I am watching porn film (still the era of good ol’ scratchy celluloid) being projected on the stone wall of the grotto. At my side is my Syracuse University college pal Mike, a career pessimist with ringed, tired eyes and a love for the absurd. He, too, has given up on romance this evening. The men around us are panting and loving with impunity. Eternal romances are igniting and sputtering out in the space of minutes. We are fighting the twin demons of alcohol and boredom. At one point, Mike breaks with backroom etiquette and says not-so-sotto-voce, “Look over there”. He points impertinently and I look through the gloom to see a dark beauty sitting in the corner. Caucasian, broad-shouldered, silky curls hanging to his shoulders. A regal savage with a hairy chest, bare save for a leather vest. I am just out of college and still think in terms of archetypes. I am intrigued. This is pure evil, I think to myself; I feel the need to embrace it.

I saunter over. He looks even more menacing and sexy in satanic goatee. I notice a thick, leather wristband on his arm, blooming with spikes. I reach out to touch the fur on his muscled chest. He looks at me with opaque eyes and a low, steady growl rumbles up from within his sculpted chest. I back off. He reaches for my fly and fumbles with my manhood. His intensity intimidates. I am unable to harden. Sheepishly, I disengage and slink back to Mike, still watching the scratchy footage of men having pre-AIDS sex. Unable to convey what has happened in just a few words, I opt for silence.

Perhaps fifteen minutes have passed. Mike suddenly breaks the dull silence by nudging me again. “Look over there,” he says, disbelief spiking his voice. “Do you see what I see?” I sigh and look again past his pointing finger. There in the gloom sits a man with a full bush of red hair, dressed in a white suit with multi-colored polka dots. It looks as if a Ringling Brothers denizen has lost his way. I am suddenly stone sober.

“Hey,” Mike coaxes me, “Go over to him.”

“And what the hell should I say,” I spit back incredulously.

“Uh – ask him what time it is,” Mike responds, displaying that brand of Syracuse pragmatism for which I love him.

Summoning my counterfeit nonchalance, I approach this clown in the corner of the gay peep show store backroom. “Hi,” I say jauntily, “Do you know what time it is?” The man in white greasepaint shakes his head and gestures with his left hand to his right-hand wrist, to indicate that he is not wearing a watch. I follow his hand to peer at his watchless wrist — and espy the aforementioned studded leather wristband.

I walk briskly back to Mike, grab him by the lapels and announce it is time to leave. He follows me as I clamber up the stone steps to the front desk.

There the manager stands, neglected teeth clenched around a big, wet cheroot. He stares us down.

I decide to go for understatement.

“Uh, pal… you have a clown down there,” I say.

“Oh yeah,” he shoots back with unfeigned disinterest, “We get a lot of clowns down there.” He gets paternal on me, adding, “No sweat. Just tell him you’re not interested.”

“No,” I yell back. All pretenses for calm are discarded. “I’m talking about a real clown… like in the circus.”

He gapes at me for a few seconds, appraising my credibility, then turns to his assistant, a dim short man and barks, “Will you go down there and see what he’s talking about.”

The lackey, all stoop-shouldered, descends the stairs to the basement. When he returns, the occupational confusion on his face has deepened tenfold.

He looks at the manager and nods slowly, “He’s right; there is a clown down there.”

“And what did you tell him?” the manager says, now visibly flustered.

“I told him we had a dress code and that he had to leave,” he beams, proud for having come up with his alibi on the spot.

At this point, Mike and I expect Rod Serling to walk in and give his typical epilogue to the surreal scene. But we have had enough heebie-jeebies for even a typical Christopher Street evening.

(All events recounted actually happened to me and Mike. Mike passed in 1992, so, alas, I have no corroboration.)

It was the Spring of 1980 at Syracuse University. At this point, 19th century fiction had little relevance in my life. For I had just discovered psychedelics and bisexuality and was dancing around Oakwood Cemetery on mushrooms, peering into the polished faces of gravestones for answers.

Todd was a rich Jewish kid from Jersey, short, wiry and dark-eyed. And Professor Judy would always indulge his outbursts. Dressed in black shrouds, with a wild nest of Havisham hair, she who would cackle in delight as Todd punched holes in the hand-wringing, stile-jumping dramas of Eliot, Hardy or Trollope.

