A Free Cardboard Box

A Free Cardboard Box

by E. W. Shannon

November 17, 1989

A bitter wind pierced my face like a thousand icy needles as the brown, red, and yellow faeries of fall danced about the sidewalk and huddled together in the recesses of buildings. While Winter hadn't officially arrived, he had managed to kill seven children by blowing a wall onto them somewhere near Newburgh. I was thankful for Henry holding my right hand and the warmth of my left pocket and made a mental note to dig out my gloves as we walked uptown after trying a new Vietnamese restaurant in the village specializing in pho. 

"Did we really just pay forty bucks for appetizers and soup," I asked.

Henry giggled at my frugalness, especially since he paid. "Mine was good. You said you liked yours."

"I did, but it still doesn't change the fact it was soup. And why do all Vietnamese restaurants say they specialize in pho? Isn't that redundant?"

I could see him out of the corner of my eye as he stopped the conversation with a slight shake of his head and a purse of his lips. We would often have this conversation, this debate over whether something really was good enough to warrant a high price (his side) or if it was just inflated because it was fashionable (my side). At Eighteenth Street I tried to pull him towards what I thought was our only destination for the evening, a club on the west side where a friend was having his twenty-first birthday party, but my pull met with resistance. We were both dreading it and would have been much happier to go home, wrap up in a blanket on the sofa, and find a black and white movie filled with impossible plot lines and over-emoting actors. 

"I need to go up to the Chelsea and take care of some business."

I rolled my eyes. I hated the energy at the Chelsea Hotel. It rode on a knife edge between chaos and sublime, often tipping towards the former. I'd attended two parties there and experienced the unsettling feeling of not being able to tell good from evil. Usually, my natural empathic abilities steered me away from danger, but inside the Chelsea I became disconnected from soul energy, as if the walls were lined with lead. Everyone balanced out there, you couldn't tell a rising star from someone a needle away from a body bag or a serial killer from your next lover.

"Don't worry we don't have to go inside. There's a drag queen outside I need to see." Henry looked over and saw my eyebrow cocked. "Just come on, it's too cold to argue." He pulled on my hand. 

Luckily for him, it was too cold to argue and, as he dragged me along, my mind wandered into sexual distraction. Every time I found myself following Henry, I would mentally undress him and imagine him walking naked in the streets of New York. With his olive skin, amber eyes, and ridiculously large lips, people would twist their necks to get a better look, which made the image in my head even more realistic.

Approaching the awning of the Chelsea, a caricature of a woman came into focus. Drag queens came in three models, fishy - the ones who looked realistic other than being seven feet tall in heels, avant-garde - those who took drag to the level of performance art, and camp - cartoon-like versions of women with exaggerated everything. This queen fell into the last category. Of the three types of drag queens, these were my least favorite. Not because they weren't talented or beautiful, but because looking at them put me in pain. While I've never been a professional drag queen, my small frame has led people to put me in drag for fun and I've experienced the squeezing, pulling, and general suffocating quality of the art.

The queen in front of the Chelsea took her cues from Jessica Rabbit. Her glitter encrusted fire engine red wig stood a foot out from her head in every direction and moved as a singular unit. Her eyes, lips, cheeks, and somehow even her nose were all edited with the help of color and shading. And not just edited for size and shape, but for placement too. The exaggerated arch and wide placement of her eyebrows, the highlighter in the center of her forehead, and the ludicrous long eyelashes coming dangerously close to being entangled in her wig, combined to make her eyes unnaturally far apart, like Gloria Swanson descending the staircase. Contouring in dark browns and even blacks worked to bring the tip of her nose to a geometrically impossible point. Her giant cakey matte red lips looked dry, heavy, and uncomfortable; like they might fall off in one piece and shatter on the sidewalk. It gave the look of a human face stretched over a balloon and then colorized by somebody familiar with 1950's Technicolor. The look was gorgeous and too much all at once, but then again, that's drag.

