Tim Murphy - Christodora

“Good thing you’re broke-ass enough that Medicaid’s paying for it, then,” Hector said. He shimmied in the bed under the sheet, put his arm around Ricky. He buried his mouth in Ricky’s neck; deep in his rib cage, he could feel his tears shuddering and he took a breath to quell them. “I don’t understand you, Ricky,” he whispered.

“Don’t squeeze too hard, it hurts.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m cooperating with the regimens now,” Ricky said.

“I know,” Hector said. He knew the data too well, though. Ricky had lost about eighteen months of good preventive treatment with Bactrim, living in his crazy denial. That had put him so far along. The data wonk’s boyfriend who shunned treatment! They were talked about like a tragedy in the movement. Hector slid his hand down into the back of Ricky’s underpants, gently ran it over Ricky’s right butt cheek.

“Does that hurt?” he asked.

Ricky squirmed happily. “Noooo. Au contraire . Are you going to massage my butt?”

“Yes, I’m doing it right now.”

“Oooh, hot. Right here in the hospital. Scandalous.”

“It’s a therapeutic massage!”

“It certainly is.”

“I love you so much, Ricky,” Hector said.

“I love you, too, papi .”

“I hate when you call me that.”

Ricky laughed. “Well, I’ve called you that for eight years, I’m not going to stop now.”

“It’s racially offensive.”

Ricky laughed harder. “Oh shut up, you love to be the papi .”

Hector laughed. “You’re fucking crazy.”

They’d had exactly eight weeks left after that night. Hector calculated that with clarity, sitting in the cinder-block shelter. The staffer who’d been on the phone with Ava walked over to him.

“A woman named Drew is going to come pick you up,” he said. “It’s a friend of your friend.”

Hector nodded. He had no idea who the woman was. He continued to sit there, beading together the months in a way he hadn’t in years. Twenty years ago! How 1992 bled into 1993. Awful fucking 1993. That was around the time he’d started the splinter group with Chris Condello and a few others and they’d taken shit for that from the main group, being called traitors. Then all those trips to D.C. They spent half that year, and 1994, too, in D.C., in meetings with FDA and HHS. That work saved him for a little while. The protease inhibitors — watching the protease inhibitors develop, 1994, 1995. He was already letting go of the work by 1996, 1997. He was celebrating — the work was done! The friends he’d barely seen the past few years were hitting the streets again, looking like something approaching normal. All their fucking credit-card debt, all the black humor about the credit-card sprees, and now they’d live to face the bills! The creepy viatical companies who’d bought all his friends’ life-insurance plans and now were making their sinister phone calls, asking, essentially, in the most roundabout, delicate way, “Why aren’t you dead yet?” The new drugs had foiled their ghoulish scheme! But still they kept calling. Hector chased the faces, the voices, the attitude, even the asses that reminded him of Ricky. So many new party drugs and a thumping sound system everywhere he went.

A woman walked into the shelter — attractive, white, slim, rich-looking, skinny black jeans, ballet flats, a white eyelet gypsy blouse, dark hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, a leather bag, big sunglasses, iPhone in hand. The catcalls instantly started. She seemed hesitant to venture farther into the room.

“That’s the woman for you,” the staffer said to Hector.

Hunh? Hector thought. Who was she? He ignored the jeers from the other guys in the room and walked toward her, mortified.

She took off her sunglasses. “You’re Hector, right?” She sounded nice enough, but unsure, wary. He nodded. “I’m Drew.” She extended her hand, which he took. “I’m a friend of Ava’s and her daughter, Milly. You know, from the Christodora? I live here in L.A.”

It all kept coming back to that kid! he thought. A friend of the kid’s adopted mother. He nodded. “Thank you for coming to get me,” he managed to say.

The woman glanced around the room. “Are you ready to leave?” she asked.

Hector turned to the guy at the front desk.

“Nobody’s keeping you here,” he said.

“Thanks for everything,” Hector said.

“Good luck, buddy,” the staffer said, reaching under the desk to hand Hector a plastic bag. It contained the dirty clothes he’d peeled off before his cinder-block shower the day before. “Try to pull your shit together.”

Outside, the sun hit him like an angry blast. He put his hand over his eyes.

“I think I have another pair of sunglasses if you want them,” the woman said. She fumbled in her bag and pulled out another big, dark pair — ladies’, obviously. Hector took them, put them on gratefully. The woman giggled a little. “Very glamorous,” she said.

He barely smiled. They got in her Prius and she put on the air-conditioning. “I would never do this usually, except Ava told me all about you,” she said.

Oh God, Hector thought. He could only imagine what that meant. “Thank you,” he said.

“Can I ask you something?”

He nodded.

“You’re a meth addict, right?”

God, it stung to hear himself called that by a total stranger, to know that was how old colleagues described him now, too. But he nodded.

“I’ll help you sort out your situation here and get back to New York, either way. But do you want to stop?”

“I wanna die,” he told her.

She sighed. “Well, so did I. I had a drug problem, too. Can I ask you one thing? Would you be willing to go to an AA meeting with me now?”

“I don’t have a drinking problem,” he said.

“There’s a lot of drug addicts there, too. There are meth heads.”

Meth heads! That was all she thought he was — how casually she said it! But, well, she was right. Hector felt a frisson of shame, like maybe he wasn’t supposed to have become a meth head. Maybe he was supposed to have dealt with loss the way other folks he knew had, with a certain amount of bitterness, defeat, and fatigue, but with dignity, staying in his post, remaining a responsible citizen, a helper of his community. The idea exhausted him and even bored him a little bit. But he also felt that perhaps he had exhausted the role of a meth head. Hector Villanueva, who had worked alongside Bill Clinton and David Kessler at FDA — a meth head! This woman had met him only minutes ago and it was clear she thought of him, first and foremost, as just that.

“Sure, I don’t mind going to the meeting,” Hector told her. His life was in shambles, he thought. Where else did he need to be?

“There’s one in West Hollywood in an hour. You want to get something to eat first?”

“Sure.”

She drove to a Koo Koo Roo, a fast-food rotisserie-chicken place, on Santa Monica Boulevard. There were lots of young gay guys inside, all in tight tank tops and shorts, toting gym bags. Hector knew he looked like a homeless person in his oversize old T-shirt and jeans, his motorcycle boots, but he didn’t much care. At least he told himself as much. The woman ordered an unsweetened iced tea and a salad.

“I’ll get you something,” she told him. “You must be hungry.”

He was ravenous. He hadn’t had a real meal in what seemed like five days. “I’ll pay you back for all of this,” he told her.

She put a hand on his arm. “Don’t worry about it, just order what you want.”

He ordered a half-chicken and two sides. They sat down together. He was still crashing; it was hard for him to keep his eyes open. He felt gutted from the inside and far away from the bright, loud, pop-music-playing world around him. The woman gave him a kind, fatigued smile.