Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (14 page)

T
HE METROPOLITAN THEATRE—though one never used the second word, so that when you told someone where you were going, it might have been the Museum or the Opera—is no longer as dark as it used to be. The two long hallways running down either side of the ground floor are brightly lighted now, and the foyer downstairs is actually visible. In the seventies the darkness of the Metropolitan was legendary; to walk into this decrepit theater on Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue was to enter a deep black cave in which it was impossible to see anything—that was the point—but now, in March 1987, the strictures of safer sex have resulted, even here, in brighter lightbulbs, and the place seems small.

Much about New York seems small to me now, however—as if the whole city has shrunk to a single fact. I wander around the city, past the buildings going up on Third Avenue, the crowds on Fifth, aware that inside the external aggrandizement of the city’s power and glitter is another, smaller city that haunts the mind as a sort of doppelgänger. The city as cemetery. When I come home to New York now, I go straight to one of the movie houses showing pornographic films near my apartment on the Lower East Side. At the end of a day spent visiting friends in hospital rooms—intelligent, brave, accomplished men breathing oxygen through tubes, staring at a brick wall outside the window—when I get down to the street, my instinct is to run, not walk, straight through this earthly hell to the Metropolitan and, once its doors close behind me, relax; relax in the comfort of the very thing that has become the Siamese twin of death. After leaving the hospital room of the friend whose pancreas has ceased to function, after leaving the apartment of the young man going blind, after meeting on the sidewalk a thirty-six-year-old acquaintance who looks eighty-nine, I walk through the cold, crowded city or down a deserted street to one of these doorways and obliterate everything in the dark, warm chamber of seed. Nothing else provides the comfort this place does—no other experience.

There is something sad, delicious, and infinitely erotic about these movie houses now that in the past seemed merely sordid. The Metropolitan has always been here—it still even costs the same three dollars—but it depressed me in the seventies; I must have gone there two times the entire decade. Often I walked by it. Passing the Metropolitan, I always thought of a story by Tennessee Williams called “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio,” about a dirty old man in the balcony of a dirty old movie house. The Metropolitan was synonymous with sleaze—famous for mixing a clientele that consisted of successful models from the Upper East Side with residents of the Lower East Side; one of those places where two groups that did not meet often socially could meet in the dark. It was so dark one could hardly see any of the men lining the hallways, the balconies, the stage behind the movie screen—and all I remember now is the feeling one had standing in the lobby, buttoning one’s coat, before going back out onto the street: that dull, depressed feeling of failure, of dejection—at having to rejoin a world in which light, law, manners, reality kept one at a distance from the objects of one’s erotic dreams. Sometimes I would walk afterward across Union Square to a bathhouse that only cost three dollars, too. But now the baths are closed. Despite the fact that they are a sensible environment for the practice of safe sex, the Hassidim picketed the one on my block, the courts acted, and its black doors are shut. A few remain—on Wall Street, in Harlem—but they don’t seem worth the trouble; in middle age, one prefers what is closer to home. And the Metropolitan is a five-block walk from my apartment, one block farther than the Jewel.

My urge to run here immediately upon returning to New York is fueled by not very mysterious things—the reasons people go to these places in ordinary times: loneliness and lust. But it’s also a response to the fact that New York is no longer a city one returns to anymore with the exhilaration and joy that used to make one consider kneeling down on the airport tarmac, like the pope, and kissing the ground upon arrival at Newark. New York is the center of the epidemic, where you learn almost inevitably that another friend is sick or see those who already are, knowing all the while you cannot do anything but behave as well as possible and wonder if they hate you for not being there with them. Depression is what brings me to the pornographic movie house—the same way it sent me home from the hospital the autumn I spent visiting a relative in intensive care (among the nurses, tubes, machinery, and horror), to turn the TV on to
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,
because he was so soothing, simple, and calm. There is an urge, when life seems totally crushing, to just crawl back into the womb.

And the womb is what these theaters—the Metropolitan, the Adonis, the Jewel—seem to me now: dark and quiet and calm. They are, moreover, all that is left, it seems, of homosexuality. Or at least one aspect of it: the central one. “I don’t know anyone who’s gay anymore,” says a woman I know. “Gay is not an option.” The bars, the discotheques, that are still open seem pointless in a way; the social contract, the assumptions, that gave them their meaning are gone. They turn you serious, if you stay long enough—because every bar, every dance floor, reminds you eventually of a friend. The memory of friends is everywhere. It pervades the city. Buildings, skylines, corners have holes in them—gaps: missing persons. And if the present is a cemetery, the future is a minefield. I think sometimes that if, in the old days, over a long enough period of time, everyone had slept with everyone else, one might now say, “Over a long enough period of time, everyone is diagnosed.” The pitier becomes the pitied eventually. As one man said after being diagnosed, “I wasn’t doing anything everyone else wasn’t.” Exactly.

