Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (4 page)

S
OMEWHERE IN
Remembrance of Things Past
—which is to say, for the reader unable to find the line, somewhere in Russia, or the Amazon—the shock of learning that a rich man has fallen in love with a prostitute is compared to the trouble we have believing a man can die of a common bacillus. It’s a double metaphor—comparing the course of love with the course of disease (Proust’s favorite link), and social snobbery with the biological superiority human beings feel to other forms of life. The idea that an intelligent man with aristocratic friends, a fortune, family, career, can fall for a kept woman—or, in our day, be converted to a jar of ashes on the bookshelf by the action of an organism invisible to the naked eye—is somehow very hard for us to grasp. “The germs don’t need me,” said a friend at the baths one evening when I asked him if he wasn’t worried about dying. “If they needed me, I’d be worried, but they don’t need me.”

In his metaphor the germs are hostesses making up guest lists for dinner parties, I guess—yet “The germs don’t need me” is perhaps only the craziest version of a denial that a lot of us have practiced over the last two years, even while the people we have played with over the last decade and a half keep disappearing. We haven’t, really, somehow, believed in this germ. However, the last line of a letter tells me as an afterthought that the weather of March 29 in New York was snow and sleet, “Perfect for Ray’s funeral.” I did not know Ray was sick, much less dead. This evening I am told on the telephone that Michael won’t live past the weekend; CMV virus is running riot through his system, he is bleeding internally. But Michael went to
Cornell
, I think when I put down the phone; came from a good family; has a little garden on East Seventh Street he was always asking me to come see; was someone I have always had a crush on. What did the germs need with him?

He was, after all, a talented architect who had come to New York after college to work and enjoy himself—a modest agenda in the scheme of things. We met because I liked his roommate—a scientist with Bell Labs who took a class in gymnastics I attended at the West Side Y. Our first outing ended with my being dropped off in a taxicab at my corner, while Michael, in the backseat, smiled a knowing grin as I bid his roommate good night—as if Michael knew exactly what had, or had not happened; as if he were saying, “This one isn’t what you think he is.” Or, “You got no further than any of the others who’ve tried.” His roommate eventually grew tired of the commute from Manhattan to southern New Jersey and vanished from the city. Michael stayed. What struck me about Michael—the first time we went home together—was that, in contrast to his roommate, he was easy. Very easy. So easy that the fact that our attempts at sex failed in no way affected the affection we felt for each other. Michael was good-natured. Had a good sense of humor. And was less sexually inhibited than most people.

This was not, in the seventies, something that lowered him in my estimation—nor any of the other friends I had who went out searching for whatever we were searching for with a determination approaching dementia. Sex was partly what we had come to New York for, from families, universities, small towns, other cities. I’d come upon Michael summer nights with his lover, floating down a near-empty Broadway on bicycles; they spoke of moving to a farm in upstate New York, or Georgia, but never seemed to manage to. I would see him instead on the beach at Fire Island. Or on the sidewalk in front of my apartment, buying flowers, on his way home from work. Or in a room at the St. Mark’s Baths. The last time I’d seen him at the baths, in fact, I’d walked into his room before I realized the body was his; and then, in a split second of recognition, two steps from his pillow, we both laughed. It was a compliment, in a way—freed of the formalities of friendship, stripped of his social identity and clothes, Michael was so desirable I’d taken the risk of stepping through the door. That door, of course, had been open to anyone who passed; there was something concupiscent, lascivious about Michael. The sheets he lay on were rumpled and damp with use, the lightbulb by the doorway red, the skin of his body shining with a film of oil. This greasy red chamber of love that eventually ended up as part of the towering heap of garbage on the sidewalk outside the St. Mark’s Baths was something he made jokes about when I met him in a suit and tie there the next day, coming home from work: black plastic bags filled with the detritus of lovemaking, cans of Crisco, lubricant, poppers, paper plates, cups, packs of cigarettes—the whole effluvia of a disposable culture that had decided to dispose of sex the same way the Japanese restaurant a few doors down got rid of its grease.

