simon

My family? Hah. Well. I wish I could say that there wasn't much to it. Wouldn't that be so easy? But it isn't. Of course it isn't.

Dad was a pastor. You know the kind. The booming Evangelical voice echoing from behind the podium, shouting fire and brimstone in that heavy accent. You can probably already guess where this is going. But really, even if he didn't have a religious bone in his body, I don't think much would have changed. He chose his profession not because of some desire to spread the truth, but to see every eye on him, an entire crowd enraptured by his words. No matter what he thought, he was right and everyone else was wrong. Unless they confirmed his worldviews, of course.

Being the only boy in the house, expectations on me from him were high. I wasn't going to be any sissy boy. He wanted me to be a real man. One he could be proud of. "I already have a daughter.", he'd always say. Ha ha. Hilarious, dad. It was just as funny the last seven hundred times you said it. Needless to say, I could never be the manly man he wanted me to be. It just wasn't there. He just had to grudglingly accept me doing well in school. It satisfied him, at least.

He never hit me or Mom or my sister or any of that. He never drank. But that didn't stop there from being a weight in the room whenever he was there. It was only a matter of time before he'd say something that set everyone on edge. I think he was still bitter about what had happened those last few decades. To say the least.

That sounds harsh. And I mean every word of it. I wish I could say that despite it all I loved him. But he just made it too difficult.

Mom was a different story entirely. It was always so hard to tellwhat she really thought about anything. A good and proper Southern woman, she kept her opinions to herself, and never complained. It wasn't until years later that I found out how she felt about anything. But, to me then, that was alright. It was preferable to the angry rants about Carter or the youth of today or any of that. She made it her priority to be warm and loving, always making sure that the house felt like a home. From her, at least, I felt some actual love.

There isn't much else to say about her. Not for any lack of warmth or affection towards her, even now, even after everything. I guess it's just easier to write pages and pages of negativity than positivity. I don't think I'll ever forget how hard she worked. But given what followed, such memories are hazy, like looking through frosted glass.

I'd known I was gay for as long as others assumed I should have been looking over girls. But naturally, I couldn't be open about it. There were a few hints that I wasn't alone, but they were mere scurries, lost in the words of my dad's rambles. For all I actually saw of my fellows he may as well have been talking about how fairies or goblins were ruining America. But they were there. And something about that gave me hope.

It was a hope that was validated when I finally left home to go to school.

San Francisco certainly deserved its reputation. Finally, I had found them. No longer forced to skulk around in the underbelly of society, there were more than a few that were out and proud, or as much as one could be in that time. Laughing, drinking, having fun in the night life. And I could actually join them. I'd open my mouth and they'd hear my accent, responding with a mix of curiosity, amusement and downright pity. I was congratulated and patronized in almost equal measure and I still suspect that half of them were surprised I could even read. As much as I wanted to be offended, and to some extent I was, it was still nice to finally get the chance to be myself.

We were untouchable, me and them. Sure, the occasional bug went around, but nothing that couldn't be taken care of with some antibiotics. It was bliss. I did my work, of course. I wasn't about to waste such an opportunity, having worked so hard to get into this school in the first place. But at night, all bets were off. I lost control, feeling so jubilated that the closet door was open that I even gained a bit of a reputation. Nobody had a mouth quite like that southern boy, I'd hear them whisper. And you know what? I was proud. It was such a stupid thing to be proud of. But I loved it all the same.

Then... well, you know what happened next.

Just about everyone started getting sick, but it wasn't an ordinary sickness. Sudden, horribly aggressive cases of pneumonia cropped up, almost instantly eating away at those who it infected and literally wasting them. Every night fewer and fewer people showed up in the bars, and those that did were tense. Unwilling to touch each other as they heard news of the epidemic that had already gripped the big cities to the south and was quickly creeping up the coast.

Then I started getting sick. Ezra, God bless him, brought me to the hospital right away.

I found out that I had become one of them. The doctor handed me back my death sentence, with that same grim and terrified glint in his eye that I'm sure so many of our people during that time were used to.

At this time, Mom was still keeping in touch. We called each other every now and then. Sometimes she would send care packages, full of food and treats I had known from my childhood. So it wouldn't have been right to leave her in the dark. For her son to merely vanish, letter piling up at a dead boy's doorstep, sent back again and again. She had to know.

It took a few days to get up the nerve to call her. But I did it.

The second the diagnosis left my lips, there was silence. The last thing I heard from my mother was her breathing growing more rapid. The phone clicked and the dial tone rang.

I tried to call back. Nothing. Left a message. Nothing. For the next few days, this repeated.

Maybe she really did hate me, but even now, I don't believe that. It's more likely she couldn't face the truth. Her boy was a statistic, and that boy's father had been right all along. I don't believe he would have changed a bit, really. As we were wasting, dying, he would wander the house, crowing about how he knew this day would come, when God would come down and wipe the fruits and the faggots off the Earth. Because that's what mattered to him. That he was right.

I wish I could say I was heartbroken. But this was the story for almost all of us. Everyone quietly thought it, that we deserved what happened. Even nurses and doctors felt this way, gossiping about the latest young man desperately dialing the hospital phone over and over to empty tones with an air of utter detatchment, even schadenfreude.

If it wasn't for Ezra, I would have died with them. I'm still convinced that I'm dying, just very slowly. I still dutifully take my treatments and my vitae. But one of these days, the virus is going to win. I'm living on borrowed time that, honestly, I don't feel like I deserve. But he keeps insisting that I do, so who knows.

Maybe there's a way out.

Even though I've had thirty years to prepare myself for it, I still don't want to die.