Just as Aleta warned me not to, I got lost on my way to find Remy. The old song coming from the second- floor window of Andrew’s house had sent my mind reeling back, leaving my legs to wander mechanically into a series of tiny, uneven cobblestone streets too small for auto traffic and lined on both sides with narrow brick houses that hugged together. The Amble-Through, I figured. In the ten years since my arrival, I’ve come to know it well—those shady alley-sized streets my brother and his friends gave that nickname to because they were always ambling through it on their way to or from the dive bars and gay clubs they haunted. The houses dated back to the mid-19th century, some of them no bigger than three shoebox-sized rooms stacked on top each other and known as trinities. Cheap rents meant student boarders and young artists tackling first fixer-uppers. The little interlocking bends were perfect places for smoking pot, sneaking kisses, or having a quickie if that was your want to do.
But right then I knew none of this. I simply left the brick sidewalks made bumpy by tree roots and took to the street, worried to have lost my bearings but happy to have found coolness from the rising heat as the hands on my wristwatch crept closer to noon. The streets either dead-ended or made so many turns they essentially folded back on themselves. I let my tired bones carry me one right-hand turn to the next until I finally spit out onto a much larger street. Across the way stood Giovanni’s Room, the bookstore where Remy worked.
The shop was on the corner of 12th and Pine, across from a pizza parlor. What Aleta hadn’t told me was that there would be books in the window enumerating The Joys of Gay Sex and chronicling lesbian leather love stories. Beaded necklaces and amethyst bookends rounded out the display, and from the look of things there seemed to be a great demand for books whose jackets showcased the male torso. A rainbow flag hung above the door. Giovanni’s Room was obviously a gay bookstore, and though I felt a little funny pushing past the glass door, I was determined to find Remy.
Find him I did, Remy standing thin and tall behind the counter. He actually cackled when I told him who I was.
“Well, pinch my tits and call me Mary!” Remy said. “I know all about you…. You’re the enabler!”
My ears grew hot. I wasn’t sure what Remy meant by the term, but it didn’t sound good. I took him in. He had thinning hair, wavy roan curls cut short. He had a largish nose and a longish head, which sprang like the top of a Q-tip above his shoulders. He slumped across the counter and leaned close to me, and I saw that the speck on his earlobe was actually a pink triangle earring. “Nice outfit, by the way,” he said, taking in my uniform. His accent was heavier than mine, a Deep South drawl--Tennessee? Georgia?--
that he peppered with the occasional hip-hop inflection. “But let’s cut to the chase,” he said. “Just what can I do for Mr. Andrew McKenna’s little sistah?”
I swallowed hard and told him how I had gone by Andrew’s old place and talked to Aleta, how she had told me that he might be able to tell me where Andrew had run off to.
“Well, I can’t help you there,” he replied, becoming serious. The store wasn’t very big, just a single room with a staircase in the middle leading upstairs. A middle-aged man pushed up behind me with a couple paperbacks, and Remy’s long arms reached around to take the purchase as he continued to talk to me. “I’ve been by his place. I’ve got a key. But Andrew seems to be long gone.”
“Do you have any idea--?”
Remy cut me off with a sigh as he started to work the credit card machine. I scooted away to give them room, and my eyes caught sight of a display of a magazine featuring two hairy, potbellied men who wore what looked like a couple of studded black belts crisscrossed over their chests. From the title, I learned they liked being called bears. I thought again of last night, of Charlie’s big stomach and meaty paws. I was glad when the customer took his change and squeezed past me to the door.
“You hungry?” Remy asked me.
I hadn’t eaten since the day before, and the knot of worry that had kept hold of my stomach was starting to give way to emptiness. “Yeah, but what I really need to know is--”
Remy held up his index finger to say wait a minute. He walked over the staircase and called upstairs. “Yo, Ed baby,” he called up. “I’m gonna take an early lunch. You cool with that?”
A thin man with graying hair leaned over the railing. “These invoices are done,” his gentle voice said. “I think I can handle the register.”
I followed Remy back out into the heat. He paused on the corner and looked around. “Skipped breakfast,” he told me. “Too busy trying to roll last night’s trick out the door.”
I wasn’t sure what Remy meant by that, but I let it slide.
“Where should we go?” he wondered. “There’s Duck Soup, there’s More Than Just Ice Cream, the pizza place across the street.”
“I’d rather just talk about Andrew and--”
“I know!” he said, cutting me off yet again. “I’m in the mood for Mexican. Taco House it is!” And with that he leapt from the pavement to jaywalk across the intersection. I followed, dodging a mail truck sneaking through on the tail end of the traffic signal’s yellow light.
