Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 01:43:55 0000
From: Ted Turner <cryptococcus@mailcity.com>
Subject: "Billy Dander, A Fairy Tale" (m/m)
Billy Dander, A Fairy Tale
by Cryptococcus
Codes: m/m
Comments/suggestions: cryptococcus@mailcity.com
Warning: This is a work of fiction, and it describes the lifestyles
of two gay men. If this is not to your tastes, or you are not of
legal age to peruse adult materials in your locale, please leave
now. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is
a totally amazing coincidence.
This story is copyrighted by the author, and the author maintains all
rights to it, except that express permission is granted to ASSGM
and nifty.org to archive and display one copy as they see fit. Please
do not distribute this, or other stories by me, to other newsgroups
and/or websites without the author's express permission.
Now, here's...
Billy Dander, A Fairy Tale
So, how do you tell the story of a relationship that lasted for
thirty years together? Well, the beginning for me and Billy Dander
was in 1959. We was sitting in the personnel office at Fort Leonard
Wood, New Jersey, in our new civilian clothes, waiting for some
pencil-pushing types to process our discharge papers. Mine would say
"Honorably Discharged," and I didn't find out until fifteen years later
that Billy's had the additional line, "For the Good of the Army." How
that came to pass, I can't rightly say, but Billy sometimes had the
problem of thinking with his dick, so it don't surprise me none, now
or then.
I was bored, and I was watching this skinny type sitting across
the room. He was intent on what he was about, whittling on a stick
and leaning over a regulation grey-metal trash bin, and the chips was
flying. Since I done give up on the out-of-date magazines, I just
leaned back to watch him. He worked on the stick for several
minutes, and then he looked up. I saw that he was young, as young
as me.
"What you looking at?" he says.
They was the nasal tones of native New Jersey, but I didn't let
that throw me. I done met all types in Uncle Sam's service. I nodded
at his stick, and said, "What are you making?"
Billy looked me over, from the top of my then-fashionable buzz
cut to my new penny loafers sans pennies, and then he sniffed. "It's
going to be a Hoiku figure for my sister."
That told me that this skinny boy had been out of the states,
but I could not place the reference. "Hoiku," I said, "is that
Japanese, or what?"
"Nah," said Billy, looking up and giving me a flash of dark eyes,
"It's Cherokee."
Now that surprised me, because I was from Dill's Mill,
Tennessee, and we got our Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation, and
I'd never seen or heard tell of such a thing.
"Where you been, that you know about Indians?" I asked,
thinking that he'd been in Oklahoma or somewhere.
"I seen it in a book," he said, and he continued whittling. I
looked around the room some more.
At length Billy looked up. "Where you been?"
"South Korea," I said, thankful for conversation. It was getting
hot in the personnel office, and the background noise was dozens of
clerk types pecking on their army-issue typewriters.
Billy nodded, and looked down at his whittling. After a few
minutes, he asked, "Was it cold?"
It took me a moment to replay back to where we was, and then I
said, "Colder than a witch's tit."
He grinned at my little blasphemy, and then he kept on whittling
and we got to talking. I guess that somewhere during that time, he
must have decided he like me, because when we were outside waiting
for the bus, he asked me where I was going, and I answered honestly
that I did not know. I had a wallet full of money, and a life
awaiting, but I did not know where I intended to start.
"Ever been to Erasmus?" he asked.
"Where's that?"
Erasmus, it turned out, was colder than a witch's tit, too, but
there was Billy's sister Rhonda to make things right. She was one of
them big gals that we used to call "substantial," and she even sort of
resembled Billy's figurine, which earned a place of honor on the
mantle of the old fireplace. (It wasn't used. Rhonda's apartment had
coal heat). Anyway, she was as caring and good-hearted as they
come. She gathered me and Billy under her wing like we was kin,
which, of course, Billy was. Lordy, that woman could cook! And
talk! She could talk you up a mile and back down two. She could
talk up a blue streak.
Of course, after two years in Korea, I was hungry for some
straight-eyed women to talk to, anyways, so I took to her like a goose
to a gander. All except sex, that is. There weren't none of that
because she was saving herself for marriage, and I weren't marrying
no one, not if I could help it, at least for another year or two.
