Always Leave 'Em Smiling

Oddly enough, it felt like love at first sight, except for the fact that she was a woman and I was a ga…I wasn’t interested in dating anyone. So, I guess it was more like love at first in line, since she stood behind the counter of the School Employee’s Credit Union counting the wad of bills I’d lain out for her. Smiling, she was always smiling, she smacked a rubberstamp on the back of my paycheck and filed it away in a drawer somewhere.

Just to make things clear, I wasn’t a school employee; hell, I wasn’t even a student. I was a bartender at, of all places, Marie Calender’s, a pie shop and she was a bank teller who smiled at me. Who smiled at me and said ‘Hello’ every time I came into the bank. She always seemed to take her time with the customers so she could wait on me, nodding ’Hello.’ Saying “Next.”

It was with that smile that she instantly became my friend; at least that’s what I told people at work about my friend Erin, at the bank. I had a handful of close friends, and I needed all I could get. See, I was gay…. Wait! I am gay…. But in those days I was so far in the closet I couldn’t even see the strip of light at the bottom of the door; if there was a light. The closet is a dark, safe…lonely, place.

Nevertheless, she smiled at me whenever she saw me, and soon I was grinning back at her…slightly, nervously, my head dropping soon after my lips curled upward. This was a new thing for me, smiling at people. But Erin’s smile never wavered, it intensified, like a florescent bulb, the wattage increasing, each time I saw her, and I, too, smiled a bit more easily, whenever she looked my way and said, “Next.”

Love at first in line. The gay guy and the teller.
_________________________________

Then the day came; the day I dreaded most of all; the reason I had so few friends, and why I kept to myself and went straight home after work and never answered the phone, never said ‘Yes’ to co-workers who wanted to see a movie on the weekend. The reason I spent my time alone, in a book, in front of the television, asleep. It was the Day of the Question. I can still see her, counting my cash—being a bartender, even at a pie place, was profitable—and depositing my check for me.

She smiled at me and asked, “Would you like to see a movie sometime?”

This was it. The budding friendship was over. I would tell her ‘No,’ making up some excuse and then I would rush out of the bank. She would smile at me a few more times; stop waiting for my turn in line to open her window. No more nods.

“I can’t.” I said, pretending to look for something in my wallet. A scrap of paper, perhaps, with a list of excuses on it. “Um….I….I—“

“Are you gay?”

I stammered and flushed. I felt my face catch fire and my eyes water; my heart thumped loudly in my chest, rattling my ribcage, echoing like a rock tumbling down cavern walls. I slammed the closet door, crawled to the back, and turned from the light.

“No.” I said. Angry, Annoyed. I wanted my deposit slip. I wanted out of there. I wanted to be back home where no one knew, no one cared.

“Yes, you are.” She laughed. “So what?”

So what? So? What? And she smiled again and the light came up from the floor, rising over my scuffed shoes and ripping along the creases in my Levis. So what? I felt her smile calm the smashing of my heart in my chest. I felt the smile, cool my skin, and the laughter dry my eyes. I grinned, still red-faced, but otherwise elated, as I had never felt in my life.

“Yes, I am,”

I wanted to faint

It was only then that I could take a breath. No holes had opened up to swallow me. No unruly mob formed among the principals and the basketball coaches, the Algebra teachers standing impatiently behind me waiting for their turn at the teller. There was no lightening bolt, and no shouts of ‘Burn in Hell, faggot.’ I didn’t die, and the world didn’t stop spinning.

Yes, I am. So what.

“Would you like to see a movie sometime?”

