THE BOOK OF SEXUA.L ERRORS

By

Nicholas T. Boggs

Submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of /\merican Uni V{'rsity

in Partial Fulfillment of

tht~ Req~irements for the Degree of

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Chair: _ f2:0:~_t_::-_C'::-: ____ _ H-.ichard McCa.rm ~~It_~~ Andrev.r Holleran

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2008

Vvashmgton, D.C. _'.2!)() ! 6

AMERICAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 0\ ~CJ"'\ UMI Number: 1460501

Copyright 2008 by Boggs, Nicholas T.

All rights reserved.

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by

Nicholas T. Boggs

2008

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE BOOK OF SEXUAL ERRORS

BY

Nicholas T. Boggs

ABS"IRAc·1·

The Book of,\'exual Errors is an original work of autobiographical fiction that e;'>'.plort.~s the story of a young graduate student at Columbia University, Nick, v\lw mov.;;s into his hom0scxual uncle's rcnt-controlkd apartment in the East V11lagc; of New York

City in the summer of! 999. Nick, who has recently come out to his family, is both fascinated and haunkd by the mythic stories he's heard itbout his uncle':; tr:-J.gl~: lilc as a prodigai soli and former habitu6 of New York's legendary nightch~bs. At the center of the :narrative is the history behind the uncle's collection of Royal Dou1ton figurines--­ eacb was purchased ·when one of his friends died ofAJDS in the I 980's, and then~ are one hundred and ninety seven of them in his living room·---and Nick's :struggle to com1:· tc krms 1.vi~h what they mean, literally und metaphorically, for his 0 1.vr: future in the apartment and in the world beyond it. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank the Creative Writing Program at American University, especially the members of my thesis committee, Richard McCann and Andrew Holleran, both of whom have guided my development as a creative writer as my teachers in the classroom and inspired me through the examples they have set forth in their own writing. I also feel fortunate to have studied with Denise Orenstein, Kermit Moyer, and E.J. Levy during my time as a graduate student at American. I thank the other writers in this program, as well, particularly those who were my classmates in the fiction and non-fiction workshops in which the ideas for this thesis first came into being. I also thank the D.C. Commission on the Arts for the financial support of a 2008 Literature Fellowship, and The Blue

Mountain Center, where much of this thesis was written during my residency there in the month of September 2008. My friends and family have supported my writing over the years, and for that I am grateful. And lastly, I thank Paulo Santos, who has always believed in the figurines, and in me.

lll TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iii

Chapter

PROLOGUE: WASHINGTON, D.C., .1988 ...... 1

I. EAST TENTH STREET, 1999 ...... 6

II. THE LIVING ROOM ...... 19

III. SAY UNCLE ...... 26

IV. THE MUSEUM OF SEXUAL ERRORS ...... 34

V. PILLS ...... 56

VI. TIME-RELEASE ...... 62

VII. A FALSE SENSE OF WELL-BEING ...... 70

VIII. IN THE BEDROOM ...... 76

IX. TWO FOR THE ROAD ...... 86

X. THE DRIVE ...... 92

XI. BENEATH THE CANOPY ...... 127

lV PROLOGUE:

WASHINGTON, D.C., 1988

It was ha(fpast five on Christmas Eve when he told his wife he was fairly certain the snowstorm the weathermen had predicted wasn't going to materialize after all. "You never know, "she replied as she leanedforward to dab at the lipstick she 'djustfinished applying to her lips. "Sometimes rain turns to snow. "

"The kids will be disappointed, that's for sure, " he added, grasping the back of the chair and bending to kiss the top ofher head. "No white Christmas. Again."

And there was every reason to believe that he was right. By a quarter to six, the light rain had turned into a steady downpour. that streamed down the windows and shook the branches of the leafless trees in the backyard. From where he was standing at the bedroom window, he could see that the empty green trashcan had tipped over right next to one ofthe puddles that were already forming on the cement basketball court next to the garage. He'd have to remember to go outside later, once it stopped raining, he thought, and drag it back up to its upright position.

A few minutes later, he went downstairs and saw his son standing there before him in the foyer in his black tuxedo, right next to his mother. He wrapped the gray raincoat he'd brought down from the closet upstairs around his son's small thirteen year­ old frame and told him to break a leg in the concert that night. Then he kissed his w{fe

1 2 on the cheek, put an umbrella in her hand, and sent them out the back door into the cold, rain-soaked air.

He watched from the foggy window in the kitchen as the old green Volvo pulled out ofthe garage, cringing for a moment as it narrowly missed hitting the toppled trashcan-from upstairs, he hadn't realized that the wind had blown it directly into their path. But everything was all right. He could see the car's headlights beaming through the rain, his wife in the driver's seat, their son sitting beside her, the windshield wipers flitting back and forth, furiously, like hands waving goodbye.

And then they were gone, down the driveway and out onto the rain-slicked streets, and he was home alone, with nothing to do but wait for the downpour to stop so he could go outside and move the trashcan before their return.

He was awaiting the return ofhis three daughters, as well, who were out singing

Christmas carols with their friends from church. He.found this amusing-teenage girls and boys out singing in the rain on Christmas Eve. He pictured them huddling under umbrellas, trying in vain to keep their candles lit, shivering, singing, families in open doorways trying to smile, the fathers thinking to themselves, as he would have, that it's raining, that it's cold, and anyway, everybody knows that the Twelve Days a/Christmas is an extremely tedious song. Can't we take a rain check and call it a night on the seventh day? Jsn 'ta week of Christmas enough?

Church had always been his wife's idea, and the singing, ofcourse, as well. He'd said goodbye to religion in the sixties. No war. No God. No Vietnam. This was what had brought the couple together, years ago, marching through the streets during the day, painting protest posters at night in their basement apartment in Adam's Morgan as they 3 sat together on the soft, weathered rug she'd brought back from the Peace Corps in

Colombia, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell records playing in the background. That was the kind ofsinging that he could get into, but church songs and Christmas carols, and, most ofall, a son singing as high as a girl for the whole world to see, this was something that his son needed to say goodbye to. For his own good. For the good of the family.

In the end, it hadn't been that difficult to convince his wife that he was right, even though she was the music teacher, even though she was the one who'd spent hours with their son in the piano room playing the accompaniment for "Amahl and the Night

Visitors" and "The Magic Flute" and "La Boheme" and "The Chichester Psalms," and, yes, for "Silent Night, " the solo that he'd sung every Christmas Eve at the Kennedy

Center for the last three years, the solo that he would be singing for the last time tonight.

No, she hadn't been that hard to convince. Not really. All he'd had to do was talk about his own brother, his son's uncle, about how he was dying alone in New York City.

Yes, the father was sparing the son, really, that's what he was doing, saving him

.from a life like his brother's, a sickness like his brother's. Wasn't this what a father was supposed to do for his children? Help them find a path in life that would bring them happiness and love, and, above all else, keep them safe from harm? At least these were the things he'd said to his wife in their bedroom on a Sunday afternoon, weeks ago now, before she brushed back her long brown hair, and nodded, closing her deep blue eyes, and then opened them again, shooting him a look ofsilent accusation.

Yes, her eyes seemed to be saying to him, though they both did their best to pretend that nothing between them had changed, New York is too far away. So what if he's been offered a major role at the Met? We can't have our son dressed up in a pink 4 bunny suit, in some Italian opera, singing like a little girl. No, we can't have that, not when his father has a brother like that, not when his father did not go to Vietnam, not when his father needs his only son to play every sport under the sun and be the man he never was.

"Just let him sing in the Christmas concert next month, one last time, " were the only words she'd finally uttered, her voice almost a murmur.

"Fine," the father had said, "but let me tell him. Let me be the one to tell him. "

What he hadn't known was that there was no need for him to tell his son. He already knew. Everything. All of it. Standing there outside of his parents' bedroom, his ear pressed up against the hardwood door, he'd listened to everything they'd said, his heart stopping and the blood rushing to his cheeks when he heard his father's words, mid-way through the conversation: "I think I've put up with this for long enough, honey.

You don't want him to turn into a fairy and get sick, like my brother, do you?"

He'd waited for his mother to say something, anything, but there was only silence. and then his father's voice again, calmer now.

"The try-outs for the basketball team are next week. I think he should be there. "

More silence, and then his father's voice, almost jubilant now.

"You know, his jump shot is really coming along. I really think he should be there. I really think it would be good for him. I really think it would be for the best. "

It wasn 't until the middle of the night that it finally stopped raining, and by that time everybody was sleeping. In the morning, the whole family ate pancakes and scrambled eggs together, as they always did on Christmas before opening the presents 5 that overflowed on the carpeted floor beneath the brightly lit tree in the living room. The children were too old now to get too excited about this, but, among other things, the son got a regulation-size football, his twin sister got a set ofsixteen silver pick-up sticks, his younger sister got a framed map ofthe world, and his older sister got a cactus to replace the one that had withered and died, sitting in front ofher bedroom window. It was small, but her father assured her that it would grow, and her mother told her to remember that even a cactus needs to be watered sometimes.

Just as they finished with the presents, it began to snow, a long, rapid snowfall, and in no time at all, the one-block street in front oftheir house turned white and quiet.

At the father's suggestion, they all went out into the street together to throw the son 's new football. "Go long, " the father said to his son, and he did, running halfivay down the block in his heavy winter boots and then catching his father's spiraling pass in his black-gloved hands and cradling it against the bulkiness of his winter jacket. Fifteen minutes, and many passes ofthe football later, the six ofthem made their way back into the house, wet and cold and smiling, leaving their scattered footprints behind them in the freshly fallen snow. I.

EAST TENTH STREET, 1999

I was sitting by myself at the front of a dimly lit bar on A venue A when a handsome, dark-haired man sat down beside me. I was twenty-four years old and he was probably about ten years older, dressed in blue jeans and a navy bluet-shirt that was just tight enough to accentuate his muscular upper-body without making him look like he was desperate for attention. I'd been at the bar for about forty-five minutes and I was already halfway through my fourth vodka tonic; but I let him buy me another one anyway, and we talked for a while about nothing in particular-the bad house music playing in the background, how hot it was outside, how I was thinking of dropping out of graduate school at Columbia because as far as I could tell, the only thing PhD stood for was Poor,

Horny, and Depressed.

"Is this your way of telling me you're horny and you want to have sex with me?" the man asked in response to my stupid joke, and then he laughed a deep, husky laugh.

"Well, actually, I'm just killing time here until midnight, when I'm supposed to be moving into my uncle's apartment."

"At midnight?" he asked, incredulous, as the bearded bartender reached over and lit a candle sitting in front of us on the bar.

"Yeah, well, it's a long story ... "

6 7

"I've got a little time," he said, with a crooked smile, as he leaned in just close enough that I could smell the trace of alcohol and cigarettes on his breath. The lights were even dimmer now, I realized, and the bar was almost overflowing with men, all of whom seemed to be wearing cargo shorts and tank tops, some of them brushing against our backs as they made their way to the larger room in the back.

"Let's just say the punch line is that my uncle pays eighty dollars a month for a one bedroom apartment with a view of Tompkins Square Park."

"Now that's rent control." The man was smirking now, his hand suddenly resting on my knee.

"Yeah, my uncle's

Sitting there staring into the man's dark brown eyes, I wondered how I could possibly find the words to capture this uncle I knew as little more than a jumbled collection of family myths that refused to take shape in my mind, most of them gathered from my aunt Debbie, the only person in my family who still spoke to my uncle at all, the one who'd come up with the idea for me to move into his apartment in the first place.

I had no idea how to say it, but I did know that I wanted to tell him everything­ that my uncle was moving to my aunt's house in the suburbs of Boston because he might or might not be dying of AIDS; that my uncle had only left his apartment a handful of times since his mother's funeral ten years ago, ordering delivery food every night and sending his laundry out for cleaning; that he was the first man in North America to get 8 liposuction of the thighs back in the 1970's; that he kept a piece of his mother's wedding cake in his freezer and hoarded all of the family heirlooms in his small apartment, including the expensive china he'd attached to the kitchen walls with Velcro, and my great grand parents' canopy bed he'd nailed to the wall of his bedroom, for no apparent reason; that he'd sold his life insurance policy whenhe found out he was sick in the

1980' s and lived off it for years; how he'd never, in fact, had a real job in his life, a life spent drugging and partying and fucking at places like Studio 54 and the Saint; how his life had cast a long and ghostlike shadow over my childhood and adolescence-an absent yet ever-present reminder that homosexuality meant decadence, it meant disease, it meant death, my uncle's death and, inevitably, my own.

"You're uncle sounds like quite a character," the man said, matter-of-factly.

"One of his other claims to fame," I blurted out, "is that back in the early 80's he slept with Diane Von Furstenberg and Edmund White on the same day!"

"Edmund who?" The man looked genuinely confused.

"Oh ... he's a writer, a gay writer." I put my drink down on the bar. "But it doesn't really matter. My uncle could be lying about that, and anyway, the truth is I've heard everybody has slept with Edmund White."

"I want to sleep with you," the man said, squeezing my thigh. "Now. Tonight. In your new apartment."

I'd seen this coming, of course, but still I didn't know quite how to respond. thought about whether I should find out if we had any chemistry by leaning in and kissing him right there at the bar, but decided against it. I felt drunk enough that it probably wouldn't matter. 9

"That sounds good." I slid my hand onto his leg. "But I've got to go meet with my uncle first, you know, and pick up the keys and stuff. If you'll wait outside the building, I'll do my best to send him on his way as quickly as possible."

He paid for our drinks and we went outside, pushing past the long line of men waiting to get into the bar. The air smelled of garbage, and even at this hour, the city heat was still rising from the pavement as I walked over to a pay phone to call my uncle.

When he picked up, I could hear loud music playing in the background.

"Nick?" he asked. "Is that you?"

His voice sounded distant and otherworldly, and I remembered how my aunt had told me he was addicted to some prescription drugs that kept him up for hours, sometimes even days on end.

"Yeah, hey there, it's me." I was doing my best to sound calm and upbeat at the same time. "How are you doing?"

"Good, good," he replied, but it sounded like there was commotion in the background now. "Come on over in a half an hour. You know where I live, right, and I told you how to find my apartment? 5D? Everything will be ready, I promise."

I wasn't exactly sure what he meant by this. In fact, based on what I'd been told by my aunt, all that I really knew for certain was that my uncle was planning on driving all the way to her house in Boston tonight, returning to New York only occasionally over the next few months in order to gradually transport all of his belongings up there. And while I'd have to be prepared, particularly given his "fickle nature," as she'd called it, for the outside possibility that he might eventually decide to move back into his apartment, when she'd assured me that she seriously doubted that he would ever really do this-his 10 life in New York was over and had been for a long time, as she'd put it-I'd decided that moving into his apartment was a risk worth taking. After all, I reasoned, if I played my cards right, I might even be able to convince him to put my name on the lease and, in a stroke of almost unimaginable good fortune, his apartment would become mine forever.

As I hung up the phone, I tried to imagine what he looked like now, this man I hadn't seen since my grandmother's funeral when he'd wept uncontrollably in the front row of the church and then disappeared in a limousine an hour later, his siblings scowling at him from where they stood beside their mother's freshly dug grave; and the image that formed in my mind was of a once-strikingly handsome but now plump and disheveled fifty year old man sitting in.my grandfather's old brown leather chair, inhaling a

Marlboro Red cigarette, and then blowing elaborate rings of smoke into the air, as if each one contained a scandalous secret.

"He won't be ready for at least thirty minutes," I told the man.

"Let's go back to the building anyway," he said, without pausing. "I'm sure we can find a laundry room or a back stairwell or something, can't we?"

I was taken aback by his question, but the alcohol coursing through my body, the excitement of moving into my uncle's apartment, the sheer absurdity of the entire situation, somehow all of these things were telling me that I was on the verge of becoming someone else that night, and that taking this man back to the building was something this new person wouldn't hesitate to do.

"Sure, let's go."

We turned down Tenth Street, walking arms' length apart as we passed the row of well-maintained brownstones facing the park. The sky was purple. The air was tropical. 11

The park was almost empty. I could hear the faraway sound of a basketball bouncing on concrete until it was interrupted by glass shattering on a sidewalk, and then the honk of a car in the distance. A throng of drunken college students were walking just ahead of us, some of them laughing and others yelling at each other, pretending to be in a fight, while a dreadlocked man and a blonde woman strolling arm in arm moved off of the sidewalk, and into t~e street, to let them pass.

Halfway down the block, we walked by an old woman in a cowboy hat waiting patiently as her dog urinated on a battered green fire hydrant, and just beyond them, a cab stopped at the curb a few feet in front of us and three women stepped out onto the sidewalk, all of them wearing stiletto heels and dressed in black from head to toe. I dodged to my left to avoid bumping into one" of them, and my arm brushed up against the man's shoulder. We stopped for a moment and our eyes met; under the streetlights, he looked even more handsome than he had in the bar, like a sullen boxer, a movie star.

We kept on walking, without saying a word, until we came to the intersection of

Tenth Street and Avenue B, where a long-haired man with a guitar walked out of Life

Cafe, a restaurant on the comer that had featured prominently in Rent. My mother had called me when I first moved to the city a year ago now and told me that everybody was saying the musical was simply spectacular, but I never went to see it. I was saving what little money I had for other things. Drinks. The five-dollar cover charge for The Cock, a seedy gay bar around the comer with low ceilings and a small dance floor. A tab of

Ecstasy here and there. A new pair of jeans.

"We're almost there," I said as we ignored the red traffic light and crossed the street. The buildings were no longer brownstones. They were tenements, low-income 12 housing complexes. We passed a community garden, bathed in darkness. Across the street, an abandoned Hispanic community towered above us, its windowpanes cracked, its doors boarded up, its brick walls covered in elaborate graffiti.

We arrived at my uncle's building, a building no different than the others on the block, the fire escape reaching up into the night sky. A group of teenage Puerto Rican boys were standing out in front. They were all wearing wife-beaters and baggy shorts, some of them hugging skateboards to their chests, others smoking cigarettes, all of them listening to a mixture of rap music and static that came roaring out from the speakers of a boom box perched on one of their slouching shoulders. I could feel their eyes on our backs when we walked down the steps to the basement level entrance of my uncle's building, and I waited for one of them to yell something obscene at us-faggots or maricones-but the words never came.

Someone had propped the door open with a small brown bucket filled with dirty water, so we simply walked inside and made our way past the laundry room, where an old Puerto Rican woman sat reading the Bible, as frothy garments tumbled and turned in the washer behind her. We continued on past the metal mailboxes, past the elevator, to the back stairwell, and as I placed one foot on the black rubbery tread of the stairs, I could hear the distant cry of a baby somewhere above us-a wail, really, until it stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

We traveled up one flight of stairs, and then another. The air smelled like asphalt and rain, even though the summer sky had been sunny and clear for days. I was almost out of breath, so I stopped and turned around to face him. We started kissing each other.

I felt dizzy from all the drinks. He te.sted like cigarettes and beer. We backed away from 13 each other so that he was standing on the stairs a few feet away from where I stood on the second floor landing. We unzipped our pants and watched each other as we masturbated.

I thought of my uncle upstairs and how my aunt had told me that when I arrived at his apartment he'd most likely be listening to disco music and carefully wrapping his Royal

Daulton figurines in bubble-paper. I thought about how she'd told me that he'd bought one of these figurines every time someone he knew had died of AIDS, and that there were one hundred and ninety-seven of them in the apartment. I came. He came. There were two small streams of semen on the stairs between us.

The man coughed and then started zipping up his pants. "It was nice to meet you,

Nick," he said, without looking at me. I couldn't remember his name, so I simply said,

"Yeah, you, too," and then zipped up my own pants and watched as he disappeared down the stairs, leaving me alone with the sound of his squeaking sneakers, a door slamming below, and then in silence.

I took a deep breath and pushed through a heavy door into a hallway awash in the dull, bluish green glow of fluorescent lights. I pressed the button for the elevator, its doors slid open, and I staggered inside the dilapidated, brightly lit chamber, almost stepping on a pile of shit that appeared before me on the tile floor. As the doors rattled shut behind me, I stumbled against the wood-grain metal wall to avoid stepping on it­ there was something about its color, the whiff of a smell at once unknown and familiar that made me think it was human shit, not dog shit; in my drunken haze, I thought of a person, a woman, a man, squatting in the elevator car and taking a shit, right there, and for a moment, it felt like the most important thing in the world to figure out why this person would do that, what this person looked like, why people do these kinds of things; 14 but as I covered my nose with my hands, I began to wonder instead if my uncle would be able to smell the odor of sex on my body.

The elevator slowed to a halt on the third floor, the doors slid open, and two

Puerto Rican girls stepped in. They were nine or ten years old, dressed in matching denim mini-skirts that made them look like twins, both of them chewing bubblegum. I thought for a moment that they might scream and point, that they might think the pile of shit was something that I had put there, my way of saying hello to my new neighbors; but they simply stepped to the side, and then one of them pressed the chipped metal button for the fourth floor, as the other one took her piece of purple bubblegum out of her mouth, held it up to the light and inspected it for a moment, and then put it back in her mouth, and started chewing again.

I stared straight ahead at a piece of magic-marker graffiti on the elevator wall--a cartoon cock entering a vagina-until the elevator stopped on the fourth floor, the doors opened, and the two girls stepped out, jumping across the hallway's linoleum floor as if they were playing a game of hopscotch, their long stringy brown hair bobbing in time with their bodies. I pressed the button for the fifth floor, wondering for a moment what these girls were doing out at such a late hour, until I reminded myself that New York was the city that never sleeps, including, apparently, even its children.

The doors closed and I stared down at the pile of shit again-It looked so lonely and forgotten, so vulnerable. My stomach began to turn, so I gazed up at the ceiling and saw another piece of graffiti-"God Hates Fags." As the elevator began its groaning ascent, I began to worry that it might break, that I'd be trapped in there, between floors, calling out for help that might never come, and even if it did, there I'd be, at midnight, an 15 unknown gringo faggot in a building full of Puerto Ricans, standing next to what looked like a pile of his own shit.

