Your Nostalgia is Killing Me

By John Weir

• AN HONEST LOOK into the AIDS pandemic and toxic masculinity in America


• THE GRACE PALEY PRIZE FOR SHORT FICTION AWARD WINNER - selected by Dr. Amina Gautier


• AWARD WINNING AUTHOR John Weir is the recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut Fiction


• FOR FANS OF the book The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, the play Angels in America by Tony Kushner, and the musicals Rent and Tick, Tick... Boom by Jonathan Larson

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Release date: Apr 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781636280301

John Weir

John Weir, winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction for Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me, is the author of two novels, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, winner of the 1989 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men’s Debut Fiction, and What I Did Wrong. He is an associate professor of English at Queens College CUNY, where he teaches the MFA in creative writing and literary translation. In 1991, with members of ACT UP New York, he interrupted Dan Rather’s CBS Evening News to protest government and media neglect of AIDS. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Book preview

AIDS Nostalgia

I remember what suits me.

—Robert Ryan in Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur, screenplay by Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom

Neorealism at the Infiniplex

My friend Dave died of AIDS in the fall of 1994. I had planned to be sad about it, but it turned out I was relieved. I’m not proud of this. In my fantasy, he would have died in my arms, and the screen would have faded to black, like in a movie. It was an Italian neorealist ending, a grim death but a noble one, suffered in a time of war or shortly after war. What happened instead was that he was so mean for the last three months of his life that I stopped liking him. Not just at the time, but for all time, both in the season of his death and retroactively, forever. His dying wasted our five years of friendship, and I lost him in retrospect. I don’t remember what I ever liked about him. People say they can’t believe their beloved husband, mother, son is gone, but I had another feeling. I couldn’t convince myself that I had ever known and loved someone named David. That was the worst thing that happened.

No, the worst thing was that he left me some money that took a long time to clear. In 1997, three years after he died, I got about three thousand dollars, and I decided to rent a place in upstate New York. Because I teach school, I have my summers free, and I sublet my East Village apartment, bought a used car at a police auction in Jamaica, Queens, and signed a three-month lease on a converted chicken coop. It was on the grounds of an old Dutch farm, and it was vast and cheap, with a high ceiling and a sleeping loft. There was no furniture, so I bought a futon mattress and a table. I put the table in the kitchen in front of a window with a view of the mountains. On the table, I set a laptop and a stack of books I had never finished reading: Paradise Lost, Proust, War and Peace. I was going to read the classics, write things, eat right, go running every afternoon on the back roads and country lanes, and finally lose the weight I’d gained while Dave was dying.

Of course, I hate back roads and country lanes. How had I forgotten that? I hate views. I especially dislike chicken coops. Mine still smelled faintly of chickens. When I looked up from my work, through my kitchen window, I could see an open field, trees in the distance, and the sky everywhere. Not the reassuringly manmade chemical sky of lower Manhattan, but an intimidating sky so awesome and inhuman that in order to explain it, you were forced to invent God.

When I fell asleep over Paradise Lost, sitting outside in an Adirondack chair that had bark clinging to its arms and legs, I woke scraped and sunburned and covered with bug bites. A mile down the road at the food co-op, the cashier was so vegetarian she would not sell me bug spray. Within days, I was aching for anything lethal or synthetic. I was nostalgic for pizza and car fumes and Avenue A. Of course, there were people living in my apartment—German students on summer holiday—and I couldn’t go home.

Twice, I drove down to the city and paid eighty dollars to sleep in the Jungle Room at the Kew Motor Inn. Obviously, I couldn’t spend the summer traveling back and forth every day between a New Paltz chicken coop and a by-the-hour motel off the Grand Central Parkway in Queens.

So I loaded Proust and Milton and Tolstoy into the trunk of my car, and I went to the movies.

I moved to the multiplex. To many different multiplexes, which are so abundant in the wilderness that I began to think of all upstate New York as a vast infiniplex. From late June to early September, I went to every several-screen movie theater from Kingston to Yonkers, listening to Billy Joel songs on the car radio and crying because I was old enough to remember liking them without irony. When I was not in my car, I was seated front row center with a bucket of popcorn and a Coke, watching Bruce Willis in Armageddon. You see how entertainment was not the point.

If I kept going back to Armageddon, I thought, it would eventually turn out to have a plot. I saw it six times, and it never did. I was grateful; it was a relief to be spared the pain of cause/effect. Thank God for a plotless world. Watching the scene where Bruce Willis, draped in an American flag, says goodbye to earth from the floor of a crater in a huge piece of orbiting igneous rock was the most satisfying emotional experience I have ever had. I’m through with stuff that really happens, like people die and you don’t. Or they die and you don’t feel bad in the way that you want.

Which is how I got in trouble with Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg’s feel-good D-Day massacre movie. I saw it twelve times. I saw it twice a week for nearly two months, like short-term therapy or a lover who beats you every time you go back, despite your absurd faith that one of these days it will end differently.

Saving Private Ryan is more believable than Armageddon—though this, for me, was not the point. I didn’t care about World War II. Isn’t it a film about a bunch of gay guys in 1983 who take a summer house on Fire Island?

