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.”
“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.