Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (18 page)

When the three of us were together, Craig and I let Roger set the tone, though I recall Craig talking about AIDS quite freely, given the strictures. Roger didn't avoid the issue at all, encouraging Craig to speak of it exactly as he had encouraged Star, by his willingness to listen and not interrupt. I suspect such openness in Craig and Cesar helped him to feel less alone as well, even if he was the silent brother. Still, it was a curiously schizoid few days—talking with Craig about nothing but AIDS whenever he and I were alone, piecing together every anecdote we knew, trying to figure patterns that hadn't been reported yet. Then Roger would come home from work, and we'd shift gears and cook dinner. Late at night after Roger went to bed, I'd sit upstairs in the attic bedroom, strategizing once again with Craig.

The Perloffs had asked us out to the ballet, a traveling company at the Wiltern Theater. The dancing was pretty overripe, and I mostly felt a sense of vast irrelevance at being there. How was it the world went on like this? Roger enjoyed himself with the Perloffs, but Craig and I were like two anti-intellectual, fidgeting children. It reminded me of Boston ten years before, when Craig and I were sometimes as raucous as fraternity mates—delayed youth, since neither of us had had a gay friend in college. Roger had been indulgent then about Craig and me at our noisiest, and he seemed the same way now, probably glad to see me laughing, however black the joke.

We came roaring home from the ballet, stopped off for quart-sized hot fudge sundaes and brought them home for a feed. By then the three of us were rollicking. There was a hilarious rush of pleasure at the prospect of immediate gratification. We joked about how quick it would be over, even as we gorged the ice cream. I ask Craig what else he remembers from that visit. The next morning, he says, when he had to get up early to catch his plane, he came downstairs half asleep. Roger was already "humming around the kitchen," getting ready for work. I keep playing that humming moment over in my mind, for I was still on the old Jean Harlow schedule, fast asleep. I love recovering any unguarded moment I might have missed, especially from a good day. It tells me all I need to know about how Rog was doing.

Craig's visit also slots it in my mind for a certainty that Rog had moved back into the front bedroom—
our
room. Craig could have taken the room by the pool and needn't have been exiled to the attic. But I wanted to give Roger all the space he needed, and partly too—irrationally—to separate Craig and his New York microbes. As a child I used to fantasize late at night that my bed was a raft set loose in a shipwreck. Of the many small victories of being restored to life, sharing a bed again felt like a real turn in the war. The deepest habit of normalcy is unconscious, as one of us would turn in sleep and hold the other, spoon fashion. This was the point of maximum stillness, proof that things were right again. Roger always averred that he'd invented the spoon on Sacramento Street after we met in '74, in order to ease my birdlike hyper nerves so I would fall asleep. Thus the middle of the night is when I feel the loneliness most. Even half-unconscious, I still turn and tuck in a spoon, preferring the memory trace to nothing.

We made love again in April too. I have to speak of this a little, though I feel the tug of my right to protect it, because I live in a generation of gay men from whom Eros has mostly fled. It's true that in time the holding close and spooning were more the ground of love than passion was. That is, we grew to need the repose of each other more than the heightened intensity. Roger was often too unwell and I too strung out to think of naked sex. But the burrowed place of holding on, where life was the same as ever, still could release an exhilaration that gathered to a peak. The first time Roger came after his hospitalization, he was almost crying even as he gasped with pleasure. England and the ballet might be over with, but not us.

Seven years into the calamity, too many gay men have lost the will to love. The enemies of our people—fundamentalists of every stripe, totalitarians left and right—have all been allowed the full range of their twitching bigotry. Though gay men have begun to understand it is something in themselves these upright men so fear, too many of us have internalized their self-hatred as shame. That the flesh and the spirit are one in love is none of the business of the celibate men of God, especially those who believe they rule the province of love. But the mission of the homophobe is more pernicious even than his morality. He wants every one of us to be all alone, never to find the beloved friend.

