Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir Read online

  I was back to my novel full force in January, hoping to get two hundred pages under my belt before I had to take off for New York, there to confer with Whoopi and eyeball half a dozen manicurists in the second-story salons of Madison Avenue. Meanwhile the Writers Guild had started to convulse in anticipation of contract negotiations. I began attending meetings of a splinter group that came to be known as the Union Blues, its avowed purpose being to prevent a strike like the one that derailed the careers of thousands of working writers back in '81. John Allison called to say his musical was on, and I purred with understanding. Spring would be fine for the play, and until then I wanted nothing more than a chance to get my nymph and my curmudgeon to the end of Chapter V.

  Late spring, it would have to be, for Roger and I had decided we were going to Egypt in April. Roger had sailed the Nile in '65 on a peasant ferry, all the way to Khartoum and on to the source of the Blue. He didn't really need another look at the Valley of the Kings, but he knew how eager I was to comb back beyond the Minoans to the pharaonic reaches of antiquity. Besides, we would be going the air-conditioned route, the Sheraton version of Cleopatra's barge. One way or the other, we figured to side-trip to Jerusalem to see his aunt and uncle. I promised Rog, who was usually the detail man when we traveled, that I'd take care of everything. He was too busy at work, and juggling all the minutiae of an apartment house we owned with his brother Sheldon.

  Roger's parents were in town for a couple of weeks, on their way to the annual winter soak in Palm Springs, and while in L.A. they stayed with his brother in the upper strata of Bel-Air. We had dinner with Al and Bernice several times and one night packed them off to see Holiday because we'd enjoyed it so much ourselves. Roger told them how he had chortled over the hero, who meant to retire in his twenties and work later. That fierce decision to split for Paris at nineteen had occasioned a good deal of anxiety in his parents. It was heartening to see them all able to joke about it now.

  Al and Bernice: my in-laws. They proved to be so heroic and so unflinching on the front lines that it's hard to recall when they were just the parents, benign in twilight. Al used to own a restaurant in Chicago, the H & H—downtown, streetside, real food, real people—all reflecting the Damon Runyon burnish of its proprietor. Owing to a bolt of angina, he'd been forced to retire in his mid-fifties, but he'd managed to parlay that brush with death into a long and vigorous retirement. Roger and I had flown in to Chicago to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday in July of '83—a day after it was announced that a retrovirus had been isolated as agent of the AIDS infection.

  Bernice had been a dancer as a young woman, a showgirl whose mother had sewed her costumes, and she still moved with a dancer's tensile strength. She'd never been hooked like The Red Shoes, though. Having given herself five years to make it, bound and determined not to stay too long at the tinsel fair, she gladly gave up her dancing to get married. Yet Bernice was surely the source of Roger's passion for high art. She painted, she read, went to concerts, didn't miss a beat at the Art Institute, and adored all manner of dance, from the clubs where she'd worked herself to the princess arc of ballet.

  On January 20, 1985, Roger took her to the Joffrey on one of our season tickets, while I ate standing up in Sheldon's kitchen with Al. Bernice and Roger came home exalted, and we sat around having ice cream. Roger was fine. How is it I remember those moments sharp as a Kodachrome and see him perfectly healthy when I know now it wasn't so? I've got two pictures from January that spook me so much I can't even look at them now. One is Sunday the sixth, a birthday party for a relative once removed, in the parking garage of an office building, with every guest in a plastic hard hat coyly atop evening clothes. Roger looks ashen and drawn, though in truth I look pretty beat myself. Cesar had left only a week before. In the other photo, at the Forty Deuce cast party a week later, he's grinning and looks more himself, but I can see those shed three pounds in his face. Roger was built no-nonsense solid, five feet nine, 143 on the button, skin quick to take color, and never looked his age. In the cast-party picture he's older—not old, just older than I remember.

