The Hidden Law Read Free Page A

paper a few months earlier which appeared under the caption “Gay crusader fights for the underdog.” The reporter had been thorough in his research, even prevailing upon my sister to describe our bleak childhood, not to mention my own stays at alcohol rehabs over the years, and the fact that my lover was HIV-positive. He seemed to regard these matters as evidence of my saintliness. Reading his piece had made me want to change my name and move to another state.
    I said, “The reporter was looking for a hero.”
    “I’m looking for a friend,” Peña said. “Someone who knows what it feels like to fail a lot of people who look up to him.”
    “I know what it feels like to fail myself,” I replied.
    “Yeah, well,” he exhaled a plume of smoke, “that’s the most humiliating part, isn’t it? I made myself into somebody from nothing, Rios, just like you. Sure, I made mistakes along the way, but there wasn’t anyone to tell me how to do it right. But I got most of it right, anyway,” he said, tapping his chest. “Only this thing that happened up there, I don’t understand it.”
    “What don’t you understand, Gus?”
    “How I got so out of control. I mean, the one thing I know about is control.”
    “Control’s an illusion, Gus,” I said. “Being born is like being tossed from a cliff. Grabbing on to the rocks that are falling around you doesn’t keep you from falling. You just fall faster.”
    He smiled bleakly. “What’s the difference if you still hit the ground?”
    “You can always learn to fly.”
    He put his cigarette out on the marble wall behind us. “Is that what you do?”
    “I’m still letting go of the rocks myself.”
    “You’re a good man, Rios. Can I give you a call sometime?”
    “Of course.” I gave him a business card, pausing to write my home number on it.
    He examined the card, slipped it into his wallet, and patted me on the back. “Say a prayer for me.”
    I watched him slip back into the council chamber, ashamed of the way I had taken him on during the hearing, but not entirely convinced that I hadn’t just been brilliantly manipulated.

CHAPTER TWO
    I T WAS NEARLY NOON when I left City Hall. I found a phone, checked in with my secretary, Emma Austen, and returned calls. When I finished, I still had an hour before a court appearance at the Criminal Courts Building, just across the street from City Hall, so I called home to invite Josh to come and eat lunch with me. All I got was his voice on our answering machine, urging me to leave a message. I hung up.
    There had been a time when the course of his day was as familiar to me as mine. Now, I stood there for a moment, wondering where he might be. It was spring break at UCLA, so I knew he wasn’t in class, but beyond that, I could only guess. I began walking to a sandwich shop in the Civic Center mall. It was warm and smoggy. The only sign of spring was the flowering jacarandas, bleeding purple blossoms onto the grimy sidewalks.
    On the way to the sandwich shop, I passed a bookstore. Displayed in the windows was a book entitled Vows: How to Make Your Marriage Work. I stopped and read the book jacket, which promised new solutions to old marital problems. What about when one of you has a terminal disease and the other doesn’t? Each time Josh’s T-cell count dropped, I felt him drift further away from me, into his circle of Act Up friends, and his seropositive support group. Josh had become an AIDS guerrilla, impatient with my caution. Just that morning, bickering again over the wisdom of outing closeted gay politicians, he’d snapped, “Spoken like a true neggie,” as if being negative for the virus was a defect of character.
    Our arguments were no longer intellectual disagreements. He had adopted an “us vs. them” mentality over AIDS, and the more anxious he felt about his own health, the more strident he became. There might have been less ferocity in our quarrels had we been able to talk about his anxiety, as we