Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone (26 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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I feel an enormous amount of guilt over my grandmother. I once wrote a fateful line in a story: “I wondered who would die first: me or my grandmother.” It’s one thing to exploit yourself in your fiction and another to exploit your own grandmother. And now I feel guilty writing about the circumstances of her death.
My sister and brother-in-law pick me up at the airport. My mother hasn’t slept at all the night before. She won’t sleep until my grandmother is buried. They are lucky to be able to arrange the funeral for Friday afternoon. If they can’t do it by the evening, they will have to wait until Sunday, after the Jewish Sabbath.
My mother paces from room to room, dusting. She has no appetite. We make sandwiches and wait. She takes a bite of half a sandwich, then leaves the rest on the plate. “Don’t eat too much, it’s fifteen dollars a head for the buffet afterward,” she warns. We are supposed to go to the funeral home at 1:00. Calling hours are from 1:30 to 2:30 P. M., which is when the funeral will start. My mother keeps peering through the front door She doesn’t want to leave before her older sister. My aunt’s car will go first in the procession.
My sister asks me if I would mind removing my earring. I ask her why. She says Mom asked her to ask me to remove it; she didn’t want to ask me directly. This is how we communicate. It is important that I de-gay myself. Earrings still mean something in Syracuse, I suppose. I have an absolute fear of being in fashion. I generally wait five years after a trend has gone out of style before taking action. By the time I finally pierced my ear three years ago, models were piercing navels, singers were piercing cheeks, and in order to reside in the East Village one was required to have at least seven separate piercings.
The gold hoop takes forever to put in, even with a mirror. And then I need help connecting the loop. My next piercing will probably be a Hickman catheter in my chest so I can do daily delivery of ganciclovir to keep my CMV retinitis in check.
When I visit Syracuse I have to stifle myself. My conversation is reduced to an appropriate level of discourse: that of a precocious fifth-grader, or a severely retarded adult. I lose my mental acuity in Syracuse. Simple logistics become complicated. Conscious thought becomes difficult. Smothered by circumstance and surroundings, I stare blankly at the walls.
My sartorial anxieties turn out to be unfounded. I am the only one wearing a white shirt. Lonnie has a light-blue Oxford. My cousin Stan wears a plaid flannel shirt.
I’ve gone to so many memorials and funerals in the past few years that I have enough points of reference to rate this one. The rabbi makes a few factual errors in his eulogy but seems fairly sincere for someone who had never met the deceased. He says we aren’t supposed to do eulogies on the eve of the Sabbath, and proceeds to give one. Jewish indirection is the mother of passive-aggressive behavior.
And of course I run out of pills in Syracuse. I didn’t bring any Ativan, a big mistake. I was planning on refilling my prescriptions on Friday. I always wait until the last possible moment. I have enough AZT for the weekend. I’m up to six Zovirax a day and I have only four to last me the weekend.
I used to have the best insurance in the world. It covered doctors’ visits and medication at 100 percent, after a miserable $100 deductible, which I was usually able to fulfill by January 10. Now it’s the standard 80-20 plan. Each prescription costs $7.50, which isn’t much, but still it adds up, considering I have three standard ones each month, and the occasional penicillin substitute and alpha interferon, and I was getting intranasal peptide T for neuropathy from the PWA Health Group at $65 a month, but it didn’t really do much, so I stopped.
My mother’s first cousin comes over to visit the family the following day. He’s had five heart attacks in the past three years. He’s had bypass surgery. His doctor said he recovered well and should expect ten more good years. I nod with him. He thought three years at best. I realize that’s what I think my life expectancy is. And he has grandchildren. It’s chilling. I should have grandchildren. Then I remember I am a homosexual and it isn’t in the cards anyway.
I am terrified that I may have to spend another night in Syracuse. On Sunday we have another mild snowstorm, and the airport is about to close. My flight is canceled because the plane was diverted to Buffalo. The following flight is canceled. Luckily I am able to slip on the previous plane, which has been stalled on the runway for two hours. My cousin takes a taxi back to my aunt’s two hours later.
 
