Luckily, the questions got easier after the whole blood type thing. It was amazing how many diseases I’d never had. Then I got to the really interesting question:
Have you had any homosexual intercourse since 1980?
“Amanda?” I said. “Why do they want to know about my sex life?”
“AIDS?” she replied.
“But, yeah, they already asked about that. A couple of times. This is just about … intercourse.”
“Maybe they just want to double-check?”
“Then why don’t they ask you about your sex life? I’ve seen some of the guys you’ve slept with, and I wouldn’t want any of their microbes in my arteries.”
“Excuse me?”
“Except Simon. I’d take a little Simon in my blood.”
“Can’t you just let it rest for ten minutes?”
“And do what? Knit?”
The Earth Mother three people ahead of us turned around and gave me a nasty look—she had probably just put her knitting back in her bag in order to fill out the form. And actually, she wasn’t the only one giving me a nasty look. It seemed like everybody was on the anti-Jasper bandwagon. Did the fact that the World Trade Center had just been destroyed mean that I couldn’t act normal with Amanda? I genuinely didn’t see the point of looking somber and talking somber and thinking only somber thoughts. Who benefited from that? You have to imagine that the minute before that first plane hit, there were guys in the World Trade Center giving each other shit.
I left the intercourse question blank and finished my form. When the guy handing out the questionnaires passed by us again, I waved him down. He looked a little like my eighth-grade science teacher, with a comb-over and the kind of Eddie Bauer shirt that was supposed to simulate being on a safari for people who would never get as far as the Bronx Zoo.
“Hey,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course,” he said.
I pointed out the question. “What’s that about?”
“Oh, they need to know if you’ve had any homosexual intercourse.”
He looked a little surprised that I of all people had asked the question. Which is what I love about American guys, especially straight ones. If you’re not a flaming Filipino dancing queen, they never, ever expect the Asian guy to be asking about g*y sex. They always figure you want to talk about math. Or the violin.
Normally in this situation, Amanda would be joining me in fighting the urge to laugh. But she was pretending like she was too busy writing everything she knew about heart disease in her family.
“Yeah,” I said. “I figured that. But they mean unprotected sex, right? I mean, without a condom.”
He shook his head. “No. It’s really any g*y sex.”
I could tell that I wasn’t the first guy to ask him about this. And I really wasn’t in the mood to spell it out for him. I tried to keep it light.
“Let’s say I have this friend,” I said. “And the only times he’s had homosexual intercourse—we’re only talking a few times here, assuming you mean all-out intercourse—there was a condom involved, and never in any of those few occasions was that condom, um, compromised. So it’s been a hundred percent on the safety side. My friend would still be able to give blood, right?”
Again, a headshake. “I’m afraid not. I’m not saying it makes total sense, but that’s the law.”
Now I was getting upset. Because this was the only thing I could do, and now I wasn’t able to do it. For this crazy-ass bigoted reason.
“You mean to tell me, if my friend Amanda here had unprotected sex with a hundred guys and I had protected sex with two guys, she would be able to give blood and I wouldn’t?”
People were definitely listening now. Let them, I thought.
“I’m afraid that’s the law. Even if we don’t agree with it, we can’t let you give blood.”
“That’s the law. Of course that’s the law! Because who would want to give a dying person g*y blood. Even if it’s screened for HIV and AIDS and everything else—no, if that person got some g*y blood, who knows what might happen? Better to go without blood, right, than get it from a fag? That’s a great law. It’s, like, America’s best law ever. I’m so f**king glad I live in this country!”
I guess I was lucky my shade of yellow wasn’t any closer to brown, ’cause if I’d been Arab or easily mistaken for Arab, someone would’ve probably called the police. Don’t get me wrong—there were plenty of people saying it wasn’t fair, and there were even one or two leaving the line—whether because they’d had homosexual intercourse or because they sympathized with those of us who had, I don’t know. I even felt sorry for the guy who was telling me all this, because clearly it wasn’t his law, and clearly he had no desire to be having this conversation.
The line was moving forward, and we were just standing there.
“I’m sorry,” the guy said.
I turned to Amanda. “Let’s go. I know when I’m not wanted.”
But Amanda wasn’t moving.
“I can meet you later,” she said. “I’ll ask ’em to take double, so I can give for both of us.”
That’s not the point, I wanted to say, but I honestly wasn’t clear what the point was anymore.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll see you later.” Even though I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t. Amanda would spend the next couple of weeks calling, but I wasn’t going to pick up.
I left the line and didn’t look back. The air was as tainted as ever—it wasn’t the kind of smell you got used to, the kind that your nose or your mind adjusts to. I checked my cell phone, and now it wasn’t getting reception. I knew there were people around—even if my friends were off at school, many of their moms would have taken me in. But I didn’t want to see any of them. So I just walked around for a while, seeing all the aimless people, picking up papers as I went—some of them the pages that had been pushed across the Hudson, some of them our own Brooklyn garbage, left behind for no reason other than there was no reason to keep them. Coupon sections from Sunday papers. Those Chinese take-out menus. Law firm receipts. Printed-out emails. Take- out menus from the World Trade Center area.
