Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir Read online

  I arrived in New York about midnight and went straight to Craig Rowland's place, a Caligari railroad flat on Second Avenue in the Seventies. Craig was thirty-six, a free-lance journalist who lived on a wing and a prayer like all free-lance types. I'd met him the same night I met Roger. We'd been pals in Boston, then lost touch when Craig relocated to Houston and I to L.A., but had recemented our friendship during the two years he'd been in New York. Two minutes after I dropped my bags on the floor of his apartment, I showed Craig a sore on the shaft of my penis that I'd noticed over the weekend. "That's not AIDS, is it?"

  He examined me closely and shook his head. "No, it doesn't look like that."

  I immediately got in the bathtub, which happened to be in his kitchen, so I could soak it. Meanwhile we were talking about fifteen things at once. Craig had hung up the phone from Houston just as I'd arrived; a friend was calling to tell him they'd pulled the plug that morning on a young man who ten days before had seemed as well as you or I. Suddenly Craig pulled back the sleeve of his flannel shirt and showed me his arm. "What about this?" he asked. I looked at a small red spot above his wrist, slightly raised, barely a quarter-inch across. "No way," I said. "They're never raised."

  I was wrong.

  But we didn't know any better that night, and we joked for another half hour before he went to bed. I cozied up in the loft in the back bedroom and called Roger. We had a marvelous chat, full of our private ironies and shorthand. He was feeling a bit better and more rested, and promised he'd take care till I got back on Thursday. Craig recalls my exhilaration next morning, telling him what a good talk I'd had with Roger.

  At dinner that evening I ate a single mussel out of a colorless bouillabaisse, and within four hours I was violently sick, groaning all night in bed without the wherewithal to vomit. I was bent double with cramps as I walked in the pouring rain on Tuesday to the Russian Tea Room to have lunch with Whoopi. I can't imagine what she remembers of that occasion, if anything, though it must've dismayed her considerably to think this humorless man sipping broth and Coca-Cola was meant to be her breakthrough into feature comedy.

  I'd talked to Roger midnausea the night before, and he was complaining again about feeling awful, but for once we had to call it a draw. Tuesday night I was stronger after spending most of the day in bed. I could hear how rattled Roger was when I called him late: he wasn't just sick, he was worried. But if it was AIDS worry it was still unconscious. He never thought he'd get it; he said so in the hospital. It was harder and harder to soothe him from three thousand miles away, and now I was near frantic to finish up my manicure research and get back to L.A.

  Wednesday night I had dinner in the Village with Star Black, my oldest friend. Star was a photojournalist who was also a closet poet. One Sunday in 1968 we'd driven out to Newton, Massachusetts, and sat in the car in front of Anne Sexton's house, I'm still not sure why: for purposes of osmosis, perhaps. It was always a great pleasure for me to encourage Star's writing, but that night in '85 all I could talk about was my fear for Roger: What if he has AIDS? I expressed it openly for the first time. Star's response was as adamant as it was instant: Impossible. We'd been safe too long; neither of us had been really sick; I was overreacting to all those other cases. I don't think she succeeded in calming me down. But this notion that we had somehow squeaked in under the wire to a sort of viral demilitarized zone, while it didn't comfort me then, became one of the totems I clung to through the next unyielding weeks.

  I left New York on the fourteenth, badly shaken. All the dazzle and energy I connected with the city—cinematography by Gordon Willis—seemed utterly dissipated now. On the way to the airport a speeding car in the next lane hit a dog, who went yowling off up a side street. On the plane I sank into my first-class studio-paid seat and talked to no one, I who usually acted as unpaid social director on a flight. I buried myself in a biography of E. M. Forster.