Just as I could feel a sense of panic overtaking me, the elevator stopped on the fifth floor and its doors slid open. I was greeted by what sounded like salsa music emanating from behind a closed apartment door with a blue and white "Jesus Loves You" bumper sticker plastered across its front. I stepped out into the hallway and then turned to open a metallic green door that led me out to a cement outdoor walkway, where I heard still more Spanish music-it seemed to be coming from above me and below me, from everywhere, louder now and so insistent it almost sounded like live music, boisterous, and full of joy.

Through the chain link fence that lined the walkway, I saw the red brick back of another building across the large airshaft, or perhaps it was the same building, it was hard to tell. Old air conditioners protruded from some of the windows; others were open, clay flowerpots sitting on the windowsills, some of them empty, others holding wilting, dead flowers. A single line of laundry hung between two of the windows-blue jeans, a pair of tube socks, two pairs of underwear, a tattered yellow sundress.

The drooping, discolored sadness of my surroundings sent my head spinning back again to the things my aunt had told me over the years, after she'd had a drink or two herself, though at that moment it was impossible to tell if these words were hers alone or if they were equal parts a figment of my own imagination-how she'd called my father on the phone late at night so many years before, and told him that their brother had gone home to Long Island, borrowed their parents' green Cadillac, and drove to a clinic to get his results, how he was worried because all of his friends were beginning to die. They 16 were dropping like flies-the first to go, really, at the epicenter of the disease, these young men who went to a club on Second A venue and Seventh Street, just a few blocks from his apartment. She'd gone there with him once, and she'd been blinded by the strobe lights, deafened by the disco music pulsating across the dance floor, overwhelmed by the sheer number of shirtless men in blue jeans, their dancing bodies heaving, pressing up against one another, sweating, beautiful, and lost, she'd thought then, yes, all of them, lost.

He's so lost, she'd said to my father over the phone, and told him how their younger brother had driven himself back from the clinic, crying, how he'd opened the windows so the fall wind would dry his tears, so that when he got home and found their mother sitting on the screened porch, and she asked him how he was doing, how was his drive, he could say it was fine, it was wonderful, mother, really wonderful, driving through the old neighborhood again, how all the houses looked just the same as they had always looked, and how sad he was to leave her, how much he loved her. And then he boarded the Long Island Railroad back to Manhattan, back to the East Village to join his friends, who took one look at the expression on his face and knew that nothing but the worst kind of news was on its way.

Struggling to keep my balance as I proceeded down the walkway, I could almost hear my father's voice mingling with the outpouring of music all around me, repeating all the things I'd heard him say over the years like a distant, somber refrain-that his brother was not sick at all, that this was another one of his lies, for attention, for sympathy, for money. That there were no lesions on his body at Thanksgiving, no coughing on the phone, that he was delusional, again, and that he'd better not say anything to their mother 17 and father, hadn't he put them through enough already? The psychiatric hospitals, the drug rehabilitation centers, the tantrums, the rants, the lies upon lies over the years. That was what his sickness was, just another lie in a life of half-truths and outright lies, just another excuse for doing nothing with his life. We'll believe him when we see it, these whispers seemed to be saying, we'll believe it when he's lying on a hospital bed, that's when we'll believe it, then and only then.

Two more doors loomed ahead of me at the end of the walkway, and as I got closer, I couldn't remember which one my uncle had told me would take me in the direction of his apartment. I pushed through the door on the right and entered a cramped vestibule, where I was relieved to see two more doors, one for my uncle's apartment on the right, SD, and the other for his neighbor's on the left, SC.

Strips of plaster from the ceiling were hanging down above his apartment door, and I could hear muffled music coming from behind it, and the faraway moaning of what sounded like a woman's voice. I pushed the strips aside, startled by the slight wetness against my fingertips, and knocked on the door. There was no answer, so I pressed the doorbell once, twice, three times, but still, nothing. I knocked again, louder this time, hoping for a moment that somehow the door was unlocked, my uncle was gone, and I could move in without ever having to see him.

I grasped the metal door handle and tried to tum it. The door was unlocked. As I pushed it slightly ajar, Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby" came flooding out, in all its nocturnal glory, and I could feel the pulsating bass moving up from the floor to my feet and through my legs, until it seemed to become one with the quickness of my beating heart. I called out my uncle's name-once, twice, but again, there was no answer, only 18 the faint smell of cigarette smoke drifting into the vestibule. I watched as my right hand reached out to push the door all the way open-it was my hand but at the same time it wasn't, it was someone else's hand, it was no hand I'd ever seen; and as I imagined the sight of my uncle standing before me in an impossibly cluttered living room, clad in his dead father's plaid bathrobe, a lit cigarette dangling from one hand and a figurine cradled against his chest with the other-"Our Lady of the Balloons," as he called the one that stood on the mantle above the fireplace in my grandparent's house when I was a child, a fine porcelain miniature woman in a white petticoat and a black bonnet, her gloved right hand clutching a cluster of little balloons in glistening shades of yellow, pink, lavender, and blue-I was overcome with a sense that all these years he'd been waiting there for something, for some person I didn't know, waiting for me .. II.

THE LIVING ROOM

As soon as I took my first tenuous steps across the threshold of my uncle's apartment, a profusion of bright lights blinded me for a split-second, and then all I could see were brilliant patches of color-dense yellows, reds, blues, and greens-until my vision blurred and then came back into focus, and this momentary mirage began to recede into the elaborate tapestry of mourning that was the living room itself. And yet no words could be more inappropriate than "living room" to describe the funereal landscape unfolding before my eyes, this strange museum of the dead; for despite all the warnings

I'd received from my aunt concerning the haunted quality of the apartment's interior, nothing could have possibly prepared me for the sense of death and decay that weighed like an anchor at the bottom of a deep sea upon the curtains, the yellow walls, the scores of porcelain figurines.

But if everything seemed to be underwater in there, at the same time the air was dry as a desert-it was as if I'd crossed over into another world, one which had nothing to do whatsoever with the rest of the building whose dank hallways and graffiti-covered corridors I'd drunkenly navigated just moments before. No, I'd stepped, simply and without question, it seemed, into nothing less than Ligeia's Tomb.

And yet what splendor there is in sorrow! What unexpected glamour to be found in grief! For even as I stood there dumbstruck before the paroxysm of colors, shapes, and

19 20 shades assaulting my field of vision from every direction, I felt for a fleeting moment as if I'd walked into a room at war with itself, a pitched battle waged between two beautiful young soldiers from the opposing camps of Life and Death, frozen there before me in a most gloriously elegant and so softly loving an embrace!

But this sensuous sensation dissipated almost instantaneously, as the room's litany of elegiac objects seemed to demand that I become an accumulator of vertiginous impressions, discarding one only to become consumed by another, so that as I tried in vain to scan the room for any sign of my uncle, I found myself unable to form a coherent mental portrait of my surroundings. And yet that is exactly how everything looked, more and more so, it seemed, the harder my eyes strained to locate my uncle's body amid the cluttered debris of his life: a life-size painting of a lavish living room, or the mockery of one, really, rather than an actual living room itself, replete with overstuffed furniture whose mahogany side tables were laden with gaudy crystal bowls filled to the brim with marbles, coins, and what appeared to be handfuls of plastic apples, oranges, and pears, all of this giving way to the imposing grandfather clock holding court between the two windows at the room's southernmost wall, the outside world beyond them fully obscured by the ornate volutes of the dark maroon curtains, and everything set against the magisterial backdrop of a dozen or so gold-framed mirrors irreverently bedecking the walls alongside a plethora of murky oil paintings of lonesome landscapes and austere, pale-faced aristocrats, all of whom seemed to be gazing down upon the bobbing sea of brightly-lit figurines sprouting up, like little colonies unto themselves, on the wooden stands and display cases ubiquitous throughout the room. 21

Yet even this surreal sense of gazing upon a perversely magnificent trompe-l 'oeil failed to integrate the room's diverse elements in my mind for more than a few precious moments, so littered were my surroundings with object piled upon object, and not just on the floor, but everywhere, it seemed, in a bulging abundance at once opulent and decrepit-wooden boxes of every shape and size, bright bouquets of bursting flowers, leafy plants towering half-way up to the ceiling, their edges browning into curls, and silver and bronze candelabra that almost seemed to be floating in the room above the incongruous rubble of old books, yellowing Homo Xtra magazines, and endless stacks of glossy Royal Doulton brochures spiraling upwards in disheveled piles from the floor.

Desperately seeking a place to rest my eyes for a moment so that I might somehow reestablish my bearings, for there seemed to be no discernible system in the fantastic display to grasp onto and fix in my memory, my gaze was drawn first to a lavender-beaded lamp in the distance, and then quickly on to a bizarre object propped against it on the little table-a collection of empty prescription pill bottles taped together in the shape of what looked like some kind of make-shift orange and white machine gun-before settling on the old brown leather couch beckoning from where it stood nestled against the far wall, only to be summarily rebuffed. For it was heaped high with stained silk blankets, and a thick and dusty rolled-up rug that resembled nothing so much as a dead body stretched out awkwardly across the full length of the couch. Staring in disbelief at the grimy silver duct tape someone had wrapped around the bulky mass multiple times in an insanely haphazard fashion, I thought for a panicked moment that perhaps it was a dead body-and not just any dead body, but the dead body of my uncle 22 himself!-until my redoubled gaze confirmed this gagged monstrosity was, after all, simply and only a rug.

And then (for this is what gazing upon the room inspired, "and then, and then, and then, and then," like the endless incantation of a child) my eyes again began to dart about in search of some object, any object, really, that might provide a moment's respite from the unrelenting sensory implosion that seemed, in these moments, to be the room's sole purpose in the world. They finally came to rest on what appeared to be a purple-hued glass chandelier, hanging not from the ceiling, as one might reasonably expect, but sprawled out like a glittering beached octopus on what must have once functioned as a dining room table. The table itself was folded in half, and pushed against a nearby wall close enough that I could almost reach out and touch it from where I was still standing just inside the doorway; but it was so cluttered with the rusty bric-a-brac of old hammers, screwdrivers, scissors, and nails-all of them webbed together by a dingy slew of multi­ colored rubber bands scattered there amid the shards of what revealed itself, upon closer inspection, to be nothing more than a glorified heap of broken glass-it was impossible to imagine its surface had ever been used for dining of any sort.

In the end, it was one particularly dense congregation of figurines glistening atop a large shelf in the nearest corner that drew my gaze away from the table, and in so doing, seemed to claim the entire room as their own. Bright spot lights shone down on them from the ceiling, emitting the same blinding glow that had wrenched me from my drunken stupor upon my entrance into the apartment just moments prior, and casting thus a ghastly luster that gave an uneasy and hideous animation to the horde of porcelain specimens--here, a Peter Pan, there, a purple-cloaked Wizard, each one roughly ten or 23 eleven inches in height, and everywhere all manner of little ladies in colorful flowing dresses and petticoats, reduplicated tenfold, it seemed, like so many tableaux vivants, by the mirrors that gleamed just behind them on the wall.

What a mockery they seemed to be making of my dream of moving into this apartment and someday calling it my own! For how could my uncle possibly move all of these figurines out of the apartment all by himself-it would take months, years, a lifetime, it seemed. And even if he did, in this moment it felt entirely possible that like ghosts haunting a house built on the site of an old graveyard, their spirits would inhabit this living room forever. So much so that it suddenly dawned on me that my mother might have been right when she'd warned me over the phone after hearing of my plans,

"Your uncle is crazy. That apartment is crazy. And if you move in there you'll end up losing your mind, too!"

Still somehow by focusing my eyes on these lovelo~ symptoms of my uncle's

Statuephilia, the recalcitrant madness of the room began ever so slightly to subside, and I even found myself aware, for what felt like the first time, of the cacophony of noises swirling about me in the room-a ceiling fan rattling from high up above, Donna

Summer's orgasmic wails rejoining, and then, cutting through it all, like an echo from the deep recesses of my childhood, the sweet nocturnal chiming of the grandfather clock in the distance.

As I instinctively turned in its direction, I felt as if some palpable though invisible object was passing by my person. And then there it was-the faintest of shadows falling upon the cluttered carpet before me. Just as the clock chimed for the third time, the 24 fourth time now, working its way up to a dozen, my eyes followed the dark pattern from the floor up towards the obscured window at the front of th~ room. There, protruding out from atop an intricately upholstered ottoman, I spied, to my bewilderment, the enormous posterior of my uncle, frozen before my eyes like a chameleon on a leaf, as he leaned over a spiky green cactus plant rising up along the side of the curtains like some kind of gruesome serpent.

I was careful not to move or make a sound, though I could scarcely reason why I shouldn't. But still, at that precise moment, my uncle's body began turning in my direction to face me, as if he were nothing less than a Grecian statue slowly coming to life before my eyes, and as he looked down upon me his own pupils widened into an expression of delight customarily reserved for a surprise one only pretends not to have known was on its way.

Save for the unruly tufts of dark brown hair sprouting out from his upper chest that somehow managed to make him look by turns older and younger than I'd imagined him to be, he appeared almost exactly as I'd pictured him in my mind when I'd hesitantly reached out to push his door open only moments before. If somehow that felt like a lifetime ago, there he was looming above me now, my grandfather's old checkered bath robe loosely draped around his large body like a cape, his right hand delicately balancing a lit cigarette between two of its chubby fingers, a purple crystal watering pitcher, rather than "Our Lady of the Balloons," as I'd envisioned it, clutched almost defiantly in the other.

·I moved my lips to say something-hello, perhaps or to apologize for .letting myself in-but the words stuck in my throat. ·I coughed and then tried again, as his thin- 25 lipped mouth broke out into a capacious smile that appeared at once spontaneous and elaborately staged.

"Ah, my long lost nephew!" he exclaimed before even a syllable escaped my nearly trembling mouth, as he stepped down from the ottoman to the oriental rug in the center of the room with a sweeping grace of carriage that not only belied his body's considerable heft, but somehow managed to steer clear of the scattered heaps of miscellaneous remnants that almost seemed designed to obstruct anything remotely resembling the seamless elegance of his untroubled landing. "So there you are, at the very stroke of midnight, no less!" III.

SAY UNCLE

When I was a child, I would see my uncle no more than two or three times a year, usually for Thanksgiving and right after Christmas, at my grandparents' house in

Rockville Centre, Long Island. I knew only that he had come there from that noisy and grimy place my family drove through in our green Volvo on our way from our own house in Washington, D.C., after we emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel into that unknown world of towering buildings, ominous alleyways, and an endless army of yellow cabs honking violently as they sped past the car window, that place where my father's shoulders suddenly tensed up behind the steering wheel in the front seat, where my mother turned off whatever Beatles song we were listening to on the car stereo and told my two sisters and me to make sure our doors were locked, to fasten our seatbelts, and to stop moving around in the back seat like monkeys.

My uncle lived in that place, that much I knew, and for this reason, in my mind he became New York City itself-that dark and dangerous place looming just beyond the protective glass of the car window, that place that could not and therefore I knew must, someday, be known.

Yet as I stood there just inside the door to my uncle's apartment with the bright spot lights shining down through the ribbons of cigarette smoke drifting through the air between us, the entire scene suddenly seemed more theatrical than foreboding, as if we

26 27 were two actors standing on a stage. Indeed, as my uncle placed his half-empty pitcher of water on the cluttered coffee table in the middle of the living room, balancing it atop a pile of glossy Royal Doulton brochures stacked right next to a large, emerald-hued crystal ash tray overflowing with countless cigarette butts, he seemed to be far less a living person than a character in a play following a director's carefully choreographed script.

And as he moved slowly but deliberately towards me, still smiling but with his glazed eyes gazing not so much at me as through me, as if my presence there in the room were as ephemeral as the cigarette smoke itself, I didn't know whether I should open my arms to embrace him or just stick my right hand out for a handshake.

"So here we are!" he cried out when he was less than a foot away. Before I could say a word in response, he was leaning forward and kissing me lightly on my cheek, Donna Summer still wailing on in the background; and as he wrapped his large arms around me in a tight hug, the faint smell of cold cream filtered through my nostrils.

"So here we are!" I said right back, almost yelling, I realized, to my embarrassment, even though my mouth was just inches away from his left ear. Then he slowly pulled his body away from mine, took a couple small steps backwards, and, after taking a long puff from his cigarette, he started looking me up and down from head to toe, a quizzical expression painted across his face.

"You look different," he finally said, gravely, and then broke out into a smile.

"Better! I like your hair. Redheads aren't necessarily a bad thing, as Jong as they aren't too red."

I ran my fingers through my hair, trying to conceal the pained expression I felt forming on my face, one that I feared was only a heartbeat away from breaking out into a 28 full-blown blush.

"It was rather too red when you were younger," he added, almost but not quite batting his eyelashes, "and let's face it, you weren't exactly an adorable child. But it's blonder now, strawberry blond, actually, and I must say, you look all the better for it!"

I couldn't stop myself from cringing at the words "strawberry blond," a term my mother often used to describe my hair when I was an adolescent, and one that always seemed to smack of an irrepressible sissiness I'd spent the better part of my teenage years trying to banish from all aspects of my personality and appearance, only, I continued to suspect, with limited success.

"You look really good yourself," I said. But in truth, he looked almost nothing like the slender, beautiful man I remembered from my childhood, though he did bear some resemblance to the grief-stricken forty year old man I'd last seen at my grandmother's funeral a decade ago. "It's been a pretty long time now, hasn't it?"

"Well, yes, yes, I suppose it has," he replied, a faraway look forming in his eyes once again. "I haven't seen you since ... well, there's no need to speak of that, not when I heard through the grapevine that you won the Gay Black Award at Yale!"

"The Gay Black Award?"

"Why yes, that's what your aunt Debbie told me." He furrowed his brow for a moment and then blinked his eyes. "She also said something about how they mistakenly announced you as Phi Beta Kappa at graduation for some reason, even though you nearly flunked out freshman year because you were so distraught about your parents' divorce­ what a hoot!-and that it started pouring rain in the middle of the graduation ceremony, all those country club parents running for cover, and that you said something snappy 29 about how all those Yale people think they can control everything, but it turns out even they can't control the weather!"

He paused for just a second and took a quick drag from his cigarette. "Of course ifl'd been there," he continued, his eyes widening in a burst of renewed excitement, "what I would have said is that those Yale people can't even control their own penises, for that matter! Just look at our lovely President William Jefferson Clinton, bless that horny little heart of his! Don't ask, don't tell, indeed, but please, Miss

Lewinsky, by all means, do go right ahead and suck!"

And with this, my uncle threw his head back and unleashed a high-pitched laugh, the bathrobe tied loosely around his body at the waist threatening to come all the way undone in the process.

A shiver ran down my spine as I struggled to find the words, any words, with which to respond.

"Yeah, I think I said something like that," I finally managed to say, "though not that last part, of course, about-"

"Whatever the case," he interrupted, "I'm so very glad to see that the formidable Von Oesen family humor is still alive and well in the new generation ... "

I was confused for a moment because Von Oesen was not, in fact, my last name; then I remembered my aunt telling me that years ago, in the midst of one particularly bad fight with their father, my uncle had legally changed his last name to his mother's maiden name, the more regal-sounding Von Oesen. Still, I didn't know what to say to my uncle then, so I simply told him that back in college I hadn't actually won the

Gay Black Award, or whatever it was that he'd just called it. 30

"Oh really, I thought that's what Debbie told me." He casually reached over and put his half-finished cigarette out in a small black ashtray sitting beside a set of figurines arranged on a shelf midway up a towering antique credenza-a resplendent

Snow White and the seven dwarves. "Then what exactly did you win?"

"I wrote an essay on Langston Hughes and the trope of the homosexual closet,"

I replied, matter-of-factly, even as I found myself struck once again by the sheer volume of figurines populating the room everywhere around me and, even more than this, the almost inconceivable enormity of what it meant that each of them represented one of my uncle's dead friends. "And it won a couple different awards, actually, one from African

American Studies, and another from Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies."

"I see, I see, how nice for you." He pulled a pack of Marlboro Reds from the pocket of his robe. "I must confess I had no idea whatsoever that you were black, although I always did know you were gay. Ever since the violin, that is."

"The violin?" I asked.

"Yes, the violin," he repeated, almost in a stage whisper this time, as he lit his cigarette with a match. "You did play the violin when you were a child, didn't you?"

"When I was like five or six years old, but I was pretty bad. My dad couldn't stand the sound of me practicing."

"Ah, yourfather," he said, taking a long drag from his cigarette and then exhaling a succession of smoke rings into the air. "He's always had a way of turning the lemonade of life back into the lemons from whence it came."

My uncle stared at me, then, with a surprisingly serious and penetrating gaze, his eyebrows raised, as if he weren't so much expecting as demanding a response from 31 me. But I had no idea how to respond-for it seemed in that moment that there was both everything and nothing for me to say to him about my father's carefully calibrated and often sports related efforts to eradicate any potential signs of homosexuality that manifested themselves in my person-so I si.mply let the silence hang there in the smoke­ filled air between us.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, how rude of me!" he cried out suddenly. "Here I am smoking away like a chimney and I haven't even asked you if you'd like a cigarette of your own. Would you care for one?" He thrust the pack of cigarettes in front of me.

"No, no, thank you, but no," I replied. "I actually don't smoke."

In fact, the smell of cigarette smoke always made me feel sick, and the room was beginning to smell as wretched as the smokiest of East Village bars on a Saturday night.

"But of course you don't smoke." He snapped the cigarettes away and slid them back into his pocket. "You're a big basketball player, after all, aren't you?"

"Well, not so much anymore," I said, shrugging, as I felt a dim sense of pride welling up inside of me. For what I liked to think of as the small but significant dose of authentic masculinity bestowed upon me by dint of my past life as a jock was one of the ways that I separated myself, in my mind, at least, from those legions of gay men who pump themselves up at the gym and wear sporty clothing but cannot, even if their lives depended on it, catch a football, much less throw one in a spiral. "But I did play my first couple years in college."

