Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (2 page)

The final Balkanization of gay life, however, was that some of us lived, others died. “How wonderful it will be,” a friend said to me one evening in the seventies, “when we get old—we’ll all go from one house to the other, visiting!” I think he imagined everyone settled in little cottages up and down the Hudson. But friendships that would have evolved over time were tested by AIDS long before old age could. AIDS made people ask: What are we to one another? Even in New York, walking into a hospital and identifying oneself to the person at the desk, the word “friend” sounded flimsy. Then there was the final breach as you watched your friends burning up in a furnace you could not enter.

What a way to end one’s life! Did it seem like life’s final penalty for being homosexual? Few writers at the time spoke of the anger the sick felt toward those who were well, or the shame—a shame still evident in obituaries that refuse to list AIDS as the cause of death. There were lots of things not said during the worst years of the plague—but now that it has supplemented the gay white male community with the straight black and Hispanic population, not to mention whole continents, one wonders still if there is any overview that can be the final word. AIDS is now thought to belong to the Third World, to Asia and Africa, and, in this country, to the black and Hispanic communities. Twelve thousand people are infected every day worldwide; in the United States, one out of four infected does not know he or she carries it. Prevention has failed to stop the disease. In this country the issue no longer seems important. Yet last night, walking down Penn- sylvania Avenue, a friend who’s had HIV for over twenty years (and lost two partners to it) told me he’d started dating a man who got HIV in 2000 after having sex with someone who said he was Negative but wasn’t. (“Don’t ask, don’t tell” describes more than a military policy the last few decades.)

It was strange having this talk in 2007 in Washington, D.C., after a relaxed Thanksgiving Day on which AIDS had seemed far away (except for the theater marquee we passed advertising a play by a man who’d died of It). But my friend’s medications are starting to show signs of failure, and the new medications he wants are experimental, and before he can take them, they must find out what strain of the virus he has. A cell has two receptors, he explained as we walked past the White House; one strain of the virus attaches itself to one receptor, the other strain to the second, and one strain to both. The medicine he wants to take works only on the virus that attaches to one of the receptors. He has just taken a blood test that will require two months of processing to learn if that is the strain of HIV he has.

Listening to him I was struck, as I was so often in the past, by how much we know about the virus, leading to the question, So why can’t we kill it? My friendships with the dead are idealized, I suppose, preserved in amber, no longer subject to the disagreements (or, conversely, the deepening intimacy) that would have occurred over the course of time had they lived. That’s why those who do remain mean more than they might have otherwise. I feel a bond with this man simply because he has lived through all of this. There is a gratitude one has for people simply because they’re still here.

There aren’t that many when I go back now to the city of New York, which, after AIDS, after 9/11, has never seemed more prosperous, popular, and populous; though when I return it’s another city, the city of 1983, the city in this book, that is the real one in my mind. I am past the point where seeing certain canopies and doorways reminds me of dead friends. New York is always dismantling itself anyway. That’s why one friend’s apartment is now part of the Whitney Museum annex, the Everard Baths is a Korean shopping center, the Club Baths a restaurant, and the building that housed The Saint—where I used to worry I might get HIV from brushing against the sweat of other dancers—part of NYU. The dome that used to float above the dance floor sits in a warehouse on Long Island, and the few friends still living in Manhattan are now dealing with the problems of aging. Act Up no longer demonstrates. Larry Kramer is writing a novel. Marathons, bike rides, walks to raise money for AIDS are not the command performances they once were. Young people still are seroconverting, but few seem outraged by the fact.

