The Fact and Fiction of Pieties

By Marc Ruvolo

Have you ever felt lost?

Not physically lost, like you’re in a forest at dusk and all the paths suddenly appear the same, but emotionally lost. Grasping at mental straws to find a way forward. To somehow be happy.

To live.

Andrew and his father, Richard, two of the main characters from my novella Pieties, find themselves at a crossroads, lost, both emotionally and spiritually. Both seek a way forward, out of the dark forests they’ve created for themselves and into the light. At first, it appears that they have chosen opposite paths. But as the story comes to its explosive, violent conclusion, we see that perhaps the two men are more alike than they ever imagined.

Andrew is living in New York City when he is diagnosed with a mystery illness, GRID, or Gay Related Immune Deficiency. Estranged from his mother and father, he’s attempting to forge a new life there, as many queer people do, one free of recrimination and judgment. Unfortunately, with few resources and little money, this new illness necessitates his return to his childhood home in uber-religious Wheaton, Illinois, a place he’d fled only years prior. His parent’s home is unremarkable, with one exception. Hidden behind a high fence, Andrew’s father has transformed the backyard into a picture-perfect Japanese garden, complete with a miniature bamboo forest, stone lanterns, wooden shrines, and a dark, still, pond filled with colorful koi fish. This place has become Richard’s refuge and is where he spends the majority of his time.

Richard is ex-military, a religious patriarch, and despises Andrew’s “lifestyle choice.” Andrew’s mother, Enid, mousey and meek, is eager to keep the peace between the two most important men in her life. But as Andrew reluctantly settles into his old room, his old life, he begins to realize that things in the house are not as they once were. His mother sleepwalks, bearing unexplained bruises, and the rooms filled with memories have fallen into decay and disrepair. Rats scurry in the walls, but his father seems unperturbed, lost in the whispering bamboo of the garden refuge. As Andrew’s world slowly unravels, spiraling into uncertainty and madness, he is unsure whether the illness is to blame, or if something sinister and evil is being nurtured by his father in the mysterious garden. 

And worst of all, his mother may be in far greater danger than he ever imagined.

The subject matter in Pieties (GRID, AIDS, religious homophobia, and the 80s and 90s) is not merely a story to me–I’ve lived it. How much of my experience is included? Not a lot, really, a few minor details. Thankfully, I managed to escape my suburban hell to create my own found family, and then I returned to educate my birth family so that we might heal and go on living in a sort of harmony.

There was no explosive end to my story, and for that, I’m grateful. The terrible monster I faced, and that Andrew faces in my novella, is the AIDS crisis, and how society at large treated it, how they treated those who desperately needed their help. 

Pieties is dedicated to Joel, my current partner of sixteen years, the cornerstone of my found family, but it’s also dedicated to Dwight Glass. Dwight was my high-school boyfriend, my first, awkward love. We dated for a year and a half before I went off to college, and as these things happened, we drifted apart. Our contact was intermittent, our worlds distant, but that initial connection we felt was never lost.

Dwight and I discovered punk and new wave music together, bonding over formative albums and singles I still listen to. He was everything I wasn’t: lean and crazy, curly-haired, blue-eyed. Slightly feral. He embraced all things worldly (especially sex, drugs, and alcohol), with a manic gusto, fearlessly hurtling across our unincorporated suburban wasteland while I followed in his wake, trying to keep up. Everyone he met instantly knew that bland suburban streets wouldn’t hold him for long. He left as soon as he was able, setting out in search of new vistas, new worlds he might conquer.

Tragically, Dwight passed away from complications of AIDS on June 16, 1994, at 6:15 pm. 

Years later, a mutual friend who was in the hospital with him told me that while Dwight had been in and out of consciousness, he did become lucid for a moment and ask, “I wonder what Marc is doing?” This image haunts me. There are probably a dozen reasons why I wasn’t at his bedside, and why his family didn’t include me, the foremost being that I was never informed of how dire his illness had become. His parents' brand of Southern religious homophobia was another reason to shut me out. Dwight passed before the internet was ubiquitous, and his parents didn’t post an obituary. If you look, you’ll find nothing, not a single trace of this young man who hoped and dreamed of finding the path out of his dark forest. Of living. Until now.

But this is all ancient history. I can’t change it any more than I can pull the moon from the sky. No, all I have are my words, my story–and in a twisted way, his story–one I think Dwight, if he were here today, would enjoy immensely, perverse and disquieting as it is. So this is for you my friend, a small gesture that says: you were here. I remember you.

And as for me, all I can hope is that those who were lost during that terrible time will not be forgotten, immortalized forever in our hearts, minds, and the stories we tell trying to make sense of it all.