It was just a few years after I’d lost my virginity that I met Derek, the boy I came to believe I was destined to be with forever. My first glimpse of him was on stage playing the lead in his high school’s production of Dracula. He was fifteen. We went to see “Rocky Horror” after the show. He still had his Dracula make-up on.
On the third date, his play was over, and he took the shoe polish off his hair. He was blond. I still loved him. I took him for my soulmate—my twin, separated from me in another life. We hung out. We made love wherever we could get away from other people, just like teenagers do: on the back seat of the car, at sleepovers, at friends’ houses when their parents were away…
Weeks went by. He called me at my weekend job at Walgreens to say he loved me. I gave him a video of “Liquid Sky” for Christmas. He gave me jewelry to wear to the clubs. We went to see Ministry and Erasure concerts with our friends. We were the Fag princes of the entire Southwestern-Suburbs-of-Chicago-High-School-Underground. We went to school dances together and made out in front of our teachers. We were legends in high schools we’d never even heard of. Jocks would come up to us in the hall and ask us if we were really queer. Were they horny, angry, violent, or merely curious? I assumed the worst and responded with wit: “What’s the matter, never seen a real man before? There’s only one reason why my sexuality could be of any interest to you, but yours is of absolutely no interest to me.”
Derek was less defensive. He was also less interested in committing himself to just one man. He took the entire football and basketball teams to bed on whatever pretexts they provided, tapping whatever fleeting curiosity had led these straight boys to him by accepting the conditions of their desire. If they wanted a blowjob in a toilet stall, he put out. Derek was not merely attracted to men’s bodies, he loved everything sleazy and two-faced in their wandering, insensitive natures. He opened his asshole to them like Jesus opened his arms to the Disciples. He became their seminal receptacle.
Some would have said he was like the vampire he’d portrayed in the play, but he offered no transformational poison, just his complete, if transitory, adoration. He demanded nothing in return but to be set free when he was ready to go on to another.
And so the monogamous idealism I offered Derek became quickly tedious for him. He wrote me a letter saying his mother had read my Christmas card (“I love you so much, Derek. I will always remain your dear lover and friend, Don…”) and that she’d forbidden him to see or speak to me ever again. Maybe it was better to just break up right there and then to avoid further pain… Of course, the story was all a big lie. I’d suspected as much even then, though I allowed myself to believe my True Lover’s tale to protect myself from deeper anguish.
Derek continued his sexual adventures. I had a few too (see chart page #), but mostly I wallowed in romantic grief over the loss of my one true lover, friend, partner, and brother.
We met again, years after our separation. I wanted him. He admitted to breaking up with me so h could “fool around.” We tried making out again. I felt him resist. We declared ourselves “just friends.”
I tried, nevertheless, to fill the physical space next to him as much as possible, dreaming he would grow tired of his tricks and recognize the inevitability of our partnership. I tried to pet his fuzzy arms, to snuggle up to his warm body, to hold him tightly before he squirmed away.
I watched doped losers parade through his life in motorcycle boots, working their macho personae. They lacked dignity, I thought, with their self-inflicted scars, and I hated every last one of them.
Derek told me that his sister Trish had showed him “Cruising” way back when he’d told her, at the age of 13, that he thought he might be gay. She had wanted to teach him what “those homosexuals” do. He took the lesson quite well, even interpreting his sister’s gesture as a helpful introduction to the construction of his sexual identity. His goal became to integrate himself into the dark, mysterious world of leathery urban men.
Which is not to say that he would have fallen in love with me had he not been given certain images at that crucial stage in his development. It’s entirely possible that he would have been in love with someone else, or with no one at all. But his formation encouraged him to deny even the possibility of any human contact that went beyond the most superficial, fleeting touch.
And so I blamed Derek’s sister, his parents, and the society that created them all for the loss of his love—a love that may have never even existed. I remember his lips against mine—never lingering to feel, just flying open to unleash a greedy, wet tongue. He whipped his cock out of his fly, ready to be done with the whole predictable business as fast as possible. I was to him, what Darren had been to me, only I wasn’t even the first.
I had the impression Derek didn’t enjoy sex at all—with me or with any of his myriad lovers. It was mostly the theatre of sex he enjoyed, along with the scatological ritual of death to which sex formed a brief introduction. He copied his gestures from the films he’d seen, for he was, first and foremost, an actor playing out a role someone else had written to highlight his adorable boyish features.
