The Last Chairlift

37. THINGS TO DO WITH A PENIS

I was thirty-nine in late January 1981, when Ronald Reagan became the fortieth president of the United States. The most loving and best-loved people in my life were two lesbian couples and the trans woman who was my stepfather. I was still seeing Wilson, who was still depressed and very tall, but she hadn’t hurt herself washing her hair and she never bent my penis. Wilson and I weren’t living together; I was still living with the snowshoer in the little Barlows’ apartment on East Sixty-fourth Street. The next year, Em would pantomime Reagan’s proposed constitutional amendment on school prayer. President Reagan, a born-again Christian, was an advocate for reinstating prayer in public schools.

Reagan tried again in 1984, when he asked Congress, “Why can’t freedom to acknowledge God be enjoyed again by children in every schoolroom across this land?” In 1985, Reagan complained about the Supreme Court ruling banning a “moment of silence” in public schools—Em had trouble pantomiming a “moment of silence.” In 1987, Reagan repeated his request for Congress to end what the president called “the expulsion of God from America’s classrooms.”

Em’s expelling-of-God pantomime made the management of the Gallows Lounge draw the line on the issue of school prayer. Nora was more riled up about abortion. In 1986, President Reagan addressed a joint session of Congress in his State of the Union address. “We are a nation of idealists,” he said, “yet today there is a wound in our national conscience. America will never be whole as long as the right to life granted by our Creator is denied to the unborn. For the rest of my time, I shall do what I can to see that this wound is one day healed.”

Nora observed that Reagan sounded so righteous on behalf of prayer in schools and the unborn, yet he kept quiet about the AIDS crisis. In the United States, AIDS began in 1981—the same year Reagan took office. By the time Reagan made his first extensive comments on the epidemic—six years into his presidency, in 1987—more than thirty-six thousand Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS, and more than twenty thousand had died. It was Nora’s opinion that, in Reagan’s silence, Pat Buchanan was just one of the goons who spoke for him. Buchanan was Reagan’s White House communications director for a couple of years. It was Buchanan who said that AIDS was “nature’s revenge on gay men.”

“More God-loves-AIDS business—Reagan is in bed with the Christian Right,” Em wrote me. “Nora says we’ll see how that goes over at the Gallows.”

At the Gallows, it was okay to put down Baptist minister Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. “AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals,” Falwell said. “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals. It is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”

Em was having her own issues with God’s wrath against homosexuals. Her father, the Catholic convert, had written to Pope John Paul II, asking him to baptize him. Em’s father was “renouncing” those things that John Paul II also found profane and sinful—such as contraception, abortion, remarriage after a divorce, and homosexual acts. Em had been copied on her dad’s plea to the Polish pope, who did not write back. Em didn’t blame John Paul II for not writing back. Em didn’t believe that her self-hating, homophobic dad deserved to be baptized by the pope.

In her short stories, Em would exaggerate how many times her homo-hating father wrote John Paul II—she mostly made up what the fictional dad tells the Polish pope. “My being gay, and my having a lesbian wife—not to mention our having a lesbian daughter—made me think of those three big vehicles that injured you when you were a younger man,” the repentant gay father writes to John Paul II. In 1940, the future pope was hit by a tram, fracturing his skull; that same year, he was hit by a truck in a quarry, leaving him with one shoulder higher than the other and a lifelong stoop. Four years later, he was hospitalized with a concussion and another shoulder injury, having been hit by a German truck. To anyone reading Em’s short stories, the future pope’s injuries sound a lot worse than the plight of the gay father with the lesbian wife and daughter, but Em doesn’t stop there.

In Em’s short stories, the fictional father’s last letter to Pope John Paul II likens the “outbreak” of homosexuality in his family to a “disease.” As for the “ongoing and unspeakable sin”—namely, the lives led by his lesbian daughter and her lesbian mom—the demented dad likens his pain to the pope’s survival of two assassination attempts. In 1981, in St. Peter’s Square, John Paul II was shot in the abdomen by a Turkish gunman—a member of a militant fascist group. A year later, in Portugal, a Spanish priest tried to stab the pope with a knife.

Emily MacPherson’s first collection of short stories would be published in April 1987, right after Reagan said: “After all, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don’t medicine and morality teach the same lessons?”

“It sounds like Reagan is saying that people with AIDS deserve it,” Nora said.

I liked the title Em originally gave to her collection of short stories—Letters to the Pope. All the stories were about the family that comes out together; the last stories were the ones about the renunciations of the gay father, the Catholic convert who begs John Paul II to baptize him. This was Emily MacPherson’s first book, and her publishers knew they could push her around; they rejected Letters to the Pope as a title, and insisted on something less inflammatory. The book would be called The Coming Out Stories—not a bad title, and the stories themselves were no less inflammatory; Em’s publishers didn’t censor her stories, just her title. For a collection of literary short stories by a first-time author, the book did pretty well.

