Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone (22 page)

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Authors: David B. Feinberg

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Memoirs, #Gay & Lesbian, #Nonfiction, #Literature & Fiction, #Essays & Correspondence, #Essays, #Politics & Social Sciences, #Social Sciences, #Specific Demographics, #Lesbian; Gay; Bisexual & Transgender eBooks, #LGBT Studies, #Gay Studies

BOOK: Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone
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5. It may not be in the best of taste to brag about the fifth-row tickets you scored to Bette Midler by waiting in line for seven hours if the concert is next fall and he may not be around to read the reviews.
6. Don’t feel compelled to share your recent rediscovery of God in the form of a Peruvian bodybuilder-masseur, unless, of course, you have explicit photos.
7. Don’t take advantage of a captive audience: If he is hooked up to an IV and life support, he may not especially want to hear your forty-two-act existential drama about the history of tobacco narrated through the viewpoint of a low-tar cigarette.
8. It is considered in poor taste to snip a lock of hair from his head, especially if you plan on incorporating it in a Guatemalan Santeria voodoo ceremony involving scattering chicken bones on the floor.
9. If his lover indicates that they would like some time alone, leave discreetly. Avoid giving blowjobs during doctors’ rounds. Be considerate to his roommate. Remember to pull the curtains closed during intimate acts. Consider a discreet handjob as reparation for a minor disturbance.
10. A variety of magazines with photos is appropriate. The novels of Thomas Mann and Fyodor Dostoevsky are not.
The Magic Mountain
is the worst book to read when recovering from PC; Roth’s
The Anatomy Lesson
is particularly inappropriate following a spinal tap.
11. Listen to what he says. Kiss him on the cheek. Touch him. Hold him. Rub his back. Massage his feet. Hold his hands. Look into his eyes. Feed him dinner. Wash his forehead. Wipe the sweat off his arms. Hold his hand while he receives an injection. Consider your hospital visit a field experiment for your personal course in self-assertiveness. Give the floor nurse hell for not changing the sheets. Scream at the resident when the painkiller doesn’t arrive in time.
12. If, on the other hand, he was an enemy and made your life a living hell for the past five years, do take every opportunity to visit him in the hospital and feel free to perform any of the above contraindicated acts. You needn’t do anything. Your mere presence at his inexorable decline should be enough.
Memorials From Hell
 
The invitation was tasteful and plain, a white card with no photograph: “A memorial service will be held for Paul Taylor [hyphenated years in brackets] on such-and-such date at 5:30 P. M. A short reception will follow.” The address was that of a fashionable Soho gallery space. The envelope was stamped with a man’s name and Paul’s familiar address: I assume he was Paul’s last lover. I suppose I dreaded the reception more than the service. For some reason, I was compelled to go, as if I had been summoned.
I knew Paul was positive, but I hadn’t realized he was ill until I read his obituary in
The New York Times.
No photos of Paul greeted me at the entrance. I’m sure this was a deliberate choice. Avedon’s too expensive and Mapplethorpe’s dead. I wonder what photo I would use: an embarrassing nude? But I suppose the point of memorials is not to humiliate those who come.
I came a bit too early: ten minutes before the ceremony was scheduled to start. People were clustering in small groups, trying to find those they knew. No one had sat down yet. I know this is the height of hypocrisy, but please do not invite tricks and one-night-stands to my memorial. There is something sad about single men with sideburns sitting in scattered seats as if at an afternoon showing of some obscure Deanna Durbin movie. I can imagine myself at home, dragging my IV behind into my office, tossing out inappropriate names from my Rolodex in a frenzied fit. Should I code names in my address book with colored markers? I’m such a control queen, I just might write out the invitations myself in my hospital bed, surrounded by life-support equipment. And when the battery of my laptop needs recharging, relying on my friend who has medical power of attorney to help me decide which device to unplug: the portable television, the oxygen, or the respirator. I would probably write the reminiscences myself if I thought I could get away with it.
Originally appeared in
Gay Community News,
April 1993.
 
