Not me!

It’s a 1984 lunch, and thin sunlight is shining through the clear and purple stained glass of Duff’s. Buddy is feeling sexy and impulsive. His new girlfriend, Lynn, is the sweetest thing he has ever seen. Much nicer looking than Val, his last serious girlfriend. He just knew they were going to have a really great relationship. Which meant really great sex, of course.

“So I says to JoAnn I says—” Buddy breaks off as Lynn butts in.

“Buddy, remember Harry?”

Lynn just has to ask.

Buddy immediately pretends to have never met the fellow.

“What Harry?”

“The waiter that used to work here? The little skinny guy?”

Lynn knew he knew it, so she wasn’t about to let the whole point be lost on either of them. Buddy admits he might have once “known” the man.

“Looked like a monkey. Little mustache, half bald? A little too Nellie to make it through the 90s?”

Buddy got an uplifted eyebrow of approbation from Lynn with each seemingly rhetorical query that he chose to diagnose as affirmative.

“He died last week. AIDS.” Lynn dropped the bomb with straightforward grace.

“Oh my God.”

“Isn’t it terrible? He was like my favorite waiter.”

“Oh shit.”

Lynn thought this sounded a little harsh, almost involved.

“Buddy, what is it?”

“What? Nothing. It’s just a goddamn shame, that’s all.”

“I didn’t think you’d react this way.”

“What? How am I reacting? I’m not reacting any way. I mean—”

“No, it’s good. I thought you were—I never thought you—”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“I thought you were going to say something about his being a fag or something, that’s all.”

Buddy stops a second and looks at her with real sincerity written on every inch of his epidermal kernel. Back when everyone knew him as Chef Joey back at Balaban’s nobody ever called him a fag basher. Not back when fags ruled the whole goddamned world. Back when he knew Harry.

“What’s to say? He was gay, right? He got AIDS, right? I just hate it when—you know. Plus this drug stuff, and the AIDS. I’ve seen the numbers you know.”

Nobody could say nay to the numbers. A chill grew like a methodical, industrious crystal, notwithstanding the weak glint of oblique sunlight.

Lynn thought of all the tragedy this AIDS stuff had brought her and would someday bring again. She broke the sudden silence.

“I’m really, really scared of AIDS.”

“Yeah, so’m I, I mean, uh—”

“Have you been tested?”

“I don’t need to get tested.”

A little too quick.

“You should get tested.”

Lynn had huge brown eyes. They widened slightly in emphasis.

“I’m gonna get tested,” Buddy announced it without certainty, with a scratch at the side of the nose. He was a little flustered, but set his jaw and fixed his gaze.

“When?” Lynn asked with the utmost gravity. Buddy looked around the room, not even sure that he knew her anymore.

“Soon.” Buddy turned his head away and wrapped one hand around the base of his neck.

They sat there a moment. Buddy pretended to not feel the tension and looked around with a quiet smile at the pleasant surroundings, bathed in sun. Lynn quietly watched him.

“I’ve been tested.”

She said it with the innocence and solemnity of a small child.

“I know you’ve been.”

Buddy gave his answer the sing-song cadence of a little brat back at her, with a little sarcastic smile to signal his amusement at the obviousness of it all.

“And I’m clean as a whistle. Wouldn’t you like to say you were too?”

Buddy knew that to actually be tested would be to admit that he felt less than clean; and he could never do that, after all the many nights of unprotected sex that would be transformed from clean, healthy fun to murder.

He cleared his throat and asked, in a cheerful voice, “So, Harry’s dead, huh?”

Buddy drove back to the office parking lot. He reflected that it was a strange thing that every office had to have it’s parking lot. The office park he worked in was punctuated by ample parking on blacktop lots.

He could tell how fascist each company was by examining the pattern of their yellow lines, deciphering the hoops the bosses drove you through, wondering which car would get the coveted spot in the only shade for miles around.

