The Road Narrows As You Go (36 page)

23

There was no more Farm under the freeway hairball to visit for lunch on the way to San Francisco General Hospital. We walked by a vacant lot instead, albeit a temporary one, while the city prepared to redesign what were vegetable, fruit, and flower gardens into sod with a small, shallow water feature the shape of a yin-yang. What was once a vacant wasteland of gravel surrounded by freeway overpasses had been turned into this thriving garden and a farm by local artist Bonnie Sherk, who tended its leaves for a decade. The Farm had provided food and a petting zoo to the community surrounding it, plus a stage for live performances. The stage would stay for now. The rest was too unruly for the parks board and needed to go.

The hospital had grown and adapted as well in the face of another kind of demolition, a much worse one that required urgent attention. It was no longer so quaint in there. Now it was clean and tidy and reeked of cleaning supplies, the halls hummed along at the urgent pace of an automobile factory going around the clock, and none of the clerical nurses had a minute to look half-asleep-on-the-job anymore. No longer were its
hallways decorated with the fingerpaintings of gradeschool kids; the walls were covered with health-wise posters featuring the latest facts surrounding the AIDS virus, which ended up being more than half-wrong.
You cannot get AIDS from a blood transfusion or mother's milk … You cannot get AIDS from an organ transplant … Condoms Save Lives … You
can
get AIDS from unprotected sex.
We remember as we got off the elevator seeing a waiting room where five or six young men started to sob and wrapped their arms around each other, speechless. And shortly after that we saw four generations of a family suddenly come together in the same way as they wept, supporting one another. The intercom paged Dr. Dritz.

We met Biz Aziz outside the door to Vaughn's room, down a busy thoroughfare for doctors, nurses, and other staff hurrying to and fro with clipboards and equipment. That day Biz wore a pair of women's Jordaches with Converse All Stars, hair cut to a shadow across her scalp, and those finely plucked eyebrows. She didn't need lipstick or blush to be a goddess. She always was, on or off stage, in or out of drag. Or halfway in between, as she was today. She had her face in her hands, and when she lifted her head up and saw us coming, her eyes welled up again. Her face was red and her lips were swollen from crying.

He's asleep right now, she said. I just got back from the cafeteria.

How is he?

Doctors did some bloodwork and the first round came back pneumonia. Biz said the doctors thought he had AIDS so they tested
her
, too. She was waiting for those results. Chances seemed good they both had it.

No, not again, Wendy said. The group of us embraced there in the hallway. This terrible thing attacking the city, the country, and the world, that no one seemed to acknowledge, was winning a war against all of our bodies, regardless of our politics, predilections. The newspapers reported on a newborn baby with AIDS, so wake up! Blood transfusions or mother's milk or both, my god. We trembled in horror. This
thing, this AIDS monster was everywhere, possibly on everything we touched. We realized right away our group hug completed a wave of grief that started with the men we'd seen in the waiting room by the elevators, followed by the family, and now us. This was why the hospital staff seemed to travel at a different speed from the patients and visitors, a much faster speed, faster than people walked in silent films, because they worked relative to the pace of incoming patients—for the staff, the clock ran according to one collective embrace a week, one group hug a day, or every minute. These days hospital-time was moving very very very fast for staff, while for patients and guests, hospital-time always took forever. And maybe these days it was slower than ever before. Every second brought you closer to the wall, that deadly question mark made of solid brick. For patients and their visitors every second on the clock of hospital-time was a struggle to heal or to succumb. Every breath was a performance for the audience of visitors, family and friends who came to watch you and your body fight. A visiting hour took an emotional toll on everyone that was all out of proportion to the duration. Until hospital-time was suddenly over. Head-first for the brick wall—either it evaporates like a hologram or it crushes you. One way or another, you always leave the hospital.

Vaughn awoke, and after he expectorated heaping dollops of yellow and green mucus from his chest, we all went in to visit him. He had a private room through his health care with a splendid view of the bay docks, a potted plant with long, striped leaves, along with the standard television plus cable, and an adjustable bed. It wasn't exactly plush, but last night he'd landed in a shared room with five teenagers who required almost twenty-four-hour care, surrounded by specialists and lovers, friends, family, and Vaughn was terribly afraid to hear any last words.