In his improvisations he alternated between two roles: the tragic heroine of a suburban TV-sitcom and the dark villain everyone loved to hate right up to the violent and abrupt end. He had accepted a path through life that he was sure had been pre-determined for him: “I’m probably not going to live past the age of 25, so I might as well have as much fun as I can now.”
“Fun” meant “going further” than anyone else.
I convinced myself I was the same. I would shock people with my suburban approximation of a mohawk and my violent poems. But for me the theater stopped with make-up and nightclub strobes. At curtain call, I washed, undressed, turned off the lights, and slept off the effects of whatever chemical had helped me perform, waking to a new morning of school and work. Even if I questioned the institutions that were forming me, I understood that I needed to participate in the lessons they offered if I wanted to have certain privileges.
Derek never came to accept that such a compromise was possible. My rebellion was full of artifice, but it was designed with the hope of an eventual, tangible victory. I believed I could, however slightly, change the world. Derek knew he was a dead man and partied on his own burial ground without apology. He discovered SM and drugs. He tried to get as close to death as possible without actually dying—an Evil Knievel of the fist-fucking pit.
Derek told me stories of getting tied up in closets for hours and cut with razors then spanked and fucked and whipped and pissed and shat on. I had absolutely no moral objection. A big yawn surfaces in my throat, even now as I write this, as uncontrollable as a fart.
But it’s hard to almost die so many times without eventually succeeding.
One day, Derek turned to me in his car as we reached a red light. “I know I only do it ’cause I didn’t get enough attention from my parents when I was a kid. I know I’m fucked up. It’s like I’m trying to make up for the kind of discipline they didn’t give me in some father figure or some crap like that. Yeah, I can psychoanalyze myself. But I still love getting fisted…”
Reasons don’t change desires, don’t change parents, don’t change anything. SM was Derek’s religion, his way of accepting that nothing could ever change. It was his way of dealing with the existence of his parents, whom he loved and hated. By accepting the role of base miscreant, they became, in relief, the kind-hearted parents who’d tried everything to save him. Whatever alcohol they drowned themselves in, whatever pills they took to forget that their son was a faggot, were all lost in the dark shadow of his abominable misdeeds.
So many of the scenes Derek acted out could have been written as a parody of his life, yet they were only too real:
He danced with his drunken mother one New Year’s Eve in front of all their relatives to the accompaniment of a pornographic punk poem emanating from his boom box: “You wanna’ fuck my pussy? Well let me suck your dick, bastard, bitch…”
He locked himself out of his car in subzero weather on the side of the expressway when he stopped to take a piss at 2 a.m.
He paraded through suburbia in his big black leather boots, leather harness, and white hair.
He rolled up in his black car on Christmas—industrial music blaring into the carbon-monoxide filtered sunset—to steal Jesuses from neighborhood manger scenes.
However cliché his supposedly erratic behavior may have seemed to me, even then, I remained obsessed and spent way too many years writing Derek poems.
Now just to avoid any useless ambiguity, I need to say it, inevitable though it may seem: Derek contracted HIV. I think he was about 17 when he actually found out. He said it was no big deal, “We all gotta’ die someday…”
I had the feeling that talking about dying—sooner than even he’d imagined—was another scene from a TV drama he’d filed away to improvise upon in his life. He knew he was going to get it, and once he got it, it didn’t change anything about the way he behaved, except possibly to accelerate his entropy. He continued the drugs, the cigarettes, the SM, the pageantry, the role of the evil son.
You couldn’t hold him in your arms to comfort him. You couldn’t say, “I love you” or “I’ll stay by you.” That was “sick”—his disclaimer for anything even vaguely mushy. He told me he was pure evil: “I am definitely closer to the Devil than God. Morality makes me sick.”
I don’t think he even knew what that meant. It was his very belief in morality that gave it such an importance in his life. Talking to him about evil was no different from talking with a bible basher about the heavenly way. Both were beliefs I could never share, dependent upon each other. Had he lived long enough, he would probably have become a fundamentalist Christian.
Derek embraced AIDS activism as a sort of new religion, searching the catharsis of its theater without asking what kind of change it might lead to. He loved dumping fake blood on his head and watching himself on television, without necessarily understanding the reason why the demonstration had been organized in the first place. Which is not to say he weren’t perfectly justified in expressing his anger and emotion. I participated in demos with an only slightly more informed vocabulary, and intentions count for little in the end.
