Babyface: Part 2

 (This entry is a continuation of Babyface: Part 1.)

Autumn 1985

My friend Rand finds me outside and around the corner, a couple of minutes later. “Hey, where’d you go?” he asks, before noticing I'm planted on the pavement. My head had been between my knees when I’d heard the approach of his footsteps. His tone changes from plaintive to worried. “You okay? What’s going on?”

Encountering Jim had sent me into a fight-or-flight dilemma. I’d chosen to fly straight out of Beezie’s Records, the door’s mocking Tibetan bells jangling like laughter in my ears. The sight of him activated memories of my incarceration in his closet—my rage and hysteria, the helpless desperation of being trapped and not knowing when or even if I’d be discovered. Four years later, despite the sunshine and the bustle of a city street, I’m once more imprisoned within the crawl space’s tight boundaries. I’m exhausted and hopeless after hours of yelling and tears. The sheer weight of so much darkness seems to break every rib in its cage. Now, as then, I’m rasping for breath. Jim had birthed nightmares that plagued me for weeks and months, and that will continue to haunt me for years to come. He’d done it with a smile and a laugh. He’d gotten away with it.

A hand grasps my shoulder. I startle. Ignoring the traffic roaring by on the busy thoroughfare, Rand squats over the filthy pavement and searches my face. “Are you sick?”

“What? No.” I’m so accustomed to blending my personal life into the background that my panic attack, quiet and still as it is, feels like histrionics. I pull myself together and slip behind the bland facade from which my real self peers out at the world. “Did you get your album? You know, the Allman Brothers?”

Through his thick lenses, Rand blinks at my non sequitur, then holds up empty hands. “No. I turned around and you’d up and disappeared.”

I’m still breathing heavily. I decide to play into it. “Dusty old places like that make my asthma act up.” I don’t have asthma. “Just needed some fresh air, is all.” I’m hoping Rand will leave me alone. All I really want right now is solitude, but my fictional infirmity has made him reluctant to leave. “I’m good. For real. You don’t need to hang around.”

It takes a liberal handful of slick reassurances to urge my friend back to his feet. “Only if you’re sure…”

“I’m heading straight home.” My lies dull the metallic tang panic has left on my tongue. “I’m fine.” I’m well enough to climb to my feet. “You should get to the office. Elisabeth’s usually around this time of day.”

Rand seems to be assessing my fitness, so I bounce on my toes with an energy I don’t feel. Elisabeth is the teaching assistant with whom he’s enamored; the prospect of alone time with her is too tempting to resist. It’s with reluctance, though, that he deems me worthy to be left on my own. “Only if you’re sure.”

I wave him off with smiles and promises. I’m fortunate at this stage in my life, adrift as I feel after college, to have been accepted by his small, academic tribe. Despite my differences, despite holding myself at arm’s-length and never quite letting anyone in, Rand and the other graduate students have embraced me. Grateful as I am for his friendship, right now I need space.

At last, his long legs carry him back in the direction of campus. I should follow. Every instinct informs me the wise thing to do now would be to head home and never return to this third-rate used record store.

Yet there’s no mental scab I’ve ever refrained from picking. My lifelong response to adversity and confrontation is to remain stone-faced before it, unraveling only in my privacy. In fleeing Beezie’s, I have ceded victory to the enemy; nothing irritates me more than the thought that Jim might now be gloating at his victory.

I’ve faced much bigger fears since that day at the tag-end of high school when a man-child left me kicking and yelling inside a locked closet. I’m not a friendless kid any longer. I’m not a kid at all. Heart pounding and face red, I brush myself off, stalk back around the corner, and push through the record shop door.

The bells clank as I enter. Jim still sits behind the counter, looking at Style Weekly. “Oh.” He gives me only the briefest of glances and pulls up the sleeves of his cardigan. “Forget something, did you?”

My mouth opens, ready with a retort. Then I hesitate. I recognize that threadbare cardigan falling from his shoulders. I recognize the plaid shirt billowing beneath it. Earlier I’d registered how oversized they appeared on Jim’s scrawny frame. Jim’s not the type for cable knits, though, nor is L. L. Bean flannel his style. That shabby attire had once belonged to Earl.

Speechless and staring at Jim, I remember Earl lounging in a leather easy chair with that sweater buttoned around his middle, scribbling upon a card a new name, address, and time of assignation. Earl in that very cardigan, padding around his kitchen in slippered feet, making me a late-night grilled cheese, and himself a cup of decaf. The sweater had been new, four or five years ago. Now it looks ratty. Dirty.

With a horrible certainty, I realize something’s happened to Earl.

It’s only been a little more than three years since the gay cancer burrowed its way into my awareness. It feels like a lifetime. Barely a year has passed since scientists announced the scourge’s cause: it wasn’t poppers gone bad, as so many men I’d known had speculated, but a rogue virus. HIV, transmitted through bodily fluids. Rock Hudson had died of it, right at the beginning of the current semester. Although I’ve been hearing on the TV news in recent weeks that scientists have finally developed a test to discover infection in the bloodstream, no such thing has yet reached the public. Not widely. Not here.

