Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (17 page)

The film was a pivot point. Howard’s illness until then had been more of a scare than a palpable intrusion, something to be shockingly remembered and then forgotten. But the Howard I knew never fully returned from shooting
Bloodhounds of Broadway
. I’d say he’d made a devil’s bargain, but that implies that he had many (any?) cards remaining in his hand. He had driven himself mercilessly at a screeching pitch, getting by on naps. He also made a choice not to take AZT, a kind of poison that was at least producing results, if only Saint Vitus’ dance results, in AIDS patients—sudden manic appearances of coming back to life, followed by another collapse. He tried AZT, found it clouded his thinking, knew the film needed exposed nerves, not dulled nerves, from him, and said, “No,” a decision of unknowable consequences. In an attempt to help him recover, to try to retrieve the elusive flush of health, and perhaps to summon the salutary benefits of our summer vacations of years past, we flew to Acapulco in February, taking a vacation home on a cliff next to one rented by friends of mine. The vacation was a failure. A robbery here, “Montezuma’s revenge” there. A sky glider with Howard as a passenger crashed and, during the rescue at sea, he lost his grandfather’s gold ring, given to him at the funeral by his grandmother the previous March. We rented a jeep to cruise the menacing streets of downtown Acapulco. Howard, as usual, did the driving, but several times nearly got us killed, always with sideswipes from the left of the vehicle. Anxiously, correctly as it turned out, I had questioned his eyesight: “How did you not see that???”

When we returned to New York, Howard went to visit his brother Andy, an ophthalmologist, for an eye examination. While he never discussed the details with me, he must have known that AIDS was, in many cases, detected first during eye exams. Consciously or not, the revelation of the secret to his family occurred in this cinematic fashion. Andy discovered retinal damage in the eye, caused by CMV, an opportunistic virus that can lead to the snapping of connections in the brain, or the death of brain cells. By the time Andy came to visit us to discuss the situation more fully, Howard had been staying with me for a week. There were more tears between us, in the dilapidated apartment that had forever lost for me its bohemian charm—because of the increasingly sad associations of the period—and then between us with his brother, and then on the phone with his parents.
His parents
. I hoped that the damaged cells in his brain had been those that were processing just how excruciating this news would be for them. I did not fathom the science, but I was picturing his brain as a screen door that flies had eaten away so that the wire in spots unraveled. Eye damage was indeed the cause of our near-accidents in Acapulco. Now, just three weeks on, he was definitely listing to the right when walking, and was unable to raise his right arm high enough to extinguish the living room lamp.

I went with Howard that same week to Barbara Starrett’s office, at Broadway and West Fourth Street, one of the central headquarters of the AIDS crisis. The waiting room was crammed, always standing-room-only during those years. One patient was smoking on a hookah pipe of Pentamidine for the prevention of pneumonia, while keeping up a hacking cough, and complaining, “I have this chest cold I just can’t get rid of.” Across the way, in another chair, a blond guy coughed little coughs while reading a brightly colored
paperback on self-healing. The main desk was operating in perpetual crisis mode, staffed by two assistants, both named Michael. The one in a red-and-white flannel shirt that looked like a night robe on him was busy phoning to tell patients their test results. “Congratulations,” he would say to those with favorable news. On another call, to remind a patient of an appointment, I heard him say, “Oh, he’s gone?” He quickly suggested that the friend bring back leftover drugs to put into the doctor’s pool of AIDS drugs, too expensive to waste, to be passed on to living patients. Starrett’s office had the mood of a tense pharmaceutical underground railroad stop.

Dr. Starrett was a big woman. She moved around her office in bulging jeans—moseying, really. Her face was sweet, dimpled, pretty. Her eyes sang a tuneful melody, though she was capable of keeping up the distant, inscrutable shield of a medical doctor, deluged by a metastasizing plague that might otherwise easily have overcome her emotionally. I heard one of the Michaels telling a caller that the doctor wasn’t taking any new patients at this time. Howard’s usual complaint was that she would not take enough time to explain to him what was going on, or the repercussions of all these different drugs. Usually true. But on that day she spent time with him. He went alone into conference with her. Before closing the door, she talked with me openly. She was worried that something was wrong with his brain. The virus had crossed the brain-blood barrier, perhaps because of the lag time in his not taking AZT, which he finally agreed to take, but not until after he had finished shooting the film. A few of her patients in this state were surviving. A few were in wheelchairs. A few were blind.

