Tales of the City 05 - Significant Others

audience as “the woman who’s shown America how to make the most of a weight problem.”
    Whatever the cause, something had soured the interview beyond repair, so he decided against requesting an introduction after the show. Mary Ann had already obliged him with introductions to Huey Lewis, Scott Madsen and Tina Turner. There was nothing to be gained by abusing the privilege.
    Besides, it was eleven-fifteen, and he had a nursery to run.
    The place had been his since 1984, when his partner, Ned Lockwood, had moved back to L.A. The exhilaration of ownership had been a new experience for Michael, prompting him to renovate and expand beyond his wildest imaginings. He had built a new greenhouse for the succulents, then enlarged the office, then changed the name from God’s Green Earth to Plant Parenthood.
    The only problem with being sole proprietor, he had long ago discovered, was that you couldn’t call in sick to yourself. To make matters worse, his three employees at the nursery (two other gay men and a lesbian) knew subtle ways to trigger his guilt whenever he showed up late for work.
    Actually, he relished his time at the nursery. The busyness of business helped him to forget how much he missed what had come to be known as “the unsafe exchange of bodily fluids.”
    If he remained idle too long, his euphoric past could creep up on him like a Frenchman pushing postcards, a portfolio of fading erotica fully capable of breaking his nostalgic heart.
    It wasn’t just an epidemic anymore; it was a famine, a starvation of the spirit, which sooner or later afflicted everyone. Some people capitulated to the terror, turning inward in their panic, avoiding the gaze of strangers on the street. Others adopted a sort of earnest gay fraternalism, enacting the rituals of safe-sex orgies with all the clinical precision of Young Pioneers dismantling their automatic weapons.
    Lots of people found relief on the telephone, mutually Master-charging until Nirvana was achieved. Phone sex, Michael had observed, not only toned the imagination but provided men with an option that had heretofore been unavailable to them: faking an orgasm.
    Michael himself had once faked an orgasm over the phone. Unable to come, yet mindful of his manners, he had growled out his ecstasy for at least half a minute, pounding on his headboard for added effect. His partner (someone in Teaneck, New Jersey) had been so audibly appreciative of the performance that Michael fell asleep afterwards feeling curiously satiated.
    Most of the time, though, he ended up in bed with the latest issue of Inches or Advocate Men, his genitals cinched in the cord of his terry-cloth bathrobe.
    He had learned several interesting things about pornography. Namely: (1) it wore out; (2) it reactivated itself if you looked at it upside down; and (3) you could recycle it if you put it away for several months.
    Unlike most of his friends, he did not have sex regularly with a VCR. He had done that once or twice, but only at a JO buddy’s house, and their timing had been so hopelessly out of sync that his only memory was of lunging through the sheets in search of the fast-forward button.
    “What are you doing?” his buddy had asked when the video images accelerated and Al Parker and friends became the Keystone Cops.
    Michael had replied: “I’m looking for that cowboy near the end.”
    And this was what bothered him about owning a VCR. If that cowboy was yours for the taking—yours at the flip of a switch—what was to stop you from abandoning human contact altogether?
    He had taken the test in April, and it had come back positive. That is, he was carrying the virus or had already fought it off, one or the other. According to some doctors, this gave him (and a million others) a 10 to 25 percent chance of developing a full-blown case, but other doctors disagreed.
    What did doctors know?
    All he knew was that his health was fine. No night sweats or sluggishness. No unusual weight loss or mysterious purple blotches. He ate his vegetables and popped his vitamins and kept stress to a minimum. For a man who’d lost twelve friends and a lover in less than three years, he was doing all right.
    Just the same, a mild case of the flu or the slightest furriness of the tongue was now capable of filling him with abject terror. The other paramount emotion, grief, became more and more unpredictable as the numbers grew. His tears could elude him completely at the bedside of a dying friend, only to