Look at the evidence: it opens with a few hundred handsome young men in expensive outerwear squeezed into a boat approaching the shore of a famous beach, where people casually speak French and stern Nordics are lurking in the dunes with their hands on their weapons. We meet eight guys, just enough for a half-share in the Pines. Most of them are Midwestern. Once ashore, they go from house to house in uniforms, carrying accessories, singing Duke Ellington songs about solitude and haunting and listening to Edith Piaf, all the while searching for just one cute boy. And every few days, one of them dies.

It’s the same plot as Longtime Companion, one of the first films about AIDS. A bunch of men with no special talent or need for intimacy or closeness have to deal with the fact that everyone they know is dying all around them all the time. Sometimes they abandon their dead. Sometimes they mourn them. They do what they can, given their uneasy sense that the next person dead could be you. Later, the dead men are buried far from their hometowns, out of sight of their folks, gone in a way their parents can’t, or won’t, understand.

When Dave died, his mom and dad came up from Florida in a rental car. He died on Wednesday and was buried on Friday. They left their house Thursday morning and drove, they said, straight through. Nonetheless, they were two hours late for the funeral service at Riverside Memorial Chapel on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The service had to be finished by sundown because he was Jewish, it was Friday afternoon, and the parents had insisted long-distance—even though David hated God or even the mention of God—that there be religious last rites.

So we waited in the chapel. It was the fifth time I had been there for a dead friend. We went through two rabbis. Each of them stayed an hour and then had to leave. The place was rented; it was full. David was naked in a pine box loaded with ice to keep the body from stinking. The coffin was sweating as the ice was slowly dissolving. We had a bucket under the corner to catch the drips. I thought of Dave floating inside this cocktail like a lemon wedge. All the mourners, David’s friends and coworkers and cute guys from the Chelsea gym, were sitting quietly in the pews listening to the drip, drop, drip into the bucket.

The stage was set, and the effects were starting to melt, and we had no parents, and now suddenly, no rabbi.

Try finding a rabbi free on Friday afternoon on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I made an announcement in the chapel, really a plea. Does anybody here know . . . ? How would I ask it? I felt in need of Mel Brooks. He would have struck the right tone. But it turned out that somebody had a cousin who knew somebody, who knew somebody . . . And I made the calls. We’ve never met, but I need a rabbi.

It took ten calls. The sun was setting. Thank God some Jews are not observant; people were answering their phones. Finally, we got a rabbi. I never said, AIDS. I didn’t know what to say about AIDS. I wasn’t sure he’d do it. I said nothing. I said, Dead guy on ice, which sounds like a hard-core band. And he understood; he came to the chapel. Why wasn’t he busy on a Friday night? I didn’t want to know. Cut-rate rabbi. Though he cost just as much as the other two. Charged for three, used one. Not the star, but the understudy. We paid for Nathan Lane, we got Steve Guttenberg instead—fine. He’s available.

He showed up five minutes ahead of Dave’s parents. Their rental car had broken down in Philadelphia. Never mind that the quickest route is not through Philadelphia. That’s why God gave us the New Jersey Turnpike. Turn right at Wilmington, you’re in Jersey. Why tour Philadelphia? Whatever. I had avoidances of my own. Just before the parents appeared, the rabbi took me into a small room and said, Quick, tell me about your friend. Say what he was like. Say three things. I don’t need more than three. Add some color, make it personal, and make it fast.

And all I could think to say was, Well, he spent a lot of time at the gym.

It was the wrong thing to say, that he was just a gym-going muscle queen, a gay cliché. Though it was true, he went to the gym the way Baptists go down to the river. Still, there were plenty of other things to say about him, and why was this my first thought? He was a writer, he had published three books; what kept me from listing these accomplishments? Grief is sneaky, not sobering; it refuses to suppress your worst impulse.

Then the parents appear.

So there is the sudden attention to the parents. Who presumably have precedence. Even though they had not visited David even once, had not in fact seen him in more than a year, hadn’t called except when the rates were low on Sundays, and had sent, as a token of their concern, only a single package of home-baked chocolate chip cookies. For a guy who could not digest so much as a piece of dry toast without soiling his shorts. David made me eat the cookies in his hospital room while he swore at his nurses. Then he swore at me. Then he died, and we had a ten-minute funeral service where the parents got front row seats.

The rabbi ripped cloth from their garb in honor of some tradition that did not include my dead friend, who had wanted to have his whole arm tattooed at the last minute so no respectable Jewish cemetery would take him.

Kaddish was said, and the rabbi made some remarks. He said, David was a man who loved sports, especially at the gym. And a roomful of people, not his parents, burst out laughing because he was famous, at the gym, for cornering cute boys naked in the steam room and asking them to lunch.

The Kaddish was endless. I don’t know when I’ve hated God so much. I had tracked down the last photograph of David taken before he went into the hospital, and we got it blown up, and it was standing on an easel next to the rabbi. An awful picture. Dave looked shrunken and rabbity and pale. He had shaved off his seventies-era Christopher Street gay clone mustache, and though I always hated that mustache, he was unrecognizable without it. He lost more than half his body weight in the two months before he died, and this photograph was how I would always remember him now: a huddle of bones under sacked skin, which happened to be my dying, now dead, friend.

