Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (15 page)

For if the plague is now part of everyone’s information kit, the individual bargains people make with it are just that: entirely individual. Someday—not just yet—there will be novels about all of this, but they will face the problem writing about it stumbles against now: how to include the individual stories, the astonishingly various ways in which people have behaved. Downstairs, at the end of the hallway that runs the length of the theater, brightly lighted now, a handsome Puerto Rican stands before a man kneeling in a shadowy curve in the wall. As I watch, the Puerto Rican removes his penis from his pants and slaps it against the palm of his hand. It’s a form of theater. When the man on his knees hobbles over to approach the penis, the Puerto Rican says, “No!” and glares at his supplicant, who then backs up and begins to masturbate, till the man on his knees in the corner ejaculates onto the floor. It lies there, like plutonium. “Thanks,” he says, getting up. “You did this just right. You were terrific.” He zips up his pants and adds, “Do you want a condom?” A token of thanks the Puerto Rican accepts from his admirer, who then leans against the door and falls out onto the street—the final testimony to this performance the fact that he can leave now, he has got what he came for, and needed. Ah, New York: always the same, ever new.

I
T’S A TYPICAL East Village apartment—if there is such a thing: ceilings of average height, a big kitchen, a front room (which is really in the back of the building), short hallway with bathroom, and bedroom. The bedroom gets no light, and looks out at a brick wall about two feet away. It was the first apartment I had without a tub in the kitchen, however, and therefore has always seemed to me luxurious. When I moved in, I got all my furniture from the street—chairs with busted springs, et cetera—built shelves out of concrete blocks, and bookcases of metal milk crates. The paint was peeling off the walls and ceiling, there were roaches in the kitchen, the window in the bathroom was broken, and the bedroom dark—but it all worked, because it went with the neighborhood, and neither it nor I had any pretensions in matters of decor. The Frenchman I invited over one evening understood when he walked in: “Ah,” he said, as he looked around, “
la vie bohème
.” Friends called it the Tomb of Ligeia.

That’s all it was for several years—until the roommate I acquired one year decided, the winter I was gone, to renovate the kitchen and the room he slept in. He hired a young carpenter-designer who transformed the two rooms into gleaming white simulacra of the photos published in the
New York Times
’s home section: sanded floors, Formica counters and cabinets, dimmers and ceiling-high bookcase. The detritus of the renovation was put in my bedroom: two-by-fours, plaster, discarded molding, manuscripts (in large, extra-strength trash bags), lamps and blenders, vegetable juicer, silverware, ceramic chotchkas for the kitchen no one ever used or threw out, bookends, phone books, phone table, headdresses worn to the Feather Ball, thrown in a heap in the back room. The carpenter who did the work never took down the old timbers and bags of plaster—the apartment is on the sixth floor—and when I returned, after the renovations were complete, and peeked around the bedroom door (which now opened only a crack), I was astonished by the proportions of the rubble. It seemed, curiously, to represent my own collapsed life in New York at that time: I was hardly there anymore, and since I never used the room for anything but sleep, and my roommate never used it at all, it seemed reasonable that it should remain a garbage dump. The timbers I took down, because nails were sticking out of them—and a few bags of plaster (though the bedroom ceiling periodically supplied more)—but I left everything else. Everything else was covered with dust, a fine gray-white dust: the towel hanging on a nail in the door, the green trash bags filled with manuscripts, the books on the windowsill, the windowsill, the suits and shirts hanging from a pole at the end of the room. The sheets were mercifully covered with a comforter, though once I returned to find a dark stain of urine and heap of hardened cat turds on that: The cat, driven mad by a full litter box, had shat on my bed, using the room as her place of refuge, too. Even this did not compel me to clean the place out, however. I aired the comforter over the windowsill in the front room, shook the dust out of my towel, and continued my vacation. My vacations—those biannual visits to New York lasting a week or two—were so important to me I did not think it worth my time to clear the bedroom. I was only there to sleep, change clothes, use the phone.

Of course a bedroom is in fact used for much more than that—it’s the temple of our psyches, the place in which we can shut out the world, make love, read, unwind, daydream, sleep, lie abed Sunday morning with the newspaper, close the door on the whole stressful, high-strung life that begins the moment you leave your house or apartment. It’s a New Yorker’s chief retreat; the place of last resort; the Cave of Somnus, the River of Lethe, the Temple of Eros. Once my bedroom had been a kind of shrine to which I brought back human gods—found, like my furniture, on the street (O wondrous city!). I would, like a good altar boy, light the candles, some fat, some thin, which lined the windowsill on glass saucers, to view that most holy object (the body) in their light. On such evenings—the door shut, the candles burning with still, upright flames in the windless air, the radiator pipe hissing, a man in bed beside me—this room was the most enchanted place in the world, or at least the very reason I lived in New York.

