Cugine

[Names have been changed to respect the privacy of the respected parties whose lives are detailed here.]           

 
      I find it somehow disturbing that I cannot find his name on the Internet.  It seems his obituary should at least be there.  It doesn’t seem right, or fair, or reasonable.  I guess what my girlfriend says is true.  People’s lives are like pebbles dropping one by one into a tranquil pond.  The water ripples in ever-widening circles, until there is no motion left, and the surface becomes still again.  The pond looks unchanged, but it isn’t, really.
            “What?  You what?” I struggled to untangle myself from the serpentine sheets that threatened to swallow me.  

“I didn’t mean to call you so early, ya know, “ Louie’s staccato voice was full of apologies.  “But I just found out and I wanted to let you know as soon as I knew that I’m HIV positive.”

         I met Louie in the dank recesses of a neighborhood dive named Rhythms.  He was nineteen years old.  A Foreign Language major at LIU, Louie was a brash, frenetic Bensonhurst boy with a ready smile and an infectious laugh. 
         I had met a lot of gay men during my furtive trips to Rhythms.  He was the only gay guido I had ever met.  He had an Italian temper and a sense of humor to match. 

Louie and I fell in with a small, cohesive crowd of gay club hoppers that trekked from borough to borough in search of a good time.  At the hub of that circle was Louie, chain-smoking Parliaments and dancing himself into a Sufi-like trance under the dazzling swirl of dance-floor lights.  People would often step aside to give him more room and watch him dance.  He loved the attention. 

Contrasted with this club kid identity was the side of Louie that made him a riveting Language teacher: “my intellectual snob side”, he called it.  His porn flicks shared the video cabinet with National Geographic films about the plight of Sumatran tigers   His bookshelves spilled over with books whose titles I couldn’t translate: Essais – Montaigne, Catalogo Dei Premi Letterari Italiani, Mein Kampf.  He taught himself Afrikaans in his spare time.  Once he got sick, his only ambition was to go on safari in Africa, so he could get close to the giraffes. 

My vowel-laden surname and Catholic school history, combined with the fact that I was absolutely no sexual threat, made me a natural choice for Louie’s “fake girlfriend”.  Louie didn’t come out to anyone but his mother until his early twenties, so family functions before that point always demanded a surrogate date.  I always obliged.

I learned early on that Louie’s mother was the center of his world.  His relationship with his father was never more than perfunctory.  Louie often said he was tired of trying.  That he would never be like his brother, Charles – the older, athletic, macho golden boy – and thus would never win the approval of his stoic, taciturn father.

Their relationship was painful to watch.  Louie could have set himself on fire and run through the living room, and still his father would ignore him.  I never saw them hug or kiss or exchange kind words.  According to Louie, when he needed money, his father took him to his Washington Heights wholesale grocery and put him to work in the packing room to earn what he needed.  When Charles needed money, his father took out the checkbook and asked how much. 

Louie summed up his relationship with his father in four succinct words, “He’s a fuckin’ jerk.”

Louie may have had a hard time with his family, and his family may have had a hard time with his sexuality.  But Louie certainly didn’t.  He loved men.  Wildly, obsessively, unapologetically.  He was like a Venus flytrap in the bars, always with several cute but unsuspecting flies buzzing around him, buying him drinks, laughing at his nonstop jokes, lighting his cigarettes.  He never went home alone.  Often, I dropped him off at Shore Road, the local gay cruise strip, so he could flit from vehicle to bike path to park bench, orgiastically worshipping the bodies of anonymous men he encountered.  It was his element.

          As our twenties faded, the bar scene and party-hearty habits we’d developed fell away like the discarded skin of a snake.  Louie held on the longest.  He did not handle aging – he got hairplugs, and he always talked about wanting liposuction.  He did not handle change - his greatest lament was the demise of disco music.  He considered 1981 the best year of his life, from which the best music and his best memories were gleaned.   I still cannot hear Jimmy Bo Horne’s “Spank” without thinking of Louie.

By the time I got the call that Louie was HIV positive, our lives had diverged in the way lives usually do.  Louie was teaching at a public high school in Brooklyn, not far from the neighborhood in which he grew up.  He was in a tumultuous relationship with Hernan, a personable Bajan guy.  His mother had passed, and his father had remarried almost immediately, then moved to Florida, leaving Charles with the house.  Every time we spoke, Louie talked about the old days, and I spent the whole conversation laughing.

Eventually, Louie’s health failed.  He had CNS Toxoplasmosis and came close to dying.  The bout left him blind in one eye.  He retired on disability from teaching and moved to Florida.  He couldn’t handle winters in the Northeast anymore.  Hernan, drained from previous months of being a caregiver, decided he could not stand Louie’s jealous behavior and fits of temper any longer, and moved to Savannah to be near his family.  

Louie had no driver’s license due to his visual impairment.  He drove anyway.  He tried only half-heartedly to quit smoking.  He enjoyed the sun, and took a job landscaping.  The job, he informed me, was making him buff.  The Internet opened up a whole new cruising venue for him.  He took full advantage.

He liked Florida because of all the barely-dressed guys.  He hated it because it wasn’t Brooklyn. 

I had fallen into the across-the-miles routine of emailing Louie frequently and telephoning every few months.  Not hearing from him for an extended stretch was no reason to panic.  Sometimes, he would forget to pay his phone bill, and would be without AOL and long distance for a month or two.  Then an Instant Message would pop up on my computer, or a rambling message would be waiting in my voicemail, and there he was. 

When a childhood friend of mine – the sister of Louie’s best friend – emailed and said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you – Louie passed away”, it was a few months after the fact.  I felt a rush of guilt and anger and sorrow about losing him.  But, for Louie, I felt relief.

I believe that Louie had already lived the happiest years of his life and some part of him knew that.  Having AIDS never panicked or depressed him.  Perhaps that’s why.  He never felt particularly comfortable or happy with the inevitable weight of maturity.  Like the stars in Orion’s belt blazing into the night sky, Louie recalled his previous luminosity and could not persevere without it.  Sometimes, I understand how he felt.

I still expect the phone to ring, and Louie to be on the other end, ready to regale me with some tale of sexual daring, or a complaint about the HMO establishment.  Part of me knows that will never happen.  Another part of me refuses to accept that.  Because of Louie, the surface of my pond will never be still.