Time
magazine called it a sexual revolution (which it then declared
finito
in March 1984). Whatever it was—the pent-up frustration of lonely years in high school; the delayed release of urges that had been a source of anxiety and fear since puberty; or just the mating instinct in a new context—Michael exemplified its inexhaustible energy. He had first fallen in love with a professor at Cornell—a married man who left his wife for him and then went back to her—and I imagined Michael searching ever since in the baths for some recapitulation of this youthful love affair. No doubt that was romantic. But in a way the whole phenomenon was. I pictured a line of Yeats’s chiseled above the doorway of the public clinic on Ninth Avenue where Michael and I went to have our stools analyzed, our blood tested. “Love has pitched its mansion in the place of excrement.” Curious location. But then whatever one came down with could be cured. If we were playing on a garbage dump—that heap of black plastic bags on the sidewalk Monday mornings on St. Marks Place—it was under control. Penicillin had made sex possible, the way plastic paved the way for swimming pool liners and airplane seats. It made accessible to the average man a dream of sexual paradise previously confined to the canvases of Delacroix, the pages of
The
Arabian Nights.
When we saw the red tea tent of an Indian mogul at the Metropolitan Museum in the India exhibit, it reminded Michael of the billowing pavilions people set up on Fire Island: a silken dream of Eros.

It was just that connection between art and life, history and the present, civilization and Eros, that Michael appreciated—his favorite things were art and sex. Paintings, sculpture, architecture—and bodies. One hot afternoon when the beach on Fire Island was closed to swimmers because the sewage that our Baghdad dumped off the coast had drifted dangerously close to land, Michael and I talked for a while beside the sweltering sea. All around us the crowd of men broiled in the sun, beside an ocean they could not enter. Unreal sea! It looked in fact perfectly beautiful, immense, invigorating—so green I stood skeptically at the edges for almost an hour before I saw the first tiny fleck of raw sewage, like a jellyfish in a transparent wave, floating in to shore. Only then did I give up thoughts of swimming and go back. There was no way to know this day—all of us marching up and down beside the polluted sea—was the future. “There’s nothing worse than an ocean you can’t swim in,” Michael said as we returned to town on the nearly empty train. “Unless it’s people you can’t sleep with,” he added with a smile. “I guess that’s why the baths are so . . . relaxing.”

Years before, a man had told me in a restaurant on Fifty-seventh Street that a doctor he knew was predicting a tremendous epidemic of typhus in the gay community—but it seemed at the time, over chicken salad sandwiches, just an instance of an ancient paranoia, a biblical vision of punishment-for-sex. No one
I
knew had typhus. Nor did I know that eventually not the outer but the inner ocean would turn foul: the sea of fluids that composed us. Little did we dream, nights at the Saint, when sweat was licked off dancers’ bodies and kisses were exchanged, that years later we would refuse to drink from the water fountain there because of a new gay cancer. It took a while for people to believe in the invisible—the germ—for the same reason it took the nineteenth century a while to accept Pasteur’s explanation of smallpox; but once accepted, the implications were mind-boggling.

It was thought when this began that those exposed to the virus—“infected” was somehow too harsh a word at the time—were simply the very reckless; the extraordinarily debauched. Then, as the numbers mounted, it seemed they were not very different from you and me. And the next popular hypothesis arose: Everyone had met these germs, but only some would succumb. (People were not ready to believe you could catch cancer the way you caught hepatitis.) When Michael got sick, he would stop and talk outside the baths on my block on his way home from work, and save for the fact that he no longer went in himself, he seemed perfectly normal. His illness did not upset me because its effects were not visible. He even seemed to be recovering under the care of a nutritionist. The only change I could see was that he seemed to wear a coat and tie more often—and he discussed his T-cell count, the results of his latest blood test. He was the example I reserved in my mind to prove it could be beaten, or at least lived with; it was not this fatal, fantastic, unbelievable thing it seemed to be. Eddie was going up to Sloan-Kettering every other day for the most avant-garde and technological of treatments, ever ready to try the new and the sophisticated. Michael, on the other hand, credited a macrobiotic diet with bringing his T-cell count back to normal (for a homosexual, that is; there were three categories, he told me with an ironic smile: Virgin, Average Man, and Homosexual). We laughed at this odd reminder that being the third, we were not the first two. He had his setbacks. One evening on his way to one of those Christmas parties New Yorkers give that, we agreed, are sometimes pointless and fatiguing, he was tired before even getting there; he’d just recovered from a bad day and was still angry that his lover had not brought him the soup he’d asked for, when he could not get out of bed. His life was quieter now, but by no means over; in fact, his work—his career as an architect—had prospered. He no longer went to the baths or Fire Island. He went to Rome instead that spring and, on his return, began to paint the ceiling of his apartment with a fresco found in a church or palace there—an admirable whimsy, it seemed to me, like Michael himself, like art these days—half-jest, half-glory. He seemed, in short, to have changed his habits—which consisted now of work, macrobiotic diet, and sitting in the garden he kept inviting me over to see, the garden I wanted to, meant to, see but did not because it was just a few blocks away and I would surely see it some evening.

