On the Other Hand, Death

Kay brought us both some potato chips, and then I asked her if she had other family members or friends who might be mad enough at Dot Fisher to harass or threaten her Kay used the opportunity to describe her six grown children, none of whom seemed to be likely suspects.
Two of the Wilson offspring were in Southern California, two lived in Queens, one was a career Army man in Germany, and the youngest, Crystal-Marie, was in a downstate mental hospital. None had visited Albany recently. As for friends, yes, all of them were sympathetic and put out, Kay said, but she could think of none who'd shown any sign of providing the Wilsons with an un-requested assist in ridding the neighborhood of Dot and Edith.
I thanked her and said I'd return the next day to speak with her husband.
"Sure thing, Bob. Just give us a call first and make sure we're on the premises and ain't stepped out. And you tell Mrs. Fisher I'm real sorry to hear about her trouble. Maybe I'll just traipse down there tomorrow and stick my nose in. And you be sure to say hi to Crane for me, you hear? That Crane, he's quite a guy, quite a guy. And you know, Bob, you're quite a guy, too. Lordy."
I had a quick triple burger at Wendy's. While I ate, I thought a lot about two people: Joey Deem and Bill Wilson.
I headed back down Central through the fuming Friday evening traffic, pulled into Freezer Fresh, and ordered a chocolate cone with sprinkles.
"Joey Deem here tonight? I'd like to talk to him for just a minute."
"Joey? No, he called in sick," I was told by a young black man in a Freezer Fresh paper hat.
"He won't be in at all tonight then?"
"Not if he's sick," the kid said blandly, dipping my cone in a bowl of multicolored specks of dubious digestibility. "Health department wouldn't like it."
From a pay phone I called Dot's place to find out if Lew Morton had arrived. He had, Dot said, as well as a patrolman whom Ned Bowman had left at the house to look after things until Peter Greco got back at midnight. There had been no further threatening letters or phone calls.
I drove on into the city, the sun melting into a gaseous black blanket spread across the sky behind me. As I drove, I thought maybe this whole business was going to be a lot simpler than I had feared it would be. Or maybe, since Crane Trefusis had a hand in it, it wouldn't. On the one hand this, on the other hand that.
5• Word had spread among Albany gays
about the incident at Dot Fisher's, and nearly fifty of them who'd seen the six o'clock news showed up at the Gay Community Center to be harangued by Fenton McWhirter. Two hours later, twelve had actually signed up for the gay national strike. Twelve thousand were needed to make an impact locally, but McWhirter took what he could get. Donations for the strike campaign added up to $37.63.
I phoned Dot's house from the center and was told by her that yet another threatening call had been received. "Death to the dykes on Moon Road!" was what the caller had said, then hung up. Dot and Edith were in the kitchen with Dot's friend Lew Morton seated by the back door and an APD patrolman just outside. Dot sounded shaky but controlled and said she'd be just fine until Peter arrived at midnight to look after things.
At the center, I also picked up a phone message from Timmy. His car had broken down and he'd meet me later, up the avenue, the message said. I thought, For sure.
I looked for Peter Greco, and at ten o'clock I joined him and McWhirter and six other leafleting volunteers as we piled into my car and McWhirter's and headed toward Central Avenue to further signal the revolt.
The sultry streets were alive with sweating crowds, and the bars even hotter and more chaotic, but revolt did not seem imminent. There was a blurry, enervated feeling to the night. I couldn't tell whether this resulted from the suffocating heat or from the simple fact that these were now the eighties, a decade in which, so far, most people, straight and gay, couldn't quite settle on what to do next
and so didn't do much of anything at all. It was the fifties all over again, except with Reagan this time, and the New Right, the AIDS epidemic, and the Bomb multiplied ten thousandfold. It was the age of nervously milling around.
The music in the discos that night was no help: cold, sarcastic punk stuff that kept only the dance junkies sporadically on the floor. I'd heard the old funky, sensuous, friendly dance music of the seventies was still alive and well in Manhattan—preserved in West Village private clubs, like family genealogies in a Mormon vault—but on this night Albany didn't even seem to have the energy for nostalgia. The music did seem louder than usual, as if more were better, but the higher volume didn't help either. At Coco-nuts, the ersatz South Seas disco where the Lacoste crowd hung out, even the tropical fish in the aquarium seemed to be clapping little fish hands over their ears.
Nor did Fenton McWhirter's presence anywhere cause enthusiasm to break out. Most people received the flyers and leaflets cordially, then studied them, and you could see their eyebrows shoot up at the point where they got the drift of what the leaflets were asking them to commit themselves to. One person asked McWhirter if he'd lost his marbles, but the rest only thought it.
There was only "incident." At the Watering Hole, McWhirter screwed up the pool shot of a golden-maned, mean-eyed, drugged-up "cowboy"—who could well have been a real one, in town after the drive from Abilene to Schenectady, as he smelled powerfully of the stockyards. Or, it could have been a new scent, Shitkicker, from the makers of Brut. The cowboy grabbed McWhirter by the scruff of the neck and instructed him to "get your faggot ass outta my way," but I rapidly separated the two, and Greco placated the cowboy with a rum and coke and gamely attempted to recruit him. The cowboy suddenly
recognized McWhirter and Greco from the TV news, and Greco's pitch did seem to set some wheels spinning in his mind, but he said his parish priest wouldn't like it and he didn't sign up.
At the Green Room, McWhirter worked the backroom disco while Greco made his way into the smog of beer breath and smoke of the front-room piano bar. I tagged along with Greco into the crowd of alcoholic fifties queens up front, even though the room had always made me uncomfortable. The problem was, I always left with the nagging feeling that I belonged there. The yellow-haired cowboy from the watering Hole came in just after Greco and I did. He peered around, seemed to decide that he didn't belong there at all, and fled back into the night.
At the piano bar, Greco unexpectedly ran into his old lover of ten years earlier, Tad something-or-other. It seemed to be a night for that. Timmy was still nowhere to be seen.
Greco and Tad were startled to see each other. Their brief conversation was awkward. I didn't listen in, but, trained and inclined to be nosy, I took in what I could by glancing their way from time to time. Tad, who'd been alone at the bar and sullenly preoccupied with a snifter of something warm and murky, grew quickly hostile, and Greco, looking injured and confused, soon retreated.
"An unhappy reunion?" I said.
Greco shrugged, trying to look philosophical, but his dark eyes were bright with hurt.
"You can't go home again," I said, and looked around to see if Timmy had come in the door. He hadn't. "When it's over, it's over. Never apologize, never explain. Never look back, or something might be gaining on you. What are some of the other ones?"
Greco didn't laugh. "Tad asked me for the money
back," he said, shaking his head in disbelief. My immediate assumption was that Tad, my age or older, had once "kept" Greco. "All he could talk about," Greco said glumly, "was his lousy three thousand dollars. Of our whole year together, that's the only thing he remembers. God."