Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (19 page)

“T
HERE’S SOMETHING DIFFERENT about gay New York,” a friend writes from Manhattan this May, “but I can’t figure it out. For instance, I’ve noticed that nobody talks about AIDS anymore. As recently as a year ago, it was the topic; three years ago, it was the only topic. My friend who does ministry to PWAs says it’s just a massive dose of denial and a desire to live even with dark clouds hanging over us and to carry on.”

Strangely enough, I’ve had the same feeling for a while—that AIDS is no longer the topic it used to be in the media, either; either because there are no news developments to report, or because, in journalism, as in every other field, everything is critical for just fifteen minutes. AIDS already seems like last season’s story. Which means I’ve the feeling we are in a lull—one of those deceptive pauses in the action that beguiles us into thinking that this is the way life’s going to be now, for the indefinite future—but which, in reality, never lasts. Lulls, in fact, make me nervous. They always precede disaster. But that’s how it seems now as I write this in late May 1989, the last summer of a surreal decade.

The weather, as I sit here on the porch in Florida, has changed several times in the past hour. Clouds form on the other side of the lake; the sky turns gray, and I watch a wall of rain move over the lake, drench the yard, and move on; then the sun comes out, it’s hot and steamy and I can smell the grass. Twenty minutes later, the sun vanishes behind another mass of clouds; the yard darkens; the lake turns silver. More rain. And then more sun. It will probably go on like this all day, and for the next few months. It’s what this lull is like—a patchwork of constantly changing conditions making up what one calls with a single word, weather.

Another friend writes this week from San Francisco, where he and his lover have just tested Positive for antibodies to the virus, about why they don’t talk about AIDS: “Bob and I are pretty much totally
over
at this point. I cannot tolerate his negativity concerning his Positive status. He
refuses
to be hopeful or do anything to attempt to deal with this entire nightmare—which—yes, it is—but lots of other guys are dealing with this, also—and their lives are progressing. Bob’s is
not
—at this time. He has quit his job and gone on Disability and is living off the interest from his trust—his life is hardly even
life—
he sleeps all the time and just lies around and reads. He obviously needs help—but God forbid I should remind him of that—so I have given up—as I do not want stress and conflict in my life right now—only joy and hope and
good
thoughts.” So he’s going out that evening, he says, to a party being given for men who have tested Positive, to meet someone who will give him the support he needs.

And that’s how it is, the Wednesday before the weekend that not only begins the summer, but seems to be a gay holiday in the way few other of our official holidays are: Memorial Day. The present silence does not mean in any way that AIDS has gone away. Even my impression that the media had dropped the subject was changed, for instance, when
20/20
ran a story last night about a young Jewish woman, the only child of a Park Avenue family, who contracted AIDS, she thinks, by sleeping one time with a bisexual bartender from Studio 54 six years ago. The segment is moving—especially the family’s decision to go public with the facts, and her decision to tour college campuses to warn other people her age: It can happen. The new twist, I guess, that induced
20/20
to feature what has, in a sense, ceased to be news must be AIDS among college kids.

The Jacksonville newspaper the same day carries a story announcing that the United States has lifted its ban on visitors to this country who’ve tested Positive, after protests that a Dutch man was refused entry in Minneapolis. Meanwhile, the
Village
Voice
wants to know if Compound Q is the cure; and the argument continues among activists and journalists whether or not HIV is the cause. Panels are held. People argue. But these elements have all been part of the mix for some time now.

So is the variety of reactions to the situation among the friends I am in touch with. One says he’s living on his publisher’s advance for books because he doesn’t even know if he’ll ever hand them in, since, “Everyone’s going to be dead in two years anyway.” Another has just moved to Seattle to begin a new life. A friend in New York says he has not had sex in six years. Another who has just moved to Key West is having so much sex there he suggests that SILENCE = DEATH is not the only logo that should be on T-shirts; NO SEX = DEATH is another.

Another friend—a bartender from San Diego—is going to New York for Memorial Day weekend. I tell him to make sure he goes out to Fire Island, give him some friends’ phone numbers, and then think: In the old days, a handsome Californian would be a present, but now, the meaning of a handsome Californian is entirely changed.

But when I say this to a friend in New York on the phone, he scoffs, “AIDS is now something you refer to in part of a conversation about other things. People have completely adapted to it, and are living around it.”

