Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (21 page)

T
HE CEMETERY IS one I’ve driven by for years, on my way to the beach—it sits atop a hill just behind the funeral home, conspicuous, as all funeral homes in small towns are, for its neatness, and its imposing architecture. It should not have been a surprise when I learned that this funeral home would be handling Bobby’s burial, but still it felt odd finally to turn in at an establishment one had driven by for nearly ten years. The day of the funeral was sunny and clear; the sort of day graduations occur on up north—the grass a deep, intense green, roses in bloom, bright sunlight. It was a grim occasion nevertheless—his friends from childhood weeping at the grave while the priest spoke to his mother and lover, seated side by side in the front row of folding chairs under the canopy. (In a small town in north Florida, a black priest presiding over the funeral of a gay man at which the mother and boyfriend are seated side by side indicates that social change really does trickle down. The florist asked his mother as he prepared the flowers, “So young! What did he die of?” “AIDS,” she said, and lectured the clerk at the state records office who assumed she wouldn’t want AIDS listed as the cause of death.) Like all funerals, it was very social; the last time, I kept thinking, I would see these people together, people I had come to know through Bobby, and could not imagine knowing without him.

Five weeks later I found myself driving to the beach through the town on a hot July afternoon, and I turned in to the cemetery to see if the tombstone had been put up. There was only one other car in the place—a man in a Plymouth Valiant on his way out, who passed me with a sad expression as I held my hand up to acknowledge him. I parked under the shade of some tall pines and walked barefoot down the dirt road that led to the graves. The cemetery is pretty—set on a plateau near Highway 16, enclosed by dense woods, the center treeless and open, the rest punctuated with laurels and tall pines; not the skinny pines planted close together down here so they will grow a size convenient for paper mills, but real pines, allowed to reach a great width and height. The pine tree is magnificent when left like that—unencumbered, casting a deep and fragrant shade beneath its outstretched branches. That was the sort of pine that shaded the graves I walked among.

The first thing that caught my eye as I walked in the general direction of what memory told me was the place Bobby was buried was a green tent, like the one erected for Bobby’s funeral. When I could not find Bobby’s grave, I walked over to it and learned why the man who’d passed me on his way out had worn so pained a face. Someone had just died. A funeral had just been held, that morning; the second half of a married couple whose tombstone was already in place, the husband dead since 1978, the wife laid in the ground that morning, her date of death not yet chiseled into the granite. She had survived her husband by fifteen years. The tent still shaded the mound of earth left above her interred coffin; the bunches of flowers numbered more than thirty, arranged in a sort of U-shape along both sides of the canopy, the tombstone itself a large one. The overwhelming impression was one of abandonment. They’ve gone off and left her, I thought—unable to see or smell the flowers heaped in her honor. This woman, I thought, will never again be told to finish her peas, or go to school, or come downstairs and meet so-and-so. No one will ever call, or make any demand on her again. Some of the flowers looked so fresh it was a mystery how they’d managed to retain their color and form in the July heat. Some were flowers I could not identify, so I bent down and removed the card stuck on a plastic prong florists insert in bouquets. On one side was the sender’s name, on the other a preprinted list used to identify the order, with blank spaces for the type of flower, sender, destination, type. These flowers were silk—which explained their durability. The breeze blew over them all, through the deep shade under the canopy, onto the blazing green meadow. All these people had been here this morning, like us, that morning five weeks ago; all of them were probably back at someone’s house now, eating ham, drinking iced tea, talking with the sad eyes and nervous volubility of a funeral party—that odd mixture of heavy feet and lighthearted chatter, that rich, rich, mixture of emotions. One of them—the man in the Valiant—had already come back to the grave site. Perhaps her son, his eyes strained, near tears, at leaving her there. Sons are expected to care for mothers; one of the things that bothered Bobby, I suspect, was the fact that he would not be able to take care of his, those last few weeks when he was so sick and so furious at what was happening to him that he turned his face to the wall and refused to speak to anyone.

I walked over to the section where I felt certain Bobby had been buried, but could not find his name on any of the stones. There were many markers, all the same pale gray granite. Surely it was this stand of pines I stood beneath. No, that one. And so on. (Tombstones settle, a friend told me; they sink, and have to be raised up; his own father’s sank, and when they raised his father’s, his mother’s and aunt’s sank lower. He would have to take care of it. “Will you be buried next to them?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, “I got mine when I got my mother’s. I just wanted to take care of it, and show her, I think, I wasn’t afraid of death.”) (I am.)

