Guilty

Ever since I got back from Fort Lauderdale, I’ve been trying to figure out if I should write this story. I don’t know if writing about it will bother me more than not writing about it.

I’ve been told that AIDS is the prevailing theme of Joe.My.God. There’s sort of a “this guy talks about his dead friends a lot” perception, which I think is probably fair. While I’ve talked about AIDS in only about 10% of my now 300+ posts, I think that it is a major theme here. And I don’t think that’s weird, necessarily. AIDS is and will have been a defining theme in the lives of just about any gay man in this country, but for the ones that are middle-aged right now, AIDS is the defining theme. We’re the guys with the dead roommates and dead best friends and dead husbands.

And still, I hesitate to revisit this topic so frequently, but something happened to me in Fort Lauderdale that I want to talk about.

One weeknight I went to the Ramrod with Robert, my roommate from back in San Francisco. It was one of those nights between Christmas and New Year’s, one of those Fort Lauderdale winter nights that make it seems like everybody in the world has money, good looks and nothing planned for the next day. I adore those nights. Every bar and restaurant is packed and even the locals dare not stay home, for fear of missing something.

The Ramrod was a zoo. A riot. A panic. Music – ringingly loud. Atmosphere – chokingly smoky. Crowd – sexingly sexy. Every two steps we ran into somebody we knew. From New York. From San Francisco. From London. We’d hardly made it halfway across the room when a man grabbed me by the elbow.

“Joe! Oh, how fantastic! I had heard you were in town!” he said, beaming.

I stepped back a little bit to get a better look, maybe to take the light out of my face, I’m not sure. That’s when I saw that this man, this guy who was so deliriously happy to see me, was clearly very ill. His clothes seemed hugely oversized and hung loosely on his frame. His face was gaunt, drawn, ashen looking - even in that lighting.

He was wearing what my old college roommate and I used to call a "trip to Disney World" hat, a reference to the Make-A-Wish kids who appeared regularly on Orlando TV wearing giant baseball hats to cover up their balded-by-chemo heads. For years, my roommate and I would try on baseball caps at stores and ask each other, "How does this one look? Am I going to Disney World?" If the answer was "yes", we looked for a different hat.

I looked at this man, who was literally jiggling with the happiness of seeing me...and I had no idea who he was. Instantly, I knew that his illness had transfigured his appearance so dramatically that he was now unrecognizable to me. It was a sick and familiar realization. I stuck my hand out and with false joviality I said, "Hey! Yes! I'm here! It's wonderful to see you!"

The man laughed and slapped my hand down. "Oh, honey! What's with the handshake?" Then he pulled me close and hugged me. He hugged me long and strong. He hugged me the way you should hug an old friend you haven't seen in a long time. It seemed like the most genuinely loving hug that I'd known in a very long time.

I pulled back from the hug and didn't know what else to say. After a moment, I feebly began making some of the usual noises. Some "Wow, this place is packed", some "I'm going to be here until such and such time", and I think I said something about the weather. The man nodded and I saw his smile fade slightly, as he began to suspect that I didn't realize who he was. Panicked, I made a quick escape, lamely blurting out, "Oh, there's so-and-so! I must go say hello." As I retreated, I cast a quick glance back over my shoulder. The man was standing there watching my back, and in a matter of seconds I saw his expression slide from puzzlement to hurt and then to a sort of sad resignation.

I felt like a complete shit. I pulled Robert to the end of the bar, out of sight. "Fuck. I have no idea who that is!"

Robert, ever the pragmatist, said, "Well, he's got to know his appearance has changed. Maybe you should find out who told him you were in town, you can figure out who he is that way."

And so I spent the next hour, peering from the far end of the room, hoping to see the man speak to somebody that I did recognize. The man sat on some beer crates that were stacked along the far wall by the pool table. He watched the guys playing pool and he watched the guys head in and out of the door that lead to the patio. A couple of times he came up to the bar and ordered a beer, then retreated to his place on the beer crates. Nobody spoke to him at the bar except the bartender. Nobody spoke to him by the pool table at all. He sat there and he drank his beer and he looked around and not one person in that crowded bar spoke to him.

The longer I watched him, the more lonely he seemed and the guiltier I felt. I felt guilty for not recognizing him and I felt guiltier for avoiding him, this man who clearly loved me. The guilt began to boil up and became a loud noise in my ears, drowning out the music. It became a sour taste in my mouth, overcoming the smoke. Finally.....I fled the bar.

In a parking lot two blocks away, behind the wheel of my rented car, I sat and wondered what to do with the remainder of the night. I needed something dramatic, something to completely pull me out of the last couple of hours. Then I spotted that man, my friend, across the street. He was moving slowly, gingerly, down the sidewalk. He moved with the cautious deliberate gait of a senior citizen, despite being in his 40's. He moved like someone who knew that a simple fall would not be very simple. He seemed so fragile. He seemed like the wind from a passing vehicle might just blow him right over.

I watched him climb into a big truck, a Ford F-150 or something like that. I tried to imagine seeing him as a robust man, swinging effortlessly into the cab, but no memories were dislodged. He put the truck in reverse and carefully moved onto the road. I watched him pull away, this man, my friend, this man whose ribs had made themselves known to my fingers as I moved them across his back during his impassioned embrace.

And then I put my head down on the steering wheel and I cried my eyes out.


UPDATE: It looks like I'll have some sort of epilogue to this story, come Monday. Stay tuned.
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