The Attic

I found an old short story I wrote about AIDS and how it effected many of us and I want to share it with you.It tells how many of us earlier pioneers felt..It happened at Feathers, but not in sequence with the history line.

The Attic

As I look out my attic window I see young lovers holding hands and walking freely down the street. I watch children running after a ball and laugh in the delight of falling down, birds fly freely through the sky. I see other attic windows and wonder if someone is hiding in them like I hide in mine. As I look at these people walking carefree in the street I wonder if they are my enemies. It starts to rain and everyone runs for shelter. I wonder, is this my time to run free in the streets? Do all the attic people come out of hiding now and enjoy the freedom? I wait for someone to go first, I’ll follow anyone who wants to be first, but I am too afraid to be a leader. I know I’m not the only one who is different. I can’t be. I cry myself to sleep on the drafty floor of the attic. I wake to darkness. I feel safe in the darkness.
No this isn’t an excerpt from “The Diary of Anne Frank”; it’s my childhood. I don’t know when it was that I discovered that I was different or how I knew to keep it a secret, I just did. I would love to trade childhoods with anyone who thinks being gay is a life style choice. I watched as my grade school classmates beat up the effeminate boys in school and pretended to be cool to get the suspicions off me. In 8th grade I was a lunch room monitor for the second grade. There was this little Irish girl with thick eyeglasses and braids who was always being picked on because she had a lisp and an Irish accent. I became her protector. I would yell at these second graders not to make fun of her because of something she could not help. Then, not wanting to look un-cool, I told them that if they put a piece of bologna behind the radiator the heat would fry the bologna. The smell would be so bad that they would be sent home from school early. It always worked. So now, this little girl is being invited to parties and has friends to eat lunch with and the other kids find out that this little girl is really cool, even if she talks different from the others. I feel good about myself until…
One day this little girl came up to me and asked, “What is a fag and why do they call my older brother one? Why does it make my mother cry when they call him one?” So much for feeling good. So much for not wanting to be a leader. All my cool friends are going to beat up this little girls’ brother and I, the class clown, will defend him and we will both get beaten up. They call us both fags. I found myself sitting in my attic and nursing a black eye and bloody nose and wondering how am I going to explain this to my mother and father. I looked out at the stars and asked, “Why, God, Why?” My attic doesn’t hold me safe anymore so I leave it in my childhood and I come out of my attic.
I don’t know how to lie and I don’t want to find my mother crying because someone called me a fag, so at fifteen I told them the truth. This was 1975, so no one knew what a gay person was, never mind a gay teenager. My mother blamed my father for not playing football with me and my father blamed my mother for letting me watch soap operas. I told them that I still love them and we never spoke of it again. I wanted to speak about it, but no one ever listens to me, maybe they don't want to hear. Now with both my parents gone, what is the point.

As I kiss a picture of my mother I realize how plastic my love has become since I lost her, I yearn to feel her kiss back. I remember all the brush kisses, kisses that meant nothing, and wonder why I didn’t make them a memory. Now they are only cloudy moments and I kiss a plastic picture and I think of AIDS and safe sex and I remember my friend Kenny Alton. He didn’t kiss plastic. It was before we knew we had to.
He was my first gay best friend. I spoke to him and shared all my childhood secrets and he never judged me. I told him how I would hide in my attic and pretend a life. How David Cassidy loved me and we loved each other and everyone loved us because we had the ultimate love. I wanted the ultimate love. The beach movies where the songs connected their words of love. I wanted the hope that it existed outside my attic. Kenny Alton would smile and know what I was talking about. He did the same things. We shared our “Anne Frank Attic” memories and even though we could walk the streets we still had to hide our secret from everyone who wanted to beat us up for being different. Of course these secrets came out after shots. We worked at Feathers together (he was a waiter I was coat check) and were told we were not allowed to drink and work, but everyone knows shots aren’t drinks. By the end of the night we’d sit on the hood of his car and compare our same attic stories and cry at how lonely it was and then laugh at how ugly we looked when we cried.
Where we differed was he needed the ultimate love, I just wanted it. He believed men when they said, “I love you” I made them prove it. I wouldn’t make love to anyone who wouldn’t bring me home to meet their mother. I was surprised at how many adult men came out of their closets, but still hid in their attics. Kenny Alton believed the hugs and the warmth of their kisses. I didn’t. I brush kissed. No memories, just moments. When he found the prince of his dreams, he also found out he was HIV+. This was the early eighties and HIV+ meant to buy a coffin, there’s no hope.
So we drank our shots and sat on the hood of his car and cried and then laughed at how ugly we looked and I knew to make this moment a memory. He told me how much he admired the fact that once I set my mind on someone or something I never give up. I never lose hope. I thought, fat lotta good that does me. I’m gonna be without my best friend. I asked him how he felt about the whole dying thing. He said, “I don’t want to die, but I don‘t want to live being afraid of dying.”
Then safe-sex came out and we knew how not to die- kiss plastic.
As my lips move away from my mother’s picture, the memory ends. I flash another memory of looking at my mother’s coffin at the cemetery. A feeling of warmth found me that day. As I turned away from looking at my mothers coffin, crying hysterically, I saw that she was buried three rows away from Kenny Alton and I heard him say, “Wipe those tears, you look ugly when you cry.” And I laughed. I realized that if I didn’t have those lonely childhood attic years, I would never have had those happy Kenny Alton years and it all made sense. The ultimate love isn’t a night of hot sex; it’s a friend who pops out of heaven to bring a smile to the face of a friend whose heart is breaking.