Yale attempted a noncommittal laugh.
And here, ridiculously, before he could properly recover, was Asher’s AFC float. Here was Asher, waving like a politician. Yale waved, but he didn’t catch Asher’s eye.
Three guys on unicycles came next, cutoffs and denim vests.
A series of aldermen and state senators in convertibles, most looking pained.
The Out Loud float. A red flatbed truck. Yale took a small step back so Katsu couldn’t see his face, so he didn’t have to worry what his eyes and mouth were doing.
Posterboard signs all over it: “Fight Out Loud for Safer Sex!” and “Out Loud Says / Cover Your Head!”
Six beautiful shirtless men—Yale didn’t recognize them, except for Dwight the copy editor—angling cucumbers from their crotches, slowly rolling rubbers onto them. Peeling them off, doing it again. Opening new packets with their teeth, milking the crowd for cheers.
From the side of the truck, Gloria and Rafael threw rubbers from a bucket.
He couldn’t see Charlie. And then suddenly he could. He had shaved his beard. He was the one holding the boom box that blasted “You Spin Me Round.”
Yale tried to wrap his mind around the irony of the whole thing, but his body was busy reacting with some strange combination of high and low blood pressure.
A Trojan hit Katsu on the chest and he caught it, laughing, and handed it to Yale. He said, “I’m a LifeStyles man. You want?” And although Yale could not see an occasion in which he’d want to use a rubber that had come, indirectly, from Charlie, he stuck it in the pocket of his shorts. He’d need to get used to them. Until he’d redone the test in March, until Dr. Cheng had told him that again the ELISA was negative—though this time he really had made Yale wait two weeks, as he’d vowed—Yale had barely let himself ejaculate in the same room as Roman. Lately, since the second negative, he’d been letting Roman suck him off—though what did “lately” really mean, when it was all so sporadic?
Yale wished the Out Loud float would disappear, but it was still making its slow way down Clark, Trojans still flying.
Someone scratched him between the shoulder blades, and he turned to see Teddy grinning, bouncing. “Look who came out of hiding!” Teddy said. Yale should have known that Teddy might have been part of Katsu’s group—and honestly it was good to see him. Good, especially, that Teddy was talking as if he didn’t think Yale was a monster.
Teddy told them about the Klan activity in the park. He said, “They’re gone now. They didn’t want to actually see any of this, you know? They left right before the parade started.”
Katsu said, “I bet half are secretly sticking around. Bet they’re jacking off under their robes.”
“Only one guy had a robe, actually. I found that so disappointing! They had, like, combat gear, with these weird little shields.”
Yale said, “What do they even want? Besides attention?”
“Um, according to their giant banner, they want to quarantine the queers. Real original. Anyway, we yelled back for a long time, and these dykes made out right in front of them. Then they just packed up. I stuck around to talk to a reporter. Anyone want a hot dog? I’m starving.”
There was no point trying to move till the parade was over, and when it finally was, they followed the crowd to the park for the rally. Katsu took off, and Yale found himself alone with Teddy in an endless line for food. Yale said, “I hope we’re still friends.”
“I was mad at you, but it was temporary. I was judging you for being judgmental. Ironic, right?”
“I’m not sure I was being judgmental. I know that for you the news was Charlie testing positive, but for me the news was him cheating on me. Maybe everyone else already knew, but I didn’t. And things hadn’t been great between us for a long time. We actually—he accused me of sleeping with you, the night of Nico’s memorial.”
Teddy whistled between his teeth. “Yeah, I don’t remember fucking you.” He laughed. “Must not’ve been that good.”
The line lurched, and Yale checked to make sure the guys behind them were strangers. He said, “I feel like we’re all caught up in some huge cycle of judgment. We spent our whole lives unlearning it, and here we are.”
“The thing is,” Teddy said, “the disease itself feels like a judgment. We’ve all got a little Jesse Helms on our shoulder, right? If you got it from sleeping with a thousand guys, then it’s a judgment on your promiscuity. If you got it from sleeping with one guy once, that’s almost worse, it’s like a judgment on all of us, like the act itself is the problem and not the number of times you did it. And if you got it because you thought you couldn’t, it’s a judgment on your hubris. And if you got it because you knew you could and you didn’t care, it’s a judgment on how much you hate yourself. Isn’t that why the world loves Ryan White so much? How could God have it out for some poor kid with a blood disorder? But then people are still being terrible. They’re judging him just for being sick, not even for the way he got it.”
Yale tended to find Teddy mentally draining, but he was right this time.
Way over at the bandstand, Mayor Washington had begun to speak. “As a black man who has suffered discrimination,” he was saying, “as part of a race of people who have suffered . . .” and Teddy said, “He’s a good one, yeah? We lucked out.”
“He’ll be up for reelection by the time we get out of this line.”
Teddy said, “Check out the cast of The Addams Family over there.”
Yale looked and couldn’t see.
“Three o’clock, behind the guy with the bird.”
Yale saw, first, a dark-haired man with a blue and green macaw perched on his shoulder. He was laughing with someone, and for a second it was hard to look at anything other than this beautiful man and his beautiful bird. But then behind him, Yale saw a group of terribly chic young people, all dressed in black. One of them was Roman. Yale started to wave but stopped.
He had never seen Roman’s friends, and this wasn’t what he’d pictured: two tall, pale, handsome men who may or may not have been gay, but given the surroundings probably were, and a young woman with waist-length blonde hair, a silver ring in her nose. What on earth had he imagined? He hadn’t let himself think about it that much, was the thing. In general, the more he thought about Roman, the more confused he became. Roman was best as a shadow that came in the night, an empty screen onto which he could project whatever he wanted. Roman was not the kind of person who showed up to Pride, on his own, with fabulous friends Yale had never heard about. Roman stayed home and worked on his dissertation.
Teddy said, “I know the one with glasses.”