Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (28 page)

Checking in with Bruce and Cesar was my way of assuring myself there would be no break in the line, for they were my platoon. Our deep-pocket source in the UC system was already beginning to bend elbows about Compound S, so we all just had to hold on. If Roger could be home and fighting after two bouts of PCP, surely Cesar would be fine after one. With Bruce so irrepressible on the day of the will signing, it was easy enough to believe the short-term notion of the doctors that a person could live as normal as you please without a spleen. A person with normal immunity, they might have said. I'd bring all the reports home to Roger, and we'd hold tight to our little population sample, relishing the safety in numbers.

By the next week, on sheer willpower, Roger started going into the office. He was still feeling dreadful and queasy, and the doctors couldn't quite understand why he wasn't bouncing back. But weak as he was, the very mobility seemed to prove we were on our way again. I recall an afternoon when I took over a poetry class for Carol Muske at USC: I had to teach William Carlos Williams's "Queen Anne's Lace," which put me in a swooning mood. After the class I called Roger at home. He was all excited because he'd just had a new bulletin from a friend about Compound S and the extraordinary results they seemed to be getting at Duke, especially from those who went on the drug early. "This one might really work," said Rog in a kind of stunned delight. I started to cry with relief. I was so giddy with hope I could barely drive home.

We heard we might have to go to North Carolina ourselves to get the drug, which now we knew by its clinical name—azidothymidine, or AZT. Months before, I'd had the vision of Paris and the barracks of HPA-23, everything changed by the war we bore within us. Now I imagined a mild autumn in the Great Smokies, a hospital terrace looking out on a view that would taunt us with loveliness, like
The Magic Mountain.
Then a few days later our source told us we might be able to get the drug in California after all, perhaps within the month, but it would all have to be top secret. The thrill of the undercover operation kept us going, and this at a time when AZT had the status of a Holy Grail in the AIDS underground. I'd immediately pass on all the details to Bruce and Cesar to keep
them
going, then call Craig in New York. Don't tell anyone, I'd tell everyone, meaning shout it from the rooftops but you don't know where you heard it. There was a time when I must have been the major leak on AZT.

No doubt we were letting ourselves get lost in magic again, just as we had with suramin, but with one important qualifier: this time the silver bullet was for real. Yet we almost lost the war waiting for the bullet. Maybe we should have been demanding something more immediate from the doctors, to get to the bottom of Roger's wearying symptoms. But I'm not sure they would have caught the problem, even with a lot of probing. The general AIDS symptoms are so diffuse and fluish that they could be evidence of anything or nothing. More often than not, you just have to wait and see. And it's all so changeable: already we were experts at the triage of good days and bad days, where you develop a hundred coping mechanisms to get you through. Late at night we'd be lying quietly in bed together, reading and watching the news. Always the hope that the next day might be better, and only a few more weeks to the next elixir.

Meanwhile our short-term goal was the party on November 10, and the visit from my brother and sister-in-law. Somehow these two bustling events mitigated or even masked the bad days, the fevers and fatigues, though finally Roger began to reconsider about his parents. Sheldon and Jaimee were both still arguing that it wasn't necessary to bring the parents in, but Sheldon didn't even know Jaimee knew, and Jaimee in Chicago couldn't see how overwhelmed we were. She was already possessed by the hope of AZT, as fervent as we were.

As November began, the only concrete detail I can recall—beyond the dinner battles and the assaults of malaise—was the matter of the Ganges. The house just above us on Kings Road had a problematic septic tank, which would now and then kick up and overflow. Then a rank-smelling stream would run down the street along the curb by our house. It stunk like raw sewage, but the problem was intermittent enough that we'd ignored it for years. Cesar had caught a whiff of it long ago and dubbed it the Ganges. Now for some reason the septic tank broke down in earnest, and the Ganges was flowing every day, sending up a stench we could smell on the front terrace.

