Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

by Paul Monette

the day we began to live on the moon.

my friends in L.A. can hardly recall what it felt like any longer, the time before the sickness.

“But we’re the same person,” he said in a sort of bewildered delight. “When did that happen?” I related those two lines to my friend Craig (diagnosed 3/2/85) this past Christmas, and he laughed: “But that’s what you always used to say in Boston. Roger and you were just two names for the same person.” Something I don’t remember saying, but clearly it was a collaborative theory of ours, rather like the Curies’ twin Nobel.

Again it is hard to separate out what is general California body lunacy from the frantic attempt to stay healthy.

Roger was a happy man with an ache inside about beauty and time, like a character out of Lawrence. There would always be a part of him that longed to be a poet, but having his own practice brought him to a place of delighted engagement and satisfaction that I’d never seen in him before. Besides, he had a poet in his pocket.

When Larry Kramer tells Mathilde Krim in Interview about the closeted gay man at the National Institutes of Health who buried the AIDS data for two years, that’s when I understand how doomed we were before we ever knew. It will be recorded that the dead in the first decade of the calamity died of our indifference.

But you find that your first bewildered erotic connection at fourteen stays with you, since most of the rest of gay history lies in shallow bachelors’ graves.

My first year as a teacher, twenty-two and stuck in a prep school run by Dickensian colonels in Connecticut, I had a student called Styler, by turns diffident and shyly charming, working to please, wouldn’t swat a fly. I was in the closet and never thought twice about him, until three years later when he killed himself, and his sister wrote to tell me. Oh, I thought with a knot of hopeless sorrow, so he was gay. I hadn’t thought to help him, because I couldn’t even help myself then.

Being as we were the same person, happily it all balanced out.

The privacy issue surrounding AIDS engages vectors of the nightmare that make it different from every other medical crisis. I know half a dozen men who are dying right now, another dozen diagnosed, and everyone’s being kept out.

That was the front-line sentiment in white, and otherwise we had the incalculable safety of a private room. The privacy alone gives you light-years of time.

When you are gay and alone and want to be a poet, suicide crosses your mind at twenty-two like an impresario’s cape.

In combat Roger had no choice but to battle the physical side, while I engaged on the metaphysical front.

And if the government was stone-deaf, the press was mute. The media are convinced in 1987 that they’re doing a great job reporting the AIDS story, and there’s no denying they’ve grasped the horror. But for four years they let the bureaucracies get away with passive genocide, dismissing a no-win problem perceived as affecting only an underclass or two. It was often remarked acidly in West Hollywood that if AIDS had struck boy scouts first rather than gay men, or St. Louis rather than Kinshasa, it would have been covered like nuclear war.

I felt two furies at once: protective about our own secret and angry at the slur on Bruce’s privacy, as if to try to escape the rumor mill were an act of contempt. But even the anger couldn’t cover the queer sickening feeling I’ve had fifteen different times in the last three years. How could Bruce be sick? You never stop asking that. There’s a strange recurrent wish to believe the epidemic has claimed enough, even as the shock waves widen. Above 8.5, an earthquake is said to liquefy the earth. I recalled joking with Bruce about AIDS in front of the gym two months before, ridiculing the hysteria of the very man who was calling me now.

What is innocent as the sniffles in single cases grows specter-thin with terror in groups. Needless to say, there was reason to think that Gordon would be glad to speak softly of illnesses that were nothing to worry about, nothing at all really.

Conspiracy: literally, breathing together. Every week or two now, a poem would go in the mail to Carol, and one from her to me. We began incompletely different places, shooting in the dark, but quickly felt our way to a workable form of address, a courtly sort of confessional. My conspiracy lines—like my table thoughts—were all about the calamity, though for a while I couched my terms. I wrote about the white-stripe snake in Franklin Canyon and his “one medium mouse a month.” About being allergic to bees, and the cloud of killer swarms advancing toward Texas. Shot through every fragment are undigested references to those who died young. Van Gogh was 36, Poe 40 Also Champagne Scott and Frank O’Hara one of ours no art news there I was writing with a very blunt instrument, but groping at last toward leaving a record—“to say we have been here.”

Half the time we were like twelve-year-olds, and the world out there was a sort of field trip. He had the energy and sense of mischief of a seventh grader with all A’s, though he also had a sweet tooth for playing hooky. Since I had been such an ancient child myself, gloomy and bookish, the only kid I ever got to be was with him. So when he said his youth was over, two children seemed to disappear into the woods, hand in hand like Hansel and Gretel.

Because after midnight and during weekends I cannot talk to those who play at business as usual. I want to tap into the rage of the positives so we can throw buckets of sheep’s blood on the White House lawn and spit in the faces of cops with yellow gloves.

I think it was all jumbled up with whether or not we should keep the dog. Cats were definitely out, because stories abounded of people with AIDS getting encephalitis from cat feces. You must never empty a litter box without protective gloves. Not that we had a cat, but I’d become quite leery of the neighborhood cats who dozed on our garden fence and switched their tails at Puck. Even the goldfish—Schwartz—was suspect. I told Rog not to change his water anymore, I’d do it. Schwartz in turn was mixed up with a story we’d heard of someone who caught a brain fever from eating too much sushi. There were levels and levels of wrongheaded myths and paranoia, even among us graduate students. Is it any wonder that the ignorant think they can get it from a toilet seat?

