Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (7 page)

And I've only begun to understand that serene contentment of his, as he lay prone on the sofa restoring himself. It makes me wonder: Was all that hyperactivity of mine—choreographing our coming and going, engineering flashes of how it used to be—was it all beside the point? Somehow it's hard to accept that a man can be totally happy just lying about, no regrets despite the ravages. I was so grief-stricken for Cesar I couldn't slow down long enough to see. Yet I know that happiness all too well now. I saw it exactly the same in Roger a year later—the respite between sieges, delirious to be home, and the preciousness of lazy hours when weeks are life and death.

Diogenes sat in a square in Athens with nothing but the clothes on his back and a tin cup for dipping water from the well. Then he saw a beggar poorer than he drink water out of his hands, and Diogenes tossed away the cup. This burning away of the superfluous, the sheer pleasure of an ordinary afternoon—does anybody ever get taught these things by anything other than tragedy?

I don't remember what sweater I gave Cesar that year, but I made him a present of an hour with Sam. "Just a quick fix," I told him. Sam of course had followed the case from the start. He ran through some relaxation and visualization techniques, did the Cook's tour of Cesar's tangled feelings, and laid out some options about support groups available in the Bay Area. For it seemed to all of us now that Cesar was going it too much alone. I know this sounds crude and intrusive relative to the stately pace of therapy, but so much gay psychology these days is crisis intervention and burnout work. There are very few fine points left when people are screaming in clinics and shutting out friends and leaping thirty stories roped at the waist with their lovers.

Yet if I was a great support to Cesar, there was still something magic I sought in return. "What if I get it?" I'd ask him; that is, how would I bear it? Would I be as tough and noble as he? And he always replied with emphatic resolve: "You're
not
going to get it." I'd practically be coaching him for the right answer. And perhaps he had a corresponding need as well, to believe the nightmare would stop with him, that he somehow bore it for all of us. A martyrdom of sorts? Well, whatever keeps you going. Sometimes he would hoot with disdain as he spoke of one self-obsessed friend or another, locked to the mirror like a dry Narcissus. He knew who could take it and who couldn't.

It wasn't all verbalized. Perhaps I've thought too long about how we spoke when we knew so little. But the paradox was this: I had the courage to face the possibility of my own illness because my loved ones kept up the litany that it wasn't going to happen. I took a similar comfort in the fact that Roger wasn't obsessive about AIDS and didn't go ice cold whenever he saw a funny bruise. Yet if Cesar projected a glimmer of magic for my sake if not his own, I also recall him saying late one night, with an ashen finality: "When are they going to realize they have to stop?"

Stop casual sex, he meant, and he meant gay men. When he said it I found the remark far too extreme, even as I gazed at his purple leg, which now gave off a sweet and sickly smell like burnt flowers at the site of the open wound. That is the smell of dying to me. And the spectral fiat—
they have to stop
—has stayed with me now three years, till I see that he meant everybody. And for all my loathing of the holy lies of straight religion as to love, I agree with him now. If everyone doesn't stop and face the calamity, hand in hand with the sick till it can't break through anymore, then it will claim the millennium for its own.

He left on the morning of the twenty-ninth, patting me half-asleep before he took off with Jerry. The Platonic interlude between them was dwindling down. Cesar didn't have any room for Jerry's despair over his mother. A few weeks later, when Jerry heard his own T-cell numbers were in the normal range, indicating healthy immune function, he exulted to Cesar about it. Cesar took offense and began pulling back. The clearest thing I remember him saying over Christmas came at the end of a long self-critical talk about his failures of the heart, the choosing of people who wouldn't love back. "At least I picked the right friend," he said, waving an arm that took me in and the room by the pool and all our laughter.

When I got up that morning, Roger was out on the front terrace. He'd had an early breakfast with Cesar and then watched him down to Jerry's car. "Oh, that poor man," he said now, choking with pain and a wave of tears. I stood there staring dully out across the milky city awash with the old year's sun, and I didn't know what to say to soothe him. The furious dance of the perfect week was over, and now the terror of what lay ahead came back in its full blankness.

I went in and spent a demented half hour airing and cleaning the guest room, stripping the bed to the bare mattress and wiping everything down with ammonia—a perfect frenzy of prophylaxis, almost a phobia. Guilty and vaguely appalled the whole time, as if I was secretly abandoning my friend. Scared shitless too, because what if everyone was wrong about the virus after all? Maybe it could cling to a pillow slip where a fevered head tossed restless. And if the sweat soaked through to the pillow, did you have to throw that out as well?

We are not just talking about the sterilizing of glasses here. Every second day while he was with us, there was a shopping bag full of soiled paper towels, rank with suppuration from being padded against the gash in his groin. The trash bags massed at the curb that year were a weird amalgam of bandages and gift wrap. Thankfully, that was the last time I was ever possessed by this particular madness, but it's why I have such an instant radar for the bone-zero terror of others. Those who a year later would not enter our house, would not take food or use the bathroom. Would not hold me.

The only thing I could think of to lift the gloom that morning was to get us out of the house. So we went to Michel Richard, where we always ended up on winter Saturdays for cafe au lait and croissants. Six little spindly tables tight to the sidewalk on Robertson Boulevard: Paris if you squinted hard enough. We needed the ballast of normalcy. And it nearly worked, because here we were, limp with an unspoken gratitude that we at least were spared. Then a voice with a nasal whine said, "Hi," and I turned, and there was Joel.