Em did a book signing of The Coming Out Stories for the regulars at the Gallows Lounge. Naturally, these fans hadn’t known that the silent pantomimist was also a fiction writer. And, like Mary Marinelli, most of the Two Dykes, One Who Talks fans hadn’t known that Nora’s nonspeaking partner actually didn’t speak in real life. When Em was signing her book at the Gallows, Nora and I had to explain this to them.

In the Reagan years, Nora and I would see a lot more of Em’s seagull thing—her arms spread like a seagull’s motionless wings. We knew this sometimes meant that Em was thinking about drifting back to Canada; yet her seagull thing was also Em’s way of pantomiming Ronald Reagan’s laissez-faire approach to the AIDS epidemic.

“Reagan isn’t laissez-faire or do-nothing about communism, but he seems content to let an epidemic run its course through the gay community,” the snowshoer had said.

The pretty English teacher was always reminding us of what Reagan said in his first inaugural—that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” A seagull’s seemingly directionless drifting was Em’s way of imitating Ronald Reagan as the Pontius Pilate of the AIDS epidemic. That went over all right at the Gallows. Reagan wasn’t as beloved in New York as he was in the rest of the country. There were the occasional angry walkouts when the onstage subject of Two Dykes, One Who Talks was the dearth of attention Reagan gave to AIDS. Nora just shrugged; she said the walkouts were from out of town.

There were only a few times when Em tried to pantomime excerpts from her short stories onstage at the Gallows. The lunatic dad’s letter to the pope did not go over well, not even in New York. There were more than a few walkouts when Em acted out the part about the three big vehicles hitting the pope, and someone threw a beer bottle at Nora when Nora merely mentioned the first of the two attempts to assassinate John Paul II.

“Okay, no more popes,” Nora agreed, when the craven management of the Gallows Lounge had complained that the Canadian was making fun of the pope.

Now that Em and I were writing each other, I understood Em’s connection to Canada a little better. Em didn’t think of herself as coming from Canada, yet she was always imagining going back. She’d been born in Canada, and she had a Canadian father, but Em’s memories of Toronto were a nonlinear narrative; her early childhood hadn’t gone in a straight line, according to plan. She distinctly remembered various girls in the all-girls’ school where she’d worn a uniform, but she only dimly remembered herself as one of the uniformed girls. In Em’s mind, it was always Christmastime in Toronto, and all the Christmas trees in Canada were blue.

Em couldn’t remember how old she was when her parents were in the process of separating, or how long it took before they were divorced. Em soon moved to the United States with her mother, who was American. Em had a more reliable memory of some small towns in Massachusetts than she had of Toronto. She’d gone to a couple of private elementary schools, then to a boarding school in the western part of the state. During and after the divorce, Em had visited her father only once a year—over the Christmas holiday. It wasn’t only in her mind that it was always Christmastime in Toronto, but it was entirely in Em’s mind that all the Christmas trees were blue. The blueness of Christmas began for Em when her parents separated. It started with the self-hatred of Em’s mother and father, and their expressed hatred of each other. This was when Em began to think that not speaking might be her best option. In Em’s mind, this was why all the Christmas trees in Canada were blue. I knew the blue trees weren’t real, but I understood what they signified for Em; the blue Christmas trees were psychologically true.

When Em’s mother read The Coming Out Stories, she wrote to Em in care of the publishing house. Em had been careful not to let her parents know her home address. Em’s mom had always known how to be hurtful. “I hope you’re not still kidding yourself about going back to Canada. As long as your father lives there, you know you’ll never go back to him, but it’s just like you to hold on to things that aren’t true,” Em’s mother wrote her.

Em’s father wrote her, too. He wasn’t interested in her fiction; he cared only about the truth, her dad told her. Yet he had been inspired by Em’s fictional letters to the pope. Her dad began writing to John Joseph O’Connor in 1984, when O’Connor became the archbishop of New York. He’d been consecrated to the episcopate in 1979 by Pope John Paul II. He would become John Cardinal O’Connor in 1985; he was created cardinal by John Paul himself. “Dear Cardinal O’Connor…” later, and more urgently, “Your Eminence…” the multiple letters from Em’s dad would begin. He was thinking the archbishop of New York was his best bet for a big-deal baptism, or a better bet than the pope. Of course Cardinal O’Connor didn’t write back.

