People in Trouble by Sarah Schulman Read Free Book Online Page B

much sound, in the way that New York can be a silent city against a backdrop of solid noise.   Molly looked over the balloons and read the names.   She carried two of her own.   She saw the name of someone she had known peripherally and hadn't even realized was sick.
     
    By the time they got to the river many of the marchers were dripping sweat from their necks.   Drops were sliding down their temples.
     
    Everyone stopped then and was even more quiet than before.   Each person looked at the water, how dirty it was, how much garbage was floating in it.   They looked across to the Jersey side, at the high rises in Fort Lee and the polluted mess that made up the rest of it.   Each one had a very private thought about a person who had died or about themself or about New Jersey or why they weren't feeling anything right then.   It was the calmest state of confusion that Molly had ever been in.   Then somebody started to sing.   When that man made the first sound he startled the other mourners, who felt interrupted.   But after the second note every single person who had come to the AIDS vigil realized that the man was singing "somewhere over the rainbow."   Another man let his balloons fly off over the water and one by one as they were singing "somewhere over the rainbow," other people let their balloons fly away.
     
    Molly looked out at the water and the reddish industrial-waste sunset and thought two thoughts.   She watched the balloons rising toward the filthy sky and thought, They leave your hand the way they leave your life.   She could only really see the sea of them after losing sight of her own.   Then she thought, bluish carmine, velvety.
     
    What does it mean to sing "somewhere over the rainbow" and release balloons?   It made her feel something very human; a kind of nostalgia with public sadness and the sharing of emotions.   But then what?
     
    To a certain extent she had gotten used to hearing about people dying.
     
    She hadn't gotten used to seeing it, but now when someone said, "I couldn't call you back because a friend of mine died," it was said calmly.
     
    This dying had been going on for a long time already.   So long, in fact, that there were people alive who didn't remember life before AIDS.   And for Molly it had made all her relations with men more deliberate and detailed.   First, the men changed.
     
    They were more vulnerable and open and needed to talk.   So she changed.
     
    Passing acquaintances became friends.   And when her friends actually did get sick there was a lot of shopping to do, picking up laundry and looking into each other's eyes.   She had never held so many crying men before in her life.
     
    Molly had recently spent three months cooking dinner for a man who was so disoriented he couldn't decide how to cut the spinach.   His name was on one of her balloons.   There were drugs that he wanted to try but the Food and Drug Administration wouldn't approve them.
     
    "I'm dying," he said before the dementia set in.   "Let me take the goddamn drug."
     
    The best he could find was a placebo program where half the men got sugar pills and the other half got experimental drugs.
     
    No one knew who got what.
     
    "Why do they need a comparison study?"   he said to everyone.   "They already know what happens if you don't treat it."
     
    He didn't say that to the doctors though, because he was afraid that if he made trouble they would give him sugar instead of medicine.
     
    He got old very fast.   He said the telephone was on fire.   His skin broke open.   His mother came in from Saint Louis and kissed his face when it was covered with sores.   He went to the hospital and then he went home.   Then he went to the hospital.   Then he went home.   Then he went to the hospital.   Then he died in the hospital.
     
    Molly knew this man, Ronnie Lavallee 1954-1987, because his sister Cecilia was a dyke who used to work with Molly at an all-women's trucking company