“Yes, I would.” And I laughed out loud. I stood a little taller and I looked her right in the eye. I felt drunk with power. I had said the words, I’m gay and it hadn’t killed me. No one was erecting a guillotine near the ATM machine. No bonfires in the safe on which to burn the queer. I was alive and breathing and on the verge of the best friendship I had ever known. A friendship that didn’t die from complications of AIDS a couple of years later…like Erin did.
_______________________________

Why her? I used to wonder when I visited her in the hospital that last time. Why not me? I was the gay one, and everyone knows that AIDS is God’s punishment to the homosexual; at least that was what the graffiti along the highway said. Why her? She was my friend, and a mother, whose own son had passed from the AIDS a few days before her. A mother and son who were in the right place at the wrong time. In that same hospital, some twelve years earlier, she was giving birth to her daughter; and hemorrhaging.

The transfusion came quick, and poisoned. Yet, it wasn’t until she gave birth to Joey that Erin learned she was HIV-positive; and so was her son.

I was gay. She was a mother. He was a little boy. They were my friends.
_________________________________

Our first, for lack of a better word, date, was uncomfortable. I had never...never...shared a meal with anyone who knew I was gay. Lots of people may have suspected, may have seen me and thought, “Yep. Fag.” However, she was the first person to know because I had told her; she asked, and I answered.

And she didn't care at all. Still, our dinner was tense. I didn’t know how gay men were supposed to act. Should I mince and lisp and talk in a high voice? Should I wear frilly shirts and tight pants? Or, should I be myself, even though I had no idea exactly what that meant?

I sat quiet while she talked. And then I spoke. I made a little joke and she laughed, and I relaxed somewhat. She talked some more, I listened. She asked questions and I gave one-word answers. But she listened to me. Listening; that was a new thing.

Our second dinner was better, if only because it was a lunch. Daylight and sunshine, a sidewalk cafe and a bottle of something white…Sauvignon Blanc, I think, from Sonoma. We let loose with one another. This time I smiled and laughed at her jokes—though we both knew I was far funnier, what with being gay, and all. I listened to her, and asked about her, and learned about her.

She had a three-year-old daughter, Merrianne, at home. And a husband, who was there in body, if not in spirit and heart. Body, because she was pregnant again and didn’t know if she should have the baby if it meant staying married. She wasn’t sure about that…being married. In the end, it wasn’t her decision. Her husband left her because of some letters he’d read: H I V.

She quickly changed the subject from babies and husbands to music. Did I like U2? I said I didn’t think so. Diana Ross, sure; U2, not so much. Then she asked what I thought of The Pretenders and I said Chrissie Hynde was pretentious—a joke. What did I know from The Pretenders? I could recite Judy’s life story but I didn’t know Chrissie Hynde from Chrissy Snow.

Erin had tickets to a concert in Oakland; a Day On The Green. U2…Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders…and a band called the BoDeans. She asked me to come along. She wanted a day away from her husband, a day with a friend. Maybe we could go into San Francisco after, she suggested; we could go into the Castro and check out the guys. Would I like to come along?
Would I!
________________________

I visited both of them in the hospital, much as I hated those places. They reeked of Lysol and death; no matter how you scrubbed and sanitized and spritzed and washed and waxed, you can’t clean away the smell of death and disease and stale waiting rooms and cracked vinyl couches and indifferent nurses and hurried doctors. And sadness; most of all, hospitals smell of sadness.

I would sit by her bed in the mornings, and go to his room after lunch. I told him bedtime stories and fairy tales; of places where little boys don’t get sick, nor do their mothers. I made excuses for why Erin couldn’t come see him, reasons why Daddy didn’t come or call or write…or care.

Back to her room I went in the evenings, where we would sit and laugh and gossip. And lie.

“He was fine.” I’d said. “Just a little tired is all.”

“Your Mom’s okay.” I fibbed. “She’s sleeping.”

And then Joey died.

I went to her room where a breakfast tray sat untouched. She didn’t seem to know I was there, who I was, or what I wanted from her. I held her hand and then I kissed her cheek. I said I would come back later. Then I went to see him.