Yet it seems incredible that people still get infected with HIV. They say it’s because people think AIDS is now a “manageable” disease; and few young gay men have seen anyone die of AIDS. But I think it’s the same old story: the irrational power of sex, of people’s search for a physical, emotional connection. So I suppose it should be no surprise that people go on getting infected, while books about AIDS sit mostly undisturbed on the shelf of the college library where I found
Ground Zero
. Even now I’m not sure what one should compare the disease that swept gay New York in the eighties to—the Spanish influenza of 1918? Maybe AIDS will turn out to be regarded as only one of many viruses that will cull the enormous herd of mobile human beings that now populates our planet—like the incurable staph infection which, the
Times
reports today, caused more deaths in the United States in 2005 than AIDS, emphysema, Parkinson’s, and traffic accidents combined. Perhaps the only reason AIDS caused such a stir in this country was that it intersected with a volatile subject: homosexuality.

Still, say what you will, we have lost a whole generation of gay men, who might otherwise have been valuable mentors to their successors. Of course, gay life has evolved without those who died. One can even argue that the very assimilation that AIDS brought about seems to have caused the disintegration of the gay community, though surely that would have resulted anyway from the inevitable change in generations, not to mention new technology like the computer. Part of Survivor’s Syndrome is to live in another era, when AIDS is simply part of the past, and for many young gay men, not even that. Yet something was lost.

Last summer when a wildfire started in the Okefenokee Swamp, what’s missing came back to me in a curious way. Away from Florida, I decided one morning when the fires were getting near my town that I should fly back immediately, put my papers in the car, and drive off so they would not burn up. Yet when it came time to decide which papers I would save, all I could think of was one of the essays I’ve added to this new edition—the record of a friend’s battle with AIDS. Why? Because it seemed important that there be some record of what he went through. We are not entirely free of the dead. Years ago a friend who had been as skeptical as I about Act Up at the beginning, but started going to its meetings after deciding the protests had accelerated medical help, accused me—after his death, through a mutual friend—of not doing enough about AIDS. This has always bothered me. Last fall, reading the latest volume of Gore Vidal’s memoirs, I came upon this line: “I am also chided for not doing enough about AIDS; but my virological skills are few.” That’s it. If a virus could only be stopped by a scientist, it seemed to me at the time, all the rest of us could do was stand by friends.

But even that was done in such various ways. Judgments about who did what during a crisis will always be with us; I have mine, too. But one comes back to the childhood fable about the symphony: Even the piccolo has its part. What I didn’t realize at the time was something I learned watching people respond in individual ways: One contributes what one can. If the story of Act Up is the public history of AIDS, all these essays might do is supply a glimpse of the private side. The private side of AIDS was not exhilarating. I am proud of some of the writing in this new edition of
Ground Zero
but not of the sense of impotence. Morose delectation? Yes. And that sin the Catholics hold especially serious: despair—in other words, some of the things many of us were feeling when AIDS was inextricably bound up with fear. Here are a vanished time and place: gay New York, when no one knew the way out.

I
MET COSMO his first year at the university in Philadelphia, my first in law school; our friendship was rooted in a time and place I considered idyllic even then. Life consisted simply of books and sports and long, clear twilights waiting for night to fall so one could go to the bars. I lived in a high-rise for graduate students a block from a brand-new gymnasium with an Olympic-sized pool and beautiful new squash courts. Cosmo lived a few blocks away in an apartment off campus, with a friend who was a dancer. The dancer was a bit snotty. Cosmo I liked from the start. He was a gymnast, and though gymnasts (and dancers) are, I often think, somewhat cold, he was not; he was reserved, poised, organized, but he was very good-hearted. He was small, but perfectly formed, in face and body; had Cosmo been tall, he would have been breathtaking. As it was, he was quite something. We both loved the gym. The gyms at that university were two: one small and brand new, the other cavernous and nineteenth-century. In the old gym, men swam naked in the marble pool, the locker room had a ceiling so high it was like a train station, and in the dim, gray air one would see athletes standing at the bottom of diagonal shafts of light as they removed their clothes, like the men at Thomas Eakins’s
Swimming Hole
. The gymnasts had a huge room upstairs. Cosmo spent hours there, but I was afraid at first even to enter it. I had come to sports late in life, disliking them as a child, knowing, in my heart of hearts, as the baseball descended from the sky toward the ineffectual glove I held outstretched in my pessimistic hand, that I would not catch the ball, was not suited for baseball or the company of other boys. And years later I still had to overcome a great deal of fear and self-consciousness to enter a locker room and use the facilities of a gym, as if at any moment someone would recognize me as an imposter. But at a large university, in an enormous gym, self-consciousness dissipates. You are on your own. No team is going to groan when you miss the ball, and no parent is in the stands watching you play. You are left alone in a huge, sunny room, on a golden, polished floor, with a pair of chalk-whitened rings suspended in space, inviting you to try a muscle-up. That’s where I met Cosmo.

