my friends. I was under house arrest.

FIRST LOVE

In May of 1974, three days after I graduated from high school, I moved out of my parents’ house. Six months later, my mother came to my apartment to talk to me about some psychiatric tests my dad had taken. She told me that they found out that my dad had homicidal tendencies, which were directed at me. It took a while for exactly what that meant to sink in. Dad wanted to kill me. Well that was no news to me, but apparently his psychiatrist thought it was serious enough that my mom came to my apartment to warn me. My mother, younger brother, Jerry, and younger sister, Nina, had been banned from visiting me. Dad was mad at me for the times I’d knocked on Nina’s door and told him to leave her alone. And for the times I’d get in his way when he wanted to go into her room. He was molesting her like he had my older sister. When Lucy finally said stop it and refused to come back home from college, he snapped. He turned evil and dumped all that meanness onto Nina. He hated her as much as he had loved Lucy. He constantly accused Nina of sleeping around with the neighborhood boys. He wouldn’t allow her to go to any after-school functions because he thought she was such a slut. She told me if he announced at dinner that he wanted “strawberry shortcake for dessert” that was his secret code meaning he was going to pay her a visit later and suck on her breasts.

“Shifting into neutral” was what I called how I dealt with my father. In order not to get too angry and go completely crazy I would retreat into myself and numb out. I became an expert at smiling and saying I was fine no matter what kind of emotional roller coaster was going on inside me. But after my mom’s warning, I pulled out of neutral and shifted into gear. I started making plans to drive my ’63 Oldsmobile Holiday to Florida to live with Lucy. She had an apartment with her college roommate, Susie, a half a block from the ocean at Jacksonville Beach. In the 1950s that stretch of beach had been a big tourist attraction and resort area. But when I arrived in the midseventies, even though it was summertime, the vacationers had moved on to other beaches, and most of the motels needed paint jobs and repairs. There was an old boardwalk lined with run-down amusements and bars that oozed stale smoke. People cruised up and down the beach in their cars drinking beer and blasting radios. It wasn’t much of a resort town anymore, but it was the first ocean I’d ever seen and it was far from my psychotic father, so to me it looked like paradise.

Lucy and Susie worked as go-go dancers. Sailors came down from the naval station at Mayport every payday and got drunk and paid my sister fresh cash to watch her small breasts bounce up and down. I wasn’t allowed into the club since I was a relative, but every day I would bring the two of them dinner from McDonald’s. I knocked on the door at the entrance and told whoever was working that I was Lucy’s brother and passed in their bag of cheeseburgers and fries.

One night I got sloppy drunk with a guy who had a crush on Susie. We hung out at the beach staring at the waves while he pumped me for information about why Susie only liked him as a friend. I couldn’t understand why he was so obsessed with her and told him he should just forget about it. When we finished off our twelve-pack of Bud, I left him. On the walk home a car slowly drove by and a man leaned over and looked at me through the passenger-side window. He drove on, but a little while later he came around the corner and crept past me again. His car crawled almost to a stop as he leaned over and asked in a soft Southern drawl if I wanted a ride. I said sure. As soon as I was in the car his free hand was all up and down my leg and then found its way to my crotch. I was already hard. He wasn’t that attractive, but he was aggressive. I went to his apartment with him. It was in a new complex built on the beach next to the Holiday Inn.

We went directly to his bedroom. He had a hairy back. I knew men had hairy chests and I liked that, but this was the first time I had felt a back that was as hairy as someone’s chest. He asked if he could fuck me and I said okay. I didn’t tell him it was my first time. I’d fucked someone before, but this was my first time to get it. It hurt but I liked the feeling of this big hairy guy heaving over me. After he came inside me I lay down on top of him and humped him with my dick between his legs until I came. He got up and, wiping the bed off with a towel, said, “Why’d you come all over my sheets?”

Afterward, we put on silk bathrobes and the man showed me around his split-level condo. We went outside on his balcony that overlooked the dark ocean. He told me that he used to have a lover who was younger than him but the guy killed himself accidentally. The boy was cleaning out a gun that the man kept in his apartment for protection and it went off. He told me if I wanted to, I could move in with him. He owned a local chain of grocery stores and made enough money to take care of me until I could find a job. He was so eager for me to move in that it made me suspicious. I told him no thanks and had him drive me back to the corner where he picked me up. I didn’t want him to see where I lived.

One day, when Susie and I were sunbathing at the beach, she told me about this queer she’d heard about at work who, just before I moved down there, had killed his young boyfriend. She said he got off because he had money and knew everyone in town. His defense was that the boy was playing Russian roulette with the gun and it went off accidentally. I panicked and thought she was telling me this because, somehow, she knew that I’d slept with that guy. I got freaked out and embarrassed but didn’t offer any information about what I knew. A few years later, after I’d officially come out, I asked her if she knew then that I’d slept with the guy and she said she didn’t.

The plan was that Lucy, Susie, and I were going to move to Gainesville and enroll in college. When it was almost time to register they decided to go back to Missouri to finish school. Tuition was cheaper since we were Missouri residents, and it was also cheaper to live in Missouri than in Florida. They’d lived at the beach for a year already and I’d just been there a couple of months. I hadn’t found work and was running out of money, but didn’t want to go back to Missouri. I decided since they were leaving Florida, that I would go down to Miami. The day before I left, the engine block on my ’63 Holiday cracked. Black sludge oozed out of the nozzle of my air filter. I junked the car for seventy-five dollars and then hitch-hiked down I-95.

When I left Jacksonville Beach, Lucy drove me to the I-95 freeway ramp. Before I got out of the car she gave me a big hug and told me be careful and don’t worry. I looked out the window at the white concrete highway. The tinted blue visor strip at the top of the windshield protected my eyes from the bright Florida sun. It was early so the heat wasn’t oppressive.

I said, “I’m not worried about going to Miami. I’m more worried about you going back to Missouri, close to Dad.”

“At least we aren’t going to be in the same town. It won’t be so bad.” She smiled a sad smile and hugged me again before I got out.

After living in Miami a little over a month, I started to get lonely and restless and began to think about leaving. It was mid-September. I’d just turned nineteen and had a depressing birthday. I missed my friends and my mom. I was living in a Cuban neighborhood in a tiny room in a motel that had been converted to single-room-occupancy apartments. I knew if I left Miami I wouldn’t be back in that part of the country for a while so I decided to hitch-hike down to Key West to see what it was like. This guy picked me up in a Volkswagen Bug and offered me a ride out of the city limits if I didn’t mind stopping with him first at the Miami Serpentarium. I said sure. He told me he made his living by going to Mexico and capturing snakes and tarantulas and selling them to the Serpentarium. He pointed to the back seat, next to where I’d tossed my backpack. There was a burlap bag that had something moving inside it. The guy was about twenty-five or so. He had on a tank top and white shorts with sandals. When I told him I was leaving town and wanted to see Key West before I left he asked me if I needed a job. Was that why I was leaving? I said kind of. I didn’t like to give out too much information to my rides before I got to know them.

He kept his eyes on the road while he talked to me. “I know how you can make some easy money.”

I looked at the guy. He seemed normal but I hadn’t been in his car two minutes and he was already up to something. I didn’t believe him. “Yeah? How?”

“You could go with me to Mexico. I’ve got a trip planned in a couple of weeks. If you go you’d have to help me catch snakes and tarantulas. It wouldn’t be a free vacation. I catch them and sell them to places like the Serpentarium.” He glanced over at me to see my reaction. I was thinking about it. It actually sounded kind of legit but I didn’t like the idea of snake hunting in the desert of northern Mexico with a stranger. He could tell I wasn’t too thrilled. “Why don’t you come over to my house to see if you can deal with snakes before you say yes? I have a bunch of them.”

I said, “Thanks, but no thanks. I’ve never been wild about snakes and spiders.”

He kept bugging me to at least give it a chance so I finally said okay, I’d go look at the snakes, but I wouldn’t promise anything. He took me to his house in suburban South Miami, where he led me into one of the bedrooms that was filled with aquariums full of snakes. He pulled two brown snakes out and wrapped their tails around his forearm. He held his arm out to me and the snakes stretched forward suspended in midair, bobbing up and down. Not fast, just sticking straight out like they were sniffing me. I broke out in a sweat.

He said softly, “Come on, just touch them. They’re not gonna hurt you.” I tried to reach for them but was too scared. I didn’t like being there. I didn’t like the snakes coming at me. I wanted to go. Just then a young guy came in the room. The guy who was showing me the snakes introduced us and told him that I might be going on the next snake-hunting trip.

“I don’t think so,” I said nervously. They both laughed.

The guy put a dozen snakes in a big bag and tossed it in the back of his VW with the other writhing bag. I rode with him to the Serpentarium, where he told me to wait in the car while he dropped off the snakes. When he came back out he asked if I wanted to go with him to North Miami Beach, then he would drop me off at a spot by the freeway where I’d be sure to get a good ride down to Key West. I didn’t really. I was starting to feel like I was wasting time. The afternoon was half-over already and I wanted to get down to Key West. He said he may have a job offer and I might be able to pick up some cash, too. He went to a pay phone, made a quick call, and jumped back in the car saying, “Come on, let’s go.”

On the way there he started telling me about how he made extra money by being in porno movies. “It’s great getting paid to have sex with someone.” He looked over at me then asked, “Would you ever do something like that?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it before. I guess it depends on how many people are watching.”

“It’s just the cameraman and whoever you’re with. No big deal. Look, I need to pick up a paycheck from the last movie I did. If you want I’ll talk to the people to see if they need any help.”

I laughed and said, “Yeah, sure.” I didn’t think he was serious.

When we got to North Miami Beach he stopped at a pay phone again. This time he talked for a longer time, looking back at me every once in a while smiling and waving.

He got back in the VW and said, “Good news. I got us a job.”

That surprised me. “What do you mean?”

“You can make a hundred and fifty dollars this afternoon if you come with me and make a movie. It’ll be with me and someone else.”

“Who’s the someone else?”

“It’s a girl I’ve worked with before. You’ll like her.”

“What’s the movie about?”

“It’s about a doctor who’s checking his patients and then winds up having sex with them. It’s a bisexual movie.”

“Would I play the doctor?”

“No. I’ll play the doctor and you’ll be the patient.”

“I don’t know.” I started feeling uneasy.

“What do you mean you don’t know? It’s an easy hundred and fifty bucks. You obviously need the money or you wouldn’t be hitch-hiking.” He was beginning to lose his patience. “Look, I’ll show you where we’re going to do it so you won’t worry.” He drove slowly by the house where the film would take place. It was a big peach-colored two-story stucco with giant palm trees in front of it.

“See, it’s respectable. What do you think?” We both got quiet. I debated to myself whether or not to do it.

“Maybe, I’m not sure.”

He shifted in his seat, then started rubbing the steering wheel up and down. He took a deep breath and asked, “Look, kid, what’s the holdup? All you have to do is just lie back and enjoy yourself. Can’t you do that for a hundred and fifty dollars?”

I was starting to feel the pressure. He wanted me to make a decision right now and I couldn’t. “What if I get in front of the cameras and can’t do anything?”

He started laying it on heavy for me to do the movie. “Look, there’s a lot of money at stake here. The girl’s gonna get five hundred dollars and I’ll get two hundred and fifty since I’m going to be in both scenes. Girls always get paid more. It’ll be fun for everyone plus we get paid. What more could you ask for?”

I looked over at him. I could tell he was trying not to lose it. I didn’t want him to be mad at me. I mumbled, “I’m just worried that I won’t be able to do it.”

“Hey, come on, are you worried about doing it with another guy? It’s no big deal. It doesn’t mean you’re a queer just ’cause you’re in a porno movie. Here, give me your hand.” He took my hand and put it on his crotch while he drove around the neighborhood. “Does that do anything for you?”

I said, “Not really.” Then he opened up his fly and pulled out his dick. Some kids playing ball ran into the street and I was sure they saw what was going on, but he kept at it. He opened up his legs a little and got his balls out of his shorts, too. He took my hand again and said, “Just feel it for a while.” He drove around and I laughed self-consciously as I felt his dick getting hard in my hand. He smiled, looked at me sideways, and said, “That feels good.” Then he pushed my hand down a little farther and had me feel his balls.

He drove back towards the house where the film shoot would be and asked once again, “Well, what do you think?”

After a long pause I said, “No. I don’t think so.”

“Come on, man, what are you talking about? That’s an easy hundred and fifty bucks.” He was starting to get mad. “Besides, if you don’t do it then I’ll be out the money and so will the girl. It’s not just you who you’re affecting by saying no.” He pressed my hand against his dick. I pulled back and said no again. He reached over and felt my hard dick through my cut-offs. He said, “Oh great, you even like this and you won’t do it. Man, you are weird…” He stopped at another pay phone and made one last call.

When he got back in the car he was quiet. After a while he said, “Well, shit, the least I can do is get you a bus ticket to Key West since I took up most of your day. You wanna come over for a while before we go to the bus station?” He ran his hand across the inside of my thigh.

“No. I don’t think so.” I was tired. I was tired of saying no. He shrugged and said, “Okay, it’s your loss, guy.” He took me to the bus station in Little Havana, not too far from where I lived. He went in with me and bought me a ticket. Before he left he wrote down his name and phone number and said if I ever needed anything to give him a call.

It was dark when the bus arrived in Key West. I got a room at a hotel on Duval Street, the main drag. The desk clerk gave me a room on the second floor with two twin beds in it. After I put my backpack in the room, I went back downstairs and asked him where I should go. He said there wasn’t really much to see since it was so late at night. He told me just to walk up and down Duval and I’d find something to do. I walked down the street past people eating in a sidewalk café. There were a couple of lively bars, but for the most part the street was deserted. It was quiet there. At the end of the street was a pier with a sign that said GLASS-BOTTOM BOAT TOURS. I made a mental note to go there the next day. I was getting sleepy so I went back to my hotel room.

I chose the bed that was farthest away from the window. I searched through the drawers of the dresser and the night table to see if I could find anything interesting. There was a Gideon Bible. I took it out and ran my forefinger across the gold-embossed genie-lamp emblem in the bottom right-hand corner. I opened it up and flipped through the soft pages. It smelled good. I liked the feel of the hardback. It fit my hand. I didn’t feel like reading it, though. The Bible made me think of Jesus and Jesus reminded me of my mother, who I missed. I felt guilty for leaving her behind with my dad. I’d only spoken with her on the phone once since I’d gotten to Miami. She said she took Nina to stay with my grandmother in Arkansas so she could finish her senior year of high school without any more trouble. Mom wasn’t sure what they were going to do after that. She said Dad was upset but everything would be okay. I pulled out one of the hotel postcards I’d picked up in the lobby to send to her to let her know I was all right. I placed it on top of the nightstand so I wouldn’t forget about it.

The rest of the drawers were empty. I looked in the closet. Nothing there either. The bathroom had old white small octagon-shaped tiles on the floor. Ceramic plaques of pink goldfish blowing pink ceramic bubbles hung on the wall above the toilet. No bathtub. The shower looked like a metal closet. I pulled back the plastic shower curtain and turned on the water. Rusty brown water that smelled like rotten eggs spurted out, then cleared up. I took off my clothes and stepped in. The warm water rinsed off all the Greyhound bus grime. I loved the feel of the shower and stood for a long time letting the water pressure massage my back.

In the morning, I devoured a plate of waffles at a little restaurant next door to the hotel, and then walked to the end of Duval Street to buy a ticket for the Glass-Bottom Boat Tour. I had an hour to kill before the boat took off, so I walked around the island to see what was there. A sign with an arrow pointed this way to Hemingway’s home. I followed the arrow down a street covered with overgrown tropical vegetation. Another sign with an arrow, an official United States historical marker saying THE HOME OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY, pointed to a house with a picket fence, bushes, and some palm trees in front. I went in and looked around. There wasn’t much to see, really. Just an old house that no one lived in. I left and headed back towards the pier and passed a hand-rolled Cuban cigar shop. There was a sign that said WE DELIVER ANYWHERE. My dad loved cigars so I thought I would go in and see if they had something I could send to him.

A man with tanned, weather-beaten skin and sun-bleached hair sat behind a glass counter rolling cigars. He smiled at me and in a soft Southern accent said, “Let me know if I can help you.”

I said, “I’m thinking about sending some cigars to my dad.”

“Yeah? Where are you from?”

“Miami. Well, Kansas City really, but right now Miami.”

He looked up from a cigar he was rolling and said, “Oh really? What are you doing in Miami?”

I told him how I’d moved to Jacksonville Beach and then my sister went back to Missouri so I came down there.

“Do you like it in Miami?”

“It’s okay.” I looked under the glass counter at all the boxes of cigars and asked, “Are any of these real Cuban cigars?”

“That’s what the sign says.” He pointed to the sign on the counter.

“How can they be real Cuban cigars if we’re not supposed to be getting anything from Cuba?” I was suspicious. I wanted to send my dad an authentic Cuban cigar but didn’t want to get ripped off.

He winked at me and said, “I’ve got my ways, but I’m not going to tell them to you.” Then he laughed. He stood up and came over to me. He held out the cigar he was rolling and said, “Here, smell this.” It stunk. I hated the smell of cigars. My dad used to dump his smelly cigar butts in the toilet and then not flush, just let them float. I would always aim at them when I was pissing and try to destroy the cigar butt. Dive-bombing the ship.

The man put his hand on my shoulder, friendly, and pointed out all the different kinds of cigars in the display cabinet.

“If I buy something, would you ship it to my parents’ house in Missouri?”

“Sure. How about a box of these?” I looked at the price and realized there was no way I could pay for that. “Is it okay if I just buy a couple of them?”

He hesitated. “Well … sure, but don’t tell anyone. I’d hate for this to get out.” After I paid him and gave him my dad’s name and address, he told me that if I wasn’t doing anything later to stop by. He closed up shop at four for a couple of hours and would be glad to show me around.

I said, “Thanks. Maybe.” Then I headed off for the Glass-Bottom Boat Tour. On the way over there I started thinking about that twinkle in the guy’s eye when he told me to stop by later, and decided maybe I wouldn’t go back to see him.

Once we got away from land the glass-bottomed boat seemed a lot smaller than it did when it was docked at the pier. It was just an old fishing boat with a big plexiglass window built into the bottom. I sat outside on a bench in front of the cabin and felt the warm wind brush against me while the bright blue ocean spread out in front of me. I thought about how far out in the water we were, beyond the very tip of the United States. A pang of fear mixed with excitement darted through me when I thought about how far away from Kansas City I was. The captain made an announcement over the loudspeaker that we could buy Planters Cheez Curls at the back of the boat to feed to the fish. They loved them. I moved to the back with the other eight or so passengers and bought a couple of small bags. The back engine parted the water in a white V formation, spreading a fan of waves behind us. The hot, salty sea air mixed with the car exhaust smell of the boat motor gave me a slight tinge of seasickness when I inhaled. Seagulls kept up with us, hoping to snatch up some of the Cheez Curls before the fish got them.

When we were out about fifteen minutes in the water, the boat came to a stop. The captain said for everyone to go downstairs into the cabin to look at the fish. There was a railing and walkway that went around the clear plexiglass floor. The water wasn’t deep there, maybe twenty feet. It looked like a giant aquarium. A huge purple angelfish swam underneath us. All the tropical fish I’d seen in pet stores were down there, only bigger than I’d ever imagined they could get. They took their time swimming by. Some were curious, others oblivious to us. On the ocean floor was a field of coral, growing in shades of peach, pink, and light red. A tiger-striped fish about three feet long glided by. Then a school of big silver shiny fish came up to the window. They blew kisses at us while we gawked at them. The tour guide pointed to the different kinds of fish, coral, and aquatic life, giving them names. He announced that if we wanted to watch those silver fish go crazy we should take our Cheez Curls up above and throw them in the water.

The ocean was clear enough that I could see the school of fish swimming around when I went up on deck. I opened a bag of the Cheez Curls and dumped it in all at once. The surface of the water broke with a silver splash when the mouths of the fish gobbled at their food. The seagulls screamed and dove down, snatching up some of the orange curlicues. I opened my second bag and a seagull hovered above me. The tour guide said to hold one out to it. I held a Cheez Curl as high as I could above my head, and the bird slowly lowered itself down in the air and picked it out of my fingers with its beak. I threw a few at a time into the water so I could watch the fish come up, snatch the food, and then dive back down.

When we got back to the island I went to my hotel and took a nap. In the late afternoon, I wandered around some more looking for a place to swim, but couldn’t find the beach. Someone said it was on the other side of the island. I thought it was weird to be around all that water but not be able to swim in it. At night there wasn’t much to do. I didn’t want to go to any of the bars. It seemed like everyone knew each other and I felt conspicuous. So I went for another walk. I passed Hemingway’s house and the cigar shop. The shop was closed. I kept on walking because I didn’t want that guy who ran it to come out and start talking to me again. I remembered his eyes. There was something about them that was both attractive and repulsive. He wasn’t a bad person. He was actually nice to me. Maybe a little too old. I went back to the hotel room and plopped down on my bed. I stared at the ceiling for a long time, following the cracks in the chipped paint like they were road maps.

The next morning, I started hitch-hiking back up to Miami. By the time I got home it was night. When my ride dropped me off he asked why I lived in Little Havana when I wasn’t Cuban? I said I didn’t know. It was the first place I found. I thought he was a nice guy, kind of normal. When I got out of his truck I wanted to tell him to keep in touch but I didn’t have a phone and felt weird asking for his number. Besides, he knew where I lived and could stop by if he wanted. I told him to stop by sometime. I got back inside my small, narrow room and sat down on the twin bed. I stared at the turquoise walls and immediately knew that I couldn’t stay there any longer. I didn’t want to go back home to my parents’ house but didn’t know where else to go.

My dad wouldn’t want me to come home but I also didn’t think he’d really try to kill me if I showed up there. I wasn’t sure, though. Besides, I wouldn’t stay with them long. I could get my job back as an orderly at the nursing home and could make enough money to get my own apartment within a month. Maybe my ex-roommate Frankie was back from India. That’s where he was headed when I left for Florida. If he was back I could move in with him and wouldn’t even have to stay with my parents. I felt humiliated and scared at the thought of facing my father, but I didn’t have much of a choice. If I’d really wanted to survive in Miami I would have had to take any kind of job that came along. I’d been holding out for one that I liked. Even though I’d lived off peanut butter sandwiches for a week I still couldn’t see myself washing dishes in a restaurant or doing warehouse work. I’d tried a warehouse job for a few days but just couldn’t do it.

Half of me felt elated at the decision to leave Miami and go back home. I was lonely and running out of money. I didn’t have anyone to talk to in Miami. The other half of me felt weighed down with an unnamed heaviness. Dread. Something else was pulling me back towards home. I had to face my father at least once more. Why was I the one who had to leave home? What had I done that deserved being sent off in exile? There was a driving force deep in me that made me want to go back. I wasn’t planning any kind of showdown. I was still scared of him. But I had to be in Dad’s presence at least once more. I had to let him know that he wasn’t getting away with his shit. Even though I didn’t know how to acknowledge it, I was angry. I pulled myself up off the bed and walked two blocks to the pay phone next to the Burger King on Coral Way. I took a deep breath then called my parents collect. Dad answered the phone.

“Joe! How are you doing, son? It’s good to hear from you.” He spoke to me in that deep cardboard voice he used for business acquaintances and people he didn’t know very well. “How are you getting along? Hold on a minute. Let me get your mother.” That was the extent of our conversation. I kicked a rock across the well-lit parking lot towards Burger King. It was a warm night. Someone had scratched the word “suck” on the metal plate below the pay phone dial. I tried to scratch “me” next to it with the edge of a dime.

“Joey?” asked my mother’s anxious, cheery voice. “Well, how are you?” She emphasized the are you like she meant it more than a greeting.

“I’m okay. I just got back from Key West.” I took a deep breath. “Mom, I don’t think I want to stay in Miami anymore. Do you think it’d be okay if I came home for a while, just until I get some money together to find an apartment? Not long.”

“Well, of course you may.” She emphasized the of course. “You know you can come here anytime you want, Joey. Just let me speak with your father.” She put her hand over the receiver so I wouldn’t hear anything. A young Cuban couple was making out at a picnic table in front of Burger King. Across the busy street was the Club Baths. One of my rides told me I should go there sometime if I wanted to have a lot of fun. There was a pause and then she got back on the phone. Her voice was softer, not quite so upbeat. “Joey, you just come on home.” She hesitated and sighed. “I would love it if you came back.” She emphasized the love. What she didn’t say, but what I knew, was that my dad was pacing back and forth puffing on his cigar cursing and swearing about her no-good kid who wants to come home now that he’s run out of money and can’t make it out in the world on his own. Mom was the buffer between me and that voice, but I heard it anyway.

It hurt to know that he was mad because I wanted to come home. There was part of me that still wanted to love him because after all he was my dad. But the only way I could acknowledge that hurt was by feeling a familiar knot tightening in my stomach. I hadn’t felt that knot in a while. Not since before Jacksonville Beach.

I packed all the stuff Lucy had sent down to me a month before in a care package—my record player, albums, and clothes—into one big box. Then I called the guy who wanted me to go snake hunting. He seemed surprised to hear from me only a week later. “Did you change your mind?”

“About snake hunting?”

“No. About doing the movie.”

“Uh, well, no. I don’t want to do that. I was calling because you said if I needed anything to let you know. I was wondering if you could drive me to the bus station? I’m leaving town and I need to ship my stuff out.”

There was a pause and then he said, “Yeah, sure.” He sounded kind of disappointed.

As we loaded my big box into his VW he told me not to act like we were together if anyone said hello to him at the station. He did a lot of his reptile shipping there and didn’t want the guys to think he was some kind of a fag.

At the station it took both of us to maneuver my box out of his VW Bug. When it was getting weighed in I shook his hand.

“Thanks for helping me out. I guess I’ll see you later. Well, maybe anyway.”

“Yeah, listen, you take care of yourself. Remember, if you ever change your mind about being in the movies or going snake hunting, give me a call.” He got back in his car, beeped the horn, then drove off.

I walked back to my little apartment along the Miracle Mile stretch of shops, restaurants, and big homes. Miami looked beautiful to me. I was going to miss it, but felt glad to be leaving.

I got out my map of the United States and planned my route to Atlanta. I-75 went right up the middle of Florida and on into Atlanta. From there I could cut across to Chattanooga, Memphis, and then up into Missouri and home to Kansas City. My eyes started wandering around the map and another idea hit me. Since I didn’t know if I’d ever be back to the East Coast I decided that, after Atlanta, I’d hitch-hike up to New York on my way back to Kansas City. I wasn’t completely broke. My Aunt Dolly had sent me a check for seventy-five dollars as a late birthday present. I cashed that along with my paycheck from my short-lived warehouse job, so I had a little over two hundred dollars. I put most of it in Traveler’s Checks in case something should happen, like losing the money or getting robbed.

When I got to Atlanta I called former neighbors of my family’s, the Parkers, and asked if I could stop by and visit. I stayed there a week. They fed me. I slept a lot and watched TV. It was just like being at home. I talked to my mom a couple of times on the phone. I heard Mrs. Parker talking to her one day when she thought I was asleep. She told her that I looked good and healthy, but she knew I’d be glad to get home. I think my mom was relieved to hear that. The Parkers told me they didn’t think it was such a good idea for me to hitch-hike to New York but they didn’t try to stop me.

In the suburbs north of Washington, DC, some guys in a van gave me a ride. They told me I shouldn’t hitch-hike up I-95 to New York. People would have trouble picking me up since there weren’t very many places to pull over. It would be dangerous for me to be out on that stretch of interstate. They convinced me to take a Greyhound bus from Baltimore to New York. They lived in Baltimore and dropped me off at a city bus stop and told me to get on the next bus going downtown, because they all went near the Greyhound station. It was late evening and I had to wait a long time at the bus stop. I was the only white person for miles around. On the bus I sat up front, close to the driver on a sideways-facing seat with my backpack on my lap. People stared at me. I had long, wavy hair, red from the Florida sun, and a dark tan, but I wasn’t as dark as any of them. I felt very white. Whiter than I’d ever felt before.

The Greyhound bus to New York City didn’t leave for another hour so I found a place to sit on a bench and wait. Two long-haired guys with scruffy beards and a girl wearing a blue jean maxi-skirt sat down around me.

One of the guys nodded his head hello.

“Where are you headed?”

“New York.” Like I said before, I didn’t like to give out too much information to people before I got to know them.

“Really?” he said, kind of excited. “Why do you want to go there? Have you ever been? It’s a scary place.”

“No scarier than anywhere else, probably.” I flashed on my mom telling me that my dad had homicidal tendencies that were directed at me and laughed to myself.

The girl asked, “Why don’t you come crash at our house tonight and think it over. You should get some rest and something to eat before heading to New York.”

I smiled at them politely. “No thanks.”

Then the second guy, who had been quiet up to now, got serious. “Did you know that Satan lives in New York? If you go there you’ll probably get killed.”

Jesus Freaks, I thought. “Maybe Satan does live there, but Jesus does too,” I said back to him.

They tried to argue with me about Jesus and the Devil and why was I out traveling alone when I should be serving God? I had been a Jesus Freak in high school so I knew what they were up to. They were trying to scare me into coming home with them so they could save my soul.

The second guy got mad because I wouldn’t give in. “You must not go to New York!” His voice echoed in the high-ceilinged bus terminal. They pleaded with me to come home with them, like they were sure if they let me out of their sight my soul would be damned forever and they would have failed their mission on Earth.

I started to get pissed. “Definitely forget it. Go bother someone else.”

When they realized I was a lost cause, they reluctantly gave up. Before they left, the second guy looked me dead in the eyes. “If you want to rot in hell, go ahead and take that bus to New York.”

“Thanks. I will,” I snapped back. Then they were gone.

Beyond the reflection of my face in the bus window I saw nothing, just black, as the Greyhound pulled out of Baltimore into the night. I thought about my friends back in Missouri. It was Saturday night, so they were probably going to a concert or across the state line to Kansas, where the drinking age was eighteen, to get some beer and hang out. The last time we got drunk on the Kansas side, Larry Stevenson almost wiped out his Plymouth Gold Duster on the way home because the roads were so slick. The car spun around on the highway a couple of times before it came to a stop. We both got out and puked and then drove on home. I smiled to myself in the window as the vibration of the bus lulled me to sleep.

“Welcome to Port Authority, New York City. Please watch your belongings as you exit the bus,” the bus driver’s cheery voice announced.

I stepped through the glass doorway of the bus terminal into the sidewalks of Times Square just two weeks after my nineteenth birthday. It was 12:30 on a Saturday night in late September 1975. It was warm but not stifling hot like it had been in Florida. I didn’t have much of a warning for the bombardment of people, flashing lights, and signs that hit me everywhere I turned. It looked like something right out of a TV show. I was tired from the bus ride but felt a rush of energy as life gushed all around me.

Across from the Port Authority on Eighth Avenue below Forty-Second Street was a chorus line of girls, wearing the shortest skirts and the highest heels I had ever seen, grabbing at men as they walked by. A half a block down I saw a hotel sign hanging on a hinge over the doorway. I slung my backpack on and walked across the street to the hotel. Just as I reached for the doorknob, a girl, not much older than me, with a feather boa draped around her neck, grabbed my upper arm.

“Hey, Cutie, you goin’ in there?”

She surprised me. “Yeah,” I said.

“You need a date?”

“No thanks. I need a room.”

She looked puzzled. “You mean you’re going in there and you don’t need a date?”

I was getting irritated. “This is a hotel, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, sure it’s a hotel. But…” She paused. “But most people don’t go in there without a date.” She looked me up and down. My backpack was getting heavy. “You just get here or something?” She nodded her head to the bus station and asked, “From where?”

“Miami.”

“You ever been to New York before?”

I shook my head no.

“You know anybody here?”

I shook my head no.

She smiled at me, not her working-girl smile, but more like the way my sister Lucy smiled at me just before she left me out on the highway in Florida. She pulled me close to her and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Listen, you take care, sweetheart.” She grabbed another man as he passed us by. “Hey, wanna date?” She disappeared into the river of people on the sidewalk.

It was dark inside the door of the hotel. A steep flight of stairs led up to a bulletproof window. The wooden steps creaked and moaned as I climbed to the top. The rail wobbled in my hand. A big guy with a big stomach and faded tattoos on his forearms came up to the window and looked down at me. He seemed surprised when I told him I wanted a room for the night.

I said for the second time in the last five minutes, “This is a hotel, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, wait, hold on a minute.” He left his booth. I could hear him talking to someone. When he came back to the window he said, “Twenty dollars.” I thought that was kind of expensive since the night before I’d paid $17.99 at a Motel 6 just outside of DC, and it was in much better shape than this place. I pulled out my Traveler’s Checks and started to sign my name.

“You have to watch me do this.”

“Do what?”

“You have to watch me sign this check or else it’s no good.”

“Oh shit. We don’t take Traveler’s Checks.”

“Why not?” I asked. “It’s good. You can cash them anywhere. I thought everyone took Traveler’s Checks.”

“Let me see some ID.” I pulled my driver’s license out of my wallet and stuck it under the slot beneath the bulletproof glass. He looked at me and then the picture of me on my license. Then he examined my signature on the check. He had a washed-out tattoo of a heart with a knife going through it on his forearm. Blood dripped off the tip of the knife. He slid my license back to me underneath the thick glass window.

“You from Kansas City, kid? I was there once. On my way to L.A. Stopped and got gas. Had some of the best damn barbecue I ever ate there.”

He stuck a clean white towel and a key with a room number scratched into it under the thick glass window, and then buzzed me in through a big beat-up metal door.

“Up one flight and down to the left.” He nodded with his head towards the staircase.

My room was big enough for a bed and an old rusted white porcelain sink. The window had bars over it and faced a brick wall about two feet away. I tried to open it but couldn’t because it was sealed shut with nails and layers of paint. My fingers turned black from the dust and soot on the windowsill. As I rinsed them off in the sink a roach shot out from underneath and ran up the wall. I pulled my transistor radio out of my pack and propped it up on the edge of the sink. I found a Top 40 station and stretched out on the bed. The sheets smelled like fresh laundry. Downy fresh. The mattress was lumpy. Every time I moved, the bedsprings groaned and pressed into me. An R&B song came on the radio that I knew from the Miami station. Guys singing you sweet sticky thing in high falsetto voices. I liked that song.

The bathroom was down the hall. It was small and dirty and smelled like urine. I definitely didn’t want to take a shower there. I pissed in the toilet and then couldn’t find the handle to flush it. I looked all over. Above my head was a wooden handle attached to a chain that was hooked to a wooden box high up on the wall. I pulled the chain and water gushed down a pipe from the box into the toilet and flushed it out. That fascinated me. It was like an antique or something I’d seen in an old black-and-white movie.

I went back to my room and stretched out on the bed. When I shut my eyes, I still felt the hum of the Greyhound bus and the sensation of landscape whizzing by in the sides of my vision. I thought about my first-hour class in high school, and how I used to stare out the window at the cars and trucks passing by, wishing that I could be in one of them going anywhere. Now, here I was just about as far away as any of those cars could take me. So why was I going back? Part of it might have been to face my dad, to see if he really did want to kill me. But, also, a big part of it was because I was running out of money. I knew I could go home. That didn’t mean I wanted to or that it was safe there. It didn’t seem like a permanent thing to me. I would stay there until I found work, and then move out. I just needed to regroup. I realized that moving out on my own was going to be harder than I’d imagined. The hardest part wasn’t being broke or hungry, though. It was being lonely.

I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a walk. It was still warm out, the middle of the night, and the streets were full of people. The sky was black but it felt like daylight because of all the storefronts, streetlights, and movie marquees. Forty-Second Street was lined with porno shops that had pictures of nude people having sex in their front windows. Kids about my age tried to sell me drugs, but I didn’t want any. I walked down Forty-Second Street from Eighth Avenue to Broadway and looked at Times Square. I went into a huge arcade filled with pinball machines. The sound of all the machines going at once drowned out the other city noises. I sat down inside a photo booth in the back corner and pulled the curtain shut. I put fifty cents in the slot and then stared at myself in the two-way mirror with the camera behind it. I stuck out my tongue and the light flashed. Then I squeezed my cheeks together and made a fish face. The light flashed again. I turned around and looked back over my shoulder, my movie star pose. Then whirled back around and crossed my eyes and flared my nostrils. All these poses had to be done quickly since the camera flash was timed.

I wandered back towards the hotel with my strip of black-and-white photos and stopped to look in tourist shop windows. I thought it would be nice if I could get something for my parents. Maybe a small replica of the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. I’d always wanted to see the Empire State Building, so in one of the stores I got directions from a woman with a thick foreign accent that I’d never heard before. She told me to be sure to go to the top to see the view.

The people on the streets reminded me of the fish at the Glass-Bottom Boat Tour. There were all different types, some hungry-looking and others just taking their time floating by. One thing I liked about New York was that it didn’t look like other American cities. My first disappointment from hitch-hiking and traveling around the country was that almost every city looked exactly the same, only the landscape was different. There were McDonald’s, IHOPs, and Denny’s in almost every suburb across America. Once you got through the miles of ranch-style homes, shopping centers, and fast-food restaurants to the heart of the city, a small cluster of skyscrapers, there was nothing to do. Downtowns were dead after 6:00 p.m. Anyone out on the street after dark was a sitting duck just asking to be harassed by the police. But New York wasn’t like that. It was piled on top of itself instead of spread out. You didn’t need a car to get around. From the minute I arrived I was surrounded by the feeling of life everywhere. It was like I had been plopped down in the middle of a giant school of fish and had to swim fast to keep up.

I didn’t sleep well. Doors slammed and people yelled in the hallway. Girls brought tricks in all night long. I had to curl up on my side to keep from getting poked by the broken springs in the mattress. That made me cranky. I could hear sounds of sex coming through the walls that reminded me of hearing my dad tiptoe into my sisters’ room late at night. The only difference with these muffled grunts and groans was that there was laughter mixed in. Finally I fell asleep, until a fight broke out down the hall. For a minute I thought they were going to come crashing through my door. I fell back asleep and dreamed my father was looking for me in Jacksonville Beach. He was pissed off that I wasn’t there and told my sister if she knew how to get a hold of me she’d better get a message to me. The dream ended before I heard what the message was, but I was scared.

I woke up early in the morning ready to get out of that hotel and go look for the Empire State Building. I threw my backpack over my shoulders and headed down Eighth Avenue to Thirty-Fourth Street. The city didn’t look like the same place in the daylight. It was a brownish-grey, and the streets seemed almost deserted. All the flash and excitement of the night before had disappeared. I stopped and pulled a sweatshirt out of my pack because it had cooled off during the night. No more warm tropical Miami breeze. Fall was in the air.

A tall man with a camera around his neck walked up next to me and said, “You look like you’re either lost or you don’t know where you’re going.”

“I’m looking for the Empire State Building.”

He laughed and said, “Look up.”

I looked straight up and realized I was standing at the base of the Empire State Building. It was so gigantic I hadn’t recognized it close-up. The man watched me as I took off my backpack and tilted my head, looking all the way up the sleek, tan building.

“If you think that’s tall, you should see the World Trade Center. It’s twice as tall.”

This was tall enough for me. Besides, the World Trade Center was new. I wanted to see this old building that I’d heard so much about since I was a kid.

“You should go to the top to see the view.” The man pointed to a revolving brass door, so I walked over and gave it a push. It was locked. A sign in the window said tours started at 10:00 a.m. on Sunday. It wasn’t even 9:00 yet.

“You wanna go get some coffee?” I turned and looked at him. He was big with curly dark hair. He held up his camera and snapped a picture of me. “I’m a photographer. How about you?”

“‘How about me’ what?”

“What are you up to? You look like a runaway or something with that ugly-looking pack you’re carrying around.”

“I’m not a runaway. I’m just looking.”

“Looking? At what?”

“New York.”

“Oh. Well. Do you want to get some coffee with me or not? You don’t have anything to do until the building opens anyway. Come on.” He put his arm around my shoulders and tugged at me. I shrugged his arm off. He seemed nice enough. I wasn’t getting any weird vibes from him so I gave in and followed him down the street. At Thirty-Fourth and Fifth Avenue he pointed to a McDonald’s. People sat looking out on the street from tables on the second floor, above the entrance. I’d never seen a two-story McDonald’s before. Yellow cabs honked as the guy ran across the street in front of oncoming traffic. We went inside and got two coffees. I ordered some hash browns, too. He took the tray and led me up the stairs to a table by the window. It felt like I was in a foreign country.

“What’s your name?”

“Joe. What’s yours?”

“Bud.”

“Hi, Bud.”

“Hi, Joe.”

We shook hands. The sudden formality made me nervous so I laughed a little.

“I don’t mean to stick my nose in your business, but what exactly are you doing wandering around with that backpack?”

“Like I said, I’m just looking around. I’m on my way back to Missouri from Miami and thought I’d stop by to see what New York was like.”

Bud stared at me. He lit up a cigarette. I looked down on the street at the people walking by. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I’m serious. Why wouldn’t I be? Haven’t you ever known anyone who’s gone traveling before?” I poured two nondairy creamers into my coffee and watched the white cream swirl around.

“Sure I have, but most of the people I know want to leave New York, not come here.” He exhaled a big cloud of smoke. “You know what? I’m not doing anything today. If you want, I can show you around. I’ll be your tour guide.”

I thought about it for a while. He asked too many questions. I liked looking around by myself, but I had no idea which way to go, really. All I knew was how to get back to the hotel and that was one place I didn’t want to go.

He said he would take me on a tour, but first he needed to go by his apartment to pick up another camera. We rode in a cab over to Ninth Avenue and West Twentieth Street. His apartment, on the eleventh floor, was small. The entryway had framed pictures of him with Bette Midler and Carol Channing and autographed covers of programs from Broadway plays. There was barely enough room in the kitchen to walk around a table that was covered with dirty dishes and The New York Times. The other room, the living room/bedroom, was as small as the kitchen. At McDonald’s he told me he had a one-bedroom apartment, so I asked him where the bedroom was. He said I was standing in it. In the daytime it was a living room. At night the couch pulled out into a bed and it was the bedroom. From the window above the couch, I could see the Empire State Building over the roofs of the Chelsea district.

He dug around in a closet and found the camera he wanted. Then, when he was ready to go, he told me I should leave my pack there. I said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

“Why not?”

“Because that would mean I’d have to come back here later.” I figured he had ulterior motives and I wasn’t going to set myself up for another awkward situation. Men only wanted one thing.

“Okay, if you feel like carrying that thing around all day, it’s up to you. But you don’t have to.”

We took the subway down to the Staten Island Ferry and rode across for a quarter each. He paid for me and said, “My treat.” I said, “Big spender,” and he ruffled my hair. When the ferry passed the Statue of Liberty I was disappointed. I expected it to be gigantic, the size of the Empire State Building. But it was much smaller. A strong, cold wind blew across the water and into us. The skyline of Manhattan got smaller and smaller as we got closer to Staten Island. We stayed on the ferry and rode back without having to pay again. Bud knew lots of little tricks like that about the city.

After we rode on the ferry, Bud took me to Greenwich Village. We walked down Christopher Street and he explained to me the different types of homosexuals who hung out in that neighborhood. He said they preferred to be called “Gays.” “I don’t know why they chose that one,” he muttered. “There’s nothing ‘Gay’ about it, really.” This was 1975 and the Gay Liberation period was in full swing so a lot of people were coming out of the closet and dressing flamboyantly. I saw a guy dressed as a cowboy in red leather chaps, a blue vest, and a white cowboy hat. Someone else was dressed in army fatigues, like he was a soldier. Bud pointed out a couple of men dressed head-to-toe in black leather and told me they were into “S and M.” I didn’t know what that was. He said they liked to beat each other up. He told me most guys weren’t as extreme as the ones we saw. There were lots of regular-looking guys who dressed low-key, like in blue jeans and bomber jackets. It seemed like all of them had mustaches and short hair.

Bud knew a lot of people. When he walked me through the Village, he introduced me to his friends. They were open and seemed genuinely glad to meet me. They didn’t act like it was bizarre or “wrong” for me to be traveling around by myself. No one asked me why I wasn’t in school, which was the first question I got from most of my hitch-hiking rides. A few of them gave Bud a knowing wink. People were nice to me in New York. Even though I’d just arrived there, I didn’t feel weird like I did back home in Missouri. No one stared at me like on the bus in Baltimore. This city felt comfortable.

Bud asked me if I wanted to go into a Gay bar. That made me uneasy. I didn’t really. He said it would be good for me to see what one was like and that it was no big deal. He walked me to one of his favorite bars called the Ninth Circle on a little side street. We stood at the bottom of the stone stairs that led up to the bar. I didn’t want to go in. I was afraid if I went in I’d turn queer and I didn’t want to be a big fag with everyone laughing at me. I didn’t want to be a lecherous old queen with a Southern drawl like that guy in Jacksonville Beach.

Bud laughed but then got serious when I told him this. He turned facing me, putting his hands on my shoulders, and said, “Joe, what about all the guys I’ve just shown you walking around the Village? Do they look like big fags?”

I said, “Yes, a lot of them do.”

He argued, “But not all of them. Right?”

I had to admit that a lot of the Gays he showed me looked fairly normal.

Inside the bar “Fly, Robin, Fly” by the Silver Convention played from the jukebox. That was another one I knew from the radio. The bar itself was long and narrow. The walls were covered with a light wood paneling. Bud introduced me to the big Italian bartender dressed in all black with a gold chain around his neck. We shook hands. Bud said to me but loud enough for the bartender to hear, “He’s married, but don’t let that fool you.” The bartender laughed and said, “Get outta here,” to Bud. He let me put my backpack behind the bar. Past the bar was the jukebox and then a bench with little café tables that ran around the perimeter of the bar. There was space to stand out in the middle. Through the back door was a garden patio with people eating hamburgers at tables covered with giant umbrellas. Heads turned and guys looked us up and down as Bud and I stood in the doorway. Downstairs was a pool table. Bud said that’s where the hustlers hung out. I went down and looked around. Some guys were shooting pool and hanging out. There was nothing dangerous or sinister about them like the word “hustler” insinuated. They reminded me of my friends back in Missouri.

Back upstairs, two men sat at the bar in a locked embrace, kissing. They were so engrossed they looked like they were going to tip off their stools at any moment. I tried not to stare but couldn’t help it, so I hid my face in the jukebox and read the entire list of selections. I found my song, “Sweet Sticky Thing,” and noted that it was by the Ohio Players. When I got back to Missouri I wanted to buy a copy of that record. The song that played the most was a disco tune called “Do It Any Way You Wanna.” It seemed like every other person who went up to the jukebox played it. There were no words except the title repeated over and over. The rhythm and beat of the song sank into me. I liked it. I liked the song and I liked hearing it at that bar. Bud brought me a beer in a big glass. The beer calmed me and helped me get over my nervousness about being in a Gay bar for the first time. Now that I was inside I didn’t feel so threatened. Like the song said, people were doing it whatever way they felt like. I felt a load lift off of my shoulders. Light, relieved. I started to relax.

Bud introduced me to an older guy who was dancing to the jukebox with a knit neck scarf like he was a burlesque dancer. He had a puffy face, droopy eyes, and a sweet mischievous smile. Bud told me that the guy was in some of Andy’s movies.

I said, “Andy who?”

Bud stopped and looked at me surprised. “You really are a hick, aren’t you?”

I said, “What do you mean?” It pissed me off that all of a sudden Bud was acting superior to me. I didn’t like being called a hick. I was raised in the suburbs, not the country.

He said, “Andy. Andy Warhol. Do you know who that is?”

I got defensive. “Of course I know who that is.” Bud glanced at me sideways like he wasn’t convinced. Thinking of Andy Warhol made me think about one of my favorite meals, a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup made with milk. I wanted to have that as soon as I got home.

The man danced up to us and said in a stoned nelly voice, “Ohhhh! My Quaalude is kicking in…” He wiggled around to the music and rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. I told Bud that was exactly what I did not want to turn into. Bud said I had a long way to go. There were a couple of girls sitting at a table in the corner. That was another thing. I liked girls and didn’t want to quit hanging out with them. Bud said just because he didn’t want to sleep with a woman didn’t mean that he didn’t like women. He just preferred having sex with men. That was the first that Bud referred to himself as being Gay. I tried to let that comment slip by but kept it in the back of my mind. I didn’t want him trying anything funny with me. The girls smiled at me and I went over and started talking to them. When I got close I realized that one of them was a boy with long hair and makeup. I was surprised for a little bit, but actually liked it. I thought he was brave. They seemed okay. I said hello and told them I was from Kansas City and had been out hitch-hiking. They said they were from Queens, and Manhattan was as far as they’d been away from home. The guy turned to the girl and said, “Oh! You’re from Queens? I’m from normal parents!” Then they cracked up laughing. I told them they should go to Kansas City sometime, that it would do them good to get away. They asked me who I was with and I pointed out Bud to them.

The boy said, “Ooooo, better watch out. I think he likes you ‘in that way.’”

The girl winked at me. “I think your friend’s cute. I wouldn’t mind liking him in that way.”

We all laughed.

“Are you two boyfriend and girlfriend?” I asked. They laughed even harder.

She said, “No, honey! Excuse me … What are you thinking? I’m his fag hag, not his girlfriend.”

I’d never heard the term “fag hag” before and was shocked. Why would anyone call themselves something like that? A hag? She didn’t look like a hag to me. I was slightly appalled, but figured it must have been okay because no one was calling her a hag. She was the one who said it. People told me weird stuff all the time when I was traveling. I filed this term away in that category and pretended like I didn’t hear her.

Bud and I went back to his apartment. He made spaghetti for dinner and then pulled out the couch in the living room turning it into the bedroom. He seduced me while we watched The Carol Burnett Show on TV. I didn’t move. I just lay as still as possible and let him give me a blow job.

I stayed there for a couple of days. The second night I loosened up. We had sex and I let him fuck me. I was on my stomach. It was kind of boring. His body was about the same size as my dad’s. Kind of big and soft, but not hairy, and his stomach wasn’t as fat as Dad’s. I enjoyed sleeping next to him with his arm and leg draped over me much more than I did having sex with him.

I wandered around the city by myself in the daytime and then met up with Bud in the evening. I ate at a Chinese-Cuban restaurant on Eighth Avenue. I went there because after Miami, the Cuban was something familiar to me. But even there I had never been to a Chinese-Cuban place where the Chinese waiters and cooks spoke Spanish to each other. That was a bizarre mix to me. English was the Chinese guys’ third language. The rhythm of the city was starting to make sense to me. No matter how out of place I felt in Missouri, I felt completely normal in New York.

I wasn’t sure if Bud heard me when I told him that I had to leave for home soon. He started talking about his lover of five years, Jose, who had died of cancer recently. Only his closest friends knew they had been lovers. Jose’s family didn’t know anything about Bud. Bud was lying on his couch under the window with the view of the Empire State Building in the distance. He started crying when he told me about Jose. He put his hand over his eyes and sobbed, “Joey, my Joey.” That made me uncomfortable because that was my name, too. The day I left he said I could stay with him if I wanted. I think he wanted me around to help him forget about his Joey. He called me a vagabond and ruffled my hair when I said no, I had to go back to Kansas City. He asked why. I said I didn’t know, I just had to go back there right then.

I was sad about leaving Bud because he needed a friend. I wondered if I was making the right decision. After all, I didn’t have to go back to Missouri. He’d even offered me a place to stay. I wouldn’t have minded staying in New York but I didn’t really want to live with him. I did feel like New York was definitely a place where I could live. I loved it that there were people from all over the world in such a small area. It reminded me of junior high when I memorized the dedication on the plaque of the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free … Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.” We were taught that the United States was a melting pot of all nationalities. It didn’t seem like that though in the all-white suburb where I grew up.

Bud gave me subway directions to get me close to the Holland Tunnel. There was a traffic jam when I got there. I stuck out my thumb and hoped someone in all that chaos would give me a ride. A man in a delivery van honked his horn and waved for me to come on. The inside of his van was messy. Lots of hamburger wrappers and paper cups were trashed on the floor. The driver had a red puffy face and a beer belly. After we were through the tunnel and headed into New Jersey he started asking me about my time in New York. Did I have fun? What did I do? Where did I go? I gave him general answers about the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. In my mind my I saw Bud’s face but I didn’t say anything about being with anyone. I didn’t feel like talking much. I just wanted to feel the wind blowing through the window onto my face. I tucked my hair behind my ears and scooted down in my seat.

Then the driver asked me if I went to Times Square. I remembered the girl I met when I was looking for a hotel room. I told him I went there but didn’t stay very long.

“Did you get a blow job?” He looked at me sideways, keeping his eyes on the road.

“What?” He’d caught me off guard.

“Did anyone suck your dick while you were there?”

I got embarrassed.

“I bet they did. You’re acting all shy but I know what you young guys do. I know you like it. You go into the Village and get guys to blow you and then when you’ve had enough you go back to wherever you came from.” He smiled at me and laughed. “Did anyone pay you? I bet you could make a lot of money if you wanted.” His smile froze on his face as he reached over and put his hand on my knee. I moved away but he held on. A giant semitruck zoomed passed us.

He said, “Come on, kid, don’t act so innocent with me.” He swiftly moved his hand up to my crotch and tried to slide into the waistband of my jeans.

I said, “Hey, what are you doing? Don’t.”

He pulled his hand away and looked back and forth from the highway to me. He started laughing kind of crazy, repeating that he knew I liked it. He reached for my crotch again and I leaned forward to keep him from grabbing me. When I leaned forward he tried to stick his hand down the back of my jeans. I put my pack on my lap and sat as far back against the seat as I could. He pushed his hand up under my pack and squeezed my crotch. I pushed his hand away firmly.

“I said, don’t.”

I wanted it to come out forceful-sounding, but instead my words seemed to fall on the rattling floor of the van. I wasn’t even sure if he heard me but he did calm down. He wiped some sweat off his forehead then said, “Listen, kid, I’ll buy you a ticket to anywhere in Ohio you want to go if you’ll just stop at a motel with me for a little while. You won’t have to do anything, just lie back and enjoy it.”

“But I don’t want to go to Ohio.”

“Well, wherever you said you’re going.”

I stared straight ahead clenching my jaw.

Finally he gave up and said that if I wouldn’t let him give me a blow job then I had to get out of the van right there on an overpass of the New Jersey Turnpike. I thought he was kidding. He thought I’d say okay. I didn’t and he wasn’t. I was wearing sandals and my feet got cut by rocks and glass as I walked along the narrow shoulder of the freeway. Elizabeth, New Jersey. There was a stream below me that was pinkish-brown from pollution. Cars and trucks whizzed by so fast that I thought I’d never get a ride. There was nowhere for anyone to stop, no entrance or exit ramps anywhere in sight. I was almost killed by a speeding tractor-trailer truck when a guy in a GTO pulled over to give me a ride. The car barely stopped and as soon as I jumped in, before I could even shut the door, the driver had to floor it to keep the truck from plowing into the back of us.

It was early October. A cool, brisk wind was blowing. The skies were sunny. Jacket weather. Eddie Harris picked me up hitch-hiking fifty miles west of the New Jersey–Pennsylvania border. He had messy brown hair, bushy eyebrows, and dark eyes with a mischievous gleam. It was hard to tell since he was sitting down in his van but he looked shorter than me, five feet eight or so. He didn’t look much older than me. He was headed from Boston to San Francisco. The slogan on the New Hampshire license plate of his white Dodge van said, “Live Free or Die.” The back of the van was filled with power tools, a large empty cage, and a big smelly pad for his German Shepherd dog, Lady. Lady spent most of her time sitting between Eddie and me, smiling with her tongue hanging out of her mouth. The three of us watched through the dirty windshield as the distant landscape came towards us. The inside of the van smelled like a cross between Lady’s dog pad and motor oil.

Eddie pointed to the cage at the back of the van and said, “I had a lion cub in there till just a while ago. I set it free. Let it go in a wildlife reserve just before I picked you up.”

I thought about that. I didn’t like the idea of a small animal being left all alone. “Why’d you let it go?” I asked him. “It might not know how to survive.”

He said, “It’s got a better chance in the wild than it did in a cage in my boss’s basement.” He lit a cigarette and looked at me like he was ready to defend himself. “Fucking asshole. He pissed me off. He’s owed me money for a month now and won’t pay me. So, I took off with those power tools and the lion cub. I’m gonna sell the tools when I get to Chicago.”

I didn’t know whether to believe him or not about the lion, so I let it slide. People said weird things. The price of the ride was listening to people talk. I didn’t mind. I liked hearing their stories. It’s just that sometimes I think people told me bizarre things just to hear themselves talk. Like they believed it even though it wasn’t really true. Loretta Lynn’s illegitimate stepdaughter was one. She might have been telling me the truth. You never know. One of the first lessons I learned as a child was that what people tell you isn’t necessarily the way it is. I applied this truth to hitch-hiking and just sat back and enjoyed the ride.

What Eddie didn’t tell me was that he was running away from a hustler home in Boston, a house of prostitution for young guys. I think he was embarrassed about that. Plus, he didn’t know how I’d take it. That’s not something you tell strangers. He stole a metal box full of money and the van we were riding in from the guys who ran the house and then took off for California. I found that out later. I also found out that he wasn’t lying about the lion cub. There had been one and he did let it go in the wildlife reserve. Eddie told me that he was a bartender in Boston and was sick of it there. I told him I’d been down in Florida and he said that sounded great. He’d always wanted to go to Daytona Beach.

It was night and we were almost through Pennsylvania. We’d wanted to drive straight through to Chicago, but neither of us realized until late that Chicago was still hundreds of miles away. We’d spent most of the day comparing notes on places we’d been, telling each other our favorite songs when they played on the van’s radio, and cracking bad jokes. Eddie was trying to get me to learn a Boston accent. He kept telling me to say, “I pawked my caw in Hawvud yawd.” I didn’t understand what he was saying at first. It seemed impossible to me that we’d just met that day. I felt like I’d know him all along. But still, in all of our talking, joking, and opening up to each other, neither one of us revealed that we were attracted to men. At least not verbally. Every once in a while our eyes would catch a little too long and I’d get flustered.

Eddie had a lot of money and kept telling me not to worry about it when we’d stop and get hamburgers. Somewhere on the black stretch of night highway he asked me if I could keep a secret.

I said, “Yeah, sure, I guess so.”

“The reason I’ve got all this money was because I held up a mom-and-pop store before I left Boston.” I’d never heard the term “mom-and-pop store” and had a vision of him holding a gun up to an old couple. “I didn’t use a gun. I pulled a knife on the guy behind the counter and he handed over a small metal box filled with cash. It was that easy.”

I was quiet for a while. I hoped he didn’t plan on robbing me. I wasn’t sure if he was telling me the truth, but thought why wouldn’t he be? He pulled the metal box out from under the driver’s seat and said, “Look. Look in here.” I opened it up and there was a roll of bills with a rubber band around it, some change, and a knife.

“I didn’t have to tell you. I thought I could trust you.” Eddie looked kind of embarrassed. He lit a cigarette.

I picked up the knife out of the box and rolled it around in the palm of my hand. It was about four inches long with a smooth black handle. It didn’t have all the can openers and fingernail clippers like my Swiss Army knife, just one long blade that was folded into the handle.

“Push that button on the side.” Eddie pointed with his cigarette to a small silver button near the end of the handle. I pushed it and the blade jumped out with a strong jolt. I almost dropped the knife. Eddie said, “That thing can do a lot of damage if it fell into the wrong hands.”

Knives didn’t fascinate me. I folded it up and put it back in the box. Eddie slid the box back under his seat. We were quiet for about half an hour. I was hypnotized by Eddie’s secret and the white dashing line on the interstate shooting towards us then darting under the van. An empty Coke can rocked back and forth on the floor behind Eddie’s seat.

We spent the night in a motel in Youngstown, Ohio, a big steel-mining town. We had to sneak his dog, Lady, into the motel room when we were sure the manager wasn’t looking. She got excited and started barking. We both tried to hush her up, which made her bark more. Luckily, she didn’t get us kicked out. Eddie was the first person I’d met on this hitch-hiking trip who I could relate to. Usually the people who picked me up were older and going someplace in particular. Most of them had pearls of wisdom to bestow on me. It was fun being with Eddie at the motel. We laughed at stupid TV shows and wrestled with his dog. We each had our own double bed. It was luxurious.

The first thing I saw when I woke up in the morning was Eddie lying on top of his rumpled sheets wearing nothing but tight white cotton underwear. There was a striped shadow across his body from the morning light shining into the motel room through the space in the curtains where they didn’t exactly meet. I stared at the profile of his face. His thick brown eyebrows twitched slightly like he was lost in a dream. I couldn’t resist looking at him but didn’t want him to know what I was doing. The last thing I wanted was to ruin our new friendship by getting weird on him.

In case he woke up, I opened my eyelids only a sliver so it would look like I was asleep. I watched his chest rise slowly up and down. My eyes followed the trail of hair from the center of his stomach to the elastic band of his underwear. I stopped there. I wanted to look farther, to get at least a glimpse of what was below his waistband, but was afraid he’d catch me. I looked back at his smooth sleeping face. When I felt sure he wasn’t going to wake up I let my eyes dip back quickly to his underwear. I stared down there until I got too nervous. It was only a few seconds but it seemed like forever. I let my gaze move on down to his thighs and the dark hair that covered his legs. I had never been as fascinated with someone’s body as I was at that moment with Eddie.

He took a deep breath and shifted his weight. I looked away. My eyes landed on the TV. I could see the reflection of his long sleeping body in the blank screen. I looked down to the floor between our two beds where Lady was curled up asleep. Even though it scared me that I wanted to look at him so much, I had to take one more glance at Eddie lying on top of the bed in his underwear. A strange warm feeling came over me while I watched him sleep. Something I’d never felt before.

Back out on Interstate 80 after breakfast, the three of us became as much a part of the van as the steering wheel, the transmission, or the air filter. The padding of my bucket seat sank to fit the groove of my body. Lady was more excited than any of us to be on the highway again. She insisted on climbing over me and sitting on my lap so she could stick her head out the window. She sniffed frantically while the cool fall wind blew hard into her face. Eddie showed me how he liked to smoke cigarettes without using his hands. He let the cigarette rest on his lower lip. It looked like it would fall off and burn him at any moment, but it never did. After an hour or so, the three of us were transfixed on the rolling highway coming towards us. The trees on the side of the road were beginning to turn, so every once in a while a splash of red, yellow, or orange passed us by.

It was our second day in the van together and we’d talked about almost everything the two of us could think of. Everything except sex. I mean, we had talked a lot about sex in general, but not specifics, like our own sex lives. Late in the afternoon in eastern Indiana, a tension started building between us until our not talking about sex became louder than if we had been talking about it. Eddie would bring up the subject, telling me about some girl he fucked or wished he could. I would go along with him, but didn’t add much to what he said. A couple of times he gave me a window of opportunity to talk about my own sex experiences, but I’d just let them slip by. There was an awkward silence, not the comfortable one we had earlier.

Eddie had both his hands on the wheel and was smoking a cigarette. He looked over at me quickly. “Hey, did any guys who picked you up ever try anything weird on you?”

I mumbled something like, “Yeah, kind of.”

He looked over at me and said, “Yeah? Me too. But you know what? I always figured as long as I could get some money out of it, it was okay.” We were both quiet, fidgety. He said, half bragging and half self-conscious, “I guess you could say I’m bisexual.”

