potato salad. I needed to sell something for cash, but the only things of value I owned were my records and my body. Naturally, I chose the latter. Michael, who’d hustled a bit at my age, was also broke and offered to guide me through my first trick in exchange for dinner. “We’ll go to the Haymarket up near the Theater District. Just remember the ground rules: Ask for the money up front. Be clear about what you will and won’t do. And if the john wants you to stay more than an hour he has to pay extra.” We gathered just enough change for two beers and walked thirty blocks uptown to the bar.
Inside, the Haymarket was dark, as befitted a cesspit of depravity. We bought our beers, then sat near the pool table and waited. Sat and waited. Waited and sat. The bar wasn’t exactly hopping, just half a dozen middle-aged men in cheap suits leering at a dozen young guys playing pool and hanging around with wrong-side-of-the-tracks swagger. “Maybe I’m too old,” I said. I’d just turned twenty and was mortally afraid of aging past attractiveness.
“Nah,” said Michael.
I examined the boys more closely. Sleeveless tees revealed the taut, tanned arms of kids who played stickball in vacant lots. Deep voices boomed with cocky confidence and a total disregard for Standard English grammar. Even their un-hip feathered hair and crooked teeth oozed sexiness. “Maybe I’m too ugly.”
Michael’s eyebrows furrowed as if to say, “Shut up.”
I only had to wait a few minutes longer before a manatee in a dark blue suit bellied up to the table nearest me and leered. “Buy you a drink?” It was on. We taxied to his apartment, attractively furnished with Japanese rice-paper screens, where we shared a joint that made me feel like an undersea creature from the briny deep. In that odd condition sexing it up with a manatee didn’t seem so bad. A short while later I returned home with sandwiches, chocolate milk, and cash to spare. Victory!
I went back to the Haymarket only a half-dozen more times. The johns were mildly gross, sure, but what really bugged me was waiting to get propositioned. It often took hours, and sometimes it never happened. The other hustlers weren’t friendly and there wasn’t enough light to read so I’d just sit there going mad with boredom and self-consciousness. After one particularly annoying trick tried to stiff me on my fee, I swore off the whole business.
Michael and I weren’t living in Manhattan so much as glimmering across its surface like sunlight on water. We lacked the roots or entanglements that would have made us real New Yorkers. I knew this well, if only instinctively, and thus it wasn’t too hard a decision to leave town when I learned my father was dying and my mother wanted me back home. My only qualm was separating from Michael, but to my great surprise and infinite relief he decided to leave with me. It turned out that he, like me, was growing tired of the city’s downsides: yucky weather, murderous traffic, surreally high rents, ubiquitous roach infestations, and—let’s not forget—diseases.
Everyone said, “VD is no big deal. Just take some pills and in a week you’re good as new.” But I’d been infected twice (sweet, innocent little me!) and it made me feel filthy. The first time I’d gone to a city clinic where an exasperated woman demanded the names and contact information of everyone I’d slept with in the last six months. “You don’t want to be spreading disease, do you? They need to come in here for testing.” All I could do was shamefacedly stammer, “Uh . . . I forgot.” The second time, I went to the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a new place where they didn’t grill you about sex partners.
Sitting in the tiny waiting room I read the bulletin board to kill time. One notice concerned the appearance of a rare cancer in a few otherwise healthy young gay men. Normally found only among elderly males of Mediterranean descent, it manifested in purplish skin blotches. I felt a wave of terror. That very morning I’d woken up with a few purplish blotches on my legs! Ten miserable minutes later I showed them to a doctor who assured me I only had an extremely mild heat rash. I left with some pills for my other problem and forgot all about the obscure disease making its gay debut: Kaposi’s sarcoma.
Chapter 6: Juan
BACK IN CALIFORNIA, MICHAEL AND I spent a rotten year watching my father die, then set about making up for lost fun. That was us teaching everyone at the house party how to dance the Shimmy Shimmy; us tripping on ’shrooms at the Frightwig concert; and us again, squabbling over nothing as we stomped through the supermarket at 3 a.m. looking for Graham crackers. To preserve energy and cash for our nightly revels we worked low-commitment jobs—Michael boxing stuff up in a warehouse, me adding numbers on a calculator in a gray cubicle—and lived rent-free in the cement-floored basement at my parents’ house.
Feckless and discombobulated, yet reasonably content, we paid scant attention to reports that gay men were now contracting pneumonia along with Kaposi’s sarcoma due to something called Gay Related Immune Disorder, or GRID. It seemed unfair that the disease only struck gay men, but not especially worrisome. Only a few hundred gay men out of millions had the disease, a tiny fraction of a single percent. Within a few months the “gay related” in GRID was replaced with “acquired” when the disease started popping up among Haitians, hemophiliacs, and IV drug users, an odd assortment of targets that added mystery to the menace. Still, we didn’t worry. Surely, someone would develop a shot or a pill and the whole mess would be done with and forgotten like polio or Legionnaire’s disease. Right?
Then I ran into an old friend from San Francisco and learned that Juan was dead. Juan would have been my first boyfriend, except I never let him call me that. We’d dated for a few months (in San Francisco before I moved to New York to be with Michael) after meeting at a house party full of guys in their twenties. I, a mere lad of nineteen, found these older men a bit decrepit, but also appealingly sophisticated. They drank fancy cocktails instead of the discount beer I was used to and played the stereo softly enough to allow conversation. I’d been awkwardly pretending to examine the vintage Barbie collection on the mantelpiece when a hefty young man with a shy smile came over and held out a drink of some sort. “Hi. I’m Juan. You looked thirsty.” He wore pointy black boots, black peg-leg slacks, and a modishly striped dress shirt, all of which combined attractively with his floppy, straight black hair, cinnamon skin, and sultry, Mayan features. He reminded me of the guys from Question Mark & the Mysterians, a Mexican-American garage rock band from the 60s whose hit “96 Tears” I considered (and still consider) an achievement on par with Mount Rushmore, penicillin, and the moon landing. Before I knew it, Juan and I were back at his place.
Making whoopee with Juan was . . . nice, I suppose. Adequate. Acceptable. Much as I admired his style, I didn’t find his body sexy. Still, any sex was way better than the absolutely none I was used to in those pre-New York days. In the morning we traded numbers and I left his apartment feeling very much a Man of The World. We went out again a few nights later and again soon after that. Somehow, without my quite noticing, we became an item. Although I wasn’t really into Juan, I did admire his calm, patient demeanor, that he was so clearly un-rattled by the vagaries of existence. He worked as a sales clerk in a downtown department store but didn’t feel discontented by his lowly station in life, probably because he’d grown up dirt poor. He seldom spoke of his early life so I only discovered this because he once made a passing reference to working as a field hand after high school. He was one of the downtrodden farmworkers on whose behalf my liberal family had boycotted grapes in the ’60s. Fascinated, I demanded to know more.
“Were your parents immigrants?”
“Yup. And they took me to Mexico a few times. It was great. You could eat mangoes right off the tree and get all sticky then dive into the river to rinse off.”
“Do you speak Spanish?
“It’s my first language.”
“Why