Nobody believes in his own death, said Freud. Too true. When I finally found, to my relief, a stone that had Bobby’s surname on it—his father’s—I saw what I’d been looking for: the coffin-shaped mound of cracked, dried, light brown dirt under which Bobby lay, a sprig of artificial red flowers stuck into it with a black wire. Here he was. Lying, under the dirt, not sitting up in a rocking chair on the porch talking to me, as he did when I stopped by on my way to the beach the past several years. In retrospect, Bobby seems that rarest, most wonderful thing: fun. More rare than we suppose, I thought, as I stood there thinking of all the people I knew down here. Witty, honest, down-to-earth, sometimes malicious, perceptive, great fun to sit and talk with, about others or himself. Only now he was not in a chair on the porch. He was under the ground. Along with, I thought, all that virus. Finally defeated. No longer replicating. Unable to infect another host. Finished. Stopped. Dead. End of the line. Along with the CMV and toxo and MAI. At what point did the cellular activity of all these organisms cease? The minute the heart stopped beating, or later, in the ground?

It doesn’t matter; it’s such a stupid question; I think it only because it’s what put Bobby here, at the ripe age of forty, instead of the rocking chair on the porch. He lies, beneath this mound of tan dirt, next to his father, who also died young, and the space reserved for his mother, now in the Keys. There they are: parents and son, right beside each other—a family unit still, mother, father, child. The acorn did not fall far from the tree. It’s touching, the sight of this cluster of graves. It makes me think how nomadic most of us are. Bobby is buried in the town in which he was born and grew up, beside his parents. My friend Cal knows where he’ll be buried too—next to his parents, in a town southwest of this one. I don’t. I am a product of the corporate culture that has banished death entirely except as a joke on
The Golden Girls
. My parents worked and lived far from their birthplaces, and they never went back. The cemetery of the town they ended up in is the ugliest I’ve ever seen: a sandy slope surrounded by a chicken-wire fence beside a two-lane highway under the blazing sun. I can’t imagine being interred there. This one is actually beautiful—on what might be called, in Florida, a hill, like something in
Our
Town
. It’s the closed circle of a family’s little romance. It’s where Bobby lies beside his father, because his mother—the day she had to buy a spot for her husband—seeing that Bobby was not likely to marry, bought one for him, too.

It’s a cliché by now to say that our culture has banished death from its consciousness, its daily life, its rituals. It’s equally banal to say that AIDS has forced many Americans to experience death at an age and in a way they never expected to. The Egyptians built pyramids and furnished their tombs with artifacts for the afterlife. We get cremated, have a cocktail party, and go out to Fire Island. We’re too sensible to dwell on Death. Some of the old-fashioned ceremonies were, in fact, gruesome. Some of the new ones are hilarious. In Gaultier, Mississippi, the paper says today, a funeral home has built a drive-in window—much like a bank—so that mourners can lean out their car window, push a button, and see the dead person lying in the back of a building on a color video monitor. A rival funeral director warned that joy-riding teens might want to be “entertained by the appearance of a dead body.” On drugs, no doubt. Basically, we don’t believe in the afterlife. So what’s the point? Death is just a moment that ends all the moments that have preceded it. Or so it seems. In reality, it haunts us just as much as the Egyptians. These accumulated disappearances of people we love. We wonder still: Where did they go—anyplace? Or are they just decomposing molecules without a consciousness? The Catholics are allegedly “good at Death.” They were the day Bobby was put into the ground. There is no substitute for those words, that rite. All our lives, no matter how shallow, advertising-soaked, consumerist, come back to it. There’s an advertisement on TV down here for a funeral home in Gainesville: A handsome, middle-aged man with a local twang comes on TV once a week and announces community events—fund-raisers, baseball games, club meetings—with an old-fashioned friendli- ness that draws on our nostalgia for the nineteenth century (which was obsessed with Death—cf. Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman). Then he makes his pitch for a prepaid funeral contract—like the one my father had, which came in very handy when he died. Yet when I imagine phoning Mr. Williams and signing on the dotted line myself, I’m stuck with the consequences of my life. Whom do I know down here? Who would come—relatives from out of state? Where would I be buried? Next to whom? All these thoughts—like deciding whom you leave your money to—force us to face the fact that lives come to an end, form a little shape, have substance, and are actually weighed, by ourselves, or others, if not our Maker, as we once believed.