He looked over at me again, waiting for some kind of reaction. We had brief eye contact and then both looked away quickly. I thought of the guy who wanted me to go snake hunting with him. Eddie seemed different, like he wasn’t up to anything except talking. I got excited and panic-stricken at the same time. I’d been wanting to hear something like that from him for over a day now. I’d thought he might be a bisexual by some of the looks he’d given me. But I wasn’t going to ask.

I sighed deeply. I looked at him and said, “Yeah, I kind of am, too, I think.” It was the thing I’d wanted to tell him the most but it was the hardest thing to get out of my mouth. I felt my face start to burn. I’d never said that to anyone, not even myself.

“Well, it’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s just most people are so uptight. They don’t realize you can have your cake and eat it too.”

I’d never thought of it that way before. I always tried to fight it whenever there was a guy around I was attracted to. Bud showed me that in New York it was okay to live as a homosexual, but Eddie made it sound fun, like it was no big deal. Bisexual. That means you’re not really, not completely, a Gay.

Now that it was out in the open, I felt a huge relief. I told Eddie about the guy who dumped me out on the New Jersey turnpike because I wouldn’t let him give me a blow job.

“That’s really fucked-up. You know, I used to hitch around Boston and let guys suck me off for money. You should try it sometime.”

“I don’t know.” I told him about the guy in Miami who wanted me to do a porno movie with him.

Eddie freaked out when I told him I could have made a hundred and fifty dollars in one afternoon. “You should have done it!” Then Eddie started talking about how he would love to do a porno movie and maybe when he got to San Francisco he would.

I felt like he thought I was stupid for not doing the movie. I wanted to explain to him that even though I wasn’t a hustler, I wasn’t as stupid as he was making it sound just because I didn’t do that movie. “I’ve kind of hustled, I guess. When I was in New York I didn’t have sex for money, but this guy let me stay at his apartment as long as I’d have sex with him.” Eddie nodded his head in approval. Once we’d both confessed to having had sex with men the floodgates opened up. We talked all the way into the night. All the way into Chicago.

Chicago was a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be. It felt kind of like New York, but different, not quite as condensed. Eddie drove us to the downtown Greyhound bus station so we could get our bearings. He said that’s what you’re supposed to do when you get to a new city because bus stations are centrally located. Also, there’s a good chance someone in the bathroom will pay to give you a blow job. He called it the “GayHound” station. We found an old hotel not too far away from there. It was run-down but still classier than the one I stayed in my first night in New York. I loved the faded rose pattern on the wallpaper in my room. It reminded me of the big old houses my family lived in when I was little. Eddie and I got separate rooms. I don’t know why. Maybe we didn’t want the desk clerk to think we were Gays. The hotel didn’t allow pets, so we had to leave Lady outside in the van. Eddie felt bad but I told him that at least with a big German Shepherd in there no one would steal his power tools.

At first we were just going to stop overnight and then head on to Kansas City. But it looked like there was territory to be explored in Chicago, so we decided to check it out. Plus, I enjoyed being with Eddie and was in no hurry to get back home. That evening, after we took a nap and washed up, we went wandering around the area. We found a strip of bars on Rush Street that we liked. We roamed in and out of them until we found a bar/disco that looked like it could be fun even if it was early in the week and there weren’t many people inside. Even though we were underage, we somehow managed to slip past the doorman without being carded. A live house band was playing downstairs so we went down to check them out. We walked into a big room that had a raised, white plexiglass dance floor with colored lights flashing underneath it. I had never seen anything like that before. The band played “Smoke on the Water” as their finale, and at the end of the song the drummer’s sticks caught on fire. It was all too exciting. Eddie taught the bartender how to make us his favorite drink, called a Freddy Fudpucker. He said they were called that because if you drank too many you’d say “Pudfucker” instead. After a couple of them I began to see what he meant. Eddie tipped huge amounts. We got drunk and danced together to the disco DJ after the band was finished.

The bartender said, “Hey, you guys, this isn’t a Gay bar…”

I said, “That’s okay, I don’t mind.” I took it like he was apologizing but really he was telling us to cool it. To me it didn’t matter where we were. I was having fun being with Eddie, getting drunk, listening to good music, and dancing. It was the most fun I’d had since I left Lucy and Susie at Jacksonville Beach.

The waitress set another round of drinks down on our table and yelled over to the bartender, “Leave them alone. They can do whatever they want.” It was a slow night and she was enjoying Eddie’s tips.

The next day we wandered around Chicago giving Lady lots of attention because we felt bad for leaving her in the van all night. Eddie stuck his head in a pawnshop to see if he could sell some of his power tools, but the guy behind the desk wasn’t interested.

That night we went into a bar that we’d seen some Gays go into, hoping we could get someone to buy us a drink. Eddie said it was easy to get free drinks in Gay bars. Not much happened here, though. There were lots of older guys dressed in leather chaps and vests hanging out giving each other dirty looks. They kept disappearing through a dark doorway. Eddie told me to wait at the bar while he checked it out. He came back quickly and said that I didn’t want to go in there. “I think this is an S and M bar,” he said, quietly. I remembered the guys in black leather in the Village that Bud said liked to beat each other up. The vibes got kind of scary so we decided to leave. We crossed the street and went into another bar, near the Bush/Wacker Hotel, on the corner of Bush and Wacker. Eddie said, “I’d like to wack some bush tonight!”

This place had a bunch of girls in it who kept staring at us and smiling. The bar itself was oval-shaped, made with rough, exposed wood. There were barrels filled with peanuts in different spots and lots of peanut shells on the floor. One girl with a coffee-and-cream complexion and a short, reddish-brown Afro-puff hairdo slowly passed by us. She pulled open her blue cotton work shirt and revealed a small tit.

Eddie looked her up and down and said, “That looks great.” He was being hetero. After she passed by he said, “Guess what? That she’s a he.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I hate to tell you this, but all the girls here are guys.”

I looked around at all the different girls. Some acknowledged me with a wink or a smile, and then I realized he was right. It wasn’t so much their looks that gave it away but more subtle details like big hands, Adam’s apples, and narrow hips. I was amazed and surprised, but liked it.

Honey circled by again and said hello, this time moving in between Eddie and me to get some peanuts out of a dish on the bar. Eddie bought her a drink. She was small and moved lightly like a bird, twitching her head occasionally. In a little while we were surrounded by Honey and her friends. Eddie bought everyone drinks. Then another round. The girls talked us into driving them down to the south side of Chicago to a blue-collar neighborhood bar where, as the big one with long red hair said, there were “real men.” We were all drunk, and on the way there they talked me into showing them my dick. It was soft and they were disappointed. When we got to the bar the mood perked up. We were all friends by then, our own party moving in on this straight, working-class bar. Only there were no women in this bar. I got drunker. I was leaning over the jukebox looking for my favorites: “Do It Any Way You Wanna,” “Sweet Sticky Thing,” and “Fly, Robin, Fly.”

A big man came over to me and said, “Now, son, do you realize that those aren’t real girls you’re with?”

I said, “Yeah, I know it,” kind of matter-of-fact. I laughed a little.

The guy gave me a worried look. “Okay, kid, just be careful.”

A couple of the girls wanted to stay at the bar to work on prospective dates. Eddie drove the rest of us back downtown, swerving a lot. He almost ran off the road once. We went to an all-night diner somewhere near our hotel. I was so drunk I fell over in my seat at our booth. Eddie and Honey seemed to be hitting it off. She kept teasing him in front of me, rubbing his crotch, kissing his neck. She took his hand and put it inside her blouse. I felt like a third wheel. I wanted Eddie to be flirting with me the way Honey was with him. Someone rubbed my leg with their foot under the table. Neither one of them let on who it was. Even though Honey was laughing and joking with us, her attention was never completely focused at our table. Her eyes darted all over the restaurant like she was looking for something or someone. She didn’t order any food but ate french fries off both of our plates.

It was almost daylight by the time we got back to the hotel. We had to leave Lady in the van again. Eddie took Honey with him down the hall to his room. I passed out, feeling disappointed and confused, like I thought I was supposed to be going with them. I wanted Eddie to be with me, not knowing that’s what I wanted. I thought maybe I should go down the hall and knock on his door. In the morning, we went back to the same place for breakfast. Honey was being silly, campy. Eddie told me in front of her that he’d “gone up her ol’ poop shoot.” She slapped him on the shoulder and squealed, “Shut up!” She rolled her eyes like he was so gross and then, when he wasn’t looking, winked at me.

At breakfast I called home on the pay phone to tell my mother that I was okay and was in Chicago.

She said, “Chicago? I thought you were going to New York.”

“I did go to New York, but I was on my way home and stopped in Chicago.”

She sighed deeply. “Well, how am I going to tell your father this one? He’s not going to like hearing this.”

“Then don’t tell him. Why do you have to tell him everything? What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

“Oh, you know your father.” She sounded worried. “He would find out one way or another, so I may as well tell him.”

“Well, what’s wrong with me being in Chicago anyway?” I’d called hoping to hear a familiar, friendly voice, and all I got was worry and the feeling like I’d done something wrong. I went back to the booth where Eddie and Honey were. I hardly knew either one of them but felt much more at home with them than I did my own family.

“Why such a weird face?” Eddie asked.

“Oh, you know. My mom was kind of weird on the phone.”

“Well, Mary,” Honey said, “why’d you call her in the first place? Of course she was weird. She is your mother!” She pulled her compact out of her purse and looked into her mirror and adjusted her bangs. Then she looked back at me. “Just what is it you’re looking for anyway?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re traveling all around. You’re obviously looking for something. What do you want? Why are you doing it? How come you’re not in college or working or something?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m just looking for someplace to live that I like.”

“How come you don’t like where you’re from?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s boring. There are no mountains. No ocean. Plus, people are always harassing me.”

“What people?” Honey cleaned her fingernails with a prong from her fork.

“My parents.”

“Ooo, girl! I know that one. There’s no way in hell my old man would let me come home even if I wanted to. Not that I do…” She tossed her hair back, then waved her hands in front of her face like she was drying her nails or fanning herself. We all laughed.

Eddie and I left Honey and Chicago that morning. I wanted to get home. Somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis we decided to move together to Daytona Beach, Florida, instead of Eddie going on to San Francisco. He said he’d always wanted to go to Daytona. I liked that idea. I didn’t have any reason to stay in Kansas City.

We talked about Honey and the night before. Eddie said sort of joking and shy, “You should have joined us.”

“Really? I kind of wanted to,” I confessed. “But I thought you were into Honey and didn’t want to mess things up.”

“To tell you the truth she wasn’t that much fun.”

“Well, maybe if we meet someone else like that I can join in.”

Eddie lit a cigarette. “Why do we need to meet anyone else?”

I gulped. I withdrew. I had no good answer for that except there really wasn’t any need for anyone else, but how could I tell Eddie that? If I told him that, I thought he’d be gone in no time. I just shrugged my shoulders. Eddie was quiet. I got really nervous. I couldn’t let this moment pass even though I was scared to death. I built up my courage. I opened my mouth and the words came out before I had a chance to stop them.

“We wouldn’t really.”

Eddie looked at me. “What?”

“I mean, we wouldn’t really need anyone else. I don’t think.” There, it was out. Not exactly the way I wanted to answer him, down deep inside. But that was all I could get out at the moment, all I could squeeze past the knot in my stomach that told me if I said anything at all about what I really wanted my world would fall apart.

Eddie sat up in his seat. “Yeah? You think so?” He looked straight ahead at the highway.

I nodded my head yes.

“Well, do you want to maybe stop in St. Louis and take a rest? Who knows, maybe we could do something.”

I panicked. I wanted to. I really did but it seemed too fast. I said, “I don’t know, I kind of wanted to get to my sister’s tonight. It’s about four hours after St. Louis.”

Eddie said, “Oh. Well we couldn’t do anything there.”

“Maybe we should wait until after we see my family. If we do anything before then my mother will know and I don’t feel like dealing with that.”

“How will she know?”

“She just will. She’ll look at me and she’ll know.”

He said, “Okay, on our way to Daytona we’ll do it.” Do it. Do IT. The “it,” such a small word, made me so excited. I was happy. Yes, we would do IT after we visited my parents. I wouldn’t have to stay in Missouri. Eddie said, “Why don’t we just skip Missouri and go down to Daytona now?” I thought about it. We could. There was no reason not to. I just felt like since we were so close, almost home, that I should at least stop by and say hello. Besides, I really missed my mom.

Eddie said, “I have to take a leak.” We pulled over at the next freeway rest stop. We let Lady run around while we sat on a picnic table watching her. She was going crazy trying to sniff everything in sight. We didn’t say much. We sat close to each other. At one point Eddie’s knee accidentally brushed mine sending a shock of electricity through me. I was happy and scared at the same time. I’d never felt this intense about anyone before. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to mess it up or scare him away by doing something stupid like saying the wrong thing or putting the moves on him or something. Eddie picked up a big stick and threw it at Lady. She brought it back to him in her mouth and he handed it to me. I threw it next. The three of us went out into an open area and played fetch, taking turns throwing the stick so Lady could catch it. She was big and could jump high. Time stood still. The air was cool, the sky was grey. I grabbed the stick from Lady and ran as fast and as hard as I could. She caught up with me and jumped on me. I fell down and she licked me all over my face. Eddie came up and lay down next to us. He grabbed Lady and started wrestling with her. Lady grabbed her stick and ran off with it hoping we’d chase her. We were both out of breath. I was flat on my back, looking at the sky full of grey clouds. I think Eddie was too. I could smell the dirt and dry fall grass. I didn’t see him, but I heard him right next to me, when he said, “Hey, Joe, you know what? It really is okay.”

I sat up and asked, “What do you mean?”

“You know. Everything. It’s okay. I like you. You worry too much. Just enjoy it.”

I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to say all kinds of stuff. I wanted to gush all over him about how glad I was we met and he was the only person I knew who could even begin to understand what I’d been through. I wanted to tell him I watched him sleep in his underwear in the motel in Ohio. I wanted to tell him that maybe we should skip Kansas City and go on to Daytona. But I didn’t. I knew he was right: I worry too much.

When we were getting back in the van I walked a couple of steps behind Eddie. I looked down at the tight way the corduroy stretched across his butt. This time I didn’t feel like I had to look away. I looked extra long. My lungs filled with air. Eddie climbed over the driver’s seat into the back and started moving some of the power tools against the side of the van. He propped Lady’s smelly pad up against a wheel well and sat down with his back resting against it.

“Hey, Joe, come here for a minute.”

I started to ask why but he gave me a look like, Don’t you dare. I looked outside to see if anyone at the rest stop would see me.

“No one’s watching. No one’s paying any attention to us.” There were only two other cars and they were parked down towards the far end of the parking lot. I climbed over my seat and sat down next to him. He leaned back a little, stretched his arms up in the air and then brought them down. One touched my side. He ran his fingers along the top of my hand. I was petrified.

Eddie said, “You can kiss me if you want.” I didn’t move. I wanted. I wanted! I felt his fingertips rolling across my knuckles. There was a moment of stillness. Neither of us moved. My heart pounded. He started to shuffle.

“Oh hell, forget it.”

Now was my chance and I was losing it. This was the only thing in the world I wanted to do and I was too scared to move. I couldn’t mess this up. I said, “Okay.”

Eddie leaned back on the pad some more. “Okay,” he said.

I looked at him. His dark messed-up hair, bushy eyebrows, beautiful face. I’d never seen a face as handsome as his. I’d never seen a face I wanted to kiss before. Our lips touched. My stomach froze into a thousand knots. The side of my body touched his body. My blood raced through my veins. The crotch of my jeans felt too tight. I shifted so they fit better. I pressed my lips against his. Eddie opened his mouth slightly. He breathed on my lips through his nose. He sank back. Relaxed. I couldn’t stop kissing him. I thought I would just plant a kiss on his lips, but once we touched there was no question in my mind that I would ever come up for air again. I started moving my head slightly, back and forth, rubbing our lips together. Our teeth accidentally clanged against each other. I took his head in my hands and kissed him even harder. He took me by the shoulders and held on. He slid his tongue around my lips and into my mouth. He was right, it really was okay. Everything was okay. I didn’t care about all those weird men who’d put the moves on me. I didn’t care that I was running out of money. I didn’t give a shit about going home.

We broke away from each other. Eddie slid his hand up under my sweatshirt and gently pinched my nipple. “You really want it don’t you, Joe?” I had to admit I did. I smiled and nodded. Eddie said, “Me too. I’ve wanted to make out with you since I first picked you up. This is far out.” Eddie kissed me with his hand still under my sweatshirt. I rolled over on top of him and we felt each other’s bodies full-on. I could tell he was having trouble with tight jeans, too. As we kissed, a huge sigh of relief seeped out of me. I started to melt into Eddie as I finally realized that it really was all right to be doing what we were doing. He liked me and I liked him. That’s all there was to it. And after we visited with my parents, which now was starting to seem like a nuisance that I would limit to a couple of days, we would move to Daytona Beach and on the way there we would officially do “it.”

We spent a couple of days with Lucy and Susie in Warrensburg, Missouri, a small college town about an hour and a half east of Kansas City. She and Susie had lost their dark Florida tans. It seemed funny to see them bundled up in fall coats after spending most of their time at the beach in cut-offs and bikini tops. I was glad to see Lucy. Eddie decided he wanted to paint his van red because he was tired of the boring white. We went to an auto supply store and bought a bunch of cans of Candy-Apple Red spray paint. Eddie was so proud of our paint job that I didn’t want to tell him I thought the van could use another coat of paint to cover up some of the streaks and lighter spots. Susie came out of the house to inspect and said that, if she didn’t know better, she’d think that van was stolen.

Two days later, Saturday afternoon, we went home to my parents. We left Lady at Lucy’s house until we were ready to leave for Daytona. I knew by heart every curve and hill on the hour drive up 50 Highway from Warrensburg to Grandview, my suburb. Still, I’d seen so many different highways out hitch-hiking that it looked like a forgotten dream. Part of me was excited to finally be getting back home. The other part was dreading it. I was glad Eddie was with me because my dad always behaved better when there was company around. When I saw the familiar well-trimmed lawns and the smooth, paved streets of my parents’ subdivision, I suddenly felt like I’d made a terrible mistake. I should have stayed in New York. Nothing had changed since I left. The only thing different was me.

I took a deep breath as the van pulled into the circle drive where my parents’ ranch-style house was. Mom was the only one home when we got there. That was a relief, even though the house seemed so empty. Mom had taken Nina to our grandmother’s at the end of August and my younger brother was out riding his ten-speed. We didn’t talk about what had happened when she took Nina away. She didn’t tell me about her frightening confrontation when she told Dad they were going. She didn’t say anything about how he was so angry he turned red while he was yelling at her about her “slut daughter” and “good-for-nothing son,” or how he almost broke the front door off its hinges when he slammed it on his way out to his favorite bar. His homicidal tendencies weren’t directed at me at that moment but I’m sure she was aware of them.

Mom wiped her hands on her apron and said, “Well, come on in and tell me everything.” Eddie and I followed her into the kitchen and sat down at the table.

“What do you want to know?” I asked.

“Well, for starters, where all did you go? What did you do? When did you meet Eddie?”

“Oh you know … I saw the Parkers in Atlanta and then went to New York. When I left there Eddie picked me up, we stopped by Chicago, and now we’re here.”

Mom tried to get me to be a little more specific. “Did you like New York? Did you go to a Broadway play?”

“Yeah, I did. I liked it a lot.” I didn’t want to tell her everything I’d really been up to. I picked up the lid to the sugar bowl in the middle of the table and examined it.

“I’ve always wanted to see New York,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll be getting there anytime soon, though.” She stood up from the table and brushed her apron off. “Don’t mind me. I have to start dinner. What do you two feel like eating?”

“How about grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup?”

“No. Your father will want more than that for dinner.” She decided on tuna noodle casserole, which, to me, was almost as good. It was one of my favorite things she made.

Dad pulled up in the driveway in his copper-colored ’65 T-Bird that he was so proud of. Mom met him at the door when he came in. “Joey’s home,” she said cheerfully.

“Who let him in?” he grunted.

Mom sighed.

He said that loud enough for me to hear but low enough like it was just meant for her. I caught it right in the gut. Dad avoided the kitchen by walking through the living room into his bedroom. Mom looked at me like, I’m sorry what can I do God knows I’ve tried. I smiled at her. Eddie didn’t know what was going on, but he was on good behavior just because he was at someone’s parents’ house. He sat up straight in his chair. When Dad came out of the bedroom, he walked up to me with a big scary smile on his face. He gave me a bear hug and said in a formal voice, “Welcome home, son. Thanks for the cigars you sent me. I smoked them right up.” I introduced him to Eddie and he shook his hand firmly, like Eddie was a business acquaintance. Dad looked at me, then at Mom. He hesitated a second, and then said he had to go look at something on the T-Bird. He went outside and stuck his head under the hood of his car.

I told Mom that I wanted to show Eddie around Grandview, so we would be back in a little while. We had only been home about half an hour but it seemed like forever. I wanted to get away from there. Dad was obviously ignoring me. Mom was genuinely glad I was home and wanted to talk more about where I’d been, but she was also self-conscious about acting too excited in case Dad walked in. I knew he would give her shit about encouraging me if he heard us talking about traveling. “Okay, but don’t be gone long,” she said. “Dinner will be ready soon.”

It was a huge relief to climb back into Eddie’s van. Larry Stevenson, my neighbor and friend through high school, came out of his house.

“Wow, man, what’s going on?” He was happy to see me. “Your mom said you were in Florida, man.”

He was always pushing his long red hair out of his eyes while he talked. I asked if he wanted to go with us. The three of us drove around showing Eddie the sights—the high school, the bowling alley that a small Cessna plane had crashed into during Saturday morning children’s leagues, and my favorite, the Sonic Drive-In, famous for their Frito Chili Pies.

We were heading back home across 50 Highway on an overpass, when all of a sudden there were police cars everywhere. Over a loudspeaker the police called for us to pull over immediately. They checked our driver’s licenses and made us get out of the car. Larry and I knew that Grandview police liked to harass young guys. Especially since we had long hair and were in a van. Eddie started to get really nervous. His hands were shaking.

Larry said, “Don’t worry, man, the pigs do this all the time to us.”

One of the cops came up to us. “Whose van is this?”

“It’s a friend of mine’s. He let me borrow it,” Eddie said quickly before I could say anything. He gave me a look like, Don’t say a word. I didn’t. The cops opened up the back of the van and started searching through it, pulling out some of the tools and lifting up the cage. Looking for pot, I assumed.

The same cop came back over. “Are those power tools your friend’s, too?”

Eddie said, “Some of them are, but some are mine, too.”

The cop went over and talked to another cop who was sitting in a patrol car calling in our IDs. It took a while to get information over the radio.

Families peered at us out of slowly passing cars like we were a freak show. Then three of the cops walked up to us. The main cop said, “Sorry, boys, but we’re going to have to take you in.”

Larry moaned, “Ah man, what for? We didn’t do anything.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Larry looked at me. “Welcome home, Joe,” he said.

They handcuffed us. The metal was cold against my wrists. With my arms behind my back, my shoulders felt like they were being stretched out of the sockets. I started to get in the patrol car with Eddie. He turned and looked at me and said in a low tone, “Sorry, Joe. I’m really sorry.” Then firmly: “You don’t know anything.” I knew he meant that’s what I was to tell the police.

One of the cops said, “Wait a minute, you, get in this car.” He pulled me by the arm and put me in the back seat of another car with Larry. The more I tried to get in a comfortable position, the tighter the handcuffs got.

We were allowed one phone call each. Larry called his mom. I called mine. Eddie said he’d save his call for later. They put Larry in a cell with four bunks and bars on one side that opened into the main office. Then they led Eddie and me down the hall and put us in separate cells. Solitary confinement. My cell had a heavy metal door with a small window and a double bunk bed. It was about eight feet long by five feet wide, just wide enough to put my feet against the wall when I sat on the bed. I took the bottom bunk. A small toilet sat in the corner. There was a bare light bulb on with no light switch. I couldn’t tell what time it was. I started getting bored. There was nothing to do. Time crept by. Finally someone came with a tray of food. It was a cold bologna sandwich on white bread, an apple, and a bag of potato chips with a small carton of milk. A couple of hours later a cop came by and picked up the tray.

“Hey, Joe!” I heard someone loudly whispering my name. I looked out the little window of my cell door but didn’t see anyone. I heard my name again. It was coming from a vent way up high near the ceiling. There was a metal grille there. I climbed up on top of the toilet and said, “What? Who is it?” into the grille.

“Eddie … It’s Eddie. Can you hear me?”

“Yeah, I can hear you. Larry, can you hear us?”

“Wow, yeah.” Larry said, “Hey, man, guess what? Our moms were just here trying to get us but the pigs wouldn’t let us out. My mom was even crying.”

Ugh. I felt a pang shoot through my stomach. It hadn’t occurred to me that our moms would come down to the jail. I just thought we’d get out and go back home. Knowing that they had been there and were turned away made it all seem much more serious. Up till then I had thought it was just a bad mistake.

“Shut up, you guys!” a cop yelled. “I can hear you, too, and you’d better not make another sound!” I stretched out back on the bottom bunk.

Hours passed. I tried to fall asleep but couldn’t. Then I heard “Joe … Joe” whispered through the vent again. It was Eddie. I stood on the toilet again and leaned over to the air vent. “Hi, Eddie,” I whispered back.

“Hi, Joe. What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Um, Joe, listen, I’m sorry about this. I didn’t mean to get you into trouble.”

“That’s okay. Don’t worry about it.” We were whispering as softly as possible. I wanted to be in the van with him on the highway. “Of course this would happen as soon as we got back to my hometown,” I whispered to him. “Think of everything we’ve done and we get here and this happens.”

Eddie whispered back, “Do you still want to go to Daytona with me?”

“Yeah, sure, of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?”

“You don’t hate me?”

“What? Why would I hate you? We’ll get out of here. These cops are just hassling us.”

“Okay, Joe, I’m getting sleepy. See you soon.”

“Yeah, good night. I guess it’s night, anyway.” The light was still on overhead. It stayed on all the time. I tried to go to sleep but was still too wound up. I felt bad for my mom because I could hear my dad bitching at her. I could hear his voice coming all the way from their house to me through the walls of the concrete cinder block jail.

In the morning, a policeman led me into an office and sat me down facing his desk. The room smelled like stale cigarette smoke. He said he had a few questions he wanted to ask me about Eddie and the van. I picked up a metal paper clip off his desk and started unbending it. I answered his questions as truthfully as I could, although I never said anything about when Eddie told me he robbed the mom-and-pop store. I knew I could get in trouble for holding out, but I wasn’t going to say a word. He took notes in a section at the bottom of a form that had blank lines for additional information. I tried to read upside down what he was writing but he shielded it with his hand. After he asked me about how I knew Eddie he said they were going to let me go. He’d already talked to Eddie and was convinced that I didn’t know anything about what was going on.

“What exactly is going on?” I asked.

He told me we were pulled over because there had been some guys in a red van breaking into houses and robbing them recently. They thought we might be the ones, especially when they found the power tools. Then, when they called Eddie’s license in, they found out that he’d stolen the van, power tools, some money, and a lion cub in Boston. The cops there were looking for him. They were going to have to hold Eddie until they heard from the Boston police. My heart sank into my stomach.

The policeman said, “Next time you should choose your friends a little more carefully.” That pissed me off. What did he know? When I was walking out of his office he said, “Oh, by the way, the good news is that they found the lion cub.”

They let me talk to Eddie before I left. He told me that he’d been living in a hustler house and got fed up with it when the guys who were running the place started ripping him off.

“Why didn’t you just move out?”

“It wasn’t like that. The guys would’ve found me and made me go back there. So I split. That roll of money I had was taken from their office.” He looked down at his feet, kind of embarrassed. “I never robbed a store. But I did feel really bad for that lion cub. I hated it being left in that cage all the time.”

“What about the power tools? Did you steal them, too?”

“No. They were in the van when I took off.” He looked up at me, then at something over my shoulder, then his feet, then back at me. “I’m so fucking sorry about all this. I hope you still want to be friends.”

“Of course I do. What are you talking about? Fuck all these people. You’ll get out and we can go stay with Lucy and Susie and then we’ll hitch down to Daytona. Don’t forget about Daytona.”

They let Eddie go the next day. I knew they wouldn’t keep him locked up for long. The guys at the hustler house weren’t going to press charges as long as they got their stuff back. The police didn’t know it was a hustler house. They thought the guys were Eddie’s guardians. The police at the jail told Eddie to “be out of town by sundown.” I wasn’t home when Eddie called, so he called Larry Stevenson. My mom gave him the number. Larry drove Eddie to Lucy’s house in Warrensburg. When he came back, Larry stopped by to tell me what was going on. We went outside and leaned against his Plymouth Gold Duster while he told me everything that’d happened. Larry said he’d drive me down there in the morning.

Before we drove down to Warrensburg, I got a call from a man who said he was with the FBI. “Listen, Eddie left some clothes at the jail and we’d like to return them.” The FBI man sounded friendly, like a big brother. “I understand there’s been a mix-up with your friend. That’s too bad. If you just tell me where he is we’ll get his things to him right away.”

“Just drop the stuff over here and I’ll get them to him.” No sense in them going out of their way, I thought.

The FBI agent said, “Only one problem, he’s got to sign some forms before I can release the items.”

“Oh. Well in that case, he’s at my sister’s in Warrensburg.” I gave him the address.

“Thanks a lot, Joe. We’ll get these right to him.” The FBI man hung up.

When Larry and I got to Lucy’s later that morning, Lucy and Susie came out of the house to greet me. Lucy came up to me and put her arm around me as we walked into the house.

“I’ve got some bad news. About an hour ago, two FBI men came to the door and arrested Eddie. They took him away.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “But the people he stole the van from aren’t pressing charges!”

She said, “I know, but the FBI said what Eddie had done was a federal offense. ‘Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property.’ It’s more than just stealing from someone when you take things across state lines. They took him to Kansas City. He’s in the Jackson County Jail.”

I sat down in a big, old, overstuffed chair. Lady came up and started licking my face. I was crushed. In my mind I was already leaving with Eddie to go to Daytona Beach. I’d had enough of Missouri.

Eddie was in the Jackson County Jail in the downtown Kansas City courthouse building. His bail was set at fifteen hundred dollars. I hitch-hiked into the city every day to see him. Usually I could get a ride most of the way, it was only about a half an hour drive from my parents’. Eddie had to wear drab-green coveralls with Jackson County stenciled on the back.

We tried to figure out how we could get bail money together. I had already started applying for jobs at nursing homes and restaurants. He told me I should try hustling. That was the easiest way to make a lot of cash fast. I knew he was right but didn’t know quite how to go about it.

I walked around down on Twelfth Street, not too far from the jail, because that’s where I’d seen guys getting picked up before. A man came up to me and asked me to go to his apartment with him. When we got there he called another man who came right over. The second man was soft and pink with pretty eyes, in his late thirties. He said he was married, but he looked like a Gay to me. While the first guy waited in the living room, we went into the bedroom and took off our clothes. I lay down on the bed and the guy felt my body, then scooted down on his side next to me and started sucking me off. He breathed heavily through his nose as he jerked himself off. Finally he came and wiped himself with a little handkerchief. He put thirty dollars on the dresser and left. Then the guy who brought me up came in and had sex with me, too. It wasn’t much fun. I felt like he’d pushed me into it. He went down on me and then turned around and we sixty-nined. After he came he told me I needed practice but to keep in touch if I wanted to make some more money. I realized at thirty dollars a shot, I wasn’t going to meet Eddie’s fifteen-hundred-dollar bail anytime soon.

After visiting Eddie again the next night, I went back to Twelfth Street but didn’t go with that guy again, even though he tried. I didn’t meet anyone else, but then I only gave it a half-hearted effort. I was hitch-hiking back home to the suburbs when I got picked up by a young couple in a light blue Volkswagen Bug. They asked me if I wanted to go home with them. I told them that I was a hustler trying to make money to get my friend out of jail. They said they wouldn’t pay me for sex, especially since I’d get to have sex with the woman. I thought about it and then said okay, since I’d never had sex with a woman before. She was driving and looked back at me in the rearview mirror. She and her husband smiled at each other. We went to their house and had to be quiet so we wouldn’t wake her mother, who was visiting from Baltimore and sleeping upstairs. The three of us went to bed together. They climbed on top of me and started kissing me. Three kissing at once. Then the husband and I sucked on her breasts. He took my dick and stuck it inside her. We fucked for quite a while, until she came, with the husband down in the bed watching close-up and feeling around. After she came she got out of bed and said she had to clean up but the two of us should continue to play. He went down on me for a while but I felt embarrassed with her in the bathroom. He jerked off and then gave me a terry-cloth bathrobe to wear. They made tea for me and we sat in their living room, talking for a while. They had just moved to Kansas City from Baltimore a month earlier and already hated it there. I got excited when I saw they had a Gino Vannelli record. I’d heard him on the East Coast but no one knew of him at that time in KC. It was before his big hit broke. The couple was surprised when they realized that I was telling the truth about hustling to get my friend out of jail, and that tonight had been the first time I’d ever fucked a woman. The woman warmed up to me after that, instead of mistrusting me like I was trying to pull some con on them that she wasn’t buying. They gave me their phone number in case I ever wanted to visit again and drove me to the highway that headed out to my parents’ suburb.

The next day at the jail I told Eddie about what happened. He thought that was really cool that I’d had a three-way with a “straight” couple. We both got bummed out when I told him I couldn’t make enough money hustling to get him out of jail.

After being held a week in the Jackson County Jail we found out that Eddie was going to be transferred back to Boston.

“I’ll let you know what happens when I get there. Oh, listen, do you think Lucy would mind taking care of Lady until I can come back for her?”

I barely heard what he asked. “It seems like there’s gotta be something we can do,” I said, even though it all felt hopeless.

“Hey, don’t worry, man. Since the guys I stole the van from aren’t pressing charges, the FBI doesn’t have a case. It’s all bullshit.”

I tried to believe him. All I knew was there was metal and glass between us and he was being taken away. I looked at his thick eyebrows, his lips. I wanted to be in the back of the van next to him again. “Call me when you get to Boston. Maybe I could hitch-hike over there. Then we could go to Daytona.”

“Really? After all the shit that’s happened you still want to do that?”

“Sure,” I said. “What else am I going to do?”

We couldn’t cry or get too mushy saying good-bye because the guards or other inmates might see us and then they’d give Eddie all kinds of shit. My eyes got blurry. I had a huge sinking feeling like my guts were going to collapse into my knees. My shoulders felt weighed down. When I left the jail there was no loud clanging sound of the iron gates like in a forties gangster movie—just the pathetic hissing of a hydraulic door jack as the door slowly shut behind me. The world as I knew it had just come to an end.

Eddie wrote Lucy and Susie a letter about a month later. He said he’d gotten out of jail almost as soon as he got back to Boston, but didn’t have enough money to have Lady sent back and didn’t know when he’d be able to get her. He said for them to tell me hello if they ever saw me. He sent a picture of himself sitting in a big chair with a beer in one hand and a joint in the other. His eyes were bloodshot and he had a big grin. That was the last I heard from him.

Mom told me that Dad had been upset that I brought “that queer” home with me in the first place. I didn’t even know Dad knew what a queer was. She said he could tell right away because Eddie’s ear was pierced and that meant he was a queer. I snapped back to her, “No, it doesn’t. It just means he has a pierced ear. Besides, they’re not called ‘queers’ anymore. They’re called ‘Gays.’” I’d never even noticed that Eddie had a pierced ear.

When I first came back to Grandview, I thought I was the only thing that had changed, but something else had happened while I was away: Dad had sunk into the dark, depressed side of his multi-personality and not come out. I think that when Mom stood up to him and took Nina to Grandmother’s, he’d recognized defeat. It was after the damage had been done, but before anyone was killed. He never said much of anything to me but I always got the feeling like I’d done something wrong. Like it was me who’d caused everything bad that had happened. When I was around him I felt like I was treading on thin ice. Like something could crack at any given moment. I watched my back. At dinner, he would give me disapproving looks out of the corner of his eyes. Afterward he’d get in his T-Bird and drive to his favorite local bar. Either that or he’d sit in his La-Z-Boy recliner in front of the TV with his big red plastic glass of coke and whiskey. He went to work at his office every day, but didn’t do much else. He was quiet, almost secretive, when he’d leave the house to go to his bar. Like a whipped puppy. Like my dog Sneezy after he’d kicked her a few times.

The house was quiet. My mother sighed a lot while she was cooking and sometimes I’d catch her talking to herself. That always made me laugh and I’d give her a hug. The only real noise was the TV. Dad watched Johnny Carson every night. I moved into the bedroom between the kitchen and the garage, at the opposite end of the house from the others. My younger brother, Jerry, had one more year of high school and still slept in the room I used to share with him. For the most part, my father treated me like I wasn’t there. Sometimes I would hear him talking to my mother in the kitchen late at night when I was in my room. He’d asked her questions about me, like how long was I going to stay there, and when was I going to get a job? I spent a lot of time on my bed listening to records. Tramps like us, baby we were born to run was my favorite. I saw Eddie’s face close-up when I heard that song.

NEW ORLEANS

LEAVING KANSAS CITY

After Eddie left I went into hibernation. All I did that fall of 1975, besides go back to work at my old job at the nursing home, was stay inside and listen to records or watch TV. I was bored and depressed. I cut off my long hair and switched from flare-legged blue jeans to straight legs because that’s what I’d seen them wearing in New York. This drastic change worried my friends. I was in culture shock after being all over the East Coast. I couldn’t deal with my old friends. I’d seen too much. They hadn’t seen anything.

Then my friend Frankie came back from his first trip to India. We were both stunned after seeing so much more of the world than most of the people around us could ever imagine. We started to hang out together again. I moved from my parents’ house into my own apartment in the old downtown section of our suburb.

Frankie never treated me like I was weird, the way most of the people in our hometown did. He was the only other person I knew who took off hitch-hiking. His grandfather and my father worked together. In high school, he had been a grade ahead of me. After high school when we were roommates in Kansas City, before I went to Florida and he went to India, he turned me on to Joni Mitchell’s Blue album. We both loved Joni Mitchell and Billie Holiday. We had a lot in common, but the main thing we shared was our burning desire to get as far away as we could from the nightmarishly boring suburb we were raised in.

Frankie had frizzy, reddish-brown hair that he wore in a short ’fro, and bright blue eyes. I was a couple of inches taller than him. His real name was Frankie but he changed it to Ali when, during one of his more spiritual phases, he joined the Sufi Order of Meditation. He told me the name Ali comes from the combination of a Muslim prophet, Muhammad Ali, the prizefighter and poet, and the spiritual guide in Hindu sects of androgynous men is called Ali. I thought that made sense, but I still had trouble adjusting to it. I kept calling him Frankie, which made him mad.

One night, the two of us walked from my apartment to the local QuikTrip mini-mart to get something to eat. It was cold and we were bundled up in sweaters and coats. Ali wrapped his favorite six-foot-long knit scarf around his neck so the loose end would fly in the wind. I wanted to tell him I was gay but was nervous about bringing the subject up. I’d tried a couple of times before but chickened out at the last minute. I had to talk about it with someone, and couldn’t trust anyone else. Also, I knew Ali was a bisexual because the first guy I’d ever slept with, Loren, told me during the course of seducing me that he knew Ali was bi, from personal experience.

I was taking a chance by revealing my secret, but thought that if Ali knew, he might be able to give me some kind of advice. When we were walking to the store I told him I needed to talk to him about something personal. At QuikTrip we microwaved bean-and-cheese burritos and then took them outside. We leaned against the glass front until I said I needed to go somewhere more private. Ali led me over to the stairwell of the phone company next to the store. We sat down at the bottom of the stairs. It was like being in a cinder block hole. Even though I knew it was okay to tell him, I was still nervous. Eddie was the only person I’d said anything to and he was long gone. I washed down a bite of my burrito with some orange juice, then set it down on a paper bag on the step beside me.

“Frankie, I mean Ali, I don’t want you to think I’m getting weird on you or anything. But I want to tell you something and I think you might know what I’m talking about. Um, you know since I’ve been traveling around, like, I’ve kind of figured some stuff out and remember that guy Loren you were friends with when we were roommates?” I rushed through this.

Ali listened, then answered, “Yeah. We worked together at the Beautiful Day Café.”

“Well, it never bothered you the way he was, did it?”

“What do you mean? We had a lot of fun together. He got on my nerves sometimes, but basically I really liked him.”

“Well,” I paused. “I think I’m becoming like Loren.” There was a lump in my throat. I looked at the drain at the bottom of the stairwell. It was half clogged with twigs and mud. “I mean I think I may be … I mean I am, at least I’m pretty sure, I think I’m turning gay.” I blurted it out. I started to take a bite out of my burrito and then put it back down. I felt terrified and relieved at the same time. The lump in my throat disappeared.

Ali didn’t say anything for a while. I looked at him out of the side of my eyes and then quickly back to the drain when he turned towards me. He put his arm around me. “That’s cool, Joe. I don’t think that’s weird at all. In fact I think it’s far out that you can tell me that. That’s really brave of you. I mean most people around here wouldn’t get it, but most people around here are stupid anyway.” He took his arm back but still sat close to me. He folded his arms and leaned forward. “You know what, Joe? I probably should have told you this a long time ago, but I’m bisexual.” I didn’t tell him I already knew that.

I told him about going to my first gay bar in New York, about Eddie, and the weird bars I went to in Chicago. He said if I wanted we could go to the Cabaret, a gay bar in downtown Kansas City. Only I was underage. In Missouri, the drinking age was twenty-one. I was still nineteen. He said that didn’t matter because they never checked IDs. He’d been going there for a couple of years now.

“Really? You’ve been going all this time and never told me?” That surprised me. I mean, I’d lived with him for six months just the year before and never knew he was going to a gay bar.

“Well, what do you expect, Joe? I mean even though sometimes I suspected it, I didn’t know for sure, until just now, that you’d even be interested in going somewhere like that. I thought it might be too much for you. Oh well. I guess we all have our secrets.”

Ali took me to the Cabaret where we lied about my age so I could get in. Going to a gay bar in Kansas City felt like doing something nasty in your own backyard with your parents inside watching television.

Soon after that Loren became my first live-in lover. He was thirty and I was twenty. We moved in together in a small house in the central part of Kansas City. He had a job at a suburban mall hair salon, but got fired after he told a woman he was giving a permanent to that he was on LSD. I had a job as the chauffeur for the Petite Sisters of Charity. I drove Sisters Evangeline and Gretchen all over the Kansas City area in a Chevrolet Suburban truck, going from business to business begging for donations for their old folks’ home and convent. I paid the rent and Loren kept us in a steady supply of good drugs. I was doing a lot of Quaaludes and Valium when I wasn’t at work. Sister Evangeline had bad headaches and was taking Tylenol 3 with codeine. We became close friends since she and I were on the same wavelength. Her favorite song was the country hit “Take This Job and Shove It.”

I made some new friends who went to the Kansas City Art Institute. They showed me their studios, taught me about painting, and invited me to parties. One friend, Tim Rubin, was very excited about video. He said that it was going to be big. Loren introduced me to Patsy D’Angelo, a student nurse, who became a good friend. I started listening to punk rock bands like Television, Blondie, the Ramones, the Talking Heads, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. After Television came to Kansas City I turned the collar up on my shirts and cut my hair short and spiky. Punk became very important to me. It was more than a fun scene. It was the salvation of rock ’n’ roll. I had just about given up on rock because it had become so boring and predictable. Now there was something new and exciting that I could relate to. The thing all my favorite bands had in common was at least one song on every album had the lyrics “I don’t care” in them.

After a year I split up with Loren because he was always tripping or coked up and brought other guys home behind my back. More than once he seduced my friends.

Ali came back to Kansas City after a few months of hitch-hiking around Europe about this time. He and I got apartments near each other and spent a lot of time together. Even though Ali had some of the same characteristics as my dad—like being domineering, aggressive, manipulative, and arrogant—he was completely different. Where my dad said no, Ali said yes. Where my dad said, You can’t, Ali said, Why not? When Dad was so worried about the neighbors’ image of us, Ali said Fuck You to everyone.

Ali was a vegetarian. Ali was a fighter. He stood up for the underdog. The last thing my father wanted me to do when I lived at home was to stand up for myself. So I was a bit slow in that area. Ali fought for me, and then by example taught me how to stick up for myself. When I got moody and bitchy for no reason, he would ask what the matter was. I’d usually say nothing even though it was obvious something was wrong. He told me about his dad throwing an iron skillet at his head. Sometimes he would flip out and get into fistfights with strangers. Other times he would sink into one of his deep depressions. When this happened I didn’t run away from him. We stuck by each other through dark times as well as fun. We weren’t related even though we argued like brothers. He could get on my nerves faster than anyone. We weren’t lovers even though we had sex together off and on. We knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

After the initial excitement of having our own apartments wore off, neither one of us could stand it any longer in Kansas City. We were bored. We were frustrated and antsy and were doing too many drugs because we thought there wasn’t anything else to do. Quaaludes, LSD, cocaine, and, Ali’s favorite, heroin. When we got mixed up with the twin blond junky prostitutes Tammi and Sammie and their scary gun-toting boyfriends, we realized there was no place left to go in Kansas City but down. It was time to leave. I wanted to move to New York. Ali wanted to go to Corpus Christi, Texas, where he could live by the ocean for cheap. We compromised and went to New Orleans.

DECATUR STREET

(June 1978)

A bright green gecko lizard lived in the storage room behind our kitchen. Every once in a while, it would peek its head out of a crack high up near the ceiling. Ali and I had moved into half of an old small house in the Warehouse District just outside the French Quarter the month before. Mark Gravois and D.J. Arceneaux, our neighbors, said that in New Orleans geckos were a sign of good luck. They ate roaches. We had lots of roaches so we were in luck. Our oven was a roach motel. It didn’t seem like it at first, just an occasional roach crawling out of a burner or underneath the stove. We hardly ever cooked so we didn’t pay much attention to it. One night, Ali and I were drinking beer and listening to records. It was hot and humid and there seemed to be a lot more roach activity going on than usual. We decided to give the kitchen a good scrubbing. Nothing better to do. We didn’t have much money to go out on the town. Out of curiosity, Ali pulled down the oven door and stuck his head up to the stove, to see where all the roaches were coming from.

“Yahh!” He let out a loud scream. “Quick, get the Raid! Hurry! There are millions of ’em crawling around in here.”

I grabbed a can of roach spray from under the sink and ran over to the stove. Ali pointed into the oven and said, “There! In there, before they get away!”

I started spraying blindly into the oven. Roaches ran out and down the sides of the stove. We screamed and laughed in terror. We declared war. We turned on all four burners and cranked up the oven as high as it would go even though it was a hot night. Roaches poured out of every seam. My job was to chase after and step on the ones that got away from the stove. Ali took a lighter and held it in front of the can of Raid and pressed the spray button, turning it into a flame-throwing blowtorch. Singed roaches did high dives off the stovetop to get away from the heat and flames. The metallic smell of burning roach spray filled the kitchen. A two-inch roach made a mad dash for safety. I stomped on him and he crunched like a matchbox under my shoe.

Our reward for cleaning the stove was going out to Lafitte’s bar for some beer. Beer was my idea. Ali’s was Lafitte’s, the big gay bar in the French Quarter on Bourbon Street. I would have rather gone to the Golden Lantern, a small horseshoe-shaped bar where Mark and D.J. hung out. It was cozy and comfortable with a weird assortment of people and a good jukebox. Ali knew that I was uncomfortable in large gay bars, especially being new in town, and promised to stick close.

Men pushed their way through the crowded aisle around the triangle-shaped bar, brushing knees, stroking butts, rubbing stomachs as they passed. Their eyes occasionally locked glances with someone, thinking, hoping, he would be the trick for the night. Ali left me sitting alone on a barstool against the wall. He was smooth and confident in crowded bars. He glided through them. I was just the opposite. I could deal with people one-on-one, but it took me a few drinks before I felt comfortable in a big bar where everyone was checking each other out. I watched as Ali disappeared through the doorway to the upstairs bar. A knot in my stomach tightened. I drank my beer to help loosen it up. I didn’t want to be left alone. I wanted to leave. A man walked by and stared lustfully into my eyes. I looked past him like I was fascinated with the bar’s rustic wood paneling decor. There were framed drawings of handsome men with mustaches wearing tight jeans and ripped T-shirts hanging along the far wall of the bar with lights shining down on them. I wanted another beer, but didn’t want to get up off my stool to get one. Ali came back through the stairway door and winked at me. I waited for him to come over so I could tell him I wanted to leave. He circled around the jammed bar, taking his time as he squeezed through the crowd. When he met up with me he said, “Come on, Joe, let’s go upstairs. It’s more fun up there.”

Anything. I followed Ali through the crowded bar. As we got near the stairs, someone grabbed my ass. But when I turned around to see who it was, no one was there, just the smoky swarming bar. We went upstairs. It was full, but not as packed as downstairs. Ali led me over to the jukebox and said, “Look, Blondie and the Cars! Can you believe it? It’s a rock ’n’ roll jukebox. No disco!”

That made me happy for a little while. I punched in the numbers for “You Look Good in Blue” and Ali played “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight.” Then we went over by the pool table. Pool rarely interested me. I played it sometimes, but didn’t think I was good enough to play in a bar in front of other people. I sat down on a barstool with a fresh beer and began to relax. Sitting on a bench across the pool table from me was a guy I’d seen earlier downstairs. Our eyes met. He smiled at me. I looked away and then back at him. He had long, wavy blond hair pulled back in a braided ponytail that went below his shoulder. He was wearing blue jean overalls and a T-shirt. I tried to make eye contact again, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at something on the floor. His nose was curvy like a boxer’s.

While I was building up my courage to go say hello, Ali strutted past the guy. I saw them eye each other. Ali slinked around the pool table and squeezed in between me and the stranger next to me.

“See anyone you like?”

“Yeah, kind of, that guy over there.” I pointed to the blond in overalls.

Ali lit up one of his clove cigarettes that he got hooked on when he went to India. I hated the perfumy smell. “Hey, Joe, no fair. I saw him first.” Ali faked being upset. “Should we go say hello?”

I winced.

“Come on, let’s do.”

With his Dixie Beer in one hand and clove cigarette in the other, Ali casually walked over and started talking to the guy. They smiled and chatted a while and then Ali waved for me to come join them. I did and he introduced me to James. We told him about ourselves, that we’d just moved there from Kansas City, had gone to the same high school, and then both hitched around the country to different places before deciding to move to New Orleans together. James was a nice guy. I liked him. My interest sparked when he said he liked it upstairs because the music was better. We talked for a while. He was from Michigan. He’d been in New Orleans a couple of years and worked at a plant shop Uptown. My selection, Blondie, came on the jukebox. He said he really liked that song. I was shocked that someone at that bar actually knew the record. It felt like destiny. Ali went cruising some more while James and I sat politely shooting the breeze. Then Ali came back over and asked me if I was ready to go. I liked James, but I was more than ready to leave that bar. I chugged down my beer and said, “Good night, nice to meet you.” Then Ali and I worked our way through the packed bar towards the door.

Outside of Lafitte’s Ali said, “You know what? I’m not ready to go home yet. I think I’ll go back inside for a while longer.”

“See you later,” I said and walked on. I had no interest in sticking around. I felt more comfortable out on the street. It was hot and steamy. Even though it was late at night there were a lot of people out. I loved that about New Orleans. Kansas City would have been dead by 2:00 a.m. Plus, I loved the fact that everything was close enough together that I could walk. I didn’t need a car in New Orleans.

When I got home, I got in bed with my spiral notebook and started writing a letter to my friend Alice in Kansas City. “Dear Alice, How’s it going? Have you thought any more about coming here to visit? I hope so. I think you’d like it here. You can get drinks to go and carry them out on the street with you.” I fell asleep before I finished the letter.

I woke up when I heard Ali and someone else trying to get through my room into Ali’s bedroom without waking me up. Our house was called a “shotgun” because there was no hallway. Each room was in a row connected by doorways. They were trying so hard to be quiet that they were loud … whispering, tiptoeing, laughing after bumping into a chair. I opened my eyes and saw James’s long blond ponytail pass through the doorway into Ali’s bedroom. Soon all I heard were licks, slurps, and deep muffled laughs. They were going at it.

I tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t help thinking about Ali picking up James. It kind of made me mad. It was just like Ali to go back into that bar and get him, especially since Ali knew I was interested in James. I felt like it was Ali’s idea of some kind of competition or lesson, like he was showing me how easy it was to pick someone up if you really wanted to. All you had to do was ask.

I had a big window fan blowing on me to keep the mosquitoes off. The hum of the fan finally lulled me back into a deep sleep. The last thing I heard was a freighter ship blowing its loud, low horn as it floated by the wharf across the street from us and slid down the Mississippi.

I woke up when the first light of morning came into my room. I didn’t get to sleep until around 3:00 a.m. so it was weird that I woke up that early. I wasn’t really awake, just partially, and mildly hungover from the beer. I thought maybe something was the matter. The smell of burned roach spray lingered in the air. I heard squeaking. The floor was squeaking. There was a soft thump thump thump through the wall. Then more squeaks. Ali and James. I was half in and half out of sleep, maybe even two-thirds asleep. The squeaks got louder. I heard muffled groans. I was back home in high school. The knot in my stomach tightened. There was that hideous sound that I heard every night. Squeak. Squeak. Squeak. My sisters’ bed was squeaking. I wanted it to stop. I put my pillow over my head so I wouldn’t have to listen to it. But there was no other sound. The squeak through the wall through the floor through the pillow into my head. The muffled grunts. Squeak squeak grunt, don’t, grunt. Stop it squeak squeak don’t whine whine umph umph all muffled all hidden all through the wall. Then the sound of my sisters’ door opening and shutting softly and Dad’s heavy footsteps tiptoeing down the hall to my parents’ room. That door shutting softly. Every night the squeaks the muffled umphs and don’ts. Every night. No one said a word.

I got out of bed, picked up my spiral notebook, and sat outside on the front porch steps. I pulled my knees to my chest and rocked back and forth for a while to help loosen my stomach knot. I could hear people in neighboring houses taking showers, putting on coffee, yelling for their kids to get out of bed. Morning. People starting their day. I stared across the street into the gravel parking lot of the Mandeville Street wharf and wondered what my younger sister was up to. She’d joined the Air Force and was either in Virginia or Saudi or somewhere in between. I knew she was okay because she was away from home. I opened my notebook and began to write her a letter. “Dear Nina, Guess what? I’m in New Orleans. But then, I suppose someone’s told you that by now (ha ha). Where are you?” I started getting sleepy again so I went back inside to finish the letter on my bed. When I woke up, there was a big puddle of drool on my pillow and my spiral notebook was underneath me, jabbing my ribs. Ali and James were in the kitchen making breakfast. I had to pee. I waited until I couldn’t hold it any longer and then got up and said good morning on my way to the bathroom. I was groggy. James was all smiles.

THE BIG MUDDY

(July 1978)

Warm juice ran down my hand as I crunched the back of a crawfish. Red legs twisted and contracted, scaly tails curled under, claws pinched lifeless. I stuck a finger beneath the shell to lift and separate it from the flesh. Under the layer of stiff legs and broken back was a bite-size piece of spicy meat that tasted somewhere between lobster and shrimp. We picked at the bowl of hot, steaming crawfish like it was popcorn. I pulled the head off its body and sucked the neck to get out the last bit of flavor. Back then, crawfish and jumbo shrimp cost $1.99 a pound. I could easily eat a pound by myself so between Ali and me we could get stuffed on five dollars. Even though we ate them almost every day, it was still a treat for us since we’d only been in New Orleans a few months.

Trouble, the stray tabby cat, rubbed at my ankles begging for food. I threw a crawfish head down onto the front walk. She ran after it, knocked it around, and tossed it up in the air until it cooled off. Then she ate the whole thing, shell and all. A wrought iron fence wrapped around our lawn, a patch of cracked concrete and sturdy weeds. The front porch wasn’t screened in and was just big enough for a folding chair. I sat on the steps and Ali sat in the chair. The only shade came from the side of the porch, where a giant-leafed elephant ear plant grew. Billie Holiday’s jazz drifted through the high, narrow window onto the porch. Ali and I swatted at mosquitoes while we ate. The late-afternoon air was heavy with July heat and humidity.

We were both tanned really dark. My brown hair was getting long and wavy and turning deep red from the sun and lemon juice that I rubbed in it for streaks. Ali’s was getting curlier and curlier from the humidity and bright red from his latest henna rinse. We were wearing cut-offs and no shirts. The only thing that separated us from the Mississippi River and the Mandeville Street wharf was our street, a parking lot, and railroad tracks. The wharf was a couple of blocks long, so there was no place to see the river except a far-away glimpse through windows of the wharf’s warehouse. MANDEVILLE STREET was painted in six-foot letters across the side of the warehouse. A breeze blew off the river and up the legs of my shorts.

A freighter ship glided by and blasted its deep, bellowing horn. From our porch we could only see the tallest masts move slowly across the roof of the warehouse. The last of the workmen shut the warehouse down for the day, got in their cars, and drove off. As soon as the wharf looked deserted Ali wanted to see if we could sneak around it to get to the river. We’d tried a couple of times before, but always got chased off. I was perfectly content to sit on the porch, drink my Dixie Beer, and eat more crawfish. I didn’t feel like moving. But the strong, silent pull of the river finally got me off my butt. I followed Ali across the street, through the hot gravel parking lot, over the tracks, and onto the concrete platform of the wharf.

We walked down the wharf to where the Mandeville Street warehouse ended and another warehouse began. There was an open gap between the two. We walked through it and found what we were looking for, what had been tugging at us: the mighty Mississippi River. I was incredibly surprised and overwhelmed. I wasn’t expecting something so big to be so close to our house. I mean, I knew the river was there, but didn’t realize the magnitude of it. All of a sudden I felt like I was face-to-face with God in my own backyard. I felt tiny.

A lot of times when I’d follow Ali into abandoned houses or warehouses, we would wind up getting into some kind of trouble—nothing too major, usually just kicked off the property. There was that time back in Missouri when an old farmer held us at gunpoint with his big shotgun until we put back all the junk we’d scavenged from an abandoned house on his land. That was kind of scary. But it was magical times like this at the river that made me glad I’d taken another chance and followed him. We sat down on a dock made with wide wooden planks and stared out over the river. The noise of the city behind us was muffled by the soft rush of the current. The slow-motion movement of the water soothed me.

The view of the river where we were was so much bigger than at the French Quarter tourist lookout in Jackson Square. We were at a bend in the river, which made it look even wider. To the right of us and up a way was the Quarter. We could see the huge silver bridge crossing to Algiers in the distance. On the other side of the wide, muddy-brown water were trees. There was lots of sky.

“Hey, Joe? When was the first time you fucked anyone?”

“The first time I what?”

“The first time you fucked someone. Not fooled around, but actually did it. Was it with Alice?” Ali was always thinking about sex.

“No, we never fucked. I asked her if she wanted to once, but it wasn’t romantic enough for her, so she said no.”

“That’s funny. I figured that with all the time you two spent together, you must have been fucking her.”

“No. I loved her. I still love her, but we never had sex.”

“So who was it with then? Me? What about that time at your grandmother’s in Arkansas when we came back from Mardi Gras?”

“No. That was the first time you and I had sex together alone, but not the first time I fucked anyone. Besides, we didn’t even fuck then. It was the first time, the only time, I had sex in my grandmother’s house!”

“Well, Joe, who was it then?”

“Loren.”

“Loren? Are you kidding? He was your first? I thought you’d had sex before Loren!”

“Well, I did have sex before him, but I never fucked anyone. Just fooled around.”

“I guess it was good for you, since you moved in with him for a year.” Ali laughed.

“No. I mean, yeah, it was good. But I didn’t fuck him the first time when I moved in with him. It was about half a year earlier.”

“How old were you, anyway? It must not have been that long ago. I fucked for the first time when I was sixteen.”

“Eighteen. Almost three years ago.”

“Well, you made up for lost time, didn’t you?”

We both laughed.

“Remember when I moved in with you on Locust Street in Kansas City?” I said. “One night, you were working at the Beautiful Day Café and Loren stopped by the apartment to see you. He didn’t know I was living there and was surprised when I answered the door. He said to tell you he stopped by and then left. I was nervous because I thought he was so handsome. I suspected he was gay, but didn’t think too much about it. I didn’t even know I was gay then.”

“That’s funny. Everyone else knew!” Ali gave my shoulder a light shove.

“Bisexual maybe, but not gay. Anyway, Loren came back over later that night with a six-pack of beer and said he wasn’t doing anything and thought he’d see if I was still home. I got extremely nervous but he made me feel comfortable when we started listening to records. He knew who John Prine was. That was a plus since I knew the first three John Prine records by heart. He played Joni Mitchell’s Blue and sang along.”

Ali started humming a Joni Mitchell song, off-key and monotone.

“Then he put on David Bowie’s Pin Ups and we clicked from there. He put his head in my lap when we listened to music. That made me nervous all over again. Loren told me he was a bisexual and asked if I had a problem with that. I said I wasn’t a bi, not really. But that I kind of thought he was. I don’t remember exactly how we got from the couch to the bed. The next thing I remember is how silky smooth his body was. He told me I could fuck him if I wanted to. I wasn’t sure at first, but then I said okay. I came almost as soon as I put it in him. He said I must have really needed it if I came that fast. Too bad for him. He was disappointed. But the best part for me was lying next to him and feeling his body. I didn’t really care about the fucking part as much as running my hands all over him.”

“You wanna know what’s weird?”

“No.”

“Joe, ha ha, very funny. What’s weird is that Loren is the first guy I ever fucked, too. He was probably coming over to do it with me and you were there.”

“That sly dog. He just liked younger guys, I guess.”

“I guess. Especially you since you moved in together.”

“Please, don’t remind me. Talk about getting fucked. That ended horribly.”

“Why?”

“Just because. Time to change the subject, okay?”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

The water teased and slapped at the telephone pole–sized pillars that held up the wharf. They were covered with scaly white barnacles and dirty green moss. Out on the water little whirlpools spun, slowly sucking twigs and trash down below the surface. The river smelled like mud and fish and warm motor oil. A tugboat pushed a long, flat barge past us. In the distance we could see the rush hour ferry chugging across the river from Canal Street.

Ali stretched out on his back along the edge of the wharf.

“Joe, this is why we moved here. Not to be hanging out in bars in the Quarter all the time. We moved here to be by this river, to feel its magnetic pull, to be a part of its energy. It’s this energy spot that got us all the way down here from Kansas City and we didn’t even know it. We just knew we had to be here, no questions asked. And now we have the answer.”

Ali always got preachy at times like this. I reacted just the opposite. I was so overwhelmed by the river that I couldn’t say a word. We stayed there for a couple of hours. The sun got lower in the sky and shone right in our eyes so we had to squint. It was still hot at around 8:00 p.m.

While we sat and watched barges and fishing boats coming in from the Gulf, Ali told me about his new job as an orderly in a psychiatric hospital Uptown. He worked on the acute unit, but there was such an overflow on the adolescent ward that they were putting kids in with the psychotics. He said he didn’t know who was more fucked-up, the staff or the patients. But, in most cases, the parents were more fucked-up than the kids. He talked about wanting to go back to college. He wanted to do something to help people, maybe become a social worker. Or maybe he would go join our friend Debra at the carnival. While we stared at the water Ali told me about traveling through India and seeing people bathe in the Ganges. All he could think about was how could something that filthy be holy?