I wrote a polite note to the neighbors, but nothing happened. I lapsed into an exponential terror about the infections carried by raw sewage: I realized the dog walked through it every day, then sometimes jumped up to curl at the foot of the bed when Roger was resting. I had already reached new heights of cleaning, my rag streaming with ammonia nightly as I wiped every surface. I'd throw away half of every lettuce and wash fruits till they whimpered. When the Ganges was flowing I wouldn't even let Roger have lunch on the front terrace, for fear of airborne horrors. I finally confronted the septic neighbors and said Roger was sick—sick, period, not the "A" word—and they simply had to do something. They were two gay men, both psychologists, both working heavily with AIDS patients, and at last they hustled to get the job done, though it took till after Christmas.

That first week of November, Alfred came over with the news that one of the cases we'd been following had shot himself dead the night before. This was a man of some wealth and prestige, very big in the art world, and he'd walled himself in with his secret. Alfred and I talked with the strange dispassion we have these days about whether the guy had been too sick to get pills, or had his friends all refused to make it easy? Did somebody bring him a gun, or did he have it already? It was then I made Alfred promise that if I got to that place and no one else would get me what I needed, he would provide. He said yes, but there's no way of knowing if he meant it. You never know till you're at the wire. A friend of mine in New York promised a friend of his to help him die, but when the time came the dying man was two thousand miles away, with a family who loathed his gayness and the sin of his illness. Luckily, he was lucid enough to pull his own plug.

Three days before Bob and Brenda were to arrive, my brother called to say he had a kidney infection. This necessitated a worried call to Cope, who reassured us Roger wouldn't be in any danger, but I was tense and frightened when they first arrived. My brother remembers how manic I was, scarcely able to sit for five minutes without going in to check on Rog. He says Roger was very thin—not Auschwitz-thin; that is a different stage entirely—and he recalls the difficulty Roger had eating and keeping down food. On Saturday we all went out for lunch, but Rog scarcely touched his meal, and had to excuse himself to lie down in the car.

Saturday was the tenth, the night of the black-tie dinner. In the afternoon Bob and Brenda and I stopped by Sheldon's house in Bel-Air to check on some last-minute seating arrangements, and Sheldon and I had a brief talk upstairs. I think until that day he kept hoping Roger would pull it out of the hat and appear for dinner. Sheldon seemed to want to say something to me, but he kept veering off into tangents of humor. When I talked about what a hard time his brother was having, I remember him saying his grandmother used to tell him, "Anything's better than being dead. It's better to be a whipped dog than dead."

It was pouring that night, and Roger took pictures of the three of us in our evening gear and sent us off with the admonition to be good children. All the way over in the car, we strategized about how we'd handle the schizoid nature of the evening. Perhaps fifteen of the fifty knew the truth, and another dozen suspected as much and were waiting for us to make a move. But Sheldon had won his point on the guest list weeks before, so there were twenty more who were black-tie regulars, perfectly nice acquaintances from the business who would presumably buy the ridiculous excuse that Roger was down with the flu.

Sheldon's house is designed for parties, the main room forty by forty by twenty, all in sand tones, with ceiling beams that are bleached telephone poles—no art, no color, the whole design vaguely Santa Fe but wildly outscale and utterly un-Indian. I went around with a frozen smile, introducing my brother and sister-in-law. My brother, because he was in a wheelchair, was perhaps sufficient decoy for people to cover their clumsy feelings about where Roger was. I spotted a couple of people and grimaced at the gauntlet of chitchat I would have to run. As soon as I escaped into the dining room to see about the seating, I placed a quick call to Roger from the kitchen to get some moral support. I'd be fine, he said, dozing comfortably. I should just try to have a good time.

Sheldon ran a dinner as smooth and punctual as a board meeting. The flow from the bar to the dining room was terrific, the catering top-drawer. Bob and Brenda and I sat at the center table with Sheldon, his half-brothers and their wives. Roger's cousin Merle was down from San Francisco, and I put her at a head table with friends—including Rand, whom she'd dated at Berkeley decades ago—because she was still reeling from the news, broken to her only tonight. All during dinner I wrestled with whether to read my "40" poem. I'd mentioned it to Sheldon that afternoon, and he'd nixed the idea. He didn't have a clue it was all about AIDS and the end of us all, but I think he had an instinct that it wouldn't be about the moon in June.