Me and Billy slept on her fold-out sofa. It was hard for me to
get used to all the noise of the city, them fire trucks running all hours
of the night and the honking of horns and the screech of tires.
Sometimes them screeches ended in impacts, and I'd lay on Rhonda's
sofa-bed and wonder what was happening outside.
I'd get to sleep hours after I went to bed, and I'd conk out flat on
my back. Then, in the morning, the smell of Rhonda making coffee
would always wake me. Then I'd push Billy's arm or his leg or
whatever part he had turned over and put on me away and get up.
Billy was a good guy, but a damn sloppy sleeper.
Billy had learned electronics in the army, and he dreamed of
having his own television and radio repair shop. TV, he said, was the
thing of the future, but I had my doubts. Myself, I had no useful skill
at all because I had been in artillery. If IBM ever decided to blow the
hell out of General Motors, then I'd have a marketable skill.
Billy took a job helping a man fix TV's, and I got a job in a
warehouse. It involved lots of heavy lifting, and I wasn't getting rich,
but I was getting stronger.
I was having a good time in Erasmus, but the clock was ticking,
and I had to make a decision about what I'd do. The new G. I. Bill
had benefits like housing loans and stuff, but I'd have to use it or lose
it.
I confided my fears to Billy, who thought for a minute and then
said, "Well, then build yourself a house. I'll come live with you."
I didn't want to hurt him. "I can't make a house up here," I told
him, "They's kin folks waiting for me back at home, and I got to go
there. Besides, it's too damn cold here."
"Is there someone special waiting?" asked Billy.
"You mean like a woman?" I said.
"Yeah," he said.
"Well, no," I says, "but that don't mean I won't never get one."
Billy's dark eyes challenged me, and it annoyed me, so I bowed
up at him. "I can too get a woman, if I want to!" I insisted.
Billy's face showed amusement, but he didn't say anything
further. Later, on the sofa-bed, he leaned over and kissed me
goodnight, and I let him, thinking about the strange customs of
Yankees. I sat up a long time thinking about that, and I thought about
it some more the next day while I was moving boxes.
The next night, Billy kissed me goodnight, and when I smelled
Rhonda's coffee, he was pressed up against me. My entire left side
was all hot and sweaty, and it undone the shower I had got before
going to bed. I rolled Billy over on his back, and he grunted, and I
got up. I wandered into the kitchen.
"You look like you slept well," said Rhonda, and I guessed I
had. Honest work makes you sleep good.
The next night, Billy decided to sleep without his tee shirt. It
was too hot, he said. After a while, I did the same.
Days, I stacked boxes. Nights, I'd fall asleep into the sleep of
the righteous and wake up with Billy rolled on me. This went on for
a while, and then I noticed a change in Rhonda. She would kind of
lean back against the counter in the kitchen and look at us two, and
she'd smile. This went on for a week or two, and one day I went to
the V.A. office and applied for a housing loan. The man there told
me that I only had ten months left to start using my educational
benefits. The housing benefits, the man told me, would always be
there, but if I wanted to learn something besides artillery, I'd
better get on the ball.
That war between IBM and General Motors weren't looking so
likely, so I talked it over with Rhonda and Billy that night.
"Heating and air conditioning," suggested Billy, "are the thing of
the future."
I had my doubts, but didn't see why not, and, besides, I could
always get a job stacking boxes, and so I signed up for night school.
Billy signed up a week later, saying he had to learn about transistors,
because he suspected that they were the coming thing. That was one
thing about Billy, he was a pretty good predictor of what was coming.
I went to school and learned all about H.V.A.C. system panels
and D.C. control panels and evaporators and condensers and those
new-fangled heat pumps that one of my instructors thought was the
future of heating and air conditioning. Billy learned all about silicon-
dioxide transistors, which he said might someday replace the vacuum
tube, but I had my doubts.
It was long about this time that Rhonda announced her
engagement. The blessed union was to take place in three months,
and I kind of suspected that Rhonda had stopped holding out. (She
hadn't. The baby came thirteen months later.) The needy couple was
going to need everything, or else live on love, which don't feed you
very good, so me and Billy talked it over and got up a list of things
that we'd get the newlyweds.
