The Last Chairlift

38. PLAGUE SONG

There were a lot more guns in my mom and Molly’s Manchester house after Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan went off the road. Those two Norwegians left all their guns to their children, but the guns ended up with Molly and my mom—originally, “for safekeeping.” Or that’s what Henrik had said.

Henrik wanted the entire arsenal for himself, but he sensed there might be “compromising complications” for him—a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, transporting firearms from New England to a southern state, “across state lines.” Henrik had a plan—“one gun at a time,” he said. He’d persuaded Nora to drive a carload of lethal weapons from New Hampshire to Vermont.

“I drove a shitload of guns across state lines—Henrik wasn’t worried about compromising complications for me,” Nora complained. I liked Em’s pantomime about the political radical and stand-up comedian who was arrested for gunrunning, but Nora didn’t think it was funny.

It was dismaying to me that Molly and my mother were happy to stash Henrik’s guns in their Manchester house. Molly once swore by her single-shot shotgun—her little twenty-gauge was the only gun my mom and Molly owned. “It’s a hard gun to shoot yourself with, accidentally,” Molly always said. (I liked the sound of that.) “No safety is safer than having a safety,” the ski patroller liked to say.

“We’re just keeping the guns for Henrik, sweetie—we’re not going to start a war, or anything,” my mother told me.

“I’m going to make a little more trouble for the deer, Kid—that’s the only trouble I’m making,” Molly assured me. In the stash of firearms, the trail groomer had seen a couple of deer rifles she wanted to try, and a twelve-gauge or two.

Henrik had been in the habit of coming to Manchester once a year to ski at Stratton, but he always spent one day skiing with my mom at Bromley. “Ray would ski with anyone, kiddo,” was how Nora put it. Henrik stayed in an inn in Manchester, not with Molly and my mother. (Henrik had always been wary of Molly.) Before the guns were in the picture, Henrik had flown to Boston or to Hartford, where he’d rented a car. It was a long drive to Manchester, Vermont, from down south. But now that the guns were with Molly and my mom, Henrik drove.

“One gun at a time—really?” I asked the night groomer and my mother. My uncles had so many guns, I calculated that Molly and my mom would die long before Henrik could drive those guns to Dixie, one at a time. Molly admitted that Henrik had been taking more than one gun at a time down south. Henrik had ski bags and boot bags. Henrik stuck a rifle or a shotgun in the ski bags—maybe one of each, my mother had observed—and he usually slipped a handgun in one of his boot bags. Even so, the arsenal of weapons was not visibly depleted. The closet in the TV room, where the pillows for the futon were stored, was full of rifles. “They’re not loaded, I hope,” I said, every time I slept on the futon—imagining myself shot by a falling rifle, in my sleep. The shotguns, I was told, now took up most of Molly’s side of their bedroom closet. I didn’t ask where the handguns were hidden, but I was careful how I opened drawers.

There were so many guns, not even Henrik could keep track of them. Henrik had told my mom and Molly that they could give some guns away—if they wanted to, if they had any friends or loved ones who wanted any. “You can’t give away a gun in Manchester, Kid—they sell any kind of gun you could want in a gas station in town,” Molly told me. I knew the gas station; I’d seen all the guns.

My mother tried to give guns to the snowshoer and me, and to Nora and Em. My mom was convinced we needed guns to be safe in New York. On the contrary, Mr. Barlow argued—for two people living in a small apartment, it would be unsafe to have a gun.

“Elliot is so quiet, even when she is moving around—I would mistake her for an intruder and shoot her,” I said.

“You should each have your own gun, sweetie,” my mom said.

“So we can shoot each other?” I asked her.

“Adam gets up to pee at night—I would surely shoot him if I had a gun, Ray,” the snowshoer said.

Nora had said that a handgun (or two) was the only kind of weapon you would want to have in a New York City apartment. “In New York, I’ll bet you could be arrested just for carrying a rifle or a shotgun from your parking garage to your apartment,” Nora pointed out. Growing up with all those guns, it was a wonder Nora and Henrik hadn’t shot each other. Now that half the guns belonged to Nora, she was surprisingly picky about choosing the gun (or guns) she wanted. Nora was uncharacteristically judicious; she wanted Em to learn to shoot before Nora took any guns to their rat’s-ass apartment above the perennially bad restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen.