That's what I get for too much dancing, too much clowning around, Vaughn said from his bed, where an IV dripped saline into a vein in the underside of his wrist. He saw us staring at the feed. I told them not my
left
wrist, that's my painting wrist. Nurse says to me, how much painting you plan to do in here? and then she sticks me with it!

The colour was out of his cheeks. His eyes were dull. He still had to laugh.

People get sick. It's okay, said Wendy. You're a fighter. I'll bet you could still draw even
with
that thing in. Maybe this is a renovation. A restoration, like the Statue of Liberty or The Farm. Tomorrow you're a whole new man.

I feel like shit on a stick, Vaughn said and coughed up too much phlegm to swallow again, so he pulled a few Kleenexes and spat into them. I'm sorry, this stuff keeps collecting in me. Spitting's given me a splitting headache.

You want a chocolate bar or something? Biz asked. They got vending machines down the hall. Or coffee? Let me go.

Vaughn said the thought of eating or drinking anything made him feel sick.

Listen, Biz said, let me go get us all some snacks, anyway, feels too crowded in here. Then she ran from the room without waiting for a response. We saw her punch the wall hard enough to make a hole, and then she ran to the vending machines before anyone saw who'd made it.

She's the reason this old man's still alive inside, Vaughn said, oblivious to what Biz had just done. Best thing to happen to me in a long time.

Biz is amazing, said Wendy. She's never believed in me. I'm a fraud in her books.

Take it as a compliment, said Vaughn and reached for her hand. So long as you try, if you try, then fraudulence is at least a sign of ambition. Ambition is two-thirds of … something.

Maybe success, said Wendy.

I
was never
me
, said Vaughn.

Sure, I know what you mean, Wendy said. Don't worry. None of us ever
are
, are we?
Biz came back in and left him a Snickers bar and kissed him one more time. I'll see you tomorrow, she said and smoothed his hair.

Vaughn didn't hear. He said, I never did my own work. I hired assistants. I'm lazy but I love life. I love life too much to work. I'm going to die a complete fraud.

What about your clowns? said Wendy.

Bullshit.

You get creator status, said Biz. You invented the first and only truly rock 'n' roll comic.
The Mischiefs
will be around after we're all gone.

I wish you could promise me that.

Those few patients who spent their last days in 5D where Hick Elmdales had died three years ago would have no idea that now their room seemed historical, intimate in its size, now that AIDS patients occupied the entire floor of the hospital, with dedicated doctors and nurses tending to as many as a hundred beds at a time, and as much equipment and resources as budgets allowed. Men were treated for drastic peritonitis, severe edema. Another man, worse off than most from lumbago, moon face, and a broken heart. Here was a mere child of a man suffering from severe hyperammonemia, megaloblast, common cancers and rare cancers and other forms of diseases only housecats ever got before. These dreadful cases represented today's youth, a satire, cruelly deteriorated under the plague of AIDS. Here were boys with handsome faces ravaged by invisible rats, here were dropouts of undergraduate degrees bedridden and frail as old poets, sicker than fallout victims, gasping for air, dying of it. The signs ranged from bleeding oozing rashes to hamburger eyeballs weeping melted cheese, skin pustules the size of red apples, the dry pukes, wet pukes, howling hemorrhoids, bleeding ulcers, shivers and shakes, runny nose, itchy eyes, anaphylactic shock. He was brittle and dry and ready to go. He was smoke. He was a pile of ice. He was shattered pottery. He was a tiny bird with broken wings.

Could a mosquito's proboscis inject you with the AIDS virus? Could a bedbug or a louse? Was AIDS on toilet seats and doorknobs? Was gay sex the cause of AIDS? Could a woman get AIDS from sex with a man with AIDS? Could your waiter give you AIDS, touching your plate? Was there AIDS in saliva? Why was there so much AIDS in New York, San Francisco, and Haiti?