“You know what, Joe?”

“Huh…”

“I have a crush on one of the nurses I work with.”

“Male or female?”

“Female. Sandra. She’s married and has three kids.”

“Oh God, Ali, don’t! I don’t want to hear any more! What about James? I thought you had a crush on him…”

“I do. I have a crush on both of them.” I looked over at Ali and he batted his sparkling blue eyes and smiled his well-rehearsed, innocent-but-sexy smile at me. It was a look I knew well. It was the look I’m sure he used on both Sandra and James to charm them. Only I was past the charming stage with that smile, and he knew it.

We both chuckled, and I said, “Oh shit, here we go!”

“What? What’s wrong with that? I can have a crush on more than one person. There’s no law against that, is there? Fuck it if there is. FUCK IT!” Ali yelled. His loud voice sounded small against the rush of the water. “Like I’ve always said: I’m not bisexual. I’m tri-sexual. I’ll try anything once, and if I like it, I’ll try it again and again!” Ali stood up and walked to the edge of the wharf, standing right over the river and screamed, “Fuck it! Fuck ME!!”

He came over and sat down by me closer. “The problem with you, Joe, is that you limit yourself too much. You should be more open to all kinds of experiences instead of just one type. It’s all the same really. We’re just humans.”

“I don’t know … I mean, I think I’m comfortable with the fact that I’m gay. I’ve accepted it and all that. I just don’t want to be on either side of hurt anymore. I don’t want to be in love. I don’t want anyone to be in love with me. I just want friends.”

“You take things too seriously. What you need is some ‘physical therapy.’ No love, just sex.” Ali licked his lips and made a loud slurping sound. He raised one eyebrow, leaned into my face, and whispered, “There are lots of guys out there who would love to fool around with you.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what I mean.” I shifted back from him a few inches. “Like before I lived with Loren, when I first came out, I thought gay life was great because you could fuck who you wanted when you wanted and no one cared. Did I ever find out different!” I flicked a small splinter of soft wood into the water. “Oh well, maybe one day soon I’ll get up enough courage to pick someone up. Maybe the love of my life is right around the corner.”

“Joe, what do you mean? I thought I was the love of your life.” Ali faked a pout-face and acted hurt.

“Oh, right, I forgot. Yeah, you’re the love of my life. Always have been and always will be.”

Ali stood up again and looked over the dock into the water. A dirty foam clung to the wooden poles that held the wharf up. “I think you put too much into it. You don’t have to be in love with someone just to have sex with them. But that doesn’t mean it has to be completely impersonal either. It’s not like you’re getting married just because you screw someone. It’s fun. It feels good. You have to get over Loren once and for all and get on with your life. That was Kansas City. This is New Orleans. Different time, different place. You have a clean slate here. You can do whatever you want. It’s up to you.”

The sun began to set behind the trees on the other side of the river. A night watchman walked slowly by and waved hello. As my eyes followed the watchman I realized that Ali and I had been quiet for a long time. The river had us under its spell. We got up and walked back home without saying a word to each other, like we were in a trance.

NEW ORLEANS

(August 16, 1978)

I had two weeks to come up with my share of next month’s rent. I had to get a job soon. I was broke and Ali was running out of money fast. That afternoon, after looking for HELP WANTED signs all over the hot, humid French Quarter, Ali and I gave up and headed home. When we got there we noticed this father and son sitting in the cab of a dirty white truck in front of our house. The truck was bigger than a pickup, like a medium-sized U-Haul with an enclosed bed. The son was wearing a leather cap with the visor pulled down over his eyes. They looked like they were waiting for someone. We said hello to them, being young friendly Midwesterners, and they smiled and waved hello back. I went inside and took a shower to help cool off.

When I came out of the bathroom Ali said, “Guess what? Those aren’t guys out there; it’s two lesbians.”

“How do you know?” I asked. “It looks like two guys to me.”

“Because I talked to them. I asked them what they were up to since it was so hot and they’d been sitting in the truck for so long. They said they had to deliver some vegetables to the Sunshine Co-op store in the morning and needed a place to park their truck out of the way. So, I invited them in. They told me they couldn’t because they were separatists.”

“Separatists? What does that mean?” I thought it might be some weird kind of Christianity. I didn’t know what a separatist was exactly.

Ali said, “It means they only want to be with women and can’t come into a man’s house.”

That made me sad. It reminded me of when I was working for the Petite Sisters of Charity in Kansas City and we delivered food to the Carmelite sisters. Because I was a man I could only carry the heavy food supplies into the entryway of their house, and even then I had to be escorted by Sister Evangeline.

Ali and I went out and said hello to them again. They were friendly. They didn’t act like they hated us or anything. We introduced ourselves. I was the only one with a normal name. Joe. The tall one, who I thought was the father, said her name was Branche, like Blanche only with an “r” instead of an “l.” The short one, the “son,” was actually older than Branche. Her name was “Fyord.” I tried not to laugh. It reminded me of the TV show Laugh-In with the Farkel Family. Frank and Fanny Farkel and their neighbor, Ferd. When I looked at Fyord closer I could see she had crow’s feet in the corner of her eyes and estimated she must have been at least thirty. We talked for a while. They said they had driven down from outside of Fayetteville, Arkansas. They lived on a womyn’s separatist commune in the Ozark Mountains. I told them we were from Missouri but I had relatives who lived in Eureka Springs, a small town in the mountains near Fayetteville.

“We don’t get out around there much. We stay mostly on our land.” Branche was from Connecticut and Fyord was from New Jersey. Neither of them knew a lot about Missouri, Arkansas, or Louisiana. They were butch. Branche had shaggy dark-blond hair and wore big thick-soled electrician boots that laced up to her knees. She was almost as tall as me. Fyord always kept her leather cap on. With her close-cropped red hair and furrowed brow, she really did look like a small teenage boy. Of the four of us, I was the most feminine.

Ali said, “Hey, it really is okay to stay with us. We’re gay so you don’t have to worry about us laying any trips on you.” I nodded my head in agreement.

Fyord looked at Branche, then back at us. “Give us a minute alone to talk it over, okay?”

Ali and I went inside and were drinking some cold water out of the refrigerator when they knocked on our front door. Fyord, in a low raspy voice, said, “Um, we decided that it was okay to stay with you so long as you keep quiet about it. It wouldn’t look right for us to be seen staying with men.”

They brought their gear in and I let them sleep in my room. Ali and I would sleep together. That evening we took them on a tour of the French Quarter. We walked down Bourbon Street, past the strip joints with women twirling tassels from pasties on their tits. I thought they’d get a kick out of that but instead they were offended. Then we took them to Wanda’s down on Iberville Street, but they didn’t want to go in because it was filled with men dressed as women. Every place I thought they’d like turned out to be a flop. Finally, we took them to Buster Holmes’s soul food restaurant where you could get beans and rice for $1.20. They loved that. Ali played Billie Holiday on the jukebox. I played the Allman Brothers singing, Lord, I was born a ramblin’ man … We ate our meal and drank Dixie Beer at a long folding table next to a beat-up dark wood bar.

In the morning Ali cooked breakfast. He chopped up a bunch of vegetables and stirred them into scrambled eggs. The smell of onions cooking in Crisco filled the kitchen. I made a pot of French Quarter coffee and chicory. People in New Orleans loved chicory in their coffee and thought that was part of the charm of living there, but I thought it tasted too bitter. Ali dumped Tabasco sauce into the eggs as he stirred them and then put the bottle on the table for us to season our own food. Everyone but me was a vegetarian, but I didn’t eat meat that often. Fyord said I really should quit. Branche smelled like garlic. Reeked of garlic. It smelled kind of sweet, not horrible, just intense. The night before, I wasn’t sure where that smell was coming from. Then at breakfast I saw her crush a toe of garlic and spread it on her toast. “Nature’s penicillin!” she said as she swallowed it down.

In between big bites of scrambled eggs Fyord told us about their commune and how certain people had special jobs. They were chosen to be drivers. It sounded ideal to me, having a job where you got to travel. Fyord said she liked it, but most of the womyn preferred to stay on the land. Their job was to make deliveries of organic vegetables grown at the commune to health food stores in Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. They came to New Orleans once a month. We agreed that it would be okay for them to stay with us whenever they came down. In fact, we insisted on it.

Branche was sexy to me, strong and sure of herself, wearing tight, dirty jeans, a white tank top T-shirt, and big heavy work boots. If she’d been a guy I would have had a crush on her. After breakfast, she and Fyord went Uptown to the Sunshine Co-op store and unloaded their truck. When they came back we all took a nap because it was so hot and sticky.

In the late afternoon, Fyord said the one place she’d love to go was to the tomb of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. Ali and I had already been there a couple of times. It was in a small cemetery on the other side of the Quarter from where we lived. Mark Gravois took us there the first time. The second time we had a picnic lunch at her tomb.

It was a tradition to mark three Xs on her grave when you were there, good luck. Branche and Fyord acted like we were visiting the tomb of some kind of saint. They took it all very seriously. I kept joking with them, but they wouldn’t have it. Just to annoy them I started singing that country pop song about “she’s the Witch Queen of New Ore-leeens.” When we got to Marie Laveau’s tomb, Ali told them how they had to make three Xs. Fyord didn’t like that. She said she didn’t want to desecrate the home of The Dead. Ali said, “If you don’t make three Xs on her tomb then you will be cursed.” Mark had told us that.

I could hear rush hour traffic off in the distance, but there in the cemetery, with its rows and rows of old marble tombs, it was quiet. A reverential mood passed over Branche and Fyord. I picked up a piece of gravel and walked up to Marie Laveau’s tomb. On top of years of faded scratch marks I made my three chalky white Xs. I handed the rock to Branche and she made her marks. Ali followed. Fyord shut her eyes and tried to block us out in order to become one with Marie Laveau. I was ready to go. It was happy hour over at the Golden Lantern and they had strong drinks for cheap. Just as Fyord was making her second X on the tomb a church bell started ringing. Bong. Bong. 6:00 p.m. Evening mass. We all jumped and looked at each other. Something was supposed to happen if you were making the Xs when a church bell went off. I didn’t know what, but something. We all got the creeps.

Ali yelled, “Come on, let’s get out of here!” Fyord started to run but caught herself, turned, and ran back to the tomb to quickly scratch in her last X. Then she dropped the rock and the four of us took off running as fast as we could out of the cemetery.

When they left the next morning they gave us a box of fresh vegetables and a big jug of organic apple juice as a thank-you present. I was sorry to see them go. I didn’t want to return to my lonely life of job hunting.

They stayed with us twice after that. Each time they came down Ali and I were more and more into drinking and partying in the gay bars of the French Quarter. Branche and Fyord weren’t interested. After their third visit we never heard from them.

When I moved to San Francisco a year later I bumped into Branche. She was helping set up the stage for the Castro Street Fair, the annual street party that was three blocks of shoulder-to-shoulder gay men. She had on her high leather work boots. I got excited and yelled, “Branche! Branche!” She didn’t respond at first. Then she looked up and saw me. We hugged briefly. She wasn’t very affectionate. I asked her what happened, why hadn’t we heard from them? She said she had a falling-out with some of the other womyn and got fed up and moved to San Francisco. I asked about Fyord and she said the last she’d heard, Fyord was still in Arkansas. Then she said, “By the way, I don’t go by ‘Branche’ anymore. My name is Lee.”

CEEDRA DEVILLE

Harold, the dishwasher, made my job at the Decatur Street Bistro tolerable. My title was “food-prep,” which meant I did things like pull the green tops off thousands of little cherry tomatoes, weigh out stacks of quarter-pound patties of hamburger, slice potatoes, make radish “roses,” and prepare the salad bar. The salad bar was the most important. Each morning I had an hour to get it ready before the restaurant opened and it was never enough time. Harold was hired a week or two after me. The small, narrow kitchen was out by the patio in the slave quarter section of an old French Quarter building. Daniel Bardeaux, the owner/manager, took his frustrations out on the two of us. He was always yelling at us to work faster. He made me nervous and he knew it, which made him yell at me even more but made me work slower. He would get up from a pleasant conversation with customers on the patio next to the fountain and come into the kitchen just to harass Harold and me. He also did a lot of barking at us before the restaurant opened up. I hated working there, but hadn’t been able to find any other work. They said when the summer ended there would be more jobs.

Harold had licorice skin. He was always singing Donna Summer songs. He loved her. He thought she was the greatest. I only liked her spacey song, “I Feel Love.” After that she became too mainstream disco-y for me. I still liked punk rock and some New Wave much more than disco. Harold would sing and prance up and down the narrow aisle between the dishwasher and food-prep counter like he was performing the show of his life at some glamorous theater. He called everyone “Miss Thing” and would snap his fingers at me to make a point. There were shutters that opened from our work area out onto the patio. Whenever a handsome man walked by, Harold would squeal with delight and tell me he’d finally found his new husband. He’d take off his apron and say, “Hold this, Miss Thing. I’m going to get married!” And then trot out the door looking both ways to see where the man went and to make sure Daniel Bardeaux wasn’t watching.

He made me laugh. He was just the relief I needed from the fast pace of the kitchen and our overbearing boss. I couldn’t have lasted any longer there if Harold hadn’t shown up. He would take the spray nozzle that hung from above the giant stainless steel sink and hold it to his mouth like it was a microphone, or a big dick.

Harold wanted to be a fashion designer. His mother was going to help him go to college. He was so campy and silly that I had trouble imagining him being a serious student. Plus, I found it hard to believe he could go from working at a job like ours to going to college. I was barely making enough to pay my rent. I couldn’t even begin to think about paying for school on top of my household bills. I kind of didn’t believe that he would really get to go. But that fall he moved to Houston and stayed with an aunt and got into a fashion design school. He sent me fashion show announcements for a couple of years.

One night, when Ali was at work, I went out by myself to Lafitte’s. Even though we’d been in New Orleans for a couple of months, I was still nervous about going out alone. I was relieved to find Harold sitting on a barstool near the entrance. I was surprised to see him there because it didn’t seem like his kind of bar. Also, because they didn’t let many Black men in there. From what I had observed, it seemed like the larger gay bars in the Quarter had a very small quota of women and Black men that they would allow in. Harold and I sat against the wall on stools and picked out the men we wanted to marry. His list was much longer than mine. Grace Jones came on the jukebox singing, “La Vie en Rose.” We both started singing along, only I thought she was saying, “Put me on hold.” Harold blurted out laughing when he heard what I was singing. He put his hand to his mouth and then quickly held it straight up in the air and said, “No! Stop. Girl, you are not serious!” and laughed even more. He told me he was going to do a drag show with some friends of his and needed a name for himself. I jokingly said, “How about ‘Ceedra DeVille’?” I’d secretly been thinking about what I would call myself if I ever did drag and thought that would be a funny name. Only it was a little too formal for me. “You know what?” he said. “I like that. I think I’ll use it. That is, if you don’t mind.”

I’d seen drag shows in Kansas City at the Jewel Box. In Chicago, Eddie and I had hung out with Honey and her friends. In New Orleans, Ali and I had discovered two transvestite bars down on Iberville Street, around the corner from the Greek bars, called Wanda’s and the Midship, but neither had drag shows. Not that it mattered because at least once a week you could find a drag show somewhere in the French Quarter. I’d never done drag in public but sometimes when Ali and I were home we’d get stoned and put on shows for each other. That night at the bar, I told Harold that if I ever did drag I wanted to lip-synch to Blondie. He said I should come over the next afternoon to watch his friends rehearse for their upcoming show. He had never heard of Blondie but told me to bring the record if I wanted and I could do a show for them, too.

The next morning I rehearsed a couple of the songs that I’d done for Ali. I wasn’t absolutely sure if I was going to do a number in front of them but wanted to be prepared, just in case. As part of my routine I wanted to do a little bit of pogoing but every time I jumped up and down the record skipped. So instead I had to rely on a few punk-attitude facial expressions, like a lip-curling sneer and pouting. My movements felt fluid. I gave a lot of hip action. I should be in a punk band, I thought. Maybe when I got to know people better I could find somebody else who wanted to start a band with me. I knew, deep down inside, that if Deborah Harry, the lead singer of Blondie, were to meet me we’d be best friends.

Harold’s neighborhood was halfway between the river and Lake Pontchartrain, off Elysian Fields Avenue. I was wearing my Bermuda shorts, clear plastic “jelly bean” sandals, and a T-shirt that had a big red heart on it and said in bold print FLORIDA IS FOR LOVERS. As I walked the few blocks to his house from the bus stop with my Blondie record under my arm, I realized that I was in a completely Black neighborhood. In the suburbs where I grew up people called this “The Ghetto.” It was quiet. I looked around to make sure no one was going to mug me even though it was broad daylight, the middle of a hot, sunny afternoon. If anything, the houses in that neighborhood were in better shape than where Ali and I lived. Children played in yards while old ladies rocked in wooden bench swings on their front porches. A few of them lazily watched as I walked by. My instincts told me nothing was going to happen, but my mind warned me to be scared. I remembered my mother always made us lock our car doors when we drove through The Ghetto in Kansas City. I tried to ignore those thoughts as I looked for Harold’s house.

Harold and his two friends were all excited about the rehearsal. I didn’t realize how seriously they were taking their show until I got there. They had wigs out and each one of them was getting dressed in an outfit they’d designed themselves. The apartment smelled like hair spray. They told me they weren’t putting on any makeup since it was just a run-through. The stage was Harold’s hardwood living room floor in front of his record player. Their high heels clicked against the wide planks, scuffing the shiny floor.

The audience (me and whoever wasn’t doing their number at the time) sat in a short row of kitchen chairs facing the stage. Harold’s friend, who asked me to call him “Tanya,” started the rehearsal with a Minnie Riperton number. “Lovin’ you has made my life so beautiful. La la la la la. La la la la la la la la la la la ah ah.” He held his hands in prayer and looked to heaven when Minnie squeaked her high-pitched “ahh-hh-aahh-ahh” that made the song so famous. He was wearing silver tights with a large green T-shirt that he belted so it looked like a minidress. The sleeves were tightly rolled up, revealing his shoulders. Tiny pieces of paper were sprinkled in his full round wig to make it look like he had baby’s breath flowers in his hair just like Minnie Riperton. He said on the night of the show he’d have real flowers.

Monica wore a tight black dress below his knees and spike heels, and was wrapped in a black-fringe shawl with silver thread running through it. He wore a short red wig. For his number, he’d chosen the classic “Lady Marmalade” by Labelle, which he did with an extremely emotional church-like touch. He pranced back and forth, waving his arms, and even slapped the floor once, like he was headlining at some gospel revival show. He was so exciting that we all started screaming and cheering. Tanya ran up and gave him an invisible dollar bill as a tip. Ceedra and Tanya kept yelling, “Work, Miss Thing! Work it! All right now!”

Both Tanya and Monica were better than I was expecting. This obviously wasn’t their first rehearsal. The upcoming show was serious business to them, but they were also having fun. I was starting to think maybe I wouldn’t do my number after all. Even though I’d practiced it and put on shows with Ali, I still hadn’t put nearly as much work into my songs as they had theirs.

Ceedra chose Dorothy Moore’s hit, “Misty Blue.” His outfit was simple: blue jean cut-offs, a striped boob-tube, platform sandals, and a long curly brown wig. I was amazed at how graceful he became as he performed. He was boyish but moved smoothly, slinking his body up and down. He stretched out his arms to me and became Dorothy Moore onstage in a smoky lounge. His full lips mouthed the words: “Oh, it’s been such a long, long time … Just the thought of you, turns my whole world misty blue.”

By the time Ceedra finished, I was caught up in the spirit. Any reluctance I’d felt about performing for them was gone. I put my record on the turntable and placed the needle at the beginning of my favorite Blondie song, “Rip Her to Shreds.” As soon as the music started it sounded wrong. The loud punk rock guitar chords broke through the air shattering the sultry nightclub mood Harold and his friends had created. My movements were awkward and stiff, there was none of my fluid hip action happening. I wished I had at least borrowed one of their wigs. I knew all the words by heart but couldn’t translate the song anywhere near as well as the three of them had done. Why did they make it seem so easy to be graceful, feminine, and sexy? When they were doing their numbers they “became” the singer.

I looked at Ceedra, Tanya, and Monica. They had big smiles glued to their faces hiding their horror at witnessing my bad attempt at lip-synch. When I had rehearsed at home I thought I was so great, but in front of them I felt stupid. The three-and-a-half-minute song became too long. I wanted it to end before it was over. When I finished they applauded politely. Ceedra said I just needed to practice a little more and I’d have it down. He tried to cheer me up by saying that maybe if I rehearsed it more I could do it in one of their shows. Tanya shot a worried glance to Monica. They both smiled at me but weren’t as encouraging. Monica said it would help if I got an outfit together to go with my number. They didn’t tell me that it really sucked, even though I knew it did.

SOUTHERN DECADENCE

Life in the French Quarter revolved around holidays and parties. By Labor Day weekend, which is halfway between Mardi Gras and New Year’s Eve, people were bored and hungry for some fun. The Southern Decadence Parade was started on the Sunday before Labor Day to fill the gap. The parade was small enough that if you didn’t know someone who knew about it, you’d miss it. The parade began on the far side of the French Quarter, Rampart Street, and worked its way across to the Mississippi River. Whenever the parade marshal announced a stop, everyone marching, if you could call it that, had to go into the nearest bar and buy a drink. This year Burt Kingston was the parade marshal. He won the honored position because at the previous year’s Southern Decadence he’d puked up a Quaalude, reached down into his vomit, pulled the pill out, and swallowed it again. The parade started out as a scraggly group of festive queens and their friends, but got bigger as we made our way through the Quarter. More people, gay, straight, all colors, joined in.

Even the morning of the parade was exciting. James rode his bicycle down to Café du Monde and brought back “fresh out of the grease” beignets, New Orleans’s version of donuts, so we could have them with our Bustelo coffee for breakfast. Then Ali and James got dressed up in drag. I still wasn’t comfortable doing drag. The house was lively while they were getting ready. The parakeets were screaming and jumping around in their cage. It was sunny and hot.

Ali wore bright red lipstick and big extra-long false eyelashes with his jeans and T-shirt. He pinned the back of his curly red hair up so that he had a Lucille Ball ’do. James pulled his long blond hair into a ponytail on the side of his head that cascaded down over one shoulder. He wore blue jean cut-offs, showing lots of leg, and a glittery blue tube top around his chest. I had on my brown plaid Bermuda shorts, Sex Pistols T-shirt, and jelly bean sandals: the same thing I wore every day.

The parade was really just an excuse for an all-day drink-a-thon. I got drunk and was having a good time. When I was drunk I’d talk to anyone. I was loosening up and starting to feel comfortable with my new friends. I loved the mixture of people marching and partying together. The Krewe of Clones marching band played Mardi Gras music. They were a spoof on traditional New Orleans bands, more rock ’n’ roll, not really in tune. Some good saxophone. Blanche, a skinny bleached-blond queen wearing spike heels, a giant brimmed sun hat, and a Fifties one-piece swimsuit, was making a scene—strutting around, trying to kiss straight men. Sometimes she’d throw her big beach towel down on the sidewalk and stretch out like she was sunning at the beach. She seemed a little bit higher than everyone else and at times would cross over the line from fun to scary. The parade got bigger and bigger as more people joined in. When we crossed Bourbon Street we all screamed, yelled, and posed for tourists taking our pictures.

Doug, Stevie’s ex-boyfriend, came back to town for the parade. He wore a Pierrot clown costume. Stevie was Mark and D.J.’s friend from college who lived around the corner from us. He was always cracking funny jokes. He rolled his eyes at Doug and said to Mark and me in his thick Southern drawl, “That’s not exactly drag.” He said it just out of Doug’s earshot but close enough for Doug to know Stevie had said something about him. Mark laughed at Stevie for being so catty. Stevie could be hilariously funny but his humor bordered on sarcasm. The drunker he got the more sarcastic he was. Both he and Mark had full beards with makeup on. Lipstick and beards. Glitter in their beards. That looked weird to me, almost clown-like. I wasn’t sure if that counted as real drag or not but they seemed to think so. What did I know? Everyone else we knew was in some form of drag, from a wig and bad makeup to elaborate gowns.

I found Ali in the crowd. He was drunk and hanging on James. They were always kissing long and hard in public. I stood next to them, waiting for them to finish. Ali put his arm around me and pulled me to him. He gave me a big smeary liquor-breath kiss on the lips and asked, “Do you see anyone here that you want?” I looked around and pointed out this man I’d seen around the Quarter a lot. He was big, with a full dark beard, balding on top, a little older than us.

“Joe, that’s just like you. All these sexy young guys and you want some scary-looking older guy.”

I stuck close to Ali and James for most of the parade. Sometimes I’d drift off with other people but not for long. It had been a while since Ali and I had fun together. We were both at new jobs and on different schedules. In a way that was nice because I had the house to myself in the evenings. But I also missed his company. He was still my best friend. He had a pint of tequila in his pocket so we kept nipping at it. He was too cheap to spend money in every bar. Tequila was trouble for the two of us. Usually it was good trouble. Our chemistry clicked with it. It’s just sometimes we wouldn’t stop before we got in real trouble.

After marching all the way across the French Quarter to the river, the parade ended up at Jewel’s on Decatur Street. The bar was so packed you could hardly move. Guys climbed up on wooden beer kegs and stripped to the music. Someone in the crowd grabbed my crotch and started rubbing. He wanted me to go in the back room with him but I was having too much fun in the front. I pulled away from him and waded deeper into the crowd. It was late afternoon, but inside the bar it was so dark it could have been 2:00 a.m. A 3-D Budweiser sign with a picture of two dead trout in front of a waterfall hung over the bar. I loved that sign.

I managed to get my beer outside without spilling much of it. There were almost as many people on the street in front of the bar as there were inside. Stevie, Mark, and Jeff LaRue were talking to some other queens, trying to figure out what to do now that the parade was over. Everyone wanted to keep on partying. I stood off to the side, just watching. I was content to stay right where I was. It was late afternoon, warm, not hot, and my feet couldn’t carry me much farther.

Doug, tall, thin, and gangly, came at me through the crowd in his disheveled end-of-the-day Pierrot costume. He was leading himself by holding his plastic Go Cup of beer up in front of him. He brushed his long, straight brown bangs away from his eyes, and in a slurry voice said, “This may sound weird, but I’d like to get to know you better. I think we have a lot in common.” It sounded to me like a classic pickup line but I could tell he was sincere about it. It was too awkward a moment to be a pickup. I kind of laughed. We talked for a while, opening up to each other thanks to the liquor we’d been drinking all day. Both of us felt like outsiders in the midst of the tight group of friends we knew from the Golden Lantern. Most of them had gone to college together. They made us feel like “Northerners.” Even though I was from Missouri and half-Southern, since my mother was from Arkansas, and Doug was from Virginia, we were definitely not from the Deep South.

Things started to wind down at Jewel’s so I decided to go home. Mark told me to stop by later for dinner if I wanted. I was drunk enough that I wasn’t walking exactly in a straight line, but I wasn’t staggering. When I got home I either took a nap or passed out for about an hour. The house was too quiet when I woke up, so I decided to take Mark up on his offer for dinner.

D.J., Mark’s roommate, was there finishing up a painting. He’d missed the parade because he’d gotten so involved in his work. I hung out and talked to him while Mark cooked one of his great New Orleans recipes. Ella Fitzgerald played on the stereo. While we waited for the food to simmer, Mark took me out back and showed me his garden. He gave me a guided tour, showing me each plant and telling me a little something about it. He started talking absent-mindedly about wanting a boyfriend but not being able to find one. Then he changed the subject quickly back to his garden.

After we ate, Mark and I walked down to the Golden Lantern to see if anyone was there. A lot of people never made it home. They went to the Lantern instead so there was still a party going on. It was 10:00 p.m. or so Sunday night, the end of a long day, and still warm out. Ali was there, only he’d changed out of drag into his bright blue satin gym shorts, a tank top T-shirt, and flip-flop sandals. He still had a hint of faded makeup on. He smelled like tequila and cheap perfume. Around his waist was a silver chain that he got in India, with small bells that clanged softly as he walked. James had to work in the morning so he’d gone home to his apartment on the other side of downtown, under the bridge. Mark and I left the Lantern after an hour or so and walked home together. It was sweet, quiet, kind of romantic after a wacky day. He told me I could spend the night if I wanted. I said I thought I’d just go on home.

Ali didn’t come home for a couple days after the parade. We didn’t have a phone so he couldn’t call to let me know what he was up to. At first I figured he’d met some trick and was off having fun. Then I started to worry. I went over to Mark and D.J.’s and told them he hadn’t been home. Mark called the police, which I thought was drastic, but they had no record of him being arrested. The next day, Mark came by after work and got me. He told me he’d made some more phone calls and found out that Ali had been arrested and he was being arraigned in night court that night.

When they led the prisoners into the court Ali came out looking like an indignant mess. He still had on his blue satin gym shorts but was barefoot. His T-shirt was ripped and dirty and his hair was matted flat on one side. Bristly red whiskers were sprouting on his face. He was charged with disturbing the peace and resisting arrest. Since it was his first conviction, they fined him one hundred dollars, which was a lot to us in 1978. Mark bailed him out. Ali insisted that he was unjustly arrested and he was going to get a lawyer and file a complaint against his arresting officer.

In Mark’s VW Rabbit outside the police station, we asked Ali what exactly it was he did to get arrested. We sat in the empty parking lot while he gave us his explanation. I was in the back seat with my knees scrunched up into the back of Ali’s seat.

He said, “The only thing I’m guilty of is defending a victim of police brutality.”

“What exactly do you mean by that?” I knew as far as Ali was concerned that anyone and everyone was a victim of police brutality. The pigs.

“Things died down at the Lantern,” Ali said, “so I went over to Le Bistro to see if anything was going on there. It was almost midnight but I was still in the Southern Decadence mood. I was really smashed so I finally decided to go home, only when I left the bar I accidentally headed down towards Canal instead of up towards our house. When I realized I was going the wrong direction I made a left and cut across St. Peter Street. Do either of you have a cigarette?” Neither Mark nor I smoked so Ali was out of luck. A warm night breeze picked up, gently blowing the streetlight that lit our end of the parking lot back and forth. When Ali realized he wasn’t getting a smoke, he continued with his story.

“When I was on St. Peter a police car sped by with its lights flashing and siren blaring. I figured someone was in trouble so I ran after the cops.”

I was sure he was drunk out of his mind because he’d been drinking tequila all day, but I didn’t say anything.

“From up the block I could see Blanche stretched out on her beach blanket on the sidewalk, minding her own business, when the police car screeched to a halt right next to her.”

Mark giggled and slapped the steering wheel when he heard this.

He said, “Ali, stop. Not Blanche? Oh God! Tell me it’s not true!”

“Yeah, well, what was I supposed to do when I see two cops jumping out of their car and in three seconds flat they’d flipped Blanche over, put a knee in her back, and had her handcuffed? I mean, she was screaming this high-pitched, bloodcurdling scream. When I heard her scream I ran as fast as I could. When I saw Blanche handcuffed with her face smashed into the sidewalk, I let out a yell and rushed at the pigs. One of the cops turned just in time to get my fist in his jaw. Then I jumped on his back and started screaming, ‘Let her go! Let her go!’”

By this point I knew Ali must have been way out of control. Mark was laughing hysterically. I was glad I hadn’t been there to witness the event.

“I put up a good fight,” Ali bragged. “It took both of those fucking pigs to get me down. Then they pinned me on my stomach to the sidewalk next to Blanche and handcuffed me, too. They got pissed at me when I yelled at them, ‘Don’t you guys have anything fucking better to do than hassle fags? You should really be proud of yourselves. I bet right this minute some woman’s getting raped or beat up by her boyfriend around the corner from here. But do you care? No, you’ve got to harass people who are just trying to enjoy themselves!’ Fucking cop jabbed me in my ribs with his night stick. After that they were making Blanche get in the patrol car. I knew it was now or never if I was going to get away.”

I said, “What do you mean ‘now or never’? You were under arrest!!”

He looked at me like didn’t I know anything and then continued. “I took off running up Royal Street with my arms handcuffed behind my back as fast as I could. That’s when I lost my fucking flip-flops. I got half a block away before the pigs even realized I was gone. One pig shoved Blanche in the back seat and slammed the door while the one behind the wheel put the car in gear. The big one ran after me while the car squealed its tires and chased me up the street. The car jerked up on the sidewalk in front of me, blocking me. The driver jumped out, yanked out his pistol, held it in front of him with both hands, and yelled, ‘Hold it right there, sister.’ What could I do? I froze in my tracks. All I remember at that point was hearing my heart pounding in my ears. The cop running up from behind crashed into me and knocked me to the ground. After a kick in my side, the next thing I knew I was on my way to Central Lock-Up. I never even saw Blanche again once we were in the station.”

Mark asked, “Why the hell didn’t you call us?”

“The fucking pigs wouldn’t even let me use the phone until I sobered up and quit yelling at everyone.”

I asked, “How long did that take?”

Ali said, “I don’t know. Maybe a day or so.” He put his arm over the back of his car seat and rubbed my knee, batting his eyelashes at me and giving me his irresistible boyish I’ve-been-bad-haven’t-I look. I didn’t want to laugh. I didn’t want him to think it was all okay. But then I couldn’t help it. I started laughing. Mark started laughing a deep heartfelt laugh. He leaned across his gear shift and gave Ali a hug. Then we pulled out of the parking lot and headed home.

NEW YEAR’S EVE

On New Year’s Eve of 1978–79, Stevie took me to dinner at Kolb’s German Restaurant, in downtown New Orleans off Canal Street. Stevie was in love with me. I was completely obsessed with Johnny Johnson, who was only interested in me for sex every once in a while. Johnny was a sexy older guy who worked with Stevie and me at the record distributor warehouse. He was the Promo Man. He had lots of energy and always knew what the latest hit was going to be before it broke. He was my type: dark, hairy, and slightly bald on top. He was thirty-two. Even though I was obsessed with Johnny Johnson, I hung out with Stevie all the time. Stevie would even listen to me talk about how I wanted to go over and have sex with Johnny. Johnny chewed the hair on my forearm and punched me in the shoulder while he jerked off. He put a dildo up my butt that he’d rotate inside me. He liked to do kinky things to me but never wanted to hold or caress me. He only let me spend the night with him once. Stevie wanted to make passionate love and be mine for the rest of our natural lives, but he wasn’t my type. Stevie and I got along great. I think both of us were hoping I would fall in love with him. I tried, but it just never happened. We even had sex a couple of times. I loved him, but wasn’t in love with him.

After dinner at Kolb’s, we went to the French Quarter to the Verti Marte to meet up with Rodney, Nog, and Stevie’s roommate, George. All three of them worked there. Nog made sandwiches, George worked the cash register, and Rodney was the manager. They had to close up and were in a hurry so we could go out. While I waited for them to finish, I called my sister Lucy and her new husband, Dave, in Missouri from the pay phone to wish them a Happy New Year. They were roller-skating in their basement. We were talking on the phone at the stroke of midnight. Someone said whatever you’re doing at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve is what you’ll be doing for the rest of the year. Rodney and Nog were closing the deli section; George was counting money from the cash register. Stevie was waiting. George said he didn’t mind the thought of counting money all year.

Rodney took the four of us in a cab to his house out by City Park, where we snorted lines of T (which is what we called Angel Dust) while he changed clothes. George looked like a fashion model with his dark hair combed back. Nog was short and round with a thick Cockney accent. I teased her about it a little but then shut up when everyone teased me about my flat, nasal Northern accent. In the cab on the way back to the Golden Lantern, Nog was starting to get off on the T and didn’t notice how much perfume she’d been spraying on herself. We told her to cut it out because she was getting it all over us, too. It made my nose itch. She was wearing a fur coat that was molting. George picked a little piece of fur off her, rolled his eyes, and said, “Very glamorous, Nog.” We got to the Lantern around 1:00 a.m. and poured out of the cab. Everyone except Nog. I heard a tiny scream from behind me and when I looked back I saw her legs sticking out of the car door. She was flat on her back on the seat and too high to get out of the cab. She was stuck and yelling for help. Stevie and I pulled her out.

As we stepped through the narrow swinging doors into the Golden Lantern, I suddenly realized how high I was. I hadn’t noticed in the cab, since everyone else was just as high as me, if not more. But in the bar it didn’t matter because everyone was out of their mind. The place was packed. I saw all kinds of people I knew and everyone was blitzed. I was happy. Even though I’d known most of them less than six months, this odd group of people had become my good friends. Big Wayne stood next to the jukebox lip-synching the new Sister Sledge song, “We Are Family—I got all my sisters with me!” Everyone was kissing each other, wishing Happy New Year. Mark Gravois’s eyelids were at half-mast he was so loaded. He kept telling me how much he loved me. An endless stream of champagne bottles passed through the crowd. Mark said he was going to change his drag name from Brenda to “Champagne Galore” in honor of New Year’s Eve.

Ali and James were there but were oblivious to what was going on around them. They sat at the bar making out, locked in a lovers’ embrace. I wasn’t sure what they were on, but I could tell by the way their eyes were glazed that it was more than just love. Ali had told me recently that he and James confessed they loved each other.

Jeff LaRue joined our troupe at the Lantern after finishing his waiter’s shift. He was still in his black slacks and white shirt. His close-trimmed beard gave him a distinguished gentleman look. I was used to seeing him in jeans and a T-shirt. Rodney took him into the bathroom and gave him a line of T. When they came out again Jeff had a big grin on his face. He snapped his fingers high in the air and said, “All right, girls, let’s party!” Things were quieting down at the Lantern just as we were getting wound up, so we decided to go dancing at the Parade disco over on Bourbon Street. It was warm and foggy outside, adding a surreal touch to the night as we managed our way through the narrow French Quarter streets. Fireworks were going off all over town. We were all so high at one point that we forgot where we were going. We’d been in the Lantern and now we were out walking. Then it clicked, oh … we’re going to the Parade to dance. We passed a bar that was playing Aretha singing “Chain of Fools.” Stevie started popping his fingers and singing along. He shut his eyes and swayed his head to the music like it was touching the very core of his soul. Soon we were all dancing in the middle of the street.

The Parade was more crowded than I’d ever seen. We were all blown away, both from our drugs and the amount of people. The bar was so packed I could hardly move. I felt lost anyway from being so high. I loved it. Everyone was soaked with sweat. There was trash all over the dance floor. Men with shirts off danced on elevated bleacher-type seats. Neon disco lights in the shape of lightning bolts flashed overhead. The dance floor was jammed with shoulder-to-shoulder men. Someone stuck a bottle of poppers under my nose. I inhaled the pungent fumes and felt the exhilarating rush temporarily overwhelm me. Someone was always handing me a drink. We danced and danced. Between being with my friends, being so high, and being surrounded by so many sexy men, I felt like this was the closest thing to heaven I’d ever experienced.

At one point on the dance floor when I was completely blitzed, George started yelling, “Berlin! Berlin!” I leaned over and shouted in his ear, “What do you mean?”

“It’s just like Berlin in the Twenties tonight!”

That fall I’d read The Berlin Stories and other short stories by Christopher Isherwood. As I looked around the disco, I thought his description of Berlin nightlife was close to this moment. I shouted back to George, “Too bad it’s not always like this!” Then he pulled a little brown vial out of his pocket and offered me a toot of cocaine while we danced.

At unspecified intervals, one guy in the middle of the dance floor would stop dancing, stand still, and scream at the top of his lungs. It scared me at first, then it became funny. Soon everyone was screaming and blowing whistles. Fog machines blasted clouds out over the crowd, cooling us off. The mirrored disco ball spun specks of light all over that reminded me of flakes of oatmeal before it’s cooked.

The big hits that night were: “I Will Survive,” “Got to Be Real,” “I Love the Nightlife,” “Boogie Oogie Oogie.” No Blondie, not even their disco hit, “Heart of Glass,” yet. Jeff LaRue took Stevie and me out on the crowded balcony overlooking Bourbon Street to get some fresh air and smoke a joint. Stevie said he bet I wished they’d play some New Wave, huh? I said it didn’t matter. I was having fun.

Once the fresh air hit me I realized I’d almost suffocated inside the disco from the lack of oxygen caused by the sweaty crowd and all the smoke. We’d been there a couple of hours and the excitement was wearing off. I was coming down from the T and the joint helped take the edge off. It brought me back to reality. Only the reality was that I was getting bored and wanted a change of scene. Jeff and Stevie said they felt the same. So we went in and pulled Rodney, George, and Nog off the dance floor and told them we were ready to go. Rodney seemed a little surprised, but didn’t argue. We poured our drinks into Go Cups and headed out to the street. It was foggier and warmer outside than when we went in. It seemed strange that it was warming up in the middle of the night, but the air felt good. We walked in a scraggly group through the narrow streets. I was happy to be wearing only a T-shirt and jeans on New Year’s Eve instead of a heavy overcoat, trudging through snow. Everyone hung on each other, walking arm-in-arm sometimes, then breaking off and walking alone.

We walked over to Jewel’s Bar on Decatur Street, where we ran into Mark Gravois. He was so out of it that he was nodding and slurring. I’d never seen him like that before. He was funny. When we propped him up on a barstool, he reminded me of a little kid. It was crowded at Jewel’s, too. Every place was packed. It felt like a miniature Mardi Gras.

I had to take a leak so I pushed my way through the bar to the toilet. When I got there I couldn’t see because the overhead light was off and the room was filled with guys having sex. I was irritated because I couldn’t get through all the horny bodies to the urinal. Plus, I was still high enough on the T that it made it hard to navigate. I squeezed my way through until I came to the long, wall-length urinal and relieved myself. When I finished, just as I turned around to work my way out of there, someone pulled me to him and started kissing me. It was a big guy. He felt good. He ran his hand up inside my shirt, around my side, and stuck his fingers down the back of my jeans. As we mashed against each other, the whole crowded dark room started turning into one thriving, throbbing, moaning organism. I completely forgot where I was. It happened so fast. I gave in and let the room carry me. I leaned back against someone else who started rubbing his hand across my butt. The guy who was kissing me moved his mouth down to my crotch. He blew his hot breath onto me, which I felt through my jeans. Then he opened my fly and started to go down on me. I wasn’t me anymore. I was a thousand different feelings rushing through my body into the guy in front, the guy behind, the whole pulsing crowded toilet. Someone else took my hand and placed it on his hard dick. I started feeling it up and down, rolling it in my hand. I laughed to myself and thought, This is what was missing from the dance floor at the Parade.

I leaned my head to the left, towards the bathroom door, and saw Stevie standing there watching me. It was like someone threw ice water in my face. He disappeared as quickly as he had appeared. I pried myself away from the knot of men and squeezed back out the door into the bar. Jeff and Stevie were near the front, holding Mark up. I worked my way there and Jeff said, “So … having a good time, Joe?” I knew Stevie had already told him what I was up to. I said, “Yeah, you should try it.” Jeff raised his eyebrows and said, “I already did!” We laughed but Stevie just gave us a sarcastic smile. I mean, he and I weren’t lovers or anything. He had taken me out to dinner about five hours earlier. It was kind of a date, but so much had happened since then that dinner felt like it happened days ago.

From Jewel’s, we dragged Mark along with us to Lafitte’s, where we had another drink. Then we went back to the Lantern, where we left Mark. We were still up for wandering, but Mark’s legs wouldn’t carry him any farther. The Lantern had quieted down so we marched back to Lafitte’s. There was more cocaine and pot being passed around.

Rodney treated everyone to breakfast at Lucky Pierre’s on Bourbon Street. Champagne and omelettes. Lots of champagne. I’d never been there before because it was kind of an expensive, touristy place. The restaurant was in the courtyard of an old hotel. Above us, surrounding us, were two stories of balconies leading to hotel rooms. Standing on the balconies were sexy prostitutes. At first I didn’t believe they were real because it looked so much like a caricature of what people think of old-time New Orleans. It was like a flash to the past. But then I realized that, yes, this was the real thing. The girls looked about my age. At first they intimidated me in their skimpy outfits of bustiers, corsets, and garters. I thought they wouldn’t like all us fags invading their territory. But while we were waiting for our table a couple of them smiled at me. One asked me if I’d been having fun tonight. I said, “Yeah, it’s been great. How about you?” She said, “Uhhmm … You know how it is, Sweetie. I’m kind of tired.” Then I realized that they were relieved we were a bunch of partying queens and not more johns looking for sex.

Rodney ordered more champagne. Nog and George ordered Bloody Marys to go along with their breakfast. Jeff was talking to two guys that he and Rodney had invited along from Lafitte’s. Jeff seemed more interested in them than he did the champagne, which he drank casually. Stevie and I looked at each other like we couldn’t take another drink. I didn’t want to be rude by refusing, but I almost got sick on my second glass. I felt a big puke coming on. I excused myself and went to the bathroom. I had to wait in a short line and wasn’t sure if I was going to make it. A girl in a red satin corset standing next to me touched my arm and said, “You all right, Honey?” I was starting to break out in a cold sweat. I felt like I was turning green. She knocked on the bathroom door and yelled, “Hurry up in there!” Then she helped me through the door. I tried to thank her but no words would come out. “If you’re not out in ten minutes I’m coming back after you, Dollface.”

I hated to puke. If I didn’t have to I wouldn’t. I sat on the floor and hung my head over the toilet. The floor was wet with smelly urine and toilet water, but I didn’t care. All I could think of was the huge churning mush that was fighting its way out of my gut. I fought back. I was not going to ruin my great New Year’s Eve by puking. I wasn’t going to be a lightweight. I was determined not to vomit. My stomach started to settle down a little. I stood up over the sink, holding on to the walls, and splashed some water on my face. That helped. I wet a paper towel and rubbed my forehead and the back of my neck. That seemed to do the trick. I went back out to the table and acted like nothing had happened, like I just had to piss and that was it. No one even noticed. I looked up and saw the girl in red standing above us on a balcony. She blew me a kiss.

The sun had come up while we were in Lucky Pierre’s. We walked from the restaurant to the Mississippi, moving in slow motion. We sat down in the grass where the river bends, near the Governor Nicholls Street wharf. Nog, Rodney, George, Jeff LaRue, the two guys from Lafitte’s, Stevie, and me. The night fog had lifted but there was a strange mist rising about three or four feet above the river. It was beautiful. A breeze blew the mist onto the bank, wrapping us like a blanket. We sat and stared at the water, spacing out in the grass, not talking much. I passed out for a short time. It seemed odd to be smelling grass and watching the mist rise from the river after everything we’d done that night. I thought the disco felt like heaven, the back room at Jewel’s brought my body to life, Lucky Pierre’s was like a movie set, but here the Mississippi was reminding us once again that it was more fantastic than any of that.

We left the river bank and went back to the Golden Lantern where everyone dispersed around 9:00 a.m. Stevie and I went across the street to his apartment and collapsed on his narrow bed. I suppose at that point we were supposed to have sex but both of us were so out of it that I didn’t even feel like attempting it. Maybe Stevie did, but he didn’t push it. There was something soothing about just lying next to each other after all the intense excitement of the night. I woke up that afternoon in a daze. Stevie’s digital clock/radio flashed “3:30” at me in big red letters. I lay there half-awake listening to the rhythm of Stevie’s sleeping breath until close to 5:00. Then I slid out of bed, took a shower, and went home. Ali and James were just sitting down to eat so I joined them. I was glad to see them. After we ate I went to the front room and listened to my Blondie record on low volume while they took a nap. It was raining outside. The music sparked the last bit of drugs that were still in my system. I stretched out on our lumpy couch and shut my eyes, letting the glow of New Year’s wash over me one more time.

KAT

(February 1979)

Kat jumped out at me from behind a row of boxes in the back of the warehouse. She raised up the tail of her oversized shirt and rubbed her crotch. “You like it? You want it? I’ve got a big one just for you, baby.” I looked down and saw her rubbing a big hard-on in her pants. She ran up to me with her hand inside her jeans saying, “Here, boy, eat this!” and pulled out a big cucumber and shoved it in my face. Before I had a chance to respond she started laughing. “I’m sorry…” She laughed. “I just thought I’d give the guys around here a taste of their own medicine. Here, watch, I’m gonna get Ray.” She ran off through the stacks looking for her next victim. I snuck up behind her and peeked through the tall rows of metal shelves filled with record albums while she surprised Ray, the dirty old man, with her hard-on. He was the worst culprit, always yelling something crude about her big tits and grabbing his crotch and shaking it at her. Everyone in the warehouse took it as a big joke, but Kat was getting her revenge.

I found Kat about ten minutes later sitting on a pile of boxes in the far back corner, laughing uncontrollably. I said, “Hey, Kat, it wasn’t that funny.” Which made her laugh even more. She finally caught her breath and whispered, “Joe, can you keep a secret?”

“Yeah, sure. I mean, sometimes,” I answered.

“Well, I’ll tell you one if you can.” Then she started giggling again.

“What? Tell me.”

She took a deep breath and said, “I took some acid this morning on the way to work. I’m tripping my brains out right now.” Then she started giggling even more. “I have this order I have to fill and I can’t concentrate. I keep thinking about the shocked look on ol’ Ray’s face when I flashed him.” She caught her breath again. “He’s such an asshole. I gotta get out of this place. Here, help me up.” I helped her off the boxes and dusted off her jeans. She stepped into a beam of light coming in from a window high up, near the ceiling. She looked electrified.

I took her order list and clipboard and said, “Come on. I’ll help you fill this, but don’t expect me to do it for you all the time.”

“Bless you, my child.” She giggled mockingly. “I shall never begin to be able to repay you for all your kind deeds.”

“Shut up. Let’s just do this. I want to get out of here early tonight. It’s Friday and I want to get to the Golden Lantern for Happy Hour.”

Kat’s eyes lit up. “The French Queerter.”

“What?”

“The French Queerter. It makes perfect sense. The Queerter. No wonder all the fags move to the Quarter. It’s really the Queerter!”

“Kat?”

“Yeah?

“You’re tripping.”

“No shit! But, think of it, Joe. It makes perfect sense.”

“Maybe to you. That’s not why I moved here. Well, partially, but not the main reason.”

“Yeah, sure. You just came to the Queerter so you could suck dick. I know how you guys are. Oh well, can’t say that I blame you.”

When it was almost time to go, Kat asked me to come over to her house after work instead of going to the Golden Lantern. She said it seemed like I could miss it one time since I go there every night after work. I said not every night. She said almost. I said okay, I’d go with her. She was coming down from the acid. We went to her house and split a Dixie Beer while she changed clothes. She called me back into her bedroom. When I got there she was naked. She looked shorter than I thought she was. I tried to act casual.

“Do I look fat to you?”

She caught me off guard. “No, just short.”

“Oh, that’s ’cause I took off my heels!” She laughed. “But, really, do I look fat?”

I looked at her. She looked soft, not fat. Her butt was twice as big as mine, but it wasn’t fat. She turned towards me and I saw her full tits. I got embarrassed. She smiled. “It’s okay. I go around the house with no clothes on all the time. I hate to wear clothes. So … am I?”

“Are you what?”

“FAT!”

“No, Kat, not really.”

“What do you mean ‘not really’?”

“Well, I mean, you’re just … soft, not fat. You look great, actually.”

“You’re just saying that.” She acted like I was complimenting her now.

I looked across her dresser and saw a picture of a little girl. “Who’s that?”

“My daughter.”

“Your daughter? I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

“Well, I HAD a daughter. My parents took her away from me. They went to court and said I’m an ‘unfit mother.’”

“Oh, sorry.”

“That’s okay. I still get to see her anytime I want.”

“What’s her name?”

“Alisha. She turned five last June,” Kat said softly.

She pulled on an oversized T-shirt that had a picture of an alligator on it and led me into the kitchen. I looked out the window and saw an old motorcycle in the driveway. “Is that your bike, Kat?”

“No, that’s Francois’s, my husband’s.”

“Your husband? I didn’t know you were married!”

“We’re not really. I mean we are legally, but we’re getting a divorce soon. He’s already got another girlfriend.”

Kat put a record of old jazz on her turntable and started singing along. “I love Louis Jordan,” she purred. “I want to sing like that. Someday I’m going to have my own band. Francois plays lead guitar for the Regurgitators. They let me sit in on their studio sessions sometimes. That’s all I want to do, Joe, sing.

“Hey, do you wanna go hear Francois’s band tonight? They’re playing down in Chalmette. We could go for a little while anyway. It’ll be fun. It’s a costume party and pre–Mardi Gras ball.”

I thought about it. Not really. Straight parties made me nervous. I wanted to party in the Quarter with Ali, Stevie, and the Golden Lantern crowd. Kat said if I wanted to go to the Lantern that bad we could stop there on our way. She said, “Besides, the change of scenery will do you good.”

I liked hanging out with Kat so I decided to go. But I was hungry. Kat wasn’t, so I ran around the corner to a little neighborhood store and got a soft-shell crab po’boy sandwich. “You want that dressed, Chile?” the large woman behind the counter asked, looking at me over her cat-eye glasses. Meaning, did I want that with lettuce and tomato? Of course I did. Hot sauce, too. I took it back to Kat’s and ate it at her kitchen table. She was still a little high from the acid and tried to convince me that the crab was alive because she saw its claws wiggling.

Kat said since it was a costume party she wanted to wear something nasty. She pulled a black leotard and tights out of her dresser. She burrowed around on the floor of her closet and pulled out a toy whip. Then she went into her garage and found a chain that she could wear for a belt. She dug through Francois’s toolbox and found a clamp to use as a buckle. She called her Doberman in and said, “Sorry, Honey, but tonight I need to wear this,” and took the dog’s studded collar off and put it around her neck. She stood in front of her mirror and looked her body up and down. Her face softened. She took a deep breath and let it out. “What do you think, Joe? Will this do?”

Before I could answer her, she went back to her dresser and said, “Here, you can wear this,” and handed me a short-sleeved black lace jacket. At first I thought she was joking. I didn’t want to wear that little thing. Then I started to get into the idea. I’d already gone out to a party wearing just my black tights and makeup. Not really drag, kind of half-drag.

I said, “Yeah, this will go great with my tights!”

Kat giggled, “Tonight we’ll be the Bobbsey Twins. Only, you need a dog collar, too.” She went back out to the garage and came in with a little red puppy collar. “Here, put this around your ankle.”

We decided to wait until we got to my house before changing completely into our outfits. On the way we stopped at the Golden Lantern. Stevie was sitting at the bar between Mark and Blanche. I told them where we were going and Stevie said I should stay with them.

“Why do you want to go to some ol’ party with a bunch of straight people?” he drawled.

“I don’t know. It could be fun.”

Stevie rolled his eyes. Kat said, “What’s the matter, Stevie? Does that scare you?”

Stevie snapped back, “Yeah, it scares me. I’m scared I might get bored!”

Kat rolled her eyes, mimicking him. She and I downed a couple of “red drinks” (vodka over ice with a splash of cranberry juice) and then left. Stevie looked annoyed. It was Friday night and he was ready to party. Plus, I think he hadn’t entirely gotten over his crush on me. I went over to say see you later to him while Kat stood outside in the street and yelled, “Joe, you faggot! Come on!”

At my house we got dressed in our tight black outfits. Kat wore black high heels that helped push her butt up and out. I didn’t wear anything under my lace jacket. It didn’t have any buttons so it opened up onto my chest and stomach. I had never noticed Kat’s hourglass figure when we were working together, but that night in her leotard and tights with the chain for a belt, I couldn’t help but notice. She touched up her makeup. She ran her hands over her hips and said in a sexy voice, “How do I look? Not too fat, huh?” I didn’t think she looked fat at all and told her so for the fiftieth time that day. She looked me over and said there was just one thing missing. She got out her lipstick and put a little on my lips and then smeared a touch of it on my cheeks for color. She rubbed her finger in some baby blue eye shadow then wiped it across my eyelids. We were a sexy pair with me being the pretty one and Kat looking strong. She stuck her toy whip in her belt and said, “There! We’re ready.”

I said, “Yeah, but will this party be ready for us?”

“I doubt it, but who gives a fuck?”

For the final touch Kat took out a tiny piece of paper from her purse that had a drop of acid on it. She tore it in two and put half on my tongue and half on hers.

The drive to Chalmette in Kat’s beat-up little Toyota took about half an hour. The acid started kicking in about ten minutes away from the party. The night air was warm for February but we kept the car heater on since we weren’t wearing much. I stared off in the distance to oil refineries with flaming smokestacks that looked like giant candles in the night. It felt like we’d suddenly been transported out of the city into some weird futuristic landscape on another planet.

It was a rock ’n’ roll crowd at the VFW hall. Most of them had also driven down from the city. I saw a lot of people in costumes, but when Kat parked the car and shut off the engine I wasn’t sure if I could go inside looking like I did. I felt naked all of a sudden. She told me to relax, that all I needed was a beer and I’d be fine. Kat became larger than life as we walked up to the door. Heads turned. She was loving every minute of it. I wasn’t so sure. She said, “Come on, Joe. This is going to be fun!” Her voice was reassuring. She knew the doorman who let us in for free since Francois, her soon-to-be ex-husband, was in the band. As soon as we got inside we headed for the bar, which was a folding table with some bottles of hard liquor on it and two big metal tubs filled with ice and beer on the floor.

Kat said, “How about a shot of tequila with our beer?”

“Okay” was all that would come out of my mouth. I was tensing up. She was right, though. The beer helped because it was something I could hold on to. The tequila was just the sedative I needed.

We drank more beer, had another shot of tequila, and the acid kicked in full force. As we wandered through the crowd and out onto the tan-and-green-checkered linoleum dance floor, I felt a surge of electricity run through me. It wasn’t a shocking jolt, but more like someone had just plugged me into a socket and the juice was flowing. My lights were on. Kat would see guys that she knew and slink up to them. Then, before she even said hello, she’d start making out with them. They all loved her outfit. She introduced me to some of her friends but I was too high on the acid to make small talk with people I didn’t know. I just stood around and stared at everyone. The costumes that had looked kind of hokey when we first got there had become vibrant and alive. There were two giant white moon faces that kept floating up to me through the crowd and then disappearing. The Regurgitators came out onstage and started their set with their hit, “Give Me Some Crawfish Lovin’.” The crowd went wild. Everyone was dancing. The funky rhythm saturated me. I lost myself in it. The combination of the music, the acid, and the alcohol transported me to that place I loved: oblivion.

While we were dancing, I looked over at Kat and saw her giggling. I looked around and no one else seemed to notice anything. I looked back at her and she was laughing even harder. She danced up to me and said, “Look at you, Joe! You’re so PRETTY!” and then laughed even more. I looked at her in her sexy outfit laughing at me and then I started laughing. It bubbled up from deep inside, uncontrollably. She saw me laughing, which made her laugh so hard she snorted. Kat held her sides and rocked forward. We couldn’t dance. We just stood in the middle of the dance floor in hysterics.

She came over and gave me a big hug. Not the sexy hugs she was giving the guys she’d been making out with, but a strong, long, hanging-on-me hug. It was hard to hug her back because we were both laughing. She said something to me but I couldn’t hear her because the music was so loud. I yelled, “What?” and she said it again. I shook my head and held up my hands like, I can’t hear you. She leaned into my ear and yelled, “I love you. You’re so fucking weird!” I said, “Yeah, well it takes one to know one!” And then we hugged and laughed more until we fell away from each other and back into the music.

The dancing moon faces came by again. Their faces were shiny and serene, about five feet high with legs sticking out from underneath. I was sure they knew I was tripping and had picked me to try to freak out. They stood on both sides of me and bounced up and down to the music, their sickeningly sweet expression never changing. I felt a smile just like the moon faces’ beginning to freeze on my face. I didn’t want to smile like that, but couldn’t stop.

Kat was kissing some guy and wrapping a leg around his waist while I stood next to her, surrounded by the moon faces. When the guy started getting hot and heavy she pulled back and said, “By the way, have you met my gay friend, Joe?” I smiled, raised my hand, and wiggled my fingers at him in a wave as she put her arm around my waist. His face went blank. All of a sudden he told Kat he had to go meet some friends and then disappeared. She and I cracked up laughing. She asked me if there was any guy there that I liked. I showed her a couple of men. She decided that we were going to have a three-way if we could find some guy that turned both of us on. She started making out with this one guy that I thought was cute. Dark hair, dark skin, about five feet ten. They were mashing and entwined heavily when she stopped and asked, once again, “Have you met my gay friend, Joe?” This time the guy didn’t freak out. He introduced himself while I batted my long eyelashes at him. He was friendly. He liked the two of us. Kat whispered something in his ear and he hugged her to him. She looked over his shoulder at me and winked. Then she led me off dancing again.

“Joe, I asked him if he wanted to go home with us and you know what he said?”

“What?”

“Maybe!”

Hmmm. That was interesting. I didn’t think it would really happen at all. The most important thing for me was that I was having fun being with Kat. I didn’t have to have a three-way, but if that’s what she wanted it seemed like it could be fun. I didn’t think anyone at that party would actually be interested, but on the dance floor it began to sink into me that someone was, and I liked him. I woke up from my acid-and-beer haze and said, “Come on, Kat, we can’t let him get away!” I pulled her by the hand off the dance floor and went looking for him. We stopped to get another Dixie Beer when Kat spotted him. This time he looked a little uncomfortable. He was friendly. He didn’t take off. Kat asked him if he’d thought any more about it.

He said, “Yeah…”

“And?”

“And … maybe.”

Kat pulled me to her and gave me a big kiss on the lips. She ran her hand over my butt. Then she kissed the other guy. He was obviously getting turned on. But he wanted her. It was like if he had to sleep with me to get to her, then he would. That kind of thing. Which was okay with me. They went off and were talking and making out away from me. I stood listening to the music and feeling good. I was starting to lose interest in the party but that guy made the night seem more promising than I’d hoped for. Kat came back alone a little while later and said, “Fuck! He chickened out.”

I was disappointed. After that we danced more. The band took a break and Kat introduced me to Francois. He was friendly. I thought he looked like Jerry Garcia. He told us that after the party everyone was meeting in the Quarter at the Dream Palace, not too far from where I lived. When the band started up again Kat asked me if I wanted to leave. She had retreated into herself after talking to Francois. She said he didn’t give a damn if she was making out with all those guys. At first I thought it was okay with both of them, like they had an understanding. But something in her mood let me in on the fact that she’d been making out with those guys with the vague hope that Francois would get jealous. He didn’t. She was disappointed.

She mumbled, “What an asshole.”

“Who?”

Kat looked at me and started to say something, but stopped. Then she said, “Come on. Let’s get back to the Queerter.”

By the time we got to the Dream Palace we were too wiped out to dance anymore. Instead, we sat at a table in front on the street bathing in the warm night breeze. Francois showed up not too long after we got there, with the rest of the band and a bunch of friends. Kat never completely came back to life after talking to him at the party. After about my fiftieth beer, I got sick and threw up into the street between two cars. It was a jet propulsion puke. All that beer shot out of me in one long powerful gush. I felt sweaty and shaky. Then the acid perked me up again. It was late, or maybe early morning, when Kat went home with Francois. I walked the few blocks back to my house and lay in bed listening to the foghorn out on the river.

