Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir Read online

  John nodded gravely, explaining he had a close friend who was ill. Then, as we talked about scheduling for my play, he said something very odd: "Of course, I could always decide to toss it all and take off."

  "Take off where?"

  "I don't know. Doesn't really matter. Maybe I've had enough of theater and all this la-de-da."

  Did any of that shiver through me like an echo? "I've had enough of traveling," Cesar had said. Frankly, I was more concerned just then about my play—that I might have a flake on my hands who'd disappear in the middle like a pouting Prospero. John reassured me with an easy laugh that we'd mount my play first, no matter if he ended up in Fiji. But he might have a musical coming along, so we probably wouldn't do Summers till late spring. That was okay by me. I figured I'd be up to my neck in The Manicurist for the next several months.

  Chris Adler, the New York composer, died ten days before Christmas. I note in my journal that Chris and Cesar had both had to suffer "the grossest misdiagnosis." Chris had been dying by inches for six months, bombarded with drugs for lymphoma, at one point requiring removal of his spleen. Yet at no time would anyone call it AIDS. I was close to a heartsick friend of his, and it didn't seem to be a case of stonewalling the truth. Rather, we were still stuck with the CDC's narrow definition. By the time Chris died—at twenty-eight, his family of strangers circled about him, his lover banished from the room—there was no doubt in my mind. It was the first time I wondered how many died and had never made the CDC list, which was hovering now around seven thousand.

  I also recall thinking, when Chris's spleen was taken out, about a psychologist I knew whose lover had died in 1980 of liver cancer. That one had struck me as curiously coincidental with somebody else—a best-selling novelist, in the closet of course, who'd died of a fast liver tumor around the same time. And now that I thought of it, a mad and gaudy screenwriter who rode high for seven and a half minutes, with a sweet tooth for porn stars, had also withered and died in the fall of '80, again of liver cancer.

  Were they all drinking the wrong kind of vodka? Or was there something we weren't being told about the organs? There was growing frustration—rage in New York—as to what we were and were not being told. Was anybody pooling this data? Sometimes you felt that your own journey and your own circle would give them the full etiology of it, if they would only factor in all these horrible coincidences.

  One night in mid-December, Roger came home in great distress from yet another dinner, Lawyers for Human Rights. Rand Schrader had told him that one of the group's officers was dying of AIDS and his family didn't know. They also didn't know he was gay. This was our first encounter with the double closet of the war, the Early Frost division.

  Roger processed the constant upheaval differently than I did. He anguished for people in pain, moved as he was by solitary lives and the cruelties of fate. A month after I had met him in '74, I came by his Sacramento Street apartment, and he was listening to Kindertotenlieder—Mahler's songs for dead children. We were in love, and I was more of a mind to listen to Linda Ronstadt. But if Roger internalized the tragic, it wasn't by way of suppressing it; he could weep openly too. He simply contemplated more than I did what people went through, while I got manic and whipped myself up to do something. That's why it's harder to piece the whole of Roger's inner story in those months, for I was furiously acting out, over the top and full speed ahead. Being as we were the same person, happily it all balanced out.

  Cesar arrived December 23, spirits high. His back was better; the chemo had checked the cancer for the present; and he felt enthusiastic about his new set of doctors. He was ready as ever to cook up a storm. To our friends who came over on Christmas Eve—last and best of our parties—there was something enormously comforting about seeing Cesar going strong a year later. He was utterly himself that night, the vivid exhilaration fine as silk, for he had more to celebrate than we did. He had pushed the enemy back. The border was barely secured, the truce uneasy, but here was a man returned from the front lines.

  During the next few days I orchestrated the time so he could appear and disappear to rest whenever he needed. I knew the rhythm now of what he could do and what it cost. During the down times I'd sit on his bed, which looked out on the pool, and talk the past with him back and forth, never tired of analyzing the strange behavior of the shadow folk who still lived in the closet. When his strength returned we'd go find Roger and off to the next party, where we'd scarf a plateful, make the rounds, then duck out and home to open another present.

  Roger, Cesar and I: the Chicago Jew, the Uruguayan lapsed RC and the hollowed-out Episcopalian lost at Delphi. I used to tell the two of them Scrooge's nephew had the proper text for Christmas:

  The only day I know of... when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely... as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

  I bore no particular animus toward Baby Jesus; he was welcome to the Sunday side of it all. Our own celebration had its fix on the year's end, druid-like, tuned to the solstice glow of pinlights on a Douglas fir. That is to say how it felt in the time before the war, years that ended gliding into a sunset harbor, the three of us out on deck watching the sun sink in the wrinkled Pacific.

  In '84 the celebrating had to be danced on one leg. I can see Cesar in his nightshirt, stretched out on the sofa with his whale of a leg, so visibly glad to be doing nothing as long as he was here with us.

  I remember one morning he called his mother in Montevideo. He bragged about the party and catalogued all his presents, as if to make her see that things were the same as ever. She told him she felt relieved whenever she knew he was in L.A. I can't imagine what her picture of Roger and me must've been, but I'd trust her version of us sight unseen. I never even wrote to her after Cesar died, because Roger and I were on the beach in Normandy by that time. I can't think who might have her address. How can a man be so dispersed? I guess what I'd like her to understand is that the past he always bragged about was true. The melon was ripe for years on end.

  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. Ro
ger'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.