"That must have been divine." He took another drag from his cigarette. "Well,

I'm sure you can find a pick up game across the street in Tompkins Square Park 32 whenever you like. I certainly picked up a thing or two from there in my day!"

I tried to smile at this, but as my gaze shifted momentarily to a figurine perched just to the left of my uncle's head-a bearded, brown and green-cloaked Robin Hood sitting on a rock with one foot resting on a treasure chest-for some reason I found myself thinking about the parties, the clubs, the backrooms, or even the bushes, where somewhere along the line he must have picked up the man who'd infected him with HIV and brought him home, I imagined, to this very apartment that was now on the verge of becoming mine; and as I watched him tap his cigarette against the side of the ash tray three or four times as if he were waiting for me to say something in response to his joke, I couldn't stop myself from wanting to know if he'd become friends or lovers with this man; and ifhe had and then the man had eventually died of AIDS, then which figurine had been purchased in his remembrance? Was it the sailor over there in the corner, perhaps, or the lady sitting beside him with the small child in her lap? Or maybe even

Robin Hood himself?

"Careful, though," he added quickly, "pick the wrong hot number to bring back here from that basketball court and you just might get your throat cut!"

I stared at him, unsure whether he was joking that these hypothetical basketball players from the park would slit my throat or if he was saying that he would, for my daring to bring anyone potentially unseemly back to his precious lair, where all of his beloved figurines and heirlooms would be vulnerable to late night thievery.

But just then the pulsating beats of "Love to Love You, Baby" started fading out in the background, as my uncle, waving his cigarette dramatically in the air, as if one cue, exclaimed, "Well, enough of that already, we'll have plenty of time to catch up! I do 33 believe it's time for me to set in motion this passing of the flaming torch by giving you the grand tour of my ... why, I mean the grand tour of your new apartment!" IV.

THE MUSEUM OF SEXUAL ERRORS

"Right this way!" cried my uncle, yanking me by the hand as he brushed aside some of the decaying plants and flowers whose tendrils were twisting and turning around and between the cluttered coffee table and towering candelabra like overgrown weeds in a once elaborately-arranged but now much-neglected garden.

"The first thing you must see, of course," he continued on-a scrap of dangling foliage grazing against my cheek as I struggled to keep pace with his dexterous ducks and turns as we zigzagged our way past the disheveled piles of books and brochures rising up from the oriental carpet-"is the view from my throne-and I'm not talking about the toilet, mind you. Though there is much to see in the ladies' room once we get there ... but all in good time!"

He let go of my hand and gestured towards the tattered navy blue armchair that sat in front of one of the densely curtained windows. The grandfather clock was standing on one side of it, the cactus plant rising up on the other, but the rather mundane looking piece of furniture blended so seamlessly into the background of this visual onslaught of a room that I hadn't noticed it at all until it was close enough for me to reach out and touch it.

"Please, do make yourself at home." My uncle leaned over to remove an old magazine that was sitting on the chair. Just before he scooped it up, I caught a glimpse of

34 35 its cover-"Down on the Farm," it said, in red block letters printed just above a faded color photograph of two hairy, naked men with shaggy, seventies-style haircuts-one of them was lying on his back amid a pile of hay in the back of a bright orange pick-up truck, his legs thrown up in the air, the other one leaning over him, clearly about to fuck him.

I hesitated for a moment and then sat down in the chair as my uncle casually tossed the dog-eared magazine on the leather couch behind him. I watched as it landed on the rolled-up, duct-taped rug, and then slid down its dusty surface to the floor, finally coming to rest amid an unkempt pile of more recent pornographic magazines that were mixed together with a scattering of colorful Royal Doulton brochures splayed across the carpet.

I recognized some of the names at once-Unzipped, Freshmen, Honcho-for though I was far too self-conscious to ever purchase such a magazine myself, I'd certainly thought about doing so numerous times as I'd passed them by in a gay book store or any delicatessen over in Chelsea. And as I stared down at the buff, naked man on one of the covers, he seemed to be looking up at me with the kind of forced and hardened expression of Eros that had so disturbed me the first time I got cruised by another man at a gay bar-it was an expression that had always registered to me, when I first moved to the city, at least, as evidence not so much of a surplus of sexual desire on the man's part than a desire, simply, to kill me. But it was also one I'd quickly learned to imitate myself if and when a situation arose that suggested such a look might be in the least bit efficacious-namely, the appearance of a beautiful man in anything close to my physical 36 proximity: on the subway, at the gym or in libraries and bookstores, and everywhere and anywhere on the city streets and sidewalks.

All of a sudden, I felt my uncle's hands gently lifting my feet up so they were resting on the ottoman; and as he stepped back and looked down at me with an inscrutable smile, I wondered, if this was supposed to be a tour of the apartment, then why was I sitting here in this actually quite uncomfortable chair?

From my new vantage point, I could see the door I'd entered just minutes before on the other side of the room; it was an industrial green, in stark contrast to the outlandish

Victorian decor of the room itself. I thought, for a moment, about the world beyond that door, the wet strips of plaster hanging down from the ceiling in the vestibule, the outdoor walkway with its prison-like chain link fence, the tattered yellow sundress hanging motionless in the hot and windless air. I .remembered the sound of the salsa music and the graffiti scrawled all over the walls and those two Puerto Rican girls in their denim miniskirts, too-where were they now, asleep in one of the apartments downstairs?-and then the pile of shit in the elevator, the little pools of semen on the stairs, the city streets outside, teeming with life.

It was as if none of these things had ever existed, or had simply been part of a dream I'd once had, only to wake up and find myself here, in this valley of figurines.

Just then, a new song started playing-it was a song I recognized, the spare instrumental introduction to Madonna's "This Used to Be My Playground," chiming away like a music box. It seemed wrong, somehow, that my uncle should even know this song, that he should be familiar with, much less enjoy, a singer I grew up listening to myself, in secret; the same singer my father had caught me singing along to on the car 37 radio one Saturday afternoon (accidentally, of course, for I knew better than to do that, even back then) as he drove me home from playing in a basketball game when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. The song had been "Into the Groove," a painful detail I remembered all too well, not to mention how my father had shot me a confused look that turned in a flash to one of profound disapproval as he heard me singing the words, "boy, you've got to prove your love to me," his long arm quickly reaching over and readjusting the dial to a baseball game that was playing on another station, my cheeks burning in embarrassment and shame.

I looked around my uncle's living room for a stereo or for speakers, but they were nowhere to be found-instead, it seemed as if Madonna's thin and nasal voice, backed now by the swelling accompaniment of violins, was emanating directly from the figurines themselves, many of which were running along the side of the wall on my left side.

Despite the spot lighting, they seemed to be swathed in a crepuscular gloom, their secrets as shrouded from me as a body lying in a grave deep down in the earth in the iron-gated cemetery my family always passed on our drive from the highway to my grandparents' house when I was a child, the one where our ancestors were buried and where we all knew my grandparents would someday be put to rest themselves. It was the same cemetery that always inspired my sisters and me to hold our breath as the scores of gravestones floated by outside the car window, our eyes wide, cheeks puffed, my mother laughing lightly in the front seat before joining us in our game, until there came that strange thrill of delayed exhalation we all felt together (save my father who had no time or patience for our playful superstitions), as we left the gloomy, grief-stricken scene behind us, transformed, then, if only for a moment, by the gleeful levity of our efforts. 38

"There they are!" exclaimed my uncle, standing above me and waving his arm in their direction, like a museum's overly enthusiastic docent. "All one hundred and ninety­ seven of them."

I looked over at them, more closely now. For a fleeting moment I felt as if I were a little boy at my grandparents' house on Long Island again, standing there and gazing up at the figurines that ran along the mantle above the fireplace in their well-appointed living room. There had only been four or five of them, then, as shiny and pristine as if they'd been cleaned and dusted that day. But this spectacle before me now was something different altogether. Rows and rows of them posing on ledges and shelves, as if they were miniature actors all dressed up in lavish costumes and frozen there on their own little stages, or a parade of figures from a carousel shrunken down to an impossibly small size, the light reflecting off their glazed porcelain bodies. And yet despite their panoply of shapes, sizes, and colors that ranged from dark browns and pastel pinks to the brightest of Technicolor blues, oranges, and reds-all these hues reduplicated in a kaleidoscopic blur in the mirrors on the walls just behind them-there were so many shades of color on display before me then that the closer I looked at them the more these figurines seemed to have almost no color to them at all, so like graves in a cemetery on an overcast afternoon, they all looked the same to me in that moment, staring back at me with their vacant little eyes.

I tried to look for "Our Lady of the Balloons" in their midst, but as I did so an wave of unexpected sorrow swept over me, sorrow for my dead grandparents, sorrow for my uncle and all of his dead friends and lovers, and sorrow, somehow, for myself as well-for had there not been, on those car rides past the cemetery on Long Island as a 39 child, a flicker of recognition that someday I would be put to rest in such a place, if not the exact graveyard we'd left behind us in our wake then another one no less lonesome?

And had I not spent my entire adolescence in my uncle's dark shadow, feeling, somehow, within and alongside the secrecy and shame of my first tremors of desire for other boys and men, that just like him, some part of me was dying, some part of me was already dead; or, rather, that death was not just something that would happen to me in my faraway future, as it would for everybody else, but something inside of me already, like the AIDS virus itself, never to be expelled?

Yet as I turned my gaze to look up at my uncle again-for there he was, closing his eyes as he took another languorous drag from his cigarette-this spell of sorrow was broken for a moment by the unmistakable melodrama of the lyrics Madonna was crooning in the background, her melancholic voice barely in key. I still knew all the words by heart, though I was loathe to admit this, even to myself-This used to be my playground ... this used to be my childhood dream ... this used to be the place I ran to ... whenever I was in need ... ofa friend ... why did this have to end?-all of which sounded at once so in keeping with the elegiac situation and mood in which I found myself now and yet so corny that I had to stop myself from bursting out into what I was certain my uncle would see as a wholly inappropriate fit of laughter.

"It all began with your Grandma Rita," my uncle broke in at that moment, as if he were the superstar here and Madonna merely his back-up singer-there was a kind of music in his voice now, a tone of wistful pride I'd never heard from him before.

"Many, many years ago," he continued on, almost in a whisper now, "when she was the President of her senior class at Skidmore, your grandmother was given her very 40 first Royal Doulton-the Balloon Lady--from the love of her life, the fabulously wealthy

Murray Bonds, the most eligible bachelor at Yale."

"You mean he gave her Our Lady of the Balloons?" I asked, feeling ridiculous as

I said these words, like another person, in fact, but somehow incapable of stopping myself, for I was almost certain I'd never heard anything about any of this, from anyone in my family, in the past.

"Why, yes, that's the very one," he replied, and then paused dramatically as he leaned over to put his cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray sitting on the coffee table an arm's length away.

"What happened?" I asked, surprised by the force of my own curiosity. For ifl'd hoped that my uncle would be on his way to Boston as soon as possible, there was something about the way the words rolled off his tongue as if he were privy to some kind of secret knowledge that kept my attention unexpectedly rapt.

"Well, she was all set to marry him," he continued, forlornly, at first. "She went to the Pump and Slipper with him, and he presented her with an engagement ring-a very nice ring, indeed, from Tiffany's, no less!"

The Pump and Slipper? I thought to myself, incredulous. I'd attended the Pump and Slipper several times; it was the formal ball held by St. Anthony Hall, my Literary

Society at Yale, an annual event famous on campus not because it had appeared in a number of minor short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald-none of us, including myself, had ever read a single one of them-but because of its live jazz band and a supply of fine champagne so ostentatious in its overabundance that I could still recall the hangover I'd 41 awoken with back in my dorm on a late Sunday afternoon, still clad in that rumpled rental tuxedo.

"But then her father, your great grandfather," my uncle went on, lighting another cigarette as he made it clear with his squint-eyed sideways glance that I was not, under any circumstances, to interrupt him right now, "he found out that Murray was actually

Jewish, of all things, and had been hiding this from everyone, and so of course that was the end of that! Her father sent her on a cruise half-way around the world for six months so she'd forget all about him, and when she came back, he introduced her to my father."

My uncle blew a stream of smoke into the air.

"lt was the great tragedy of her life," he added gravely. "And, I dare say, of mine."

I opened my mouth to ask him why this was so, but he continued on, unabated and more excitably now, a look of renewed possibility replacfog his mournful pallor, as he explained how just before departing on her cruise, my grandmother had stolen herself away from her parents under false pretenses in order to spend an afternoon at the bar of the Algonquin Hotel. It was here that she had met and returned the ring to her heartbroken lover-who, being the consummate gentleman that he was, had naturally insisted that she at least keep the Royal Doulton in her possession as a small token of his undying love. She'd acquiesced, my uncle explained to me next, by wrapping the figurine in Murray's tear-stained handkerchief, and promising him that she'd take it with her as she sailed all the way to South America and back, a promise that she most dutifully kept. But, he continued on, that faraway look returning to his eyes once again, she'd married my grandfather within months after her return to New York, "Our Lady of the 42

Balloons"-its amorous origins unbeknownst to anyone but herself-coming to rest on the mantelpiece in the living room of the new home in which his parents would spend the rest of their lives together. Murray Bonds was never heard from again.

"And the rest, as they say," he concluded with a final flourish, "is History-my history, that is, and soon enough ... yours and yours alone!"

I was startled to see that my uncle was suddenly holding some kind of elaborate contraption in his hand-it looked like a long pole, the length of about half a fishing pole, with two or three wires running down it, and, however improbably, a yellow-stained white lace glove attached to it at the end.

At the precise moment that he took another long drag from his cigarette, as

Madonna sang on in the background, her voice at once solemn and saccharine in equal measure, and nearing, I knew, the song's conclusion-

Say goodbye to yesterday ... those are words I'll never say-

-my uncle extended the pole above the sepulchral sea of carefully-arranged figurines like a puppeteer gently pulling at the strings of his beloved marionette, so that the pole seemed to become a natural extension of his own body:

Then, as if it belonged to a ghost, the gloved hand grasped one of the figurines-a miniature woman standing prominently on her own private ledge amid a set of little gilded clocks scattered at her feet like so many luxurious accessories-and then he slowly guided her towards me, until she was hanging right there, like a Holy Grail, in the smoky air just in front of my face.

"Here she is!" my uncle proclaimed, with an air of pomp and circumstance that sounded extreme, even coming from him. "Your Grandma Rita herself!" 43

The glistening miniature lady looked like something out of a Walt Disney cartoon, clad as she was in a blue dress with a red shawl and bonnet, a parasol in one hand and her pale porcelain head tilted to the side, as if she were about to turn around to look behind herself at something far off in the distance.

It was pretty enough, but all the same she looked almost nothing like my grandmother, at least not as I remembered the rather sweet old woman, well-dressed but a little bit overweight, who spent the evenings in her living room smoking cigarettes and reading from one of the numerous paperback mystery novels stacked on the little table by her side. The truth is that the whole house had smelled of cigarettes back then, mixed with the sweet scent of talcum powder, of this I was certain, just as I knew that when my grandmother would come down to visit us at our house in Washington-where a small porcelain "Thank You For Not Smoking" sign, written in delicate cursive letters, the sort you sometimes see at restaurants or hotels, sat prominently on the mantelpiece in our own living room-my father would always make her go outside to smoke, no matter what the ' weather might be. Indeed, I remembered watching this elderly woman, wearing heels and all bundled up in an enormous fur coat, stepping out all by herself onto the back porch blanketed with snow. I could see her profile through the kitchen window, then, her eyes staring blankly into the darkness of the yard in the distance; and when she finally came back inside to join the rest of the family for an after-dinner game of charades, she was inevitably cupping three or four lipstick-stained cigarette butts in her wrinkled and vein-covered hands, barely looking at me as she walked across the kitchen and placed them gently in the trashcan under the sink, like some kind of delicacy that had suddenly gone bad. 44

"Simply gorgeous, now isn't she?" He raised his eyebrows at the figurine in between puffs from his cigarette-and for some reason this made me think of those times in my childhood when I'd sneak downstairs at my grandparent's house for a late night snack, usually around Thanksgiving or Christmas, only to find my grandmother, clad in her nightgown and bathrobe, sitting with my uncle in the dimly-lit TV room, smoking cigarettes and watching Dynasty together. I'd wanted to join them, of course, to be a part of their secret life by taking in this scandalous and forbidden television show with them, but they'd always smile and tell me that my parents simply wouldn't allow it, sending me back upstairs instead with a glass of warm milk and a couple of chocolate chip cookies, if

I was lucky.

"Yes, yes, she really is quite gorgeous," I replied, nodding, but then immediately disturbed as I realized that, much like a foreigner in another country who inadvertently imitates the accent of the native speakers, I'd replied to my uncle in precisely the same queeny tone with which he'd addressed me. "I mean ... how could you possibly know all these things about her past?" I asked him right away, affecting a low, gruff voice, as I remembered how my father still referred to my uncle as "the biggest liar in the world," "a man without a moral compass," or some other ignominious description that my older sister had borrowed from him over the years in order to hurl them directly at me, herself, like a verbal rock, in the petty fights and arguments of our childhood and adolescence, making sure to remind me that even our names-Nick and Rick-rhymed with one another, thereby proving, she'd claimed, once and for all and no matter how much I might try to deny it, the inextricable nature of our bond. 45

"How do I know these things?" He used the gloved pole to gently guide the figurine all the way back over to its pride of place on the ledge in the distance, a broad smile spreading across his face now. "Contrary to popular opinion, diaries, not diamonds, are a girl's best friend!"

With this, he flung open an old, black military-style trunk that was sitting on the floor nearby, pages and pages of yellowing paper and old notebooks bursting forth from its interior. But the curiosity I'd felt about my family history only a few minutes earlier was now almost entirely eclipsed by my growing suspicion that my uncle had simply lured me here to play the role of his captive audience and that he was not, in fact, going to move out of the apartment, tonight or anytime soon; and as he licked his fingertips and started rifling though a set of letters one-by-one, as if he were trying and failing to locate one piece of correspondence in particular, I began to worry that I'd have nowhere to sleep that night-for while I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable staying here while my uncle was still in the apartment, not only did I no longer have the keys to the Morningside

Heights apartment share that I'd moved out of earlier that afternoon, it was also getting far too late for me to call my former roommate to see if I could at the very least crash on the couch.

"Of course, there's only so much you can learn from reading anything," my uncle added all of a sudden, closing the trunk just as quickly as he had opened it. "Just as there are some things in life that a woman will only tell her homosexual son, things she can scarcely admit to herself. But you must know all about that yourself, now don't you?"

I thought about my own mother for a moment, and the summer before I left for college for the first time, when I'd sat with her at a Mexican restaurant a few blocks from 46 our house, listening to her complain about my father the whole time. "Why don't you divorce him, then?" I'd asked without thinking, mid-way through the meal, half a bite of a taco still in my mouth. I hadn't really thought about it at the time-I hardly thought she'd take me seriously-but it was only two months later that my distraught father drove all the way up to New Haven to tell me that my mother was leaving him, and that one of the reasons was because he'd been such a bad father to me, and would I please give her a call right away and assure her that this was simply not the case at all? Overcome with guilt, I'd done so right away, though it wasn't until several months later that we all learned she was leaving my father for another man, her high school sweetheart, it turned out, whom, until the affair had begun a few months earlier, apparently, she hadn't seen in almost thirty years.

"Are you quite all right?" my uncle asked, furrowing his brow.

"No, I...l'm fine, it's just I'm feeling a little ... "

"Well, let me take care of that." He slowly pulled something out from the pocket of his bathrobe. It looked like some kind of elaborate remote control panel, the back of it covered in dirty red tape. "You really must learn how to relax. Believe me, I know it must be hard for you. You do come from such an uptight family."

He pressed a button on the remote control and the chair I was in hummed and vibrated as some kind of metal knobs started kneading me against my buttocks and back.

"It's an electric full-body massage chair," my uncle proudly explained, almost yelling to make himself heard over the humming sound. "But I like to call it The Ninth

Wonder of the World." 47

He reached over and swiveled an outdated-looking computer console, attached by some kind of metallic, crane-like contraption to the low book shelf standing on my left side, so that it was positioned right there in front of my face. The chair was vibrating even more now, and as a warm feeling spread through my body, my uncle pressed another button on the remote control and the computer turned on, accompanied by a beeping sound, as a split screen lit up before my eyes-one of them featured what looked like a film still of a naked Latino man with a thin moustache and a shaved head, his hairless, muscular body covered in glistening oil as he cradled his enormous erect purple­ hued penis in his left hand; the other one was a bottle-blonde white guy with a fake tan line bending over and spreading his ass cheeks wide with both hands to reveal his tight pink shaved asshole.

"Top or bottom?" my uncle asked, as nonchalantly as if he were asking me if I were right or left-handed.

"Excuse me?"

"Are you a top or a bottom? I need to know what kinds of images I should keep on the screen for your viewing pleasure when I leave."

"You ... you really don't need to do that."

"No, I absolutely insist. I promise, you'll love it. Everybody always does, once I show them how well the chair and the slideshow work together. So which one is it?"

It was clear from the expectant look in his eyes that he wouldn't take no for an answer. And who was this "everybody" he'd referred to, anyway?

"Um ... I guess I'm a little bit of both?" I finally said, blushing. 48

"Me too!" my uncle cried out, his eyes lighting up with excitement. "Or a lot of both, to be honest. Back in my day, of course, we weren't so hung up on these kinds of things-everybody was having far too much fun fucking and getting fucked by everybody else to worry about it! But I know things aren't quite the same for the younger set today, are they?"

"Um .. .I really don't know." I looked around the room and tried to think of a way to change the topic of conversation as quickly as possible. "Wow, that's ... that's quite a lot of books you've got here," I remarked before my uncle could say another word, and with as much enthusiasm as I could muster.

