Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (20 page)

“Would you?” the caller says. “Tell him—
Dewdrop
called.”

“Dewdrop?” I say, writing this down on a pad.

“Yes,” he says, with just the hint of a laugh in his voice.

Thank God for the young, I think after hanging up. Someone has to have drag names.

Y
EARS AGO, SOMEONE leaving Manhattan for a job in Hong Kong said, when I asked how he could bear to leave the city, that it made no difference; when he came back, five or ten years later, everyone would be doing exactly the same thing—standing in the Eagle holding a beer, leaning against the wall. He was right. The Spike seems to have surpassed the Eagle in terms of popularity, but the Eagle is still the Eagle, and you go back and forth between the two of them on a cold winter night, glancing across the street trying to remember just where the nooks and crannies were underneath the West Side Highway where knots of men gathered to have sex in the early seventies. The Eagle and the Spike one can always count on: The men look the same, the milieu is exactly what it always was. The thrill, and monotony, of standing in these bars are unchanged, too; and, when you leave, the walk home—across the blank, dimly lighted expanse of Twenty-second Street, past the first beautiful facades of townhouses (whose lanterns may burn a little brighter now, for purposes of crime detection), past the Empire Diner, down to whichever avenue you choose to whatever cross street appeals to you next, past a new place, the Sound Factory Bar, probably worth going into (but you don’t), then down Eighth Avenue for a few blocks, since that has become a clone corridor crowded with handsome men, then Eighteenth Street all the way to Broadway. There are new bars near Broadway, too, bars with big glass windows and heterosexual customers, but the rug store is still opposite Paragon, also unchanged, and the wonderful beauty of walking downtown on a cold Sunday night in winter is exactly as it always was. The quiet, the emptiness, the solitude are extraordinary: This huge beast of a city is as gentle as a lamb. Everyone’s crashing, getting ready for work the next day, as the same particles in the sidewalk sparkle under the streetlights: Gramercy Park, Irving Place, a couple on the corner discussing how they should go home together, then Third Avenue, then the park at Stuyvesant Place, dark and lovely under its bare trees and a light dusting of snow, with two men cruising. Then down to Second Avenue, over to First, where there are more new groceries and bodegas open late, and more fruit stands, of course, and more restaurants and more gay men. Past the Tunnel, down First Avenue, past the old Club Baths (now a bar called Stella’s, outside of which you stop to watch some cute Hispanic men playing pool where the lockers of the baths used to be), past the little grocery on the corner of Houston, where a patient man of Andean aspect stands outside, guarding the produce and opening the door for you when you finally pick up a paper and two grapefruits and head inside to pay for them, and then a new popular restaurant on the corner itself, where, under the streetlight, you finally make eye contact with a beautiful young man with short, black hair, dark eyes, carrying a gym bag, who may be straight or gay, you can’t tell.

Walking in New York is a form of theater—
the
form of theater the city offers, and always has—and walking New York as a gay man means, inevitably, cruising. Cruising, when you are young, makes every walk—to the grocery, or post office—fraught with possibility. On Bank Street one slushy afternoon, I see a young man coming toward me with beautiful wavy hair, clear eyes, pale skin, as fresh on that grimy street as a field of snow in Vermont; and I realize, or recall, just what it means to walk about the city when one looks like that. When you are older, however, you begin to notice yourself, as you walk the city, vanishing, bit by bit, like the Invisible Man, in the faces that don’t look at you. Still, there are always lots of faces to look at. There are Asian faces on Orchard Street, where I’m staying this time, and, around the corner, Puerto Rican faces, and, down Allen Street, at East Broadway, Chinese faces, and then, past City Hall, into the maw of Wall Street, every kind of face. There is around some of these faces a gay uniform: black leather jacket, faded jeans, baseball cap worn backward (the latter even at the baths). Fashions, like generations, seem to last a decade, so the baseball cap is with us for a few more years. So is short hair (which, on the young, looks young, and on the old, gay). There’s the East Village clone, and the Chelsea clone, and the very buffed, model/actor/waiter look one sees in the restaurant at Eighth and Eighteenth, where, my friend Victor tells me on our way to the McBurney Y, all the boys go. They do. We press our faces against the glass and peer at them, the way one looks at fish in an aquarium, and then go on. The McBurney Y is also the same—the lobby slightly rearranged, but otherwise, the feeling on a Saturday afternoon is exactly what it always was: the slightly seedy, sexy silence, the gleam of smooth stone, faint echoes, people descending the stairs fresh from a workout, pausing in the lobby to wrap scarves around their necks before taking their stimulated bodies out into the cold.