In years past, the many expertises gay men cultivated were better suited to the worlds of espionage, or anthropology, or semiotics: how covertly to spy upon a man who’s piqued our interest, to evaluate his body language, to read messages coded in colored bandanas arranged in a back pocket. We arranged rendezvouses in clandestine places without being seen, became adept at distinguishing our own kind from enforcers of the law attempting to entrap us. We all have some proficiency in recognizing each other without word, sound, or often a gesture.

To survive this plague age, we scramble to assimilate new skills. We’re required to be sexual actuaries, to gauge each new encounter with an eye to risks far beyond the familiar. Does our quarry look like a local? Is he a regular good old boy who shops at the Army Navy Store, or does his clothing insinuate trips to a big metropolitan area where the virus spreads unchecked? We all like a good looking man, but is the one we want too good looking? Too in demand, attracting too many questionable partners? Does he cruise like a local, in fits and starts, not too fast or slow? A line had been drawn in 1981 between one era and another. On a summer night in the park four years ago, my outlaw brothers and I would all have been debauched beneath a full moon. To do so now indicates depravity of a type precarious to consider.

We’ve raced, too, to become diagnosticians. Without the benefit of any education, without even really knowing what to look for, we assess every potential partner for disease. We reject a man whose skin is too flushed or too warm to the touch. Our eyes search for lesions, though I have no clear concept of what a lesion might look like. If a man of a certain pallor walks my way, I might swerve to avoid crossing paths. Anything out of the ordinary is frightening and not worth the gamble.

One evening I accompany home a handsome fellow who seems like a safe bet. As he removes his clothes in the light of a table lamp, I can spy bluish bruises covering his body. When he moves close, arousal growing, he's accompanied by a faint, sickly-sweet scent, like a newborn's diaper. I vault from the stranger’s bed and away from his apartment as if my life is threatened.

All our snap judgments are based on faulty understanding. We’re medical imposters, forced into emergency-room rotations before we've cracked our first textbook. Real physicians are scrambling to stay abreast with the newfound virus and its ferocity. How can any layman hope to keep pace?

Not that I stop trying. My nights are often sleepless. I lie awake in my bed, staring blind into the dark, obsessing over every potential omen of my inevitable decline. As I try not to rouse my parents, my fingers travel every inch of my body—not for pleasure, as once they were accustomed, but to check for lumps, for inflammations and flaws. I’ve learned where my lymph nodes lie and prod them until they ache. I trace my hairline, certain the most minute shift might spell my doom. Somewhere I’ve picked up the term ‘night sweats,’ but haven’t learned enough to distinguish them from the ordinary perspiration of a warm Virginia night. A divot on my shin I know is from repeatedly banging into my bed frame worries me daily. I pick and poke at it until it’s tender and redder, reinforcing my worst suspicions.

It’s with my clinician’s eyes that now I appraise Jim. He’d always been a scrawny little shit. The wrists protruding from the cardigan are thinner than I remember, though. Too thin. He’s a scarecrow in those oversized clothes, a bundle of sticks about to clatter into a heap. His color is sallow; around his eyes the skin seems to have sunk and blued; red veins spiderweb the whites. His hair has thinned. He’s trained long strands over a sparse patch.

Jim looks older. Jim looks old, and he should be only, what? In his mid-thirties?

Perhaps sensing my judgment, he narrows his eyes and snaps, “The fuck you looking at?”

Once again, my instincts tell me to flee in the face of hostility, of danger, of probable contagion. I stand my ground, however. “That’s Earl’s sweater, isn't it.”

My soft-spoken observation deflates him. He crosses his arms and stares to the side, refusing to meet my gaze. If we’d been in a standoff, it’s over, with both sides limping away in concession. “So you don’t know. Of course not. You went away. No one thought they’d ever see you again. You never even checked in with him. Why would you, even after everything he did for you?”

I’d gone away to school, I wanted to point out. I keep my mouth shut throughout his provocations.

“She didn’t even let me have a suitcase to pack my clothes.” Jim’s speaking in low tones I must strain to hear. “I had to grab paper grocery bags and the laundry basket. Some of his stuff was in it. Fucking grocery bags. Do you know how long I’d been with him?”

He’s glaring at me, but I’m not the enemy any longer. “A long time.”

“Fifteen years. Fifteen fucking years of putting up with his—“ He presses his knuckles against his lips. His hand’s trembling suppresses whatever might follow. He doesn’t speak again until he’s under control. This time, words spray forth in a concentrated stream, like water from a hose end compressed by a thumb. “A person goes from a kid to an old man in fifteen fucking years. You know? All that…I shouldn’t have called the ambulance when it got bad, but I was…that’s when everything got…real, after the hospital. And she came. From fucking Charleston. He hated Charleston. Hated them. That’s why he was up here. What did they ever do for him? I didn’t even have a suitcase of my own! She wouldn’t let me take my TV. My plants. I had to scream bloody murder to get my checkbook out of the office, and that was my checkbook with my name on it.”

