Chapter 4
DINO
Judy’s office is a mass of paperwork: small mountains leaning against the wall, others arranged into some obscure order on her desk. This visual reminder of the more mundane parts of her job doesn’t seem to bother Judy. She just kicks back, her feet on top of the nearest pile, and stretches her long arms over her head.
She runs her finger down a resident list, “Liar, big liar, liar, getting better.”
“What about Ding-Dong?”
Judy’s face lights up. “He’s doin’ great.”
“Should I ... call him Ding-Dong?”
“What everybody calls him.”
I stare out the window at a palm tree that looks as if it’s trying to free itself from the earth. The rains have paused today and a gusty wind has cleared sections of deep blue California sky but a few blue-black thunderheads are still rolling along the hills.
“He makes me uncomfortable.”
Judy doesn’t follow-up on this but smacks her sensible shoe down just in time to pin an errant government report to the desk as it begins to slide to the floor. I know she’ll wait me out so I might as well just be out with it. “You know ... he reminds me of my lover ... Dino. Died of AIDS.”
On one level, Ding-Dong bears absolutely no resemblance to Dino, other than being a middle-aged man eaten away by disease. Ding-Dong has spent years on the street and wears clothes that tend to be shades of dirty beige whereas Dino was always wrapped in rich layers of deeply colored wool. It’s Ding-Dong’s cough and angry resignation that remind me of Dino. Just before Ding-Dong doubles over, hacking away, there’s a moment when his milky white eyes flash with anger. He knows the cough well by now, an unwelcome friend, and also knows that it won’t be leaving. Still there’s a moment of challenge, a drawing up as if to say, “Are you back already?”
Long after he was too sick to comfortably go to such places, Dino would insist on going to wildly expensive and chic Manhattan restaurants for dinner. The urbane patrons would not allow themselves to appear shocked at the sight of Dino’s bone-thin but well-dressed form staggering across the dining room. However, at some point in the meal, despite a heavy dose of Hycodan syrup, he would always begin to cough. Wet and rattling, it was what is called a productive cough. He would cover his mouth with an elegant white hankie, his eyes challenging the stares of diners at nearby tables, daring them to stare or move to another table.
Judy has the ability to wait through a silence without any apparent discomfort. If this were Group, she’d let the feeling gnaw at me until I spit it out but, as a friend, she gives me a little prod. “Does he make you afraid?”
“I don’t know.”
In nearly every room of the House, a laminated poster titled “How Do You Feel?” is prominently displayed. An illustrated version of the “Feelings List” that each resident carries around, the poster has thirty or forty little circles on it, each given a slightly different expression and labeled underneath with a different emotion. The “happy” face is instantly recognizable as are the narrowed eyes and down-turned mouth of “angry.”The wide eyes of “afraid” are joined by an open mouth to signify “shocked.”
I can feel that my face is red and I don’t know why because the story of my ex-lover is no secret. I’ve told it many times in front of hundreds of people in Twelve-step meetings. But somehow, here, it seems shameful, as if it’s something I’ve been hiding.
“Maybe I should start using a Feelings List,” I laugh.
“Why not?” Judy asks flatly as she reaches forward to pluck one from a towering pile near her knee. She holds it out and I take it but I don’t need to look at it because I know how I feel.
“Ashamed.”
I exported myself from Iowa the day after high school graduation, hoping to get as far east as possible, preferably New York City. However, New York University was not suitably impressed with me and, in rejecting my application, probably saved my life. Instead, I landed in Pittsburgh with two goals—getting drunk and getting laid—both of which I achieved brilliantly.
I thought I wanted to be a theater director but soon found that the razzle-dazzle of Carnegie-Mellon’s theater department was not for me. Not quite willing to give up on theater, I added in enough lit classes to also qualify as a morose English Literature major. Because most of my nights were spent drinking and my mornings were devoted to recovering from hangovers, I had little time to study. Fortunately, I’d always been good at tests so I still managed to get decent grades while learning next to nothing. I spent the next two years, until I was a junior, haunting the gay clubs of Pittsburgh, picking up several cases of gonorrhea, and looking for love.
