Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (11 page)

The Test is the most concentrated form of the Fear there is—which is why people tell you not to take it if you think you will have trouble handling the results. Why should we know? The fact is things are happening in our bodies, our blood, all the time we know nothing of; the hole in the dike of our immune systems may appear at any moment, and is always invisible, silent, unadvertised.

When does a person begin to develop cancer? When does a tumor start to grow? When does the wall of the heart begin to weaken? Do you want to know? With AIDS, there is presumably something in hiding, in the brain, the tissues, waiting for some moment to begin its incredibly fast and protean reproduction. It may be waiting—or reproducing—as I type this. This is the Fear that is utterly personal—that makes you think imagining is worse than reality. This is what makes you think: I must know, I can’t bear this, I’ll take the Test. So you drive over one hot afternoon to do it, thinking of the letter from a woman whose nephew just died at home of AIDS: “Tony even tested Negative two months before he died.” What fun. You feel as if you are driving not toward the county health department but the Day of Judgment. In my right hand, I give you Life, in my left, Death. What will you do, the voice asks, when you find out? How will you live? How do people with AIDS drive the car, fall asleep at night, face the neighbors, deal with solitude? The stupendous cruelty of this disease crashes in upon you. And so you bargain with God. You apologize, and make vows. You ask: How could this have happened? How could I have reached this point? Where did I make the turn that got me on
this
road? Every test you have ever taken, written or oral—the book reports; the thesis examination; the spelling bees; those afternoons walking home from school as far as you could before turning the page of your test to see the grade on a corner where no one could see your reaction; the day you got drafted; the day you found out whether you were going to Vietnam—all pale, or come back, in one single concentrated tsunami of terror at this moment.

In eighteenth-century Connecticut, Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which was so terrifying that women in the congregation fainted. Imagine you are a spider, he said, suspended on a web over the fire—the fire of Hell—by the grace of God. Some things never change. The Fear, like the sermon, feeds on the imagination. But whenever you’re with someone who faces this disease daily with composure, calm, humor, and his or her own personality intact, you realize how deforming, how demeaning, how subject to the worst instincts it is.

O
NE NIGHT IN 1970, I think, friends took me to a very small theater on Tenth or Eleventh Street to see a play called
Hot
Ice.
It was a play about cryogenics, and it cost five dollars, I believe; no one explained what we were about to see, yet everyone I went with—people who had seen
Turds in Hell
or
Bluebeard
—had about him a certain air that implied there was no need to explain, I would soon see why one went to any play Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company put on.

At the time, I’d stopped going to the theater—mainly because the baths were far more thrilling, more dramatic, and cheaper than anything on Broadway—and because I basically agree with a friend of mine who said theaters should be shut down for ten years and be allowed to open after a decade’s darkness if, and only if, there was some justification for it. (And who got up during the second act of a play once and said—when I hissed, “Where are you going?”—“Home, to watch
Masterpiece Theater
.”) That was the problem. Sitting in a theater uptown, one was always wondering:
Why did they have everyone drive in from the suburbs, get a
babysitter, come uptown on the subway, for this? Why couldn’t we be
at home in our underwear, watching this on TV?
With Charles Ludlam one never asked these questions. Uptown, one found oneself observing people in their living rooms—or, as the “legitimate” theater continued to shrink from a news-clogged world it could not compete with, their dining rooms (
Table Manners, The
Dining Room
), as if the family melodrama would someday be distilled down to single pieces of furniture (
The Bidet
). On the local five o’clock news you watched, as you dressed for the theater, a man walking a wire strung between the twin towers of the World Trade Center; when you got to the theater, you saw a woman cleaning her house before she committed suicide. That strange custom of applauding the set when the curtain went up (so often on a plush Manhattan apartment, reproduced to the last book on the library shelf ) seemed as artificial as the plays on Broadway at the time; we might as well have been clapping for the designer rooms at Kips Bay, or the windows at Altman’s. At
Hot Ice
there was no curtain, if I recall; the stage, very small, depicted the laboratory of a mad scientist (the character that lay beneath, behind, within, it seemed, almost all the roles Charles Ludlam took on), and from the moment he came onstage, I knew something was going to happen.

