CJ raised his hand and a man onstage, possibly Larry, pointed at him.

  “Let’s hear from the youth,” he said.

  I grimaced. What version of CJ was going to show up this time? I wasn’t sure I had patience for another con. Not now. Not here.

  “I’m CJ Gorman,” he said. “I’m eighteen and I have HIV.” Murmurs of support drifted through the room.

  “My stepfather is kicking me out of my home. I’m scared.” A tear fell from his right eye, and as much as I wanted to comfort him, put a hand on his shoulder, I didn’t. This was his moment, not mine.

  “I actually have put away some money. I dance at the Gaeity, so …”

  “Oh, Mary!” a tittering voice in the back whispered, and immediately that person was shouted down.

  “Seems like no one wants to rent to an eighteen-year-old gay stripper without a credit card, so, I’m looking for a place to live. Preferably with a true friend attached. I have a special one”—he pointed at me—“but I could really use others. And yeah, I really do want to help. With ACT UP. I’m ready to fight back because it’s fuckin’ not fair!”

  “Amen!” someone shouted. Another person yelled, “Yeah!”

  “I got you,” the first woman who’d spoken said. “See me after.”

  “Thanks,” CJ said, and I could hear the tears in his throat.

  Larry spoke. “You boys want to get involved?”

  CJ looked at me. Sometimes an idea just comes to fruition, and suddenly, without speaking, I knew that affirmative action meant something new right now. Silence equals death. So does inaction.

  “Sure,” CJ said, while simultaneously I said, “Yes.”

  Hoots from the crowd. “All right,” Larry said. “That’s the spirit.”

  * * *

  After the meeting, the muscular woman came over to us and gave CJ a bro-handshake-slash-hug and introduced herself as Becky.

  “You okay with a roommate?” she asked.

  “Um, I guess. Who?”

  She ignored the question. “Drugs? Drinking?”

  “Not my thing.”

  “Promiscuous? Lots of men in and out of the place?”

  He pointed at me. “Just one,” he said.

  She smiled for the first time. She had a pronounced underbite and dimples that made me immediately like her.

  “Awright,” she said. “Roomie.”

  “Oh,” CJ said. “Um. How much? Where?”

  “A block from here. Can you do three hundred a month?”

  He nodded, apparently dumbstruck.

  “I have a small second bedroom I use as an office. I don’t need it. Just don’t be a dick, okay?”

  He laughed. “Promise. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  “We’re family here,” she said. “Welcome to the family.”

  A warm feeling passed through my chest and gut. I wanted to stay forever in this feeling.

  Then a rail-thin mustached Black man about my dad’s age came up to us. “Did they put you on AZT?” he asked.

  CJ shook his head.

  “Good. It’s poison. It’s killing people. No AZT. If you want to know what’s what, take me out for coffee.” He handed CJ a card.

  “Thanks,” CJ said.

  “No sweat,” the guy said.

  We’d walked in feeling overwhelmed by this thing so much bigger than us. But now, we felt plugged in to something fierce and strong. And that gave me just a tiny bit of hope that we could fight this.

  March 1988

  When I got to CJ’s new place a few weeks later, Becky answered the door in sweats and a tie-dye tank top.

  “Glad you’re here,” she said. “He’s having a bad day. Maybe you can get him up.”

  It was a Wednesday after school. Becky was completely awesome, and CJ, for once, had space of his own. I’d been coming over after school on days when he wasn’t dancing or delivering meals for God’s Love We Deliver.

  We were making great strides as a couple, now that we had a place to hang out. I hadn’t ever spent the night, but one time after school and before his work, we fell asleep in each other’s arms. It was glorious.

  Sex was still out of the question. For all we knew about safer sex, neither CJ nor I could seem to get our heads around having sex with this virus a permanent presence in our lives. For my part, I had fantasies all the time, but the reality still scared the hell out of me. I had no idea what it was like from CJ’s point of view—whenever I asked, he’d deflect.