Then I met Constantine Zachary Moraitis—Dino—stand-ing in an ugly little gay bar down the hill from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Actually, I didn’t meet him that first night but saw him from across the room. By the time I’d gotten drunk enough to talk to him, he was gone. The second time I saw Dino, he was magically hanging out with a group of friends whom I’d gone to the bar to meet. Though I had no idea what my type was at that point, Dino was completely and utterly it. A Greek, there was something exotic about his beautiful, dark eyes framed by thick lashes and his furry arms.Yet he was dressed like a Brooks Brothers advertisement in an old buttoned-down shirt, madras shorts, and a battered gold Rolex, which I learned later was a fake. He wore the strangest shoes I’d ever seen. They were called Clarke’s Wallabees and they looked like little brown boxes encasing his feet. He was fascinating. Most of all, though, I loved the way he smelled; he was doused, practically floating in a cloud, of Guerlain Vetiver.
I fell deeply in love for the first time and was fascinated by this man to such an extent that I really wanted to become him. Dino wasn’t butch but he was eccentric in a masculine way. He had an odd, duck-footed walk and his upper lip would sweat with pleasure when he ate. I would later come to love his family. They had weathered a series of tragedies that lived up to their Greek heritage. Dino’s mother was dying of cancer when I met him, and his brother, a brilliant young doctor, had been horribly murdered in an S/M sex scene a few years earlier. Dino’s father was a miniature version of his son, accurately predicting Dino’s future course of shrinkage, but relatively unbowed by the tragedy in his life. Most of all, I loved Dino’s elder sister who was a voluptuous Greek woman with a voice like a bell. Wrapped in flowing dresses, with long black hair and tinkling gold jewelry, she was an earth mother version of Maria Callas. Dino had just graduated from Yale with a master’s degree in classics and had returned home because of his mother’s illness. He worked in his sister’s restaurant, shopped, and hit the bars.
On the first night I spoke with Dino, one of us asked the other on a date the next evening. At the time, I was off from school for the summer and working as a waiter in a chic French restaurant on the still industrial South Side of Pittsburgh. In the afternoons, I would ride my bike from Shadyside down past the Carnegie Institute, the University of Pittsburgh and, finally, along the border of the city’s poor black neighborhood—the Hill District. Although Pittsburgh was no longer a steel town, a few of the mills were still in operation in the early ’80s and their outlines formed a surreal backdrop along the Monongahela River. As night fell, the mills would glow, belching smoke and fire from deep within their bellies.
For our first date, Dino was to pick me up at a bar on the South Side after I got off work. I waited at the bar for fifteen minutes and, when he didn’t show, I figured he was a flake. This was, of course, before cell phones and patience has never been one of my virtues. I left on my bike, pedaling angrily back over the bridge toward town. Dino pulled alongside me halfway over the bridge, driving an old yellow station wagon and full of apologies. I think he was probably impressed that I hadn’t waited longer for him and I was definitely impressed when he insisted on loading my bike into the back of his wagon, immediately christened the Banana Boat, and drove me home. Though he also carried my bike up the stairs to my apartment that night, I would later find that Dino was not in the habit of lifting anything. But that night he was the perfect gentleman and it all began.
We spent that summer and my senior year of college eating and drinking. Dino wasn’t much for drugs and neither was I at the time, although I’d developed a taste for cocaine when I could afford it. At the time, coke was the kind of drug that prompted all-night, intense talks with close friends rather than the degrading fuck fests it would later inspire. We preferred Dewars and sodas in seedy lounges with black leather banquettes and an elderly chanteuse draped over the piano, wheezing out standards.We slept together in the single bed in my dorm room most nights, tightly wrapped around one another.
At Thanksgiving Dino took me to New York for the first time and we stayed at the St. Regis. I didn’t understand at the time that Dino wasn’t really rich because I had no sense that there were levels of wealth.There were people like Dino who enjoyed luxury, and with his small inheritance along with money from his father, an eye surgeon, he plunged into the velvety excess of New York when he could. For me, New York was a world of impossible glamour and Dino unlocked it effortlessly. On that weekend in New York, we ate the first of many meals at the old La Côte Basque, strolled through Central Park, and bought Vetiver at Bergdorf Goodman.