And it was true: they were everywhere, old hardcover books populating the low bookshelves that doubled as display stands for the Royal Doultons clustered throughout the room, and more books rising up in stacks from the floor, too, as numerous, almost, as the figurines themselves.

I scanned the titles stretching across their spines, but I had never heard of most of them before-"The Art of Drinking," "Marilyn," "The Status Seeker," "Judicial

Process," "Wild Horse Mesa," "The Selling of the President of 1968," and "Private Acts,

Social Consequences." Scattered among these, though, were others I'd heard of but never read, so like a passerby searching through a crowd for the comforting presence of a familiar face, it was to these that my gaze was drawn-"AIDS and its Metaphors," "And the Band Played On," "City of Night," and-

" Ah-what about this one?" my uncle broke in, and I was relieved to see that he'd taken my conversational bait. "Have you read it? It's the story of my life!" 49

He pulled a book from the top of one of the stacks nearby and thrust it in front of my face. The image on its plain white cover was a painting of the profile of a man's face, in dark silhouette, offset by a mane of hair that almost seemed to be on fire, giving the entire form an almost glowing, supernatural quality accentuated by a golden loop in the man's ear, as if he were as much a gypsy as a homosexual man; beneath the image, in bold black letters, I saw its title, "DANCER FROM THE DANCE, a novel by ANDREW

HOLLERAN."

"Well, have you?" my uncle asked, and there was a note ofreprobation in his voice, as if he were a district attorney presenting crucial evidence at a trial and I, the nefarious defendant.

"I'm pretty sure I've read part of it ... "

The chair was still vibrating and humming away, the knob-like parts inside of it pressing up and down my back in slow and labored waves.

"Part of it?" he cried out, aghast, and for just a moment it seemed entirely plausible that he might reach out and bum me with the cigarette dangling in his other hand. "What self-respecting homosexual starts 'Dancer from the Dance' and only reads part of it?"

"I ... "

"Next thing you're going to tell me is that you couldn't make it past the first illustrated page of 'The Joy of Gay Sex'!"

He took another drag and then added, "You are getting your doctorate in literature, aren't you?" 50

"I'm sure it's a wonderful novel," I said, in a rush. "I mean, absolutely everybody says that it is."

He eyed me skeptically, but with the hint of a smile at the corner of his lips.

"My best friend in college loved it," I continued, quickly deciding not to tell my uncle how shortly after coming out my junior year, I had in fact borrowed a paperback edition of the novel in question from this friend of mine-the cover had been different, though, and I dimly remembered how the opening pages were comprised of italicized letters written between two male friends but signed with women's names and so full of campy talk of gay sex and drag queens and Fire Island and all manner of over the top posturing and outlandish behavior that I'd become gripped with fear that these pages foretold my own future in a world I could not, did not want to understand; and though there was an undeniable beauty in the language, it seemed to me then so horrible a beauty-the horrible beauty of those italics!-that I never made it past the epistolary prologue and into the novel's first chapter.

Instead, I explained to my uncle that as an English major in college I'd had so many books to read for class that anything extracurricular always fell by the wayside, but that if he would be so kind as to lend me his copy, I'd be sure to read it all the way through to the end as soon as possible, adding that I'd actually been meaning to do so for quite some time, a claim that did, in fact, have some truth to it.

"Yes, yes, you absolutely must do that-it's a classic work of gay literature, you know, and this is a first edition." He dropped the book in my lap and then gazed off into the distance, inexplicably, as if he were trying to recall some person or experience from the faraway past. 51

As I gripped the book in my hands, I didn't have the heart to tell him that I

actually abhorred the category "gay literature"-novels were novels, after all, not people,

. and had no sexuality unto themselves!-and that anyway I preferred those writers in

whose books homosexuality was everywhere but nowhere, where it remained that

sublimated love that dare not speak its name-James, Proust, and yes, Langston Hughes,

the subject of my senior thesis in college, not to mention the whole canon 'of African

American literature. For these novels had always seemed to me a far safer and less self­

implicating haven in which to read about the experience of social marginalization, though

as my best friend in college said to me once back then as we walked across the campus to

the library, emboldened to speak freely on such matters in part because he was Asian­

American himself, "You were never a slave, Nick, and neither was your father, even if he

is a civil rights lawyer. So get over that whole black lit fetish of yours!"

Just as a new song started playing in the background-the slow and portentously

synthesizer-driven introduction of yet another Madonna song, her lonesome ballad, "Live

to Tell"--my uncle put his cigarette out and pressed another button on the remote control

panel. The chair went mercifully still and quiet as he looked down at me, his eyebrows

arched.

"I don't suppose you're aware that I'm the author of a novel myself, now are

you?" he inquired.

I remembered my father's words about my uncle's penchant for telling outrageous

lies.

"No, actually, I'm not. Was it written under a pseudonym or something?" I

humored him. 52

"Well," said my uncle as he put the remote control panel down, "that's a very good question. The novel you're holding in your hands was written under a false name, after all."

I looked down at the image of the man on the cover again. It did look something like my uncle, actually, if not as he appeared to me now then at least as I remembered him from my childhood-a thin and glamorous figure with silky black hair and olive skin who wore expensive suits and fashionable sweaters; until something changed during my adolescence, irrevocably, it seemed, and he started gaining weight even as he skipped the family meals during our holiday visits to my grandparents' house, always disappearing into a small back bedroom on the second floor, only to reemerge unexpectedly in the middle of the day, clad in a bathrobe and bedroom slippers, his hair disheveled and dark circles under his eyes.

I turned my gaze from the book and back up at my uncle as Madonna slowly began to sing those familiar lyrics-/ have a tale to tell, sometimes it gets so hard to hide it well ...

"You wrote 'Dancer from the Dance'?" I asked, astonished, but at the same time fairly certain that I must have misunderstood him.

My uncle slowly lit another cigarette.

"Did I write 'Dancer from the Dance'?" he said back at me, then, with a weary voice, as if this were a woefully pedestrian question that he'd been asked a million times.

I slid my feet off the ottoman and onfo the floor, and in this moment the whole world seemed to shift beneath my feet. For if this was somehow true, if somehow he was, indeed, the author of this novel I was holding in my hands, a gay one but a classic 53 nonetheless, then everything my father had ever said about him was the lie; and those holidays he'd spent hiding out in my grandparents' back bedroom, not to mention all these years he'd been shut up in this very apartment, he must have been toiling away in secret on those books that came after his celebrated debut novel. All of which meant that his whole life was serving some higher purpose, after all, and one far grander than I could have ever imagined-for it was devoted to nothing less than Literature itself!

My uncle exhaled a hazy plume of smoke into the air.

"Actually ... no," he finally said. "The novel I wrote was called 'The Book of

Sexual Errors."'

'"The Book of Sexual Errors'?" I asked as I tried to conceal the expression of disappointment on my face that I feared was turning quickly to one of anger.

"Yes, that's right. 'The Book of Sexual Errors.' And while there are parts of it that are quite reminiscent of 'Dancer,' it takes as its subject the big question of what came after the glittering age captured so deliciously in that novel-the Plague itself, of course."

He blew two thin streams of smoke out of his nose as Madonna sang on in the background-a man can tell a thousand lies, I've learned my lesson well ...

"In fact," he continued, "had it ever seen the light of day, I have no doubt it would have been lauded as The Greatest AIDS Novel Ever Written."

... hope I live to tell the secret I have learned ...

"Oh, I see," I said, even more disappointed now, but hardly surprised, and somehow managing to hold most of my resentment in check. "So it never found a publisher?" 54

The smoke seemed to swirl around his head then, like a halo, until it gently wafted up towards the ceiling in time with the yearning rhythm of the music .

.. . 'ti! then it will burn inside of me ...

"Not exactly," he said, and there it was again, that sadness in his eyes that seemed

a perfect match for the melancholic melody. "You see, many years ago I was all set to

send all 1,012 pages of the manuscript to a friend of a friend of a friend from the gym­ this man's name was Felice, or 'my darling Felice,' as everyo.ne seemed to call him-so he could deliver it by hand to a prominent publisher he knew. I'm absolutely certain they would have jumped at the opportunity. But then tragedy struck. Unexpectedly."

"Tragedy?" I asked, leaning forward in the chair.

"Well, there was so much tragedy in those days-every morning and afternoon a .

funeral!-that it hardly seemed to measure up. But looking back now, I can see the catastrophe that befell my book for the smaller tragedy that it was at the time, for the tragedy that it still is today, amplified over the years, and not just for me, but for all of

gay literature itself!"

I could hardly contain myself now. "What happened?"

... will it grow cold, the secret that I hide, will I grow old ...

He took "Dancer from the Dance" out of my hands and placed it back on top of the stack of books rising up from the floor, the faraway look disappearing from his eyes

in a flash.

"Ah, it's a long story," he said with a sigh as he looked up at the grandfather

clock. "And anyway, it's getting late and I really should be on my way."

I sat there speechless as Madonna's song neared its conclusion. 55

--how will they hear, when will they learn, how will they-

"It' s quite a drive all the way up to Boston, after all." He extinguished his half­ finished cigarette. "And I haven't even shown you the rest of the apartment yet."

"But-"

"Shall we, then?" he interrupted me, gesturing with the perfectly synchronized movement of his eyebrows and hands that it was time for me to stand up; and since there was nothing at all in his tone of voice to suggest this was really a question at all, that's exactly what I did. v.

PILLS

"Oh my!" my uncle cried out as I pitched forward and grasped hold of the bronze candelabra that suddenly seemed to be rising up from the carpet as if its sole purpose in the world were to safeguard against such a fall. Clearly still feeling the after-affects of the five glass of vodka tonic I'd consumed back at the bar, I told my uncle in a slur of words that I was just a little bit tired, even though the whole living room was spinning around me in such a whirling blur of figurines that I was beginning to feel like a child taking their first panicked ride on a merry-go-round. I tried to regain my composure by fixing my gaze on the face of the grandfather clock in the distance, but I just barely managed to see that it was thirty-two minutes past midnight before I was taken aback by the sight of four porcelain baby dolls, more macabre even than the Royal Doultons, somehow, that were sitting on the very top of the grandfather clock, like gargoyles in a cloud-they were all dressed in matching white pinafores and crowned with wisps of blond hair, their beady black eyes looking down at me blankly, as if possessed.

"I know just what you need," my uncle said, rushing to my side and curling his arm around mine as if we were about to go strolling through a field of sunflowers together. "In fact, I could use another few myself!"

A new song started playing, a delirious old disco beat without any vocals, as he led me over to the small mahogany table in the corner of the room. He gently unhooked

56 57 his arm from mine and picked up the collection of prescription pill bottles that had clearly been taped together in the improbable shape of an orange and white machine gun. But before I could gather my wits to ask him what he was going to do with it, he opened the pill bottle at the tip of its "nozzle," the only one of them that appeared to be filled with anything, and then he quickly dipped the whole "drug gun" to the side so that the cream­ colored pills-there must have been at least ten of them-spilled out into the palm of his hand like little pieces of candy.

"Follow me!" he commanded, ushering me past an enormous bouquet of withered pink and red chrysanthemums into a doorless kitchen that was lined with so many crates and boxes that there was only the slimmest of trails leading to its far end.

A rusty metal fan was blowing in a closed window down there, just above a sink full oflittle glass figurines, some of them broken, others covered in gold paint and glitter, small droplets of water dripping from the faucet. A sheet of plywood covered the entire stovetop---Its knobs painted red, green, and yellow, like a child's toy-the whole surface littered with a collection of gold-painted nails, rubber bands, paper clips, and crusty old containers of Elmer's glue. But the garishness of the room owed mostly to the arrangement of the china that had been attached with Velcro, I assumed, based on what

I'd been told by my aunt, to the dark blue wall that faced the kitchen counter: there were tea cups and plates and bowls, most of them with finely painted flowers on them, all of them displayed in a bizarre constellation that seemed to tilt the entire world on its side, only exacerbating the queasy feeling that was building moment by moment in the pit of my stomach. 58

My uncle let go of my hand and opened the refrigerator door. It was covered,

absurdly, with a large black dinner tray, a cluster of red roses painted on its surface. I

' recognized it at once as the handiwork of my great grandmother, whose intricately

painted wastepaper baskets and trays had been a ubiquitous presence in the rooms and hallways throughout my grandparent's Long Island home. Stranger still was the sight of a number of framed paintings of the old family beach house on Shelter Island that were adorning the kitchen's cabinet doors--one, a muted watercolor of my grandfather's

sailboat adrift on a calm sea in the distance, another a piece of driftwood half-submerged in the sandy shore.

The next thing I knew, my uncle was reaching into the freezer, and the way things were going now, I fully expected him to pull out the piece of my grandmother's wedding

cake, the one my aunt had told me he'd been hoarding in there for years, all wrapped up

in tinfoil. But instead, he grabbed a liter of Diet Coke and an old wooden mallet. He pounded away on the bottle cap, a look of extreme focus appearing in his eyes that only

grew in intensity as he put everything down on the refuse-heaped countertop and tried to

unscrew the bottle with his hands, beads of sweat gathering on his brow. All of a sudden, the bottle started to emit a tremendous hissing sound, and I had visions of soda spraying

all over the kitchen's musty, carpeted floor.

"Uh-oh!" he cried out as he quickly tightened it back up again, just in the knick of time, and then balanced it against his hip. "Sometimes there is a little waiting process."

The disco music was picking up its pace and volume in the background now as he

untwisted the cap again, safely this time, and poured us each a bubbling glass of soda.

Then, after he clinked his glass against mine in an impromptu toast, he stuffed the pills in 59 his mouth, threw his head back, and took a long, gulping sip. Finally, as if he were a magician performing sleight-of-hand, a broad smile broke out on his face as he revealed the single little pill that remained captured there between his thumb and index finger, like some kind of precious stone.

"What is it?" I was feeling more and more nauseous by the moment.

"Adderall," he replied, knowingly, though I'd never heard of this drug before.

"Go ahead, give it a try. It's simply marvelous the first time you take it, though now that

I take about thirty of them a day, I hardly feel a thing. But if you're feeling even the least bit level-headed-pardon me, I mean the least bit light-headed, of course-this should certainly do the trick and then some!"

"Where do you get these?" I managed to ask, remembering how my aunt had told me that his addiction to prescription drugs kept him awake for days and nights on end.

"Online," he explained. "From this lovely place called 'Ethical Pharmacy.' I'll be sure to leave a bunch of these little beauties here in the apartment for you so you can go out dancing with your friends all night long. You do go out dancing, don't you?"

"Yes, of course," I struggled to say, even though I wanted nothing more in this moment than to find the bathroom-any bathroom-and vomit my entire dinner into the toilet. "But ... is right now really the best time for us to be taking this?"

"Don't be ridiculous!" He waved his hand in my direction as if he were swatting away a fly. "The time for drugs is always now. Here, I'll cut it up for you and you can just take a half. You can handle that, now can't you?" 60

I watched him warily as he cleared away a small space on the cluttered countertop and then picked up a rusty old Swiss army knife that he used to cut the pill into two perfectly symmetrical little halves.

"Voila!" He pressed one of them into my hand. "And please don't tell me that you take after your father when it comes to his skittishness about indulging in the harmless pleasures of recreational drugs, pharmaceutical or otherwise," he added. His features contracted into a frown. "He must have been the only anti-war protestor back in the sixties who never so much as took a single hit of marijuana!"

Without missing a beat, he launched into a story about how much he'd adored my mother when he first met her years ago and how horrified he'd been when he'd learned that my father had forced her to stop smoking cigarettes.

"My mother smoked?" I interrupted him, in shock, as I took one small step backwards and knocked into a piece of china Velcroed to the wall behind me.

"Oh yes, I thought you knew that," he replied. "Your father told her that she simply had to stop smoking if she wanted to have any chance of marrying him. In fact, come to think of it, I do wonder if she' 11 be taking it up again now that she's left him for good! Anyway, bottoms up!"

I stared down at the half-a-:pill in the palm of my hand-could this tiny little thing possibly make me feel any worse than I already did?-and in this moment I suddenly felt as if some person I didn't know, some person I could have been or should have been or would have been but wasn't, was taking control of my entire body against my will. It was the same person who'd picked up that man at the bar and masturbated with him in the building's back stairwell; the same person who'd pushed aside those strips of plaster 61 and stepped through this apartment's front door; the same person who was closing his eyes as he popped the Adderall in his mouth and then washed it down with the coldest, most delicious Diet Coke he'd ever tasted in his life, all the while knowing there was no turning back now, his first night in his uncle's apartment had only just begun. VI.

TIME-RELEASE

"That wasn't so bad, now was it?" my uncle asked as he scooped up the wooden mallet and the two liters of Diet Coke and placed them back in the freezer, closing the refrigerator door firmly behind them. "It's time-released, of course, so it comes and goes in these rapturous little waves of indescribable bliss-up and down, up and down, lik.e an elevator, but thank God mostly up!" He turned back to face me, his eyes aglow. "See, there's so much for you to look forward to in this life. Or at the very least in the next few hours!"

Miraculously enough, my stomach was already beginning to feel just a little bit better as my uncle led me over to a white plastic boxlike contraption sandwiched between the kitchen sink and the china-covered wall; and when he explained that it was a portable miniature dishwasher that he'd been using for years, it hardly seemed to matter that it could only clean a handful of dishes and silverware at a time-it was a working dishwasher in an, apartment in New York City, and this was already more than enough to make me feel as if I was walking on air.

As we made our way back across the kitchen, he explained to me that I mustn't throw anything from the apartment away, under any circumstances-pointing, by way of example, to a dusty cluster of old unopened bottles of champagne peaking out from underneath the clutter of the kitchen counter. They'd all been saved from my

62 63 grandparents' wedding seventy years ago, he told me with pride. But I barely heard a word he was saying after that, lost as I was in a reverie of wishful thinking about how the apartment would look once all of his belongings had been evacuated from the premises and moved to my aunt's house in the suburbs of Boston.

I pictured a bare kitchen, in which only the portable dishwasher remained, opening onto a spacious living room without so much as a single Royal Daulton or anything else anywhere in sight; and with the dark maroon curtains a thing of the past, I imagined the front windows thrown open to reveal an expansive treetop view of

Tompkins Square Park and then the city itself stretching out beyond it into the distance, like the dramatic backdrop for a Hollywood movie, all of these sights pregnant with the promise of lazy afternoons, late night parties, and unadulterated freedom from all responsibilities save the pursuit of the only two things that mattered to me in the world:

Literature and Love!

Suddenly everything around me felt at once heightened and less overwhelming at the same time; and when I looked over at my uncle as he straightened the teacup I'd knocked askew from its Velcroed position on the wall, it was almost as ifl was seeing his face for the very first time that evening. If he was not exactly handsome he was, to be sure, remarkably well preserved for a man of his age and physical condition. Despite his corpulence, he had high cheekbones that seemed to perfectly complement his dark brown eyes, the hair on his head lush and slightly curly, without even a single strand of gray visible to the naked eye; and as he turned back towards me to tell me that he wanted to show me something he'd been saving in the apartment just for me, he had a child's smile on his lips and not a single wrinkle around his eyes. 64

"I always thought that the only good thing about having this disease was that I knew for sure I'd always be thin," he said with a half-hearted laugh as he led me over to a closet in a short hallway off of the kitchen.

I wondered for a moment if perhaps my father was right, and my uncle was not

HIV-positive, after all. I'd seen those skeletal men on the new drug cocktail, with their bloated stomachs and the veins that popped out from their legs as if they were about to burst, never failing to wonder if and when I might make the slip in judgment-that's all it would take, one night of too many drinks, a tab of Ecstasy gone awry, a broken condom, the wrong man brought back from a bar-and I would join their growing ranks. And yet my uncle looked nothing like them.

"But since that's clearly not the case-just look at me!-these sartorial gems are all yours for the taking," he added as he started rummaging through the overstuffed closet, tossing piles upon piles of clothes onto the floor. In a matters of moments, we were both standing in a sea of Ralph Lauren Polo dress shirts, silk scarves, colorful ties, a faded gray T-shirt with the logo from the Pleasure Chest on it, a suede jacket, a leather biker's jacket, paint-splattered jeans, blue corduroy bell bottoms with two zippers running up the front of each leg, stone-washed overalls, black leather pants, a plaid shirt, denim jackets, a bomber jacket, a black jump suit, a pair of roller skates. I wanted to try everything on immediately, but just then my uncle seemed to find exactly what he was looking for when he pulled forth three hangers draped with plastic-covered suits.

I remembered these suits, or ones much like them, from the framed photographs of my uncle posing like a young dandy that were displayed throughout my grandparents' house when I was a child. Though I couldn't remember which one, I knew that one of 65 these photographs had been sitting on the bureau in the guest bedroom when I was twelve or thirteen years old and my mother sat my sisters and me down on the king-sized bed for what she'd called a "special talk" about my uncle. What I did remember-what I will never forget-was not just how the sheets had been pink and the room had smelled like talcum powder and flowers that barely masked the stench of cigarette smoke permeating the entire house, but how when my older sister asked my mother if our uncle was gay, she'd explained to us that he'd been with many women and many men. And though I'd been too afraid to ask any questions myself, my sister seemed to be reading my mind when she'd asked next ifhe used drugs and if he had AIDS, my mother simply pausing and then saying yes, your uncle has lived a very, very fast life in New York City.

The first one he unwrapped from the plastic was a brown pinstriped Saville Row suit he'd acquired while he was living abroad in London in his mid-twenties, he told me in a low, breathless whisper, running his fingers across its lapel. As soon as he'd moved there he'd bought a convertible with some money he'd inherited from his grandmother, printed up a bunch of business cards that read-"American Gentleman in London. Will do anything. lfas Porsche"--and in no time at all he was living on an estate outside the city working as a "groundskeeper" for a middle-aged British aristocrat who gave him the suit to wear for formal occasions (though he spent most of his time relaxing in the infinity pool and playing croquet in knee-high socks and short tennis shorts, he informed me in a little aside).