  Roger must have mentioned to his brother that he'd lost some weight, because I recall Sheldon telling him one night to eat the fattening stuff, rattling off a merry list: potatoes, avocados, sour cream. Was it all dismissed like a joke because we were still in the age of lean-is-in? After all, there were body-mad men at The Sports Connection who would have paid equal weight in gold to lose three pounds. Not for very much longer, though. Within six months, lean—let alone thin—would become synonymous with the flashing amber of AIDS. In Africa they call AIDS the "slim disease." And even the impulsions of vanity don't hold up to fear. Thus in a year you would start seeing men at the gym who had chiseled themselves like Phidias now suddenly running to fat, the empty pounds accumulating in the waist and buttocks, evidence of the late-night binges on Oreos and Ring Dings that had replaced the faster food of bathhouse sex.

  I'm not saying Sheldon's caloric list was a form of denial, not at that point, but it was very difficult to understand what Roger's brother thought about AIDS. In Chicago at Al's birthday in '83, I remember him saying he'd talked with a doctor who predicted they'd have a cure within a year. I took comfort in that for a while. Now, it the beginning of '85, he made it clear he didn't want to talk about Cesar. This mattered to me because Sheldon was openly gay himself, one of the few older men of the tribe I could talk to, who had seen the whole history of the movement, from the closets tight as Anne Frank's hideout to the broad daylight of liberation. I wished he didn't keep changing the subject whenever I mentioned AIDS.

  He was a power broker who lived on a hill of money, who had made a huge reputation as a lawyer in the gay community when there was no community to speak of. Meanwhile he bought up bungalows and apartments in West Hollywood like Monopoly, and in the intervening years the mortgages were all paid off and the rents quadrupled. In the last few years he had opened Trumps, a watering hole on Melrose in which "foodies" gathered deliriously to graze, an overnight sensation, and had become chairman of the board of the Bank of Los Angeles. This last, in a former Rexall Drugs at the San Vicente corner of the Boys' Town strip, had been postmodernized within an inch of its life. Charlie Milhaupt called it the Tallulah Bank.

  Many of those in power considered Sheldon the most important—or at least the most visible—gay man in California politics. He was close to Governor Brown and had addressed the Democratic Convention in 1980. Yet his constituency in the gay community was a curious one, since he also owned the trendiest bathhouse in southern California, wildly popular with the gym and disco crowd and noted for barring the door to men who were not "hot" enough. Sheldon's world was rife with small-town Adonises who came to L.A. for the good life. Roger and I always got rather tongue-tied around these men, feeling ourselves far too cerebral for the disco beat that roared through Sheldon's house. The two brothers lived in very different lanes of the freeway.

  Yet it was a matter of some crisis in the family that both of Al's sons had turned out gay. Sheldon didn't come out to his father till '79, aged forty-eight, when he was made the centerpiece honoree at the first Center dinner. In saying yes to the testimonial he was already so far out that he had to tell his family. Of course they knew already, all of them, but knowing is very different from talking about it.

  In '77 Roger and I had been living together in Boston for two years, and my parents had welcomed him into the family with pretty open arms. But nobody ever said the word gay. My own point of no return occurred when my first novel was about to be published. I slipped a copy of the bound galleys to my parents, figuring they'd better know what was coming before the book hit the stores. They reacted predictably, I suppose—telling me they would have to sell their house and leave town, that I'd never hold a job again with this infamy to my name, and besides, my mother had the idea I wasn't really gay. Roger was just a phase, I guess.

  It's just an unavoidable mess, this coming-out business, and there don't appear t
o be any shortcuts through the emotions, though we try to make it easier for those who come after. Someday the process will be more human, perhaps, because we are open forever now, and people can't hate their children or themselves for that long.

  When Roger finally sat his father down to tell him he was gay, we had been living together for six years, so obviously happy that to everyone around us we were a hyphenate, Roger-and-Paul, such a unified field had we become. Yet despite Sheldon's status as a gay leader, despite Roger's depth of feeling and his grown-up marriage, the double knowledge had thrown their father into a terrible depression. Roger and Sheldon were half-brothers, Sheldon's mother having died a generation ago. When Al went home to Chicago and told his doctor the news was twice as bad as he'd thought—two sons now—the enlightened doctor rolled his eyes and made it plain that Al must have done something very wrong. Thanks, Doc. For the next year and a half Al couldn't look me in the face, couldn't speak my name or enter our house. We got through it and were all very close now, as close as Roger had come to be to my family, but that doesn't mean that getting there was fun.

