Peter Pan

Echoes from another pandemic.

Have I ever written about Peter Pan? I’m sure I have. His name was Richard, and at first he was just a silly cute boy, the first I met in Ocean Beach acting like he had no cares in the world. He was fun naked, and then that changed too, into a friendship that would come and go as it chose. He got a boyfriend and turned into a Disney-loving bear but then he got the virus and the boyfriend abandoned him and slowly, surely, so did everyone else except just a few of us, and when I asked him if he might like a retreat in the mountains for POZ folks, he said yes and I think he found his Peter Pan there again. I forget how many years we attended together before he got too sick to travel. I held his hand when he took the pills mixed in applesauce with a whiskey chaser. Before he ate the vile taste of his own freedom, he gave me a Peter Pan statuette and told me to never abandon the little boy he always saw behind my blue eyes. Peter is the first thing I would grab in an earthquake I think, and he has moved through life with me like this silent rock of a friend who just bears witness. First I loved Richard like a lover, and then I loved him like a brother, and of all the people I have loved and lost it is his sweet face that I think of when the memories of that horrific time try to breakthrough in order to be bleached of their traumatic edge by the love that lives in my life now. Richard would not want me to feel guilty that I survived, but he would want me to live remembering his collective dreams, and he would want me to live mine, all of them, as if I was joining him tomorrow. I think he would approve of the man who saved me, and I think he would approve of my obsessive need to rescue Wendy and the Lost Boys from another clumsy ending.