Tension and humidity hung in the old house.
In the short story which opens this collection, the narrator of this story relates the incidents surrounding the death of his great-grandfather, Evelyn, the mentally disturbed cousin of his mother, the adolescent awareness of his homosexuality, Evelyn’s creepy attempt to seduce him and his family’s suspicions that she is also responsible for the death of the old man. All taking placed in a house crowded with relatives there for the wake. Anyone who has ever been inside a house located in a hot climate when domestic secrets start becoming the topic of public conversation can relate to this very simple, but especially well-conceived description of the situation.
John had met me at his door. He told me I could live with him forever. I lived with him more than four years, then he died.
In the Acknowledgements which prefaces the contents of the book, the author notes that his lover, John, died in 1987, the same year he was told he had two years to live as a result of contracting AIDS. “Unprotected” is the only one in the story section of the collection in which John appears. By contrast, John appears by name in almost half the poems that comprise the second half the book. Historically speaking, verse has long been the domain of the personal, the literary form of choice for expressing that for which prose seems lacking. It is worth noticing, however, that the author writes narrative poetry, not lyrical; his poems tell a story about John that serves to fill in some of the information missing from “Unprotected.”
I couldn’t stay to take care of him,
and when I came home, John was delirious,
huddled into the corner of the couch,
the floor heater pinged loudly
the pilots turned all the way up.
“The Quilt Series” is a cycle of six poems which chart the chronology of the final days of John before his death. This quote are the lines which open the that series and suggest that it will be not just a recollection of the path to inevitable death from AIDS, but also the path of the inevitable guilt which accompanies loving someone undergoing such horrific conditions for confirming mortality as well as the range of emotions that prey upon the mind when forced to deal with the living trying to bring relief which seeks to alleviate both the guilt and pain.
When I turned nine, my relatives thought there must be something genetically wrong with me, some inherent defect in their first-born sons. My cousin, Rolando, crib death. My cousin, David, “half-retarded.” Me, they couldn’t put their finger on it. They were annoyed whenever I spoke, and they thought I whispered intentionally, kept things hidden. And then one day I cut my wrists.
This paragraph could make an interesting scenario for a class in psychology. The family, burdened by incomprehensible, yet irrefutably unlinked tragic coincidence seek desperately for answers that can only succeed in negating the truth while also confirming a predisposed attitude that homosexuality is equitable to intellectual impairment and death. But then, a suicide attempt that actually does demonstrate some sort of mental defect in the narrator which can only confirm their originating thesis. So, is the narrator’s suicide attempt a result of his own conflicted emotional response to signs of the “deviance” of homosexuality or is it the direct result of emotional abuse on the part of his family? As the story progresses, this hypothetical increasingly complicated because while it is revealed that David’s defect is truly something to be concerned about as his condition clearly makes him a threat to his own safety and a potential threat to others, the question of the narrator’s condition is also called into question as he is made privy to the darker secrets of David without telling anyone and, even more distressing, allows himself to be coerced into taking part.