“I confess I have acted out my homosexual inclinations, but I am no longer guilty of homosexual behavior, Your Eminence,” Em’s father wrote to John Cardinal O’Connor. Her dad had plagiarized Em’s letters to the pope from The Coming Out Stories; he made an all-out effort to persuade Cardinal O’Connor to baptize him in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where he hoped his homosexual daughter could be converted to the church. Em’s father also claimed he was “inspired by” Cardinal O’Connor’s opposition to any New York City or New York State legislation that would guarantee the civil rights of homosexuals. “If you baptize me in St. Patrick’s, Your Eminence, this could inspire my wayward daughter to give up her lesbian lifestyle,” Em’s dad wrote to the cardinal.

That was the kicker. Of course Em was angry that her homophobic father had plagiarized her in his letters to Cardinal O’Connor, but what really pissed her off was the stupid idea that she would walk out on Nora if the cardinal baptized her hateful dad. “Dear Cardinal O’Connor, I doubt that my dad has given up his homosexual behavior—he just thinks you’ll believe him, and he’s counting on the Catholic Church to forgive him for it,” Em’s letter to the cardinal began. “I have no plans to give up my lesbian lifestyle, but if you baptize my homophobic father, I will burn down St. Patrick’s Cathedral, or something.”

Nora and I weren’t making much headway in our efforts to discourage Em from sending her letter to the cardinal. “You can’t threaten to burn down St. Patrick’s, Em—not even at the Gallows,” Nora said, but Em just stared at the nearest wall, as if she knew she could run through it.

“Show your letter to the snowshoer before you send it,” I told Em. I was hoping the little English teacher could talk her out of it. Elliot Barlow was a good teacher.

“Cardinal O’Connor is as homophobic as your dad, Em—the cardinal is just much smarter and better organized about it,” the snowshoer said. “Your threatening to burn down the cathedral, or ‘something,’ gives O’Connor a weapon he can use. The cardinal would love to be able to say there’s a homosexual conspiracy against the Catholic Church—he would love to portray St. Patrick’s as a victim of homosexuals,” Mr. Barlow told Em. She didn’t send the letter. That was a bullet dodged, but there would be other bullets. There’s more than one bend in the road.

Eric, the stand-alone singer in Eric’s All-Gay Band, had AIDS; he was dying. PCP was the big killer—a pneumonia, pneumocystis carinii. In Eric’s case, this pneumonia was the first presentation of AIDS—a young and otherwise healthy-looking guy with a cough (or shortness of breath) and a fever. It was the X-ray that didn’t look great—in the parlance of radiologists and doctors, a “whiteout.” Yet there was no suspicion of the disease. There was the phase of not getting better on antibiotics, and then, finally, there was a biopsy, which showed the cause to be PCP, this insidious pneumonia. They usually put you on Bactrim; that’s what Eric was taking. Eric was the first AIDS patient I saw waste away.

“It should be me, Adam,” the snowshoer said. She was trying to prepare me for seeing Eric. “I’ve had a life—Eric is just beginning his.” Eric was placed in hospice care in his parents’ Chelsea brownstone; he had his own nurse. Eric had chosen not to go on a breathing machine; this allowed him to be cared for at home. As the little English teacher would explain to me, intubating at home is problematic; it’s easier to hook a person up to a ventilator in a hospital. Eric wasn’t intubated, not at home.

I remember Eric’s parents—how they lovingly fed him. I could see the cheesy patches of candida in Eric’s mouth, and his white-coated tongue.

Eric had been a beautiful young man; now his face was disfigured with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. A violet-colored lesion dangled from one of Eric’s eyebrows, where it resembled a fleshy, misplaced earlobe; another purplish lesion drooped from Eric’s nose. The latter was so strikingly prominent that Eric later chose to hide it behind a bandanna. Mr. Barlow would tell me that Eric referred to himself as “the turkey”—because of the Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions.

We saw Eric age, in just a few months—his hair thinned, his skin turned leaden, he was often covered with a cool-to-the-touch film of sweat, and his fevers went on forever. The candida went down his throat, into the esophagus; Eric had difficulty swallowing, and his lips were crusted white and fissured. The lymph nodes in his neck bulged. He could scarcely breathe, but Eric refused to go on a ventilator, or to a hospital. He wanted to be with his mom and dad.

Eric was twenty years younger than Elliot Barlow, who was in her fifties when the soloist who was Eric’s All-Gay Band passed away.

Around that time, I remember I ran into Prue, the Tongue Kisser. I was in my forties. Prue was only four years younger than me. She brought her husband to the Gallows; she wanted him to see where she’d once had an all-noir act. “We’re staying in a hotel, and we’re traveling with our own babysitter,” the former tongue kisser wanted me to know. Nora and Em had taken their bows and left the stage; they’d just wrapped up “The News in English.” AIDS was the new all-noir act in town. Prue’s husband was staring at everything, with his mouth open. He’d been appalled by Two Dykes, One Who Talks. Now Damaged Don was doing a dirge onstage.

