Two weeks after I first met Clyde, he invited me to go with him for a long weekend in Atlanta.
Clyde was worried we were moving too fast. I was interviewing for (and would be offered) a job running an English department in Utah. We both had a feeling that being together was the right thing to do … but fourteen days into our relationship, we had no idea what the future would hold.
While moving from one house to another — just days, in fact, before our thirteenth anniversary — I stumbled on a packet of old stories. Among them was the following essay, detailing our adventures together on that weekend all those years ago.
Over the next few days, as a way of celebrating our thirteen years together, I’m reprinting the essay here. Enjoy!
Adult situations and language ahead. Reader discretion is advised.
Atlanta burns again, the westward face of its skyline blazing with the setting sun’s last light. Three days before Gay Pride Weekend, we arrive to explore the city before attending the march. Clyde, my companion, expects a scale model of the March on Washington — gay men and lesbians streaming from subway cars to flood the streets. This trip marks my first pride march; visions of communion with my own kind have coaxed me a few steps farther out of my own closet.
Clyde weaves our Nissan Stanza through the last of the day’s homebound traffic while I read aloud from a book titled What the Odds Are. “The chances of a heterosexual person contracting AIDS from one unsafe encounter with a ‘safe partner’ are one in five million.”
Clyde divides his attention between the rearview mirror and me. His skillful driving and the thin steel sheath of our car provide our only protection from the tons of metal and glass hurtling past us. “How does that compare with other odds?”
“The odds of winning the state lottery are only one in four million.”
“No,” Clyde says. “I’m talking odds on gay people getting AIDS.”
I quote from a paragraph. “The odds of getting AIDS over several years of regular, unprotected sexual activity with an infected partner are 2 in 3. With a condom, the risk is still a very dangerous 1 in 11. Atlanta is the fourth hardest-hit city in the nation.” I pause, watching the skyscrapers rising up around us. “One in one hundred-thirty-six people in Atlanta are infected with HIV.”
We arrive at Robert’s condo as the day’s last light slips away. The three-story townhouse nestls in a thick and unexpected grove of trees. Above the treeline, a massive office tower pierces the night, filling the sky like a glowing glass mountain. Robert waits for us ouside, chatting with a female neighbor. Their beagles romp in the azaleas, stopping behind each bush to nuzzle each other’s private parts like cruisers in a public park.
Robert hugs Clyde and shakes my hand. I’m the newcomer here; Robert, Clyde, and two other neighbor boys grew up together, wandering the streets of the same small Missisippi town, attending the same mostly-white high school, and hiding the same secret. Robert took a lover not long after he left college to live in Memphis — a lover who died all too soon of what the newspaper always calls “complications related to AIDS.” Clyde and I both wonder if Robert has tested positive, but neither of us will ask.
Once inside, he gives us keys. “Come and go as you please,” he says. For the rest of the evening, Clyde and Robert catch up with each other. I sit next to Clyde on the couch, doing that new spouse thing and defending my right leg from Otto, the perpetually horny beagle.
At one point, Robert asks about our plans. We outline Six Flags, Underground Atlanta, the pride march, and, perhaps, a movie.
“Underground Atlanta?” Robert asks. “Don’t miss the Oribitron.”
I picture one immediately: a kinetic sculpture of concentric rings, a cross between a model of the atom and a fitness machine, with a beautiful, muscular boy spread-eagled in its center.
Clyde expresses reluctance, so Robert tells a story, probably apocryphal, designed to spark interest. “There was this kid? He was wearing shorts? But no underwear?And he got on that Oribitron — the one at Underground? And when he got on it? This big long cock of his lunged out in all directions.”
We give Robert a sidelong look, doubting him.
“The operator just kept spinning him around and upside down so that big thing could come lolling out. People were watching and everything.”
“Anybody clap?” I ask.
“I offered the operator more money if he’d keep the kid going.”
“Did he?” Clyde asks.
Robert says nothing, but his sits with his mouth wide open, his wide eyes tracing the path of the kid’s member, bobbing in air thanks to the zero-gee gyrations of the Oribitron.
Later that night, after Robert goes to bed, Clyde and I take a shower, rinsing away the stiffness of four hundreds miles of travel. I hold him against me, our fatigue dissipating in the steam around us. On the shelf beneath the showerhead, I spy a plain, white lotion bottle, plastered with a druggist’s typewritten label. My heart sinks — out of sadness, ot fear.
I reach out, take the bottle, and read the label. Apply to affected areas. External use only. Like most medical information, the prescription raises more questions than it answers.
Despite the hot water and Clyde’s warmth, I close my eyes and shiver.
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