October 1987

  “So this boy, CJ. You met him at the Tunnel, and he took you to the piers. Red flags, honey,” said Raina, Felicia’s girlfriend. Her voice was deep and wide, sort of like the way she was built. We were sitting in Felicia’s office on a Tuesday night after the curtain had gone up.

  “He’s my age,” I said. “He can’t possibly—”

  “HIV doesn’t care how old you are,” Felicia said. “Please be careful. Think of Walter. We know so many people who are sick and dying.”

  I nodded, feeling that buzzing sensation in my head, the one that always came with this discussion.

  “Brent lost his job,” Raina said to Felicia.

  “What? No!”

  Raina shrugged. “He made the mistake of telling the guy he was understudying for that he tested positive, and what do you know? Suddenly they decided to go in another direction. Just like that. And the director and producer are gay, of course. People suck.”

  I wanted to stand. I wanted to walk out of the room. Not because they were wrong, but because I wished this cloud wasn’t always everywhere. I was seventeen, and I couldn’t seem to go a day at the Lortel without hearing about it. I couldn’t go to sleep without dreaming of contracting it and having to tell my parents and then dying a terrible death. And weirder, at school it was just the opposite. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone at Trinity had mentioned AIDS outside of a mean joke.

  “I know, Mother,” I said. “I will put a condom over my entire body the next time I see CJ.”

  She gave me that half smirk of hers and said, “Kids these days.”

  * * *

  “He wants to date me. Let me say that again, and slower. He. Wants. To. Date. Me.”

  I guzzled my orange soda, and Deena popped a piece of Bananaberry Split Bubble Yum into her mouth. We were heading toward Broadway after school on Monday.

  “I honestly don’t know why this surprises you,” she said, smacking her gum rudely. “I mean, you’re not even close to grody. Yes, your clothing is unfortunate, and your taste in music is putrid, and at this moment your breath is not lilacs, but …”

  I sank my head in mock shame, and Deena, to rub it in, poked me in the shoulder and pointed out a slight red stain on my yellow Lacoste shirt. Probably been there since lunch. Hopeless. I scratched at it, to no avail.

  Deena was wearing a skintight pair of Sasson Jeans that shaped her butt like a lovely teardrop, and a black blouse with big shoulder pads from Charivari. Her wrists were covered with rubber bracelets, and the silver rhinestone necklace around her neck sparkled. Red Reebok high-tops finished off the look. She was nothing if not trendy, and it worked for her. It would not work for me, so I never tried.

  “What would you do without me?” Deena asked as we crossed Amsterdam at Ninety-First.

  “Have self-esteem?”

  She laughed. We passed the pristine new Luv’s Pharmacy with its bright and shiny exterior. Right next to it, a craggy-looking white guy stood in the doorway of a dilapidated building that looked like its windows had been smashed. That was pretty much the Upper West Side in a nutshell. Growing up, I hadn’t been allowed to cross east of Amsterdam Avenue alone until I was fourteen, and now, a few years later, though evidence of its former self remained, it was becoming almost chic.

  “I’m going to Crazy Eddie’s,” I said. “Wanna walk me up to Ninety-Eighth?”

  “Their prices are INSANE!” Deena said, imitating the annoying commercial.

  “I have to buy this album. Have you heard of Missing Persons? We’re doing a music swap.”

  I gritted my teeth for what was to come.

  Deena stopped right in the middle of Broadway. An older Latina woman wearing a paisley headscarf had to do some quick gymnastics to not run into her. “Oh no! Micah! Why would you … this is why you have to ask me before you make any decisions in your life. Tell me you lied and said your favorite was Echo and the Bunnymen or R.E.M.?”

  I ducked my head in mock shame.

  “You have literally the worst taste in music,” she said.

  Yes, I liked Tiffany. And Debbie Gibson. And Lisa Lisa. Deena didn’t get it. No one at school did. The people I hung out with liked U2 and The Smiths and Hüsker Dü, and that was all fine. But really? Give me Lisa Lisa any day. Maybe it was a gay thing?

