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Their accounts differed regarding how they met. Dave mumbled something once about "the back room at CBGB", which made John hoot with laughter, punch him in the arm, and remind him, repeatedly, that there was no such place.
According to John, they met at a Saturday morning screening of The Thing. John was supposed to go with Jade, but she'd canceled when she'd learned the movie involved an evil dog. Being alone made it all the worse when a New Wave lost boy slid into the row ahead of him, wearing asymmetrical sunglasses formed from the collision of two different-sized triangles. His spiky, rat's nest teased-up hair was hard with gel.
John couldn't help himself. He leaned over to the older man sitting three seats down and not-quite-whispered, "Why would you wear sunglasses to the movies?"
The guy studiously ignored him, concentrating instead on opening his box of Jujubes.
But the New Wave poseur turned around. He gazed impassively at John for a long while before he said, "I happen to have a disfiguring and humiliating eye condition."
Nervous laughter bubbled up in John's chest like carbonation inside soda. "What, really?"
"Yeah, really. Called sudden-onset acute oculacuna. Look it up sometime."
John opened and closed his mouth like a beached fish; no air was getting into his lungs. "Oh, God, oh, man, I'm so sorry, I'm such a jackass!"
New Wave boy -- who, now that John could see all of his face, was really pretty cute, sharp jaw and wide, smirking mouth -- just nodded. "Appreciate your sensitivity."
His voice sounded a little soft and raspy. Southern accent, maybe? John was terrible with identifying such things. "Hey, where are you from?"
The kid pursed his lips, pausing, before he replied. "Texas. Why?"
John raised his hands. "Just curious! Seems like no one's from here, you know? But here we are all the same."
"Paradox."
"Yeah! Plus, you have an accent. So I wondered."
"Huh." The guy sucked in one cheek and tilted his head, like he was sizing John up. Even though John knew the guy couldn't see, it still felt like he was being scanned somehow. X-Rayed, right down to his soul. Suddenly, the guy rose to his feet, planted one hand on the back of his seat, and vaulted up and over, into John's aisle. He sank into the seat next to John and offered up his box of popcorn. "Wanna share?"
He was being flirted with. John understood this belatedly, but once he did, he couldn't stop grinning. The tips of his ears felt hot, and his entire face, and most of his chest. "Sure. Want me to describe what happens in the movie?"
"Nah." The guy flipped his sunglasses up onto the top of his head. "I'm good."
"Oh. My. God." For a long, long moment John felt like he was floating, like he was buoyed up on some big gust of helium, and he was hanging there, looking into the guy's perfectly normal eyes and face, and then he was laughing, so hard that the people around them started shushing even though the movie wasn't even on yet. "Oh, man, you got me. You got me so good! Prankmaster!"
He held up his palm to high five and the guy complied, giving him a weird little half-smile. "I'm Dave."
*
They had both come to the city for college -- John to Columbia, major yet to be chosen, and Dave to the School of Visual Arts, where he was supposed to be studying photography. Neither told anyone, until they told each other, why they were really here: New York is the place you go to become yourself. Whoever they had been back home -- beloved son, bemused brother -- they were so much more here. Like surfacing after a deep dive, reality bending back over their faces, only millimeters-thin now before they transformed.
The city was theirs. New York's secret is simple: no one gives a shit about you. That sort of brutal freedom kills a lot of us, but there is always the potential, just around the next corner or up the next darkened stairwell, that you'll be different, you'll be the exception. You'll be the hero. In the meantime, you're the star of your own private melodrama.
They went everywhere in the city, up its broad avenues enclosed by looming, leaning-in skyscrapers and down its narrow side streets lined with regular, but eccentric, apartment buildings, none quite like the previous. Everything was filthy -- subway cars and shop windows, gutters and high-rise fire escapes -- with that particular gleeful grime one sees on the face of a child jumping in mud puddles. They could go anywhere, take their lives in their hands on the train, sleep overnight off the haunted trails of Central Park, dance like electrified madmen all night long at The Saint.
After they met, however it was that they met, they were inseparable.
After John spent the night in Dave's dorm room, he woke to see Dave carefully, oh so carefully, slicking Dippity-Do into his hair. The smell of stuff, astringent but sweet, was so familiar now, so Dave, that John's morning wood got a little harder.
"Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who's the coolest of them all?"