When Nora and Em visited my mom and Molly in Manchester, Molly took Em shooting in a quarry outside of town. There were safe things you could shoot at in the quarry; everyone went there for target practice, Molly said. This was a safer bet than turning Em loose with a handgun on Ninth Avenue on the West Side of Midtown Manhattan, Nora said. Molly told us that Em had “taken to” shooting at things in the quarry.

Whenever we went to see my mother and Molly, Elliot and I refused to take a gun back to New York with us. “You should take two,” my mom always told us. She was already mad at us for taking our cross-country skis to the city. We’d never wanted the skis in the first place; in Vermont, Elliot and I preferred snowshoeing. But sometimes when it snowed in New York City, they closed Park Avenue to traffic. It was magical to ski at night on Park Avenue in the falling snow, but my mother was mad that we wouldn’t ski with her in Vermont.

“You don’t even like cross-country skiing, Ray—you’re a downhill girl,” the snowshoer said.

“I would ski on Mars or the moon, if I could ski with my honeys,” my mom said. She was hurt by it. Maybe that was why she snuck the gun into Mr. Barlow’s backpack. On an earlier weekend, she’d tried to slip the same .357 Magnum into my suitcase, but I was wise to my mother’s not taking no for an answer, and I knew that it was one of the handguns Nora had her eye on—a six-shooter Em had been blazing away with, out at the quarry. It was nowhere near Valentine’s Day, but my mom had included a Valentine’s card with the gun she snuck into the snowshoer’s backpack. There was a big heart on the card, where Little Ray had written: “To keep my darling snowshoer safe, and to protect my sweetie!”

To my surprise, Elliot Barlow said she thought it was “a pretty little gun,” and she liked “the feel of it.” I pointed out that we could bring the gun back to Vermont the next time we went there for a weekend, or maybe Nora and Em would want it. Em had liked shooting the .357 Magnum. It had a short barrel, but it wasn’t a little gun—not from a shooter’s perspective.

“That sucker packs a wallop,” was all Molly said about it.

I wasn’t that surprised the snowshoer wanted to keep the gun, but I thought she was funny about it. “I don’t want to know where it is, but I also don’t want it to surprise me if I just happen on it,” she told me. When the little Barlows were around, I was instructed to “take pains” to keep the gun hidden from them, too.

“Your parents don’t like guns?” I asked the snowshoer.

“My parents love guns, but they’re thriller writers—they’re drawn to disasters,” the little English teacher told me.

We should have hidden our cross-country skis from the little Barlows. They were hurt to see the skis in the front-hall closet of their Upper East Side apartment. Like my mother, the writing team was angry that we went skiing on Park Avenue when we wouldn’t ski with them—in the Alps.

The pains I took to hide the gun were not very creative. I wrapped it in a pair of underpants I didn’t like, in the bottom of my underwear-and-socks drawer. I put the bullets in a pair of athletic socks; they were big bullets for such a small-looking gun. Of course I concealed the socks with the ammo under other pairs. This was not a novel idea. It was what my mom did with the bullets she’d snuck into the snowshoer’s backpack—she put them in a pair of socks.

All this had happened when Eric and Charlie and Dr. Dave were dying and when God knows what Dave’s parents were up to, or their Russian driver. Nora and Em ended up taking two guns from Henrik’s stash. Contradicting herself, Nora slipped a double-barreled, twelve-gauge shotgun into a ski bag, carrying it over her shoulder from her parking garage to her apartment. Em had chosen her own handgun—one she’d used at the quarry. “Em wanted the Colt,” Nora said to Mr. Barlow and me. Em’s gun was a .357 Magnum—“a different kind than you have,” Nora told us. Em’s pantomime was startling to the snowshoer and me; Em seemed to be saying that her penis was bigger than both of our penises, together. “She means her barrel—the barrel of Em’s gun is twice as long as your barrel,” Nora explained.