Slinging this suit over the closet door, he showed me the second one, a beautiful blue pin-stripe Yves Saint Laurent number that he'd acquired from an admirer from his

Studio 54 days, replete with a matching vest; and then finally a black velvet Calvin Klein 66 suit he'd inherited from a friend named Paul, an aspiring model who'd received the suit as a gift from the designer himself and was one of the first men in New York, apparently, to die from AIDS.

"I'm sure they'll all fit you perfectly," he said as he hung the suits back in the closet, leaving the rest of the clothes lying in the huge piles on the floor. "You look like you have the exact build that I had back in the glory days of my bulimia phase-which lasted well over a decade, thank God! Speaking of which, you must take a look at this!"

He pulled some kind of document out of a long cardboard tube he'd dragged out from the back of the closet.

"It's the floor plan for the Saint," he explained, unrolling the thin blue paper like some kind of ancient scroll. "My dear friend Michael bought it at an AIDS fundraising auction at Christie's in the late 80's,just a few months before he died. He came from a

Mon:non family in Utah, bless his heart, and they never accepted him, the bastards, even-no, especially when he got sick. You'd think a bunch of polygamists would be a little more understanding of depravity, after all! Anyway, his ashes are over there in that gorgeous gem-studded urn in the living room," he added, waving his hand in the direction of the end of the hallway as if some member of the royal family were about to make an appearance. "He wasn't a beauty, but he did have a tremendously large cock and a law degree from NYU funded entirely by the hustling he did on the side!"

As my uncle continued on about how much this friend had "absolutely lived" to dance beneath the glowing planetarium at the Saint, his voice at once excited and weary in equal measure, my eyes were lost in the purple maze of the blueprint before me, the printed words running up and down its left side blurring in and out of focus like a 67 dream-"The heart of the Saint is the dancer," it read, "and dancing here is different from dancing anywhere else." There was something sad and beautiful and mysterious about the document that seemed to have some kind of talismanic effect on me; and when I looked back up at my uncle as he continued on about how horrible things had become by the time the club closed down-"It was the end of an era," he said, as if the world itself had ceased to exist, and in very real sense it had, he explained, as hundreds of membership renewal forms had been sent back to the club with "Occupant Deceased" stamped all over them-I felt a certain kind of lightness in my heart, a boldness to speak freely about whatever happened to pop into my head.

"Do you know who you got it from?" I asked ~s casually as ifl were inquiring about how tall he was or whether he liked his coffee with or without milk.

"The floor plan?" His face contracted into that frown again. "I just told you that I got it from my lovely friend Michael."

"No." My voice was still strangely calm, almost as if some other person was speaking through me. "I meant do you know who you got HIV from."

Somehow I sensed that with just this one exchange of words we'd managed to arrive at an impasse of great consequence for both of us, or at least of great consequence for me, one whose immediate aftermath would alter the dynamic of our relationship forever, though it was impossible to predict exactly how. And I was right. For if we'd been occupying disparate universes ever since I'd entered the apartment, it now felt as if we were inhabiting the same planet as soon as he opened his mouth to answer my question, less a distant uncle and his nephew, strangers, really, than two new friends speaking the same language. He didn't know for certain whom he'd gotten it from, he 68 told me-it could have been any one of hundreds of men; but he suspected he'd gotten it in the fall of 1983 from a couple on the upper West Side, a doctor and a young actor, in a delirious, drug-fueled three-way that had begun in the morning after a night out dancing at the Saint and extended into the afternoon and early evening that followed.

They were both sweet men, dead and buried by the fall of 1986, and when my uncle said these words I felt a pang of tenderness towards him, a desire less for knowledge than for empathy, for understanding, all the while surprised by how much my emotions felt at once full of depth and utterly superficial, a mere play-acting at grief that was still, somehow, tinged with an awful authenticity. For in a very real sense I already understood what must have happened to my uncle-we all understood, all the young men who flock to this city in search of love, sex, and above all else, a sense of purpose and belonging long-denied to each and every one of us. Or perhaps, in the end, it was mostly the promise of sex that brought us here. Whatever the case, we did not come here to get sick. We did not come here to die, or to live our lives wondering why we-just barely and by no means all of us-had been spared.

Yet as I stood there in the narrow hallway with the piles of faded old clothes

~cattered at my feet, I couldn't stop myself from wondering how many of them had been worn by the scores of young men who were now dead and gone forever. Just as I knew that if by some accident of history I had found myself in the same position as my uncle and his friends, I had no doubt I would have done many of the same things that they had done-and why not?-and that I'd most likely already be sharing the same fate as the men immortalized in the porcelain tomb of ~y uncle's living room. For all I knew, I might join them yet. 69

And when I surprised myself by telling my uncle these things, the words flowing from my lips as effortlessly as if I were writing them down in a diary, the apartment's overwhelming psychic weight seemed to lift for a moment, much like a curtain at a theater that had been shut down for years; and as he took me by the hand and led me in the direction of a closed door at the end of the clothes-strewn hallway, it felt as if we were less a pair of actors walking across this forgotten stage than two shadowy figures buoyed and adrift in the sea of a shared nightmare that was also, somehow, the shared dream of still being alive.

For that's what I was-that's what we were, and thank God for it, I thought to myself in a sudden and inexplicable burst of emotion-each and every one of us, alive! VII.

AF ALSE SENSE OF WELL-BEING

The first thing I noticed when I followed my uncle into the bathroom was that the entire back wall of the shower was covered with an enormous floor-to-ceiling mirror; until my gaze was drawn next to the plastic curtain rod wh0se bright red, green, and yellow stripes were so sloppy and uneven that it looked as if a child might have painted them there. Yet somehow neither this nor the absence of a window in the bathroom seemed to bother me at all-in fact, it even struck me as strangely endearing that the wallpaper on all of the walls was a print of identical little smiling red-haired mermaids.

But I didn't know for certain that I wasn't quite myself anymore until I realized that some part of me seemed to think it entirely practical that nailed to the wall just above the forest green toilet was a narrow wooden credenza that climbed all the way up to the ceiling, each of its shelves overflowing with dusty golden chalices, copper bowls, and old medieval-looking silverware. Even more telling than this, I realized a moment later as my eyes quickly surveyed the rest of the bathroom, was the way the bright red fire hydrant next to the door appeared more functional to me than anything else, as if the only purpose it had ever served in the world was to provide a convenient place for the single roll of toilet paper that was resting there at its very top.

It was only the interior of the shower that gave me pause, and this had nothing to do with the fact that the streaks of bleach in the faux-marble tub only drew more attention

70 71 to the brown and yellow stains beneath them. Instead, in the little opening where soap would nonnally be, I spied a single rusty razm that somehow provided just enough of a hint of danger to return me to a long-forgotten memory of a shower I'd taken in another bathroom back at my grandparents' house on Long Island.

What I remembered first was the warm water running down my body-I must have been thirteen or fourteen years old-and how pink and smooth the shower tiles had been, its glass door so fogged up that I'd felt enclosed in my own private world. But what I remembered most were the milky soapsuds sliding slowly down my thighs, and how I couldn't stop myself from wondering ifl was using the same bar of soap that my uncle had used when he'd taken his own shower just a few minutes earlier. The thought had frightened me--could I get AIDS this way?-but still I hadn't stopped washing my r back, my chest, between my legs, all the while thinking of my uncle washing his own body in this shower, how the soap between my legs must have been there first, between his. But when I'd thought of all the things I'd read about in the newspaper and seen on television and heard about at school-about monkeys in Africa and beautiful movie stars with lesions growing purple on their skin like the slow blossoming of a hideous flower-I put the soap down immediately and turned off the water, afraid even to touch the shower.'s slick walls. Inspecting my naked body in the bathroom mirror afterwards, I'd held both of my wrists up to the light-they were so pale and thin that I'd thought that I looked like I was already sick; and even though my skin was moist and unblemished, I'd felt clean and dirty all at once, so sullied and shamed that I'd promised myself that this was the last time I would ever use this shower, his shower, and that I would never allow myself to think of my uncle's or any other man's naked body ever again. 72

"Now as you can probably imagine," said my uncle just then, as if he'd been reading my mind, "this bathroom has such a long and colorful sexual history of its own that my friends used to refer to it as The Museum of Modem Homosexuality!"

The way the campy intonation with which he uttered these words severed the person he was now so completely from the object of my adolescent fantasies that my moment of ambivalent remembrance was instantaneously dispelled, replaced by something far closer to the buoyant feeling I'd begun to feel just before we'd entered the bathroom. And the more my uncle talked the more that each sentence that escaped from his lips seemed to be so full of all the flash and filigree of what I was only now beginning to appreciate as his unparalleled wit that the only appropriate response was to simply stand there and enjoy the show. But by the time he was about mid-way through his third or fourth perfectly-crafted anecdote concerning the sexual escapades of his youth, each one more outrageously ribald than the one that preceded it, I couldn't stop myself from interrupting him with a question.

"Wait a second. Are you seriously telling me that you brought twin gay sumo wrestlers home with you from Studio 54 and had sex with both of them right here in this bathroom?"

He paused for a moment, a confused look flashing across his face.

"Is it just me, or is there an echo in here?" he asked, to no one in particular; and then he proceeded to tell me about how all three of them had climbed into the shower together on that balmy August night back in 1981 in order to engage in what he called, as if I would know exactly what he was talking about, "A Sumo Sandwich Summer

Special." 73

"A sumo ... sandwich ... summer ... special?" I asked slowly, trying to wrap my head around the concept.

"Yes, that's right. 'A Sumo Sandwich Summer Special.' Doesn't that just roll off the tongue?" He pointed at the shower's floor-to-ceiling mirror. "It's the whole reason I had to have this installed."

I caught a glimpse of our reflection in the mirror and I was struck for just a moment by how incongruous we looked standing there together in this strange little bathroom-a portly, middle-aged man in a tattered old bathrobe and then me, a young blonde-haired guy in his early twenties in tight blue jeans and a ripped gray tank top, as if he were about to go out clubbing any minute.

"You put that huge mirror in here so you could watch yourself having sex with sumo wrestlers?" I asked.

"Not exactly." My uncle was off and running again, telling me how in the middle of his three-way with the sumo-wrestling twins, they'd all slipped and fallen over together, making a terrible crashing sound as they'd knocked all the way through the shower wall into the bedroom of the adjacent apartment, at four o'clock in the morning, no less. He acted out with perfect comic timing how his pajama-clad neighbors, Jose and

Maria, had shot up in bed and started screaming obscenities in Spanish at him as he lay there on the ground amid all the rubble, buck-naked and sandwiched between the twin sumo wrestlers, who were likewise completely disrobed, though for them, my uncle explained, this was far less unusual.

"So when the buildingfinally fixed the damaged shower wall," he concluded, "I decided to put in a full-length mirror to hide the shoddy repair job they'd done, with the 74 side benefit that it made showering, alone or with others, an even more .. .self-reflective experience. I do hope you'll enjoy yourself in there."

"I'll do my best," I told him. "But what about that fire hydrant? It's very red."

"Oh yes, I painted it myself, and the curtain rod, too, but the real story here is how it ended up in the apartment in the first place." He patted the roll of toilet paper that was perched on top of it. "You know, you really should be taking notes. If this isn't the stuff of great literature, then I'm not at all sure there is such a thing!"

Gazing down at the fire hydrant with a fond look in his eyes, my uncle explained to me that one night back in the early eighties he'd met two of the most famous gay porn stars in the business, a couple visiting from Los Angeles, on the dance floor at Flamingo, and how desperately they'd both wanted to sfoep with him. High on Angel Dust and thinking they wouldn't possibly take him up on his cockamamie challenge, he'd told them that the only way he'd even consider leaving the club so early to have sex with them-it wasn't even three in the morning yet-was if they'd agree to remove his favorite fire hydrant from the comer of 11th Street and A venue B all by themselves and deliver it directly to the front door of his apartment. But as lie'd watched these leather­ clad queens roll the fire hydrant down the dimly lit street less than forty-five minutes later, a police car suddenly rounded the corner. The three of them quickly ran into his apartment building, he told me, and hid beneath the stairs-the fire hydrant in tow­ where they quietly fucked and sucked for nearly an hour as they listened to the scurrying footsteps of the policemen who were running up and down the stairs looking for them until they'd finally given up and left the building. 75

"The only thing that could have possibly made the experience any better," he concluded, "is if one of the cops-the youngest and most beautiful one, of course-had spied us hiding down there and decided to join in all of the fun. Now that would have been positively pornographic!"

With this, my uncle threw his head back and broke out into an uproarious fit of laughter, inadvertently knocking an Adderall pill bottle that had been sitting next to the sink onto the bathroom floor. I picked it up and glanced at the doctor's warning that was printed on the label in bold black letters: "MAY CAUSE A FALSE SENSE OF WELL­

BEING," it said.

Then, before I knew it, I was laughing uncontrollably myself, just like my uncle was, great big hiccups of joy that seemed to be spilling out of every pore in my body; and the more I laughed, the more it felt as if I was laughing, truly laughing, not just for the first time that evening, but for the very first time in my life.

"Oh dear," said my uncle, clapping his hand against his cheek. "The drugs have clearly gone to your head. That fire hydrant episode is always a big hit-a real fan favorite--but I'm afraid that even I have to admit that none of my stories are quite as amusing as all that." He scratched his head for a moment. "Ah! Except, of course, for the one about ... well, actually, come to think of it, it would probably make more sense for me to tell you that particular story in the bedroom ... " VIII.

IN THE BEDROOM

"Welcome, welcome to my oh so lovely boudoir!" my uncle cried out, in a thick

French accent, as he swung the door open to reveal a bedroom that was just as densely packed and brightly lit as the living room had been, a cluster of three glass chandeliers dangling ostentatiously from the ceiling. It smelled like old cigarettes in there, like dead air, like the timeworn pages from the books that were piled high against the wall in the far corner of the room. But before I had a chance to take it all in, he directed my attention to a large poster hanging amid a multitude of family photographs-some in color but most of them in black and white-that were covering nearly every inch of the room's dark green walls.

"RICHARDS CHEMICALS," the poster said in bright red letters printed just above a detailed drawing of what looked like a power plant of some sort, the kind my family had often driven past in New Jersey on our way from Washington to visit my grandparents on Long Island.

"This is where all the family money came from," he said, tapping his fingers against the poster's glass frame.

"The family money?" I asked, for I'd been raised in a frugal family in which we were always told that finances were tight and that any family vacations that cost any kind of money were a luxury we simply couldn't afford. In fact, when my mother was about

76 77 to file for divorce from my father and all six of us had gone in for our first and only family therapy session together, my father had explained to us that the whole thing was going to be video-taped because the therapist had told him it would only cost half-price if we allowed the tape to be used "For Instructional Purposes Only."

"Yes, of course, the family money," replied my uncle. "As I'm sure you must know, before the reversal of fortune brought about by your great grandfather's untimely death by heart attack at the age of fifty-oh my, that's exactly my age right now!-the family had homes not just on Long Island, but on Park A venue in Manhattal)., and up by the racetracks in Saratoga, too, and of course the beach house on Shelter Island where you spent so many leisurely summers of your own childhood, just as I did mine."

But all that I really knew or remembered about this beach house were the jellyfish stings and sunburns I'd endured there, as well as the painful barnacle cuts I'd suffered on my hands and knees whenever I'd tried to pull myself up out of the water and onto the old dock, not to mention the many splinters that inevitably seemed to lodge themselves in the bottom of my feet whenever I'd made the mistake of walking barefoot across its rotting wooden surface. As for the house itself, all that really stood out in my mind was the way the toilets had never seemed to flush properly, and the time my father, telling us it was simply a game, had convinced my sisters and me to hide all of the many ashtrays scattered throughout the house from my uncle and my grandmother; both of whom, but especially my uncle, had become irate not so much at us, but at my father, who'd laughed and laughed as my uncle demanded that we round them up and put them back exactly where we'd originally found them. 78

"It was the last of the real extravagances to go, that beach house," said my uncle, that faraway look reappearing in his eyes for a moment, "and it would still be in our possession today if not for all the petty squabbles initiated by my siblings after my parents died, and especially by that father of yours."

"Petty squabbles?" I asked. "What kind of petty squabbles?"

Based on the conversations I'd overheard between my parents over the years, all I really knew was that after the reading of my grandfather's will, my uncle had sued three out of his four his siblings-only aunt Debbie had been spared-even though apparently he was the one who had already gone up to the house on Long Island in the middle of the night with a rental van and loaded it up with all of the most valuable family heirlooms to take back to his apartment in the city.

"Oh, I surely don't want to bore you with all that," he replied. "Not when the whole reason I brought you into this bedroom in the first place was to tell you the titillating story upon which the opening chapter of 'The Book of Sexual Errors' is based."

Part of me wanted to hear more about my uncle's take on his feuds with his siblings-I'd only ever really heard my father's side of things-but I was also curious to hear him talk about his novel again, especially since he'd never told me exactly why it had never been published.

"I was on my way home from the baths one night not long after I'd moved into this apartment," he began after clearing his throat, as if he were an actor preparing to deliver a dramatic monologue, "and when I turned onto my block, lo and behold, beneath the streetlights I spied a man with the most beautiful ass I'd ever seen in my life, bending over to fix a flat tire on his pick-up truck-and when he stood up and looked over at me 79 from across the street, I saw that he had the face of a god, to boot! I mean, really, the man looked like a sullen boxer, but as beautiful as a bona fide movie star!"

"Of course, in those days," he continued on, "this neighborhood was far from safe-in fact, everybody told me I was crazy for moving down here at all, including the super I had sex with in order to get my name on the lease. But being the Good Samaritan that I was back then, I went up to the man and politely told him I'd be happy to let him come up to my apartment and use my telephone to call AAA. Naturally enough, once we made it back into the apartment, with just a little bit of prodding he ended up using my mouth for a blow-job I offered to give him on the couch. I thought for sure that would be the end of that--he had a broken down truck downstairs, after all, and he'd never even been with a man before-but when I gave him a quick tour of the apartment, much like the one I'm giving you right now, come to think of it, it ended up changing our plans for the rest of the evening, not to mention the entire course of his adult sexual life."

"What happened?" I asked.

My uncle lit his cigarette with a match.

"Well, you see, when I showed him this bedroom," he continued, "the first thing he noticed was the 'RICHARDS CHEMICALS' poster right there on the wall. He started to get very excited, even more excited than he'd been on the couch a few minutes earlier, because it turned out his father and all six of his uncles over in Queens had worked low-level jobs at my grandfather's chemical plant in New Jersey for years!" He took a quick puff from his cigarette. "So, to make a long story short, as I'm sure you can imagine, this little piece of serendipity was such a powerful aphrodisiac for both of us that we forgot all about that silly flat tire of his, grabbed some poppers, and made a 80

beeline for that bed over there by the window-which, appropriately enough, just

happens to have once belonged to my great grandparents, of all people! Needless to say,

we ending up having quite possibly the most incredible night of sex I've ever had in my

life, which is saying quite a lot considering there were no third, fourth, or fifth parties

involved!"

"Wow," I said. "What was the title of that chapter?"

'"East Tenth Street, 1979, '"he replied with a sigh, exhaling a long stream of

smoke into the air. "Alas, the next time I saw him just a few weeks later, he was

surrounded by a bevy of beautiful men at the Mineshaft and he wouldn't have a thing to

do with me. Within a year-a lifetime in the homosexual world, as you know-he'd

moved to Brazil with this new boyfriend he'd acquired-or had been acquired by, I

should say-an older South African gentleman who just happened to be one of the most

' successful and discriminating rare jewel collectors in the world. As if anything could

compare with what we'd shared together between those sheets!"

He gazed longingly at the canopy bed on the other side of the room. White

Christmas tree lights ran, wisteria-like, all the way around the entire perimeter of the

enormous dark maroon canopy, flashing on and off so as to illuminate the glass-framed

pencil sketches of naked men's bodies that decorated the ceiling above the bed. Three of

my great grandfather's old wooden rifles-I could have sworn my father had once

remarked that they had been bequeathed to him in his father's will-had somehow been

attached to the bedposts at the foot of the bed, whose unkempt navy blue sheets were

reduplicated by a softly lit mirror, covered in a film of dust, that was hanging on the wall

just above the bed's large wooden headboard. 81

On the windowsill next to the bed, I spotted a digital clock that was flashing

"12:00," and while I knew this couldn't possibly be accurate-I'd arrived at the apartment at midnight, this much I could remember-somehow its presence there perfectly captured my growing sense that time was at once standing still and moving forward at a rocketing pace, and that somehow this bed was at the very center of this new time-warped world in which I found myself now so fully ensconced.

I looked around the room at all of the framed photographs of my family for generation after generation that were hanging everywhere on the walls as if they were great works of art being displayed in a museum. My gaze finally came to rest on a black and white photograph of my great-grandparents-he in a top hat, she in pearls-and then quickly moved on to another of my grandmother, resplendent in an elaborate wedding dress that flowed all the way down to the bottom of the picture frame. More than anything, I thought that they looked like ghosts competing with all of the color photographs of my sisters and me as children that were scattered there in their midst, our smiling mouths full of braces, all of us fighting for air, fighting for life.

Just then, my uncle pulled the remote control out from the pocket of his robe and starting pressing a combination of buttons. The room quickly darkened all around us, except for the white Christmas tree lights that were still flashing away-only now the illumination they cast was a spectral shade of red, like a broken stoplight on dark street in the middle of the night.

"Of course I'll be taking this shrine up to Boston with me eventually," said my uncle, as a spotlight appeared on a small curtain that was covering a portion of the wall at the foot of the bed. "But until then, you should feel free to enjoy the view, though please 82 do your grandmother the favor of keeping the curtain closed during any sexual activities you may be fortunate enough to indulge in!"