Now those days are past; one day years ago my roommate and I agreed not to bring people back to the apartment for sex, out of deference to each other; the plague began; and the candles that had illumined these sacred, paradisiacal, sometimes comic, sometimes depressing moments are now covered with dust themselves and sit unused, guttered, waxy, gnarled, on glass saucers so encrusted with ash and soot they seem made of another material. And I come home to bed now with merely the newspaper and an ice cream sandwich, to unplug the phone, stash it among the garbage bags, read the next day’s headlines, and then turn off the light, falling asleep finally on mountains of junk—mountains of junk that, I realize now, made me feel as temporary, as uprooted, as depressed as most of the people I know in New York these past four years; afraid of the future, horrified by the present, not knowing what to think of the past.

And now that the sky itself seemed to have fallen in upon us, the plaster dust and shards, the heaps of unused objects that I climbed over to get to my bed, or the pole on which my shirts hung (embroidered now with ermine collars of dust) seemed perfectly true, right, appropriate, in tune with the times. The young man who did the renovation recently decided he loathed homosexuals and homosexual life, and no longer even speaks to my roommate when they pass on the street. My roommate’s new friends, in turn, have nothing to do with his milieu in the seventies (gym, Saint, Fire Island); and his new life—macrocrobiotics, celibacy—seems to turn its back on the past with an almost surgical finality: Like Harriet Craig, he keeps his countertops, pots, and pans scrupulously clean in the new kitchen. Only the bath- room and short hall leading to my refuse-heaped bedroom remain in the premodern state. My roommate showers at his new gym, far, far from Sheridan Square, and does not use the bathroom much; it and the crummy hall outside seem to form a buffer zone, a transition period between his devotion to a New Age and my remaining in the Past.

The Past has exploded in our face like some car on a street corner in Lebanon. When I went out the door one morning to spend a day on Fire Island, he looked at me and cracked, “Don’t be wistful!” But wistful was exactly how I planned to feel. When I found one afternoon a trove of photographs my roommate had taken during summers at the beach, I sat down and pored over them. They seemed at first as innocent as all photographs of summers at the beach: men lying on blankets under a cloudless blue Atlantic sky. The men were all muscular—so muscular their bodies seemed to have nothing to do with their much smaller heads. The handsomest was now dead. He lay on the blanket with four other men, bound together by some invisible witticism, their bodies curled with a laugh about to explode from their lips. The longer I looked—at the silver-sharp sunlight, the wide beach, the distant and irrecoverable laughter—the more extraordinary he seemed: free, stylish burnished by the sun; paragon of a way of life whose main sense of proportion had to do with muscle groups. But that was thought for some other time; on their face, the photos were so delightful, I put them on the kitchen table with a note for my roommate to find.

When I returned that evening and asked excitedly if he had seen the pictures, he looked across the two chopsticks suspending a strand of boiled seaweed at his lips and said, “I threw them out.” “Why?” I asked. “Because I don’t want to look at dead people,” he said. “That’s morbid.” I did not say that was no reason to consign them to the trash—but that was his reaction to the horror; mine was to pick the packets of photos out of the garbage can and put them back in the bedroom, where they would presumably remain intact, in my Museum of the Past.

I had been removed from New York in 1983 through circumstances that had nothing to do with the plague—but now when I returned to Manhattan for those brief visits, I felt like the World War II veteran who returns home a stranger to his wife and children. The cat recognized me—I think—but my roommate did not; he told me which pots and pans I was to avoid (like kosher implements, reserved for macrobiotic cooking) and even left a frosty note one morning after he’d gone to work about my use of a forbidden frying pan the night before. All these things hurt. But his friends were dying; my friends were dying; and New York was merely a place where one went to funerals and avoided the eyes of other men on the street—at least, in our generation. The things on which we based our lives had proved disastrous. The rubble in my bedroom was no less than the rubble of our friendship, the rubble of homosexual life, the rubble of fear, the uncertainty, the impossible present and grimmer future. The cosmic transportation system must be very busy, a friend now living in San Francisco wrote one evening; there are so many trains taking away the dead; while reading the obituaries in the
Bay Area Reporter
in a restaurant on Haight Street, he burst into tears. Another writes at three in the morning from Seattle, because he is awake with diarrhea, about a new infection his doctor has just told him he has. I climb over the shards of plaster, dust, trash bags of failed novels, to reach my toothbrush, towel, and finally bed, and relax only when I shut the light off and plunge the whole room—like the letters, the place, the headlines of the
New
York Post
about a man I know with AIDS jumping out the window of his apartment with his lover—into darkness.

