Between Men

I met Jake when he was sixteen, at a volunteer recognition dinner hosted by an HIV service unit I worked for, the Central Region AIDS Project. I didn’t recognize anyone. The dinners (like the organization itself) were parodies of function, marked as they were by inedible catering, incoherent speakers, and the absurd resurfacing of volunteers who hadn’t done anything for the place in years. This annual commingling always made me think of parties thrown by high-ranking Nazis to honor the rank and file, but maybe I’d just talked to one too many menopausal “buddies” who loved their collies, hated their husbands, and aspired to appear philanthropic with their time. The cream of the crop hosted AIDS garden parties that made the local “Seen” column every spring. I called these well-intentioned women the Opportunistic Infections: for them, the fun didn’t start until one of their buddies was losing an eye. The theme of this particular dinner was “I Volunteer Because People Are Still Dying.” People were still dying? Well, glory be, and there before the grace of God were we.

My friend Natty the fund-raiser (whose days at our agency were numbered: he was sane) came up, said “Hi.” We filled plastic glasses with Chardonnay and transformed cheap hors d’oeuvres into dinner. No sooner had I slipped some sweaty Swiss onto Ritz Bits than a short, pale, and winsome lad materialized by Natty’s side. I’d seen this kid once at work the week before; we’d traded a quick molten stare from opposite sides of the bulletproof glass that had been installed in the receptionist’s office as soon as the board realized African Americans were infected, too. I elbowed Natty and he introduced us. “Meet Jake,” he told me. “Jake’s been doing some volunteering for Development.” I asked Jake what college he went to. He laughed nervously and said he was a high school junior. As I debated whether to ply him with wine from a cardboard box, our volunteer coordinator, Carnie, who resembled an oversize beach ball with a tassel of deep purple hair, harrumphed, and Jake and Natty ambled to the last two chairs.

Carnie wasted no time starting a call-and-response: “Why are we here?” she barked. “Because people are still dying!” I couldn’t sit and couldn’t talk and wasn’t about to listen to that crap, so instead I skipped out the door into the cold rain and rode my rusty bike over God’s green hills where people were still dying, home.

Ever since, my meetings with Jake have always been rendezvous; and that very word, even in this most mundane place, a steely river-front mill town plopped down in a sooty valley, infused an exotic extract into our earliest and most banal meetings. Our next conversation occurred at the Project, in front of several witnesses. Wandering around after testing clinic rounds, I noticed Jake making sex packets (two condoms and a lubricant, stuffed into a dime bag) in the library with some girls his age. He told me of an upcoming Boston trip, and I gave him my friend Emilia’s number there. Carnie waddled in and surveyed us all balefully, no doubt confused that her volunteers were actually doing something besides making a hash of confidentiality law. I asked the room if anyone would be driving to my neighborhood later, I’d popped a flat and lost my patch kit.

I waited a beat and began to leave. Jake piped up, stuttered, cracked, said he could give me a ride, and blushed blood red. I didn’t even let him drop me off at home, only blocks away so he wouldn’t get lost or come stalk me. The next day I was called in for a special session convened by the board of directors. They were a wizened bunch of local television personalities and bathhouse owners who’d once spent six months coming up with a mellifluous alternative to “Center City HIV Taskforce” and had fixed on something with the acronym CRAP. “He’s sixteen,” noted the corporate, gray, happily married executive director. “We might have to investigate this.” I told them to go ahead, ’cuz I had more important things to concentrate on. After all, people were still dying. They decided it was better not to fuck with Jake. (His dad, it turned out, was a lawyer.) That afternoon Jake sent an e-mail to my work account about his favorite bands. I can’t remember what they were or how he got the address. It was the only thing he sent me that I ever lost.

Astrid had been my girlfriend and boyfriend for the last sixteen months. (She liked to strap it on—she named her strap-on Ralph—but when I suck cock I like a hole in the head.) That night I confessed: I was in love with someone else. Even though I couldn’t have him it wouldn’t be right to keep seeing her. She’d been idly explaining how easy it would be to pierce my scrotum when I broke the news, and she was sharp and steady about the whole thing. She talked me down, and we kept seeing each other, but it was never the same after Jake. Or only once: together in the fall at a goat farm just out of town, in a rickety old bed-and-breakfast attic reading Warhol’s diaries, cedar joints squeaking, knotted boards squealing, kids bleating out on the lawn. Fucking so hard and so true . . . and I’d seen Jake clandestinely when his summer internship ended. He and I had walked around a local campus on a warm late August night and had coffee. Mostly he’d talked, about everything he liked or didn’t. Yes to opera, track stars, capri pants, and his dad. No on homework, the Central Region AIDS Project, his mom. Still forming an opinion about guys, coming out, his younger brother, Judaism, and why his parents divorced. On a bridge over the hollow, I lifted my shirt to wipe my nose, and Jacob stopped chattering for an entire minute. I wondered what it would take for him to shut up for an hour, and knew someday I had to find out.