My eyes seemed to be playing tricks on me, then, like a camera blurring in and out of focus, like memory itself, when the curtain began to open from both sides, as if by its own volition, to reveal a gilded-framed portrait of my grandmother on the wall just behind it, all lit up by the expanding circumference of the spotlight's glow.

It was a painting I'd walked by countless times in the second floor hallway of my grandparents' house when I was a child, one that had always struck me as so beautiful and alluring that I would often stop there to stand transfixed before the image of her youthful and exotic beauty. Now, just as then, her deep brown eyes seemed to be looking directly at me and me alone, as if she were privy to all the secret yearnings of my heart, even those I did not yet even know I had.

"You have no idea how happy she'd be to know that you were standing here with me tonight," said my uncle, stepping back to take a long look at the painting. "You do know that she was always your biggest fan."

"My biggest fan?"

"Yes, of course," he said. He pressed some more buttons on the remote control and a lamp on the cluttered bureau turned on. "She kept everything that was ever written about you as well as all the photos and programs from every single one of your operas and concerts, and some recordings, too, I do believe, in a special little box. If it hadn't been for me, why after the funeral I'm sure all of it would gotten thrown out with the costume jewelry. Can you imagine the horror?" 83

He started rummaging through the objects stacked on top of one another on his bureau. A black leather cock ring, a Rubik's cube, and a string of red anal beads tumbled down to the carpeted floor below, where they were joined a moment later by a couple of porn videos-"Men in Prison" and "The Bigger the Better"-and then finally a copy of

HomoXtra that had been folded back to the "Escorts" pages in the back. A number of the advertisements had clearly been circled in a red ballpoint pen -"Swedish Hunk," "Hairy

Brazilian Top," and "Bi-Curious Daddy."

"I just know it's here somewhere ... Ah, yes, here it is!" he exclaimed, picking up a black jewelry box. He turned towards me as opened it slowly.

It was with a strange mixture of emotions for which I had no words-something akin to shame, curiosity, pride, anger, and sadness, but with all of them canceling each other out into a numb blankness-that I recognized some of the memorabilia from my performances at the Kennedy Center and Wolf Trap and the National Cathedral, though I hadn't seen any of these things in more than a decade.

"I just love this photo of you as one of the three Genies in 'The Magic Flute.' I mean, what an outrageous outfit, or lack thereof! And didn't Dawn Upshaw star in this production? Could there be a more fabulous Pamina? You must tell me what she was like--in person, onstage, backstage, everything! Did you ever see her dressing room?"

I looked at the photograph he was holding in his hands and my heart stopped for a moment. I must have been eleven or twelve years old, smiling wanly at the camera as I leaned against a wall backstage, clad only in a translucent golden loincloth and a white,

Elizabethan-looking wig, a silk sash across one of my arms and white powder sprinkled all over the rest of my pale, skeletal body. I looked like a ghost. 84

"Well?" asked my uncle. "Did you? And what was it like working with Jean

Carlo Menotti and Leonard Bernstein, anyway? They're both big fags, you know that, don't you? I think at least one of them even tried to marry his own adopted son!"

I was still staring at the photograph, trying to keep a flood of memories at bay, until my uncle quickly put it back in the box and pulled out a photocopy of a newspaper clipping' instead.

"Ah yes, this is one of my favorite reviews, from the Washington Post, no less."

He cleared his throat and then began to read part of it out loud. "'Of the many performers on the crowded stage of the Kennedy Center's concert hall last Friday, young

Nicholas Boggs did some of the most compelling work. Boggs, 13, performed the boy soprano solo in Leonard Bernstein's 'Chichester Psalms' with a soulfulness that was beyond his years. Bernstein himself likens Boggs' voice to a 'fine Bordeaux wine' that matures with age before turning. His control of the quiet moments in the otherwise highly percussive piece was ethereal, a calm eye in a musical tornado."'

He looked back up at me, his eyebrows arched. "A calm eye in a musical tornado?! A soulfulness beyond his years?! A fine Bordeaux wine?! Why on earth did you stop singing?!"

"I'm ... I'm not--"

"It was that father of yours, wasn't it? I swear, if your grandmother had still been alive she would have never allowed this to happen! It's a crime against art, against nature, against the very fabric of what it means to--·-"

All of a sudden the phone rang. My uncle picked up the receiver. 85

"Von Oesen Residence," he said, calmly, as ifhe hadn't been almost yelling at me just a moment earlier. "Speaking. Oh yes, that's wonderful news. No, you can just leave it there in front of the building. I don't care if it's illegal to park there. My nephew will be right down to pick up the keys. Yes, of course, it was nice doing on-line business with you, too."

He hung up the phone. "The car has arrived," he told me. "'So please be a dear and go downstairs and fetch the keys. By the time you come back up I should be all ready to go."

"To Boston?" I asked as I noticed a set of matching green bags that were sitting on the floor by the bed. They looked like they were fully packed.

"Oh good heavens no, not yet!" He put the jewelry box back on the bureau.

"But it must be at least two in the morning by now," I said.

"All the same, I have a very important errand I need to run first, so the two of us are going to have to go out for a little drive together. There's still so much for us to talk about, anyway, isn't there? Hold onto your Louis Vuitton hat, though-and if you don't have one, you can certainly borrow one of mine, circa 1983, the very best year, of course.

The car is a convertible, you see, and I haven't left this apartment in ... let's see ... why, come to think of it, I haven't left this apartment in almost ten full years now. So it's sure to be quite an adventure. Run along!" IX.

TWO FOR THE ROAD

Of course I should have known better, but by the time I made it back up to the apartment with the keys to the car-taking care to use the stairs in both directions in case the pile of shit was still in the elevator-I fully expected to see my uncle all dressed up. and ready for our drive. Instead, there he was, still in his bathrobe, sitting back in his electric full-body massage chair as it hummed and vibrated away like mad, his feet propped up on the ottoman, a slice of cucumber on each of his eyes and a green facial masque covering his entire face. At least three fans were propped up on little tables and blowing directly onto him, too-I hadn't even noticed them before-and what sounded like yet another Donna Summer song, "State of Independence," was blasting away in the background.

"Don't you worry!" he yelled out above the music as he heard me enter the room.

"I'm almost done with my preparations. But do tell me, how do you like the wheels?

Simply marvelous, no?"

Even though I'd never been much of a car person, even I had to admit that the brand new gray BMW Z-3 convertible was a thing of beauty. When I'd seen it for the first time out there on the street just a few minutes earlier, with that tall Korean man in a white trench coat and dark sunglasses leaning against the hood, I could scarcely believe that it was the right car.

86 87

"Yes, it's beautiful," I said, wondering if he'd bought the car with the last of the money my aunt had told me he'd gotten from selling his life insurance policy back in the eighties. "But where exactly did you get it from? And who was that Asian guy, anyway?

He just dropped the keys in my hands and then disappeared down the street in the direction of the East River without saying a single word."

"I could tell you that but then I'd have to kill you," my uncle replied, and then broke out into another fit of laughter. "Let's just say that I have my ways. You must remember that when I first moved in here this street was full of drug dealers and heroin addicts and all manner of sordid persons, until it was converted in the early eighties into

Section Eight housing. I was, and still am, the only Caucasian person in this building, and to this day all of its residents, and even the mailman, call me 1 El Gringo.' As a term of endearment, of course!"

I remembered my father's tirades over the years about how his brother was abusing the New York public housing system, staying in an apartment that was designated for low income families, how he was a crook, a fake, a liar, and a cheat.

Once, not so long ago, just after I'd taken a course in college on "AIDS and Social

Policy," I'd tried to tell my father that as a man with HIV my uncle likely qualified as a disabled person for public housing purposes-my father had actually helped to draft The

American Disabilities Act around that time-at which point he'd scoffed at me and said,

"Yes, if he even has it, which is a dubious proposition at best!"

When I turned my attention back to my uncle, he was talking on and on about how when he'd first moved into the apartment, whenever he'd gone out at night he'd always come back to find another few pieces of furniture or electronic equipment had 88 been stolen. But, it turned out, he had a friend who was sleeping with the closeted police chief at the time, and within a matter of days, whenever my uncle would come back from the clubs in the morning, another couch or stereo or speakers would have been returned exactly where it had been before it had been stolen. Apparently, the very same drug addicts and petty criminals who'd originally carried these objects down the fire escape had been rounded up by the police chief and convinced to return them via the exact same route and method.

I did my best to give my uncle the shocked and amused response that I knew he was looking for. But by this time the Adderall was clearly wearing off, and I was beginning to tire of his endless stories and self-absorbed soliloquies, no matter how outrageous and expertly rendered some of them may have been-so much so that now it seemed entirely possible that he had in fact written a novel that totaled well over a thousand pages, and one that I had no desire to read in its entirety, much as I doubted that that friend of a friend's of a friend's editor he'd told me about earlier had even made it past the first one hundred pages.

My uncle was still continuing on with his monologue, and even though he couldn't possibly see anything with those cucumbers on his eyelids, somehow he started lifting individual figurines with his gloved pole contraption as he sat there in the electric full-body massage chair, using his other hand to dust them with a bright pink duster of some sort. So I picked up a large thick photo album that was sitting on the coffee table­ it looked like it had been spray-painted gold-and began to browse through its pages, flecks of gold flaking off onto my fingertips. The photographs were mesmerizing­ magazine cut-outs of hairy naked men from the seventies and eighties all posing with 89 their flaccid cocks, interspersed with photos of my uncle and his friends. They were all young and beautiful: on the streets of New York in their cut-off shorts, a sea of toned and tan bodies at the beach on Fire Island, a page of some of them all dressed up as drag queens, and then, impossibly, a whole slew of them dancing in the living room of my grandparents' beach house at Shelter Island, wearing nothing but togas, and everywhere on the tables around them those same ashtrays my sisters and I had hidden from my grandmother and my uncle at the my father's behest so many years ago.

A tattered and stained letter of some sort fell out of the photo album and fluttered down to the floor. I picked it up and saw that it was undated and written in pretty cursive handwriting. Dear Richard, it said, You are such an unusual man that, like Russia, you are a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Your honesty is refreshing and valued, but your honesty must be balanced with discretion. In o(her words, your honesty begets honesty from others. But there is an honored rule that repeating what others have said about others makes good dish, but may be exceedingly destructive to people or organizations.

You are VERY bright, outgoing, informed, and will add more to what you have already achieved. Destroy our enemies, but be careful with our allies, even ifyou (and I) don't particularly like them. As to us, frankly you annoyed me when I re~ponded to your question about my four years of 'bachelorhood.' My answer was the truth, and how does one proved an intangible, emotional truth? Also, what is said, what occurs within my house is private and never to be related to the rest ofthe world. It may seem dramatic, but perhaps this rule is why so many people come to talk. There i$ a mutual, safe ground to seek answers or resolutions. And the rule is always respected. Raymond will tell you very little, but I will tell you anything-about me. Just ask. Please go a little slower, 90 though, and don't expect too much by way ofmy wit and charm ofyesteryear. Tonight I can feel the unexpressed grief and rage which is overwhelming me (us) and which must be kept inside rather than burden the few close friends lefl who are now sick. You focused on the positive/negative issue last Friday and perhaps that was reasonable. Yet

But the letter cut off right there, as if the writer himself had suddenly died or gotten sick. I looked back up at my uncle fiddling with the figurines in the corner of the room.

"So anyway," he was going on, ad infinitum, it seemed now, "as you can imagine, this apartment has been through several incarnations, to say the least. In fact, before the

Plague hit, this living room was not a living room at all. It was what we liked to call 'The

Disco Gym of East Tenth Street.' You see, it was full of work out equipment, mirrored walls, an elaborate light show, and dance music playing on a first-rate sound system, and of course an enormous disco ball hanging from the ceiling. In those days, my electricity bill was so expensive-two hundred and fifty dollars a month, which was astronomical at the time!-that I had to start collecting donations at the door. It was quite a sight to behold-all of the most beautiful men and boys in New York, and a couple drag queens, too, would come over here to pump some iron, listen to the latest dance tracks, and sniff and snort some drugs before we'd hit the Saint or Studio 54 and dance the night and morning away. It wasn't until everybody started dying, of course, that these figurines began to take over, instead. And once my parents passed away, too, well, as you can see, that's when I inherited all of these lovely heirlooms and this room became what it. .. "

I could hardly take it any more. "Isn't it time for us to go?" I interrupted him. 91

"Hold on to your handbag!" he cried out. "This is my favorite part of my favorite song!" He jumped out of his chair and starting singing along. "Yes, I do know how I survived. Yes, I do know why I'm alive. To love and be with you, day by day by day-ee­ yay!" The cucumber slices dropped from his eyelids and fell into his hands. "As a matter of fact, I do believe Donna is giving me all the strength I need to make my way back out into the world once again, and perhaps, even, to find true love! Well, Miss Summer and a few more of these, that is!" He picked up the Adderall gun and poured himself another handful of pills. "Just give me five minutes to get dressed, put my face back on and powder my nose, and we'll be on our way, I promise! In the meantime, why don't you be a dear and run back downstairs and wait in the car. I'd hate to get a ticket. So tacky!

Oh, and take this pill gun down to the car with you, too, please." He slipped it into my hand. "And since you're looking less than enthused right now, I do insist that you help yourself to two full pills right away. Just be sure to wash them down with some of the

Diet Coke over there in the freezer on your way out. Believe me, you'll need them."

"For what?" I asked, feeling utterly sober and ridiculous now, and fairly exhausted, too, as I stood there in the middle of the living room as stiff as a scarecrow, the keys to the convertible in one hand the Adderall gun in the other.

"Why, for the road, my darling, for the road!" x.

THE DRIVE

I would have thought it would have been quite a sight to behold, the two of us heading up East Tenth Street in a spenking new BMW Z-3 convertible-its top pulled all the way down with my uncle in the driver's seat all dolled up in his Louis Vuitton hat, tinted sunglasses, and an old striped dress shirt that he'd unbuttoned half-way down to reveal his dark nest of chest hair, and then me beside him in the passenger seat, brandishing the Adderall gun like some kind of postmodern piece of pharmaceutical guerilla art. But at three in the morning in the East Village on a Friday night in 1999, such a spectacle hardly stood out. Instead, we were just two more bodies and a car to be avoided, among many, so much so that the throngs of drunken college students, bar­ hopping fags, and long-standing Latino residents hanging out in front of their buildings hardly seemed to notice us passing by them at all.

For once, my uncle wasn't saying much, at least not at first. Though it was hard to discern his facial expression behind those sunglasses and beneath that hat, like an animal returning to his natural habitat only to find it altered in some irreversible way, he seemed to be warily taking in a neighborhood that had surely changed quite a bit since the last time he'd seen it ten years earlier.

As for myself, I'd waited in the car for a good twenty minutes before he'd finally come down to join me, and I could already tell that the two Adderall pills I'd consumed

92 93 on my way out of the apartment as instructed were beginning to take their effect. Clearly, taking two pills instead of a half of one was making a big difference, too-a powerful sense of levity seemed to be springing forth from my chest and up through my body to my head until I felt like I wanted to start talking away and never shut up.

"I just love this neighborhood," I declared, stretching my arms out above my head as we passed a darkened Tompkins Square Park on our left, the Adderall gun I was still holding in one of my hands reaching into the night sky above. "Really, I can't thank you enough for allowing me to live in this apartment. You must let me pay you something­ for the utilities or for the rent. I can surely afford eighty dollars a month!"

"Don't be absurd!" My uncle seemed to have woken up from some kind of trance. "I would never charge a blood relation rent. Not a cent! I'm just happy to pass it along to a deserving tenant."

"Do you think we could get my name on the lease?" I was shocked that I had the gall to ask this question already.

My uncle paused for~ moment as he took a left on A venue A, passing Cafe Pick

Me Up on our right. Its tables and chairs that were usually spilling onto the sidewalk and almost into the street had been taken inside already, the windows and doors all closed up.

"I'm afraid that won't be possible," he finally said, gravely. My heart stopped for a moment.

"What do you mean that won't be possible?"

We slowed to a stop at a red light at the corner of Avenue A and J1h Street. All of a sudden a drunken young man in a Penn State baseball cap started banging his hands on the hood of the car. 94

"Sweet ride!" he yelled out, staring at us with his bloodshot eyes and then running across the street to join his friends who were waiting for him on the sidewalk over there.

All five of them were wearing the exact same Penn State baseball cap.

"What happened to my neighborhood?" My uncle was visibly appalled. "Such a person wouldn't have been allowed within ten blocks and three avenues of this place back in my day. We'll just have to head towards the river!"

He took a sharp left onto Seventh Street, almost hitting a young woman who was walking her Doberman pincher across the intersection. She was dressed all in black with dyed jet-black hair, black lipstick, and piercings and tattoos all over her face.

"Hey, watch it, motherfucker!" she screamed at my uncle, the dog barking away like mad.

"Now that's more like it!" My uncle smiled as he stepped on the gas, Tompkins

Square Park blurring by us on our left.

"I would certainly put your name on the lease if it were at all a possibility," he said a moment later as he fiddled with the car radio. "But I'm afraid they've been trying to throw me out of that apartment for years. In fact, we've been involved in some rather nasty litigation for quite some time-remind me to tell you all about it later-so I think our only option is for you to become me."

Static roared out from the car speakers. It was so loud that a couple walking hand-in-hand down the street turned their heads to watch us pass them by.

"To become you?" I was almost yelling over the static as my uncle adjusted the dial. Some rap music started playing, still at an absurdly high decibel level. 95

"How dreadful is this music, if you can call it that! They used to play the best disco hits on that this station!" He turned the radio off. "Anyway, yes, as I was saying­ you must become me. By that I mean that you'll have to legally change your name and get a new driver's license and passport-that shouldn't be too hard-whereby you become Richard Von Oesen. Believe me, I'll be happy for them to take twenty-five years off my D.O.B. Yes, indeed, I'm just a flaming phoenix waiting to be reborn! Of course you'll have to tell anyone new you meet, and certainly anyone you bring back to the apartment and anyone that you meet who lives in the apartment building itself that your name is Richard Von Oesen. Though between you and me, of course, I'll just call you

'El Gringo la Segundo!"'

"But what about you?" I asked as we passed a less populated block and arrived at the intersection of East Seventh Street and A venue C. "Can there really be two Richard

Von Oesens in the world?"

I wondered what my father would think of this scheme of ours-he'd be horrified-but then I told myself that he simply doesn't understand the realities of urban homosexual life like his younger brother do~s. This is New York City at the tum-of-the­ century, after all, and one does whatever one must when it comes to Real Estate and

Love!

"Well, I'll be in Boston, of course, for the most part," my uncle replied,

"especially once I've moved all my belongings up there. I had my time in New York, but now it's over and it's your turn. Anyway, truth be told, who knows how much longer I'll even be around."

"Be around? In the States, you mean? On the East Coast?" 96

"On the earth, darling, on the earth. I am sick, you know." He looked to his left and then to his right. "Oh thank God it's not entirely gentrified down here yet!"

"Fabulous!" I blurted out. "I mean, not that you're sick and not that it's not gentrified down here yet-though I agree with you, that is great, the latter, I mean, of course-but it's fabulous that you'll be moving your stuff up to Boston ... "

Everything seemed to be coming out wrong and I was worried that I was insulting him, so I tried again. "I'm sorry ... I mean it would be just fabulous if you would allow me to help you move evel)ihing up there. It would be my extreme pleasure."

My uncle took a right on Avenue C. "I'm sure something can be arranged," he said. "But of course I have to deal with your Aunt Debbie first."

"Deal with Aunt Debbie?"

"You know," he replied. "She can be very controlling of her environment. We'll have to bide our time and play our cards just right to see how much of my stuff I can manage to move up there. Thank God I'll be taking over that spare apartment she used to rent out on the second floor. It has its own entrance and a rather plush private bathroom.

But the apartment itself isn't exactly spacious, so eventually I'll have to display most of my beloved figurines in her living room. I mean, I'm not so worried about the paintings and heirlooms from Rockville Centre-she's at least halfas nostalgic as I am about these kinds of things, which is saying quite a lot! Did you know that she wears your dead grandmother's bra almost every day? And that she sleeps in your grandmother's old silk underwear, too? Now if that's not lesbian behavior, then I don't know what is!"

He took a left onto Houston Street, barely making it through the yellow light before it turned red. 97

"It's the strangest thing, isn't it," he continued on as we headed east on the broad two-way street that was nearly deserted now, "how she refuses to admit to anyone that she's a full-blown dyke. I mean, what do you think is the nature of her so-called

'friendship' with Maggie?"

Maggie was the woman with who my aunt Debbie had lived with for as long back as I could remember-a calm, pale-faced woman who exuded an aura of unparalleled intelligence, as if she were always thinking several steps ahead of you but was far too kind to ever let you know this, simply smiling and laughing gently instead as she took a sip from the can of beer that she was almost always holding in one of her hands. She came along for all the family vacations, joined in the games of tennis and charades, and was generally accepted as a member of the family, though her precise relation to my aunt was never really discussed. Instead, aunt Debbie often referred to her as her "law partner" because they'd started a private legal practice together, making most of their money representing families whose children had been exposed to lead paint poisoning, though what they really practiced privately, I'd always wondered.

"I'm not sure what you mean," I replied as my uncle honked at a taxicab that had just cut in front of us for no apparent reason.

"Oh don't play dumb with me," he said. "I don't know what they are for certain either. But the whole arrangement is certainly a little bit odd, don't you think?"