One of things that Rhonda wanted to take with her was the sofa,
but that was okay because we would inherit Rhonda's bed, which she
was leaving. We gave her and the groom, Chuck, a big sendoff and
had a bunch of new furniture waiting in their apartment for them when
they come back from honeymooning at Niagara Falls.
Billy and me just kept on, then one day I took a test and became
a heating and air conditioning technician. (Ain't that a mighty fine
sounding title for a person who crawls around attics and under
houses?) Shortly thereafter, Billy took a test that certified him to
work on big radio transmitters, like at television stations, about which
he stayed optimistic. He was right in the long run, because then
Gilligan's Island and Gunsmoke come on, and everybody started
buying televisions.
Our incomes went up, and we had some leisure time to go to the
movies and bowling and the occasional delicatessen, but I kept
thinking about grass that was green and streams you can drink from,
and I was homesick. Billy sensed this, and one day he asked me
when I was planning to go south and pick out a lot, and I found
myself asking him if he still planned to go with me. It had become
important to me.
He was still a damn sloppy sleeper, and I never knew when he
might decide to kiss me, but other than that, he was a pretty good
roommate. He said he'd make big money in the south. The south
was going to resurge, he said, when all the big companies up north
figured out that their taxes were supporting crumbling cities and
downtown ghettos and decided to get the hell out. Billy was right
about that, too. He was smart that way.
I left Erasmus and visited the old folks, but Dill's Mill wasn't
home anymore. Sure, there was the old farmstead and my cousins and
their young'uns, and the same pretty gals I remembered, but most of
them done got hitched anyway, and some of them just flat weren't so
pretty anymore.
I drove down to Chattanooga to look around, and then on down
to Atlanta, where I learned about civilian jobs at Fort McHenry
handling ordinance that paid as good as heating and air conditioning.
That figured. I also went to look at a very tall television tower that
had just been built, thinking that Billy might just be right again. Then
I went to Rockdale county and found me and Billy's new home.
It was in a piney place called "Granite Point," despite the fact
that the nearest point of granite was Stone Mountain fifteen miles
away, and the subdivisions hadn't come in yet. Even despite that, new
houses was popping up left and right, here and there, and they was
expensive - some in the thirties! - but I stood on a patch of red dirt
and looked at the country side all around me and knew I had arrived.
I called Billy.
The V. A. man looked at me kind of funny when I went to do the
paperwork, concerned that the acreage and house payments would do
me in. I never admitted that two incomes would provide the money,
but I did take out loan insurance, of which I made Billy the
beneficiary. If something happened to me, the house would be his
free and clear.
Billy stayed in Erasmus, and I stayed in an small upstairs
apartment run by the mother of the V. A. man. Billy had been right
about heating and air conditioning. I was hired at the first place I
applied. The bulldozers came, and the loggers, and the well driller,
and then the house just sort of unfurled from the ground, it seemed,
and one day it was there. I went north to get Billy.
He was so happy to see me that he threw his arms around me
and kissed me. Then he was clinging on me and crying, and I was
ashamed for him, and I tried to comfort him but didn't know the
words. Billy was crying because he thought I wouldn't come back for
him. Where ever he got that damn fool idea I never knew, but I ended
up holding him until it passed. Then he let me go, sniffed, and told
me that he didn't ever want to lose me. I told him he could count on
me to hang around because I was a pretty regular fellow about things
like that, and he smiled, and I felt better, without a clue that in
another twenty-five years it'd be me losing him.
We packed the car up and went to see Rhonda and Chuck. I got
to see the newborn, Rhiannon, and I was tickled when she grabbed my
finger. Rhonda had decorated her apartment with throw rugs and
pillows, and the place looked good. Then she made a big supper of
lasagna, and we listened to Chuck brag on her. We bragged on her
some, too, and Rhonda took it all in, beaming.
Rhonda and Chuck followed us out to the car. Rhonda cried and
hugged on Billy, and Chuck shook my hand. Then it was on to
Atlanta.
I should mention that another element of Billy's personality was
impatience, and he was impatient on the trip. "How much longer?"
he'd ask. "How far to Charleston?" "How far is it down this
mountain and up the other side?"
