This wasn’t entirely true, but it felt—as CJ might say—emotionally true, since the two guys I’d been with were both straight, and therefore both not particularly interested in me as a human being. No kissing, which was actually the thing I most longed to try.

  “Yes, yes,” CJ said, grinning. “Me too.” And then he ducked under the table and cloaked his head with his hands as if to avoid a lightning strike.

  “No. Really. I am,” I said.

  “How is that even possible? There’s so much temptation!” He gestured around the restaurant. “So many men, so little time,” he sang.

  “You don’t get it. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to find a willing partner.”

  He gestured around the restaurant again. “Any. Man. Here. Any. Even the straight ones after a few drinks, in my experience. Check this out.” He turned to the two middle-aged men at the next table. Besides the mustaches, they both had thinning brown hair and drawn faces.

  “Hey!” he said, and the two men turned toward him. He smiled at them. “You wanna take us home? We’re down for literally anything.”

  “What?” I said, but he put his hand up.

  One of the men turned to look me up and down. He raised an eyebrow. “Honey? You’re chicken. Are your fathers available?”

  CJ cackled. “I think if you catch my stepdad after his fourth G and T, probably.”

  The guys laughed and went back to their meal. CJ turned back toward me, openmouthed and enchanted. And I was like, What is this? Who is this person? What is happening?

  “Do you want dessert?” he asked, and I paused because I didn’t know if this, too, was code for something he planned to do to me at the piers, where I was clearly not going to go with him, as I had no idea what I was doing, and this was like a real gay guy, and I didn’t even have condoms, and who has sex outside anyway?

  Noticing my pause, he said, “I mean, like, actual dessert. Häagen-Dazs, next door.”

  I didn’t want him to see how relieved I was. “Sure.”

  “Good. I’ll take care of dinner if you buy me a small rocky road cone. Rocky Road: the name of my future autobiography.”

  My shoulders sagged. He didn’t actually like me; he wanted a free ice cream cone and he didn’t want me to see him dine-and-dash. Shit. I was part of his free night out.

  “How are you going to pay for all this?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “If you’re ready, why don’t you go get us ice cream and I’ll meet you outside in five.”

  I paused.

  “Go,” he said. “Git.”

  My stomach crashed. I hadn’t ever broken a law before, and I didn’t want to start doing it now. I also didn’t have nearly enough money to pay for whatever this meal was going to cost. I did, however, have a credit card just in case of emergencies, as my mom always said. I had never used it before.

  Was this an emergency?

  No, I decided.

  Or maybe I was just afraid of what CJ would think if I tried to pay.

  I got up, put on my jacket, and went outside, sure that the waitstaff was onto us and that at any moment they would call the cops on me. It was a relief when I got outside into the chilly night air.

  Next door, Häagen-Dazs was apparently now a gay bar.

  The line appeared to be all gay and lesbian couples, mostly drunk. A dark-haired couple wearing matching gray overcoats was making out, which fascinated me and made me want to stare. The white guy with thinning brown hair in front of me was wearing what I’d come to understand was the gay uniform: tight black jeans and a black bomber jacket with silver zippers on the sleeves. He turned so I could see his profile, and I saw several purple splotches on his neck and cheek.

  I caught my breath. Walter didn’t have any, but I certainly knew Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions when I saw them. I’d see guys like this sometimes coming in to see Steel Magnolias, and I knew what it meant: AIDS had gotten its hold on these men and wouldn’t let go. Although I tried to rip their tickets like everyone else’s, those lesions looked like death to me.

  The man in front of me must have sensed me looking at him, because he turned. I stared across the street, straining my neck as much as I could so I could ignore what was right in front of me.

  When I got to the counter, I ordered CJ’s rocky road and my plain chocolate. Just as the poor overworked sap on the midnight shift gave me my change, CJ came in, grabbed his cone from my hands, and said, “Thanks! C’mon.”

