Preston et le Tour de Manhattan

My late friend Pres visited me in New York when I was on the Upper East Side. He wanted to go on a walking tour of the island, so we set off toward Midtown one morning. Now, Pres had already come from where he was staying on the Upper West Side, so he had already traversed Central Park. Having no proper job (and I probably didn’t either at the time), he had very little money so we lunched on day-old bagels. We visited Leonard Bernstein’s office (where I saw my first Gold Record, as well as my second and a host of others), and walked and talked all the way down to the Village. We walked along Christopher Street and stopped in at a shop called “The Leatherman.” I’m not a leather person myself and I didn’t recall ever seeing Pres in anything not preppy. Pres seemed to be getting quieter. Finally he relaxed a bit. “I just figured out what’s wrong,” he told me. “I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t being cruised. It’s because I’m with you.” Ah, the other men weren’t checking him out and that had been worrying him. We weren’t holding hands or anything. My presence was enough to render him off-limits. I suppose that also explains why he went into the leather shop, to make himself a bit more visible. Then again, a man interested in black leather is not automatically gay.
We continued down to the Battery where Pres considered taking the Staten Island Ferry to look at Miss Liberty, because he was too cheap to actually ride on the one to Liberty Island.
Instead, we started home. We were probably heading straight up First Avenue to go to my apartment, because we made desultory plans to take a bus if it just happened to come by when we were near a stop. That never happened. We walked all the way back. The sun was starting to go down. This may not seem as much of an adventure to you, but look at a map of Manhattan and figure out how far we went. We were gone from ten in the morning until dusk with nothing to eat but lightly stale bagels.
Pres dropped me off at my apartment and then said he would walk back through Central Park to the West Side. “But it’s getting dark!” And I insisted he take a bus. I knew I was worn out. That was probably the beginning of my varicose veins. And Central Park is dangerous in the dark. He insisted he’d be fine. And it took another decade and AIDS to finally get Pres.
Pres had been a good friend. I had met him the summer he debated telling his parents he was gay. (He told me later his dad responded to the news with, "You know, I sort of suspected something, but I didn't want to say anything.") His parents had a place on Hilton Head and Pres had come up from Florida to stay with them a while. We met at an island disco, since that was all the rage at the time. He asked me if I thought he should tell his parents and I'm always for telling the truth. I had met his parents at that point (and worried that they were giving me the eye) and thought they were nice enough folk and could handle it.
He called me one day to tell me the cat was now officially out of the bag. Then he invited me over to their place for cocktails and dinner. It was my turn to feel awkward. I felt as if I had been party to some sort of deceit in being a cover for Pres's homosexuality. No, no, no, he told me, they liked me and would want to see me again. So I went.
Pres introduced me to many of my firsts: first time on a tandem bicycle, first time the handlebars of a bicycle, first time on some sort of cycle holding a glass with bourbon on the rocks and worrying that we would fall, the glass would break, and a large shard would go straight into my heart, first time in a Rolls Royce, first time in a car that may or may not have been Taken Without Consent (Pres was a doorman at the time at a posh downtown Boston hotel).
He told me that he was HIV positive the day he came to visit me after my accident. He said that if he developed AIDS he wanted to go back to Florida where it was warm. As it turned out, his mother cared for him and his partner until they died ... in Maine.