  The plane was fitted out with a novelty item, an air-to-ground pay phone. I called Roger to wish him Happy Valentine's over Kansas. He was home in bed, too distracted by fluish aches and pains to appreciate the call. We were to meet that evening—I was going direct from LAX—at the Variety Arts Theater, where Roger was sponsoring a table at a benefit for Room For Theatre. I figured we'd play a little ship-to-shore, but the connection sucked, and besides, he wasn't in the mood. I went back to my seat and forced myself to finish the Forster. I wrote out my notes from the visits to all the haute salons. The in-flight movie was Garbo Talks, but I didn't take the earphones. I needed to keep busier than that. Yet there was a random moment when I looked up to think and stared unexpectedly at the silent screen, and Anne Bancroft was lying in bed in a hospital, dying. I started to heave with sobs. The stewardess gently skirted by me with the liqueurs, as if I were on my way to a funeral.

  I shlepped my bags from the airport to the Variety Arts, and went limp with relief when Roger came in, beaming, with Alfred Sole. A look was all we needed by way of anchorage. The evening was structured as a musical revue, and I remember sharing a grin with Rog as a high-camp comedienne did a flaming send-up of the benefit circuit. Even so I was feeling annoyed that he'd been stiffed to pull together yet another charity affair. We already did this sort of thing twice a year for the brothers and sisters. I felt a surge of protectiveness, as if people were taking advantage of Roger's benign nature. He couldn't say no to a good cause. Yet he seemed in terrific form that night, bantering with his fellow board members, in tune with the collective goodwill as usual. Unlike me, who soured easily these days, on the edge of burnout.

  Next day he came home early from the office and went to bed. It was then I told him he really had to call Dr. Cope at UCLA. Not to panic, I quickly added as he winced apprehensively, but he could be harboring some sort of low-grade walking pneumonia that needed antibiotics. He agreed with a certain relief, comforted just to be talking about it as a concrete thing with beginning and end.

  I might note here, with an odd dispassion, that while I was back east the carpets were cleaned, and all through the house were little white squares of Styrofoam under the feet of the furniture. Two years later there are still tables and chests with the Styrofoam crumbling beneath. As I say, it's the details that get away from me.

  I cooked stevedore meals and pampered Rog all weekend. "Everyone's got the flu, it's all over the place, everyone says," I wrote two weeks later. grasping at the straws of the flu tautology. Yet from the moment I said the "A" word out loud to Star in the dive on Irving Place, I had crossed a line. I spoke openly now of this marrow terror of sickness—not to Rog, I didn't want to upset him, but to certain gay friends. I know now I uttered the word as a sort of reverse hex, as if by daring to speak I would neutralize its power. Being scared is not the same as being convinced. Fear still has room to maneuver, and every wave of its energy goes into pushing the terrible thing away, like the ocean leaving a body on the sand.

  My journal gets very spotty here, with only a single detailed entry for the whole sea change of the next six weeks. As if the record itself didn't know how to stop taking its cue from Mrs. Woolf and learn to be The Plague Year. I know the refrain of the next month, from every side, was constant: It's not, it can't be. Roger was the last man anyone thought would get it, just as Leo had been in his circle. To the gay men around us, admitting the shadow had fallen on Roger was to unleash a wild surmise naked as the pandemic across the belly of Africa.

  My memory of those weeks, back and forth to UCLA, is mostly shell-shock fragments. I can't even put them in chronological order, let alone weigh them. I know Roger spent three days in bed, then tried one at the office, only to wilt and crash with another fever. That would be February 19, the day the water pipe burst in the bathroom off the guest room and another burst on Detroit Street, so we had plumbers slogging in and out, distracting us with the chaos of banality. Thursday Roger put in a full day at work, came home with 101.6 and logged yet another weekend in bed. He would seem to get stronger if he laid low for a day or two—he wa
sn't getting worse, just not getting better. People would drop by to visit, full of statistics about the alphabet of influenza coursing through the city like an ill wind from the East. How much denial was everyone practicing? Enough to power Chernobyl, but nobody did it consciously; that's why it's called denial.

  Then Monday the twenty-fifth, Craig called from New York. He was reeling from a session with a doctor who had diagnosed KS right in the office, after the briefest eyeball of that minor spot on his forearm. Since the biopsy would take a couple of weeks to be certain—laboratory backup, one of the essential elements of plague—Craig was on his way to Houston the next day. He had high-level connections in the medical world there, having been founding VP of the Houston AIDS Committee. He promised he'd call as soon as he knew one way or the other. He knew already, but there is the matter of the formal confirmation. One spreads the shock as best one can over several days. I wasn't much help from my end, having suddenly developed amnesia in the positive-attitude department.