Instead we sat on the stoop across from the baths on my block—which continued to draw men from all over the city and country—and watched people go in and out. “They want to commit suicide,” said Michael. “In a few months they’ll all be sitting in a doctor’s office.” The people at the baths said, “All life is risk.” Homosexual men were either Puritan or Cavalier, and it all depended on your attitude toward something we could not see.

Before Michael died, I sometimes went into the baths and sat at the counter of the little restaurant to see the men going by the doorway in their towels—the baths, after all, were supremely visual—and sometimes, having seen a certain man go by the doorway in his towel, checked in myself and hung around the hallways in the darkness for a couple of hours, watching people I had not seen in some time, people who reminded me of the men you ran into at the Everard in 1971—and not only reminded me—since some of them were those men.

They were as improbable and beautiful lying in their rooms in their Jockey shorts and towels as the gods Michael had painted on his ceiling on Seventh Street—a burst of beauty, fantasy, art—in the midst of a nightmare reality. The thrill of homosexuality is finally an aesthetic thrill. They lay there exactly as I wanted them to; not so much gods floating on celestial clouds as river deities, lying on the shore of some sacred stream between the mud and the bulrushes. Dark, gritty, salubrious mud. “Life is risk,” one said. “I don’t care if I die tomorrow.” Or, “The germs don’t need me.” And, “You can’t stop living.” But of course you can. It still seems against nature, a violation of the hierarchy of things, that a microbe could destroy a man who could stop on a summer evening and talk about friends, Rome, Christmas, while the city he loved went past us. It still seems a scandal that an item scientists do not even define as living—a microbe that can’t paint angels, trumpets, clouds, or gods upon a ceiling—can devour a creature who can. It still seems a reproach that a virus can return us from the twentieth century to the Stone Age. Yet that is the revolution this thing has effected; that is the toppling that has occurred—the world turned upside down. Human beings lie broken and shattered on the ground, like statues pulled down by barbarians invading Rome, or Protestants smashing the art in a cathedral. The basilica’s empty. The church is closed. Michael—who went to Cornell—is gone. And sometime this summer, some ignorant tenant will move into that apartment, unpack his bags, kill the first cockroach, lie down to rest, and find himself staring in surprise at a host of gods and goddesses, angels bearing trumpets, golden clouds—all painted by a man the germs needed, for what I do not know.

T
HE ROOM HAS a view of the East River; it’s on the fourteenth floor. I sit there beside a thick plate glass window in silence and watch the barges and tugboats go by in both directions. Rising up from the flatness of Long Island City, across the river from Manhattan, is the steel skeleton of a mammoth skyscraper being built by Citibank, probably to hold canceled checks—a forecast of what will eventually be another Manhattan over there, since Manhattan seems to have doubled itself each time I come back. On the very edge of the island below, landing and taking off from a ledge concealed by the expressway built out over the river—FDR Drive—are helicopters. Two kinds: large white ones with red stripes that resemble the markings of the Coast Guard; and small black ones that take off in twos and threes and bring to mind a movie with James Bond. They’re so American, somehow: our nervous energy, our impatience and desire to dip in and flee, our technology, our short attention span. I sit there and watch them take off and cross each other’s flight paths, avoiding what looks like inevitable collision, and the sight is mesmerizing. The room is so quiet, the view so glorious, the sight of the soundless river traffic something one could sit watching for hours—mainly because the patient in the bedroom is at the moment fast asleep.

I think he is asleep; he may be waking, or just lying there, too tired to speak—whichever, he is covered in blankets, but still shivering as the onset of another fever takes hold. It’s odd to see him shivering. We are in the center of the medical universe. This hospital is the state of the art. It’s more like a luxurious hotel, in fact: a living room, a bathroom, and a bedroom with twin beds, so the patient and a family member or a friend can stay here with him. Upstairs and downstairs, on the other floors, are the doctors and machinery that represent the farthest medical science has gone in our century. The patient has just had a CAT scan and a spinal tap, and blood tests are being run to find out if some bacteria other than tuberculosis is causing these persistent fevers.

Outside the helicopters come and go with a frequency that suggests that time is never wasted in this city, or at least not in this neighborhood. Anything may happen in the next five minutes. Last night, a friend in Berlin told me that in Germany they think the answer to AIDS will come from the United States. I tell him that my friends and I, a few years ago, thought the answer would come from France. We imagined some eccentric Gallic genius, some Madame Curie, would see the tiny clue our bureaucratic institutes could not and shout “
Voilà!
” Odd, that no one says a word today about HPA-23, the drug that sent Rock Hudson over to Paris in his last days. No one says much about any of the drugs that we thought would be the treatment that worked—including AZT, which the
New York Native
now says killed Robert Joffrey. Who knows?

