Even if it hadn’t been next to the Rite Aid where I bought my lice shampoo, the Out of the Closet on Sunset would have been hard to miss. The thrift store was attached to an AIDS Healthcare Foundation Pharmacy. Strapped to the roof of the building, a fifteen-foot inflatable muscle man flexed his biceps. Free HIV Tests read the sash across his chest.
The counselor who administered the test handed me the certificate verifying I was negative—my clean bill of health—and shook a basket of free condoms at me. The wrappers were red with the word Love written across the front in white letters, like Valentines. “Remember, use lots of lube,” he said, as if I were limping because I hadn’t thought to. I’d had anal sex with only five people in my life, but I wasn’t that naive. I knew to use lube.
What can you see about me that I can’t? I remember wondering.
Corey pulled up as I was coming home. We’d been messaging on gay.com for the past week and I was disappointed to see he wasn’t worse looking. A big lug of a guy with flouncy brown hair, he didn’t appear to be missing any digits, and when he took off his Ray-Bans both eyes tracked me darting into his field of vision. I had liked that his profile was un-Hollywood: no sizzle reels, shirtless selfies, or YouTube videos with adorable dogs. I’d thought I might have a chance.
I felt bad for the guys I met online. Based on how I presented myself, it’d be reasonable to expect a shaggy blond camp counselor ready to scramble up a boulder. It wasn’t a lie, exactly, just not the complete picture. While I loved to jog in the Hollywood Hills with my roommate, Katie, and while I did resemble a camp counselor, the able avatar I created online would fall apart the second I stepped toward these internet beaus, no matter how flat I tried to walk, how earnestly I attempted to roll from heel to toe or swing my right arm. My limp made me the damaged goods people warned you about on the web.
The alternative, I figured, was to add “super-minor case of cerebral palsy” to my profile and end up with an even sadder inbox. I took my chances instead.
I showed Corey the Band-Aid where the counselor had pricked my finger and told him he better get tested soon, in case this was going somewhere. Corey laughed and said he’d just gotten tested, too.
“And?” I asked.
He smiled an easy smile and I made out a toothpick-sized gap between his two front teeth. His chin was weak, his voice deep and charmingly doltish, like a surfer’s. “Negative,” he declared. “And by the way, hi.”
A wave of relief larger than I’d like to admit whooshed through me. Growing up closeted in Utah, I’d been taught to think of LA as a cesspool of crime and HIV. Two nights before leaving Salt Lake, I went to a Bret Easton Ellis movie that took place in LA in the glamorous 1980s. The film featured Kim Basinger injecting drugs into Billy Bob Thornton’s penis and ended with a chick in a gold bikini roasting on the beach as she died of AIDS.
It was obvious: moving to a bigger city meant bigger risks.
I was totally going to be the girl in the gold bikini.
Corey offered to drive and I hoisted myself into his truck, casually lifting in my right leg after me. I had my usual arsenal of excuses at the ready: “tight tendons,” “born with it,” “not in pain or anything.” For the first few minutes of the drive I was glad he didn’t ask about it, and then I started to get annoyed. What’s your deal, buddy, I wanted to say. Didn’t you notice my limp? Are you some kind of asshole?
The truth hit me with a pleasurable pang: He’s a little nervous.
Corey had a decal from the Catholic high school he’d attended in his rear window and a school picture of his little brother, Miles, on his dashboard. “That’s some ’fro,” I said, pointing to the orb of curls engulfing Miles’s cherubic face.
It was all the invitation Corey needed to spend the rest of the date, at a Mexican restaurant in Silver Lake, bragging about Miles’s college prospects and SAT scores. “He’s smart in school and dumb in life,” Corey said, not without pride.
Corey didn’t use the term Asperger’s, not at first, though it was easy enough to piece together. I recognized many of Miles’s proclivities, as described by Corey, from my little sister, Chelsea: an endearing if overpowering inability to go with the flow of a conversation or speak at an appropriate volume, the trouble making friends and clumsiness with social cues, the detachment that could read as bratty or immature. I also identified with how much Corey adored his younger sibling. Miles and Chelsea were just one year apart in age. “If it doesn’t work out with us maybe we’ll set them up,” I said. “Or even if it does.”
The waitress brought out our beers on a tray. Picking at the label on mine, I apologized for being so in Corey’s face about getting tested earlier. I’d just watched my dad slowly die of ALS. Plus, my mom had cancer. She was back in Utah with weird, wonderful Chelsea.
“Anyway, that’s why I’m a total hypochondriac,” I said.
My leg tightened under the table and I had to work to keep from wincing. In addition to CP, I have what my brother refers to as “verbal diarrhea.” I say something harmless like “I’m a total hypochondriac” and then find myself bringing up pertinent if unflattering anecdotes such as the time I caught crabs on a family cruise in the Mediterranean. The trip was a last hurrah before my dad went on a respirator, and given that we were sometimes sharing pool towels, I’d had to come clean to my entire family in the ship’s formal dining room as Chelsea threw dinner rolls at my mom.
“The thing is,” I whispered to Corey across our two top, “I hadn’t had sex for months.”
“It sounds like you’re not a hypochondriac,” Corey said, picking up my hushed tone. “It sounds like you had crabs.”
But where’d they come from, these immaculate crabs? It couldn’t possibly have been the theater major with the cute accordion bong who I’d hooked up with a few months before college graduation. No, like many before me, I blamed a pair of chinos I’d tried on at a Banana Republic outlet days before our flight to Barcelona.
Probably because of what I still insisted were the mysterious circumstances of my first outbreak, I remained paranoid about crabs for years, periodically shaving my body hair and lathering my crotch stubble with specialty shampoos.
This habit followed me to Los Angeles.
Leaving clumps of hair in the wastebasket by the toilet, I’d limp to the Rite Aid across Sunset for yet another lice kit. Lather, rinse, nit comb, repeat. I even thought I spotted a crab crawling from Katie’s sports bra on one of our jogs, a false alarm compounded by my misuse of the word midriff. I’d meant cleavage. The crab turned out to be a clump of mascara.
A consultation with a dermatologist in Salt Lake over Thanksgiving revealed that the red spots crawling from my hairless abdomen to my chin were not pubic lice but a staph infection for which I needed antibiotics. My crabs had gone from immaculate to delusional.
“And how are the crabs now?” Corey asked, scratching at a spot behind his ear.