  I hated how casually he said it, and how complicit I was in what he’d just done. I kept my feet planted where they were. CJ was lots of fun, but I wasn’t a thief, and no way was I going to walk by Dave’s Pot Belly Stove every night and worry that they’d recognize me.

  “What are you—?” CJ asked, but I was already walking back into the restaurant.

  October 1987

  I hurried over to our table and was about to pull out my wallet and the emergency card when I saw something shocking.

  A fifty-dollar bill on the table.

  I looked at the check and it was for thirty-nine and change, so that meant CJ had given the waiter a generous tip. Stunned, I turned around and walked out of the restaurant.

  Who was this guy, who was so full of surprises?

  I prepared to apologize, but when I walked out, CJ had this impish smile that drooped his lip slightly on the left side of his face.

  “I can see why you’d think that,” he said.

  He started walking west on Christopher, so I followed. “Sorry.”

  “No sweat. I get it. I have perhaps not seemed like the most honest and credible person on earth so far.” He turned his head sideways and licked his cone. “But the truth is that I am honest. In the important ways. I don’t lie to friends. And I like you, Micah.”

  We walked west in silence along the crowded sidewalk. I was thinking about how he’d said we were friends. But he’d also said I was cute. Was this a date? Could there be a date in the future if this wasn’t one?

  This was the latest I’d ever been out. Saturday Night Live was already over, and Christopher Street was filled with people who had better things to do than watch it. A bevy of chattering gays gallivanted up the other side of Christopher Street. A drunk woman sat against the wall of the army/navy store, muttering to passersby that she had crack for sale. A bunch of men in leather vests stood smoking in front of Ty’s, the gay bar where CJ had scored his theater ticket earlier that night. Two balding white guys sucked face in front of Li-Lac Chocolates, across from the shuttered-for-the-night Lortel Theatre.

  As we wandered farther west, I felt this sense of elation pushing out against my chest, as if I were discovering a hidden wonderland. Because I was. Not only was it late, but I had never walked west of Hudson Street, where the streets seemed to widen and the crowds thinned out.

  A Latino kid maybe our age, wearing impossibly tight stretch pants, walked past. Then we passed a frail white man with a cane who looked to be about eighty but was probably thirty, like Walter. His head was down, like each step took concentration.

  “Jesus,” I muttered, once we were well past him.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “How do you even deal?”

  He didn’t answer. We walked on, and an older-looking Black woman wearing a fur coat and flowers in her hair was walking toward us, swinging a paisley pocketbook, and CJ elbowed me in the ribs and said, “Yay, it’s Marsha.”

  Her face was lined like she’d seen some stuff, but what was most memorable was her wide, perfect smile, framed by ruby-red lips.

  “Hey, babies,” she said. “Be safe, okay?”

  “Yes, Marsha. Love you,” CJ replied.

  “Love you, too, baby.”

  “How do you know her?” I asked as she walked past.

  “I don’t, personally. She’s a Village legend, like Rollerena. I see her all the time. She always says hi and tells me she loves me and to be safe.”

  There was that word again: safe.

  “Really—how do you deal with it? This AIDS thing?” I asked again.

  He sighed and put his hands in his jacket pockets. “That, my friend, is too long an answer for this late-slash-early on a Saturday-night-slash-Sunday-morning.”

  “I’ve never walked this far west on Christopher,” I said.

  He stopped in his tracks. “Is that right? Well … you’re in luck.”

  He cleared his throat and gestured dramatically as if onstage, and he channeled the intro to Robin Leach’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. “Welcome to television’s unchallenged authority on debauchery, excess, and syphilis!” he announced to me and anyone else within fifty feet. “It’s another dazzling Lifestyles of the Gay and Infamous. I’m your host, CJ Leach.”

  I looked around to see who was seeing and hearing this, and my reticence just egged him on.

  “Tonight, meet the movers and shakers of homosexual New York, from its epicenter, Christopher Street. For all the yuppies from hell and midwestern ladies on this tour, I must tell you that we’re about to see things that will shock and appall you and send you running back to Iowa.”

