“Did you take your AZT?”
“Everybody I know on AZT is dead,” he said.
“Pat, do us all a favor and take your prescription. I don’t need you dying on me.”
“I’ll take it, don’t freak. I’ll be fine, I’m a survivor,” he said, his eyes lighting up to convince me….
Two days before the fund-raiser.
Pat was very sick in the morning and I didn’t get out to inspect the Eastman Ballroom until the afternoon. Six blocks north of Colfax on Comanche Street. A large, boxy building with grille-covered, high-arched windows. Plain all the way around, but at the front a lovely art deco facade: marble columns that held up a statue of two seminaked figures who were either ballerinas or angels or prisoners on a starvation diet. It was a beautiful structure, though, elegant in its simplicity.
The ballroom sat on its own block, opposite an empty ball-bearing factory and an old warehouse. The closest apartment building was four blocks south and derelict. I couldn’t quite understand how the neighborhood had worked; the sidewalks were large, the streets wide. No traffic, no people, no apartment buildings. Perhaps this had been the equivalent of a factory town and when the factory had closed, it had killed the neighborhood completely. Definitely an area waiting for redevelopers to swoop in and convert everything into condominiums.
The CAW “white attire” ball was by ticket only, but I felt I couldn’t take the risk of attempting to buy a ticket, even under a fake name, since I’d have to have it sent to my Colfax address. Someone would put two and two together.
I’d have to find another way in.
I stared at the Eastman Ballroom entrance. A dozen steps led up to a set of double doors under the columns. There’d be ticket takers up there, and if I tried to bluff my way past, I knew it would all go wrong from the start. If I tried to shoot my way in, that would give Charles plenty of time to get to cover. I walked all the way around the building again and leaned against the wall of the old ball-bearing plant.
A dry, sunny Denver day and the factory made big, bold shadows on the road and sidewalk. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to actually go inside the ballroom, have a check and see what the layout was. But then, what if there was a guard or a cleaner or even someone from CAW making preparations? Why show my face to a security guard when I didn’t have to?
I took a final look and walked away, in case people started taking an interest in me. I hadn’t come up with anything. Maybe I’d try and bluff my way in regardless, I’d say I’d lost my ticket. We’d see. The one thing I now definitely decided that I wasn’t going to do was to wait for him on the sidewalk while his limo or taxi pulled up. Since there were absolutely no pedestrians in this weird part of town, I’d be totally suspicious.
The getaway was another problem. Car could get roadblocked in the nasty Denver traffic, so I went to Kmart and bought a hundred-dollar mountain bike and a fifty-dollar lock and chain. If I could get out of the ballroom somehow, I’d bike quickly to Colfax, and once on Colfax, I’d be safe.
If I could get the fuck out.
We didn’t talk the whole day. Pat tried to make me eggs for dinner, but I took over the cooking. He couldn’t eat, I couldn’t eat. When night fell, I dressed in the white suit I had bought from the Arc Thrift Shop for five dollars. A third of the price of the dry cleaning bill. I grabbed the bike from the hall. Pat looked up from the Rocky Mountain News with a face full of tears and said:
“Have you got your passport?”
“I do.”
“Your tickets?”
“Aye.”
“Your gun?”
“Yes.”
“And you want me to toss the rest of your stuff?”
“Yes.”
He sat for a minute, swallowed. Now even his hair was graying. I went and sat beside him.
“Alex, there’s nothing I can say to stop you?”
“No, Pat.”
“Ok, then, give me a hug.”
We hugged, Pat kissed me on the cheek.
“I’m worried about you, Pat,” I said.
“Fuck that, mate, worry about yourself, I’m not dead yet,” he said.
“If the police come for you, Pat?”
“I’ll handle it, Alex, I’ll be ok,” he said, his face in a fixed grin that neither of us believed. I nodded, stood, and looked at him, I didn’t want to be talked out of it. I didn’t want Pat to convince me of anything, but I needed something. I needed some word.
“Pat, you don’t have to tell me I’m doing the right thing, I know you don’t think I am doing the right thing, but at least tell me you understand. You knew John, you saw what Mulholland did to him. And Victoria and maybe another girl. You know that. Tell me at least that you understand.”
Pat looked at me, smiled weakly.
“I understand,” he said softly, tears streaming down his cheeks.
I picked up my backpack and left the apartment for the last time. I never saw him again….
I rode the bike along Colfax and up to Comanche Street. At the ball-bearing factory, I dismounted. It was darker now, and with no streetlights I would have been practically invisible, apart from the white shirt, white tie, white seventies suit, and white pimp hat. And I still hadn’t figured out a way of getting into the CAW party.
I locked the bike. Hid my bag with my change of clothes and passport.
I walked to the Eastman Ballroom. A lot of activity at the front of the building. Town cars, limos, taxis. Rich white people getting out, the women wearing too much jewelry, the men paunchy, older.
I walked around the back, waited, tried to think. Maybe get in one of the fire exits. I skulked in the shadows of the derelict factory, my mouth dry.
An hour went by. I didn’t even have smokes.
Getting tense. Sooner or later, I’d have to go around the front and try to bluff my way in. I didn’t want to, I figured it wouldn’t work, but soon I’d have no choice.
I counted a final fifteen minutes on the watch. I could hear a band playing inside.
I started making my way to the front of the building and just then I got a break. An emergency exit opened and a man in a dinner jacket came out for a smoke. He left the exit open, lit his cigarette, and then decided to take a leak up against the dimly lit ball-bearing factory wall. I crossed the street out of the shadow.
“Hi,” he said.
I nodded.
I went in the open emergency exit, walked down a concrete corridor, pulled a door, was in the ballroom.
A large floor, a closed balcony, a band up on the stage, a chandelier, tables ringing the ballroom with waiters in dinner jackets bringing hors d’oeuvres and booze. About two hundred and fifty people. Half of them dancing whitey fashion to light jazz and Muzak versions of Rat Pack standards. The rest sitting at tables or standing to the sides, chatting, flirting. White dresses, white suits, a couple of people in more creative white lab coats, white boiler suits. Dull as dishwater. Exactly the sort of thing you’d expect at a fund-raiser for an organization like the Campaign for the American Wilderness: middle-aged, wealthy, satisfied, not a person of color who wasn’t carrying a tray. Trophy wives and girlfriends. Grizzled men in their forties and fifties who had dodged the draft, made money in real estate, swung from left to right, and whose dream was to someday make the cover of Cigar Aficionado.
I zeroed in on a group of tables near the stage. Charles, sitting there in a white morning suit, Amber in a dazzling cream dress. Everyone in orbit about her. God, I’d forgotten how beautiful she was. I couldn’t see Robert or the retiring Congressman Wegener, though there was a fat man in a white vest, flanked by goons, so that was a possibility. The congressman had been getting death threats for his antigay stance. The guys with him might be armed. It wouldn’t matter, I’d be quick. Amber was talking to a man who looked so like her, aged thirty-five or forty years, that I knew instantly it was her father. He and a couple of hoods with him were wearing black jackets with a white buttonhole. It made them look like the wait staff. I smiled. I might have been right about my assessment. Maybe I’d brought them together. Having had to find men to kill me had been the great family rapprochement. Touching. The taller of the two goons looked like one of the shooters from Fort Morgan a few weeks ago.