The White House gave press conferences about the threat of nuclear annihilation. We were winning. Brezhnev was all of a sudden dead. Good for us. He was a bear if there ever was a bear. The nightly news reported on the many thousands of atomic warheads in the American arsenal, pointed at strategic locations throughout Eastern Europe and Asia. The movies showed us what a nuclear strike would look like.
Red Dawn
made it look bad.
The Day After
brought home it was hideous. And the latest,
Threads
, was the most hideous movie ever made—because
that
could happen. If someone dropped a bomb, how would our faces look afterwards? What would happen to the human body if exposed to massive doses of radiation and nuclear fallout? Special-effects artists showed us. Blisters and sores would form on the skin. Joints would break down. Organs would fail. Body parts would fall off. Blindness. Third-degree burns. Vomiting. Diarrhea. Cancer.

That night in his sleep Vaughn's lungs filled as if a faucet had opened in his system, and after retching for an hour he drowned this way. With drowning, there's no pain, said the doctor, whose face had android written all over it. Even as he continued to speak to us about the deceased, the doctor had clearly moved on.

The funeral was held in Santa Maria, the cemetery where Staedtler's parents were buried. Amid headstones and oak trees we stood at Vaughn's plot with the many hundreds of friends and admirers, the family, mostly dressed in black. The women wore black frocks. The men in black leather jackets. When it was our turn to shovel earth over his casket, we thought selfishly
of ourselves and what our chances were of surviving the eighties. Vaughn's was not the only service being held in the cemetery that afternoon.

We followed the procession back to a funeral home in North Beach. The old folks Vaughn's age wore leather here, some men had ponytails, they chainsmoked, drank, and talked about drugs. The women were slanteyed as soldiers. Thing was, when Vaughn Staedtler broke into the funnies in his youth with
The Mischiefs
, many papers were too afraid to subscribe because of the rebel image he portrayed on and off the page. Vaughn was the outlaw son of the Staedtler family of Southern California. Two years into drawing
The Mischiefs
, Vaughn's cousin ran away from home to be with him, then the SFPD arrested him in his studio and he did three months for kidnapping a fourteen-year-old and keeping her in a hotel in the North Beach. Comics fans like to point out his strip came a full two years before Elvis, and was a big success in the South, including in Memphis, where papers started carrying it in their classifieds section next to the automobiles for sale. Vaughn Staedtler was invited to appear on a parade float in Memphis with locals dressed up as the greaser characters from his strip. The older folks of Vaughn's generation told stories about how they preferred bourbon and pure horse to grass and LSD. Some of his litigious former assistants were present, looking beleaguered, insecure about paying respects to the man on the other side of a class-action lawsuit. Bill Blackbeard said a few words about Vaughn's significance to the world of comics, placing Staedtler alongside Walt Kelly and Al Capp as one of the great voices of irony, dissent, and bohemianism in the funny pages. Chester Gould stood with the help of an assistant and spoke of his friendship with Vaughn and the good work they did together on the board of directors of the National Cartoonists Society, despite, he said, Vaughn's famous cantankerousness. Art Spiegelman told us he arrived this morning from New York to pay his respects. We didn't know he'd moved.

Explains why you haven't seen me around the manor much, he said and laughed. Pardon me, I'm going outside for a smoke.

How did you know Vaughn? we asked a stranger seated at our table with a coffee and a plate of cheese in front of him. He was about our age, in his twenties, thick glasses, big hairdo, that's why we asked.

You know those clowns Vaughn's been painting? Yeah? Well, those are mine. I painted them. He paints his signature, that's all. He hired me to be his assistant. I didn't realize that meant he wanted me to paint everything. Every day he tell me to paint a clown, one with a hatbrim full of water and a cigar on fire in his mouth, or, paint a clown with a sad expression under smiling makeup, or just,
paint a clown
. Fucking clowns. Funny thing is, he owes me at least five thousand dollars. He hasn't paid me in almost a year. I've been borrowing from my sister's husband to get by. He promised me they would be bought by the Guggenheim.

You painted his fuckin' clowns? Biz said. Did you all hear that? Wait till I tell Wendy.

How did
you
know Vaughn?

I'm his
widow
, Biz answered.

I didn't know he was remarried, said the assistant.

Well goddamn, he sure kept secrets, didn't he?