Cosmo was the best at tumbling and mat exercises—back flips, handstands—but he was also expert enough on the stationary rings, and pommel horse, and parallel bars, to teach me those. My goal was a handstand on the rings and circles on the pommel horse. Cosmo was a patient teacher: cool, calm, humorous. Though he was far beyond my beginner’s level in the sport he pursued with the thoroughness of a perfectionist, he was always willing to help. He seemed from the moment I met him master of things I wanted to learn. In fact, Cosmo awed me slightly, because, while six years younger than I, he seemed several years more poised. He was one of those people who strikes you, even in school, as knowing what they want. I did not. I would often leave the books on contracts and torts unread on my desk to go down to the gym in the middle of the afternoon and try hanging from the rings, balancing on the pommel horse, perfecting my handstand. Destiny—in that somnolent world of gyms and libraries—seemed more bound up with my body than my mind, though the guilt this engendered only increased an air of apology Cosmo was quick to make fun of. He had, besides a mania I did not share for puns, a somewhat wicked sense of humor.

Cosmo was not his real name. In high school, his classmates had nicknamed him Cosmopolitan; I think they must have been responding to that quality Cosmo had even before I met him: a certain self-possession. He came from a large midwestern city he expressed no particular desire to go back to. He seemed, on his ten-speed with his knapsack, utterly independent, as if all he needed in life were a combination lock, a Penguin paperback, and a can of V-8 juice. Even greater proof in my mind of his sterling character was his complete lack of interest in the bars downtown, which, like gyms, I had only recently discovered and could not get enough of. He did like to go to the beach, however, and the two of us went to Atlantic City together.

Atlantic City in 1970 was wonderfully seedy, in a physical, not moral, sense: crumbling, faded, forgotten; a ramshackle, salt-misted facade of huge hotels with grandiloquent European names (the Marlborough-Blenheim, the Chalfonte, Haddon Hall), overlooking a brown beach and even browner surf. We were happy there—those long afternoons when the men hawking ice-cream sandwiches stomped about the hot sand in boots with thick soles and two pairs of cotton socks. Cosmo and I would lie on our blanket, talking in British accents, mine that of a BBC announcer, his that of a Cockney prostitute. Why I don’t know. But all Cosmo had to do was blare some cheap sentiment in the voice of that British tart to crack me up—perhaps because Cosmo himself was so well-mannered an example of WASP reserve. In everything else (including the sensible manner in which he brought in his knapsack lotion, water, oranges, a Penguin paperback on Hinduism, extra money, clean T-shirt, hat), he was the soul of reason. So that when a momentary confusion about what to do with his life occurred that year, it did not surprise me when he resolved it quickly by deciding to study architecture. About the same time I left law school because I could no longer endure torts, Cosmo was accepted by Columbia, and when he moved to New York to study, I moved to New York to move to New York.

He praised the Columbia gym on the telephone; I joined a course in gymnastics at the West Side Y. From time to time I saw Cosmo downtown, including one morning on Avenue A when he introduced me to his new lover, a man who seemed to me a worthy catch—handsome, smart, with a sense of humor as dry, if not as wacky, as Cosmo’s. He was also an architect, and when Cosmo graduated, he went downtown to work and live with him. The lover disliked sand. So Cosmo and I went to the beach together—first to Fire Island, and then to Jones Beach, because it seemed more convenient in the end. The lover was anxious and ambitious for the firm he had founded, and during those early lean years, I felt guilty calling on Cosmo. When I went to pick him up at the loft he shared with John, I felt slightly sub rosa, like a nine-year-old playmate who calls on a friend to take him out to do something naughty. Yet we were doing nothing so awful. All we did was what we’d done in Atlantic City: talk in British accents, laugh, and lie on our blanket discussing the bodies passing.