At one point I found myself walking by the entrance to the park, seeing all the people there, and I thought, It can’t be Tuesday. It was unreal that it was a Tuesday and everybody was walking around. I could see the people who must’ve walked across the bridge, who were coming back from Manhattan looking exhausted, like it was night. You could tell that a lot of them had bonded in their journeys, and you really didn’t know whether it was because they all worked in the same office or if they had just met as they forged across. I was seeing a lot of goodbyes—then hellos as people headed up their steps and made it to their own front doors. More often than not, there was someone waiting there to meet them, hold them, bring them inside.
I went back to my house. I sat down and turned on the TV and didn’t get up for another six or seven hours. I flipped from newscast to newscast—they were all saying the same thing, and I guess it all depended on who you wanted to be telling it to you. I decided I wanted to be with Peter Jennings the most, because there was something about his accent that calmed me down. He made me know he was going through it along with me, that he was trying to figure out how to deal with what he had to do, too. They kept showing the same footage of the planes hitting the towers—then the fires at the Pentagon and the field in Pennsylvania, and everyone wondering if there were more targets, if more things were going to happen. At one point they’d repeated everything enough, and I wanted to tell them to stop showing the planes hitting the tower. We didn’t need to see it again. And yet I didn’t turn it off. Because I was hanging on every minute, wanting to be there when whatever was going to happen next actually happened. I tried flipping to other channels—the Food Network and Nickelodeon and VH1 Classic. But these channels felt like they were being beamed in from another planet, or even from the past—like the airwaves were taking a little longer to get here, so we could live in yesterday a little while longer, even if it felt wrong.
Around dinnertime, the phone rang again. I picked up and heard Mom’s voice. She was just checking in, she said. She’d been trying for over an hour to get through.
“Isn’t it early in the morning there?” I asked her.
And she said, “Do you really think I can sleep?”
There wasn’t much I could tell her—she was watching the same news I was. And I wasn’t going to tell her about giving blood—there was no reason to do that. I wasn’t even sure she would take my side. If anything, she’d think I was using a roundabout way to tell her I had AIDS.
It wasn’t like they were using the blood. They kept collecting it and collecting it for survivors who weren’t being found. Maybe that’s why I kept watching, and why Peter Jennings kept talking, and why I’m sure the streets of Brooklyn that night were lit by the blue flickerglow of all of our TV screens—because what we needed was that one moment of good news, that one person pulled from the rubble. I remembered how, when I was little, there was a baby girl who fell in a well, and it was like the whole country held its breath until they got her out. It’s not that survivors would have erased what had happened to everyone else, but it would have at least told us that our hope was justified, that it was still the kind of story we were used to.
Instead the only victories we had were the things that hadn’t happened. The fourth plane hadn’t made it to D.C. There weren’t fifty thousand people in the World Trade Center at 8:46 in the morning like there would’ve been at noon.
Darkness came, and I had to turn on the lights. The TV became too repetitive, and I had to put it on mute. My phone started working, and I had all these messages. And the whole time, all I could think about was how I’d really wanted to give blood and they hadn’t let me.
I took a pizza out of the freezer and preheated the oven. I got a call through to my best friend in St. Louis but we only talked a little while. I unmuted the news and listened to it enough to know that nothing had changed since the last time I’d checked. I ate my pizza. I didn’t pick up when I saw Amanda’s number. I tried to watch a movie and couldn’t.
I washed my dishes and put them on the rack to dry. Then I went back to my computer to tell more people I wasn’t dead.
LOVE AND THEFT
Peter
The songs are wrong. The songs are wrong. This is what hits me: The songs are wrong.
I am at Tower Records, waiting to buy the new Bob Dylan, Love and Theft. I have Ryan Adams in my ears, but I turn the music off when the guy from Tower sees me outside, comes over early to unlock the doors, and says, “Man, do you know what’s going on?”
It’s the way he looks so sorry for me that makes me feel like I’m about to lose something. I can only stare at the blue dragon tattoo on his forearm and shake my head, not knowing until he tells me the news. I think for a moment it’s a joke. And then I think, no, it isn’t a joke.
I keep the music off, walk to Washington Square Park, look downtown—and there it is. I see it clearly. I’m standing there with strangers, and we’re all talking as we stare at this dark, jagged hole in the right-hand tower. It looks, we all say, like a special effect from a big-budget science-fiction movie. This is our first way of grasping it. We are still in disbelief. More people come up and stop in shock. In the shadow of the crater you can see the fire. It seems so small to us—it isn’t until we think about it that we realize the mark of flame is stories high. And the crater is the size of any of the buildings around us. The smoke has just started.
I know immediately that this is going to be one of the true historic moments of my life—that the personal and the historic are converging. I know people will ask, Where were you when you first heard?