Harvey pursed his lips. “Did this choice have something to do with his music?”
I dodged the question. “It had to do with his health.”
“And you think he should listen to you, because you know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Yeah.”
“Is he doing drugs?”
“Griffin? God no, not that. Well, maybe pot, but I can’t throw stones about a little weed.”
“Drinking?”
“No.”
“That’s good.” Harvey glanced at Owen. “We’ve had too many friends battling addictions over the years and that’s one problem no amount of love can solve.”
I sighed hard. “I just… I can’t do this.”
“Then don’t but…” Owen raised a bushy eyebrow at Harvey. “Can I tell him about the big fuckup?”
“Sure. He knows the only part that’s risky already.”
“Okay.” Owen fixed an intent stare on me. “So it was 1988. We lived in New York in those days. Harvey travelled a lot for work so I was the one in the city most of the time, with a bunch of local friends. And, man, that was a fucking plague year. I told you about Harvey’s uncle. We were on edge. Families were doing fucked up things, guys were sick, and I couldn’t escape it.”
Harvey set a hand on Owen’s leg and Owen covered it with his own.
“I don’t mean Harvey had it easier, but there were places where the plague wasn’t as in your face as New York.”
“I hated leaving him,” Harvey said. “But sometimes it was a relief to go into a bar in Minnesota or Wisconsin and not wonder which friend wouldn’t be there this time. He’s not wrong. It was easier.”
“Anyhow,” Owen continued. “This one time he’d been on the road for two weeks, and I’d gone to two funerals by myself. Iwent home and I crossed out the second name in my address book, and I stared down at the page. I listed our friends by first names, sometimes didn’t know their last till the funeral hit. That was Brian. Two months earlier had been Benny. The year before, Brad. Boris passed in the early days. I crossed out Brian’s name and the entire B page in the book was scored through. Every one of them gone. And something hit me.”
Harvey turned his hand over to clasp Owen’s fingers. “And he didn’t call and tell me.”
“It was a work trip. You couldn’t come home. Nothing you could’ve done.”
“Except talk you off the ledge.”
Owen nodded, his jaw clenched. “I went a little crazy then. I looked through that whole damned book and there were too many missing, too many thick black lines and scribbled out names. We still were having a hard time with how to think about HIV, all the rumors about where it came from, what worked and didn’t. Some folks said the Hep B vaccine was tainted. And Harvey and I had never been exclusive. Dying seemed… inevitable.”
My chest ached for the bleak look in both the old men’s eyes.
“So I got totally wasted and I went out to a bathhouse. One of the last ones around. The city had closed most of ’em down by then. It felt like an act of defiance, claiming my identity, spitting in the face of death.”
I knew he’d made it through. HIV status was part of every resident’s medical record and both these guys were negative. But I still held my breath.
“I did some things,” Owen continued. “Fucking stupid things, which I became really aware of when the booze wore off. And when Harvey got back from his trip, before I let him kiss me, I confessed.”
“I was furious,” Harvey said. “Like, wanting to kill him if he wasn’t already gonna die, steam coming out of my ears.”
Owen said, “I thought he was going to leave me.”
“I almost did,” Harvey told me. “I wasn’t sure I could face that with Owen. We’d all seen exactly how horrible a death it was. We’d carried soft pudding and mashed potatoes to guys who couldn’t eat them, washed sheets. And if it happened because of his stupid, stupid blowout? How could he do that to me?”
“But you stayed?” I asked. “I mean, obviously. Unless you came back later.”
“I stayed. We had sex with a fucking condom for six fucking months. I yelled at him a lot. But it was exhausting to be angry and I asked myself, can I really walk away from that fuckhead now and not care what happens? I knew the answer was no.”