The AIDS years were hard years for a comedy club, even for dark comedy. The management of the Gallows Lounge had considered taking down the hangman’s noose above the bar, or at least removing the sign with the graveyard humor—the one encouraging the club’s patrons to come hang themselves. The way Prue’s husband kept staring at the hangman’s noose made the COME HANG YOURSELF sign seem inadvisable. Perhaps Prue’s husband only felt like hanging himself because of Damaged Don. “He’s supposed to be funny,” I heard Prue saying to her suicidal-looking husband, but I knew Damaged Don. It had never been Don’s intention to be funny—his comedy was strictly the unintentional kind. In the AIDS years, Damaged Don wasn’t funny at all.

Charlie was dying—he was the one who rubbed the snowshoer’s shoulders when the snowshoer was cooking, the boyfriend who was Mr. Barlow’s age. Elliot didn’t know Charlie was married—not until Charlie’s wife called with the news that Charlie was dying. Her name was Sue. Charlie was “slipping away,” Sue had said on the phone; Charlie was “asking for Elliot,” Sue told the snowshoer.

“They live somewhere like Yonkers or New Rochelle—one of those places north of the Bronx,” the pretty Mr. Barlow told me. She would never sound like a New Yorker. It turned out to be Bronxville. The snowshoer and I drove up there together.

When she saw us, Sue thought I was Elliot—she wasn’t expecting Mr. Barlow to be a woman. “I didn’t know Charlie was seeing another woman,” Sue said.

“I was a man when Charlie was seeing me, and we never had sex—we didn’t do it,” Mr. Barlow told her. This was confounding to Charlie’s wife, but the AIDS crisis had clarified certain things for those of us who knew and loved the snowshoer. We needed to know the facts. Had Elliot Barlow actually done it? Did Mr. Barlow ever do it? Or had Em been right from the beginning?

“Are you saying the snowshoer doesn’t do it?” I’d asked Em. She’d pointed her index finger at me, like a gun—her thumb straight up, like a cocked hammer. But she didn’t shoot. Em had lowered the imaginary gun; she’d wrapped her arms around herself, looking sad and lonely. Em had wanted us to know that Mr. Barlow never did it—he simply didn’t pull the trigger.

When the AIDS business began, even my mother was forthcoming about what Elliot did and didn’t do. “There’s no penetrating, sweetie—there’s just rubbing. It’s very sweet, but that’s all the snowshoer does—just rubbing,” my mom told me. “I think there’s something Greek about it,” she added.

“I think it’s only Greek when men do it that way with other men, Ray,” Molly told my mother.

“Women do it that way, too, Molly,” my mom said. “That’s all some women do with other women, under certain circumstances—just rubbing!”

“I know, Ray—that’s when there’s nothing Greek about it,” the night groomer said.

“Smarty-pants! When it comes to just rubbing, Molly, you don’t know everything!” my mother told her.

“I don’t want to know everything, Ray,” Molly tried to tell her.

“I don’t want to know any more—I think the rubbing is clear enough,” I told them.

Naturally, Nora wouldn’t let it go. “There was a whole lot of rubbing going on in the girls’ dorms at Northfield,” Nora said. “Rubbing was never enough for me,” Nora always added, while Em covered her ears with her hands and violently shook her head.

The Gallows had pulled the plug on the Two Dykes’ skit about things to do with a penis, but Nora and I knew Em’s pantomime by heart. Em demonstrated that she knew all about just rubbing; she would put a penis between her boobs or between her thighs, but nowhere else. This got a pretty good laugh at the Gallows, but Nora’s punch line was why the comedy club had pulled the plug. “Not me,” Nora said onstage, in her deadpan way. “The only thing I would do with a penis is cut it off.”

People shouldn’t have to tell their parents exactly how they have sex. It’s nobody’s business what works for you. Understandably, the little Barlows were worried about their one and only Elliot. Was their gay son, who was now their transgender daughter, in danger of dying of AIDS? The poor snowshoer. The little Barlows weren’t alone in their wanting to know. We were all badgering Elliot Barlow about it.

“What the snowshoer does is called intercrural, or between the legs—‘legs’ in Latin is ‘crura’—but it’s also called femoral intercourse,” Em wrote me. “Same idea as mammary intercourse—between the boobs, you know.” Even I knew that, but Em had done her homework on the subject—as had Mr. Barlow.

The little English teacher knew those boys who’d been teased (or worse) at Exeter; those all-boys’ schools were familiar with just rubbing. The poor snowshoer was embarrassed that rubbing was all she did, but in our fear for Elliot Barlow, we made her spell it out for us. We needed to know, for a fact, that the snowshoer was safe from AIDS. That was why we made such a big deal about the rubbing; under the circumstances, it was a relief to know it was just rubbing. Of course we knew the snowshoer wasn’t safe from other things. And we all knew another thing about Elliot Barlow. I know my mother and Molly knew it; I know Nora and Em knew it, too. We knew the snowshoer wasn’t afraid of dying. In the AIDS years, when we were afraid for Mr. Barlow, we were afraid that she felt guilty because she wasn’t dying.