Cosmo admired the male body, and so did I. I was even more addicted to bars, beaches, and gyms than I’d been in Philadelphia. About the time I moved to the McBurney Y on Twenty-third Street, Cosmo joined the Sixty-third Street Y to work out with the gymnastics squad there. His body was always a shock to me when I saw it on the beach—without the wristbands, chalk whitening his hands, the worn gym shorts and T-shirt, the wire attached to a belt, which enabled him to learn a dismount from the rings without falling. His body—hardened to a fine edge through hours and hours of the painstaking repetition of certain moves that, unless they are done perfectly, do not count at all—was, like that of a ballet dancer, so tight, so chiseled, it seemed out of place against the blowsy, lazy, limitless stretch of soft sand, heaving sea. Yet Cosmo knew how to unwind: remove a banana from his knapsack, peel and eat it as if it were quite something else before turning to his suntan lotion. The contents of his knapsack never changed, nor did the contents of our friendship (“Would you do my back?”), which was why it meant so much to me: Cosmo was a link with the academic world I’d left behind in Philadelphia. He stood for all the things I still, at bottom, loved more than any others: books, wit, the body, a beach in summer, a friend to laugh with and sit beside on the train going back to the city—tired, spent, completely happy—as the big red sun winked between the buildings of Queens.

There was also something else about him, something morally solid, that I admired. One day when I mentioned my confusion about whether a blind person in public wants assistance or not, Cosmo said, “Just go up and ask them.” He had an uncle who was blind. That Cosmo knew this etiquette did not surprise me, nor did the fact that his business finally prospered. I was proud when an apartment Cosmo and John had done was “published” in the
Times.
In fact, because Cosmo and John were witty, smart, good-looking, I always wanted to invite them to parties, introduce them to friends—but I never did. For one thing, they had no need of friends; they had each other. They wanted to meet clients, I suspected, and that was that. So I would, on my way home from the Y on Twenty-third Street (where I eventually moved), merely ring their buzzer and go upstairs to talk. We always had fun, and on one occasion Cosmo lent me a book he liked,
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol:
From A to B and Back Again.

It was not a book I particularly wanted to read—the one area in which I perhaps did have confidence was reading—but for some reason that evening I let him press it on me, thinking that if Cosmo found it special, I should check it out. It was another connection between us (just as friends who constantly borrow money from each other are, I sometimes think, only asking for proofs of affection). In fact it only confirmed my disinclination to borrow books. I read just a few pages and then put it beside my bed on the humidifier. People who borrow books, or money, or anything else, I’ve always felt, are under an obligation to return them as soon as possible; but I let Cosmo’s loan gather dust beside my bed for quite some time because I thought I must be wrong about the book and intended to give it another chance. After all, Cosmo had recommended it.

In the meantime, as in some fairy tale, the years passed happily. I was published, Cosmo prospered, and we acquired what, when still in school, one fears one never will: a vocation and a source of income. We saw each other at the gym, or at the beach, riding back to town after those perfectly happy afternoons, with our knapsacks, sunburns, as the sun loomed very large and red beyond the dirt-encrusted windows and Cosmo—by merely widening his eyes over someone’s conduct in the next row—broke me up. I forgot about the book; I forgot about the humidifier, an item which, when I bought it, had been touted as the magic means to moist skin and, months later, had been exposed as the means by which bacteria circulate through a room. We were very health conscious. So much for trends. Life proved as reversible as the function of the humidifier. The decade of—among other things—meeting Cosmo at Jones Beach, the baths, his loft, ended abruptly in 1983 when I was forced to leave Manhattan for family reasons.

