Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (9 page)

That’s kind of it. And with this I walk across the room to find my host, whom I half hope not to find, since the right mixture of condolences and gratitude—the referring, or not referring, to the person he’s lost; the thank-you for his party—is still not one I’ve grasped. The room is so crowded I give up with a good conscience. The man in the red bow tie gives me that blank look that seems to convey the sense that men are as nameless and perishable as the flowers I will not learn the names of tonight, either. The tall windows of the loft gaze down on the cold, empty street outside: the street that can no longer promise, when you leave the party, a man to sleep with, in place of the one you did not have the nerve to introduce yourself to here. In the Age of Parties there were lots of substitutes. As I go to the coatroom the refrain of a song that’s been going through my mind since this began repeats itself: “The Party’s Over.” But is that right? It goes on behind me with laughter and talk and introductions, louder than ever. Perhaps everything
but
the party’s over.

T
HE EVENING OF December 3, 1983, it rained hard in Manhattan, and yet I couldn’t stay in my apartment—I had been living in a house in the suburbs all fall, where one stays indoors and things come to you (United Parcel, mailmen, relatives with day-old doughnuts). The chance to be out walking through the streets was intoxicating, even in the rain, even at the end of a rotten year, in the early-winter darkness. The year 1983 seemed to be a year of blows: the circumstances compelling me to leave town in September and now the funeral of a friend dead of AIDS that brought me back. If—before I left—I was like most residents of Manhattan, who lead, despite the cliché, lives as routine as people in small towns, I now found myself walking east from the Astor Place subway at five o’clock with the surge of adrenaline that affects tourists and the happiness of a traveler finally returning home. Home was the little hole-in-the-wall that sells Middle Eastern food to go, which was the first thing that brought me to a halt near the corner of St. Marks Place and Third Avenue. Waiting for the Arab to finish stuffing the pita bread for the woman on my left, things looked the way they did to Emily in
Our Town
when she comes back to earth as a ghost because she misses her old life: Everything was poignant, as I waited for the Arab to toast my pita. An actor from the Negro Ensemble Company came up and said to the woman standing next to me that he’d been assured he would be in the production they had just auditioned for, and as they talked happy actors’ talk, I thought,
Isn’t this just how someone
imagines New York? You wait for the Arab to give you your pita sandwich
while two ecstatic young actors talk about their next show, while
beyond the awning the rain is streaming down in slanting orange lines
and all these people are coming home from their day uptown to romantic
little apartments in the East Village.
Was this rain real? Or were we shooting a film? There was a functioning dry telephone in my apartment just a few doors away, but the street, the crowds, the excitement of being here again were so intense I went next to the bank of pay phones near Second Avenue and started making my calls there. The handsome man who came up to use the phone on my left intensified the romantic element—Who is he? Who’s he calling?—as the faces went past in the rain and I found myself listening, in a few seconds, to a friend tell me he’d quit his job in August, gone to Greece and Paris, nursed his lover through hepatitis, changed his apartment, and wanted me to come to dinner that evening to meet the young man his roommate was “interviewing” as a possible boyfriend.

When you leave New York and come back, the joke is you find nothing has changed—despite the infinite number of trivial events—but this time I learned a lot had: Not only had friends left their jobs or moved to new apartments, but most of them were depressed—one newly macrobiotic and saintly; another living half of each week in the country; another visiting doctors who told him to calm down; another who was asked to come back for a blood test. Returning after four months, I was like the relative of a patient recuperating in a hospital, or a parent who visits his child in school infrequently: One arrives and expects to see progress. You want to see your patient better, walking again, your child fluent in French, your city cured of the plague. But apparently there is no cure for this plague. There are things being tried—so many that one man who died said before he went, “The treatment is worse than the disease”—but the friend whose funeral I was here to attend had tried most of them. For that was why I was back—to attend the funeral of Eddie, a friend so bound up with New York it was hard to imagine the city without him, a friend who so unfailingly enjoyed everything that was new in New York—from nightclubs to phone systems to winter coats—even now I had the impression he’d got AIDS only because he was always the first to do everything.

Eddie’s motto, in fact, if he had one, was that of Auntie Mame, his favorite heroine: “Life is a banquet, and most poor fools are starving to death.” Not Eddie. Long past the point at which most people I knew had begun to slow down—to stay home on Saturday nights with Sunday’s
New York Times,
to stop going to Fire Island, to stop dancing (unless it was what one friend replied when I asked him where he was dancing these days: “In my living room!”), to stop going out to new clubs (“I’ve been to all the nightclubs,” one said, “including the ones that haven’t opened yet”), to stop participating in the sixty things each night that made living in Manhattan distinct from living in, say, Rutland, Vermont—Eddie kept going. Eddie was out every night. He was in fact whatever you call the man who stands in front of certain nightclubs and decides who will get in and who won’t. His life was nocturnal—he got home around four or five in the morning and then, if he hadn’t arranged to have one of the bouncers from Brooklyn come over (“Let me put it this way—he has no neck”), he slept. For only four or five hours; like Napoleon, Eddie got by on less than most of us need. And then, from the depths of that eccentric apartment we’d christened the Eighth Wonder of the World, he awoke and began to telephone; depositing the details of the night before, the incidents, the shoes, the faces, the celebrities, into my ear as if I were the diary he was too busy, too excited, to keep.