That must be why my correspondent says nobody talks about it in New York anymore. One cannot expect people to live in a state of perpetual horror and outrage. Eventually they subside. Fatigue sets in, burnout, boredom, acceptance—and the attention span turns to something else. How could it be otherwise? Yet all of this is strange. That is, what’s new about AIDS now is the fact that nothing
is
new. This package of facts is
it
—this mixture of health and sickness, fear and accommodation, action and inertia, participation and withdrawal. It’s all settled down into a pattern, and become—along with AZT and pentamidine, the HIV test, the division of people into Positive and Negative—a way of life. A way of life described tellingly in an article by Victor F. Zonana called “Survivor’s Syndrome: AIDS Takes Toll on Ones Left Behind” in the May 6
Los Angeles Times
. This odd sense of malaise isn’t just my imagination. This article, which one wishes had been written long before this, is doubly fascinating because it
has
appeared now—the eighth year into the plague—as if the dust has settled, things have fallen back to earth, and we can actually speak of survivors. With one exception, apparently: the people who’ve survived.

“Have you ever wondered why you have been spared?” a seventy-year- old married man from Seattle I have been corresponding with for five years wrote recently. “I know the question is very personal, which may be why you didn’t want to answer it in your last letter.” I wrote back, “I did not mean to evade your question about surviving. The answer is simple: No one who has survived thinks he has survived. That is, most gay men who’ve lost friends have no explanation, do not think this thing is over, still don’t know what’s going on, and are superstitious enough to believe that the moment they think they’re a survivor, they’ll get sick. Because, you see, the time lag—the latency period—is so very long.” Odd, isn’t it? One of the most striking things about the tumult of the past eight years (and the new modus vivendi) is not only that this disease has dominated the decade, truncated gay lives and gay life, produced both physical and psychological casualties, taken some and (apparently) not others, produced arguments over what the real cause is, but—staggering as it may seem after the expenditure of so much blood, energy, and effort—nobody really knows even now why some people have “survived” and some have not. The friend in New York who is, of all the people I know, most privy to the latest theories, gossip, treatments, has always impressed me, when I asked at various times the past several years, “Is this the cure?” “Is that the cause?” “Was that how he got it?” and “What would
you
personally take?” by answering, with a sigh, “I don’t know.”

Ignorance—the inability to solve a problem, the weariness that comes with failed attempts to—is not something people are generally comfortable with. Like children who cannot get a turtle to come out of its shell, they eventually leave the insoluble enigma and go on to something they can decipher, and replace that problem with newer, less intractable ones. The current silence is really that of science. Those announcements of new drugs that used to appear in the news, one after the other, and cause such a stir, do not come so frequently anymore. Doctors speak of AIDS as a “manageable disease,” like diabetes; something, that is, one can live with, as if everyone has given up the idea of a magic bullet, a final end to this—as if AIDS is going to be relegated to the shelf on which those other, long-term, debilitating afflictions lie: multiple sclerosis and dystrophy and Lou Gehrig’s and cystic fibrosis—the telethon diseases. This weekend, memorial marches will be held for those lost to AIDS—an annual remembrance, like Memorial Day itself. It all settles into a way of life.

And yet those who will live this way, in this brave new world, are not really able to, according to the article in the
Los Angeles
Times
. They do not believe they are uninfected, it says; they do not believe safe sex or celibacy will prevent their being infected; they think it would be egocentric to imagine they’ve been “spared”; they lie to friends who’ve tested Positive about their test results; they lose friends who don’t believe they can understand what they’re going through; they think their psychological problems (guilt, depression) are not important compared to others. For such people, says Dr. James Titchener at the University of Cincinnati, “the sub-conscious mind’s irrational sense of guilt is telling them that they do not deserve to enjoy life when others around them suffer and die.” Many of them, says John Acevedo, a psychologist who works with the AIDS Health Project in San Francisco, “have withdrawn socially or sexually. ‘In their attempts to avoid more pain, and in some cases to avoid infection, they isolate. They shut down completely,’ he says.” Like the man described in the article’s opening paragraph: “Three years ago, after he had watched his five best friends die of AIDS, interior designer David Ramey fled his native San Francisco to begin a new life across the bay in Walnut Creek. ‘I moved to the suburbs and became a hermit,’ he says.”

While some of the “survivors” have given up mainstream jobs to work full-time for AIDS fund-raisers, or participate in experimental vaccine programs, the majority of them—which means the majority of gay men in this country, the article points out—have, I suspect, moved physically or emotionally to some version of Walnut Creek. And so you get, near the close of the eighties, a splintering of homosexual America into millions of individual fates, different positions in relation to AIDS, and a sense that everyone has made his little bargain with fate and adjusted to all of this as best he can. And this is the way things are going to be, for a long, long time.