Just being in Jake’s presence changed this town for me—removing the toxins, turning its rivers from sludge into silt. In the fall, when he was seventeen, he drove me back from a needle-exchange retreat. Astrid was staying the weekend, but she had gone to the lake with her best friend, a glorious sprite of a girl. I invited him in, and my kitchen seemed suddenly alien to me. Was this really my folks’ old table, its porcelain so white, with edges so deep blue? Was the linoleum really this filthy? Was the cabinet really sloping off the wall? Typically I found my rented place large and drafty, but on this cool afternoon, with the light fading and the mulberries drooping against the window in the latest chill, it was confined and almost too warm. Jake held out a UCLA brochure, but turned it toward himself so that I had to stand behind him in order to read it. I wanted to reach out for comfort. Touch his shoulder. Palm his flat ass. Instead, I convinced myself I was home, here in this land of restraint.

I hated everything about these decisions. Jake wasn’t saying a word. Until I was sure he’d turned eighteen, I avoided every subsequent meeting. Nothing I was doing was right. Astrid moved in on Thanksgiving and we broke up on Christmas Day. I was taking a crap. She came in to brush her teeth.

After the next overdose-prevention brainstorming session we went out for an Italian ice (mango for him, lemon for me) and I led him down a hill near a subterranean park. The blackberry bushes welcomed us, thorny strangers you passed in the night on the way home from work now smiling and saying hello, come inside, pick me, take a bite.

I stopped my hand from reaching out to his. But when we got to a stone bench I needed to touch him. I moved to kiss him on the cheek and he turned his lips to mine. The dogs and their owners were not in this plane and they left us alone. He pleaded with me to come over again. I begged off. I wanted to savor the expectation. I wanted our plane to be delayed so I could hang around the airport and know that I was leaving, really know it: not yet, so soon.

And that, I thought, was it: another brilliant mistake, another little death. A gaggle of boys his age started testing positive in my clinic, and I spent the fall giving them their hard-earned results and riding fast through the cemetery, trying to lift love from the dead with the wind from my spokes like the dust I raised from the paths.

There is a certain ritual to taking blood. Lift the arm. Place the latex tourniquet under the triceps, wrap it below itself in a quarter knot. Pal-pate the inner elbow, feeling for the antecubital vein, a small straight section of coursing plumpness. Wipe a circle on the skin with an alcohol swab, snap on gloves, wave the area dry. Screw the butterfly needle to a small plastic barrel, which has its own needle inside to puncture the rubbery red tube top. Then say something like, “You’re going to feel a stick,” or, “Small pinch now,” or, if I really don’t like the client, “Big prick here.” Then a forty-five-degree angle, a quick smooth stroke, the red flush vacuuming into the tubule, and we’re in. Jam the tube into the barrel’s needle and listen to the miniature waterfall splashing glass walls.

You can trace this ritual to the antiquarian practice of bloodletting, venous punctures made by clerics to let sickness out of the body. The condition of my modern subjects was just as purgatorial. The invasion and blood loss was a symbol of their flaw; the blood released symbolized the expurgation of this failure; the bottling of the blood alluded to the worldly containment of such sin. Vial, vile, evil. My subjects knew I held evil in my hand.

You will be, if you will, one of my testees. Something is rotten in the state of . . . well, not Denmark, exactly—everything’s great in Denmark. It’s a relative paradise. But here, something stinks. I’m not authorized to divulge our location. Or my name, for that matter—anonymity is a double-sided dildo. So we’ll use the old standbys. You can call me Average Joe. Here in Anytown, USA, it’s not too small or big, not too black or white, not too straight or gay. Just your average . . . rot.

You’re just human. And you did what you did for a reason. That thing you couldn’t tell your husband or wife or girlfriend or boyfriend or mom or dad or fuckbuddy or slumbergirl or hairdresser or priest or dominatrix. The shit you couldn’t tell the moralists at County Health or the worrywarts on the CDC hotline, that’s what you came here for.