Between the veal and the salad, I slipped into the breakfast room and called home again. "Should I read my poem, Rog?" I'd finished it only a few days before, and no one had heard it but Roger and my brother.

"You do what you want, darling," he said mildly. "It's your birthday."

Then Sheldon popped his head in. "What are you doing? You've got fifty guests out here."

Sheldon gave the first toast, which was warm and oddly intimate. He said he'd tried to tell me that afternoon that he loved me, but couldn't find the words. It is the truest thing about him that he could only say it now, in front of fifty people, but it was no less moving for that. He had earlier gone around and fingered various friends to follow him, choreographing a seemingly spontaneous outpouring. They all rose in turn, in the proper order, but there Sheldon's control of the flow of events ended.

The toasts were uniformly sober, not very successfully couched and extremely painful. Susan toasted Roger and me, saying what great friends we were. Charlie's voice cracked as he toasted "my most original friend, who's always there for all of us." Carol spoke about our poetry conspiracy and ended with: "You've taught us what it means to love."

It's not that I'm so wonderful. These very friends have seen the wallpaper curl from my overwrought opinions. I am nice to old ladies and dogs, but otherwise I might say anything at all, often about as subtle as a pipe bomb. But they were all having the same problem I was, staggering under the subtext of this party, a tragedy all around it like the Alaska storm that roared across the high Bel-Air hills. So they spoke their valedictories to a life that ought to have been an Astaire and Rogers movie by the time it played Bel-Air. And everyone wanted to spill a drop for the absent friend who anchored us.

I don't know what the twenty still in the dark were thinking by that point, but when I stood up, all I wanted to do was say it out loud at last. I knew then I had called home to get Roger's permission. First I volleyed the compliment back to Sheldon and said I loved him too. Then I said I'd always thought turning forty would matter, and here it was and it didn't. I said I wished Roger were here, and then I began, the poetry lesson, giving the whole background for the conspiracy to a group half of whom probably hadn't cracked a poem since high school.

The poem is all about dying at forty, and its main figure is Robert Louis Stevenson, dead in Samoa at forty-four. The poem is forty lines, and after the bit about the wasted generation of World War I, it goes on with the nerve-racking business of waiting to die:

ask any phobic it's not the heights

it's the edges that get you that weird thing

of being drawn to the precipice do it

the time has come to take the plunge and none

of your youthly coy and basket shots will

save you time doesn't give a fuck oh but

we planned such plans if the war hadn't come

and the weather had held and life had cleared

like a late Manet...

Stevenson died half a world away from his native Scotland. Now here we were, a world away from being young, "bone-thin and sunburned, blown like a sailor." The poem ends with a wish windy enough to blow out forty candles, a wish that in the end was granted:

...if I

must go early give me please one friend one year but nothing's enough and the cliffs at Thera where the old world ended tomorrow my love is a stolen kiss but we sail together if we sail at all hey 40's kid stuff.

Sheldon gave the waiters a little nod, and they came around with little icy wedges of chocolate cake drenched in raspberry sauce. I sat down again with the family, and one of Sheldon's sisters-in-law observed that she hadn't understood a word of the poem, and one of the half-brothers grinned at me and said, "Not a lot of money in poetry, I'll bet."

We were all out of there punctually by midnight, the catered syncopation never wavering. Bob and Brenda and I swept home through the rain, talking nonstop, and woke Roger up with the details. My brother reminds me the next day was a good day. Roger was up and around, animated with Bob and Brenda and loving the closeness of family. Good days are such a mysterious gift that you dare not question them much, and the only problem is they give you a false sense of security. That night we had dinner at Cock 'n' Bull, and Roger put away a plate of prime rib, leaving us all daft with merriment. When we got home there was a message from Ted Hayward in San Francisco, a friend of Cesar's and mine who'd been very close to the case. I thought Ted must be calling to give me birthday wishes from Cesar. When I phoned the hospital and was told Cesar wasn't there, I assumed they'd negotiated the move home. Denial doesn't get much deeper than this, but please, it was a good day.