The cold is dry, exhilarating, the reason, I suspect, New York is New York—the thing residents get sick of by the middle of February, but which, to a visitor, is deeply energizing. Of course there are other reasons for the feeling of excitement—mainly the street life. Cities other than New York are oozing out on all sides now with new subdivisions, new expressways, more strip malls, glassy office buildings that regard splashing fountains in office parks set beside expressways in the middle of nowhere: Edge City—all variations on the automobile, all deserts without a scintilla of street life. The polar opposite of Manhattan, where there is only one place to expand—up—and where old neighborhoods, because of that, get revitalized by new populations, and a single storefront becomes, over the ten years you return on visits, a bar, a gallery, a clothes store, the sidewalks around it providing more eye contact, more stimulation, more information per square block than any other city I know. The information may be crushingly monotonous when you live there. It may even be startlingly the same, when you come back. But it’s much more stimulating than the vacuum, the social void, in which people live—or rather, drive cars—in Edge City.

One night I walk up from Houston to Ninetieth Street and Central Park West—around seven o’clock, when Fifth Avenue is still thronged with people; another evening, I walk down Third Avenue to Orchard Street from Fifty-seventh Street; back and forth to Soho and the West Village almost every other day; but mostly, this time, I find myself turning south when I leave the building, and heading down to Wall Street.

This walk is new to me—through a part of town that used to intimidate me slightly, when I lived on St. Marks Place—but this time, as with so much that frightens us in life, I see there is nothing to be afraid of at all. The atmosphere is the one the East Village used to have. The East Village is now middle class and filled with young people; Avenue A now looks better than First or Second. There are new bars, restaurants, up and down it. But south of Houston, down Chrystie and Allen and Orchard, the landscape has that abandoned, bombed-out look it used to have north of Houston. Orchard Street is absolutely dark at night: the stores closed, a single light burning above the doorway of the building I return to, the only person on the block. Walking down Allen Street, past the bare trees that line the park that bisects the avenue, one has the feeling one used to have on St. Marks in the early seventies. Walking south the faces change from Puerto Rican to Chinese—the language, too—and soon you find yourself in Chinatown; Greater Chinatown, expanding and spilling over its old confinement to Mott Street—where faces, fish, vegetables, stores, letters suddenly become more vivid, strange, and self-contained. Then, heading toward the World Trade Towers, you wend your way through narrow, angled streets toward City Hall, and, if you have a mind, up onto the Brooklyn Bridge—at dusk, or afterward—for a view that ranks, especially when night is falling, with the Pyramids, the Grand Canyon, or whatever is on your list of show-stopping sights; and then, back on to Manhattan, and the Wall Street Sauna.

Then back to Orchard Street, up Rivington, Madison, Grand, Ludlow, Forsythe, Eldridge, Delancey, getting lost, passing projects, and streets of tenements occupied by teenage girls sitting on stoops talking in accents that do not change, and constitute New York, back to your corner, on which a bright-eyed Puerto Rican youth tearing at a Danish walks back and forth, looking at you with shining eyes, eyes you would love to make contact with, till you see another man come up and make an exchange with him that means he is on the corner dealing crack; while just across Houston, at First Avenue and First, the
jeunesse dorée
are looking at each other romantically over candles on the tables of the restaurant on the corner. You look at the Puerto Rican; he looks at you. But instead of meeting him, you buy the
Times
, and go upstairs to bed.

When you get up the next day, you raise the blinds, and lie in bed watching a cold blue sky; a pillow case flapping on a windowsill; a man in an apartment building across Houston who keeps opening his window, sticking his head out, then closing it; two cats sunning themselves on the snow in the rubble-filled backyard; and, finally, seagulls that swoop across the space between your window and Houston Street. Lying in bed in New York in perfect solitude is a luxury because you know that when you wish to leave that bed, there is all that life waiting for you outside.