I had never met a queen before, and scarcely had heard of that term back then. But the sight of Remy’s pierced navel peeking out from beneath his high-riding belly shirt suggested volumes.
Taco House was up Pine Street a short way, a little hole in the wall on the edge of the Amble- Through. An enormous cactus dominated the plate glass window, giving the place a hominess the chain
restaurants back home could never muster. Remy flung the door open for me, and I realized then that he performed every gesture dramatically, as if performing upon an imaginary stage.
The place was small--a few mismatched tables in front, a counter in back, a kitchen tucked
somewhere behind. I let Remy do the ordering, and soon we were drinking Diet Cokes by the front window at a table that was actually an old Ms. Pac-Man game. Remy worked his broad smile, as he took a stab at interrogating me. “Andrew didn’t say much, but when he did, the way he talked about you and home, well, I can’t say I’m surprised you finally followed him here. But why’d you wait till now, when he’s already flown the coop?”
I didn’t know what to tell him. How could I explain what had finally set me off? All the creeping worry I’d felt since the Christmas before, when I’d last seen Andrew. How his communication had slowly trickled off over the months, then stopped altogether. In the five years since he’d left home, never once had he forgotten my birthday with a call or a card. Not until last week. How could I describe the panic that had set in when I called his number and was told it had been disconnected? How could I explain about the omen I saw when old potbellied Charlie had walked into Hardlee’s Fastfood yesterday evening and told everyone working the counter that the gendarme atop Seneca Rocks had finally fallen sometime the night before? Since God knows when that rock had stood. How could I tell Remy that I suddenly realized staying one more day in Seneca would cause me to petrify and crumble as well, that I had to get out, go with Charlie and find Andrew, no matter the price it cost me? There was no way I could say all that to a stranger. My eyes welled up. I felt my ears grow hot.
The shifting calculations Remy passed off as expressions disappeared then, replaced by genuine concern. He wiped my tears with his napkin, took my hand in his.
“Come on, kiddo,” he said softly. “It’s not that dire. People do weird things all the time and live to tell the tale. Your brother’s okay, wherever he is. And you’ll be okay, too.”
While we waited for our food, I managed to convey to Remy a condensed version of why I had come to town--all the misgivings inside me, my growing concern for Andrew. In turn, Remy did his best to fill me in on Andrew’s life since he had come to Philadelphia. He told me how the two of them had met in a college composition class at Temple their first semester there. Andrew had been bored with the class, having already taken a similar one at a college back home the year following his high school graduation, the same year he had tried to save up money working as playground supervisor for the county. I
remembered that Andrew had lost interest in that earlier class prior to completing it; there had been a knockdown, drag-out fight with Momma about the tuition money he had wasted--she had opened his mail and discovered his failing grade. But I had never really known why Andrew had abandoned his first
academic foray. Listening to Remy connected the dots. Although it had been obvious Andrew was unhappy back home, and I had plenty of clues as to why, I never knew how badly he had been in love at the time or
how heartbroken he would become once he moved to the city. According to Remy, Andrew had ended up in that north Philadelphia English classroom hot on the heels of a boy he had chased from back home.
“The guy was a pretty good-looking cuss,” Remy recalled. “I met him once at a party we had in the Rodman Street house. Josh or Jamie or something--”
“Could it have been Jake?” I asked. That was the boy Andrew had hung around with right before he left home. The same boy from The Seneca Sentinel clipping I sent my brother a couple winters later, figuring Andrew would want to read about what had happened to his friend in the Gulf War. But I didn’t know that Jake might have come himself to Philadelphia in the years in between.
“Honey, it could have been Bilbo Baggins, for all I know,” said Remy. “I recall faces, not names. Faces and torsos and arms and legs, and this boy was the complete package, all right? Though no hobbit at all, really, but trés preppy--all faded Calvin Kleins and Izod alligator shirts. I think he wanted to play professional baseball for the Phillies or something, but there he was that fall attending classes at Temple, with your stalker brother lying in wait for him behind the bell tower every chance he got. At any rate, Andrew was very hush-hush about whatever drama had unfolded between them back home, though I think they managed to hook up a time or two.” Remy’s eyebrows had grown animated again. I could tell he plucked them. “Miss Iona here--that’s my drag incarnation, and she’s veryintuitive--could tell from the get- go that Mr. All-American was way too closeted for his own good. But your brother, on the other hand…. Hell, once he had gotten to the City of Brotherly Love, he was all about lovin’ the brothas. Mmm-hmm!” For a while I had known that Andrew leaned that way, but still it felt strange to hear someone else speak of it. I was glad when the tattooed boy working the counter brought us our food just then, a pair of overstuffed burritos and a plate of nachos slathered with cheese. I was famished, I realized, and my first bite of the burrito was warm and comforting.