“Gone,” I said. I didn’t add that I kept a nit comb and shampoo under the bathroom sink just in case of a recurrence.
When Corey didn’t slip away to the bathroom, never to return, I thought I just might invite him over.
I lived in a turquoise house on Harold Way with my brother, Danny, and Katie, my best friend from college. The three of us had moved to Los Angeles together to make it as writers: Danny kept up a comedy blog and was going to screenwriting school at USC; a journalism major like me, Katie worked as a personal assistant out of a famous media mogul’s Brentwood mansion; and I stayed home and edited the two short stories I’d written in college. I was applying to get my MFA. As a side project Katie and I were also adapting, on spec, one of Roald Dahl’s adult stories, “The Great Switcheroo.” We had a recycling bin full of bottles of Two-Buck Chuck to prove it.
Our street, like our lives, was what you might call “showbiz-adjacent.” Harold Way was sandwiched between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards. At the end of the block sat a derelict motel, the sort that could plausibly be closed off for both premium cable shoots and the sleazy activities they depicted. News choppers circled low. One night after I’d moved out, Danny drove home from Del Taco to discover cop cars blocking our street, their lights swirling: a fugitive had been captured in our driveway. Harold Way was where police chases came to an end.
Why did it feel so much like home? Our landlady, Maripat, had raised the funds to buy this crumbling block of Hollywood by playing a nun in a one-woman show. Red-faced and usually wearing a Hawaiian shirt, Maripat lived three doors down from us with her girlfriend Glinda and a gang of chihuahuas named after Chicago mobsters. She wrote emails in all caps and, like a nun, threatened to line us up and slap us across the face whenever we left our security door flapping open at night. It had been installed backwards so coming or going made you feel like you were in a behavioral psychology experiment. When the plumbing backed up, Maripat shouted in our front lawn, “You tell Katie to stop flushing her tampons down the toilet!”
Katie’s godmother, Maripat’s long-suffering sister, was an interior designer. She had decorated our house, stringing our single bathroom with Christmas lights, sponge painting the living room purple with gold stenciling. A candy-colored acrylic chandelier hung in the kitchen, where you’d also find a pallet of Diet Coke and an overflowing trash can filled with the brown paper towels I used as coffee filters. A glorious midlife crisis of a place, we called it “the bungalow.”
A pot a day plus the shared-bathroom sitch turned me into the bungalow’s outdoor water feature, forever whizzing into some ivy off the back patio. A rocking chair sat on the front porch and a lemon tree dropped its bounty onto the hood of my dad’s hulking Lexus at the back of our skinny driveway. Around the corner from a Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, Harold Way always smelled like fried chicken, except for the time someone down the block ran over a skunk.
Corey entered our stanky lair with low-key aplomb. It took me the second half of that first date to determine that much of what he had told me about himself wasn’t true. This is not a testament to my skepticism or detective work. Corey’s lies were guileless—he was a couch potato of a liar. The first fib was that he had gone to Berkeley. In an unlucky break for Corey, it just so happened that Danny had also gone to Berkeley. Naturally, when the two met over drinks at our kitchen table, the subject came up. Danny asked where on campus Corey had lived. “Where did I live?” Corey said. He took a quick swig, looking up at the chandelier as if he might divine the answer there. “Sort of all over.”
I’d visited my brother only a few times in college. Most of one homecoming weekend I’d spent blacked out in a side room in his frat that had been filled with packing peanuts. But even I could recall a handful of street names and major landmarks. Corey had never heard of Noah’s Bagels, Zachary’s Pizza, Telegraph Avenue—places I knew just from being alive.
“Telegraph, yeah, that sounds right,” Corey said. “I lived there. Around there.”
At the end of the night, Danny and I rolled our white picket fence slash security gate aside so Corey could back out of the driveway. “Your boyfriend is full of shit,” Danny said, giving him a friendly wave. “But he’s probably just trying to impress you. Either that or he’s homeless.”
We watched Corey’s brake lights blink at the end of the block and disappear around the corner. The palm readers, payday lenders, and weed dispensaries on Gower would be open for business now, neon signs lighting up their windows. The night air smelled deliciously of fried chicken, hashish, and something else: possibility.
Someone trying to impress me? I liked the sound of that.
Walking home from 24 Hour Fitness one crisp morning, I got a call from Corey telling me he had been fired from his job as a construction site manager. Though typically mopey, from what I could tell, he’d already tied his mattress to the flatbed of his truck. He was leaving behind his Santa Monica apartment, and his annoying roommates, and moving back in with his mom and Miles about forty-five minutes down the interstate in Santa Ana.
I hit the walk button to cross Gower. “That happened fast.”
“I was subletting,” he said. “Hey, aren’t you going to tell me you’re sorry I had a rough day?” He let just a bit of irritation creep into his voice.
“Of course,” I said. “That really sucks. Can I help you move?”
“Nope, all good,” he said, “but I’d like to take you out. Do I get a second date?”
“I can’t turn you down now,” I said.
Corey came over and made out with me in the driveway for a good two minutes. For starters, he’d already gotten rehired at his old job at a fuel dock in Newport Beach, and for another—here he pulled a red T-shirt out of his backpack and tossed it to me—he was the newest part-time deckhand on the Balboa Island Ferry. “Look on the back,” he said proudly. “See how it says crew? They only give these shirts to actual crew members. I stole one for you.”
Sure, it was a little fishy that Corey had lost his job, found two new ones, and moved within days of meeting me, but I was struck by the modesty of his invention, if that’s what it was: this “Berkeley” grad had gone from being a construction worker in Santa Monica to a gas station attendant in Newport Beach. Big whoop. We were in a recession. I never even got a response to the job applications I filled out.
Until I did. Sort of.
On a Wednesday night in March, about a month after meeting Corey, I received an email from the director of the Michener Center for Writers in Austin. All the coffee had paid off. The promise of a funded, three-year fellowship lay before me. My writing career—if that’s what I now had—was taking me to Texas. I’d be moving by the middle of July.
Corey turned down my offer to celebrate at Disneyland with Katie. He was disappointed I’d be skipping town; he was also happy for me. It took the pressure off. We figured we should enjoy each other for whatever time we had left, not worry about our relationship status. We didn’t have sex, not for that first month of seeing each other. I had a swimsuit rash and an appointment at a free clinic on Melrose: I wanted to make sure the rash wasn’t herpes. Plus, I wasn’t ready to take off my jeans and explain the surgical scars on the backs of my legs and have my flaccid penis poked at. My limp didn’t bother him, but I was scared Corey wouldn’t want to see me anymore if he found out I’d never topped anyone, ever, that I doubted I could. That I both struggled to get hard and came too easily.
