Page 67 of Like a Love Story
My eyes open at a piercing, awful sound. I see whistles being distributed to everyone by the facilitators.
“Attacks against gay men are increasing,” Jimmy says. “And we need to protect each other.”
The whistles are meant to be worn around our necks, to be used in case of emergency. Is it not bad enough that our bodies are being attacked from the inside? Do they need to be attacked from the outside too?
Art places a whistle around my neck and whispers in my ear. “Do you, Reza, accept this whistle?”
“I do,” I say, giggling.
He looks at me with expectation. I place a whistle around his neck and whisper, “Do you, Art, accept this whistle?”
“I do,” he says. “I do and I do and I do and I do.”
“You do?” I ask.
He laughs. Then, his face suddenly serious, he says, “And don’t worry, if anyone tries to hurt you, I’ll kick their ass so hard, they’ll think they were hit by a tornado.”
“Like the storm that takes Dorothy to Oz?” I ask.
“Exactly like that,” he says.
Art is my tornado. He came into my life like a cyclone, and ever since, I have been in my own version of Oz. My life was once sepia toned, one color, bland. Now it is a rainbow world of excitement and anticipation.
He stares at me for a long time, and then, when itseems we can’t look at each other any longer, he leans in and licks my lips and smiles.
When the meeting ends, people don’t leave. They cluster. They talk. They make plans. They trade numbers. They go to the fund-raising table to buy mugs and pins and T-shirts. Art wants to buy me something. He chooses a black T-shirt with a Keith Haring image on it, the words IGNORANCE = FEAR above the image and the words SILENCE = DEATH under it.
“Try it on,” he says.
“Here?” I ask.
“No one cares. And I want to see you without a shirt on.”
I take my T-shirt off and throw the Keith Haring shirt on. Art points his camera at me.
We saw Keith Haring at a meeting in January. Art worshipped him. After the meeting, Art told Keith how much he had inspired him, and Keith smiled shyly and thanked Art. A month later, he was dead.
Art snaps a photo of me in the Keith Haring T-shirt, and then he pays for two of them. One for himself, and one for me. “Why Keith Haring?” he asks, shaking his head. “Why isn’t this disease killing assholes instead of artists? God doesn’t deserve him.”
He takes his T-shirt off before putting the new one on. Time stops when I see that jolt of skin. So much skin. I inhale it all, every beauty mark, every hair on his body, the contours of his torso and his shoulders and his nipples. And then time starts again when he putsthe new T-shirt on and throws our old T-shirts into his book bag.
We have the same T-shirt on now, the same whistle around our necks. We are becoming one, or perhaps I am becoming him. I long to be him, to escape myself and crawl into the safety of his skin. The clink-clink of his camera against the whistle sounds like a metronome and reminds me how different we are. He is an artist. He has a voice. I am still finding mine. The whistles also remind me of those fish pins Judy and I wore, and how much it bothered Art. Judy has not spoken to me for months. She hates me, and with reason. I miss her. She was my friend. The only one I have ever had.
We walk with Stephen and Jimmy after the meeting. They have begun spending all their time together. They are not a couple in the romantic sense, but they have become companions to each other. They hold hands. Art tries to hold my hand, but I pull away. We could run into my mother. We could run into Darryl Lorde. We could be seen. I sometimes have moments when I look at my life from above and wonder how I arrived here. This is one of those moments. Who is this Iranian kid in a Keith Haring T-shirt holding the hand of a boy with rainbow nails and a ponytail walking next to two men on the verge of death? Is it me? When did I become this person? When did I become so... lucky?
“I need to run into the drugstore,” Jimmy says.
“Our second home,” Stephen jokes.
We follow Jimmy into Duane Reade, and he headstoward the pharmacy counter to pick up a prescription.
We linger in one of the aisles with Stephen. Condoms line the shelves. Regular and jumbo. Ribbed. Yellow boxes. Black boxes. Latex and nonlatex. Flavors.Flavors?
“I think I’ll wait outside,” I say. “I hate air-conditioning.”
“Reza,” Stephen says, “if there’s something you want to ask me about, you know, sex...”
“I am okay,” I say.
