Giuseppe and Me

GIUSEPPE AND ME

  Written for

  The Real Story Safe Sex Project

  by

  Robin Reardon

  Copyright 2014 by Robin Reardon

  Published by IAM Books

 

  Giuseppe and Me

  "Your turn to wash the dishes, Alex."

  Derek's grin isn't a pleasant one. The message it sends is like, And you know what that means, you skinny twerp. Or maybe it would be you skinny faggot. But, no; he doesn't use that term when the Dunlaps can hear him, and they're right here at the table with us. I don't know whether he knows I'm gay. I think faggot is just a term he throws around a lot.

  I do know what the ugly grin means, though. Because when it's my turn to wash dishes, I'm stuck at the sink. And Derek will be drying, which means he's not only mobile but also he has a weapon in his hands. Maybe tonight I'll be able to do-I don't know, something, anything, to make him leave me alone.

  Mr. and Mrs. Dunlap stay at the kitchen table, deep into some financial discussion, and as soon as I'm up to my wrists in hot, soapy water Derek starts up his usual taunts. He opens with verbal abuse, so quiet that only I can hear him. I do my best to ignore him and don't reply at all. That's supposed to make him give up, or so I'm told, but in my experience it makes him go to the next level. Which is snapping the towel at me. This time, for some reason-he probably doesn't know how much it will bother me or why-he decides to aim at my ass. Snap. Snap. Snap. Pretty soon he figures out how to get it to strike right at my crack. Again. And again. I can see my hands start to shake, and inside my head I'm shouting, Stop it! Stop it! But it won't come out.

  Finally Mrs. Dunlap gets out of her chair, comes over, and yanks the towel away from Derek.

  "What will it take to make you stop terrorizing Alex? Will you tell me that?" He has no answer, of course, because there's almost certainly nothing that would make him stop, but he has more sense than to say that out loud. She bunches the towel up and shoves it at his chest hard enough to make him take a couple of steps backward. "Knock it off! Now finish the job, and don't you do anything with that towel other than dry the dishes."

  He waits until she sits down again before he leans toward me. "Chicken shit."

  She must have heard that one. "Derek!"

  Chores complete, he goes out as soon as he can get away, and I have a few moments alone in the bedroom we share to stop shaking. Why the fuck hadn't I hit him? Or at least threatened to? No wonder he calls me chicken shit. Leaning against the door, eyes closed, I take a breath in for two beats, let it out for four, in for two? And then I hear a nearly-whispered conversation start up in the kitchen.

  "Honestly, Bill, why am I always the one who has to deal with this problem? Why can't you ever say anything?"

  "Alex needs to learn to stand up for himself. You know what Dr. Tomkins said."

  "Have you forgotten what happened to him? It's not something he's going to recover from right away, and always getting beaten down by that bully will only make it worse."

  "Maybe, but if you always come to his rescue like that, he never has to take action. He'll always be a coward."

  "Coward? He was abused! Horribly abused!"

  I shove away from the door; don't want to hear any more. Christ, but I wish I were bigger! At fifteen, Derek is a year younger than me, but he's taller and heavier. And a bully. Barring bigger, could I maybe at least get some courage? Where's the Wizard of Oz when you need him?

  I never had a lot of courage, but I feel like I lost all of it at the last foster home. The one before this one. As many problems as Derek makes for me here, the Dunlaps' apartment on St. Marks Place is the best of all of them so far, and there have been quite a few. I mean, it's a little crowded, what with her and Mr. Dunlap in one bedroom and both of us foster kids sharing the other, but it's sure as hell better than the last place, where Mr. Ellis started coming after me.

  He only got me twice before Children's Services got me out of there, but it was enough that I had to get tested. Twice, a few months apart, just to be sure. Something about HIV taking three months to show up, maybe. And I sure heard a lot about condoms from the people at the clinic, like the whole thing had been my idea to begin with.