A man ought to be free to find his reason. Not that freedom alone will serve it up: it requires the gods' own fury of luck to get two people to meet. But when it finally happens, two men in love can't rejoice out loud—joy of the very thing everyone burns for—without bracing for the rant of prophets, the schoolyard bully, and Rome's "intrinsic evil." I try to remember that we fight as a ragged people to outlast the calamity so that others can sleep as safe as my friend and I, like a raft in the tempest.

Random memories of that April are spots of time. I can see Roger sitting at the desk in the study, writing a condolence to Star's mother, while I sit watching from across the room with nothing to do, till I run out and get him a milk shake. When in doubt, feed. I remember a brutal op-ed piece in the L.A.
Times
, written by a doctor at San Francisco General, where he tried to make graphic just how desperate the disease was. Yes, fifty percent of those stricken were still alive, but only because they weren't dead yet. They would die soon enough. It's one of the times I recall Roger crying, and I own the idiocy of my response. I said, "Look, Rog, the worst that can happen is both of us will die," which
really
set him off. I try to remember that bit of backfire when someone says something off the wall to me.

I remember renting
The Night of the Shooting Stars
and both of us being enthralled by it. A lucky draw, since I was a wash at the video store, where I would dither among the
Rambos
and be unable to locate anything. My brother had urged me for years to see
The Horse's Mouth
, with Alec Guinness. We laughed all the way through—that great moment when Guinness disguises his voice on the phone, declaring he's the Duchess of Blackpool. Yet when it ended and the madly sane painter sailed away down the Thames, I started to sob uncontrollably: "I always thought I was going to be Virginia Woolf, and now look at me!" A comic enough disguise all by itself, if it weren't so sad.

Gottlieb managed to throw us both off balance one morning after an examination, with a soft-spoken exhortation: "Make every day count." Roger and I groaned over that one, comparing it to the moment in
Great Expectations
when Miss Havisham snarls at the terrified Pip: "Play!" Sam tried to place the doctor's remark in context. It didn't mean we were supposed to stumble around looking for roses to smell; rather, we had to learn to savor life as we used to—except now it could only be day by day, whether we liked it or not. I was acting as if I could keep Roger's situation stable only by staying depressed and morbid. If we laughed too loud, the Big Foot would stomp us. My guilt and doomsday magic were keeping us from reclaiming the fullest measure of life, and if it kept up, I would rob us after all of the love we had. The question I needed to face was: Where had Paul Monette disappeared to?

The only answer I can come up with is that the last and best and only PM I care about is the Paul of Paul & Roger, and now that I live with the sword over my head there is this constant pain and stupefied disbelief.

But don't you believe you can help him to live, demanded Sam. This "Paul & Roger" that I believed in so fervently required of me sometimes that I be stronger than I was. The loneliness of the secret was turning me inside out, and gradually I would have to accommodate more people like Star and Craig. I had to build myself a support system with others so I could be the mainstay to Rog. Some mornings I would lie in bed swirling with horrors, unable to get up at all. Fight to seize the day, Sam said, call somebody even worse off than you are,
engage.

Roger after all was busy at work, husbanding his energy, brimful with a world that had welcomed him back. He relished coming home to me—to us—more than ever, but now too often he'd find me glazed with pain and emptiness. Even to me it was sounding too close to what happened during the bad months of '81, when I was reeling from my obsession over Joel, unable to work. Back then, Roger had finally admitted it was getting to be an ordeal to come home to my misery every day. Not in so many words, now he was pleading with me to get the AIDS despair behind me. I was the one who hadn't recovered yet.

I hope I make it clear that both were happening at once: raft and tempest, peak and valley, the prostrate Harlow and the ice cream messenger, all in a day. So much was Roger not blaming me for his illness, or beating me up with his own pain, that I'd fashioned a way of blaming myself twice over, till I was more invested in self-punishment than in relief. Sam told me I was fixated on the unfairness of it all, refusing to cope with this thing that didn't belong in our lives. Sam practically shouted at me: There is no fairness! I was clinging to the iceberg instead of the raft. Life was about survival and challenge—so
meet
it.