In despair of all the questions, I taught him how to read a map,
and then I taught him how to drive my car, and I was amazed that
both was skills a city boy never needed. Hadn't the army taught him
anything? After that, Billy kept buying maps every time we stopped
for gas. As a joke, I gave him an atlas for Christmas that year, and he
kept it in his cars for twenty years until it was so dog-eared and wore
out that I gave him another one.
It was dark when we got to Georgia. Billy stood in the bare red
clay yard full of pine stumps and hugged himself, and turned full-
circle. I had to grin at him. "Ours!" he said.
"Only a hundred-sixty more payments!" I reminded him.
"No big deal," Billy said. "I'm going to be the chief engineer at
a television station. We'll do real well." This surprised me. Out with
the idea of having a repair shop and in with this. I believed it,
though. Billy was smart, book smart. If he believed that he could do
something, I'd sure not bet against him.
I opened the front door, and flicked on the light, and Billy
leaned his head inside and looked around. "Smells new," he says. I
just waited. Billy did things Billy's way. "Did you pick out that
green?" he says. He was in the doorway. I reached into my pocket
and pulled out a second key to the house.
When he turned around, he was about to cry, and when I handed
him the keys, he let go. Billy was a fool about crying when he was
happy and when he was sad both. He hugged up on me and kissed
me, right there in the doorway with the lights on. I was glad that
there weren't no other houses close!
"Let's go in," I says, and then Billy toured the house, sniffling as
he went and touching things. There wasn't a stick of furniture in the
house, but I had five-hundred dollars left, and Billy had done such a
good job picking out Rhonda and Chuck's furniture, I figured that I'd
just leave that to him.
I showed Billy his room, but he could have either one since they
were both the same. He said, "Wouldn't this make a great reading
room?"
That comment took a while to flip over in my head, but then I
must of blinked in understanding. Billy assumed that we'd continue to
sleep together. He didn't want his own room.
"Uh, sure," I said. "Maybe a good place to put the hi-fi, too,
so's it don't interfere with the TV."
"Great," said Billy, like it was a done deal, and then he was
looking up at the trap door to the attic. I showed him where the light
switch was, and then I went outside to get our sleeping bags, which I
put in the other bedroom. On the way by, I turned on the air
conditioner. I heard the unit in the attic click on, and I heard Billy
holler, and I laughed. That night, Billy hooked the sleeping bags
together and asked me to hold him. I did, thinking about how much
I'd missed him. I went to sleep with Billy in my arms, and the
morning sun found us that way, too.
The next morning I gave Billy my Rich's card and we headed
into the city. I had to work, but Billy wanted to explore Atlanta. It
weren't like Erasmus or Trenton, I explained, because there wasn't a
place you could point at and say here's the center of Atlanta. Atlanta
sprawls.
When I got home, we had a bed, a sofa, and a dinette set. Billy
had convinced the manager of Rich's that we couldn't live in our new
house without some furniture, and he had sent the truck straight out.
Billy joked that if he ever got mad at me, he could tell me to go sleep
on the sofa. He thought it was funnier than I did. We spent the
second night in a proper bed.
On the third day, Billy surprised me. I left him at the house, and
when I got back that evening, there was a '55 Ford in the driveway.
It was black, and looked pretty good, even if it was sort of dated.
Billy come out and explained that he needed me to check the car over
and tell him if he should buy it. I thought it was pretty ambitious for
a fellow that just started driving three days before to be buying a car,
but I did what he asked, and the old car was sound. Billy made a
phone call and an elderly gentleman arrived a little later in a brand
new Ford. Some cash changed hands, and then we were a two-car
family.
Billy soon got a job with the television station that had put up
the huge tower, and with him and me both working we were pulling
in some change. Billy had worked out a budget for us that he said
would save twenty-percent of our house payment money over the
period of the loan. Then he figured the power and the gas and the
groceries, and came up with a figure that we could easily meet and
still have money left over. Billy then made a second list of luxury
items, and we agreed that we would purchase them as time and money
allowed.
The next few years I think of as our building phase. In that
time, me and Billy was buying things and doing things around the
house, and he was building his career as a top-notch fix-it man at the
station. I began to look forward to the day that I could start my own
heating and air conditioning company.