Yet nothing is really resolved—which is one of the hardest characteristics of the plague to accept. Like the war in Vietnam, which military men predicted Americans would never support, because democracies do not tolerate long, drawn-out guerrilla wars, AIDS is something we would just as soon have off our TVs. It is now quite literally a commercial, in fact, a little film that comes on during station breaks, like the clip about drunk driving. But AIDS is not something we can withdraw from, as America did from Vietnam. It may be over, as news, as a shocking, horrifying novelty; it may be something we can remove from the media, or stop talking about or brooding about because that doesn’t seem to help. But it’s not going away so long as the virus continues to spread. There may be no way of predicting the future (personal or public), but people will go on, as in wartime, under its influence. They will grow used to the rationing (of sex), and the dangers, and the deaths of friends, and the possibility of disaster. They will take what pleasures they can, where they can, and drift in and out of bouts of anxiety and depression, and then take a renewed interest in life. They will adapt.

In 1984 a friend compared the plague to a shark attack—and that’s just what it was like, initially: a beach party, a group of people swimming along (quite literally at places like Fire Island) who suddenly saw one another disappearing. No one knew what was going on, and no one had time to think. Now they can—about the unfairness, the irrationality of fate, about how much is still mysterious, and how much there is still to come, about how they have adjusted—because people do adjust, to anything. AIDS has lost its urgency in the national consciousness. Science seems stuck. And everyone would like to say, “It’s over,” even though it’s not. Eight years into the plague, in fact, almost everything has lost its immediacy—except the news that a friend has just had a seizure in a taxi in London. (Brain tumor. Not long to live. Better say goodbye now.) Then the original horror, the anger, the grief, the outrage return—and this lull, this banality, seems even more bizarre.

S
OME THINGS DO not disappear: the people on St. Marks Place who somehow express something in themselves by laying out on a thin blanket forty-five back issues of
Honcho
, and seven hardback books, and stand there all night waiting to sell one of them—they’re still here, in greater numbers, it seems, since the outdoor bazaar now spreads westward all the way to Astor Place and south to Seventh Street. Walking back to the apartment now requires a sort of delicate ballet, especially if you want to pass the pedestrians in front of you, in that small, faster-flowing space between the strollers and the vendors straddling their blankets at curbside. If you’re really in a hurry—or suddenly claustrophobic in the press of all these gawkers and faux-merchants—then you’ve got to dash between the two
en pointe
, without stepping on a single magazine. Getting to the apartment building now is like crossing a finishing line: Once the door closes behind, it’s victory—peace and quiet. St. Marks Place is empty now only very late at night—divinely empty; the merchants, their blankets, childlike collections of found objects, gone. How they make money I don’t know, why they do it, I know less. But they’ve been here for the past six years, and they’re not going away.

Others are. Years ago people talked of having to edit their phone books—rip out whole pages—but at the time I did not relate to this very much. This time I come back to New York with my list of addresses and phone numbers, and I do. The people I cannot call, the friends I cannot go see, for the first time equal in number the ones I can. Some have moved away—to Los Angeles, Long Island, upstate. Others are obsessed with new things (jobs, Act Up). Others are making new friends to replace the ones they’ve lost. But most are just gone. Eddie, who died first; Rhodes, who surprised us by dying; Robert—whose absence we’re still not used to. “It’s like with Barry,” a friend says over lunch. “I have this urge to say: ‘All right, you’ve done this long enough now. Come back.’” The fact that he’s not coming back, as time goes by, expands rather than shrinks. This time, too, there’s Emmanuel—or rather, there’s not Emmanuel. His widow, and roommate, are living in his loft now. I think of calling her, but don’t. What would we talk about? Emmanuel. His memorial service, who came, who spoke. Eventually we would have to hang up. And he would be no more there at the end of the phone call than he was at the beginning.

On Monday I walk over to his building instead. It’s mid-afternoon; I stop half a block away at the tiny intersection of two streets at the southwestern edge of Soho, and look up. Knowing what went on in the loft—the death of his lover, and then Em- manuel, after a considerable struggle—I expect the windows to look different from those on the floor above or below: sepulchral cavities exuding a spectral air. But they don’t. In fact, there is no trace of what was endured and defied there.
If these walls could
talk
is the expression; but these walls do not. The windows on the sixth floor look out on a mild fall afternoon broken by the cries of some boys playing basketball at the end of Thompson Street. Otherwise there is nothing. Emmanuel doesn’t live there anymore. You can’t play with him. Nor does Matthew. Or Matthew’s mother who came east to nurse her son. All three actors in an unbelievable tragedy, gone.

