Tales of the City 06 - Sure of You

down at the Flower Mart, and he sewed ’em on a doll’s bonnet.”
    “Pretty clever.”
    “He’s good with a needle,” she said. “He’s been working on the AIDS Quilt.”
    Michael nodded.
    “He’s already made ten panels for his friends.”
    “That’s nice,” he replied.

    Five minutes later, at Eula’s insistence, Michael led Thack onto the dance floor.
    “Just once,” he said. “Then we’ll go home.”
    His lover gave him a grumpy look but went along with it, faking a waltz step admirably.
    “Look happy,” said Michael. “She’s watching.”
    “She’s not your mother.”
    “I’ll say.”
    “And you wouldn’t like it if she was.”
    “I dunno,” said Michael. In his mind’s eye, his mother was perpetually lunching at some mall in Orlando, telling anyone who insisted on knowing that her son lived “in California”—never in San Francisco, because San Francisco was such a dead giveaway.
    Thack said: “You’d hate it if your mother was a fag hag.”
    “Eula’s not a fag hag.”
    “That’s her name? Eula?”
    Michael smiled. “She’s just enjoying herself. Look, she’s dancing with a dyke now.”
    “O.K.,” said Thack. “A dyke hag.”
    “Be quiet. They’re coming this way.”
    Eula and her new partner waltzed alongside them. “Look-in’ good,” said Eula.
    “Thanks,” said Michael. “You too.”
    Eula’s partner was as short as Eula, only wiry and fortyish, with a delicate blue flower tattooed on her left bicep.
    “Jesus,” said Michael, when they had danced out of sight. “If Havasu City could see her now.”

    Relieved to be done with nightlife for a while, they drove home to Noe Hill well before eleven. Harry greeted them deliriously at the door, toe-dancing like a carnival dog at the realization that they hadn’t deserted him.
    “Has he been walked?” Michael asked.
    “Not by me.”
    “I’ll take him in a minute.”
    While Thack shed his clothes, Michael sealed off the garbage with a twist tie and dragged it from its niche beneath the sink. Harry recognized this as a sign of impending departure and yelped indignantly for his walk.
    “All right,” said Michael. “I hear you.”
    With the dog straining at the leash, he headed out into the darkness again and dropped the garbage into the curbside can. Thack had recently built a little weathered wood house for it, which looked homey and Martha’s Vineyardish in the moonlight. Michael stopped and admired it long enough to receive another reprimand from Harry.
    Dolores Park, Harry’s daytime stomping grounds, was bristling with crack dealers and fag-bashers at night, so Michael opted for the safer circle route along Cumberland, Sanchez, and Twentieth streets. He freed the dog at the base of the Cumberland steps and watched as he rocketed through the oversized cacti to the softer, more welcoming green patch at the top. Before he could catch up with him, Harry was yapping in a way that could only mean he’d confronted an unidentifiable human.
    “Harry!” he yelled, wary of being branded a noise polluter by the neighbors. “Just shut up. Behave yourself.”
    At the top of the steps, leaning against the rail, stood a chatty old geezer with a cane, who often “took his constitutional” there.
    “Little Harry,” said the man, as if that explained everything.
    “He’s a nuisance,” said Michael. “I’m sorry.”
    “That’s just Harry. He’s just announcing you.”
    Harry circled the man, yapping obnoxiously.
    “Harry!” Michael clapped his hands authoritatively. “Get your fuzzy butt up the street!”
    When the dog was gone, he gave the old man an apologetic smile and continued walking. It was odd to think that Harry had some sort of relationship, however abrasive, with at least half the people on this street. They all knew him by name, while Michael was regarded merely as Harry’s owner. When he walked there by himself, the first thing they asked was: “Where’s Harry?”
    He liked that, and he liked the talk that usually followed: good basic village chat about the drought or the wind, the graffiti problem, the roses in bloom, the ugly new house that looked like a Ramada Inn. What he had with the people on this block was an unspoken agreement to exchange pleasantries without exchanging names. It wasn’t so different from the thing he’d enjoyed at the baths, the cordial anonymity that made strangers into equals.
    Tagging after Harry, he passed the white picket fences of Cumberland,