  On January 22, Tuesday, Joel left a message on the machine: "Leo has AIDS." I called him back and learned that Leo was going into the hospital for tests. I remember getting very precise with Joel: There had been no diagnosis yet, it was still just speculation, in any case if was pre. I made the same pedantic distinction to Leo, as if the nightmare could be outsmarted with hairline distinctions, as if Leo could really care, feeling as wrung out as he did.

  On Thursday the twenty-fourth we had dinner in Beverly Hills with a motley cross-section of the extended family—Sheldon's ex-lover and his current lover, various in-laws and out-laws, maybe hi teen altogether. They were talking that night about a miracle drug that had just been announced, guaranteed to curb baldness; no, actually grow hair. One receding fellow knew the name: minoxidil. He and Roger laughed that it had come along none too soon. I'm sure it was that night Bernice and I were talking about Cesar. She shook her head with compassion at some indignity he was suffering, and I shifted gears quickly and spoke with rigorous optimism.

  "Well, of course, you have to have hope," she agreed, and though she meant it sincerely there was a gaping hole over to one side of the remark. For a moment I seemed to look over the edge into nothing.

  I reached page 200 of the novel the same day as the dinner of the baldness cure. I don't remember anymore what happens right then in the book, but at the time I was thrilled at the rightness of it and torn about putting it aside to write manicure jokes. Yet all my notes from a session with Sam two days later are about mourning, what to feel about all the wasted time of your life, the wrongheaded decisions. I guess this must've sprung from some tortured version of What if it all got taken away ? Mourning, said Sam, was a form of self-compassion. Looking back with sadness and asking why was the proof that one had grown. Don't just mourn; celebrate movement forward. As to how to get off the dime of all those squandered hours, the bottom line was this:

  I know that when I was in Greece I felt X and I dreamed Y and it felt good. So onward.

  I had lunch with George Browning, an old friend who managed the mad American Express office in Beverly Center, the mall-in-the-sky at the southern tip of West Hollywood. George was delighted to sketch us a proper Nile itinerary, with a possible side to Jerusalem. But I had a new idea—I can almost hear my wheels spinning even now. We could do a week on the Nile, then fly home via Greece for a few days in the Peloponnesus, since I had to see Olympia now that I'd seen the Games. And then we could go to Israel in October, by which time our bonus mileage would be astronomical. We could do it all first cabin, coming home via Rome so I could spend my fortieth birthday perhaps in Capri, gazing out to sea from Tiberius's villa.

  I lay all this out in its full hummingbird intensity because it was our last grope for the whole world, and none of it would happen. We had already had all of the world we were going to get. But you can't fault a guy for waving his ticket, even as the gate swings shut.

  At 2 A.M. on Sunday, the third of February, I finished the last lined page of my bound notebook, the type I use for a journal. I don't appear in a millennial mood as I close the volume. The sheer casualness of it shows how much recovering one does from shocks like Cesar's visit or Leo's diagnosis. I still had a place to come home to, apart from all that:

  The dog is sleeping in a curl beside me.... May this house be safe from tigers.... R & I both struggling with viruses, and we had a heaping bowl of oatmeal after the ballet.

  That is the first reference, right there, to the beginning of the end. But the twin flu is another sort of magic, homely as the oatmeal, for I felt safer that Roger and I were both under the weather. I knew deep down that all it was in me was a cold, ergo the same with him.

  The day before, I'd had coffee with Carol Muske in the Valley. Carol is both a fellow poet and fellow iconoclast, with a laser wit and dead-center delivery. We always have a great romp, trading the silk scarves of literary gossip. Carol is married to actor David Dukes and mother to Annie, then two years old. She was as sentimental as I about Christmas, and I think she did string the popcorn and cranberries I drew the line at.

  How it got started I don't know, but we'd spent nearly the whole time together talking about this tidal wave of doom we were feeling. It jarred the air around us like a siren din pitched just too high for human ears. My own horrors were all about AIDS now; Carol's were more in the deep cave of a mother's fear, where the only wakeless nightmare was any threat to Annie. Meanwhile Carol enjoyed my dispatches from the loop-the-loop of Hollywood, a writer's game at the exact polar remove from poetry. We respected one another's work without envy, since we weren't trying to be each other at all. In the next six months I didn't get saved a scrap of agony, but Carol proved to be the one who saved me as a writer.