RESTLESS

Our one-year anniversary for moving to New Orleans was the end of April. By March I was starting to get restless. It seemed like all there was to do in New Orleans was drink and, even at the age of twenty-one, it was taking its toll on me. I wanted to go to college. I applied to the University of New Orleans but couldn’t get a loan because I made enough money at my warehouse job to pay my rent and bills. I didn’t make enough to pay for classes, though. I wanted to move to New York. Even though I’d made close friends in New Orleans, I still felt like an outsider. I remembered how comfortable I felt when I was in New York and wanted to get back there. My sister Lucy and her husband, Dave, had moved back to Jacksonville Beach and said I could stay with them until I saved enough money to move to New York. I was seriously considering that. Then I thought if I just moved out of the Quarter I wouldn’t drink so much. Maybe I’d move Uptown. But I didn’t really want to settle in New Orleans.

I wanted more. I loved the R&B music that I’d heard and learned about in New Orleans, but my main love was still rock ’n’ roll. Even though I’d seen some great concerts at Ole Man Rivers (a converted Holiday Inn restaurant across the river) like the Ramones, the Talking Heads, and Peter Tosh, I still felt like the real music scene was happening somewhere else. I knew there was something exciting going on and I was missing it. The Peter Tosh concert was great, actually. We sat at a little table right in front of the stage and kept passing joints up to him. When I left I was so inspired that I felt like I’d been to church. At the Talking Heads concert David Byrne stepped on my toe when he was climbing up onto the small stage. I was that close to one of my rock idols. But it wasn’t enough for me, because these bands came to town and then they were gone. I wanted to be in the middle of it all. I wanted to be where they were.

I was broke a lot and kind of burned out. I’d fallen in and out of love a couple of times with guys I’d had good sex with. I couldn’t leave it at just good sex. French Quarter life was getting to be too much and at the same time not enough. When I felt down or confused, I’d go hang out with Mark and D.J. and talk things over with them. They didn’t give me any real advice but they listened to me churn my thoughts over and over. It seemed like D.J. was always standing in front of an easel making paintings that I loved more than any other artist. Mark was like my big brother.

One night, when I was feeling really confused, I went over to their house for dinner. While Mark was fixing gumbo in the kitchen I lay on D.J.’s bed and watched him paint.

“I’m thinking of moving,” I said kind of bluntly and out of nowhere. D.J. moved his eyes from his canvas to me on the bed.

“What?”

“I’m thinking of moving. Maybe New York.”

“Why?” D.J. asked.

“I don’t know. I just need a change I guess.”

“Well, New York sounds exciting. I’d love to be able to take off for somewhere, but I just can’t.”

“Why not?” I picked at a knot on his chenille bedspread.

“I’ve got my painting to do. It would be hard to move and start a new life and be able to keep painting.”

I thought about that for a while. I didn’t have anything I did that held my interest like that. I wasn’t doing anything that would be affected by moving to another city. I thought maybe someday I’d get in a band. But I didn’t even play an instrument and couldn’t carry a tune.

At dinner I asked Mark what he thought of me moving to New York. He got quiet. He scooped a piece of okra out of his gumbo with his spoon and slurped it up.

“Well, for personal reasons I don’t think you should go. I like having you around. I’d miss you.” Mark dipped his spoon in the gumbo and held it up to me, saying, “You won’t get food this good in New York. That’s for sure.”

D.J. laughed and said, “Yeah, but the pizza’s better there!”

Mark said, “I don’t blame you for wanting to go. It sounds fun. But, if you do, you have to promise to keep in touch.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere right away. I’m just thinking.” I didn’t talk about it anymore that night. After dinner Mark read a short story to me out of a book by Eudora Welty.

I talked to Ali about the possibility of moving to New York. He said it was too big for him but he was getting tired of New Orleans, too. He said maybe he would go with me to Jacksonville Beach and then try to figure things out. Ali was getting sick of his orderly job at the psychiatric hospital. He said if he had to assist one more shock treatment that he would quit.

The seed was planted. We both were ready to leave. We just had to figure out what we were going to do next. New York was pulling at me, but I also had trouble thinking of moving somewhere without Ali. He was my security blanket.

A month or so later Ali went to San Francisco for a vacation. He’d just broken up with James, against James’s wishes, and needed to get away. One night at work I got a call from Ali. He wanted to know if I was interested in moving out to San Francisco with him. He said that he’d found an apartment that was almost as nice as our house in New Orleans for two hundred dollars a month, just twenty dollars more than we were paying. Ali always watched his money, so for him to be willing to pay that much for a place meant it couldn’t be all bad. I told him it sounded tempting but I only had forty dollars saved. He told me not to worry because he had a thousand dollars and I could pay him back. My dream was to live in New York, but San Francisco sounded interesting. It was 1979, the year after the Jonestown suicides, there had just been a huge Gay Rights riot out there, Harvey Milk had been murdered, and we were ready for some trouble. I said okay, I’d go.

I gave a week’s notice at my job and then started going through my things to see what I could throw out. It was hard. I kept all my magazines that had articles about Blondie. I threw away a lot of letters but not until I’d sat on the floor and read each one over again.

Ali came back from San Francisco to get me a few days after his phone call. That night Kat stopped by. She was all excited because she’d finally seduced Ron, this guy we worked with. She woke me up pounding on my door to tell me her success story. I sat her down on the old lumpy couch in the front room and told her my news that I was leaving for San Francisco in a couple of days. Her face shifted from a giant grin to a big sad frown. She suddenly started sobbing.

“You can’t go!” she cried.

That surprised me.

“What am I going to do? You’re one of my best friends. Who can I talk about sex with?” We hugged and she cried some more.

Kat sat up and wiped the tears from her eyes and laughed a little. “You know what, Joe? I really think it’s great that you’re going. It’s like you’re looking for your dream.”

I didn’t know what to say. It sounded kind of corny but true at the same time. I asked her what her dream was.

“I don’t know. All I really want to do is sing.”

I said, “Then sing, Kat.” It sounded stupid and simple, but at that moment we both had the same realization that if we wanted something bad enough, we just had to do it. No more wishing. I wanted to get out of New Orleans. San Francisco wasn’t my first choice, but it wasn’t a bad choice. It was a way out.

SAN FRANCISCO

TO MECCA

(June 1979)

The long flat stretch of I-10 across southern Louisiana and eastern Texas was lined with thick forests of tall fragrant pine trees. The highway was elevated above the swamps. White egrets with long legs and longer necks stood motionless in the water along the roadside. Lake Charles. Port Arthur. Houston.

We spent the night with a friend of Ali’s in Houston and were on our way by 11:00 the next morning. It was ninety-three degrees and humid. On the outskirts of Houston we stopped to gas up and get some snacks to hold us over. I washed my Honey Bun down with a Coca-Cola while Ali drank orange juice. He told me drinking Coke was about as good for you as eating a color TV.

We got back on the interstate and headed west. I put my feet up on the dashboard and burped while Ali drove. The farther into Texas we got the harder it was to pick up anything on the radio. The best thing we could get was a country station that played mostly Mexican ranchero music. Then it started to fade in and out. I spent thirty miles twisting the dial trying to find a station. Finally we turned the radio off. Ali lit up a clove cigarette and the whole cab of the truck filled with the sickly sweet smell of tobacco and clove mixing with the hot air.

The wind blowing in the windows didn’t cool us down, it just made things windy. The vinyl car seat was so hot we took our T-shirts off and draped them over the back to keep from burning up. Near the exit for Waco I couldn’t take the heat anymore, so I took off my shorts. Ali took his off, too, only he kept driving while he pulled his cut-offs down around his ankles. I stuck my foot over and put it on the gas pedal while he swiftly kicked off his cowboy boots, then yanked his cut-offs down over his feet. We sat on our shorts to keep our sweaty legs from sticking to the seat.

As we drove farther and farther away from New Orleans I started to think about the previous couple of days and how quickly we’d left. We’d crammed everything we could into the back of the Toyota pickup. The drive-away company had given us three days to get the truck from New Orleans to Los Angeles. We didn’t have anything lined up going from L.A. to San Francisco but Ali said there would be plenty of drive-aways once we got to L.A. We packed in such a hurry that Mark Gravois jokingly asked me if we were running from the law. James had gone to his parents’ in Michigan to collect himself after Ali broke up with him, so he was out of town for a few more days. He was still in love with Ali. Ali didn’t want to wait for him to come back to say good-bye. He wanted to leave immediately, no looking back. I felt bad for James but was ready to get out of New Orleans, too, so I didn’t put up much of a fight. I said good-bye to our long, narrow shotgun house and the banana trees in the backyard. Then I stood on the front porch to stare one last time at the giant masts of the freighters that were docked across at the Mandeville Street wharf.

Two days later, there we were on the Texas interstate. Ali was driving fast. We fell in with a convoy of semitrucks and kept up with their pace. If any highway patrol cars were around the semis would spot them with their radar and slow down. One semi pulled up next to our little truck and the driver looked down at us riding along in our underwear. Ali raised his fist up in the air and pulled down, a signal for the driver to honk his horn. He blasted it and then sped away. I put my feet back up on the dashboard and settled in for the long afternoon ahead of us. Ali started singing Patti Smith songs. I joined in for a while. We made it through all of “Gloria” and part of the way through “Ain’t It Strange” until he got mad at me because I changed the words to “boy in white dress, girl shoot white stuff.” He was very reverent about Patti Smith. No one messed with her lyrics. I wasn’t as down on him about his tone-deaf singing. Talk about ruining a song. We switched to singing “Birdland,” but he lost me at the part where she starts telling the story about the boy on the farm whose father died leaving him two white opals. Ali knew the entire album word for word.

We both had white line fever and felt more comfortable out on the highway with the landscape flying by than we did in most social situations. Most people our age were in college or starting down some career track. Neither one of us was ready for that. Finding a place to live that felt comfortable, a home, was more important. New Orleans almost fit the bill. It was just a little too sleepy, unless you wanted to hang out in the bars all the time.

Ali asked me to tell him a story to keep him entertained while he drove. I told him about the time this guy I used to work with hitch-hiked through Texas and got busted for throwing a roach out the car window. Both he and the driver who picked him up had to go to jail for a month for illegal possession of marijuana. He shared his cell with some other guys. One of them had a wooden leg. For fun they would wrestle the guy down and unscrew his leg then hide it from him.

Billboards for the El Paso Natural Gas Company kept creeping up on us then swooshing by at the speed of light. They made me laugh.

Ali asked, “What’s so funny?”

I said, “Those signs. That name sounds like ‘the Passing Gas Company,’ like there’s a company where they bottle farts and sell them. El Pass-O Nature-O Gas.”

Ali laughed a little bit then said, “Joe, you’re weird.”

Then he told me about getting his tattoo when he was in India. On his left shoulder he had a small bluebird with a star in its beak flying over a crescent moon.

He said, “You know what? I’ll bet the last days of Earth aren’t going to happen with the rapture of born-again Christians being lifted up into the heavens. When it really happens, only people with tattoos will be snatched up. Then all those Christians will be cursing God and wondering what they did wrong. So, Joe, you’d better get a tattoo quick because I’d hate to have to leave you behind.”

Ali had me drive for a while. I didn’t go as fast as him. He said I drove like a grampa. I hated to drive fast. It made me nervous. I drove through the hills of western Texas at sunset. The huge sky was beautiful with orange, pink, deep blues, and reds. Driving was starting to relax me after all the excitement of packing up and leaving so suddenly. Soon it was dark, so I couldn’t tell what the landscape was like ahead. I figured the road would continue to rise and lower and slowly bend around back and forth all night. Then, all of a sudden we were in a mountain range. I had no idea there were mountains in Texas.

Since heights have always made me nervous, I decided it was better to go even slower than to run off the road. I thought it was a good idea, but the long line of semitrucks and traffic in a hurry to get wherever they were going didn’t think so. Soon there was a ribbon of yellow lights streaming behind us. The palms of my hands were sweating. I held my breath. It was dark and all I could see ahead of me was what our headlights were shining on. The tension was mounting. My shoulders were getting tighter and tighter. Ali was telling me to go faster so the trucks wouldn’t ride us but I couldn’t go any faster. I knew all the cars and trucks behind us were mad at me for going so slow. I was scared shitless. I was also sure if I were to go any faster I’d lose control of the truck and drive off the side of the road and we’d go tumbling down the mountain and the truck would burst into flames and then we’d never make it to San Francisco. Ali had me pull over at the first wide shoulder we saw so he could take the wheel. The traffic that had built up shot past angrily.

The next day, with Ali behind the wheel, we drove from western Texas through the southwest tip of New Mexico and on to the desert flatlands of Arizona. On this stretch of open highway there were vultures lurking on telephone poles and huge grasshoppers at least four inches long leaping across the highway. We stopped on the side of the highway and got out of the truck to watch a giant tarantula take its time crossing the road. When it saw us it reared back and waved its black hairy arms in a warning. By midafternoon, we’d run out of things to say to each other, so we drove in silence through the desert past a forest of cactus trees. Just looking at them made me thirsty. I remembered that Mark Gravois said there was a place in San Francisco that was a “juice bar.” It was a gay disco but they served only fresh juices, no alcohol. That sounded exotic to me coming from New Orleans where the bars were open twenty-four hours a day. I took a swig of water out of our beat-up canteen. We had just enough to hold us over to the next gas station, fifty miles away. It felt like we were driving through the desert towards Mecca. I thought about all the other people who had moved to San Francisco in the last few years and wondered how many others were driving there at the same time as us.

The vibration of the truck and the landscape whizzing by sent us into a trance. Ali shifted to automatic pilot behind the wheel, daydreaming. I began to feel like a deaf-mute. The only sound I heard was the roar of the wind hitting my ears. The desert flatlands started to swell up and down like waves. Up ahead the air started to glitter. At first I thought it was raining off in the distance, but there were no clouds. The sun was shining hot. We glided over a low hill and around a curve where we saw a cloud of white snowflakes hugging close to the ground. I thought it was a mirage. We sped forward down the highway and got right up to the cloud. It covered a wide meadow to the left of us and was moving in our direction. Then we saw them. Butterflies. White butterflies. Glittering summer snowflakes floating in the wind across the highway, heading directly towards us. They didn’t try to change direction. They hovered ahead and waited for the truck to approach. The whole cloud fluttered in front of us. We headed towards them as they sailed in and dropped down into our airstream. Suddenly we were in the middle of a silent blizzard of butterflies. There was no way to avoid them. Not all of them. Ali slowed down. He turned on the windshield wipers. He honked the horn. We screamed. It was too late. Splat. Splat. Splat. It ended almost as soon as it began.

The white cloud whooshed behind us. The butterflies scattered and then regrouped, their numbers thinned out. They hovered in the background when the wind from our truck died down. Ali pumped out wiper fluid. Blue liquid mixed with white wings and yellow oozing butterfly guts all over the windshield. We pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway to collect ourselves. About a third of the butterflies were smashed all over the front of our truck. Ali in his underwear and cowboy boots got out a rag from the back and wiped off the windshield, front headlights, and grille. I looked back and watched what was left of the shimmering cloud as it sailed away.

Once we got to Los Angeles, Ali and I had no idea where we were going to stay. I’d been to L.A. once before, just through it, really, two years earlier, but didn’t know much about it. After driving through miles and hours of suburbs, we arrived downtown. It was about 10:00 p.m. and the streets were dark and deserted. We parked the truck near the main bus terminal and went inside to look up cheap motels in the phone book. We didn’t know where we were exactly so it was hard to decide which motel to call. We tried a couple but they wouldn’t hold a room for us because we didn’t have a credit card. So Ali called the Club Baths, a chain of bathhouses that were all around the country. He got directions and we took off to the Hollywood Club Baths.

I had never been to a bathhouse before. We didn’t have enough money for a private room, so we had to sleep in the orgy room. It was a weeknight and not very crowded. We checked our clothes into a locker and walked around with towels wrapped around our waists. Ali folded his in two so it looked like a miniskirt.

I was nervous. Ali knew it, too. He said, “Joe, relax. This is really perfect. For seven dollars we get a place to crash plus we can get laid. What more could you ask for?”

“Well, a room of my own for one thing,” I mumbled.

Ali ignored that comment. “Here, let’s go check out the pool.” We went outside to a patio surrounded by a high wooden fence. There was a small heated pool with a couple of guys messing around in it. I didn’t want to interrupt them. Ali motioned for me to follow him into the water. We took off our towels and then sat at the opposite end of the pool from the guys.

“This feels great, doesn’t it, Joe? Now aren’t you glad we came here?”

I had to admit that it did feel good. All that time cooped up in that little truck had made my joints stiff. Ali and I swam a little. The guys who were messing around turned to us and smiled. Ali smiled back. He swam close to them and said hello. Soon I was left sitting at the other end of the pool by myself watching Ali get it on with the other two guys. One of them broke off and swam over to me.

“You wanna join us?”

I got nervous. “Not really. I’m just trying to relax.”

He swam closer. “I know what’ll help that.”

He swam right up to me and gave me a big kiss. He pulled me to him and pressed his body against me. I panicked. I wasn’t ready for that. We’d hardly even said hello. I stiffened up and pulled away.

“What’s the matter?” the guy asked, surprised.

“It’s just that I’ve never done this before. I mean I’ve never been to a bathhouse before. We just got here. I’m not sure if I like it.”

The guy pushed back in the water. He looked kind of puzzled. “Well what are you doing in this pool with no clothes on if you don’t want to mess around?”

“I don’t know. Just trying to relax, like I said.”

“Well, when you decide you really want to relax let me know.” He splashed some water at me playfully then swam away.

I immediately slid up out of the pool and wrapped around my towel. I was tired. I wanted to go to sleep. I didn’t want to mess around with anyone I didn’t know. I wanted a beer. I wanted to get to San Francisco. Ali saw me climb out of the pool and swam over.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, kind of, just tired I guess.” I slicked my wet hair back with my hands. “I’m gonna go lie down and try to get some sleep.”

“Okay.” Ali winked at me. “I’ll meet up with you in a little bit.”

The orgy room had a large mat on a wooden frame. It was more like a wrestling mat than a mattress. There was a television in the next room playing porno movies with the volume up loud. I tried to go to sleep but was uncomfortable with men walking in and out all the time. I curled up against the wall with light from the doorway shining on me and started to drift off. I woke up after a while with someone gently rubbing my arm. There was a beautiful man sliding up next to me. At first I was nervous but calmed down when I felt his body rubbing mine. He felt so good. This guy made me feel calm. He wasn’t coming on as strong as the guy in the pool. We fooled around for a while, but I didn’t get off with him. He came and then slipped off the giant bed. I looked over and saw a midget and a normal-looking man having sex while Ali was getting a blow job from an extremely fat man and then some guy with glasses on started to go down on me. I got off on that. I couldn’t sleep in there so I got up and went into the porno room and stretched out on a couch in front of the TV where I fell into a half sleep with the sound from the porno pounding into my head.

In the morning, we went to a big luxury hotel downtown we’d seen the night before, where we could get comfortable in the lobby and use their pay phones. Ali taught me to do that whenever I was in a new city. Go to a fancy hotel with a nice lobby and set up office in a phone booth until you get your bearings. This hotel had plush deep-purple carpet with cushioned benches curved around white marble columns. The phone booths were in a separate room off the lobby. It was quiet and out of the way. The booths were wooden and looked like something out of an old movie. We called the drive-away company where we were supposed to drop off the truck and they told us they didn’t have any cars going to San Francisco. I felt a panic coming on. Ali told me not to worry, that it would be easy to find another drive-away car. We called every drive-away place listed in the Yellow Pages until we found one in East L.A. County that said they might have something going to San Francisco. We drove out there and talked to a woman behind a wood-paneled counter who said they did have a van going to SF but they also had somebody else interested in it.

Ali batted his eyelashes and asked, “Do you think we could have it if we left a security deposit?”

“Like what?”

“Like everything we own.”

She laughed until she realized he was serious. “Well, you can leave it, but I can’t promise you anything.”

Ali grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out into the parking lot where we quickly unloaded all our stuff from the truck and put it in the van that was going to San Francisco. She told us once again that she couldn’t promise us we could have it. We told her we’d be back the next morning.

We had to drive the truck to Oxnard, an hour or so north of Los Angeles, to drop it off and then hitch-hike back down to Hollywood. It was rush hour and no one wanted to give a ride to two guys on the L.A. freeway. After waiting a couple of long miserable hours, just when we thought we might have to split up and meet later even though we had no idea where we were, a guy picked us up. He drove us all the way into Hollywood, and dropped us off at Mann’s Chinese Theatre so we could see the Footprints of the Stars. From there we took a bus across to Melrose and Western back to the baths. That late-night bus ride was the first time I felt like Hollywood could be a scary place. There were some junkies nodding out in the back. We were two fresh-faced Midwestern white guys and the bus was taking us into dark uncharted territory. That night at the baths I slept on the couch in front of the TV and kept to myself.

At breakfast the next morning we ran out of cash. Ali had a cashier’s check for a thousand dollars, so we went across the street from the diner to a Bank of America to cash it. They wouldn’t accept it because we didn’t have an account with them and were from out of state. I was tired and disoriented after sleeping the last two nights at the baths. I started to feel lost and hopeless like I always do when I run out of money, but Ali wouldn’t take no for an answer.

The bank teller, a thin middle-aged woman with a frosted curly permanent hairdo and big glasses, repeated herself to Ali. “I’m sorry. This bank does not redeem cashier’s checks. You’ll have to take that to a branch of the bank you bought it from.”

Ali was getting pissed off. “But you just told me that there are no Hibernia Banks in Los Angeles. What am I supposed to do? Go back to New Orleans to cash it? When I bought this they told me it was better than a Traveler’s Check, that it was good anywhere.”

The cashier tightened her lips. “Well, it’s not good here.”

I felt sick to my stomach. The world was caving in all around me. “Come on, Ali, let’s get out of here. Let’s go someplace where they treat people like humans.”

Ali shot me an angry glance. “No. I’m not leaving.” He turned to the cashier. “I want to speak with someone who has some authority around here. Where is the manager?”

I sighed and spoke quietly, “Ali, let’s just get out of here.”

He stepped on my toe with the heel of his cowboy boot, a warning to me that the cashier couldn’t see. “I’m not leaving here until this check is cashed. Please, ma’am, will you get the manager?”

She left and came back with a big man in a tan business suit. He came around from behind the teller’s counter and motioned for us to come to his desk. He didn’t offer us a seat.

“Now what seems to be the problem here?” He rubbed his stomach like he was a Buddha.

Ali was livid but tried to be as polite as possible. “That cashier said she wouldn’t cash our check. It’s supposed to be good anywhere.”

The banker took the check from Ali and looked it over. He smiled and shook his head no at the same time. “I’m sorry but she was correct. We don’t cash out-of-state checks like this.”

Ali was fuming. He raised his voice loud enough for everyone to hear. “When I bought this they told me it was good anywhere. What’s the problem? Why are you making it so difficult for me to cash this? I’m not leaving here until you cash it. Do you understand? Look, here’s the phone number of the bank I bought it from right on the check. Call them if you don’t believe me.”

The banker shot a look at the teller who was glaring at us. Bored customers waiting in line were watching everything that was going on. He got up and walked over to the cashier. They whispered back and forth for a while and then he came back to us smiling.

“Okay, we’ll cash it. But next time don’t bring one of these things in to us.”

Ali laughed. “Next time? No, I won’t. Believe me, there won’t be a next time.”

The cashier gave us a thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills while the banker watched over her shoulder. Ali tried to be gracious as he took the money and smiled at the two of them. We both said thank you, then left.

From downtown Los Angeles, we took a bus back to the drive-away lot in East L.A., where they reluctantly let us have the van. If Ali hadn’t insisted on leaving all our belongings with them, I don’t know how we would have gotten out of L.A. So, thanks to him being pushy and obnoxious, we were finally on our way out of Los Angeles and up Highway 101 to San Francisco. We drove stripped to our underwear until the cool California evening set in.

EARTHQUAKE

We arrived in San Francisco about 11:00 p.m. the night of July 3, 1979. After stopping by our new apartment, Ali took me to a bar a few blocks up Folsom Street called the Stud. I fell in love with it immediately. It was the kind of bar that I was always looking for but didn’t think existed. They were playing rock music that I only heard on my own stereo when I lived in New Orleans and Kansas City. No disco. There were gay punk rockers hanging out. I’d only known a few gay punks and here was a bar filled with them. Lots of girls were there as well as boys. Right after I walked through the door of the bar I bumped into the cook I’d worked with when I did food-prep in New Orleans. I took that as a good sign. Ali and I unloaded our things from the van the next day, the 4th of July. That night we ate at Woey Loey Goey in Chinatown, in the basement of a building. On all four corners of the intersection by the restaurant, crowds of Chinese kids were throwing firecrackers and bottle rockets. It was fun, but kind of scary.

I had to take the city in small doses until I got used to it. There was too much to do. Café Flore was exciting, with lots of punk rockers and New Wavers hanging out, smoking cigarettes, and drinking coffee. I was amazed by the fact that it was the middle of the day and the place was packed. It seemed like no one had to work in San Francisco. The bus system was better than in any other city I had lived in, cheap and efficient. I was kind of disappointed in the Castro District, the gay area. I’d heard so much about it, that it was built up really big in my head. My first impression was that it was too bland, an entire city block exactly like Lafitte’s. I was expecting to see the kinds of freaks and weirdos that San Francisco is so famous for, but the men looked identical with their tight blue jeans, knit Lacoste alligator shirts, and mustaches. The neighborhood was very middle class. It was like a movie set: Main Street, USA, re-created for homosexuals complete with ice cream parlors, restaurants with home cooking, and at least two gay bars on both sides of the street on each block. For me, the Stud, in the run-down warehouse district, with its mixed bag of fruits and nuts, definitely had Castro Street beat to hell.

Our apartment was on Clementina Street just off Sixth and Folsom. It was on the third floor of an old three-story Victorian apartment building that tilted slightly to the right. Our new neighborhood reminded me of the one we had just left in New Orleans, with warehouses on both sides of our building. Our block was a no-man’s-land. There was a run-down hotel on the corner and the Slot, an S&M bathhouse, was behind us. On the street there were lots of winos and families from welfare hotels mixed in with leather queens and punks. Almost everyone was out of it. I didn’t mind.

The lock on our front door was broken. The refrigerator didn’t work. Exposed wires stuck out of the ceiling in every room where light fixtures should have been. Our landlady, Mildred, had promised Ali she’d fix all this by the time he returned with me from New Orleans. We had been living there for two weeks and she still hadn’t repaired anything. Mildred was in her sixties, wore her grey hair pulled back in a French twist, and was short and hunchbacked with big wandering bug-eyes. We didn’t have a phone and she would show up unannounced with Jorge, her muscular sidekick. Ali wanted her to quit stalling and do the repairs on our apartment. She always had an excuse why nothing had been fixed. Ali told me that he was certain she was coming into the apartment when we weren’t home and snooping around. He said he could tell by the way some of his things had been moved. We nailed a hinge and padlock to the front door to hold us over until she fixed the lock.

Ali was tired of waiting for Mildred to send Jorge over to fix our refrigerator like she’d repeatedly promised. I was willing to wait a little while longer, since I’d been having fantasies about being seduced by Jorge when he came by to do repairs. Ali decided it was time to do something about it, like move the working refrigerator from the empty apartment next door into our kitchen. The idea made me a little nervous but Ali said we were paying for a working refrigerator. Mildred owed it to us. He pried open the back window and we climbed through it into the apartment. We went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. A light came on. Cool air cascaded down across our feet. It was heavy and took a long time, but we got it moved, waddling it from one foot-pad to the next across the back porch and into our kitchen.

One afternoon a few days later, we heard Mildred barking orders down on the street. Then there were lots of footsteps clomping up the three flights of stairs to our apartment. I knew from her tone that trouble was on its way. Ali and I looked at each other. He put his finger up to his mouth to shut me up. He ran into the bathroom and signaled for me to follow. Mildred pounded on the front door. We kept as still as possible.

“I know you’re in there! I want to talk to you boys. Come on, now. We’ve got some business to discuss. I know you’re in there!”

We could hear her talking to Jorge. She knocked and yelled for a while longer. We huddled in the toilet, snickering like kids hiding out. Then there was a long silence. I stared out the bathroom window over the rooftops of the neighborhood warehouses. The sky was clear blue. We stayed in the bathroom and strained to hear sounds of her leaving. In a little while we heard footsteps coming up the back stairs and then knocking at our back door.

Mildred cackled, “There it is! There’s the refrigerator!”

A man’s voice yelled through the back door, “This is the police. If you don’t come out we’re going to kick the door in.”

My stomach began to twist in knots. This wasn’t a kid’s game. Ali and I peeked out the bathroom door where we were huddled and saw Mildred, Jorge, and two policemen. Mildred’s head bobbed up and down through the back window as she paced back and forth, her nervous bug-eyes searching the apartment. We didn’t feel like having the back door lock broken, too, so we sheepishly came out of the toilet.

We went out on the back porch and faced them. They wanted to come inside but Ali blocked the door with his body and refused to let them in.

Mildred shook her finger at us and started to scream, “I want them arrested! I’m pressing charges of grand larceny for breaking and entering!”

That pissed off Ali. He snapped back, “Oh yeah? If you arrest us then I want her arrested for breaking and entering, too, because I’ve got proof that she’s been coming into our apartment when we weren’t home.” It was news to me that he had proof, but I kept my mouth shut. Ali added, “I’m also pressing charges against her for negligence. She’s never lifted a damn finger to fix this place like she said she would!”

Ali was in a fighting mood. I braced myself. The longer we stood there, the more hysterical Mildred became. The more hysterical she became, the more pissed off Ali got. They yelled back and forth at each other until the whole thing started getting ridiculous. My eyes moved from Mildred to Ali to the police. I couldn’t believe this was really happening. Finally, one of the cops calmed her down by talking her into a deal where we would agree to put the refrigerator back if she wouldn’t press charges. Ali said if she didn’t press charges, he wouldn’t either. Then she promised us, with the police as our witness, that she’d fix everything that was wrong with the apartment. After everyone left, Ali and I moved the broken refrigerator into the empty apartment and kept the working one. Mildred never knew the difference.

We spent our first couple of weeks in San Francisco discovering good food for cheap, hidden treasures like burritos in the Mission District and Sam Wo’s Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. Even though it was summertime, it was cold and foggy at night. We had to adjust to the weather after spending hot sweaty nights in New Orleans. Late at night, Ali and I wandered through the seedier neighborhoods like Polk Street, where hustlers, guys our age and a little younger, lined the streets. We learned our way around the Tenderloin with all its peep shows and booths where you could see a live naked woman for a quarter. I wore my tweed overcoat all the time. Ali wore my black leather jacket.

Once, we wandered into the Black Rose, a long, narrow drag queen bar, but the working girls gave us attitude since we were more interested in the men who came to pick them up than we were in the girls. After a few vicious remarks, we headed back into the streets. We were walking down Market Street on our way home when we stumbled into the Starlight Room, the only circular bar in all of San Francisco. It had a panoramic glow-in-the-dark painting of the city along part of the curved wall. The center of the bar was a white plexiglass island lit from the inside with a pink light with a metallic fountain on top. The entire centerpiece rotated slowly. I loved that bar. I knew the minute I walked in that it was made just for me.

At the 2:00 a.m. closing time Ali and I finished last call. We were drunk and feeling good as we walked down Market Street towards home. From somewhere off in the distance we heard a woman moaning and crying. A man was yelling at her and then we heard more of her muffled moans. A big dirty white car was parked on the side of the street and we saw a woman standing next to it having a tug-of-war with a man in the driver’s seat. As we got closer her moans sounded like she had marbles in her mouth. She saw us coming and flagged us over. After being held up in New Orleans by someone in a car I was leery of this kind of scene. I started to walk in a wide circle away from the car, checking out the whole area to be sure it wasn’t some kind of a setup. She started waving her arms furiously while she pulled at something in the car. Ali said, “Come on, Joe, let’s see what’s the matter.” He went first. I followed at a safe distance behind him.

We got close and saw the tug-of-war she was having with the man in the car was over a handbag. She started moaning louder when we got there. She had on a tight white dress, down below her knees. The purse was white with fringe and beads. The man told us in a boozy voice to mind our own business and go away. She squealed and stomped her foot.

Ali said, “What the hell’s going on? Why won’t you give her that purse? Are you ripping her off? What the fuck’s going on here?”

The man said, “I’m not going to give her the purse until she gives me my fifty dollars back.”

Ali asked her, “What fifty dollars?”

She grumbled and moaned some more.

The man said, “It’s no use, she’s deaf and dumb and can’t understand a damn word you’re saying. Now just get the fuck out of here and let us settle this.”

Ali wasn’t about to leave after hearing she was a deaf-mute struggling to get her purse back from this man.

“She’s a whore. She’s just a fucking whore. I paid her fifty bucks for a blow job and then she wouldn’t give me one. She took the money and got out of the car. She’s ripping me off. I’m not ripping her off. Now get the hell out of here.”

Ali flagged down the police and demanded they make the trick give her the purse back. Neither one of them wanted to talk to the police about it so Ali explained what was going on. The police made the man give the woman her purse back and then the man got out of the car and started yelling at Ali. Ali got mad and swung at him. One of the cops grabbed Ali in mid-swing before any damage could be done. The woman started yelling and moaning even more than before. It was a lost cause. I got fed up with all of them and left.

The next morning Ali wouldn’t even speak to me because I was so cold and heartless, leaving him there alone to defend the deaf-mute prostitute. He went outside on the back stairs to eat his breakfast, soak up the morning sun, and ignore me. I was washing dishes. Through the kitchen window I could see over the building behind us and across the street to the Slot bathhouse. Every morning I saw the same guy opening windows to air the place out. After a while he noticed me, too, and we started waving hello.

Ali laughed and said, “Joe, only you would make friends with a bathhouse maid.”

That was the first friendly thing he’d said to me all morning. We were both stubborn and holding out for the other one to say something. I kept on washing the dishes. The plates on the shelf above the counter, next to my head, started to vibrate. I didn’t pay much attention to it at first until I noticed the dishes in the sink starting to rock in the water. Then all the dishes in the kitchen started to rattle. Then the room started to vibrate. Just when I realized that we were having an earthquake, the vibrating stopped.

I walked to the back door and said, “Ali, I think we just had an earthquake.”

He looked up at me and then suddenly the entire building started to swing back and forth. He jumped up holding his plate in front of him so it wouldn’t spill.

I said, “Ali, we ARE having an earthquake!”

“What do we do?” he yelled.

“Quick! Inside! Get inside!”

The apartment began to rock back and forth. Dishes bounced on the shelves. The antique framed picture of Jesus with his flaming heart swung out and banged back against the wall.

“In the doorway, Ali! Hurry. Get in the doorway!”

I’d read in the front part of the Yellow Pages what to do in case of an earthquake. I was obsessed with disasters and always had to know what to do. They said to stand in a doorjamb because it was the strongest part of the frame of an apartment.

Ali ran to the doorway between the living room and the hallway. I stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. We braced ourselves while the entire building rocked back and forth like it was on a giant porch swing. A big Boston fern plant fell off its stand and crashed to the floor, the pot breaking and spilling dirt. We heard people yelling out in the street.

Ali looked at me with big eyes, then yelled, “Come on! Let’s get out of here before anything else happens!”

We ran down the front stairs trying to keep a steady balance by holding on to the railing. Everything was swinging. Then, halfway down the stairs the shaking stopped. The entire time that had lapsed since the dishes first started to rattle was about a minute, but it seemed like ten. The Filipina women from the shampoo factory next door poured out into the street. Men from a machine shop a couple of doors down came out. They told us to get back inside because if there was a big aftershock the electrical lines might come down on us. We were safer inside than where we were standing. No one moved too fast. Instead, we all hung out in shock and exchanged stories about what we were doing when it hit. Then, slowly, everyone drifted back inside. I couldn’t get used to the idea that the Earth, the only thing that was always constant and steady in my life, could tremble like that. The very foundation of my physical existence wasn’t secure anymore. My psychic energy had been jolted as much as my home. Nothing felt safe.

When we got back inside our apartment, Ali put his arm around me and told me how scared he was. “How did you know what to do, Joe? You stayed so calm.” I didn’t feel calm. I think I was having a delayed reaction. I was completely aware of everything that was happening while the earthquake was going on and was too busy figuring out what to do to be scared. Now that it was all over I started to shake. My kneecaps bounced up and down, which always happens when I get scared. Ali and I held on to each other for a long time. He was my rock, more secure to me than the Earth, which could take us and jerk us back and forth anytime it felt like it.

LANDS END

Things weren’t going our way. Between the mess with Mildred and the shock of the earthquake, we decided to leave San Francisco. After a few weeks the initial charm of the city had worn off, and we found ourselves trapped in a depressing neighborhood with a freaked-out landlady. My nurse friend Patsy had moved from Kansas City to Seattle. I called her from the pay phone on the corner to see if we could stay with her for a while. I wished that I’d moved to New York like I’d wanted to. Why had I let Ali talk me into moving to the West Coast when I really wanted to be three thousand miles away? Patsy said it was okay for us to come up there. We started calling car rentals and drive-away places and found out that there were no drive-aways available going to Seattle and we didn’t have a credit card so we couldn’t rent a car. We couldn’t take a bus because we had too much junk. We were stuck in San Francisco.

Ali made friends with Terry, a self-described “maladjusted young adult” who lived in the welfare hotel on the corner. He was a six-foot-tall, big-boned, twenty-five-year-old child. He stopped by sometimes to split a Coke with whoever was home. He’d bring one Coke and want to split it and then hang out most of the afternoon. I usually didn’t mind since I didn’t know anyone. He told us about the wonders of California General Assistance and Social Security Insurance (GA and SSI), which he went on after his parents quit supporting him. I played records for him while he sat and stared out the window sipping his Coke. After hearing Terry talk about what a great thing public assistance was, Ali and I decided to apply for it. My wallet had been stolen in New Orleans and I had no ID so they wouldn’t give it to me. Ali got food stamps and a monthly bus pass.

One advantage of living near welfare hotels was all the great thrift stores nearby. We both loved rummaging through them and found everything we needed for our home as well as new additions to our wardrobes for next to nothing. Ali said since we were new in town we should change our looks. He hennaed his hair bright red, and I dyed mine blue-black.

Ali liked to hang out in the gay bars of the Castro District and started bringing home tricks, just like New Orleans. Just like Kansas City. He told me if I wanted a man I’d have to “clone out.” “Castro Clones” were the gays who wore jeans, Lacoste shirts, and hung out primarily in the Castro District. Their uniform style was a revolt from the fashion of San Francisco’s hippy days, which was still predominant. I told Ali that I didn’t want a man bad enough to lose my identity. I hated it that everyone had mustaches so I grew sideburns because no one else wore them. The clones wore tight blue jeans so I wore perma-press slacks. They wore tight T-shirts so I wore button-down-collar dress shirts from thrift stores. I waged my own personal war for individualism. I wore my green iridescent sharkskin suit with pants to match almost every day.

Sometimes we put on drag shows for each other. One day we cleaned the house in drag and pretended Ali was the next-door neighbor who dropped by for tea in the middle of my housework. I vacuumed the floor in my yellow shift and spike heels while Ali sat in an antique ballerina tutu and sipped tea.

One day Ali and I bumped into Terry, our emotionally disturbed neighbor, after a thrift store shopping spree and invited him back up to our apartment for a drag show. Ali pulled his curly red hair over to one side to do his number, Bonnie Pointer’s sultry disco hit “Free Me from My Freedom (Tie Me to a Tree and Handcuff Me),” wearing his backless black fringed minidress. In the middle of my part of the show Terry jumped up and asked, “We’re all Christians here, aren’t we? We’re all Christians?” nodding his head and smiling like all this is okay as long as we’re Christians. Me in my yellow shift, having just eloquently lip-synched Julie Andrews’s virginal song, “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music, assured him that no, we were in fact, like him, “maladjusted young adults.” That seemed to satisfy him.

Since I was broke I couldn’t go out much. I spent most of my time listening to records. The lead singers of the bands I listened to became my friends. They knew how I felt. I sang along with them and started to write lyrics for when I got a band together, which was something I thought about a lot. But, since I didn’t play any musical instruments, it never seemed to happen. I went on long walks until I got bored with them. I would look in restaurants and see friends together. I knew from previous moving experiences that in time I would have friends. I just wished I could speed that time up.

One day Ali came home all excited about a part of the city beach he’d discovered, and made me promise to go there with him the next day. We took an old, dark green, cucumber-shaped streetcar out past Golden Gate Park to the beach at the end of the line. That place was not my idea of what a California beach should look like. The sand was a dirty grey with lots of washed-up seaweed. There were no surfers or blond beach kids running around. Still, I loved being by the Pacific. It soothed my spirit to breathe the ocean air.

Up a steep hill was Lands End, next to the Cliff House, a restaurant where tourists took pictures of a tiny island covered with barking seals waiting to be fed. Ali led me through the restaurant parking lot into bushes at the far end, to a trail that led to a spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean from a cliff. Succulent iceberg plants with small bright blue flowers covered the ground. It was foggy out on the water, blending the green horizon of the sea into the grey sky. As Ali led me around the trail, I hugged the wall of the cliff that extended about forty feet above us as well as below. Turbulent water churned between boulders at the base of the cliff. I had to look down at my feet to be sure I wouldn’t lose my footing. I was afraid there would be an earthquake and we’d get tossed suddenly over the edge and down into the water below, only to get dashed against the rocks by a tidal wave. Ali said if you have to go, that’s a great way to do it.

After a few treacherously narrow twists and turns, we came to a wide point in the trail. To the left was the vast Pacific Ocean. To the right was the rust-colored Golden Gate Bridge that went across into the Marin Headlands with its golden hills and cliffs. I stopped and sat down on the edge of the trail, high above the water. I looked off in the distance at the ocean. I wanted to stay there longer but Ali insisted we move on. He had to show me his favorite spot. We got to a point in the trail that had been broken by fallen rocks and debris from past earthquakes. The cliff tilted at an angle becoming a steep, rocky slope. Loose rocks made the trail barely visible. We hiked up to an abandoned house that leaned at a forty-five-degree angle and was sunken partially into the ground. Someone had made it a makeshift home. Inside was a beat-up metal coffee pot, a couple of wet dirty blankets, and some ripped canvas gum-soled shoes.

Up and over one more slope and we were there, a secluded nude beach. A few naked guys were stretched out on towels, but not many. Ali told me that he had been there on a sunny day and it was packed with beautiful men. Directly behind the beach was a steep rise covered with trees and bushes with a trail that went up to the top of the cliff. High above a few Peeping Toms were looking down with binoculars for naked bodies; otherwise there was hardly anyone around. Tourists didn’t know about this place. Men cruised in the bushes up above. I followed Ali up the trails into the undergrowth and cruised around with him for a while, crawling under bushes and over broken branches. I got bored and went down to the water. It was low tide so I walked out to some giant boulders.

Ali came down from the bushes and we walked along the rocky beach together. We talked about what we were going to do with ourselves and the new people we’d meet and what was next in our lives. Ali put his arm around me as he talked. He said he missed his grandmother and sister and wished they could be there enjoying the ocean with us.

“Yeah, I’d love it if my sister came out here, too,” I said.

“What about your parents? Do you want them to visit? Mine would freak out. They’ve hardly left the Midwest. They wouldn’t know what to think of it here.”

“My mom would be fine. I doubt my dad would come. Mom would like it though.”

“We got as far away from home as we could without getting our feet wet, huh?”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“Well, we went to New Orleans, didn’t we? You can’t go much farther south than that from Missouri without winding up in the Gulf of Mexico. Now we’re sitting here at Lands End, San Francisco, California. You can’t get much farther west than that, can you? So, we got as far away as we could without getting our feet wet.” Ali laughed. “Hey, Joe, you want to?”

“Want to what?”

“Get our feet wet?”

“It’s kind of cold, isn’t it?”

“Who gives a fuck?”

We sat on the boulders down by the ocean and cracked up laughing as we took off our shoes and socks and rolled up our jeans. The cold sand was wet and soft beneath our feet as we walked slowly up to the water. Then we started to wade in. The first touch of water sent a cold shiver up my leg. I screamed and jumped back. Ali yelled, too, but took a step deeper in. For a moment we stood in the water watching the waves smash against the giant boulders with the steep cliff, the edge of the United States, rising up behind us. The waves broke up before they reached the shore so they weren’t very big at our feet, just foamy. Ali waded out to mid-calf. I stood in one place as the icy water came up and surrounded my feet up to my ankles. Then it rolled back out, leaving the breeze to add the final freezing touch as it blew over my wet feet. The next wave that came up felt a little warmer but the wind made me even colder when it rolled away. The sand under my feet started to slide out with the waves, causing me to almost lose my balance. I had to take a step forward or else get out of the water.

Ali stretched out his hand to me and said, “Come on, Joe. What are you waiting for?”

The third wave felt warm. I waded in deeper.

RED CROSS

I was treating Ali to breakfast in a coffee shop on Haight Street with the money I got from selling most of my albums to a used record store for much less than they were worth. I sold everything but my favorites: Blondie, the Ramones, Yma Sumac, Mink DeVille, and Aretha. Our table was covered with a red-and-white-checked tablecloth that reminded me of Wade’s Family Restaurant back home in suburban Kansas City.

“Fucking Mildred. I can’t believe she was gonna have us arrested for moving that refrigerator into our apartment. She’s the one who should have been arrested…” Ali talked with his mouth full of food.

“Bitch,” I mumbled, still thinking about which records I should have kept.

“Next time she comes near the apartment I’m calling the pigs.”

“Fuck her. She’s evil. Gross, Ali, don’t you ever get sick of scrambled eggs?”

“No. I’m a vegetarian. I have to eat scrambled eggs.”

“Why don’t you eat pancakes or waffles? Every day you eat the same thing.” I looked over the top of the paper at his curly red hair bouncing up and down to the rhythm of his chewing.

“They don’t fill me up. Besides, I need the carbohydrates from the hash browns. Hey, tomorrow morning let’s go to the tenants union and report Mildred for not fixing the lock on our door.”

“You can. I have to turn in my application at Ben Hur.”

“I will. Why do you want to work in a porno shop anyway? Oh my god, look at this. Fucking Cambodia! Read this article.”

“I don’t want to read the paper. I’m trying to eat.”

“Thousands of people fleeing Cambodia in small boats are being hijacked by pirates. Oh my god, they’re robbing those refugees and forcing them off their boats. Fuckers!”

“I’m trying to eat.”

“I can’t take hearing any more stories like this family being made to watch their father being forced to jump off a boat into its propellers. How can we allow this to go on?” Ali started crying quietly while he kept reading.

“Ali, I’m not allowing it. I’m trying to eat my breakfast, if you don’t mind. I’m trying to keep my landlady from throwing me in jail for grand larceny. I’m trying to find a job.”

“Don’t you even care about those people? There’s a holocaust going on and you’re eating waffles and applying for a job in a porno shop! I just can’t stand it anymore.”

“Well what the fuck am I supposed to do,” I blurted out, “volunteer at the goddamned Red Cross? I can’t even take care of myself right now, much less thousands of fleeing refugees. If you’re so concerned about them why don’t you do something about it? You’re sitting here at this table with me. You’re not doing anything about it except ruining my breakfast.”

I was still somewhat pissed off at Ali for getting us into the mess with Mildred and the police and wasn’t interested in hearing him carry on about the injustices of the world and how fucked-up our society is. His crying over his scrambled eggs and hash browns was really getting on my nerves. I just wanted him to shut up.

He stopped and looked at me. “That’s a really good idea.”

“What is?”

“The Red Cross.”

Oh great, I thought, here we are living in the worst part of San Francisco, neither one of us has a job, I’ve just sold almost all of my record collection for next to nothing, and he’s going to go volunteer at the Red Cross!

The next day I dropped off my application at Ben Hur adult bookshop. The boss flirted with me but didn’t have any work at the time. He told me to keep in touch. After that I went out to the San Francisco branch of the Petite Sisters of Charity old folks’ home and convent. I wanted to visit a couple of the nuns I worked with at the home in Kansas City who had been transferred to San Francisco. It felt good to see their familiar faces. The sister who ran the kitchen said she might have work for me, to check back next week.

Two days later, I was so desperate for money that I took a job doing phone soliciting, but I only lasted half a day because I hated it so much. At the lunch break I collected my things, took the supervisor aside and told him I was sorry but I couldn’t work there. I was afraid Ali would be pissed at me since he was supporting me but instead he was comforting. He said there’s no need for me to work for assholes when we had enough money to last at least another month. I hated depending on him for money. He didn’t mind.

Ali did volunteer at the Red Cross. They referred him to the International Rescue Committee, where he started volunteering on a regular basis. Soon it worked into a full-time paid position. His job was to meet the Cambodian refugees at the airport, gather them and their luggage, and lead them to a van to take them to a nearby motel for a night’s rest. He didn’t speak a word of their language and most of them didn’t know English. They were dazed, frightened, and overwhelmed. He would find the families in their motel rooms sleeping on top of the beds with no blankets over them. They didn’t understand that they had to pull out the tightly tucked layers of sheets and blankets from the mattress. He told me he’d found footprints around the rim of the toilet where they had climbed up and squatted over the toilet rather than sit on the rim. The next day he’d put the refugees on domestic flights and send them out all across the country to their new homes.

Ali seemed to be adapting to San Francisco quite easily. I was still having trouble getting settled in. He told me just to hang in there, that things would start to work out for me, too. I wasn’t sure I believed him.

SUMMER ’79

A month after moving to San Francisco I got a job in the kitchen at the Petite Sisters of Charity old folks’ home and convent. The maintenance man, Jack, would always stop by and talk to me while I was working the giant dishwashing machine. He told me that he had worked as a model and was now studying French and electronics in Berkeley so he could get a good job and move to Paris. Lestor, the old Filipino guy I worked with in the kitchen, caught on that I liked Jack as more than just a friend. He would hold up zucchini and giant carrots and ask me if I liked them and then laugh at me.

I met Don Vinyl at the Web, a punk/New Wave club at Ninth and Howard, not too far from where I lived. Don was the lead singer for the ska/punk band the Offs. He was tall and thin with pale skin, dyed black hair, tight black jeans, ripped T-shirts, hyper, always talking, always moving. He followed me home one night from the Web even though I told him I wanted to be alone. I didn’t really. I was just nervous about being with this guy I didn’t know very well who was coming on really strong and in my face. He said he just wanted to come up and talk for a while. We had sex and it was fun. He asked me out on a date a couple of days later. He and the bass player from his band drove me around San Francisco and showed me sections of town that were cool like the Haight and the Mission. When we drove through Eighteenth and Castro they told me that “we” (they were including me in that “we”) didn’t go there. “They” (Castro Clones) didn’t like us and we didn’t like them that much either.

We went to the Deaf Club at Sixteenth and Valencia to hear some bands. I thought it was called “the Deaf Club” because the music was so loud you couldn’t hear what anyone was saying, but it turned out it was run by deaf people and when you ordered drinks you had to write what you wanted on a piece of paper. We smoked a joint that was soaked in morphine outside on the street with a few of Don’s friends. Then we went to buy cigarettes with a girl named Walker at a store around the other side of the block. Walker was bass player for a band called G.O.D. (Girls on Drugs). We were all extremely loaded and talked about the punk rock scene in San Francisco versus New Orleans versus New York. The Offs had played CBGB’s, the ultimate punk club, so Don was an authority on the New York scene. Don stopped in a dark part of the street and kissed me. Walker rambled on about the time G.O.D. played warm-up for Siouxsie before anyone in San Francisco knew who Siouxsie was. She was oblivious to the fact that Don was sliding his tongue around inside my mouth. The three of us sat down on a doorstep and yacked until someone turned on the porch light and peered out their window at us. We went into the corner store for cigarettes and then headed back to the club. When we came back around the block we saw an ambulance with its lights flashing in front of the Deaf Club. While we were on our walk, one of the guys who got high with us earlier had stepped into the street and was struck by a car. We hadn’t heard anything. He was already strapped onto a stretcher in the ambulance when we got there. We smoked another morphine-soaked joint while we watched the ambulance take him away.

Don knew everyone at the club. He was having fun, but I thought we were on a date and were supposed to be hanging out together. We weren’t, and I was getting bored. He would come by and check on me every once in a while. I told him I wanted to go home but since I was new in town I didn’t know which way to go. I went outside to the corner of Sixteenth and Valencia where the guy had been hit. I lived at Sixth and Folsom and knew I wasn’t too far but I had no idea which way Sixth Street and Folsom was. I asked someone passing by and they told me I shouldn’t walk through that neighborhood alone in the middle of the night if I didn’t know where I was going. I was too stoned to try to figure it out so I waited for Don to come out of the club. We went to his house right up from the intersection of Haight and Ashbury and smoked another morphine-soaked joint. He puked for a while and then we fucked until the sun came up. He lived close to my job so I walked to work from there. I was out of it all day.

Within two weeks of working at Petite Sisters, I got promoted from dishwasher to orderly in the nursing home section. I’d been an orderly before in Kansas City. In fact, I was a certified geriatric aid in the state of Missouri. I made friends with one of the residents, an old man named Fred. Fred had worked as a bellhop at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill most of his life. He had reddish-blond hair that was turning white. He wasn’t that old, in his sixties, but he had Hodgkin’s disease and was in a wheelchair. Because of a stroke, he had to be propped up with pillows under his paralyzed side so he wouldn’t tip over. After we got to be friends, he told me one night that his best friend and roommate of twenty-some years had died in his arms.

Fred told me stories about famous people he’d met when he worked at the Fairmont, like Kim Novak when she was filming Vertigo.

“San Francisco’s not the same anymore,” he said. “It used to be a nice place to live.”

One night after my shift I sat with him and watched The Sound of Music on television. While we were sitting there Fred started to rub my forearm. We were used to touching each other since I was the one who helped him to bed, changed his clothes, and helped him in and out of the shower, so I didn’t think much about it. I looked up at him while he rubbed my arm. His tired eyes followed the trail of his fingers as they lightly brushed in a circular motion from my wrist to my elbow. A warm tingle bristled my forearm hair. I sat still and let him rub back and forth absent-mindedly. When our eyes met he stopped, suddenly aware of what he’d been doing. I smiled at him. He patted my wrist. He ran his hand over my arm again with a heavier touch. He squeezed and felt my long muscles and bone. Neither one of us had many friends. I wanted to tell him I loved him. I did love him. After the movie I wheeled Fred in to his room to begin our nightly ritual of getting him ready for bed. We had to be quiet because the other men in his ward were already asleep. Just before I turned out his light, Fred called to me. I stopped and looked at him, an old half-paralyzed man in a big hospital bed with the side rails pulled up.

“Joe?” He hesitated like he was trying to think of what to say. I waited for a long time by the door, my hand on the light switch. I think he just called my name to keep me from leaving.

“Yeah?” I said.

Another pause and then Fred said, “Good night, Joe. See you tomorrow.”

Ben Hur porno shop and distributor called me back for a second interview and then hired me to work in their warehouse. I turned in my notice at Petite Sisters, telling them I got a job in a bookstore. For two weeks I worked at Petite Sisters full-time and on my days off I worked in the warehouse. It was hard to say good-bye to Fred. It wasn’t officially good-bye because I said I’d be back to see him, but we wouldn’t have our daily visits anymore. He took it like a man, shook my hand, and thanked me for all my help. He was getting sicker. We both knew he didn’t have much longer but neither one of us said anything about that.

My first job at Ben Hur was to stuff deflated Teenage Swedish Love Dolls into boxes. They’d stare up at me, their O-shaped mouths screaming silent screams. Once they were boxed up I stacked them next to the racks of dildos, Beta and VHS videotapes, and boxes and boxes of porno magazines that filled the warehouse. My co-worker’s name was Brick. He was a model on the cover of the male douche box that Ben Hur was marketing heavily and making a lot of money from. It had a photo of his face with his arm raised so it looked like he was sniffing his armpit. While we stuffed Teenage Swedish Love Dolls into boxes he told me about fucking two guys and taking both their dicks up his ass at the same time. After a month in the warehouse I was promoted to work in the Ben Hur porno shop on Polk Street. I could have advanced further up the ranks to the assistant manager position but I refused to sleep with the slimy boss, Dennis, who was always taking me out after work, getting me sloppy drunk, and then trying to get me to go home with him. No matter how drunk he got me, I did not want to have sex with him.

One night, when I was working at the porno store, Jack, the maintenance man at Petite Sisters of Charity, came into the shop with some friends. I looked up from stocking the front counter with small bottles of the amyl nitrite Rush and saw him.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

“Same to you…” I was surprised to see him and felt stupid. My face burned with a blush because he’d caught me working in a porno shop. Jack didn’t seem to notice.

“Here, Joe, take a look at this.” He showed me a magazine put out by Colt Publications that he was in. Just seeing Jack again rekindled the spark I’d felt for him when we’d worked together. A big, handsome man came up to Jack and put his arm around him. Jack introduced him to me as his “friend.”

“We’re moving to Paris together when I finish this semester,” he said happily, talking more to the man than to me.

When they left I took the magazine with pictures of Jack having sex with a highway patrolman and stashed it under the counter so I could take it home with me when I closed down that night.

REFUGEES

It took me a little longer to adjust to San Francisco than it did Ali, but soon I was right in the middle of everything and loving it. I was making friends and going out a lot. Friends from New Orleans moved to San Francisco, so I spent time showing them around. After the Southern Decadence Parade in New Orleans, Doug had moved to Kansas to live with his sister, and then to Kansas City for a while, where he lived at the Y. He moved to San Francisco a couple of months after we did and stayed out in the Avenues with his best friend from college. He and I hung out together a lot. We looked like brothers, both tall and lanky with dark brown hair. Only Doug’s hair was straight and fell in his eyes. Mine was shorter and wavy. His mild-mannered ways were just the break I needed after spending so much time with Ali and his intense, often abrasive manner.

Ali and I moved from Clementina to Fair Oaks Street and Doug moved in with us. It was a big three-bedroom flat in an ideal-looking San Francisco neighborhood. Dark hardwood floors. Working fireplace. Fair Oaks was a small street on the side of a steep hill where all the neighbors knew each other. There were flowers in front of almost every house. It was just above the Mission District and over the hill from the Castro. Sally, Ali’s co-worker, lived in the apartment above us.

By the time we’d been in San Francisco a year, Stevie, Jeff LaRue, and James had all moved to San Francisco from New Orleans. James moved in upstairs with Sally and her roommates. He was still in love with Ali. Stevie stayed with us on our couch until he found a place not too far away. I was no longer working for Ben Hur. I got an office job working with almost all gay men. I met Bo at the baths and was seeing him on-again, off-again. I was much more into the New Wave scene than my friends from New Orleans. Sometimes the two worlds didn’t mix well. Stevie didn’t like to go out to a lot of the bars that I did because they didn’t play music he liked. It was like the tables had turned from when I was in New Orleans and Stevie and everyone but me was into disco. I started taking classes at City College. I’d been wanting to go to college for a long time but couldn’t afford it. Since I’d lived in California for a year, I was a resident. The junior college system was free to California residents, so that was ideal for me. I finally had a chance to go.

Ali was completely absorbed in his job. Sometimes he would cop an attitude about me working in an office when there were so many people who needed help. He was still always bringing tricks home. Our bedrooms were separated by a big sliding door so I could hear everything through it. After working with refugees for over a year, Ali decided to go to Thailand to work in the Cambodian refugee camps. He didn’t have a job lined up but hoped he could find one. He had enough money saved that if he couldn’t get a job he could volunteer for a few months and then travel some.

I was going to miss Ali. He knew me better than anyone. We decided to have one last party before he left for Thailand. We put colored light bulbs in the beat-up brass chandelier to give our living room a festive feel. A lot of people from his job at the International Rescue Committee came to see him off. Some of his co-workers were from Cambodia. They had fought the Khmer Rouge and had seen their country massacred. The girls wore traditional dresses made of bright-colored fabric and gold jewelry. They were much shorter than me and danced by making graceful movements with their hands while I did wild figure eights with my hips.

Stevie and his roommates were sponsoring some of the gay Cuban refugees who came over during the Mariel boat lift. They had been in prison for being gay. We told him to bring them to the party. They told their friends who told their friends so we had a large contingent of Cubans. They kept taking my Grace Jones Warm Leatherette album off the record player and putting on Celia Cruz, the queen of Latin rhythm. My friend Gina and I had been doing volunteer work at Casa El Salvador and invited people from there. Not many of them showed up. Frank, the volunteer coordinator, reminded us that there was a war raging and they had too much work to do to party. But a few came, like Dolores who brought some of her Nicaraguan friends. Doug’s friend Elena came with her lover, Alina. Doug and Elena had worked together on the 1980 Census going door-to-door to find out how many people lived in the Mission District. Elena y Alina were Miami Cubans who we thought of as rich because they were in art school. They helped bridge the gap between the Mariel Cubans and us by translating jokes in fast yackity Cuban to American English.

Then there was our usual party assortment of misfit friends, people Ali and I knew from work or other cities who had also recently moved to San Francisco. The guys from New Orleans insisted people in San Francisco didn’t know how to have a good time. I could always count on them for getting the party going by saying a few rude comments to people about how boring Californians were. Gina, the only native San Franciscan, still hadn’t gotten over our Halloween party when Jeff dressed as Hitler. She said he had gone too far. He said that you were supposed to dress like a monster on Halloween. Gina still didn’t like it. A Patti LaBelle song came on and the Southerners—Jeff, Stevie, James, and Doug—started popping their fingers and dancing slowly like they were in ecstasy. When Patti sang their world stopped. Stevie shut his eyes and raised a hand above his head and said, “Yeah, girl,” like he was offering a prayer to the heavens.

Ali divided his attention between everyone at the party and his boyfriend Twan. Twan stood in the kitchen near the table with all the liquor. He was getting drunk. His eyes were red and watery. He and Ali were in love and Ali was going away for at least a year. Twan had recently moved to San Francisco from Taipei with his parents, brothers and sisters, and grandmother. He was our age, in his early twenties, the oldest of four kids. He was shy about speaking English but could understand everything. When there were only a couple of people in the room he was relaxed and even animated, but in a crowd he kept to himself. Ali had the attitude that they would stay boyfriends even though he was going away. Twan knew better and he wasn’t happy about Ali leaving. I liked Twan because even though he seemed timid, he actually was spirited and had some fight in him.

Ali would float around the apartment hugging people, dancing with them, being a good party host, and then he’d go make out with Twan in the kitchen corner for a while. He’d leave again and make a couple of rounds through the party before coming back and checking on Twan. While he was away Twan got drunker and drunker. I hung out with him for a while. It was hard to understand him between his soft-spoken accent and his drunken slur. He told me he wasn’t having much fun at the party because he knew soon Ali would be gone and he’d be alone again.

Everyone smoked joints like they were cigarettes. My eyes burned from all the smoke, but it never occurred to me to step outside for some fresh air. I was having too much fun dancing. The Cuban guys were getting really drunk. Someone put on Donna Summer and they all screamed. Emilio, the butchest of the bunch with his broad, muscular back and short Afro hair, grabbed an oblong-shaped balloon and used it as a microphone to lip-synch “Hot Stuff.” He alternated using the long balloon as a microphone and a dildo, opening his mouth in a wide O like he was going to swallow the entire length. Everyone danced in a close circle around him while he carried on. The Thai boys from Ali’s job stood in the background giggling and acting shocked.