Standing there in the unseasonable warmth, however, I imagine pressing the buzzer, hearing Emmanuel’s voice on the intercom, seeing the smile that greets me after walking up five flights to his loft, the same smile that is now on the dust jacket of his book,
Mortal Embrace
. I hear too “
Bon jour
”, as I leave my shoes just inside the door, follow him back into the kitchen for the chicken or steak he always prepared, and then the conversation after dessert as he hooks himself up to his portable IV—conversation mostly, the last year, about his book: its discovery by an editor at Farrar, Straus, the praise from Susan Sontag and Richard Howard, the publication in France, the trip back to Paris to appear on the TV show
Apostrophes—
the literary excitement that made Emmanuel’s struggle with AIDS almost glamorous. I miss the visits, this excitement, these long talks, but mostly I miss Emmanuel, and it is strange to turn away finally and realize he’s not in that building on Thompson Street anymore, that I cannot ring the buzzer and go up.

Nor can I visit Robert—and, since he lived on the Upper West Side, it seems too macabre to take the IRT uptown to walk past his building, on its tree-lined block of brownstones. That
would
be silly. Yet it seems incredible that the sunless, lamplighted living room is no longer one whose door will open for me. (After calling first, of course. Who answers 663-1244 now?) After Robert’s death, a friend said he could not imagine other people in the apartment; said it should be installed intact in a museum. It is: the museum of my mind. And since I can summon up quite clearly the sight of Robert, or Michael, offering me a basket of muffins while their phone rings, there would be no point in walking past their doorway. The same doorman would, I’m sure, be slouched in the dim gray lobby watching a baseball game on his portable TV, but their names, in fancy script, would not be above the buzzer, and I could not walk up the stone stairs to the second floor, knock, and have the door swing back to reveal one, or both of them, standing there with bright eyes and slightly comic expressions, like adults on Christmas Day, you, their guest, the present they are about to unwrap in conversation. Someone else lives there now; who I don’t know, or care to. In New York one could write novels simply listing over the years the tenants of an apartment.

All of this I resent. I know that each time I come back, New York has changed, and I have, too, but the evisceration of what was constant (Emmanuel, Robert) has gone too far this time—not only Emmanuel and Robert, but the people I knew through them. Each time a friend dies or moves away, so do six acquaintances. There is a story by John O’Hara called “Teddy and His Friends” about a (presumably gay) man liked by a number of people who have nothing in common, they realize after he dies, but their friendship with him. Emmanuel brought me Jean Michel, Jorge, Kristine, Patricio, Tony, the last two part of a crazy group of Argentines who went back and forth between Paris and New York. Robert brought me Stephen, George, Robert W., Barry. Some were friends I introduced to Robert; but having lost Robert, our own friendship is altered—because it had grown to include him. His disappearance now weakens all those ties. One day reading the
Times
I come upon an article about the apartment on Fifth Avenue in which Robert’s memorial service was held. The article is about the aviary in the apartment and the trompe l’oeil ceiling in the dining room. (Death takes an instant; style is forever.) My first reaction is: I must send this to George, who misses Robert even more than I. But I don’t. It too seems pointless, like calling Emmanuel’s widow; the reason for the connection is gone.

And so—with editions of the newspaper that continue to appear daily after we die—the city goes on without its missing persons. There are replacements. My new roommate has a lover at last; they get up each day and cook elaborate breakfasts punctuated with hugs and kisses; but each morning I leave the apartment for another round of visits to museums, lunches with friends, walks, outings. I keep running into these holes in the landscape, and finally I realize melancholy is going to be the mood of this visit, whether I approve of it or not. Of course it’s wrong. Of course it’s nostalgic. Of course it’s indulgent. But I can’t seem to snap out of it. Because each time I come back, it’s friends I want to see first. This October it was Emmanuel, and Robert, for some reason; and they’re gone. And now, as I walk the city, the others who’re not there to call or have lunch with begin to step forward.

They’ve named a corner off Sheridan Square in honor of Charles Ludlam. I’m glad. But there are many corners, doorways, buildings in New York now that memorialize people without an official designation. Walking through Madison Square I think of Cosmo—whose windows overlook the park. The canopy of 96 Fifth Avenue means Eddie. The bus going down Fourteenth Street, Rhodes—he used to take it from the gym to his apartment on Avenue C, get off it if he saw me on the sidewalk, and say, “Greetings! What’s the dish?” On our way to the Gaiety one night, sitting in a deli on Thirty-fourth Street, one of us says—raising a pickle to his lips—“Friday is the anniversary of Rhodes’s death. He’ll be dead two years.” Suddenly I feel like I’m part of that coterie of old Jewish men at the Y who sit on the bench at the racquetball court joking about friends who are no longer there. The man who mentioned Rhodes takes a bite of his pickle, and goes on to describe Junior, his new boyfriend, but our little gathering does not feel quite the same after that. Why? We’re missing Rhodes, in both senses.