The suramin ticket came through at last. We went in for the first dose on Friday, May 24, with very little sense of what to expect. We knew that Roger would have to be officially admitted to the hospital and pay for a half-day's room, even though he would be in the Clinical Research Center only three hours every Friday. Two other patients had already begun the program during the previous week, but on that first Friday Roger was the only one. We'd been told it would be administered intravenously, and we had the name of the doctor in charge, but all we knew for certain was that this was the only game in town.

Clinical Research was altogether different from the tenth floor or any other bustling space at the medical center. Here the corridor was quiet as a Zurich clinic, with three or four rooms on each side, only a couple of them occupied at any given time. Cancer patients mostly, I suppose, watching daytime television while something quixotic dripped in their arms, and maybe a wife or husband flipping through a magazine. The room at the end of the hall on the right was a two-bedder, which happened to look out into the thick crown of a banyan tree. "It feels," I wrote in my journal, "like we're in a tropical hospital somewhere, getting treated for a rare jungle infection." A dietitian came in and took an order for Roger's lunch, though it was only 9 A.M. I don't know why that seemed so generous—we were paying a hundred dollars an hour to be there—but this friendly woman was very proprietary about feeding her guinea-pig patients. The chief cook in me applauded the sentiment mightily.

Then Peter Wolfe came in.
This
was the clinical researcher? He was disarmingly young, with a shag of blond hair that slumped across his forehead and gave him rather a hooded look, though he tended to peer through the thatch with wry amusement. It happened that he'd gone to Harvard, and Roger flushed with pleasure as they traded memories of Cambridge. It turned out Peter had also read a novel of mine, which was proof enough to me that he was gay, but on second thought he was pretty forthcoming with that information himself. Explaining that he had been treating AIDS patients since his first day as a doctor, he spoke simply and feelingly of looking down at a stricken man in bed and thinking: "This is me."

As he went through the technical rigmarole of the drug, dosage and possible side effects, Roger and I had much the same reaction. We were in the care of one of our own, and here I don't simply mean gay. We shared with Peter a common geography of the mind, which only by chance happened to have the Charles River meandering through it. Still barely thirty, Peter was the age of the men and women Roger had worked with as senior tutor at Dudley House. Peter also had an eccentric sense of humor and love of puns that mirrored Roger's own, to which Roger responded with quick delight.

So began the first elixir. I soon came to think of that room looking out on the banyan tree as a safe haven. Over the course of the summer it grew populous with its own queer and hardscrabble island folk.

Later, of course, when the Swiss Family treehouse came crashing down, the island seemed a mirage, but now the stronger memory is how happy we were to beach there. We still froze with terror at every bruise. Only a week before, we'd almost missed a wedding in Venice when I found a purple blotch on my upper arm, and now I searched both of us head to toe every day. But from the moment of that first dose in the tropics of the CRC, we had an ace in the hole. The picture in my mind was of the virus pulling back, shrinking into itself as the blood woke up.

I can't pretend the panic and despair shrank in direct proportion, but we left Clinical Research that first day with an awed feeling of gratitude. Roger had been required to sign a consent form, and I had witnessed it just below. That our names were twinned there meant more to me then than the marriage license the laws denied us. Peter Wolfe read the form aloud, and there was a sentence to the effect that one would have the satisfaction of knowing one was advancing the search for a cure. I sat up straight at that, quick as an old soldier to salute. Hope is not the same thing as believing anything higher, but it suffices unto itself. We had two secrets now, the illness and the treatment, and the second was so extravagant we fairly glowed. It's a long way still to being a hero, but within a week the teary boy who would never be Virginia Woolf finally admitted there was something to say besides "More dead."

...frozen too long, and there is this ache like tears that wants to burst. It's like I died, and I
didn't
die. We are here, and we love each other, and now I have to find some work. Sentence by sentence, nothing by nothing, even if I can't sing. Then hum a few bars at least. Whistle a bit in the dark. We cannot all go down to defeat and darkness, we have to say we have been here.