That day in Bronxville with Charlie and Sue, I could see that the snowshoer had a whole lot of guilt going on. Sue had been frank on the phone when she told Mr. Barlow that Charlie was dying—Charlie had been asking for Elliot, we knew. The snowshoer and I were inside the Bronxville home when Sue told us that Charlie had developed a rash from the Bactrim. That was when we knew Charlie was being treated for the PCP. From the way Sue kept looking at the pretty Mr. Barlow, it was clear Sue was wondering about Elliot.

Sue seemed to be delaying the inevitable moment of showing us the dying Charlie. She wanted us to see the photos of their children, who were staying with her sister. That day in Bronxville was not the time and place to explain Elliot Barlow’s transitioning, or to tell Sue about Mr. Barlow’s preference for just rubbing. Sue wanted to forewarn us that Charlie’s breathing was harsh and aspirate. Since Charlie was in hospice care at home, we knew he wasn’t likely to be on a ventilator. Sue also said something about how hard it was for Charlie to eat. “He has trouble swallowing,” she told us.

“From the candida—he can’t eat?” Elliot asked her.

“Yes, it’s esophageal candidiasis,” Sue said, the terminology sounding terribly familiar to her. “And he has a Hickman catheter,” Sue explained. Mr. Barlow knew that if there was a Hickman, there would be a nurse.

“If they have you on a Hickman for hyperalimentation feeding, you’re probably starving,” the little English teacher had told me.

“Peter is Charlie’s nurse,” Sue was saying; she sighed. “One of our neighbors said it was ‘kind of funny’ that Charlie had a gay nurse named Peter, because Charlie’s peter was what started the trouble. I don’t think that’s the least bit funny—do you?” Sue asked us, but she was looking solely at the pretty Mr. Barlow.

“No, that’s not funny,” the snowshoer said. “I’m guessing that one of Peter’s jobs is to take care of the catheter—you have to keep flushing out the catheter, or it will clot off,” Elliot Barlow told her.

“Yes, I know,” Sue said.

It was an exertion for Charlie to breathe. We knew that his hands and feet would be cold; the circulation to Charlie’s extremities was closing down, trying to shunt blood to his brain. Charlie barely moved in his hospital bed. Maybe it hurt him to move his head. It seemed strange that his head and the rest of his shrunken body lay still, but Charlie’s bare chest was heaving. The Hickman catheter dangled from the right side of Charlie’s chest, where it had been inserted under his clavicle; it tunneled under the skin a few inches above the nipple, and entered the subclavian vein below the collarbone.

“Is that you, Elliot?” Charlie asked. The snowshoer saw Charlie try to move his head, and stepped closer to the bed. “Elliot Barlow—are you here?” Charlie asked; his voice was weak and labored. His lungs made a thick gurgling. The oxygen must have been for only occasional (and superficial) relief. Morphine would come next, Mr. Barlow knew. It seemed impossible that poor Charlie didn’t recognize Elliot Barlow as a woman.

“Yes, it’s me—Elliot—and Adam is with me, Charlie,” the snowshoer said. I could tell by the way Elliot touched Charlie’s hand, and then withdrew her hand, that Charlie’s hand was cold. I could see Charlie’s face—that greasy-looking seborrheic dermatitis was in his scalp, on his eyebrows, and flaking off the sides of his nose.

“Adam, too!” Charlie gasped. “Elliot and Adam! Are you all right, Elliot—are you still not doing it?” Charlie asked me.

“The other one is Elliot—she’s a woman,” Sue pointed out.

“Are you a woman now, Elliot?” Charlie asked her.

“Yes, I am, Charlie—the transitioning is a slow process,” the snowshoer said.

“But you’re all right, aren’t you, Elliot?” Charlie asked her.

“Yes, I am, Charlie,” Elliot Barlow told him, but I hated how ashamed she sounded—she felt awful to be all right.

There was a tray of medications and other stuff on the bedside table. I would remember the heparin solution—it was for flushing out the Hickman catheter. I saw the white, cheesy curds of the candida crusting the corners of Charlie’s mouth.

Of course I couldn’t blame Charlie for not recognizing Elliot Barlow as a woman. Charlie thought I was Elliot—poor Charlie didn’t recognize me, either. “The great horror”—as I would say to the snowshoer, when we were driving back to New York—was that I didn’t recognize Charlie, but how do you recognize a grown man who weighs less than ninety pounds?