The snowshoer and I had been waiting for the next time it snowed all night in New York City. And when it did, Elliot Barlow and I had a plan. We were New Englanders—we knew what to wear for snow. We wore our winter hiking boots to the Gallows Lounge. We wore our snowshoeing clothes, the layers and layers. We had extra gloves and ski hats in our backpacks—rain gear, if the snow turned to sleet, extra socks and warmer clothes, if it turned cold. I’d put a second pair of hiking boots in my backpack. “Overkill, Adam—you’ll regret carrying the extra weight,” the snowshoer had said, but we were proud of ourselves. New Yorkers were lost souls in a snowstorm; New Englanders were prepared. We’d planned a late-night hike home from the Gallows—from the West Village to East Sixty-fourth Street. We knew some New Yorkers who would think this was a long way to trek through the snow, but we were snowshoers—the walk from the West Village was just a warm-up for us. When we got to East Sixty-fourth Street, we would put on our ski boots and grab our ski poles and our cross-country skis. Still later that night, we thought they would be closing Park Avenue to traffic; from the forecast of the snowstorm, it sounded like a skiing-on-Park-Avenue night to the snowshoer and me.

We were not prepared to have Damaged Don with us. Nora used to say that having Don with you was “like going to a brothel with a child.” I never knew what Nora meant, but we knew we were supposed to protect Damaged Don. What eluded us was what to protect him from, and exactly how. Don was well-meaning, good-hearted, and kind, but he had no talent as a singer-songwriter, and he was a sad sack onstage—Don was a doom-and-gloom guy. You could see it in the faces in the audience at the Gallows—those poor people who were hearing Damaged Don sing for the first time, the ones who hadn’t run to the washrooms. You could not prepare yourself for the overwhelming sadness, or the way Don droned. “In a comedy club, you need some sorrow relief,” Nora used to say—in Don’s defense—but she’d stopped saying it. “Maybe not that sorrowful,” Nora later said.

Don was always getting evicted from his apartment; it didn’t matter where he moved. The last time he was homeless, he’d crashed on Nora and Em’s couch. Nora nearly suffocated him with a sofa cushion—Don had been singing in his sleep. “The same old song,” was all Nora said, but it could have been fragments from a song Don was writing. The way Don sang, even in his sleep, his new songs sounded like the same old song. It was always Don’s neighbors who got him evicted; Don was up all night writing and singing when he wasn’t singing in his sleep. Now that Nora and Em were heavily armed, it was out of the question that Damaged Don could stay with them. In the dead of night, Don’s plaintive yowls might have been mistaken for the confessions of Em’s father to the unresponsive Cardinal O’Connor. In the dead of night, it wouldn’t have been safe for Em’s homo-hating dad or for Cardinal O’Connor—to be wandering around, lamenting, in Nora and Em’s apartment. Nora and Em despised conversion therapy; they would have blasted away at either one of the Catholics. Damaged Don was an all-night moaner. In the dead of night, it wouldn’t have been safe for Don to sing at Nora and Em’s.

That snowy night in New York, the snowshoer and I knew we were stuck with the Damaged Man—Don had nowhere to go after he’d performed. There were dressing rooms backstage at the Gallows, but it was a challenge to dress Don for the snowstorm. He’d brought his few clothes to the Gallows. The clothes, the songs he was writing, his guitar—that’s all he owned. “Doesn’t it snow in Montana—where are your winter clothes?” Mr. Barlow asked Don.

“I hate the snow—I left my winter clothes in Great Falls,” Damaged Don said. It sounded like a line from one of his songs, dismal and lacking foresight. We had winter wear in our backpacks, but most of Elliot Barlow’s stuff was too small for Don. For a first layer, we crammed Don into the snowshoer’s turtleneck, though this seemed to compromise the singer-songwriter’s circulation. Don complained that he couldn’t straighten his toes in the snowshoer’s socks, but my second pair of hiking boots would have been too big for Don—if we hadn’t doubled up on the socks. We doubled up on the ski hats, too, though Don said he couldn’t feel his ears—whatever that meant. Don definitely couldn’t hear.

The snowshoer and I had enough room in our backpacks for Don’s meager assortment of clothes. Don didn’t have a suitcase, not even a backpack, and he wouldn’t leave his guitar at the Gallows—not even overnight. There was a case for the guitar, with backpack straps, but it would be cumbersome to carry in the snow. The songs Don was writing went in the guitar case.

“You can lock it in a dressing room, Don—no one at the Gallows is going to steal your guitar or your writing,” the snowshoer told him.

“What?” Don shouted. It was pointless to shout back at him. “My writin’ and my guitar go with me, every night—even if it’s the night I’m dyin’,” Damaged Don shouted. Definitely, the same old song. Of course the Damaged Man was shouting, or he couldn’t have heard himself. Dressed for the snowstorm, with his guitar and his writing on his back, Don looked like a doomed clown. We tried to make the two ski hats look less clownish and not crush his ears, but Don’s hearing was completely impaired and he looked no less doomed.