Joel is a couple of different stories, only one of which is AIDS. He was thirty-four then, a pumped-up former actor given to facials and Melrose threads. When I met him, in the summer of '81, he was writing a play, and I was two feet from the brick wall my career was about to smash head-on like a runaway train. I had a tortured six-week fling with Joel, being pushed away with one hand while the other ran dialogue by me. Like all obsessions, of course, it was lunacy. But even when the affair had died of my own misery, the seduction of being a mentor held. I filtered every line of Joel's play through my own assaulted heart, and the only good that came of the whole mess was the spur it gave me to write one of my own.
Just the Summers
was about Joel and Roger and me, and I couldn't begin to be finished with him till I finished it. Though Roger and I had weathered and survived it, the dead end I was in for months was very hard to come home to.

In the years since, Roger had come to see Joel as childlike and floundering but not unamusing. From that awful summer on, Joel had been hooked up with Leo, a kind and simple man who worked as a caseworker for the Feds. By way of putting it all to rest, Roger and I maintained a certain guarded acquaintance with them, but I hadn't actually seen Joel in nearly a year. What shards of the wreckage remained were like shrapnel the doctors do not feel the need to remove; very deep in the tissue, aching slightly on a rainy day.

Yet I stiffened the instant I saw him that Saturday noon, because the wound of Cesar's pain was still so fresh. There was a group of people waiting for Joel farther down the sidewalk, so the encounter couldn't have lasted thirty seconds. But as he sauntered off, I thought—I wrote it this way in my journal—"Why is my friend sick and this asshole is so strapping well?" Needless to say, I'm not proud of that. The free-floating rage with a hex in its tail, almost wishing the horror on others, is as annihilating as any feeling I've ever had. I knew it was wrongheaded even then.

Besides, Joel and Leo had been through six months' terror of their own, as Leo had been plagued by a set of symptoms he couldn't shake—sinus infection, rashes, fevers. The doctors assured them all along that it simply couldn't be AIDS; Leo just didn't fit the profile. What I didn't know on that Saturday was that Leo's low-grade fevers were getting worse. The day before we saw Joel outside Michel Richard, he'd filled the tub with water and fumbled a razor across his wrists. He didn't get much further than breaking the skin, he admitted as much, but the feel of overload and the rope's end were real enough. Joel had been hospitalized overnight on suicide watch, and the group he was walking with on Robertson was an outing of the self-destructed, trying to make do with one day at a time.

Nothing was simple anymore. Even if it used to be complicated, the complication wasn't AIDS, and now it always seemed to be. Still it was all unfocused, isolated cases, maybe eight hundred in L.A. now. There was minuscule coverage in the local press, and nothing approaching a citywide welling of fear and protest. The most constructive thing anyone seemed to be doing was avoiding all travel to New York and San Francisco, which were now perceived as "over," not to mention a bummer.

Thus I was all alone in my rage over Cesar. I didn't even know how to speak it to Rog, though I'm sure I'd already begun screaming at bureaucrats on the phone and erupting in major outbursts while standing in line at the post office. These three years have taught me that fear—terror, that is, with a taste like you're sucking on a penny—is equal parts rage and despair. The panic makes your brain race so fast that the yelling spews like poison food and the blackness flattens you, without any back-and-forth like day and night, not even any contrast. You are up and down at the same time.

So if I've neglected to mention that Roger was still pretty beat at night, complaining again that he'd lost a few pounds—only three, how could that be anything?—it's because his minor frets were in a whole different league from the general nightmare. I did as much complaining about the malingering of my cold. Roger's late-night two-note cough had gone on so long that it actually made me feel secure. Whereas Cesar wasn't waking from the bad dream.

The year did not end neatly, that much is clear. But years are so ingrained in us—the number of our own, the numerology of history—that we cleave our lives and make our resolutions on the cusp between last day and first day. Which reminds me of another toast: In '75 on Sanibel Island at New Year's, we split a split of champagne at midnight on the beach. We ended up pouring half of it in the sand, preferring the star-shot sky to wine, in the process spilling libation to the gods. And to show how little foreshadowing there was, even on the jamb of '85, I stare as if from a receding train at the final entry for '84. Despite the shell shock after Cesar and the thundercloud statistics, I'm "ready to start the year. R was reading his old journal from 1980 tonight, and we roamed back over things."

I can see us so vividly side by side in bed—reading, dozing, roaming—always coming round again to that evening anchorage, no matter if the day had been a hurricane. It would all begin to accelerate very fast now. Compared to the bend in the road ahead, this last stretch—Thanksgiving to Christmas, all for our brother below the equator—was sweet as a harvest picnic. At the time I thought there were no more layers of innocence to peel. Things couldn't be worse, I'd think sometimes, and that was to
calm
me. "No worst, there is none," goes the line from Gerard Manley Hopkins that would toll out of nowhere in my head.

I cannot say what pagan god it was, but I'd gotten in the habit, last thing at night, of praying:
Thank you for this.
I'd be tucked up against my little friend, perfectly still, and thanking the darkness for the time we'd had—the ten years, the house, the dog, the work. I did, I counted my blessings. Praying for more, of course. Willing—at that point anyway—to make my peace with the infinite, that our life should stay exactly as it was, nothing but nights like these. I knew what I had and what I stood to lose. I held it cradled in my arms, eyes open even as I slept. The night watch from the cliffs at Thera, clear along the moon all the way to Africa.

I was back to my novel full force in January, hoping to get two hundred pages under my belt before I had to take off for New York, there to confer with Whoopi and eyeball half a dozen manicurists in the second-story salons of Madison Avenue. Meanwhile the Writers Guild had started to convulse in anticipation of contract negotiations. I began attending meetings of a splinter group that came to be known as the Union Blues, its avowed purpose being to prevent a strike like the one that derailed the careers of thousands of working writers back in '81. John Allison called to say his musical was on, and I purred with understanding. Spring would be fine for the play, and until then I wanted nothing more than a chance to get my nymph and my curmudgeon to the end of Chapter V.