Slouching Toward BethlehemJohnny would be dead before the night was through.
Alan knew that and yet, it didn’t stop him from squeezing his lover’s hand and dreaming about miracles. When he looked at Johnny, lying there in the mahogany sleigh bed the two had purchased together more than fifteen years ago, he saw someone he didn’t know. He remembered Johnny as if he were already gone: the olive skin his Italian heritage had given him, the wavy black hair and green eyes, the vanity-inspired shifting facial hair (goatee, full beard, mustaches in different lengths and thicknesses) and the body he had always worked so hard on, made lean from years of running, muscular from years of free weights, defined by black curly hair. But now the person lying before him couldn’t be Johnny, could it? This
