To Forgive and Forget - 1999

After my youngest brother died of AIDS in 1995, I traveled to the holiest shrines in Asia. The ancient temples salved little of my grief and I switched to worshipping the high heels of the go-go girls. Vee danced at the Baby A Go-Go in Pattaya. She had one eye. We had an affair. The word ‘love’ was traded between us many times. My money ran out before Christmas and a 747 flew me back to the States. My vow to return was a lie. Friends phoned to say she was seeing an Englishman. It seemed better that way.

A year later I took a plane to Thailand. The taxi ride from Bangkok lasted two hours. I stayed at the same hotel. A knock sounded on the door. It wasn’t room service. Vee hadn’t changed much physically, but told me she had AIDS. I said I would help her. We went up country to Isaan to see her baby.

Nothing had changed at the farm. THe fields were fallow and dry two months before the monsoons.

Her son was healthy. She said it could have been mine. The math didn’t work out. I didn't care. I liked children.

The farm had prospered. Vee and I slept in the same bed. She wanted me to hold her. We did nothing else. The next morning I looked for water. No medicine filled the refrigerator. Vee put the child on my lap. She had told her lovers the same story. It had been a test.

None of them came north. I was the only one who passed this exam. The memory of my brother stopped my strangling her. Her son cried as I packed my bags. Vee asked if I was angry. My answer was a weak no and I put down my bag. Her son climbed into my arms. All three of us slept in the bed together. Two days later I caught the bus back south. Forgetting her lie was much easier in Pattaya as was everything else, because life is too short not to forgive and forget.

THE PRESENCE OF THE GONE by Peter Nolan Smith

Boston is a four-hour bus ride from New York. My brothers and sisters lived in the southern suburbs of my old hometown. After my return from overseas in September 2011 from my European posting I called several times to arrange visits, but my father’s death in 2010 had disconnected our present paths from the routes of the past.

We are still family and that December my younger sister asked, “Are you coming home for Christmas Eve.”

“I’m working late on the 24th.” I also had to open the safe at the diamond exchange the morning of the 26th and I apologized for my holiday no-show.

“I understand.” Pam was heading to her in-laws in New Haven for the 25th.

We wished each other ‘Merry Christmas’ with love, thinking that we might see each other until some distant date in 2013.

Happily Pam phoned from New Haven on the 26th to announce that her loving daughter and she were arriving at Grand Central Terminal that morning.

“We’re having a ladies day in the city with the various members of my husband’s family, but I could meet you for a drink at the Michael Jordan’s steakhouse after our shopping.” My sister had promised to take her daughter down to Chinatown to purchase cheap knock-off fashion bags and glasses. Sawah was an easy teenager to please.

“That sounds good to me.” My boss Manny wasn’t at work, so we could close early. “I’ll see you then.”

My co-workers were more than amenable to my suggestion of cutting out at 4:30 and we packed away the jewelry in record time. After Hlove and I double-checked the safe and security alarms, we were good to go.

Twenty minutes later I entered the Grand Central Terminal from Vanderbilt Avenue. The elegant train station was bustling with comings and goings of commuters and holiday shoppers. There was few open spaces like it in the world and I glowed in the power and beauty of New York before noticing my sister waving from a table shared with three other women and my niece, who greeted me with a kiss.

I shook hands with the older woman with a pleasant smile
“I’m Ryan’s mom.” She was married to my sister’s husband’s brother. Her son was serving his fourth tour in Afghanistan.

“I’m Ryan’s fiancee.” A pretty girl with long brown hair offered from across the table. “We met in Afghanistan.”

“She worked for intelligence,” Pam said to prevent my asking any questions. Her hair stylist had worked a miracle on her color, then again she was known as Auntie Stunning to her nieces and nephews. I was simply Uncle Bubba. “If she told you what she really did she would have to kill you.”

“I’m not a spook,” Marie protested with a laugh.

“My brother says the same thing.” My sister has joked that I have been in the CIA since graduation from college. “His last job was writer in residence to a British Embassy in Europe.”

“Unofficial position.” Madame l’Ambassador was a long-time friend.

“Definitely a spook.” Another young lady commented from the banquette. “I’m Marines too. Just back from Afghanistan.”

“Happy you could make it.” My sister hugged me with tenderness.

Whatever difficulties separated us during our youth have been buried under the hubris of time. The defense lawyer was my good friend and saved me with a timely loan after Hurricane Sandy. She knew me well and asked, “Care for a glass of wine?”

“A Mer-LOT.” I mimicked my father’s pronunciation of the wine and my sister laughed, “Glad to see that someone is keeping up the tradition.”

“Not only that, but I teach people about the milkman’s and lumberman’s handshakes.”

“Oh, no.” My sister and niece groaned in familial harmony.