I’m sure Bobby thought about all this; what he thought I do not know. At any rate, he’s gone, and only we have to deal with his—and so many others’—absence. Bobby’s death put a punctuation mark, a period, on the lives of everyone who knew him; this cannot be denied. It put everything in a new perspective. Gone is the worry about car titles, insurance, nurses who would not come back because either the gay “lifestyle,” or AIDS, made them uncomfortable, the vomiting, incontinence, changing of sheets, exhaustion, anger, resentment of friends who were not coming by (“People stay away from Death,” said the hospice worker), the long, draining, painful vigil. All gone. In their place is sleep under the pines, the silk flowers that never wilt. Bobby’s death created a new geography—a new map. All roads are connected now to this spot: his grave. One will never drive past this hill without thinking of him, or stopping to visit. It forms a point on the compass—a fixed foot, around which other journeys, other highways, radiate. Bobby’s death left those who remain bitter, sad, judgmental, depressed, withdrawn, forlorn, quiet. Not all deaths are enlightening, though they do throw us back on ourselves. (Read Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child.”) They throw us back on ourselves because, after the death of someone we knew, or loved, we are both more alone and more aware that someday we will die. This knowledge should change things—but it seldom does. Most of us go on doing the same things, only with more anxiety (as Bruce Mailman predicted when asked what effect AIDS would have on sex). Yet there is a deep sea change, beneath the surface. “I’m damaged goods,” a friend from New York said after calling to read the obituary of yet another friend there. “There’s something inside me that’s broken and can never be fixed.” A week later, Bobby’s partner says almost the same thing: “I’m like a toy I had as a kid that I broke. It could never be fixed.
I
can never be fixed.” Later that evening, I find this in what Whitman wrote, after Lincoln died, in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”:

But for the moment, life goes on, which means I leave the cemetery and drive by Bobby’s little white house, empty now in the blazing sunlight, so empty, and head for the beach.

W
ALKING IS CONSIDERED odd in this little town in the country—but since the laying of a sidewalk last summer, you can go all the way uptown now to the intersection where two highways crisscross each other beneath a traffic light, before the facade of a gas station, a fried-chicken franchise, and a stretch of railroad tracks. The intersection could be anywhere in the United States, anywhere at all, but on the way, you walk past particular things: the insurance agency, the nursery that failed last year in the freeze, the bank, the town hall, and the public park. In the park is a fountain that plashes in the still night for apparently nobody’s benefit but my own; at night I am usually the only person out. Sometimes the lights are on above the tennis courts, and people are playing a game or are on the basketball court adjacent to the courts, shooting baskets. Sometimes I make out a solitary teenage boy dribbling a basketball in the dark (the lights now cost twenty-five cents every half hour; in the old days people walked away and left them burning) with the radio on in his car to keep him company. There is also a man who walks his poodle on a leash in his pajamas, and sometimes a policeman is sitting in his car by the public beach waiting for a crime to be committed. Twice I have been accused of a crime—most recently, a woman saw someone walk across her lawn, phoned the cops, and they stopped me and asked to see my footprints. (To take a walk in the United States is to be suspected of either poverty or criminal intent.) Sometimes it is overcast, and in the summer often too humid, but in winter it is mostly clear and dry, and when you finally go up the hill past the public beach and begin the last stretch along the dark, silent gardens of the houses on the lake, you are all alone beneath a cloudless sky. The stars in Florida in the winter are mesmerizing—though it may be merely my imagination, they seem more thickly strewn across the sky than in the summer. Or perhaps the cool air merely leaves one free to look up at them undisturbed—no bugs to swat, no heat to make you want to get indoors to a ceiling fan or air conditioner. In winter, conditions for star watching are perfect; the stars are plenteous and bright, and, if there isn’t any moon, you stand there looking up with the distinct feeling that you are on the surface of a planet suspended in space shared by countless others that merely face you, like houses across the lake.