Corey proved worth the wait. One of the great lays of my life, he was gentle with my stiff legs, patient with my temperamental parts. The subject of me topping never came up, though he’d boyishly offer to blow me when he got drunk. Sober, Corey was squeamish about anything that smacked of passivity. He was the top. “Masc.” A dude’s dude. Give him a beer or four, though, and he’d camp it up, rolling his eyes and lisping, a giant grin on his face. It felt good to let Corey inside the tight coil of my body, to give up control. I’d be so relaxed when he left I’d walk into walls as I made my way up the stairs to Katie’s attic bedroom to tell her all about it. There was JBFed and then there was JBCed: Just Been Coreyed.
Every ten days or so, Corey drove the hour north to hang out at the bungalow. We weren’t exclusive. I went on dates with a guy whose WASP roots stretched back to the Mayflower and who enjoyed John Irving novels as much as I did. And I gleefully hooked up with the guy who hosted me during my program visit in Austin that spring. (What can I say? His condo complex had a sauna.) But I was happiest with down-to-earth Corey. He was the first guy I ever knew who called me handsome to my face. “Hey, handsome,” he’d say, and I’d stand there blushing, astonished at how good it felt.
“You know what you’re getting with a guy like Corey,” Danny said, brushing pretzel crumbs from his lap. “His ancestors weren’t butt fucking on the Mayflower, I’ll tell you that. Life with him means hanging out on a fart-stained couch.”
Danny meant this as a compliment. Corey was great at hanging out on our couch.
When we weren’t boning, we’d go on dates to the Getty or the La Brea Tar Pits. We’d walk around Hollywood Forever, tossing bits of granola bars to the cemetery’s peacocks and marveling at the tombstones that, anywhere else, would have been roadside attractions: the granite replica of the Atlas missile, the bronze statue of Johnny Ramone humping his electric guitar. Corey teased me when I left a stone on Estelle Getty’s grave. Hiking in Griffith Park, he playfully flipped off my camera and snuck kisses during a laser show at the observatory. He’d make me laugh when he told stories of playing tricks on his dad, bleaching his hair as a teenager and earning badges as an Indian Guide, the YMCA’s version of the Boy Scouts.
Generally speaking, Corey was as sketchy as he could be sweet. He’d stand me up and then text the next morning about how he’d hit his head in his dad’s garage and sustained a concussion. I’d offer to meet him somewhere in Orange County and save him the drive to Hollywood and he’d turn me down. After a night of being standoffish, he almost passed out at a Dr. Dog concert at the Palladium and had to go take a seat in an armchair in the lobby. “What is up with you?” I shouted over the music. “Why are you being weird?”
Corey mentioned once or twice that his dad was Jewish, mostly as a way of putting him down. I’d find out later from Miles that their mom identifies as Native Californian, descending from the indigenous inhabitants of the state. It was a heritage Corey openly rebelled against. If he said the word “Mexican,” it was usually with the word “dirty” in front of it, even if we were out in public—at the ArcLight, say, as the lights dimmed.
“Dude, why are you being racist and anti-Semitic against yourself?” I hissed. I said “dude” sparingly, and, in my estimation, to devastatingly bro-ey effect.
The only time I ever saw Corey really lose it was when he tried to use chopsticks at a pho place in Silver Lake. I remember him throwing them down and banging the table with his open palm so hard I jumped in my seat.
“Hey, it’s not like I’m great with them either,” I offered.
Corey’s dad had accidentally backed over Corey’s right hand when he was five or six and he couldn’t spread his fingers or make a fist. I hardly noticed the scar, but he carried the trauma of the accident with him all these years later. He told me his dad once threw him against the wall, that his dad had wanted his mom to abort Miles when she’d gotten pregnant.
Corey’s parents divorced when he was fifteen, and in a fit of anger, Corey had accused his dad of turning him gay. That’s how Corey had come out of the closet, not with tears and hugs and his mom giving off-color advice about hooking up with men and women to see which he liked best, as mine had, but with a shouted accusation. It was hard not to laugh at the story the way Corey told it, using his dad’s prejudice against him, but I could tell there was also real pain there.
Now that I was leaving Los Angeles for grad school, I gave up any pretense of finding work and spent my days reading literary fiction and AIDS memoirs on our back patio, library books and coffee mugs piling up around me.
The epidemic was an obsession of mine, even more so than it is for a lot of gay men who came of age in the ’90s. I turned anxiety about my disability and my parents’ terminal illnesses into hypochondria, and hypochondria into humor. Not good humor, mind you, but humor. After hooking up one afternoon, I joked that a birthmark on Corey’s thigh was a lesion he was trying to cover with makeup. I’d read about an actor doing that very thing in a tell-all memoir on my nightstand. “You’re a jerk,” Corey mumbled.
This reaction in itself was surprising. I’d expected Corey to laugh.
I spent the rest of the night walking back my stupid joke.
Still, I wanted him to buy firming cream for the bags under his eyes and told him he needed to see a dermatologist about the acne on his legs. He claimed he already had seen a doctor about the outbreak: it was from not toweling off properly after the shower. And maybe his semen would be less watery if he started working out?
“Eat a dick,” he told me.
“OK,” I said with a shrug.
It would be easy to make too much of these warning signs. Even when I look back at pictures of Corey today, it’s impossible to spot the ravages of illness. What I see is a depressed person. Corey’s graphic tees and 511 Levi’s are stylish, but he needs to shave the scruff off his cheeks. And for the record, my catty observations about the bags under his eyes were said in the context of him being a healthy, good-looking-if-schlubby twenty-five-year-old, like me. We were both sweethearts, playing with bitchiness like it was a lighter. That was our thing. I figured because of the whole Jewish-Mexican hunk vibe Corey had going, his skin was a little different from mine, more prone to irritation. Was that a thing?
In his driver’s license picture, taken just a few years earlier, Corey was downright chubby. Only in retrospect would I recognize the wrinkled flab on his stomach as a sign of catastrophic weight loss, as if the fat had been lipo-ed off rather than slowly burned away through diet and exercise. Far from alarmed at his recent downsizing, I made fun of him for being a former fatty. He put his hands on my butt and pulled me toward him. “You don’t seem to mind when I’m doing you,” he said. It was true: I didn’t even have to touch myself to come against the flab of his belly.