  I wasn't nervous, waiting for the first test results; probably still too traumatized over what had happened to focus on getting sick. By the second test, though, I'd done some research. It had started after I'd seen the movie Philadelphia at the Film Forum over on West Houston, where I've gone many times to see Italian films, always with subtitles so I can close my eyes and just listen to the Italian. But this was a different experience, watching Tom Hanks wasting away, covered in plum-colored lesions, walking around with an IV attached to him like some kind of feeding tube. That scared the shit out of me, and although a little more research showed that HIV isn't quite the death sentence it was when they shot that movie, it totally takes control of your life. And I've had little enough control of my life so far, thank you very much.

  So I was nervous as hell through the months of waiting until it was time for the second test. What if I had HIV? My life already sucks, but I know better than to think there's any fair play about how things happen that would keep this curse away from me. I prayed to God, I prayed to my dead mother, I prayed to the father I never knew. It's hard to tell you what the relief was like when I found out I was negative.

  I won't say Mr. Ellis did me any favors, but I already knew I was gay, and now I know that the experience can only get better from here. But it looks like I'll have to testify at his trial. I already went to some court thing, I forget what it was called. He wasn't there, but I had to answer all these questions about what happened, and-man, it was like reliving it all over again. And if what I've seen on TV shows is anything like real life, it will be even worse at the trial. I might fall apart. I might not be able to go through with it. The prosecutor, Mr. Lewis, tried to help; he told me to lean on my anger. The trouble is, all I feel is afraid.

  So I hate to admit Mr. Dunlap is right. Shit.

  Well, if I don't go out, if I stay here, I'll just be a ball of nerves, not knowing when Derek will return or what mood he'll be in. It's Saturday, and I can't think of a reason not to go someplace where I'm more comfortable, someplace I'm more in control. So I grab a hoodie, fly down the two flights of stairs to the street level, and head west toward Greenwich Village.

  I especially like to hang out in Christopher Park, which is right across the street from Stonewall Inn, where everything got started. I love that St. Marks, my current "home," is so close to where those riots happened, where enough men finally got so pissed off about getting treated like shit and thought of like even worse than that, that they just refused to take any more. Gay men are still men; sometimes I think straight people forget that.

  By the time I get to Christopher Park, I'm feeling calmer. I always feel better when I'm alone. That way I don't have to keep up the act. You know the one? It's where I won't be shocked. By anything. My persona is not to react, not to give away that something has hurt me or startled me or even surprised me. I guess there's a certain level of that, a kind of undertow, all the time, especially walking around the city at night. But it goes into high gear when there's someone else with me, someone who might just do one of those things-shock me, startle me, hurt me.

  There's not much I can actually do in the West Village at night, at only sixteen. But I love strolling around, looking in the sex toy shop windows, standing where I can watch the entrance to a gay bar to see who goes in, who comes out, and who he's with. I try to guess where they'll go next, and of course what I imagine is one of them has a cool apartment someplace close by. He leads his guest up three flights of stairs, and once safely inside the kissing and the touching start, and bef
ore long...

  Sometimes when I'm walking around like this, I look for people I might like to be related to. My mother died when I was five-drug OD-and I never knew my father, but I do know that both my parents were Italian. So if I see someone who looks really Italian, I look hard at him: Does he have my nose? The shape of my mouth? The eyebrows that start out as a slight squiggle near my nose and arch strongly toward my temples? Lots of people think my last name-which was my mother's-is Latino. But Lupo is Italian. I suppose it doesn't help the confusion that everyone has always shortened Alessandro to Alex, which could be from almost anywhere. Alessandro means "defender of men." Lupo means "wolf." If only I could apply those meanings to my life.

  I read this article once about how many people who've come to the U.S. from Italy become landscapers, or start plant nursery businesses. It seems Italians have a passion for plants in general and flowers in particular. So when I'm wandering around the West Village looking for Italian people, if I end up on a block of apartments where lots of people have planted flowers in window boxes, I walk up one side of the street and back on the other and pretend I'm in Italy.

  There's this one guy I've been seeing a lot. I'm pretty sure he's Italian: long, straight nose, full lips, strong jaw, dark brown hair just long enough to show