My father loved to show children these handshakes on his travels with the Elder Hostel. The tour operators warmed him that parents might think that he was strange. We did the same. He ignored everyone and I demonstrated both to Ryan’s mother.

“Another Smith tradition.”

Their train was leaving in twenty minutes, so we rapidly conversed about our connections and histories. I told them about my petitioning to the Pentagon to get a pension for my anti-war protests in the 60s and my sister mentioned our entering Studio 54 with the legendary wrestler Andre the Giant.

“The greatest athlete of all time.” I liked saying that because it’s true and most people don’t realize how true it was.

“You must have lived a great life?” Marie asked with envy. She was young. Life in the 70s was nothing like today. “I read about those times. They seem like a dream. Everyone and everything was so free, especially the drag queens.”

“Really?” Her comment took me off guard. Maybe she was a spook.

“Yes, there nothing like that now.”

“There was back then.” I told her about Boston’s The Other Side, the trannies of the Meat Market and a transvestite trapeze show on 45th Street. “I think the place was called GG Barnums. I had a friend Dove. She was always trying to get me to go home with her. I refused her each time, even though she looked like a vogue model.”

“Some of them were so beautiful.” Marie cooed, while her future mother-in-law frowned with moderate disapproval. America was changing albeit step by little step.

“Dove was gorgeous and she saved my life once.” I recounted how Dove had stopped a beating at the hands of a New Jersey biker pissed that I had interfered with his roughing up a gay ballet dancer.

“Where is she now?”

“I don’t know. So many of them are gone like so many of my gay friends.” I think about them often.

“I know what you mean.” Her future sister-in-law was talking about fallen Marines.

“My brother died of AIDS. He comes to me in dreams along with my mother. They visited me at a Cape Cod cottage, then he runs out to a beach filled with all the gone like that movie LONGTIME COMPANION.” The final scene filled the empty beach with the dead and I started crying about the loss of my friends and family. I could feel the gone in the air. They were everywhere.

Pam put her arm around me as did the Marine, who said, “I know, I know.”

I stifled the tears with my palm.

The mother nodded with sympathy. Her son was halfway around the world.

“Thanks.”

“We all have these stories.” Marie grasped my hand. She shared the trauma. “Everything will be better one day.”

“I like to think that.” I wanted the troops back home and a cure for AIDS and to see my kids in Thailand soon, each a simple request complicated by hard times.

My sister signaled for the bill. She paid fast. The train departure was in four minutes. We rushed down the stairs to the platform. They caught the 7.05 to New Haven with a minute to spare. Pam hugged me with my niece joining her embrace.

It was good to be with family and I waved goodbye walking back into the terminal.

No one is really gone as long as we remember that they were here.

Not my brother, my friends, or the fallen Marines and soldiers or the Afghanis lost to decades of war.

We are all here.

Then, now, and later.

The Fears

Last night I read Poe's MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, despite having promised not to delve further into the literature of death. The opening paragraph portrayed a world lost to the plague.

"The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal -- the madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were incidents of half an hour."

Prince Prospero sealed his castle against the incursion of the poor. His wealthy and royal guests were entertained by nocturnal soirees of decadency. They felt safe within his walls, but the Red Death suffered no barriers and one evening a spectral creature appeared before the host. The nobleman waved for the musicians to cease their playing and confronted the unwanted intruder.

""Who dares" -- he demanded hoarsely of the courtiers who stood near him -- "who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him -- that we may know whom we have to hang, at sunrise, from the battlements!"

Prince Prospero's attack on the masked figure failed with his flailing death throes.

His guests perished without exception.

"And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."

Death took them all, but not so Covid 19.

The virus' mortality rate is about 4%.

The 1918 Spanish Flu killed between 10%-25%.

My grandmother Edith might have been infected by the pandemic in Etaples, France, where her sister, Marion, and she were RCME nurses tending to the wounded soldiers of the Western Front.

AIDS killed scores of my friends as well as my baby brother, Michael Charles Smith.

Who will C19 take?

Not me.

I already had it.

I think, but nothing is certain in this world.

Stay safe and I promise not to read anymore plague books.

To Forgive and Forget by Peter Nolan Smith

After my youngest brother died of AIDS in 1995, I traveled to the holiest shrines in Asia. The ancient temples salved little of my grief and I switched to worshipping the high heels of the go-go girls. Vee danced at the Baby A Go-Go in Pattaya. She had one eye. We had an affair. The word 'love' was traded between us many times. My money ran out before Christmas and a 747 flew me back to the States. My vow to return was a lie. Friends phoned to say she was seeing an Englishman. It seemed better that way.