Corey wanted to follow me to Texas, but he had his brother and mom to look after in the OC. I felt relieved he couldn’t move with me, and then guilty for feeling relieved. I’d only just started feeling confident enough about my lame body to date. This was my big adventure. I wanted it to be mine. I wanted to play the field. But would Corey be willing to drive with me to Texas?
When he made the bumpy descent into Salt Lake, the starting point for our road trip, I took him home and introduced him to my mom and little sister. Later, when I was 90 percent sure they’d gone to bed, I pulled Corey outside by his busted hand and had him make love to me on a lawn chair by the pool in the backyard as I looked up at the starless purple night. I’d always wanted to do that.
On our drive south, we got caught in a lightning storm in Arizona. Stuck on the freeway because of a flash flood warning, we watched patrolmen pile sandbags along the side of the road and poke the beams of their flashlights into the cars in front of us. I gave up on our audiobook. It was Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Corey would not stop imitating the monotone of the British actress doing the reading. “Have it your way,” I said. I turned off the car and we watched the lightning cross the sky like we were at a drive-in movie. I gave Corey a blowjob but he gagged at the suggestion of returning the favor. “I hate swallowing,” he said.
In Texas, Corey built my IKEA bookshelf, desk, and chairs. Sometimes he got cranky but he was mostly a good sport. He picked out an expensive couch at Crate and Barrel and then guilted me into buying it by making fun of me in front of the saleslady. “You’re getting that couch,” he said. “You should own one nice thing.”
It was red, midcentury modern, and I still have it.
Corey cleaned the bugs out of my light fixtures, hung curtains, and drove me to two Costcos across town from one another to buy a TV. We walked to a place playing live music on South Congress one night and I tried to make him race me down the street. All he would do was call after me that I was being a dick. He wouldn’t swim in Barton Springs or eat at Whataburger. He hated Whataburger. He wouldn’t even try tacos. “I have a sensitive stomach,” he said. Friends ask me now what Corey did eat, if not burgers or tacos, and I tell them the truth: I can’t remember. What I do remember is that we watched Clint Eastwood movies on my living room floor and had so much sex Corey said he felt like his dick was broken.
One of our last nights together, lying on my mattress on the floor, Corey told me he loved me. “I love you too,” I replied. “I love you like a brother.”
Corey rolled out of bed and said he would sleep on the floor. Downstairs.
After fifteen minutes or so, I followed him downstairs to find him drinking a bottle of water in the kitchen. The anger was gone, replaced by a sadness he’d never let me see before. I didn’t realize until then how much he cared about me.
He told me how lucky I was to get to move to Austin and start a new life.
“You can visit,” I tried. “You’ll have your own bathroom.”
My new place had three.
“I love you,” he tried again, looking me full in the eyes.
“I know,” I said, feeling my scalp prickle. “I love you too.”
It was the easy thing to say. I wish now we’d had it out, cried, screamed. Things might have turned out differently. Next I knew, I was lying on the floor with my foot in his lap and he was spreading my bunched toes. In the shower, I asked him if he would say yes if I proposed. He looked down at his large, pale feet. “Probably.”
When you’re young, such a remarkable turn of events is possible: over the course of a single night, even a single hour, you can go from loving someone like a brother to floating a marriage proposal.
Corey stayed with me for two weeks. At the end of our time together, I gave him an orange Longhorns cap and kissed him goodbye at the airport. He told me he loved me and I thought he might cry. I hurried out my own I love you. He looked cute in his new hat. “No one’s being shipped off to war,” I said. “No one’s dying. We can always Skype.”
My first weeks as a Michener were filled with workshop, after-class beers at Crown & Anchor, and talking to Corey. We’d Skype and chat at the same time, typing long strings of gibberish to each other when the screen froze or we got disconnected.
I was stoked to see that Corey was experiencing a personal renaissance. He was all about taking night classes in Long Beach to become a high school history teacher or a psychiatrist. “You should see the looks people give me when I tell them I went to Berkeley,” Corey said. He joined a gym, went running, cut his hair, lost even more weight. He seemed to be coming out of a years-long funk. “Now all we have to do is get rid of those bags under your eyes,” I said. “Let’s raid the MAC counter.”
Corey and I Skyped less as the fall progressed. I assumed it was coming from my end. I was dating the writer who’d hosted me during my program visit. We spent one Saturday reading naked on the rocks of Hippie Hollow and arguing about what he should call the spaceship in his Mars novel. My vote, for reasons I’ve now forgotten, was DietCoke.com.
“The writer’s giving me a bed frame,” I reported to Corey.
“I’m gonna beat that guy up,” Corey said, playfully jealous.
Corey sent a card for my twenty-sixth birthday in October. You have changed my life for the better. Love, Corey. He called on my birthday, too, but I was at a café on Lake Austin with the writer and didn’t answer. I Skyped with him the next day to scold him for not singing “Happy Birthday” to my voicemail. I felt bad for not answering.
“Do you want me to sing to you right now?” he asked. “I will if you want me to.”
“No,” I said.
A smile spread across his pixelated cheeks. “Do you want me to?”
The writer broke up with me a week after my birthday. Among other things, he did not appreciate me calling his spaceship DietCoke.com. I started to think that maybe Corey really was the one for me. Maybe he should move to Austin so we could make a go of it. “Let’s at least spend New Year’s together,” I told him, tilting my laptop down so he could see the Crate and Barrel couch he’d picked out, finally delivered to my living room. “You’d look good in a tux.”
“I would,” he agreed.
The last time I talked to Corey he had a cough—not a racking cough or a hacking cough, a dry cough or a wet cough. Just an everyday, regular old cough. He said he couldn’t video chat because his computer was broken. It occurs to me that he probably said this because he didn’t want me to see just how much more weight he had lost, how he struggled to breathe.
In mid-October, the Michener Center gave us free passes to the Austin Film Festival and I took full advantage, going to movie after movie. I had just come out of a Friday night screening of I Love You Phillip Morris when I got a call from Corey’s best friend, Elizabeth. I didn’t know what to make of it. Corey had mentioned her in passing, but we’d never spoken. My dad’s Lexus was still splattered with bugs from the drive to Texas, and finding it in the lot, I hesitated at the thought of leaning against it. The lights above were crowded with bugs, too.