Jeff yelled, “Get it, girl! Work!” Then James pulled his long hair up in a ponytail on the side of his head and joined in a duet with Emilio. That song finished and everyone started dancing to Donna’s next disco hit. A cloud of cologne blasted me in the face and made my nose itch. I sneezed. I saw Carlos leaning against the wall watching everyone carry on. I’d met him earlier in the week with Elena y Alina and kind of had a crush on him. I picked up my plastic drink cup off the fireplace mantel and worked my way to him through the wiggling bodies. I was proud of myself for making it all the way across the living room dance floor without spilling my drink. Carlos had also come from Cuba on the boat lift, but he wasn’t friends with the guys staying at Stevie’s. His English was better than theirs.

Carlos and I were talking. He was beautiful, shorter than me with smooth skin and penetrating black eyes. He was serious, which made me feel playful. He told me he was a poet but hadn’t written much since he’d been in prison. I couldn’t quite fathom what he was telling me. The last couple of years I’d been moving around the country, partying, learning to dress in drag, falling in and out of love, reading Isherwood, Burroughs, and Bukowski. Not to mention all the nights I’d spent out roaming from bar to bar getting drunk and stoned. The concept of being in prison for what I had been doing was almost intangible.

Carlos leaned up to me and said, “Emilio would never have done that in front of strangers in Cuba.”

I laughed and said, “I never would have done that in front of strangers in Kansas City!”

Carlos looked at me and for a split second there was a moment of recognition. Like yes, he knew that it hadn’t been a smooth road for me either. I saw what he was telling me about prison in Cuba related in some strange way to the guilt I felt about my family back in Missouri. His eyes pierced me. Without saying a word he knew about what my dad had done to my sisters, and my bruises. A split second.

“Come on, Carlos, let’s dance. You’re too serious!”

I pulled him into the bouncing party and started dancing. It was at that moment, in the middle of my crowded living room, when I realized that everyone at this party had one thing in common. We were all refugees from one kind of torment or another and could never go back home. Home was something in the future that had yet to be created, not someplace in the past. I felt like we might never be rich or famous, but at that one moment, when Donna Summer was playing on the stereo and everyone was dancing and singing along, there was a feeling of success. Of victory. We had all come out of our own separate nightmares to a place where just being ourselves was okay, not dangerous. That was a strange new feeling, reason alone to celebrate.

HOW I GOT HIV

(Version 1, 1981)

“Money is freedom.” That’s what Ali always said. He liked to have at least one thousand dollars in the bank at all times in case he needed to escape wherever he was. When Ali left for Thailand he entrusted me with his bank card and two thousand in his account. Bank cards were new then. It had just been in the past year that people started getting them. There were only a few bank machines installed and the closest one was at Sixteenth and Valencia, eight blocks away. I kept the card in a tan plastic wallet that I’d bought in the souvenir department at Woolworth’s. Scenes from San Francisco were printed all over it: a trolley car, the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower.

When Ali left for Thailand to work in the refugee camps we gave up our apartment. Doug moved upstairs with James and Sally. Gina, a friend who lived across the street in a studio apartment, said I could stay with her for a while. It would help with her rent. I didn’t have much to move, just a wooden vegetable crate filled with records, some books, clothes, and a big box of souvenirs and letters. The entryway to her apartment was barely big enough for a twin bed and dresser that Gina had squeezed in. That was my bedroom. I hid my wallet in the back corner of the top dresser drawer.

Gina and I were both unemployed. She had a little bit of money left from the last time she’d brought coke back from Peru. She was also getting unemployment from a secretarial job that didn’t work out. I was getting unemployment checks from my job as a desk clerk at the Hotel Cherokee. They had decided to make some changes in the hotel’s employee schedule, which didn’t include me. They never came right out and said it, but I knew they were mad because I rented a room for the night to a black couple when I was under specific orders not to rent to black people. I thought the couple had more class than most of the people at that hotel. I lasted three days there, long enough to get unemployment in the state of California. I liked not working, but was disappointed to find out that my unemployment checks didn’t cover all my bills. It was just enough to pay rent and buy food. I didn’t have any extra money to do anything else. Even two-dollar burritos began to feel expensive.

We’d start our days with espresso coffee. Espresso reminded Gina of when she was in Italy. She loved Italy. She wanted to be Anna Magnani, full of dark hysterical passion. Gina taught me how to make spaghetti sauce the way her Italian boyfriend Paulo made it, with sliced carrots to cut the acidity of the tomatoes. The kitchen was small, with just enough room for one person to move around in, but big enough for a little table and two chairs by the window. Gina would put the small silver espresso pot on the stove while I ran across the street to Abu-Dee’s corner store for fresh orange juice and croissants.

There were windows on the southern and western sides of the apartment, giving the place more than enough sunlight. The main room was big enough for two chairs: a metal butterfly chair and a big overstuffed one from St. Vincent de Paul’s thrift store. Gina’s bed was a futon mat on a light wooden frame. It was covered with a brown-and-black-striped alpaca blanket that she got when she was in Peru. She loved that blanket. She kept the bed pushed in a corner against the wall so when you were on it you faced the windows. Outside the windows were rooftops of buildings leading up to the steep Twenty-Second Street hill.

Once her boyfriend Blair came over when I was there and I wound up sitting at the little kitchen table with the door shut for what seemed like hours while they had sex. I couldn’t help but hear them. They told me they’d be quick. I tried to be as quiet as possible so I wouldn’t disturb them but after a while I started feeling trapped. They were taking their time about it. The rhythm of the bed knocking up against the wall started to work my nerves. I thought about leaving but didn’t really know where to go. It was cold and damp outside. I didn’t have enough money to go hang out in a bar. Besides, I kept thinking they’d be finished any time now. After about half an hour things quieted down and then Blair left. Gina and I made a deal after that to give each other plenty of warning if we were going to have someone over for sex so the other one could find someplace else to go. She said I could use her bed as long as I changed the sheets.

Gina spent most afternoons on the phone, having screaming fits with either her sister or her mother. I would walk over to Sixteenth and Valencia to get vegetarian burritos and then we’d sit on Gina’s bed eating them while she told me how fucked-up her family was. When we’d finished the burritos, one of us would go downstairs to the lobby to check the mail in case any unemployment checks had arrived. They came once a week. Besides the checks, I also looked forward to letters from Ali telling me about his travels. After the excitement of the mail, we’d settle back down on her big bed and turn on the TV. At 4:00 Channel 21 ran two episodes of Hazel back-to-back. That was our show. Every afternoon we’d watch Hazel while the apartment filled with warm sun. Then at 5:00 we’d get into position at the windows facing south to watch the guy across the street come home from work. He always went into his bedroom, which was directly across from us and below about half a level, and took off his clothes. We’d pull the curtains close together so he couldn’t see us. We could almost touch him while he lay on his bed completely naked to soak up the last of the sun. Sometimes we’d get out Gina’s 35mm camera and look at him through the zoom lens.

During that time I was taking acid once a week because I wanted to get over being paranoid while I was tripping. The only way to get over it was to learn how much I could handle and to be used to it, so that when I was tripping in social situations I wouldn’t get paranoid. I learned that if I took a quarter or half of a Quaalude it would help take the edge off the acid. I wouldn’t tell anyone when I was tripping because then people acted different. They’d be self-conscious or do weird things like wiggle their hands in front of my eyes and try to freak me out. I never took enough to be out of my mind in public when I did it by myself. I would go to the movies with friends or out to a bar. Sometimes I’d do it and just go about my daily business. It made me feel like I was living in a Fellini movie. The only thing missing was the Nino Rota soundtrack.

I realized I couldn’t survive on just my unemployment. I was used to having more money, not a lot more, but at least pocket change. Ali always loaned me money when I needed it, so I figured he wouldn’t mind if I borrowed some from his account as long as I paid it back before he returned from Thailand. I would only spend money from Ali’s account on rent or food. I would spend my own money on drugs, beer, or going out. Conveniently, the bank machine was right around the corner from La Cumbre taqueria where Gina and I liked to get our burritos.

One day, coming home from Sixteenth and Valencia with our bean-and-cheese burritos and money in my pocket thanks to Ali, I walked past a handsome man. We did one of those “ten-step turnarounds” where you have slight eye contact with someone you pass and then take ten steps and turn around to see if they’ve done the same. If so, then it’s okay to say hi and hope you’ll go off together for sex. This guy motioned me into the doorway of an empty storefront. He told me his name was Bill and asked my name. He moved in close to me, looked around to see if anyone was near, then when the coast was clear, he rubbed my ass. He made a funny face, pursing his lips and breathing in through them. I guess that meant he was getting turned on. He was my type, slightly older than me, dark hair, a little bit shorter. I could see chest hair poking out from his shirt at his collar, which was an added plus. He had a mustache and was wearing an Izod shirt with khaki pants. That was a giveaway that we’d never be best friends. He was a clone. I was a New Waver. But that didn’t mean we couldn’t have sex together. He gave me his business card and told me to call him at work. We made a date for him to come over. I warned Gina in advance so she could find something to do.

We had great sex. He was five feet ten or so and just as I suspected, had a hairy chest. He was very sexy. We were very sexy together. He poured beer down my chest and licked it off. He ripped my underwear and made me dance for him while he jerked off. We sixty-nined for what seemed like hours. He fucked me on Gina’s bed. While he was still inside me, he pulled me to the side of the bed, braced himself by bending his legs, then picked me up in his arms and fucked me in midair, bouncing me off his thighs.

When Gina came home later that night I told her every detail of what we’d done. She loved hearing about it and kept giggling and saying stuff like, “Oooo, you did all that on my bed?”

A NIGHT AT THE BATHS

After Ali left I started going to the baths on my own. I used to only go with him. I was nervous and insecure about going alone. When we went together it was no big deal, just a night out on the town. The first few times I went by myself I was scared. A couple of times I’d planned all day to go and then backed out at the last minute. But I didn’t have a steady boyfriend and had never been very good at cruising in bars, and I was horny. The baths were convenient. Almost every time I went I got laid. Not always though. Sometimes things just didn’t click.

I went from being timid about going to going fairly regularly. I had some good times there and some weird times. For the most part I had good sex and left satisfied. Also, the baths were often more fun than going out to a bar. They had a live DJ who played better music than anywhere else in town. It wasn’t all dance music. It was darker, music to fuck by. He played some of my favorites like Siouxsie, the Sisters of Mercy, the Buzzcocks, and Tuxedomoon, among others.

The more I went, the less scary it was to go. There was often the debate with myself about whether or not I wanted to go. Sometimes I was just horny and went. But the scary, alone feeling disappeared simply by going there on my own enough times. Soon I’d even forgotten about how I wished Ali was around to lead me in and protect me. Often I’d meet friends there and we’d hang out in each other’s rooms and smoke dope or take drugs and have small parties. Sometimes someone would sneak in liquor, but if the management smelled it they’d kick you out. They never bothered anyone about smoking pot, though. With the mood music mixing with the sounds of sex, it was a very druggy environment.

One night at the baths things were hopping. I think it was a Saturday because I was going to visit Sister Evangeline the next day at the Petite Sisters of Charity and Sunday was her usual visiting day. I had gone out to the Stud and gotten drunk. Plus, I’m sure I’d smoked some pot as well. That was pretty much a given at that point. I didn’t have a room, either from lack of money or because it was too crowded. I put my clothes in my locker, wrapped my towel around my waist and then did my usual tour of the place before I got involved with anyone. I checked out the two short rows of rooms downstairs to see if there was anyone interesting, then took a shower before going into the steam room. I liked the steam room. It was a good place to relax and center myself before heading upstairs to the main floor. Plus, I often had good sex in there. I loved the fogginess mixed with the wet slipping and sliding bodies. That night I sat and watched some guys through the thick mist getting it on before I headed upstairs to the main floor.

Once upstairs I walked down the long hall with four or five little hallways off to the side that led to the Orgy Room. Each hallway was lined with cubicle after cubicle. Inside each cubicle was a little bed (mat on plywood) about six and a half feet long, with a lamp and a little shelf area next to the bed. I wished it wasn’t so crowded because I wanted a room to myself so I could shut the door and have some privacy, both alone and/or with someone I would meet up with. As I walked down the hall I looked in rooms that had their door open. Guys were sitting on their beds with their towels over their laps watching people go by. A couple of them moved the towel so I could see their dick. That was a signal that they were interested in me. I saw one guy I was interested in and looked in his room to try to make eye contact. He didn’t move his towel but instead just stared straight ahead like I wasn’t there. He wasn’t interested in me so I moved on.

In another room a guy was lying naked on his stomach with his butt showing. That meant he wanted to get fucked. Some guys let one guy after another come in and fuck them. That freaked me out. I mean, I liked to get fucked but I didn’t want just anyone to do it. I was pickier than that.

I’d been there for at least an hour and had played around with a couple of guys. The orgy room was crowded. I found my way to the back corner, between bunk beds and the wall. There was some action going on and I plopped myself in the middle of it. When something started to happen in the orgy room people gravitated towards it. Not much privacy. That night there were clusters of guys going at it all around. Most of the bunk beds were rocking back and forth. The big mats were full. Guys on them and guys lined up around them.

I felt this big guy pushing up next to me. He was about six feet tall, an inch or so shorter than me. He had a hairy chest, which turned me on. We looked at each other in the dim light that came from the hallway and started feeling each other. He reached down and felt under my towel. Someone else reached around from behind and started rubbing my chest. I was getting interested in the big hairy guy so I moved a little bit so the other guy would leave me alone, one of those subtle signals guys didn’t always pick up on. Anyway, the big hairy guy and I got pressed together in the crowd and started making out. He pulled me down to the bottom bunk right next to the cluster of men in the corner. We fooled around for a while but I wanted to get fucked and he wanted to do some fucking so we got right down to it. It was great. We worked up a sweat. I lay on my stomach and he lay on top of me. We were about the same height so our bodies were very comfortable together. He bit my neck. I loved feeling his hairy body and his weight on top of me. I got up on my elbows and twisted my head around so we could kiss while we fucked. It seemed like it lasted a long time. It probably didn’t but it was fun.

When it was over and we were lying next to each other the man said something like, “Well, I guess we’re supposed to say something to each other now.” He had an accent.

I said, “Are you from New York?”

He said, “No. Why?”

“Because your accent sounds kind of like a New York one.”

He laughed and said, “I’m French. No one’s ever told me my accent sounded New York before.” He was getting up. “Well, thanks.”

“Yeah, you too.” I said something about how I was going to be leaving then. I think I was satisfied for one night.

He said he was going too and if I wanted I could walk with him.

I said, “Sure. My name’s Joe by the way.” We shook hands.

“Mine’s Michel.”

“What?” I didn’t hear him clearly.

“Michel. Mi-shell. You know, Mee-Shayl,” he said with a nasal, fake American accent, kind of joking. “Like Michael. Or, if you speak Spanish, like Miguel.”

“Mi-shell,” I repeated.

“Well, that’s close enough. Your accent is a little off. But not bad.”

We walked up Eighth Street to Market where I was going to catch the J Church streetcar to go home. He asked if I wanted to come over and spend the night, that he lived nearby. I told him I couldn’t because I was going to visit my nun friend the next day. He thought I was kidding at first. “No,” I said, “I’m serious.” He got a big laugh out of that.

“I just fucked the hell out of you and now you’re on your way to visit a nun ‘friend.’” He wrote his phone number down on the back of a pink Tuesday night discount pass to the baths and told me to call him soon.

He waited with me until the J Church came, probably twenty minutes. It didn’t run very often late at night. He was easy to talk to. Something about him made me want to tease him. I’d tell him stuff and then he’d say, “Really?” and I’d laugh and say, no not really. It was like, if it was true that I was going to visit a nun the next day after having sex in the orgy room, then he would believe almost anything I told him. I liked his accent. He had a nice smile. I thought he was handsome. His clothes didn’t fit him quite right. His pants were kind of baggy. It was hard to make out the shape of his butt. He was older than me, early thirties or so. He had curly brown hair and a mustache, which made me leery, but it was shaped different than a Castro Clone ’stache. “More European,” I told myself.

A few nights later Michel invited me over for dinner. He lived near the Civic Center area on Hyde Street. I’d always loved Hyde Street because it reminded me of New York. His building was on the edge of the Tenderloin, so there were lots of winos, junkies, and prostitutes hanging out on the street. The neighborhood didn’t bother me but I was a little nervous about meeting him again. It wasn’t every day that I went to someone’s house when I hardly knew them. I did know one thing though: we’d hit it off the night we met so I knew if nothing else came of this we’d probably have another session of good sex. As soon as I saw him I realized that it wasn’t just stoned lust that night at the baths that had me attracted to him. This guy was sexy.

His apartment was like a shoebox with a small kitchen and dining area. The main room had a bed against the wall to the left when you walked in. There were bookshelves in one corner, but besides that it was very sparse. In the small kitchen above the table was a big black-and-white poster for the movie Salò by Pasolini. While he fixed dinner I sat at the end of the table next to the window. He had a great view looking across the roofs of the big stone Civic Center buildings to the dome of City Hall. He poured us each a glass of beer while he made spaghetti with ground hamburger and onions mixed in. I watched him cook until I realized I was making him uncomfortable so I looked out the window at all the buildings. The dome looked kind of eerie because it was lit with floodlights with a hazy fog blurring the view. The closest building was the big, black, modern steel Federal Building. It loomed above everything else, adding a black backdrop to the older grey stone buildings.

As he stirred the mixture he said, “I hope you weren’t expecting gourmet cooking. You should feel honored that I’m cooking at all.”

The way he said it so seriously mixed with his accent made me laugh. I liked him.

After we ate he lit up a joint and passed it to me. I looked out the window again.

“Nice view,” I said as I inhaled.

“Yeah, I like this area because it looks like Europe. The old buildings with their big columns.”

“I’ve never been to Europe.” I handed the joint back to him.

“No? You should go. You’d like it.”

We talked and smoked another joint. He asked me what I did when I wasn’t hanging out at the baths or with the nuns. I told him I liked to go to concerts, hang out with my friends at the Stud, go to movies. Our conversation was small talk but nothing felt forced. It started off a little rocky but soon I felt comfortable with him. He was sexy in an unconventional kind of way. I liked looking at him. Plus, he was smart. I liked the combination of handsome and smart. After he washed the dishes there was an awkward moment. We both sat at his kitchen table. I watched a cockroach climb up the wall until it disappeared behind his Salò poster.

Then I took a look back into the main room. The walls were painted white with nothing hanging on them but a molded white plaster-of-Paris Greek head. On the floor was a black area rug. His windows were covered with royal blue floor-to-ceiling curtains. The only other furniture in the apartment besides the kitchen table and chairs was his bed. It seemed to be growing. At least my attention to it started to grow. The bed was a foam mattress on top of a piece of plywood supported by plastic milk crates. His bedspread matched the royal blue curtains. The bedside lamp shone down on the bedspread, giving the room a blue glow. As we talked at the table he started rubbing my leg. I scooted my chair closer to him and leaned over the corner of the table and we kissed.

“That was nice.”

“Yeah, me too. You, uh, want to maybe move in there?” He pointed to the bed.

“I thought you’d never ask.” I meant that to sound like a joke but it came out more desperate sounding and made me feel stupid. Michel didn’t seem to notice or if he did he didn’t say anything about it.

We had sex. We started off hot and heavy and then slowed down. It was nice to have sex with him without all kinds of other people around like in the orgy room. It was even better the second time.

Afterward I got really hungry so we decided to go out for dessert. He said there was an all-night restaurant, a few blocks up on O’Farrell at the Travelodge Motor Hotel, that was a fun local hangout. The first thing I saw when we walked in was a big round corner booth filled with working girls. At second glance I realized they weren’t real girls. They checked us out when we came through the door. They were loud and busy. We got a booth by the window and watched more transvestite hookers coming in and out of the place. Some of them were working the streets and waving to their friends in the restaurant. They all carried oversized combs and were always teasing their hair or fixing their makeup in little compact mirrors. A couple of guys got in a fight, maybe they were fighting over one of the girls. The manager had to throw them out. We were there on a Tuesday night around one thirty in the morning. The bars closed at two so we were situated when the place filled up. There were a few tourists in the restaurant as well. It was an odd combination of people. We both had hot fudge sundaes and sat back to watch the show.

We spent the night together back at his apartment. The building elevator shaft was right next to his bed. You could hear it going up and down at all hours. Winos in the parking lot five floors below his window screamed at each other off and on all night. Before we went to sleep he turned off all the lights and called me over to the window. He pointed down to the parking lot below and told me to look inside the cars. In a couple of them were prostitutes giving men blow jobs.

“Never a dull moment,” he said sarcastically.

PRIVATE LESSONS

After seeing Michel a few more times, he brought out his private collection of porn to show me. He kept it in the back of his closet in a big cardboard box. Not only did he have a lot of great regular gay porn but, in a woman’s hosiery box, he had beautiful black-and-white prints of fetish photographs. A few were old photos of men in bondage but most of them were of women’s feet in extremely high heels. He also had some violent crime scene photos, and a small white plastic Super 8 film projector that he’d ordered from the back of a magazine and some Super 8 sex films. Mostly of young blond guys that didn’t interest me. The projector played everything a little bit faster than real life.

I started to fall in love with him but at the same time was cautious about it. I hadn’t been seriously involved with anyone since Loren. I’d been through some boyfriends and mad crushes, but nothing long-term. This was starting to feel secure and real. I wanted to take it slow. Michel said he definitely did too. It was more a kind of matter-of-fact type of falling in love at first. It made sense for us to be together. We had a lot of the same interests. Sex was great. We had lots of sex. It felt good to lie in bed next to Michel with our arms and legs wrapped around each other.

One day we met downtown for lunch. Michel had freelance work doing translations for businesses. He spoke fluent French, Spanish, and English. He could do a lot of his work at home but sometimes he had to go downtown to meet with clients. He was wearing a business suit. I was living with Gina and on unemployment. Over sandwiches he asked me what I was doing for money.

“Well, not much.” I laughed nervously. “I mean not much besides unemployment.”

“You seem to be doing pretty good for someone on unemployment. I thought maybe you had some side income like maybe selling drugs or working for an escort service?” He looked at me like he thought I was up to something that I wasn’t telling him.

I decided to be truthful. “Actually, remember my friend Ali I told you about who’s working with the Cambodian refugees? Well…” I took a bite of my sandwich.

Michel looked me in the eyes. “Well?”

“Well”—I swallowed—“I’ve been kind of borrowing money temporarily from his bank account.”

Michel stared at me, waiting to hear more.

“I mean, I’m going to pay him back. He left me in charge of his bank account and if he were here he’d loan it to me anyway. So, I’ve been borrowing just a little to help me make it through to the end of the month.” I felt horrible saying this out loud to someone I didn’t know very well. With Gina it didn’t seem like such a big deal. She knew Ali would have loaned me the money. “Besides, I only spend his money on food and rent. I spend my money on going out or getting high.”

Michel sat up in his chair. “Does he know about this?”

“Not yet. I’m going to tell him. I’m just waiting till I get a job so that I can pay him back when I tell him.”

Michel thought about what I said. He looked down at the floor then back at me. “That’s called embezzlement. You could get in a lot of trouble.”

I’d never thought of it like that before. “Well, not really. I mean, I’m going to tell him about it soon. It just hasn’t been the right time.”

“You know, if you want to have a lifestyle where you can be some kind of an artist, whenever you figure out what kind you want to be, then you need a job skill that’ll pay you decently and has some kind of mobility, not one you’ll be stuck in for the rest of your life. You can’t keep on the way you’re going.”

“Sounds great, but what could I do? I don’t want to be a waiter.”

“I have a friend who does word processing. She says that’s the thing of the future. That’s something to think about. Law firms pay good money and you can work at night or on weekends. You wouldn’t have to work a nine-to-five job.”

That sounded intriguing, only I was enrolled in City College full-time.

“But what about school? I can’t just quit.”

He thought about that one. “Don’t you think you’d be better off dropping out and getting a job until you’re on your feet again? It doesn’t seem too smart to be in school when you’re so broke. You don’t want to be broke all the time, do you?”

When I left him I was excited about the prospect of looking for work for the first time in a long while. Every idea I’d come up with for a job before had been horrible. I hated restaurant work. I didn’t want to go back to the Petite Sisters of Charity. I wasn’t wild about nine-to-five office work. Filing and taking phone orders drove me crazy. I didn’t know how I was ever going to learn computers without going to college, but he was right. I did need to figure something out and I liked the idea of “word processing.” I liked to read books and write. I liked computers. To get paid to do something that combined the two sounded good. And the best thing about it was I could work at night or weekends.

Michel and I established a rhythm of me coming over about four times a week. We’d sit at the table, smoke pot, snack on almonds and dates, and talk and talk and talk. He liked that I could keep up with him in conversation even if it jumped from one topic to another. What I didn’t know about I’d ask and he’d tell me.

Michel said if we were going to be together as much as we were then I’d have to bring things over to keep myself busy, because he wasn’t getting any work done. Besides doing business translations, he was working on a book about the demimonde society in Paris during the turn of the century. He did lots of research at Bay Area university libraries, mostly Berkeley. He told me I needed to find something I could channel my energy into. He stressed the importance of finding some way of expressing myself creatively. He said I needed to find that special place I could go to that no one could take away from me, so I wouldn’t be dependent upon other people or drugs but instead be dependent upon myself. I started bringing books over to read while he was working.

Late-night hot fudge sundaes at the Travelodge became a regular event with us. The restaurant had become one of my favorite spots in all of San Francisco. Some of the working girls started to recognize us and would say hello. We had a cute boy waiter who, over a few months, kept getting prettier and prettier until one day he was dressed as a she. Our waiter had become our waitress.

I found a job through an employment agency at a law firm. I didn’t know anything about legal work, but I could type. My mother made me take typing in high school because she said you never know when you’re going to need to fall back on it. The job was in the word processing center of a huge corporate law firm as the printer tender–telecopy operator–telex sender, as well as answering the phones. I was on my feet from nine to five every day. After I was there a few months, I started staying after work and learning word processing on my own by going through the manual and asking co-workers questions.

I moved out of Gina’s apartment and in with James and Doug on Fair Oaks upstairs from where Ali and I had lived. I had a room to myself again instead of sleeping in the entrance to Gina’s studio. After I’d been there two months, Doug moved to England temporarily and gave up his room. James and I asked Felipe, a friend from James’s job at the Liberty House department store, to move in with us. The days that I didn’t see Michel I hung out with Felipe and James. Felipe and I were getting to be really good friends. I loved hanging out with the two of them, listening to music, dishing the dirt, talking about who he and James were dating or what sex they’d had lately, telling them about what Michel and I did together. When I wasn’t with Michel I thought about him a lot. I also talked about him a lot. They liked hearing the juicy parts of our relationship like the fact that Michel stuck his tongue in my mouth when we kissed. James and Felipe would listen for a while, at least to the sex details, but then they’d get bored with me going on and on about Michel and tell me to shut up. The three of us started having “Art Nights” where we’d go to our own rooms and work on art projects. Mine was usually writing porno stories or letters to my friend D.J. in New Orleans. Felipe drew and James worked on design projects for his classes at San Francisco State. It was fun because we were together and had company but we were also getting some art made.

Ali wrote me a letter every few weeks. He’d give an update of what was going on with him in Thailand, when he found work, what it was like working in the refugee camps on the border of Cambodia. He started getting into smoking opium and described going to opium dens up in the mountains. He’d organize supply runs to take to the Hmong tribes in secluded mountain areas. While he was there he’d spend two or three days in an opium den. When he wasn’t working in the camps, he lived in Bangkok and started getting strung out on heroin. I could tell because not only would he talk about it in code, calling it Billie Holiday, but his letters would start out normal, then get kind of floral and descriptive, then dissolve into nonsense. At Michel’s encouragement, I eventually wrote him and broke the news that I’d been spending his money. He wrote back and told me not to spend any more and when he came back to San Francisco we’d talk about how I was going to repay him.

Things continued pretty much the same for the next year between Michel and me. A lot of our relationship happened between his kitchen table and bed. Going out was kind of awkward at first. My friends were a little too silly and energetic for Michel. Then he caught on and relaxed and was really just like the rest of my misfit, goofy friends. He even started spending the night with me at Fair Oaks every once in a while. He and Felipe would yack away in Spanish, trashing me and James and laughing at us.

Being with Michel was like having my own personal modern art history tutor. He had a collection of art books that we’d look through when we got stoned. One of my favorites was a book of black-and-white photographs by George Platt Lynes. The photos were lots of nude men in surreal settings. He took me to a gallery opening of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos and another time to see Joel-Peter Witkin’s work. Both photographers completely amazed me. We both loved Fellini movies so we saw those together whenever there was one in town. He loved La Dolce Vita and had a postcard with the picture of Anita Ekberg in the fountain holding up a white kitten on his refrigerator. We had both seen the movie a couple of times but it was like a romantic date when we saw it together. One night at the Roxie movie theater the experimental film director Kenneth Anger spoke before showing his films. Michel was extremely excited. Afterward, we went up to Anger and Michel introduced himself saying he was a big fan. He was usually kind of cool and reserved. It was funny to see him act like a kid meeting a movie star.

I knew more about pop music than he did so I’d bring tapes over to play for him. He turned me on to harpsichord music, which I fell in love with. The music we both agreed on was Stan Getz and João Gilberto’s samba music, especially “The Girl from Ipanema.”

He took me to a poetry reading in North Beach given by a tall lanky guy from L.A. that he thought I’d like. Hearing him excited me more than anything. His poetry was like a friend of mine talking about their boyfriends and what band they’d seen the night before. I didn’t know you could write about things like that except in letters. All the other current gay writing I’d read besides porno stories was about fashion models or Ivy League college guys moving to New York and going to Fire Island, stuff that seemed completely foreign to me.

Sometimes I’d get moody and not feel like talking. When I didn’t have a boyfriend it was no big deal, I’d just keep to myself. But Michel noticed if I’d get quiet for a few days and he’d want to know what was bothering me. It was very difficult for me to talk about things when I wasn’t in a good mood. I couldn’t do it at first. I’d clam up. Even though there was a lot I wanted to say, I felt paralyzed. He said something really bad must have happened to me that would make me get like that. I thought about my dad and how we weren’t allowed to be angry around him when we were growing up. We were supposed to be grateful for what we had and how hard he worked for us even if we were lazy good-for-nothing kids who would never amount to anything.

It was difficult to talk about my emotions and what was going on inside my head, but I didn’t have much trouble talking about most other stuff. Like the night Michel took me to see the former Sixties fashion model and pop star Nico perform at a small nightclub in the Embarcadero. We were expecting some kind of ultrahip New York/European art rock star, probably dressed in black leather with bleached blond hair. Instead she had long brown hair that covered her face and was wearing a loose-fitting blouse that hid her body. She’d gained a lot of weight. She sat on the floor with her legs crossed at the front of the stage and nodded out in a heroin fog over her little harmonium while she sang. I thought she was still good even though she was so stoned, at least until she got mad at the audience. She yelled at us to shut up. She said we were too noisy. Then, after only her second song, she left the stage and refused to come back out. The concert promoters apologized and sent everyone home.

Michel was sad afterward because Nico was fat and so stoned. It was cool and windy out as we walked through the tall grey buildings of the Embarcadero and on up Market Street back towards his apartment. I tried to cheer him up. We were holding hands until we saw a man and a woman in business clothes walking arm-in-arm towards us. They saw us holding hands. They saw us let go when we noticed them, too.

“You don’t understand,” Michel said. “Nico used to be so beautiful. She was my idol in my early twenties. She was more than a pop goddess.”

“Something like Deborah Harry was to me? I loved Deborah Harry. In fact, I’d still love to see her again in concert. I’ll never forget the time Blondie played in Kansas City when I was back there visiting. I drank a pitcher of beer before they came on and I had to pee really bad but couldn’t stand to miss a second of seeing Deborah Harry sing. I was miserable and afraid I was going to pee my pants but refused to go to the bathroom because I couldn’t stand the thought of missing any part of her show.”

“No, Joe!” Michel cut me off. “Nico is nothing at all like Deborah Harry. Nico is a real artist! Not some poseur.”

“Deborah Harry was a real artist, too.” I put my arm around his shoulders but he pulled away.

“Bah! She’s just a fashion doll with a cute voice. That’s it. She’s over already. Nico’s music will last.”

“Well, what are you talking about, ‘fashion doll’? Isn’t that what you love so much about Nico, that she was a model first before becoming a singer?”

“Nico’s real. Her art comes from her soul. Blondie’s just about making money. Period. That’s it. Nico started out as a pop star and went on to be something better.”

As we walked up Market Street towards the Civic Center, Michel and I argued about who was more of a pop goddess: Nico or Deborah Harry. He ended it by saying I could keep my Deborah Harry. He didn’t want to hear any more about Nico being reduced to some pop culture figure. She was much more to him than that. We were mad at each other. It was our first real fight.

Not long after that, I started to get restless. I was feeling strong and independent, maybe a little too arrogant, and tired of our routine. I felt like I was falling out of love since I didn’t feel that rush of excitement anymore with Michel. It seemed to me like it was over between us. The flame wasn’t there. When I was with him it felt more like we were friends, like when I was with James and Felipe, than it did when we first met and I was madly in love with him. After a lot of worrying and debating in my head, I decided to tell Michel that I didn’t think I was in love with him anymore. It was over between us. I tried to tell him a couple of times but got too nervous. He was going to yell at me and I didn’t want to upset him. Finally, I realized I had to be honest with him. The night I told him, just before I made my announcement, I went in the bathroom, looked myself in the eyes, then took a deep breath and walked into the kitchen where he was sitting at the table. I told him I thought I wasn’t in love with him anymore.

I could tell that caught him by surprise. He had a sincerely deep look of hurt on his face that I wasn’t expecting. I’d figured he probably could tell how I felt just by the fact that I’d been distant from him. After the initial surprise he seemed kind of sensible about it all.

“I think what’s happening to you is our ‘falling in love’ stage is ending. You don’t know that a lot of being in a relationship is just about regular everyday life together. The excitement does wear off, you know. Maybe we need a change. We can’t continue spending so much time cooped up in this tiny apartment.”

That didn’t sit right with me. By the time I’d gotten up the courage to discuss this with Michel, I’d already made up my mind that I was leaving him. He didn’t have the luxury of any kind of debate or conversation over the matter.

“Well, I know one thing, Joe. I’ll be fine without you. You’re the one who’s gonna have a harder time. I’ve got my research. I have something else in my life besides you.”

It didn’t end as easily as I thought it would. Michel and I continued seeing each other off and on for about six months. At first he didn’t want to sleep with me after I’d told him I wasn’t in love with him anymore. He got really mad at me for a while. Then I didn’t think it was a good idea to sleep together. We started sleeping around again, but we always seemed to wind up back in bed together. Sometimes I had regrets and thought maybe I’d opened my mouth too soon. But I wasn’t ready to settle down just yet. I went to the baths after not going since I’d met Michel. The adventure of it seemed to have disappeared. I preferred having sex with someone at home. Being with Michel had spoiled me.

I started spending more time at the apartment on Fair Oaks with James and Felipe. I also enrolled in classes at City College again so I was working full-time plus going to school. I kept busy. Ali was on his way back from Thailand via a trip around the world. I was dreading talking with him in person about the money I owed him but besides that was looking forward to him coming back. I didn’t want to live with him again. I was happy living with James and Felipe. They didn’t have as many dramas going on in their lives as Ali did. Plus, they didn’t bring home as many people all the time. I had settled into a routine that I liked of work, school, and hanging out with my friends. Whenever I thought of Ali wanting to come back and pick up where we’d left off, it made me anxious. I still loved him as one of my best friends, but my life was okay the way it was, without him.

FELIPE AND THE LIVE NAKED LADY

Felipe snipped sticky leaves off a big bud of killer pot from Humboldt County with a pair of toenail scissors. I packed Bustelo coffee into the stovetop espresso maker. Soon the kitchen filled with the smell of fresh coffee and the sweet perfume of marijuana. We sat at the Fifties-style kitchen table, grey Formica top with chrome legs, and slowly sipped our coffee while we smoked from a small red pipe. Once we were sufficiently buzzed Felipe started scrambling eggs, stirring in salsa, and heating up tortillas. James came swooshing in, grabbed a hit of pot and a small cup of coffee before rushing out the door. “You guys better hurry up or you’ll be late for work,” he yelled as he left. Felipe and James worked together, but James was more concerned about being punctual. He liked to get to work a few minutes early. Felipe and I didn’t care if we were a few minutes late. I was always a few minutes late whether I was stoned or not. It was my way of protesting having to go to work.

It was cool outside but we had the window open for fresh air anyway. The bright morning sun warmed up the kitchen. I could wear jeans to work so it wasn’t hard for me to get ready. James and Felipe had to wear suits and ties. They were in sales at the Liberty House department store, Union Square. I was still working in the word processing center of a big law firm, taking care of the printers, so I could dress more casual.

Felipe and I floated from our apartment to the Twenty-Fourth and Mission Street BART station, not talking much. While we were waiting for the train, I saw this guy who I was starting to notice around and was infatuated with.

I said, “Felipe, don’t look now but there’s my new lover.”

He said, “Where? Who?”

I pointed the guy out, standing down a few cars’ length from us. He had close-cropped hair and was wearing khaki pants that accented his curvaceous butt and a waist-length bomber jacket. He looked older than us, maybe five years or so.

Felipe wrinkled his face and said, “Gross, Joe, you don’t mean it! He’s such a clone.” He started pushing me, saying, “Go say hello to him. Go on. What are you afraid of?”

Not that Felipe would say hello if he was interested in the guy. The good thing about us was we had different taste in men so we never had to worry about being competitive or stealing someone from the other. Felipe liked guys his own age or even a little younger.

I started to get nervous. I wanted to acknowledge the guy. Maybe smile at him or something. Since I saw him once or twice a week on the way to work there was a possible chance of actually meeting him. So, of course, I acted like I didn’t see him. I could be completely outgoing, warm, and friendly as long as I wasn’t sexually attracted to someone. When sex came into the picture I clammed up. All my neuroses and insecurities came to the forefront. I was sure that guy would see everything wrong with me. I tried to remember to stand up straight. I brushed my hair back with my hands. I was dressed all wrong. I shouldn’t be wearing such bright-colored clothes. I’m too crazy. He wouldn’t like me. I’m too tall.

The BART train whooshed into the station. The doors slid open and we shuffled in. I had my favorite seat, the third one back on the left. I hurried before someone who didn’t care where they sat beat me to it. Felipe was right behind me. The guy I wanted got into the car ahead of ours. When the train took off, all my thoughts about him were left behind at the station. Even though I rode BART almost every day I was always amazed at how much it was like riding in an airplane instead of public transportation. It was clean, quiet, the seats were padded and not ripped up. There was no graffiti. It wasn’t till I settled in and started looking around at the other people going to work that I realized how stoned I was. I looked at Felipe and he nodded to me, his eyes half-open and bloodshot. I realized my eyes probably looked the same.

We poured out of the train at the Powell Street station with thousands of other workers. The flow of people riding up the escalator and marching down the white space-age-looking hallway covered with bubble tiles started to make me feel claustrophobic. I pulled Felipe’s arm and asked him to slow down so everyone could go by us. A minute later the station was almost empty. As we walked through the hallway I ran my hand along the cool wall. I rarely paid attention to the station but that morning it seemed like the tiles had tennis balls planted underneath each one. I thought it was weird that someone would go through all the trouble to make tiles like that. We rode up one more escalator and then were out into the street. Liberty House, where Felipe and James worked, was right across from the station exit. I had to walk a few blocks to my job. We said see you later and went our separate ways.

After work I took a nap and didn’t hear Felipe and James come in. I woke up when I heard music blasting from the living room. It was Felipe’s favorite band of the moment, Pylon. They were part of the Athens, Georgia, scene. I went out to say hello. James and Felipe had changed out of their work clothes and were hanging out in jeans and sweatshirts. The room reeked of the pungent skunk weed that we smoked before work. Without even having to ask, James automatically passed the pipe over to me and I took a big hit from it. The smoke expanded in my lungs. I blew out a big cloud, took another hit, and then passed the pipe back to James. “Thanks,” I said, tight-lipped, trying not to let the smoke escape from my lungs.

Felipe was all excited. He made me guess what he had in his wallet. Two tickets to a surprise concert by Prince at the Stone, a small club in North Beach. I couldn’t believe he had tickets for it. I didn’t even know Prince was in town.

“How’d you get tickets?” I asked.

He said with a gleam in his eye, “I have my ways … special connections.”

James said, “Yeah, right, his ex-roommate Rhonda works two departments away from us at Liberty House’s ticket counter! That’s his special connection.”

I thought about it. I loved Prince’s song “Soft and Wet” that I used to listen to in New Orleans. That was one of my favorite songs. I had also worn out his Dirty Mind album. I hesitated before saying yes, though. Prince was kind of weird. He wasn’t New Wave and he wasn’t R&B.

“Well, don’t get too excited, Joe,” Felipe quipped.

“I know, I’m just not sure.”

Felipe said, “What are you going to do if you don’t go? Stay home and masturbate to your porno magazines again?”

James let out a laugh. “Get down, Felipe!”

He was right, I probably would do something like that. I said I’d go. The three of us started fixing dinner. We had a household arrangement where we all chipped in on food money, grocery shopping, and took turns cooking. James had made a big pot of lentil soup so we heated it up and ate it with fresh whole wheat bread from the People’s Bakery. After we ate I ran down to Abu-Dee’s, the corner store, and bought a six-pack of Budweiser to drink while Felipe and I got ready to go out. James had school in the morning and said maybe he’d meet us at the Stud later, but he doubted it.

Felipe made getting ready to go out half the fun of the whole night. He was in control of the stereo, playing the right records to get us in the mood. He played Prince’s Dirty Mind record once but didn’t want us to be burned out on it before we got to the show. I really loved the song “When You Were Mine.” I hoped Prince would sing that at the concert. Siouxsie and the Banshees was a favorite of Felipe’s so we got a good dose of them that night. He alternated Siouxsie with the Psychedelic Furs and Japan’s “The Art of Parties.” He changed outfits three or four times. They all looked almost exactly the same. In the end he looked kind of low-key, casual, like you’d never know it took him over an hour to decide what to wear. But getting the clothes right and getting his thick black hair to stand up like an overgrown flattop took time. We were kind of drunk and definitely stoned by the time we were ready to leave.

There was a line around the block on Broadway in front of the Stone. Word was out that Prince was doing a show and it seemed like half the town was there, trying to get tickets even though the show was already sold out. It was a small club so not many people could get in. We had to wait in line outside in the rain for over half an hour. Rhonda and Rudy pushed in line with us, which made me feel uncomfortable. I was sure everyone behind us was mad because they cut in. Rudy worked the makeup counter down the aisle from Felipe and James at the department store. He and Rhonda were all made up with glitter and ruffles. Rudy said he was going “New Romantic,” that New Wave was out now. Once we got inside we pushed our way through the crowd to the dance floor area in front of the stage. Behind us were three tiers of café tables. Before the show even started the place was filled with smoke. We worked our way right up to the stage.

Prince came out onstage in a cloud of a fog machine bathed in purple lights. He opened with my fave, “Soft and Wet.” Then he played a couple of songs off Controversy and Dirty Mind. We danced to the music but could barely move because we kept getting pushed closer and closer together by the crowd. Some girls behind us were standing in one place screaming and screaming. I told Felipe if Prince sings “When You Were Mine” that I was going to start screaming, too. A couple of songs later I heard the introductory chords and started screaming before Prince even opened his mouth. Felipe cracked up laughing at me and shoved me back towards the girls. Then Rudy started screaming, too. Felipe looked irritated or embarrassed and moved closer to Rhonda, like he didn’t know us.

I was disappointed because Vanity wasn’t with him. Instead he brought out a look-alike, Apollonia. Prince said he wanted to sing some songs off his new album that was going to be released soon. He played a long version of a song that sounded like a weird sci-fi soundtrack, “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute).” I looked over at Felipe. His eyes were shut. His head bobbed slowly to the beat. He was being transported by the music. Then Prince snapped us out of the trance by introducing his new single, “Little Red Corvette,” and the crowd went wild. Everyone but me, Felipe, Rhonda, and Rudy. We were kind of surprised that he would play something so commercial sounding.

After the Prince show was over, Felipe and I decided to walk across town from North Beach to the Stud, South of Market. It was summer but we were wearing our overcoats because of the cool foggy ocean air. We walked across Grant Street through Chinatown, which always felt like Christmastime to me because of all the hanging lights. When we turned and headed up Market Street I got it in my head that I wanted to show Felipe the porno place where you could Talk to a Live Naked Lady for a Quarter. It was a little bit out of our way, but we went up there anyway. The Tenderloin was known for its peep shows, drugs, drag queens, and sleazy environment. It looked scarier than it was. Lots of people on SSI were living in hotels, strung out on alcohol or dope. No one really bothered us except the occasional person wanting spare change or a cigarette.

The marquee outside the peep show had a huge neon sign with flashing light bulbs that said TALK TO A NAKED LADY FOR 25Ȼ. Felipe didn’t want to go in at first. He was giggling like a little kid.

I said, “Felipe, how often is it that you get to see a naked lady, much less talk to one? You can’t argue with the price.”

He said, “I’ll go in if you go with me, but first I want to smoke some more dope.”

We stood out on Taylor Street and lit up our pipe. We didn’t have to worry about the police stopping us, just some of the winos who might try to hit us up for a puff.

The place on the inside was dark. Rows of doors made of wood paneling painted black opened and shut. The closing doors made a slapping sound. Men came out from behind their cubicles and looked right through me. It was different than a gay peep show because there the men always looked directly at you, hoping to connect. Here it seemed more like they were embarrassed or else didn’t want to be pulled out of their fantasy. On the door outside of most of the booths, under a sheet of clear plexiglass, was the box cover to whatever Super 8 porn film was playing. Inside was a plywood closet with a little bench facing a white plastic screen about two feet square. It smelled of disinfectant spray. The floor was sticky. I found a booth with a picture of two men and a woman on the door and went in. I dropped a quarter in the slot that was lit up red. The little projector started whirring behind me and played onto the screen. The woman was naked and had a wig on so you wouldn’t recognize her. The guys were letting her take off their polyester print shirts. They both already had their flies open with their hard dicks snaking their way out of their slacks. Just when they started to get naked my time ran out. I could have put more quarters in, but I knew Felipe was kind of freaked out so I went out to check on him. He’d gone into a booth too but didn’t even finish his quarter. I don’t think he’d ever seen a woman’s crotch up close before.

He wouldn’t go into a booth by himself to talk to the live naked lady so he followed me into one. I stood in front of a screened window with Felipe close behind, put a quarter in the slot, and a black screen rolled up from bottom to top. Next to the money slot was a little speaker with a green button that you pushed to talk into and hear the naked lady. When the curtain came up there was a round rotating platform covered in gold short shag carpeting. The live naked lady was a girl about our age. She was dancing provocatively, blowing kisses at some of the other men who I could see dimly through their windows. She was saying stuff like, “What’s the matter? Are you shy? Don’t you like me?” At first she smiled at me, but when she saw Felipe standing behind me she shook her index finger at me like, No No.

Then she yelled, “Only one person in a booth at a time! Only one person! You’ve got to get out! Jerry, there’s two guys here in the same booth! Only one at a time!”

I spoke into the speaker and said, “Sorry, I didn’t know you had rules here.”

She shook her finger some more and stood up and pointed at us. “OUT!”

Felipe almost fell on the floor, he was in such a hurry to get out of the booth. A big doorman came over and said, “What’s going on?”

I said, “I just wanted to show my friend the naked lady.”

He said, “And you can’t spare another quarter? Get outta here.”

Felipe and I couldn’t get back out onto Taylor Street quick enough. Once we were outside we cracked up laughing. Not only did we get to see and talk to a naked lady, but we also got scolded by one! All for a quarter.

As we walked out of the Tenderloin and up Market Street, Felipe started talking about how great the Prince show was. I said I liked it all except that incest song, “Sister.” I couldn’t grasp “incest is best.” I told Felipe about my father. He tried to defend the Prince song by saying it was two consenting people, brother and sister, and not Dad forcing himself on my sister. I didn’t go into a lot of detail with Felipe and he didn’t ask a lot of questions. But it was a step towards deepening our friendship.

On the way to the Stud a carload of young white men pulled up next to us and slowly followed us. We tried not to look. One of the guys yelled, “Faggots!” and then someone threw a beer bottle at us. It smashed on the ground. Shattered glass bounced up and hit us on the legs. I mumbled “assholes” and Felipe said under his breath, “Joe, shut up, just pretend like they’re not here. Don’t give them anything.”

They followed us like that for another half block or so, making kissing noises and saying they sure could use a blow job right about now. We looked straight ahead, slowing down our pace. I was looking for a place to run. We were both bracing for a bashing. Then, as suddenly as they appeared, they gave it the gas and peeled out. We both sighed a huge breath of relief. I started telling Felipe how I was ready for a fight, that I was sick of being harassed for being gay. “You can’t even walk down the street without someone saying something,” I said. “And they’re such chickenshits because they wouldn’t do that if they were alone. It takes six of them.”

Felipe said, “Yeah, sure, Joe. I can really see you taking on six guys. You’d get the shit beat out of you. I’d rather take off running as fast as I could and pray to God they don’t catch up!”

He was right, but still I felt indignant. If Ali had been there I’m sure there would have been some kind of much scarier exchange.

Before getting to the Stud, we stopped at a corner store and bought tallboy Budweisers. We sat on a rail in a parking lot next to the store and chugged them. That way we had more of a buzz on when we got to the Stud and also saved some money, not to mention time waiting at the crowded bar for the bartender’s attention. Felipe pulled out his little red pipe and we smoked a few hits of pot. We were sufficiently high and more than ready to go into the Stud, our refuge, home away from home, the best party in town.

For a Tuesday night the place was surprisingly packed. After hanging out there for half an hour or so I decided to slip out and see what was going on at the Brig, a leather bar a few blocks up Folsom Street. I didn’t tell Felipe. He was having fun hanging out with friends, dancing, dishing. The atmosphere at the Brig was dark and serious. It smelled of leather and poppers. I cruised around for a little bit but got bored pretty fast so I went back to the Stud. I was glad to get back to the party atmosphere.

At closing time Felipe and I decided to walk home. We talked nonstop. We had to cross under a dark overpass with a six-lane freeway above us, exit ramps coming at us from both sides. After crossing we walked down Mission Street towards Sixteenth. We did that rather than walk Valencia Street past the Fourteenth Street Projects, a guaranteed trouble spot. I was staggering some. Felipe was freaked out because he’d seen his ex-boyfriend Mike with a new boyfriend. I thought they had ended it mutually between them but it turned out that Felipe was hurt. He just acted like it was all cool with him. At first I thought he was joking and I made some stupid crack that made him get quiet. That’s when I realized he truly was upset about Mike.

Felipe got kind of serious, almost gloomy. He said, “You know what, Joe? Not many people would admit it, let alone most gay men, including myself. But deep down inside I feel the need to share myself with someone. Sometimes I think I’m better off alone. I mean, think about how much time we waste wandering the streets looking for someone who has your name stamped on their forehead. Like that’s really going to happen. I think being gay means being alone. I mean, you might find someone to satisfy you sexually for a while, but it’s rare that you find someone that will satisfy you emotionally too.”

“God, Felipe, lighten up, why don’t you?” I said with a mild laugh. As soon as I said that, I realized it was the wrong thing to say. Felipe was pissed.

“Didn’t you hear what I just said, Joe?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Well, it’s not a joke.”

I tried to defend my response and then figured I was better off not saying a word. We agreed that we were glad we were friends and not lovers because sex ruins friendships. “I mean it, Joe,” Felipe said. “I’m glad you’re around.”

I said, “Yeah, me too. I mean I’m glad you’re around, too.” We walked on without saying anything.

ALI’S RETURN

Ali and I decided to hang out together, just the two of us. That’s what he said. But he had a couple of errands he wanted to do. The first was to visit some friends at the International Rescue Committee, where he used to work. I wasn’t really in the mood to go downtown to an office building on my day off but I went anyway. I was surprised how busy the office was for a Saturday afternoon. I knew a couple of people there from before he left so I wasn’t completely bored. Everyone was glad to see him. They gave him a hero’s welcome. One tiny Asian woman came out from the back and when she saw Ali she let out a big Ahhhh! She ran to him and hugged him like she wouldn’t let go. Then she started to cry and just held on. There was a lot of jabbering in Thai or Cambodian. He hugged her back gently for a while then started looking around like, “Help, she’s not letting go.” Finally, Ali peeled himself away from her. Some other Asian workers took him aside and asked him for all the news from the camps. He’d been traveling for about six months between quitting his job and returning to San Francisco so his news was old, but they still wanted to hear about friends and family.

The big boss of IRC was there working in his office. He saw Ali and came out and shook his hand. That surprised me because Ali used to be terrified of the man. Ali was always getting called on the carpet for something he’d done wrong, some mischief he’d gotten into. Now this guy was treating him like a colleague, not a troublemaker. I couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. To me Ali was still the troublemaker he’d always been. But these people were showing him respect. He was “somebody” to them. By watching them respond to him I realized he’d done something profound when he worked in the camps. He’d helped a lot of people. He had done more than getting high on dope and going to the beach like he’d told me about in his letters. He finally had a chance to put all his idealism to work. He seemed a bit more grown up to me.

After we left, I asked if he wanted to go have coffee in North Beach, then maybe go to our favorite Chinese restaurant, Woey Loey Goey. He said that first he wanted to drive by Twan’s, Ali’s boyfriend before he left to work in the camps. He said he was too nervous to talk to him, but he just wanted to go by the house. I didn’t want to do that at all.

“I thought we were going to have a ‘special day’ together,” I complained.

Ali batted his eyelashes. “Joe, just being with you makes it a special day.”

“Yeah, right, you’re so full of shit.” I laughed.

Here we were on one of Ali’s escapades, once again, with me tagging along like I didn’t have anything better in the world to be doing, grumbling to myself the whole time.

Twan lived with his family out in the Avenues, on the Richmond side of Golden Gate Park. It was late afternoon when we got to his house. Ali parked down the street a ways so we wouldn’t be noticed. He said he just wanted to sit there for a while. Twan’s block dead-ended a couple of blocks down. Through some trees I could see a glimpse of the very top of the Golden Gate Bridge. The fog was starting to roll in.

After what seemed like forever, but I think was more like ten minutes, I started to feel foolish. The VW felt too small. There wasn’t enough legroom for me to get comfortable. It would have been okay, but Ali was in another world. He smoked one clove cigarette after another. I hated the smell of clove cigarettes and opened my window a crack. At least his radio worked. I turned it on and tuned it in to KSOL. “Just Be Good to Me” by the S.O.S. Band was playing. I started singing along under my breath. Then “Juicy Fruit” by Mtume came on. “Juicy, mmm, fruit…” Ali looked at me out of the corner of his eyes and said, “I can’t believe you know the words to these songs. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed—you and pop music.” Then he turned back to watching for any sign of Twan. I put my black Derby jacket on to stay warm. I loved that jacket. It’s what the “cholo” gangs wore in the Mission. Ali came back to reality. “Just think, everywhere else it’s summer and here we have to put on warm clothes.”

Even though it made me nervous, I decided while we were sitting there that we could at least talk about my taking the money from his account. Ali had been in town three days and neither one of us had mentioned a word about it. I dreaded the conversation. I knew he was pissed off. But, I figured it was better to get it out in the open than not talk about it. We’d have to eventually, so why not get it over with? I felt someone looking at me from behind and turned around. On the back seat of Ali’s VW were all his stuffed animals, lined up in a row and staring at me. They were the jury. I was guilty. I took money from their daddy. The old handmade bunny rabbit looked the most disappointed in me. I’d never liked that rabbit. I turned back to Ali. I couldn’t put it off any longer. The silence between us was driving me crazy.

I felt the blood leaving my face as I said, “Look, Ali, ummm, I’m really sorry about your money. I’m gonna pay it back, I prom—”

He held up his hand and cut me short. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I can’t talk about that right now. I have to see if Twan’s home. I need to concentrate.”

Ever since Ali left to work in the camps, he had been obsessed with Twan. Twan felt like Ali broke up with him when he went to Thailand. But Ali still loved him; it’s just that his job at the time was more important. He’d always asked me about Twan in his letters. I didn’t have that much contact with him. I’d called him once to say hello as a favor for Ali. One time James and I bumped into him at the Midnight Sun bar on Castro Street. But besides that I hadn’t seen him. I’d always thought Ali’s obsession was a waste of time, but at that moment I was glad for the distraction. At least I’d tried to talk about the money. At least I brought the subject up.

I opened the glove compartment and found the same envelope full of photos of his friends, cats, and family back in Missouri that had been in there for years. It reminded me of the time we got pulled over in Kansas City for running a stop sign, right before we moved to New Orleans. We were fucked-up on dope that night and were holding both a syringe and heroin. But we were only going a few blocks. We were pretty scared. Ali got so nervous that he pulled the pictures out of the glove compartment and looked at them over and over while the cop was calling in our IDs over the radio. The cop let us go. He told Ali to pay more attention to what he was doing.

As the neighborhood got darker from the fog, a light came on in Twan’s house. The front curtains were shut so we couldn’t see in. We’d been there about fifteen minutes. Just sitting. Finally I said, “Look, Ali, this is ridiculous. Let’s go. Aren’t you getting hungry? I thought we were going to Chinatown. I can’t sit here any longer. Come on.”

Ali blew out a big cloud of cigarette smoke. “Yeah, sorry, Joe. I just had to see. He wouldn’t talk to me on the phone yesterday when I called. I know he was home.”

He started up the Bug and the car jerked when he shifted gears. I looked at the stuffed animals. They’d been knocked over. All except that fucking rabbit. It still stared at me accusingly.

We had dinner at Woey Loey Goey. We knew it was one of the worst restaurants in Chinatown, but we’re both sentimental so we didn’t even care that the food was bad. It was the first Chinese restaurant we went to when we moved to San Francisco. The one that’s down in a basement. Round silverware containers filled with plastic chopsticks sat on each table along with a red-capped bottle of soy sauce. There were two spouts on opposite sides of the cap, which I could never figure out. Why two spouts? The walls were dirty yellow. I ordered Tomato Beef Chow Mein because it reminded me of Chinese spaghetti. Ali had the Vegetarian’s Delight. He thought my meal was gross looking. “How can you eat that shit?”

Over dinner we weren’t talking about the money and the silence was getting too loud. I said, “Look, Ali, can we talk about the money now?”

He immediately proposed a plan that he’d obviously thought of already. He said I should pay him a hundred dollars a month until I pay him off. I owed him eight hundred dollars. I agreed to the plan. It would be tight financially for me, but I could do it. After we talked about how bad I felt and how freaked out he was, we finally start to relax around each other. Really relax. When we left the restaurant, Ali put his arm around me as we walked up the street. It felt kind of like possession to me, like he was claiming lost merchandise. I’d never liked public displays of affection, he knew that, but he always kissed me or put his arm around me or something. I wasn’t embarrassed about being gay in public, it was more about being affectionate in public. Right then it didn’t matter so much.

We left Chinatown and went over to the Castro and barhopped. We debated about whether we were having “cocktails” or “highballs” since it was still early. Then we went home and took a nap before going out to a big party I knew about. It was in a warehouse South of Market. The place was filled with lots and lots of sexy guys. They were playing dark, moody disco music. There was a coat check so we didn’t have to drag our jackets around with us. Ali treated me like I was his date. He held my hand, walking me through the crowd like I was “his.” He hugged me and kissed me on the lips. We were having fun. We were kind of pretending, but at the same time we were definitely together that night. Guys were looking at us like they’d love to have a three-way or something. Ali had his YALE T-shirt on that’s too tight and too short, and showed off his hairy belly button. His jeans hung low on his hips. You could see his tan line, but no underwear. Black army boots. Very sexy. I was wearing my favorite blue Koratron perma-press slacks and my tight orange T-shirt that was starting to wear thin. It had some holes around the neck. I had on my brown pointed-toe thrift-store loafers that had leather soles, and when I danced in them, I floated across the floor. We danced together, funky, erotic. When Ali danced, he would do this seductive move that was a toned-down version of what he did when he was in drag. He would lower his eyes, pooch his lips, and then look up at me through his long eyelashes. We danced to the original version of “Warm Leatherette,” not Grace Jones’s version. The one with the guy singing about being in a car crash with a petroleum tear dripping from your eye.

We were smoking a joint while dancing and Richard Locke, the big Daddy porno star, danced over to us. I thought I’d seen him earlier, but then thought it was just my imagination. He asked if he could have a hit. I passed him the joint. He danced with us for a while as the three of us smoked the joint. He had a full dark beard with two white stripes running parallel from both corners of his mouth down his chin. He was big, as tall as me, but not a bodybuilder, just beefy. I had seen him in movies like El Paso Wrecking Corp. and Kansas City Trucking Co. I was so excited I could hardly look at him. He was someone I’d fantasized about so many times and there he was right next to me, smoking pot with me! Instead of being my usual friendly self, I clammed up. I always did that when I was attracted to someone. Everyone else I could talk to with no problem. I felt self-conscious. When we finished the joint he rubbed my stomach and said, “Thanks a lot, guy.” He looked me deep in the eyes, then dissolved off onto the crowded dance floor.

“Oh my God, do you know who that was?” I asked Ali.

He didn’t. He had no idea I had been so traumatized and excited just then. To me it was like meeting a Hollywood movie star.

“Gross,” Ali said. “I can’t believe someone that big, ugly, and old could be in porno movies.”

That night when we got home Ali asked if he could sleep with me instead of in the little guest room on the back porch. We fell asleep in each other’s arms, drunk and happy to be together. In the middle of the night we woke up and had sex. I fell back asleep and had another of my nightmares about my dad raping my sister. He was like a big mean bear in a business suit. I jumped on his back trying to get him away from her. I tried to scream but no sound would come out. Ali woke me up because I was moaning.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Oh, God,” I mumbled. “I was dreaming about my dad and sister,” I answered only half-awake.

He said, “Are you still having those dreams?”

I didn’t answer, just fell back asleep. Ali was the only person who knew that I’ve had nightmares about my dad and my sister off and on for years. Plus, he’s the only one I knew who knew both of them. At that moment I was so glad he was there.

In the morning we fixed a huge breakfast of Mexican eggs, tortillas, salsa. Felipe did the cooking. We had Bustelo coffee and smoked some primo pot. It was another beautiful California day.

THE CAULDRON

Ali continued sleeping in my room after that night so there was no place at home for me to be alone and quiet. I needed a break. I wanted to be alone. Not only had I been around too many intense people that month, I was also working at a fast-paced, demanding job and had started two evening classes at City College (Intro to Computers and Conversational French I). I needed a night alone where the only voice I would hear was my own. I decided to go to the Cauldron, an S&M sex club in one of the many converted warehouses South of Market. No one else I’d been hanging out with would want to go there. I wasn’t interested in playing around with anyone. I just wanted to go somewhere and be anonymous. I called going out by myself my “Margaret Mead social studies outings” because I’d put myself out in the middle of the natives, but all I’d do for the most part was sit back, watch, and take mental notes.