I didn't like hearing my uncle talk this way. Aunt Debbie had always been like a surrogate parent to my three sisters and me, swooping in to take us on camping trips and to Jones Beach when we were children. Gorgeous and frugal, like a goddess of thrift, she'd worn the same yellow bikini for years, my entire childhood, it seemed, her skin so 98 much darker than my own, like my father's was; she'd cover it in tanning oil like butter on a frying pan, so that the smell of coconuts always takes me back to those moments when she'd carried me out to the waves and taught me how to ride them, my own pale and skeletal limbs slick against the oil on her skin, and when I became afraid, she'd put me on her shoulders and carry me safely to shore. "You're adorable," she'd say, wrapping my whole body in a big, colorful b'each towel afterwards, her green, almost emerald eyes gleaming in the sun. "No, you 're adorable," I'd say. ''No, you 're adorable," she'd say right back. And so on. Back in those days, I'd often sit in her lap watching television at my grandparents' house and she'd quiz me during the commercials: "What's sexist about this ad? What's sexist about that ad?" This and that is, I'd reply. This and that is, just to please her. And it did. But when I was about eleven years old and she'd told me that she was adopting a child from Paraguay, in a fit of jealousy I'd turned to her and asked, "What are you going to name it, stupid-face?"

"Well, maybe they are together," I replied to my uncle. "But that's their business, don't you think?"

But then I remembered that back in college I'd tried to hint to Aunt Debbie that I might be gay, telling her as we drove in a car together, the summer after my freshman year, that I was thinking of quitting the basketball team and going on and on about a new friend I'd met, who was in fact my first boyfriend, though we were keeping it a secret from our families as well as everyone at school. She'd just nodded away, but a few weeks later she gave me a book-"It'sjust about a man who went to Yale, like you," she'd said. But in fact it was all about his struggles coming to terms with his 99 homosexuality, and at the end of the book, instead of coming out of the closet, the man hung himself.

"Ah, well, yes, I suppose you could look at it like that," my uncle said, slowing down as we came to a stoplight. I could see the East River now in the distance, and then the lights of Brooklyn on the other side. "I just think it's a little bit sad, that's all."

I thought of my grandmother's funeral ten years ago, how both my uncle and aunt

Debbie had been weeping in the front pew as their three other siblings sat there stoically beside them. The rest of the family had been sitting in the next few pews behind them, but I remembered turning around in the middle of the funeral and looking at Maggie sitting alone in the back of the church, an entire pew all to herself. She was weeping, too, and clutching a handkerchief. Our eyes met for an instant. I'll never forget her bright blue tear-streaked eyes. She almost looked embarrassed, as if I'd caught her doing something wrong, and I think part of me must have known, even back then when I was only thirteen years old, those tears are thicker than blood

"Ah, will you take look at the East River tennis courts down there," said my uncle, lighting a cigarette as he made a left onto the FDR Drive. "I played a tennis match against your father on those courts once-and I beat him, 7-5 in the third set! I hadn't even slept a wink, coming straight to the courts from the Flamingo! Come to think of it, that was the last time he ever visited me here, around 1982. It must have been devastating for him."

"You play sports?" I asked, as I turned my head to catch sight of the darkened courts down below us in the distance. They were almost fully obscured by the tops of the trees. 100

"Well of course I did," he replied. "It would be impossible not to at some point, growing up in our family. But then I quickly learned that there are other pursuits in life that are far more worthwhile."

"Like what?"

"Like art. Like friendship. Like love. And, perhaps, most importantly, that it's far more fun beating off with another man than beating him at some silly little game!"

The wind was hitting my face now as we sped up the FDR Drive. The summer night had turned almost cool.

"Anyway," my uncle went on, "let's get back to the homosexuals in the family, an endlessly fascinating topic for you, I'm sure. You must know all about Aunt Molly and

The Little People, no?"

"The little people?" I asked. ·

Aunt Molly was one of my other aunts, the sister I knew my uncle hadn't spoken to in years. At least this is what Aunt Debbie had told me, though until this moment it had never struck me as that odd that she'd spoken quite a bit about Aunt Molly's lesbianism but never about her own-telling me little bits and pieces about how Aunt

Molly was the one who had suffered the most growing up, the one whose irrepressible butchness from the moment she was born, really, had made her family's life a living hell, and how she'd become notorious on Long Island as a teenager when she'd made a practice of picking up little girls half her age and driving them around in her grandparents' Buick.

''Well Debbie must have told you something about her," my uncle said, "but I'll fill you in on the climactic scene!" 101

He turned off the FDR Drive and onto Fourteenth Street, where we immediately got stuck right behind a city bus whose exhaust fumes started washing over us in noxious waves.

"So when I was about eight or nine years old, my parents were having a large dinner party, as they often did back then. You know, a little music, some drinks, good food. Though it was past my bedtime, as we often did, Debbie and I were sitting at the top of the stairs trying to pick up as much of the conversation as we could. Anyway, the doorbell rings and my mother goes to answer, elegantly dressed, as always. Standing in the doorway is a woman from the other side of town-definitely from the wrong side of the tracks-holding the hand of her daughter, who was barely older than I was at the time. 'Are you Rita Dunn?" she asked my mother. 'Why yes, I am,' my mother replied, all of the guests falling silent in the living room behind her. I mean, you could hear a pin drop in the room just before the woman starting screaming at my mother, 'Then you keep your fucking dyke daughter away from my baby!' Everyone in the room was taken

' aback, of course, including me and Debbie up there at the top of the stairs. But my mother kept her cool and simply said, 'Why yes, I'll be sure to do that, my dear,' and then slowly closed the door."

"Wow," I said. "Did that make it into your novel?"

"Oh, of course," my uncle replied. "In an extended flashback in a chapter I decided to call, 'The Drive.' It was about Aunt Molly and all the 'little people,' as we began to call them in my family, that she would pick up in the car by befriending them with her endless supply of cotton candy. You see that's when my mother started taking

Valium on a daily basis, as Molly's behavior spiraled even more out of control from 102 there. Drinking, drugs, gambling, the whole gamut. You can imagine the impact that all had on poor little me, and on your Aunt Debbie, too, I imagine. No wonder she doesn't want to admit she's a lesbian!"

My uncle switched lanes in order to pass by the bus, and then zoomed up to a stoplight at First A venue.

My own childhood memories of Aunt Molly were characterized by the image of a large woman with a short hair cut walking around the second floor of my grandparents' house like a zombie, dressed only in a bathrobe and pink slippers that were utterly incongruous with her thick calves and stony gaze. My had mother told me she was just a little bit depressed, and that's why didn't look at me or smile at me, but to me she'd always looked inflated, like a plastic doll, oversized and undergendered.

The last time I saw her was at my grandfather's funeral. Things had gotten better for her by then-she was a public school teacher, "a respected member of the community," as my father often put it-and though it had apparently been a long and difficult road, her parents, and especially her own father, had never given up on her.

When it was her turn to get up and say something about him-her siblings had already said some kind words about their father-she'd slowly walked up to the altar holding a little cheap tape recorder. Then she simply pressed play on the tape recorder and stood there before us all, sobbing away, her large body shaking the whole time as the Bette

Midler song, "The Wind Beneath My Wings," wafted weakly through the half-empty church. 103

Just then, as we slowed down to another stoplight at Second A venue, I was shocked to see the man I'd masturbated with in my uncle's back stairwell standing on the corner trying to hail a cab. He noticed me, too, right away.

"Hey Nick!" he called out, walking over to us. He looked just as handsome as he had before, if a little bit tired by this point. "Small world, isn't it?"

"Sorry, I forgot your name," I said, "but this is my uncle, Richard Von Oesen."

"Hello there," said my uncle, flicking his cigarette into the gutter.

"I've heard all about you," the man said to my uncle in his gravely voice, and then turned his gaze back to me. "And my name is Tom."

"Where are you heading, Uncle Tom?" my uncle asked him. "To your cabin, perhaps?"

"Yeah ... sort of." He gave my uncle a weird look. "Oh, there's a cab! Nice to see you again, Nick. I'll see you around. You too, Richard!"

And with that, he jumped in the cab.

"Who was that?" my uncle asked as we watched the cab head up Fourteenth

Street.

"Umm .... a friend?" I said.

"A friend whose name you don't know? How odd. You know that's not his real v01ce. He practices that every night in front of the mirror before he goes out."

"Yeah, probably," I said. "I know the type."

"I love the type," my uncle said, stepping on the gas. "Let's follow him! He looks exactly like that guy I told you about from so many years ago, the one whose whole family worked for your great grandfather! Deee-licious!" 104

"Oh no, please don't!" I cried out. But it was too late. My uncle had already caught up with them and was practically tailgating the cab by now. I could see Tom watching us out of the back window, a slightly disturbed look on his face. He was pointing at something-the Adderall gun, I realized, and mouthing the words, "WHAT IS

THAT?''

My uncle let out a hiss of laughter as we passed the cab on our left and then sped beyond them towards Union Square Park.

"You slept with him, didn't you? Tonight, somewhere sordid. I love it. He probably had sex with somebody else, right afterwards, and now he's heading home to his lover-a man at least twice his age who owns a penthouse on the Upper East Side.

Ah, homosexual life in New York City. It's so gorgeous, and it never truly changes! I tried to capture that in my novel, but .... "

His voice trailed off and out of nowhere, it seemed, I could feel another Adderall wave building in my stomach and making its way up to my head.

"You must tell me about the tragedy that befell your novel!" I blurted out. "I've been waiting to find out all night!"

"Ah, well, I suppose it would only be fair for me to tell you," he said, "as horribly painful as it is!"

He lit another cigarette as we left Union Square Park in our wake. I thought of my twin sister for a moment-she'd performed in an off-Broadway production of De La

Guarda earlier that night at a theater just around the corner, flying around on bungee cords, before her Brazilian boyfriend picked her up and drove her back to the apartment they shared in Brooklyn with his two young children from a previous marriage to a high 105 fashion model. More than ever, my sister seemed to be occupying a completely different world, a different era, light years away from what I was experiencing right now.

"I finished my masterpiece one evening back in the fall of 1987 ," my uncle began,

"smoked a celebratory cigarette or five, and then went to bed. But then I woke up in the middle of the night to the smell of smoke, ran into the living room, and there was my manuscript, going up in flames! The radiator had exploded, for some reason, so there I was putting the fire out with a fire extinguisher in one hand and trying to save as much of the manuscript as I could with the other! Alas, I managed to save almost nothing, just a few half-burned up pages ... "

He paused for a second, sighing. "Oh my, it used to be there was a hooker and a trannie on every corner around here. Now there's one of those instead."

He pointed over at a Starbucks amid the darkened storefronts at the intersection of

Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue.

"Please, tell me more about the tragedy," I implored him.

"Oh, but that chain of coffee shops is a tragedy," he said, blowing a series of smoke rings that dissipated quickly in the open air. "But anyway, yes, of course I couldn't stay in that apartment while they fixed the destructive radiator. It was a physical as much as an emotional hazard, particularly given how low my T-cell count was at the time. So naturally I moved into The Ritz Carlton off of Central Park and stayed there for an entire year, charging it all on my credit card. Now for one thing I didn't think I was going to live more than a year or two-by this point I'd watched every single one of my friends die. But I was also suing the city government at the time for the damage caused by the malfunctioning radiator-they should cover the cost of my year living in the hotel, 106

I reasoned, not to mention the fact that they had destroyed the only existing copy of 'The

Book of Sexual Errors,' and with it my only reason for living, other than caring for my dear dying mother, of course." He took a left on Seventh Avenue. "To this day, as I mentioned earlier, I'm knee-deep in my lawsuit-their lawyers have the gall to make the claim that it was an errant cigarette of mine that started the fire, not the radiator!-one that you will have to take on as your own once you become Richard Von Oesen yourself."

This prospect was not something I wanted to think about. "So what was the novel about exactly?" I asked instead.

"So many things! It contained multitudes, truly! It was about the AIDS crisis, of course, and our family in all of its insanity, and how three out of my four siblings betrayed me, and then how all of my many friends l;>ecame my surrogate family, instead.

What was the line I used about that? Oh, yes, of course, how my friends who died all around me taught me that 'tears are thicker than blood.' Isn't that a lovely phrase, a nice tweaking of a cliche? That's my favorite thing to do in the world!"

"I noticed that, " I said. "I really like that one you said ~arlier tonight about my father and how he always turns the lemonade of life back into lemons, or something like that."

"Oh yes, that one is a gem. Speaking of which, shall we finally really talk about your father now? I feel like you've been putting this off all night."

I looked out at The Riviera Cafe on my right, and then at the Duplex on my left, my gaze finally settling on the red and white letters of the "Village Cigars" sign just up the street. 107

"I'm not sure what there really is to say," I replied.

"Well, for starters," my uncle said, as he decelerated through a green light, drifting past Stonewall Place in the process, "can you think of any ways in which he's been a positive influence on you?" He paused for just a moment. "Or, if I may be more pointed, when you were growing up, do you believe that he truly loved you?"

"To the best of his ability, I suppose." I was surprisingly calm.

"To the best of his ability?!" My uncle swerved wildly to the left onto the intersection of West Fourth and Grove Street, driving partially up onto the cement island that houses the entrance to the Christopher Street subway stop and almost slamming into the newspaper kiosk there. "This isn't the Special Olympics we're talking about," he added as soon as all four of the convertible's wheels were safely off of the curb and back onto the street. "This is your father! You're his only broth-I mean, you're his only son!"

Just then I heard a police siren behind us, its red lights flashing.

"Oh dear," my uncle said, pulling over to the side of the road, just across the street from Sheridan Square. A homeless person sleeping on one of the benches stirred and stared over at us, as did more than a few passerby on the street. A couple of them-a young black gay man and what looked like his transsexual friend-were even pointing at us and snickering. I couldn't believe this was happening.

"Good evening, officer," my uncle said casually when the rather stout policeman appeared at the side of the convertible, his walkie-talkie beeping away.

"Driver's license and registration, please," the policeman said in a gruff voice. 108

"Yes, of course, officer," my uncle replied, reaching over me to open the glove compartment. "But whatever is the problem?"

"You been drinking tonight?" he asked.

"Why, heavens no! I gave up that particular vice years ago, officer! Why do you ask?" He handed him his driver's license and a slip of paper he'd procured from the glove compartment.

"That was an illegal left tum you just took back there. Could have caused an accident. Hurt, even killed, a pedestrian. Stay in the car. Both of you. I'm going to go run these through."

My uncle yawned. "I have a feeling this could take awhile."

I looked behind us at the policeman getting back in his car and talking on his cell phone. The red lights were still flashing, drawing in a new crop of pedestrians who were gawking at us as we sat there in the convertible, almost as if we were two famous actors in one of those movies that someone always seems to be shooting on some street in New

York at the oddest hours of the day and night.

"Anyway, back to more pressing concerns," my uncle said, lighting another cigarette. "How exactly was your father a positive influence on you? I'm horribly curious to know."

"Well, for one thing," I said, "I guess you could say that he sparked my academic interest in African American literature."

"Oh yes, of course. Because he's a civil rights lawyer." He blew a stream of smoke into the night air. "And how would you say that has affected your sexual object choices?" 109

"Excuse me?"

"Well, we've already established that you're 'versatile," which of course in this day and age means that you're a big bottom. But now I need to know whether you've had sex with a ton of black men, too. It's nothing to be ashamed of, mind you. I'm just trying to connect all the dots here."

"Well, my first boyfriend was black, back in college-he was a singer, a member of the Whiffenpoofs, in fact-but after that I've been kind of all over the map, you could say."

"I see, I see. I've been all over several maps myself, of course. Do keep going."

"Actually, truth be told, it was never so much that I wanted to have sex with black men exclusively as that, growing up as I did in Washington, D.C. and attending the public schools there and playing on the basketball team and whatnot, in many ways I felt like I was black."

"Oh, good heavens! You're deluded!" My uncle clapped his head against his forehead.

"Oh no, once you read enough African American literature, like I did in college, and especially African American literary criticism, you discover what a pathological act of hegemonic cultural appropriation it is for a white person to actually believe that they are in any way truly black."

"Come again?"

"In other words," I explained. "It's about on the one hand recognizing your whiteness and your white privilege, and on the other hand--and this is crucial-it's about 110 enacting a subversive disidentification with whiteness itself as a socially-constructed category of diff-"

"Oh, do shut up!" my uncle broke in. "The only thingyou're enacting right now is your own insatiable need for your father's approval! It really is ... why it's truly perverse, and for the first time in my life I mean that as a pejorative! It's so clear what's going on here. You slept with one black man in college thinking you could find your way to your father's love through your mutual interest in colored bodies. But then that didn't work out, so you turned to African American literature instead because unlike that black boyfriend of yours, it couldn't talk back to you. But only then it could, because you discovered critics writing about African American literature" And that's how you ended up blindly pursuing your Phd at Columbia having never even read 'Dancer from the Dance'!"

"No, that's not right," I protested. "African American literature is a completely valid course of study, no matter what you're skin color. In fact, your line of thinking is precisely what-"

The police officer was standing beside us again, listening to our conversation.

"All right, Mr. Von Oesen," he said. ''You 're all clear with that new car of yours, but here's your ticket for a moving violation. And be sure to get it registered soon-the temporary registration runs out in a week."

"Oh, thank you, officer," my uncle said, grabbing hold of his driver's license, registration, and the ticket. "I'll be registering it in Boston. I'm moving there tonight."

"Tonight, huh?" asked the policeman, and then looked at me. "This isn't a hustler you've got with you here, is it?" 111

"A hustler?! Officer, please. What do you take me for? This here is my nephew."

"Oh really? Then what's that your nephew is holding in his hand?" he asked.

I looked down at the Adderall gun. It was pretty incriminating-a collection of about thirty or forty prescription pill bottles all taped together to form the perfect simulacrum of a machine gun.

"Well, let's see-" began my uncle. He was trying to smile but it was clear he was stumped.

"It's an art project," I broke in. "A philisophico-aesthetic exploration of the explosive growth of exploitative pharmaceutical companies in late capitalism. I'm a graduate student up at Columbia, you see. I can even show you my student ID!"

I pulled out my wallet and then thrust the ID towards the policeman. He peered down at it.

"Hmmm, that's curious," he said, looking at my uncle again. "He's your nephew but you have different last names. Is he your sister's son, then?"

"Yes," my uncle said, just as I said, "No."

"It's complicated," my uncle said right away. "But I assure you, officer, there's nothing untoward going on here."

"All the same," he said, taking my Columbia ID and my driver's license, too,

'Tm going to have to go check this out. Standard procedure in this neighborhood, I'm afraid. I'll be back, but this could take a while." 112

"That was a nice one," my uncle whispered to me as the policeman walked back to his car again. "Even I wouldn't have thought up that 'art project' alibi. Very impressive! Let's see what happens. In the meantime, where were we?"

"The merits of African American literature," I replied.

"Oh yes, that's right. But didn't you write stories yourself as a child? Ifl remember correctly, your father had to drag you from your room at Christmastime at your grandparents' to play football in the snow and so forth. But you filled notebook upon notebook with all those tales of knights and dragons and damsels upon damsels in distress! You seemed particularly interested in those damsels ... "

"Yeah, that's true," I said. "But that all changed in college when I discovered

African American literature and especially African American literary criticism."

"Well forget all that and get back to those stories of yours!" My uncle was almost yelling now. "In fact, you should write a novel!"

"A novel? About what, though?" I asked.

"Why, about me, of course!" he replied, taking off his sunglasses and blinking his eyes at me.

"But that wouldn't really be a novel," I said. "That would more be like an autobiography."

"Well, not exactly," my uncle said. "You haven't become me yet. And anyway, there's no need to make things up when you come from a family like ours."

"But then that wouldn't be fiction," I said.

"Oh, but of course it would be. You embroider! You cut and paste! You make things more beautiful but also more ugly, as well. In short, you dramatize the self!" 113

"Dramatize the self?"

"You were a performer! You should know al! about that! But first you're going to have to come to grips with the role your father will play in the novel. And the only way to do that is to try to come to grips with the role he played in your childhood."

"But like I said, there isn't much to say about that."

"Ah, but you're clearly blocked. You must always remember, your block is your subject!"

"My block is my subject?"

"Yes, of course. And by that I don't mean the block of your new residence on

East Tenth Street, although that will be part of your subject, too, naturally. Yes, that's exactly it! By God, I am brilliant! Your novel will be all about your complicated relationship to your homophobic father and his traumatic termination of your career as a professional boy soprano, all filtered through your experience of moving into his estranged homosexual brother's fabulous apartment in New York City ... and you'll call it, why you'll just have to call it 'The Book of Sexual Errors,' of course!"

"But that's the title of your novel," I said. "And I don't think my father is homophobic, not exactly. And anyway, I'm not a novelist. I'm a graduate student in

African American literature!"

"Oh, after tonight you'll never set foot back up at Columbia University ever again, my dear. And why on earth should you? Downtown New York is now your school without walls, and I, your peerless professor! Here, quick, take another one of these before the policeman comes back!" 114

He slipped an Adderall pill directly into my mouth and then passed me the liter of

Diet Coke he'd brought along.

"So where were we, again?" he asked as I washed the pill down. "Ah, yes, how your block is actually your subject. Which means we must return to the original question, the only question that really matters, in fact-in what ways has your father been a positive influence on you, excepting, of course, your now-defunct academic interest in

African American literature?"

I tried to think of something-anything-to say, but my mind was a blank.

"Umm ... well, once we had this fake plastic egg that we used to toss around the kitchen, just for fun, you know?"

"Yes, yes." My uncle seemed to be taking mental notes.

"And once when I was like ten or eleven we had a big barbecue with a bunch of the neighbors and my father brought the plastic egg outside. He gathered everybody around and then he tossed it at me and I caught it. We tossed it back and forth a few times and everything was fine. But then for the last toss it turned out he'd replaced it with a real egg he'd been hiding in his pocket so it broke in my hands and the yolk splattered all over me-my face, my clothes, everything. Everybody was laughing, except me, of course. It was pretty embarrassing."

"And how exactly was this a positive thing?" my uncle asked, lighting yet another cigarette, a concerned look on his face. In fact, he almost looked like he was on the verge of tears.

"Well. .. I guess it taught me that things aren't always what they seem." 115

"I should say not!" My uncle took off his Luis Vutiton hat and scratched his head. He'd regained his composure by now. "Let me put this another way. How did your father refer to you when you were a child?"