  I was also running out of friends who weren't sick. Now I began to hyperventilate with panic and claustrophobia, the stakes seeming to double every time the phone rang. What morning was it that I first woke up suspended in that instant before a car wreck? The hysteria first to last was much more acute in me than in Roger. It's with a certain awe I look back and see how balanced and focused he stayed, even as he gathered and husbanded his strength, patiently trying to get back to work. It's not just that he wasn't a complainer, or that his attitude was stoic. That would come. It was rather that he took refuge now in his temperate nature, a capacity for quietness that began as instinct and ended as character.

  There's a complicated Greek idea that the Greeks pared down to a single word: sophrosyné. R. W. Livingstone, the Oxford don who translated the Plato we read a far summer later, describes the force field of the word with eloquent high-mindedness. Sophrosyné, he says,

  stretches out and tends to become the whole of virtue, an inner harmony of the soul, a reasonableness which reveals itself in every action and attitude. In war-time it vanishes almost entirely—especially among civilians. It is, in the literal meaning of the Greek word, 'soundness of mind'. Restraint is of its essence, but is felt not as restraint... but as that natural service to right reason which is perfect freedom.

  He wrote that in 1938, at the end of another world. There isn't a nuance of it that isn't full of Roger, all the time I knew him but especially through his illness. If I idealize him out of proportion in saying so, well, beware the storyteller then. I'm with Livingstone. You're not supposed to have to be a hero to embody such a vastness. The whole of Greece used to work toward it. If it seems rare and outsize now, that only says more about an age resolved to face the millennium without it.

  More to the point, if Roger had great patience, I have none. Here at the pitch of emergency I can only lay out the fragments of what seared my frantic heart. I am the weather, Roger is the climate, and they are not always the same. Yet the careening of those next few weeks, fitting in visits to UCLA, more and more in tandem, is the story of a kind of bond that the growing oral history of AIDS records again and again. Whatever happened to Roger happened to me, and my numb strength was a crutch for all his frailty. It didn't feel like strength to me, or it was strength without qualities, pure raw force. Yet it took up the slack for Rog, and we somehow always got where we needed to be. In a way, I am only saying that I loved him—better than myself, no question of it—but increasingly every day that love became the only untouched shade in the dawning fireball. What Tillich calls God, the ground of being.

  Roger's blood was drawn fifteen different ways, but we had no test for antibodies yet, so none of the numbers led anywhere. Still there was no perceptible cough, and the general malaise and zigzag fever weren't in themselves conclusive, could still be that phantom flu, shimmering now like an oasis. During one of his consultations, Roger came out to the waiting room and said Dr. Cope wanted to meet me. The feeling was mutual.

  As soon as we sat down with Dennis Cope I silently took back every idiot pun I'd ever made about his name. He's a bear of a man, seized with concentration yet extraordinarily mild by way of affect. Speaks carefully but not guardedly, and never to cover his ass. We were three ways blessed: that he was brilliant, that his reputation gave him power, and that Roger had been his private patient for five years going in. Dennis Cope and Roger already had each other's measure before they ever engaged in this battle together. Modest to a fault, incidentally; doesn't even hear praise. And not once in twenty months did he not have time.

  He was perplexed the day I met him, but proceeded methodically and threw up no red flag that I could see. He said we had to keep probing these tentative symptoms, but no, whatever it was didn't present like AIDS at all. For one thing, Roger wasn't sick enough. If that sounds naive two years later, I have to remember the syndrome was defined then only by its direst fulminations—gasping on a respirator, lesions head to toe like shrapnel. Roger didn't exhibit the requisite pair of pre signs, or not sufficiently to chart a downward curve. Maybe a doctor in New York would've been more grimly fatalistic, like the dude who flattened Craig in a matter of seconds. Maybe Cope was growing more worried and chose to protect us. But so far he still appeared to subscribe to the stubbornness of bugs, just like all our dutiful friends.

