Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (22 page)

“Beautiful.
S
í
?
” he shouted above the crash of the falls.

“Yes. Beautiful.”
And terrifying.

“Please. Stand on the bridge.” He pointed with the long lens of the camera to an icicle-covered pedestrian bridge. “I want to take your photo so I can remember this day.”

I really
don’t
want to remember this day.
“Oh, no. I don’t want my picture taken. Not today.” It was so cold. I was shivering and the reprieve I felt from the screwdriver and food was dissipating.

“
Para mi,
Hi-may.
Para mi
.”

I sighed. “Okay.”

I walked onto the bridge and faced the Great Falls. They were falling, falling, falling into the swirling river, just a quick jump below. I thought of that van ride and how I was sucked up into the current of the night. I fantasized riding the falls down to the river and being swept away, never to see days like this again.

“Hi-may!”
he shouted.

I turned around to see Latin Avedon pointing the camera at me. I was facing him but looking westerly, toward Manhattan. I tried to keep from shivering. I stuck my hands in my pockets and hunched my shoulders forward in a futile attempt to warm my body.

“Say chis!”
he yelled.

I just want to go home.
I cobbled together all the energy I could to birth a smile. “Cheese,” I murmured, certain that he couldn’t hear me.

The number one tourist attraction checked off on my tour of Paterson, we finally,
finally,
headed back to Manhattan. I explained to him that I had a longtime boyfriend, a husband, really, but we were open.

When Mr. Glass of Rum dropped me off in front of my apartment building, he held up the camera that contained the frozen image of me in front of the Great Falls of the Passaic River. With his other hand he gave me a slip of paper. I looked at it.
(973) 321-4568—Manuel Antonio
. Manuel Antonio!

“
Gracias,
Manuel Antonio.” I enunciated every syllable of his name.

“Call me sometime,
mi amigo,
and I will send you the photo.”

“I will do that,” I said, but I knew I wouldn’t because I never wanted to lay eyes on that photo.

I could see him back in Paterson boasting to his visiting
mamacita
about the copper-headed lush he’d picked up at a trendy club in Manhattan. When he tells that story, he points to the top of that dorm-room refrigerator, lousy with a collection of black-and-white photos in drugstore frames. In the center is a picture not of a bright-eyed, ripe teen, but of a puffy-faced man, wanly smiling in the gray of day as he stands in front of the Great Falls of the Passaic River—forever forlorn, forever hungover.

TWENTY-TWO

The Bare Truth

“What’s barebacking?” Mama Jean asked as I cringed. She and Dad were visiting Michahaze and me, and I’d taken the day off work to spend it with them. She and I were watching the tale end of an episode of
Oprah
devoted to crystal meth addicts. Oprah was interviewing a gay man whose fabulous, successful life was destroyed when he became addicted to crystal and lost everything. As he explained it, he started barebacking and became HIV-positive.

I explained the phrase to Mama Jean. “It’s when you have unprotected sex. Sex without a condom.”

She screwed up her face in disgust. “Oh, God.”

An hour later she, Dad, and I were having a drink in the living room when Michahaze came home from work. He said a brief hello and went directly through the open archway into the adjacent den to deal with a work issue.

Mama Jean leaned forward with a mischievous grin and whispered, “Bare-skinned? Bare-assed?”

“What?” I asked.

“What’s it called? That thing that boy was talking about on
Oprah
? Bare-skinning?”

“Oh. Barebacking. Why?”

“Never mind.” She held up her finger to silence me and leaned back into the sofa with a just-you-wait smirk on her face. Then: “Michael?”

“Yes, Jean?”

“Have you been barebacking lately?”

Dead silence.

Dad was shaking his head in resigned exasperation, his eyebrows raised.

Mama Jean was silently tee-heeing. She cocked her perfectly coiffed head with her ear in Michahaze’s direction. “Michael? Did you hear me?”

Michahaze appeared in the archway with his expert poker face, which made him unflappable in any situation. “I heard you, Jean. But I’m not sure that I understood you.”

“You don’t know what barebacking is?”

“Riding sidesaddle?”

“Oh, come on. If you don’t know what barebacking is, I’m worried about you.”