There was nothing new about this tragedy. Each of us had his own rigid role. The only question was how long it would last. It went on for more years than anyone expected, but the years went faster than a teenager could ever have imagined.
There was the intravenous speed period when he thought of killing his parents for their money. Then he got off the drugs only to take their money in smaller installments without having to pull the trigger. He crashed up a half-dozen cars. They bought him out of traffic violations and accidents and lawsuits. They bought him a lineup of new cars. His gums began rotting away from his teeth…
• • •
I was living in New York at the time. One summer, I met my parents in London to go on a tour of Britain and Ireland. We were stuck in a bus with old American and Australian couples for 21 days. In Edinburgh, I snuck out of the hotel to go cruising and picked up a British guy in a leather bar. Malcolm took me back to his place where he showed me pictures of himself in old newspapers. He’d served as one of the Queen’s horsemen. He was renovating a sort of castle, turning it into a hotel. From the tower, he overlooked the poorest outskirts of Edinburgh. We made love there two nights in a row. I told him that his lube was no good because it wasn’t water based. He laughed. I used my emergency pocket pack. He told me about how the Royal Saudi Arabian Army wanted him to direct their military pageants. We exchanged addresses.
A year or so later, back in New York, Malcolm looked me up on a visit. He’d found out he was HIV positive. He was wrecked. He was going to Florida to chill out for a couple of weeks. Derek had just moved to Florida. I gave Derek’s address to Malcolm, sure they’d hit it off. They fell in love. Violently in love. They rolled in each other’s shit and sperm, kissed each other with bleeding gums, swapped virus particles and called themselves “blood-brothers.”
Malcolm went to London to get some paperwork sorted out. He was going to return to Florida just as soon as his visa got cleared. His flight arrived the same night Derek cracked up his last car in a drunken-head on collision. As Malcolm was going through US immigration control (where his HIV status was never questioned in a habitual oversight of the illogical, hypocritical and ineffective US policy regarding HIV positive foreigners), Derek was being scraped off the pavement and flown in a helicopter to the nearest hospital where it was determined he was in critical, near-death condition.
Malcolm called me in New York. “I’m at Derek’s flat, and there’s no one here. Where is he? I’m getting really concerned at this point, Don. I’ve got a bad feeling about this business.” The neighbor let him into Derek’s place. Still no Derek.
Eventually, we got the bad news. Derek was almost dead, and the driver he’d crashed into—a father of three, I think—already was. Malcolm was devastated. He broke up on the phone. He said he needed me down there. Derek needed me too. I was leaving New York in less than ten days on a six-month work visa in London, but I managed to squeeze in a roundtrip flight to Florida, arriving a couple days before Christmas…
It would be the last time I’d ever see either of them. Two of Derek’s friends picked me up. They smoked pot in the car all the way to the hospital. “He’s in bad shape. I don’t know if he’s going to make it.”
At the hospital, Malcolm was hovering over the bedside, giving orders to all the nurses. “Can’t we have a bit of water here? His lips are dry… Thank God you’re here, Don. It’s been horrible. You can’t begin to imagine. I haven’t slept a bit in days, and his parents are beginning to suspect me of being dodgy. It’ll all be better now that you’ve arrived to serve as my witness.”
When Derek, the tube-ridden, plaster-packed, fleshy thing in the bed, managed to stir over the next few days, he wrote me little notes: “I think my parents like Malcolm. I really want to make him happy. Tell them he’s okay.”
So I did. “I’ve been to his château in Edinburgh,” I said, reassuringly.
“But Don, he said he had all his papers stolen in London,” cried his mother. “He said they were in a briefcase, but I just don’t know. Do you think he ever had anything, Don? Do you really think he ever did?”
“He showed me the newspaper clippings with pictures of him riding next to the Queen,” I promised. It was true—he had. “He might exaggerate the importance of some of his accomplishments, and he may be something of a has-been today, but I think that’s because he’s in shock about his own HIV status. Anyway, I think he’s sincere about his feelings for Derek…”
We were in one of those Florida motels with rooms running around the swimming pool, plastic flamingos dotting the green lawn. It was decided that I would sleep in the same room with Malcolm. Derek’s parents were picking up everyone’s tab. It was 3 days to Christmas, and I had to put on sunglasses.
