Page 11

10.

The Sad, Sad Beauty of Howard Fishbein

“Disco Witches get older. Fear not. Keep boogying. The Great Goddess Mother has a DJ set just for you.”

—Disco Witch Manifesto #73

Howie awoke from another bad dream, which he couldn’t remember. Even though Lenny was only two rooms away, and Joe was asleep above his head in the attic, he felt so alone and frightened. He couldn’t stop thinking about Max’s terrible coughing and the last words he’d heard him speak: “Must look for the …”

“What did you want us to look for, Max?” Howie whispered to the giant black-and-white photo facing his bed. It was of Max dressed as his most famous drag-queen prophetess character, Eartha Delights and Her Ominous Bush. “You need to get better and call me back, Max. I need you.”

Howie got up from the bed and tiptoed into the living room. He drew down from the top shelf his favorite photo of Max and himself from that first summer they spent together in Provincetown. It was 1960, and they were both working as barbacks at the A-House, both so young and beautiful. Max had emigrated from Guatemala as a teenager and still spoke slightly accented English.

The photo had been taken at the top of Pilgrim Monument, the two-hundred-and-fifty-two-foot memorial that defines the center of Provincetown. It was Max’s idea to climb the tourist monument—and that’s where he and Howie had kissed for the first time.

Howie spent so many hours that summer stretched out naked in the dunes, listening to Max recount stories of his mystical youth among the volcanos of Lake Atitlan or, more recently, as a love rebel in the communes of Lavender Hill. It was Max who would teach Howie his rightful place in the world and unlock his magical gifts.

“We’re in our first Saturn Returns, mi amor,” Max had told him during that metamorphic night of dancing, his beautiful brown skin gleaming with sweat, his eyes lit up from magic mushrooms. “The significance of us is limitless!”

Howie was so desperately in love with him, but by the end of August, despite a summer of discovering and increasing their magical collaboration, Max told Howie the actual limits of their limitlessness. “Come come, don’t cry, mi coraz ó n,” he said. “Neither of us is made for just one love. We are amantes sagrados, the children of Dionysius and Diana—we are fire! We must burn, mi amor! We must burn and love and burn and love! We will change the world!”

Young Howie’s heart broke for the first time that day. But he knew he would rather be proximate to Max’s brilliant light than to search for some lesser, consistent affection. From that point on, he and Max maintained their non-romantic, but passionate, mentor–mentee relationship and eventually, as with the other members of their coven, became family. Howie couldn’t (didn’t want to) imagine his life without Max.

More mental fireflies of Max flashed across Howie’s brain: the night they cast that first spell on the dance floor of the A-House, the discovering of the other blessed ones in their midst, the foundation of their dance coven, their inaugural sacred gathering in the salt marsh at the end of Commercial Street, Max’s nine tortured nights in the dunes composing the sacred Disco Witch Manifesto, all their struggles and triumphs in the wild sixties, and the move to Fire Island in the seventies, where they became island protectors, moving into 44 and ⒈／⒋ Picketty Ruff. So many years of love, sex, and magic until that darkest of days seven years prior when Max broke down sobbing as he showed Howie the crimson lesion on his stomach.

“I have so much yet to do, mi amor, so much,” he’d said. “How will the earth ever forgive me for leaving it too soon?”

Max had been holding on, but how different he looked from the photo the last time Howie had seen him at the autumn equinox. The bittersweet irony of their chosen dance track: “I Will Survive.” But would he? Would anyone? Howie felt those prescient eels of impending doom slither around his gut again. Did the omens indeed foretell something devastating was in the works? If Max could not rally and get out to the island, then they would have an impossible task ahead of them. Without Max we are nothing.

Howie kissed the photo and returned it to the shelf. He then went into the bathroom, flipped on the light, and began to stare at his all-too-human face in the mirror. There they still were, the sagging jowls, those thinning lips, and the eye bags bulging like little worn-out pocketbooks. That he would still be vain at such a moment made him shake his head. The young heart thinks youth will last forever. They believe old farts just appear out of thin air full of wrinkles and regret.

Was that why Joe’s friend Ronnie resented Howie so much? Did he blame their generation for this plague? Did he mistake them for the Darkness? Or was Howie just an awful reminder of the winters yet to come?

Didn’t Ronnie understand? The more one fights the inevitable, the more painful it is. Howie knew that all too well.

“Are we just wasting our time,” he asked his reflection in the mirror, “pretending we will ever be able to make magic again?”

After one long, deep sigh, he switched off the light.