I didn’t encounter the sexual, draining side of New York on that first trip because I was wrapped in the safety of being deeply in love. When we wandered through the streets of the Village, the city was a postcard. Even had I known they existed, I would have had no interest in the crumbling industrial buildings that held the Mineshaft and the Hellfire a few blocks away. Instead, I walked down the windy streets holding Dino’s hand, content with what I had. And, for his part, Dino was entirely focused on me and touched at being able to introduce me to this new world. Where I would have trembled before the formidable sales clerks, Dino flung open the door to A La Vielle Russie to show me a Fabergé egg, pulled me into J. Press on Madison to try on a sports coat, and at Bergdorf’s flirted with the sales girl who told me I had beautiful skin. It seemed perfect but, had I wanted to, I could have already seen the beginnings of trouble.
For one thing, there was an old boyfriend from Yale that still hovered on the horizon. Although it would be years before I actually met Bob Works, he seemed like a formidable competitor. He went by the nickname of “Works” and was an architect in Boston, bi-sexual, with an enormous member that was apparently documented in a series of photographs displayed in his apartment. Dino never seemed to think of him as an actual boyfriend but Works remained tantalizingly on the horizon as an escape route from our relationship. A few times a year, Dino would disappear to New York or Boston to meet Works and I would hunker down in despair. Only when Works finally announced that he was engaged to be married, did it seem that the final barrier to our life together had been removed.
Dino was not the only one who kept some action on the side. Like many men in their early twenties, I simply felt incapable of monogamy but was also too afraid that, if I confessed to Dino that I wanted another arrangement, I would lose him. In fact, because he was fucking around, Dino would probably have welcomed a looser arrangement. I also believed that the kind of rough, aggressive sex I was becoming interested in could only be had anonymously or during quick affairs. For that kind of sex I sought out older, powerful guys who were walking stereotypes of masculinity. One such man was a rugged professor with a floppy moustache and a fisherman’s cap who I pursued through my senior year at Carnegie. At the time, there were occasional parties on campus where students and professors would get dead drunk together in one of the old mansions near campus that housed visiting faculty. At one such party, I finally bedded my fantasy man but remembered little other than the raging hangover that greeted me when I woke up in his bed the next morning. I’d lost my contact lenses, vomited in his bathroom, and was, most likely, a cautionary tale for him regarding future teacher/student dalliances.
Whether it was a result of one of my local flings or one of Dino’s trips to New York, we both developed hepatitis B. Our response was the first of our lies by omission.We simply never discussed how we had become infected. For a few weeks, Dino retired to a hospital, very ill, while I, equipped with a Herculean immune system, simply felt tired. Once we had both recovered, we stopped drinking for a while and never spoke of it again.
As my senior year drew to a close, I decided that I would move to New York. The city the most likely place to get a job in the theater, which was ostensibly my career plan, but it also had other attractions. It wasn’t just that I wanted to move to a gay city—San Francisco and Los Angeles never occurred to me—New York also represented all that was dark and rough as well as chic and glamorous. I simply assumed that Dino would be eager to come with me. Rather, he began a torrid affair with an egg-headed local sculptor who, financed by his family’s money, had been living in Rome. After much screaming and guilt-inducing tears—he could never bear to see me cry—Dino drove me to my new apartment in the Banana Boat but made it clear that he was going to Rome with the sculptor and had no interest in living in New York.
Once Dino had departed for Rome with the sculptor, I was left in a small apartment with three roommates and a job as New York’s worst waiter. I had a fantasy of New York that had little to do with the grinding reality of living there without immense amounts of money. I thought that I was equipped to play in the city’s sexual wonderland, fueled by drugs, but found them to be more complicated than I had expected. In 1984, AIDS was certainly known, even in Pittsburgh, but it was not central in my thoughts about sex and I never used a condom with Dino. When tricking, I practiced a loose version of safe sex but, with Dino, I convinced myself that something about being in love with him protected me and, besides, the idea of either one of us already being infected was too terrifying to even consider. It was as if I vanquished that thought through the act of having unsafe sex with him.
The world of gay New York that I arrived into had already been crippled and twisted by the mounting death toll. However, I rushed in thinking that it was still whole and not realizing that I was walking through a funeral. But there was always an edgy feeling that held me back from losing myself entirely. Perhaps I would have gone further had I really felt single; I had a brief affair and lots of anonymous sex but I was waiting for Dino. With all that happened between us, I was always sure that he was “the one.” Within six months, Dino’s mother died and his infatuation with the sculptor in Rome lessened. By the following fall, we were living together in a loft on Twenty-second Street near the Flatiron Building. I don’t know if he moved to New York because he loved me or if he simply didn’t know what else to do.