I broke the charade and explained that she was just showing off the new term she had learned. We laughed uneasily over Mama Jean’s little gotcha. The story became an instant classic before it was even dry, an award-winning entry in my repertoire of Mama Jean dinner-party stories—right up there with “two kinds of sex: oral and anal.” But every time I laughed at the reaction it got, I cringed inside because of the secret I had been carrying around since the fling with Father John had ended, when we were still living on West Eighty-second Street
.

Back when Father John called to tell me that he had the clap, I got checked out as I promised him I would. A few days after the exam, my doctor called me at my office at four-thirty.

“Hi, Jamie, it’s Dr. Connolly.”

“Oh, hey.” I held a press release in my hand that I was proofreading.

“I have good news and bad news.”

I laid the press release down. “Okay?” I said with a nervous rise in my voice.

“The good news: you don’t have gonorrhea.”

“That’s a relief.” But I wasn’t relieved.

“The bad news: you’re HIV-positive.”

I closed my eyes and held the phone in silence. My mouth went dry. When I opened my eyes, they were still fixed on the press release, but I couldn’t read a word. My vision was blurred.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. All the negatives of tests past had lulled me into a false sense of being one of the lucky ones. When I went in for the clap check, Dr. Connolly asked if I wanted an HIV test, since it had been over a year since my last one. “Might as well,” I said with nonchalance to hide from him—but more from myself—my fear that I had reason to worry.

“Are you sure?” I asked. Had he been joking, it would have been a cruel joke, but a cruel joke would have been better than the truth.

“Yes, I’m sure. But these days, it’s a
manageable
condition.” His voice was suddenly upbeat, as if I had just won the lottery, only it was the lottery in that famous Shirley Jackson story where the winner is stoned to death. “You may not even need to go on medication right now. Make an appointment and come into the office next week and we’ll talk about it.”

“Okay. I’ll make an appointment.” I hung up.

Is he supposed to tell me this on the phone? What if I opened my twenty-third-story window and jumped out?
I shut my office door and sat at my desk like a zombie waiting for the workday to end. Why I didn’t leave immediately, I don’t know. At five on the dot I robotically rose from my desk and left the office as if I worked in accounting. If ever I
needed
a drink, it was then.

How many years do I have left? Five? Will I have to take those pills that give you sunken-face syndrome? How long have I been positive? Was there ever a more negative term than
positive
? Did I get it from that guy in the bathhouse that time I did crystal meth with him? I know I didn’t get it from Michahaze because we always have safe sex. Who knows where I got it, there were so many morning afters when I suddenly remembered that a condom hadn’t been part of my night before. How stupid am I? I came of age when the AIDS epidemic was full-blown and safe sex was standard protocol. I’m not supposed to get this.
Mama Jean’s warning echoed in my ear: “Remember, a moment’s pleasure isn’t worth a lifetime of regret.” I couldn’t tell her she was right and face her I-told-you-so wrath, but mostly I couldn’t tell her because it would kill her. God, I needed Michahaze. But more than anything else, I needed a drink.

I sat on the crowded subway white-knuckling the ride until I could gulp a martini. Someone seemed to be staring at me. I looked up, and floating in the sea of strangers was the pale, wan face of a man who was a dead ringer for the actor who played the sad, middle-aged uncle with AIDS on the gay soap opera
Queer as Folk
. Maybe he actually was that actor. Once when I was watching the show while visiting Mama Jean and Dad in Beaumont, Mama Jean walked into the room. “What’s on TV?”

“
Queer as Folk
. Ever seen it?”

“Uh, yes!” she said in disgust. “If your life’s that sordid, I feel sorry for you.”
My life is that sordid and I love it,
I wanted to say as she walked out of the room.

The hangdog, pallid face of the man stared at me.
Is he cruising me?
I moved to the end of the car to get away from his gaze. I couldn’t. No matter where I went, his eyes followed me, like the Uncle Sam
I WANT YOU
poster, only it was Uncle AIDS who wanted me. As if I were the only one in the subway car who could see Uncle AIDS, I was convinced he was an apparition.

