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2018
Seeing Johnny Lawrence after 34 years, Daniel felt light. Felt giddy, almost. He couldn’t help ribbing him a little about his ‘84 win, figuring Johnny could take it, since he’d been a good sportsman about it at the time for all their differences before the tournament. He could help offering to fix his car for free even less.
He didn’t know this yet, but Johnny would, in due course, make him regret so much as going over to him. But in the moment, it felt monumental just to stand next to the guy again. See the crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes and his still blonde hair. It was only half way through telling Amanda about it later that he started to feel a sinking feeling in his stomach as he saw her arch look.
“Careful, Daniel, I’ll get jealous,” she said.
Daniel laughed hollowly.
1981
In California, in June, Johnny Lawrence was already training for his first All Valley Under-18 Tournament. At the same time, the CDC published an article in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report titled Pneumocystis Pneumonia — Los Angeles. Five previously healthy young men were treated for pneumonia in five different LA hospitals. Two of them died.
Daniel LaRusso was still in Jersey, innocent of these facts and the way they would shape his future.
1979
Looking back, Daniel had thought that he hadn’t put it together, that gay wasn’t just a bad word bullies hissed at you in P.E., until he started hearing about AIDS—gay cancer, they’d called it at first.
But then he did the math, looked at some timelines online, and he realised that wasn’t quite right. He’d been ten. He vividly remembered being ten, but at that age not only was he not following the news, but there wouldn’t have been anything for the news to report about on that particular topic. Not yet.
He had came home spitting mad, kicking cabinet doors and crying and his mom had (after clipping his ear for kicking her cabinets) asked him what was wrong.
“Those rotten ass—those jerks won’t stop calling me gay,” Daniel had said, with a wobbling lower lip and eyes brimming over with tears.
His mom had just laughed.
“Well, do you like boys?” she’d asked, as though it was a ridiculous question.
“What?” he’d asked in return, taken aback.
“Do you like boys the way girls like boys?” she asked him again, hands on her hips.
“What? No!” Daniel put his hands over his ears. He snatched them down. “You can do that? Why?”
“That’s what gay means,” his mom said. “If you don’t like boys then you’re not gay. Who cares what those little jerks say?”
It seemed very easy for her to say that when she wasn’t the one who no one would leave alone, while he couldn’t go a day without the word ringing in his head.
Gay, gay, gay, gay …
Even if they didn’t know what they were talking about it still hurt.
Another, smaller voice in his head said, ‘what if they’re right?’ He squashed it down instantly.
1985
Sitting waiting for his name to be called at graduation, Daniel couldn’t stop fidgeting and shifting in his seat. In the seat next to him, Johnny Lawrence huffed a sigh and put a hand on his shoulder and shook him lightly. Daniel turned to look at him. In profile (from face on, from behind, from anywhere) he looked like a goddamn movie star. Like a blonde Rock Hudson.
“Relax,” Johnny said in a tight voice. “You’re making me nervous.”
For a second, the weight of his hand on Daniel’s shoulder was grounding, centring. Then a spike of anxiety flared up and Daniel shook it off.
“I am relaxed,” he lied.
A month from then, when Daniel was in Okinawa, Rock Hudson would announce that he had AIDS. In October, he would die.
1984
Daniel had a lot of nightmares. It wasn’t a big deal; he wasn’t a baby. They were just bad dreams. Dreams he woke up from shaking and soaking wet with sweat like he pissed the bed. Daniel’s dreams were all mixed up amalgams of the worries he had during the day. He dreamt about getting beat up, about needing a blood transfusion, about dirty needles, about dirty thoughts. More than once he had stupid, mixed up dreams where he was kissing Ali, but then she turned into Johnny Lawrence, pulling back from him with his face twisted in a cruel smile.
Waking up from a dream like that, Daniel shuffled into the kitchen as his mom was reading the New York Times.
“Did you hear they think you can get it from saliva now?” his mom said, eyes glued to the text in front of her.