Buddy had reached a point of no return with the parking lot, and opted out of the frenzied competition for the shady spot. He parked down at the end of the sun-scorched blacktop, down by the driveway where nobody else ever parked.

He pulled up in the farthest possible spot, turned off the car, and sat looking at the dead dashboard one blank second in the silence. Then he looked up at the building. A cute girl got out of her car not too far away. He gave her a look, realized she was young and very good looking, tore his eyes away from her a second with a physical wrench, and then looked back at her again because he simply couldn’t stop himself.

After she was far enough away that he didn’t feel like a stalker he followed her into work, but when he reached the lobby she was gone forever. He looked around hopefully, but she was gone.

The next day Buddy found her in the copy room, the den of a huge old copier, stinking of toner and oxygen-starved heat. She was slouching next to it, lower lip dangling in youthful disdain. She was watching the machine churn out multiple double-sided collated copies. It looked like a big job.

“Can I get in here?”

“I don’t think so. They’re waiting up there for these reports.”

“In the conference room?”

“Yeah. Like they should have been ready an hour ago or something.”

“I’m only talking about two copies both sides. Like 30 seconds.”

She stuck her lip out even further in an adorable pout and shook her peroxide locks.

No.

Buddy bit his lip and squinted from the pain of this spectacle of youthful beauty. He wasn’t thinking of sex. But his whole body was suddenly flooded with hormones. In the flush of bodily maturity there was no need or call for extravagant fantasy, no need for the full-fledged scenario of this girl naked, having sex with him, nothing as brutal and plain as an object on a windowsill. It was simply meat heat, internal shudders of quickly squirting juices, hidden deep in glandular recesses.

She was pointedly ignoring him, but he still wondered if she felt it.

JoAnn paged Buddy from the cubicles. “Call for you, Bud!”

He rushed back to his desk. Buddy liked to walk quickly through the cubicles. It gave him an air of urgency and efficiency that offset the actual lack of real work to do at his office.

He leaned over his desk and grabbed the phone.

“Yeah? Hi! Great. Lunch? Great! Yeah. Yeah! What? Where? Oh yeah. Sure I know—yeah, c’mon. I know. Yeah, I’ve been there a million—yeah, great! Look if I’m ten minutes late can you—No! No way, I’m just saying just in case I happen. To. Be. No! Wait a minute, Val, you know, no no noo! Look, I’m a little tied up with the copy machine—I could go up to the fourth floor to do it—or else I swear to God there’s this copy center right down the street, on the way to the place, right! So there’s no way I’ll be any more than two seconds at the outside—Yeah! Right! Don’t worry! Bye.”

Buddy watched JoAnn adjust her skirt and opened the morning paper to a Sex Quiz.

Over his shoulder, you could read the large headline: “How many sexual fantasies do you have a day?” as he snorted contemptuously.

At lunch Buddy left the office, and got into his car. He watched, eyebrows aloft, leaning under the askew sun visor, as the copy girl mounted a motorcycle with some pissed-off looking boy. A good looking boy. A tough boy.

He pulled up to a cafe with a few tables outside. He sat down, tried not to stare at a good-looking woman across the street walking her dog. He was craning his neck over his shoulder when Sheila and her friend Bert entered the patio and started towards him. He was a little embarrassed, but everyone said hi and didn’t mention it.

Sheila said, “What are you doing over here all by yourself?”

“I’m not alone, you guys are here, and besides, you know, I’m like waiting for a certain young lady—”

Bert, her new husband this year, saw an opportunity to crack one of his famous sarcastic remarks.

“Yeah, right. Mr. Big Dick Stud out on the prowl. Oh, brother.”

Sheila asserted her new matrimonial authority. “Shut up, Bert.”

Turning to Buddy, “You look nice! What, did you just come from work?”

“Yeah, this is how they make us dress, yeah.”

“Not like when you used to bus tables at Duff’s huh?” Sheila cracked. Bert gives her a bemused look as he appends his own crack right after hers, as if her sarcasm were implicit permission to allow him another dumb crack. “A fellow wage slave. So what are you drinking, wage slave?”