It usually worked. They usually talked. The slim young brunette, her hair a frazzled split-end mass, told me how she was raped in the car after a date. The married man cried as he recalled that day in the steam room where he sat on someone’s thumb and it went inside his ass. (What fortuitous circumstance befalls those least in need!) The spinster came every two weeks for a year after she serially accepted glasses of iced tea from a man whom she suspected was HIV positive. Her situation always involved “flecks” of blood from his mouth swirling into her Mandalay. “What should I do?” she asked the last time she came. “Stop drinking iced tea,” I suggested. “It’s very unhealthy.” The responsible bears who fucked around when their cubs were gone but came in every few months to make sure things were cool. The riot grrrls making statements: we take it up the ass, too! And the boys, always the boys, drinking and smoking and losing their teeth to crystal, wearing insouciance like cologne. “Cool, I’m not positive yet,” they’d say. Or, “Oh, well, guess I should see a doctor now?” I cried for them when they left because they could not cry for themselves, and the girl who was raped returned for results and gave me a trembling, feathery hug. It felt nice then, like I mattered, but later it just made it all worse. My skull stored all the suffering of this town, and not even Astrid knew any trepanists.

There are other ways in this modern world to approximate bloodletting. Astrid moonlighted as a piercer. She claimed to have pierced more dicks than I’d ever even seen. Piercing is a nicely impermanent way to let those evil spirits out—unless the piercer fucks you up, then it’s as permanent as scar tissue. She used to be a cutter; she would slash her forearms evenly with razor blades. She told me it felt better than screaming or puking or hurting someone else. Someday we will all be as brave as Astrid. We will sizzle our shoulders with cattle branders and roll around in the dirt and bubble forth keloids. We will let pain pass through us and out the other side. We will treasure its entry and celebrate its departure. We will not bottle it so long, so evilly, inside our bodies, our capsules, our vials. And maybe we will find a new ritual for that. But for now, HIV testing, due to its lethal implications, its linkage of sex and punishment, is the best thing we’ve got going.

In the fall, Carnie was fired for stealing six hundred donated trinkets from our Toys for Dying Tots campaign. Casper, my favorite client, died shortly thereafter. He’d had HIV since he was fourteen, traced to his hustler lover who ran away to California on him. Casper’s tiny tombstone read “GHOST, 1974—2000, RIP.” Among the mausolea, maple leaves turned the color of Carnie’s hair and bombed my face.

Once I saw Casper’s most recent girlfriend, a sixteen-year-old silent albino, sitting solemnly on my bench—Jake’s bench, our bench. Casper had brought her in to see me once, and she’d tested negative. I didn’t think Casper could fuck by the time he’d gotten to her. He’d wasted into two dimensions, like a windowpane, and when I made him a long-simmering pho it went into his mouth and out his ass in two minutes flat. From then until he died, I made sure to serve him diapers with his soup. I didn’t say anything to his devoted waif. She stared fixedly at the ground. I guessed she had as much right to the seat as I did; we were both doing the same thing, being here with the ghosts, trying to summon them back.

I’d turned thirty and moved into an apartment much closer to the cemetery, my eye on a fresh plot for myself. If you order early, the commercial said, you can save your family 50 percent! Another pleasant June night, a year after we’d first kissed, Jake called on me again. He fairly skipped along while I gimped on a busted ankle. We circumscribed huge echoing tombs and ghostly limestone pyramids and I saw him for a short dorky overanalyzed sweet and scared Jewish kid who’d just finished his first year of college. We lay on flat headstones from 1892 and stared at the scimitar moon, Venus in its sheath. The fireflies danced around us like sentient beings from another planet, and faraway porch lights flared through the curtains of the night.

He came off in ten seconds, but it was a start. Then he said he needed to call his dad. Jake told him he was somewhere close to where we were, but not quite. Either Jake’s lies were getting closer to truth or I’d moved closer to the neighborhood he liked to lie about. In bed he quivered and stayed on after I limped off in the morning. When I got back from work, he was gone. He left me a note on the desk. It said, “Thank you for being patient with me for a few years and watching me grow up and not be as scared.”