A year later I took a plane to Thailand. The taxi ride from Bangkok lasted two hours. I stayed at the same hotel. A knock sounded on the door. It wasn't room service. Vee hadn't changed much physically, but told me she had AIDS. I said I would help her. We went up country to see her baby. She said it could have been mine. To Forgive and Forget by Peter Nolan Smith. The math didn't work out, but I was glad that the child was healthy. The farm had prospered. Vee and I slept in the same bed. She wanted me to hold her. We did nothing else. The next morning I looked for water. No medicine filled the refrigerator. Vee put the child on my lap. She had told her lovers the same story. It had been a test.

I was the only one who passed this exam. The memory of my brother stopped my strangling her. The baby cried as I packed my bags. Vee asked if I was angry. My answer was a weak no and I caught the next bus out of toto wn. Forgetting her lie was much easier in Pattaya as was everything else, because life is too short to not forgive and forget.

Miss You Long Time - Michael Charles Smith

In the summer of 1995 my baby brother succumbed to the ravages of AIDS. I miss him every day along with the rest of my friends and family who died from that killer. I will remember them forever.

My brother's name was Michael Charles Smith.

He's the smaller blonde boy in the photo.

And still always the youngest.

GAY BOY by Peter Nolan Smith ON SALE

GAYBOY is a semi-fictional novella of my experiences with gay friends and family. The central character is my baby brother Michael Charles Smith, a gay radio personage in Boston. He like so many of others succumbed to AIDS and GAYBOY is an attempt to reincarnate my younger brother and the good times that exist in the Here-Before.

Here's an excerpt from GAYBOY;

In the Spring of 1966 I won a math scholarship to Our Lord’s High School. Its enrollment was all-boys. The football team was State Champs and the coach tried to recruit me onto the freshman squad. At 5-10 I weighed 180.

“You’re built for running. Short powerful legs and a strong torso.” He assessed my strengths with a slaver’s eye.

“I’m here for math.”

“Brute force timing impact.” Coach Amado understood the poetry of geometry.

“I’ll think about it.”

I ran cross-country instead.

I had short legs and finished fourth and fifth.

After practice and meets I hitchhiked home on 128. Men picked me up and after a mile asked, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

At first I answered yes, but these men exploited this opening as an invitation to discuss sex.

“You look like an athlete. Do you shower with other naked boys?”

They all glanced at my crotch.

Getting a ride from the rush hour traffic on 128, so I endured the come-ons.

Sometimes they gave me a ride home. On the long stretch through the Blue Hills I fended off their

gropes. A slap on the hand scared them. I told no one about these rides.

Exactly what they wanted from me was solved by Chuckie’s discovery of dirty book stash in the woods.

The moldy photographs depicted depraved intercourse without anything left to the imagination and the crumbling pages of written words described unspeakable acts never to be confess to priests. Chuckie let me pick three. My favorite was THE ITCH by Steven Hammer, who opened my body and soul to the broad spectrum of sexuality with an erudition bespeaking experience. I must have read Chapter 3 a thousand times. I started letting men do things to me. Not all of them were bad.

One day I came home to find Michael crying on his bed. “What’s wrong?”

“Someone saw me playing with Barbie dolls.”

“And?”

“He called me a queer.”

“And you know what that means?”

“Yes.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t want to say.” The label of a snitch was almost as bad as being a queer.

“Who?” I wasn’t in the mood to hear no.

“Bobbie.”

“Bobbie with the fat brother?”

“Yes.”

“You stay here.”

I ran down the street to a white ranch house. My brother’s persecutor was a thirteen year-old.

Bobbie refused to come outside.

“No one calls my brother a queer. Do it again and I’ll burn down your house.”

I wasn’t kidding either.

Back home Michael was singing OVER THE RAINBOW to a Ken doll.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be playing with Barbie Dolls.”

“Every boy in this neighborhood plays with his sisters’ dolls. Anyone who says that they don’t is a liar.”

Michael had me dead to rights.

To order GAYBOY please go to the following URL:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/GAY-BOY-by-Peter-Nolan-Smith-A-Novella-of-an-Era-or-Errors/162968178082

FREEBIRD INDEED by Peter Nolan Smith

Throughout 1994 the doctors at Boston's Beth Israel spoke about turning the corner on AIDS and in January my youngest brother had made enough of a comeback for me to contemplate taking a West Coast job offer.

"We're opening a Milk Bar in Beverly Hills." The original club in New York had been a success lining my pockets with cash.

"Swimming pools, palm trees, and movie stars." My brother painted a pleasant picture.

"Something like that. Do you want me to stick around?"

"No, I'll be fine." Michael was living with my parents on the South Shore. My father drove him to the radio station twice weekly for his show promoting gay life in Boston. "But if you see James Brolin, I want you to get his autograph."

"You got it."

My baby brother loved swarthy men.

The next week I left for LA and the futuristic club opened that March. Beverly Hills had never seen such a place and tips quadrupled my salary. Everyone wanted to be inside, but by July the nightlife was taking its toll on my body and soul. I wasn't twenty anymore. It was time to quit and I had enough money to travel to Tibet for the rest of the year.