“I’ve got a beer coming. There, here it comes. You guys?”

“I’m going inside. I’m not sitting out in this heat.” Sheila hates even the slightest bit of heat. San Francisco girl.

They went inside, as Buddy gazed after them with a half-amazed, half-contemptuous look. He jiggled, tapped his foot, and felt a light smack on the back of his head. It was his lunch date, Val.

“Stop ogling the broads, Casanova.”

Laughs, hugs, kisses.

“I was not looking, Val, I swear to Christ God Almighty!”

“Like hell you weren’t. You know what you are, Bud? Huh? A pig. A big pig, that’s what.”

“I try, or at least I used to.”

“What? The death of an Era?”

“I mean it’s hard to be a stud with like three triple strength condoms on.”

“Why worry about it? Oh, I guess you heard about Harry!”

“Harry? Who’s Harry? I mean, which—”

“Cut the crap, Buddy. Some of us still remember the drug-crazed days of our youth, you know. I remember when you quit Balaban’s and ended up washing dishes at Duff’s. You would have stayed down in that stinky basement washing those dishes forever if Ginger and Harry hadn’t thought you were cute enough to bus tables instead. And some of us still recall a certain intimacy between—”

“For crying out loud, Val. I was 17 years old, for Christ’s sake.”

“With a dick as hard as a steel bar and balls as blue as the Mediterranean sea.”

“Give me a break, Val.”

“The Mediterranean sea off the isles of Greece! The Straits of Rhodes, pal! Anyway, you’ve heard he’s dead, right? AIDS, right?”

“Hell, I haven’t seen him in like years. Not since he moved down to Soulard when the whole gay scene kind of went back underground when the big disco craze was about over with.”

“About the time they took Quaaludes off the market.”

“Now that was a black day.”

“Honey, you wouldn’t begin to know about it. You were always a honky at heart, Buddy my son.”

“Me? The biggest maggot brain in town? I owned two copies of every Funkadelic album ever made, including that one with “My Automobile” on it, remember?”

He starts to sing “My Automobile”.

“After your brief little indiscretion with Harry—”

“Listen, Val, I deny everything!”

“Sure you do. You were seen at breakfast with him one time. Some people think you spent the night at his place once or twice. The evidence is purely circumstantial at best.”

“I don’t even remember any of this. I mean, we’re talking fifteen years ago or something.”

“Save your convenient memory lapses for Lynn, Bud. Did it ever occur to you that you might just as well accept it? What’s the big deal?”

“No big deal. If I was gay, I’d be proud of it. Even more so back then. I was in the process of reinventing myself as a New-Wave Punk. If I could have passed as a fag I would have flaunted it all over the place, but no! I was desperately, completely, uh unre- irredeemably straight. And I never cared how uncool they tried to make me feel for being that way.”

“Like that time Miss Vera Vogue chased you all around the back kitchen of Herbie’s discotech trying to show you his ‘operation’.”

“That swishy little asshole! He kept grabbing my hand and trying to get me to stick it down his pants and feel it. And the other waiter Steven who always looked at me so pityingly as he tried to make me understand that everybody was really gay deep in the hearts, and I’m sure he really believed it, too.”

“Hell, yes, he believed it. Ask anyone down at the Baths.”

“You know to this day I never knew where these famous Baths are?”

“Ask anybody.”

“I never asked.”

title: Not Me!, genre: literary fiction, age range: 17 to 72, author name: Tony Patti, why your project is a good fit: It's an instant best seller, a snarky book showing white male presumption rampant in the days before cancel culture, the hook: white male denies his fears about AIDS and his sexual past and stumbles on his own tangle of justifications and privilege, synopsis: Buddy finds dating increasingly problematic as he becomes convinced he might have AIDS, and is soon tricked by his ex into actually being tested, with the aftermath of the results changing everyting about how he sees sex as recreation, target audience: woke young things and those who remember the AIDS crisis.