The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

‘Among other things,’ Dave said.

‘Have you ever heard someone say they were too old for one of America’s military adventures? Vietnam? Iraq? Afghanistan?’

‘Sure. Although what they usually say is they were too young.’

‘AIDS was a war.’ Ollie was looking down at his gnarled hands, from which the talent was departing. ‘And I wasn’t too old for all of it, because no one is when the war’s on one’s native soil, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I guess that’s true enough.’

‘I was born in nineteen thirty. When AIDS was first observed and clinically described in the United States, I was fifty-two. I was living in New York, and working freelance for several advertising firms. My friends and I still used to go around to the clubs in the Village once in a while. Not the Stonewall – a hellhole run by the Mafia – but some of the others. One night I was standing outside Peter Pepper’s on Christopher Street, sharing a jay with a friend, and a bunch of young men went in. Good-looking guys in tight bellbottom pants and the shirts they all seemed to wear back then, the kind with the wide shoulders and narrow waists. Suede boots with stacked heels.’

‘Yummy boys,’ Dave ventured.

‘I guess, but not the yummy boy. And my best friend – his name was Noah Freemont, died just last year, I went to the funeral – turned to me and said, “They don’t even see us anymore, do they?” I agreed. They saw you if you had enough money, but we were too … dignified for that, you might say. Paying for it was demeaning, although some of us did, from time to time. Yet in the late fifties, when I first came to New York …’

He shrugged and looked off into the distance.

‘When you first came to New York?’ Dave prompted.

‘I’m thinking about how to say this. In the late fifties, when women were still sighing over Rock Hudson and Liberace, when homosexuality was the love that dared not speak its name instead of the one that never shuts up, my sex drive was at its absolute peak. In that way – there are others, I’m sure, many others – gay men and straight men are the same. I read somewhere that when they are in the presence of an attractive other, men think about sex every twenty seconds or so. But when a man’s in his teens and twenties, he thinks about sex constantly, whether he’s in the presence of an attractive other or not.’

‘You get hard when the wind blows,’ Dave said.

He was thinking of his first job, as a pump jockey, and of a pretty redhead he’d happened to see sliding out of the passenger seat of her boyfriend’s truck. Her skirt had rucked up, revealing her plain white cotton panties for a single second, two at most. Yet he had played that moment over and over in his mind while masturbating, and although he had only been sixteen at the time, the memory was still fresh and clear. He doubted if that would have been the case if he’d been fifty. By then he’d seen plenty of women’s underwear.

‘Some of the conservative columnists called AIDS the gay plague, and with ill-concealed satisfaction. It was a plague, but by nineteen eighty-six or so, the gay community had a pretty good fix on it. We understood the two most basic preventive measures – no unprotected sex and no sharing of needles. But young men think they’re immortal, and as my grandma used to say when she was in her cups, a stiff dick has no conscience. It’s especially true when the owner of that dick is drunk, high, and in the throes of sexual attraction.’

Ollie sighed, shrugged.

‘Chances were taken. Mistakes were made. Even after the transmission vectors were well understood, tens of thousands of gay men died. People are only beginning to grasp the magnitude of that tragedy now that most folks understand gays don’t choose their sexual orientation. Great poets, great musicians, great mathematicians and scientists – God knows how many died before their talents could flower. They died in gutters, in cold-water flats, in hospitals, and the indigent wards, all because they took a risk on a night when the music was loud, the wine was flowing, and the poppers were popping. By choice? There are still plenty who say so, but that’s nonsense. The drive is too strong. Too primal. If I’d been born twenty years later, I might have been one of the casualties. My friend Noah, as well. But he died of a heart attack in his bed, and I’ll die of … whatever. Because by fifty, there are fewer sexual temptations to resist, and even when the temptation is strong, the brain is sometimes able to overrule the cock, at least long enough to grab a condom. I’m not saying that plenty of men my age didn’t die of AIDS. They did – no fool like an old fool, right? Some were my friends. But they were fewer than the younger fellows who jammed the clubs every night.