“MR. WINTON?”
“Mr. Winton?”
The short, obese young man who had woken him—or was he a teenager, Larry wondered—wore a white jacket two sizes too small. His pockets overflowed with tongue depressors, penlights, and cotton swabs. A mask covered his mouth and nose, drawing attention to the pimples dotting his forehead.
He introduced himself as Dr. Bartholomew’s medical student and rolled up his sleeve, revealing columns of tiny words scribbled in ink on his forearm. Reading from the list, he asked Larry about a host of symptoms, ranging from nausea and diarrhea to numbness and tremor. As Larry answered, the student made notes on a sheet of paper full of strange diagrams.
“Mr. Winton, can you tell me today’s date, day of the week, and year?”
“Today….”
Larry searched his mind. He wasn’t sure. It must be the middle of March.
Frustrated by the interminable questions, he said, “Saint Patty’s Day, m’boy.”
The student stared at him.
“Never caught a Texas leprechaun?” Larry asked in an Irish brogue. “Ask me where my oil well is.”
The student checked his notes against the words on his arm. Dispirited by his failed attempt at humor, Larry closed his eyes. He thought of the mysterious diagrams on the student’s clipboard, as inscrutable to him as those in a horoscope he had acquired in 1968.
When Larry got off the bus from Fort Worth, he was met by a middle-aged woman wearing dark eye shadow and a paisley caftan. She dangled a paper template of collapsing circles, radial lines, and arcane symbols. I’ll predict your future for a pack of cigarettes, she offered. Just tell me exactly when and where you were born. Larry had liked this idea of a predestination absolving him of any responsibility for his own fate.
By the time Larry arrived in San Francisco, the city’s “Summer of Love” was over. There was more “speed”—methamphetamine manufactured by local biker gangs—being sold on Haight Street than LSD. Larry soon sampled all the available drugs. One LSD trip was enough. He wanted to empower his self, not transcend it. Although the pleasure of heroin easily matched that of a good orgasm and lasted longer, he saw what it did to people—the scars and open sores, the degradation addicts were willing to submit to for another high. Speed, on the other hand, wasn’t overtly self-destructive. He could listen to music for hours, dance for hours, have sex for hours.
Larry fell in with a tribe of homeless speed freaks, an honorable society compared to heroin addicts. However, surviving in the city with a drug habit required money. Occasionally, he resorted to petty theft, until he learned about the Castro.
Larry discovered he was irresistible to the older, well-off, gay men who had settled in a neighborhood known by its main commercial street, Castro, at the end of World War II. He packaged his lean, six-foot frame into a tight pink tank top and blue jeans worn low to display his flat belly. His cheeks, chiseled by methamphetamine, and a scar on his chin completed the erotic bait. He set the hook with a cowboy persona, half vulnerable, half rugged, brazenly bootlegged from James Dean.
As the gay scene grew exponentially, he graduated from doing tricks on the street to being a kept lover in an elegant furnished apartment. He usually had two or more sugar daddies, discretely scheduled so as not to meet one another. A few were married, had children, and lived in the suburbs. Collectively, their support covered his living expenses, including the upkeep for a pristine, white Thunderbird convertible.
After the medical student left, Larry saw he was being scrutinized by a male nurse. Not examined objectively like a patient would be but sized up on a scale of desirability. The man’s layered, shoulder-length hair and thick mustache were familiar. Of course, Larry realized, the nurse was a regular in a Castro Street fern bar where he had done some higher-end hustling. The man had approached him once and suggested a tryst. When Larry explained what he charged, the man was furious. Must picture himself too hot to have to pay for it, Larry had thought.
He watched the nurse amble to the central ER hub of telephones and chart racks and whisper to a butch-looking clerk he recognized from a down-scale, South of Market leather bar. The clerk’s mutton chop sideburns were the same. Just his suspenders and chains were missing. Larry recalled being hit on by him with a similar outcome.
Larry had learned early on that such misunderstandings were a professional hazard. One had to cast a wide net in making seductive eye contact. Sometimes a potential client misread the situation. Thrilled that this young stud was attracted to him, the unsuspecting target would strike up a conversation and become hostile on finding out Larry was interested only in commercial transactions.
The two men sneered at him. They seemed to be enjoying his misfortune. Larry was indifferent. His pretense of vulnerability had always been a bigger act than the ruggedness. He still lived the mantra he first heard as a homeless teen in the Haight— “Don’t let other people’s shit bum you out.”
Though there had been one exception to this rule. In 1973, while cruising Haight Street in his T-Bird with the top down, a muscle-bound, blond farm boy from the Salinas Valley hopped into the car and offered to sell him speed. Larry countered with an invitation to lunch. They quickly became lovers and stumbled into an arrangement that permitted intimacy without sacrificing too much pride. Larry helped pay Chris’s share of the rent in a lower Haight crash pad. Whenever Larry’s apartment was free of clients, Chris stayed over.
After a year, Chris was chafing at his financial dependence. Wanting parity, he escalated from dealing small amounts of speed on the street to bigger buys and distribution. One evening, Chris borrowed the T-Bird to close a deal in Hunter’s Point. He didn’t return. A week later, a policeman notified Larry that his car, stripped of its tires, doors, and radiator, had been abandoned in an empty parking lot. A body was never found.
Larry quit using drugs and started lifting weights as an outlet for his grief. The change in his physique increased his professional value which led to the most lucrative arrangement of his career, servicing and keeping house for a trio of international airline stewards. Their short layovers in San Francisco allowed Larry the free time to take junior college classes. He even developed an exit strategy for when his marketability declined—obtaining a real estate license.
Then the loss of appetite and fatigue began. Larry went to the Haight Street clinic, but penicillin injections for gonorrhea and syphilis didn’t help. He stopped lifting weights at the gym. Soon he was too thin for the airline stewards’ taste. They let the apartment lease expire. Larry had to move into a shared flat in the Haight. He worked the streets again—a higher volume at a lower price. Each night, he awoke drenched in sweat. The coughing became constant. He returned to the clinic where Gwen urged him to get a chest x-ray and his sputum tested. He put it off until he couldn’t walk a half a block before halting to ease the panting and the pummeling his heart was giving his ribs. Finally giving in, he hailed the cab that brought him to the city’s brand new public hospital.