We’ve all been to memorials when the slightest of acquaintances testifies with a personal recollection. I just think it would be in poor taste for someone I had met on a phone-sex line to speak: “I knew him as Fred.”
At weddings, sections are designated for friends and family of the groom and the bride. Memorials could divide seats into couples and singles to facilitate cruising. One-night-stands could sit at the back, near the hors d‘oeuvres. A woman sitting in front of me said hi. I had no idea who she was.
Luckily I ran into my friend Jay, who sits next to me. Jay, it develops, had had a two-week affair with Paul; I had had a three-week affair. Jay had borrowed someone else’s invitation; I received mine in the mail. I guess three weeks was the cutoff date. Paul dumped Jay because he was too fat; Paul dumped me because he was an empress and I was only a pitiful princess.
Nervously, I take out some Certs stored in a Ziploc storage bag in my backpack. Jay thought it was a drug. “Fifteen dollars from the PWA Health Group; I think they import it from Sweden. I can’t wait until they get FDA approval; the cost is astronomical.”
Paul had mastered the art of rudeness. He was brilliant. He was compelling. He had an incredible amount of personal charisma. He was not unlike Hitler. His friends loved him and were intensely loyal to him. His discards avoided him like the plague. He liked having me come over to his apartment for lunch so he could be continually interrupted by phone calls. He criticized my table manners because I didn’t point my silverwear down in the European manner; I used the savage American style with fork tines up, although I don’t understand the consistency of this approach given gravity and the tendency of soup to return to the bowl when the spoon is facing down.
Paul was quite simply a genius. His friends were devoted to him, and his former friends loathed him. Paul was a textbook example of the Squeeze song “If I Didn’t Love You, I’d Hate You.” He was the type of person whom you would never expect to die. Let’s face it, some people you expect will die. With others you are shocked. I wasn’t surprised when I read about Anthony Perkins having AIDS. The
Enquirer
never lies. After seeing Crimes
of
Passion I believed he was capable of anything.
Four women and one man addressed the crowd, leading one to wonder whether he had any male friends save the odd executor. Astonishingly enough, most of them mentioned Paul’s rudeness during their speeches. One said she was surprised to find out Paul’s age from the Times obituary; he had always led her to believe he was older. All the speakers were incredibly eloquent, so eloquent that they all elicited applause one might expect at a Broadway memorial. Of course, it would have been rude to greet subsequent speakers with silence after the first. Is it appropriate to applaud the cleverness of a speaker at a memorial service? Would Paul have approved? I doubt it. I still recall my ninth-grade choir teacher, who stopped the evening performance dead in its tracks to glare at the parents in the audience who dared applaud between movements. I have since relented in the silly judgment that under these circumstances clapping is boorish. The only boorish behavior would be to leave at the end of the ceremony, skipping the reception. In my private tribute to Paul, I left posthaste.
 
I had been overwhelmed by life. There were just too many things to do. Somehow I hadn’t gotten around to visiting David and Luis. David Serko was a peripheral friend-of-a-friend whom I knew only remotely: enough to say hello to at the gym or at ACT UP. I was hoping to visit him with my friend Wayne.
Tom advised me against seeing Luis because he was doing so poorly. Perhaps Tom was overcompensating for asking me to visit his friend Charles after promising Charles I would see him. Tom shared a lot of his difficulties in dealing with Charles, and since they were such close friends, he rarely mentioned the good; consequently, I had an extremely poor opinion of Charles and was reluctant to visit. Hospital visits require an enormous amount of emotional energy: I feel they should be done selectively. Still, I knew Luis’s lover, Jon, and however bad Luis was, I could always comfort Jon.
So I added “visit David and Luis” to my “to do” list on Sunday night. On Monday at noon I found out that David had died that morning. With double my determination, I went to see Luis that afternoon, after work. One hospital information person referred me to another; the second told me that Luis “had expired” yesterday. He had expired. Like a library book.
 
