Lies With Man. Michael Nava
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is but if it were your life, you’d break some laws, too, I imagine. I called around the AIDS organizations and asked about those drugs for my sister’s boy. They were pretty cagey, but I got a couple of names. Gave them to her. Don’t know if she followed up.”
“You didn’t follow up yourself?”
“I have my tenure to protect,” he said. “Can’t get involved in breaking the law.”
“Caleb, if you know all this, why did you vote to support endorsing the proposition?”
“I’ve learned to pick my battles,” Cowell replied. “This isn’t one I want to fight.”
“Do you think AIDS is the judgment of God on homosexuals?”
Cowell squinted at him. “You’re asking me? You’re the pastor.”
••••
Jessica was waiting in his office when he came in, sitting on a sofa in a corner of the spacious room with her little bit of knitting abandoned at her side. On the low table before her was a thermos of coffee, two cups, cream and sugar. He joined her. Across the room the big bulk of his father-in-law’s nineteenth-century partner’s desk was flanked by an American flag. On the wall above it was a reproduction of the painting by Heinrich Hofmann of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.
It was the kind of painting the young convert Daniel and his Jesus People friends might have gently mocked back in the day for the spotlessness of the Savior’s robe, his beautifully groomed hair and beard and stately look of sanctity. Their Jesus back then looked like them: holes in their clothes, unkempt hair and untrimmed beards, filled with laughing, joshing energy. Someone who, as Daniel had at the beginning of his ministry, would have baptized the young by dunking them into the ocean at Venice Beach. Would have slapped together cheese and baloney sandwiches to pass out on LA’s Skid Row where Daniel had preached in the shadow of St. Vibiana, the Catholic cathedral. Sometimes a couple of Franciscan monks had joined him in feeding the homeless or Mormon missionaries had wandered by and stopped to listen and compare notes on conversion techniques. There was always singing. Someone had a guitar, and everyone had a voice and they sang the old songs in a van decorated with flowers and the words “Jesus Saves” in psychedelic script.
“Coffee?”
“Thank you, Jess,” he replied.
He watched her pour him a cup, mixing sugar and milk in the exact proportions he preferred.
“I thought the meeting went well,” she said, pouring her cup, black with two teaspoons of sugar.
She wore a peach-colored pantsuit over a white blouse with a big bow tied at her neck. Stiff wings of hair, once naturally blond, now discreetly dyed, framed her face. She wore lipstick and a touch of blush. The mask was on. She sipped her coffee, put the cup into its saucer, and said, “I’m so gratified we’re going on record supporting Proposition 54. Those people need to be stopped, Dan. We’re not safe with them around.”
“Caleb Cowell says people can walk around for years without knowing they’re infected. That quarantines won’t catch them.”
A slight frown creased her face. “Caleb spends so much time around those young college students, I don’t wonder that their permissive attitudes rub off on him.”
“He makes a good point. How is the proposition going to catch people who don’t know they have the virus?”
“Bob says the next step will be mandatory testing,” she replied.
“You talked to Bob about this?”
“For a minute or two before you came into the room,” she said, hackles rising.
He suspected from her defensiveness the conversation had been private and longer but asked, “How would mandatory testing work?”
She took another temporizing sip of coffee, as if reluctant to impose herself. “We’ll make getting tested a condition of renewing a driver’s license, entering a public school, receiving medical services, or applying for a marriage certificate,” she said. “Anything that people need from the government or for medical care, they’ll have to give a blood sample first.”
He shook his head. “You want the government invading people’s lives like that? It’s a bad precedent.”
“It’s a public health emergency, like Bob said. Emergency measures are needed.”
“It’ll never pass the legislature, not with the Democrats in charge.”
“If we fail in Sacramento, Bob says we’ll put it on the ballot in 1988. After Proposition 54 passes, it should be no problem to convince the voters to take the next step.”
“Are you so sure Proposition 54 will pass?”
She looked at him quizzically. “Of course it will pass. The polls give the yes vote a twelve-point lead. Do you have doubts, Dan?”
“I remember reading about the last time we took a position on a ballot measure, when your father supported the one that banned school desegregation back in the ’60s. We got called bigots and—”
“Daddy was not a bigot,” she said sharply. “Daddy was from the South, where the races don’t mix.”
“I’m not saying he was,” Daniel replied, soothingly. “It’s about appearances, Jess. We don’t want to appear to be intolerant.”
“There are worse things,” she replied. “‘Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you for my sake. Rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward in Heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.’ These are the kinds of enemies we want, Dan.”
They drank their coffee in silence for a minute; then he said, “You know, Jess, if Bob Metzger has something to say to me, he can say it directly. He doesn’t have to use you as the middleman.”
“I’ve known Bob since I was a little girl,” she replied. “Of course we talk. That’s what old friends do.”
“Sure,” he said. He stood up. “Thank you for the coffee, Jess. I better get to work.”
She gathered up the coffee things on a tray and left.
••••
He settled himself behind his father-in-law’s ostentatious desk and thought about what Caleb Cowell had told him of the smuggling of drugs for AIDS. He had wanted to ask him who he had called and the names he had been given but that, of course, was out of the question. He opened a heavy drawer and removed the phone book. He started at the A’s for AIDS and there he found it: AIDS Project Los Angeles. He buzzed his secretary and instructed him that he would be in prayer for the next hour and was to be completely undisturbed. Then he dialed the number.
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