It is not that life in New York has ended—young men walk down St. Marks Place at six o’clock on their way home from work with perfect haircuts and dreams as romantic as mine when I arrived in town. Friends still take shares in houses on Fire Island and give a party for their new housemates, and watching them—good-looking, giddy, hopeful—I am reminded that in this vast and various city, in the midst of the plague (or New Age, depending on your viewpoint), everything still goes on, somewhere. My roommate wants to forget everything about the Past; others I meet stop me, like the Ancient Mariner, to reminisce, starry-eyed, about people, parties, an era so free of care it seems to them mythical. And why not? We want the past five years to be a nightmare one wakes up from; we want it all to have been a bad dream and not something we will have to live, or die, with for the rest of our lives, like the fallout from Chernobyl. We want there to be a whistle, or siren, that signals “All Clear.” Fear and hope come and go in alternating waves, prompted by the latest statistic, phone call, newscast, blood test. Conversations that begin on the old high note end in gloom. The homosexual world—its common language—is broken up now. There are many dialects. Many conditions—some sick, some well, some with reason to worry, others with none. It’s as eclectic as life in New York: in any crowd walking down St. Marks Place, young men in business suits carrying attaché cases, skinheads with great prongs of hair radiating from their scalps, fifties haircuts on Elvis Presley profiles, boys who want to look like Japanese art students in Paris, men with the long hair and pony tails I last saw in the sixties, and—a small fraction of what used to be the cutting edge—museum-quality clones in mustaches and jeans. The city is all jumbled up. The ghetto has blurred, unraveled, like the sexuality of individual gay men. Friends of mine, turning homophobic, say they’re attracted only to straight men or women; when they look at homosexuals, they think of death. The Saint—that cathedral of the seventies—is now desanctified; friends who went there with religious fervor now go to a Sufi dance class. I cannot tell who is gay or straight in the East Village, and when I go to the bars, I have no sense of the mood of the man across the room. It is probably like mine: bedeviled, frustrated, and cautious. Yet at the Palladium you can still dance to “Golden Oldies”—the cream of disco from the seventies—in a nest of Puerto Ricans in muscle shirts and dark glasses who are obviously drugged. The floor is jammed with gym bodies. But when “Love’s Theme” comes on, and I look up to remember the dead friend who loved this song (“Listen to the violins going up, up, up!” he used to say), a huge volleyball net descends from the ceiling and an enormous balloon, which the dancers hit back and forth across it. So much for remembrance. So much for trying to draw a line between the past and the present. There is no clear boundary between the two. Though I may ask myself,
What would X be doing today if he were
alive?
and,
How would gay life have evolved had there been no
plague?,
the answers would be meaningless. He’s not, and there was, and that’s that. And these reflections somehow—over the course of a night’s sleep—produce the next morning, when I awaken, a decision to clean my bedroom.

It is one of those tasks you do by not stopping to plan—by saying aloud, “Don’t think about it. Just start with that pile.” The papers I touch send up clouds of dust that make me sneeze, the heaps look insurmountable, but I go ahead because I want, for the first time in four years, to walk on the floor. I have not walked on the floor in four years because I’ve been intimidated by the proportions of this rubble, but now I pick up all the dusty, dirty clothes and take them to the laundry on Second Avenue; then excavate the rest—jackets, sweaters, bathing suits, parkas, boots, sweatshirts, jeans, books, letters, bank statements, travel brochures, schedules of ferries to Fire Island, Long Island Railroad timetables to Sayville and Freeport, a pool schedule for the McBurney YMCA, two tennis rackets, an old passport, a cash machine credit card that is no good, old running shoes stiff with dust, pornographic magazines, a collage of photographs I’d composed on a piece of cardboard linking nude men I thought belonged together, an invitation, stamped on a coaster, to a Wild West party at the River Club—the archeological evidence of a life that seems to have been unable to locate a golden mean between Trivia and Catastrophe. Then I find my journal, caked with dust. The journal—when I open it and choose an entry at random—reminds me again of the friend I thought of the previous night on hearing that song by Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra. On 5/22/74: