Free Man About Town: A Novel by Mark Merlis Page B

loan. The Gephardt national health insurance plan. Keith, who flirted with him for most of 1979, finally went home with him, and turned out to be wearing a girdle.
    By the time Sam came along, Joel was thirty. He had used up nearly half his life, all the years of saying “No” and then the equally taxing years of saying “My place or yours.” How could he have accomplished anything? Gay had been his profession; everything else had been a sideline. Now he was forty-five, Sam was very possibly gone, and he had nothing, was nothing.
    Harris returned. He looked dismayed to find Joel still there, but covered pretty quickly. “Um … I guess Melanie will be back in a minute. Why don’t you just go on?”
    Go on? What the hell had they been talking about? “Right. I guess … you were asking why these aliens didn’t become citizens.”
    “Uh-huh,” Harris said blandly. He had already lost interest in this question. “Listen, let’s hold off on this till Melanie comes back. There was something else I wanted to ask about.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “AIDS.”
    “AIDS?” Joel’s voice cracked. It was just another health policy issue. Surely Harris just thought: here’s a health guy, I can ask him my AIDS question. Yet Joel felt himself blushing, as if he had given himself away somehow.
    “Yeah,” Harris said. “I hear people with AIDS get Medicare.”
    “Oh. Some of them do, yes, sir.”
    “How come?”
    “Because they … you know, if they get disabled and can’t work, they can get Social Security. And then two years after that they get Medicare.”
    “They have to wait two years for Medicare?”
    “Right.”
    Harris was, astonishingly, taking notes. “Then after that they have it until …”
    “Until they …” Joel repeated. It was creepy, joining Harris in saying “they.” They were
they,
people with AIDS: to Harris they must have seemed as far away as Eskimos, and as unimportant. But they were
they
to Joel as well. Joel and Sam were negative. So were most of the people they knew, those who were still around by 1995. The epidemic had about finished with Joel’s generation and had moved on to kids, with whom he felt only a tepid kinship.
    “So how do they get disability? Just call in and say, ‘Oh, I don’t feel up to teasing anybody’s hair today?’” Harris smiled.
    Joel was supposed to smile, too. He was not supposed to say, “We don’t all do hair.” He didn’t, but at least he didn’t smile.Mr. Integrity. “I … you know, I don’t do Social Security, but I think you’re automatically disabled if you actually have AIDS. If you have HIV but don’t have AIDS yet, there’s a list of, like, symptoms, conditions.”
    Harris sighed. Joel had no sense of humor. Joel was boring. “So they … get something on that list and then two years after that they get Medicare.”
    “Twenty-nine months, actually. I mean, they have to wait five months for their Social Security and then two years after that for the Medicare to kick in.”
    “Twenty-nine months. I guess not everybody … makes it.”
    “No, sir.”
    “So what do they do in the meanwhile? Buy their own insurance?
    “Well, they can’t do that, usually. You know, insurance companies don’t want them.” Joel was encouraged to describe all the insurance problems of people with HIV. COBRA coverage they couldn’t pay for. Limited drug benefits. State programs that required them to impoverish themselves. Probably he went on too long, but Harris listened with surprising attentiveness. Funny that a guy from a rural state should be interested in AIDS. Maybe Melanie was right, maybe the guy really did care about people.
    When Joel ran out of steam, Harris shook his head and said, “My.” He looked off into space for a second. “Anyway, the ones on Medicare. They’re all on disability, none of them are over sixty-five?”
    “Oh, I guess some are. You know, if they got it through a transfusion or something like that.”
    “Uh-huh. But