“Every time you smoke or drink, you’re shortening your life,” Cohen had told him.
“Without all that—and sex, too—what’s there to live for?”
Cohen shrugged.
“Then I don’t want to live,” Peter said.
“Are you talking suicide?”
Peter drew back. “I don’t know.”
Peter put down his cigarette and pulled the sheet and blanket up to his chin. Was he talking suicide? Like Billy?
The night Billy talked like that, the November moon was crumbling blue marble in an iridescent sky. A magic night. Only two months after Peter had been diagnosed—though nobody but Peter knew it. Kirk had picked him up in a cab at the Nouveau Riche at the end of his shift. They’d met Joey and Billy and Ron at a new bar in Adams-Morgan, The Cock Pit. The four of them had ranged themselves around Peter at the corner of the bar where Peter could keep an eye on the action. All the talk was about who’d been diagnosed. Joey downed one too many shooters and puked. Kirk and Ron had taken him home. When the bar closed, Billy invited Peter back to his place on Connecticut Avenue to do some coke. As they walked down Calvert toward the park in the cold, piercing moonlight, the city around them was a medieval cityscape in a Disney film, blue and powdery and mysterious. Billy kept stumbling. Too much beer. Peter was drunk enough to feel daring. Right before the bridge, they pissed on the sidewalk, giggling. Then onto Calvert Street Bridge over Rock Creek Park, lost in a blue shadow far beneath them.
“You always see this bridge in movies about Washington,” Billy said. “Maybe that’s why there’s so many suicides.” He ambled onto the pavement from the sidewalk.
“Stay out of the street,” Peter said. “Cars.”
“No cars.”
Peter looked both ways. He could hear the traffic from Columbia Road behind them and see an occasional headlight on Connecticut Avenue some blocks beyond the bridge, but no cars came their way.
“They always jump from the northern side,” Billy said. He clopped across the pavement in his boots and stepped up on the sidewalk by the guard rail. “From the middle of the bridge.” He stretched his arms over the thick top bar of the rail. “Right about here.” He hoisted his weight, rested his chest across the railing, and stared down. “They’re talking about putting up a fence to stop people from jumping.”
Peter ran toward him. “Get down from there, you asshole.”
Billy turned his face toward Peter. “Here I am all bent over, asshole in the air. Want some?”
“Billy, get down.”
“My ass is too fat for you. You like bubble butts. Or all muscled up.”
Billy’s body shifted forward.
Peter tensed. “Will you please get down from there?”
Billy’s face disappeared into the darkness, as his head ducked downward. “It’d be easy. Slide over the edge. Wouldn’t be but three seconds before you hit. You’d never feel nothin’. Three seconds.”
Billy’s body slid. His feet came off the ground. Peter caught his breath.
“Boost myself over and let go.”
In a panic, Peter grabbed Billy’s studded cowboy belt and pulled. Billy rolled off the railing against Peter. They both fell backwards into the street, Billy on top of Peter.
Billy, his back on Peter’s chest, spread his arms and legs wide. “Take it, man, take it.”
Peter pushed him off, stood, and brushed his clothes. “Pig.”
Billy laughed and staggered to his feet. “Scared you, didn’t I? You thought I was going right over the edge.”
“You’re sick.”
Billy chuckled. “I had you goin’ that time.”
“Come on. I’m cold.”
Peter headed toward Connecticut Avenue in the middle of the bridge, following the yellow median line, as far from the rail as he could get. Billy skipped and stumbled along beside him, still guffawing.
“You’re not funny,” Peter said.
Billy’s laughter dwindled and died. “Sorry, Peter. I was only kidding around.”
“Don’t kid with me like that.”
“I said I was sorry.”
They reached the end of the bridge in silence. Peter breathed easier. “We better get on the sidewalk before we get hit.”
A block from Connecticut, Billy glanced sidelong at Peter. “I wasn’t really kidding.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that . . . if I was ever diagnosed, I’d boost myself over the edge and let go.”
“Come off it.”
“I mean it. You ever see what AIDS does to someone?”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“Okay, but I’d do it, Peter.”
Peter stopped and took him by the shoulders. “What’re you talking about? Neither one of us would do it. We’d keep having a ball right up until they carted us away. Man, we’d boogie.”
Billy nodded loosely. “Yeah, I know. We’d fuck until our cranks fell off.” They began walking again, more slowly. “You never seen one of those guys. Jeez.” He shook his head. “Peter, what are we going to do when we can’t boogie anymore?”
Peter whisked a stray ash from the sheet, took a long drag on his cigarette, leaned back against the headboard, and let the smoke float from his lips. He hadn’t boogied in a long time. Boost himself over the edge and let go? Three seconds until impact. Three seconds of terror, then nothing. His stomach felt cold. No, never. He wanted to live, as passionately as he could for as long as he could. He wanted life to be magic and rich, full of rose and orange, lilting and graceful. Not just lying here all day every day, fighting his way out of the gray miasma and waiting for something to happen.
He stumped out the cigarette. Maybe waiting was all there was left. How could he face another battle with pneumonia? His bowels glittered with panic. Suffocation. And yet he didn’t want to die hooked to a respirator, a catheter stuck in him, all wired up, more lab rat than human being.
Or what if he got Kaposi’s sarcoma? The lesions would shrivel his skin, turn it purple, brown, black, hideous. He’d hide from all human view, as Johnny had.
Peter’d found out about Johnny’s KS one night in February, in The Long Shot. Kirk and Joey and Ron were there that night. And Billy.
And Eric. What a hunk. All bulges and fur in painted-on jeans and a torn tank top. Peter had seen him before and tried to strike up a conversation, but somehow Eric always escaped after a few opening lines. That night, Peter was determined. Eric sat there at the end of the bar cruising the scene, hunting for some ass. Peter tried to catch his eye.
Billy got in the way, as Billy always did. He was already a little drunk. He kept following Peter around and talking non-stop.
“Jesus,” Billy was saying. He pushed his wild hair back from his face, squinted up at Peter, and blinked over his contact lenses. “Everybody’s gettin’ diagnosed. You know that cute bartender at The Wild Boar? The one with the beard? He’s been diagnosed.”
“Billy, let’s talk about something else. This is depressing.”
Billy nodded. “It is, real depressing. I found out a guy I met in The Back Door a few months back has KS. Real bad. They don’t think he’ll make it much longer. And he won’t let nobody see him.”
“Billy,” Peter said,