' "How did he refer to me? He called me Nick, of course. Sometimes he did call me Nicholas, mostly when I misbehaved."

"Did he ever call you ... oh, I don't know .. . too sensitive?"

"Actually, yeah, sometimes he did."

"Or. ..so melodramatic?"

"Um, yes, yes he did. Quite a few times, actually."

"Or perhaps .. . such a lazy boy!"

"Oh my God, yes!"

"And did he ever happen to tell you, on more than one occasion .... TO GET

TOUGH!"

"All the time!" I was yelling now, just as loudly as my uncle was.

"Well, my dear, those are all the things he used to say to me. And that splattering egg game, if you can even call it that?"

"Yes? What about it?"

"Aly father taught it to your father who in turn unleashed it on me, his defenseless younger brother. But the buck stops here, my dear, because I shall never play that dastardly trick on anyone! And I hope neither will you!"

The policeman suddenly reappeared next to the convertible. He handed me my

Columbia ID and my driver's license. 116

"Everything checks out," he said. "But there's still the matter of that so-called

'art project' of yours. I' 11 need to take a look at it."

"Well, officer," said my uncle, "I could hand it over to you, but I am HIV­ positive, you see, and this is my medication. In fact, I'm fairly outraged at my nephew myself right now for borrowing these pill bottles without my permission, all for the sake of some horribly didactic art project. And so pretentious, too! You see I'm very sick right now--highly contagious, actually-and that's why I'm moving up to Boston, so my beloved sister can care for me in what just may be my final days."

My uncle started coughing violently. The police officer took a quick step backwards, looking at him and then at me and then at the Adderall gun.

"All right," he said. "Be on your way. This has taken long enough already. But don't let me catch you driving recklessly around here again. And don't forget to pay that ticket!"

And with that, the policeman walked briskly back to his car, shaking his head and talking on his walkie talkie the whole way.

"That was a close one," my uncle said. "But I must say, we're quite a team."

In just a few moments we'd already turned around and were heading south down

Seventh Avenue ~gain. But I was no longer looking at the city all around me. Instead, my uncle had adjusted my seat electronically so that I was lying back and gazing up at the sky--only a few stars were visible now and the. wind was cool against my cheeks.

"My sincere apologies for these interruptions," my uncle said. "Now close your eyes and let's go back to the splattering egg experience just for a moment. Was your mother present for the incident?" 117

His voice was somehow calm and soothing now.

"No, I don't think so," I replied. It felt good to have my eyes closed. "I don't know where she was. Probably in the kitchen cooking."

"Naturally. Now what about your sisters?"

"Well, Abbie was only a couple years old then, so she was probably inside with my mother."

"And she's the sister you're closest to, right?"

"Yeah, that's right. I always wanted a brother so I called her 'Jeffrey' for the first couple months after they brought her back from the hospital."

"Poor thing," my uncle said. "So which sisters were there?"

"Erin, my older sister. And she was laughing a lot. I remember that."

"Oh really?"

"Yes. In fact, it's one of her favorite stories to retell to people, other than the one about how they mistakenly announced me as Phi Beta Kappa at my Yale graduation."

"Well, that is a funny one," my uncle said. "But the splattering egg debacle, now that's another matter entirely. What about your twin sister, Amanda? Was she there?

Was she laughing?"

I tried to picture that day and the crowd of neighbors gathering around my father and me as if we were two boys in a schoolyard game that had turned quickly into a fight.

"I can't remember," I replied. "I'm sorry. I just can't .. .I can't remember."

"That's quite all right," my uncle said. I could feel us making what felt like a wide left turn but I kept my eyes shut tight. 118

"Tell me more about your twin sister," he said. "Do you feel you were treated equally? For example, was she ever subjected to the splattering egg game, or anything commensurate thereof?"

"Oh no, certainly not," I said. "My father adored her. I ,did too, in fact, especially when I was very young."

"Oh really? Tell me more about that."

"Well, actually we were in pre-k together and I would just follow her around all the time. She was so confident and self-reliant. It got to the point where my parents had to transfer me to another school. I must have been very irritating and kind of pathetic."

"I wouldn't be so sure about that. Love comes in many forms. But anyway, please say more about your relationship with her when you were very young. This is all in service of your novel, of course."

"Well, I do remember this time when I was probably five or six years old and my mother was taking us somewhere and she put barrettes in Amanda's hair and of course I wanted her to put some in my hair, too. But my mother refused to do it, telling me that barrettes were for little girls. So I cried and cried and cried and delayed our departure until finally my mother put about five or six of those little green barrettes in my hair, my sisters watching on, and then held me up in front of the mirror in the hallway. My face was all red and streaked with tears-she'd put the barrettes on super tight so my scalp was really hurting and they looked utterly absurd-my hair was too short for them, of course. My mother took them out immediately, I finally calmed down, and pretty soon we were on our way."

"I see, I see. And how did any of this manifest itself in your adolescence?" 119

"Well, I was doing the opera stuff of course. Amanda auditioned for some, too, I think, but she couldn't really sing so she would get supernumerary parts instead-you know like walking around silently in the background type stuff. My mother always told her that she was a wonderful mover-and now look at her, she's off-Broadway flying around on bungee cords. When we were kids, though, I actually wanted to take ballet lessons too, just like her. The ballet school was just down the street from our house. But my father wouldn't let me. I think he might have been afraid that I would be gay. In fact, I'm pretty sure of it."

"And now you're here. With me."

"Yes, I suppose ... well ... yes, here I am."

We were driving fast now, speeding in fact, I was sure. But I continued to keep my eyes closed.

"And when you stopped singing opera? Do you remember how that came about?"

I paused for a moment. "You know, I don't. I just don't really know about that."

"But whose idea was it for you to stop?"

"I don't remember. I'm sorry but I just don't remember."

"Listen to me now, and carefully. He was my only brother, so I completely understand how hard it must be for you to tell the truth about him. He was the Golden

Boy, apple of my parents' eye, and especially my father's, then legal savior of the downtrodden of the world, husband to the Homecoming Queen-your mother-and father of four talented, athletic children. It's very difficult to puncture that fa9ade, I 120 know, and yet one must. So, again, whose idea was it for you to stop, despite the accolades heaped upon you by the press?"

"I told you. I don't remember. I was very young back then."

"But you simply must remember! Don't you see that everything-your entire novel, your whole life-it all comes down to this!"

My eyelids fluttered.

"Don't you dare open those eyes of yours!" my uncle cried out.

He took a deep breath. "All right. Do you remember your final performance?

What you sang? Where it was? I'm fairly certain it was at the Kennedy Center. At least that's what your grandmother told me, and she was rarely wrong about anything"

"No. I told you I. .. I don't remember."

"All right, all right. Do you remember what happened afterwards?"

"Afterwards?"

"What was your life like afterwards? Specifically in relationship to your father?"

"Well, I played a lot of basketball. I made the varsity team in junior high school.

I was the only white guy who made it. I'm pretty sure that made my father very happy.

But I sat on the bench almost the entire season. I was thirteen, but all the other boys could dunk. I could barely shoot a jump shot. I only made the team, I thought, because I was so good at Suicide."

"Suicide?"

"Yeah, I've always been good at that. That's the warm up where you run up and down the court, touching the various lines--mid-court, foul line, et cetera. They call it 121

Suicide because its so painful it's like you're killing yourself. Yeah, I was really good at that."

"Clearly a typically depressed adolescent homosexual. Anyway, go on."

"Yeah, so everybody on the team had a nickname for me. They called me

'Politics.' And I had no idea why. I thought maybe it was because my father was involved in the politics of D.C. public schools, you know, trying to get more funding from the D.C. government for sports facilities and things like that. But how would they know that? It was very confusing. Then one day, late in the season, one guy-I think he was Mexican, the only other guy on the team who wasn't black-he told me they all nicknamed me 'Politics' because I only made it out of tryouts and onto the team because of some kind of reverse Affirmative Action-you know, they needed at least one white player on the team."

"And how did that feel?"

"It felt right. Because they were right."

"And how did the season end?" I could hear my uncle yawning as he asked me this question.

"Well, that's a funny story, actually. We were in the Junior High School City

Championship Game. We were nearing halftime and the game was very close. I was sitting on the bench-you know, the old bleachers, as usual. At a crucial moment, they called a time-out and I jumped up and started heading past the scorer's table. 'Where do you think you're going, Politics?' the coach yelled at me, thinking I was subbing into the game. 'I'm just heading to the bathroom,' I told him, blushing. I'd been sitting on the bleachers so long there was an enormous splinter in my butt!" 122

"Oh, how horrifYing!" my uncle broke in. "Though I'm not sure how pertinent this all is."

"Well, but that's not the end of it. My father was there in the stands with the principal, a big tall black man named Mr. Moss. They were good friends. Mr. Moss had a talk with my coach during half-time and in the second half when we were way way ahead, suddenly they put me in the game for the first time the entire season. I was the only white guy on the court, and smallest guy, too, of course. Somebody passed me the ball, by mistake, I think, and it seemed like suddenly. every member of the other team was swarming around me. In fact, it felt like my whole team was swarming around me, too. I think I was fouled at least five times. So I ended up on the foul line for a one-for-one opportunity. Do you know what that is?"

"Yes, of course. We are from the same family, remember? If you make the first one then you take a second one. It's a rule I've always tried to apply to lines of cocaine instead offoul lines, though." My uncle yawned a second time. "But please, do go ahead."

"Yeah so I'm standing there at the free throw line and the home crowd is going berserk, everybody chanting 'Politics! Politics! Politics!' I look over at my father, standing there next to Mr. Moss in the sea of pompoms and black faces. The referee gives me the ball. I bounce it once, twice, three times. All the players are lined up in their lanes ready to rebound. The sound of the cheering is deafening. I lift the ball to my chest and then thrust it towards the basket, praying to God please please please at least let me make the first one. Everything seems to be in slow motion as it lands on the rim, circles around and around slowly, and then falls off to the side and gets snatched up right 123 away by a member of the opposing team as the entire crowd gives out a collective,

'Awwwwww.' And I'm just standing there frozen at the foul line as all the rest of the players head down the court. Adding insult to injury, the other team quickly scores a basket for the first time in over five minutes and the coach takes me out of the game right away. So there I was, back on the bleachers collecting ass-splinters again."

I took a deep breath and then continued on. "You know, now that I think about it, though, if I'm completely honest with you and with myself, I do remember sitting in the locker room after the game that day, wondering why I was there at all, and hating my father. Really, really hating him. And yeah, part of me wanted to be back on stage, too, singing, you know, and flying around on that hot air balloon designed by Maurice Sendak for the production of 'The Magic Flute' I'd been in. That was really fun. We were

Genies, but when I look back now I felt more like an angel up there. It's weird, too, now that I think about it, how right after I stopped singing my mother and I started going off together every Sunday afternoon and looking at houses in other neighborhoods, houses

I'd looked up in the Real Estate section of the Washington Post that morning, in secret, because I knew my father had no intention of moving anywhere and would be mad at my mother and me for even looking. In fact, when he found out once my parents got in a huge fight and I remember one of my sisters-I can't remember which one it was­ yelling at me to stop going to see those houses because it was going to make mom and dad get a divorce. But we kept going anyway, and I do remember one time she brought a tape recording of me singing 'The Chichester Psalms' at the Kennedy Center with her and she played it while we drove around to go look at a house somewhere. Only a few months had passed, but it felt like I was listening to another person. I didn't how I did 124 that, how I·made that sound, how I moved people like that, or how I'd ever be able do anything like that ever again in anything else in my life. It was like I knew there was this hole in my heart now that I'd have to spend the rest of my life trying to fill. And I remember that just as my solo was coming to an end, my mother said to me, 'We'll always have this. No matter what, we'll always have this.' She was crying, too, just a little bit, I remember that, and then we went in and looked at this house that there was no wi:iy we were ever going to buy. And I asked the real estate woman how many phone jacks there were on the third floor. I was thirteen and I asked her that. She didn't know.

She just looked at me like I was crazy. But she did try to smile. Then she gave my mother her business card and we drove home. I don't remember what we talked about.

But we didn't listen to the tape of me singing. I know that. In fact, I never listened to it ever again."

The engine was still running but we weren't moving anymore. I could feel it. I opened my eyes and saw that we were parked right in front of my uncle's apartment building. The sun was rising over the tenement buildings in the distance and the birds were chirping, too, a garbage truck ambling down the street in front of us in the direction of A venue C. I looked over at my uncle. He was asleep.

"Uncle Rick?" I said, shaking him.

"What? Who? Oh, there you are!" He put his sunglasses back on. "Just nodded off there for a moment. But here we are, home sweet home!"

"Yeah," I said, looking up at the building. "So which windows are yours, anyway?" I paused for a moment. "I mean ours." 125

"Those two, on the fifth floor," he said, pointing up at them. "Though I always keep them closed nowadays, and have for quite some time-for years, actually, come to think of it. But do you see the fire escape up there? That's the setting for the final chapter of my novel. In fact I called the chapter, 'The Fire Escape.' Not so original, I know, but one is fairly exhausted by the time one finally gets to the end of writing a whole novel. You'll see!"

My uncle was fully awake now but suddenly I felt completely exhausted.

"It was a very, very dramatic closing chapter," he went on, "and utterly tragic, of course, as the conclusion of any decent homosexual novel must be!"

"What happened?" I asked, but for some reason I scarcely cared anymore.

"Well, it was 1986 and all my friends were dead or dying, except for the Jove of my life, a ballet dancer named Raymond. We were friends, lovers, soul mates whatever you want to call it. These labels meant nothing to us. We slept with whomever whenever we wanted to, together but more often separately. We were beyond such petty concerns. But when he found out he was HIV positive, just a few months after I found out that f was myself, he was beyond devastation. He begged me and begged me to commit suicide with him. He couldn't bear the thought of watching me die the way we'd watched all of our friends die, or of dying that way himself. It was a great moral dilemma for me, and constitutes the great ethical crux of the novel's last few pages. You see, my mother was still alive-ailing, but alive. So I stalled and stalled, hoping for a cure for AIDS, but in the end I waited too long, and Raymond jumped from that fire escape to his death all by himself. .. " 126

His voice trailed off. We both looked down at the sidewalk directly beneath the fire escape. There was a flattened piece of dog shit right there.

"But did you see that beautiful Royal Doulton ballerina in my living room?" my uncle added quickly, gazing back up at the fire escape. "That's my Raymond."

His voice was almost trembling now, but I couldn't remember that particular figurine at all. Instead all I could think about was the pile of human shit I'd almost stepped on in the elevator when I'd first arrived at my uncle's building. Was it still there,

I wondered, or had somebody cleaned it up already, perhaps even my uncle himself when he'd finally come down to join me here in this car just a few hours earlier? And if not, then would this somebody be me?

The engine fell silent as my uncle slid the keys out of the ignition. "Shall we go up, then?" he asked. "It's almost six in the morning now so I imagine you must be ready for bed."

"Yes," I said. But it was my own voice that was trembling now as I opened the convertible door and tried to put one foot down on the hard pavement of the street below, and then another. "In fact I don't think I've ever been so tired in my life ... " XI.

BENEATH THE CANOPY

The dark blue sheets smelled so pungently of cigarettes and mothballs and musty blankets that for a moment I thought I might be all curled up in an old canopy bed in the unfinished attic of some ancient farmhouse in the mountains far away from New York

City. And while part of me felt disoriented and disturbed by this sensation, at the same time the mattress was so soft and the room so dark and my body so tired that I felt sure

I'd fall asleep right away, no matter where I was, until my uncle appeared in the doorway, as if out of nowhere, a dark silhouette against the brightly lit hallway behind him. He was holdirig the remote control in one of his hands and offering me what sounded like his parting words.

"So I'll just leave the keys to the apartment for you on the electric full-body massage chair in the living room," he was saying, "along with a list of instructions for watering the plants and dusting the figurines and so forth. Help yourself to the Adderall and the Viagra in the bathroom cabinet, of course, and any of the pornography stacked over there in the comer of the bedroom. And let's see, well I shall certainly be in touch from Boston, but please don't answer the telephone unless I call and on the message machine I ask you to pick up. You see I'll be checking my messages frequently, and I have to punch in my code at the beep to do that. And remember, you must not throw out anything-anything!-from the apartment, unless it's something you brought in here

127 128 yourself, of course-a trick gone awry, for example! As for the mail, please make two piles on the day desk-one for bills and the other for any Royal Doulton brochures that may arrive in my absence. Oh, and lastly, I'll be redrafting my Last Will and Testament up in Boston, so if you can think of anything from this apartment that you'd just love to have bequeathed to your own Estate, please let me know right here and now!"

I looked at the rifles dangling at the foot of the bed, and then at the outline of the enormous crystal jar full of pennies on the floor next to the bureau. I knew that both of these had been left to my father by his own father, and yet neither of them interested me in the least. In fact, I couldn't think of a thing from the apartment that I'd want as my own, except, of course, for the apartment itself.

"I suppose I'd like the grandfather clock in the living room," I finally said, my voice surprisingly weak.

"Very well," my uncle said, moving towards the bed and then bending over and kissing me on the top of my head. "The clock is yours when I go."

Then he turned around, picked up the set of matching green bags next to the bed, and walked out of the bedroom, closing the door gently behind himself. For sorrie reason,

I had the distinct feeling that I would never see him again.

Lying there, my body spent but my mind still racing, I felt as if I'd spent the last twenty-four hours crawling all the way down to the center of the earth. The room itself was steeped in a murky darkness that was made all the more eerie by sight of the digital clock that was still flashing "12:00," all of this augmented by the intermittent glow of the red Christmas tree lights wrapped around the canopy above me, and then the dimmest of 129 spotlights that continued to illuminate the portrait of my grandmother's youthful face on the wall at the foot of the bed.

I could hear the old air conditioner laboring away in the window, shutting out all the sounds of the world outside, but not those in my head. And so I spent what felt like hours tossing and turning in search of a sleep that only seemed to arrive in small and fitful moments of forgetfulness before I was fully awake again, listening to the sound of the air conditioner as I shielded my eyes from the flashing red lights and tried to ward off my growing sense that I was the solitary object of my grandmother's watchful gaze.

My uncle returned to the room so many times in the dark and numberless hours that followed that I lost count of them completely. The first time I simply saw his dark shape in the distance rummaging through the bureau for a few minutes before he walked over to me in the bed. "Good night," he whispered, bending over and kissing me on my cheek, "and goodbye!" "Good night," I whispered back, waiting until he'd left the room to wipe his saliva from my cheek. Then came the sweet and painfully transitory moments of forgetting that were suspended somewhere between dreams and the waking world, before he came back again, this time making his way straight to the bed and planting another kiss on my cheek, his lips lingering there for longer this time. "Good night," he whispered again, a little bit louder, "and goodbye!"

I said nothing back this time, and after he left I turned on my side to face away from the room and towards the air conditioner protruding from the window. The digital clock was flashing directly in my face, too, but still somehcw I managed to reenter those moments of restless forgetting, if only momentarily again. But then my uncle returned a third time, a fourth time, a fifth time now, so many times that I lost all sense of the 130 intervals between them. And though he merely kissed me on the back of my head each time without saying a word, even between these visits I could still feel his presence floating through the room and watching me as closely as if his own gaze had somehow become one with my grandmother's caressing eyes.

There were moments when I felt as if I was drowning in his bed, in his past, in his memories, in his own sleepless nights, his own lonely vigil, so much so that I wanted to run out of the apartment and into the street, to go anywhere and be anywhere but in that bed. But my body was frozen there, as ifthe bed sheets were made of drying cement.

Finally, after a long enough time had passed since his last kiss that I thought he must have left the apartment by now, I was able to drag myself from the bed and stagger through the bedroom door. The hallway was still strewn with all of the disheveled piles of my uncle's old clothes, and when I looked to my right the bathroom door was just far enough ajar for me to make out the edge of the bright red fire hydrant with the toilet paper resting on its top. Somehow I managed to make my way all the way down the hallway and into the living room, but when I got there it was so brightly lit that it hurt my eyes and I couldn't see a thing, as ifl was looking directly into the sun itself.

Two songs seemed to be playing simultaneously in the background, Madonna's

"This Used to Be My Playground" and Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby."

And when my eyes finally began to adjust to the light, I saw a man sitting in the electric full-body massage chair on the other side of the room, all hunched over as if he were looking at something in his lap. Only then I realized--or I thought I saw, but my eyes were still smarting-that his hands were reaching all the way down his unbuttoned pants. 131

He looked up at me, then, and it was my uncle, or at least I thought it was, or a man who looked just like him, a look of surprise flashing across his face, and then a broad smile.

"Why goQd morning!" he cried out. It was the voice of a stranger. No, that's not right. It was my father's voice. He slowly took his hands out c;>f his pants and folded them in his lap. "Or should I say good afternoon? I'm just about on my way out now. I only have one more thing to finish up!"

Standing there speechless beneath the bright lights, I realized that I was only wearing my underwear-tight white Calvin Klein briefs. But I couldn't remember having ever taken my clothes off, and I suddenly felt so exposed that I might as well have been completely naked.

"I.. .I'm going back to bed," I finally managed to say, my voice cracking as I watched him slowly slip his hands back down his pants.

"Yes, yes, you do that," he said, not even looking at me now as he hunched his shoulders over and ducked his head again. But as I turned around and retreated back through the hallway towards the cool darkness of the bedroom, I could hear him calling out after me, in a voice that almost sounded like my own, "I do hope you're comfortable in there!" . I closed the bedroom door and threw myself beneath the canopy again. Lying there on the far side of the bed, all wrapped up in the blankets and so close to the window that three or four other bodies could have easily fit beside me on the mattress, I closed my eyes and wondered if any of this had really happened-not just my uncle's kisses or the man in the living room, or the drive through New York City in my uncle's new convertible, but the whole evening and, somehow, my whole entire life, too. And then, 132 irrevocably, it seemed, I gave up, because that was all there was left to do, and finally fell into the deepest sleep this body of mine has ever known.