The nurses were taking away the sheets and the flowers, pulling down the construction paper “Get Well” cards his school friends had made. His Grandmother wanted them packed in a box for when Erin came home. “Erin will want them, I know.” She tried convincing herself. The cards and flowers and little boy clothes all shoved inside a box, destined for the top of some closet at home, the corner of the attic, a Goodwill bin.

I kissed his grandmother—her mother—and asked, “Does she know?”

The grandmother could only manage a tear, a weak smile, and a tug on my hand. I nodded, and then went back to the elevator. I rode, shaking, up to the fifth floor and trembled down the tiled hallway to her room. I nudged the door open.

“He’s gone.” I said, sitting next to her, and waiting far too long to speak. The sky outside the window looked like oatmeal; overcast, lumpy, and gray; like I felt. “But he’s okay now…I think.”

She smiled a pale imitation of the Erin smile from those long ago days at the bank. Her eyes were drugged and heavy, lackluster. I held her hand and she squeezed mine as her mother had done. But she didn’t know. And for some reason, one I can never articulate, I don’t think she ever did. At times, when I drive by the hospital and look up to the window that was her room, I think that might have been for the best. She had enough to worry about and her little boy was fine.

Joey didn’t hurt. Anymore.
____________________________

Scarcely a week later, late one night, I was visiting the hospital, this time with Erin’s sister Dian. Erin didn’t seem to know the days anymore, all the hours bleeding together, though between the hours of dementia there were scattered moments of lucidity that made you almost forget she was very sick’ almost.

Dian and I sneaked a bottle of one of Erin’s favorite wines, a Fleur de Lis, from Whitehall Lane in the Napa Valley, into her room. Actually, it wasn’t too hard getting the wine inside the hospital. Since the nurses knew Erin didn’t have a lot of time they mostly closed their eyes to my after midnight visits and bags of take-out food I brought with me.

Erin and I had made several trips to the wine country over the years of our friendship and we always stopped at Whitehall Lane first; it sat still, perched at the doorway to the valley and as good a place as any to begin. One year we tasted a wine they called Fleur de Lis, and ended up buying a case and splitting it. That night we opened the last bottle; it seemed appropriate.

Dian found some paper cups, as light as air, in the bathroom; just three. Lucky. I poured shots of the red wine for us all and we toasted the good times. Smiles over counters. A friend coming at me from out of the blue. A friend to show me that I was okay…gay. Coming out of a marriage; coming out of the closet, though I still had one foot nailed inside. My parents didn’t know; nor my family. Some friends knew; some didn't.

Erin seemed in a mood to remember and we sang some old songs; mostly the BoDeans. We had seen them that night, years earlier, opening for U2 and The Pretenders. Standing in the mud at the Oakland Coliseum, the BoDeans became our band and we saw them whenever they came out west. I still have a poster we took from one of their appearances at the Fillmore.

‘Going home,’ they sang; ‘On the wings of angels…’

She and Dian and I had a grand time that night until her eyes turned dark as the sunlight crept into the room; until her smile flat lined. Until her hand slipped and that spare paper cup of Fleur de Lis from Whitehall Lane fell to floor with a papery thud.

THUD. Thud, thud.

And she said…something.

“What was that?” I asked.

“I think she said ‘Goodbye.” Dian began to cry softly.

Goodbye? How do you say goodbye to your best friend? How do you let go of the one person who truly knows you? Really knows you; knows of your secret crushes on the waiter at work; knows of your love of old movies and popcorn and African music and Chinese art. The one person who knew the good and the bad about me, and never cared because she was my friend and, to her, nothing mattered more than friendship. How could I say goodbye?

A cough, a grumble in fact, came from the bed. My best friend’s eyes were open and the darkness and clouds had disappeared. She seemed angry with us for dismissing her so soon and I had never seen such a beautiful fury.

“I said,” she began, evenly and defiant, “Good wine!”

And we all laughed. And breathed again. Laughed some more. Gossiped. Reminisced and lied.

She was gone later that same day. But she always left us laughing.

Good wine.