Our early days in New York together were slow and dreamy. Dino, unsure of his career aspirations, still grieving from his mother’s death, and never the most ambitious person anyway, spent his days trailing through stores and waiting for me to get home from my waiter job. I was probably one of the few lunch-shift waiters in New York who, in the evenings, ate regularly at the Four Seasons. With its stark modernism and undulating curtains of metal beads, the restaurant, my favorite, erased any memory of being a white trash boy from Iowa. It was as strange and wonderful to me as Alice in Wonderland was as a child; this was a place where silver trays of cotton candy were presented to diners celebrating a birthday. As I became more involved in the New York art world, I began to realize the value of the huge Rosenquist canvas and the Picasso tapestry that decorated the walls. I hadn’t yet become jaded enough to worry that lunch was the time to be seen at the Four Seasons, while dinner was about tourists and high-priced hookers. I never noticed any famous faces but Dino, never one for traditional celebrities, once flushed with excitement and whispered to me, “Don’t look now but it’s MacArthur’s widow.”
We walked constantly in New York, exploring every inch of Manhattan. Autumns were particularly beautiful and Dino would sometimes take me to a strange hulking resort in New Paltz called the Mohonk Mountain House to look at the turning leaves. In the ramshackle Victorian hotel, we would sit in front of a fireplace and look at fall storms rolling toward us from across the valley.
Courtesy of his father’s credit cards, Dino showed me the world and he always traveled in style. Although he flew coach, he loved the luxury of great hotels and taught me that they can transform a normal trip into a fantasy. Over the next nine years we stayed at Claridge’s in London, the George V in Paris, the Hotel du Cap in the south of France, the Grande Bretagne in Athens, the Hassler in Rome, the Pera Palas in Istanbul and the Gritti Palace in Venice. Our first trip together was to Egypt and we checked into the Mena House in the shadow of the Giza pyramids before traveling down to the legendary Cataract Hotel in Aswan. From our room in Aswan, we could see Elephantine Island and the white sails of feluccas gliding along the Nile.
At some point in each of these beautiful hotels, I would look out at an incredible vista and know that something was wrong. Why was I so unhappy sitting in the center of everything I had ever hoped for? Neither of us was drinking on those first trips; although we rarely visited a doctor, we were both still scared by the harm we’d likely done to our livers. Vacations tend to make me crazy because, without my daily routine, I’m left with myself. I have little interest in trailing through churches and ruins to look at the past, preferring instead to simply walk through the city. For someone who would later work in the art world, I also have a short attention span for museums. In short, without alcohol and drugs, I was a brooding nightmare during our trips.
We were sitting in the bar of the Hotel Cecil in Alexandria when we decided to drink again. Suddenly, a trip that had seemed like a disaster became carefree under the influence of Negronis and green Chartreuse. Dino had introduced me to Chartreuse in Pittsburgh and I had, at first, been revolted by its medicinal flavor but was intrigued by the burning sensation it created in my throat and the intense buzz it gave me. The liquor is a distant cousin to absinthe, which also made it irresistibly glamorous to me.
So, after Alexandria, we would drink on our trips and things would improve until I drank too much. Then, late at night, when Dino was either asleep or pretending to be asleep, I would go out to roam the city. I betrayed Dino in the alleyways of southern France, in the park on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, in the hammams of Istanbul, and the late movie theaters of Alexandria. When I returned from these walks, there was never a scene or even a comment, but I could tell that Dino was not really asleep in the bed. I would slide into bed beside him, with the filth of other men still on me, and hold him, knowing full well that I had betrayed him but unable or unwilling to ask him for help.
