What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day by Pearl Cleage Page B

didn’t cut yours?”
    “I don’t know.” He smiled again. “Yes, I do. I didn’t do it because everybody thought I was going to.”
    “Defiance,” I said. “One of my favorite reasons for doing anything.”
    That was the damn truth. The problem is, Eddie’s defiance got him a head full of beautiful dreadlocks. My rewards weren’t always quite so spectacular, but I bet his weren’t always that way either. There was something in his face that made me think he’d seen enough and done enough that there was nothing I could say that would shock him. Which is not to say he couldn’t be surprised. I didn’t have enough information to speculate on that yet.
     
     
• 11
     
    i’ve been masturbating like a madwoman for two days. I feel like I haven’t been touched by anybody but me in a hundred years. I woke up last night with my hand between my legs in the middle of a seriously scandalous dream involving me and two guys I had sex with once during a particularly heated political campaign. Not at the same time, of course. I had one on the night of the primary victory and one on election day. But in the dream, the three of us were all there together, rolling around on the couch in the candidate’s inner sanctum.
    That’s probably what woke me up. I hate politics. Plus, even in my wild days, I had pretty strict rules about some things. I was never interested in groups or animals, most especially
snakes,
which had their fifteen minutes of freakish fame during one memorable summer when somebody had a girlfriend in from New Orleans with navy blue fingernails and a seven-foot boa constrictor she liked to wear around her neck. Needless to say, whenever she appeared, Negroes lost their minds.
    It’s hard to think about that stuff now without beating myself up for being so stupid, but I think I’d feel that way even if I hadn’t gotten sick. I used to justify some of the things I did then by saying, well, at least I’m having a lot of great sex, but you know what? I wasn’t having a lot of great sex. Some of it was fun and exciting, but a lot of it was just sweaty and boring and seemed like the quickest way to finish the evening without hurting anybody’s feelings.
    Once I took the test and admitted the results, everything changed, of course. Folks who used to spend whole evenings trying to look down the front of my blouse would now break out in a cold sweat at the very thought of having sex with me. Some gay friends who’ve been positive for a couple of years tried to tell me that it gets better once you complete the transition from what they called your
preplague
lovers to your new
postplague
relationships, but I have my doubts. Most straight brothers are still in such denial that when you fess up, their first reaction is to run in the opposite direction as fast as they can. That pretty much leaves a bunch of people you wouldn’t fuck on a bet or who are already sicker than you are.
    After the first couple of months of my involuntary celibacy, I was so crazed that I went to one of those Sunday support group gatherings where a whole lot of HIV people who want to have sex get together and try to see if they can work something out. Everybody gets a glass of cheap wine or sweet tea and then you sit in a circle like group therapy and tell your name and indicate whether you’re just HIV-positive or already diagnosed with
full-blown
AIDS. I hate that expression. Sounds like a typhoon moving through your body, but those distinctions are important. Some people who’ll give you a shot if you’re just positive won’t have anything to do with you if you’re already standing in the eye of the storm. You’re also allowed to say something about your sexual preferences if you want to be specific.
    The first two people to speak were men with AIDS who liked integrated country-and-western gay bars where they could do the Texas two-step without being hassled because they were black. They had lucked out and found each other, but