Charlie’s hair was translucent and thin. His eyes were sunken in their sockets, his temples deeply dented, his cheeks caved in. Charlie’s nostrils were pinched tightly together, as if he could already detect the stench of his own cadaver, and his taut skin, which had once been so ruddy, was an ashen color. Hippocratic facies was the term for that near-death face—that tightly fitted mask of death, which so many of Mr. Barlow’s friends who died of AIDS would one day wear. It was skin stretched over a skull; the skin seemed so hard and tense, it looked like it was going to split.

Elliot and I were disconcerted that Sue had left the room, after twice mentioning that the oxygen wasn’t working anymore. “I’m not the one to oversee this process,” Sue had told us as she was leaving. “I’ll go get Peter.” The snowshoer and I mistakenly thought Sue meant she wasn’t the one to supervise the oxygen, but Sue meant the dying process. Charlie had been so still when he was alive, Mr. Barlow and I had failed to notice that he had stopped breathing.

At first, we thought Charlie had fallen asleep, but he’d pushed the oxygen mask away from his mouth and nose—his face frozen in a grimace. Charlie must have known that the oxygen wasn’t working. I think he knew it would never work again, because his cheeks were wet with tears. Elliot and I were not alone with Charlie for long. We didn’t expect to see Sue again. There was no reason for Sue to say goodbye to us. I was surprised how Peter, the gay nurse, behaved, but Mr. Barlow wasn’t taken aback by it.

“Oh, you’re still here,” Peter said, when he saw me, but the nurse did a double take when he got a look at the pretty Mr. Barlow. “No one told me you were also married—that’s too bad,” Peter said unpleasantly to me. Peter had looked twice at Elliot Barlow, but he’d quickly looked away from her.

“I’m not married. Charlie had been asking for Elliot—she’s Elliot,” I told the indignant nurse, with a nod to the pretty Mr. Barlow. But Peter made a point of not looking at her.

“Charlie had been asking for a man—Charlie wasn’t asking for her,” the nurse told me, in a huff. I was feeling like an outlier, or a complete know-nothing, again. I wasn’t at all prepared for such unmasked hatred from a gay man for another sexual minority—in Mr. Barlow’s case, a more minor one. I’d had no experience with the hatred of some homosexual men for trans women; it looked and sounded the same as homophobic hatred to me, but I knew nothing about hatred of the transphobic kind.

“We should go, Adam—we’ll have some traffic, going back to the city,” the snowshoer said. She appeared unperturbed by Peter’s hatred, or she was used to it to the degree that she didn’t react to it—hatred made Mr. Barlow speak slowly.

The nurse, we noticed, didn’t like being ignored. Peter was roughly washing the crusted candida from the area of Charlie’s slack mouth. “If you don’t mind, I want to clean him up before the kids come see him,” Peter told me, with the utmost prissiness. The nurse had been deliberate in his disregard for Elliot Barlow as a woman, but he wasn’t expecting to be overlooked by her.

I wanted the transphobic nurse to hate me more than he hated the pretty Mr. Barlow, but Elliot Barlow had been my wrestling coach—she knew exactly what I was doing. “It didn’t seem that the oxygen was working. Wasn’t the oxygen your job?” I asked the nurse, but Mr. Barlow answered me before Peter could overcome his surprise.

“The oxygen was working only a little, Adam,” the snowshoer said. “The problem with PCP is that it’s diffuse. It affects both lungs, and it affects your ability to get oxygen into your blood vessels—hence into your body. That’s why Charlie’s hands were so cold,” the little English teacher told me. She’d been speaking to me, only to me; she’d not once looked at the nurse. I knew exactly what she was doing.

“It’s a dry cough—or there’s no cough, Adam,” the snowshoer went on. “When we hear it, we make too much of the cough. It’s the shortness of breath that gets worse—Charlie just ran out of breath,” Elliot told me.

Peter was at last looking at the pretty Mr. Barlow. I took a closer look at the Hickman catheter dangling from Charlie’s unmoving chest, not because I liked looking at it. “If you want to clean up Charlie before the kids come see him, Peter, you ought to get rid of this thing,” I told him. That was when the snowshoer stepped seamlessly between us. Mr. Barlow had turned her back to me, but she spoke to me—only to me—with her pretty face uplifted to Peter.

“It’s not necessarily a nurse’s job to remove the Hickman, Adam—an undertaker will pull it out,” the snowshoer said, with her face still looking up at the nurse, who was repulsed by how close she was standing. The little English teacher was almost touching him. “Look at the cuff, Adam—it’s like a Velcro collar around the tube, just inside the point where it enters the skin. Charlie’s cells, his skin and body cells, have grown into that Velcro mesh. That’s what keeps the catheter in place, so it doesn’t fall out or get tugged loose. All the undertaker has to do is give it a good yank—it’ll come right out,” the pretty Mr. Barlow said. She’d taken hold of the nurse’s hands when she said the yank word, but Peter had recoiled from her, and she let go of his hands—as quickly as she’d first touched him, as if sensing his revulsion.

