“That sounds disgusting.”

“It was really awful,” he assured. “She put it in a glass, rubbed it against a black cat, and then had me sip it slowly.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “She rubbed the glass against a black cat?”

He nodded.

“And did it work?”

“Have I ever complained about my back?” he grinned.

“Wow,” I said, impressed that the potion had worked for him. “I need a Hoodoo cure-all. I want to sip it and forget everything’s fucked.”

“I thought you relied on booze for that?” he teased, tickling my side.

“You’re a regular Buster Keaton,” I laughed.

“She mixed me a Hoodoo drink to enhance my cleverness,” Cal smirked. “As you can see, it worked. I thought about staying in New Orleans, close to my Voodoo queen and never worrying a day in my life.

“You worry so little anyway,” I reminded.

“I worry more than you know.”

“Why do I not know?”

“Why would you want to?” Cal asked, pushing my shoulder down to the mattress, prepared to give me his version of a cure-all.

We both worried less, at least for a little while.

17

April 1934

I had never been anything other than myself, not due to excessive pride, but more because I found it unnecessary to identify my qualifying parts when I found their sum insufferable enough. Perhaps I would have related to people better if I had settled into a category: the fairy, the Jew, the Russian. I was so much and so little at the same time. I preferred not to focus on being anything other than alive, and at times not even that. Though I hadn’t pulled apart my strands, I could not avoid the pangs of discomfort I experienced when a piece of me was under attack. The moment Adolf Hitler banned art produced by Jews, I was a Jew, vulnerable to religious persecution and repressed. As soon as I read news of the Soviet Republic’s decree imposing three to five years in prison for those convicted of homosexuality, I was homosexual and an enemy of a country I hadn’t lived in for nearly two decades. I was everything I didn't want to be, seeing how the world thought there was so much wrong with me. Perhaps that’s why, against my better judgement, I had allowed Cal to become my world. He saw me differently than everyone else and made me feel like every fucked-up inch of me was the way it was supposed to be. It was the first time I had ever been fully accepted by anyone and it was more powerful than I’d anticipated, allowing me to get entangled in emotions that hadn’t existed before him. It was the reason supporting Cal as best I could became a given instead of a question.