In a small town at night a walk clears the head, gets you out of the house, lets your mind wander, sets you free. I am upset when I meet someone else walking; I have grown accustomed to having the sidewalk to myself as I let unravel in the darkness whatever is on my mind, so that, returning an hour later, whatever facts, events, incidents have made that day good or bad seem to have played themselves out and become a little more ordered than they were on my first receiving them. Sometimes I leave the house after a telephone call from New York. I digest the news—so dense with incident—in the silence exuded by the sleeping gardens. Sometimes the news is bad: A friend is sick, or dead. Tonight I’m told a man committed suicide rather than suffer any longer the deterioration caused by the virus. On the tennis courts I see two couples playing, and some kids on the basketball court beyond, borrowing their light, and the first thing I think about them is,
They do not have It. It has nothing to do with them.
The stars are very white above me when I put the tennis courts behind and go down the hill by the public beach, very thick and beautiful in the black sky—and I think,
R. belongs to that now, a part again of the
universe, no longer in human form, a mix of elements, vaporized,
cremated, gone, eternal, and dissembled: as unearthly as a star.
And he joins a constellation not marked in the maps of the heavens—of these friends and acquaintances who have now entered the past; I imagine them all out there, white pinpoints of light, stars.

Some of them were stars—to me, or the homosexual world of New York City, or the world in general. Some of them were men who were famous for designing clothes or buildings, or interpreting history, or composing music. Some of them were merely admired on Fire Island. Some were stars in pornographic films—like the man I saw in the slides flashed on the screen of a bar in Washington several years ago, one of the sexual icons of New York, who was in fact withering away even as the men around me paused in the conversation, their drinking, to admire his penis and his pectorals. And now this most recent, newest star: a man so good-looking everyone urged him to become a model, but who chose to remain in publishing, a copywriter, a man from California whose skin, hair, teeth, smile, and bright good looks were startling on the gray streets of Manhattan, whose grime and falling dust could not dim his blondness. He was so blond that unlike everyone else I knew of that hue—whose appearance was affected by age, stress, fast living, the general ash of the urban air—he looked as crisp and golden the last time I saw him as he did the day ten years before when we first met. His western health was a kind of marvel. Why didn’t the city get to him? He lived in a house with friends, and former lovers, in the city and commuted to Fire Island in the summers; he was a staple, an icon, of homosexual New York City—handsome but not vain, smart but not mean, blond but not wasted; so that when he got sick, we were all shocked as if it had never happened before, and when he killed himself, we felt a light had been extinguished—and a new star put up in the sky, beneath which I walk on these quiet nights with fear, dread, remorse, sadness, and disgust in the heart. Fear, of It. Dread: Who’s next? Remorse: that we should have lived differently. Sadness: that friends suffered. Disgust: that something common as the flu, wretched as African pestilence, could destroy so much that was secure, beautiful, happy; that there should be such penalties for sex. I look at the public beach as I walk by—in a ravine, where a stream issues from another lake. I see a dark grove of live oaks draped with Spanish moss swaying in the breeze, a pale white dock and changing room whose white clapboard sides gleam in the streetlight refracted through the limbs of the trees—and want only one thing: to be alive, and able to swim when the weather gets warm this coming summer.

This ambition is somewhat scaled down from previous ones: I used to take this walk wondering if I should get in the car and drive to Jacksonville and visit the baths and bars. I felt on the loveliest nights—when the moon was new, and there was a soft, warm breeze, and the sensations that characterize a southern night were all in bloom—that such beauty, such a night, required a lover. Then I felt sorry for myself, annoyed that homosexual life was confined to cities, and in those cities to one-night stands. Now I have no such ambitions, do not demand a lover, merely want life. A decrease in expectations, the economists would call it; a rise in conservatism, the politicians; a return to morality, the priests. In fact it is fear and loathing; in reality it is the mind scrambling to accommodate itself to facts beyond its control. The town seems to me as exotic as a colony on the moon because it does not have it. The little old lady who sits alone in her tiny living room in the miniature house so near the sidewalk I can almost reach in through the window and touch her; the solitary adolescent dribbling his basketball on the cement court in the darkness, his bare chest flashing as he passes near the faint radiance of the streetlight; the children who have left their tricycles tilted in the sand of their driveway might as well be living on another planet—and as I walk past the bank whose sign flashes the time and temperature with a loud
clunk
, I feel I can deal with only two facts:
It is nine forty-three, it is sixty-three degrees.
That is all I want to know right now. I don’t want any more phone calls, any more news—I have come to detest the sound of a ringing phone.