Two nights later, secretively, he met our friend Markos. Markos was sixteen and had been a prodigiously lyrical poet a few years before. We’d “met” in a local writers’ chat room, where he’d told me he was bisexual and sent me a poem about AIDS. It’s the only thing Markos ever sent me that I lost. He’d been incommunicado since his dad hired a private investigator after finding marijuana in Markos’s room a year before. The family was Greek Orthodox and his parents’ version of therapy was a series of consultations with the priest. Jake knew Markos through me: they both lived in half-ritzy, half-country, all-white, all-suburban Elk Abbey. I introduced them electronically soon after I first met Jake, before Markos’s shit hit the fan. I’d never seen Markos in person. To me he was an amalgamation of excited electrons that made my computer screen pulse.

“If you don’t hear from me for a while,” said Jake’s voice on my machine, “it’s because while Markos and I were taking a shower at my mom’s old house, his dad called my cell, whose voice mail I check ten minutes later to realize such a thing, and I am listening to this man identify the color and make of my car and the license plate (incorrectly) and he begins to threaten me before I delete the damn message and don’t listen to it. I took Markos back to the high school, about a five- to eight-minute run from his house; I hope he is OK; his dad is fucking crazy. Finding my cell phone number in his son’s e-mails (maybe? somehow?). That he saw my car means he saw the two of us meet up at the library for all of sixty seconds. Probably a good idea that we left rather than undressing in the woods, with Greek daddy standing there. So I’m going to flee the country. Meet me later this summer. I’ll be somewhere in Holland.”

“His dad’s message said the police would be after me. If he really wanted to get me, and not just ‘get his son back,’ he would have told me that he would fucking beat me up himself.” His voice was shaking but he sounded resolved. “All right, I am going to appease my dad and play pinochle with him before I have to go to the gate. I’ll see you later,” Jake said, and hung up.

There was no having with Jacob, only desire, but I guessed I wouldn’t have it any other way. One August night I soared over my mercurial valley and landed in drizzly Amsterdam the next morning. I spent the day there glad for the dope. I was suddenly too anxious to see Jake. What if I could have him, for instance? And for how long this time, before he vanished again? I stayed at a leatherman hotel in cheap dorm digs, cruised by a naked young Frenchman in states of dreaming but no desire for anyone but Jake.

Take the train from Centraal Station to Apeldoorn.

Catch the 110 bus to Hoenderloo.

Get off at the Apeldoornzweig stop after the first yellow bakery.

Order something. The beignets are good, light and flaky.

Take a left at the second yellow bakery.

You will be at Hoge Veluwe National Park. Keep walking.

Take a left at the first unmarked dirt road by the white house.

Walk to the end.

Find me.

22/8. Early morning I left for Hoenderloo; short trip to Apeldoorn, then long wait for bus. Walked to the farm in the downpour. Jake was bearded and drenched. Helped him haul firewood, then walked alone to the national park in the deluge, biked along heath in forest and bog and over the shifting sands, amazed by putrescent, so-bright-they-make-you-puke rough neon strokes of museum’s Van Goghs and elegant skeletons of Fernand Léger’s soldiers playing cards, not human troops but death masks and machines made of bone saw. J again. Smiling, wet, got stuff ready, left swampy polders for sunnier German pastures. Train ride perfect, clear, expectant, ideal. Arrived in Hannover late. Novotel. I want what we started to happen, Jake smirked. You cocky little shit, I thought, and engulfed him.

23/8. Hannover, Léger, Kandinsky, Sophie Calle loves James Turrell, calm lunch and warm sun, hand in hand in hand. Train to Berlin jangled, happy, dreamy, not a minute off. A lucky room at Pension Kreuzberg: dark, Gothic, huge, pleasant, sexy, hot late-night walk along Brandenburg Gate/Reichstag/Checkpoint Charlie construction zone, history’s occlusion by steel, glass, cranes, dust, spiderwebs on bicycles abandoned for months, wall remnants glued to postcards. Too late for Bergen-Belsen, no buses back from death.

25/8. Breakfast at Obst und Omelette and Kaffee, the blond frau at the table across smiling for us, wistful love everywhere, angiosperms, postfuck in the air, then Brecht’s grave, Hegel’s headstone, Jake’s sore throat, husky philosophies, sexy, sick, sun in the meadow, blue wild-flowers after sex or sleep so hard to distinguish. Jake’s pillow over his head and he finally stops speaking languages when I straddle his furry blond ass: Shut up already shut up already shut up. Sweetly crazy, the smell of his armpits, he wants to buy deodorant, Shut up, I say, no way.