Nothing is so ephemeral as a theatrical performance—it even differs from night to night—and, in an age when songs, concerts, films, books, the explosion of the
Challenger
, the inauguration of a president, can be reproduced over and over again, hoarded and stored, what Ludlam did on his little stage is remembered solely by people who happened to see him. Writing about him now seems dumb, like analyzing laughter, which no doubt Ludlam did, but never in front of us, onstage; in front of us, onstage, he simply induced it. He induced more than that, however; in any performance of
Camille
, half the people in the audience were tearing up and half were shrieking with laughter—at the same line. That was Charles Ludlam. In a country whose critics, and actors, are always bemoaning the absence of a repertory company, Charles Ludlam, and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company he founded, were just that: a place we could go year after year, to new play after new play, to be entertained. How he did it I don’t know. Proust had trouble analyzing Sarah Bernhardt as Berma in
Remembrance of Things Past
—and Ludlam was, like Bernhardt, just an actor. And playwright. And director. And designer. And—it would sound ridiculous, I suppose, if I said genius, but that was how I felt that night in 1970, sitting on the edge of my seat at
Hot Ice,
open-mouthed as any child at a Punch-and-Judy show. Charles Ludlam
did
a Punch-and-Judy show, in which he took all twenty-two parts, and that was only one aspect of his theater mania: Nothing in the performing arts was foreign to him, or unused. Puppets, wigs, ball gowns, snoods, musclemen, fake fog, mechanical fish, daggers, goblets, vacuum chambers, flowers, and real flush toilets found places in his theater. His theater was
very
—theatrical. If someone had never seen a play in his life, he could have gone to Charles Ludlam and seen virtually all of theater encapsulated in one performance. Ludlam was comprehensive—pure theater. Which we were starved for—driven to his little group by the staleness of Broadway, the fatuities of a mass-produced, television-dominated, film-and-book-soaked century that gave equal time to the fall of Beirut and the fire in Michael Jackson’s hair started by a commercial for Pepsi Cola. Drowning in what Godard said the West had simply too much of—Culture; on the lam from history, novels, films, the
New York Review of Books
—and none of them any FUN! Grenades ready to explode in our seats when Ludlam came onstage—pins pulled by this short, bald man with a big nose, large dark eyes, and a little mouth. There was something about Ludlam—no matter what the costume, wig, or role, he held you in thrall. There was an insane, cracked quality in this smoldering anarchist of kitsch that made him, no matter what the scene or part, the center of attention. Onstage he had the air of a madman, really, listening to some lurid music of the spheres the rest of the cast could not hear. This performer, who looked, on the street, like the superintendent of an apartment building on Jane Street, or a janitor sweeping up at a high school on the Lower East Side, or a salesman who sold trusses out of an office in midtown Manhattan, was, when he came onstage, an actor so charismatic, so in possession of his method, that no matter how bad the play—and there were a few one did not
rush
to recommend to friends—or how mundane the particular passage, one never took one’s eyes off him. Ludlam—and his
gothic
eyes—always seemed at the least perturbed; at most, as loony as Rasputin.