Like the New Englanders we were, the snowshoer and I felt superior to the New York taxi drivers in the snow. Many of the cabs didn’t have proper snow tires, and a lot of the cabbies didn’t know how to drive in the snow. The subways and the buses were a mess from everyone’s wet shoes and boots. But we must have been crazy to imagine Damaged Don could make it even a third of the way up Seventh Avenue in the snow. Don didn’t run; he didn’t walk anywhere, not even when it wasn’t snowing. It didn’t matter that the snow was just starting to accumulate when we left the Gallows Lounge. There were only a couple of inches on the sidewalk, but the Damaged Man was slipping and sliding from the get-go. We’d trekked up Seventh Avenue only as far as West Eleventh Street and Greenwich Avenue—we were still in the West Village. Don was already winded, having inhaled the snow as he sang.

“You can’t prepare for everything, Adam,” the snowshoer said, as we were leaving the Gallows and Don had already started to sing.

Don will die before we’re halfway home, I was thinking. “You don’t want to wake up with Maureen,” Don was singing when we began trekking. We will all be killed, if Damaged Don starts singing on a bus or in a subway, I thought. “Your worst nightmare is knowin’ Louise,” Don was singing, when he started to cough.

Then something else we couldn’t have prepared for happened. We’d stopped on Seventh Avenue, just to give the Damaged Man a breather. We were standing outside that last stop of a hospital, St. Vincent’s, when the snowshoer started to sob. Don probably thought it was his song. Don didn’t know where he was; he’d never been in St. Vincent’s. Don didn’t know that Mr. Barlow felt guilty for not going inside. If someone the snowshoer knew wasn’t dying at St. Vincent’s, Mr. Barlow worried there was someone inside she hadn’t known was sick. Once or twice, in St. Vincent’s, the snowshoer had spotted someone she hadn’t known was gay.

Damaged Don wasn’t gay. Don was no homophobe; he was a sweet man—he often didn’t know who was gay or straight. Don didn’t care what you were; he probably had a few gay friends he didn’t know had died. While the snowshoer sobbed, Don just kept singing. He was singing lines from “It Never Gets Better with Gwen”—a song was all Don knew how to do, even in the snow. “She’ll run over your kids and fuck your best friend!” Don sang, while the snow kept coming down and Don kept coughing. I sometimes wonder if we would all still be standing there—if time would have stopped—if Damaged Don had just kept singing, but the Damaged Man suddenly stopped. “No, it never gets better with Gwen,” he’d been repeating, in his customary moan—made worse by his respiratory distress. Between the nonstop singing and the coughing, Don had inhaled and swallowed a lot of snow, and we’d been walking only for a few minutes.

The broad-shouldered Russian woman wore a mannish black suit with a white dress shirt and a black scarf, instead of a necktie. For the winter storm, she’d donned a black overcoat with a fur collar, but the chauffeur’s cap didn’t cover her ears. She appeared impervious to the snow and the cold; the stiff brim of the soldierly cap gave her a military resolve. She stood like a sentinel on guard, on the corner of Seventh Avenue and West Eleventh Street. Her blonde ponytail notwithstanding, she struck me as a Nora type. Despite her masculine attire and military bearing she wouldn’t usually be mistaken for a man. Even in the overcoat, the prow of her bosom preceded her—as surely as a ship’s bow above water. It was unusual to see the sturdy chauffeur standing closer to the hospital buildings than where she’d parked the limo. We’d heard that Dave’s parents had stopped visiting other AIDS patients; we knew the Russian driver wasn’t waiting for Dave’s parents anymore. Yet the way the imposing woman stood sentinel, she looked like she was keeping watch for someone. Her commanding presence made the snowshoer stop sobbing. The big Russian woman had seized Damaged Don’s attention, too.

Don was always seeing prostitutes who weren’t prostitutes. The Damaged Man would try to save them from themselves, which was always misunderstood. Surely the Russian limo driver was too respectfully dressed for a streetwalker, I was thinking; this wasn’t my part of town, but I’d not noticed any streetwalkers outside St. Vincent’s before. “She’s not a streetwalker, Don,” Mr. Barlow told the Damaged Man, but Don was as good as deaf in the two ski hats. Don resumed singing; he’d already made up his mind about the big woman on the corner of Seventh Avenue and West Eleventh Street.