Me and Billy was a team. He knew how to do what I couldn't,
and I could figure out what he couldn't. I finally admitted that he had
become more than a friend, or best friend, to me. I valued his
opinions and his sense of taste. Even his mood swings and the easy
way he cried at something in a book or something on TV I valued,
because I guessed that by having more emotions than me he made up
for something I lacked. Maybe I was crippled, in a way, and being
with Billy made it less noticeable.
Ah, hell. That's not what I mean. I mean to say that I loved
Billy Dander. I loved him from the moment I laid eyes on him in
Fort Leonard Wood, New Jersey, and I just didn't know it. Being
with Billy was easy, because I knew that he loved me, too.
Sometimes I felt like he was the smarts and I was the sense,
but we mostly got along. Eventually, he proposed something that I just
wouldn't do, but three days later I let him do it to me, and I found it
weren't so bad. A week later, I did it to him, and he was so happy
and satisfied that I was afraid he was going to cry, but he held his
happiness in that time. And then we included these night-time
activities in our bed routine, but we never talked about it, and we
never referred to it during the day.
The neighborhood was growing, and me and Billy was glad we
had bought such a big lot. A real estate agent called and asked didn't
we want to subdivide our lot for some more houses. Billy and me sat
down at the table and discussed her third offer, but we never seriously
considered it. It was our privacy that we'd be losing.
Billy's car turned into a recent Mustang, and I bought a brand
new Ford Fairlane. The war in Viet Nam had done heated up, and we
watched Walter Cronkite every night. Billy was worried that I might
be called back in active service, but I never saw that happening. Then,
on the last day of January in '68, during the Tet Offensive, Billy clung
to me in fear in front of the TV, and we heard General Westmoreland
explain that we had won the battle.
Billy stayed tense during the war in Viet Nam, and his fears took
away some of the pride I felt a year later when we heard on that same
TV that "The Eagle has landed."
The next decade was our secret time. Our secret stayed home. I
never considered us gay men. He was my best friend, and he filled a
void in my life. I hoped I did the same for him.
Well-meaning friends tried to fix us bachelors up, and we both
went out on dates with women, but the real action was always at
home after the date. My company was growing, and I had hired an
electrician so we could bid on bigger jobs. Billy was made number
two man at the station, under the chief engineer. He started taking
night classes again, because he became convinced that computers were
the future and he wanted to be ready for them. I laughed when he
put together a thing called an Altair. It was a box that blinked when
he flipped switches, but it was binary, and it was a computer.
After a few more years, I finally saw an Apple computer that did
something, and I bought one for the company. By that time, Billy
was beyond the small Apple. He was programming on a mainframe.
His studies took him away more and more, while fixing glitches in my
quick-growing company took more of my time. We started seeing
less of each other, except on weekends. Then Billy would go over the
books, keeping my business straight, and we'd clean house, do the
wash, and catch up on yard chores. It was a busy, busy time for us,
and so the decade passed.
By the mid-eighties, Billy had moved from the station's
engineering team to the nearby computer center, where he soon made
a name for himself - again - as a fix-it man. He started wearing a
pager, and was liable to get up out of the bed in the middle of the
night. Even our weekends weren't safe.
It never occurred to me that if Billy weren't getting it from me
on the many nights that we were apart, he was getting it from
someone else. He never let on.
Then he began losing weight. We put it down to overwork and
stress, but it continued, and by the time I parked the Fairlane to drive
my new company truck, Billy was skin and bones. I insisted that he
go to the doctor, but he was reluctant, as if he was afraid what the
doctor would say.
A month later Billy got a cough and complained of a sore throat.
When I asked him where it hurt, he took his fingers and pointed at the
base of his jaw. I got him some cough medicine, but it didn't seem to
help. A couple of weeks later, he developed sores along his lower
ribcage, and he complained whenever he was joustled or when I
touched him. This scared me, and we argued, but the next day I made
him an appointment. On the day of the appointment I called the
station to tell them that he would not be in, and I told Billy, who was
now too sore to walk easily, that I was going to take him to that
appointment if I had to carry him. He gave in when he saw how
determined I was.
At the doctor's office, I sat in the waiting room, as far as I could
from a child in his mother's lap that looked like he had leprosy or
something, but then the nurse came out, called me by name, and asked
me to come back. My heart almost seized right there, and I had a
sudden, black premonition of Billy's death. It was all I could to get
up and follow the nurse.