“If a man wanted a woman, he would want a real one—he wouldn’t want you,” the hateful nurse suddenly said to her. “As for a man who wanted a man, what would he want with you?” Peter asked Elliot Barlow. I put my hands on her waist—just to move her out of the way, so I could get to the guy—but that slight contact was all Elliot needed to take control of my hands. The snowshoer was in her fifties, but her hand control was as good as ever. I knew the pretty Mr. Barlow would have heard the nurse’s kind of hatred before; maybe this was why it was so hard for me to take.

When we were back in the car, Elliot and I didn’t really talk about the gay nurse’s repugnance at the very idea of a trans woman. All the snowshoer would say was what I’d heard her say before—about how much she loved gay men. “Most of my friends are gay men—I love gay men. Of course there are a few gay men who hate trans women, but there are more straight men who hate us,” the snowshoer said. I was the one who was hung up on the moment, and on this gay nurse in particular.

On the way back to New York, we didn’t talk about Charlie and Sue’s neighbor—the one who thought it was funny that Charlie’s gay nurse was named Peter. That wasn’t the only peter joke in the 1980s. There were a lot of AIDS jokes going around. I don’t remember when it was that I heard about the 1986 rededication of the Statue of Liberty, but it was after the fact. Either what happened at the centennial celebration wasn’t in the news or I just missed it. Yet I was living in New York at the time, and the Statue of Liberty is in New York Harbor. How could what Bob Hope said not have been in the news? How could I have missed who laughed at Hope’s wisecrack? It was the hundredth anniversary of Lady Liberty in New York Harbor. Bob Hope, the wisecracking comedian, was entertaining the audience. President Reagan and his wife, Nancy, were seated beside French president Mitterrand and his wife, Danielle. It was Em who brought this AIDS joke to my attention. Em wrote me that Bob Hope had been accustomed to entertaining the troops. Maybe Hope had forgotten that he wasn’t speaking to soldiers, Em wrote. Hope had joked that the Statue of Liberty had AIDS, but that nobody knew if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Ferry—pronounced Fairy, I would guess, having grown up subjected to Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. Maybe Hope had forgotten that the statue came from France. The Mitterrands were shocked by what Hope had said, but the Reagans were laughing. In some news stories, Nancy Reagan was only smiling—she wasn’t laughing. By all accounts, President Reagan was laughing. In one report, Em had read, Reagan was “roaring” with laughter—in another, he was “howling.”

Bob Hope’s smart-assed remark about AIDS might not have gone over well even at the Gallows, where bad taste was generally well received. But when Dr. Dave (Elliot’s endocrinologist) got sick, Nora and Em stopped doing “The Specialist” at the Gallows—not even the OB-GYN extra version. The bananas would pile up onstage, or Em would do one of her other pantomime routines with a banana. When someone in the audience would shout out for “The Specialist,” Em closed her eyes and looked like she was praying. “Dr. Dave is sick—out of respect for him, we’re not doing that one,” Nora would say. Later, Nora would give the audience more information about it. “Dr. Dave is HIV-positive—we won’t be doing ‘The Specialist’ again,” Nora told the audience. No one laughed, not even at the Gallows. And it was a comedy club, for Christ’s sake. People went to the Gallows to laugh.

“What are the bananas for? Long time passing,” Nora used to sing, in the 1970s. Not anymore.

“Where have the bananas gone? Long time ago,” the snowshoer sang back to her. It wasn’t funny anymore. No more bananas.

Dr. Dave had a transgender patient, Diane, who was dying at St. Vincent’s when Dave, at his own request, was sent there to die as well. As if that weren’t confusing enough, after Diane died, Dave spoke of her as if he were still treating her.

The estrogen Diane had been taking caused side effects in her liver. Dr. Dave told the snowshoer and me that estrogen can cause a kind of hepatitis; the bile stagnates and builds. The itching that occurred with this condition was driving Diane crazy, Dave told us. Diane had to stop taking her hormones; then her beard grew back. It seemed unfair to Dr. Dave that Diane, who’d worked so hard to feminize herself, was not only dying of AIDS, but was dying as a man. “It doesn’t help that the nurses shave her,” Dave said to the snowshoer and me. Dr. Dave only meant that Diane was spared seeing her beard, but she could feel it.

In the end, when Dave was dying at St. Vincent’s, he looked like he was starving. By then, the snowshoer and I knew what the Hickman catheter in Dave’s skeletal birdcage of a chest was for. They’d had him on a breathing machine, Mr. Barlow told me, but Dave was off it—“for now,” Elliot said. Dave would have been in his late fifties—he was only a little older than Elliot Barlow.