“She’s one of those militant hookers I’ve been hearing about—she’s into tyin’ you up and causin’ you pain,” Don interrupted his song to confide to Elliot Barlow and me, in a raspy voice. “She shouldn’t be standin’ out in the snow—that’s just so sad!” Don struggled to say, between coughs. He was shivering, his teeth were chattering, he could barely talk, but he couldn’t stop singing.

The limo driver had heard Don’s song and his cough, and she recognized the little English teacher and me—even in our snowshoeing clothes. “Well, look at you two—you look like a couple Russians tonight,” she told us. The way she’d said Russians didn’t sound entirely complimentary. “The poor choirboy shouldn’t be out in this weather,” the Russian chauffeur said. “Don’t bring this poor boy here to die—he’ll be better off dying at home,” she told us.

We knew this had been Dave’s parents’ theme, but Mr. Barlow and I just looked at each other. We knew it was beyond us; we had no hope of sorting out the misunderstandings between Dave’s parents’ driver and the Damaged Man. Don thought she was a militant hooker, into bondage and whips, or worse—this sounded like a Damaged Don song. The limo driver thought Don was a dying AIDS patient, who should go back home to die, instead of dying at St. Vincent’s—all because of Don’s cough and the lamentation of the song she’d heard him singing. “You were singing, weren’t you?” the chauffeur asked Don, but he hadn’t heard her—not with the two ski hats.

“I should go home, to Montana—I should just go back to Great Falls,” Don told us, as if he’d suddenly decided to go home to die, although he’d not heard what the driver said.

The snowshoer took off Don’s two hats. “Going back to Great Falls is one option, Don, but not tonight—tonight you should stay with Adam and me,” Elliot Barlow said. There was more confusion caused because the snowshoer had first met the driver when the little English teacher had been dating Dave. “That was when I was a man,” the pretty Mr. Barlow had to explain. That Dave’s parents’ driver wasn’t a prostitute had to be explained to Don; that Damaged Don was a singer-songwriter, who was not dying of AIDS, had to be explained to the Russian chauffeur.

Her name was Zasha, she told us. “Like Sasha, it’s short for Alexander or Alexandra—it means ‘defender of the people.’ Not an easy name to live up to,” Zasha said. The big woman was of indeterminate age. She seemed younger than Dr. Dave had been when he died, but Zasha spoke of him as if she’d known him as a child. She was paid a generous retainer by Dave’s parents; Zasha had her own bedroom and bathroom in their apartment. “I’m not only their driver—I’m more like the family servant,” Zasha wanted us to know. When we asked her how Dave’s parents were doing, and why the family servant was hanging around St. Vincent’s in the dead of night, Zasha told us how she was trying to live up to her name. “The people who leave St. Vincent’s late at night really need a ride,” was the way she put it. Like a genuine defender of the people, it didn’t matter to Zasha if her passengers could pay her or not. “Some riders overpay me—the ones with nothing pay nothing,” Zasha said, shrugging her big shoulders.

The Damaged Man, hatless and shaking with cold, had clearly heard what the Russian woman said, but from Don’s awed or stricken expression, he might have imagined that only the most militant prostitutes referred to their clients as riders—the snowshoer and I hoped not. We were getting Don a ride with Zasha; that’s all we knew.

I was overthinking how Zasha or Sasha could be a kind of nickname for both Alexander and Alexandra; I should have left the subject of Russian names alone.

“It’s a gender-neutral name, Adam,” the little English teacher told me.

“I’m not gender-neutral—I’m a girl,” Zasha told us; she wanted us to know there was no funny business about her. She’d accepted the pretty Mr. Barlow as a woman, but the snowshoer should have left the subject of Russian literature alone.

“Take Gogol’s barbed satire, or Chekhov’s portrayals of upper-class sadness,” Mr. Barlow began.

“I’m not really Russian,” Zasha said. “My parents came from Russia, but I was born and grew up in Brooklyn. I’ve never been in Russia,” she wanted us to know, but I knew there was no stopping the snowshoer now.

“Take Tolstoy—think of poor Pierre in War and Peace,” Elliot Barlow persevered. “Pierre tries to liberate his serfs; he only manages to make their lives worse.”