On the table here is the
AIDS Newsletter
, a publication that discusses treatments and drugs for the opportunistic illnesses that come in new batches every year. In Key West, a friend tells me, the leading doctor plays tapes of Louise Hay and everyone sits around like children in kindergarten singing, “I love myself.” But most of us wait wherever we are for science to give us the answer, even when the thoughts and emotions raised by the spectacle of suffering seem (though one does not want to admit it in this secular age) religious.

But what religion? On the table by the window where I sit watching helicopters land and take off is a paperback copy of
Kalki
by Gore Vidal.
Kalki
is, I think, about the end of the world—the last line is “I am Siva.” It feels, sitting here, as if this is the end of everything: a culture with infinitely subtle and complex technology made useless by something so primitive it is a question whether or not a virus constitutes Life. It certainly seems to make Life do whatever it wants. Inside the bedroom it is inducing in my friend Michael temperatures that have nothing to do with the warm spring day outside. He huddles on this April afternoon—when all the trees in Central Park are in new leaf, and the streets of the Village are jammed with handsome men in muscles and T-shirts, and people are sunbathing on the piers—while his body shakes under five bedspreads as the virus, or the bacteria it has allowed to proliferate, instills a deep chill into his bones. He might as well be in an igloo. He’s shivering, shuddering, shaking, and it won’t stop. Tomorrow more tests, and results of tests. He fights each battle as it comes. While outside the helicopters come and go in the shining sunlight, and the barges push their container cargo up and down the river, we sit perched in an aerie of what is perhaps the richest and most sophisticated city in the world in the bedroom of a man shivering like some victim of malaria in a little village in Panama in 1910.

I feel, watching these helicopters land and take off in perfect silence beyond the thick plate glass, the way I feel most of the time now in New York: not there. So much that is horrible has happened, one goes numb inside—one sits there, like the doctors, with no answers. We keep waiting for the tide to turn; statistics say the current growth in cases will be among drug addicts in the inner cities; but why then do more people I know have it each time I return to New York? This division that the test has set up—between Positives and Negatives—seems increasingly like so much nonsense. The news about AIDS, it seems, has always held two contradictory strains: (1) It’s difficult to get (Then why do so many have it? And why are they predicting such huge numbers by 1991?); and (2) they know more about the AIDS virus than any other in history (Then why can’t they stop it?).

Depending on which person you talk to, the theory on the street is: (1) Only bottoms get this; or (2) every one of us has been infected (the word used to be “exposed”) by something that, given the variety and number of the sick, we must have picked up off the banister or doorknob, and before this decade is very old, every one of us is going to be in this room, or some much crummier version of it. (Hence anxiety attacks.) The fact is that what- ever happens, those who are in this room now, or out (on leave, you might say), are fighting battles whose lessons will teach those who follow. They are the veterans Emmanuel Dreuilhe speaks of in his book,
Mortal Embrace
. His metaphor is that of war, and he is exactly right.

There is another book called
Borrowed Time
by Paul Monette, which is also about the skirmishes in this room, this room that is replicated more or less in so many towns and cities in this country, which, when you finish it, makes you think: No one who reads this can be the same afterward. Finally, we have a portrait of the hysteria, nobility, and suffering. Both books are very important. They’re both about the attempt to repel each assault as it comes, which is what the shivering patient in the bedroom is engaged in. “I just want him a little while longer,” whispered Robert, Michael’s partner, before he left the room to do some errands, and I think: This is only the first, the first of many battles.

Yet it’s strangely peaceful here; far more peaceful, in a way, than any other place in the city. The plague is not some dreaded amalgam of guilt and superstition that deforms our lives with anxiety and worry, some hidden assassin; it’s here, out in the open, in this room. Michael asks me, when I go in, to turn his pillow—that pillow that grows overheated and stale when you are lying on it with a fever for a long time—but then I’m released back into the living room, whose flowers and books and magazines I ignore to watch the helicopters instead. Easy duty. When Robert returns from his errands, we try to talk about the funny things that have happened to us both since we last saw each other, but we talk a bit too fast, and finally I’m relieved when Michael asks us to be quiet because the talk is tiring him. The awkwardness we feel then soon evaporates; the reality is faced; the blessed silence of the place returns.

“Had your fill yet of New York?” Robert asks next in a very soft voice.

“No,” I say. “I’d love to stay a few months.”