  “Bursulous, the God of Sex, has decreed it not to be,” he’d say. Or something equally maddening.

  The walls of his tiny room were covered in posters: One of Dale Bozzio from the Spring Session M era, one of the entire band Missing Persons in concert, and one of Terri Nunn of Berlin, which was fast becoming his new favorite band.

  I went into his room to find a lump on his bed, under a big blue comforter. A song I’d never heard before was playing.

  “You in there?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  I sat down on the bed next to him. “And why aren’t you in there?”

  “Just listen to this song.”

  I listened, and to my surprise, the vocalist was unmistakably Dale Bozzio. The song didn’t sound like Missing Persons, though. She was singing about the feelings she had being so strong.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s Dale. That’s what she’s going by now, which means Missing Persons is done. Done. The album is called Riot in English and it’s on Prince’s label, Paisley Park. It just came out, found it at Tower. I love Prince and I love Dale, but this is a union that was not meant to be. There is a song called ‘Giddi Up Baby—Be Mine.’ It made me unsure I can still live.”

  I massaged the lump under the comforter. “Poor baby. And this hibernation is all because of Dale’s new album?”

  His sigh was loud enough to be heard through the layers of down. “This is the kind of time where if I didn’t have you, and I didn’t have HIV, I’d be out on the prowl.”

  “Okay …”

  “Yeah. Because sometimes it’s the end of an era, and everything is a little bit shit, and you just need to take the edge off, but then you find out you have this disease, and you get a boyfriend and you have to be on your best behavior because without him you’d have nothing, but what you really, really want is to be in a dark room with a stranger, swapping spit and pawing at each other like animals in heat, and obviously that’s a no go, so you don’t even say it or think it, even though it’s very, very true, and one of the reasons you shouldn’t be in a relationship anyway, because you’re not worthy of love from a real live actual person, obviously.”

  I got under the blanket with him. Inside, it smelled like a combination of cinnamon and bitter that I’d come to know and love.

  “Mind if I join?” I said.

  “Whatever,” he said. “Fine.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened. Nothing ever happens. I talked to Jack today. He did this whole thing where he told me how proud of me he was. That I’ve been able to make it on my own and that makes him feel good about the job he did with me. And I’m like, Yeah, good job throwing me out, Jack! Nicely done! Except I didn’t say that. I basically just said thanks, and then he talked about us getting together and healing this rift—his words—and I said I’d be up for that, and then, when I got off the phone, that’s when all the words I should have said came to me. I should have been like, Sure, Jack. I don’t mind that you threw me out of my mother’s house because I have HIV. No problem at all, Jack, you fuck. Fuck you so hard, Jack.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah, not a great day. Also, I asked Mira for a Saturday night shift, because there’s good money to be made, and she said I’ve been slacking off lately, missing too much time, but really I think it’s because I’m not muscle-y enough or hot enough.”

  “You’re crazy. You’re too hot, if anything. You’re always the life of everything. No one can look away from you.”

  He snorted. I couldn’t quite see his eyes, but my own eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness, and I could see the shape of him.

  “I’m lust boy in love with himself.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a song I wrote last year. Don’t ask me to sing it. It’s more like poetry and I don’t sing. It goes like this: ‘Lust boy in love with himself/Don’t know rejection is something I’ve felt/They call me sleazy and crazy and all/They leave me lonely/I’ve been through it all.’ ”

  I touched his hand and massaged it.

  “That may be who you were, but you’re not that now.”

  “The hell I’m not.”

  “Well, it can’t be you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not leaving you lonely, for one thing.”

  He took my hand in his and squeezed. And then he sang, his voice warbly and not entirely on any recognizable key. “ ‘Lust boy in love with himself/They take advantage of his uncommmonwealth …’ ”

  “Eek,” I said.

  He laughed. “Not great?”

  “It’s perfect … but maybe some quiet time?”

  “Mmm,” he agreed, and he laid his head on mine.