The pseudo-opulence didn't end with her face. A long-sleeved floor-length gown covered in navy blue sequins with giant shoulder pads and a slit up to her hip reflected little blue dots of light with every passing car. Making sure her leg remained stretched out and posed at all times must have taken up half of her brain power. Her thighs and calves weren't particularly feminine, and the shimmering opaque hose didn't help. I bet she could have done a dead lift with my body weight. The ensemble ended in a pair of matching sequined pumps she must have felt weren't 'enough' because she had added art deco shoe clips, each with three huge clear emerald-cut stones.

The next of my senses she vandalized was smell. That sickeningly sweet, perfumed scent of makeup and then the undertone of death I always chalked up to the animal fats rendered to create it emanated from her every pore. A few more steps and her voice caught my attention. It was distinctly Puerto Rican from the Bronx. Even speaking English, the staccato rhythm persisted forcing everyone she spoke with to ask, "Can you repeat that?" The tone struck me as unnaturally low, not Harvey Fierstein low, but two packs of Newports a day low. A line of cocaine sometime after I met her must have cleared away her name; in my head, I christened her Gay Raoul. Not that I knew any straight Raouls. 

As with most of humanity, her face lit up at the sight of Henry. How she managed a smile without her face cracking or falling off, I'll never know. I always thought most people took him for a gigolo because anybody who looked like him would never waste their time with employment. Gay Raoul did the same thing most people did when Henry introduced me, raised an eyebrow in a way that said, "Why is this gorgeous man with this basic WASP? Even if he is ten years younger." They spoke to each other in lightning speed Spanish while I tried my best to blend into a beige Buick waiting at the curb. The conversation didn't last long. It ended with Gay Raoul giving Henry a slip of paper, an air kiss, and a pat on the ass as he walked away.

"What was all that about?"

"It's a funeral I have to attend tomorrow." He said as he took my hand again and we headed west.

"Who died?"

"It's difficult to explain and I don't want to ruin our night with sadness."

"Do you want me to go with you?" 

The obese pause after my question made me nervous. Who was this dead person? An ex? A lover? A drag queen? Henry knew most of gay New York, so my list got longer and longer until I tripped on it, or maybe it was an uneven piece of the sidewalk. He caught me in both arms and stared at me with a look I'd never encountered on his face. There was something sad and tense and dire in his eyes. "Yeah," he bobbed his head and relaxed his face, "yeah, you can go with me." We walked a few paces in silence until I felt his mood shift. "It's down in the financial district, so we can go to that Greek deli you like for brunch afterwards."

"Ooh, feta and a funeral."

My inappropriate merriment made him smile. "We'll just pop in for a moment to this party and then we can go home and do something else that starts with 'F.'"

The next morning, I woke to Henry jostling me. "Get up sleepy. We have to get downtown."

The bed's magnetic powers were hard to fight, but his scent hooked me by the nose and pulled me out from under the covers. After showering and dressing, I found an anxious Henry in the living room pacing with our coats draped over his arm and jingling his keys.

"So, who is this that we're going to pay our respects to?"

The same odd look from the previous night dropped onto his face as he thought how best to answer my question. "Actually, I don't know him. Well, I may have met him at some point, but it would have been in passing."

"Is this some weird kink? You get horny looking at corpses or hearing people cry?"

He shook his head and stretched a quiet smile across his face as he put an arm around me, steering me to the door. "No, nothing like that. We just have to acknowledge the passing, or it might be that it goes unnoticed and people like him have been invisible long enough." He opened the door and handed me my coat and his keys. "Lock up while I run downstairs and get us a cab." The sound of his footsteps sank into the building until I heard his shoes on the tile in the lobby.

The cab dropped us off on a corner of Broadway in front of an old stone church. A crowd bathed in black swarmed around the sidewalk and up the steps leading to two enormous wood doors set in a gothic arch. "Looks like we weren't needed. He's got tons of people here to see him off," I commented to Henry as I stepped from the cab.