The doctor greeted me. "Your friend," says he, "has shingles.
It's a viral infection that occurs along nerve paths, particularly the
dorsal nerves." Here the doctor indicated on his own body.
"Can you cure it?" says I.
"I can treat it, and it may resolve itself," said the doctor, "but
that's not what I wanted to talk to you two about. You've heard of
AIDS?"
I nodded, wondering what he was getting at, and I looked at
Billy, who would not meet my eyes.
"I'm concerned," says the doctor, "because this type of infection,
the shingles, is sometimes seen in AIDS patients."
I said nothing.
"It's associated with the middle stages of AIDS," says the doctor.
"The middle stages?" I asked dumbly.
"Yes," he said, "no one knows much about HIV, the virus that
causes AIDS, but it is believed that certain symptoms begin to occur
two to five years after the initial exposure. There are a host of
diseases that take advantage of the depressed immune response caused
by AIDS. Among these is herpes zoster, or shingles. He told me that
he has been bothered by a cough, too."
"And a sore throat," I said.
"This might be, and I stress might be, a form of nonexudative, or
non-pus producing, pharyngitis that is also associated with AIDS. I
consider also that Mr. Dander reports a chronic diarrhea as well as a
rapid weight loss. And fatigue."
I looked at Billy again. He wasn't much to start with, just skin
and bones, but he was looking thinner than I've ever seen him.
Then the doctor says, "I understand that you two have been
sexually active?"
Still Billy had not looked at me. I nodded.
"Then I'd like a blood sample from both of you," says the
doctor. "And I'd like for you to refrain from sex until the tests come
back. With each other, I mean, or anyone else."
I must of blinked, and I sat there with my mouth shut, but my
world was crashing down all around me. I had been faithful. Sure,
I'd heard of AIDS, but that was out in California, and it was
something that happened to intravenous drug users and people who
went to bath houses. It didn't happen in Conyers, Georgia, and it
didn't happen to those I loved, and, God, it didn't happen to me.
The doctor was saying not to give up hope. "Maybe this is just
a scare," he said, but then he gave us the name of a specialist at
Emory University Hospital that Billy should go see. I realized then
that the doctor had treated enough AIDS patients that he could
recognize the various stages.
The doctor called right from the room to make the appointment
at Emory, and I should have become even more scared at that, but my
brain wasn't working very well. Then he gave me some pamphlets,
and a nurse came in to draw our blood. I saw her put on a pair of
gloves, and then pull a second pair over them. She seemed nervous,
and that did more to unnerve me than the doctor did.
After giving our blood to the nurse, I gathered up Billy. He
looked shell-shocked. Tears were in his eyes, but he did not speak
until we were in the car. He said, "I'm sorry, O.B. I'm so sorry."
And then he began to cry bitterly. He slumped toward me, and I took
him in my arms, and I cried, too. We sat in the car outside the
medical center and cried until we couldn't cry anymore. My nose was
all stopped up and my eyes hurt, and I just was cried out. People
weren't meant to cry. They were meant to laugh and smile and enjoy
their lives. I knew this, and I knew that the doc had left a sliver of
hope. Our heads touched, and I comforted my friend the best I knew
how, and something in the back of my brain turned over that was
angry and accusing, and I refused to hear it or even to admit to its
existence.
We rode back to the house, and I held him for hours, and
talked to him. I got him to eat some chicken soup and take a few
bites of a grilled cheese sandwich. Billy said he was tired and wanted
to take a nap, so I watched him get into bed, and then I went outside
and sat in the truck, turned on the radio, and read the pamphlets. Then I
cried some more.
A week later we went to Emory. Billy's shingles were better,
and he was able to walk unaided. We sat in the waiting room for an
hour and then the receptionist called us back. We looked at each
other, wondering what this might mean. I saw fear in Billy's face, and
thought it was better that I did not see my own face.
We were met by an older doctor who had grey hair at his
temples. He talked primarily to Billy, telling him that HIV was
present in his bloodstream in quantities consistent with the onset of
AIDS. Then he looked at me, and told me that my test was negative,
but he wanted to repeat it. He talked about false reports and
mentioned percentages, but I was looking at Billy. His eyes were full
of tears, but by his smile, I could tell that they were for me, not for
himself. He was thankful for me, and I was thankful, too, but I'd
have to await that second test to be sure.
