One-Sentence Story: Wally
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| Starry Night by Edvard Munch |
Wally was living in San Francisco in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when treatments were few and a diagnoses of AIDS was almost as good as a death sentence (a short, slight boy with long blond hair who was openly gay, he kissed me once at a college dorm party—we were all sitting on the floor in the hall way, drinking beer from paper cups and passing joints around, and Wally was moving from one guy to another, kissing whoever he found attractive—and everyone laughed and accepted it, even the straight guys—when he took my hand in his and slipped me a big wet one, even though I was a girl, and he later had a long affair with one of my ex-lovers and then went on to live with my friend Joan’s ex-high school boyfriend—of course, that was when everything was different—in the early seventies, in Santa Cruz, California), so even though his fever rose to 105 and his head was throbbing with pain, Wally refused to see a doctor—“It’s the gay plague,” he said to his roommate, “there is nothing I can do,”—and that is why Wally was killed by AIDS, in just a matter of days, even though he did not have it, and burned briefly and brightly, like a shooting star, on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle (“Gay Man Dies of Ear Infection—Believed He Had AIDS”).
by Nina Zolotow
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