My exploits were not limited to exotic foreign lands. They played out on an almost daily basis in the sex clubs, movie theaters, porn shops and streets of New York. As our life together came to an end, I betrayed Dino even in our own bed when he was visiting his family. And he did the same to me. One afternoon when I was home alone and making a half-hearted effort at cleaning the apartment, I glimpsed a slip of paper sticking out of a book on the shelf. Most of our books were from Dino’s days at Yale and I had no reason to open the volumes of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Homer, all in ancient Greek. But Dino apparently had used the books almost daily during his time in New York. Stuck in the pages of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Lysistrata were hundreds of slips of paper, each with a different man’s name and telephone number scribbled on it. As I opened book after book, Dino’s sexual history rained down around my feet.When I fucked other guys, I justified it as being just about sex and having nothing to do with my love for Dino. On one level, I was even proud of my promiscuity, believing that it set me aside from the mundane constraints of the straight world. But on that winter afternoon in New York I knew all my sexual bravado was bullshit. I sat down on the floor, surrounded by the fragile remnants of Dino’s passionate sexual encounters with other men, and cried. I realized that each of those numbers in fact represented falling a little bit in love with another man. In total, we’d both loved other people so much that we didn’t have enough love left for one another. After crying for a while, I carefully put the slips of paper back in the books, put the books on the shelf, and never confronted Dino anymore than he confronted me.
The shame I feel in the present has little to do with the drug-fueled sexual compulsion of my past. We were even on that count. It rises from the knowledge that as I dove into the haze of drugs I abandoned Dino emotionally in the last days of his life and, though I may have been there physically, he probably felt alone. No, I know better than that. He told me that he did. One late Sunday afternoon when I was still asleep, hungover after a late night that had stretched on until morning, he sat on the bed next to me and put his hand on my head. He was already very sick, his days consumed by doctors and medication, when he said to me sadly, “I always thought the point of having a lover is that I wouldn’t feel alone.” Not a day goes by that his words don’t ring in my mind.
Our life changed one day in the late ’80s when Dino and I were staying at a friend’s house in the Fire Island Pines. Our sex had already become infrequent and I was trying hard to ignore his rapid weight loss, which began as a diet but had taken on an unstoppable momentum. I was already fairly drunk that afternoon when we went to our room to take a nap. I wanted to have sex, wanted to connect with him somehow, erase all the lies and start over. He turned away from me and pulled down his pants. I took it as an invitation but he began to cry and stuttered, “I have this ... this thing on my ass. I don’t think we should have sex anymore until I find out what it is.”
I remember that thing so well. It was clearly not a mole. I knew from the moment I looked at it that the smooth brownish black stain on his buttock was a lesion and that all the force of what I’d stupidly believed we’d avoided was about to slam into us. Within two weeks, there was a diagnosis and the endless round of hospitals and doctors that would stretch on for the next two years had begun. There was absolutely no reason to believe that I would be negative. In fact, my belief that I was sick was reinforced by my initial test results being lost. After nearly a month of waiting for the results of the first test and then finally having another done, a belief that I was myself ill had become cemented in my mind and would take many years to dislodge despite numerous HIV tests. I would lie in bed at night, in sheets soaked by Dino’s night sweats, trying to heal myself and force the illness, which was never even there, out of me. The daily terror of my belief that I was sick was deadened only a bit by an avalanche of white powder, pills, and cocktails.
There were moments during the process of Dino’s dying when I was proud of myself. Although Dino was uninterested in activism and already resigned to his death, I found release, even inspiration, in the early years of ACT UP. I was arrested several times during large protests and one day after coming home from jail, Dino folded me in his arms and told me that I was his hero. Those words stay in my mind along with the more shameful ones.
But mostly I was in a haze of drugs during Dino’s illness that allowed me to feel nothing but craving. I tried my best to hide my addiction from Dino but it must have been apparent to him as my using increased. His father had given me Fiorinal for my migraines and the powerful muscle relaxant became a daily aid. I also swirled Dino’s tincture of opium into my evening drinks. Up to that point, cocaine had been only an occasional treat because of its expense. However, I ran into an old friend one day who looked thin and exhausted. I asked him what he’d been doing and he replied, deadpan, “A lot of blow.” He assured me that his dealer had the cheapest coke in town and would deliver. I’ve since come to believe that my experiences with crystal began in those endless white packets delivered to my apartment because what little coke was in them was often supplemented by something infinitely more powerful. This was not the cheap coke I’d sometimes had before that had been cut with laxative and ground-up speed.This coke had a nasty yellowish cast to it sometimes and I stayed high for days.
Whether it was coke or crystal, I loved the feeling of a little brown vial of white powder in my pocket. Every few moments, I would put my hand in my pocket to reassure myself that the magic talisman was still there. I soon became a connoisseur of public restrooms in New York, favoring those that were large with multiple stalls; there was too much pressure to get quickly in and out of a “one-seater” bathroom with someone always waiting on the other side of the door. In a large, noisy restroom, no one kept track of the many minutes I spent in the stall. There I could leisurely examine the level in my vial and calculate exactly how much high time the amount of powder represented. Then, as a culmination of the ritual, I would snort several large lines laid out carefully on a credit card or the toilet paper holder.