We waited almost a year to call Billy's sister, but when he was
hospitalized with an opportunistic form of pneumonia for the second
time, I insisted. I didn't say AIDS to Rhonda, though. I called it
pneumonia. She'd have to hear that from Billy.
Rhonda flew down and was at the hospital the next day. She
gasped when she saw how emaciated Billy had become. He had also
developed a cancer on his nose. It made his smile look lopsided over
the oxygen tube in his nose, but I didn't care. It had been a week
since I'd seen Billy's smile.
I left the room, leaving brother and sister alone to talk. I sat
down in the waiting room, and the nurse called me a minute later.
The doctor would like to see me, if I had a moment?
I walked into his office, and he invited me to sit. "O.B.," he
started, "I need to talk with you about Billy."
"Okay," I says, bracing myself for bad news.
"These opportunistic infections are coming more frequently now,
and we here at this hospital, we doctors, will not always be able to
knock them down. You realize that this disease is invariably fatal?"
I nodded.
"You should make preparations."
I sat still as tears flooded my eyes. I had tried to deny it, to
present a strong face, to accommodate this damn disease, to fight.
Then my throat convulsed, and I was sobbing. I had held it in, every
day for a year, presenting a cheerful face and attitude to Billy, but no
more. I was like I was in the car outside the clinic in Conyers.
Grieving for the friend, the lover, that I had not yet lost.
The doctor shifted in his chair, but he let me have my peace
without interfering. With his specialty, I guessed, he saw a lot of
grief. Eventually, it ran its course. Then the doctor wanted to talk to
me about the hospice movement, which I had never heard of. I must
have looked horrified, because he quickly changed tacks. Then he
talked about the limitations of medicine, and he spoke about doing
things to make Billy more comfortable as the end neared. He said he
admired me for being strong and for standing beside Billy, and then
he stood up and offered me his hand, which I took.
I thanked the doctor, and walked out into the corridor, where I
met Rhonda. Tears were streaming down her face, and she clutched
me close and bawled, and she got me going again. The nurse guided
us to the waiting room, and I held this large woman who loved me
more than I deserved until she became calm. I felt cried out. A part
of me wanted to die.
Rhonda dug into her purse and retrieved an entire box of
Kleenex, which I had to smile at, as far gone as I was. She looked at
me and looked at the box, and she offered me a smile, too. I saw a
bit of the Rhonda I remembered. She honked into the tissue, and she
looked at me.
"You don't have it, do you?" says Rhonda.
I shook my head.
"And you two never did drugs?" she said.
I said, "No."
"So he got it from someone else," she says.
"Yes."
"Oh, my Lord," said Rhonda. "I'm so sorry, O.B., when he first
told me, I thought you..."
"No," says I. "It's okay." But it was a lie for Rhonda. It was
not okay, and I was not okay, and I thought I wouldn't be okay for a
very long time.
"Can he come home?" she asked.
Billy did come home, but I had to lift him from the wheelchair
into the car. He grinned at me as I hefted him up, glad to be leaving
the hospital. Before I closed the door, Rhonda leaned over and kissed
him on the forehead, and promised him that she would see him at the house.
I had, with the doctor's help, ordered a hospital bed for Billy. It
sat in our bedroom beside our bed - the bed Billy had bought when
we bought the house. So far, it was little used. I had maintained the
strength that I earned stacking boxes, and moving skinny Billy around
was no problem for me. He slept in our bed, although I seldom woke
to find him curled against me. Sometimes this saddened me more
anything, when I woke up in the morning expecting his arm across my
face or his leg over mine and instead having only the sound of Billy's
soft coughing.
Rhonda made lasagna, Billy's favorite dish, and he was strong
enough to sit up at the table and pretend to eat it. I was too upset to
do it justice, so later on I apologized to Rhonda. Also later on, I'd
make him some soup that might be light on his stomach and sort out
the pills that he would need before bed.
Billy wanted to use his computer. There was a bulletin board
system that he corresponded with other AIDS patients on. I had read
some of the messages, but the starkness of the gallows humor I saw
there made me uncomfortable. He asked for his wheelchair, which I
got. Then Rhonda and me sat and watched, and I saw the old Billy,
leaning over the keyboard, typing furiously.