I don't know how Todd did it, but I finished the course with a C. Eventually, I learned how to juggle mind expansion with the rigors of academics.

I came to New York City in 1982, and was drawn to the feral East Village. I roamed the streets with friends, weaving in and out of Ukrainian bars. And there, invariably, was Todd, all wicked grin and laughing eyes. We would nod hello while on our respective rampages.

My hedonism eventually focused; I traded bisexuality for gay activism, leaping into demonstrations with ACT UP and Queer Nation. I was now living hand to mouth on Essex Street. And then I saw Todd again.

He began materializing on Avenue A, eyes hollowed, hands slapping at his clothes to keep warm. I tried to play it cool when we met; no judgments. After all, I was a fan of weed and the occasional hit of ecstasy. Todd, however, had gone hardcore. He was always wired, his jackal smile looking wounded. He insisted that he had just knocked out a new book on income tax management, and it was sitting in the window at Barnes & Noble. I smiled in pure placation. How do you respond when a guy looks more an addict than a man of letters?

I fled the East Village three years ago, just as cafes and boutiques moved in to chase the shadows and the dopers from my neighborhood. I moved to the cobbled, leafy calm of the West Village with my new boyfriend.

Last October, I was doing errands on an unforgiving, overcast autumn morning. I was passing Two Boots Pizza at the corner of 7th and Greenwich. Huddled in the doorway was Todd. His face was tattooed in city dirt. I gave him a brave smile, walked past him to the drugstore and came back with a bottle of juice and a packet of vitamins, handing them to him before I crawled away, churlishly convinced my own shame was far more burdensome than his.

I felt like crap all day, trying to bolster myself with pep talks crafted from pure liberal guilt. I've fought for the homeless, I reminded myself. I'd even been arrested during a sit-in at Trump Tower. But what did I owe this guy? A shower? A bed? Where did Todd fit into my crusades?

I would see him again and again. The last time, he was sleeping on a cardboard mat. I woke him with a big bag of food from Au Bon Pain. Todd smiled winningly and insisted he was getting up to go to work. I just nodded.

I figured I could end this piece with some leaden observation on the vagaries of Fate, in the tradition of Thomas Hardy. But I ran into Todd this morning on East 15th Street, and he provided a hopeful coda: He's up for a job as a super in Brooklyn. He sounded relieved. Both his agent and his father, he continued, urge him to write a book about his months on the street. He shook his head, telling me no one would ever believe the reality of it. He smiled sheepishly and asked for a quarter. I pulled out a dollar.
 

“Here’s how I want my funeral made,” he whispered, as we gathered around his bed at Beth Israel Hospital for what would be his 32nd and final birthday. We were proud of Michael’s sudden surge of pragmatacism. After all, when you’ve been wasting away for months, and lost the power even to shuffle off to the john, the timing is right. Besides, this was the Mesozoic Age of AIDS; no magic cocktails for four more years. But when he elaborated on his funeral arrangements, Michael really scared us, moreso than had any of his fashion-victim ensembles. “This is what I want,” he continued, “My ashes put into white balloons and let go over Central Park. This is how I want it to happen.”

We were novices in matters of Final Requests, and too dumbfounded by Michael’s Hallmark Card from Hell proposal to protest. This was a man who had always dismissed cheap sentiment with a snarl. So we merely nodded, presuming there’d be a later occasion to disabuse him of his fanciful notion.

But Michael had set life into fast motion with his final request, and three weeks after returning home to Syracuse, his wheelchair clearing the front stairs with an awkwardness noticed by every last neighbor who peeped from behind her curtains, Michael died.

Before departing, however, Michael had repeated his request to his mother Vicki, a pious Italian woman with an expansive middle ideally suited for her huge heart. Vicki had acquiesced to the Ritual; there was no way to convince her that the request sprang from the same dementia that once had Michael insisting that Bette Midler was perched on the hospital room clock.

I resigned myself to the ceremony, to be held on a Monday afternoon in September. The previous day, I visited my ex-boyfriend Theo, who was a balloon salesman, supplying giddy outer-borough couples with bouquets of undying love. He kept a helium tank in his West Village apartment, and we experimented with peat moss, an unworthy stand-in for the smudgy, bleached ash known in the funeral business as cremains. The balloons were burdened by even a handful of peat moss and barely rose off the living room floor. I called Vicki in Syracuse, wincing as I instructed her to empty each balloon by half.