Elizabeth told me that, last night, Corey had been admitted to the intensive care ward of a hospital in Orange County and treated for pneumonia. They had intubated him and pumped a quart and a half of fluid from beneath his lungs and said he was going to be fine. “He didn’t want me to tell you, but I figure if my boyfriend was in the hospital I would want to know,” she said.
I had the urge to correct Elizabeth, tell her Corey and I weren’t technically together, but I settled for saying thanks and to keep me posted.
Why wouldn’t Corey want his friend to tell me he was sick?
I went to a movie at the Alamo Drafthouse on Sixth Street the next day with my new classmate, Mary. Mary was from Jackson, Mississippi, in her early thirties, divorced. She already had an agent and a published story collection. She’d been in McSweeney’s. I thought of her as a lady.
In the middle of the movie, I got a call from Corey’s phone and excused myself to the lobby, expecting to hear a pneumonia-weakened wheeze.
“Hi!” I said. “Corey! How are you feeling?”
“This isn’t Corey. This is Miles. Corey’s brother.”
“What’s that?” I pressed the phone to the side of my face, folded my other ear shut to hear better. “It’s sort of loud in here. I can’t understand you.”
I went out to the sidewalk, and when that was even louder, back inside to the lobby. Eventually, I found a nook near the front door where I could just make out Miles’s words on the other end of the line. Like Elizabeth, I’d never spoken to him besides shouted hellos during my phone conversations with Corey, never seen him except for that picture Corey kept in his truck. Miles would say “Hi, Greg!” in the background and Corey would relay the message. “Miles says hi.”
“Corey is gone,” Miles said. He sounded clinical, more grown-up than you’d imagine possible from a college freshman who had just lost his only sibling.
“What do you mean he’s gone?” I asked.
“He’s gone,” Miles repeated matter-of-factly. “I’m looking at him right now.”
The incongruity of this statement made my leg go rigid: Corey was gone but also present. Miles was in the room with him, right then, watching him not breathe.
At the end of the call, I went back into the darkened theater and took my seat on the aisle. The movie dragged on for another hour with bad jokes about rednecks and musical numbers with fiddle and banjo. I kept the screen in my periphery, turning my face away from Mary, feeling, as I picked at the Philly cheese steak I’d ordered, like one of those people who does weird things after committing a crime. Corey was dead. What else was there to do but settle my check and wait for the credits?
I must have been curt with Mary because as we left the Drafthouse and came out into the bright afternoon, she wanted to know, in her soft Southern cadence, if I was mad at her. “Things are about to get very short story-ish,” I said, starting to cry.
I laid out the situation with Corey and told Mary I wanted to keep walking around. The festival ran for only a few more days and I didn’t want to ruin her chance to meet other writers in the city both of us had lived in for just a few months. Mary said, “No. We should get you home.”
On the walk back to my car, I told Mary what a terrible person I was, how I insisted to Corey that we weren’t together after my move to Austin, how I dated other people while I was dating Corey. “We just seemed so casual,” I said.
“How old are you?” Mary asked.
I told her.
“You’re young,” she said. “You can’t blame yourself for not being ready.”
Once I was settled back at home, Miles called again and asked if I was sitting down. Instinctively, I got up and paced around the red couch, Corey’s couch. I sensed what Miles was going to say before he said it: Corey had succumbed to PCP, pneumocystis pneumonia. At the time of his death, he had a T-cell count of twenty-two and what Miles described as “full-blown AIDS.” I found an unopened envelope on the coffee table and wrote “22” and “full-blown AIDS” on the back of it and circled them again and again in pen.
“How are you holding up?” I asked.
“Not very well,” Miles said. “You?”
“Same,” I said.
I still don’t know if Corey got tested when I met him, or ever. What I do know is that he lied to my face about it half a dozen times. He’d roll on a condom and come inside me or let me swallow his come without so much as a heads-up.
Miles’s tone remained clinical as he relayed what the doctors were telling him and his mom. Judging from Corey’s state of physical collapse at the time of his death, he had contracted HIV in his late teens and fought the disease for years without seeking treatment or, apparently, telling anyone close to him he was sick, an especially baffling thing to do considering he had been out to his family for a decade. The doctors said Corey would have needed to come in four or five years earlier to have a real shot at prolonging his life. He was doomed from the day we met.
After hanging up with Miles, I found Corey’s JetBlue itinerary in my email. He’d flown back to Long Beach on Friday, August 13. That made it seventy days since we’d had sex, almost enough time for me to be through the window period, the time between when you’re infected and when you’ll test positive.
Not for the first time since my move, I missed Harold Way, and not for any of the normal nostalgic reasons but for the Out of the Closet on Sunset. It was open Saturdays. No testing center in Austin could say the same, at least none that I could find, and all the thrift stores were just thrift stores. Out of reasonable options, I called Mary and asked her to drive me to the emergency room. When they wouldn’t give me an HIV test after hours of waiting, we prowled East Sixth Street looking for a testing center on wheels. A nurse had said she thought there was such a thing, a bloodmobile for STDs, that they rolled it out on weekends.
Walking up to food trucks, I’d ask, “Is there an AIDS van around here?”
“Sorry, man,” one guy said. “We do brisket.”
We must have made a funny pair, inching along the busy street in Mary’s white Accord. As if we needed to look more like lost out-of-towners, Mary’s car had a Mississippi license plate in back and a pink Patty Peck dealership plate in front. It was like driving around in the Flannery O’Connor–mobile.
Sunday was agony, not knowing if I was positive, not knowing if my whole life would be different from here on out. I sobbed and wandered around my condo naked, hating my body, missing Corey, hating Corey, staring at my face in the mirror. I tried to write. I tried to remember if the condom ever broke. As far as I could remember we’d always used one. Even when we’d had sex in my mom’s backyard? I dunno, I thought so. It’s not like Corey had resisted the idea. He hadn’t been fanatical about it, either, hadn’t made extra sure, as would be common courtesy for someone at his most contagious. How could he not treat a treatable disease? How could he abandon Miles? I wanted to spit in his face. I wanted to ask him why he’d never told me, though of course I knew: it was the same reason I didn’t mention my leg in dating profiles. The fear of an empty inbox. I kept picturing him dead in a hospital bed.