There was a whole entourage of aunts and uncles from the deep South. They spoke of the bible. Their cars had NRA bumper stickers. They glared at me and Malcolm and hugged Derek’s mother as if to protect her from us.
Malcolm cried in huge waves of violent sobs. I held him and let him cry. He said he wouldn’t know what to do if Derek were to die. Malcolm’s own lymph nodes were visibly swollen on either side of his neck. He had the HIV look, all right. How long before he joined the pneumocystis club?
We marched up and down the corridors of the hospital between the cafeteria and Derek’s bed. We went nowhere. Periodically, Derek’s mother would stand up suddenly and scream, “We all know he’s not going to make it! Why are we kidding ourselves!”
All her husband could offer was a gentle pat on the shoulder and: “Relax, Bonnie. Calm down.”
I sat with Derek’s mom by the side of the pool one night and held her hands. I told her that I loved her son and that he was my dearest friend. I explained in whatever clichés I thought might mean something to her that Derek was wonderful in his own way and that he’d added so much to the lives of his friends. She cried and cried. I spewed out a string of clichés—the closest to truths I could come up with in the midst of all this misery. I said I didn’t know why he was the way he was or why he crashed up cars and took drugs. I said, “Maybe he’s the flame that burns twice as bright…”
She just cried harder and offered me sleeping pills. “These will let you sleep, honey.” Her face took on a conspiratorial grin when she talked about drugs and liquor. “They’re good.”
I knew I’d lied to her by trying to sort some meaning out of the chaos of Derek’s imminent death, but it seemed like the right thing to do. I figured she needed some reassuring if she was going to make it through all this shit and help Derek recover, if only temporarily. I felt her mother’s pain for a dying son, and I wanted to ease whatever pain I could.
And sure, I also wanted to guarantee my place in the family, thereby assuring my bedside rights. There was a touch of politics too: I wanted to be sure she always remembered that Derek’s gay friends had been there in the end to help not only him, but his whole family.
But when I told her that maybe she could take some of her pain and use it to help other mothers who might suffer later on as she had suffered, she cried, “I’m not that strong, Don!”
The next day, we were packed into the family car: the parents, the sister, Malcolm, and me. She told her husband, “Pull over to this pharmacy, Gary, I wanna’ get some nail polish remover. I can’t stand this color of nail polish any more.”
“Bonnie, the nail polish is fine.”
“Gary, I said I can’t stand it another minute, now pull over and get me my nail polish remover.”
“Bonnie, your son is in the hospital, and no one gives a damn about your goddamn nail polish.”
“GARY, PULL OVER THE GODDAMN CAR AND GET ME MY NAIL POLISH REMOVER!”
He pulled into the strip mall and she went in. We waited in the car. The sister started in on me: “You really upset my mother with some of the things you told her last night. I don’t know what exactly you said, but I don’t want you to talk to her like that anymore. She’s got a lot on her mind, and she doesn’t need to be burdened with any more.”
“I can’t imagine what I said to add to her burden, Trish. If she cried it’s because her son is in the hospital, and maybe I opened her up by listening a little.”
“She doesn’t need any opening up right now. What exactly did you tell her, anyway? When she came back into the hotel room last night, she couldn’t stop crying.”
“I just told her that Derek was very dear to me and his friends and… Well, it was her question that I answered, really. She wanted to know why he had a death wish, and I tried to answer in a way that would reassure her as much as possible. Anyway, I don’t see what harm there is in crying when someone you love is on his death bed.”
“Just don’t talk to her anymore.”
That conversation has become fluid in my memory over the years. I can no longer remember exactly how it started or which phrase followed the other. I’m only certain that at one point Trish told me, “You’re all just trying to pass off your guilt onto my mother.” I don’t remember how I answered, only that my words were inadequate.
A few weeks later, in London, I tore up several letters to Trish. They responded to that comment—the comment she’d delivered to me with all the force of a punch—better than I possibly could have responded to it at the time she’d delivered it. I tore up those letters, certain they’d be falling into the hands of a sad little girl in search of a scapegoat for her parents’ alcoholism. Her brother’s homosexuality would do: it was, after all, a sexuality imposed on him by other homosexuals and, so, not even his fault. Her family’s problems were all due to external causes. Her big goal was to bury her brother before she had time to accept who he was. That way she could mourn his death—caused by Bad People—and use it to excuse her parents’ escalating mountain of pill and liquor bottles.