“It wasn’t that bad in Brighton Beach, but some of my Jewish friends had a hard time everywhere else, and there was a Ukrainian girl in my grade in school—her name was Bogdana, which means ‘gift from God.’ Talk about a hard name to live up to—poor Bogdana wasn’t God’s gift to anybody,” Zasha wanted us to know.

“Think of Dostoyevsky’s approach to human suffering—the moral problems imposed by politics and religion,” the little English teacher lectured to us. For some reason, Elliot Barlow wanted Zasha to know there was little joy in Russian literature. It would later emerge that the snowshoer saw Zasha as a somber character in a Russian novel—“grave but brave,” Mr. Barlow called her. The snowshoer saw Zasha as a noble servant, loyally performing her duties to a couple of doomed aristocrats. Dr. Dave’s parents were suicidal, Zasha told us.

“They’re going to kill themselves—they just need to work up to it, but they’ll get there,” Zasha said. “There’s a gas stove—I’m always sniffing around for gas—but it’s easier to take pills,” Dave’s family servant told us. “They never leave the apartment. I do all their shopping. Their pharmacy delivers. Their only kid died in a plague—I would kill myself, in their situation,” Zasha said. Either Damaged Don reacted strangely to the word plague, or he dropped to his knees in the snow for no reason. “Speaking of human suffering, we should put this poor guy in the car—the car is running and the heat is on,” the limo driver told us. “I’m an American—I’ve never read a Russian novel,” Zasha wanted the snowshoer to know.

“Start with Turgenev,” the little English teacher told her. The Damaged Man stopped singing when we lifted him off his knees.

“I’m writin’ a plague song,” Don said to Zasha. Elliot and I had heard about Don’s plague song. He’d been writing it since the start of the AIDS epidemic; it was still the 1980s, and AIDS had a ways to go. We didn’t know what was holding up Don’s plague song, but we weren’t eager for Don to finish writing it; we were hoping we would never have to hear it.

“I hope you’ll sing one of your songs to me,” Zasha said to Don, as we followed the limo driver to the car. The snowshoer had put just one of the ski hats back on the Damaged Man. Don didn’t have a lot of walking to do; he wouldn’t need two ski hats. The keys to the little Barlows’ apartment—not to mention the little English teacher’s written instructions regarding which key opened which door—were in Don’s guitar case. If you wanted anything to be safe in Don’s hands, you had to put it with his guitar and his songwriting. Naturally, we’d taken Zasha aside just to be sure she understood where she was taking Don. Zasha looked like a contemporary character in a New York novel, I was thinking; there was nothing recognizably Russian, or of the nineteenth century, about her. Of course I said nothing, not wanting to provoke the pretty Mr. Barlow’s passion for the gloom in Russian literature.

“I met Fuzzy Ouilette in a bar,” Don began to sing, as he and Dave’s faithful family servant got in the limo. “He’d lost his last job, his wife just left him, his dog had been killed by a car!” Don sang.

“Sounds like Coney Island!” Zasha exclaimed.

“Poor Fuzzy had no lucky star,” the Damaged Man kept singing. “No, Fuzzy had no lucky star.”

It was hard to reconcile the high hopes Mr. Barlow and I had for a snowy night in New York with everything else that was happening. “Do you think Don will be safer in Great Falls?” I asked the snowshoer, as we were trekking uptown through the snow on Seventh Avenue. Given our ski hats, and the way the snow was coming down, I thought the little English teacher hadn’t heard me.

We were almost at West Fifty-seventh Street—we were passing Carnegie Hall—when Elliot answered my question. I could tell she’d been thinking about it. “Don is a danger to himself in New York, but someone might shoot him in Montana,” the snowshoer said. That was all she said, the whole way. We were a couple of New Englanders, trekking in new snow; we weren’t out for a stroll and a conversation. Mr. Barlow had insisted that we not cross Park Avenue “too soon”; she wanted to put off finding out if it was a ski night, or it wasn’t. I think the snowshoer didn’t want to be disappointed until the last possible minute. We walked all the way to Central Park South before turning east. It was beautiful walking alongside the park in the falling snow; keeping the park on our left, we headed north on Fifth Avenue. We could have been trekking north on Park Avenue, I was thinking; we could have seen for ourselves if there were skiers on the avenue, or not. Mr. Barlow was just stalling, I knew.