  How far was that? On March 1 he told us the chest x-ray looked clear, except for a shadow that was probably the pulmonary artery, but he was playing safe and ordering a CAT scan to make sure it wasn't a lymph node. Roger and I had lunch that day at the hospital cafeteria, in the prison-yard court on plastic chairs under a lowering sky. Roger said how glad he was I was there. My sentiments exactly: as long as we stood our ground together we could thread our way through this maze a step at a time, Buddha's way to the top of the mountain.

  A few days later when Roger went in to see Cope, I ran out to the corridor and called a friend, to grill him as to his own bout with "regular" pneumonia the previous winter. There had been a suspended day or two back then, as we all waited uncomfortably for the man's results, and then the tests proved negative for AIDS, and we all went back to life. Now I gripped the phone white-knuckled, hammering symptoms out of him. One by one I compared them to Rog, pinning my case on that regular brand of infection. When I strode back to the waiting room, Roger was sitting there stunned, and he stumbled out into the hall as if my five minutes away had nearly let him drown. He sagged beside the water fountain and spoke in a kind of bewildered shock: "He says it could be TB."

  Then he started to cry, and the burst of tears sent one of his contact lenses awry. So instead of holding him I had to cup my hands under his eye while he worked the lens back in, swallowing the scald of tears. That specific helpless moment, the soft disk swimming out onto his cheek, stuck with me like a pivot of agony. A year and a half later I'd still be trying to explain to Rog, when the talk came round to the horror, how in that noon moment I died inside. As if I would not live in a world where my friend could be in pain like this. I don't remember what happened then, if we had another test or were given leave to go home, but something had cracked that would never knit again.

  As to how we so tenaciously continued to deny it, I offer one morning when I let Roger off at the main entrance to the medical center. He was going to the eighth-floor pulmonary unit to have an arterial blood-gas test. I parked the Jag in the underground garage and was lurching across the plaza when Rand Schrader happened to come out of Jules Stein Eye Institute. As soon as we saw each other I began to weep, and Rand waited till I was calm and walked me all the way to where Roger was, through a labyrinth of corridors. He says now it was obvious that Roger was very ill, and the test in question extreme. They sink a needle into the artery at the wrist and sip out a vial of deep blood.

  Rand doesn't remember, but I do, his telling me as we walked about an acquaintance in San Francisco who was out of the hospital after a bout of Pneumocystis, back to work and fit to travel. This was supposed to be encouraging
. It was, in fact, so deep had the needle sunk now. My panic had evolved to the more encompassing fear that Roger was dying. If it kept getting worse, Death would start sniffing around, no matter how incomplete the diagnosis. Rand stayed through the test, then waited with Roger outside while I brought the car around. Yet he says by the time he got home he'd buried the whole episode. He bought our story two weeks later that Roger's pneumonia was normal as a football jock. He didn't want to know yet, and I don't blame him. Once you know, it's all over.

  A couple of days afterward we were eating a glazed breakfast before going off to UCLA. As I cleared the table—things in order if not life—Roger looked up at me and said: "It's just the two of us."

  "I know," I replied, though of course we weren't alone. Al and Bernice had left for the desert on February 1, but they were calling in regularly to check up on us, clearly very anxious. Roger had been looking forward all winter to his sister Jaimee's arrival in Palm Springs with Michael and the kids, yearning to put this thing behind him so he could go play uncle. We had two doctor friends we ran the numbers by, and the phone was constant with friends' concern.

  All the same, it was just the two of us lining up as the tests grew more harrowing, the corridors at UCLA more like a separate equal world every day. Forgive us the feeling now and then that the woods had closed behind us. In the most visceral way, with a taste like a ball of blood in our mouths, it seemed that life itself was pulling in like a tortoise. Inside its armor crouched the "group of two" that Freud calls a marriage. Not career, not the past, the waste of errands or the state of the planet. Just us.