Rainbows
Nevada, 1991
Gabriel on the bench seat: Kelly-green Chuck Taylor high tops on the dash, grinding a plastic lighter over sticky shreds of pinched-off bud. “Here we g-o-o-o-o-o,” he says, lungs clenched with smoke, more, I think, to the view through the windshield than to me behind the wheel. We tipped a low mountain range an hour out of Reno; we’re dipping slowly now into a wide valley cragged with rock and scrubby brush. “Over the crests, down the craters,” Gabriel says through a throat gripped after a second hit from the pipe, air in the pickup tinged with skunk and burn, cassette deck blasting Lucinda Williams. “Crest and crater all the way,” he says. “Crest and crater to Durango!”
That first night in Reno: stained indoor/outdoor in the lobby, the motel owner reminding us, sari rustling as she walks back from the printer, that we absolutely can not smoke on the premises, Gabriel lighting up soon as the room door shuts. He’s on spring break from his teaching job at a gated private school, his first since leaving Harvard last spring. I last-minute found someone to cover my kitchen shifts, after Gabriel declared let’s get the fuck out of SF—declared his aunt won’t be at her cabin in Colorado, and we should get in his pickup and drive: spend a week just looking at the stars and rowing out in her canoe.
I met Gabriel the day he and a Harvard buddy came over to sell my boyfriend Dean a bag of weed big enough for a chihuahua to sleep on. Dean and I are longtime players in a ring cycle of dysfunction that up to now has had no plausible final act. Not until Gabriel smiled at me and scribbled his number on a corner of my notebook, teasing an escape hatch from the guilt- and mildew-stained apartment where Dean and I torment each other.
Gabriel’s wiry, earnest, adorably awkward; syrup-brown eyes and pale skin. His folks are Palestinian from the West Bank who settled in Orange County: Christian, Reagan-adoring, homophobic. (He’s not out to them.) I play the jaded role in our affair: out for a decade now; mired in a relationship—an arrangement—that’s made me cynical about love, which I’ve decoupled from the need for sex. Gabriel is still in that ecstatic flush of freedom: out at work, his Birks-and-Volvo-wagon school; sharing an apartment in the Castro with three other queers from Harvard. Together they make signs to hoist at political marches, blast Toshi Reagon, and cook vegan dinners. Annoyingly, adorably, they smoke weed together to bond.
Weed has been my nemesis. Living with Dean, not smoking has meant keeping a wide swath of psychic distance, since for Dean getting high is a daily ritual, something he talks about in terms of spiritual practice. I mean, just say you’re a fucking stoner.
I do not trust weed, its inclination to flood the foundation of my world, which, let me tell you, I have barely been keeping stable. I do not trust weed not to tell me that my life needs a major makeover, a task I am afraid to take on since it’ll make me look at how diminished I have let myself become. But somehow with Gabriel, though I’ve only known him a few weeks, I’ve begun to flow cautiously beyond the retrenched borders of my life, the identity (gay; a cook) I built for myself a decade ago, when like Gabriel, I had the courage that comes from being 21.
And Gabriel…well, he clads himself, almost literally, in the optimism of the Pride flag. On the landing outside his front door, he keeps his growing pile of Chuck Taylor high-tops—says he wants a pair in every color made. His collection so far includes brown and cat’s-tongue pink; blues ranging from powder to cobalt; greens and turquoise and porpoise gray; red, orange, Lemonhead yellow, lesbian purple: a scrambled rainbow of queer definitude. Each morning, as he leaves the apartment, he sits on a step to channel the day’s imperative from an array of possibilities.
As I spend more and eventually all my evenings in Gabriel’s room, I let myself float on his energy, his fearlessness. I take the pipe when he passes it and a new world opens within the borders of the old, a place wiped of much of the pessimism and mistrust I’ve let sprout and spread across my 10-year slog with Dean, how we kept each other mutually captive in a cage bent from our blended neuroses.