"This won't be our funeral," he said with a flat tone and an expressionless face. Taking me by the hand, he led me around the corner away from the crowd. Halfway down the block we came to a set of glass doors attached to an ugly addition done in the 1960's, judging from the pebble dash and institutional hue of the blue paint surrounding the windows.

Henry put his hand on the door handle, looked up to his Catholic God he barely believed in, and pleaded, "Let it be completely full or completely empty." When he opened the door, the sadness reached out, grabbed me in a bear hug, and pulled me inside. I don't remember my feet moving, just suddenly finding myself standing on pink and blue speckled white linoleum. 

The sadness sat perpendicular to the cheerful turkeys traced from children’s hands plastered all over the inside of the windows. Bright colored plastic bins stored in cubbyholes hid away the happiness of youth while a man hung on a whiteboard with "B _ S _ _ _" underneath. "Smart kids," I thought. Tucked off in a corner sat a gleaming chrome coffee server seeming far more at home than his primary-colored neighbors. I wondered how many alcoholics had pressed down on the lever with a shaking hand as they clung precariously to their sobriety and how many "respectable" churchgoers used it the following morning. 

Henry turned me around and led me to the other side of the room. On the wall hung an exquisitely cleaned chalkboard. The OCD monster in me rejoiced at how solid the field of green was, not even any chalk along the edges. Somebody had taken great care and pride in cleaning this board. It almost made me ignore what sat in front of it, a cardboard box with three strips of yellow plastic banding holding it together.

It took a moment for my mind to realize, this wasn't just any cardboard box, this was a coffin, somebody's last tiny dwelling in New York. In front of the box sat twelve steel folding chairs in a variety of colors, separated in the middle by the world's shortest aisle. The sadness squeezed tighter.

I hadn't realized how slow the door was closing until it finally completed its journey and blocked out the ambient noise of the city, leaving me with only the sounds of the interior. Up until that moment I thought the worst thing would be a memorial with no people, but I couldn't have been more wrong. The worst thing turned out to be the sobbing of a solitary skinny grey man echoing off all the nothing in the room. 

He swam in a charcoal serge suit he had bought in happier times. From behind I could see his head rise and fall on a choppy sea of tears. His thinning hair had the same soft wispy quality of puppy fur. Just below his left ear a reddish-brown lesion indicated he wouldn't be far behind the man in the box.

The entire interaction with this man happened in a fog; my senses and my mind were all present, but a seraph had swooped in from a dark corner of the room and covered my heart in bubble wrap to protect it from too much sadness. I remember shaking his bony hand covered in grey baggy parchment-like skin that hadn't managed to keep up with the weight loss and how it looked juxtaposed encased within my rosy taut eighteen-year-old clasp. Henry hugged him, something neither of us did easily in the best of circumstances, and then the three of us sat with Henry in the middle; another spirit buffering the sadness for me.

Just our energy in the room gave this man enough support to stop sobbing and, after a silence lasting one hundred and twenty-one ticks of the grey metal school clock on the wall, he felt strong enough to speak. "Would you like to see him?" Henry and I must have both shot him the same look of, "No need to undo the box," because he quickly said, "I brought a few pictures with me."

From a brown nylon Thirteen tote bag came the sound of pills rattling and a small photo album, the kind able to hold a single photo per page, front and back, perhaps forty or so in all. The first page contained an overexposed black and white photo with scalloped edges showing a little boy in a cowboy outfit standing in front of a pickup and a station wagon in some rural area. He looked shiny and new in contrast to everything around him caked in thick American dust.

A similar face greeted us in the next picture, but this time his hair was long, he'd grown a beard, and, even through the faded Kodachrome and a set of amber tinted glasses, his blue eyes captivated the viewer. In the third picture a smiling ghost of the sobbing man appeared next to him. From then on, every picture contained the two of them, right up to a digitally date stamped glossy image of two sick men sitting on a hospital bed together. The one that would leave soonest with his head rested on the chest of the one to be left behind, and he with a look of knowing he needed to cherish every second left.