Dave didn't turn around, but he grinned into the mirror. "Morning, Egbert."
"It's my New Wave Eurotrash boyfriend, that's who!"
Now Dave did turn around. With sticky fingers, he twisted the thin rubber bracelets around his wrist. His heart was jolting and sputtering, right in the center of his chest. "Boyfriend. Surely you must be joking."
John sat up, the sheet sliding off his skinny chest, and fumbled for his glasses. "Nope, not joking! And don't call me --"
Grabbing John by the shoulders, Dave got one knee on the mattress between John's legs, then slid his hands up to John's neck, tilting his head back. "I'll call you Shirley any damn time I please."
*
When summer came, Dave lucked into a sublet from a junior in his darkroom. The building was right on Second Avenue, the place a sixth floor walk-up. "More like climb up," John joked whenever he got the chance. There was no air conditioning, not even room enough for a full-size fridge, so they stocked the bar fridge with beer, popsicles, and bodega plantains.
To their domesticity, John contributed his new, overwhelmingly adored Commodore 64. Dave added a creepy display of dead things -- squirrels, roaches, two-headed frogs -- in Mason jars as well as what he claimed was "the bitchingest record collection in a five-block radius".
They slept on the floor in front of the open windows, between two ancient fans, misting each other with water from a spray bottle.
Then it got hotter. Some nights, they slept on the roof. The heat pressed down on them like a sodden blanket and the screams and sirens and constant, grinding noise of the city sounded a little romantic. It never got all the way dark; at best, the sky overhead was the color of milky coffee.
John picked up more shifts at Gristedes, alternating between heavy lifting on the loading dock and careful whisking and frosting in the bakery department. Dave scored a job at one of the snootier record stores off St. Mark's Place, where his duties involved sneering at out of towners, low-balling estimates on what people wanted to sell, and generally looking bored at all times. On all these criteria, he was the best employee they'd ever seen. When he remembered to come to work, of course.
They were working, sure, but neither thought of himself as anything other than becoming. Not that they'd use the word, unless it were very late and Jade had brought them some particularly good weed. They didn't know what to call what they were doing besides living. A shivery, shuddering sort of life, lurching from one adventure to the next, fucking two or three times in the morning because they were nineteen and could, swimming off Coney Island, saving up to afford the Hamptons jitney and skinny-dipping there, stuffing their faces with $2 kielbasa omelettes at one of the Ukrainian diners off Tompkins Square, stalking the sale rack at Fiorucci while John pretended to be blinded by all the neon, playing Zeppelin Rescue and Jupiter Landing until they were bleary-eyed and hoarse from shouting at each other, skipping through the shallow puddles at the St. Mark's Baths, whipping each other with wet towels and cruising only half-seriously (but almost always successfully), being.
Art is about so much more than self-expression. And New Yorkers prove that, again and again, over and over, it's about formal innovation, determined communication and obfuscation, and jazz-like riffs that turn the familiar into the strange, the revelatory.
John and Dave excelled at being New Yorkers. They accomplished all this, both consciously and unconsciously, in their headlong pursuit of fun, and sex, and ridiculous jokes that no one else ever had a chance of understanding.
When the SVA photographer didn't return from Caracas at the end of the summer, they stayed on in the tiny, stuffy apartment that had become home. Every day, John made the crosstown trek on foot to take the IRT up to campus; usually Dave walked with him, denying that he had any reason to other than he felt like it.
When John got a cold that fall, neither thought anything of it. John had finals coming up, so he was probably already a little run down. He was supposed to fly home for Christmas; Dave said it was fine, he'd make do with Chinese food and bad movies and the Channel 11 yule log, just like last year, but they argued anyway. They weren't exactly skilled at articulating their feelings, least of all the feelings they were unaware of, so the anxiety of separation came out as barbed sarcasm and sullen silences.
Three days before his flight, it snowed. Not much stuck, of course. In general, snow is altogether too wholesome for New York streets. But as it first began to fall, Dave stood in front of one of the windows, watching the white-on-gray cascade, mesmerized. He felt calm for the first time in weeks, quiet inside, warm wrapped up in one of John's stupid wool sweaters straight out of The Preppy Handbook.
Eventually, he came round. His coffee got cold, the snow slowed down, an especially vicious argument broke out down the hall: something shook him out of his trance and realized that John, who'd gone out for milk, had been gone way, way too long.