We were on Park Avenue for only one block; then we turned east once more, on East Sixty-fourth. They’d not yet closed Park Avenue to traffic, whether they were going to or not. “We’re not real New Yorkers, and we never will be—we not only don’t know the rules for when there’s skiing on Park Avenue, we don’t even know who to ask,” the snowshoer said. Our not being real New Yorkers was a theme with her. She was a trans woman. What I was afraid of, for her, was that she would be an outsider anywhere—while she blamed herself for not knowing there were Russians in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

There were a multitude of doormen on Park Avenue, I was thinking; a long-standing doorman must know what rules applied to closing Park Avenue to traffic when it snowed. That snowy night, we weren’t on Park Avenue long enough to ask a doorman—we didn’t actually see a doorman standing out in the storm. What we did see was a skier carrying his skis and poles on one shoulder; he was coming toward us on East Sixty-fourth, between Lexington and Third, the little Barlows’ block. Unfortunately, the skier wasn’t a real New Yorker—he was from Minnesota, as much in the dark as we were.

“Maybe they only close Park Avenue if it’s snowing on a Sunday night,” the skier said. None of us could remember if the last time we’d skied on Park Avenue had been a Sunday. That it was late at night, and there was more than enough snow to ski on—these were not hopeful signs. We sensed we weren’t going skiing.

“We’re too out of it to live in New York,” the snowshoer was saying when we got to the apartment, which was unlocked. Damaged Don had let himself in, and he’d turned on all the lights, but Don hadn’t relocked the door. Two out of three wasn’t bad for the Damaged Man, I was thinking—three out of four, if you counted Don’s daring to ride with a militant prostitute. “Maybe we should go to Great Falls with Don—maybe we wouldn’t be so out of it in Montana,” the snowshoer was saying, but Don’s singing in the shower discouraged us.

“Don’t give Ronald Reagan eight years,” Don sang. “He talks tough to commies, he kills all the gay boys, but that does fuck-all for our fears! Please don’t give the Gipper eight years. No, don’t give the Gipper eight years.”

It was Don’s plague song, clearly. Notwithstanding the importance of the plague, there was no discernible difference in Don’s cadence or tone—his plague song was as doleful and morbid as any Damaged Don song. In the shower, the Damaged Man sang like a drowning man, yet Elliot and I were relieved to hear him keep repeating the same verse. It seemed there was only one verse to Don’s plague song, so far. But later that night, when Don was singing in his sleep, the snowshoer and I were awakened by a different verse. It sounded like a last verse to us, but how would you know with Don? How could we have slept through the middle of a plague song? We could only hope the Damaged Man hadn’t written the middle; we hoped his plague song would forever be in progress. In his sleep, Don still sang like a drowning man.

It’s time to head back to

Great Falls.

I’m lackin’ the talent,

I can’t stand the sadness,

I don’t have big enough balls!

It’s time to head back to

Great Falls.

I’m just goin’ back to

Great Falls.

They would give the Gipper eight years. There were only two verses to Don’s plague song, which we’d heard Don sing in the little Barlows’ apartment. “Goin’ Back to Great Falls,” the Damaged Man would call his last song. When we first heard it on the radio, the censors had bleeped out the balls and the fuck-all. “Less bad ain’t better,” as Don used to say. There was no bleeping out Ronald Reagan, who would be reelected in a landslide—naturally, the right-wing radio stations wouldn’t play “Goin’ Back to Great Falls,” not at all.

Don would be killed in Montana. He’d been playing with a band in Bozeman, but the band was based in Missoula; the details weren’t clear, not at all. They were a couple of college towns; Don had been playing with college kids. That was all Nora knew about the band. Someone shot Damaged Don in a parking lot, after he’d been singing “Goin’ Back to Great Falls.” This was after Reagan’s reelection, when the gay boys Don had been singing about were still getting killed.

After Don was killed, there were sympathetic DJs who played “Goin’ Back to Great Falls” as a protest song. There was a resurgence of the Damaged Man on the airwaves—of “It Never Gets Better with Gwen” and “No Lucky Star,” and the rest.

For as long as Ronald Reagan was in office, Nora closed out every performance of Two Dykes, One Who Talks with a Damaged Don song. “I can’t sing, but neither could Don,” Nora always said, bringing tears to the eyes of the veteran patrons of the Gallows Lounge—even before she started singing. Em would just hug her, crying, while Nora sang.

In the Reagan years, when Em and I wrote each other about our writing, we always asked how the plague song was going.