“Really?” he said. “I’d get out in a minute if I could. When Michael gets over this, I want to go.”

“Where?” I ask.

“Someplace dry,” he says, “and hot.” (The longing of people with tuberculosis; the dream of D. H. Lawrence.) “I’ve just got to get away. And we will. But I don’t know where.” Then he looks over at me and says, in an even softer voice, “It’s so bad”—just once; his only reference to the fact of his heroic efforts to help his partner.

Finally Robert leaves to return to their apartment—the only time in two weeks he has left—and I sit here in the deep plush silence while he’s gone, staring at the river, watching cars, boats, and helicopters move back and forth across the landscape.

The radio in the bedroom is playing very softly—some concert by the New York Philharmonic, a symphony by Scriabin. The angst of modern music, the despair of artists, seems silly in a room like this. “The cure for metaphysical pain,” writes a friend of Paul Monette’s in
Borrowed Time
, “is physical pain.” So much for Scriabin. I could not listen to this music in the best of circumstances, but Michael wants the radio left on, like the lamp or fire an invalid needs to provide a sign of life, of warmth, in his sickroom. He cannot watch, on the other hand, television. He is infuriated by the evening news, the daily fare of New York City: the black teenager upstate whose story of being raped by white policemen seems with each passing day to have been made up; the hijacking of a Kuwaiti airliner; the gridlock in Palestine; the daily beatings, murders, scams the local news feeds us for our delectation because, whatever else crime and disaster are, they are dramatic. Too dramatic for a man fighting for a moment’s rest from the onslaught the bacteria are waging.

“I’ll be brave, I’ll be brave,” he says through chattering teeth. Then the little beep that says it’s time to take his AZT goes off; he puts a hand out of the blanket to get two pills and swallows them. Imagine life broken into segments of four hours. Trapped in this technological nightmare, he goes forward with whatever weapons are handed him. And I sit down again to watch the helicopters.

Not that many people visit this room—partly because the patient has chosen not to tell most of his friends he is ill. Only now, when help is needed, does he think about widening the circle of those who know. Another friend who came here earlier today lost his own lover recently; he made wisecracks and gave the patient a massage with an irreverence, a black humor, that made me think: The more you live through this, the less august it seems. But he does not come back again; I suspect he’s had enough of it for one lifetime. The details of these battles differ, but it is the same war. The instinct is to just stay home. A friend dressing for yet another wake recently stopped, took off his coat, and said, “I’m not going to another single one of these, ever.” The photographer who’s spent the past three years photographing people with AIDS is now taking pictures of rich people’s llamas.

Even the people in this room long for their moments of escape—the sweetest passages in
Borrowed Time
are the lulls between the crises. Watching the helicopters is like that. Surely with all this energy, and wealth, and technology, you think as they fly off, we can find the solution to this thing. Surely the city that can build these buildings, highways, ledges for helicopters to dart on and off of, can defeat whatever is making the patient in the next room shiver and burn at the same time. Yet the city this room perches above is such a mix. The beggars who are everywhere, the Senegalese who unpack their bottles of perfumes and incense on tables in the subway, the panhandlers and youths who spend all night on St. Marks Place standing above a blanket covered with old porn magazines and books, remind us of a Third World from which this city can hardly hold itself aloof. “We Are the World” seems less like a hymn to brotherhood now than a sentence of bacterial doom. This generation of middle-class gay men stumbled into something it never dreamt of—this fever, these shakes. No helicopter can get us out of this one, I think as I sit watching them. From the window of this room, the helicopters don’t so much symbolize the power of science as a desire to get away. Even the sick feel it, of course—most of all, no doubt. The Frenchman I know who stays in New York for his treatment says, “Now that I can no longer travel, I feel this huge nostalgia for Europe. If I could go anywhere now, I’d go to Greece.”

How one must long to leave the tubes and catheters behind—the artificial parts—and go off to sunlit islands. Instead one stays and goes to yet another doctor. The Frenchman who dreams of Greece now takes a cab several times a week between two doctors in midtown who do not know about each other, so that he can qualify for the studies in which each one has enrolled him. Meanwhile everyone else eats out in restaurants, doubles his workload, takes trips to places he’s always wanted to see with the unspoken thought:
I’ll just keep moving till I have to stop. Who knows how
much time I have?
New York is more than ever a study in contrasts. One goes from the hospital room to the ballet, from the restaurant to the friend battling with cytomegalovirus for his eyesight. One comes to New York—to its money, energy, modernity, sophistication—to learn what people are doing
now.
What they are doing now is lying in this room, as cold as a man abandoned on an ice floe in the Bering Straits.