He pulled on his vinyl windbreaker and headed down to find John.
He didn't have to go far. His boyfriend was slumped on the first step of the second-floor stairs, head back, chest heaving. Under the red flush of cold, his skin was gray, shining with sweat. His eyes bugged out as he tried to stand up, and Dave only just caught him before he crumpled back down.
"What do I do, what do I fucking do?" Dave called me from the pay phone on the corner, one arm holding John up, the other waving furiously for a cab that stubbornly refused to appear. "What do I do?"
Uniquely in the history of our relationship, he actually took my advice and took John to the hospital. The only one he could think of, besides Bellevue, was St. Vincent's in the village, so that was where they went. They kept John overnight, hooking him up to a ventilator. Dave stayed with him, so he was there when the test results came back. John had pneumonia, an impossibly rare form.
The doctors explained more, even observed that incidences of the pneumonia were on the rise, but Dave wasn't listening. He couldn't talk to John, not with the tube in his mouth. Sitting there, gripping John's hand beneath the glare of fluorescent lights, he became aware -- instantly and perfectly, as if in some kind of spiritual transcendence -- that there was no more time. Everything was over, lights were going out, closing time, good night.
When he told me that, I told him he really needed to get some sleep. I'm afraid I was something of a bitch; I always have been, to some extent. I was scared. We all were, and seeing Dave sway on his feet and mumble even more nonsensically than usual only scared me more. He spent the night with John again, and the next night, too, curled up next to him in that narrow hospital bed, one arm flung over John's chest as if to ward off whatever would be the end.
When they put John in the oxygen tent, all I could think of was Snow White inside her glass tomb.
Dave just coughed out what was supposed to be a laugh and pulled John's sweater more tightly around his chest. "Can't kiss and save him, though."
John squeezed his hand at that and waggled his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.
Dave stopped laughing. The sound he made wasn't quite human and his eyelashes were suddenly wet.
I sent him home when John's father arrived. No one knew how Mr. Egbert might react to the one-two punch of his nineteen year old son dying and his distraught boyfriend clinging to him. Instead, Jade and I waited for him, one of us on either side of John's bed.
We needn't have worried, but, to be fair, the odds were against us. We were suddenly remembering other friends who'd vanished, stories about guys you knew by sight just not coming around any more, some odd deaths due to weird cancers and infections no one else ever got.
It was when Dave was climbing out the shower at their apartment, dazed and exhausted, that he saw his first lesion. He thought it was a bruise at first, but -- other than leathermen -- who gets a bruise smack-dab in the center of their chests, one that is, furthermore, the shape of a 7" vinyl single? And God knows Dave was many things, experimental and voracious and fearless, but he wasn't a leatherman. Though if you know otherwise, I'd love to meet you.
John died on New Year's Day. He never drew a breath on his own again, nor did Dave ever tell him about his lesions: "dude's a closet worrywart," he claimed, "not going to do that to him. Not that much of an asshole."
By the end of January, we were back at St. Vincent's when Dave caught thrush on top of his KS. And, well, I guess you know why we're here today. Dave would be crushed to know he died on the most romantic day of the year. It would kill his cred dead, after all.
I'm thinking now of all those stupid games they played together. Mr. Egbert gave John's Commodore to Jade; I don't know what she did with it, but I'm pretty sure it's either in storage or donated to some needy kids. I hope they're playing it. I hope they know how to reset each game, every time the gas gets low in their zeppelin or planetary lander, and get another series of extra lives. Everyone deserves that imaginary, delusional safety net.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. They weren't even twenty fucking years old. (Excuse me.) There was no approach, no build-up, certainly no warning. One day they were fucking like bunnies and wrestling for the last chips in the bag; the next they were arguing; and after that, they were gone. No story works like that. Poems rarely work like that.
I have a feeling that the elegy form is about to enjoy a renaissance.
I wish it wouldn't. I wish we could keep on hurtling blindly, joyfully, forward and never have to stop and mourn.
So this is my Valentine's Day wish for all of us: that we never forget lovers, and artists, and kids who shouldn't have died for fifty years at least. As soon as you do forget, soon as you start thinking this is normal, that's going to be when we're all out of time.
-- Rose Lalonde, eulogy, 02/16/83