  * * *

  I stopped by the theater to see Felicia on a Saturday afternoon.

  “A sight for sore eyes,” Felicia said, hugging me.

  “I missed you, too. How are you? How’s Walter?”

  She let me go and I could see it in her face before she even said it.

  “Walter’s passed, Micah.”

  I had to sit down. My head spun. Here we were in the room where Walter used to pop in and say nice things to me. And now he didn’t exist anymore.

  “It’s been hard,” Felicia said. “He was such a fighter and he gave it his all, but in the end his body gave out.”

  “Yeah,” I said, still shocked.

  Felicia came and stood behind me, putting her chin on my head. “This is your first, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “The first is really hard. They’re all really hard. I wish I could tell you otherwise.”

  “CJ and I are in ACT UP,” I said, after a bit of silence.

  “Oh, really? Wonderful! I’m so proud of you. And are you and CJ … together?”

  It felt a little wrong to be smiling, so I suppressed my smile. “Yep.”

  “That’s great,” she said. “Just great.”

  “He has it.”

  “Shit.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, that’s good. Keep it that way.”

  “We’re not having sex. Too scared.”

  “You don’t have to avoid sex completely.”

  “I know, I just. I can’t right now. We can’t.”

  “Totally understand. If you need me, I’m here, okay?”

  “Okay. And thanks.”

  * * *

  A Sunday call from Napoleon:

  N: Hey, what’s up, wanna come over?

  M: Nah, sorry. I’m seeing someone.

  N: Oh. Cool. Okay. Whatever.

  M: It was fun, though. Thanks.

  N: Sure, yeah.

  M: Hey, Napoleon?

  N: Yeah?

  M: Make sure you use condoms, okay? There’s a disease out there and it’s not something you want. I don’t have it, but you never know, you know?

  N: Okay. Thanks, dude.

  M: Later, dude.

  March 1988

  Skipping school to spend time with CJ had become something of a bad habit, but on this particular Thursday, I knew it was the right thing to do.

  We gathered in front of Trinity Church with a ragtag crew of misfits old and older, mostly. CJ and I stood out, as we had at the initial meeting. Some of the people looked very ill, others totally healthy, like us. The way we fit in, though, was our signs, which had been created by CJ.

  The one I carried read ONE AIDS DEATH EVERY HALF HOUR.

  CJ’s said CORPORATE GREED IS KILLING ME.

  This was a side of CJ I was just getting to know, and it both scared me and made me love him even more.

  “I’ve seen you at the meetings,” a Latino guy with maybe six piercings in each ear said to CJ.

  CJ nodded, and the guy smiled and winked.

  “Good thing,” he said. “We need some younger blood.”

  I flinched at the use of the word blood.

  A bald man with a bullhorn got our attention, and the milling around ceased.

  “First, we stop traffic. We chant ‘ACT UP! FIGHT BACK! FIGHT AIDS!’ Then, once our front liners are set and the police show up, we do our die-in. Jacko will hand out our gravestones. You hold it upright above your head, you lie down, and you wait for the cops.”

  “My arms don’t reach that high,” a voice yelled.

  Another voice yelled back, “Put your legs over your head, Mary!” and there was a mixture of laughter and insults shouted back and forth before the bald man took control again.

  “You DO NOT fight the officers. You go limp, then let them carry you. You can scream, you can shout, but you do not harm, okay?”

  “Fuck that. They harm us. They kill us!” someone yelled.

  “And that’s why we’re out here,” the bald guy said, and there were murmurs of assent and dissent.

  Before I could even catch my breath, there we were, an army of protesters, marching toward traffic on Broadway.

  I looked at CJ. He looked at me, shrugged, and lifted his placard over his head. It was like a question: You in?

  I was all in.

  It took me a bit to find my shouting voice. At first I matched the pitch with the people nearest me, but it was too low for my voice to be heard. So I took a deep breath, as if standing at the edge of a cold pool, and I jumped in, my dissonant pitch melding with the rest as I shouted our slogan as loud as I could.

