Page 106 of The River Is Waiting

“You were around back in 1918? Jesus, you’re even older than I thought.”

“Not funny,” he says. “I’m talking about HIV.”

For all his gabbing about everything else, Manny’s never said much about his life during the AIDS crisis and I’ve never asked. But now I want to know.

He says he was seventeen, a busboy at a pizzeria, when he began having sex with a closeted assistant manager at a Sherwin-Williams store in the same plaza. “Billy was thirty-one and he had his own apartment. My pop kept threatening to kick me out for being a ‘homo,’ so I told him I’d save him the trouble and moved in with Billy.

“He was sweet to me and he didn’t charge me for rent or food and beer, but he started saying how he loved me and how I was his boyfriend, and it kind of freaked me out. I was young and horny and more into dancing, drugs, and the pickup sex available at the clubs. I was basically just using Billy. He’d go clubbing with me sometimes, but he didn’t like the way I’d go off with other boys. And I didn’t like him telling me what I should and shouldn’t be doing. We broke up at about the time HIV started being a thing on the news. Reminds me of what’s happening now with Covid: older people waking up to how scary it might get and younger ones thinking keep the party going because nothing’s going to happen to them.”

Tears are welling in his eyes. He folds his arms across his chest and looks out the back window. I can tell his memories are hitting him hard.

“I was young, you know? So I figured I was immortal. This ‘gay disease’ I kept trying not to hear about was affecting older queers. Wear a condom? No thanks. That would be like eating a candy bar with the wrapper still on. Me and my fake ID were looking for pleasure, so safety could go fuck itself.

He grabs some toilet paper and wipes his eyes, blows his nose.

“This one guy, Hamish, who used to make the rounds at the clubs? Midtwenties, built like a god. Everyone wanted to fuck Hamish. Then he kind of dropped out of the scene. But one night while I was delivering pizzas, I passed him on the street and got a reality check about what AIDS could do to a person. He had these purple blotches on his neck and he’d lost maybe fifty pounds. The virus had turned him from a god to a walking skeleton. That scared me enough to start being more careful. Getting tested, making sure I had Trojans on me. I’d still take risks once in a while, but for the most part, I got way more cautious. And then I started having to go to the funerals—guys who were maybe four or five years older than me.

“But to this day, Corby, it doesn’t make sense that Billy became infected and I didn’t. I had heard he was sick, but when he started calling and leaving messages, I wouldn’t call him back. The last time he tried to get ahold of me, I answered thinking it was someone else. He said he was in the hospital with pneumonia. He told me in this whispery voice that he was scared. Could I come see him, sit with him, and maybe just hold his hand? There was still a lot of confusion about how, besides sex, you could catch it. I promised him I’d come, but I didn’t. And then he died. And to this day, I haven’t forgiven myself for that. And for surviving whenIwas the one who should have died, not Billy. I don’t know. Maybe I loved him, too, in a way or maybe I didn’t. But he was the closest I ever got to a guy I was fucking loving me.”

I don’t say anything for a while. Can’t think of what Icouldsay.

He turns off the TV and says he’s scared that this new virus is going to spread like HIV. “If it comes here, we’ll be sitting ducks the way they pack us in. I don’t think I can go through it again.”

I thank him for telling me about Billy. “Thanks for listening,” he says. He climbs up to his bunk. Neither of us says anything more.

On evening break, I go down to the phones, intending to call Mom. Instead, I push the buttons for Emily’s number. She picks up on the third ring. I wait out the recorded spiel about where the call originates from and blah blah blah. If she hits “1” and decides to talk to me, I have a chance that she might listen to my explanation.

“Hello, Corby,” she says.

“Oh, hey. Thanks for taking the call. I wasn’t sure you would.”

“I only picked up because I need to tell you something. I’m through. I can’t do this anymore. Don’t call here again.”

“Yeah, but if you’ll just let me explain, I think I can—”

“You can what? Give me more excuses? Tell me more lies? I mean it, Corby. I’m done. If you call me again, I’ll change my number.”

“Listen, you can’t just cut me off. She’s my daughter.”

“And he was my son, you bastard! You killed my son!”

Click.

What she’s just said and the way she said it—the hatred in her voice—knocks the wind out of me. Her inability to forgive me has always been there, under the surface, since the day he died. And now she thinks I didn’t get out because I’m using again. I put my hand out and grab the wall to regain my balance. My other hand’s still clutching the receiver. “Hey, dude, you through yet? Someone else might want to make a call, too.” I turn and face a new arrival on the tier, an acne-scarred punk who’s begging for an attitude adjustment. I’m tempted to smash the receiver against his pockmarked face. Instead, I slam the phone back on its cradle. “It’s all yours, loser,” I tell him.

As I walk away, he challenges me. “Loser? Why am I a loser?”

“You’re here, aren’t you? We’re all losers here.”

When I get back to our cell, Manny’s asleep. I keep trying tounhear Emily telling me she’s done with me. That she’ll change her number if she has to. Am I going to have to fight her to get visits with my daughter? I will if I have to. If they’ll even grant them to me.

How has everything gone so wrong so quickly? I’m pissed, sure, but more than that, I’m scared. What’s the point of sobriety if this is where you end up?

Lying on my bunk, I keep shifting around because I can’t get comfortable. When I hear the crinkle of paper, I reach down and grab that poem, the one about Bruegel’s painting of Icarus. It didn’t make sense before, but I try reading it again.

“Musée des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

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