Years ago, when the first friend died, those he’d left behind talked about his illness for months; the whole city seemed haunted by him; we could not imagine New York without Eddie. Now when the news comes that the twenty-fifth or thirty-ninth friend has died, I discuss the death, and before hanging up the phone, ask the person who brings these tidings if he wants to go to the movies Tuesday. It’s nearly banal. Won’t someone please turn off the bubble machine? We get the point. The friend who lives upstate says calling friends in Manhattan is “like phoning Germany in the thirties.” Or, as a friend who lives in town puts it, “It’s like living in Beirut. You never know where the next bomb is going to go off.” The bomb seems the best metaphor as I wander the Metropolitan. “Oh,” people say when they learn someone left New York in 1983, “you got out before the bomb fell.” Well, not really, he wants to reply, the bomb fell several years before that. Only we didn’t know it. The bomb fell without anyone’s knowing the bomb had fallen, which is how it destroyed a community that now seems—looking back—as extinct as the Mayans.

The Mayans left temples in the Yucatán; we seem to have left pornography. At the Jewel—around the corner—they show films in which the actors are all men; the first time I went there I sat for hours watching them, the way one might watch a movie about Chichén Itzá. It seemed—this sunny Californian world that provided our sexual icons—as distant from the present as life upon the pyramids of ancient Yucatán, divided from the present—in both cases—by a single cataclysmic fact. People go to the Jewel not only to watch the films, however. They go to cruise, to breathe the forbidden atmosphere. What persists through all this is the allure of the body. “The skin,” a man at the Jewel explained, when we left together in a cab, “needs to be touched.” (His apartment, on the other hand, was littered with three-by-five cards on which he’d written, BHAGWAN, PLEASE PROTECT ME FROM AIDS. We ended up talking, not touching—the exchange of stories, of fear, that sometimes replaces sex itself.)

At the Metropolitan—for a reason I never understood fully—the mostly gay audience watches (or does not watch) heterosexual fantasies on-screen. That is part of the mystique, the legend, of the Metropolitan—the illusion that this place was more
real.
Now things are too real, of course, and the Metropolitan seems fantastic. The women in black lingerie, garters, and stockings produce a cascade of fervid gasps, an “Oh! Oh! Oooooh!” in the backseat of automobiles, a tent overlooking Big Sur, a train compartment, that makes one think men do not even come close to enjoying sex, that only women experience pleasure. The men attending them on-screen seem merely drones—as nervous and harried as bank robbers pulling off a job. The men in the audience sit for the most part alone—straight men, perhaps, who don’t care what the rest of the audience is doing, or men whose egos require that they establish their masculinity by watching women first, or simply men who need the time to adjust their eyesight to the darkness and to figure out just what is going on and who is here.

Who is here are mostly black and Hispanic men. The graffiti in the hallway reads, among other things, STOP NIGGERS FROM SPREADING AIDS and PUERTO RICANS RULE. Fifty-three percent of the cases in New York City are now Hispanic and black (which has more to do with drugs than with homosexuality and more to do—most cruelly—with babies than with right or wrong). For a while, blacks thought it was a white man’s disease, and whites thought blacks had caused it: Africa accusing Europe, and Europe accusing Africa. Everyone wants someone else to have AIDS, if someone has to have it. Farther down the wall in the same handwriting are the words EVEN A SIMPLE BLOW JOB CAN GIVE YOU AIDS. USE RUBBERS AND LIVE! (Most gay men do not believe this; they think oral sex is safe.) Rubbers are something one was once embarrassed to even suggest—at the beginning—for fear one would be considered anal-compulsive, neurotic, germophobic. Rubbers were jokes, the idea of constraints on sex anathema to those who argued that the essence of sex was freedom, and the glory of freedom sex. “He said he’d use a rubber,” one friend told me, “if I’d eat what was in it afterward.” Safety ran counter to the whole expansive spirit of the seventies, the exhilarating suspicion that we were pioneers in the pursuit of human happiness and no one had found its limits yet. The plague provided limits. Limits that seemed so draconian and harsh that even after their arrival—during that period when people knew, but did not quite believe—friends considered infringements on their sexual options to be merely more American puritanism. There was no romance in rational sex. (The curious paradox of anonymous sex, of one-night stands, of places like the Metropolitan, was their deeply romantic nature.) The death of Dionysus—the closing down of promiscuity—took a long time to complete itself, a lot of fear. But fear was what the plague has produced copiously, till it now constitutes the substance of homosexual life. AIDS has been a massive form of aversion therapy. For if you finally equate sex with death, you don’t have to worry about observing safe-sex techniques; sex itself will eventually become unappetizing. And the male body will turn into an object of dread—not joy—an object whose touch makes you lie awake afterward, with the suspicion you have just thrown your life away for a bit of pleasure. “There’s so much more to life than sex,” says a friend who has sworn off it for several years now. “What?” I say. “Well, living,” he says. “Living is important to life.” Yet despite this—because of this—we come to the Metropolitan.