Sometimes, of course, I didn’t have the luxury of buying drugs and taking them home to chop up. I was once waiting for a delivery from my dealer when Dino announced that he wanted to go for tea at the Pierre. I told him that I would go downstairs and get a taxi to wait for us. A few moments later, my dealer arrived, handed me the drugs and disappeared just before Dino tottered out of the door wrapped in a huge Brooks Brothers overcoat. By the time we arrived at the Pierre, I had fondled the tiny package in my pocket a thousand times. Although he was very, very ill, Dino still loved the old ladies and the murals in the oval room where the Pierre served high tea. With his sunken cheeks and huge glasses perched on his bony nose, he staggered into the room oblivious of the stares from the ladies in their discreet Chanel suits. For me, their stares were like scalding water and I escaped to the bathroom as soon as we had ordered.
As was usual in elegant New York hotels, there was an elderly black man who was the attendant in the bathroom. In my tweed jacket and Hermes tie, he saw me not as a drug addict but someone who belonged in such a place. He simply smiled and nodded his head. I headed to a stall but knew that the room was far too quiet to chop up the drugs with a credit card and snort them. I took down my soft, elegant corduroy pants and sat on the toilet. As time passed, I stared at the glassine envelope and became progressively more paranoid that the bathroom attendant was becoming suspicious of my behavior. In that quiet, quiet bathroom, I silently unfolded the paper and stared at the whitish rocks.When I heard the attendant clear his throat, I panicked. Without further hesitation, I plucked the largest rock from the sachet, reached between my legs and stuffed it up my ass.
When I returned to the table a few minutes later, Dino was looking pensively at a cucumber sandwich. As I crossed the room toward him, it felt as if a hot knife was slowly tracing itself up and down my spine.
Dino died on the thirtieth of October in 1993 at the age of thirty-two. I had been snorting steadily, drinking, and taking Valium. In the preceding months, he had transferred the remainder of his money to me because, were I to ever probate the will he had written naming me as sole beneficiary, I would have had to pay his, by then, extensive credit card debts. I had already begun to mail-order clothes with his credit cards in the months before his death, anticipating that the companies would be unable to collect on the debt. The greed I felt for the money and clothes helped me not to think for a few hours and allowed me to focus on something tangible I might still get out of the situation.
The morning of his death I’d had to carry Dino to the toilet for the first time during his illness. For several days, he had been lying in bed with his eyes open but not seeing. I knew he was dying. His eyes were still beautiful that morning. I was admiring them when I saw one of his still thick eyelashes floating in his eye. When I tried to get it out, he thought that I had somehow decided to remove his eyelashes and moaned, “Don’t take my eyelashes too.”
I don’t remember much of the day after that. He lay there dying and I could no longer go in to look. I sat in the living room drunk and high. A friend who’d come over finally came in to say, “I think he’s dead.” I cried and I kissed Dino and I closed his eyes but I was glad it was over.
The morning after my first true love died I stole his credit cards, got drunk, snorted some blow, called a car service, and went shopping. It was the best I could do at that moment. With the passing comfort of a new suit, a computer or two, and a few more lines, I mourned Dino as I had watched him die. I wasn’t really there.
By the time I returned home that night, I was close to passing out. My hired car, filled with stolen goods, pulled up in front of my building. When the driver opened the door, I saw a tall bright-red devil strolling down the street. He leered at me and stuck out his tongue. For a moment, I thought I had gone insane or had been transported to hell, where I belonged. Then I realized that it was simply Halloween in Greenwich Village. Hell was yet to come.
Judy’s not one for handholding. In response to the tears streaming down my face, she hands me not a tissue but a bag of Depends adult diapers. I note that they are the “new snug-fitting briefs.” She winks at me and nods.
“Judy, I’m fucked up. Not incontinent.”
“Ding-Dong’s both fucked up and incontinent. Maybe you should help him out. He’s an actual person, you know.”
“Of course, I know that.”
Judy’s beaming now and that usually means she’s come up with a solution. As I feel my stomach churning, I know she’s willing to just sit there and wait me out.