  Neither group, unsurprisingly, was represented.

  “I look forward to this tour,” I said as we passed a metal awning and some stairs leading down.

  “And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the PATH train station. It’s where the queens from New Jersey congregate every weekend night at three a.m., to venture back to their homes after sampling the fine drinking establishments of the West Village.” He gestured as we crossed Washington. “Such as Two Potato, catering to a mostly Black and Latino crowd of homosexual men due to rampant racism and segregation in the gay community—great rum and Cokes, by the way.”

  “How do you even get into all these places?”

  “And coming up, the Church of St. Veronica, where pious homosexuals pray to a God who does not exist on Sunday morning … and then Golden Woks, the Chinese takeout hole-in-the-wall where men purchase egg rolls after doing unmentionable things to each other on the piers. Across the street, you’ll see Bailey House, which is housing for homeless people with AIDS.”

  Out in front of Bailey House, a man lay in the gutter. Just across the street stood a crowd of men in leather outside a bar, ignoring the body. Many were shirtless, wearing leather vests. Some were also in leather chaps, some wearing jeans under the chaps with handkerchiefs in the pockets, and others with their bare asses hanging out. Bare asses!

  I didn’t want to stare, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “And here is the aforementioned Badlands,” CJ announced as we waded through the crowd. Suddenly I was standing in a sea of older male gayness. A cigar-smoking guy with big fat nipples protruding from his vest grinned and went to pinch CJ’s nipple. CJ karate chopped his hand away. “And you, sir,” he said, not really addressing the guy but still in character, “cannot afford my rent.”

  “Whoa,” I said as we continued to weave through the maze of men. It all made me feel a little dirty and uncomfortable.

  “This is the Badlands, where men whose day jobs are spritzing cologne on passersby in Bloomingdale’s try to look tough.”

  I ducked my head, and we hurried on before any of the men could further molest CJ. None of them tried anything with me. Which was good. I guess.

  “I feel like I’m in a parallel universe,” I said as we hurriedly crossed the West Side Highway, three lanes of traffic in each direction with a median in the middle.

  On the other side, he lowered his voice. “And here, it might behoove me to control my volume, as we are allies and visitors, and hence this is NOT a place for a white boy to make a spectacle of himself at one in the morning.”

  We had approached the waterfront, and here, a very different, very young crowd had assembled. A boombox nearby blared “Don’t You Want Me” by Jody Watley, and lots of Black and Latino kids stood in clusters, some cackling, most just talking, but some dancing. One boy danced with his hands, using them to frame his face in different poses. Another bent over backward until his head almost touched the ground behind him, and a third balanced on one hand, his legs akimbo.

  We stood and watched, and for just one moment, all was good in the world.

  At Trinity, my school, there wasn’t a single out kid, and other than Deena, no one there knew about me. Well, two athletes did, but it wasn’t like we talked about it. And here, on the Christopher Street pier, was a veritable world of young, apparently gay and lesbian people, and transgender people, too, lots of them. We walked out a bit, past various groups. Some were dressed to be seen. Either in revealing, tight dresses in DayGlo colors, or, in some cases, very straight-looking outfits, like sweatpants, Tommy Hilfiger, and baseball hats.

  CJ continued to speak softly. “Banjee boys and banjee girls,” he said.

  I had no idea what that meant.

  “I get along with everyone, but you gotta be aware that we’re visitors here. Lots of these kids don’t trust white people. With good reason.”

  We climbed over a barricade and made it to water’s edge. Across the river, the eyesore of dank Jersey City warehouses lurked in the shadows. The moon glowed, yellow and full, off the water. A chilly breeze hit me in the face. I looked down. My reflection was a Cheetos wrapper. My heart pulsed. We were so close to the water, with no barrier between it and me. CJ took my hand in his.

  We faced each other. “I’m glad I met you,” he said. “In all seriousness. With all the guys I meet, I feel like I have to be someone else. But with you, even though, yeah, I like to entertain, I feel like maybe I don’t have to.”