For the next four years I did not see Cosmo; when I came back to the city on visits of one or two weeks, I walked by his loft overlooking Madison Square and looked up at the window and at the rings hanging from his ceiling. I thought often of pressing the buzzer and just dropping in. Just dropping in on friends as one walks around New York is one of its great pleasures, but it’s tricky, in a way: One doesn’t want to drop in at the wrong time, or drop in and not be welcome. And the truth was I always called Cosmo; he never called me. So I’d sit for a while on a bench in Madison Square and look up at the window instead. During the years I was mostly out of New York, during the years his book lay beneath bags of manuscripts and plaster and dirty clothes, during the years I did not really know where I lived, and felt that I belonged neither to New York nor to the other places I stayed, I did not have the sort of ebullience one needs to drop in on people you don’t see often. AIDS had arrived. People were dying, people were changing, and stopping by to visit a friend meant talking not about the baths, the beach, the gym, but death. So I would merely think of ringing the bell; that’s all; then leave town without doing it. Instead I sent Cosmo from Cleveland one fall a clipping about a house there (because he grew up in Cleveland), and he sent me back a clipping about a project of his own in Manhattan, which struck that note of professional pride that made me feel I did not have that much in common with Cosmo anymore. For if youth lies on a beach discussing men with no thought of the morrow, middle age shrinks life to career.

Then one spring I returned to New York in a different mood. The changes that had been so painful seemed complete; people seemed to have constructed sane lives around the plague. When I did visit friends, we did not talk about It with the same leaden finality at the end of every conversation. I even began to think that the worst was over and that those alive were the lucky survivors. And one April afternoon, I cleaned my bedroom—the physical expression of a mental change—and came upon the book Cosmo had lent me nearly four years before.

It was clear to me now I wasn’t going to read this book, and since I’d had it quite long enough, I decided that returning it was the perfect pretext to see Cosmo. But I did not rush to the phone. Why not? Because the four years that had passed since I’d seen Cosmo were not just any years; they were a sort of minefield. Then one day a friend got me into the McBurney Y, and not only did I recall, instantly, how for years in New York the gym was a source of pleasure, but I found myself growing mentally more confident about everything. And one afternoon I returned from a swim at the Y in so buoyant a mood my fears seemed simply silly. And I picked up the phone with only one worry: that I’d get the new scourge of New York—the answering machine.

Instead, I got a human voice, a gentle, smooth, resonant voice—typical of Cosmo and his crowd, in a way: calm, friendly, intelligent. I asked if Cosmo was there. “Cosmo?” he said. “Cosmo?” And I heard a shuffling of objects, a pause, as if he were looking around in embarrassment. Instantly, I thought,
Cosmo and John have split up. This is the new lover. The replacement.
Then he asked who was calling; I said I was an old friend. He said, “Cosmo died.” Now, even the reception of bad news is accompanied by a thrill, a frisson—when a macabre premonition is fulfilled—and yet as I stood there trying to absorb this juxtaposition of subject and verb, discounting all the factors that pollute grief with vanity, and noting that I half suspected the news and was attracted, meanwhile, to the voice of the man on the phone who told me, even after reminding myself that everyone must die sometime, that there have been plagues in human history before, that our emotions really do not amount to much in the vast scheme of the universe, that billions of people have died before this and billions will after, there was still something about this two-word sentence. Each question I fired at the gentle voice on the phone was only an attempt to dilute the shock, by acquiring concrete details. I asked how, when, how long. For there seem to be two ways people die of AIDS: slow and fast. Cosmo was fast. Two weeks. No symptoms, pneumonia, boom. And part of what I was feeling was terror—since each time a friend dies of this thing, your own hunch that you will escape seems less and less rational. And part of this sadness was that I had no one to mourn with: None of my friends knew Cosmo; he was not part of my circle; he belonged to those sleepy days in Philadelphia that seemed so innocent now. I had no one to tell the news to and thus relieve the sting.