I felt like an idiot for not calling him out on all his fibs, for thinking I could move away from home and live the life of a normal person without contracting a deadly disease. I let dark fantasies overtake me. My tongue was covered in thrush. My lymph nodes were swollen. My groin was spotted in what must have been Kaposi’s sarcoma. I remembered a time in May when I had a sore on my lip, another time when I cut myself shaving. Had he used the razor?
Determined not to panic my mom, I decided to consult her girlfriend Claire. Claire had been my mom’s cancer surgeon when I was in high school, removing a series of basal cell carcinomas from the top of her head. The two had kept in touch over the years, even after Claire moved home to Minneapolis to take a position at a university hospital. When my dad died, she had stepped in to take care of my mom, and as improbable as it was, the two had fallen in love and now found themselves in a long-distance relationship. They wore each other’s engagement rings, flew back and forth for visits. I should have guessed they’d be together.
“Hi, Greg,” Claire said when I called. “Your mom’s right here. Let me get her.”
Before I could stop her, Claire passed the phone to my mom and I broke down.
Mom was surprisingly calm. She told me she’d devote all her time and money to helping me stay healthy. They’d clear out the guest room in Claire’s apartment. I could move to Minnesota and get treatment under her care.
My crying let up a little. “Mom, I’m not quitting grad school,” I said, irritated. “That is not happening. You realize I get a stipend, don’t you? They’re paying me to be here.”
“I know Corey loved you,” Mom said. “You could see it in the way he looked at you.”
“I know.” I was shaking so hard I could barely hold the phone. “I’m not going out like Corey.” I tried to find the resolve in my voice. “Not without a fight.”
“No, you’re not,” Mom said.
We talked for maybe fifteen more minutes before Mom concluded, with a clarity that startled me, “It isn’t fair you can get a disease just from having sex, is it?”
After we hung up I blew my nose and took a picture of a spot on my hip and texted it to Claire. Is this a lesion? I asked.
Lesions are late-stage symptoms sweetie, Claire wrote back. You’re not late stage.
Once I’d told Mom about Corey, I figured I should call my siblings.
“I can’t lose you, not after Dad,” Danny said, choking up. “You’re my best friend.”
“I’d cut off Corey’s balls if he wasn’t dead,” Chelsea said.
Meanwhile, Katie and I pledged, through laughter spiked with tears, to finish our “Switcheroo” script. “It’s our masterpiece, dude.”
Since we’d lived together the entire time I dated Corey, Katie had hung out with him almost as much as I had. She had memories of the time before Corey, too, when I would barge into the living room after a night at Akbar, asking if you could get HIV from precum. “I doubt the condom ever broke, dude,” Katie said. “I’m pretty sure you would have freaked out about it.”
“What about all the times I blew him?” I asked.
“I googled it,” Katie said. “He would have had to come directly in your eyeball.”
Mary and I arrived at a free testing center on Cesar Chavez a little after nine in the morning that Monday. A church van pulled up next to Mary’s car in the lot and a group of women filed out wearing tank tops and sweatpants. A few had smudged magenta eyeshadow and glitter on their cheeks.
“We better get you in there or we could be here a while,” Mary said.
I complained to the counselor about the runaround trying to get a test. The ER doctor I’d seen on Saturday, the one who wouldn’t test me, had accidentally referred me to a treatment center, not a testing center, a mistake that had cost Mary and me an hour of waiting in the wrong place that morning. I suppose I wanted to air my grievances before I lost the capacity, while I could still play the role of concerned citizen rather than pissed off antibody-positive gay man, as if the disease would taint my opinions as well as my immune system.
The counselor had me swab my cheek and asked about my sex life, whether or not I injected drugs. “Some of these questions don’t apply,” she said.
“He lied to my face,” I told her. “He told me he got tested and that he was negative. Is there any chance he just didn’t know? He didn’t look like a walking AIDS patient. He was pretty healthy and strong. He had bags under his eyes and he was losing weight, but I congratulated him on it.”
“He probably knew,” the counselor told me.
By the time I was finished dumping out my feelings, the test was ready. I held my cheeks in my hands, my body not numb but tingling, like I’d just been hit.
This is it, I thought. This is my life.
The counselor warned that the results were preliminary. The window period for a third-generation antibody test, which is what I’d just taken, could be anywhere from three to six months from last contact. That word seemed weird to me, contact, like Corey was the disease and not the carrier.
I returned to the waiting room with swollen eyes and handed Mary the certificate with the test results, letting her see it in writing.
“You were sure in there for a long time,” Mary said, pulling out her earbuds. She read the results, stood up, and hugged me. I was negative.
The women in the waiting room cheered.
Corey’s mom, Anita, called between classes that week to ask me to come to Corey’s memorial. It was going to be on a boat. I recognized her garbled tone from my mom’s grief-fueled benders after my dad died. “We have to keep him alive. In our hearts,” Anita added, after a long pause.
I parked myself on a patch of dirt under an oak tree on campus and ran my hands over its lumpy roots, looking out at a bunch of carefree kids in flip-flops migrating across the lawn to class. “I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what,” she said.
Anita was glad to hear that I was OK. She sounded hurt when I asked if she had been in touch with Corey’s other partners. “Other partners?” she asked. There had only been me.
That night I emailed her some pictures I’d taken of Corey. It was hard to find ones where Corey wasn’t sticking out his tongue or gagging or giving the camera the bird. Corey fake-smiling in front of a pen of flamingos at the Los Angeles Zoo. Corey squinting on a bench next to a plaque encouraging patrons to “Join the Wild Beast Society.” And there were the ones I took around the house: Corey brushing his teeth in the bathroom, my head on his shoulder. Corey pulling the comforter over his head in bed. Corey kissing me in the kitchen, his eyes squeezed shut, looking rapturous. I kept those for myself.
“Thank you for being Corey’s friend and everything,” Anita wrote in reply. “I miss him so much, I am in a real fog, but it will take some time. Like you, I am sure.” She’d sent a link to his four-line obituary in the Daily Pilot. It didn’t mention anything about AIDS and was written like an E. E. Cummings poem, with weird spacing, line breaks, and everything. Besides Elizabeth, I was the only one outside the family they’d told. “We want to keep things private,” Anita explained. “Corey was a very private person.”