This shrinking—of the universe to a bank sign on this quiet night—while above me the eerie stars provoke dreary thoughts, this reduction of my dreams to the simple goal of being able to swim this summer, intensifies as the roll call of expiring men expands. As every other day the television or newspaper carries some new fact—300,000 are exposed, Dr. Curran announces; 30,000 will get It in the next five years—one’s desires, defiance, beliefs, wilt. One wonders if there isn’t some way to fight back—besides celibacy, that is; a treatment of some kind that would allow one to go out and meet the barbarians rather than sit quietly in fear waiting for them to reach the gate. “It’s so depressing,” a friend says on the phone from New York, after telling me about his arrangements to increase his insurance and make out a will. “You mean all this grown-up stuff,” I say. “No,” he says, “I mean all this death stuff.”

This death stuff is unnerving—one gets up each day, or walks through the quiet town at night, past the two-story houses with lights burning in cozy rooms, and dogs drooping on porches, and bicycles knocked over in the sand, and wonders just how many more facts one will have to absorb. When will it happen? Where do I want to be when it does? How will it happen? Friends say if you don’t want to get It, you won’t; but this seems to me silly; friends who did not want to die have. Your desire to live one, two, three, or four years is within your power, to a degree; but how much more? And you wonder as you walk through the sleeping town under a sky filled with crystalline stars how this happened, because on quiet nights in winter you have time to think over the past fifteen years and ask,
Could I have lived differently?
Been a different kind of homosexual?

Even as I do, a friend of mine ten years younger is living in the apartment above the first one I lived in, in New York, and writing me letters at three in the morning about the men he has just met, and in some cases slept with—and I thrill to this reenactment of the adventure I had when I moved to the city, and think happily,
It still goes on.
Yet I wonder if this vicarious pleasure is not foolish. In Florida as of February there are thirty-five new cases a month. Thirty thousand are predicted over the next five years in the nation. Promiscuity is, after all, like the engine of some giant ocean liner, which takes days to start once it is stopped. Promiscuity is so huge, so enormous, so habitual, so vital that it is brought to a halt very slowly, and only in the direst of circumstances: the equation of death with sex. There are homosexuals who say promiscuity is our right and cannot be taken away from us, but this sounds like the man on the bridge screaming he has a right to jump. Shut the whole vast machine down, with a shudder, and let us be quiet till this thing is trapped. Because each evening I take this walk, it is pure sentimentality to imagine friends who have disappeared as stars twinkling in the night sky above the Earth—in fact they are just gone.

And the statue to be erected in Sheridan Square of two men on a bench seems oddly outdated now—perhaps a piece of marble with names engraved on it might make more sense. The town beneath these stars does not remember how blond, bright, witty, and well liked R. was; nor does the woman behind the counter of the 7-Eleven store across the railroad tracks whose bright light brings me in out of the darkness. It is open all night. Inside, the woman who works the register on the graveyard shift is talking to a customer buying Tootsie Rolls about a city they have both lived in, San Diego. I buy some cookies, and a wrestling magazine that features foldouts of ten wrestling stars who, both hairy and smooth-chested, wear elaborate belt buckles, tattoos, black bathing suits. It is the sort of magazine a ten-year-old boy or a girl who follows the wrestlers on TV might buy, I guess—neither of which I am, or both of which I am, as I walk home with the magazine folded in my pocket, feeling like a kid who hopes to grow up and have enormous muscles. I guess I still do. Walking home with my cookies, my wrestler magazine, the sound of my footsteps down the quiet street, I have regressed; I might as well be ten; my desires as chaste as stars. And soon I have left the light behind, and pass the boy still dribbling his basketball with an intensity that sounds odd in the deep darkness but comes no doubt from the fact that as he leaps up to make his shot, he too imagines he’s a star. Down in the hollow, coming up from the beach, I think the real stars at this moment are the journalists, scientists, volunteers in New York and San Francisco, and wherever else, caring for the men determined to hang on to their human form. And the doctor who delivers us from this thing the brightest star of all. But enough of metaphors. Now the real stars make me stop on the sidewalk and look up: so cold and brilliant, so far away, so unlike anything we know. All that remains beneath them on this planet of hope and dread is the determination to remain terrestrial. All that beats in the stillness of the winter night is the basketball, and the horrified heart.