I loved traveling to the farthest reaches of this world, however the morning after the 4th of July the telephone rang in my rented North Hollywood studio.

"Who is it?" Few people called me.

"Me." It was my younger brother, Padraic. "Michael isn't well."

"How unwell?"

Padraic quickly explained that my youngest brother's health suffered a precipitous decline, as the experimental drugs failed to stem the ruthless ravages of his aliment.

"How long?"

"I don't think he'll make August."

"Fuck." His life expectancy had shrunk from years to months to weeks and the next day I was on a plane to Logan. My family was waiting at the hospice on the South Shore. I had seen friends die of AIDS. None of those passings prepared me for the sight of my brother's condition.

His only nourishment was a morphine drip.

I guessed his weight to be 120.

Our family sat by his bedside. My mother patted his hand. My sisters wet his lips. My father faced the tragedy with a noble stoicism. He had done his best. Tears were for another day. My older brother read from the Bible. My youngest brother responded to none of this.

I sat my his bed and didn't leave his side for days, except to eat in the hospice's canteen. They made a nice meatloaf.

One night I entered Michael's room and my younger brother was playing FREEBIRD on his guitar. My youngest brother was more into show tunes and disco than southern rock and I said, "You know Michael hated this song?"

"I know, but in his state I figure that he would hear this song and know it was me."

My youngest brother strummed his guitar and I joined his singing the song. I was more a punk than anything else, but I knew every word. FREEBIRD had been a huge hit for Lynard Skynard in 1972.

If I leave here tomorrow
Would you still remember me?
For I must be traveling on, now,
'Cause there's too many places I've got to see.
But, if I stayed here with you, girl,
Things just couldn't be the same.
'Cause I'm as free as a bird now,
And this bird you cannot change.
Lord knows, I can't change.

Bye, bye, its been a sweet love.
Though this feeling I can't change.
But please don't take it badly,
'Cause Lord knows I'm to blame.
But, if I stayed here with you girl,
Things just couldn't be the same.
Cause I'm as free as a bird now,
And this bird you'll never change.
And this bird you cannot change.
Lord knows, I can't change.
Lord help me, I can't change.

Padraic put down his guitar and kissed his emaciated brother on the forehead. I kissed his cheek.

His skin was waxen.

Michael had only a little further to go in this life.

"Let's take a photo."

"Now?" Paddy knew how vain Michael was. It was a family trait.

"If not now, then it will be never." Michael had only hours left in his heart.

I positioned my camera on the bureau. The timer ran for thirty seconds. The camera snapped a shot of Padraic and me with my baby brother between us.

Michael died a day later and we buried him in the town cemetery.

Three days later I fled to Asia and mourned my brother at the holiest temples in the Orient.

Upon my return I developed the roll of film from Michael's last days. I didn't show the shot on the bed to anyone, but Padraic.

He shook his head.

"What? You thinking about how thin he was?" I asked, taking the photo back from his hand.

"No, just thinking about how fat we were."

I looked at the picture and laughed at the truth. Michael would have laughed too and probably did someplace in the afterlife. He was out there somewhere in the Here-Before as we all are with the ones we love.

FREEBIRD INDEED.

To hear FREEBIRD please go to the following URL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiB-MG49spw

MIss You Long Time - Michael Charles Smith

In the summer of 1995 my baby brother succumbed to the ravages of AIDS. I miss him every day along with the rest of my friends and family who died from that killer. I will remember them forever.

My brother's name was Michael Charles Smith.

He's the smaller blonde boy in the photo.

And still always the youngest.

The Endangered Money Shot

The term 'money shot' originally referred to an expensive FX scene like the car chase in BULLITT, however the XXX industry kidnapped the phrase to describe the moment of male ejaculation preferably on the female lead. Wikipedia reported that Stephen Ziplow's The Film Maker's Guide to Pornography (1977), stated, "There are those who believe that the come shot, or, as some refer to it, 'the money shot', is the most important element in the movie and that everything else (if necessary) should be sacrificed at its expense. Of course, this depends on the outlook of the producer, but the one thing is for sure: if you don't have the come shots, you don't have a porno picture." The 'money shot' debuted in the 60s and 70s as porno actresses rejected internal ejaculation as a inappropriate if not rude according to Joseph Slade. Coitus interruptus also protected the women from unwanted pregnancies, for condom in XXX films were rarer than nuns at an orgy, however AIDS activists are insisting on condom protection for actors and actresses throughout the XXX world. Viewers of these DVDs have never cottoned to condom in hardcore films and the industry fears a loss of income in a business already threatened by saturation and online piracy. That phenomena may come to an end as health campaigners in California have applied for a ballot to enforce condom use in the XXX industry in November. Porno producers have threatened move their multi-billion dollar industry out of the city without saying where. Could this be the end to North North Hollywood?