“Alas, the affair ended badly,” Remy announced in between chews. He couldn’t remember what happened. Something about the army? The details had gotten lost among art shows and college degrees. The L’il Dump Theatre Troupe he and my brother started. Andrew’s string of subsequent boyfriends. The suicide attempt of an old housemate of theirs. “Andrew ever tell you about Waif? No? I think it was he who gave that very strange girl the nickname, ‘Waif’, like she was a starving model in some Calvin Klein ad. Tiffany was her real name, but that sounded too much like a poodle or a jewelry store, and that sad girl had neither a puppy’s playfulness nor Harry Winston’s sparkle.” Remy sighed. “So much history, so short a time. Like the hullabaloo outside the Bellevue Hotel where your brother got brained. But you don’t want to hear all that now, do you? You’re tired. Just look at you.”
Remy’s spiel had moved through my mind like a whirligig. At least I caught hold of the first part. The army. It had been Jake after all. “Yeah, I’m tired,” I said aloud. I felt like roadkill. Like something old Charlie would have to wash off his truck’s mudflaps.
“Go to your brother’s apartment,” Remy told me. “The rent’s paid until the end of the month. Wash your face, have a nice lie down..” He dug in his pocket and produced a chunky ring of keys, slid a couple off. “I used to dog sit for your brother and that asshole Steven once in a while.” He laid one key in my hand and then the other. “Two doors,” he explained. “One outer, one inner.”
I reached for my bag. “Who’s Steven?”
“Good God, how could I skip him?” Remy exclaimed. Steven was the latest add-a-bead on your brother’s chain, chain, chain of fools.” Remy rolled his eyes. “I never cottoned to him. Mr. Hotshot Art School Photographer, he was. Too good to talk to anybody he didn’t want to catch in his camera lens. He’s the one who gave your brother the bright idea he could be a model.” Remy laughed. “Naturally, out of all of the tricks to pass through your brother’s turnstile, Steven’s the one Andrew had to go and shack up with.”
As I went to put away Andrew’s keys, I dropped my bag.
Remy reached down to help collect what spilled out. “What’s this?” he asked. I explained it was my EpiPen. Remy held it at a slight distance, as if it were the kind of dirty hospital needle Andrew used to tell me sometimes washed up on the Jersey shore. I took it from him.
“I have allergies. Sometimes I need a shot.” I gathered my checkbook and change.
One of Remy’s plucked eyebrows arched a little higher than the other. “Well. As long as you’re not going off the deep end like your brother.”
I looked at him. Curiously.
“Let’s just say Andrew was not at his best when he was chemically enhanced.”
I wasn’t altogether sure what Remy meant, but I had a good idea. Last Christmas, when I’d last seen Andrew, he’d been drinking far too much. He could have been on something else too for all I knew. I tried not to worry about it right then as Remy explained that he had last heard from Andrew via a postcard mailed to the bookstore.
“I got it about a week after the he left us the dog He was in Baltimore of all places. Working at some fleabag hotel. But he hated it.” Remy drained the last of his soda.. “I think he was planning on heading to California.”
We spoke a while longer, but our plates were empty by then and Remy had to get back to work. I gathered up my purse and the plastic bag containing Andrew’s journals I had gotten from Aleta. Outside, Remy lit himself a cigarette and told me if I headed straight up Camac Street through the Amble-Through I would find Andrew’s apartment above a deli. He pointed the way, then gave me his phone number and an air kiss to the cheek, promising we’d have to get together again real soon.
* * *
The apartment wasn’t far at all. The brownstone building had a set of stairs leading up to a small landing where a door to the left broke off to AppleJack’s Deli while another led to a staircase to the apartments above. Andrew’s name was still on one of the mailboxes, and I gathered up the bills and junk mail that had
accumulated there. It took me a minute to remember again which key opened the outer security door, but soon I was climbing the two long sets of stairs up to his top-floor apartment.
Inside it was a mess, just as Remy had warned. The door opened onto a combination kitchen- dining area. I tried the light switch as I entered, but nothing happened. Despite the dimness I could see the table was covered with pizza boxes and take-out containers. Dishes were piled in the sink, and dirty clothes covered an empty futon frame in the nearby living room. The place reeked. A TV stand had been rolled in