Page 88 of Like a Love Story
“What about your new best friend Annabel?” I ask, instantly regretting the snide tone.
“She’s cooler than you think,” she says, defensive. “Still, I haven’t known her as long as you. It’s not the same, you know.”
“Yeah, I know,” I say.
“Anyway, please tell no one. Especially not Reza. I don’t want it to be awkward for him.”
“Okay,” I say, nodding.
“I think I’ve earned the right to have a few secrets of my own,” she says, pointedly.
I put up my hands. “You have absolutely earned that right.”
I realize this is it. We’re friends again. We tell each other secrets once more. We trust each other. It’ll never be me and her against the world the way it used to be. Too much has happened. I have a boyfriend now. And she has her girlfriends. But me and her, we’re good again. We’re us again.
“It’s not always gonna be easy, is it?” she asks.
“What?” I ask.
“Us,” she says. “Friendship.”
“It’s like what Stephen said about Joan Crawford in his notecard,” I say. “That she was like Sisyphus pushing that boulder up a hill, except what she was pushing was the idea of ‘Joan Crawford.’”
“I’m not sure I follow,” she says.
“She survived—that’s the whole point of her. Nothing came easy to her. You could always see her working for everything she had. And every time they tried to kill her, she came back. I guess what I’m saying is that... easy is overrated. We’ll put the work in, and we’ll survive.”
Judy laughs. She can’t stop.
“What’s so funny?” I ask.
“It’s just...” But she still can’t stop the laughter. Finally, she catches her breath. “You’ve literally turned into Stephen,” she says. “You used Joan Crawford’s career as a metaphor for the survival of our friendship.”
“If the shoe fits,” I say. “We had our flapper phase and our MGM glory years. We just survived our box office poison days, and we’re about to get signed to Warner Brothers. Watch out, ’cause there’s an Oscar and a troglodyte in our future.”
“I’m ready for it all,” she says. “Bring on the trogs.”
Now I laugh too. We laugh together. We laugh for the rest of the hour, and when our time together is up, we meet the others in the lobby as planned. Jimmy has been working with an affinity group that’s planning onsetting off multicolored military smoke grenades outside the NIH. As we all walk together, Jimmy explains this element of the action to us. “The whole idea is to get on the cover of the newspapers. See, a lot of papers are printing their front pages in color now. The rest is still black and white, but the front pages, those are bright and colorful. This affinity group had an ingenious idea. Basically, give the papers a color image that they cannot say no to. Rainbow smoke bombs outside the NIH.”
“But is it safe?” Mrs. Bowman asks. “Because this movement is about saving lives, not hurting people, right?”
“No one will get hurt,” Jimmy says. “It’s totally safe. It’ll just be beautiful and cinematic.”
“Leave it to fags to turn protest into installation art,” I say. Mrs. Bowman shoots me a look of death, and I correct myself. “Sorry. Leave it tohomosexualsto turn protest into installation art.”
“Where does one buy multicolored grenades?” Judy asks.
“Soldier of Fortunemagazine,” Jimmy says. “You can find anything in the back of a magazine these days.”
“Wow,” Reza says. “I guess you really can buy everything in America.”
“Except life-saving medication,” Jimmy says. “That’s either too expensive or not approved yet.”
No one says much after that. A somber silence hovers around us, like Stephen is walking by our side. I canalmost feel him, smell him, hear him. And then I imagine José walking next to him, and Walt walking next to Jimmy. And James Baldwin leading us, and Michelangelo, and Oscar Wilde, and Judy Garland. They’re all walking with us. When we arrive at the protest, one of Jimmy’s friends tells us that over one thousand people showed up. “It’s incredible,” the activist says. “This turnout will show them how much we care.” I want to tell him that even more people are here than he thinks, because there are spirits protesting alongside us.
Jimmy and the members of the affinity group run toward the entrance of the NIH, holding long poles, and then they ignite the grenades. I’m so mesmerized for a moment that I forget to raise my camera up and take pictures. That’s how beautiful it is, how powerful. We have taken grenades, symbols of destruction, and turned them into symbols of love, of color, of hope.
And then, CHAOS.