He didn’t have to ask what ‘it’ was.
It would be another two years before it was proven that HIV could not be contracted through saliva, but dreaming about kissing Johnny Lawrence would feel dangerous for a lot longer.
1994
That goddamn Tom Hanks movie pissed him off. Must be nice to get a bunch of awards for pretending to be sick, pretending to be gay. The two still felt synonymous. Not because—he wasn’t—he wasn’t conservative or anything, he didn’t think it was a sin, but … he did start having these feelings at a time when it seemed like everyone who did got sick, and everyone who got sick died.
Everyone was still dying—it wouldn’t be until ‘96 when things started turning around.
But anyway, they came and went. The feelings. By this time, it was clearly not some mixed up Freudian thing with Johnny Lawrence in particular where violence and sex got confused, but he wasn’t convinced that this wasn’t just a thing that everyone dealt with to some extent. It felt so … normal to follow a guy with his eyes, check out the cut of his body along with his clothes, think about brushing the hair out of his eyes. But it didn’t feel like it was him. It was just an urge, like wanting to throw your car keys off a bridge or scream in public. It wasn’t real.
Besides, even if it were … well, it wasn't real.
1979
He didn’t complain about bullies calling him names anymore—calling him gay—but Daniel couldn’t help but ask one question of his mother.
“Would you care? If I did like boys?”
His mother got a serious look on her face and smoothed his hair back from his forehead with her hands.
“Of course,” she said, and his heart twisted. “Not because there’s anything wrong with it, but … it’s just such a hard life. It would break my heart if you had to fight that battle, honey.”
He didn’t ask her again.
2002
Homophobia.
The thing about phobias is they’re irrational. Maybe they start out being about something real, but eventually the panic response becomes hard wired and you can’t logic your way out of it. Or so said Amanda, who minored in psych. She told him about a study where the researchers conditioned a little boy to be afraid of his own pet rat. It got so generalised that he would freak out if he was shown a fluffy scarf the same colour rolled up into the same approximate shape as a rat.
That made a lot of sense to Daniel. He had to work not to flinch when he saw two men together sometimes. When he saw the approximate shape of what his life could have been.
2019
Daniel was sixteen before he kissed a girl. Pretty late bloomer.
He was 51 when he kissed a man. Well. Was kissed by a man.
Unfreezing, Daniel pulled back suddenly.
“What the hell, Johnny?” he asked.
“Sorry,” the other man said, not sounding very sorry at all. “I guess I got some wires crossed. I thought that’s where we were headed.”
“Do you even like men?” Daniel asked. “Or is this some kind of macho power move I’m too sissy to understand?”
“Not sissy enough,” Johnny sighed and put his hands in his pockets. “Daniel, it’s fine. I won’t do it again. I thought you wanted me to kiss you, but I made a mistake. Clearly. Let’s move on.”
“But do you? Like men?” Daniel asked again.
“Yeah, obviously,” Johnny said caustically. “A babe’s a babe.”
Daniel saw red. He was furious that this guy, this fucking guy, got to be a chill 21st century bisexual and do shit like say ‘a babe’s a babe’ and lay one on him when Daniel had been keeping his shit under lock and key for decades.
“A babe’s a babe?” he repeated sarcastically.
“Don’t get conceited, Danielle,” Johnny rolled his eyes. “But yeah, you’re a hottie. What’s the big deal?”
Daniel crushed their lips together and ignored the way his chest seized.
2019
Johnny woke up to find Daniel crying next to him in the bed and shuffled closer.
“Who the hell does this?” Daniel asked him between cracked, stuttering breaths. “I skip out on the hard shit and go straight to standing on the LaRusso Auto float at Pride acting like I know what the hell it’s like? I, I never—”
“Daniel,” Johnny interrupted him with a hand on his shoulder. It felt grounding, centring and dangerous all at once. “I really don’t think you skipped out on the hard shit.”
Daniel tucked his face into Johnny Lawrence’s neck and sobbed. Johnny held him.