  “Which one? Don’t tell me … not The Jets.” She snapped her gum and started walking again.

  “Bubble Yum is made of spider eggs,” I said, and she swatted at me from the side.

  “The Jets? Really?”

  We passed a newsstand where an elderly lady was yelling obscenities at the guy behind the counter because, apparently, her newspaper was creased. “Their music is highly underappreciated, and one day we will all celebrate their greatness,” I said.

  “Sure. Of course we will. George Michael? You want his sex?”

  “I went with Wham!, actually.”

  “Oh no. Date over before it started. And maybe it’s for the best. That boy is dicey.”

  “He isn’t, though. He’s different and he’s wild, but there’s something about him that is as undicey as it gets. You’d have to meet him to understand.”

  She raised one eyebrow.

  “And of course, you never will.”

  * * *

  I sat down on my captain’s bed and took the album out of its wrapping as soon as I got home. There she was, the famous Dale Bozzio, with her wild platinum-and-pink hair that CJ had been imitating. She had a blue slash painted over her eyes, a mole on her right cheek, and shapely red lips. Those had not been part of CJ’s ensemble.

  I had to admit: She was hot.

  The music started. Harder rock than I tended to like, with blaring guitars and a driving drumbeat, and then, as soon as she started singing the very first song, “Noticeable One,” Dale took over. Her voice was brassy and determined and unlike any voice I’d ever heard, and colors seemed to flood my room—pinks and purples and oranges. I closed my eyes, laid my head back, still in my coat, and let the music take me on a trip. My mind traveled to six places at once, but mostly I thought of CJ, and what his life must be like, and where he lived, what his eyes did when he smiled that toothy smile. The chorus, with its call-and-answer of notice me, made me think of CJ standing in the corner of the bar, alone. Notice me. Sometimes, not very often, I wanted to be noticed, too. Not as Hot Deena’s tagalong, but for me.

  CJ had noticed me.

  On the second song, Dale squeaked. Actually squeaked. I jumped up and picked up the record needle and put it back some to hear it again. A squeak! Like Betty Boop!

  Awesome!

  CJ had brought this music to my mundane life. He had flipped a switch, and suddenly I was experiencing higher levels of color, the sound and taste and smell of them. He was taking my monochromatic world and making it neon. Dale Bozzio was neon.

  Where had this album been all my life?

  “Destination Unknown,” with its haunting refrain of Life is so strange, utterly hooked me. “Walking in L.A.” dizzied me. And then, on side two, I finally got to understand why CJ had said, “What are words for?” That song, “Words,” exploded from a single synth note into a blowout of ethereal keyboard, slashing guitar, frantic drumming, and Dale’s squeaks. It was like a teenage protest song, like everything I had ever felt but never got to say.

  My body shivered with recognition, and suddenly it was like the music I had listened to all my life had been mono and this was stereo for real. I suddenly got it. I suddenly got CJ. This connected us in a way that gave me a full-body rush. It was basically my whole life, summed up in one song.

  What are words for

  When no one listens anymore

  By album’s end I was crying. And it wasn’t a sad album. It just … understood me. It got my pain and it got my quirky weirdness and it celebrated it all. I knew that this was a side of me Deena wouldn’t get at all, and that was okay. When the needle automatically went back to its holder and the record stopped spinning, I felt changed.

  I also felt incredible shame. Because this was NOT Wham! And I was suddenly a bit afraid CJ might actually give up on me for making him listen to it.

  I went into my parents’ bedroom, grabbed their phone, pulled the cord as far as it would go, and went back into my room. I shut the door. My mom and dad weren’t home yet, but in case they came home, this was a conversation I wanted to have alone.

  “Connell/Gorman residence, kindly start speaking,” the voice on the other end said in lieu of a hello.

  “Um,” I said. “Um. Does CJ live here?”

  There was a pause and a shuffle on the other side of the phone, then a familiar voice.

  “Hello?”

  “CJ?”

  “This is me.”

  “Oh, um. This is Micah?”

  He laughed. “Are you asking me, or are you telling me?”

  “I’m telling you?”

  “Are you sure?”

  I froze, unsure of what to say. After a few seconds, CJ laughed.

  “Oh, relax,” he said. “Just razzin’ ya. Hey!”

  “Who was that who answered?”

  “That would be my riotous stepfather,” he mumbled.

  “Ah. The famous Jack.”

  “You remembered!”

  “So, um, I’m calling you in tears to repent, because I just finished listening to Spring Session M, and, wow. I have officially found life.”

  “Are you being serious? Do not kid me like this.”

  “Totally serious.”

  “Oh my God oh my God!” he yelled, and I could hear his feet stamping a bit. “It’s so rare that someone GETS IT. Jack! Someone else gets Missing Persons!”

  “Slick and suave,” I heard the voice in the background say. He pronounced it sway-ve.

  “No, I totally get it,” I said, lying on the floor and looking up at the yellow, orange, and peach sunrise my mom had an artist paint on my light blue wall back when I was about eight. “It spoke to me. What are words for? Yes.”

  “You have no idea,” CJ said.

  “I have a clue.”

  “Anyway, I’m so glad you get it.”

  “She’s amazing!”

  “You have to see their videos. The visual is important.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  “Way cool.”

  I smiled, and then I remembered the bad news. “So, um. Maybe don’t listen to that Wham! album?”

  He snorted. “Too late.”

  I buried my face in my hands. “Oh no.”

  “Yeah. It was nice knowing you.”

  “But …”

  “Kidding, God. It’s poppy, but. You know what? It was really fun. And there’s this one song that totally doesn’t suck. Not even a little.”

  “Oh?” I had no idea which one he was talking about.

  “The quiet one. ‘Turn a different corner and we never would have met’?”

  “Oh! Yeah! That was a single. Went to number one.”

  “I don’t pay attention to that shit, but that song has depth. Seriously. I thought he was just this bubblegum guy, but that song, you can’t fake that kind of emotion. He’s also completely hot, and obviously gay.”

  “Do you think so?”

  He snorted. “Gayer than the French army.”

  I laughed. “Is that a saying?”

  “It is now. And … he’s gone. It’s interesting. I mention something gay and suddenly my stepfather needs something in the other room.”

  We talked and talked and talked, and it was amazing how it never got weird. It was almost like I was talking to Deena, which was crazy, because first of all it took a long time to get that comfortable with her on the phone, and second, I didn’t want to sleep with Deena. That thought made me shiver, and I jumped up on my bed, throwing my coat to the floor. I scanned my room and wondered what CJ would think of it. Would he get my huge collection of albums and 45s? Would he think it was weird that I had a Nerf basketball hoop over my closet door?

  Maybe one day I might find out. And that thought made my entire body blush.

  We talked some more about MTV, and his homophobic high school, where he had altercations basically every day, and my liberal-but-blinded parents. As the conversation wound down, about an hour later, I felt so confident that I did the unthinkable. Or at least the unthinkable before Saturday night at the piers and hearing Spring Session M. Life was so strange, indeed.

  “So,” I said, “could you be coaxed out on a date? Friday night?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line, and my heart sped.

  “Let me ask my girl,” he replied. I could hear him put the phone down and move away from the mouthpiece. “Holly, dear? Do you have my book? No, not that book—who keeps their calendar in a Bible?” he muttered. “Yes. This Friday night. Can we work around that? Should I have you call him back? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay, okay. Thanks, dear. Love your hair, by the way, hope you win.” He picked up the phone and spoke into the mouthpiece again.

  “It appears I am indeed free on Friday night.”

  * * *

  I went out to the living room, where my mom was now home and sitting on the black-and-white couch eating carrot sticks and watching Wheel of Fortune. I did my best to put my smile away, though truly I felt like I could float out the window and onto West End Avenue.

  “Ooh, carrots!” I said. “Let me get the peanut butter.”

  My mother shielded the carrots with her hand. “No, Micah. Don’t eat peanut butter. It’s too late for peanut butter.”

  It was seven thirty. I would have said that, but it was useless. My mother tended to plant her flag on extremely random hills, and her plants were permanent. No, don’t wear that blue shirt, wear the green one. Or, when I was younger, No! Not that teddy bear. That one is so trashy. Get the black one.

  So no to peanut butter, because it was kind of late but not really.

  “Were you talking to Deena?” she asked, smiling but not taking her eyes off Vanna White.

  “No, um. A new friend. CJ.”

  “Oh! How nice.” She looked up from the show and focused on me.

  “Yeah. From the theater. The one I went for a bite with after.”

  “That’s terrific, Micah. I’m so happy to hear you’re expanding your circle.”

  That was clearly a shot at Deena, who my mom felt was using me. I had no idea what she thought Deena was using me for, but something.

  I paused for a second, thinking about what would happen if I just went one conversational step further. It wasn’t like my parents didn’t know gay people and like gay people. And it wasn’t as if I were the straightest-acting guy in the world.

  “He’s gay,” I said, kneeling on the arm of the couch.

  “Oh!” she said. “Good for you, dear. I think it’s absolutely darling when straight men have gay male friends. It makes them more sensitive. Like your father with Rick. I wholeheartedly approve.”

  She smiled and offered me a carrot stick from across the couch, and like a fool I took it, because I’d run out of things to say.

  There was no way she’d listen. So I kept the rest of my words to myself … though I had a sense that I’d share at least some of them with CJ at a later date. Which made this interaction with my mom different than most.

  October 1987

  I waved dramatically from our tiny table in the back of Big Nick’s on Broadway and Seventy-Seventh. To say the seating arrangement at Big Nick’s was a bit intimate was like saying Sting was kinda handsome. Ten people max could fit in the seating area, and that was about six too many. You basically sat on top of strangers. Still, it was my favorite restaurant. Despite having a cooking area that was only slightly larger than my bed, there was somehow a twenty-page menu, complete with duck, lamb, shrimp, lobster, falafel, pizza, pies, and milkshakes. Anything you could ever crave. The food just sort of appeared out of nowhere.

  “Hey,” I said as CJ wended his way around bustling servers to our booth in the far back corner. He tried to make himself even skinnier to squeeze past the middle-aged lady sitting next to us. The lady scowled and kept eating her lasagna while CJ shuffled past her, his butt inches from her face.

  “Well, this is … quaint,” he said once he’d sat down. He smiled at me. He was wearing tight jeans and a homemade T-shirt with a pink triangle and the message SILENCE = DEATH handwritten in block letters. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure what that meant, but I had a feeling it was related to the governmental silence about AIDS, and how that resulted in so many people, especially gay people, dying. I quickly glanced around the restaurant to see if anyone knew me. Safe for the moment.

  “This place is magic,” I explained. “I want you to look at the menu and explain to me how they have all those ingredients in this place.”

  He thumbed through the menu. “Impressive,” he said. “Hi, by the way.”

  “Hi.”

  I looked at those sleepy eyes of his. They were smiling at mine, and I had to look away quickly. A guy could get lost in there, and doing so while sitting so close to two adults that they might as well be our guardians didn’t seem ideal.

  We read our menus and I scanned around like a person about to commit murder. The walls were adorned with headshots of actors I’d never heard of, along with, once in a while, an actual familiar face. Like Jerry Stiller, or the guy from the Big Apple Circus. Someday I’d be up there, and I’d be one of the known ones. Not Maggie Stanton, who looked like she’d just arrived from Cleveland and had the perm to prove it.

  “Oh, look.” I pointed at Ms. Stanton. “I loved her in nothing anyone’s ever seen.”

  CJ looked up, saw the various headshots, and smirked. “She was the best! And Max Brandon! Wasn’t he an extra in a gay porn movie once? Was it Ferris Bueller’s Day In? Or maybe Cockadile Dandee?” He pointed to a guy with perfect cheekbones and wavy brown hair.

  The woman next to him turned her head and glowered. I blushed. My instinct, as perfect Micah Strauss, son of Ira and Dalia, was to apologize. But there was a new part of me, too, one that was tired of trying to be perfect.