I felt more useless than ever, so I flew back to spend Christmas in New York with Dan before going off to London on a student work visa. Malcolm gave me the address of a friend to look up when I arrived. These were the days before we’d lived in San Francisco together, and long before I met the German tourist who’d carry me off to Paris. These were days that seemed desperately close to the end of the world. I filled Dan in on my 72 hours in Florida, crying in his arms over that and our rushed goodbye. I waved to him from the window of the airport bus at Grand Central Station. He was so pink and fragile in his puffy red coat, lost in New York’s filth and decay…
I arrived in London at 7 a.m. in the morning and found a hotel. The jetlag going to Europe from the US is the worst. I couldn’t sleep right for a week. And that half-awake state of dreamy, feverish lethargy was mixed with all the voices of the lovers, family, and friends I’d left behind in exchange for the merciless rules of the “old world.”
I had a British work visa, a guide to London, and just enough cash to start out. I cried at least one hour per day over leaving Dan. I kept a picture of him with me at all times. Derek was like a bad dream I’d had weeks ago, all but faded.
I looked up Malcolm’s friend Michael, an ageing Irish rent boy in a Council flat on the outskirts (and I mean the outskirts) of London. All that was left of the old Docklands were dank pubs, concrete apartment cubes, graffiti in metal elevators—all ready to be torn down. Michael was the last tenant in building 6X on the umpteenth floor. He’d been on a rent strike since God-knows-when. He was suing for a brand new Council flat.
We exchanged notes on Malcolm. When I mentioned the situation with Derek in Florida and Malcolm’s “missing briefcase,” he rolled his eyes and said we’d talk about that once I got settled in. He made a few calls for me and found Charles, an old leather queen with a room to let. I could move in the following day. It was £50 a week. I said I’d check it out.
The next day, New Year’s Eve, I dragged all my bags to Surrey, just South of London, to another Charles’ place, in yet another Council flat. Charles was a worn out drug addict with glossy books about the bombing of the Falklands strewn around his filthy apartment. For Charles it was decided that I’d moved in. Never mind that he hadn’t cleaned out my bedroom, which was piled with years of memorabilia and plain old rubbish. The big concern was getting tickets to some New Year’s Eve event and scoring some drugs to imbibe at the party. There was a stream of baggie-toting derelicts. No hard stuff…yet. Just pot. Lots and lots of pot. How was I going to get out of there, or at least unpack something to wear that night? I decided I’d leave my stuff there for the night and decide if I would actually move in or not in the morning.
It was decided we’d spend the night at his favorite bar, the Market Tavern: “It’s the one place in London where you can be ya’self. You can light up a bit of a joint in the corner and no one minds ‘ya business.”
As it turned out, Charles knew Malcolm too. When I mentioned him, Charles rolled his eyes just like Michael had and said we’d talk about that after the New Year. I hung out with him most of the interminable night since I had no idea where exactly the Market Tavern was located in reference to Surrey. Besides, even if I had wanted to go back to the apartment to get my bags, I didn’t have keys to the apartment, and the underground had stopped running hours before. London taxis were out of the question at several pounds sterling per block. I knew I’d entered another ring of hell, but which one? Could I drop down even deeper?
Stupid question. We got home at 4 a.m. accompanied by a Cockney punk kid and a fresh sack of pot. There followed a week clouded with thick smoke and littered with badly tattooed skinhead rejects on the couch, dirty dishes, dirty laundry, dirty everything. Each morning, I left at 8 a.m. and apartment hunted till 5 p.m. Slept little. Cried over Dan. Wondered vaguely if Derek hadn’t died. Just how had he survived that car crash, anyway?
One evening, over canned English pasta, Charles told me that Malcolm was a regular con artist. He’d been telling people his “I worked for the Royal Family story” for years and it was the laughing stock of Queer London. As for the stolen briefcase, well, when did Malcolm ever have any money to begin with? I said I thought Malcolm seemed to genuinely feel something for Derek, but when Charles heard that there was money in the picture (as in Derek’s family’s appetizing estate), his smile evaporated into a straight line: “Oh, I’d keep an eye on him.” And that’s when I began to care a little more about what was happening in that hospital unit on the other side of the ocean.