The greatest comedy has this element of madness, I think—the sense that we’ve shoved off, there are no limits, the actor is wacko. (Mel Brooks, not Woody Allen; Richard Pryor, not Bill Cosby.) Lunacy and cunning pulled Ludlam’s chariot with competing force. The saying “Life is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think,” is too schematic, after all. Because most of us think
and
feel, if not always simultaneously, the pressure of the two creates an urge in some of us to just—
lose it
now and then. That’s what the cult of Dionysus was all about, and the cult of Dionysus is where Theater started. You could lose it with Charles Ludlam. It would be pointless to subject Ludlam to a dissertation—he was too funny—and yet no one was more grounded in theater’s ancient roots than he; like a child running through the contents of his bedroom closet, putting on fake noses, mustaches, pulling out toy airplanes, little plastic gladiators, goldfish bowls, ray-guns, Cleopatra wigs, he always gave the impression of having assembled the particular play from a magic storeroom in which he kept, like some obsessed bag lady, every prop and character that two thousand years of Western history had washed up on the shores of a childhood on Long Island. If uptown you watched depressed people in their living rooms, when you went to the little theater that became Ludlam’s permanent home, you sat down before a palace in Carthage, a temple, a crypt, a tomb, a railroad station, a yacht cruising the Aegean with billionaire and diva taking the sun—everything
but
the living room. Instead of a
hausfrau
committing suicide, Camille in Paris, gayer times, other centuries, cultures, codes of conduct: the gamut of Western culture’s books, plots, and characters. Ludlam added subjects, when the theater was subtracting them; introduced new plays, when the houses uptown were dark for lack of original work; became more theatrical, when most of the lore and craft of theater seemed to have slipped away to Hollywood.

Ludlam did make movies—even appeared in a television sitcom I tuned to once by accident—but his genius belonged to the theater. Theater was his
subject.
He mined past plays for his exaggerations, intonations, looks, monologues, asides, settings, props. He made fun of all its pretense. Once Ludlam sat down on a toilet onstage in
Stage Blood
, delivered Hamlet’s soliloquy, stood up, pulled the chain, and in that single flush sent up every apartment erected on a Broadway stage. In Ludlam, realism was make-believe; make-believe was the joke (and the delight)—so that we gasped when, as a Carthaginian princess about to be purified before her marriage in
Salammbo
, he raised his skirt to reveal what looked like a vagina for ritual shaving. And we thrilled when the cardboard train came sliding onstage to deliver Galas (the diva whose first line, at the station café, was, “I’ll have the veal cutlet”). The make-believe train was the sort of thing children would be delighted by, but then that is what we all were, at a Ludlam play: children. Smart, jaded, ironic, sophisticated children, watching a magician dress up, caress, and bring to life again a theater whose corpse the “legitimate” theater was too sophisticated, too tasteful, too realistic, too something to rouse.

It seems that simple: Ludlam
used
theater—its most ancient, vulgar tricks—when no one else was able to. He did so, chiefly, by making fun of it. That was all he needed to give us entrance to realms one could no longer visit any other way. The god of originality in the arts, after all, is mean: One can no longer offer up on his altar a sonata like Schubert’s, a poem like Keats’s. One can only write
The Importance of Being Earnest
or paint the
Mona Lisa
once. (So today we get electronic music, and Julian Schnabel.) Ludlam found a way around the altar—had a key that unlocked the door of that chamber behind the deity in which all those heroes and heroines, villains and viragos (Camille, Bluebeard, Hamlet, Wagner, Callas—and Houdini), were waiting to amuse us again. The key, the rejuvenating alchemy, was satire. Farce. A unique aesthetic in which the classic became avant-garde. Who else but Ludlam would have staged an obscure novel by Flaubert as a send-up of Hollywood epics about gladiators with the sort of chests that made Groucho Marx say he never went to films in which the men’s tits were bigger than the women’s? (Ludlam merely hired a group of muscle builders from a local gym.) Who else but Ludlam would have given us
Camille?
With such conviction—such art—that half the audience was laughing while the other half groaned, and what the audience was doing changed from moment to moment, line to line, syllable to syllable, as we followed the rises and dips of that incredible voice—that resonant, dark, wounded, demonic, sinuous, whimsical, whining, wheedling, imperious instrument?