“What do I say to him?” I regret it immediately.
“Something like ... I’ve got your diapers, Ding-Dong. Need some help?”
I retreat from her office with the Depends banging against my leg like a bale of hay. They’re incredibly light for their size but Judy likes to buy in bulk and there must be a hundred in the package.
In the front hall, the residents are milling around, finished with their chores but reluctant to dive into morning Group. They don’t trust me yet so most are content to nod and keep their distance. I ask Tommy, a little bald guy who I used to know from A.A. meetings, “You see Ding-Dong?”
He regards me for a moment with my bale of diapers and nods, “Upstairs gettin’ dressed.”
I’ve never been upstairs and feel like I’m trespassing as I plod up the central staircase. Four large bedrooms, converted into dormitories, open off the hallway. I decide the first must be for the girls because it is painted Pepto-Bismol pink. Down the hall is another bedroom but the door is closed. From inside, I hear a wracking cough and, then, soft muttering, “Fuck. God damn it.”
I knock on the door. “Ding-Dong? You in there?”
The rustling stops. Silence. I open the door slowly and see Ding-Dong sitting on the side of a bunk bed, completely naked except for a pair of underwear twisted around one ankle that he yanks at without much hope. I haven’t seen a body in this condition since Dino. His arms are so impossibly thin that it looks as if the bones of his elbows and shoulders will tear through the papery, sallow skin. Only a few desultory wisps of hair remain around his shrunken cock.
Ding-Dong hasn’t had a chance to pull back his hair and it hangs in his face, making him look mostly like a shorn, emaciated sheep dog. He abandons the underwear and pushes the hair back from his face. His eyes are milky white, covered in filmy cataracts. He peers into the room, “Who’s that?”
“Patrick.”
“Hmm.” Ding-Dong just waits to see what will happen. This is what his years on the street have taught him—don’t struggle, just see what happens.
“Um ... Judy told me to bring these up to you. See if you need any help.” I hold up the Depends, wiggling them a little like a play toy in front of a kitten.
Ding-Dong tilts his head. “I can’t see, Patrick.”
“Oh, right. They’re Depends.”
Ding-Dong struggles to his feet and prances a bit, singing the jingle from the Depends commercial. Then he just stands, arms slack, next to the bed, staring silently.
“Let me unwrap ’em for you.” I tear at the Depends and find that they are vacuum-packed. The bundle begins to expand as it fills with air. “Fuck, Ding-Dong, there must be about a thousand of ’em in here.”
“Good, ’cause I’m full of shit.”
“That you are, honey.” I extract a pair of diapers finally. It looks like a pair of puffy briefs.
Ding-Dong looks blankly into the middle distance but his voice is full of despair. “They’re big. They make me look like ...”
“Like you’re wearing diapers, right?”
Ding-Dong nods. I put my hand on his bony, ice-cold shoulder and guide him back down onto the bed.
“Well,” I say as I lean down and pull the tattered underwear off his ankle, “I know a thing or two about diapers and these happen to be the Rolls Royce of adult bladder control.”
“Hmm.”This seems to be Ding-Dong’s indicator that he’s willing to listen but unconvinced.
“Because Ms. Judy has bought you the new snug-fit briefs, they’re gonna feel like slipping into a pair of Calvin Kleins.”
I begin to wiggle the diapers up Ding-Dong’s body and I’m surprised that he doesn’t smell. Somehow he still manages to bathe himself and little whiffs of cheap soap float off his body as I pull the Depends up past his cock.
Toward the end of his life, Dino’s skeletal body, stripped of its easy muscularity, revolted me. Somehow I lost sight of him. I was grateful that Dino, being extremely fastidious, rarely allowed me to help him. To the end, he insisted on showering and bathing himself while I waited anxiously in the bathroom in the event he crashed to the floor. Touching the sharp angles and strange bulges of Ding-Dong’s body, I realize how much I missed by not allowing myself this intimacy with Dino.
Ding-Dong puts his hand on my shoulder, “How do they look, Patrick?”
I step back from Ding-Dong. “Let me take a look.”
Ding-Dong stands with a hand on his hip, coyly posing. He grins. Half his teeth are cracked off or black. His hair has fallen back down into his face like a wig that’s been pulled on backward.
I step forward, pull out the elastic waistband of his new panties and give them a little snap. “Honey, you look like a million bucks.”