Yet most of it is somewhat déjà vu; which is why one just keeps walking. When you stop walking, you call a friend to see if you can visit—which may be the real unstated pleasure that anchors these walks, gives them a focal point. Everyone you drop in on, it seems, can be divided into two groups—those who have withdrawn, because of the ravages of AIDS, or middle age, or the synergistic combination of the two; and those still participating, still playing the game, still out there running around. Which category you belong to has to do with factors both external and internal: age and its transformations, and temperament. Two bowls in which people’s names can be placed: Stopped Living, and Still Running Around. The former has to do with Survivor’s Syndrome—as a character in Paul Rudnick’s new play
Jeffrey
makes clear, in a stinging speech to the lead. Is it possible to stop living when you are still alive? Do you stop living when you stop having sex? “You give out the message that you are not to be considered,” says a friend, about walking the streets of New York. “You make it impossible to be approached.” He’s right. It’s self-protective, of course, but also a reaction primarily to the fact that one doesn’t feel worth approaching. People are still approached, however. One day I walk the Village with a handsome thirty-year-old and watch the response: the sidelong, furtive glance at the last minute; the frank, warm smile; the turning back to look (sometimes immediately, sometimes after they’ve crossed the street, to retain their dignity). Heads still turn. People are still having sex. One friend I visit has two boyfriends—one scheduled to come by at five, the other at seven, the evening I drop in—and cannot decide which to continue with and which to end. On Saturday afternoon, he tells me, when I come in out of the cold, that he’s thinking of dumping B., who takes too many drugs, has too pronounced a Long Island accent (for some, an aphrodisiac!), and is too eager to get married. The newer one has a gorgeous body, a huge dick, and is very hot sex. The next evening, after dates with both, the descriptions are reversed: The first one is truly devoted, handsome, hot sex, and willing to correct his flaws, even to the point of taking diction lessons. The second is, really, a queen. He plays their voices on the answering machine for me. The next evening, after going to the theater with my friend and Boyfriend No. 2, I leave them in front of his building on lower Fifth Avenue (still the most picture-perfect sidewalk in New York), in the slushy snow, on their way up in the elevator to his place. Ah, New York: between the theater, and lovemaking, a walk.

The next night I drop by another friend’s and watch him dress for a concert he always attended with his best friend—who died a year ago—and cannot help but think: He’s going alone. Alone. This man who used to know so many people: all dead.
So get new
ones
, someone says to him on the street one day when he describes his predicament. He never speaks to that person again. “It was like saying: Go out and get another baby to kill and eat. I was astonished. Friends can’t be replaced!” Of course they have to be, if one wishes to have friends. And they will be, I suspect, when he leaves this city that has so many memories for him they crush the life out of it, this city whose streets are all lined with buildings in which someone used to live, used to be handsome—the city he has decided to abandon, to start a new life, elsewhere. “Everything’s so
old
,” says another friend I meet on Thirteenth Street to walk around the East Village with my last night. (He’s waiting for his boyfriend to get out of prison; perhaps that will make things new again.) It’s hopeless, and poignant, trying to keep up these friendships that circumstances have left so high and dry, so distant from the context in which they were formed. But they are all one has left; one can only mark changes in people one has known a long time. And, like the city, whose neighborhoods die, lie fallow, then come to life again, like individual storefronts, for that matter, these lives are variegated: Some shut down, are replaced; some remain almost as they were; others renovate to keep up with new styles; some busy, some nearly unvisited. (We go to New York, after all, to merchandise ourselves; the analogy is almost exact.) And when you leave them, you’re walking again, past new people, new faces, new restaurants, new bars. When the crush of memory, the sense of déjà vu, the changes in yourself become confusing, you can always set out again—someplace—and walk. Just walk. And walk. Losing one’s confusion, suspending one’s depression, in the cold air, the somber slums, the figure of a man in a hooded parka coming toward you in the fitful light of store windows, a man who may or may not be the one to make you feel new again, detached from your past, in this city of fixed character and oh so painful change.