Ludlam was also a master of the punch line—the mainstay of Woody Allen—which punctured the balloon of High Art but fast. (When Camille is dying, her lover Armand ends a florid declaration of his love with the words, “Toodle-oo, Marguerite!” When Galas lists the reasons she wants to die, the last one is, “And there’s nothing on television tonight!”) But the punch lines came only after we’d drunk rapturously of the Real Thing. One may ask, “What did we know of the Real Thing?” “Tragedy is dead,” said the critic. We could no longer stage this seriously. Our teeth were fluoridated, our theater air-conditioned. Too modern, too rational, too prosperous, too aware of genocide to care about individual fate. Why, then, did we sit rapt before dying Camille? Ludlam was our only showcase of the bravura roles, the classic acting of a sort one could no longer find, in the Age of Realism—in a culture whose solution for grief is grief counseling, whose reaction to catastrophe is stress management and acupuncture, Ludlam played Tragedy. He played both Tragedy and Farce and refused to tell us which was which. He died onstage of tuberculosis, or heartache, and left us not knowing whether to laugh or cry, suspended somewhere (with parted lips) between the two; so that when he raised his gloved hand to his lips, as Camille, and coughed those three little coughs—just three—the audience both howled and stopped laughing altogether.

He also performed at a time when what was underground and what was homosexual were one—there was a whole decade, after all, between Candy Darling and Harvey Fierstein—and his two greatest roles were basically Tragic Drag: women whom fortune dumps in a rather rude way—Camille (whom Ludlam played more than once, a favorite he could always resurrect) and Galas. It seems now in retrospect that all art presupposes a certain health, leisure, freedom in which to laugh at things that in life are actually horrid and brutal. We all could scream at the three little coughs that caused earlier generations to sob—or Galas’s lament, “Everyone I know is either dead or in Monte Carlo!”—because at the time we were worried primarily about our
latissimus dorsi.
Ludlam was described to me, in fact, that night I saw
Hot Ice,
as an ornament of gay New York—like the Loft, the Everard—pleasures of a segment of society that in 1970 was Fun. In the theater that night were people who had come to the city, to work and play, for whom Ludlam was the adored genius whose next play (no tortured intellectual he, observing long periods of silence before he had something new to say; Ludlam put on plays the way bakers bake bread) was a piece of news joyously transmitted in the hallways of the baths. When Ludlam turned, in
Camille,
to his maid in a boudoir in Paris and said (in that ruminating, pathetic tone), “Throw another faggot on the fire!,” the maid respectfully replied, “There are no faggots in the house, Madame.” And Ludlam, rising on one arm on the chaise longue to look directly out at his audience with that morose expression would say, “What? No
faggots
in the house?,” whereupon whole ages of repression went up in shrieks.

There were lots of faggots in the house, of course—bronzed, muscular habitués of gyms and Fire Island, in plaid shirts, muscles, and mustaches—and if everything Ludlam did was ironic, a double entendre of sorts, so were their lives, and Camille and Galas spoke to that. Ludlam was superb in a lot of other roles (
Le
Bourgeois Avant-Garde, Salammbo, The Mystery of Irma Vep
), but there were plays I let run without making the effort to see, because they were, as a friend fumed one time when I asked how the new one was, “hardly high school.” (Some high school! What Bluebeard said might apply as a small understatement to Lud-lam’s work: “When I’m good I’m very good, and when I’m bad, I’m . . . not bad.”)
Camille
and
Galas,
however, were of another order. Drag is a profound joke—the fundamental homosexual joke, no doubt: The Woman at Bay, wounded but triumphant, lascivious or frigid, repressed or mad, rings all the notes, high and low. That which appalls the race in real life (change of sex roles) onstage unchains. Charles Ludlam was the greatest drag I’ve ever seen. It ceased to be drag, in fact, or acting: It was art. That mouth, those eyes—that voice, that fan! That insidious send-up of absolutely everything! That superb evocation of the classic, the romantic, the aristocratic. (Yes, aristocratic. The secret wish of every homosexual—the drag queen as Queen. Of the
Universe
.) We sat in our jeans and T-shirts in a city, culture, and century flooded with fake emotion and took
Camille
utterly seriously—the only way we
could
take it: as a joke.