Lika Starr

Excerpt:
(Prologue)

Gerald was as well prepared for death as anyone could be. Over the winter, after the last of his three hospital stays and in an interval of relative health, he’d made a last will & testament, a living will, assigned a health care proxy and arranged his own cremation. He’d thrown out hundreds of eight by ten photos accrued over his twenty-five years as an actor, a tattered porno collection and all his journals. He’d acquired a hefty collection of barbiturates in case things got too ‘icky.’ His parents were dead, so they weren’t a concern, and he’d stopped returning calls from well-meaning friends. Everyone really, except Barbara, who faithfully checked in on him or called every few days; if something happened, he didn’t want to get left until the neighbors noticed a bad smell. Gerald was as ready to go as the dinner guest in coat and gloves standing at the open door.

‘Unbreak my heart….’ The electronic purr of a white noise machine failed to annul the noisy jukebox in the Irish bar downstairs. But it had been worse earlier, when the drunken bar patrons were having their three a.m. sing-along. That’s when Gerald turned the machine on. At this hour, only the bartender remained, tallying up the evening’s take.

Gerald lay on his bed without hope of falling back to sleep. What was today? He’d had a doctor’s appointment on Wednesday, was that yesterday? Oh. Today he had to go to one of those government places where poor people with jobs decide if poor people without jobs are eligible for assistance - food stamps, disability. He’d been putting it off. He had enough money to live - and nothing else - for a few months, but he’d be penniless by December if he didn’t arrange some kind of cash flow. Another winter, with or without penury, was an ominous thought. In icy weather, he was more vulnerable to colds and flu which might, like last winter, turn into pneumonia and send him to the hospital.

Was today Friday? He could look on his beside table at his pill arranger, the one area of his life in which he was diligent. He didn’t even believe the pills - part of a trial study by a pharmaceutical company - did anything. In fact, the study had a placebo arm, so his religious adherence to a three-times-a-day schedule might just be adding a daily tablespoon of sugar to his diet. And if he were getting the actual drugs? Friends who’d taken AZT or the massive doses of penicillin some quack in Brooklyn had prescribed, had just shifted from slow decline to downhill plummet. If it’s a placebo I’ll die, Gerald reasoned, and if it’s the real stuff, I’ll die quicker.

‘So why do you take them if you don’t think they’re doing any good, Mr. Negative?’ Barbara asked.
‘Because I want to be part of the effort to find a cure, even if it kills me,’ Gerald said.
‘That’s so noble, Sweetie.’

Gerald wanted to kill her. Barbara was a petite ingenue with a bright soprano range and a show biz dream when they’d met in college. Now she was an obese legal secretary, who still worked out weekly with a vocal coach, didn’t audition and insisted that under Gerald’s grim expectations, he clung to a fairytale hope that the pills just might work.

Thursday’s compartments in the weekly pill arranger were empty, so today must be Friday. The bartender had gone home and the jukebox was quiet. Gerald turned the white noise machine off with his foot and sat at the folding card table he used as a - dining room table was too euphemistic - flat elevated surface to eat off. Among the unopened mail and dirty dishes was a recently excavated note left by the previous tenant that read, If the garbage downstairs starts to smell too bad, sprinkle perfume on the lamp bulb. Gerald must have kept the note because, at the time, he thought it grimly funny.

Gerald only intended to sublet the place for a few months. Now, eight years later, he knew he’d never leave the charmless mid-town studio, unless it was to go into one of those renovated S.R.O.’s turned AIDS homes - hospices really, considering the turnover. Friends told him he was crazy to live on Eighth Avenue, a block from Times Square. ‘It’s dangerous. You should be in the Village - or Chelsea! That’s the new hot spot. Where you live is so seedy.’ And sexy. Those same friends who disparaged his neighborhood, gorged themselves on his tales of tourist trysts: the Ohio husband who spent a steamy half hour in Gerald’s apartment while his wife and children waited at the Marriott, the Harvard undergrad in town for a Dukakis convention, the pimply eighteen-year-old sailor, here for fleet week, who’d seen four Broadway musicals in three days. Sightseers, foreigners, conventioneers. In those days, Times Square meant sex, and the out-of-towner lingering outside Show World, or the businessman glancing nervously at his watch on Forty Second Street, were looking to get laid.”

Rigoberto Gonzalez’s sensitive and lovingly crafted story of Antonio’s dilemma will resonate with all children who have been faced with speaking up for themselves or for the people they love. The accompanying acrylic paintings by Cecilia Concepción Álvarez bring Antonio’s story to life in tender, richly hued detail.”

Join Cassie and Luke in the small town of Sebastopol, California where the number of artists far exceeds that of farmers. Cassie’s struggles with her feelings Luke has brought out in her is overshadowed by the unexpected visit from Cassie’s father, Reverend Parker. Will Cassie choose life without family or life without love?”

Guest editor Eileen Myles adds her street smarts and lyrical dynamism to Tristan Taormino’s annual powerhouse of riveting girl-girl erotica.”

Mary Meigs suffered a stroke in 1999. Undaunted and irrepressible, Meigs embraced her fate with both a penetrating curiosity and an utterly undiminished will to create. New, discrete forms of writing emerged: an incisively contemplative journal; a beautifully witty, illustrated fax correspondence between her cat Mike and Marie-Claire Blais’s cat Mouser; and a fascinating series of collaborative ‘free writing’ sketches, beginning with a line or phrase, usually from a poem, on which the writer elaborated without moving pen from paper.

Lise Weil has constructed a celebratory gathering of these magical pieces in Beyond Recall, Meigs’s paean to the indomitable human spirit and its triumph over the infirmities and obstacles old age imposes on the human condition.”

Excerpt:
It seems to me the biggest problem with the down low in the black community is our unwillingness to talk candidly about sex. When it comes to sex, we’ve created a culture of lies. Women often lie to themselves about their men being gay. Men on the down low lie about having sex with men. Men who are infected lie about their HIV status. Gay men lie about their sexual interests. What makes us think people are going to suddenly start telling the truth when we start calling them dirty names?

The truth is we can’t deal with the down low until we learn to deal with our hang-ups about sex. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen anytime soon. That’s why we have to accept personal responsibility for our behavior. This is 2004 and we all know the deal. If you have unprotected sexual intercourse, you’re putting yourself at risk. Period. For some reason, we in the black community just can’t seem to stay focused about AIDS. First we denied it affected us. Then we ignored it because we thought it only affected a few of us. Next we preached morality because we thought it only affected the ones we didn’t like. Then we dramatized it as we tried to figure out which secret laboratory developed it. At what point do we just deal with it?

AIDS is a huge problem in our community. It doesn’t matter how we got here, we’re here. It doesn’t matter how anyone got it, they have it. It doesn’t matter who’s to blame. It matters how we respond to it. The big lie of the down low is not just the lie men tell their women. No, the big lie is the lie we tell ourselves-that it’s somebody else’s responsibility.”