Maybe it was enough that we kept on saying we loved each other. That is all you are sure of afterwards. “Hello, darling,” he’d say when he heard my voice, his own voice sweet and grinning as ever, no matter how faint. And then before we hung up: “You keep the pool open. I’m coming down for that swim.”

I lapsed into an exponential terror about the infections carried by raw sewage: I realized the dog walked through it every day, then sometimes jumped up to curl at the foot of the bed when Roger was resting. I had already reached new heights of cleaning, my rag streaming with ammonia nightly as I wiped every surface. I’d throw away half of every lettuce and wash fruits till they whimpered.

Next day we went down to the APLA offices on Santa Monica Boulevard, across from Plummer Park. Not an easy place to enter. I remember one of the founders of GMHC in New York telling Craig how he’d hate to need any of the services he’d created, not because it was demeaning to ask for help but because the issues raised were so awful—lost insurance, lost jobs, evictions, the full gamut of miseries. Roger and I had spent years blithely writing checks to such organizations, and surely there is magic in that as well. One does it in part to cover one’s ass, knocking on wood: Please, not me.

The whole guilt-and-redemption trip was much too Catholic for my taste, besides which it seemed to consign those who died to the status of losers.

Sontag argues this as well

June was rife with visitors from out of town, and if they were coming to say good-bye they kept it to themselves. To us it was all serendipitous. Richard Howard and his friend David Alexander, a painter, came out from New York on the way to comfort a friend in San Francisco, who’d lost his lover after a long fight. Richard read aloud to Rog a new poem, as well as a witty essay on baldness and a graceful obit for Jean Genet. We spent two lively evenings talking, and Richard was especially eloquent about Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor—a bracing caution about the scapegoating and self-blame that attach to certain diseases. We were all being assaulted now with the verbiage of self-help guerrillas who said gay men had brought AIDS on themselves. “I’m taking a course in miracles,” as one West Hollywood airhead shared with me on the phone one night. “People pick their own diseases,” he said, bragging that his lesions had faded to inconsequence.

Of course I knew to be grateful that he got AZT at all, just as he and I both were certain it brought him back and was giving him time. But the longer I watch the government do nothing, the months thrown away with the lives of my friends, the more I see it didn’t have to happen. The drug was there on the shelf in ’83 when they finally pinned the virus down, but nobody bothered.

Suddenly Roger began to recite Milton’s sonnet on his blindness: “‘When I consider how my light is spent / Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide …’” I don’t remember how far he got before he choked up and couldn’t go on, but that didn’t matter. Neither of us would have been very receptive to the bullshit about bearing God’s “mild yoke.” But I can’t ever forget the moment, looking out at all the sunset yuppies and their dogs while Roger declaimed his loss in a broken voice.

On Wednesday, August 20, Roger had blood transfused, about three units, as I recall. Though the white count is most consistently affected by AZT, the red count is also a problem. Many full-blown AIDS patients on long-term AZT have become transfusion-dependent. They have also gotten fairly blasé about the vampire part; but we still thought of transfusion as a grave and unsettling procedure. Yet the new blood perked Roger up considerably for several days, animated and energized him for work. He even talked with Esther Richmond about getting a new will written, the matter unbroached since we’d tucked the ’80 version in a drawer.

After one of his Wednesday sessions with Dr. Martin, Roger reported that he had admitted he’d had a good life. I remember how lucidly he repeated the phrase, amazed almost to be saying such a curiously final thing, and with no foreboding of death in the tone, or nothing gloomy at least. But I can’t be sure, for I was behind in the death department. Even now, when I’m all caught up, it bewilders me to try to figure what he knew and I didn’t. I had an appointment with Martin myself a month after Roger died. The first thing he said was: “He loved you greatly.” Then he explained how Roger had gotten beyond the fear of death. Toward the end, he said, Roger’s world was one of constricted hopes—Will I have enough energy to work with Fred? Will I be able to eat my supper? “It’s impossible to conceive of ourselves without ego,” Martin said, but that is where Roger arrived. I can’t, of course, know what he must have thought in the hours when he lay there quietly, all but blind. I only know we never seemed any different, not between ourselves. And I felt no shadow of death when he said that his life had been good. Mine too, I thought with a pang of pride.

One afternoon, I walked in calling “Here I am,” as usual. I realize now that I would announce myself this way as a counter to his blindness, but it’s still the phrase I speak when I visit the grave, or sometimes when I walk into the empty house. As soon as he heard my greeting he smiled and declared, with a mixture of astonishment and tenderness, “But we’re the same person. When did that happen?” As if he’d been waiting all day to say it. I agreed up and down right away, yet I’ve also brooded on it longer than almost anything he ever said. I think the reason for the “But” is that this was his answer to the darkness that told him he would die. But how could he die and leave me? How was it even physically possible to separate us now, with the two of us so interchangeably one?