Vicki and Michael’s father, Michelangelo, joined by an aunt and uncle, flew in the next day and met us at the entrance to Central Park across from the Dakota. Their faces were numb with grief, each searching ours for an indication of appropriate emotion for the Ritual. One final gracing touch: it was a raw, rainy day. “Here,” Vicki said, extended a plastic bag towards me. Inside a clear Tupperware container, laying side by side like sardines, were thirty balloons containing Michael. I imagined Vicki sitting at the kitchen table, recalling her son’s short life as she silently completed her absurd task. Not for the last time that day, I cursed my pal.

Twenty of us soon gathered. Jackie, a striking brown-haired woman with beestung lips, had rented a helium tank. We set up an assembly under a tree which offered little protection from the icy drizzle. We persuaded the family to stand around the bend, out of sight. One prudent soul suggested a trial balloon. Good thing; it inflated with a whoosh and immediately popped. We squelched our pained laughter long enough to send one person to reassure Vicki and Michelangelo that Michael was not part of the mishap.

Soon, we were getting the hang of the process. A gust of helium shot into the white globes would send the bone chips dancing in a mad circle. Then, we would quickly tie and affix it to three other balloons. Only once did we err, when Michael’s best friend Mike unhooked balloon from nozzle prematurely, sending it flail spastically through the air, finally sputtering onto the pavement.

George, a man in his mid-60s, with the insane look of a fakir, rubbed the tattoo of ashes into the ground before we could protest, prompting more nervous laughter at the surrealism of it all. Even with my eleventh-hour intervention, we discovered that the balloons were unable to bear their burden aloft. We tied extra helium-only balloons to each bouquet, just as Michelangelo appeared with his Instamatic camera, egging us on to smile and hold the balloons aloft. I eked out a grimace as the flash hit my eyes.

Leaden balloons in hand, we rejoined the others at Strawberry Fields. A crowd of twenty-five people had gathered. The air was silent, save for the staccato beat of icy rain on the leaves. Fakir George ordered everyone in a circle for the service, as I hoisted a boombox, offerering two songs by Michael’s favorite divas. Both numbers embodied Michael’s fervent but oftimes messy iconoclasm: Yoko Ono’s “Walking on Thin Ice” and Nina Hagen’s “My Way.”

At a signal, we released the blue twine holding each cluster of balloons and watched in dismay as they fell, one by one, to the ground. The group fell into silence. Thankfully, one single bouquet, a miraculous balance of

helium and bone chips, inched upwards . Its indecision was painful, but eventually it nudged its way towards heaven. As people stood awkwardly with their remaining earthbound bouquets, George suddenly announced, “A change of plans, folks. We will be releasing the balloons down by the pond. Come with me.”

Drenched, but still game, we followed the mad Fakir down the sloping path. Abandoning any pretense of grace, we burst the balloons over the mossy oval of water beneath a copse of trees. When Mike exploded his bouquet, an errant gust of wind suddenly stirred. Mike cried out and reeled back. I held his head between my hands as I tweezed small chips of bone from the corner of his eye.

A mourner who favored the traditional extracted a bottle of Dom Perignon from her raincoat and distributed plastic cups. Pia, a slim, young woman with Betty Boop eyes, whose faith embraced paganism, lit a bundle of sage and a candle to purify the clearing where we stood and sipped.

Suddenly, a black man in ragged clothes appeared, lugging a threadbare chaise lounge in his left hand. Sizing up the crowd, he launched into an a cappella version of “You Make Me Feel Brand New” in a falsetto flexible enough to require no apology. But when he finished his song and approached each mourner with outstretched palm, I took him aside to explain the situation. To hide his embarrassment, he fumed, “Well, I wouldn’t have done that if I knew what was going on. What kind of person do you think I am?”

It was only after Michelangelo coaxed him into posing for the camera that the man backed down, feeling the score had been settled.

Pia, Mike and I said our goodbyes to Michelangelo and Vicki, who had been sobbing silently. Walking back through Stawberry Fields, Pia produced a joint. Mike, Pia and I were nicely toasted by the time we arrived at a sushi bar on Avenue A, where we giggled and reminisced over sake the way you do when tears are not a proper send-off for a friend who has had the last loving laugh on the lot of you.

September, 1992