I flew to Los Angeles the Thursday before Corey’s funeral and crashed on Katie and Danny’s couch. It was my ex-couch now that I didn’t live there anymore. They told me about how the guy who was renting my old room, a former Marine turned cinematographer, had come into the living room to find them crying the day Corey died. When they’d explained why, he’d gone back into his room and flipped the mattress, like a homophobic Hulk. He had scrubbed every inch of our house, tossed my lice shampoo from under the bathroom sink, even done the dishes. Katie had visited her psychic on Gower, who said I was going to be OK. Danny had gone to Out of the Closet and gotten tested.
“I wasn’t aware you were bottoming for Corey,” I said.
“I know, I’m nuts,” Danny said. “We’re all total hypochondriacs.”
As if to prove his point, I returned to Out of the Closet myself the next morning. It had only been twelve days since I had tested negative in Austin, twelve days since the waiting room full of women with glitter on their cheeks cheered.
“Wow, this is a lot of testing,” Jonah, the counselor, said. I’d wanted it to be the same guy who’d given me the Love condoms last winter, but it wasn’t. This was Hollywood. People came and went. “I can test you again but the result is going to be the same.”
“I’d appreciate it,” I said, pulling out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill as if to bribe him. “Here’s my donation, and I’m planning on buying some shirts.”
If I was positive, I wasn’t going to Corey’s funeral. I was angry enough as it was.
I hoped I wasn’t shaking as I ran the swab along the inside of my cheek. “Total déjà vu, your situation and mine,” Jonah said. “My ex lied to me about getting tested, too. It took him months to come clean. I thought he was going to tell me he was back with his wife.” Jonah let out a theatrical sigh, took the swab back from me. “I don’t know how positives find me. It’s not like I talk to them at parties and they say they’re positive and we go home together.”
“It’s because you have a good aura,” I told him, pointing to the Virgin Mary inked on the underside of his wrist.
“Oh my crazy self,” he said, swatting away my compliment.
The morning of Corey’s funeral I was a plank on the couch, already feeling too sore and exhausted to move. I woke my brother up rifling through his dresser for socks and we got into a fight. I told Danny he couldn’t blog about Corey’s funeral and he told me he could blog about whatever the fuck he wanted.
“I don’t want to go to your gay boyfriend’s AIDS funeral anyway,” he said.
“Yeah, this must be a really hard day for you,” I said.
Danny sat up in bed, not saying anything for a few seconds. When he finally spoke his voice was soft. “Can we not fight? Today is shitty enough already.”
It was just like my brother to be a jerk and then call a truce. But I knew, even at the time, that beneath his anger and worry was the fact that we’d both lost a friend.
While Danny elected to stay home and get drunk, Katie took the day off from her new magazine job to drive me to Newport Beach. We got there early, looking like goons in our sunglasses, and killed time with cheap French roast coffee and croissants filled with Nutella, debating whether or not we should go to Disneyland or the Nixon Library after the memorial, as if the experience wouldn’t leave us totally wrung out.
Miles was the first person to walk up to us, hugging me before I even introduced myself and planting an ear against my chest to listen to my heart. The heat radiated off him. His cashmere sweater was too warm for this sunny November day.
He was the same cherubic nerd I’d seen in his school picture, a miniature Eugene Levy with curls and retro black glasses slipping down his nose. Corey had bought those glasses for him. If Miles had sounded detached on the phone, in person he was full of quiet composure, a state all the more remarkable given the disarray of the rest of his family. He reminded me, just a bit, of a benevolent teddy bear.
“Corey had the best time on your road trip,” Anita said, hugging a shawl tightly around herself. “The best time.” She looked frail in her baggy purple tracksuit and her face was terribly broken out. Corey’s dad, on the other hand, was rocking the laidback California vibe: curly silver hair, short-sleeve shirt, wraparound sunglasses. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was what Corey would have looked like had he made it to the fiefdom of his mid-fifties—red and jowly from a lifetime of hanging out by the water and eating burgers without worrying about instant diarrhea. Corey’s dad was passing around a stack of childhood pictures of Corey—I recognized one from Corey’s gay.com profile—and I suddenly had the urge to throw him against a wall or run over his hand with a truck. Instead, I just teared up and said the pictures were nice.
The boat where the service was held was named Western Pride. It was normally used for whale-spotting tours, not funerals. Corey’s pals at the dock had pulled some strings. For example, we didn’t have to take off our shoes. Corey’s friend Elizabeth was there, but as far as I could tell, I was the only boyfriend, Katie and I two of only a handful of friends, period. Maybe two dozen people total were in attendance. It startled me to see just how small Corey’s world was, small and not dealing with his death. No one sang or prayed or offered fierce rocking hugs. It says something that the nineteen-year-old with Asperger’s was the most emotionally in-tune person aboard. If not for Miles, we could almost have been on a regular whale-spotting tour.
He passed around the manifest and a woman with spiky blond hair approached and handed Katie and me yellow roses to throw in the boat’s wake. “I’m the evil stepmom,” she said, curtsying. All Corey had ever told me about her was that she had paid thousands of dollars to have flames painted on the side of her car, and I don’t think it was even that nice of a car.
I don’t usually go in for the “celebration of life” thing. If a funeral isn’t a mega bummer, something’s up. But I will say it’s hard to stay sad on a boat. Leaving the trashy shore behind, we made our way through an obstacle course of buoys and into the spectacular open water. The captain let us cruise around for a while, the sun on our faces, spume spraying our shades, not a whale in sight, and then he found a patch of smooth blue ocean and cut the engine. I was able to take a deep breath for the first time that day.
As the boat gently rocked, Miles ducked into the captain’s deck, a wad of damp pages in one hand. A voice wobbling between bassy and nasal in that unmistakably teenage way came over the speakers. The way I remember it, he just started talking, like he was on a short-wave radio, broadcasting his brother’s eulogy to the great beyond. Miles quoted Emerson with undergraduate aplomb and talked about how Corey had helped move him into his dorm in San Diego and had checked in with him every night during his first months of school. “That part of my life is over,” he concluded with a finality that should have been illegal for someone his age.
I tottered at the back of the boat, the smell of gasoline still stinging my nostrils, devising a plan for how I would smuggle Miles back to Texas. It had occurred to me on the ride out that Corey wasn’t the only one light in the friend department. Miles didn’t have a single pal on that boat, no one from high school or college supporting him. Now I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving him behind. “If anyone wants to say a few words, please come up,” Miles was saying. A few painful seconds passed in which no one made a move toward the captain’s deck, not Anita or Corey’s dad, not Elizabeth or me. This wasn’t cool.