Later that week at the Metropolitan Museum at the Velázquez show, oppressed by mobs in front of his paintings, I retreat to the cool, empty rooms devoted to Islamic art—a perfect refuge, shadowy and still, where I look at the woven things on the walls and think: Ocsi used to buy textiles like these and sell them to collectors. In the doorway of the room from a seventeenth-century house in Damascus, listening to the water splash in the little fountain, I think of him again. The beauty and serenity remind me of his calm good humor. The view from a bench in the Rambles afterward, where we used to run into each other, makes the title of a Samuel Beckett play run through my head:
Happy Days
. So that I’m reassured that I’m not crazy when a friend, after dinner a few evenings later, says as he shakes his head and taps his cigarette against the ashtray, “We had the best times. The best times.”

Everyone feels that way about his youth, no doubt—but this time it’s not just nostalgia. People and places
have
disappeared. The city
is
shrinking. New York
is
strangely haunted. The neighborhood I live in, its sidewalk covered with magazines and old LPs, is more crowded than ever, congested in a way it was not ten years ago. The Act Up meeting I go to Monday night is jammed with an exhilarating mix of men and women, all ages, types, milieus; the energy is intoxicating. People are beginning to have sex again, I’m told, because they assume that if AIDS has not got them by now, it’s not going to. The parties at the Saint have resumed. Rumors have Michael Fesco opening a new club. The park on Fifteenth Street is cruisy again; a man tries to pick me up. But over his shoulder I’m staring at the facade of a hospital at the park’s north end, where a friend was trapped for weeks before he died. At a certain point, one simply knows too much.

That’s it. Everyone engineers the particular mix of past, present, and future he wants in life—by staying, or moving away; changing, or keeping, a job; acquiring, or losing, friends—but this time the city has silted up with the Past. New York has always seemed to me a marvelous stage set in which different companies of actors get to do their roles, and then depart; but there is a dreadful moment, I’m beginning to realize, when the floor show you came to see is over. Nothing brings this home more to me than the news that the Ridiculous Theatrical Company is now doing Charles Ludlam’s first play—without Ludlam. Brave move. What else can the remaining members of the company do? Yet I cannot imagine these plays without him, and I think, each time I walk past the corner named for him, that honors do not really compensate for the loss of genius, or any person who brought you joy, for that matter. This time Manhattan reminds me of something I’ve always known but didn’t want to believe: That one part of us exists only in the form of people we love and who love us. The rest of the world is backdrop. The rest of the world really is just a stage.

But the show, of course, must (literally) go on—which is why the Ridiculous Theatrical Company is doing
The Big Hotel
—and why I end up staying in the apartment a bit longer each morning while my roommate and his lover make breakfast. It’s not just that we’re getting used to each other. It’s the sight of two people lodged in that most salubrious medium (the Present), making their version of the memories I’ve been wallowing in and can’t seem to shake loose this visit. They met at a party, took a share this summer in a house on Fire Island where everyone had a nickname, live and go to the gym together, plan to visit Los Angeles for Christmas, make French toast every morning—like the people who now live in Emmanuel’s and Robert’s apartments, perhaps—and sit at the kitchen table eating together, while I skim a book review in the
Times
of Umberto Eco that makes me want to call Robert to ask if there is something in the Italian imagination that runs to plots, secret societies, conspiracy theories. Eventually they get up to do the dishes. And hug each other. All I can think—the Brooding Queen watching them from the other room—is: They’re kissing now right where A. lay on the floor decomposing after he took his overdose. (“Did the man who lived here before have AIDS?” my roommate asks one day. “No,” I say, “but he thought he did.”) How time flies! How Life, its generations, goes on; superimposed on top of the previous, like the cities from different epochs the archaeologists found while looking for Troy in Anatolia. Do my roommate and his lover need to know of the people who lived here before they did? Did I know anything about the people who preceded me? Of course not. Why should we? Yet this time, I know. And the knowledge is so heavy this time in New York, my roommate asks why I seem “less enthusiastic” this visit. I say it’s my writing. But it’s really, I think, the fact that, this time, the number of people I can’t call equals the number of people I can. So while I sit there leafing through the newspaper—going over in my head the fact that I can’t see Emmanuel or Robert—I wonder if either of them knew how much I’d miss him after he died. How could he? I didn’t know myself.

My roommates dress, say good-bye, and set out into the city—a single unit, two entering the world as one—and moments later the phone rings. “John just left,” I say, “shall I tell him who called?”