Dead People

Dead friendships can say a lot. It's a weird thing having to cut ties with people who turn a psychological corner. Their beliefs become so alien that this person you've known for so long and grown close to is now totally unrelatable. You find out how much you can take from people, and really how much you're asking from them in the first place. Burning bridges light beginnings and endings, I guess.

I had a friend who was really effeminately gay. One of the nicest, most open and warm people I'd ever met. He hadn't said so outright, but it was hard not to assume; all the trappings of the stereotype were there. He moved to California from Arkansas as a 24-year-old virgin. I asked him about it once, a month or so after we'd met, and he told me he just hadn't found the right person yet. I started reading between the lines. What I was hearing was, "I've lived in a small town in Arkansas my whole life. I've never been able to be myself, at least not in public, without fear of being crucified. I would've died hung up with a sign on my back that said "THE ONLY GOOD FAGGOT". I moved out to California to be able to live my own life around people who accept me." Time would prove my assumptions right.

Some months after that talk, to the suprise of no one, he finally came out. To his friends, sure, but mostly to himself. He gave himself the gift of a real identity. I remember him posting a clip from Pinocchio the afternoon he told me. Subtle, I know. I was really proud of him for being able to take that step and embrace himself that way. It was cool watching him become more active in the gay community and immerse himself in a culture he'd been reading about and following forever.

Then it got weird. Maybe it was overcompensation or making up for lost time, but he'd disappeared into the lifestyle for a while and didn't come up for air for a long time. I'd hear from him now and again when he'd invite me to parties with his new friends. I never ended up going, and after a while he'd stopped asking me. It just wasn't my scene.

A couple years later, after he'd gotten to be something of a regular in the gay clubs and leather bars, I heard he hooked up with some bad people who had some shitty beliefs. They slowly convinced him to become a Bug Chaser, someone who wants to get AIDS in order to gain power over the stigma and fear of, in their words, inevitable infection. Think of it as black people using the word "nigger", only way, way worse. It's fatalism at its most literal and bizarre. I remember when he told me he'd been infected. I agreed to meet him after not talking to him for a while, just trying to sort out my own feelings about it. He sent me a text message.

"Can you meet me for lunch?" I already knew the story before he told me.

"Okay. When?"

We meet at Mel's on his lunch hour. Seeing this coming a mile away, I basically just sit there, taciturn. I am about to watch my friend publically declare himself a zombie. A coming-out party for the walking dead. Roy Orbison's "Running Scared" starts up.

"I did it," Dead Person tells me. "I'm positive." The smile on his face probably belies the fear he's feeling, but I tune out more every second. Over his shoulder, I see a hot redhead waitress at the corner booth. I think about fucking her in the bathroom and coming on her shirt so she can't keep wearing it. Rack focus to Dead Person, still talking.

"...figured, 'Why get treatment?', you know? I mean, the pills are so fucking expensive and it's really just delaying..." Dead Person explains to me, but mostly to himself. Not a word of it gets through. I am somewhere else.

"This is my favorite Roy Orbison song." I'm so removed from the conversation as to be almost glacial. Legally dead inside.

"...So, what do you think?" Dead Person asks, maybe.

"...So sure of himself, his head in the air..."

Neither of us says anything for the rest of the song. We are two dead people listening to a dead person.


THE END.