His body had nothing to do with him. His funeral service had nothing to do with anyone who cared for him. It was an appalling farce. I had to be polite to his parents, who, if they loved him at all, could nonetheless not manage to visit their dying son. They knew he was dying. If he were my son, I would have moved into his hospital room. I would have postponed my life to be with him, which is basically what I did. And they were his parents, they sent cookies, I despised them, I wished they had died instead, I hope they die soon, lost and alone and uncared for by their own flesh and blood.

Afterward, we talked like I thought they were human. They barely registered my humanity or my closeness to Dave. They had me down as good friend, official funeral parlor role. I was not family. It was their loss, not mine, and I had exactly a minute to cry. It happened in a closet. No kidding. I was not going to cry in front of someone’s suddenly visible parents. I found a coat closet, oddly empty for November. I thought, Well, as well here as anywhere else. I thought, This is where it turns out I was always going to have my private sorrowing moment. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in the fated emptiness of coat closets and private moments of sequestered grief. I leaned in a corner, folding myself into the crease of a papered wall as if the angle of the building could hold me.

In a minute, I was going to have to walk out into the reception room and answer questions, give directions, to the cemetery in Queens, to the ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center. That’s what the parents wanted to know. They had driven all the way from Florida and they were not leaving without seeing the sights, buying souvenirs, My Son Died of AIDS and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt. But for now, avoiding them, crouched under coat hooks, I cried; it was almost the only time I cried about AIDS. Half the people I knew when I was twenty-five years old are dead, and I have cried while Dave’s parents waited, and I cried at twelve different showings of the last scene of Saving Private Ryan.

The scene that Amy Taubin of The Village Voice called creepy.

I thought it was the whole point.

Actually, the popcorn was the point. It was my steady diet. Every chain movie theater sells a Supercombo Special—a huge bag of popcorn and a giant soda—served by an underpaid teen who stares to the left of your head and asks, as slowly as possible, Do you want the Special it’s only fifty cents more than the medium size the soda comes with free refills—

And I say, Yes. Now. Immediately. Please. I want, I want, I want, I say, interrupting, slapping money on the counter, exact change. God forbid I should have to wait for them to make change. Give me a giant size popcorn, I say, soak it in butter to ruin my heart and salt for my tears, so I can taste it on my face hours later when Steven Spielberg makes me watch an old guy walk through acres of white crosses—a military graveyard in France—and drop to his knees in front of the headstone of a friend who died in battle instead of him.

It’s the end of Saving Private Ryan. World War II’s over; we won. Spielberg has returned us to the framing device, a scene taking place more than fifty years after the war, in the present moment, a summer day in 1997. Private Ryan, who was saved by his buddies, is now an old man, no longer played by Matt Damon. He is white-haired, slow-moving, unglamorous. Since the beginning of the film, and presumably all through the two-hour-long flashback to the Second World War, he has been walking with his family, his wife and son, and his son’s wife and his grandchildren, up and down the rows of headstones in the military graveyard.

Suddenly, he stops in front of one of the bone-white crosses. The John Williams music swells and an American flag whips overhead— though we’re in France. You’re right, Amy Taubin, it’s schmaltz. I’m moved by schlock. In front of the headstone, the old guy seems to be tossed to his knees by an electrical shock. He is on the ground before the grave, weeping, not dead. He turns to his wife.

Tell me I’m a good man, he asks her.

His family stands behind him, kind of appalled. They’ve got no idea what he means. Clearly, he has never mentioned the war or how he was spared, or why his friends died.

His family doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about, but I do. He wants them to know what it’s like to have the worst thing happen, to lose everything and never discuss it, so that you lose it twice, both in the moment, when it actually goes, and afterward, in the official record of its going. So two things are gone, Dave is gone and you’re gone. And maybe you get a moment to cry for what, now, you will never be able to tell: that all the people you loved for a season had died, and that you, for years and years after, quite simply, had not.

American Graffiti

Jodie Foster came out at the Golden Globes by saying she wouldn’t.

It was the opposite of a speech act that performs what it says. Her statement performed what it didn’t say. What it refused to say. It was like how you’d come out if you were Magritte.

There she is framed in the TV set or computer screen, enacting disclosure, above a caption that reads, THIS IS NOT A DISCLOSURE.

A surrealist says, I’m gay, but it’s in French and it’s a collage and the words are scattered across the page in the shape of a teapot.

It was 2013. She was fifty-one years old. If you had been a public figure from the time that you were a toddler, she said, maybe you too might value privacy above all else.

And what I want to know is: what’s privacy?

It’s the bicentennial spring of 1976, America’s two-hundredth birthday, and I’m seventeen years old and sitting in a football field, waiting for my name to be called.

I’m at my high school graduation.

My best friend Lottie picked me up this morning and drove me here. She finished school two years ahead of me, but she’s around. We split a joint in her car, and she gave