26/8. S-Bahn fast to Wannsee beach. Deep in the FKK section the families diffuse, gay Aryans tall and fair, uncut, hairless. You can tell we’re the Jews, Jacob cracks, but in the Wannsee Villa conference room the framed Jewish boys are the shaven ones. Jake still sick and zitty in a cemetery near Hallesches Tor kissed me beautifully with chapped lips like crepe paper, erections touch through denim, then gone, Jake gone again on the evening train to the Netherlands. Alone again so soon I find a small dorm room in a hostel, sad grateful lonely e-mail Astrid, J, say, Love you always, and thanks. Then smoked silly with loose nicotine, missing Jake so terribly, only absinthe helps. Wormwood, sugar cube, slotted spoon, ice water, ritual of desire and pain and forgetting. Weaving back through the streets, ask all passersby, Do you have a Führer? My German’s not so great; all I need is a flame. Our love is a sunburn, quick and pink and taut and my nose is peeling already. The skin that touched Jake is sloughing off.

27/8. Free Internet at Hostel Transit. “I’m in the yellow bakery,” Jake has written me. “It was so great to see you, if only for a bit. By the time I see you again I don’t know what will have transpired. Guess that’s something I keep open. But I think that I think of it as friendship right now rather than romance, if we’re working with categories. We’re always so far away.”

28/8. On flight back I am stuck next to a lounge singer from Jersey who finally met a Dutchman she’d talked with on PalChat, some network where “you can see them and hear them.” They’d had an incredible two weeks together in Arnhem, she said, during which time she’d managed to get knocked up. This explained her intermittent bouts of happy sobbing. “He says he will stop drinking so much,” she blubbered, her nostalgia thick as snot. She blew her nose. “I guess I’ll have to take the kids to Holland!” she wailed, exultant. “And of course, I’ll need a divorce.” I gave her my pretzels, it only seemed fair, she was eating for two and I wasn’t at all.

Arrange two cotton filters, small and dense like birdshot pellets; one metal cooker, an empty tea light candle; one red Bic lighter, the flame. One small baggie nicked from the County Health asphalt after the needle exchange; distilled water, straight from the pharmacy; two antimicrobial wipes from the office. An eyedropper from my medicine cabinet. A diabetic syringe, blue topped, we call it a pogo stick for inventory. They won’t miss this one.

Tap the baggie so half the powder falls into the cooker. Let the eyedropper pipette tap the distilled water, pinch the bulbous rubber stopper. Squirt two drops onto the spoon. Light the flame underneath. Let the mixture boil until it turns to golden mud. Water droplets race away like the impure from the pure. Draw twenty cubic centimeters, a half inch, into the pogo, through the filter. Make a fist and, with the other hand, a forty-five-degree angle. Then, a smooth straight stroke, and we’re in. Watch the syringe for crimson. Let the blood’s flashback be a guide. Release the tourniquet with teeth. Relax the fist.

“It seems like he is the kind of dude that likes a quickie and then just goes,” Markos tells me. Then again, I think, Markos’s dad might have had something to do with those particular escapes. His parents seem to view their progeny as a sort of faulty but vaguely important appliance that keeps breaking down, like a wood-burning stove that’s never used for cooking but looks great in the kitchen and can provide warmth if properly stoked. Problem is, they hired the wrong people to do the job: a priest and a PI might poke around a little, but you can’t keep the home fires burning when you don’t let the wood taste the air. “I really knew inside that I didn’t like him because of his personality or anything,” he continues. “Sure, he was nice, but my initial attraction was based on the fact that I could get a piece from him.”

Markos soon sends me a letter and a picture and a CD he burned for me. In the picture, he is grinning, a curly young Hermes standing next to a happy clown. He is wearing a birthday cone hat that reads, “17.” In the letter he writes, “You better like this CD, son, because I ran six blocks in the snow to send it.” The CD’s first cut is “Here Comes My Man.”

“You’re my dream man,” Markos says on my machine. “I just get high and listen to Radiohead and think about you after school. I’ll buy an MG this summer and every day I’ll come over and we’ll smoke and walk around and you’ll feel like a teenager again. Then we can go to the desert and ride horses and have campfires and sing songs and play guitar and live under the stars. And we’ll have a cactus farm and grow peyote.” His voice drops to a death rattle. “Listen. My dad found out about you. But it’s OK because we never did anything. I’m going to write you from a safe address next time.” Now a whisper: “My friend is having a party this weekend.” He gives her address fast and soft. “She knows about you and she’s cool. We’ll hide you upstairs if we have to. I’ll be so stoked if you come.” The only noise from the machine is the whir of the tape wheels. Then, one last breath: “Will you be my valentine?”