When I got out of the subway, I headed straight for the Works, aka the Last Chance Saloon, glancing behind me to make sure my fate wasn’t following me. I parked myself on a stool and ordered my drink, Beefeater martini, dry, up, with a twist, and drained it. “Another, please.” It was barely five-thirty, so only a handful of people were in the bar. I felt a man standing behind me, watching. I turned around and was relieved not to see Uncle AIDS, but instead a new stranger with a concerned face. He asked me what was wrong. The dam broke and in a flood of tears I told this nameless stranger that I was positive. That my life was over. That no one would want to have sex with me again. He said that it wasn’t true. To prove it, he took me to Les Hommes and had sex with me. Only then did I truly understand what Blanche DuBois meant about always depending upon the kindness of strangers.

By six-thirty I was home drinking a fresh gin and tonic and robotically blowing cigarette smoke into the air when Michahaze came home. He kissed me as he always kissed me when he came home from work. He looked at my red, puffy face. “Is something wrong?” He sat on the sofa across from me with his unflappable poker face.

I put out the cigarette and I nodded my head yes. My lips curled inside my mouth as the tears started to break again.

“What is it?”

“I had an HIV test. I’m positive.” The tears broke.

“Oh, no.” His face cracked—a hairline fracture—but it cracked.

I abandoned my chair and crawled onto the sofa and lay my head in his lap and guttural cried as he held me and caressed my head.

TWENTY-THREE

Gown Days

“Stop making me laugh,” Liz’s reflection in the nightclub mirror said to mine as I sipped my usual martini. “It hurts when I laugh.” She turned away from my reflection in the mirror to my actual face. She was dolled up for the company Christmas party in black velvet pants and a winter-white angora cardigan with rhinestone buttons. Trash disco played to an empty dance floor while the rest of our colleagues ate and drank on the sidelines.

I was imitating the Brits, which always made her laugh, and telling her one of my blue tales from the time I lived in London my junior year of college. “Well, you lived over there,” I said to her. “You know how disgusting and
wrong
the food is in England. So I was having a
very
playful time with a new boyfriend. ‘I have an idear,’” I said, mimicking his Cockney accent. “So he ran naked to the kitchen and returned with some creamy, white stuff spread on his dick. When I swooped down to inhale every sweet drop of what I assumed was whipped cream, I gagged. It wasn’t sweet at all. It tasted like paste. ‘Puh! Puh!’ I said, and spit it out. ‘What
is
that?’ He looked at me, hurt. ‘Plain yogurt.’”

At “plain yogurt” she spit out the cabernet she had just started to swallow. Laughing with closed eyes, she waved her left hand at me to halt while holding her abdomen with her right. “I told you. Stop making me laugh. It hurts too much.”

“What’s so funny, dearies?” Jo Ann asked as she joined us. Jo Ann was the editorial director and Liz’s second-in-command. A veteran editor who specialized in psychology books, Jo Ann was one of those native New Yorkers of a certain age who mixed a dry wit with maternal concern. Anne Bancroft would have played her in the movie.

“Him,” Liz said, holding her abdomen with both hands. “A blue tale involving yogurt.”

“
Plain
yogurt,” I said.

Jo Ann cut both of us a look over her glasses. Then, in a falsetto singsong: “I can only imagine.” She pointed to Liz’s abdomen. “So, do we know more about what’s going on there?”

“No!” Liz said, annoyed. She’d been having abdominal pain for several weeks. “And it’s starting to interfere with my sex life. That’s not good. Because I like sex
a lot
.” She looked at me with a twinkle in her eye, a mischievous smile as if it were meant only for me, and kiss-ready lips—the Look of Liz, I called it—and said, “Oh, I long for the day when we don’t work together and we can
really
get to know each other. I have so much more to tell you.”

“Me too, but come on. Let’s at least dance tonight!” I dragged her to the dance floor.

“Wait for me, dearies!” Jo Ann was as in love with Liz as I.

The three of us punished the parquet, twirling and laughing to my favorite disco hits: “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” “I Will Survive,” “Love Hang Over.” Our joy was contagious. Soon our colleagues danced around us. My martini buzz was perfect, so I was feeling no pain. I pushed aside the anxiety over the recent Caine Mutiny of my staff, which had been causing me enormous worry and pain. If Liz was worried about the mysterious pain in her abdomen, she ignored it for that brief, euphoric moment.