At the Cauldron there were cans of Crisco for lubricant placed conveniently throughout the warehouse. The place was lit with only a few soft beams of light shining down from the ceiling. Off to one side, there was a bathtub with a man lying in it, fully clothed, while other men stood shoulder to shoulder around the tub pissing on him. He stayed in the tub the entire time I was there, getting his clothes soaked with urine. A lot of people, including myself, used him as a regular urinal. Beyond the tub were lots of other little attractions. I watched a naked guy in a leather sling. He had his legs up and wrapped around chain supports while someone else dipped a hand in a tub of Crisco then slowly slipped it inside the guy’s butt. Other men walked around the club looking normal in their blue jeans and T-shirts, only their cocks were hanging out of their jeans. Scattered here and there along the perimeter walls were leather boys butt-fucking standing up, bracing themselves with their hands against the wall like they were getting arrested. Other guys leaned back against the walls while they got blow jobs. Along with current New Wave music being played, there was some dramatic symphony blasting from the speakers. That made me laugh. It seemed so ironic that this bold classical music was blaring away while this decadent scene was happening. Not only that, but a lot of the clientele seemed to know the music. The mood actually perked up when the classical music came on.

For me, being in that environment was meditative. I would wander to different parts of the warehouse, and check out the different scenes, looking for a place out of the way, in the shadows, to stand. Watching all that sex pulled me out of my world. I wasn’t worried about what Ali was up to or how much work I had to do or how it seemed like everything was all too much at the moment. A few guys tried to start something with me but I just slipped away. Instead of thinking about myself for a change, I just looked at what was going on around me, at everyone getting into this raunchy night of sex. I started thinking about the men there and wondered why they liked what they did. How come regular sex wasn’t enough for them? Why did they like to do it in public like that? What was that guy in the sling thinking? Was it really okay for anyone who wanted to fist him?

This was about the time when people were beginning to get sick with Gay Cancer. It was the start of my awareness of the possibility of passing viruses besides regular VD. Gonorrhea and syphilis were fairly common and weren’t such a threat. All you had to do was go down to the VD clinic and get tested. If it turned out you’d caught something they’d give you a shot and it would be gone. No big deal. Everyone caught the Clap at least once. At one point I imagined what it would be like if I had special glasses, like 3-D movie glasses, that would light up all the germs in the warehouse. I saw a bright red light spread around the floor like a spill in one corner. Along one wall I saw a puddle of turquoise blue light. There was a bright green puddle running across the floor into a drain.

The highlight of my visit was when I followed a muscular man around and watched what he did. He knew I was watching him. I didn’t want to do it with him, just observe. He started getting off on doing things with other guys while watching me watch him. I groped myself through my jeans while he stood a few feet away and let men run their hands all over his body and go down on him. He would be getting into it then look up to see if I was still there. Towards the end of the night I stood against one of the walls, in between guys getting and giving blow jobs, and jerked off. I came onto the floor and it mixed in with everyone else’s cum.

I stayed longer than I should have. I didn’t leave when I’d had enough. I stayed until it started feeling sick there, like I was ODing. What was a pleasurable, decadent experience became gross, too much. I had the uncomfortable feeling like I’d overeaten. I knew it wasn’t good for my soul. I should have left the first time the thought occurred to me. But, the way I did things was to run it into the ground. I’d try to squeeze every bit of fun out of everything even when it was obvious the good time was way over.

I finally walked up to Market Street at about three in the morning to wait for the J Church streetcar back home. The K Ingleside came. That meant it would be half an hour before the J Church. So, I took the K to Dolores and Market and then walked the rest of the way. I was scared walking past Dolores Park late at night. There were stories of gays getting beaten up or killed around there. I took my chance anyway. I walked up the steep Dolores Street hill. We always said as long as we lived in San Francisco we’d have great butts because of all the hill climbing we did. That was an exceptionally good hill for shaping and firming. Nothing happened. Even for a Saturday night it was pretty quiet. I guess the police were sticking to the park curfew.

The exercise and the late-night air cleansed me of all the grossness I’d felt from staying too long at the Cauldron. It purged me. I was glad I’d gone out. I had been feeling like a pressure cooker and that night let the steam out. I loved wandering around, both inside and outside the club, on my own. Not talking to anyone else. Not having to decide what we were going to do, where we were going to go. Not listening to how anyone felt or thought about anything. I wasn’t being yelled at like at work or lectured to like in school. The only voice I’d paid any attention to that night was my own and I tried not to do that as much as possible. It felt good to be able to go somewhere and space out and be alone, relaxing.

JANUARY 1983. I THINK I HAVE GRID.

My supervisor at work was mad at me. It was early January 1983, just two weeks after Christmas, and I was already using one of my five sick days for the year. My job was being the printer tender in a legal word processing center. I babysat three big printers feeding continuous form paper through them, unjamming them, changing ribbons and print wheels. Each printer had a large wooden and plexiglass hood over it to muffle the sound. My main job was to tear the printed documents from the continuous form paper, tear the perforated edges off, and then separate each sheet individually. After that procedure I’d attach the document to the rough draft the word processing operator had brought to me and call the attorney’s secretary to tell them their document was ready. On top of that I answered the phones, sent telexes and rapicopies. Rapicopies were like faxes only the paper wrapped around a drum, and then as the drum spun around and around, an electric eye read the print and sent it over the wire. Incoming rapicopies were printed out on thermal paper. My last duty was the OCR machine. Optical Character Reader. It was the size of two washing machines with a tiny black-and-white monitor and a big tray to feed the document into. The electric scanning eye slowly went back and forth over each line until the page was read, then it would show up on the screen. After making corrections on the screen, because the OCR never read clearly, I could either print out the document to paper tape or save it to a seven-inch floppy disk. I was on my feet all day. I did all of this at just above minimum wage. My co-workers told me to hang in there because if I learned everything, then I could move into a word processing slot and make a lot more money.

But that day my supervisor was mad at me for calling in sick. The temp she’d called in had no idea what he was doing, so on top of covering for me she had to work with an imbecile. She wasn’t known for her patience. She didn’t believe that I was really sick. But I was. I’d had a horrible flu. I’d gone to work with it for three days and it just kept getting worse. Plus, I had a dry cough that wouldn’t go away. I felt guilty calling in, even though I really was sick. I told my supervisor I was sorry but I just couldn’t come in. She warned me that this wouldn’t look good on my record.

After I got off the phone with her I got back in bed. I tried to go to sleep but my cough wouldn’t let me. I didn’t feel like reading. I wanted to watch TV, but if I did I’d have to move into the living room and get on the couch. That was too much trouble. I turned the radio on and listened to top-forty R&B for a while until it started echoing in my head. My body ached. I couldn’t get comfortable. The worst was my dry cough that wouldn’t go away. Cough medicine only helped for a little bit. Drinking water soothed it just while the water went down. Tea was too much trouble to get up and make. I think it was postnasal drip that started the cough. It went down in my chest for a little while and then cleared up except for this tickle in the back of my throat. I tried to scratch it with the back of my tongue but it was too far down.

I lay there following the cracks in the ceiling with my eyes. I liked to squint to see if I could see any cartoon faces made by the cracks. Sometimes I could. That day my eyes were too watery. Everything blurred. I could tell it was going to be a long day. I reached to my pile of porno magazines at the side of the bed. None of them interested me. I picked up the B.A.R. (Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco’s gay newspaper) and started flipping through it. There was another article about how more people were showing up with Gay Cancer. It said the symptoms included red splotches on your body that usually first appeared on the soles of your feet, flu-like symptoms, and a persistent dry cough. I read that over again. Flu-like symptoms and a persistent dry cough.

My heart sank. I had flu-like symptoms and a persistent dry cough. What if I was coming down with the Gay Cancer? I couldn’t, I thought. I was too young. I was twenty-six and most of the men who were getting it were in their thirties and forties. The paper said they thought it was tied in to doing poppers. I’d done poppers a bunch of times, but I wasn’t a freak about them. It’d been probably a year since I’d snorted any at all. I started thinking about the red spots. I didn’t have any as far as I knew but thought maybe I should double-check. I got out from under my covers and pulled down my insulated underwear to check my legs. Nothing unusual. Then I pulled off my socks to check my feet. The soles looked okay. There was nothing on the top of my feet. Then something caught my eye. On the tip of my right big toe was a small red spot. I gulped. I brought my knee up to my chest and looked at my toe closely. It looked like a blood blister or maybe a mole. On closer inspection it wasn’t a mole because whatever it was was under the skin. There was no raised bump. I had a red spot on the tip of my toe that I’d never noticed before.

Red spot. Flu-like symptoms. A persistent dry cough. I got back under the covers. I pulled them up to my neck and curled up onto my side in a fetal position. I couldn’t have it. I just couldn’t. But what if I did? My nose started running. I pulled a Kleenex out of a packet on my bedside table and blew it. That made me start coughing. Then I knew it must be true. As I lay there I started thinking about what it would be like if I were to die. I couldn’t die. I hadn’t done anything with my life yet. I was just getting started. But what if I was to die? I got still at that thought. What if I was going to die? Well, I guess I’d die. I’d have to be grateful for the life I’ve led and just leave it at that. Not much I could do about it. Then panic set in. I didn’t want to die. If anything I wanted to move to New York, but I was having enough trouble just paying my rent, so that wasn’t in the near future. I’d never been to Europe. I hadn’t finished college.

I hadn’t prayed in a long time but decided this was the time to do it. I was a little rusty but started in anyway. “Dear God, please don’t let me die. I don’t want to have the Gay Cancer. If you’ll let me live I promise I’ll quit doing drugs and live my life better. I’ll shape up and learn a job skill that will help other people. God, if you let me live I’ll do whatever you want me to do. Just let me know. Thanks.”

I knew it was a desperate plea, but I meant every word of it. I would gladly give up drugs in order to live longer. I was getting kind of tired of them anyway. I’d gone overboard during the holidays with speed, heroin, and drinking. I probably caught that flu, if it was just the flu, from being so run-down. But at least all I had done since the holidays was smoke pot and I didn’t really consider that doing drugs.

I started thinking about my life. After moving away from home and such a strict, mean father, I was totally undisciplined. I roamed around the US, hitch-hiking and taking drugs and learning about being gay from the street-level on up. I’d taken lots of drugs in my life. I was fourteen when I started. I’d never thought of myself as real promiscuous, but in retrospect, I realized that I’d gotten around. But finally, I was starting to settle down. I’d lived in the same apartment for two years, which was a record for me. I had a real nine-to-five job where I was learning something. And I was taking a film class at City College. Things were getting good. I couldn’t be dying yet. Not when life was just starting to look up. If I was going to die, at least I felt okay spiritually. I wasn’t a born-again Christian or anything like that, but I felt like after all the shit I’d been through I’d made some kind of peace with God. Not the God I was raised with, but the God that I felt comfortable with. The one who helped me out rather than condemned me.

I’d probably been lying there worrying like that for over an hour when the phone rang. It was Ali. He asked what was going on. I told him I was sick and he said, “Oh too bad,” that he was going to the beach and wanted to know if anyone at our house wanted to go with him. I told him I was the only one home.

“What’s the matter with you? Your voice sounds weird.”

I hesitated. “Promise not to tell anyone?” I asked. “I think I might be getting the Gay Cancer.”

He was quiet. “What makes you think that?”

“Well, for one thing, I’ve got flu-like symptoms, a persistent dry cough, and there’s a red spot on the tip of my toe. It’s all the stuff they say to look out for.”

“Have you been to the doctor?”

“No.” That thought hadn’t even occurred to me.

“Listen, Joe, why don’t I come by and get you and drive you over to UCSF hospital? They have a sliding scale and will see you for next to nothing.”

“Will you come with me?”

“Maybe. I’ll think about it. I really want to go to the ocean today.”

He didn’t stay with me at the hospital but went on to the beach. He gave me a kiss when I got out of his VW and told me I’d be okay, to quit worrying. I filled out all the necessary forms at the clinic then waited for about an hour before someone called me back into a small examining room. They had me take off my clothes except my underwear and socks and put on a hospital gown. Then I waited, sneezing and coughing, for about ten more minutes. A young doctor came in with three even younger student doctors all holding clipboards in front of them. They were about my age and I felt kind of embarrassed. He asked me what was the matter. I told him I had flu-like symptoms, a persistent dry cough, and a spot on my foot. He said yes, there is a bad cold going around. Then he asked to see the spot. I took off my sock and pulled my foot up on the examining table. The doctor looked at it closely.

“I think I have the Gay Cancer,” I blurted out.

As soon as I said it I felt stupid. The doctor looked up at me over the top of his glasses. The students looked shocked. Suddenly I felt sleazy. Now they knew I was a homosexual. They knew that I had anal sex. They were wholesome and clean-cut and going to medical school, and I was this street trash at a free clinic who thought he had Gay Cancer. The doctor didn’t say anything. Instead he touched the spot on my toe. He showed it to the students and let one of them touch it. That scared me. They knew something I didn’t.

The doctor listened to my chest and then put his hand on my shoulder and told me he didn’t think it was Gay Cancer. He said he thought it was the bad cold that was going around, which had developed into a mild case of bronchitis. He looked me in the eye and said that I would know if it was Gay Cancer. He said I would get much sicker much faster and the spots would be bigger. To him, the spot on the end of my toe looked like some kind of a blood blister or liver spot. He told me he understood my concern. A lot of other people were coming in to get checked out, too. But I shouldn’t worry. “By the way,” he said, “we’re calling it GRID now.”

He made me feel better. Not so sleazy. He wrote out a prescription for codeine cough syrup and told me not to drink it all at once. Then the four of them left me there sitting on the side of the examining table feeling like a fool. It was kind of embarrassing and humiliating, like I was crying wolf. Still, I didn’t completely believe that I was okay.

I went home and drank half the bottle of cough syrup and felt much better. I was hugely relieved, like a giant weight had lifted off my shoulder. I remembered my prayer to God and said a thank-you prayer. Ali called me later that night to tell me that his friend Madeleine had the same cough and he was pretty sure it was just the flu that was going around. I told him that’s what the doctor said, too.

“Joe, you worry too much.”

SPRING FIESTA AND TALENT SHOW

The Fair Oaks Boys, as Felipe, James, and I were called, were known for having fun parties. There was the “Fellini Party” where the guys wore white suit jackets, the women cocktail dresses, and everyone had on sunglasses à la Marcello Mastroianni. We played Nino Rota’s Fellini soundtrack music as well as the easy listening records of Martin Denny and Les Baxter. We stood around sipping highballs until we couldn’t stand up any longer. Sometimes I would have small parties and invite people over to show Super 8 movies that I’d made in film class. I called those “Home Movie Nights.” Our apartment was great for parties. It had a big kitchen and living room and a long hall with bedrooms where you could have smaller parties away from the big one. It was early March and flowers were just starting to bloom. It had been a while since we’d had a party, so we decided to throw a big Spring Fiesta. We added the idea of having a costume ball and talent show and it became the first (and only) of our Annual Spring Fiesta Costume Ball and Talent Shows. We printed up flyers announcing the Fiesta and took them to the Stud the week before the party and handed them out to people if we liked the way they looked or if we knew them. We mailed some out and carried the flyers around all week passing them out to friends.

The day of the party was one of the few times James ever did speed. Someone gave him a line at work and when he came home he blew up one hundred balloons. Then he covered the entire floor of the apartment with confetti and replaced all the light bulbs in the hallway and living room with colored lights. Felipe and I twisted two-toned crepe paper streamers and strung them up from the old brass chandelier in the living room to each corner. Felipe hung some Mexican Christmas decorations from the chandelier. Putting up decorations made it feel like we were really doing something big. I started to get nervous and excited. Nervous because what if no one showed up or just a few people did and the party was a dud? And excited because it felt like it was going to be a great time.

The three of us went to the liquor store at Twenty-Second and Dolores Street. We ordered a keg of beer to be delivered and bought about a hundred dollars’ worth of liquor and ice. That was a lot to us then. A lot to spend and a lot of liquor. It went really fast at the party though. Fortunately, most people brought stuff, too. We also bought bags and bags of tortilla chips and James made a big bowl of guacamole. There were other chips, too, and carrot and celery sticks. It all went fast.

Before anyone got there we started the night off with a toast to each other. We drank Cuervo Gold tequila. Tequila was my “get crazy” drink. Vodka kept me cool and calm. But that night I wanted to party. James, Felipe, and I did two shots each and then the doorbell started ringing. Felipe’s friend Dwight brought over some mushrooms so we chewed them up. They tasted terrible, like dirty tree bark. But I got them down with the help of a beer. He said it’d take an hour or so before we felt anything.

The flyer we passed out said the talent show started at 9:00 p.m. Two people showed up by 9:00. I had this sinking feeling that no one was going to come. We joked that if no one comes then we’d have lots of liquor to last us through the weekend! By 9:30 the living room was filled. The talent show started at 9:45. A guy who worked with James and Felipe did a drag number to “Respect” by Aretha Franklin with two of his friends as backup singers. Patrick, a friend from my job, did a slow Bette Midler song, “Drinking Again,” and everyone cheered. James almost had a heart attack when two guys we didn’t know got up and did a tap dance routine on our beautiful dark hardwood floor. He whispered to me, “The landlord’s going to kill us!” Then Sam Smith suddenly jumped up off the couch, yelled “Judy lives!” then passed out for the rest of the party. We put him in my bedroom on the bed. That was supposed to be the coat room. I checked on him every once in a while to be sure he wasn’t buried under a pile of coats. Later that night, when the party was in full swing, I had a small intimate party with friends in my bedroom. We passed a vial of coke around and smoked a joint. We were all sitting on my bed around Sam. He was as completely oblivious to us as we were to him.

The talent show was the early party. It ended around ten thirty and everything was kind of mellow and fun, nothing wild. Then around eleven a lot more people started to arrive. Word of mouth must have spread because soon people were showing up who the three of us didn’t know. As more and more guests arrived, a thick cloud of smoke formed throughout the apartment. Even though it was cool outside we had to open the windows to keep air circulating, and it was still stuffy. The bathroom was right across the hall from the front door so as soon as you walked in you could smell the keg of beer. Basically, by an hour into the party, the place smelled like a nightclub: tobacco, perfume, liquor, and marijuana.

The living room became the dance floor. Not too long into the party the receiver on the stereo blew out. By that time the apartment was so crowded and noisy that the only people who noticed just wanted to change the music because they didn’t like what was on. They didn’t realize nothing was on. I ran across the street to Neal Wilson’s apartment to see if I could borrow his receiver. He was doing coke with some friends so I had to be hospitable and sit and do some lines with them before he’d get up and unplug his receiver. When I carried the receiver back into the apartment the hallway was so packed I could barely get through to the living room. The mushrooms had kicked in full force and I felt like I was having to hack my way through a jungle to get through the crowd. Felipe saw me across the room and started laughing, which made me start laughing. Through all our giggles we finally got the receiver hooked up and put in a party tape that he and I had made especially for that moment. Once the music started up again everyone seemed happy.

The Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” was a big hit. Then Rick James’s “Super Freak,” the Gap Band’s “You Dropped a Bomb on Me,” Sheila E.’s “The Glamorous Life,” and “Body Slam” by Bootsy followed. The B-52s were always a party favorite so we played the entire first side of their second album.

In the middle of dancing I did my rap song to the instrumental side of “Rapper’s Delight” with Felipe and Dwight backing me up. The three of us were all nervous and excited. They made me mad because they started giggling and forgot their lines. Those mushrooms made me giggly, too, but I really wanted to do my rap. I should have followed my original instinct and said no to them when they asked to do it with me, but I thought it could be fun. We’d even rehearsed it a couple of times so it should have been easy to do. The mushrooms made it seem like it was a really important moment, like we were onstage even though we were in the middle of our living room, which at that moment was a crowded dance floor.

I started rapping, “I said hello, my name is Joe. What do you know? I know what’s right. I know what’s wrong. I know I’m gonna rap you this here song. Rap it up. Rap it down. Rap it all over this SF town.”

This cute girl I liked, Eileen from Parallel Martha modern dance group, yelled in my ear that I needed a mike so people could hear. I hadn’t thought of that. All that excitement about rehearsal and getting worked up over Felipe and Dwight, and then it turned out that most people couldn’t hear a word I was saying over the music. Oh well, it was still fun rapping while people were dancing.

Rudy came dressed in a black miniskirt, tight leopard-print top, bright red lipstick, and a black teased-out wig. Some guy in the kitchen was calling everyone “fags” and trying to pick a fight. Rudy pulled a steak knife out of the drawer and chased the guy down our back steps yelling, “Honey, don’t you mess with this drag queen! Go on now, get out of here, asshole!” He jabbed the knife at the guy, and the guy took off running down the back alley.

Lots of little parties were happening in each different bedroom. Lots of drugs. The Mutants, one of the best punk bands in the city, showed up. They blessed our party: if they came it was extra cool. Sally Mutant was our local hero. She was famous for falling off the stage and stuff like that during a concert. She was wearing a bad wig that made her look kind of scary.

The people in the apartment below us also had a party that night. They came up to see our party and we went down to theirs. The people in the building next to us on the corner had a party, too, and also some people up the hill. The police came and wanted to know how many people we had crammed in there and told us that we were going to have to keep it down. I wouldn’t let the cops in. It was a big flat and it was filled shoulder to shoulder. Definitely over two hundred people were there.

Enrique debuted his Tammy Wynette drag wearing a brown bubble-shaped wig, tight shirtwaist jacket, and capri pants. He carried one of Tammy’s records with him that had a picture of her dressed just like him on the cover. James did his Judy Jetson look with a lime-green minidress, bright yellow plastic cat-eye sunglasses, orange pumps, white wrist-length gloves, and Day-Glo jewelry. There was lots of good drag. Stevie went all out, dressing like a Barbie doll going to prom. His wig even had a big flip ponytail just like Barbie’s. Matt and Donny came dressed as vampires.

The climax of the party was when the entire hallway, living room, and kitchen were filled shoulder to shoulder with people and “Boogie Oogie Oogie” by A Taste of Honey came on the stereo. The whole place started singing along. No matter how cool or New Wave people thought they were, everyone knew that song and started moving to the groove. People were screaming, kissing strangers, snaking their way through the crowd, leaning against the walls, dancing in the living room. The floor of the entire apartment, from back porch to front bedroom, bounced up and down with a light spring.

The police came back a second time and told us to shut it down. The party started to thin out but didn’t really empty until about half an hour later when there was no more liquor. Then the apartment cleared out fast. It was about two in the morning. We were sitting in the kitchen, drunk and high and feeling good because the night had been such a success. Then we heard yelling out front. Felipe and I went outside to see what was going on. Some guy had followed a woman from our party up the street and tried to snatch her purse. She started screaming bloody murder and he ran off but not before the neighbors called the police. So there they were for the third time that night. I assured them that our party was over and everyone had left. A neighbor who came out to see what the commotion was all about said she’d lived on that block for twenty years and had never seen it that lively. Even the police noted what an odd coincidence it was that there were so many big parties on that corner all in one night. It must have been spring fever.

A guy none of us knew was the last to leave. He was drunk out of his mind and stood in the middle of the kitchen talking to himself while we were cleaning up. We kept dropping big hints that it was time for him to go and he’d say okay and then keep on talking. We started getting rude but he was oblivious. Finally, James and Felipe walked him to the front door then down the steps to the street and sent him on his way.

We cleaned up the kitchen and living room and James swept up confetti in the hallway before we went to bed. The colored lights looked so good in the living room chandelier that we left them in. We decided to save mopping for the next afternoon. The bright kitchen lights glared at me since I was still a little high from the mushrooms. James kept wondering why Ali didn’t stay very long at the party and did we think that beautiful young Billy, Matt and Donny’s new roommate, was Ali’s new boyfriend? Of course we did but James wouldn’t accept that as fact since he was still in love with Ali. We didn’t have any proof of it except why else would Ali be hanging all over him the way he was?

“The reason they didn’t stay,” Felipe said, “was because they probably went home to fuck.”

“Felipe! Girl! How can you say that?” James said, and popped him with a kitchen towel. James was teasing, acting like an innocent, but we all knew that’s exactly what they did.

We slept in the next day. That afternoon, James did a good mopping. Felipe and I searched for hidden spilled food and drinks, and swept up more confetti. A lot of it was stuck in the cracks between the floorboards and wouldn’t come up. Some was even ground into the wood floor by so many people dancing and walking over it. We were all extremely hungover.

Ali came over with Billy while we were finishing up and made Bloody Marys for us. I got out my Super 8 camera and made a black-and-white movie of the two of them fixing drinks and then making out on the living room couch. James gaily pushed the dust mop around the beautiful hardwood floors the whole time. He acted like it didn’t bother him that Ali brought over his new boyfriend. Felipe sneered at James like, See I told you so, and then announced, “James doesn’t need sex as long as he can clean.”

James stuck his nose in the air and pushed the dust mop up the hall and away from us. We cracked up laughing. I asked about a slightly older guy I’d never seen before who was at the party.

James piped in from the end of the hall. “There goes your ‘Daddy’ complex again.”

“I don’t have a Daddy complex. It’s a ‘scoutmaster’ complex,” I said kind of smugly. “My sixth-grade scoutmaster was my positive role model. He was tall, dark, and handsome and had a hairy chest. He encouraged me rather than treated me like I was weird, like a lot of people did when I was growing up.”

I was in a good mood and decided to call my parents on the spur of the moment. My dad answered with his impersonal cardboard voice and just passed the phone over to Mom. Before he did, he asked when I was going to come home. Mom and I talked for a while. I told her about the party and how much fun it was and how many people were there. She kind of laughed and said, “Oh my…,” when I told her the police came to tell us to quiet down or they’d quiet it down for us. She asked when I was going to come home. I told her I didn’t have the money or much vacation time. Maybe at Christmas. When I hung up I had that same weird feeling I always did after I called my parents. Like, why did I call just then? I was feeling good and wanted to share it with them but they just didn’t get it. They didn’t really know what to say to me, being open about being gay and having lots of drag queens at a party. They couldn’t get excited about what excited me and I felt disappointed. I didn’t know if I was disappointed in them or in their response. I was hoping for some kind of encouragement, or at least less distance.

James and Felipe tried to snap me out of it by teasing me. I said something about how both my parents asked when I was coming home, but told James and Felipe that seemed weird because I felt like I already was home. My parents were the ones who were someplace else. Their house wasn’t my home. They’d even moved from the house we lived in when I was in high school. Fair Oaks was my home. James and Felipe were my sisters, brothers, mother, father. I felt safe with them, something I never felt with my real father.

Felipe talked about the husband possibilities at the party and then got depressed. He told himself to be realistic, that he was never going to meet Mr. Right so why did he even bother?

James told both of us to get over it. We started exchanging stories of who did what at the party. Who was there. Who didn’t show up. Who was making out together. How did Sam Smith ever make it home?

Then the three of us went out for burritos and a long walk from Sixteenth and Valencia up through the Castro and back down. We walked by the Women’s Building as two heavyset women in oversized flannel shirts, blue jeans, with shoulder-length hair parted in the middle passed us.

“Dykes,” I mumbled.

“Muff munchers,” James said.

“Lesbeetians,” I said back to him and we started laughing.

“Shut up, you two,” Felipe snapped. “Don’t be so mean. They’re not bothering you.”

“No,” I said, “they’re not bothering us. Lesbians just don’t like us because we’re men. You saw the way they looked at us.”

Felipe gave me a sideways look like, What are you talking about? “No, I didn’t,” he said. “They hardly even noticed us. Besides, what do you mean ‘lesbians don’t like us’? If that’s true then why does Patsy call you from Seattle all the time? Why does Elena invite you to her parties? And what about that girl at the vibrator store around the corner from us? She loves you.”

“They’re different,” I say.

“Why?” Felipe asks. “What’s so different about them? Patsy still wears Earth Shoes for God’s sake, and every piece of clothing she owns is purple. If that’s not lesbian then I don’t know what is!”

I didn’t know what to say. Felipe was right. He’d caught me making a stupid remark and called me on it. I felt stupid. “Not all her clothes are purple” was all I could say.

When we got back home we were still energized from the party and wanted to do something but didn’t know what. We were also exhausted from not much sleep. We decided to have one of our Art Nights, where the three of us would go into our separate bedrooms and work on whatever we felt like. I had my old Royal typewriter on my little round black café table and would write letters. I was corresponding with the editor of Straight to Hell true-life-first-time-experience magazine, in the hopes of getting published. Felipe was doing color pencil portraits of people like Frida Kahlo, or a Mexican peasant woman with a shawl over her head. He was beginning to get more psychedelic, blending Mexican Indian patterns into the backgrounds. He would color in patterns and then polish the color with a cotton swab to make it shiny. James was working on shapes, design, and form. He loved doing little boxes like Joseph Cornell with maybe a ball or small toy placed off-center and some colored yarn making lines in space. He would get a cigar box and place a few sparse things in it just so.

An Art Night was just the thing to do the night after our party. It felt cozy in the house. It was comforting to know we were all there, working away. The apartment was glowing.

MEXICO CITY

Felipe’s grandmother was tired of living in California. She wanted to be old in her homeland. She was willing to give up all the luxuries of the States for the comfort of the familiar. His mother asked if he wanted to go back to Mexico City with them and he asked if I could go along. She thought that was a great idea, because then we could help carry all his grandmother’s heavy bags, plus the duffel bags filled with presents, mostly clothes, to all his cousins.

We stayed with Felipe’s aunt and uncle and lots of cousins way outside of the city in the State of Mexico. It was hard to tell where the city ended and the state began because it seemed like one big sprawl of cinder block houses with corrugated tin roofs. His cousins picked us up at the airport in a van and drove us to where they lived. To get there any other time from central Mexico City we had to take the subway to the last stop, then a diesel-powered school bus to its last stop, and then walk up over a big hill.

His little grandmother, Abuelita, with her long white pigtails, settled into the routine there in no time. Her job was to bring into the house buckets of water she boiled outside on a fire. When we wanted to shower we’d have to stand behind a shower curtain over a drain in the room that one day would be the indoor bathroom, then scoop hot water out of one of her buckets with a plastic cereal bowl and pour it over us. All of Felipe’s little nieces, nephews, and the family’s grandchildren took turns peeking around the curtain to watch me. They giggled and giggled because they couldn’t believe that I was so pale all over. Plus I was so tall.

His aunt and uncle had electricity in their house but no running water. My first night there, I had to use the outhouse, which was a short walk off to the side of their house. For toilet paper, I had to tear a page out of a magazine and crumple it up to soften it. Next to the john was a small pig in a pen. When I went up to it to say hello, it raised up on its hind legs and put its front legs on the wooden fence sniffing at me like a friendly dog. When I went back inside I said to Felipe’s uncle, “Su puerco … esta muy peligroso!” (Your pig, it’s very dangerous!) I was cracking a joke but they thought I was serious. Already I was the weird gringo.

Felipe’s cousins were all about a foot shorter than me. The tallest one was maybe eight inches shorter. They had square faces and boxy bodies. The amazing thing was they all seemed to have the same round black eyes and long broad nose. Felipe told me it was from their Indian heritage. His family hadn’t mixed much with the Spaniards or gringos throughout the years. Felipe was taller than them and had fairer skin but he still had their dark eyes and broad nose. You could tell they were related.

His cousins were into rock ’n’ roll. One cousin even had a band called Pegasus. He gave us both a copy of their record. Everyone in Mexico City loved the Doors. There was even a radio station that played nothing but the Doors for twenty-four hours every day. We listened to that station a lot the ten days we were there.

Felipe and I shared a bedroom with one of his older cousins and the youngest one. The older cousin moved into the twin bed with the young one and Felipe and I slept in the double bed. It seemed like everyone shared bedrooms. Other cousins were old enough to have their own homes, but they’d built them on the same hillside, next door, or down the road. They didn’t go too far. I asked Felipe if anyone thought it was odd that the two of us were sleeping together. He said they didn’t think twice about it because they were all used to sharing and sleeping together. He said that they might think I’m weird, but it didn’t have anything to do with the two of us sleeping together.

He and I were used to staying up later than everyone else, so we would talk as quietly as we could while they went to sleep. He told me the complicated tale of how everyone was related to each other. Even though they were all called his cousins, some of them weren’t first cousins. They were second or third cousins or cousins by marriage or just friends that the family took in. It was easier for everyone to say cousin. While we were lying there we’d talk about what had happened that day or plan out what we were going to do during the rest of our trip. Sometimes the older cousin would stay up and ask us about living in the United States. He said he wanted to come there some day. While he talked with us we’d listen to the Doors’ all-day, all-night radio station.

These late-night talks where we summarized and dreamed brought Felipe and me even closer together than we already were. It felt like we could have been lovers sleeping in bed together. We’d been roommates for over two years and had both agreed that we didn’t want to have sex together because sex ruins friendships. Our friendship was growing stronger and stronger.

I didn’t think twice about helping to clear off the table after meals but it upset Felipe’s relatives. I wasn’t allowed to help clean up in the kitchen because I was a man. Felipe had to explain to them that it was my custom to help with the dishes and then he had to explain to me that it was their custom for me not to help. There were always fresh pinto beans cooking on the stove in a big clay pot. The whole house smelled like pork fat and beans, and sometimes a faint whiff of fresh-cut jalapeños would drift by. One night for dinner we had a special delicacy of blood sausage that everyone loved but I just couldn’t eat. I tried but it was too gross. It was black and runny. Felipe’s cousins thought it was funny but his aunt, uncle, grandmother, and mother were kind of pissed, I think, like their food wasn’t good enough for me. Once again Felipe had to intervene. He tried to make light of it all and kept calling me a wimp.

Even though the air in Mexico City was so thickly polluted that my eyes stung and sometimes it was hard to breathe, I fell in love with the place. I’d never been to Europe but it felt like what a European city must be like, very old with most of the activity happening in the center of the city, El Zócalo. There were different sections of El Zócalo for different products. Felipe wanted a new belt so we went to an area that was a couple of blocks of narrow streets where they sold nothing but leather belts, purses, and wallets. Next to that section were blocks and blocks of shoes. We walked down a tiny street behind the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, where I found a gold mine of religious stores. My friends and I were into collecting religious articles, especially old ones. I found some beautiful hand-tinted black-and-white religious cards. There were small baskets filled with milagros, charms in the shape of different parts of the body that Mexican Catholics use as an offering to Christ to heal or protect themselves. In San Francisco people were making jewelry and artwork with them.

Felipe wore his new designer leather jacket that was his prized possession. We both had New Wave hairdos. His jet-black hair stuck straight up with Elvis bangs curling out over his forehead. Felipe’s cousins called him “puercoespín” or porcupine. I’d dyed my hair bright red and had it cut real short on the sides and back but let the top grow long. I’d keep it brushed back off my forehead and tucked behind my ears. When it fell, it was so long that my bangs came down below my chin. When people saw us on the street in Mexico City they’d say “Duran Duran,” meaning the British New Wave band.

Felipe had a degree in archeology and was my personal tour guide through the National Museum of Anthropology and the National Museum of Art. His cousins surrounded and protected me from beggars when we were out in public near El Zócalo or at tourist spots. We were at the Museum of Anthropology and I heard this guy with a thick Texas accent say, “Those sure were some purty green rocks.” I started laughing because he was talking about this ancient jade. Felipe’s cousins wanted to know what was so funny. So in my bad Spanish I told them what he said with a Texas accent. That cracked them all up into hysterics. The rest of my stay there they had me say that over and over.

Mexico City felt like a cross between New York and Los Angeles. It had the congestion of New York and the sprawl of L.A. The central part of the city was very cosmopolitan. Besides El Zócalo, the old shopping area and main plaza, there was La Zona Rosa, the Pink Zone, that had lots of restaurants, nightclubs, and exclusive shops. Kind of like Rodeo Drive. Once you got away from the downtown area there were what seemed like miles and miles of cinder block houses with corrugated tin roofs. Some hillsides looked like they were covered with cardboard shacks. I’d never seen so much poverty before.

Riding the subways with Felipe’s cousins was fun. We got on at the very first stop. His cousins told us when the doors open to run for a seat. We thought they were exaggerating but when the doors opened everyone ran for seats and Felipe and I were left standing without a place to sit. We stood there laughing. After that we ran right along with the rest of the crowd.

My favorite times of the trip were alone with Felipe walking around the city, especially the museums. Felipe would tell me the history of Mexican Indians and explain what was going on in a painting. So many were about the tragedy of Cortés conquering Mexico. Felipe and I bonded even closer.

On Sunday, we packed into his cousin’s van with his mother, his aunt, and as many cousins as would fit, and went to Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. On the way we were pulled over by a traffic cop. Felipe’s cousin got out and talked to the cop for a while. He came back to the van and got some money from his aunt and then gave it to the cop. He let us go without a ticket. They told me that’s how you avoid tickets and traffic court in Mexico. Our Lady of Guadalupe had an old cathedral and a modern one. The original church was sinking. It reminded me of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It was built on a marsh or something. At the old Our Lady of Guadalupe Cathedral there were hand-painted pictures of accidents and illnesses posted on the walls as prayers. Many of these had milagros nailed all around them on the picture frames. The new church was very modern. I was amazed at the conveyor belt that took the constant stream of people under the pulpit, past the famous painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe. I was also amazed at the tradition of old ladies walking pilgrimage on their knees from God knows how far to the church. Their knees were bleeding but they kept on walking towards the cathedral, praying with their rosary beads. The plaza in between the old and new cathedrals was like a carnival or flea market. It felt like a Fellini movie to me.

Another day, Felipe was made godfather to one of his cousin’s babies. We went to a chapel on the side of the hill where his family lived for the ceremony. It was an open-air chapel. Everyone was dressed in their best. The women had double knit dresses, and some of the guys wore suit jackets, but mostly nice polyester shirts did the trick with clean jeans. After the ceremony the priest invited Felipe, his mother, myself, and the baby’s father into his house for some “Mexican wine.” It turned out to be good tequila. He said that’s what they called Mexican wine. We all laughed. He had spent a lot of time in the States and wanted to talk about it. He wanted to know where I grew up. He’d been to Kansas City before. I made points when I told them that I’d driven the Petite Sisters of Charity begging for donations as a job for a year and a half. I think he might have been a homo, too. You know how it takes one to know one. He was probably one of those guys who went into the priesthood because they didn’t know how to deal with being gay. He was older, pre–Gay Lib, so it’s possible.

Felipe knew a gay couple who lived in Mexico City. They invited us to spend a couple of days with them. Our first night, they took us to a gay bar in a mini-mall. It was called El Barón Rojo (the Red Baron). It reminded me of a gay bar in Kansas City or Reno, Nevada. The fun part was that besides regular disco music they played salsa and ranchero music. I got drunk, danced, and made a lot of friends that night. It was fun.

The next evening they fixed a big dinner for us and invited a few friends over. We talked a lot about Cuba because it was easy for them to go there and visit. They had a completely different take on politics than what I was used to hearing. Communism wasn’t so horrible to them. A couple of them wanted to come to the US to live. One was going “via Detroit,” which was Mexican gay slang for “via de droit,” which meant “on his back,” sleeping his way into the country with an older man. The others, like Felipe’s cousins, weren’t interested in living or migrating to the US. They didn’t think too highly of it. That surprised me.

At dinner the subject of AIDS came up. They wanted to know why it was no longer called GRID and seemed disappointed that we didn’t know. They said they’d heard of a dozen or so cases in Mexico City. We said there was a lot more than that in San Francisco. They told us about an American who had AIDS who’d escaped from a hospital. The Mexican press was freaked out that he was out spreading AIDS around the city, but I figured he was probably just trying to get back to the States for better health care. One of them, the guy who spoke the most of Cuba, crawled in bed with me after our night of intense discussions. We had become almost psychic while talking. I liked him but didn’t want to have sex with him. He didn’t understand why. Felipe and I had decided not to pick anyone up while we were there. We were afraid that if we had the AIDS virus we could pass it on to them, but we didn’t want to say anything about it.

One night back at Felipe’s relatives’ house, I just wanted to sit outside by myself and watch the stars. Felipe’s mother was worried about me. She and his aunt thought something was wrong because I didn’t want to be with the entire family. His mother came out on the porch to make sure I was okay. I tried to reassure her that I was fine. I just needed some time to myself.

One of my last days there, Felipe and I went into the city on our own. I bought a couple of bags of souvenirs that made me look like the gluttonous American consumer. It was all Day of the Dead–type stuff. They were things that Felipe’s family weren’t really interested in and thought kind of odd that I liked. I was thrilled at all my buys, but got embarrassed when I showed them to Felipe’s relatives. I’d wasted a lot of money on junk. It was cheap to me, but not to them. I offered his aunt money for feeding me and putting up with me but she wouldn’t think of taking it from me.

By the end of ten days I was ready to go home. I wanted to be in my own bed. I wanted to use a real toilet with real toilet paper. What I missed most was the shower. I wanted to take a long hot shower. I think Felipe and his mother were ready to go, too. I know I’d started to get on Felipe’s nerves. It was a sad good-bye for Felipe’s mother and grandmother because they might never see each other again. I got teary-eyed when they were saying good-bye. Felipe’s uncle made eye contact with me and looked kind of disapproving of me showing emotion.

Our flight back had one stop between Mexico City and San Francisco. That was Mazatlan, where we went through customs. Just as we were taking off there was a loud boom underneath the plane. A couple of people screamed. We waited in silence until the pilot came on the speakers and announced that the plane had a flat tire. Felipe, his mother, and I all laughed. She said, “How Mexican! A flat tire on an airplane.”

When Felipe and I got home we headed straight for the Stud. While we were waiting for the J Church streetcar we noticed how clean everything seemed, how spacious and well-kept the streets were. The asphalt was new and smooth. There weren’t any potholes. Our neighborhood had never looked so rich and luxurious to us as it did right then at that streetcar stop. It almost shone. We felt abundantly rich. We were glad to be home. It was also a relief not to have to strain to understand what anyone was saying to me, although my Spanish had improved. I was able to order food much better in the Mission district. The people in the burrito shops were impressed with my accent, which I’ve long lost.

THE MAN IN THE ORANGE PICKUP

I was drunk out of my mind, on foot, cruising Ringold Alley with Felipe. Leather men waited in dark doorways while other men walked slowly up and down the short street behind the Brig leather bar. A small group of men huddled close together in the back corner of a parking lot. Some kind of action was going on but neither Felipe nor I felt like getting too close. Everyone was so serious. We were laughing at how ridiculous it all seemed. “A bunch of old trolls,” Felipe said when we decided to leave. We were on our way back to Folsom Street and heading home when a guy in an orange pickup truck pulled up to the intersection. He cruised me. I smiled. He asked if I wanted a ride. I said, “See you later,” to Felipe and got in the truck. I practically fell over into the guy’s lap I was so drunk. We went to his house and had great sex. He wore a condom. I’d never had sex with anyone wearing a condom before. He was sexy-looking, with prematurely white hair. In the morning I was seriously hungover. There were some photos of a handsome man on his dresser.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Was,” he said. “He was my lover.”

I said, “Oh…,” like I thought they broke up.

He hesitated and then said, “He died a month ago.”

I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to ask what from but dropped it. “He’s so young” was all I could say, even though the guy looked ten years older than me.

The guy fixed breakfast for me and we talked about my word processing job. I joked with him and he said it was the first time he’d laughed in a while. I was so hungover I felt like vodka was evaporating from the pores of my skin. Even though all I wanted to do was crawl back in bed with that man, I had to leave and go to a Super 8 film shoot I’d planned with my friend Enrique. We were doing the fashion sequence for our At Home with the Stars featuring Tammy Wynette. We shot it even though Enrique told me he was hungover, too.

The guy with the truck and I exchanged phone numbers and I saw him a few more times. He treated me really well and our sex got better and better the more comfortable we were with each other. One morning after spending the night with him a friend of his stopped by and they started talking about another friend of theirs who was really sick and in the hospital. His friend gave me a ride home. He assumed that I knew what was going on and said something about how the guy I was seeing was still torn up about losing his lover to AIDS. He told me about another friend of theirs who found out he had it, so he shot himself in the head to avoid all the horrible suffering.

I told Felipe about all this. It still didn’t seem like anything like AIDS could happen to us. Those guys were older. They’d been into sleazier scenes than us back in the seventies. We hadn’t done anywhere near the amount of poppers they had. At least that’s what we told ourselves when they were saying AIDS may be caused by doing poppers.

The guy with the orange pickup wanted to keep seeing me. It was about that time that I heard that someone who worked in the copy center at my job had died of AIDS. He was a year younger than me. That news freaked me out. I was starting to put two and two together. I told the guy I needed some time to myself. He said he understood. I never called him back.

THE MERRY WIDOW AND THE RUBBER HUSBAND

(or How I Got HIV: Version 4, Fall 1983)

That night it was just going to be Ali, Kat, and me getting high. We were celebrating Kat’s recent move from New Orleans to San Francisco to try to break into the music business. She was staying on the back porch/tiny guest room. She’d cut her hair short and bleached it blond. James and Felipe came home and wanted to join us so we had to go get more dope before we could get started. The five of us piled into Ali’s VW and went out and scored.

Back home, my little café table next to my bed was the best place in our entire apartment to shoot dope. It was cozy and out of the way. In my dresser drawer I kept candles, a bent spoon, some cotton, and my syringe. Ali, Felipe, James, and I had to share the same needle. Ali used to be able to buy U-100 insulin syringes at the Star Pharmacy in the Castro until they started asking him to show ID proving he was diabetic. Kat brought her own syringe. My syringe had only been used once so it was still kind of sharp. And besides, we always sterilized our needles with rubbing alcohol and ran them through the candle flame to burn off any germs. The main thing we had to be concerned about was accidentally squirting blood back into the glass of water when we were doing the syringe wash. That’s when we’d draw water into the syringe after we shot up and squirt it into our mouths to be sure to get every last drop. Ali always made a mystical ceremony out of fixing the drug and shooting it up. I just wanted to get high, but we let Ali do it his way. It was our family ritual with him as the high priest.

Kat had tiny veins and had to dig around a lot with her needle to find a good one. She was getting kind of messy, with blood running down her arm, so finally Ali and I took over. We were both good at shooting other people up. They called me “Dr. Joe.” It’s just that I would never push the plunger into myself. I didn’t have a problem pushing it in for other people, but for myself I’d insert the needle in my vein and then have someone else, usually Ali, pull the plunger out slightly then push it in. I figured that way I’d never become a junky because I wasn’t good at shooting myself up.

By this time, there were frightening articles about the horrors of AIDS every week in the gay newspapers. The B.A.R. started to run an obituary column. I saw the guy who’d poured beer down my chest in it one week. The article said he was survived by his partner of seven years and their dog. We were also beginning to hear more rumors of guys committing suicide when they found out they had it. Every time any of us caught the flu we were sure that the end had come. When I was helping Felipe do his shot we looked at each other like this was really crazy, like we both knew that this was serious business. We were playing for keeps. But the look didn’t last too long and we didn’t stop what we were doing.

Felipe said, “Well, I guess we really are blood brothers now. If one of us gets it then the others will, too.”

Ali said, “You know what? Being blood brothers is a good thing. It’s spiritual, like an American Indian tribal ritual.”

James asked, “What if one of us really does get sick? Would we all get sick?”

It still seemed unfathomable. We weren’t the type of guys that were getting sick. Most of them were older than us. They were the ones that sat in sex club bathtubs all night and had everyone pee on them. Or the ones that went to the baths five nights a week and lay in their cubicles on their stomach waiting for anyone and everyone to fuck them.

Ali said, “Listen, why don’t we make a pact that if any of us gets sick with AIDS then the others will stockpile heroin and provide enough for the sick one to overdose if we want so we won’t have to suffer a horrible death?”

That sounded like a good idea but it was hard to comprehend. No one said yes or no to him. We just got quiet. I watched as a thin trail of black smoke rose from the long flame of the small white candle in the middle of the table. I stared at the blue Star of David on the box of candles. Rokeach Sabbath candles. Sabbath. That word stuck in my head. My mind started to wander, thinking about stockpiling heroin. James wiped off the top of the café table with a cotton swab and rubbing alcohol. My room started to smell like a doctor’s office so I got up and lit a stick of orange blossom incense.

Ali snapped me back to the conversation when I heard him say, “I’ve suffered enough in this life and I don’t want to have a horrible painful death.”

We all nodded in agreement.

“Besides, there’s nothing wrong with ending your life if you know there’s no hope,” he added.

“There’s always hope,” Felipe said.

“No there isn’t,” Ali said. “What about the children of the Cambodian boat people who watched as their fathers were forced by pirates to jump into the boat’s propellers, then saw their mothers get thrown overboard, then were left by themselves to drift in the sea without food or water?”

I said, “Hope or no hope, when I’m dying I don’t want to be in pain. I want it to be over as soon as possible. I just want everyone to be sure that I’m really dying.”

James mumbled thoughtfully, “Yeah, me too.”

Instead of asking if we wanted to, Ali announced that from now on we had an official pact. We would help each other end it all in a peaceful way.

Kat lifted up her head from digging around in her purse and said, “You guys, quit being so morbid. Just hurry up and finish fixing the stuff.”

We all got sufficiently high and were lying around on my bed, nodding out and snuggling close to each other. My red handwoven Indian blanket glowed in the soft light from the lamp on my table. It was one of those special nights where we were all psychically bonded. Warm love flowed through my bedroom. I tuned my Fifties grey Bakelite plastic AM radio onto the easy listening station. It was silly but fit the mood exactly. Relaxing. Mellow. I stared up on my wall at the big Talking Heads in Paris poster that Michel had given me. I noticed the background grid of the poster matched my grey-and-white-checked curtains that I’d made myself. Well, really all I did was sew a hem at the top and bottom by hand.

After a while, James and Felipe went off to their bedrooms. Ali pulled out another small bindle of dope that he’d stashed away and he, Kat, and I each did a shot. Then we had a three-way. It started when Kat wanted to show us her extra-large clitoris. It was half the size of my small finger. Ali started sucking on it, then she told me to suck on it, which I did. She told me where to lick to make her feel good and I followed directions. We all made out, rolling around on the bed while we peeled off each other’s clothes. Kat had large breasts, a small waist, and wide hips, an “hourglass figure.” She loved it when I’d rub her tits, not too rough though. Ali was better at that than I was. He and I both sucked on her nipples at the same time while we felt each other up and intertwined our legs. Ali took my hand and guided a finger inside her. He and I both had our index fingers up in her soft wet fleshiness at the same time while we were sucking her tits. Ali moved up and put his dick between her tits and humped back and forth. I’d try to catch the head of his dick in my mouth as it poked out between her cleavage. I mostly just got a good lick in occasionally. While she was on all fours getting it from behind by Ali, I put on her Merry Widow corset, got off the bed, and psychedelic free-danced in front of them. Kat pulled me over and sucked on me. Ali and I watched each other for a while then leaned over Kat and started kissing while I was still getting sucked and he was still inside her. Kat wanted us to fuck her at the same time, me in the front and Ali in the back, but both of us kept losing our hard-ons, mostly from the heroin. I was semi- to two-thirds erect most of the time, except when Ali fucked me while I was fucking Kat. That felt good. I just wished he was bigger and she was smaller.

The three of us were lying side-by-side next to each other, jerking each other off when Ali started shaking and got the chills. We were a little worried about him but didn’t know what to do. I took off the Merry Widow, sat up, and felt his forehead. It was hot even though he was shivering.

Kat said, “I think he might have ‘cotton fever.’”

“What’s that?” I asked.

Ali said through chattering teeth, “That’s when your dope cotton is too dirty and you get an infection.”

My dick shriveled with that bit of information.

Ali said, “I think I’d better go lie down with James since there’s more room in his bed. Wow, you guys, sorry for ruining our fun time.”

Kat said, “Hey listen, this is more important. You take care of yourself.”

I nodded my head in agreement and gave him a loving smile.

After he left Kat started making out with me again. She said she wished she could fuck me. I said you can, kind of. She asked what I meant and I told her about the Rubber Husband. It was a dildo that we kept under the towels in the bathroom closet. Anyone in the apartment could use it as long as they cleaned it off afterward. Kat got all excited and sent me to the bathroom for it. When I brought it back she’d put her Merry Widow back on and was ready. We lubed it up with some baby oil, I lay on my back, and then she put it part of the way in me. It felt good. I immediately got hard.

She started slowly rocking back and forth saying stuff like, “Do you like that, Joe? Do you like getting fucked by a woman? Do you like me fucking you?”

Well, of course I couldn’t deny it. It felt great. She rubbed baby oil on my dick and started jerking me off at the same time. She didn’t have quite the right stroke for me, so I took over and soon I was coming all over my stomach. She climbed on top of me and started to rub her crotch on my stomach as she fingered herself. Then she rolled over onto the bed on her stomach with her hands in her crotch and humped for a little while. She started to shake a little, then sighed, then a deep long moan, another sigh, another shake, and then she collapsed. A few minutes later we kissed and hugged and then started laughing.

Kat smiled to herself and said softly, “I’ve finally had a dream come true. I got to fuck a man.”

Once we’d calmed down we tiptoed into James’s room to see how Ali was. They were both snoring so we figured he must be okay. In the morning James and Felipe wanted to know all the details of what exactly happened after they went to bed. They said it must have been good since we’d done Ali in like that.

MR. MATTHEW MARTIN, OUR HONEYMOON, AND THE DISCOVERY OF SPEED

(Summer 1984)

I used to see Matthew Martin hanging out at parties and places like the Stud and the 181 Club. He was handsome in a GQ-ish kind of way, stylish but not trendy. He intrigued me. At first I was afraid to talk to him because he was so handsome, kind of like Gene Kelly with a Clark Gable mustache. I asked Felipe who he was but he didn’t know. Felipe said to forget him, he wasn’t scruffy enough for me, plus he wasn’t a Daddy. I told Felipe for the fiftieth time that I’m not into Daddies, but Big Brothers. And besides, I was open-minded. I would sleep with other guys besides “my type.” This guy looked about my age and I felt a definite pull. He was sexy.

One night outside the Stud I asked my friend David who that guy was and he became animated. He shuffled around, leaned back, crossed and uncrossed his arms, put his finger up to his chin, then his temple, then his chin. “Oh!” he said, “That’s Matthew Martin. Why? Do you li-i-i-ke him?” He kind of laughed. I didn’t answer him. David leaned close to me like he wanted to tell me something very confidential. “Yes, well, he’s very interesting. But very different from you, Joe,” he said in a low voice. “He likes Donna Summer, you know.” David raised his eyebrows like what he’d just told me was a very revealing fact.

Matthew saw us talking and looking at him. He came over and said hi to David. I knew it was mean of me to use David to meet Matthew, but I had to. While Matthew and I started talking an uncomfortable what-are-you-up-to kind of talk, David disappeared into the crowd. Within a few minutes I was flirting with Matthew. I’d had enough drinks that evening so I wasn’t feeling self-conscious, but energetic and horny. I asked him home but he said no, and instead offered to give me a ride home in his white Honda Civic. Away from the crowd he was much livelier. He was charming. He had a raspy cigarette voice and a deep hearty laugh. He was the man for me. I knew from that first ride in his car: this guy was marrying material. He made me nervous. I wanted to say the right thing to him but wound up saying stupid things. He knew I was nervous and seemed to be flattered by it.

When he dropped me off he asked if I wanted to do something Saturday night. It was Wednesday. I could hardly wait. I got all worked up and excited. At my job I couldn’t concentrate. By the time our date night came I was almost too nervous to go out with him. I hadn’t felt like that about anyone in a long time. We went out to a late dinner at Dish on Haight Street. The waiters all knew him there. Matthew told me that was his favorite restaurant because not only was the food good but they covered the walls with plates from thrift stores. He said he loved thrift store shopping and flea markets. He drove all around mid-California to thrift shops. He also collected Fifties furniture and even sold some stuff to vintage furniture stores. He collected small stuffed dolls called “Naugas,” which were the mascots of Naugahyde, the fake-leather upholstery. They were kind of satanic looking really; round with pointed ears and a big pointed-tooth grin.

I told him I liked to shop at thrift stores too, that most of my clothes were from them. After dinner we went driving around. It was fun to be in a car since almost everyone I knew except Ali took mass transit. He had a Nauga on the back seat. He said it was his guardian angel. We drove through Golden Gate Park at night to the ocean. Then along the beach, but couldn’t see much because it was dark and foggy so we headed back into town and drove around South of Market. Everyone was out going to the bars. We pretended like we were cruising guys and took turns pointing out who we thought was hot. We cruised slowly and quietly up Ringold Alley. There were a lot of guys out. We didn’t act silly then; it would have spoiled the ambiance of the dark cruisy street. We were having fun together. Matthew asked if I wanted to go to his house to see his Fifties collection. It was just the invitation I was waiting for.

We stopped and got beer for me and seltzer for Matthew. He said he didn’t like to drink. I said that I did. When we went into his apartment building it was late. He said we had to be quiet so we wouldn’t wake up his friend Bryan who lived across the hall.

We were sitting on his black Naugahyde couch with chrome legs, listening to Martin Denny’s Quiet Village record that he’d found in perfect condition in a thrift store for twenty-five cents. He had egg-shaped planters with snake plants pointing up two feet high growing in them. A kidney-shaped coffee table was in front of the couch and a folding screen with a Fifties pattern painted on it was behind it. The windows were shaded with venetian blinds. There was a black wrought iron framed butterfly chair, an original, filled with Naugas across from the couch. Matthew explained to me why the Naugas were collector’s items. He talked like this was important information that I really needed to know, like it was something very personal that he didn’t tell just anyone. I was more fascinated by the fact that he wanted to tell me about them than I was about the dolls themselves. He said that they were difficult to find now.

He had on a baggy white shirt and blue jeans. He stretched his arm out towards me on the back of the couch. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I leaned over and kissed him. He kissed me back. I sat back on the couch when we stopped the kiss and said, “That was nice.” What I wanted to say was that was perfect! He was a good kisser on top of everything else. Everything about him was just right. He smiled a devilish smile and asked me if I’d like to do some speed. That was becoming my favorite drug. It made much more sense than cocaine because it was cheaper and lasted longer and didn’t make me feel as anxious. It also relaxed me and calmed me down when heroin made me antsy. I smiled back and nodded my head yes.

We spent the rest of the weekend together. He worked the day shift and I worked the evening shift. I was going to leave late Sunday night but he asked me to stay. When he went to work Monday morning I left with him, floating on a cloud.

We couldn’t see each other during the week because of our work schedules. We usually got together after midnight on Friday and hung out through Sunday night or Monday morning. I hated to say good-bye. I’d call him on my break from my evening legal word processing job in the Pyramid Building just to say hi. I didn’t want anyone I worked with to hear me because they’d tease me about having a boyfriend, so I’d call from the phones in the building lobby. I’d be nervous and excited and would almost hang up, but if Matthew was home it felt so good just to say hello to him and see what he was up to. Answer machines were still kind of new and I felt a little awkward, but I would leave him a short message. My dinner break phone calls were usually brief, which was more frustrating to me than anything. He wasn’t home half the time, or he’d be going out or coming in from dinner with friends and couldn’t talk very long.

But when we were together on the weekend things were great. Sex was hot, fun, tender, nasty, passionate. He didn’t want to get fucked. I was okay with that. I loved getting fucked by him. When we were driving in his car, he’d put his arm around me and reach down and pinch my nipple through my shirt or lean over and raise his hand off the gear shift and rub my thigh.

Matthew introduced me to the world of flea markets. Most of them were in drive-in theater parking lots on the outskirts of San Francisco. Since I spent most of my time within the city limits this was all new territory. Fifties stuff was cheap then so we almost always found something we were happy with.

One Sunday morning during one of our weekend speed binges, Matthew and I decided to go to the Alameda flea market when it opened. We arrived bright and early, only it turned out we were too early; they were just setting up. I felt weird being the first customers, all dressed and out in the bright sunlight at 7:00 a.m. I bumped into a former word processing workmate who was selling junk with her boyfriend and his kids. She was on something … pot, hungover maybe. She knew we were high and asked what I was on.

I loved speed. It made time fly by while at the same time a minute seemed like an eternity. It made me feel good.

When we were at Matthew’s apartment he’d get out his Dustbuster and start vacuuming. He’d do it as kind of a nervous habit, especially if there were a few other people hanging out with us. He needed to stay busy all the time. I was happy to just sit back and relax.

I couldn’t sleep. Matthew and I had been up all night again. It was two in the afternoon and he’d finally passed out. I lay next to him on his futon that we’d unrolled across the floor of his studio apartment. The room was warm. The sun was shining through the window and starting to creep across the floor towards us. I stared at the ceiling. I looked around at all Matthew’s Fifties furniture. The sun had worked its way to the futon now and was shining a stripe of bright light across Matthew’s back and spilling onto me. We were wearing nothing but our underwear. Matthew had on white cotton briefs and I had on my plaid boxers. He was asleep on his stomach. His head was turned to the side causing his dark curly hair to fall into his face. I leaned over and kissed his lips gently so I wouldn’t wake him. I ran my hand over his shoulders. They were smooth, solid. I wanted to have sex again. My hand followed the line of his spine down the middle of his back to his round butt. There was a big hole in his underwear over his right cheek. I slid a couple of fingers through it and felt the silkiness of his skin. I was never going to fall asleep.

Matthew woke up after I’d finally dozed off. He quietly went across the hall to Bryan’s apartment. Both apartment doors were opened partway. I could hear them talking in the hallway but couldn’t make out everything they were saying. It sounded like they were arguing.

Bryan said, “When are you going to tell him?”

I could hear Matthew’s voice but couldn’t make out his words.

Bryan said, “Matthew, don’t do this. What about…”

I lost the sound again. I heard footsteps and Matthew was coming back into the apartment. He whispered across to Bryan, “Just don’t worry about me.”

Bryan said, “It’s not you I’m worried about.”

I kept my eyes shut like I was asleep but was trying to figure out what that was all about. It was my first glimpse that things might not be as rosy as they seemed. Matthew set a tray down on the futon next to me. He whispered in my ear, “Time to get up, Joe. We’re going to miss the entire afternoon.” I sat up and looked at the tray. He’d brought me fresh coffee, a few Pepperidge Farm cookies, and a line of speed. By the time I’d finished everything, I’d forgotten his conversation with Bryan.

One night Matthew and I went out with a bunch of friends to hear Kat sing at Club 9. She was doing a big performance with a new band. She said they were jazzier, more experimental than rock and she got to sing the blues. She was in top form. Especially when the band would quiet down and let her go. Her voice was her talent, her passion. It was amazing to hear her start from a traditional New Orleans blues song and then go into an impromptu free-form style. She could sing deep and gutsy and then high and beautiful, like a songbird. While I was listening to her I remembered when we were in New Orleans and she told me her dream was to be a singer. I felt proud of her.

Off and on during the night Matthew and I would go into the bathroom and snort some speed, then make out a little bit before going back into the club. We weren’t affectionate in front of anyone else. That was okay with me. I didn’t want everyone knowing my business. I had just met some of the people we were with and felt a little uncomfortable. They wore nicer clothes than me. They knew a lot more about fashion and design than I did. They weren’t the funky arty types in baggy thrift store clothes that I was used to hanging out with. I loved it that listening to Kat was the social event of the evening. Everyone loved her.

