Tim Murphy - Christodora

When he woke up — eleven hours later, according to the institutional black-and-white clock on the cinder-block wall — the dude on the cot next to him said, “Fuck, man, all you been doing is crying and screaming and tossing around in your sleep like a crazy motherfucker.”

Where was he? What was that smell? Bit by bit, his mind pieced the past few days back together. The lost car. The abandoned apartment in Palm Springs. He was in a fucking homeless shelter in Los Angeles? What was he wearing? He wanted to cry, but not in front of the dude on the next cot. He thought that he could kill himself, that the whole thing had just gone too far this time to try to piece things back together. But how would he do it? He didn’t have any drugs or pills to do it with. Should he just walk out in front of traffic?

Then the whole “Ysabel Mendes!” moment came back to him. Oh God, not that again. No, no, no. Please God, no. The fucking kid.

He lay there on his side, crushed by the depression of the crash. His mind kept sorting out that he could do three things. One, he could kill himself, but that would take some doing with no drugs or pills around — he’d have to leave the shelter and go out into the streets and figure it out. Two, he could just stay here. They had no ID for him; nobody would ever come looking for him. He had effectively cut himself off not just from New York City and everything that had ever happened there, but Palm Springs, the half-dozen or so guys he’d had to his friend’s apartment before he got the text from the kid. He could just stay here and be a bum and be taken care of at the lowest level — cot, shower, bologna sandwich — make peace with these fellow bums, maybe be brought into their card circle or TV clique.

But there was a third choice, motivated by a dim grain of recognition that, just maybe, because of all the people he had actually helped years before, he’d earned a crumb of credit to be helped in return. He lay there and mulled over that extremely alien thought for several minutes. It motivated him enough, finally, to sit — and oh, that was a miserable effort — then to stand, holding up the too-big jeans, and walk over to one of the staffer guys, who was watching a wrestling match with some of the dudes.

“Can you make a call for me?” he asked the staffer.

The staffer — not the same staffer as the night before, correct? He wasn’t sure — looked up at him disinterestedly. “You got somebody to come pick you up?”

Hector nodded yes; it seemed like the easiest answer. Slowly, apparently reluctantly, the staffer pulled a cell out of his pocket. “What’s the number?” he asked.

Hector didn’t know it, he realized. “I need you to call 411 for the number,” he said. “I know it’s listed.”

“Are you serious?” the staffer asked. Hector was sure now the guy wasn’t the fairly nice guy who’d brought him in here the night before. This guy seemed like a dick. “It’s like a dollar-fucking-ninety-nine a minute to call 411.”

Hector suddenly had a long view of just how much subjugating himself he was going to have to do to take this third choice rather than kill himself or simply say nothing and stay here and rot. Was it really worth it at this point?

“I know, sir, I’m sorry,” he made himself say. “But I really need this person and I forgot her number.”

The staffer rolled his eyes and dialed 411. He looked up at Hector. “What’s the name?”

“The last name is Heyman.” He spelled it out. “First name is Ava.” He also spelled it out. “New York, New York.”

“You gotta call New York?” the staffer asked, more pissed off every minute.

“That’s where I’m from,” Hector said. He started to cry. “That’s where I’m from.”

All the guys in the TV clique looked up at him. “What the fuck?” they said. “Why you crying, marica ? It’s gonna be okay, don’t worry.”

“Okay, okay, relax,” the staffer said. He waited for several seconds. “Here, I got somebody here who needs to talk to you,” he finally said into the cell, handing it to Hector.

“Ava?” Hector said into the cell, walking away from the blare of the TV.

“Who is this?” she asked. Oh God, Hector thought, he hadn’t heard that rasp of a voice in a long time. He came extremely close to snapping the phone shut. He couldn’t do this, he told himself. He said nothing.

“Who is this?” Ava said again. “Emmy?”

“Ava, it’s Hector.”

Silence. Then: “Hector? Villanueva?”

“Yeah.”

Another beat. “I haven’t heard from you in a long time.”

“I need your help, Ava.” That was all he needed to hear himself say before the tears flowed again. He sat down on a chair and sobbed choking sobs into the phone.

“Hector, what’s wrong? Where are you?”

“In Los Angeles,” he said through his tears.

“In Los Angeles? Are you high?”

“I was.”

“Who was the other guy on the phone?”

“The guy working at the homeless shelter.”

“The homeless shelter? Hector, what is going on?”

“Will you help me get home?” He was still sobbing.

There was silence on the other end of the line. Ava finally sighed again. “Of course I’ll help you get home.”

“Thank you, Ava. Thank you so much.”

“Let me get a pen and — put me back on with that other guy, okay?”

The staffer was already standing over Hector. He put a hand on Hector’s shoulder. “Gimme the phone, buddy, I’ll work it out,” he said.

Hector handed over the cell and put his face in both hands and wept into them. Parallel tracking hadn’t worked, he thought. Well, it hadn’t worked until 1994, 1995—saquinavir, indinavir, ritonavir — the names of the drugs that had meant everything to them, the ones that changed everything. And Ricky? Until he couldn’t talk anymore, he was obsessed with fucking Madonna! It was all mashing together in Hector’s head now. He’d had to bring Ricky the September issue of Vogue with Claudia Schiffer on the cover — an outsize tome that further weighed down Hector’s already overladen work bag, on perhaps the steamiest day of the late summer — because another stylist with whom Ricky had imagined himself in a bitter, unspoken rivalry had gotten to do Claudia’s hair color, and Ricky just had to see how it had come out.

“Ooh, thank you, thank you,” Ricky had cried from his hospital bed, grabbing for the magazine. “Let me see.” He’d appraised the cover shrewdly for a few seconds, then sighed and rolled his eyes. “This is horrible,” he’d finally pronounced. “ Horrible . That color is so flat. No depth.”

Hector had laughed. “Are you relieved?”

Ricky had looked up and smiled coyly. “I most certainly am,” he’d drawled.

“I’m glad it makes you happy,” Hector had said. He really meant it, too. It wasn’t the spitefulness, Hector had believed, that had delighted Ricky, but the prospect of curling up with hundreds and hundreds of pages of hair, makeup, and clothes. Ricky could peruse and analyze fashion spreads with a minuteness that amazed Hector, pointing out the tiniest imperfection or oversight in an eyebrow, spotting the faintest telltale wig line that would be invisible to the layperson’s eye. Ricky had prided himself on his meticulous work, which he’d not properly been able to take part in for several months.

Then Hector, overcome with longing, had gently drawn the magazine from his hands.

“Hey!” protested Ricky. “What are you doing?”

“I need to lie down with you,” Hector said, pulling the curtain around the bed, taking off his boots, lowering the top of the bed with the control switch.

“This is my bed,” Ricky fake-protested. “It’s a very, very expensive bed.”