“You know doctors—they like experimenting,” Dave’s most candid nurse told Mr. Barlow and me. They’d been experimenting on Dr. Dave with sublingual morphine, versus morphine elixir, Dave’s candid nurse had informed us. “At this point, the suction is very important—to help clear secretions,” she said. I had no idea what she was talking about, and the snowshoer never explained the suction or the secretions to me, but we liked Dr. Dave’s most candid nurse; she clearly knew what lay in store for Dave.

The snowshoer sensed that all of Dave’s nurses were wary of his parents—“not wary enough,” the candid nurse would later tell us. Dr. Dave’s parents had instructed his nurses not to allow other visitors to see Dave—not when his parents were with him. When the snowshoer and I were seeing Dave, the nurses warned Dave’s parents that we were there. The parents waited in their limousine until we were gone. “They have a Russian chauffeur—she’s a woman driver,” Dave’s candid nurse told Elliot and me.

“Why don’t your parents want to meet us, or your other friends?” the snowshoer had asked Dr. Dave.

Apparently, Dave’s parents didn’t want to meet anyone who might have given their son AIDS in the first place. As the little English teacher put it, Dave’s parents thought of us as “among the perpetrators.” We never saw them, but we’d seen their woman driver—she looked more like a Russian shot-putter than a chauffeur. Sometimes, while she was waiting, she got out of the limo to stretch; the Russian driver did her stretching on the hood of the car, which looked cleaner than anything in that area of Seventh Avenue.

Dave died at St. Vincent’s. He’d told the snowshoer that his parents had wanted him to die at home, in their apartment—not at St. Vincent’s, where so many people were dying of AIDS. But Dr. Dave wanted to die where other AIDS patients were dying, including some of his endocrinology patients.

I thought Dave’s parents were crazy. “No, they’re not crazy—they’re just parents,” Mr. Barlow had said.

When you write fiction from so-called real life, there are those details you feel free to change, because you know you can make them better—or worse, if making things worse is your thing. “As a writer, Adam, making things as bad as they can be is your predilection,” the little English teacher told me.

“You’re a worst-case-scenario guy, as a writer,” Em wrote me.

“It takes one to know one,” I wrote her back. As a writer, Em had moved on from The Coming Out Stories. Her mom and dad were still writing to her, and Em’s father kept writing to Cardinal John Joseph O’Connor. Her dad had continued to copy Em on his letters to the cardinal, but Em didn’t write back to her parents, and she had stopped writing fiction about them.

When you write fiction from so-called real life, there are also those details you sense are unchangeable—because you know you can’t make them any better, or any worse, than they already are.

After Dr. Dave died, the snowshoer was visiting another friend who was dying at St. Vincent’s. The candid nurse we knew recognized the pretty Mr. Barlow. The nurse said the hospital’s security personnel had to be vigilant in their efforts not to admit Dave’s parents to St. Vincent’s. The snowshoer said it was understandable why St. Vincent’s had to keep Dave’s parents out of the hospital, after Dr. Dave died.

Dave’s parents tried to sneak into St. Vincent’s, where they looked for AIDS patients who were dying alone. The parents sat with the dying patients, until someone asked them to leave. After a while, they’d stopped coming, but the Russian chauffeur still parked the limo and sat in it, waiting for someone; the woman driver still stretched on the hood, as if she thought Dr. Dave were still alive in St. Vincent’s. Maybe the Russian driver was crazy, I was thinking, but the snowshoer said the limo driver must know something. “Maybe the driver knows the parents have killed themselves, or she knows they soon will,” Elliot Barlow said.

“What do you think my mom would do, if I had AIDS?” I asked Mr. Barlow.

“Your mom wouldn’t wait for you to die, Adam—she would shoot you first,” the snowshoer said. I thought this was true. My mom would have shot me if I had AIDS; she wouldn’t have watched me die with one or more of those AIDS-associated, opportunistic illnesses. She would have shot me first, and then shot herself. Little Ray was not inclined to prolong things, except for dramatic effect.

As for shooting someone else, I didn’t doubt that my mother could have done it. At the end of the 1980s, Little Ray would express her surprise that only one person had shot Ronald Reagan. “And it was a guy,” my mom said, in her wide-eyed, disbelieving way. What my mother meant, Molly said, might have gotten Little Ray fired as a ski instructor—even in Vermont, where President Reagan wasn’t as popular as he was in the rest of the country. What my mother meant was something Molly and I tried to discourage Little Ray from saying. “But it’s true,” my mom always said. “A mother who lost her son to AIDS could be forgiven for shooting Ronald Reagan, sweetie.”