David Ah Lum got off the graveyard shift at seven in the morning, the way he did six days a week, coming up out of the casino kitchen where he had spent eight hours on the egg line into a downtown that was always startled to find it was daytime. He was twenty. He had been cooking in the coffee shop for a year and a half, ever since he had figured out that he was not going back to the university, and the man who had taught him the line, an older cook named Cy who could plate forty tickets in a rush without raising his voice, had been out sick now for three weeks, and everybody in the kitchen knew what out sick meant and nobody said it.
The new arch was up over Virginia Street, the one they had put in the summer before last, brighter than the old one, BIGGEST LITTLE CITY IN THE WORLD in white bulbs against the morning. David walked under it toward the bus. He liked the town best at this hour, emptied of tourists, the sidewalks getting washed, the cocktail waitresses going home in their coats over their costumes. He was tired in the specific way of a person who worked while the world slept, and he was thinking about Cy.
It was Cy who had first taken him to the place on South Virginia, the club at 1099, a year ago, after a shift, saying only that David looked like a young man who needed to know a few things and there was no sense letting him find them out the hard way. David had gone in expecting he did not know what and had found a room of people who did not look at him the way the world looked at him, and he had understood, in about ten minutes, a fact about himself that he had been managing not to understand for years. Cy had bought him one beer, told him to nurse it, and gone off to argue with the bartender about a football game. That was the whole of the instruction. It had been enough.
Now there was a benefit for Cy at the 1099 on Sunday, and David had said he would help set up, and he had not told his grandmother where he was going.
His grandmother was Helen. She was seventy-three and she had worked the USO downtown during the war and she had never in David’s life said a soft thing when a plain one would do, and she came from people who stayed. That was the family, as far back as anyone told it. His great great grandfather had laid the railroad and then stayed when the other men went on, and opened a laundry on Commercial Row. His great grandfather had kept the joss house going when the old Chinatown was gone and there was almost nobody left to keep it for. They were people who did not leave and did not explain themselves, and David loved them and had not found the sentence that would let him tell them the truth, and he was beginning to understand that in this particular year the not telling was a kind of luxury, because the men at the 1099 who had told their families were finding out what it cost, and the ones who had not told were finding out what that cost too.
Sunday he came in the afternoon light and helped carry folding tables. The place looked smaller with the lights up. Somebody had strung a banner. There was a coffee can at the door for the fund, and a card table with a sign-up sheet for people who would cook meals and drive to appointments, because the appointments were down in the county now and there was no clinic yet that was theirs, only a health district office and a foundation the court people had started a few years back, running on donations and a mailing list and the plain fact that if they did not do it, no one would. A woman David knew only as the reigning empress of the Silver Dollar Court, out of drag, in jeans, was counting the float and swearing at a roll of quarters.
Cy came in around four, walking, which David had not expected. He was thinner than three weeks ought to account for, and there was a cane he was not quite using, and he sat down at the end of the bar with the careful economy of a man who had learned that every motion had a price now and was choosing which ones to pay for. David brought him a ginger ale.
“You made the chef cut the melon wrong all week,” Cy said. “I heard about it.”
“I cut it the way you cut it.”
“You cut it the way you think I cut it.” He took the ginger ale. His hands had the tremor David had seen in the others, the ones on the AZT, the pills you took around the clock so that even sleep got rationed into four-hour pieces. “Listen. When they do the panel.” He stopped. The panel was the quilt. The tour had come through the fall before and everyone had gone to see it laid out, the whole enormous grieving blanket of it, a name for every panel and a life folded into every name, and after you saw it you understood that a person could become a rectangle of fabric with their name sewn on and that this was, unbelievably, one of the better things that could happen, that it meant somebody had loved you enough to sew. “When they do mine,” Cy said, “I don’t want it maudlin. No angels. No ribbons. Put a good knife on it. You do it. You’ve got the steady hands.”
David did not say that Cy was sitting right there drinking a ginger ale. That was not what was being asked. “A boning knife,” he said. “Or a chef’s.”
“A chef’s. Christ. Give me some dignity.” And Cy almost laughed, and the almost was the most alive he had looked, and then he was tired again and quiet.
The room filled up as the afternoon went. Men from the other bars came, from the old place on West Street that had been going since before David was born, from the resort out on Fourth that was closing this year after decades, the last of its kind, everybody’s history getting shorter at both ends at once. Somebody put money in the can and somebody put in more. The empress got the quarters rolled. David stood behind the bar he had no business being behind and washed glasses because it was the thing he knew how to do with his hands, and he watched Cy hold court at the end of it, thin and joking, surrounded, and he thought about his grandmother, who came from people who stayed, and he thought that he had found, without looking, another set of people who stayed, who did not leave a man to die in a county with no clinic, who cooked the meals and drove to the appointments and rolled the quarters and sewed the panels and stood behind the bar.
He was going to have to tell her. Not tonight. But he saw the shape of it now, the way you see the shape of a room when the lights come up. He dried a glass and set it in the rack and reached for the next one, and out in the room somebody had put a quarter in the jukebox, and the song started, and a few of them started to dance in the early evening while there was still time.
By 1988 the AIDS epidemic had reached Reno’s small, close gay community, which mounted its own response through bar benefits and a volunteer network when public services were scarce; Northern Nevada’s first dedicated HIV clinic, HOPES, did not open until 1997. Real institutions of the era included the gay bar at 1099 South Virginia Street, the long-running bar on West Street, the resort on West Fourth Street that closed in 1988, and the Silver Dollar Court, Reno’s chapter of the Imperial Court System. The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt was first displayed in 1987 and toured nationally in 1988; the drug AZT was approved in 1987.