  “ACT UP, FIGHT BACK, FIGHT AIDS! ACT UP, FIGHT BACK, FIGHT AIDS!”

  A shivery feeling flooded my veins as I felt a new power emerge from my body. I glanced over at CJ, and he was crying freely. I reached over and took his hand and squeezed, and he responded by gripping my hand harder and allowing his voice to warble our war cry.

  Cars stopped. They had to. Horns honked, then honked some more, a battle cry of those who didn’t give a shit, who were mad that their commute was being ruined without caring that our entire lives were at stake. I felt hatred and pride merge in the muscles of my arms. I raised my sign higher and raised my voice even higher than that. I knew tomorrow I’d have no voice left—and that was okay.

  The police arrived, and there were whistles blown and shouts through megaphones ordering us to disperse immediately. I held CJ’s hand even tighter. The part of me that was pre-CJ felt the urge to run, felt petrified that I was maybe about to find out what true loss of freedom felt like. What if a police officer hit me with a billy club, or dropped me because he hated me so much for my message, for who I was?

  But I stayed with it, and when I was handed my gravestone, which read I DIED FOR THE SINS OF THE FDA, I lay down on the cold pavement and let my body shiver and the pain of the truth of the message merge with the thrill of taking action.

  CJ’s gravestone read KILLED BY THE SYSTEM.

  Being part of a die-in was weird, because it got unnaturally quiet. And lying there, I had a lot of time to think about death. How one day, AIDS or not, I was going to die. All of us were. I thought about how many years of good life had been stolen by this disease, from people just like me, just like CJ, and that was so deeply unjust.

  Soon I could hear the defiant screaming of our people, and without even looking I realized they were being carried into police wagons, one by one. As they were, we cheered from our reclined positions, sending truth and power to our family in arms, and tears were now falling from my eyes. I wanted to reach out for CJ and make sure he wasn’t carried away from me, but my hands were needed to hold the gravestone above my head, so I held on, and as the screams of those carried away closed in, I again felt that urge to run, to avoid the figurative blood on my hands, to stay clean, to stay safe.

  But I held on.

  It wasn’t CJ who was grabbed first, which I had just assumed would happen, because wild things always happened to CJ.

  It was me.

  With a rough grip, the officers grabbed both of my arms and pulled, tweaking my shoulder, and I screamed, I screamed so that CJ would hear me, so that the world would hear me and feel the injustice, that this was so wrong, to be hated so very much just for being who I was, for being part of a group that was being slaughtered by inaction, and the voice coming from the middle of my chest was a roar I hadn’t known I was capable of, and it sustained me as I was dragged backward, my arms in an unwieldy position that I knew with one change of direction might take my shoulder out of its socket. I was totally goddamn free, and exhilaration swept through my chest and into my stomach and groin and I kicked my legs until another officer grabbed them, and roughly I was thrown into a dark vehicle, where my hands were cuffed to each other above my head. I could smell the slightly sour breath of the person lying next to me, and I turned my head and my eyes met the eyes of a man with lesions covering his face, and he had tears in his red eyes, and so did I, and we smiled at each other and I realized we were truly all one, all connected, and if he had AIDS, we all had AIDS, because one death unnoticed was a million deaths.

  “Attaboy,” the man said, his voice rusty like the color of his hair. “I’m proud of you, kid.”

  My voice spent, I whispered back, “I wouldn’t be anywhere else.”

  * * *

  As it turned out, CJ was not arrested that day. They arrested about a thousand of us, mostly in front of the stock exchange but many in front of the church, too. And thank God for CJ not being one of them, because he could be the one who posted my bail.

  After a few hours of sitting in a dank cell with no water to quench my dry throat, I walked toward the 1 train with him, in shocked silence.

  CJ didn’t have to ask. He handed me a Popsicle and I wolfed it down, craving the moisture against my hoarse vocal cords. When my vocal cords were quenched, I sighed, completely dazed by the day’s events.