The night the Gulf War begins—Gabriel’s portable TV flickering with tracer fire over Baghdad—we hear the booming No Blood for Oil protest rallying in Dolores Park echo up to the Castro. “John, fuck! We have to go right now.” We’re already high (higher than I thought) but take another hit to fortify us. The walk down 17th Street, one I know so well, tonight feels like a stoners’ quest down gluey, unfamiliar blocks stretching on and on, as if we’d exited Gabriel’s building into an unknown world, where a shadow city lurks peripherally, more sensed than seen. We don’t actually make it to the march—we give up, perch in the window of a taqueria, munching burritos and chips, flashing thumbs-ups to stragglers with signs. We hike slowly back to the apartment, the familiar blocks and buildings settling partially into place.
In our Reno motel room, a sheet of glossy rainbow stickers slides to the bed from Gabriel’s daypack.
I say, “What are these?”
“We’re putting these wherever we stop,” he says. “Bringing pride to the wilderness.”
“Gabriel, some redneck is gonna kill us.”
“Fuck ‘em,” he says. “Are you proud or not? I’m serious, John.”
“I’m proud but I don’t wanna be dead.”
Even in San Francisco, brutal attacks were a risk of being visible. There were 70 murders of queer and trans people documented in 1989, and more than 7,000 reports of homo- and transphobic violence: an undercount (duh) since a dozen states don’t even bother gathering data. AIDS has stitched an even more irresistible target on gay bodies—the lies and misinformation; the evil of Rush Limbaugh, mocking and cheering the deaths of faggots to his radio millions.
Whether or not Gabriel wants to see it, Nevada is a red zone.
He slaps a sticker on the motel ice machine in Reno the morning we leave; sticks one to a topographic diorama at a vista overlook after we’re on the road. We stop to pee at a gas station outside Fallon. I go the men’s after him and see it: shockingly bright, bubbled where it hasn’t gone full contact with the scratched and cloudy mirror. Each time we stop there’s the peel and smack, the hustle to the pickup, Gabriel flashing his let’s-get-the-fuck-outta-here grin.
Within hours, my resistance to these guerrilla acts evaporates. At a park in Winnemucca, I grab a sheet of stickers, peel one off and clap it to the glass of a notice board. “Wooooo!” Gabriel says back at the truck, palm raised for a high-five. “You’re a criminal!”
We stop for the night in Elko, at a cheap old hotel with a sad casino in the lobby filled with aged RV cowboys and stiff-haired women in tracksuits. Our room has a pale green Jacuzzi tub sanded with dust that must have filtered in from the desert.
Next morning we pack up the truck and stop at a diner before hitting the highway. “Back in a minute,” Gabriel says between ordering and the pancakes and grabs his shoulder bag. I’m just finishing my coffee when the waitress, middle-aged—jeans and Reba shirt—says in a low voice, suddenly grave, “I saw what you did in there.”
“Yeah? What’s that?” Gabriel says.
All I can think is how we got cocky. How there’s a baggie of weed in Gabriel’s backpack, just waiting for those cops at the counter to find. How we’re fucked.
“I’m a tolerant person,” she says, dropping the check. “But not everybody round here’s like me. Y’all be careful.”
Her warning chills the hell out of me, but calms me, too. It’s confirmation that the rainbows we’ve been leaving have been seen; that they have a truth that’s undeniable, that they have the power to bend, even in some infinitesimal way, the arc of human understanding. They mark Gabriel and me as existing. They pay shiny witness that people were—are—gay here, do gay shit, lock legs in churning, washed-out Jacuzzis, have gay dreams. Sorry to violate your sense of prudence, Reba lady. It’s all I can handle to violate mine.
We climb the highway out of town, up the last range and onto the western Utah plateau, into a dryness that feels squeezed out of the vast, glaring sky.
A rainbow—the kind that arches across a landscape—is a trick of perception. Its conditions can be ambient but invisible, until the subjective conditions are right and it beams into view. A trail of rainbows along an arid, hostile route is an act of provocation, a souvenir map of my affair with Gabriel (which we both know has a looming expiration date), and the plotting, for me, of the possible arc of a life after Dean, one in which I take care of myself; one in which I maybe find someone who loves me for real, likewise Dean. As for us, Gabriel and me, we are delivered at last from this state’s crests and craters, speeding eastward in a truck stinking of weed. #
It still breaks my heart that a rainbow strikes such fear in certain places and people. A rainbow, I learned in 2nd grade happens when it is raining and the sun is shining. Natural, beautiful, surprising. A gift. Just like a trail of stickers. Just like the people.