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Richard Stevenson

Third man out

1

I almost asked John Rutka if somebody had shot him in the foot-I knew plenty of people who'd have loved to-but before I could, he gave me a look of astonishment and said, "I've been shot. One of them actually shot me. "

"Somebody shot you in the foot?"

"One of them tried to kill him," Eddie Sandifer said, "but they only got him in the foot. "

Sandifer looked stunned too, and uncharacteristically shaky; ordinarily it was these two who inspired anger and fright, and Sandifer seemed unsure of what to make of this turn of events.

"It must have been somebody I outed," Rutka said, and looked down, appalled, at the bandaged foot. "God, they're even sicker than I thought. I knew some of them were pathetic, but this is something only a psychopath would do. "

We all peered down at the foot as if it might add something on its own behalf. I'd walked over to Albany Med from Crow Street to visit yet another dying friend when I ran into Rutka and Sandifer, and we were in the parking lot outside the E. R. , standing in vapors rising from the tarmac after an early evening thunderstorm. Everybody looked purple under the arc lamps, spooky in the urban miasma.

Ambulances coasted in and out through the mist, the Tuesday night torn and traumatized delivered as swiftly and silently as Fed-Exed envelopes. Somebody was probably working on a way to fax them in.

Rutka's wound was to his right foot, which he lifted from the pavement a few inches, his right arm over Sandifer's shoulder for support, while he described the incident. As I listened, I tried to concentrate on the narrative and not become distracted by Rutka's wandering left eye, which, in his excitement, was now all over the place.

The loose eye was Rutka's one physical imperfection, the flaw that confirmed the beauty of his sturdy frame and curly-headed Byronic good looks. Watching Rutka was sometimes like looking at a Romantic poet as rendered by a cubist, and you had to be careful not to let the visual spectacle get in the way of Rutka's spiel, which was forceful in its single-minded way but lacked the quirky surprises of his appearance.

Eddie Sandifer listened with eyes half closed to Rutka's recitation, nodding occasionally as Rutka backed up to clarify a point or add a detail; this was probably the third or fourth time in the past three hours that Rutka had told the story of the shooting, and esthetic considerations were already starting to color the reportage.

From time to time, Sandifer reached up to wipe the purple sweat from his face and head; though in his early thirties, like Rutka, Sandifer was nearly bald, his dome glistening. Bathed in the weird light, the stocky, fair-skinned Sandifer looked like a big, masculine, radioactive baby. Both were wearing jeans and yellow-and-black Queer Nation T-shirts, the two of them composing a walking-and-talking embodiment of postmodern gay liberation ideology: We're queer and we're here to stay and you'd damn well better get used to it.