“Do you really want to know?”
He sat back in the high, wooden booth seat and countered: “Do you really want to tell me?”
I laughed. “You seem like a smart kid. You’re actually pretty good-looking — and you keep yourself clean. I’d never have thought you were living rough.”
“I wash in the bathroom at Port Authority every morning.” He winked at me. “I do sort of okay out here.”
“Billy, the truth is, I just don’t find you sexually attractive. And if I’m going to pay for it — even the price of a bottle of crack — it seems to me I should be getting something I’ll enjoy.”
“You’d enjoy it,” Billy said, with a nod of mock smugness. “I’d see to that. But I get your point.” Then he narrowed his eyes. “You say I look good; so how’d you know I was a crackhead?”
“How did you know I was a science fiction writer?” I asked. “It’s a fairly small world out here.”
“Mmm.” Billy nodded.
But two weeks later, the next time I ran into him, Billy approached me with:
“I’m hungry. You wanna buy me a sandwich?” Which I did — the second of perhaps a dozen over that winter and into spring. During our meals I got the pieces of a story, tedious in the similarity of its details to any hundred like tales of like young men and young women: relations severed angrily and violently by a Brooklyn family because of his drug involvement; a penally checkered career throughout his late adolescence; his last two years (he was twenty-four) living on the street — most of that time, in Billy’s particular case, sleeping in the upper tier of the Port Authority Bus Station’s Gate 235, which, because the gate was not in service that year, became the rotational sleeping space of some dozen young people (all but Billy, in those days, black) in an uneasy and often violated truce, both with each other and the Station authorities. Some of those details bespoke a level of organization, however, notably higher than most street druggies maintained — especially those on crack. Billy always kept two shirts and a pair of pants in the dry cleaners around on Ninth Avenue, one of which he took out every three or four days. Sometimes I gave Billy science fiction novels to read.
As such friendships will, this one tapered off to where we just called hello to each other on the street when we passed; later, from time to time, we only nodded, or raised a hand. Then, one summer’s day as I was walking up Eighth Avenue, I saw Billy sitting on the single step in a doorway, plaid sleeves rolled up his forearms, still neat and clean enough so that most people would not guess immediately he was homeless.
As I nodded, he looked up at me, elbows on his knees and one hand holding his other wrist. “Well,” he said. “I got it.”
That halted me. I searched about for a reasonable response. Billy was not above feigning illness to put the touch on you. For three months, about six months before, he’d had a low-grade ulcer which, while he’d treated it with Mylanta and Emergency Room prescriptions, he’d not been above working up into something more serious to hustle a few dollars from sympathetic passers-by. But this seemed outside Billy’s usual range of fictions. I asked: “Any idea how you picked it up?”
“Oh,” he said, “sure. Needles. I’d never do anything sexually that would give it to me.” He nodded. “Sharin’ needles.”
“Well,” I said, at a loss to think of an appropriate rejoinder. “You’ve got to take care of yourself.” Then I walked on… while I realized the fact that Billy had not asked me for a handout as I moved away was probably the surest confirmation of the truth of what he’d just told me.
I saw Billy a couple of other times — even had another sandwich with him. “I had the pneumonia,” was how he put it, at the hot-plate bar; he dug inside his mouth. “They said, at the hospital, if I got it again, that would be it. They also said, since they knew I had it now, if I showed up with pneumonia again, they wouldn’t take me back. Can they do that? I guess, if you don’t got any money, they can do what they want. Right?”
All I could say was that, honestly, I didn’t know.
Work had already taken me out of state; the next few times I saw Billy were in my sporadic trips back to the city. October a year ago, when the weather took a final leap into Indian summer warmth, briefly I was in New York and walking up Eighth Avenue. In the same doorway where I occasionally used to find Billy sitting, I noticed a gaunt man, his shoulders near nonexistently thin. His eyes and temples were sunken. The lower part of his face was swollen so that he seemed a sort of anorexic Neanderthal. He wore a baggy blue t-shirt, and his legs came out of a pair of even baggier Bermudas like sticks. He looked up to catch me staring at him — and I thought to look away. But, slowly, he smiled and said: “What’s the matter, Chip — don’t you recognize me?”
“Billy…?” I said. Then, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I said: “How’re you doing?”
“Pretty bad,” he said, matter of factly. His voice was decidedly slurred, and I wondered if the swelling in his jaws was the packing of some internal bandage. But I don’t think so.
I kept on walking, because for the last year, that’s what I did when I saw Billy.
But later that evening, I was in one of the neighborhood gay bars — Cats. I’d come down to talk with a gay friend, Joe, a recent Jesuit novice, who’d left his calling and whom I’d helped get a job in publishing. We’d been catching up on his adventures and mine, when the door opened and three young men came in, Billy among them. He saw us, grinned, came over, draped one matchstick arm around Joe’s neck and one arm around mine. “Hey,” Billy said, with the same slur from the afternoon, “you guys know each other? Joe’s my special friend here.”
Which Joe confirmed by a grin and a hug.
“Just a second. I’ll see you in a minute.” And Billy was off to say something to the other hustlers he’d come in with.
Again, I had no idea of the protocol for such situations. “Billy’s a good kid,” I told Joe. “How long have you known him?”
“Oh, about three weeks.”
“Mmm,” I said. Then I said: “You know, of course, he’s got AIDS. At least he told me he did, sometime back.”
“I kind of…” Joe nodded. “Suspected it. He doesn’t say the word. But he talks about it.”
That didn’t make me feel much better.
But Joe said: “We don’t really do anything, anyway. We lie around and hold each other. He says he likes it and it makes him feel good. But that’s all.”
At which point Billy was back, arms again around our shoulders, bony head thrust between. “Joe says he’ll take care of me whenever I get real sick,” Billy announced, straight off. “He’s a special guy. Like you.”
“That’s good,” I said.
Joe, at any rate, was smiling. Billy reached behind him and pulled a stool up between us. As he sat, his baggy Bermudas rode up his gaunt thighs till his uncircumcised genitals hung loose. Reaching down with one finger he hooked the plaid edge back even more. “It’s amazing,” he said, and I realized I was getting used to his slur, “most of my johns haven’t deserted me. But that’s because I always gave ‘em a good time, I guess.” (Though I had never been his john, looking at him now it was a little hard to believe.) Gazing down, Billy apostrophized himself: “You bought me a lot of dope. Made me some money — some friends. Gave me a good time.” Shifting to the side, he pulled his shorts leg down now. “Got me into a lot of trouble, too!” He looked back up, grinning at us with swollen jaw and bony face.