I come to the Metropolitan for the same reason friends began traveling to Brazil when the plague began—escape. But standing there letting my eyes adjust to the darkness, I cannot help but think of friends who are not there with me—seeing what I see. Life’s a movie people leave at different times; the ones who remain get to see a little more of what happens next. Eddie and I used to see things together—now I come here alone. “I’m going to Ceil’s for lunch, then the D&D Building, then down to your neighborhood for a shiatsu massage from that Dutch boy, and then I thought I’d drop by the Metropolitan,” he’d call and say, reciting a menu for the afternoon that only a city like New York can offer. “I’ll wait for you before going in. It’s only three dollars!” It was much more expensive than that—but we didn’t know this when we met on the sidewalk in a lightly falling snow that dusted the mustaches of the young Puerto Ricans passing the glass doors of the theater that separated the public from the private world. Eddie usually wore his torn fatigues and ripped tank top, under an Armani topcoat. His motto was Auntie Mame’s: “Life’s a banquet, and most poor fools are starving to death.” Eddie’s not here now. Other people are. They wander back and forth—across the foyer, up and down the aisles, searching, searching.

Sometimes we forget how far we’ve come, or at least how much we have assimilated, in the past four years. The shock is gone now, perhaps, the dangers accommodated in daily life. Each person makes his daily wager with the facts. The telephone still strikes a residual fear each time it rings—it will bring, for sure, more bad news—but it’s not what it used to be: the panic of a shark attack. Yet the sadism, the cruelty, the meanness of the disease, remain the same. It may no longer surprise, but it still takes the breath away—and makes you yearn for an end to the suffering. “I keep thinking there’s a beach at the end of this,” a friend said. “An island, and we’ll be happy again.” In the meantime, I come to the Metropolitan the moment I get back to Fun City.

And it is fun—the old freedom, the old romance, the old excitement, come back the moment the doors to the lobby close behind me, and, after allowing my eyes to adjust to the darkness, I start to walk around. There may be far fewer vignettes—people have adapted; they always do—but there are still some. Two men squat downstairs on toilets in the bathroom stalls, cans of beer lined up in a row at their feet, peeking out around the partitions to see who’s coming, with the expression of children waiting for Santa Claus. When the plague began, and I heard stories of people with AIDS having sex with others without telling them till it was over, I thought them preposterous; now, given the depression, the despair, the idea that what-the-world-gave, I-can-give-back, I believe them all. The prostitutes with AIDS who keep going back to work exemplify a strain in everyone. The best guide to this mysterious battleground in which death may be entirely hidden was given by a friend with AIDS: “Treat everyone as if they have it.” Caveat emptor. That really is all people need. No legislation is necessary. The Metropolitan seems so dangerous that it’s safe. When I go upstairs again, I notice that most men watching the movie sit alone in their seats—alone and safe—but others are walking back and forth along the dark rear walls that lead up to the balconies. Even there, at the darkest center of the Metropolitan, the men leaning against the wall of the projection booth are separate. No clumps, no orgies; none of the feeding frenzies that, even before the plague, made one wonder what it all meant. In the darkest corner, the handsomest Puerto Rican in the place—so far—is being licked by someone I cannot see. Next, a handsome youth who looks as if he just got off the bus from Indiana comes up the stairs, can of beer in hand; his bright eyes, broad-shouldered frame, wide-open expression (what does it mean?) are the image of health, the look cereal companies use in commercials. He walks onto the narrow balcony, sits down next to a black man who is leaning against the wall, and stares at him . . . the white man watching the black man, the black man watching the white woman on the screen . . . till the black man approaches his seat and there is a connection: like a car stopping at a gas tank, a bee on an azalea in spring. The mouth fits over the tube, the figures merge in silhouette, and a crowd gathers to watch what many of them will not do themselves anymore.