He knew where to go in the East Village for a shiatsu massage, and where to go near Times Square for male strip shows, and where to go on lower Broadway for the cowboy boots and shirts he began buying after he and a friend returned from the gay rodeo in Reno. He had a pass to Man’s Country—the baths we both frequented—and passes to three or four fashion shows a day when the collections were being shown. His dream was to go around the world on the
QE2
as a member of the crew assigned to dine and dance with widows from Omaha traveling alone. Instead he went to the dentist one day and learned he had tumors on his gums—tumors he showed me one day when they were larger and we were walking down Fifth Avenue in the bright sun- light on our way to go shopping. “Do you want to see them?” he said and then pulled his upper lip back so they were visible: dark purple, like clusters of grapes.

Eddie was not embarrassed by anything personal; he began to tell the people he met, “I have cancer, but I’m not going to die,” in the same breathless, dramatic voice he used to describe the arrival of the king of Spain at Studio 54. And he telephoned every morning with the same cheer to tell me not only that he’d fainted in the hospital elevator the previous afternoon but that “that gorgeous boy we used to say had a Very Important Stomach—the one who plays
baseball,
you know—came to my interferon group today, only they gave him too much and he was shaking like a windshield wiper. Covered with spots!” Eddie’s spots went away when he was radiated; then they came back; still, we listened to the progress of his illness with a certain impatience, a certain refusal to take it in—like children who cannot allow a parent to get sick. Eddie, after all, was the central figure in our family of friends—New York itself, somehow. When a man got on the elevator we were riding in one afternoon at the D&D Building and asked politely, “How are you?” and Eddie said, “I have cancer,” another friend of ours turned to Eddie after the man—speechless, shocked—got off at the next floor and said, “Couldn’t you say you’ve been swimming
laps
?” For we somehow could not permit him to be ill. And that was the only change in Eddie’s appearance we could see: a certain gauntness. Eddie claimed, “It’s in the eyes. I can tell, in any crowd, at any party, who has It. It’s in the eyes.” And so, just the way he’d told us about Los Angeles—how they dressed, what the houses were like—and the rodeo in Reno, the crowd at Studio, the models in Kenzo’s fashion show, so Eddie became the first traveler to a new and scary destination.

There was a white high-rise building about halfway between Eddie’s apartment on Fifth Avenue and mine in the East Village—a building occupied primarily, it seemed, by elderly Jewish men and women who were often being wheeled up and down the sidewalk by maids from the Caribbean when I walked by. Across the street from them was a small school playground behind a chicken-wire fence and a churchyard in which apple trees bloomed in spring. I left New York not long after Eddie began treatments for his tumors; he would, with the enthusiasm and interest he had shown all his life for what was new and experimental, try anything—things we learned later had probably hastened his death. The next time I came back to New York on a visit, Eddie looked like one of the eighty-year-old Jewish men watching the children play kickball from his wheelchair across the street. He was dressed in a black overcoat and scarf, though it was a warm spring day; his face was even gaunter, and the flesh around his mouth seemed to protrude to make room for the tumors; he shuffled along at the pace very old people, who are usually in a wheelchair, use. We walked from the lunch he served at his apartment—he loved to cook for his friends, and only afterward did we learn he was careless about what he himself ate—to a store on University Place that rented videocassettes. He was bringing some movies back and he did so very slowly. He rented both conventional and pornographic films, and he took me to the shelves of cassettes to tell me which ones he’d rented (“
Teen
Marine
is fabulous!”) and select new ones. When he was shuffling out of the store, the people behind us finally could wait no longer and veered around him, like cars passing on a highway. Eddie only smiled as I waited on the sidewalk outside for him to finally cross the threshold. Smiled at their impatience, his own predicament. We parted on that corner; I thanked him for lunch and did not look back till I had crossed the street—to see him standing there, turning north to start his long shuffle back to his apartment, a man of forty in a heavy black overcoat and scarf on a warm spring day who happened to look ninety-five.

The friends whose mascot he had always been were faithful to him; one gave me news on the phone of how he was doing—the naps he took every day at five, a sudden blindness, his discovery of classical music.
Teen Marine
was beyond him now. He began listening to Mozart. That was how I—five hundred miles to the west that winter, taking a walk each night in the only place available, a local cemetery illumined by the lights of a nearby shopping mall—thought of Eddie: lying in the Eighth Wonder, blind, listening to Mozart. One Saturday morning the word came that relieved the strain, the knowledge of his suffering and the suffering itself. “Some private-duty nurse they hired called his brother at four in the morning,” said the friend. “She wanted to know where her check was, Eddie was dead. Can you believe it? Eddie’s gone, dear. Eddie’s gone. He took a left.”

