Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven? Read Online Free PDF Page B

biopsy.”
    “Oh, shit…” Michael said. “Let’s think positive. Do they think it’s—it’s—”
    “I’m a big girl. You can say it. Cancer? They don’t know.”
    Ellie patted my hand and then took a tissue out of her purse.
    “Are you sniveling already?” I asked her. Ellie had bent her head full of flaming red curls.
    “Yes.” She blew her nose.
    “Ellie, we don’t know a damn thing yet.”
    “I know, but…I hate medical stuff. My mother had M.S. Even the sight of the doctor’s office makes me break out in hives.”
    “You’ve never had a mammogram?” I knew she was three years older than I was, and in my research prior to my mammogram, I’d discovered women who had children were less at risk than women like Ellie who’d never had and breastfed children.
    “No. And you know, I don’t think I ever will. I prefer to die oblivious of whatever it is that’s going to kill me.”
    “Ellie…You can’t hide your head in the sand.”
    “Yes, I can.”
    Michael looked at her. “I’m with you. I hope I die in my sleep.”
    I stared from Michael to Ellie. “What a supportive friggin’ pair you turned out to be. One of you is more chicken than the other. Look, whatever happens, I’m instituting a No Crying rule. I came out with you two to cheer me up. You already have me in a pine box. And for the record, I want to be cremated should something go wrong.”
    “Nothing’s going to go wrong,” Michael said soothingly. “Me and you? We’ve been through too much together. And you’re way too unpleasant to die. Too bossy. God will keep you down here for a while until you learn your lesson and start learning to work and play well with others.”
    “Now you’re talking…. Will you go with me a week from Friday when I get the biopsy?”
    “Wild horses and an evil head nurse with rubber gloves and an enema couldn’t keep me away.”
    “Now you’re just being gross.”
    The three of us ordered another round, and by ten o’clock, I was sufficiently calmed down enough to go home to bed. Of course the spot was nothing, I told myself. Besides needing to learn to work and play well with others—which I hadn’t mastered in kindergarten with the rest of the world—my kids needed me. And so did Michael.

8
    Michael
    I couldn’t sleep. Just the thought of Lily needing a biopsy turned my world upside down. And she was right, of course. I am chicken.
    Growing up, I did everything to prove I was a red-blooded American male. I played every sport, was on every varsity team and screwed every girl who’d let me. But my heart was never into it—women, that is, not sports. I was into baseball so obsessively, I could recite the batting average of every Yankee since the team was formed. I used to spend hours in a batting cage. I’d bat until I had to ice my shoulder when I got home.
    I may have been macho on the outside, but inside I was chicken. The thought of admitting I was attracted to men terrified me. But the feeling was there, like a spider on the wall in the corner. Every once in a while, I’d shine a flashlight beam on that spider. Examine it. Then I’d turn off the flashlight, too afraid of whatever else was lurking there.
    After I accepted, to myself, that I was gay, I was terrified of being outed.
    And after I was finally outed, there was a new fear—AIDS. And it was Lily who made me shine the flashlight on that fear.
     
    “Come on,” she said. She was standing in my apartment, circa 1989—back when I had an ugly black leather sofa that I used to stick to if I wore shorts when I sat on it, and LeRoy Neiman prints on my walls—tapping her foot in that impatient way of hers. The big ’80s hair was still big, though not near the heights it was when I’d first met her. Her pale blue eyes were cold—she wasn’t in the mood for my bullshit.
    “Look, Lily, I’m not going. AIDS is a fucking death sentence, and if I have it, I don’t want to know.”
    I plopped down on my leather couch and