I walked back into the waiting room, numbed down to a nub. Seated against a far wall was Robert Mapplethorpe, his hair silver and flowing, his face bony, with glistering gray eyes, looking like
Noah Webster. He seemed very much in his element, as if this waiting room were just the next rung down from the Mineshaft, which he had articulated and repackaged with elegance. I sat next to him, and he told me that he had been taking pictures of “Jewish princesses,” as he put it, for money. I said, “Every photo an appliance,” trying to be clever. Most of the time I was distracted by catching glimpses of Howard as he passed from examining room to blood room and back to consultation room. My respect for him rose like mercury in some interior thermometer. He was moving like an old man, slowly, jerkily. But he beamed in on people with a firm smile and with firm eye contact. I think that he was happy, even proud, to have me with him. It eased the pain, since loneliness was just another degree of pain, and lots of these guys in the doctor’s office weren’t just HIV-positive, they were lonely. Howard and I joked about AIDS patients hiring escorts as status symbols to accompany them to the doctor’s office.

From there we went to a neurologist with a consonant-rich Eastern European last name. He didn’t behave like a doctor. He was a comedian, jolly, in his thirties. He shared his office with a liposuction specialist. Josh was his name, and he became important in Howard’s medical trajectory. Josh played teaser mind games with Howard that day, saying, for instance, “Pull up a chair,” when he invited him into one room; then, “Just kidding,” as Howard looked around to see that there were no chairs. He sent him sauntering down the hall to check his listing to the right. (The right side of his body was becoming weaker as the left side of his brain disintegrated.) He decided not to charge Howard on our way out. Downstairs, at Bigelow Pharmacy on Sixth Avenue, we waited for five prescriptions to be filled. Those twenty minutes turned out to be the worst. My eyes blurred when I
tried to read magazines on a rack. I felt I was losing my stamina. I wanted to bolt out of the corridors of sickness to wherever healthy people were. The more I felt this powerful surge, the more clinging Howard became. And then the panic passed over both of us like a wave, and then we were restored to our usual selves. Repeatedly during that day, I caught Howard’s face in the distance searching for me with a look marked by horror, a lost puppy. And then that look, too, was erased back into sweetness and light.

Three weeks later we put Howard in the hospital for an experimental course of medicine to try to quell the CMV virus that was destroying his brain cells. When I went to pick him up at the loft, he started to cry as we walked down the narrow white corridor—his initiating the crying, rather than me, a first. We pushed on, Howard bumping every few beats into the side wall, our arms around each other. By then I was crying, too. In those days, if anyone started crying, on TV, even if I saw someone crying in a passing bus window, I’d start, too. The portentous music of Bob Dylan’s
Slow Train Coming
resounded from the open doorway as the two of us swept, or wept, our way through the dark square.

Then the mood oscillated. Soon we were laughing again, for a time, with much silly energy funneled into packing, as if we were going on vacation. Howard insisted on taking along all sorts of technology—video camera, portable CD player, a spectrum of CDs, a minuscule radio clock, and books-on-tape with a Sony Sports Walkman for listening. I packed his porno collection into a carton so that his parents, who would be staying there for the next two weeks, would not find the magazines with shiny
covers of tanned boys baring their asses, or bulging dicks. Climbing onto a stool to hoist the box onto a top shelf, I noticed a copy of my book of poems
The Daily News
, which I’d given him when we met, and which I’d inscribed with a drawing of a gun resembling a cocked cock.

The sunset that night was positively Venetian, an orange dispersion turning the waters of the Hudson turquoise, yellow, blue, and white, as the sun bottomed out. I pointed at the extravaganza, yapping about how it was like the view from Accademia toward the Giudecca, filled in for by New Jersey. Howard sat down in a metal chair, and motioned for me to draw up a neighboring chair. We looked out. I sensed some primal fear, and wrapped my arms around him, putting my head against his chest somewhere.