After Kat’s show we hung out more, drank, kissed Kat, and told her how great she was. Most of the group was going out to eat, but Matthew and I weren’t hungry. Kat invited the two of us over to the warehouse space where she was living. She had moved from Fair Oaks into a place South of Market with her new friend Sean. The place was pretty empty. There was a kitchen area with sink, stove, refrigerator, table and chairs, but not much other furniture. She and Sean slept on mattresses on the floor and sectioned off their “rooms” by hanging blankets from the ceiling. It was cold and damp there, but according to Kat it was a great place for her band to practice.

Her boyfriend, this skinny biker guy, was waiting for her when we arrived. They had dope and went to her mattress on the floor at the back of the space to shoot up while we waited for them at the kitchen table. She pulled her hanging curtain, the bedroom door, across so we wouldn’t see them. When they finished she put Louis Jordan on the stereo. We hung out bullshitting with them for a while but our highs didn’t mix so we left and went over to Matthew’s. He and I were sitting around talking nonstop but not really doing anything. I was always ready to have sex with him but he was restless and still wanted to go out, only everything had shut down for the night. It was three in the morning on Friday night and nothing would open until 6:00 a.m. Then it would be the EndUp bar with a bunch of other speed freaks who’d been twiddling their thumbs between two and six.

Matthew said, “I know! Let’s go to Sacramento.”

“What for?” I asked, surprised.

He said, “They have great thrift stores there. If we leave now we can get there just about the time they open.”

I didn’t have anything better to suggest. I hadn’t been out of town in a long time so I said sure. In a few minutes we were in his Honda on our way to Sacramento. We stopped at a truck stop about halfway to get some coffee. Everyone stared at us. We obviously looked like a couple of fags from the City. Matthew was wearing seersucker Bermuda shorts and a suit jacket. I had on my favorite pair of vintage cream-color Levi’s with a perma-press crease, my Talking Heads T-shirt, and my green suede jacket. I loved that jacket more than any of my other clothes. I got it when Ali was working at Old Gold, a vintage clothing store. He let me pick out anything I wanted and wear it out of the store without paying.

Sacramento was hot. As soon as we got into the Valley the temperature began to rise, and this was in the middle of the night. Matthew drove to a motel he knew. We had to wake the manager up, a Mexican woman who wasn’t happy about us coming in so early/late. It was an L-shaped two-story motel with a small pool next to the parking lot. We were given a room on the second floor in the middle of the long part of the motel. It was about 5:00 a.m. It’d be a few hours before the thrift stores opened so we decided to rest. We both took showers and then stretched out on the bed. We snorted a line of speed each before I took my shower. The sound of the shower zinged in my ears. I was really high. The warm water felt good. My body had tensed up from the speed and the long drive in his small car. I talked out loud to myself a little bit saying stuff like, “Joe, you are so crazy,” and mock scolding myself. “You should be home in bed right now.”

When I got out of the shower Matthew was lying on top of the bed in his striped boxer shorts. My eyes landed on the thin dark line of hair that went from his waistband up the middle of his stomach to his chest where it mushroomed and swirled around his nipples. His dark hairy legs were thick. His calves were especially thick in contrast to my skinny legs. I slid on top of him, still a little wet, and pressed my body against his. We kissed for a long time. His dick slid out of the fly of his boxer shorts. I kissed his neck, nuzzling around for a while then moved down to his nipples. I sucked on one then the other, back and forth, while I jerked him and myself off. He was running his hands through my hair and breathing deeply. I could hear his heart pounding double-time from the speed. I moved down to his boxers and started sucking him. He raised his hips up and slid his underwear off. We were both naked. I moved back up next to him and we kissed some more, long and slow. It was passionate. Matthew joked saying, “Joe, this is our honeymoon.”

That should have made me even more passionate and horny, but instead it triggered something in my mind. I hadn’t expected it, but that was just what I wanted him to say. Then I started wondering, does that mean he wants to marry me? Is that his way of saying he wants to be more than boyfriends? I knew I was ready for more, but wasn’t sure about Matthew. I started losing my hard-on. Great. Of all times. If anything I should be rock-hard for hours. Between what he’d just said to me and the speed I should be up and running nonstop. I had to slow myself down and take a deep breath. Matthew had been sucking on me while my mind was racing away. He looked up to see if I was okay. I smiled a fake smile down at him.

He said, “What? What’s going on?”

I said, “I think it’s the speed. I need to catch my breath.”

He sat up over me and rubbed his dick while he felt my body, looking at me, staying turned on. He looked sexier to me at that moment than all the other moments when I’d thought he looked sexier than anyone ever. My hard-on returned. We sixty-nined for a while. I lay on my stomach and Matthew fucked me until he came. It felt good. I could have stayed like that forever. Stayed there in our honeymoon suite forever and ever till death do us part.

It was my turn to come. My heart was pounding. I couldn’t believe how great the sex had been. I couldn’t believe Matthew said that about our honeymoon. I couldn’t believe how high I was on all the speed we’d been doing. I rolled over on my back. Matthew lay next to me, a leg over my legs, my arm around his shoulders. He sucked on my nipple while I jerked off. That was one of my favorite positions to come. My heart beat triple-time. I was ecstatic. But I couldn’t come. I started jerking faster. I reached down and squeezed Matthew’s butt. It was silky smooth. Firm yet soft to the touch. I was hard, that’s for sure, but I couldn’t come. I slowed my rhythm down. That didn’t work. Then I started tensing up. Then I started worrying. Then I jerked off faster. Matthew wasn’t having fun. I wasn’t having fun. He looked up at me and patted my stomach. He said, “Listen, Joe, give it a rest. You’re too wound up.”

I really wanted to come, to have a resolution to all this, but it just wasn’t happening. I stopped. Matthew fell asleep in my arms. Slowly I could feel my body start to loosen up. I didn’t realize how tense I’d become. My legs were sticking out straight like boards. My neck was tight, almost to the point of getting knots. My breathing was quick and shallow. I forced myself to take long slow breaths. Finally I started to relax. I reached down and felt my half-hard dick. I ran my hand down Matthew’s back. He felt so good. He rolled over facing away from me, sound asleep.

I couldn’t go to sleep. All those thoughts started churning over and over again. Did he mean what I thought he meant about the honeymoon? I knew he liked me but did he like me as much as I liked him? Would it even work out between us? We’re so different.He’s much more together than I am. He’s suave and debonair. How would we be together in social situations? Would we live together? Would I have to move out of Fair Oaks? I liked living there even though I’d always dreamed of one day having my own place. And on and on and on.

He woke up about the time I’d managed to get my eyelids to half-mast and was in a semi-sleep mode. I’d worked every angle about the two of us over and over in my head at least fifty times until I could hardly think anymore. Matthew woke up fresh and invigorated. I was a complete wreck. We each did another line, which helped. After that we checked out of the motel and went to Dunkin’ Donuts and got coffee and a donut each. That was breakfast.

We hit the thrift stores with a vengeance. I had started collecting plastic fruit and vegetable decanters. That seemed to be something I liked that hadn’t been picked over. Before this trip I had already found four orange pineapple pitchers with green leafy tops. Now I was keeping my eye out for carrot and celery decanters that were big enough to put spaghetti in. That day I found one orange carrot decanter and another pineapple pitcher. I didn’t really need the pitcher but decided to get it just in case. After that I started losing interest in eyeballing every shelf in every thrift store that Matthew took me to. I slowed up my pace as the day got hotter and hotter.

Around 2:00 p.m. we were in a thrift store that wasn’t air-conditioned. Matthew was completely absorbed in his search for the perfect find but I couldn’t look at another piece of used anything. I was getting lightheaded. I had to find a place to sit down. A woman who worked there, wearing a rose-colored pullover apron, guided me to the furniture department and told me to have a seat on a couch. She said that I was looking a little pale and she’d go find my friend for me. Matthew came over and teased me, called me a lightweight, and said he’d take me back to San Francisco pretty soon. He seemed disappointed that I didn’t want to stay longer, but said he needed to head back to the City anyway because he was getting low on speed. I didn’t say anything, but I wouldn’t have minded spending another night at that motel. We went to a McDonald’s drive-thru and got a hamburger and coke. That helped revive me. Then he pulled a mirror down from the back of his windshield visor and put out another line for each of us. Just enough to get us back home.

The next weekend Matthew said there was something he had to do so he wouldn’t be able to see me. I’d been looking forward to being with him and felt kind of lost, but was glad to have the time to hang out with James and Felipe since I’d been neglecting them. I thought about him the entire weekend. Sunday evening he called and asked if he could come over.

We were in my bedroom. He was pacing. I could tell he was speeding. He seemed like he wanted to concentrate but kept getting sidetracked. I wanted him to lie down beside me on the bed but he sat at my café table in the bay window instead. He finally moved over and sat on the side of the bed and looked at me for a long time. He ran his fingers through my hair. He stroked my face with the back of his hand. We kissed. Then he sat up straight.

“Listen, Joe. There’s something I have to tell you.”

Gulp. That was unexpected. I knew that tone of voice but wasn’t expecting it from Matthew. It was the same tone that I’d used a few times before.

“Joe, I don’t want you to hate me. I want to be your friend, but I have to tell you that I’ve been seeing some other people.”

That threw me. Not “another person” but “some other people.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, feeling stupid as soon as I said it. A knot started to form in my stomach.

“Well, I mean when you’ve been at work during the week I’ve been seeing other people. Two in particular.”

“But, when did you have time?” It seemed to me that the three nights out of the week we spent together was a lot to spend with someone else.

“Joe, don’t. That’s just what’s been happening. I hate telling you. I wish it could be different. I’m no good for you. You’re too sweet. I want to be friends with you. I don’t want to hurt you.”

Well what do you think you’re doing right now, I thought but didn’t say. I just sat there. I wanted to say that’s all right don’t worry about it but couldn’t bring myself to do it. “Don’t say you’re no good for me. You don’t know me that well. I’ve got a bad side, too, you know.”

“No, you don’t. Not like mine. I just can’t be a one-man guy for too long. But like I said, I want to stay friends. I like you better than most of the guys I’ve met in a long time. I know I’m a jerk and you probably hate me and never want to see me again for the rest of your life. I understand if you do. But I hope we can be friends.”

He started to leave. I was in shock but I knew I didn’t want him to leave. “Matthew, wait. Come here.”

I sat up on the side of the bed. He stood next to me. I wrapped my arms around his waist and hugged him to me. I listened to his stomach gurgle. I could feel part of him come towards me while his feet were trying to walk. I stood up and kissed him. He kissed me back. I knew then it wasn’t that he didn’t want me. It was still good. He was telling the truth but I couldn’t believe it was over. He tousled my hair. His eyes were glassy.

“I’m sorry, Joe. I tried. Honest.”

I felt the outline of his body one last time. My hands went down from his shoulders to his waist to his butt. Perfect. He had everything I needed and he was taking it away from me. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t say anything else. I walked him to the door and we kissed one more time.

“See you soon, okay?” he said as I shut the door.

I went back to my bedroom and shut the door. I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, feeling like someone just let the air out of my balloon.

He’s sorry? What about me? I’m sorry. A sorry sack of shit. How could I have not known he was seeing anyone else? Was I that blinded by love? Was I really in love with him? He wanted to be my friend. He wasn’t good for me? Who was he to decide what was good for me or not? I’m old enough to know. Then I remembered that conversation with Matthew and Bryan in the hallway that day when I was trying to nap. That was the warning sign that I didn’t see. It all started to sink in. He’d just said to me almost the exact same thing that I’d said to Stevie, to Michel, and, most recently, to David. This was the first time someone I’d wanted was dumping me. It felt like karma, but it also felt unfair. He had everything I needed.

SOME OTHER NIGHT …

(Fall 1984)

It took me a while to get over Matthew Martin. We kept on seeing each other as friends but it was hard when I had to go home alone, so I took a break from him. I slept with a few other guys but no big deal. The thing that helped get Matthew off my mind the best was moving. After living at Fair Oaks for three and a half years, I moved into Doug’s apartment in the Tenderloin, right across the street from the giant black Federal Building. I was subletting from him for a few months while he went to England. It was my first time to live alone since Kansas City and I loved it. I missed always having someone around to talk to but I loved being able to do anything I wanted without having someone’s eye on me. I could walk around nude all day. I didn’t have to do the dishes immediately after eating. I could turn up the volume on my dual-deck cassette player in the middle of the night. And I discovered I loved getting high by myself. Especially with marijuana, but with speed, too. I could keep myself entertained for hours. I’d get as silly as I wanted without embarrassing myself in front of anybody else. One thing I did miss about living with Felipe and James was that there was no one to talk to when I was depressed. That security blanket was gone.

After the excitement of moving calmed down, thoughts of Matthew started creeping back up. What made it worse was one night he came over and we did speed together. He got all inspired and rearranged the apartment for me. It did look better after he was finished. He added style to the functionality. The problem was that I wanted him to spend the night and I told him so instead of acting like everything was okay just being friends. He didn’t do anything to hurt my feelings except refuse to stay. He said it wasn’t a good idea. It was still too soon since we’d stopped seeing each other. It had been at least two months. That didn’t seem too soon to me.

I was feeling bummed out about still being in love with Matthew so I decided to visit Ali, who I hadn’t seen in a while. I was depressed and needed more comfort than I was getting from my quart bottle of Budweiser. Fortunately, Ali lived on Geary Street just a few blocks up from where I was staying on Larkin. I called him to see if he felt like having company. He said, “Sure, come on up.” I brought one of my favorite tapes to listen to. It had Joy Division EPs on one side and The The’s Soul Mining record on the other. I loved the song where he sang about staying up all night while he watched his eyes turn from red to white. That was me. That and Joy Division’s lead singer’s deep voice singing, “She’s Lost Control.” I’d been playing that tape back to back, over and over, for three days straight. On the way there I picked up some fish and chips from Ye Old Chelsea Fish and Chips on Larkin Street. It was foggy out and the streets seemed darker and greyer than usual. A couple of winos spare changed me but I didn’t give them anything. I just pretended like they weren’t there.

Ali could tell with one look that I was in bad shape. Without even asking what’s the matter he gave me a big long hug. We went into his studio apartment and sat down on the bamboo love seat. He didn’t look so hot himself. I asked him what was going on and he said I didn’t want to know. Then he asked what was up with me. I told him I couldn’t shake Matthew Martin. Ali knew him and liked him. He’d given me his seal of approval as far as boyfriends go. He said it was too bad that I was taking it so hard. Ali doused all the fish and chips with vinegar and started opening and squeezing out a handful of ketchup packets onto the newspaper the chips were wrapped in.

We ate and talked at the same time. Grease dripped down my fingers. Ali wiped his hands on the newspaper, getting them dirty but not noticing. I went into detail about what I’d been thinking over and over … what did I do wrong? Why hadn’t Matthew asked if I minded seeing him while he was seeing other guys? I could have lived with that. And the main thing that bothered me was that Matthew said I was “too good” for him. That tore me up. Ali was patient with me while I turned these thoughts over and over. I put on my tape for him to hear. He especially liked Joy Division. It was much darker and less hopeful than The The.

I wanted to talk about Matthew Martin some more but then Ali started talking about his drug problem. I had to stop my train of thought to hear what he was saying. Both of us were bummed out. We could get pretty depressed on our own but together it was a dark party. We let each other talk, but didn’t listen much.

I said, “It’s not even the sex that I miss as much as being with Matthew. He made me happy.”

Ali gave me a look like, Are you nuts?

“Well, yeah, I guess the sex was pretty important.” I loved having sex with him. But just as much, I loved it after we had sex when I’d be sitting up and Matthew would rest his head on my stomach talking about his Nauga collection or what was happening on the TV show Falcon Crest. He loved that show. I loved having his head on my stomach.

“Maybe I seemed too eager,” I said, “too ready to settle down with him. Only I didn’t want to settle down with him. I loved all the running around we did together. I was having fun.”

Ali said, “It sounds like you’re having the same kind of trouble I am, only your problem’s a man and mine’s dope.”

To me heroin wasn’t like Matthew Martin.

Ali said, “I’m trying to kick, Joe. I’ve been too spaced out. My body needs dope now and I don’t like that. But on the other hand I love it when I’m high. I wish I could stay that way all the time. Either that or go to some tropical beach in Africa and never do anything. But what I really want is to get through college and get my social work degree.” He was taking a poetry class that he liked a lot and showed me some of the poems he was working on. He was a terrible speller. I sat and corrected his spelling. He must have had dyslexia or something.

“I feel so crazy when I don’t fix,” he continued. “It all comes falling in. My head feels like it’s crumbling. The plaster’s falling down. I can taste it in my mouth. I feel dizzy, get sick. Everything is a mixed-up, wacked-up, whirling cesspool.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said, thinking about Matthew.

“The other night I was watching TV sitting on the bed rambling on and on in this repetitious dialogue with myself. It was weird, like drifting in and out of reality. It becomes hard to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not. Everything floats along together. I guess what I hate most about heroin is its power over me. I could count a million times when I truly didn’t want to fix but somehow always ended up doing it.”

I was half listening to him and half listening to the music. Ali pulled a few flakes of fish off a piece and ate them. He licked the grease off his fingers and kept on talking.

“The last time I got high I didn’t even enjoy it. The dope was good quality, but holy hell, I’m trying to quit altogether. I guess the real problem is that it’s been a real problem for some time now. But I never wanted to kick this bad before. I dread going to AA or NA or the Haight Street Free Clinic drug treatment program. But my priorities have changed one million percent. I want to finish school so desperately.” He lit up a clove cigarette.

I asked, “Well, Ali, if you want to quit so bad then why don’t you just quit?”

“Why don’t you just forget about Matthew?” he snapped back. Then he said thoughtfully, “It’s too painful.”

I said, “Yeah, but it’d be over in a few days.”

Ali looked at me for a long time then said, “No, not withdrawal. I can deal with that pain. It’s living without dope that’s too painful. Making it through a regular day, feeling everything, thinking about how fucked-up it all is. That’s what I don’t want.”

He was depressing me. “I know what you’re saying, kind of,” I offered. I wanted to say something back to him that would make it seem like I understood. All I could do, though, was keep on talking about Matthew. “I know I miss fucking with Matthew, but right now I’d be happy with a nice long kiss. That sounds so good to me. I wouldn’t push it for anything more than that. Just a kiss.” Ali didn’t hear me.

“What freaks me out,” he said, “is when I see my friends that I’ve known for a while, I feel like it’s all normal. Everything’s under control. But at school I feel like an alien.”

Ali put on Joni Mitchell’s “Blue.” We talked about what that record reminded us of. I remembered doing acid in Kansas City with Loren. It also reminded me of the time I hitch-hiked to Boulder and a bunch of kids sat around in this park singing Joni Mitchell and Neil Young songs. Ali said it reminded him of driving to Florida with his girlfriend Susan and Roger Davidson with their three cats in his Dodge van. All that was ten years before.

Ali asked if I wanted to spend the night with him. That sounded like a great idea. I don’t think either one of us wanted to be alone. I went to the corner store and got a six-pack of Budweiser to help us go to sleep. We slept on his futon on the floor. His white kitten, Kyoko, kept viciously attacking my feet while I tried to sleep. I woke up with Ali curled up next to me in the fetal position. He was shivering and sweating at the same time, really bad. The bright sun was shining in. I tried to wake him up to see if he was okay. He just asked for more covers because he was really cold. I’d never seen him like that before.

GEARY STREET POTLUCK

My sublet with Doug ended after New Year’s of ’85. Fortunately, Michel, who lived a block away on Hyde Street, was going back to Paris for six months and needed someone to stay in his apartment. So I moved there. Ali and I were both either in school or working so we didn’t see each other very often. One afternoon he called to tell me he was having an impromptu potluck that evening and wanted me to come over. I made my World-Famous Tuna Noodle Casserole and took it there. James and Doug arrived not long after I did. Gina, Tom, Matt and Donny, and Madeleine were already there. Tom was Gina’s junky friend. He was straight, a car mechanic, and just out of a drug rehab that he’d been sentenced to after a bust. He was attractive yet unassuming, about our age. He had dirty hands, a tight body but not overdeveloped. Besides the fact that all of us had a crush on him, we liked him as a person. He was “one of us.”

I was excited about showing off my tuna noodle casserole. It was an offshoot of my mother’s traditional Midwestern recipe. I added my own touch to it with basil mixed in and, on top, a Monterey Jack cheese and potato chip crust. Madeleine made a layered, multi-colored Jell-O “cake” that was very beautiful. She told me that Jell-O was her artistic medium. Ali was busy in the kitchen making “Cheese Chops.” That’s crushed saltine crackers, grated cheddar cheese, and tomato soup mixed together. He’d make patties out of the “dough” and fry them in a big skillet, like vegetarian hamburgers. Gina brought a Middle Eastern plate of stuffed grape leaves, hummus, and tabouli. Doug brought baked yams. Matt and Donny brought a big tossed salad. James cooked a huge batch of brownies. They were still warm and soft from the oven. It was a complete, well-balanced meal.

Gina made a point of taking Ali, Doug, and myself aside to tell us not to offer Tom any drugs. He was clean. Anytime the conversation would get around to the slightest drug reference Gina would jump in and try to change the subject, which was funny to me because she was usually the first one to want to get high.

It was a fun little get-together. Between work and school, I hadn’t seen many of my friends in a while. I was happy to get a chance to catch up with everyone. Ali turned off all the lights and lit candles around the apartment. I sat at the kitchen table and talked with Madeleine, finding out what she’d been up to since we’d seen each other last. She said she was still working at the gift shop at the Pier where she’d met Ali, Matt, and Donny, but was thinking of getting into City College’s food service program. Matt and Donny were sitting on Ali’s bamboo love seat in the main room. I could see them from where I sat. They were a sexy pair, looking like twins in their plaid madras shirts and khaki slacks. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but in the middle of their conversation they would stop and kiss affectionately and then keep on talking. We waved to each other from where we were sitting. Matt’s eyelids were at half-mast. He and Donny disappeared into the bathroom every once in a while and would come out a bit more stoned each time.

I was having fun, hanging out, smoking pot, and drinking beer and shots of tequila. Then there started to be talk about getting heroin. That soon became the sole focus of the party. It seemed like that was the only reason we were there and everyone had just been waiting for someone else to bring the subject up. On the other hand, Gina was worried about us talking about dope around Tom, but it didn’t take long for him to be right in the middle of the conversation. In a few minutes’ time a collection had been taken and Ali and Tom were on their way around the corner to score. They came back extremely stoned about fifteen minutes later.

Ali didn’t want to do the dope out in the open in case anyone could see in through the windows so he took it into his walk-in closet and started dividing it up on his dresser. Soon almost everyone had followed him in there. Five people crammed into the closet, shooting up dope. It would have been much easier if Ali had just pulled his shades down and not been so paranoid about neighbors.

It turned into another one of our weird nights. Madeleine and I wanted to get high but weren’t up for cramming into the closet with everyone else, even if it was a large walk-in. If it had been speed, I might have felt differently. She and I sat at the kitchen table and tried to figure out exactly at what point it had turned from a nice little potluck into a heroin night. It seemed to be a group consciousness. No one in particular initiated it, but everyone was up for it. What bothered me was that wasn’t what the night started off to be. I don’t think anyone came over with the intention of doing heroin. In fact, it was the opposite with Gina being so overprotective of Tom.

A cool night breeze blew in the windows. Across the street and half a block down was my favorite neon sign in all of San Francisco. It was a big sign for Woerner’s Liquors that lit up the entire corner in a red glow. Gina’s nonstop nervous chatter finally quieted down. I guess she’d had her turn. Madeleine and I were able to pull back enough from the situation to see the ridiculous side of what was going on. But still, I had that gut-gnawing feeling that there’d better be some left for me and maybe I really should stick my head in there just to be sure they weren’t doing it all.

There was some left for us, but not a lot. I got kind of high, definitely not my money’s worth. Oh well. I wanted Ali to shoot me up. He was the best. I still didn’t push the plunger in on myself. Ali knew my system. We were a team. But when my turn came to go in the closet to get high, he was nodding too heavily. Tom said he’d do it for me. He just slid the needle in, checked it for blood, then pushed it on in. It was over in a matter of seconds. Ali always made such a production of shooting up that this was kind of anticlimactic.

Kyoko had gotten bigger since the last time I was over. He was a teenaged cat. He kept hiding and pouncing at me all night. I felt like he’d selected me as the one to get. It was fun up to a point, then it became irritating. I picked him up and sat him on my lap for a short time, but he didn’t want to cuddle or be rubbed. Instead he bit my hand and jumped off.

Gina and Tom had to leave because Tom was living in a halfway house and he had a midnight curfew. We all wished him good luck even though it didn’t really sink into me how much trouble he could get in if they found out he was high.

Ali went out and got some more dope. No one was as frantic with the second batch. We played some of Ali’s favorite “old” music like Laura Nyro, Janis Joplin, the Doors. Ali loved that song by the Doors where Jim Morrison sings “Father?… I want to KILL YOU!” He had me play that over again. Ali’s chin was resting on his chest while he listened to the song. When it was over he looked up at me and said, “That should be your song, Joe.” That caught me off guard.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He said, “You know. You’ve always wanted to kill your father. You should make that your theme song.” He laughed a little through his nose and smiled at me.

“I never said I wanted to kill my dad,” I said.

“You never had to. It’s obvious.”

Ali was talking a drug truth. It was something he’d never say if he wasn’t as high as he was. It was also something I wouldn’t have been able to hear if I hadn’t been as stoned. I stuck my hand under my shirt and scratched my stomach. Ali tried to open his eyes wide enough to look at me directly.

“Right?” he asked. I rubbed my nose but didn’t answer. “That’s okay. I know you’d do it if you had the chance.”

We nodded out to Janis. It was the first time I realized how great she was. I’d always liked her, but she was about five years before my time. I didn’t understand her when she was alive. Plus, I’d been so into punk and New Wave that I didn’t pay much attention to the musicians from the generation before. I told everyone that when I die I want Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee” played at my funeral. Like her, I didn’t have anything left to lose.

Someone said something that made me respond with, “Yeah, that’s just like all the times our parents threatened to disown us, huh?” There was an awkward silence. Ali looked at Matt and Donny who looked at Madeleine who looked at James and Doug.

Madeleine said, “My parents never threatened to disown me. I guess that’s because I never knew my dad and my mom turned me over to my grandmother to raise.” We all kind of laughed.

Doug looked down at his feet. “You know what, Joe? My parents never threatened to disown me.”

“Mine either,” James mumbled through his high.

I looked around the room. I don’t know why I’d assumed that everyone else had been threatened with that. I guess because I’d heard it so much growing up. It was so familiar to me that I thought it must have been as familiar to everyone else. Kyoko kept pouncing at my feet and biting my ankles.

Matt looked puzzled and asked, “What’d you do to make your parents want to disown you?”

I said, “Nothing, really. It wasn’t my mom, anyway. Just my dad. Every once in a while he’d get mad and say he was going to disown me. No big deal, really.”

Ali said, “What do you mean, no big deal? Joe, what are you talking about? In high school you never did anything. You were a fucking Jesus Freak. Why would your dad say something like that to you?”

I looked around the room. I wanted to nod out. I didn’t want to think about this. I wished Gina was still there. She had a short attention span and could always be depended on to change the subject.

“Forget it,” I said. “He was just crazy, that’s all. He was always saying something like that to me. Time for a new topic.” I looked over at Madeleine and she gave me this look like she knew I wasn’t telling everything. But it wasn’t a look like she thought I was full of shit.

Madeleine said, “Well, thank God we have each other. I mean, we’re more of a family than I’ve ever had. Plus, I feel like I can talk to you about anything. I could never do that with my mom or grandmother. Even though my grandmother was pretty cool. She was just old.”

James perked up. “Me too. My parents weren’t horrible, but I never felt like they knew me. Never.”

It got quiet. The conversation lulled. It seemed like a communal nod came over us. Donny stood up slowly, scratched his arm for a while, then said, “All right, if we’re a family then who’s the mother?”

I automatically pointed at Doug and said, “Doug! Doug’s the mother!”

Doug got embarrassed. “What if I don’t want to be the mother?”

“But you have to be, you’re the only one who can cook yams!”

Ali started laughing. Then he said, “I want to be the dad. I want to be able to disown you guys whenever I feel like it!”

Madeleine said, “James, you can be my big sister. Matt and Donny are the twins, the spoiled babies of the family.”

“And who am I?” I asked.

Ali, without missing a beat, said, “You’re the lost child. The bad child and I’m going to have to scold you.” He came after me and pounced on top of me. He started pulling at me, trying to turn me over his knee. “I’m gonna spank you a good one. You’ll think twice next time!”

After that burst of energy we all fell back into a nod. There was enough for one more shot each so we did it.

Ali said, “Okay, how’s this for changing the subject?”

“Changing what subject?” James asked.

Ali said, “Didn’t Joe say he wanted to change the subject?”

Madeleine laughed a deep gut laugh. “Yeah, right, Ali. About half an hour ago.”

Ali said, “Oh well. I’m changing the subject. Here: I’m getting tired of San Francisco. If it weren’t for school I might move somewhere else. I probably will when I finish but that’s still two or three years down the line.”

We went around the room saying where we’d move if we left San Francisco. Doug said Portland. James said maybe back to New Orleans. Madeleine said Hollywood. Matt and Donny said probably L.A., too. Without a doubt or hesitation I said New York. I’d wanted to live there for years. I always had a fantasy of eventually moving there. I said I probably would be moving there in the next couple of years, school or no school. Since I had word processing experience I knew that I could get work there. We agreed that San Francisco was starting to feel like a small town. Plus, everyone admitted that we were really bored with the Gay Scene. Tired of discos. The bars weren’t as much fun as they used to be. There was nothing to do in San Francisco. Nothing but get high.

NICK

I first started seeing Nick when the 1984–85 holidays were over. Everyone was back from visiting family and burned out from all the parties and socializing. The weekend after New Year’s a few of us were hanging out at Matthew Martin’s. Nick brought back Sade’s “Smooth Operator” tape for Matthew from a trip to London just before Christmas. It hadn’t been released in the States yet. We listened to it all the time. We had Quaaludes so we were all lounging around kind of rubbery and silly on Matthew’s couch and on the floor in front of the stereo. In order to change the music on the tape deck I had to crawl over a couple of people. Nick was stretched out right in front of it. I teased him by almost sitting on his face.

I said, “Oops! ’Scuse me!” as I put on side B of Sade.

He said, “Well … I had no idea you were interested.”

I said, “Well … you never asked.”

Matthew’s friend Lois said, “Ah-oh, boys, calm down now! There are ladies present.”

Matthew winked at me and said, “There are? Where? Oh, Joe, I forgot. You are such a lady.”

Nick and I flirted some after that, but more subtly. Later that night he called me at home to say he couldn’t go to sleep. I was house-sitting at Michel’s apartment at Turk and Hyde. I invited him over and we spent the night together. We wound up spending a lot of time with each other and soon fell in love. I still felt something for Matthew Martin but pushed it way down. He was happy Nick and I got together. He was still running around, doing speed, picking up lots of guys.

Felipe wasn’t thrilled with me hanging out with the “fashion crowd.” That’s what he called Nick and Matthew’s group of friends. He thought I should be making films or writing and was always scolding me for wasting time. But he liked Nick so I got his okay as a boyfriend. They had known each other for years from hanging out at the Stud.

Nick was cute in a sexy way. He was about six inches shorter than me. He was balding on top and often shaved his entire head. He made me laugh. One thing he and I had in common was our demeanor. I was from Missouri and he was from Texas. We both had kind of that Midwestern/Southern slowness about us. Our rhythms matched. It wasn’t like being on a roller coaster ride the way it was with Matthew. Things flowed smooth and easy. No big deal.

A lot of our relationship revolved around eating out. Nick liked to go to nice restaurants. I loved to eat out but couldn’t afford to do it as often as Nick. I learned to enjoy white wine at dinner. I also liked fast food, diners, and burritos, but he had a certain limit to what he would eat, how low he would go. We did a lot of cocaine together, but unlike me, Nick had his limits there, too. He stashed his drugs in a blue patent leather clutch purse and when he felt it was time to stop he’d snap the purse shut. The sound of the clutch snapping shut always brought a chill to me. It meant the party was over. There was no arguing once you heard that. I always wanted to do more.

Nick had good taste in music. He’d buy EP singles of the Smiths, Sisters of Mercy, Cocteau Twins, and Everything but the Girl. He owned a small trendy clothing boutique, mostly men’s stuff, that had been open barely a year. It was the most important thing to him. He went on buying trips to London, Milan, and New York. When he was away we’d miss each other so we’d call and have long talks late at night, which was early in the morning where he was. It was weird talking to another lover long-distance on Michel’s phone. I’d had so many phone calls with Michel when he was in Paris and I was staying at his apartment when we were in love. It was almost déjà vu.

Nick managed his money well. I was lucky if my two-week paycheck lasted ten days. He got money to start his boutique from an inheritance when his dad died. He had a little yellow Honda like Matthew’s white one. I was impressed with anyone who could maintain a car in San Francisco. That seemed so far out of my realm. Nick was always talking about the things he’d do “when I get my settlement money,” referring to a car wreck he’d been in. I never really believed the insurance money would come through, but eventually it did.

I had a great shift doing word processing in the Pyramid Building, 1:00 to 7:00 p.m. This was the era of Reaganomics. A lot of money was being made by law firms and they were spreading it around. I was considered a full-time employee even though I only worked a six-hour shift, including full-time benefits like health insurance, 401(k) plan, and three weeks’ vacation. I didn’t like most of the attorneys because they were arrogant and had a lot of attitude, but I loved my immediate co-workers. They were an interesting cast of characters: artists, students, ex-hippies trying to make a go of it, and single mothers. Mostly women and gay men. There were a few straight guys, but they got along with the gays and women. The work was very demanding and intense but it was also kind of fun. We were working with the latest technology in word processing and computers so there was always something new to learn. There was also usually some kind of drama between one employee and another, someone fighting or having an affair. A lot of people I worked with did double-shifts and worked tons of overtime. It was a great time to be making money. I took advantage of it in another way, by not working as much as possible. I hated it if I had to be there longer than those six hours. My schedule was conducive to sleeping in as well as going out after work for dinner, drinks, cocaine, and sex until the wee hours of the morning. Also, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings I’d meet James at the gym and we’d work out together.

Nick gave Kat a job in his store. She was getting more and more popular as a singer. Her band was finally coming together and playing lots of gigs. The job at the boutique was perfect for her. She got to dress up, borrow clothes for her shows, get discounts on jewelry, and she was always meeting new people and promoting her band. Madonna came into the store and bought a hat and a big fake jewel pin the night before her big concert at the Civic Center. Kat waited on her. As time went on Kat became more of a starlet. She was modeling for artists as well as for local fashion magazines. It was fun for me to be able to see a lot of Kat since I hung out at the store a lot.

One afternoon on our way home from somewhere Kat and I went into Grace Cathedral on top of Nob Hill. It was a beautiful old church with extremely high ceilings and big stone columns. Kat got excited all of a sudden.

“Oh, Joe! Oh my God! Will you do me a big favor?”

She was making me laugh because she was so hyper. “Yeah, sure, I guess. I mean, what?”

“Will you walk me down the aisle?”

I thought she was kidding. I stared at her blankly, waiting for her to ask me what she really wanted.

“No, Joe, listen. Neither one of us is ever going to get married, so why don’t we pretend? That way we’ll know what it feels like. It’ll be fun.”

“Okay.” I shrugged. “Sounds goofy, but why not?”

I looked around the church to be sure no one was watching. The only people in there were a couple of nuns saying their rosaries and some old drunks in the back nodding out, oblivious to us. I held out my arm and led Kat down the center aisle of Grace Cathedral. She held on to my arm and walked proudly. She was glowing. I stood up straight. For a moment it felt like we really were getting married. The stained glass windows shimmered. It wasn’t a bright day so rays of light didn’t shoot down from anywhere like in the movies, but the windows were vibrant. In my mind Kat had on a beautiful full-length wedding gown filled out with layers of skirts underneath. Her veil was long and flowing. I was in a tuxedo. My cummerbund was a little too tight. The bow tie was uncomfortable, the shirt collar starchy. The rows of pews were filled with people all turning and smiling at us as we slowly passed them by. I noticed a few tears in the eyes of distant relatives. My parents sat in the aisle near the front. As we walked by they turned their heads to me, beaming with pride.

When we got to the podium we turned to each other and kissed. Not a deep throat French kiss or anything, but I held her in my arms and we closed our eyes and had a real kiss. We loved each other. When I opened my eyes the wedding dress and tux were gone. Kat had on her black leather jacket, tight black jeans, and Doc Marten boots, and I was standing there in my green suede jacket and tan vintage Levi’s that I loved so much. The stained glass windows still shimmered. We stood for a moment looking at each other, joined in holy matrimony. I could tell by the look in her eyes that she’d been imagining something close to what I had. Then Kat burst out laughing.

She hugged me and said, “Now we can tell people we’ve walked down the aisle. We are married in the eyes of God.”

I laughed at that thought. “Yeah, Kat, in the eyes of God, but no one else. Just you, me, and God.”

“Well, Joe, that’s all we need.”

I felt kind of silly and embarrassed but, at the same time, something powerful had happened. It was a magical moment.

Kat, Matthew Martin, and I were arrested on Super Bowl Sunday. It was a bright sunny day. Everyone was out and excited because the San Francisco 49ers were the home team for the Super Bowl. We could have cared less, but the city was charged up. Matthew and I were on speed. Kat was tripping. We were on our way to visit a friend of ours who ran a vintage clothing store on Haight Street. The shopping area on Haight was extremely crowded that day. We were looking for a place to park when we got to a busy intersection. The light turned yellow and Matthew gave his car the gas so he could make it through before the light turned red. Just as he did a teenaged guy running to catch a bus dashed out across the street. In a split second he jumped in front of our car and Matthew hit him. There was no way to avoid him. The kid landed on the hood of the car, I made eye contact with him, and then he rolled off to the side of the car. He stood up and started to walk away. We stopped and asked him if he was okay. He said he was. We said, “Are you sure?” and he said, “Yeah, cool. I’m cool.”

Cars were honking for us to get out of the way so Matthew drove half a block up the street and then pulled over. We looked behind to see if the kid was all right but he was gone. Back at the intersection an earth mother–type woman, dressed in baggy purple pants and a turquoise top, was staring and pointing at us. We were shaken up. Matthew drove through Golden Gate Park so we could calm down and collect ourselves. He was right. The fresh air scented with eucalyptus soothed us. He drove almost to the ocean, then we turned around and headed back to the Haight. We found a parking place on a side street in front of a skateboard shop when all of a sudden we were surrounded by police. They jumped out of their cars, got behind their open doors, and pointed their guns at us. Over a loudspeaker they told us to get out of the car slowly with our hands up in the air. We did, not sure what was going on. I was so scared that I was shaking all over, especially my kneecaps. Some kids from the skateboard shop started taunting the police saying, “Oh, you’re so bad. Look at you, messing with a couple of fags and a girl. Oooo, I’m scared.” The cops told them to get out of there. We were handcuffed and taken away. A woman cop took Kat in a separate car.

They put Matthew and me in the back of a patrol car then left us there for a while. Matthew was worried because he had a bindle of speed in a matchbox in his jeans pocket. With some wiggling and maneuvering he was able to work it out of his pocket and drop it onto the seat between us. He told me to push it onto the floor with my hands that were cuffed behind my back. The handcuffs got tighter whenever I’d move, but I was able to swat at the matchbox and knock it to the floor. Then Matthew tried to push it under the front seat with his foot but couldn’t because there was a plastic barrier. We were worried the cops would find it. Then we’d really be in trouble. Suddenly they came back and moved us to another patrol car. They took us in to the police station and cuffed the three of us to a pipe that ran parallel along a bench. Then they put Matthew and me in a cell away from Kat. I felt bad for her because she was left out in the open, tripping her brains out. But if anyone could handle it, she could. The cops came in later laughing and in a good mood. We figured they’d found the speed and were keeping it for themselves.

They let us go because the kid refused to press charges. He told them what we’d told them, that he was okay. He had scraped his shin, but that was it. The woman who was standing in the street pointing at us when we stopped to check on him called in and reported us as a hit-and-run, which was a serious felony charge. So, we were released after maybe two hours. Out on the street, crazed football fans were driving around, honking their horns, and waving giant foam hands with the index finger pointing up saying WE’RE NUMBER ONE! Other people were yelling, “Joe Montana rules!” He was the quarterback for the 49ers. There was Super Bowl hysteria. We started honking and yelling, too, because we were so relieved to be out of jail. We went over to Nick’s because we knew he had Quaaludes and we needed something to calm us down. Then to avoid all the madness in the streets celebrating the 49ers’ big Super Bowl win, the four of us went to a movie. We saw Dune. We could still hear horns honking out on the street when we were inside the theater.

In April, my sublet from Michel came to an end and I had to find my own place. I wanted to stay in the neighborhood so I started looking around. Nick wanted to move in together near his store, which was up the hill from Michel’s apartment. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be in a live-in lover situation. I told him I’d look with him but couldn’t guarantee anything. I liked living on my own after having had roommates for so many years. Nick found a two-bedroom apartment on Sutter, a couple of blocks up from Polk Street, just a short walk from his store. It had chocolate-brown carpeting. I almost agreed to move in, but at the last minute I realized I couldn’t make the commitment. It was a hard decision because I didn’t want to hurt Nick’s feelings. Instead, I moved into a studio up on Hyde Street off Geary, and Nick moved around the corner from me, halfway between me and his store. It was the first time I’d had an apartment in my own name since I’d lived in Kansas City.

I loved that apartment. I bought orange-and-gold iridescent curtains for the bay window, and a green-and-gold floral embroidered demi-chaise with a big, curved back. I put my little café table and chair in the front window just like in my bedroom on Fair Oaks. In the back corner I put my futon bed and next to it a Fifties Japanese-style pull-out slat table that I found at a thrift store. I also had a big walk-in closet and a small kitchen. The bathroom had a tub with lion’s feet and the floor was covered with small white honeycomb-shaped tile. The entrance to the building had marble steps leading to the front door. Inside the lobby was a small elevator with an accordion door painted gold. It was only a four-story building with four apartments on each floor. It all seemed very luxurious, even though the neighborhood was kind of run-down. My friends and I all had hopes that it was an up-and-coming area. Instead of calling it the Tenderloin, I said I lived in “the Upper Theater District” since down Geary Street a few blocks were some Broadway-type theaters.

Ali moved in with his boyfriend Kevin on Bryant Street by that park up behind the Stud. He was in his third semester at San Francisco State and had gotten a job through the Social Work Department working in the day-care center at the county jail. He’d watch the kids while their mothers went up to visit their fathers in jail. Ali loved that job. Because he was so busy with school and work he had less time to do dope, even though he still managed to get high on occasion. We didn’t see each other as much since we were both hanging out with our boyfriends. But, whenever we did, it was always comfortable, like it had been just yesterday the last time we visited. Ali was happy that I was in love.

AN EARLY FROST

(October 1985)

I still hung out a lot with James and Felipe on Fair Oaks Street after I’d moved into my own place. Felipe never wanted to come over and visit me. In fact, he hardly ever wanted to leave his bedroom. All he wanted to do was sleep. He called in sick to work a lot and just stayed on his bed. As an excuse not to go out, he started telling everyone he had sinus problems. Maybe he did, but I knew that wasn’t all that was wrong with him. I thought he was depressed so I’d bug him to try to get him to come out with me. He was grouchy, especially towards me. I took it personally, like he was mad at me for moving out, or I was partying too much and he didn’t approve. I didn’t know how exhausted he really was.

At the beginning of October Felipe went to the doctor for a checkup, after having a bad cough and feeling lousy for over a month. The doctor diagnosed him with AIDS based on his symptoms. That evening Felipe told James he’d been diagnosed. They called me up and told me I should come over because they wanted to talk to me about something. James and I smoked a bowl of pot while Felipe broke the news to me. He didn’t want to smoke any because it made his cough worse. He said his chest felt tight and he could never catch his breath. At first the three of us were completely freaked out. We just sat there getting depressed.

I said something like, “It’ll all work out.”

James said, “Yeah, of course it will. They’ve got to find a cure to this soon.”

“I hope so,” Felipe said.

He told us that the doctor wanted him to go into the hospital the next day for tests. When he went in they discovered he had pneumonia and immediately put him on oxygen and an IV drip of a drug called Septra. He was in for about ten days. I visited him almost every day. James was there every day. It seemed like it was always raining. The doctors told Felipe that since he was responding well to his medications they weren’t worried about him getting sicker. They said they were finding with AIDS that often there was a first bout of pneumonia, and then nothing happened for a while.

Felipe seemed to take it all in stride. If anything he would get irritated when James and I started worrying too much. I wasn’t sure what it all meant. I couldn’t grasp the idea that Felipe might die anytime soon. None of us talked about that. There were always lots of questions about what the doctors told him, but we didn’t talk about anything beyond his pneumonia. Luckily, he had disability insurance through his job. He said the woman in personnel was really nice to him and told him not to worry, just to get better and he could come back to work when he was ready to. He would still be getting paychecks while he was sick as long as he had a signed note from his doctor.

Madeleine moved in with James and Felipe into my old bedroom. She kept Felipe company when he got out of the hospital and would fill me in on how he was doing. A few days after he was released he and I took a walk up Valencia Street to Sixteenth to get burritos. He couldn’t walk as fast as he used to. He said his lungs were sore, that they had sharp pains in them. We took our time walking up the street. It was hard for me to slow down. I hated it that he couldn’t go faster and there was nothing I could do to help him. It seemed like he should automatically be back to normal since he was out of the hospital.

Felipe had a small color TV right next to his bed, which he watched, or at least had on, all the time. One night when I was there I didn’t feel like watching TV, so I went in the kitchen and hung out with James and Madeleine. We smoked a joint and gossiped about Ali and his boyfriend Kevin. It was rare that Ali went for a blond and even rarer that he was attracted to someone bigger than himself. In fact, James was the last blond Ali was involved with and it had been six years since they were together. I got a beer out of the refrigerator, then went to check on Felipe. I stood in the doorway to his bedroom and watched him watching an animal documentary on TV. When he saw me he held his arms out to me and said in a silly, overdramatic drawl, “Joe, I’m dying.”

I thought he was kidding. He was, but I realized he was also serious. I was stunned. No words came out of my throat to respond. There was just a lump that got stuck halfway up. I lay down on the bed next to him and put my arm across his chest. I snuggled in close and he held on tight to my arm. We lay like that for a long time with the TV playing in the background.

When he wasn’t watching TV, Felipe was doodling at his drafting table. He was making more colored pencil portraits. My favorites were the ones of Frida Kahlo and a really psychedelic-looking Maya Indian warrior. He became obsessed with his drawings and worked on them every day. In a short amount of time he became really good. The eerie thing about them was that they all looked like self-portraits even though he didn’t mean for them to.

A made-for-TV movie called An Early Frost starring the guy from the movie Desperately Seeking Susan came on that month. There was a lot of publicity about it in the gay papers because it was about someone who was dying of AIDS. James, Felipe, and I made a date to watch it together. We popped popcorn and sprawled out on Felipe’s bed. It was the first time we’d seen anything vaguely like what we were going through on television. I kept getting so choked-up that I’d have to leave the room to wipe my eyes and take deep breaths. It was hard to watch because we all suspected that this movie was going to end the same way Felipe was. Felipe nonchalantly passed a box of Kleenex to James and me so we could wipe our eyes and blow our noses. Then he took a tissue out for himself. He teased me and called me a wimp because I was so teary-eyed.

That night I took the J Church streetcar back downtown. It was moving slowly and I was self-conscious about being puffy-eyed and teary on the streetcar, so I decided to walk from Van Ness and Market. It was about to rain but I thought I could make it home before it started. I was wrong. I hadn’t even gotten to the Federal Building when it began to pour. Everything was black. The sky was black, the Federal Building was black, the streets were shiny black. The rain was cold and I was getting drenched. I started to cry. I didn’t care if anyone on the street noticed. Besides, they couldn’t tell I was crying because the rain dripping down my face blended with my tears. I could hardly see where I was going. It seemed like my tears were part of the storm. I know it sounds corny but it felt like not only me but the sky was crying for Felipe. Or, the sky was crying for Felipe and me.

There was a candlelight march planned for AIDS awareness. We’d marched for Mardi Gras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Gay Pride, to remember Harvey Milk, but never for AIDS. The other marches were rowdy and fun. If we weren’t chanting protest slogans then we were dancing in the street. This was a silent march. Felipe wanted to go even though he was still weak. James, Felipe, and I went together. It started on Castro Street then went down Market to the Civic Center and ended at City Hall. Candles were passed out. We stuck them through the bottom of paper cups to block the wind and keep the wax from dripping on our hands. It was a night march, dark except for the candles. Quiet. Someone in the distance was beating a drum slowly. It sent chills up my back. We started out at the front of the march but we’d have to stop on apartment stoops every once in a while so Felipe could catch his breath while the parade went by. We marched with Stevie, his lover, and some of their friends for a while, but they went on ahead because we were walking so slow. For a little while I didn’t think Felipe was going to be able to finish but he kept going. By the time we made it to City Hall we were near the last of the marchers.

At the steps of City Hall we placed our candles on a statue of Abraham Lincoln. It was covered with dripping candles, turning Lincoln into a wax statue. It seemed appropriate. He represented freedom. We wanted freedom from this horrible thing that was happening to us. There were some speeches made that I didn’t pay much attention to. The main thing was the gravity of it all. San Francisco had been such a party town, such a playground, and now everyone was so serious. Dead serious. People were hugging each other. Some were crying. A lot of people looked scared. A lot of others looked baffled. I was somewhere between scared and baffled. It was the first time I realized how big this thing was. At first we thought it was just the sleazy older leather men who’d done all kinds of wild things that got Gay Cancer. Then my friend Bo got sick. Now Felipe. Then it seemed like everyone was getting sick. I hated to admit it, but Ali hadn’t been looking that great the last couple of times I’d seen him. It was terrifying. No one knew who’d be next and this march just proved it wasn’t only people I knew, but many, many more. I couldn’t understand why it couldn’t be stopped. Science was so advanced and could cure almost anything. Why weren’t they stopping this?

LOSING IT

Sometime that fall, about the same time that Felipe got sick, Ali also went into General Hospital for a week or so with pneumonia. That’s when we found out that he had AIDS, too. On one hand I wasn’t surprised, because he’d been having some sick spells off and on. But on the other hand, I was completely freaked out. James, Doug, Gina, and I spent a lot of time calling each other on the phone to see if anyone had heard any more news about how he was doing. We talked about how we didn’t know what to do. Did we think Ali was getting good care at the hospital? Should we take shifts visiting him? And on and on. His hospital room was almost always packed with visitors. Once he got out of the hospital it didn’t take him long to get back on his feet. Soon it was in the back of our minds that he’d been diagnosed.

Felipe still wouldn’t come out very much. Ever since his bout with pneumonia and stay in the hospital he’d kept close to home. I finally convinced him to come visit me. I’d lived in my apartment for almost half a year and he hadn’t seen it. When he came over, I talked him into doing a couple of lines of coke with me. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to, but I insisted. About a half an hour later he had to leave because he said he was feeling seasick. He wound up getting an inner ear infection that made him extremely dizzy for about a week. It never completely went away. He couldn’t snort drugs after that. I should have known better and listened to him when he said he didn’t think it was a good idea. Instead I bugged him until he did some. I thought he needed to have more fun than he’d been having.

Kat was dating a tattooed punk rocker named Scab. He hung out in the store with her all the time. She started selling pot out of the store. Nick didn’t like either Scab or her side business. He had a talk with her and said Scab was scaring off customers and he didn’t want the place to get shut down for being a drug front. Kat started calling him “Little Hitler” behind his back. She was doing more speed and heroin than ever. She was getting into the rock ’n’ roll legend of sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll. Especially the sex and drugs part. She wore tons of makeup, at least ten shades of eye shadow at once. She always loved me and wanted me on her side, but she started hanging out with guys that were too tough for me. I didn’t like them. She teased me about being a nelly fag. The two of us were growing apart. I didn’t like being around her when she was in her hard-core strung-out rocker mode, which was becoming all the time. I tried to get her to concentrate on her music instead of running around so much. She had such a beautiful voice. I hated hearing it get raspy from all the drinking, drugs, and cigarettes. When I talked to her about doing her music, I could hear Felipe’s voice in the back of my head talking to me about my writing and filmmaking.

I took a video editing class and learned the basics of video production. It was supposed to be the next big thing beyond film. There were going to be lots of job opportunities. The class was on Saturday mornings and I was invariably hungover from the night before. I bonded with a woman in the class who was also always hungover. My friends Tony and Nancy from the band Taktix asked if I’d work with them on their music video. They were putting one together to shop around down in L.A. to try to get a record deal. They were doing well in San Francisco and developing a name. They’d played warm-up for the Eurythmics at a big concert. They liked my Super 8 sensibility and wanted to mix it with their stuff. Plus, since I was learning video production that would be even more helpful. I agreed to work with them because it sounded like a fun project and good experience. That made Felipe happy. He liked Taktix a lot. Also, Felipe’s former roommate Rhonda was dating Tony. The band was a mixture of punk and funk. We’d been going to their shows since they first arrived in SF in ’81 and played at the Sound of Music, this tiny little dump in the Tenderloin right between the 181 Club and the Bulldog Baths.

Nick and I had sex almost every night. Good sex. I was going to the gym regularly so I was in shape, toned not huge. He swam at the YMCA pool almost every weekday afternoon. He shaved his head and sometimes trimmed his chest hair with his electric razor. It was sexy-looking, but I liked him better when he was hairier. We knew about the spread of AIDS by then. We didn’t wear condoms but we never came inside each other.

Sometimes I’d get worried and confused about what I was going to do with my life. Nick would hold me while we lay in bed together and tell me not to worry about it, that everything would fall into place. He told me about how he didn’t know what he was going to do with his life until he inherited his money. Then he was able to do what he’d always dreamed of, open his clothing store. He’d point out that I was doing something with my life. I was working on a video, and I was always running home to write in “that damn journal” of mine. Although he could never figure out what was so important that I had to go write it down, he said that was something I did that made me unique. I was the only person he knew who kept a journal. Plus I’d been published in Straight to Hell. He was an avid collector of porn and was impressed that I’d had a letter published there.

Nick would kiss me and tell me not to worry. Nick liked me for who I was. Michel had tried to change me, to make me a better person. Nick didn’t do that. I made him laugh. He was attracted to me. We had fun together but it was never forced. When we were together, we just were together. He wasn’t good about emotional support when it came to me worrying about my friends being sick. He didn’t know what to say. It was as new to him as it was to any of us. It was too much. When I couldn’t see him because I had to go to the hospital for Ali or Felipe, he’d just say, “Do what you’ve gotta do.” He wasn’t open when it came to talking about his feelings, but he was open about loving me and wanting me in his life. He’d point out my good side when I couldn’t see it.

I started losing it a little bit. The way I dealt with Ali and Felipe being sick at the same time was by drinking more. Not when I was with them, but after I’d leave them I’d stop by the liquor store on the way home and buy a quart of Budweiser or a bottle of white wine and drink it by myself, listening to music and staring off into space. I started getting high on speed with Matthew again. Nick didn’t want to, so sometimes he’d go to sleep while Matthew and I went out driving around looking for something to do and usually not finding anything.

It seemed like everyone was going kind of crazy. Kat, Matthew, me. Stevie broke up with his lover of five years and moved into the apartment directly above me. He was drinking all the time and doing speed every weekend. I joined him when I was home. Nick fired Kat. She was talking back to him all the time and his store was starting to look like a punk rock hangout rather than a designer clothes boutique.

In January of 1986, a year after we started seeing each other, Nick sat down with me to have a talk. I knew it was hard for him and he kept talking around the subject but it basically boiled down to the fact that he couldn’t take all the craziness. If he wanted his store to be a success, he had to focus on it. That came first. He wanted me to be with him, but he couldn’t take all the insanity that was going on with my friends. There were too many drugs.He didn’t know how to deal with Ali and Felipe having AIDS. He knew I had to be with them but that was taking time away from us, and when I was with Nick, I was worried and depressed all the time so then I’d start drinking. He told me he was afraid that I was becoming an alcoholic because I drank every night. For almost a year we’d seen each other every day; now it was once or twice a week. He never wanted to sleep at my apartment even though it was right around the corner from his. He told me he needed me to make a decision. I couldn’t desert my friends. He said, “Okay then. If that’s the way it’s gotta be.”

CONVULSION

Ali was fired from his job at the San Francisco county jail’s day- care center when they found out he had AIDS. Ali loved that job. Losing it was a major setback for him. He got really depressed. Then his pneumonia kicked in again. It wasn’t bad but the doctor wanted him in the hospital for a few days just the same for a Septra IV drip. While he was in there they injected chemo into his veins to get rid of some cancer spots that had appeared on his legs.

I was word processing in the evening so I was able to visit him in the afternoon when most of our friends were either at work or in school. I was lucky because that day it was just the two of us alone. Ali was telling me about Elizabeth Taylor visiting their wing the night before. At first I thought he was kidding but he said no, look at that huge bouquet of flowers at the nurses’ station. It’s from her! He said they took all the patients who could get out of bed into the dining room and they all sat around a table and Elizabeth Taylor spoke to them. She said she didn’t know exactly what they were going through but each one of us has difficult times in our lives. She said she’d been through her share of them so she knew it wasn’t easy. Ali got pissed off at one guy because he started talking to her about Jesus. Ali cut him off by saying some snide remark. He told me proudly that when he did that, Elizabeth Taylor looked at him appreciatively and smiled.

All of a sudden his body jerked stiff and he arched up off the bed. It took me a second, which seemed like a minute, to realize something was going on. I ran out in the hall and grabbed a nurse. Ali was jerking and writhing on his bed. More nurses came running in. He started hyperventilating. He was looking at me and then at the nurses like, Do something! Only I didn’t know what to do. He started gasping for air. I got scared. Then I realized he was more scared than I was, so I tried to appear calm so he wouldn’t freak out even more. It was hard to stay calm. I’m sure he could tell I was worried. A nurse was taking his blood pressure and told him the doctor was on his way, that he’d be there as soon as possible. She stroked Ali’s hair and told him he had beautiful blue eyes. He suddenly stopped panicking and looked at her and said, “Thank you,” very sweetly. Then, just as suddenly as he stopped, he went back into panic mode. I thought it was just like Ali to be flattered like that in the middle of a crisis.

A big doctor came in and tried to ask Ali some questions but Ali was having trouble talking. His eyes looked wild. The doctor turned to me and asked if he was on any drugs that I knew about. I hesitated. I didn’t want to get Ali busted.

The doctor said emphatically, “Look, I’m not going to turn anyone in. I have to know in case there’s some kind of drug interaction. We don’t know what’s going on here!” He almost yelled at me.

I mumbled that Ali did cocaine and really liked heroin but I didn’t know if he’d done any recently. I felt like such a snitch, but this was an emergency. The doctors and nurses couldn’t figure out what was wrong. They decided to take him off somewhere to an emergency room or an operating room or someplace. All I knew was that they put him on a stretcher and were rushing him down the hall.

A janitor was in our way, mopping the floor. The whole hallway smelled like lemon-lime disinfectant. I wanted to shove him out of the way because he was moving so slow but the orderlies maneuvered the stretcher around him. I held Ali’s hand. His face turned purplish-blue and he started spitting up blood. Ali stared scared into my eyes. I was the only familiar thing to him. Then they told me I couldn’t go any farther. I wasn’t allowed past a set of doors. I told Ali that I would be waiting for him in his room. That he’d be okay. I wasn’t sure if he would be, but I didn’t know what else to say. When the double doors hissed shut everything suddenly got very quiet. Just a voice on the intercom asking someone to call some extension. I was trembling all over. There was a handrail along the wall and I leaned against it for a moment. I couldn’t shake the picture of Ali turning blue and spitting up blood and me not being able to do anything to help him.

I waited back in his room for what seemed like hours. I called Kevin and Doug to tell them what was going on. I called in sick to work. Soon the room was packed with our friends. When they brought Ali back he was knocked out. They said that they thought he’d had a stroke and would find out more when the test results came back. A stroke? None of us could believe what we were hearing. Old people had strokes. Not someone thirty-two years old who was up and about just the other day. It didn’t make sense.

We sat around Ali’s bed talking it over. Madeleine was there. Matt and Donny came as soon as they heard the news. Doug came in with James and Gina. Kevin sat next to Ali, kind of stunned. His friend Jennifer was with him. Gina talked on and on about what she’d learned about strokes in her nursing classes. She reassured us that this was probably temporary and Ali would pull out of it. Ali was breathing kind of funny out of the side of his mouth and leaning to the right a little, but besides that there was no real sign of anything wrong, except all the tubes running in and out of him.

When I returned the next day to see Ali, I stopped at the nurses’ station to ask how he was doing. The nurse in charge took me aside and said that yes, he did have a stroke. Not only that, but he’d lost the use of his right arm and leg. She said it was related to something called toxoplasmosis. I’d heard of that but didn’t really know what it meant. It was all so hard to believe. I remembered what Gina had said, that it was probably temporary. If anyone had the strength to get over something like that, it was Ali. I thanked the nurse and then took a deep breath before walking into his room.

He was resting peacefully. The room was bright with afternoon sun. Kevin was asleep in a chair next to him. I pulled up a chair on the other side of his bed and settled in. My rustling woke Ali. He turned his head in my direction and gave me a half smile and held out his left hand. I took it in mine. He was weak. He asked me how I was doing and I said all right, kind of tired, kind of worried about him.

He looked me in the eyes and said, “Joe, I’ve had a stroke. They told me this morning.”

I said, “I know, I was here when it happened.”

He looked kind of puzzled and said, “You were?”

I said, “Yeah, you had me scared there for a while.”

He said, “Oh, sorry.”

I didn’t know what else to say. Everything was too overwhelming. I sat back in my chair and soon joined Kevin and Ali in an afternoon nap soaking up the warm sun that poured in through his hospital room window.

FEBRUARY 1986

It was a typical San Francisco winter night. Rain had been falling lightly for most of the week. It was cold enough to wear sweaters under our coats, but we didn’t need layers of clothes to stay warm. Ali was being released from the hospital. His right arm was partially paralyzed and he’d lost the use of his right leg, but he’d built up enough strength to go back home. His sister Valerie had just flown in from Colorado. She, Donny, Gina, and I were with him at the hospital, gathering up his things. It had been a long evening getting him discharged, waiting on doctors’ signatures, making sure papers were filled out properly, and receiving all of his medicines. But finally we were on our way to the car. I had to gear myself down to be patient while Ali slowly walked from the wheelchair to the car in the rain. My mind was racing a hundred miles a minute thinking of what to do, wanting to help him as he pulled his bad leg along, wanting to let him do it all himself, being proud of his strength, and wanting to break down and sob all at the same time.

When we got him settled at his apartment, I told him that I had to leave to visit Felipe, who was back in Kaiser Hospital with a relapse of pneumonia. I broke the news to Ali that Felipe wasn’t doing very well and it seemed like he wasn’t going to last much longer. Ali said in a matter-of-fact voice that he wanted to go along. Ali had always been headstrong and once he made up his mind to do something there was no stopping him. This part of his personality was something I loved and dreaded at the same time. It usually meant that if I was nearby, he and I would be getting involved in some kind of mischief or adventure. I’d tag along with him, usually wishing I’d gone home instead, but then we’d wind up having a great time. We’d been friends for so long that we could get mad at each other and know that we would still be friends the next day.

