The Roman Catholic Church was riding roughshod over the Constitution, Nora was railing—that bit about “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Nora was reiterating what had been Mr. Barlow’s mantra—the snowshoer’s way of saying that freedom of religion wasn’t a one-way street. We were free to practice the religion of our choice, but we were also free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us. Nora and the snowshoer sounded like a broken record—the way they never stopped saying that freedom of religion also meant freedom from religion.

Damaged Don, who we didn’t know was listening—Don just kept strumming his guitar—spoke up. “Those Catholics—they’ll beat you up about their freedom of religion, but they don’t give two shits for yours,” the Damaged Man declared.

Well, we know what became of Don. The Damaged Man was gunned down in a parking lot in Montana, after Reagan’s reelection, when the gay boys Don had been singing about were still dying, and Don was still singing his plague song.

Don’t give Ronald Reagan

eight years.

He talks tough to commies,

he kills all the gay boys,

but that does fuck-all

for our fears.

Please don’t give the Gipper

eight years.

No, don’t give the Gipper

eight years.

If there was a Damaged Don box in the snowshoer’s pied-à-terre, I knew it wouldn’t have been easy going for Em. After Don was killed, and for as long as Ronald Reagan was our president, Nora had closed out every performance of Two Dykes, One Who Talks with a Damaged Don song. As Nora said, she couldn’t sing, but neither could Don. Em, crying, hugged Nora while she sang.

In the Denver airport, I decided that singing the Damaged Man would be better than hearing more of The Hand of God. I started with the chorus of Damaged Don’s plague song. Em, crying, sang with me on the phone.

It’s time to head back to

Great Falls.

I’m lackin’ the talent,

I can’t stand the sadness,

I don’t have big enough balls!

It’s time to head back to

Great Falls.

I’m just goin’ back to

Great Falls.

The Damaged Man was with us; he’d managed to make Em and me feel less alone. Later, we sang “No Lucky Star” to each other.

That was when Em told me she’d barely glanced at Elliot Barlow’s notebooks. She had filled two boxes with the notebooks; we would read them together, she told me. All she’d read was a short passage about the snowshoer’s last visit to St. Vincent’s—in the 1990s, after Ronald Reagan was no longer in office. The snowshoer had written about Reagan—just one sentence, after seeing her friends who were dying of AIDS.