BRAD
: Don’t worry.

HOWARD
: I’m not worried. I don’t know what I’m feeling now. It’s so scary. A strange bed.

The buzzer sounded. His brother Andy was downstairs to take us to the hospital in his big old car, a ’78 burgundy Oldsmobile sedan, with the speedometer frozen at 30.

Once we were inside St. Vincent’s ER waiting room, I started to reel again. I was seized by the same sensation of standing outside and looking in that I’d experienced at Bigelow Pharmacy, a trauma victim distancing himself from the source of trauma. The crowded area rumbled like a bowling alley from all the gurneys being wheeled on the floor above. I pointed out the occasional beeps emanating from Howard’s chic black canvas suitcase. He tried to say that it was his
“alarm clock radio,” but he kept getting the words screwed up, like “sound alarm time radio,” until Andy guessed his meaning.

ANDY
: It’s all right. I have a two-year-old. I’m used to word-association games.

Soon enough Howard was booked into his room, a double on Cronin—the AIDS wing on the seventh floor. His neighbor was in much worse condition than he. And the neighbor’s significant other was chewing out the nurse for not giving the patient his sleeping pills the night before. I bowed out to go for a haircut with Gil, a bodybuilder and haircutter, with an expensive loft nearby. Gil, a star of the Chelsea Gym, photographed by Bruce Weber, would soon be dead, as well, after a brief disappearance. Andy and I hugged in the hall. Exiting, I checked out other patients in other rooms chattering on bedside telephones, the views half-blocked by white screens.

When I called Howard later he was in a chipper mood. He’d already developed a new shtick of taking a poll to find out who was Catholic, as the hospital was “St. Vincent’s”: one of his doctors was, but not the Jamaican wheeling him to his X-ray.

HOWARD
: They keep you very busy here.

I told him that I was sure he’d be popular with the nurses. He always got along well with any crew. And his zany humor was made for that hospital, with its Catch-22’s and gallows suspense. He was in a hurry to get off the phone to cruise the TV lounge.

BRAD
: I’ll come by tomorrow after the dentist.

HOWARD
: What time?

BRAD
: About five.

HOWARD
: Okay. I’ll pencil you in from five to seven. But it’s tentative.

Old issues of control wittily surfaced between us in this sober new setting. And then night truly fell, with no way for me to get from where I was to where he was.

Time speeded up, or rather Howard’s decline was so declivitous that I felt as if I were watching decades go by in weeks. He was in a time machine hurtling him fast into decrepitude and old age. I would lie for hours on my bed in my tomb-sized bedroom with the icon Howard gave me of Christ Pantocrator, the wall’s only embellishment, like a monastery cell. Each evening I felt sick, my stomach cramping around five o’clock, just before I left to visit him in the hospital. I felt my life force draining into a thin puddle. Hard to believe: when we entered together, the admitting nurse had looked at me and Howard and Andy and said, “Which one is the patient?” And then the nightmares started to occur for him in a rattling sequence, rat-a-tat-tat, in that shooting gallery of an AIDS ward.

Now there was no mistaking the patient. Two weeks in, Howard needed to take a shower, and I realized for the first time that we were definitely into some next phase. We waited a half hour for a wooden stool with side arms to help him to sit upright in the shower. When the stool never came—nor a nurse—we went ourselves down the hall to a shower. I was unwilling to have actual physical responsibility thrust on me. Nothing in my life had prepared me for this task, I thought. I was an only child. My parents never even had me do chores, like mowing the lawn. I never took a first-aid class. I didn’t know how to administer artificial resuscitation. I was frightened to the point of throwing up. I didn’t know how Howard wasn’t hurtling himself, body and mind, through a windshield, at least emotionally—the dynamics of a Francis Bacon painting—or maybe he was. We maneuvered to the shower room, Howard in the white robe he’d brought from Japan with the name of a Tokyo hotel stitched on the outside, me in a flimsy chartreuse hospital gown. The more confined the space, the more difficulties Howard had navigating. I soaped him down, rinsing off his pale, tender skin, while he held onto the tubular handle on the side, like a bone, bones holding onto a bone.