I was getting mad this time. We’d finally gotten him home where it was warm, dry, and comfortable, and now he wanted to go back outside in the rain with his sore leg to go to yet another hospital. He was insistent. We all sat around the kitchen table trying to talk him out of it.

Kevin was sitting next to Ali. He gave him a hug, “Ali, it’s really not a good idea. Why don’t you just stay here tonight and rest and we’ll go tomorrow?”

Ali looked at Kevin then at me. I nodded my head in agreement. He folded his arms across his chest, furrowed his eyebrows, and clenched his jaw.

“I want to go now.”

I said, “Listen, Ali, think about it. To get to the hospital I’ve got to take the bus all the way across town. You don’t want to do that in the rain, do you?”

“I don’t give a fuck if it’s raining or not,” Ali said. “I really think I should see Felipe tonight. You said yourself he might not last much longer.”

Ali wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Gina said, “Listen, I’ve got to go home soon, so why don’t I drop you off on my way? That would solve half the problem. Then you could take a cab back home after you see him.”

That sounded better than getting Ali on a bus but it still seemed like he should just stay home. He’d been through enough for one day. We all had. I was tired, very tired, but realized that this evening still had more in store for me. Donny also said he’d take us there. He said that he’d wait for us to visit with Felipe and drive Ali back home. I lived a short bus ride down Geary Street from Felipe’s hospital so it wasn’t a problem for me to get home. We went with Donny.

Valerie wanted to come along but Ali told her that, since she’d just arrived, she should stay home and take it easy. He didn’t want her to see another sick person, especially since she didn’t know Felipe. He said, “It’s just too much.” I wasn’t sure if he was saying that to Valerie or if he meant it about everything that was happening.

Ali put his coat back on and we started the slow process of getting outside and into Donny’s car. He was bundled up in his black camel hair overcoat and a derby hat. He still had on his hospital slippers. He said they were comfortable on his swollen feet. Ali had to hold on to my arm with his left hand and raise his right hip in order to swing his paralyzed foot in front of him. We repeated these steps slowly, over and over, until we’d gone from his apartment building, across the sidewalk, and into Donny’s waiting car. The rain trickled down the brim of his hat onto his back. The bottoms of his slippers were beginning to get wet. Ali let go of my arm and grabbed the car door. He braced himself, turned around, and slowly sat himself down in the front seat of the little car. He looked up at me and smiled, like half saying, “See, I did it!” and half a sheepish, apologetic smile. He knew I was feeling reluctant and tired, but we didn’t say another word. We both knew that this was something very important.

When we got to Felipe’s hospital we had to reverse the process we’d just been through: getting Ali out of the car, up onto the curb, and onto the sidewalk. It looked simple enough but there was a fast current of cold rainwater flowing down the gutter. This meant, in order to avoid Ali’s feet getting soaked, we had to get his leg up higher and onto the sidewalk. I got out first and he grabbed my arm. With one hand he pulled on me and with the other he pushed off on the side of the car. There. He was out.

Next, we were facing a fifty-foot ramp that led up to the hospital door. We walked slowly, ignoring the rain, concentrating on walking up the ramp. Ali worked out a rhythm swinging his bad leg around, then moving his good leg forward. Concrete slabs that were tilted at angles made it more difficult to navigate. Tiny streams of water ran down the sidewalk towards us. We had to be careful not to get his feet near the streams or in any puddles. It seemed strange. Something as simple as walking up a sidewalk ramp now became an ordeal, something that had to be done with headstrong determination.

We made it. We took the elevator up to Felipe’s floor and started the long walk to the end of the hall and into Felipe’s room. People stared at us as we walked by. Bored family and friends sat by beds, watching patients watching television. Nurses looked a little worried, like we were on the wrong floor or someone else was being admitted to their already-full unit. Still, we concentrated on one foot in front of the other and the room at the end of the hall.

Felipe’s room was like a visit to the Twilight Zone. Tubes writhed around him, hooking him up to an IV drip machine and an oxygen tank. Steam rose out of his green, translucent oxygen mask every time Felipe exhaled. His face was wet with sweat and moisture from the steam. He had lost more weight since the last time I’d visited. His eyes were starting to glaze over with a milky film. They were dark and sunken. His lively energy was gone. Felipe’s mother sat at the foot of his bed resting her head in her hand, her elbow on the arm of the chair. A male nurse stood silently at the foot of the bed. I didn’t like him being there. It felt like this was too personal for a stranger to be watching every move we made. But the doctor wanted a nurse there in case of an emergency. The whole thing felt like an emergency to me.

Ali and I went up to Felipe and said hello. He was too weak to talk, but he knew we were there. That’s what mattered. We sat down in chairs next to his bed. An ominous silence swallowed up the entire room. I got a big whiff of rubbing alcohol from a container on the bedside stand that was wedged between my chair and Felipe’s bed. The dial on the IV machine whirred around and around, steady and rhythmic. Each whir sounded louder than the one before. I stared at the clear sugar water and medicine solution dripping from a plastic bag into a tube and on down into Felipe’s body. There was no sound from the dripping, but with each drop my mind registered a plop. Plop … plop … plop …

Felipe strained to keep his eyes open as wide as possible, like he knew once they were shut it was all over. Felipe’s mother, Ali, and I sat watching his chest rise and fall, listening to the gurgle of his breath. Steam constantly rose from the green plastic mask that covered his face. I stared at the linoleum tile on the floor, hoping to find some crack to follow or pattern to space out on, but the floor was all white with grey speckles. There was nothing unusual to focus on. Time stood still. I felt useless. There wasn’t anything we could do except be there, and that wasn’t enough.

Donny stuck his head in from the hallway to see if we were going to be much longer. He said he’d have to move his car pretty soon if we were going to stay. I asked him how long we’d been there. He said about fifteen minutes. It seemed like it’d only been a minute but it also seemed like forever. Ali pushed himself up out of his chair and moved over to Felipe’s bedside. He leaned over the guardrail and looked directly into Felipe’s eyes. Felipe muttered something, trying to speak. Ali stood over him for a while, not saying anything. He didn’t need to. Their silent communication was louder than any words could ever be. He reached over and touched Felipe’s heart, as if to say he knew exactly how Felipe felt, that he was there with him. That touch seemed to calm Felipe down. His breathing wasn’t as strained. I was sorry that I’d ever been mad at Ali for wanting to visit Felipe. He knew that he had to see Felipe that night. There was no waiting for tomorrow or a better time. This was their moment, their last time together.

We said good night to Felipe and his mother. She followed us out and gave Ali a hug before we left. It had been a long day for everyone.

Before he went in the hospital, Felipe had been getting really thin. He knew he was getting sicker so he took himself on a trip to Europe in the late fall. He hadn’t told most of his friends how sick he was. Rhonda and Dwight were two of his closest friends and all he’d told them was that he’d been in the hospital with pneumonia and was also having sinus problems. I bumped into Rhonda at the Museum of Modern Art and told her she should go see him, that he really wasn’t doing very well. Felipe still had trouble confessing to her that he had AIDS. Catholic guilt, I guess. Embarrassed, ashamed. He went into the hospital for the last time that February. He just got worse and worse.

A couple of days after Ali visited Felipe, Felipe’s dad called me at work to say if I wanted to see him one more time I should come right then. I dropped everything. I didn’t even go to the word processing office to sign out, just got on the elevator and left. I caught the Geary bus to Kaiser as soon as I could. Felipe’s breath rattled. It was slow and irregular. His eyes were completely glazed over. I stayed for two or three hours. I don’t remember exactly how long. James came by during that time. The two of us left together when we realized there was nothing more we could do. I gave Felipe’s mother a hug when I left Felipe’s room. She gave me a half-hearted hug back. At first when she hugged me like that, or didn’t really hug me, I felt like she must be thinking it was my fault that Felipe caught AIDS. I was the bad influence. After all, hadn’t Felipe told me that his grandmother thought I brought a demon into their house when we went to Mexico and his cousin got drunk with me? Then I thought about it more and figured she was probably in shock.

There was a bright full moon that night. I went over to Fair Oaks with James after leaving Felipe. Matt and Donny, Rhonda, and Madeleine were there waiting for us. We drank tequila, smoked dope, and played records. James and I went through Felipe’s stuff to be sure there wasn’t anything that Felipe wouldn’t want his family to find, like his porno. Or maybe some artwork or books they wouldn’t appreciate as much as we would. He’d already made plans to give his stereo, records, and clothes to his brothers. He’d made a tape compilation for me about a month earlier because he said I had bad taste in music and after he was gone I wouldn’t have anyone to turn me on to good records.

When we were going through his things James and I felt Felipe leave us, like something went out of both of us, out the top of our heads. We looked at each other and knew. It seemed like Felipe’s spirit had come into the room to check on us for one last sweeping good-bye. We got a call from Felipe’s dad about 11:00 p.m. James talked to him. He said Felipe had died.

Madeleine, Rhonda, Matt and Donny, James, and I continued to drink and smoke until really late. Madeleine and James lived there and Matt and Donny lived down the street so eventually they all went to bed. Rhonda and I stayed sitting at the kitchen table finishing off the tequila. We drank until the sun came up and then decided we should go on home. Around 7:00 a.m. we called a cab. We reeked of alcohol. The cab driver said, “Some party, huh?” and tried to strike up a conversation with us but we were too depressed to talk to him. I dropped Rhonda off at her apartment then went home and passed out.

That morning, I was asleep when I heard the sound of plastic beaded curtains jingling. Then I felt Felipe’s presence. I got scared. He called me a wimp. He was always calling me a wimp, either that or a “ho.” “Joe de Ho” was one of his nicknames for me.

He told me not to be scared. Then he asked urgently, “Where’s my body? I’ve got to find my body.”

I couldn’t stop being scared. “Your mother,” I said. “Go to your mother!”

I said that for two reasons. One, because they were taking his body to his hometown in the Valley, and two, because his mother was kind of psychic and would know what to do if Felipe’s spirit came to her. She wouldn’t get scared like me.

As I felt him leaving he said, “Joe, you wimp.” One more time, only this time kind of lovingly.

UNDERWEAR PARTY

Doug and I were hanging out in my apartment, listening to a tape of the Emotions that he’d just bought on the street. Their hit “Best of My Love” was our song when we first became friends in New Orleans. We were having fun singing along and dancing when James called. He said Gina and Ali were over at Fair Oaks and they were wondering if they could stop by after they picked up some dope. I said it was okay with me. I didn’t have any plans. I told Doug they were coming over and asked if he wanted them to pick any up for us. He said sure, but just a little. I told James to get us a quarter and we’d pay him when they arrived. I hung up the phone and went back to Doug and the music.

We were pretending we were the Emotions, working out a bad drag routine, when the doorbell rang. As soon as the three of them walked in the mood of the apartment changed from lighthearted and gossipy to serious business. They wanted to get high and that had to be taken care of before anything else. I started running around the apartment getting spoons from the kitchen, rubbing alcohol from the bathroom, and my syringe from the dresser. It was too bright in the apartment for Ali so he turned off the overhead light. The right side of his body was still partially paralyzed but he was getting around much better than the month before when he was first out of the hospital. Besides being thinner he seemed almost back to normal. At least that’s what I told myself. Gina paced around and talked really loud to Doug about this beautiful Italian man she’d met the other day in North Beach. James, the neatnik, went right to the coffee table by the front window where we liked to fix the drugs and started to tidy up. He straightened the magazines on the table, cleared off excess litter, and made sure my orange-and-gold iridescent curtains were pulled completely shut so no one could see into the apartment. Doug stretched out on my futon, taking in the whirlwind of activity that had just blown in. The Emotions were singing their hearts out on the tape deck.

“Do you mind if I turn this down?” Gina asked. “I have a headache.” She reached over and turned the volume all the way down.

“Why don’t you just turn it off while you’re at it?” Doug snipped sarcastically.

“Well, it was just so loud. I need to concentrate. This place is so small and there’s too much going on already. You want it up? I’ll turn it back up. I just can’t take loud music. It makes me nervous. But, if you want, I’ll turn it back up.” She went over and raised the volume just enough to barely hear the disco beat.

We became obsessed with the dope. Who got how much? Who will go get more if we run out? How many needles do we have? Who’s going first? Where did Gina put her syringe? She would never use any of ours. But soon enough, the preparations were complete. We all shot up and got high.

We smoked some, too, what we called “Chasing the Dragon,” by putting a line on tinfoil, lighting a match under the foil until the dope went up in smoke, and then following the trail of smoke with a hollowed-out Bic pen, sucking it up. Our needles were too dull to use too many times, so this helped us stay high without wasting the syringe. An extra kick. Very practical.

Once we’d all gotten off I brought out my boxer shorts collection and dumped them in a pile on my bed. We dug through them, picking out which pair we wanted to wear. I had a wide assortment with various patterns and sizes. Some were new and expensive, made with beautiful fabrics. Others, the plain cotton ones, were from thrift stores. My favorites were my “underpants from Paris, France” that had the Eiffel Tower printed all over them. Those were reserved for me. We started to slip off our jeans and pull on the boxers. Doug took the old-style cut with thin green and blue stripes running through them. Gina put on an oversized pair of white cottons. I tossed the silk ones from Bangkok over to Ali, but he was too out of it from a nod to notice. James wore the ones that had a fake Picasso print on them. Whenever he sat up the fly would come open. We kept teasing him about that, grabbing at his dick.

Out of all my music, there were only two tapes we could agree on: Billie Holiday and Sade. Ali managed to get up off the futon and put on Billie Holiday’s Greatest Hits. He turned off all the lights and lit candles around the room. The curtains glowed orange from the candlelight. Ali loved to listen to Billie Holiday music, burn candles, and nod when he got stoned. It was because of his ritual that we called dope “Billie Holiday.” Billie.

It was family night. James, Doug, Gina, Ali, and I were together. We’d been friends for a long time. We still hadn’t gotten over Felipe, but no one brought the subject up. Everyone was lounging around on my futon nodding and listening to the music. Gina asked, again, if I minded if she turned down the volume. Of course I did, but said it was okay. She turned it down so low it could barely be heard. After a few minutes of no music I couldn’t stand it any longer and turned it back up. She and I bickered like brother and sister for a while until we finally “agreed” to keep it low, but still audible.

Lots of lying around hugging. Silly, joking, loving, candles burning. Dope always made me anxious and I itched all over. Everyone else was nodding off while I paced back and forth simultaneously scratching my nose and my balls. I wanted to play one of my tapes like the Sisters of Mercy or Siouxsie and the Banshees and dance around, but no one else did. “Smooth Operator” was as perky as we were going to get. James told me to sit down and quit scratching, that my nose was turning red from rubbing it so much. He said I should just calm down and enjoy the high.

He and Gina decided that since I was so hyper and we were running out of beer, I should go to the store and get some more. Doug said he’d go with me. We put on our jeans over our boxer shorts and got ready to go out. I pulled on my shoulder-length rock ’n’ roll wig that I wore as a hat when I went out in the Tenderloin. It looked almost like it could be my real hair, dark brown, close to my natural color.

Doug and I went to the Solo Market on Geary Street for Budweiser, leaving the other three on my bed, nodding. Knowing them, they were probably going to do another shot while we were at the store, but I didn’t care. Besides, I had some speed stashed away that I could do and had no intention of turning them on to it.

On the way to the store Doug asked if I thought Ali was okay. Did I think he should be doing so much dope since he’d been so sick last month? We debated about it for a while and then Doug started to tell me about Lyle, his curly red-haired obsession. He told me about the night they carried bundles of six-foot-high sticks that they found at the fountain by City Hall up to Doug’s apartment and how romantic it was and now Lyle won’t talk to Doug and Doug thinks Lyle might be seeing someone else but he wasn’t sure. Doug and I were alike in a lot of different ways, but falling in love wasn’t one of them. I fell in love if sex was still good the third time. Doug fell in love if it was still romantic the third time. To him sex was secondary.

We got our groceries and headed back to the apartment. No one in the store seemed to notice that I had a wig on. I was hoping for a little bit of attention, a smile or giggle, but everyone was lost in their own world. After all, it was the Tenderloin and people were used to seeing much stranger sights. We walked back through the cool, foggy night. We didn’t talk. We just enjoyed being with each other.

When we returned Ali, James, and Gina were nodding away. They didn’t say anything about it, but I knew my suspicions were true. They had done another shot while we were out. I passed around beers to everyone and then Doug and I smoked a little more. Ali drifted off, still in his jeans, clutching the boxers I’d thrown him earlier. James’s dick kept poking out of his boxer shorts. Gina and I would grab at it but he would jump back every time anyone got near. We teased him, telling him he didn’t have to be so shy, that he was among friends.

“Just because I’m among friends doesn’t mean I have to let you grab at my crotch all night.”

I jumped up. “Hey! Does anyone want to see me play my stringed instrument?”

They thought I was going to play air guitar but instead I opened the fly to my underpants from Paris, France, stretched out my soft dick and started twanging away like I was Elvis himself.

Doug and Gina groaned like they were grossed out.

I said, “There, James, I showed you mine, now you show me yours.”

Maybe it was because we were high and acting silly, but James, the more prudent one of the bunch, surprised us by standing up and pulling his boxer shorts down.

“There,” he said. “There it is. This is what you’ve been after all night. So take a good look!”

We all cracked up laughing.

Then James said, “Now since I’ve shown mine, you all have to show yours!”

Gina started giggling and hugged a pillow to her body. Doug got a sparkle in his eye that told me he was up for it. I didn’t need any coaxing, especially since I’d already pulled out my stringed instrument, but I played hard to get.

I said, “I’ll show mine if Gina shows hers.”

She said, “That’s not fair, Joe. You’re always trying to get me to show my body.”

She reminded me of the time a few years ago, when we were alone in a room at a party and I asked her if I could see her tits. She wouldn’t let me. I just wanted to see them. I wasn’t going to do anything.

Ali was off in his own world on the bed so we moved into my hallway so we wouldn’t bother him. We were all laughing hysterically, but we did it. James, Doug, and I pulled down our boxers and showed our cocks. Gina said she couldn’t just pull hers out like that so we moved into my little kitchen, where she sat down on a chair and pulled her boxer shorts down.

When she spread her legs so we could get a good look, James moved his face into her crotch and said, “So that’s your labia? I’ve always wondered what labia looked like. Up close I mean.”

We all agreed that hers was very beautiful.

Doug was uncircumcised. He and I had been friends for a long time but had never seen each other’s cocks, except maybe in passing, and never close enough for examination.

From there it was downhill. James and Gina had to go to work in the morning so they decided to leave. Doug hung out for a little while longer before taking off.

Ali and I did one more shot before calling it a night. He let me go first since he’d been sick and didn’t want to take a chance on infecting me. It didn’t really matter, since it was the same needle we’d been using all night. Besides, he and I were blood brothers from way back. I mixed a little bit of speed in with my shot for an added zing. Ali fixed the solution and drew it up into the syringe. I watched as he lined up the needle with a big vein in my left arm. There was a prick of pain as he pushed it in. A tiny mushroom of deep red blood burst into the syringe. As he pushed the plunger slowly down I began to relax. Relief was on its way. My face flushed. There was a metallic smell off in the distance. My body became warm and tingly. My nose itched. I felt like stretching out on the bed. The sound of a razor blade ching-chinged in the background as Ali chopped more fine brown powder, getting ready for his shot. My eyes were half-open. I wanted to rub my body, hold Ali. A temporary vacation.

Only for Ali it wasn’t a vacation. It was what got him through the day. He loved heroin. It was his passion. I liked it okay. I liked speed better. But then my metabolism had always been messed up. Speed was what really relaxed me. After the initial rush, heroin just made me itchy and antsy. But I loved that initial rush. Ali’s shot was about twice the size of mine. So was his tolerance level.

After getting off, Ali crawled under the orange-and-blue quilt on my futon. I knew he was drifting into a deep nod when I heard him start to cluck his tongue against the roof of his mouth. That was something new since he’d gotten sick the last time. When he was really out of it he would make these deep clucking sounds. The doctors said it had something to do with the combination of medicine he was taking and the Toxo microbe he’d inhaled while cleaning Kyoko’s litter box. He said the roof of his mouth itched and he was trying to scratch it with his tongue. At first it was weird, but it didn’t take me long to get used to it. It meant he was either on his way into a nod or coming out of one. Which, for Ali, meant everything was okay.

I climbed under the quilt with him. He came out of his nod and we talked about how good it had been to see everyone. While we were talking he moved closer to me and started to rub my forearm. He was warm. It felt good to lie next to him. Even though he’d lost some weight when he was sick, he was still muscular. He felt solid, secure. He was my oldest friend. We’d moved around the country together. We were a part of each other’s pasts. Familiar territory.

There was a dent in the mattress where I slept. I sank into it and let my high take over. I could hear Ali talking to me off in the distance as a warm haze settled over me. He started to rub my stomach gently and then slipped his hand under the elastic waistband of my boxer shorts. He pressed close. I looked over at him in the candlelight. His eyes were shut. His face was calm. I realized he wasn’t really thinking about what he was doing. He was just moving with the warmth. It was nice to be with him again with no one else around. It had been a while since the two of us had been alone together.

I leaned over and kissed his forehead and he pulled me to him. He kissed my neck and then my lips. I rolled onto my side and he turned facing me, still kissing. His hands ran around my waist and over my back. We kissed long and deep. Our tongues slid around each other’s mouths. His hand traced my hip, then moved down between my thighs like an outward extension of the warm dope that was caressing my veins.

I undid the top button of Ali’s jeans and slid under the quilt, where I could get them completely undone. I tugged them down around his thighs and started to go down on him. He was too stoned to get a full hard-on, but neither of us really cared. We weren’t trying to impress each other. It just felt good, so I stayed there for a while. When I came up for air he was nodding again. I slid on top of him and licked his nipples. He tried to respond but had given in too deep to the rush and couldn’t wake up. He lifted his hand slowly and opened his mouth like he wanted to say something, but nothing came out.

I rolled off of him and stared across the room at the shimmering orange-and-gold curtains. I ran my hand along his chest. His skin was smooth. I started thinking about how sick he’d been recently but you could hardly tell now. Just a few weeks ago we thought he might not make it and now here he was back to his same old self, getting high and listening to Billie Holiday. I ran my hand lightly along his collarbone and felt below it where they’d inserted an IV tube when he was in the hospital. I touched the scar with my finger. He twitched a little so I pulled away. I looked at the scar closer and a cold panic started to creep up from deep in my stomach, chilling the warmth in my veins. I moved back onto the mattress and started thinking about Ali being infected and what we’d been doing. I mean, what if I caught it? Then I thought, for all I knew I already had it. But if I did, wouldn’t mixing our germs make it even worse? I couldn’t quit thinking about it. The reality of the virus started to sink in. I kept churning these thoughts over and over in my head. I couldn’t shake them. I loved having sex with Ali, shooting dope with him, but I was starting to think that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. I also knew him well enough to know that when he came out of his nod he’d be wanting to pick up where we left off.

I slowly slipped out from under the quilt and went over to the bay window. It was too quiet, just Sade singing to me softly from my tape deck, “Hang On to Your Love.” I was wide-awake thanks to the speed I’d mixed in with my dope. I pulled back the curtain and stared out into the late-night fog. One of the neighborhood drag queens walked by across the street, the one I called “the Albino Grace Jones.” She had pale white skin, a bleached white flattop, and always wore white. She looked like she was walking into a black-and-white movie as she disappeared down the dark night street in her plastic raincoat and go-go boots.

I didn’t want to climb back in bed with Ali. He felt good and I was horny, but I just didn’t want to do it. I told myself maybe it was because we were such good friends that I didn’t want to continue to have sex with him. I knew him too well. But that wasn’t true. Felipe and Bo were already dead. It was 1986 in San Francisco and to me sex equaled death. My sex life consisted of getting really high on speed and then going to the peep shows at the corner of Geary and Polk, sitting in a little video booth and pushing the channel selector button over and over to see fourteen different porno movies for the price of one twenty-five cent token. Except it was never one token. It was usually three to five dollars’ worth of tokens. I didn’t want to miss anything in any of those fourteen movies. I wouldn’t jerk off in the booths, though. I just spaced out with my thumb pushing the channel button until finally I had absorbed so many penetration and come shots, both straight and gay, that I couldn’t soak up anymore. Then I would leave.

The walk back home was foggy and grey and the streets between Frenchy’s K&T porno shop and my apartment were lined with boy hustlers and drag queen prostitutes. They all knew me, if not from my frequent walks to the peep shows, then from the grocery store or the Travelodge Motor Hotel’s all-night diner. I wasn’t friends with any of the hookers, but we knew each other to say hi to. They also knew not to waste their time asking me for a date. Sometimes the boys tried, but I would act like they must be talking to someone else and walk on by.

Once I got back home I’d take off my clothes, get out my porno collection, and beat off to them. I had my favorites. There was my collection of Straight to Hell true-life-first-time-experience magazines that I knew by heart and I would wind up my voyeuristic sexcapade by reading them cover-to-cover. By the time I finished the sun would be coming up. I was usually speeding, which meant, on top of being sexually freaked out, I couldn’t come for a long time. But, once I did, I’d have about three or four orgasms in an hour. Then it would be light outside and too late to go to sleep. So I’d snort another line of speed and do something constructive around the apartment, like go to my dual-deck cassette player and make a compilation tape of my favorite songs.

Ali clucked his tongue while he nodded off. I looked over at him from the window and felt embarrassed. If anyone, especially Ali, knew I was having second thoughts about sleeping with him, they’d think I was a real asshole. Maybe I was. There’s no way I’d let on to him that he freaked me out. I mean he had been really strong through all his pneumonia and shit. I loved him and cared for him. He also turned me on and was right there in my bed. We could have a fun time if I wanted, but I just wasn’t sure. What had changed? Not Ali. I was the one who was freezing up, becoming the ice queen.

Ali opened his eyes and caught me staring at him. As soon as our eyes met he became a person, my friend again and not a sex demon out to ruin my life. I looked back out the window and watched the taillights of a car gliding down the street, then looked back at Ali. I realized how stupid and paranoid I’d been. I went over and lay down on top of the futon next to him. He was half-awake, half-nodding. I climbed under the quilt with him and moved in close. I wrapped my arms around his chest and lay still for a moment. All the worries that were freaking me out slid off my shoulders when I touched him. Ali smiled with his eyes shut. He rubbed my arm. I ran my hand along his stomach and down to his cock. It was soft. I rubbed around and tugged on it for a while, but nothing happened. I moved down and started to go down on him again. Now I was the one who wanted to pick up where we left off.

Ali’s clucking turned into a light snore. He’d fallen asleep. Great. After all that worrying and finally I’m ready to have a good time and he’d fallen asleep. I got up, went to my closet, and pulled out my porno collection. I dug through it until I found my Straight to Hell magazines. I jerked off, reading them page by page like I’d never seen them before.

MORPHINE

“They’re taking my morphine,” Ali whispered weakly. He pointed his bony finger to the large brown bottle on his bedside table. “Joe, tell them not to take my morphine.”

“Okay, Ali. I will.”

He sighed and rolled his eyes up at me and then further into the back of his head. His hand slowly sunk back onto the bed. His lips were drawn and stretched over his teeth. His teeth seemed too big for his mouth. He was skin and bones. No butt. No butt at all. Just skin over wing-shaped hip bones. This was Ali. This was beautiful, sexy, beefy Ali.

He came back to reality and focused his eyes on me. He slipped his cold twiggy hand around the back of my neck and pulled me to him. He had bad breath. Cottonmouth. “You’re an angel,” he breathed to me. Then he was out of it again. The room smelled like strawberry-scented canned air freshener that the visiting nurse had sprayed earlier to cover up his stink. I shifted into neutral emotionally. I took a damp washrag and wiped his face and then left the room with him sleeping.

Ali wasn’t doing well. He’d been going downhill fast. I think it was lymphoma. This was 1986 when the doctors knew as much about AIDS as we did: not much. Even though, at the time, we were the blind leading the blind, there was one thing we did know. Morphine eased Ali’s pain.

Doug was in the living room. Doug wasn’t taking Ali’s morphine. He didn’t like morphine.

“Ali said someone’s taking his morphine. He wants me to tell them to stop.”

Doug got quiet. This was a problem, stealing a painkiller from Ali when he’s being eaten alive from the inside out. Besides, everyone knew how much Ali liked narcotics. You’d think they would know not to dip into that. It’s not like we didn’t have enough drugs around. Kevin, Ali’s big blond boyfriend, was selling cocaine to help cover their expenses since Ali couldn’t work anymore. We were taking care of Ali in shifts and Kevin was generous with his coke. He gave us all we wanted to keep us going during our long nights of sitting by Ali’s bed, giving him sips of water, spoons of medicine, and cleaning up after him. Kevin gave Ali baths. That was their special thing. Kevin would pick Ali up out of bed and carry him to the bathtub like he was a big baby. Ali even wore adult diapers for a while. He always had powder blue Chux absorbent pads under his hips. Kevin always put out lines of coke on this big round mirror with a floral pattern etched into the borders. The lines looked like a snake, long, fat, and winding. We could snort as much as we wanted. We could all be drug pigs. Kevin had a supply of Quaaludes to help us get to sleep when our shift was over. He never complained about how much of his drugs we did.

We had a family. Ali had a family and we were it. Doug, James, Gina, Matt and Donny, Madeleine, and myself. This was Ali’s immediate family. We all hung out in Kevin and Ali’s apartment. Gina was in nursing school so she was a big help. James was still in love with Ali from over six years before, when we lived in New Orleans, but he didn’t make a big deal out of it. Then there were Kevin’s friends who we didn’t know so well, but they loved Ali, too. They would come around and help when they could. They were also coming around to make sure Kevin was okay. That he wasn’t too stressed out. Kevin was a painter, a very good artist, and he wasn’t getting much work done. In the evening, between 7:00 and 9:00 p.m., Kevin sold coke. Customers came into the apartment in a steady stream. The neighbors complained because people kept pushing their buzzer instead of Kevin’s.

When Gina, Matt, and Donny came over later that afternoon I asked them about the morphine. It wasn’t easy. I kept waiting for the right moment but there never seemed to be a right moment. I didn’t like this added pressure. I was having a hard enough time dealing with Ali dying. Although that was the easiest part, really. With Ali, something tangible was happening. It was a nightmare but I had some tiny bit of control over it when I was taking care of him. On the other hand, what was going on outside of his bedroom in the rest of the apartment was a communal freak-out. We didn’t have training in this. Bo had died the year before. Felipe two months before. Kevin’s best friend was also dying. You’d think we’d be used to it. Bombs were going off all around us. The repercussions from the bombs knocked us back.

We were in the kitchen. I took a deep breath. I looked out the window by the refrigerator to the crisp blue spring sky. I crossed my legs and picked at a stain on my jeans. It was probably some food I’d dropped on my lap at some point in the last week.

“Ali says someone’s taking his morphine,” I blurted out softly, not wanting to upset anyone.

Donny looked surprised. Gina looked at Donny. Matt looked at Gina. I made a mental note about how much Matt and Donny looked alike. They were more like brothers than lovers.

“He asked me to tell whoever it is to stop.” I sat on my hands.

“Did he say who it was?” Gina asked defensively.

“No. He just said, ‘They’re taking my morphine.’”

Donny looked at his feet, at me, then back at his feet. “He told us we could have some. He said he could get a refill anytime he wanted.”

“Well, he needs it now. He doesn’t want anyone to take any more.”

I looked down at Kevin’s mirror on the kitchen table and wiped my finger across a dusty white section. I rubbed my gums with the powder I’d collected on my fingertip. My front teeth went numb. I woke up a little bit. Better than a cup of coffee. “There’s still part of a line here if anyone wants,” I offered. A light breeze spread strawberry air freshener throughout the apartment.

That evening we were in the living room watching The Golden Girls on TV. I went into the bedroom to check on Ali and he told me he had seen us watching television. I asked him what he meant. He said that he had gone in there, up above us. He had astral-projected and was watching TV with us. Often, when no one else was around, Ali and I could communicate with each other without ever speaking a word.

One night Doug and Madeleine stayed with Ali so the rest of us could go to the Public Image Ltd concert. After the show, James, Matt and Donny, Gina, and I came home with Kevin to snort some coke and see how Ali was doing. Kevin said he didn’t have much because he’d sold a lot that evening. He put a half-a-gram bindle out on the coffee table in the little family room behind the kitchen. We were fixing drinks, saying hi to Ali, and getting ready to do some lines when Kevin announced that he couldn’t find the bindle. Just a moment before it was right there on the coffee table. We saw it. What had happened to it? We looked all over. We sat around and discussed what could have happened. James and I picked at the last slice of cold black olive and mushroom pizza that had been left on the coffee table. Gina went into her hyperactive mode and started pacing back and forth, talking about how bizarre it was and where could that little bindle of coke have gone? She talked about it so much that we began to think something was up. Kevin insinuated that maybe Gina might have seen what had happened to it. There was an icy silence. We all wanted to get high. She was hurt that Doug and I wouldn’t defend her.

“Do you really think I would do something like that?”

We didn’t answer. I plucked the last olive off the pizza crust. Gina looked at us with her big brown eyes. When she realized we weren’t going to help her out she stomped out of the room. We sat there for a minute, absorbing the harsh realization that we wouldn’t be getting high.

“Wait a minute! Here it is!” Gina yelled from the kitchen. “It must have fallen onto the floor.”

Kevin went out to see where it was. Gina was sitting on a kitchen chair holding her foot. “It was stuck on the bottom of my shoe.”

“Well, how’d it get there?”

“I don’t know. It just did.”

“Seems like you’d have felt it.”

“Yeah, well, what seems like isn’t always what is, Kevin. Just be glad we have it, okay?” Gina teased him, trying to break the tension. Kevin gave her a suspicious glare and took the cocaine into the back room and started dividing it up. There was enough for three lines each. Not much.

We hung out until the high wore off. Then Doug, Gina, James, and Matt and Donny went to sleep on futons in the living room. Madeleine volunteered to keep watch over Ali. Kevin and I slept on the floor in the back room. We were both still in our T-shirts and jeans. In the middle of the night Kevin got up to check on Ali. When he came back I curled up next to him from behind and held on to his big round shoulders. It was cold and damp in that little room and his body heat soothed me. I fell into a deep sleep. I woke up running my hands around his chest and down his arms. I wanted to have sex. He let me feel him for a while, never really waking up to tell me yes or no. I fell back asleep. Ali came to me in my dream, loud and clear, and told me not to have sex with Kevin.

THINGS FALL APART

It was the end of April, two months since Felipe had died and I still couldn’t get over it. After his death I started staying home more. I loved my studio apartment on Hyde Street and felt more comfortable there than anywhere. Friends stopped by often enough that I didn’t get lonely. I made a point to always have marijuana and coffee in the house for whoever wanted it. On weekends I usually had speed, too, but that was for me. Kat lived across the street. Nick around the corner. Doug and Michel lived down the hill a few blocks. James and Gina’s dealer lived around another corner from me, so they would stop by once in a while after picking something up. I was still working until midnight so I didn’t see many people during the week. James and I managed to keep working out at the gym. I didn’t have much discipline but having someone to meet there helped me go.

I missed Felipe. It seemed like his death got lost in all the confusion as Ali and then other people we knew started getting sick. I never really had time for it to sink in that Felipe wasn’t coming back. I kept thinking of things I wanted to tell him. I’d hear a song on the radio and would wonder if he’d heard it yet. I wanted to drop by the Fair Oaks apartment and hang out with him. Sometimes I’d go over there. James was still there. Madeleine had moved into my old room. Kat’s friend Sean was living in Felipe’s room. It didn’t feel the same. It was weird. What I really missed was just hanging out and talking with Felipe. I missed him laughing at me and calling me a wimp. I played that tape he’d made for me all the time.

I used to get speed from a guy called the Widow Grealy. I don’t know why we called him that. We just did. He took orders over the phone and then made deliveries between the hours of five and seven. He would pull up in front of my building and ring the buzzer. I’d run down and sit in his car and make our transaction. It was much easier than having to track someone down, hope they’d be home, and hope they didn’t run out before I got there. Plus, speed was a lot more economical than cocaine or heroin. One small line kept me going for hours. I’d start on Friday night and snort a big line and then do small lines throughout the rest of the weekend until Sunday evening when it was time to come down and rest up for work on Monday.

Stevie had broken up with his lover and moved in upstairs from me. On weekends we spent a lot of time together, staying up all night. We did speed, drank vodka, and swapped porno magazines. We would be extremely quiet so we wouldn’t disturb my next-door neighbor. We started getting paranoid that she could hear everything we were doing and was going to complain to the landlord. We’d keep the music turned down as low as it could go and whisper to each other. When we’d go from one apartment to another we’d sneak like burglars up and down the carpeted hall stairs.

In the middle of the night I’d go out to the peep shows. Sometimes Stevie would come with me, but most times I’d go alone. I never picked anyone up. I just went and watched porno videos. Between AIDS hitting my friends and things not working out with Matthew or Nick, even though I was horny, what I really wanted was to be alone.

Some of my co-workers told me I needed to get out more. They said they were worried that everything was getting to me too much. I didn’t seem as happy-go-lucky as I used to. Wanda, one of my closest work pals, invited me to go with a small group of word processors, paralegals, and first-year attorneys to the horse races one weekend. Everyone was all excited and talked about going all week. The more they talked about it the less I wanted to go. The night before I was supposed to go I did my usual Friday night fat line of speed and stayed up all night. I drank a bottle of wine or two also. When my alarm went off at ten in the morning I rolled over on my back and stared at the ceiling debating about whether or not to cancel. Finally I called Wanda and told her I couldn’t make it. She sounded disappointed but didn’t lay a guilt trip on me. I felt bad about canceling until I did another line. Then I continued my weekend binge all through that Saturday afternoon and on into the wee hours of the morning. At some point during the evening Stevie came over with a fifth of vodka. We mixed it with cranberry juice over ice and drank it down like it was Kool-Aid.

I woke up at the break of day sick to my stomach. The shades were pulled but it was still way too bright in my apartment. I felt a puke coming on but didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to move. I hated to puke. I hardly ever did, but this time it felt like it was on its way out of my stomach without my permission. So I climbed up off my futon and staggered into the bathroom. I fought the urge to puke as hard as I could. People told me they felt better after they puked but I didn’t believe them. My head was swimming. I sat down on the old white honeycomb-shaped tile floor and rested my chin on my arms around the seat of the toilet. I could smell vodka evaporating from my pores. What did Enrique call it? “Calling up Ralph O’Rourke on the big white telephone.” Only I wasn’t answering. No one home. My stomach churned and churned. I burped and a little bit of puke came up. I wasn’t going to puke anymore. I broke out in a cold sweat. This wasn’t the first time. I knew it wasn’t the last. If I could just hold out a little while longer the urge would pass and I could go back to sleep. While I waited I flushed the toilet. I watched the water rise up towards me, spinning around. Then, when it was almost to my face, it stopped and suddenly reversed directions, spinning faster and faster and disappearing out of sight.

The Toilet Bowl Effect, I thought. That’s the name of my new band. My life twirling up higher and higher, and then suddenly the bottom falls out and everything gets flushed down the toilet with the rest of the shit. That’s where I am today, on my way down. No sense trying to grab the sides, they’re too slippery.

I laughed at myself for thinking that and stood up slowly. No stomach rumbles. The churning had subsided. I washed the sweat off my face with a cold wet washrag and felt renewed. I could go back to sleep. I plopped back down on my futon and buried my head under a pillow to block the creeping sunlight. As I fell back to sleep I thought, At least when I drink like that I don’t think about Felipe being dead.

I wanted to get away. Nancy and Tony had been bugging me to move to Los Angeles. They wanted me to continue working on their band’s video. I think part of it was that they were worried about me, too, and wanted me to come down there so they could keep an eye on me. Nancy told me if I came down she’d teach me video editing on a state-of-the-art three-quarter-inch tape deck. She’d gotten a job with a company that edited music videos and fast-food commercials and we could work there at night. It was a chance to learn a job skill as well as get out of San Francisco. Tony said I could stay with him until I found my own place. I knew that the law firm I worked for wanted people to transfer to their new office in L.A. so I could probably even have a job when I got there. It all seemed to fit together. I’d always wanted to move to New York, but Los Angeles was okay. I didn’t hate it the way most people do in Northern California. It was a way out. I decided almost overnight that I would go down there.

The next day I felt relieved to be leaving. I was burned out and exhausted. I wanted San Francisco as far behind me as possible. Part of me was elated. I still had to talk to my job and Ali before I definitely made up my mind. But I woke up feeling fairly certain that I was getting out of San Francisco.

LEAVING ALI

I reached in my pocket and pulled out my little brown vial of speed. There was only enough left for one hit each and we had five hours to go. I’d bought half a gram the day before instead of my usual quarter. I thought that’d be enough to hold me over until I got to L.A. and got settled in. But I wound up doing most of it while I was finishing my last-minute packing. I’d stayed up all night. Stevie had volunteered to drive me down. We snorted the last bit of speed and then began the long drive down the middle of California in our rented van. We’d just crossed over to I-5 and were heading down to L.A. when I felt a rush of energy swoosh in through my window. Warm golden light swept around my chest and then went back out the window and up. It was Ali. One last hug. I told Stevie that Ali just died and he looked at me like, Sure, Joe, okay, you’re under a lot of pressure. Whatever you say. He smiled at me and looked back at the road.

I’d talked to Ali about leaving San Francisco for L.A. a month earlier when I first decided I wanted to go. There was a chance that I wouldn’t be there when he died and I wanted to be sure it was okay with him. He was sitting in his big overstuffed chair. Our nurse friend Patsy from Seattle, who knew us from Kansas City, was visiting. She was sitting next to him on the arm of the chair. I sat on the floor at his feet while we talked. I told him all about Nancy’s phone call. I had a chance to learn state-of-the-art video editing, which would be a way to learn a job skill so I could get out of the corporate word processing world. He told me it sounded great. He said if he had a chance to move somewhere else, he would take off in a minute. He’d had enough of San Francisco. If he’d let on at all that he didn’t want me to go I would have stayed. No questions asked. But he knew I wanted out of San Francisco. It was driving me crazy. It seemed like everyone was either dying or getting strung out on drugs. Myself included. A dark pall had settled over the city and was swallowing all of us up. The terror that had set in was beyond my wildest imagination and I didn’t know how to deal with it. Speed, pot, and Budweiser helped tremendously, but they were just Band-Aids.

It was a good thing I talked to him when I did, because during the next few weeks he got sicker and sicker. He was literally skin and bones. And his skin was developing bedsores. His paralyzed right side had gotten worse and now, not only had he lost the use of his leg, but his right arm had curled up next to his chest. He kept his big brown bottle of liquid morphine on the table beside his bed. We gave him a spoonful about every two hours. It was the only thing we could do to help ease his pain. He was shitting and pissing uncontrollably. He didn’t want to go back into the hospital so a bunch of us had agreed to take care of him.

Saying good-bye to Ali was the last thing I had to do before leaving San Francisco for good. It was warm and sunny that day. May 30, 1986. A perfect day. When I went into Ali’s room, I stopped in the doorway and looked at him before he noticed me. His bed was pressed up into the corner. In the other corner was his dresser, with some of his favorite things on top, like the small statue of Buddha that he’d had forever. I remembered it from Kansas City. I remembered it on his dresser in our house in New Orleans. We made sure he had clean sheets and warm blankets. He liked for his window to be open a crack to let in fresh air. The pillows and blankets swallowed him up. The room had a permanent odor of that strawberry air freshener. There was a small teddy bear that someone decided Ali liked, and people were always putting it up next to his head so he could have it to comfort himself. He called it “Oatmeal” because the fur was the color of oatmeal and kind of lumpy. But the picture of him in bed versus what I felt when I walked in that room were two different things. While his body had completely deteriorated, his soul had gotten bigger and bigger. It couldn’t be contained in his body anymore. It filled up the entire room. The two of us communicated without ever uttering a word. I wasn’t the only one. Ali was able to do that with almost everyone he loved. His death felt important, like I was in the presence of something greater than I’d ever known.

Ali was alert but having trouble staying awake. Patsy was in the bedroom with him. So was Doug. Kevin was in the kitchen smoking a cigarette. Ali was surrounded by people who loved and cared for him. His blankets were pulled up to his neck. Oatmeal was on the pillow next to his head. Doug and Patsy left the room so Ali and I could be alone together. His skin was drawn tightly over his face. His cheekbones stuck out. His eyes were huge. His lips were dried and chapped. When he saw me he tried to push himself up a little in bed. He patted beside him on the bed for me to sit down. I took a deep breath, then I told him I was leaving for Los Angeles.

He smiled up at me and said, “I’m going to miss you, Joe.”

He pulled his skinny, shaky arm out from under the blanket and raised it to me. I leaned over and let him wrap it around my neck. He didn’t have the strength to hug me. I moved in closer so it felt like he was pulling me to him. I wasn’t going to cry. I made a vow to myself that I wasn’t going to cry. I was going to be strong. I wasn’t going to have Ali worrying about me being upset.

“Joe, remember those Venus de Milo salt and pepper shakers I gave you?” Ali asked.

That caught me off guard. I told him, “Sure I do. I use them all the time.”

His eyes penetrated me. He squeezed my arm. His dry lips stuck together when he opened his mouth. He said, “I want you to always keep them. They’re a special present from me. When I found them I knew you’d love them.”

“I’ll take good care of them. I promise.” I started to shake. I was not going to cry. I sat up straight, holding on to Ali’s bony hand.

I looked out the window at the scraggly alley trees being blown by the wind, green shimmering leaves with a light blue sky behind them. I thought for the thousandth time that I should stay. Ali needed me. I needed him. Why was I going to Los Angeles, of all places? But there was a rented van filled with all my possessions sitting out front. The law firm I worked for had transferred my word processing position to the L.A. office. It was Friday. I was starting work there on Monday. Nancy and Tony were expecting me to help them finish their video.

I went into the kitchen to say hello to Kevin. I was kind of stunned after being with Ali. The others were in the living room staring blankly at a Mary Tyler Moore Show rerun on TV.

“Ali looks pretty bad, huh?” he said. He tapped his cigarette on the side of an ashtray and looked at me with tired eyes.

I just nodded. I could hardly talk. I was still gathering my wits. I couldn’t sit down. Kevin stood up and paced in between the refrigerator and the stove, holding his lit cigarette but not smoking. He stopped moving and turned to me. I knew what he was going to say. A few days earlier we’d had a talk about whether or not to help Ali over by giving him some extra morphine. Kevin and I talked about the pact Ali, Felipe, James, and I had made a couple of years before. If any of us got sick the others would get them enough heroin to OD so none of us would have to suffer. But when the time came neither Felipe nor Ali wanted to do it. They wanted to keep going as long as they could.

It looked like Ali had gone just about as far as he could that morning. Before Kevin could open his mouth I said that I thought maybe now was the time to give Ali that boost.

Kevin’s shoulders dropped about six inches. He took a long drag off his cigarette then put it out in the ashtray. As he blew out the smoke he looked at me. “I know.”

“Do you want me to do it?” I asked.

Kevin said, “No. I will. Just a little extra morphine is all he needs.”

It wasn’t a hard decision. The other day when we talked about it, it seemed so difficult. Now it just felt like the thing to do. Ali liked morphine. It eased his pain. It relaxed him. An extra tablespoon would help him let go, quit hanging on. It wasn’t like we were killing him. It was more like we were helping make his last moments better. At least that’s what I told myself. That’s what I told Kevin. He and I hugged for a long time. I wasn’t going to cry. Kevin was big and strong and I needed to hold on to him. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could go on. For a brief moment I wished it was me getting that extra boost. All over. Nothing to worry about. No more word processing job. But I knew I had to go on. It was time to go.

I walked back into Ali’s room one more time. He was asleep. When I kissed his forehead he opened his eyes slowly.

He whispered, “Thanks for everything, Joe.”

I said, “Oh no, thank you.”

He mimicked me, whispering, “Oh no, thank you!” and we both kind of laughed.

I kissed him gently on the lips and told him to go back to sleep. He smiled at me and squeezed my hand the best he could.

As I walked out the door of his apartment my knees started to shake. My eyes filled with tears so thick that I could barely see. I fought them back. I wasn’t going to cry. I turned to jelly when I stepped down off his front porch. My knees got wobbly. I almost didn’t make it to the van.

I climbed up in my seat, turned to Stevie, and said, “Get me out of here. Let’s go.”

AFTERWORD

by Joe Westmoreland

I wrote Tramps Like Us to remember what happened to me and my friends. Today, the book seems like a time capsule of a moment inside a larger worldwide health crisis. At the time, it was just what was happening to us and the people around us. My tiny world. There’s been a lot of writing about the sudden onset of AIDS and its devastation. Many stories of death and loss. I wanted to show those rough times, but I also wanted to show the good times. There were moments of fun, of tenderness, of getting so high we had no idea what was going on. Moments of escape. We were young, lost, and trying to find our way out of a nightmare.

Just like the narrator at the end of the novel, on May 30, 1986, I moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco, the same day my friend Qalbee (the inspiration for Ali in the book) died. Within a few months, I was arrested for drunk driving and sentenced to ninety days of Alcoholics Anonymous. Within six months of starting the meetings, I got sober. But L.A. didn’t feel like home to me; I’d always wanted to move to New York. The deciding factor was when I found out that I was HIV positive. I didn’t want to die in L.A. The timing was also right, since my job at the time could transfer me to their New York office. I found a sublet in downtown Manhattan and moved.

Within a week after arriving in New York in August 1987, I met Eileen Myles and Charlie Atlas. Two years later, Eileen and I became good friends. They were running for president of the United States at the time and I offered to be their campaign secretary. Not long after that, Charlie and I started seeing each other. We’ve lived together for over thirty years now, and Eileen still drops by regularly to visit.

One night during my early New York days, Eileen, Dennis Cooper, and Roberto Bedoya did a poetry reading at a bar in Brooklyn. I had a copy of Not Me, Eileen’s new book of poetry. I knew Dennis from a reading he did in San Francisco. He was the first writer I’d ever heard who wrote about things I could relate to: Boyfriends. Getting high and feeling stupid. New Wave music. I didn’t know you could write about those things. I thought writing, especially poetry, had to be serious. At the bar, Eileen read a letter to a friend. Not a poem or short story, but a letter! I wrote letters all the time. I didn’t know that was considered “writing.” When all three of them read that night, they sounded like they were speaking directly to me.

I began writing Tramps Like Us so I could tell my new friends about my life before I got to New York. To do so, I needed to back up and review everything that happened that led me to San Francisco with my friend and companion, Qalbee, dying. I started writing the book as a memoir with the working title How I Got HIV.

Our arrival in San Francisco was the basis for the first stories I wrote. But in order for the reader to understand that time, I had to go back to how we got there. I wrote about New Orleans. My time in New Orleans was an education in itself. It’s where I learned about gay family and community. I made lasting friendships there. Then I had to go further back to my hitch-hiking days. I wrote about why I felt safer standing on the side of a highway alone than in suburban Kansas City with my family.

But as I was writing, all my stories became too bogged down with detail. Relationships and events were hard to separate and keep track of. I tried hard to keep the essence of what happened as close as possible to the truth. I blended two or three people into one character. I did the same with events. This helped the story start to flow. As a result, parts of the book are patches of total fiction. The narration also had to be played with so the story would move forward. The memoir inevitably became a fictionalized novel.

While writing Tramps, I got sick with AIDS for the first time. In the summer of 1995, I spent ten days in the AIDS ward of St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital in New York. It was 104 degrees outside and 104 degrees inside my body. My first roommate “slipped away” late one night. The second roommate had a health crisis and was wheeled out of the room. He didn’t return. My third roommate talked too much. Half the patients in the AIDS unit died that summer.

The patients who lived were soon able to start new experimental antiviral drug trials. I was one of the lucky ones. I responded to the treatments, although adjusting to the new drugs wasn’t easy. Some of the medications made me as sick as HIV/AIDS. Nevertheless, about six months later, the drugs were approved and available to everyone with AIDS. I was feeling better, back on my feet. That period included lots of time in doctors’ offices. More new drugs came along that got the virus under control. Finally, there was light.

I kept working on my book. It was a relief to close myself in the little world that was unfolding on my laptop screen. I was transported to a different plane of consciousness, one that I actually had control over. It took a couple of years more, but eventually I had a manuscript.

Finishing it was a group project. I was in two writers’ groups. One group had four of us who met at a memoir-writing workshop. The other was my friend Lucy’s group—a mix of friends, usually about six people, sometimes more. We read our poetry, screenplays, fiction, journal entries. Both groups made suggestions to my stories and showed me problems that needed to be fixed. When I felt like my book was finally finished, two friends, both English professors, each read the entire manuscript. They pointed out some problems and helped with grammar. The help from my friends was invaluable.

Next it was time to look for a publisher. I found an agent but it didn’t work out. I gave him my manuscript and after a year of no interest from publishers, I took it back. Eileen Myles was friends with Bill Sullivan, the publisher of the small independent Painted Leaf Press. He’d heard me read stories and was interested in seeing my book. I really wanted a big publisher, but it didn’t look promising. I made a few calls and was told that I needed an agent to bring the book in. The University of Wisconsin Press replied to a letter I sent them. They also were interested in my book. They had to present it to a university board to decide for sure, though, which would take six months. My friend Gary Pensyl, who the character James in my book was based on, died of AIDS-related liver cancer while I was looking for a publisher. I thought if he could get sick so quickly and die, it could happen to me, too. I didn’t write the book thinking that I had a personal deadline—I wrote it for myself, but Gary’s death startled me. I needed to get my book published.

Bill Sullivan’s Painted Leaf Press office was in his loft apartment on Fortieth Street across from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He had a copy of Reinaldo Arenas’s hand-edited manuscript of Before Night Falls sitting on his kitchen table. I got excited because I loved that book. Apart from Arenas, Bill had also published poetry by Joan Larkin and Jaime Manrique. I’d met them both and heard them read their poems. I knew I was going to be in good company. Sitting at Bill’s kitchen table covered with books, I felt relieved. I’d finally found a home for Tramps Like Us.

In April 2001, Tramps Like Us arrived in boxes at the publisher’s office. The book looked beautiful, better than I’d imagined. When I held it for the first time a warm rush went up my arm. It felt like a physical manifestation of love.

But things didn’t go as planned. My publisher, Bill, had a heart attack the week after my book was released. It was late spring 2001. We decided to go slow promoting it until the fall as a result. I did a few readings and finally had a big book release party planned on the Lower East Side in September. I chose my birthday, September 11, for the kickoff.

On the morning of my birthday, the World Trade Center was attacked. I saw the towers smoking and collapsing from my corner of Fourteenth Street and Ninth Avenue. The world as we knew it came to a standstill. My book was forgotten. Even by me.

At the same time, I was also dealing with my own health issues. I had to stop writing for a while because of a combination of my weak immune system and the side effects of new HIV/AIDS medications and experimental treatments. My filtration system (liver, kidneys, pancreas) were wearing down. My doctors were surprised by my unusual body malfunctions. I spent so much time in medical clinics and hospitals being poked, prodded, and scanned that I forgot about my life before I got sick.

In 2007, I developed colon cancer and lost all my hair from chemotherapy. It took a few months to grow back. It seemed like one body organ would get fixed and then another would break down. It was a full-time job trying to stay healthy. Sometimes friends would remind me that I had a life before my illness and had even written and published a novel.

Nonetheless the book was out there during all these years. While at that point Tramps Like Us had gone out of print, people still managed to find copies somehow. The best thing was still seeing my book on the shelf in my local library. The New York Public Library had it at their main branch and at the Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village. That was my library. It even had a Dewey decimal number!

During Covid lockdown, early 2020, I got very ill. Not from Covid, but other body malfunctions. Within a few months, I’d had a heart attack, my liver cancer returned, and I fell over and broke a few vertebrae in my lower back. I was close to the edge. Eileen was visiting one afternoon. I was in too much pain to get off the couch. I told them that I didn’t have the energy to write anymore. My brain was clogged with medications and fever dreams.

Eileen suggested I try writing one sentence a day. It sounded silly at first. But I listened to them and started doing it. At first, I wrote how I felt. Then what I was doing. Then I thought I should say something interesting. I began to pay attention to sentence structure. Slowly, my writing voice was coming back.

My friendship with Eileen expanded my world. They explained the writing industry to me—publishers, editors, and agents. Mostly they showed me the life of a writer by example. They were encouraging and generous with their time, not only with me but with many other poets and writers. We talked about how it was too bad my book wasn’t in circulation anymore. I’d thought about shopping it around again when I felt better. I had a lot of plans for “when I felt better.”

But Eileen said we should think about finding a publisher now. They asked if I had extra copies of my book that they could use. They had some people in mind to show it to. So, I gave them my last extra copies. It was hard to give them up.

One afternoon in March 2023, I got an email from the editor Jackson Howard, saying Eileen had given him a copy of my book. He said he loved it and wanted to know if I’d have coffee with him to discuss it. A half an hour later, a literary agent, Eloy Bleifuss, emailed saying almost the same thing. It was a dream come true. Every writer wants an agent and an editor. They were telling me they loved my book and wanted to bring it back out into the world.

Once, after a serious surgery, I woke up with a nurse standing over me. She said, “Hello,” and smiled. I replied, “Wow, I didn’t know if I was going to make it.” She said that it must be God’s Plan. I agreed but actually wasn’t sure. I know it’s corny, but after Jackson and Eloy asked about republishing my book, I thought of my conversation with that nurse.

The prospect of my book coming out again twenty years after it was first published—and more than forty years after the years that it covered—made me think about what has changed.

What’s strange to me is how hardly anybody talks about AIDS these days, as if it’s a thing of the past. People continue to get infected with HIV, but it’s rare that anyone dies from it, at least in America. These days people of my generation are dying of age-related problems more than those caused by HIV.

For years people had commented on how much sex there is in my book. We were “practicing” unsafe sex and sharing needles. To some people, I was telling on myself, and it made them uncomfortable. I imagine that readers today aren’t afraid of getting AIDS like we used to be, which probably changes how they see the book. There are drugs that keep people from getting sick or even catching the virus. With those drugs some of the longtime fear and shame has lifted.

Today, my HIV viral load is so low that I can’t infect anyone. That’s a miracle of modern technology. Twenty years ago it would have sounded like a pipe dream.

But some things haven’t changed since my book first came out. I still miss Qalbee and Jose, who was the inspiration for the character Felipe. Sometimes I’ll remember something that happened and make a mental note to tell them. Then I realize I can’t.

I was scheduled to have a tumor on my liver removed the first Thursday of August 2013. It was to be at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. The weekend before, I went up to the Catskills to see my friends Kathleen and Liz. I love it up there. My friend Kathleen is an attorney and had already been working on my will. We thought it was a good idea to finish it before my surgery.

For dinner they grilled fat, juicy hamburgers. I took a couple of bites of my burger and then felt two sharp pangs in my right side, like a snake bit me. I felt like I needed a nap and I went up to my room. When I woke up, I swung my legs off the bed and stood up. I collapsed with a loud boom. Kathleen and Liz took me to the little county hospital close by. It wasn’t prepared for an emergency like me. They sent me in an ambulance to the much larger Vassar Brothers Medical Center in Poughkeepsie.

My surgeon in Manhattan just happened to be on call at Vassar Brothers that weekend. It was a forty-five-minute ambulance ride from the county hospital to Vassar Brothers’ ER. My surgeon was waiting for me at the emergency receiving dock when my ambulance pulled up. My partner Charlie and our friend Lori met me there. The surgeon told Charlie that he couldn’t promise I’d make it through surgery. My tumor had burst.

In the ER, my surgeon couldn’t perform the high-end robotic liver surgery that he’d planned at Lenox Hill. Instead, he had to do it old-school and slice across from my center-right side, along the bottom edge of my rib cage across to the left side. Then they peeled me open and went to work. As that happened, I floated up above the operating table almost to the ceiling. I looked below and saw my surgeon and two other doctors hovering over my body. My long legs stuck out over the end of the table. There was a wet rope that connected me to the opening below my rib cage. I had the choice of letting go of the rope and floating higher, up, up, and away. Or, I could pull myself back down. I wasn’t ready to go, so I pulled. The next thing I knew everything was quiet. My surgeon stood next to my bed and said, “Mr. Westmoreland, it’s nice to have you back.” I survived the surgery.

After a couple of days in Intensive Care, I was moved to the Step-Down unit. When the nurses had finished checking on me and I was left to rest, things got interesting. At the foot of my bed, the big wall clock looked like the friendly face of a man smiling down on me. The hands of the clock were a thin mustache.

There were two leather coats hanging on the door of a metal storage closet. In the quiet, they became two gay guys talking in low voices. They’d look at me and smile. The curtains that divided my bed from another patient turned into three girls snuggling close together, whispering shyly. Their long dresses were the same peach color as the divider curtain. Their hair was teased up high. When a nurse came around, they’d fade into folds in the curtain.

The clock was the head guy. He told me they were all glad I was there because sometimes it gets boring in the hospital. I looked around at all of them. It felt good to have some company. When my friends visited, they looked so sad and worried. With these guys, I felt like I was going to be okay. They weren’t scary. I told them that I lived in the city. The gays in leather said they used to live there, too. The girls in the peach dresses giggled. The clock told me not to talk too much. I needed to rest.

My fever dreams began to lift. I started to come back to reality. The nurses helped by asking me standard post-op questions.“Where do you live? Who do you live with? Do you have any pets?” As I answered, I began to remember what I was doing there. They asked what I did for a job. I told them that I’d been on disability from an office job for a long time. Then I added, but I did write a book. “It’s called Tramps Like Us.” I was pleased to remember its name. They asked what it was about and if they could get it. When I was a little better the nurse who spent the most time with me came back and told me that she read the book.

The author would like to thank the Authors League Fund, Key West Literary Seminar, PEN American Center Fund for Writers with AIDS, and the Writers Room, New York City. Special thanks to Charlie Atlas, Kitty Baudoin, Eloy Bleifuss, John Bliss, Douglas Bourgeois, Donna Brodie, Kathleen Conkey, Kyle DeCamp, Xavier Demange, Brianna Fairman, Alice Fasano, Lina Fellini, Sue Fenoglio, Henry Flesh, Arturo Galster, Jerry Gravelle, Howard Grossman, Jackson Howard, Hettie Jones, PJ Mark, Sheila McLaughlin, Dan Munoz, Eileen Myles, Hugh Rowland, Nette Scott, Lori Seid, Lucy Sexton, Tommy Stephan, Tony Stinkmetal, Jan Taylor, Greta Turkin, Joan Valencia, and Eddie Valentine.

A Note About the Author

Joe Westmoreland is the author of the novel Tramps Like Us, originally published in 2001. His writing has appeared in several anthologies, zines, and catalogs for art exhibitions. He lives with his partner, the artist Charles Atlas, in New York City. You can sign up for email updates here.

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Copyright © 2001, 2025 by Joe Westmoreland

Introduction copyright © 2025 by Eileen Myles

All rights reserved

Originally published in 2001 by Painted Leaf Press, New York

First MCD edition, 2025

Frontispiece image by Aastels / Shutterstock.com.

Cover design by Charlotte Grimm.

Cover photograph by Stanley Stellar.

Ebook ISBN: 978-0-374-61401-0

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.