He stared at that picture for a moment and slowly closed the album, the plastic sheets and binding all creaked against one another sounding like a tomb door closing, sealing a moment. The silence came back and, without the levity of the man's funny stories about his lover, so did the crushing sadness, like the corpse itself was sitting on my chest and making it hard to breathe. Cool air and a woman in a navy-blue pantsuit entered and broke the spell.

The man knew her and rose; she hugged him tight, squeezing more tears from him. Still in their embrace, they sat down together, pushing Henry and I out of their way. She looked at us over his shoulder and gave a half smile through her sobs. We would learn she was a lesbian named B.J. (the irony of a lesbian with such a name is the only reason I remember it), she had a spare room this man would soon be moving into, and they had known one another since college. She had a look in her eyes like she still couldn't believe any of this was happening, or maybe that any of it had needed to happen.

Soon after, another burst of cool air accompanied Gay Raoul. For the first time I smelled only the sweetness of the makeup and not the decay. She was dressed in a black Chanel suit, the skirt hanging just below her knees, a black pillbox hat with a veil of netting hanging over her face, a brown wig with frosted tips, and ridiculously tall black stilettos. I guess when drag queens buy shoes, they rarely think about the possibility of wearing them to a funeral.

She hugged Henry and whispered in his ear just loud enough for me to hear, "Follow my lead sweetie," and sent me a wink over his shoulder. She was jovial and loud and everything you're not supposed to be at a funeral or a memorial...or whatever it was. In just a few sentences she invented a person who was expecting us at a made-up event, and, after hugs and a few earnest sympathy relaying smiles, we were back out into the icy thin air of lower Manhattan. 

We walked hand in hand in silence for a few blocks, passing the Greek deli. Finally, Henry broke our little bubble of silence, "You, okay?"

"I got a few more blocks before okay." After we had crossed six more streets and it had become obvious we were walking home, I asked a question I probably should have known the answer to, being a gay man in New York City at the time. "Why didn't anyone show up for him?"

Henry was sometimes too direct, but this time I appreciated his answer. "They're all dead. He's the last of his group of friends. Didn't you notice in the photos? Every time he turned a page their group of friends got smaller and smaller. That's why we were there. The church probably gave him that room for free, another example of the phrase 'the least we can do.' The coffin was clearly free, if not, then it was grossly overpriced. He spent every single dime he had trying to save his partner and still wound up alone in the multipurpose room of a church, who a few years ago wouldn't have thought he was good enough to lick the front steps. The lesbian is no doubt letting him move in for free, she knows he needs a comfortable place to die, and, from the look in her eyes, she knows it'll be quick. Can't imagine how many scrawny hands have lost their pulses holding on to the hand of a lesbian who's seen all the gay men in her life die."

"Stop. It's too much." Both his rant and our bodies stopped on the sidewalk, and he wiped away a tear from my cheek with his thumb. I saw my reflection in a pharmacy window and knew something had changed in me, not only could I feel it, but it was one of those changes you can see in your face. I was no longer the same person I was when I woke up. 

An hour ago, thoughts of newly freed people in East Germany ran through my head and how lucky they were to get to experience the freedoms I had. Or did I? I wondered how long it would be until a unified Germany would forget the joy of being one nation and devolve into conservative and progressive, citizen and immigrant, straight and not straight, us and them. This revered democracy we've flaunted all these years has certainly never improved our level of humanity. I wondered if Germany would start their new democratic journey in 1989 or 1949, or...perhaps...have the foresight to look decades ahead. 

I sighed and said, "Let's just walk home and be grateful that we can."

Henry kissed my forehead, took my hand, and we continued our urban stroll. True to form, he had to have the last word; after just a few steps he said, "Just remember, the reward for complacency is a free cardboard box."