 
Memorials come in twos and threes. For a while we referred to the obituary pages as the “gay sports pages”; we would turn to them first, scanning names to see if we knew anyone. Once Michael Morrissey called me at ten, asking if I’d seen a death notice.
“I missed it.”
“Oh, I see you only read the celebrity obituaries.”
Now, out of guilt, I diligently go through the paid announcements in
The New York Times.
We would read between the lines to see whether AIDS was the unspoken cause of death: if the person died at an early age, if there were no survivors or longtime companions listed, if pneumonia or lymphoma or any one of several opportunistic infections was mentioned, and so on. Now, even though more often people are forthright enough to mention “complications from AIDS,” there is a stunning lack of urgency surrounding this disease. Our lives are imploding into silence. The walking wounded are trapped behind glass.
I am angry because the deaths keep piling up.
I am angry at the government for the continuing travel and immigration exclusion of HIV-positive people, which led the government to house hundreds of Haitian political refugees in a concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay for over a year, until the courts ruled this imprisonment unconstitutional.
I am angry at drug companies like Hoffmann—La Roche that sit on valuable treatments and charge exorbitant prices for others.
I am angry at Senator Jesse Helms, who has done so much damage by imposing his perverted sense of morality on this country and taken away funding for sexually explicit safer-sex information that could have saved countless lives.
I am angry at Cardinal O‘Connor for interfering with safer-sex education in the New York school system and promoting bigotry by denouncing the Rainbow curriculum.
But most of all I am angry because Bob Rafksy’s prediction came true. He never spoke at another memorial after Tom Cunningham’s. Bob Rafsky, my hero, died on February 21, 1993.
I wrote this piece for Details magazine. It was due on February 15; I handed in the first draft about a month later. For a while, I was considering writing it in the form of an apology: “Please excuse David for being late with this article as he has had some difficulties of late,” signed by my mother. But, of course, this is yet another piece that I would rather my mother never read.
If anything, my antipathy against organized religion has grown in the past few years. The only time I find myself in church is for a memorial service. Bob Rafsky’s memorial was held in the Quaker Friends Meeting House in Gramercy Park. It was highlighted by a disruption that should place it in the Hall of Fame of Memorials from Hell. After a video was shown documenting his AIDS activism and his relationship with his family, especially with his daughter, Bob’s last boyfriend took to the lectern and claimed that Bob’s love for his ex-wife was a “fake love.” The boyfriend felt that he had been overlooked by the family in the aftermath of Bob’s death, although they had broken up months earlier. He felt that the video had glossed over Bob’s gay identity. Bob’s ex-wife had just finished speaking; his parents were sitting in the front row. Everyone was totally appalled, but the etiquette of memorial services dictates that no one interrupt or dispute any reminiscence. For Bob Rafsky, however, I think it would have been appropriate to disrupt his
old
boyfriend.
Jim Lewis also died as I was writing this piece. I was unable to incorporate his death into this piece: To include it would defuse the importance of Bob Rafsky’s death. That’s the problem with this endless epidemic: It is impossible to give each individual death the attention it deserves. Jim was the editor of The Body Positive magazine and co-author of the seminal piece “You Are Not Alone” that appears in every issue. I found I was unable to speak at his memorial. I think the only time I can actually have the presence of mind to say something about a dead friend is during an ACT UP death announcement. The Monday after a member of ACT UP dies, we have on-the-spot mini-memorials during our meetings, when people from the floor stand and provide personal reminiscences. These are always contained, confined within the three-and-a-half hour agenda of the meetings; they generally last no longer than fifteen minutes. We end these memorials by chanting “ACT UP, fight back, fight AIDS!” three times.
Response to the article was very favorable. One friend had a minor objection about my saying that Binky came with a fifty-year warrantee. His sister had been killed by a drunk driver ten years ago. Nonetheless, I told him it was probable that he would outlive me. We agreed that the survivor would donate five dollars to a charity he found personally loathsome that the deceased favored.
Shortly after my article came out, Harold “The Oldest Living Confederate with AIDS” Brodkey told all to The New Yorker in a second annual installment. The government pays farmers not to grow certain crops; I wonder whether the NEA would consider giving Harold Brodkey a grant to stop writing about AIDS.
My longtime relationship with my doctor ended abruptly in December 1993. He called me to tell me my crypto titers had risen.
“Cryptosporidiosis?”
I inquired.
“No, cryptococcal meningitis.
”
He put me on Diflucan as prophylaxis. I, of course, began experiencing imaginary fevers and headaches that evening. I was to see him two weeks later to check on my blood. His office manager called the day before. My doctor had to cancel due to a “medical emergency.
”
I subsequently found out that he was in the hospital. He closed his practice. He died in January. My new doctor practices in the Village. His offices are next door to the rooming house where my first boyfriend lived—ironically
,
the most probable site of my original HIV infection.
Michael Morrissey died on April 14, 1994. I found out he had died by reading the paid announcements in The New York Times. He held fabulous parties every February. The invitation to his final party had a photo of him walking in a cobblestone alley in Italy. He wrote at the bottom of the photo: “I’m going to that corner and turn. Promise not to watch me go beyond that corner.
”
David P.
 
I promised David P. I would tell his story. But how can you summarize a life in a few paragraphs? How can you attempt to encapsulate an individual’s essence in a few brief pages? Any attempt will necessarily fall short. I want to write more than a mere memoir of disintegration, the irreversible decline of David P. I want to capture some part of David in print. I fear I am destined to fail. The best I can do is try to create a few snapshots from a history all too brief.
I am writing this to pay tribute to a friend. I am writing this because I miss David P. I am writing this because I am compelled to write it.
In these horrible times we have been forced to abbreviate the mourning process. How many people can you grieve for properly when everyone is dying? I wrote a novel for Jim Bronson, whom I barely knew. I wrote stories about my friends Saul Meissler, Glenn Peter Pumilia, and Glenn Person. Now I am reduced to brief essays in memoriam. Eventually all will be reduced to nothing but a litany of names chanted at the Quilt, panels of cloth the size of a coffin.
 
I was David B. and he was David P. We met at work. He was in typesetting; I was in the computer department. There was always something special about David P. He was the warmest person I knew. David P. was warm oatmeal, fresh bread, and homemade lemonade all in one, with a soft furry cat purring in your lap. I craved him like a drug.
David grew up in Connecticut. In the late seventies, he lived a block away from the Ramrod in the Village. I used to tease him about his scandalous life. “We were all wild and crazy then,” he told me, half-kidding, half-serious. I would tell him my own shocking stories of depravity. He would chide me jokingly, “Congratulations. You’ve done it again. Five minutes with you, and we’re back in the gutter.”

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