An overweight middle-aged man, perspiring in a shirt and tie, sidled by them. “Jesus Christ, right out on the street?” he muttered, clearly just loud enough to be heard.
“That’s right,” Hector called back. “Right out on the street. Sorry to offend you.”
“And look at her,” said Ricky, his arms still around Hector. Ricky jerked his head leftward and Hector turned. Ava’s daughter was watching them, mesmerized, from the doorway of the café she’d stopped at, but when she saw them both turn back to her, she ducked inside, mortified. Hector and Ricky laughed. “How’s that for college?” Ricky said.
They walked on. Hector kept his arm close around Ricky’s waist. Hector was almost addicted to that gesture, squeezing Ricky around the waist until he felt his head growing like it was going to explode. Then Hector’s ravenous, mad hunger kicked in and Ricky would say, “Oh God, no, here we go again, el voraz!” And it was true: when it came to Ricky, Hector was voracious. He marveled at how it never got old; just put that butt between his hands for a few seconds and he would be groaning and marveling, “Holy shit, holy shit!” Ricky laughing with delight at his powers of assitude, a colorist who’d become a potentate. Sometimes Hector would nearly cry; it was too much for him to bear: a full, complex effusion of feelings that encompassed past, present, and future all at once. Past: How had he gone so long without this? All those nights in the office, boxed away. Present: Was this really happening? Could he possibly be so happy? He was exploding! Future: What if he lost this? He would surely die. Get more now! He plunged himself back into the assitude with a renewed burst of psychotic joy, a mix of gratitude and terror, making Ricky cry, “You’re crazy, you terrify me!”
Walking down Bleecker now, Hector crept his hand down lower, lower.
“Stop it!” Ricky hissed, yanking up Hector’s arm. “Have some decency.”
Hector glanced at him and smiled a silent, wicked smile. Then, the wires of lust and fear crossing in his head, he asked, “You went this week, right?”
Ricky dropped his self-satisfied grin. “Went where?” he asked.
Hector knew Ricky was thinking: Oh God, here we go again. “Come on, you know what I mean,” he said. “Went for a test.”
Ricky straightened, almost imperceptibly picked up his pace, jerked his bag up more securely on his shoulder. “I’ll go next week,” he said. “This week was crazy. Work and all this shit.” He jerked his head at the bag full of flyers and folders.
“Wednesday I said I’d meet you there and I called you at the salon and you didn’t call me back.”
“We got crazy. Ivana came in.”
Hector snorted a laugh. “Oh, Ivana comes first.”
“Well, she kind of does,” Ricky said in his duh voice. “She’s brought in, like, a hundred friends.”
There was no point, Hector knew, in doing the whole spieclass="underline" everything they were working out at these meetings to get drugs faster; this whole miracle of parallel tracking they were working on, where you could get the new, experimental drugs even if you didn’t qualify for the actual clinical trial because this or that picky lab test of yours wasn’t quite right and you weren’t their perfect trial specimen. They were going to get thousands of people access to a drug in the baby phase, the drug ddI, and when you took it along with AZT it was very likely going to do what AZT alone couldn’t do. Well, Hector amended himself, maybe not very likely, but likely. But Hector knew that Ricky knew all that. So instead, he just said: “Can we go this coming week, please?”
“Oh!” Ricky exclaimed, infuriated. He stopped dead on the sidewalk, making Hector stop, too. “I’ve told you a hundred times, Hector. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know.” He was saying it in a nasty singsong. “I don’t see the point. La-la-la, la-la!” He walked on a few more paces, then stopped again. “And if you’re so concerned, then use a fucking condom when you fuck me. Okay?” He kept walking.
“You’re fucking pissing me off,” Hector called to him. “You know it’s you I’m concerned about, not me.”
They stood there, about twelve feet apart, an awkward standoff. Finally Hector caught up to Ricky. “Let’s just go to the meeting,” he said. They walked on but they didn’t touch. A car went by blasting “Cherish,” Madonna’s new song. In the video, Madonna played in the waves with the hot merman and the cute, curly-haired little black girl.
Half a block from the meeting, they ran into Chris Condello, one of Hector’s fellow science wonks in the movement, with his unkempt shock of jet-black hair, tote bag, Bronski Beat T-shirt sweaty and worn down to crepe over his modest spare tire. They exchanged hello kisses. Hector noticed Ricky hang back ever so slightly, the way Ricky always did, a bit insecure about his non-braininess when Hector encountered another data geek.
“You ready to present with me tonight?” Chris asked Hector. “You do background and I’ll do prospectus?”
“Sure,” Hector said. Why don’t you do background and I do prospectus? he thought flickeringly. But for the most part, he avoided those stupid ego wars in the group. He brought the same clinical, businesslike calm to the group that he’d provided in his closeted days at Health, and he knew people respected him for it and respected that he had a real clinical background. The difference between working with multiple-degree Health bureaucrats and working with people desperate for their lives, and their friends’ and lovers’ lives, stunned him. When he wanted to go off on people at the meetings for being stupid, impetuous, angry, or uninformed, he reminded himself that he was taking what he’d been expensively educated to do and was using it to help save the lives of his own people — and he got to have fun and flirt and plan major disruptions and then go dancing along the way — instead of shuffling papers in a closet in a city agency.
They arrived at the meeting. “Holy shit, it’s packed tonight,” Ricky said. And it was, noted Hector, slightly in awe, as he always was when he showed up to a full house. These meetings: such a mix of righteous anger and complicated lust, social energy, bitterness, and hurt that preceded AIDS and went back into childhoods, adolescences. Such a sea of white boys in sleeveless T-shirts, jean shorts, and combat boots! Then his other fellow members of what they all called Brown Town, maybe about thirty of them in all. There was Ithke Larcy, the social worker with his massive head of locks, and Ithke’s white boyfriend, Karl Cheling, the wild-eyed left-wing evangelical minister. The two of them were trying to force the city to let homeless people with AIDS live in real apartments and not the chaotic cesspools of the shelter system. Then there were all the lesbians. That novelist Esther Hurwitz, the kingpin of the downtown arty dyke rat pack, was here, Hector noticed; she’d been coming around and getting all vocal, but some people suspected she was just collecting material for a novel she’d write about them all someday. You couldn’t hear yourself think in here, it was so loud.
Hector and Ricky found some boys Ricky called friends, boys in their twenties who worked in fashion or at salons and came here because they knew on some level it was the right thing to do — but also because, the past few years, there was no cooler place to be. Here you could be angry but sexy at the same time, all riled up about a plague, which made for great carnal energy that you could take out of the meeting, then dance or fuck it off at Boy Bar or Meat, Dusty Springfield singing, Since you went away, I’ve been hanging around, I’ve been wondering why I’m feeling down, over a hand-clap backbeat. The boys were there with Micki, a five-foot-four magenta-haired dyke who said she’d come to the meeting when she heard that the federal definition of AIDS, which drove benefits and funding and research, didn’t include symptoms that showed up only in women, like the early lesions of cervical cancer. “That fucking pissed me off,” Micki had said. “Dykes get AIDS!” In fact, this is exactly what Micki had screamed at Barbara Bush at an event in D.C. Micki had managed to infiltrate, posing as a young congressional page, looking hilariously straight in pumps and a skirt and a blond bob wig with a headband.