"I'm telling them I'm still alive," said Billy, and then he typed
some more.
I sat beside Rhonda, and I was thinking about all the things Billy
and me had never done, and would never do. I always had planned to
give him a puppy and take him to the Smithsonian, but that was really
because I really wanted a dog, not him. We had planned to travel, but
we were always so busy. We had never been to the Bahamas. We
had never been to Boulder, or L.A., or New Orleans. Now we never
would.
"How are your brothers and sisters?" Rhonda asked me, and we
talked about our kinfolk until Billy reached over and flipped the
computer's switch. Then we talked a little longer, and I put Billy to
bed, and went to get his pills. He told me he was still full and didn't
want any soup, which was a lie and a truth, so I brought him orange
juice to wash the pills down.
That night I slept with Billy in my arms, for the first time in two
weeks. I imagined our lives come to this. Frequent hospital stays and
infrequent visits home. "Make your preparations," the doctor had said.
What preparations? I wondered. Financially, everything was arranged.
Even Billy's final resting place was known, in a church plot beside his
parents in Erasmus. Delta Airlines would fly his body home. The
elderly pastor that had buried both Billy's parents would see him off,
too.
Rhonda stayed for a week, and then she kissed Billy full on the
lips, which I had never seen her do before, and then she kissed me on
the lips, which I had surely never seen her do. She said she loved us
both, and told Billy that she'd be praying for him. I drove her to the
airport and saw her off. On the way, she expressed her fear that she
would never see her brother alive again. There was very little I could
say because I doubted it myself. I watched the silver jet arch into the
sky, and then I went home to Billy.
That summer, he developed oral candidiasis, or thrush, and I
couldn't even kiss him goodnight. I had been reading everything the
doctors suggested, and I was becoming an expert on the complications
of AIDS.
Three months later, on October 18, 1988, Billy Dander died. He
died in his sleep at Emory University Hospital of pneumocystis carinii
pneumonia. I was asleep in a chair beside the bed when it happened,
and the nurse woke me to tell me. I looked at Billy's emaciated face
with the persistent tumor on his nose, and I leaned over and kissed
him goodnight for a final time. Then I took his hand and sat silent
by his bed until the nurse come to check on me.
I rode on the same Delta jet that carried Billy's coffin to
Erasmus, and I was met at the airport by a weeping Rhonda and her
family. Rhiannon had become a woman in her own right, and there
was a dark-haired boy that I had never seen. His name was Will. He
shook my hand solemnly and looked at me with dark eyes, and he
reminded me of how Billy looked in 1959.
The service was held at the Presbyterian church, and the preacher
spoke at the grave side about the resurrection and the life and ashes to
ashes and dust to dust. Rhonda, as Billy's closest relative, was
expected to throw a handful of dirt onto the grave, but she pressed the
moist earth into my hand instead, and I stepped forward to let it
trickle down onto Billy's final rest.
I walked away from Billy's grave with my eyes dry, but
something had opened up in me and escaped and I felt the loss of it.
I had loved Billy in life, as he had loved me, but it had been our
secret, and we had hid it from the world. It had affected our habits
and where we went and what we did. It was private, and now I had
to keep it private, and I had to grieve for Billy the same way, in
private.
And I held it, that private grief, close to my chest and away from
the world until one day in 1989 when I joined twenty-five thousand
other mourners on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Rhonda and
Rhiannon were there to meet me, and we searched along the mile-long
AIDS quilt to find Billy's patch. When we found it, we stood there,
me and the large woman who loved me as she loved her brother and
the dark-haired beauty that had reached for my finger as a baby, and
we were before the world, and I cried publicly for the friend and lover
that had been stolen from me.
The patch was simpler than some, but more ornate than others. It
was black. In the middle of it was Billy's name in gold. In the upper
left hand corner was the symbol of an atom with a circling electron.
The upper right corner said, "We love you," and had listed the names
of Rhonda, Chuck, Rhiannon, and Will. Below Billy's name was a
single line that said, "Life mate and soul mate of Charles Randall
O'Brien."
Who survives.
The end of "Billy Dander, A Fairy Tale" All rights reserved.