That was the problem, as I stood there now on the sidewalk of a city that seemed inseparable from his voice each morning on the phone. One might as well say New York was finished. In fact everything remained, just as I remembered it—even the baths on my block whose two slender black doors people were going in and out of as I stood there watching. “There’s no reason to go to New York anymore,” two British art critics said in an article I’d read on the plane about the fall season in various capitals, “now that sex and drugs are Out.” Try telling New Yorkers that, I thought. Ah, New York! Ah, humanity! It is banal by now to say the whorehouses in Paris were never as busy as they were during the plague. But when I went into the baths to sit in the cafeteria for a while, before the wake began—it seemed the right restaurant, in this case—I watched men passing the doorway in their towels who looked exactly as they did before the world turned upside down. The music in fact was wonderfully familiar—a flawless blend of the best songs of the seventies that made me very sentimental; Eddie and I had danced to some of them. Listening to “You’re My Peace of Mind” as the men walked by, I thought,
The faces, the music,
were
wondrous
—
still are
—
and the
fact that some virus has insinuated itself into the collective bloodstream
through the promiscuity that homosexual life evolved is a medical,
not a moral, fact.

Or was it? I wasn’t sure. Eddie was dead either way, and I left the warm cafeteria and its amazing view without touching the men we used to gasp over together (the central expression of our friendship: the gasp) and walked down St. Marks Place to the funeral home. The funeral home was only a block from the baths. The men gathering at the chapel in their dark suits and ties were even handsomer than those I’d seen pass the cafeteria—men I was used to seeing in towels or bathing suits, or in beach clothes on a sunny boardwalk. The rabbi—a whirling dervish on the dance floor one summer—speaks of a special generation that is being singled out, afflicted before its time. It seems wrong that the pleasure we shared should lead to death—it seems out of proportion to the crime; but, then, this is a medical, not a moral fact. I feel numb and unreal in the little chapel. I have not taken a full breath since entering; the air is heavier here, oppressive, weighty, and thick. This is not happening, I think. This is not the reason we gather together. These are the people Eddie has adored all these years—
adored
is the correct word. These are the people whose beauty he praised, whose style he appreciated, whose exploits he followed, whose friend he finally became. These are the men who—handsome, bright, successful, original—constituted the glamour Eddie, and New York, was so fond of. They do not gather together for this. They come together for parties, for beaches, for dinner, for fun—for a song that Eddie used to drag me out of the house to run down to the bar to hear. (“The one where the violins keep going up, up, up!”) But there is the casket being wheeled down the aisle, through the dense, airless room. There are Eddie’s parents—this collision of Eddie’s two worlds, his past and his present—in the midst of these men, and there is Martin delivering the eulogy to a crowd Eddie would have loved, for they have all turned out for him. Only he isn’t here to describe their faces, and their shoes, and their love affairs; he isn’t here to whisper, “Look at that man with the puffed lips, and those aristocratic hands! He’s
drop-dead!
” So’s Eddie. And when we pour outside onto the street afterward, the darkening streets, the red sky above the rooftops, the sidewalks thronged with people coming home from work—all seem to demand his presence, or at least his comments on the funeral we have just attended. The odd thing about a wake is it leaves you feeling very alive afterward. “Who was that
handsome
man with the beard in the third row?” says a friend, supplying words that Eddie would have otherwise; it’s the first sign that life goes on. The funeral is reviewed: shoes, beards, friends, strangers. We walk down Second Avenue together in the suits and ties we rarely wear in each other’s presence and enter a café. The room is warm, crowded with young men and women who sit in black turtlenecks writing in their journals, like the Hollywood version of an artists’ café. We find a table. We notice the man behind the counter making carrot juice has beautiful forearms. A friend tells the story of the oboe player from Minneapolis who came to live with him this summer. Everyone at the table agrees a favorite male model looked wonderful and that Eddie would have loved the crowd who came to his wake. The carrot cake, hot chocolate, and tea arrive, the room gets louder, handsome young men come into the café. Happy to be here, with his three friends, the tourist suddenly takes their four neckties and joins them at their tips over the coffee cups in the center of the table. The tourist doesn’t know why he does this; it seems a silly gesture; he suspected the differences in the four neckties might reveal something about each of them, or he wants to unite the quartet at that moment, somehow. When he sees it does not and no one understands what he is doing, he returns them to their shirt fronts and goes on talking about the funeral, watching the people in the room with a wild eagerness, thinking it is still the most extraordinary city, lovely, horrendous, thrilling, sad. And missing one thing, besides sex and drugs: Eddie.