Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [128]
Ruined armor.
One more memory: Wally and I have just moved to Provincetown, and Lynda’s come to visit. We’ve planned to take her to a drag show, knowing she’ll love the illusionists’ repertoire of sequins and sentiment, glitz and irony. And since we’ve decided to sport her out on the town, we both dress in black leather, our hair slicked back, and each of us takes one of her arms, so that she—a deconstructed flapper, in fringe and toque, jet beads and crystal earrings—has a man on either arm like some Broadway ingenue.
The drag show’s wonderful; because it’s a late autumn night, few people in town, it’s been moved to a small room in the front of the hotel/bar where it’s held, and we’re right beside the stage where Tish de Williams does her signature lip-synch of “You’ve Come a Long Way from St. Louis.” We’re greeted, dished, and flirted with by a succession of drags, including a tall black man in a sparkling gown and big Diahann Carroll wig who winds up in my lap (how hard those muscles, what an unexpected weight). The performer asks me what I do for work, and when I say, simplifying things, that I’m an English teacher, the whole place goes up with laughter, the tension between my faux-manly surface and my bookish self revealed.
Lynda is greeted with great regard by the “hostess,” who asks, “How are you tonight, sister? Where you from?” It takes me a minute to get it that the reason my friend’s getting this extra attention is because the queen on stage thinks she’s a man. I’m not sure at first Lynda knows this, or how she’ll feel about it—will she be hurt, insulted, to have her gender called into question? I hope not; it’s the drag queen’s perennial message, after all: we’re all self-made here.
And then I realize Lynda’s utterly delighted, in a sort of heaven: between the two of us, also in disguise as butch men, she is being seen as “in drag” too. And, of course, she is: my unforgettable friend is utterly happy, in her finery, wearing her vocabulary of style and gesture, wearing herself.
I’ve come to New York to teach a writing workshop for HIV-positive men. Around the seminar table, these eager faces, men leaning forward because they have so much to say. I find myself wanting to sit with each one alone, to hear each story, to find a way to help the narrative of each of these lives make it onto the page.
The next day, in a midtown restaurant, I’m having lunch with R., a new friend. Our professional relationship’s almost immediately become a friendship. He’s telling me about his boyfriend, how L.’s T-cells have just slipped below the signifying two-hundred mark, into the zone of greater risk. He says this almost casually, as if placing the information on the table beside everything else we’ve been talking about. And it occurs to me that this is how we deal with terror now; it’s so much a part of the daily fabric that we treat it as such, one more fact in a jostling crowd of actualities. R. and I don’t even have the conversation about how little the numbers mean, so familiar has that exchange become. We talk instead about our ways of being sick: how tough-minded R. goes on no matter what, smoking and drinking black coffee through whatever, how L., who whines and takes to his bed for days with a sore throat, is not a good candidate for illness. We talk about the way some people make good use of disability benefits, while others find the weight of an AIDS diagnosis crushing, paralyzed by the acronym’s bitter weight. I say I think Wally was wounded by the term, by all it seemed to spell for him. I say I don’t know that this makes any difference at all in terms of how long one lives, or the course of the illness. But I am sure that how one responds to the “word” AIDS—the numbing blow to the head that diagnosis is, its awful feel of finality—has a great deal to do with the quality of one’s life.
And that’s when R. casually tells me that, despite his bad habits, his T-cell count remains high anyway; he hasn’t seemed to drink or smoke himself out of a