  On Friday, February 8, Roger had an appointment to show an apartment at one-thirty. I notice in his calendar for that week that he'd had to be there at noon on Wednesday too. There was always a pipe bursting somewhere. These gnatlike errands can prick a blood jet in me now because I remember how hard Roger worked on the house at Third and Detroit, how fastidious he was about details. There was a moment sometime in the previous month when he discovered he could buzz people into the building long-distance from his office in Century City, twenty minutes away. Till he knew that trick he'd always had to carve out an hour for Detroit matters.

  I couldn't bear the details myself, being the sort who never would've gotten the mortgage or the taxes paid without a lawyer in residence. I expect he'd given up asking me to help out much; it wasn't worth the shrill of complaint from the resident word processor. This is where survivor's guilt and helplessness merge, because you start to think if only there were fewer errands to the apartment building, if only I'd picked up the Wednesday meeting, he wouldn't have gotten so run down. Maybe he would've been able to hold it back another two months. That way madness lies, I know, but you find yourself far down such paths in the woods before you know it. Then darkness falls and you're lost.

  I was leaving for New York and the nail research on Sunday afternoon, so I had a torrent of errands of my own, from taking the dog for his shots to dropping by my doctor's for a dose of hepatitis vaccine. There was some vague theory around this time that hepatitis immunity was a line of defense against AIDS. People I knew still believed you had to have hepatitis first. As it happened, however, I'd already been through the six-month course of the shots and fallen in the one percent for whom the vaccine didn't take.

  When I started the second go-round, I asked my doctor if presence of the AIDS virus couldn't have run interference and blocked the hep vaccine. Not too patiently, he explained for the nth time that I showed no sign of AIDS infection. He pulled out a learned journal and read the now-familiar catechism of pre-AIDS symptoms. You had to have at least two of these for at least two months to be pre, he said. He was growing very weary of this particular strain of somatic whine.

  On Satu
rday night we went to a screening of Rob Reiner's The Sure Thing, because a swell lady of our acquaintance, Lindsay Doran, had been executive in charge of the production. The movie was half an inch deep but rather endearing, and in any case we were there to celebrate with Lindsay, who'd just landed a plum job at Paramount. There was a milling reception after the screening, which the three of us ducked to go eat at the Ritz Café, the Cajun beachhead in West L.A. As we were leaving, I bumped into a pair of writers who snarled with outrage at Reiner's little movie, attacking it with poisonous overkill. "It is not enough to succeed," as Gore Vidal first told me about writers in Hollywood. "All others must fail." Roger and I rolled our eyes as we left, relieved to have gotten past that stage at least. We laughed ourselves silly at the Ritz. Lindsay was the only Hollywood big shot we knew who had a hair-trigger aversion to taking herself too seriously. In this she and Roger were very much alike.

  That was the last unravaged time. If Roger was feeling bad that night he didn't say, or maybe I'd just dismissed it as the tail of the cold I'd barely shaken myself. Sunday he was feverish and fluish, and I told him to relax by the pool and rest all day. I packed; I went to the gym for twenty minutes, pacing myself for a four o'clock flight. Midafternoon, Roger was in bed, yet his fever was barely ninety-nine. He didn't really have to take me to the airport, but he wasn't the type to spring the twenty-five for a needless cab. We were driving down Sunset, me at the wheel, when he suddenly said, in a frail voice with a quiver of tears: "Don't go."

  I looked at him, startled. "I'll be back in four days. You'll be all right." As tender and reassuring as I could be, because I knew how unanchored we were when either of us was away. We'd always agreed it was harder on the one who stayed home. He fretted about feeling weak and awful, and I told him he'd be fine. I had a knack for soothing and calming him down, de-escalating crises. He did the same for me. Of course I would've canceled the trip if he'd pushed, but he didn't. I was sure he only needed to spill the low-grade misery and be stroked a little.