  Shivers. “You don’t,” I said.

  He leaned in and tilted his head slightly, and for the first time in my life, my lips met those of another boy. His were soft and plump and delicious. His breath smelled sweet like ice cream. He just barely opened his mouth, and I copied him. The tip of his tongue tentatively met mine, and I shivered. When he pulled back, he smiled. I did, too.

  “Wow,” I said, a million warring thoughts going through my brain at once. Sensory overload. My first kiss. With a real gay person. Trading saliva and germs. Walter and his deflated face.

  “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” CJ said.

  He went in for another kiss, and I wanted to, but I couldn’t. My mind was spinning with images of Walter, and the guy with the lesions, and the guy with the cane. And Felicia’s admonishments.

  “Is this safe?” I asked, pulling back. I’d seen the guidelines that it was, but reading something was okay and actually doing it were two different things.

  He stroked my hair, which felt incredible. “Yeah,” he said. “Believe me, I’m basically the condom queen of Tribeca. Kissing is safe. Oral? Unclear. Anal, gotta use a condom every time.”

  What does unclear mean? I wondered. This disease wasn’t unclear in the least. It killed people. And before it killed them, it robbed them of everything. And what risk would I be willing to take, if those were the end results? With Napoleon and Lucas, I didn’t really think about these things, because they were straight and had never been with anyone else. But CJ obviously had.

  “Have you been tested?” I asked.

  “Yes, Mother. Negative. And I don’t take risks. I talk a big game, but I’m pretty safe.”

  My mind went to the word pretty, and when he went in for a kiss again, I shrank back.

  His face registered hurt in the crease formed by his eyebrows and forehead.

  “I want to,” I said. “I’m scared, I guess.”

  He nodded and sighed. “That’s cool. I mean, no biggie. I just … how are you seventeen, gay, live in New York City, and not know this stuff?”

  I opened my mouth to disagree, and then I shut it again. Yeah, Felicia had told me a lot, and I knew Walter. The Lortel had made me far more aware of it than any of my classmates, that was for sure. So many guys with canes walking along Christopher Street and coming to see the show. I read up on it every chance I got, locking myself away in the periodicals closet at the school library and reading every article I could find about AIDS. But there was knowing, and then there was knowing. My mom’s hairdresser, Lorenzo. He used to save all the red lollipops for me when I went with her to the salon. He died in 1984. My mom had told me. It didn’t seem possible that someone who had once been so alive could no longer be, and yet I knew that didn’t make logical sense as a feeling. I knew everyone died, but I guessed until you really knew someone who had, it didn’t feel real.

  “I wonder how you can put yourself out there at all,” I said. “I’m not judging. I just … It’s so scary.”

  He shrugged and looked out at the water. “Not sure I really have any choice. This is life. I like this life. I like gay life. On any day, anything can happen, you know?”

  I nodded, but I definitely didn’t know.

  “So,” I said, trying to figure out what I wanted to have happen. I wanted to experience another kiss, and yet I wanted to not have to worry about him only being pretty safe. I wanted to be in a place where I could admit who I was, yet not graduate into this gay world where I’d have to worry about my own health. To have to worry about dying.

  “Do guys, like, go on dates?” I asked.

  He smiled that toothy smile again. It was truly dazzling and alive to me, like his personality was too big for his facial muscles.

  “They do,” he said. “How about we do this: Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to go out and buy Spring Session M by Missing Persons and listen to it. What album should I listen to?”

  I took a deep breath and told the delicate truth.

  “Music from the Edge of Heaven, by Wham!”

  “Oh dear. Okay. Accepted. Let’s do that, and why don’t you do a little research so you can come to the conclusion that, yes, it’s safe to kiss me. And then, let’s talk by phone, and see where we’re at. And if I even want to see you again, after suffering through Wham! Deal?”

  His impish grin let me know he was giving me crap about my musical tastes and wasn’t serious, and the possibility of a date with CJ made me feel like I could jump out of my skin.

  “Deal,” I said.