The record shop spins around me. I’m so light-headed that I stagger against one of the waist-high record bins for support. Jim’s grievances, building for years, have at last found an audience, though in a long-standing adversary. He spits his stream of consciousness in rapid fire, sometimes ranting, sometimes trying to wheedle me to his side. As a linear story, it makes no sense. But in its impressionistic way, it’s little different from what I’ve heard whispered by others: a tale of unexpected illness, of long-estranged family whisking away the afflicted, of a survivor being evicted from a home not in his own name. Real as any of our relationships might feel in 1985, in the face of an vindictive family and their lawyers, years of togetherness flicker into ash and smoke, like tissue to a flame.

Jim hasn’t mentioned what might have taken Earl down. He doesn’t have to. One doesn’t name the bogeyman when he crawls out of the cupboard. I have so many questions, though. How long was Earl ill? When did all this happen? What's become of Earl's business? Most important, perhaps most essential: is Earl alive or dead? Because Jim hasn’t said, either way.

I don’t ask these questions, though, because they paralyze me with fear. I don’t ask these questions because, on a very basic level, I’m convinced I might not be able to cope with the answers. Never does it occur to me that some finality might comfort me years down the road. I don’t yet realize how quickly a life's hanging threads accumulate and form knots that neither time nor care can untangle.

Earl wouldn’t be the first of my lovers to die from the virus. That would have been David, the red-headed junior who’d wooed me as a freshman in college, whom I had been too frightened to meet. After his graduation, he’d moved to New York City. I’d read about his death in the alumni magazine this last July. There have been rumors of others. A former customer as a teen—a retired college professor of literature, who liked reading aloud to me from Sterne while I sat naked on his lap, had been rushed to the hospital, accepted no visitors, and then never heard of again. Another man, a habitué of Bryan Park, married, the only person I knew who took vacations to San Francisco for the sex he could find there—vanished, presumed dead. No one knew his real name, to hunt for an obituary. Christ, I used to think Earl so worldly for all his trips to Manhattan, to Key West, to the West Coast.

“Fifteen years of watching little sluts like you roll across his mattress, that’s all I got out of him. And a fucking sweater. You thought you were special? You weren’t. You think going off to some fancy college makes you better than any other whore? It doesn’t.” Outside the shop, through the glass, shadows loom. We both glance at a gaggle of students checking out the posters in the front window. Jim lowers his voice. “So don’t come in here acting the little duchess to me, because…” The door opens. The kids who enter are younger than either of us. The boys are dressed in uniforms of jeans and polo shirts with the collars popped, the girls in flouncy Madonna skirts. Jim rolls his eyes at the sight and finishes his speech before addressing them. “…Because we both know where your precious Earl found you. We’re mostly classic rock and some jazz, guys,” he snipes at the kids, as if he believes they can’t appreciate either. “Good luck finding the stuff you probably like, though.”

Even as I navigate through this thicket of new fears, I recognize how tiring it surely is, being Jim: always to assume the worst of the world, to resent everyone in it for not supplying what he feels he's owed. It must take all his energy, gnawing at grudges. “I’m sorry,” I tell him, meaning it. If I were a more generous person I might try to convey my sincerity with a hand on his, or a hug. But this is the man who had locked me into a closet and left me to suffocate, inspiring years of claustrophobia and nightly torment. Even now, he's calling me a whore. This stiff acknowledgement is the best I can muster.

As I turn to go, he cranes his neck close and issues his benediction in a savage whisper. “It was in him. So it could be in you, too. Don’t think you’re immune.” His glance sweeps over the VCU kids, who are looking through the racks while chattering loudly. “They could crack you open and find it swarming inside. Think about that.”

This time I make my exit slowly, dignity battered, but intact. I never return to Beezie’s—nor do I ever again see or hear anything about Jim. Twice in my life he is the source of long-lasting misery: once four years before, then today. It’s because of him that from now on, when I perform my nightly exploration for lumps and bruises, I can't shake the vision of being rotten within. With a scalpel, doctors could slice me in one smooth motion from stem to stern and discover disease bursting from my seams. In the months to come, as I should be taking my first few tentative steps to building a career, I will not be able to shake this vision of myself as overflowing with foulness and death. Any day now, any moment, what lies dormant might surface upon my skin: I'll bear its mark, and none of my accomplishments will matter. All my studying, my teaching—I wonder when the day will arrive that proves my work was for nothing. Next month? Next week? Tomorrow morning?

This is my life, both now and for the unforeseeable future. I’m all of twenty-one years old and already I divide my life into four distinct acts. The curtain rises on my dewy innocence; Act Two covers the too-brief teen years reveling in both the discovery of sex and the independence I gain in selling it. In Act Three, my college tenure, the tone grows somber as with the eyes of a Cassandra I watch storm clouds gather, yet find no one I can warn.

This day, this encounter, commences what I can only conceive of as the last and longest expanse of the drama. Beyond the horizon it stretches, into the indefinite future, both its and my own conclusion well out of sight. Upon this stage, without benefit of a script, my outlaw brothers and I find ourselves inducted into an army of the dead and the dying. We know the enemy, though it cannot be seen. Our arms are inadequate, our shields shabby.

Over the fallen we march onward. Though to what fresh battle, no one yet knows.