I poked Katie’s leg with the stem of my rose. “I’ll hold your rose, go,” I said, and Katie gamely gripped the railing and strode up to the microphone in her calf-length boots and Joe Biden aviators. Most of her impromptu speech was snatched away by the wind, but she got in a good line about how Corey was excellent at “hanging out.”
Battling a bout of inappropriate laughter, shoulders shaking, I handed Katie back her rose, too emotionally pinched off to cry. “Now we’ll scatter Corey’s ashes,” Miles reported. I’d known this was coming but it still seemed sudden, indicative of a desire to get things over with. My dad has been dead twelve years and we still haven’t scattered his ashes.
Miles hung up the mike and descended the deck, heading sternward with his parents. The engine sputtered to life and the breeze picked up, the boat’s wake spreading its white wings behind us. I remember the urn was lined with a plastic bag that Miles and his parents hoisted over the back of the boat and emptied like a wastebasket, letting Corey’s ashes spill into the harbor, the wind for once, thank God, at his back. I composed myself with a single sniff and threw my rose in with the others.
In college, we called it “going on tour” when a guy came out of the closet and slept with anyone he could get his hands on. Seeing those childhood pictures of Corey that day, it was hard not to think of the angry teenager he had grown into, blaming his dad for making him gay, bleaching his hair, and then going on tour with his broken hand and beautiful dick. To think the simple act of having sex had made him sick. It wasn’t fair.
Feeling a little floaty after our seafaring “celebration,” we decided we needed something in our stomachs besides coffee and Nutella. With Anita’s go-ahead, we carried Miles off to lunch at a restaurant in the harbor—Katie, Elizabeth, and I—watching from our table by the window as a batch of tourists boarded Western Pride. We ate our turkey clubs. Then, honoring Corey’s legacy, we hung out, and kept hanging out. An hour passed without anyone noticing. Afternoon sun sparkling off the water, the four of us walked the pier, a goth funeral procession somehow less wretched than the one we’d just endured. We talked about Waiting for Godot, Quentin Tarantino, and comic books, anything to avoid saying goodbye. Corey hadn’t mentioned Miles even liking comic books, but everything else about him was just as described, this short, sweet savant. We hugged and I let Miles climb into his car to collect his mom only if he promised to call.
“And if you think of it, send me the names of some comics,” I said, hoping this might give us something to talk about on the off chance he did reach out.
I came home from the memorial to an email from Miles. Subject line: Comics Reading List. “So you asked for a comics reading list and while I could think of hundreds of cartoonists who I consider essential, I’ll start you on ten of them. Ten Great Cartoonists, in No Particular Order.”
I spent the rest of that fall and winter placing holds at the public library, scavenging through the university stacks. On the phone past midnight, I might find myself scribbling down an artist’s name to look up later. Miles talked about things like diagrammatic space and minimal line drawing, who it was blasphemous not to like and who was unmitigated filth. The kid had an astounding vocabulary and, it must be noted, some quirky phone habits.
If he called and I couldn’t pick up, if I were, say, in class or hauling groceries up the stairs to my condo, he would try me ten or eleven times in a row, try until I dug my buzzing phone out of my pocket and answered. To my frantic “Is everything OK?” he would offer a casual, “Hey, Greg. Yup, everything’s fine. How’s it going?”
He was just checking in.
The whole thing was a little intense.
“A little intense?” Mom said when I called to talk to her about how to handle it. She’d joined a support group for parents whose kids have Asperger’s and amassed a stack of books on the subject that she kept in a wicker basket by her bed. “The poor kid just needs some stability. Think about how annoying Chelsea would be if you died. We’d have to put her in a straitjacket.”
“Thanks, that’s sweet,” I told her.
I heard Chelsea in the background telling us both to fuck off.
Mom suggested Miles and I set up a time to talk each week and stick to it. Make it part of the routine, text if anything came up. It worked. My phone would ring right at ten every Tuesday night and I made sure to answer. Miles and I talked about movies, comic books, art, the classes we were taking, comic books again. We talked on Corey’s birthday, Christmas, the anniversary of his death. But mostly, we talked on Tuesdays at ten.
I’ll admit I had a lot of questions, though I tried not to put Miles on the spot. Every time he confirmed another one of Corey’s fibs, my right leg would seize up and I’d hobble around my living room feeling stupid all over again, then just sad. There had never been any roommates in Santa Monica or a job as a construction site manager. Corey had lived in his mom’s house with Miles the whole time we’d dated, picking up shifts at the dock. Nor did he go to the fancy Catholic school whose decal he’d stuck in his truck window. Miles had. After coming out, Corey had gotten into some fights and been sent to a remedial high school in Orange County. He’d barely earned a diploma, let alone gone to Berkeley.
In a switcheroo worthy of Roald Dahl, it’s Miles, not his older brother, with whom I’ve developed a long-distance friendship. I knew Corey for eight months. I’ve talked to Miles on the phone for ten years now. If it hadn’t been for him, I probably would have come to reduce Corey to a cautionary tale from my twenties: The Jerk Who Lied About AIDS. Instead, I’ve gotten to know, posthumously, the loving big brother who pitched in for school supplies, the guy who may not have thought he was smart enough to go to college but made sure his brother got there. I’m reminded of the man who changed my life for the better.
And for what it’s worth, I like to think that, in those first years, the certainty we would talk freed Miles to live his life, to draw and play Dungeons & Dragons, to switch his major from engineering to art and seek out other comic book lovers. I know it helped me. We still talk a couple times a year, sometimes for hours, though now Miles is in his late twenties with a job at a wedding cake shop and a girlfriend. Baking has replaced comics as his obsession. Other stuff has changed, too, but you’ll have to ask him about that. It’s fair to say the kid is baffling, brilliant, ever evolving, getting older by the day, just like I am. More and more when I call, he offers a friendly hello and excuses himself, promising we’ll catch up when he’s not in the middle of something. I tell him not to worry. I’m just checking in.
“Life is long,” I tell him. I say it into the phone like a wish, hoping he’ll agree. 
Greg Marshall is a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in prose and a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers. His essays have been collected in The Best American Essays and recognized as notable in the anthology three times; they have also appeared in Fourth Genre, Foglifter, and Green Mountains Review, among other publications. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Corporation of Yaddo. Marshall is at work on a novel and a memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew from It. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his husband.
