Marigolds, Ch 34

34

Michael’s blood tested negative for the antibodies to HIV. He sat mostly upright, on a backless stool in an overpriced “bistro” across the street from Quincy Market. He was still in his bug-killer’s clothes. Though the place was crowded, the stools were vacant to either side of him. Yuppie babies; that smell didn’t bother me.

In front of Michael on the bar were his cell, a mound of change, and a drained shot glass. Head bobbing to the jukebox, he held his pint in both hands in his lap. His eyes had a certain glassy shimmer.

“Live to fight another day, eh, Finn?”

I ordered a Sam Adams and asked the bartender for an approximation of Michael’s consumption. He pulled the keys to Michael’s truck from his pocket jingling them in my direction.

“Good man, the barman,” Michael said. “Maybe he can recall where it’s parked.”

A nurse from the clinic had called earlier in the day with the news. Michael had asked her to fax him the confirmation. He read it aloud to me.

Dear Mr. Devlin,

It is our pleasure to inform you that our testing indicates no HIV antibodies present in your blood. You are not HIV positive.

We know that this experience is a sobering one, and in that spirit please allow us to remind you that every act of unprotected sex or intravenous drug use may lead…

The letter was not very different in content or tone from the one that I had received years ago. My response was, as I recall, similar to Michael’s. His results’ turnaround time, however, was much quicker.

“Fintan, isn’t it an ironic piece of irony…now look at me Fintan, are ye lookin’ at me, Fintan…”

I was indeed, right into his swimming eyes.

“… that this clinic thinks this is sobering? Huh? I’ll bet it is anything but sobering for most people who get that fuckin’ letter, now. Am I right? Mormons maybe or old ladies might maybe find it sobering, but then again those bastards are always sob…”

“Right you are, Mikie.” I handed him back his letter.

“I guess now I’ll be about the business of the organizing and the telling of this story…now that it has a happy ending.”

Even drunk Michael caught himself.

“Shit…a happy ending for me, anyway…poor girl.”

That night, after I trundled up my friend and drove us back to Chelsea, I told Michael my story. He knew I had been tested, but he didn’t know the details. I had let him assume what happened to me was more or less what happened to him.

It was not.

About ten years ago I had spent the evening in a smoky bar on Water Street. In those days Boston’s financial district after dark was a neighborhood with some jagged edges, poorly illuminated jagged edges.

That night in the emergency room at Tufts New England Medical Center, where I had taken myself in a cab, I would have lied to the nurse had I been able to compose one remotely plausible. She held my chin in her plastic-coated hand as she spoke.

“Sweetie, you are not the first man to be assaulted this way. These are interesting times.”

When BPD arrived I described the three men. I felt it necessary to tell the cops more than once I was not gay. At one point an exasperated detective told me, “Probably neither were they, Mr. O’Keefe. This wasn’t about sex; it was about power and humiliation. As a matter of fact, it was most likely about one of the three guys who did this to you showing the other two who’s boss… just how he’s… he’s the alpha male, know what I mean?”

Whether that cop was right or not, I never knew. I’d like to think I didn’t care, but the truth is I never figured out how to integrate this into my sense of self: three men in an alley off Milk Street in downtown Boston had raped me.

Later, just after dawn I walked slowly out of that hospital holding close a list of clinics and not much else.