When I heard that Tom Cunningham had died, my first impulse was to call a friend and find out where he was when he heard; what he was doing; what he was thinking; how he was situated in time and space. Somehow I needed to share this. I want my death to be unforgettable, a bullet lodged in the spine, a scaly burr stuck in the neck, an alien organic presence that merges with its host and becomes a part of it, a virus that grows to overwhelm and kill, but then it would kill the memory: Death is the end of memory.
 
 
Several years ago some members of ACT UP would go leafleting on Sunday afternoons at Jones Beach and Fire Island. They were given the nickname the Swim Team. God knows how many stories from
Honcho
and
Playguy
centered on the archetypal golden boy from the high-school swim team. David Serko was the archetypal Swim Team member. Back in the early trendy days of ACT UP, activism was sexy: At this moment it is in an off-cycle of waning popularity. I’m sure more than a few people went to ACT UP meetings just to bask in David’s beauty.
David was always pleasant to me. I was hoping to see him last summer on Fire Island, when I rented a week at Wayne’s house. Unfortunately, he wasn’t feeling well enough to travel then. He was blind then.
I went to the memorial with Wayne. It was a church on 110th Street, complete with organ, chorus, and fey minister. Out of respect for those who organized the service, I took a red ribbon and impaled it on my jacket. Wayne didn’t. The music reminded me of a bad daytime soap opera. Our friend Ron told how David was a bus captain for the Kennebunkport demonstration, and how he quietly administered his one-hour drip of DHPG on the bus ride up. People applauded after various speakers because they were expected to: David had, after all, toured Europe in
A Chorus Line.
I stood when everyone else stood for a religious moment. Wayne remained seated.
The service lasted three hours.
Angels in America
was quoted, even though it hadn’t yet opened in New York. Afterward I rushed to a Publishing Triangle party, where I was chastised by another cynic for wearing a red ribbon.
I vowed that my service would be different. Guests would be told that in the last few months of my life I became deeply interested in worshipping Satan. Instead of handing out red ribbons, ushers would be instructed to write “666” in charcoal on the foreheads of the guests. There might be a pagan sacrifice of a baby lamb. Instead of an organ, there would be a kazoo. Oh, and Liza has to sing ”But the World Goes Round.“
If David’s memorial was the
Nicholas Nickleby
of memorials, my memorial would be a Ring Cycle marathon. My friend Michael Morrissey told me that he had topped me; his memorial was to be a subscription series.
 
Don’t die in late November or December: Scheduling the memorial service will be hell. In addition to seasonal shopping, holiday parties, last-minute tax-deductible benefits, Stop the Church anniversary demos, and outlaw sex parties, you’ll have to contend with Seasonal Affective Disorder. My friend Jan color-codes events in his datebook: December is a kaleidoscopic blur of stacked events. I had to go to a seasonal party and a birthday party after Luis’s memorial, which started promptly Latino/Latina time an hour after it was scheduled to. Was I out of my fucking mind? It made no sense.
Luis’s memorial was at the Manhattan Center for Living, a million psychic miles from the Frank Campbell Funeral Home. People were encouraged to come in drag. I had thought this was only for the lip-syncing performers: I stuck to the traditional black jeans and black-leather jacket. Luis was totally outrageous, and his memorial service was completely over the top. My friend Tom “channeled” Stevie Nicks wearing four skirts, black stockings, a cowl, and what seemed like three feet of teased blond hair, dancing like a lunatic. He then proceeded to strip to his jockstrap while telling a poignant tale of how he woke after an emergency appendectomy to Luis playing with his nipples and fainted as he saw his blanched father sitting at the base of the hospital bed. Heidi danced in leather chaps over pink panties. Jon, the widow, dressed in widow’s weeds replete with black veil, did a lip-synced duet to Natalie and Nat Cole’s “Unforgettable” with a poster-board photo of Luis that had a hinged manipulable mouth.

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